If it’s Tuesday and you happen to be visiting Los Osos from out of the area, perhaps thinking about moving there, and want to know more about the future of this nature-lover’s seaside paradise, you may want to sit in on a rare Los Osos Update or weekly . . . → Read More: The ROCK: Gibson Under-Estimating Sewer Bills to Win Los Osos Votes]]> By ED OCHS

If it’s Tuesday and you happen to be visiting Los Osos from out of the area, perhaps thinking about moving there, and want to know more about the future of this nature-lover’s seaside paradise, you may want to sit in on a rare Los Osos Update or weekly public comment at a San Luis Obispo County Board of Supervisors’ meeting in charming downtown San Luis Obispo. There you can hear Los Osos residents ask question after question about the County’s proposed $165 million – now $180 million – Los Osos Wastewater Project. And, if you hang around long enough, you can catch Los Osos’ County representative to the board, Supervisor Bruce Gibson, administer frontier justice by turning his blowtorch on Los Osos speakers complaining about having to pay $250 a month to flush their toilets with the most expensive sewer project a disadvantaged community’s dwindling dollars can buy in a desperate economy. You’ll find what’s in store for Los Osos and more at weekly County Board of Supervisors’ meetings, but it comes with a stern warning: they aren’t for the thin-skinned, faint of heart or short of breath.

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Holed up in Lake Havasu City, Arizona, Murphy has been firing off rounds . . . → Read More: “Reclamator” Man Sues Everybody]]> Rebuffed by Los Osos and the courts of San Luis Obispo County, urban wastewater cowboy Tom Murphy, proprietor of “The Reclamator” onsite system, is back pawing familiar ground and has turned himself into a perpetual suit-filing machine. His target for the new year: Everybody.

Holed up in Lake Havasu City, Arizona, Murphy has been firing off rounds of lawyerless suits in federal courts against the federal government, the EPA, the State of California, and Lake Havasu City. Filing suits is nothing new for Murphy – it’s always been his calling card — but he may have already played all his cards and used up his suit quota for 2010 just in January and February alone.

On January 29 Murphy had “Consent Judgments” delivered to members of the Lake Havasu City Council, giving them a midnight deadline to accept, sign, notarize, and drop in the mailbox at 1802 Combat Drive in Lake Havasu City. It seems Murphy claims not only to have caught the city red-handed breaking federal water law, but city council members personally violating federal law by polluting as well.

“I am filing against 5 LHC city council members as citizens discharging toxic pollutants from their home, i.e. source,” wrote Murphy “To All” in a January 22 email. “They will have 20 days to decide to agree to a Consent Judgment (I am drawing up now for their acceptance), or, they are in for one big challenge to convince a federal judge they have a right to pollute…oh, not to mention at an estimated cost to retain an attorney to represent them in a federal court will be about $150,000 each.”

Murphy’s filing and court costs? Next to nothing.

On February 4 he launched payback suits against a variety of high-level government officials, including Lake Havasu City council members, Governor Schwarzenegger and Attorney General Brown of California, U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, USEPA District Administrator Alexis Strauss, the San Luis Obispo judge who heard his case there and dismissed it with prejudice (he still owes $5,000 in court costs), and others who have either previously ruled against him or generally ignored him.

Now the city of Lake Havasu has had just about enough of Dee Thomas Murphy and officials are looking for legal ways to make his stay in Lake Havasu a brief one. That’s won’t be so easy. It seems it’s tough to hold someone accountable in Lake Havasu City if they have no fixed address, own nothing in their own name, and haven’t been charged with any crime they can make stick — yet. At this point, there is nothing the city would rather do than hasten his departure or jail him for abusing the law — as soon as they can figure out exactly which law he is abusing.

Meanwhile, Murphy’s charges are the same as those tossed out by every other court: Failure to obey federal water pollution law which triggers “Murphy’s Law.” Following federal law, he preaches, would pave the way for his exclusive, must-buy, no-questions-asked, souped-up-septic bullet, “The Reclamator.” To freshen his stale brief, Murphy lodged federal R.I.C.O. racketeering charges against the government all-stars for criminal failure to embrace federal law and multiply “The Reclamator.”

Murphy may have had the right idea regarding the need to send a broadside across the bow of corrupt government bureaucracy married to heavy industry (MWH). Yes, greener, cheaper onsite wastewater solutions are currently available that would be a far better fit for coastal, small-town Los Osos than a leaky, big-city raw-sewage pipeline through high groundwater with eventual $400 a month sewer bills.

