Opinion

Well, we don’t take many trips, and it’s a good thing for the public interest that we don’t. Every time we leave the country, it seems that something happens. We were in France when Watergate broke. We were in England during Tianamen Square. We were in Italy at the time of 9/11. And those are just about all the vacations we’ve taken in the last 30 years, so we sometimes feel that we’re influencing the course of world history every time we go somewhere. -more-

Here is an instant critique of the UC-city settlement. While one should be humbled by Theodore Roosevelt’s dictum that it is not the critic who counts, but the man in the arena, in a democracy critics (especially those who volunteered to participate but were excluded from the arena) have an obligation to speak up. While the passage of time may bring greater perspective, at the moment one asks if the city is worse off with this settlement than if they had never filed the CEQA lawsuit in the first place. T he city has limited its future environmental and fiscal options notwithstanding changes in the law—such as the Cal State Monterey Bay case pending before the California Supreme Court that could give the city a CEQA opportunity to exact full mitigation for UC’s impacts—and obtained little prerogative or improvement in return. -more-