We can have a say about the future of Monterey County.

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Has it turned into a civil war? This is the question of the week. It’s in every newspaper and on every news-talk program on TV and radio. It’s everywhere. My sweetheart even asked for my opinion on the topic at the breakfast table this morning.

I hadn’t had my second cup of coffee yet, so I was groggy. Plus I was cranky because I was worrying about work—thinking about an article in these pages. I was thinking about the General Plan.

“Civil war?” I said. “No. It’s an invasion. Sure, everyone is calling it a civil war—Rich Environmentalists against Regular People Who Need Houses. But that’s a crock. This is a fight against an invading army of Suburbanites From Somewhere Else who want to build a gazillion ugly tract houses here, who don’t care anything about Monterey County except that the weather’s better than Texas or Michigan or wherever.

“And the developers who want their money, and the politicians who want the developers’ money…”

I paused to take a sip of coffee. I looked up from the newspaper. My sweetie was gone. I was sermonizing to an empty chair. Oh well. She’d heard all of this from me before.

I could hear the shower running. I shouted toward the bathroom: “Civil war? Hell no! This is an attack by colonizers who want to turn the Salinas Valley into Bakersfield!”

I could hear that she was singing.

I do not blame her. I do not blame anyone for being bored sick or frustrated to tears with local land-use politics. I do not blame anyone whose eyelids become heavy when they espy a story dealing with Planning Commissioners or inclusionary housing or LandWatch or “supes.”

And I understand why any loyal Weekly reader might violently cringe at the words “General Plan.” I understand that better than anyone.

Over the past five and a half years, I have edited something like 1,327 stories about the General Plan Update. I have closely followed three full-blown year-long efforts, each of which involved many, many meetings, documents as thick as the Bakersfield phonebook, hours and hours of labor by bureaucrats and volunteer activists, offers of compromise (some sincere, some phony), thousands of promises, hundreds of lies, millions of dollars—and more meetings. And each of those massive efforts produced diddly squat.

Time and again, the majority of the Board of Supervisors refused to follow the will of the people who want to keep Monterey County from being overrun with sprawl. The supes would not accept any plan that created real limits to growth—limits that distressed the powerful elite, who stand to reap obscene profits from unbridled development. Instead of forging a compromise, the supes demanded “consensus,” and the powerful pro-growth forces refused to bend.

Watching this undemocratic display year after year has been disheartening. Only once, two years ago, was there a glimmer of hope. Perhaps worn down by years of battle, the slow-growthers made numerous concessions to the go-go-growthers. A compromise plan, General Plan Update 3, won the unanimous approval of the Planning Commission; County staff green-lighted it for passage; everyone who had worked for years on this thing crossed their fingers and held their breath—and the supes killed it.

The supes killed it because a handful of powerful landowners and developers weren’t satisfied with it. And soon thereafter, the supes began working with those same powerful landowners and developers on a new plan—GPU4.

Meanwhile, anti-sprawl activists gathered 15,000 signatures to get their own plan qualified for the ballot as a voters’ initiative. But the supes refused to place the General Plan Initiative on the ballot—claiming to believe that it violated the Voting Rights Act because it was not circulated in Spanish.

That was the low point in a years-long story that is suffused with cynicism and rank arrogance. This Board of County Supervisors is going to do what it wants to do. Screw democracy.

So I understand wanting to go hide in the shower and stick your fingers in your ears and sing a little song, “Fa la la la la!” But this is the wrong time to do that. (No offense, honey.)