But Murphy, more than “The Reclamator,” was not up to the task. He is simply the wrong messenger with the wrong motives. Who willingly wants to do business with him? After spending more than a year in Los Osos trying to sell his high-strung waste-to-water machine, Murphy came up bone dry. Not a single customer. Not a single testimonial. He offers no plausible evidence whatsoever of the competency of the man or his machine.

Only what suits him.

— Ed Ochs

Los Osos Affordability Report: Sewer Costs to Lower-Income Residents Will Be ‘Unbearable’

There is no escaping it. No topic in the far-flung Los Osos Wastewater Project universe remains on more residents’ minds than affordability. Yet the word and what it stands for – thousands of people forced to leave Los Osos because of . . . → Read More: Sewer Costs Will Be Unbearable]]> New article from The ROCK

Los Osos Affordability Report: Sewer Costs to Lower-Income Residents Will Be ‘Unbearable’

There is no escaping it. No topic in the far-flung Los Osos Wastewater Project universe remains on more residents’ minds than affordability. Yet the word and what it stands for – thousands of people forced to leave Los Osos because of the looming $250 a month sewer bills — has all but disappeared from the public dialogue, as if the issue never existed in the first place. To document the ongoing ground-level reality of this overriding issue in Los Osos, Sherry Fuller and Mimi Whitney last year co-authored a “white paper” on the potential sewer project costs to lower income residents of Los Osos. Their “Affordability Report” of January 2009 used census data from the year 2000 that had been projected to the year 2008 by a leading computer modeling firm (ESRI) that is widely used by both government and industry. “With the new Census being prepared now, we should see updated figures next year that will most likely be even worse that what I reported last year,” co-author Mimi Whitney recently told The Rock. “Consider the effects of our current recession on Los Osos residents: unemployment, bankruptcy, the housing market…We will do an updated ‘white paper’ after we have the new census data to work with. Stay tuned for the really bad news.”

» Read Article
http://www.rockofthecoast.com/news/local/860-los-osos-affordability-report-sewer-costs-to-lower-income-residents-will-be-unbearable

By ED OCHS

As a result of the Coastal Commission’s 7-5 vote last week to hold a limited de novo hearing in April to review finite details of the Los Osos Wastewater Project, the County will have to wait at least four to six . . . → Read More: The ROCK Takes on the Coastal Commission]]> Here are two new articles hot off the presses!

COUNTY’S SEWER PROJECT TIMELINE DELAYED MONTHS

By ED OCHS

As a result of the Coastal Commission’s 7-5 vote last week to hold a limited de novo hearing in April to review finite details of the Los Osos Wastewater Project, the County will have to wait at least four to six months to receive a CDP from the Commission for the $165 million project to be permit-ready. Despite staff and Commission recommendations to find ‘no substantial issue’ with any of the nearly 30 appeals brought before the Commission, and Supervisor Gibson’s warning that a delay might put at risk $80 million in federal stimulus dollars for the project ($64 million of that in the form of a loan), the Commission rejected any attempt to use time or money as an excuse to waive its standards of consistency and rubber stamp the project.

Read More Click Here

http://www.rockofthecoast.com/news/local/858-countys-sewer-project-timeline-delayed-months

County’s Omissions, Gaps and Lies Force Coastal Commission Hearing on Unresolved Sewer Issues

The 2nd District Supervisor had stumped up state and down lobbying the all 12 Coastal Commissioners in their offices, via email and on voice mail to approve the Los Osos Wastewater Project, and when the commissioners voted 7-5 to extend the process and hold a de novo hearing in April for a limited review of project loose ends, Bruce Gibson bowed his head, his ears red. He was joined in defeat by brother San Luis Obispo County Supervisor “Katcho” Kachadjian, who had lobbied from within as both a Coastal Commissioner and County Supervisor, to follow staff’s recommendations and find ‘no substantial issue’ with any of the almost 30 appeals of the project brought before the Commission in Huntington Beach on January 14. But at the end of that long day, after waging what the Tribune called a “week-long lobbying blitz,” Gibson and Kachadjian stood there with the long faces of losers, looking more like the blitzed. It was a most reassuring sight and worth the long trek for several Los Osos appellants who had driven five hours to Huntington Beach to speak to the Commission for five minutes each. It was also a reprieve, no matter how brief, for homeowners and residents back in Los Osos.

Read More Click Here

http://www.rockofthecoast.com/news/local/859-countys-omissions-gaps-and-lies-force-coastal-commission-hearing-on-unresolved-sewer-issues