Yay for LA County!

The railroad crossing that has been landlocking Briggs Road residents for the past ten years has been recognized by Los Angeles County as a legitimate crossing. Norm Hickling, deputy to Los Angeles County Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich, made the announcement at a community meeting in Agua Dulce Monday night, February 10, 2014.

Sunrise at the Three Sisters

It is the first encouraging move toward the result for which our community has been struggling, namely to be able to drive to our homes by a legal route of reasonable distance and construction. For a decade our path to our properties has been neither legally our own nor of a truly manageable length or condition.

Is the End in Sight?

I promised I would say it and now I will. My hat is off to you, Mr. Hickling. From where we sat it appeared that Los Angeles County was locked into a position from which it could not gracefully extricate itself. We do not know enough about the actions of other players, but Norm Hickling is exhibiting the kind of grace and sophistication that seems to elude so many public figures—and thank you for that, sir.

I want also, at this point, to give Norm all the credit he is due. And I most certainly do not want any undeserved credit given to this blog. Norm Hickling was making promising statements before I made a single post. It was his remark that he was working on the railroad crossing that first encouraged me to begin this blog. You see, we had been bitterly disappointed before, and I decided to do anything I could to prevent that from happening again. Others in the neighborhood pitched in with the same resolve.

One Giant Step for LA County

But stay with us! Things have looked almost this good before, then come to naught. And, though we are inclined to believe that this time it could actually happen, we have determined that it isn’t over until it’s over—until we are actually driving out over the lovely concrete railroad crossing and the beautiful Santa Clara River.

Our Next Hurdle: Crossing the Santa Clara River

There are kinks still to be worked out. Our drive home is not yet guaranteed. We will report on our progress as fully as we can in future posts.

Stay with us! And we love those comments! Keep ‘em coming!

More on the Peculiar Email

In the study of logic two statements are said to be logically equivalent if they are both true (or both false) under the same set of circumstances. And if one statement is the contrapositive of the other, then the two statements are logically equivalent. In symbolic terms, the statements “If A then B” and “If not B then not A” are contrapositives.

Let me give you an example from real life. The statements “If you are granted a building permit then you must have legal access” and “If you do not have legal access you will not be granted a building permit” are contrapositives. Therefore the two statements are logically equivalent.

Our legal research assures us that Los Angeles County has the right to deny a Certificate of Compliance, and thus a building permit, for a plot of land that does not have legal access. We have called the county offices, without identifying ourselves, and been assured that absolutely no Certificate of Compliance will be issued without legal access.

Any office that issued a building permit for any parcel along Briggs Road must have believed that Briggs Road had legal access.

Mr. Novak says, in that peculiar email: “One point about access that is important to bear in mind:  according to Building & Safety records the property-owners you represent have “official” access off the back (other) road, the one that is essentially impassable. Our building officials checked the records, and all of the owners pulled their permits identifying the other road as their access.”

You see, in order to be logically consistent, he had to say that. Otherwise there is a big problem about having issued all those building permits. But in order to say that, he had to say something else that was even more untrue, and imply yet another untruth after that.

Whatever kind of access Mr. Novak imagined the Department of Building and Safety imagined the property owners had, and whatever the word in quotes “official” is supposed to mean, the Briggs Road community does not have legal access out the back way. We have very tentative physical access, but have been informed rather abusively that our access is not legal.

So whose mistake is that? Building and Safety when they approved the permits? The alleged researchers at Building and Safety when they informed Mr. Novak that we had access the back way? Or could this all have been a convenient fabrication?

And, again my question: suppose all of this is simply a web of unfortunate but innocent errors. This email was sent less than a month after the first closure of our access. Mr. Novak is gone now, but why would the County of Los Angeles perpetuate the error and even compound it with other obstacles?

But wait! There’s more!

Mr. Novak admits that the back way is “essentially impassable.”

WHAT ABOUT THE FIRE DEPARTMENT?! The Fire Department would never ever ever sign off on an access road that was “impassable.” In fact, their requirements are very explicit and quite strict—and the back way fails because there are many hairpin turns, many grades are too slippery and steep, and the road is too narrow almost the entire way. 

