50 miles north of Los Angeles is a small ocenside hamlet of La Conchita. It is an odd collection of 100 or homes and a population of 300 or so people. In 1995, tradegy struck in the form of a massive landslide. Despite massive litigation trying to prove otherwise it was clear to anyone with a brain that the entire town was the geological equivalent of a low-tide sand castle.

Residents wanted Ventura County to foot the bill of protecting their little ocean paradise; a cost that county officials estimated would be $150 million dollars and even then there would be no guarantee that it wouldn’t happen again anyway. With all of the lawsuits and dialog residents knew the risks and enjoyed the benefits of living next to the ocean at a significantly lower costs than they would have had they not had a mountain of mud teetering above them. Since landslides had been recorded in that exact area for hundreds of years it was only a matter of time before it happened again.

And then it did on January 10, 2005. The ensuing carnage could be described as unimaginable had it not been so predictable, so expected. One can only feel empathy for those poor people enduring this terrible tragedy. That is until they open their mouths and start cammoring for the County, State, or Federal Government step in and take care of them. If it was only that easy.

To see how ridiculous this is one only has to have taken a high school or above economics class and then do the math. The cost of “fixing” the hills above La Conchita will be $150m–or more. There are only 250,000 households in Ventura County. That means that each and every Ventura County household would have to chip in $600 so that the La Conchita residents could continue to live by the ocean at below market rates. Since 100 homes would be effected, they are asking for a hand-out of roughly $1.5m per home. If they ever sell, they’ll get the immense windfall from the investment of the 99.99% of the people who footed the bill.

This should not be the time for this type of discussion and the focus should instead be on the immediate care and relocation of the mudslide victims. However, residents have already started descending on County Supervisors (and the Govenator) demanding action. Unfortuately, what they want makes it more likely that we’ll see a repeat of this sad story in 2015. In a rare moment of support for a county supervisor, Area Man and Independent Sources support the stand that the Ventura County Supervisors are taking in factoring in the needs of the many over the demands of the few–especially in this emotional time where the knee jerk reaction would be to do the exact opposite.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 14th, 2005 at 7:00 pm by Insider and is filed under Brilliant, but uncategorizable. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.