Editorials : Guest Opinion: Who's Doing the Gouging?

Editorials : Guest Opinion: Who's doing the gouging?

Andy Caldwell
July 30, 2015 9:22 AM

We are supposed to believe the Board of Supervisors doesn't want the Chumash to annex Camp 4 because the property will be taken off the tax rolls. Yet, once again, UCSB has purchased property, taken it off the tax rolls, and not a word has been said by the county despite the fact that the lost tax revenues in question are without comparison. The value of the Camp 4 property taxes are less than $100,000 whereas the property purchases by the university over the years have cost the county and school districts millions.

What's worse? The self-inflicted blow to our local tax revenue stream due to the fact that the county would not offer an emergency permit to allow temporary trucking of offshore oil production to mitigate the shutdown of oil pipelines. The permit was applied for in order to avoid a shutdown of several offshore platforms and the idling of oil-processing facilities in the county. Why is this significant? Because these processing plants and the oil that flows through them are all taxed as property. In fact, these production facilities are the highest taxpayers in the county by orders of magnitude.

There is every reason to believe that the county, the fire district, and several school districts in the region are going to suffer multimillion-dollar deficits as a result of these operations being shut down. The reason we don't know the exact cost of the shutdown has to do with the fact that here, too, the county Board of Supervisors has not bothered to ask for an estimate. I believe these fiduciary inconsistencies represent the insincerity of double standards and dubious values.

The context of this financial crisis in the making has to do with the age-old phenomenon of an immovable object meeting an irresistible force. In this case, the oil industry, consumers and taxpayers are caught between the federal government dragging their feet in reopening the pipelines and the county refusing the temporary permit to truck oil in the meantime. Of course, that leaves California consumers and environmentalists in a lurch. We now have to import that much more oil from the Dakotas by rail or the Middle East by tankers, as if that is better for the environment than trucking oil to Nipomo?

In the meantime, consumers in our state are now paying nearly double per gallon of gas as is the rest of the nation. Some want to blame the industry for this "price gouging," but make no mistake about it: The cost of gas in California is a reflection of the cost of doing business here. Dare to compare our state's disparate sales tax on gas, the income tax on business, the regulatory costs of greenhouse gas legislation, the cost of additives that California alone mandates, our lack of production capacity and the cost of the type of impediments we have just discussed. Well, somebody has got to pay for all this excess, and that somebody is you.

P.S. Don't forget to thank your elected officials.

Andy Caldwell is the executive director of COLAB and the host of the Andy Caldwell Radio Show, weekdays from 3-5 p.m. on News-Press Radio AM 1290.