Publisher’s Notebook

• So Much for Sacto •

ANNE SOBLE

You’ve got to hand it to the governor and the legislature in Sacramento. They would endanger much of what is special and irreplaceable in California in order to keep from asking their friends—and possibly their own financial portfolios—to pay their fair share of what they extract from natural resources to help address the state’s economic woes.
The governor and the so-called leadership of the state legislature have agreed to use an odious proposal to sell the Tranquillion Ridge oil lease to the Plains Exploration & Production Company, or PXP, for $100 million to help close a small portion of the budget gap. This action bypasses the California State Lands Commission, which held its ground earlier this year against the first new oil drilling lease in the state since the Santa Barbara oil spill 41 years ago. Malibuites were adamant at the CSLC hearings that the California coastline should not be for sale.
If the governor was willing to consider an oil severance tax, it could generate ten times the revenue to be gained from the PXP pittance that could eventually open the door to even more offshore drilling and oil exploration off the California coast. This drilling proposal has the potential to undercut efforts to reintroduce the federal moratorium on offshore oil drilling lifted by the Bush Administration. But the governor didn’t accomplish this misstep alone. Legislative leaders beholden to short-sighted special interests did their part to make it happen.
We’re loath to think that one of these leaders was so preoccupied with the paparazzi parable that she had trouble focusing on budget negotiations. The assembly speaker is the latest politico to think that celebrities will flock to her bandwagon if she takes on the issue that already caused city council members from Los Angeles and Malibu to back down.
AB 524, an anti-paparazzi bill drafted by the speaker, is directed at keeping paparazzi from trespassing onto celebrity estates, as if celebs don’t have their own security forces to do this, and from violating existing traffic laws, which appear to be ably addressed by local local enforcement agencies.
The measure proposes civil fines for the camera wielders, but ignores the insatiable lust of the public for celebrity blather. The American Civil Liberties Union, the California Newspaper Publishers Association and all of us concerned with increasingly persistent assaults on the First Amendment oppose AB 524’s violation of free speech rights.
However, free speech, along with the environment, is hardly a priority in Sacramento right now.