Radio Tower, Chapter 2

Review: a couple of weeks ago we here in Sloughhouse trudged over to our local CPAC meeting (which is a planning advisory committee) to protest the proposed building of a 500 foot radio tower next to our farm land. The problem is it would block the route crop dusters have to take.

Today we had another meeting. What it comes down to is this: Capital Public Radio has a $300,000 grant to improve its transmission. To get this money, they have to have a tower built by November of this year. They claim to have started this project 5 years ago and they claim to have spent a lot of money just getting this far. The tower would actually be built by an investment company and CPR would only be one of many users.

So there was a meeting today at the CPR offices. People from the county planning department and the department of environmental review were there to gather information. Ten of us from Sloughhouse attended, accompanied - I'm proud to say - by a member of the CPAC, our county Farm Bureau rep, and two reps from the county ag commission who are familiar with our area.

If any of the planning department dudes and dudettes had bothered to get in their car and come out here at 5:30 a.m. when a plane is spraying, all of their questions would have been answered in an instant. But no. We spent a lot of time looking at a map and putting little markers on it to show where obstacles to spraying already exist. In my opinion, the farmers were put on the spot to identify and justify their farming practices, something that is totally none of CPR's business.

Aside from the tower issue, we've had an ongoing series of challenges from our county government, which has absolutely no respect for farmers or farm land. So this was a good opportunity to communicate with the county people about that. One of the major points the farmers tried to make is that the Sloughhouse valley is a unique place, with soil and farming conditions that are very rare. It's exactly the kind of farm land CEQA is supposed to protect.

Was anything accomplished today? I don't know. The city people who are responsible for writing EIRs for these annoying projects are simply clueless. They may well acknowledge the value of the land, but not understand how a project they think should get a negative declaration because it's "harmless" can actually make using the land very difficult. A lot of them really, truly, don't know where their food comes from. Others think that just because they can raise tomatoes on their patio without spray (by picking the worms off), farmers should be doing the same.

One of the dumbest things I heard today: "This tower is designed so it won't be obtrusive to the view, the tower and the guide wires are practically invisible." And in the next sentence that person claimed this feature shouldn't be a problem for a crop dusting pilot.

The CPR people were trying to say that the farmers should "modernize" and do away with spraying by planes, giving no suggestions what would replace that. They couldn't see, however, that their tower would be perpetuating a near-obsolete technology. It's all about getting that $300,000, isn't it?

This would make a good investigative story for National Public Radio.