And you don’t get a Certificate of Compliance without the Fire Department.

There is NO WAY our neighborhood acquired building permits based on the back way. In reality, one of our first neighbors to successfully land a building permit remembers very specifically riding back and forth with a fire department official over the front, traditional route. That official declared our front access adequate for fire protection and it was on the basis of his approval that subsequent Certificates of Compliance were issued. There was none of this nonsense about the back way being official. It was probably never even mentioned.

So we are the victims of a big shift in policy, it would seem, but with no explanation, no redress, no compensation. How can one explain that? I wrote a poem:

L is for the land that we have learned to love so well,

I is for our isolation,

A is for the access that we crave, legally implied, and

R is for the railroad and riparian crossings in our way.

***

I hope you are all reading the many comments we are receiving. Apparently there are a lot of people out there with knowledge and experience and ideas that surpass our own. And I have to say this: if the officials of Los Angeles County and the State of California are ever able to stand up and admit that a wrong has been done and to actually correct it, I, for one, want to be one of the first to acknowledge their courage and conscience. It must be an extremely difficult thing to do; witness how few in politics are able to concede errors in judgment.

But it would be so much more pleasant to have things go that way than into some of the other outcomes our readers have suggested.

BIWT

“Because I wanted to.”

In my family, that is one of the most common answers to the question:

“Why did you do that?”

“Because I wanted to.”

Here we are, legally landlocked. Our little neighborhood is cut off through the actions of the very people you’d expect to be devoted to preserving our lives, not ruining them. Why have the Southern California Regional Rail Authority, California Department of Fish and Game, and Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy blocked our community’s legal access to the world, while our own Los Angeles County Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich stands by pronouncing that there is nothing he can do? They are not telling—not in a believable way. But we know.

Why are the people who run Metrolink, Fish and Game, and the conservancy working together to render our property worthless?

Because they want to.

The explanation that my own two little girls have given me over the years, and sometimes even my own grown up wife—“Because I wanted to”—really says it all. My girls’ explanation is a non-explanation, but is really the only true one. “Because I wanted to,” augmented by an examination into just what she gets out of her actions, tells more than she wants to admit. It tells that her bottom-line motivation is selfishness.

And don’t give me that hogwash that every action is at bottom selfish, or that we do good just to make our own selves feel good. That may be—very trivially—true; but there is such a thing as good and evil. You know it, I know it, my girls know it, even Michael Antonovich, the SCRRA, Fish and Game—and even Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy knows it!

It’s just that they calculate to gain more out of selfishness than they stand to lose feeling crappy about themselves. We don’t know what they calculate to gain. They won’t say, but it must be of more value to them than right action.

Personally I hope I am a healthier human being than that. And I imagine that I am in that regard much closer to average than public officials are. The degree of crappy I would feel for ruining the property values of a dozen families is much greater than almost any monetary gain.

Do you wonder where you stand between selfish gain and right action? Aren't you just a little tempted to dash off an email or note to Michael Antonovich or your favorite legislator or the newspaper, or us?

There is another non-explanation for dirty behavior: “Because I can.”

Who says, “Because I can”? A wise-ass. Someone with no regard for the feelings of others and the consequences of his actions, right?

Why would Metrolink close our railroad crossing and leave others open? Why would Fish and Game allow culverts all along the Santa Clara River, and even assist a movie company to install one near our old crossing, but prohibit us from crossing? Why would Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy quietly acquire property at the end of our only other access route and refuse us an easement through it? Why?

Because they can.

A Gallery of Rogues

This is a summary of the role of each of several agencies complicit in the legal isolation of the Briggs Road community.

There are two routes from black top to our community. To landlock us, it was necessary to close both. The historical access started at Soledad Canyon Road, crossed the Santa Clara River over a pair of culverts, ran through Oasis Park on existing park roads, crossed the Southern Pacific Railroad (now used by Southern California Regional Rail Authority, i.e. Metrolink) on a paved at-grade crossing, and continued on dirt road to our neighborhood. 

The “Back Way” is on Southern California Edison’s easement road. It starts at Agua Dulce Canyon Road, crosses a small piece of property owned by Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, an agency created decades ago by the California Legislature, and continues on for five or six (depending on where one lives) miles over a miserable dirt road.

