Here’s the first rule all new council members learn: The sewer plant has to go somewhere. And the neighbors are never going to be happy about it.
Substitute “high-speed rail line” for “sewer plant” and you see one of the main problems the $68 billion construction project is facing.
A lot of folks who should know better don’t seem to realize that.
Take, for example, a recent Associated Press story about the troubles the rail project is facing in the Central Valley. The folks quoted in the story included a Fresno man who’s losing his restaurant to the project, a Hanford engineer whose home is on the proposed rail line, a raisin grower who will have to sell some of his farmland to the project and a Chowchilla almond farmer whose groves are endangered.
Of course these people are upset and want to see the project stopped. All the talk in the world about the benefits the rail project will bring to the state, their communities and the people of California, valid though it may be, doesn’t take away from the fact that they will lose their business/home/field/orchard.
The NIMBY position, which is behind a bunch of the complaints, charges and lawsuits that have bedeviled the high-speed rail project, stems from a perfectly logical question: Why should I have have to pay the price and deal with the inconvenience of this project?
Or, to put if more bluntly, “It’s not fair.”
That’s a cry that’s heard at every city council, school board, planning commission and board of supervisors meeting in the state whenever a major — or not so major — project comes up for a vote.
But if a project benefits the larger public, it has to go somewhere, despite the inevitable screams from the people affected by it.
No one’s saying that the high-speed rail plan isn’t a controversial subject. Although prep work on the first section from Madera to Fresno has begun, actual construction has been on hold while the state tries to deal with a Sacramento Superior Court decision earlier this year that questioned whether the current plan is the same as the one that was approved by voters when they overwhelmingly approved a $10 billion bond measure in 2008.
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