Question: If you were looking to buy a TV set and found two that you liked, one cost $500 and the other $250 and wanted to make 10 monthly payments wouldn’t you expect to pay less per month for the $250 TV (disregarding taxes and fees) then the $500 TV? I’m not a whiz at math but I think the answer would be yes.

So the next question is: Why does a desalinization plant that supposedly is going to cost the residents of the Santa Clarita Valley $250 million dollars cost the same per month on our property tax bill as the (formerly) proposed $500 million dollar pipeline to the sea?

Five or six years ago I attended a meeting of the Stevenson Ranch (now West Ranch) Town Council. The guest speaker that night was one of those nameless, faceless bureaucrats from one of those nameless, faceless boards that we don’t elect but seem to have total control over our lives. He told us about the chlorine (salt) in our local water and how it was affecting the strawberry and avocado crops in the Oxnard/Ventura area. The proposed solution to the problem was to build a pipeline from Santa Clarita along the Santa Clara river that emptied the salty water into the Pacific Ocean. The pipeline was going to cost $500 million dollars and would “only” increase our property taxes by about $50 dollars a month.

Today in 2009 the pipeline proposal has been dropped and replaced by a desalinization plant. It is going to cost us only $250 million dollars, half of what the pipeline was going to be. And we are told that our property taxes will go up “only” about $50 dollars per month.

As I said before, I’m not a math whiz but it seems to me that if something costs half of the original price and going to be paid off over the same amount of time (in this case 30 years), that the monthly cost should be around half. Call me a skeptic if you will, but something is rotten in Denmark.

This whole thing makes no sense. The farmers down stream from us claim the salt is affecting the strawberry and avocado crop. Yet in the five years since that town council meeting the farmers have had bumper harvests. We passed a law banning soft water devices that use rock salt because we were told they were the cause of 50% of the salt in the water. Then we were told that wasn’t exactly the case that in fact most of the salt occurred naturally in the water we get from the state.

Sometimes I think we are living in Wonderland: up is down, east is west and numbers are whatever the bureaucrats what them to be. But I guess it has always been that way.

Simon Weston- Commentary

Simon Weston is a resident of Stevenson Ranch. His commentaries represent his own opinions and not necessarily the views of any organization he may be affiliated with or those of the West Ranch Beacon.