• ·         Rancho Agua Dulce LLC, new owners of Oasis Park, began the nightmare by blocking Briggs Road residents one day in August, 2004. Paul Novak, deputy for Los Angeles Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich, appeared to save the day and managed to get the route open.
• 
  
• ·         That December, a flood wiped out the culvert in the Santa Clara River—not a rare occurrence. The owners of Oasis Park refused to allow residents to repair the bridge, and so we began to use the back way. Meantime, on behalf of the Briggs Road community, the title insurance companies took Oasis Park to court for a legal easement, and after a lengthy battle, won an Easement by Necessity in court. 
• 
  
• ·         However, by now the California Department of Fish and Game had decided that even if Oasis Park had to allow residents through, they were prohibiting replacement of the culvert, on the grounds that they were protecting an endangered species of fish, a subspecies of stickleback trout that lives only in the Santa Clara River. Other abuses, up and down the river, were ignored by Fish and Game. As far as we know, only the residents of Briggs Road were forbidden to cross the river. And…
• 
  
• ·         Just to make sure, Metrolink also barred use of the long-existing crossing, threatening handcuffs and jail. Dozens of other crossings remain open.
• 
  
• ·         The Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy bought the last bit of acreage through which the back way crossed. It was a tax sale, but the County of Los Angeles somehow failed to notify the community of their chance to prevent themselves from being sealed off. When approached by the title companies to negotiate legal passage for Briggs Road residents, Conservancy representatives became abusive and refused even to consider accepting payment of some $700,000 for an easement.
  The Conservancy vowed that there would be no building permits issued in the area, easily enforced because no landowner could claim legal access to his or her property.
• 
  
• ·         All this time Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy was buying up properties as owners gave up on ever building their dream homes or just enjoying owning a piece of bare California land.
• 
  
• ·         The City of Santa Clarita also began buying properties, as the County of Los Angeles assisted with funding. Possibly embarrassed by the placement of Stevenson Ranch, a tract of homes just west of their western boundary, Santa Clarita may be intent on avoiding a similar humiliation to the east.
• 
  
• ·         Norm Hickling, deputy for Michael Antonovich, has been acting as go-between and some-time advocate, though it is increasingly apparent that the word “acting” is the most appropriate. Observers with experience of the man assert that Mr. Hickling is motivated only by the wishes of Mr. Antonovich, and we can be assured he has little intention of assisting this community.
• 
  
• ·         Further, again based on anecdotal reports from those who have seen him work in other contexts, Mr. Antonovich is widely believed to be working solely for his own benefit, and depends on Mr. Hickling to intercept any mud tossed his way. All we know about any of this is that in almost ten years Mr. Antonovich’s office has accomplished no visible progress in opening the Metrolink crossing, despite his position on the board of same. Nor has he or anyone in his employ made any headway in re-establishing the river crossing. Not to mention the back way.

So that’s the cast of characters, as best we know. If you go back into past postings, you can find more fleshed-out stories for most of these. There are a couple of stories yet to bring out.

If this were a bank robbery or some kind of street crime, and only one of these outfits held a gun and pulled the trigger, all would be charged with the offense. We learned that in high school. Readers have emailed their concern that a focus on one of the perpetrators of our nightmare might be letting others off the hook. No, every single member of the list above is an eager participant, should be regarded as such, and thus held responsible for the part it plays in this heartless collusion. A posting can expand on only one of them at a time.

It is amazing that among all these complicit participants, not one single person has had the guts or the simple decency to stand up for what is right. But I have yet to meet anyone outside of this issue who is not horrified by the actions of these Southern California public offices. I dare not begin to express the disdain of the larger community for those people.

Just as reprehensible, not one representative of any of those agencies has had the common courtesy to come forward and attempt to justify the actions of his or her office. Perhaps they realize that if they did so, the world would soon discover that their arguments are specious and absurd. We can only interpret their silence as voluntary participation in a self-serving scheme.

We would like to find one, even just one California public official with a sense of ethics evolved enough to support our righteous cause.

Do you know one?

