A big thing happening up here in Butte County is the long delayed and much needed expansion of 
Hwy 149 [or to those from south of Visalia, THE 149] It is a two lane connecting road that runs east-west between the north-south highways 70 and 99. In 1979 or so, while I was attending Butte College nearby, 149 was greatly improved, safety and traffic flow-wise. It went from a narrow windy rolling road to one that is now wide, straight and flat. In just a few years it became very clear that with a growing population, 2 more lanes were needed. Just add ’em next to the existing ones, right?
Not so fast.
The ‘endangered’ meadowfoam plant was discovered in Butte, in the path of the needed roadway expansion. And the ‘stop or I’ll sue’ enviro crowd was determined that this wasn’t going to be a project done timely or fiscally reasonable. So after it was studied, workshopped and hearing’d to death over 15 years, the couple of dozen government agencies that quake in their boots over the lawsuit threats by the greenies, finally were able to sign off on a plan to get started.
Never mind that the meadowfoam plant is growing on the manmade berm that the existing roadway is on, having adapted quite nicely since 1979. Or that meadowfoam is commercially grown as a seed oil crop in Oregon, calling into question it’s ‘endangeredness’
In the mid nineties, this was a $40 million dollar project to add a few miles of 2 lanes. In 2006, it is now somewhere north of $120 million. This on top of all the lives lost and injured in the horrendous accidents, on an outdated structure that requires left turns, basically across a freeway, at both ends of 149.
And the enviros say with a straight face that the delays and loss of life "isn’t our fault", it’s the lack of dollars. Yeah, 15 years of silly games, moving the goalposts when an environmental issue is nearly resolved by all the stakeholders, hasn’t delayed it at all! Nor has it made it more challenging to get scarce highway dollars up here when the price triples because of litigation and changing engineering plans, including tearing up existing roadway so the new one can dodge a meadowfoam patch. They may even not be done suing to stop it yet until Butte has a map of every square inch of the county for a ‘Habitat Conservation Plan’.
I haven’t even mentioned the required $3.5 million beaver pond relocation project. Apparently the beaver recognized the need for the freeway more readily than many of the humans as he relocated while they were constructing the new pond…without the cattle prod of eminent domain!
At the groundbreaking, I thanked the agency people whose earnest efforts made the project finally
happen and to the obstructionists, thanks for nothing. Maybe Patton had it right when at the end of WWII in Berlin he said the the Allies should keep the tanks rolling all the way to Moscow and knock out Stalin. A similar way of thinking in 1979 would’ve just built 2 more lanes while the earthmovers were still rolling. Many lives and nearly $100,000,000.00 would’ve been saved…and we’d still have the meadowfoam and the beaver pond!
"Life is like a beaver colony, it’s just one dam thing after another"