No Guts No Easement

If you go to the State of California Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy webpage, you will read there that “Through direct action, alliances, partnerships, and joint powers authorities, the Conservancy's mission is to strategically buy back, preserve, protect, restore, and enhance treasured pieces of Southern California to form an interlinking system of urban, rural and river parks, open space, trails, and wildlife habitats that are easily accessible to the general public.”

Their mission is to cooperate with other public agencies to secure land. There is nothing in there that says they will do it ethically, or even legally. It does not say that private ownership of land will be in any way respected. Yes, they could buy land back—from a huge, powerful organization—but there are other ways to push out the little people.

Early on in the course of our community being cut off from the world, a Los Angeles County official assured us that eminent domain was not part of the plan. We were comforted. Little did we know that this official was telling us that the spirit of the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was to be violated, that we would receive nothing for the loss of our property values, that we were to be besieged by the State of California until we gave up our property for nothing, because we would eventually give up paying our taxes for land we could not use. The Conservancy would buy our land back in a tax sale.

A friend told me recently to be careful, that the agencies cutting off this neighborhood’s legal access to the world were run by powerful, dangerous people.

Really? What might they do? Ruin my property values? Physically close off the only reasonable route to black top, a route that has been successfully acquired legally twice? Force me and my family to traverse five and a half miles of a rough and treacherous dirt road going out from and coming in to our property?

Should I worry that these dangerous people have worse tricks to perpetrate? I can only hope that, if I am taken out of the picture, another will take my place. The first time our easement was won in court was by folks of our parents’ generation. Our generation has won it, but only to be cut off by other means that some find very suspicious. Our children, and others of their generation, appear to be stepping forward.

Am I in some sort of danger? Surely there is a lot more bad stuff “they” could do. Maybe if "they" do something bad enough it will actually motivate a public official with competence and a conscience to actually do the right thing. But let’s hope that no more damage than we have already suffered is necessary.

Anyway, it makes you wonder: who else, besides the inhabitants of the Briggs Road community, might fear the actions of our besiegers?

Their mission statement does say that the State of California Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy works “Through direct action, alliances, partnerships, and joint powers authorities.”

Could it be that Michael D. Antonovich and his deputies, good men all, have been muscled into a very uncomfortable position by the much more powerful State of California? They have a lot to lose. I don’t know for sure, but I’ll bet anything that they still have access to their own front doors. What if they and their families had to drive a horrific dirt road in and out every day? That thought would be enough to frighten anybody. It sure upset us, anyway. And those guys have even more to lose.

Previously I argued that intelligence stood on the tripod of brains, heart, and courage. I claimed that it was not courage that was lacking in our besiegers. But could Mr. Antonovich and his deputies be motivated by fear? Is guts the missing component of character? Guts to turn around and tell California that “this is wrong and I’m not having any part of it?”

Of course none of us have any idea, but we do have a hard time accepting the possibility that Mr. Antonovich and his deputies are as humanly limited as all of this is making them appear. But maybe? Who knows? Anyway Occam’s razor suggests that it is highly unlikely that all of those people are motivated to strangle a neighborhood .

When the truth is withheld, as it is here, all sorts of theories spring up. Anything is believable. It’s only human nature. By not openly and honestly defending their actions, the City of Santa Clarita, the County of Los Angeles as represented by Mr. Antonovich, and the Conservancies run by the State of California all indicate that they have little confidence that their motives could stand public scrutiny.

On the other hand, if the City of Santa Clarita is really only about green space, and is willing to trash the property values of eleven families as collateral damage, then let that be acknowledged—and please, let there be one, just one public official with a conscience stand up and say, “But that is wrong.” My personal favorite is to see Norm Hickling turn into a hero. I hear from various sources that I should give up that hope, but I can still dream.

Similarly, if the State of California is really concerned with the well-being of all animals (except the human animal), and is willing to wreck the finances of eleven families as collateral damage, despite the laws of the land and common decency, then let them openly say so—and please, let there be one, just one national magazine or media outlet that has the guts and conscience to stand up and say, “This is not right.”

If anyone knows what altruistic goal Mr. Antonovich might be pursuing in so weakly pretending to defend this community, please tell someone.

If you don’t see another post here in a few days, call the cops. If they won’t do anything, come looking for me.