Brown unveils plan to close 70 California parks

SAN JOSE, Calif -- SAN JOSE, Calif. - Seventy of California's 278 state parks will be closed under a plan announced Friday by Gov. Jerry Brown's administration, a historic blow to the state's storied natural heritage that may actually get worse as lawmakers scramble to fix the budget crisis.

Although state parks officials initially said Friday the padlocks would go up starting in September, they revised that later in the day, saying instead none would close until July 1, 2012.

The list includes a significant number of Northern California parks, including Henry W. Coe State Park near Morgan Hill; Castle Rock and Twin Lakes State Beach in Santa Cruz County; Portola Redwoods in San Mateo County; Moss Landing State Beach and Limekiln State Park in Big Sur; and Samuel P. Taylor State Park in Marin County.

"We were working night and day to keep this day from coming. Nobody wanted to have to do this," said state Natural Resources Secretary John Laird.


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Read more: http://www.sacbee.com/2011/05/13/3625704/brown-unveils-plan-to-close-70.html#ixzz1MVSx1WBW

is a travesty.

It's not like parks or portions thereof which are closed during the winter months, and you just stretch a chain across the main entry. You can put barricades across main entries, but you still have to maintain at least some fire roads/access in case of forest fires. Anyone with an ATV or any kind of off road/4 wheel drive capacity vehicle can get in. The boundaries of state parks are like the "border" with Canada - porous as hell.

Hunters, fishermen, people looking for someplace to party/drink/do drugs - now have a place with no game wardens, no park police, etc. The state will save some funds but still have to pay to patrol and monitor these parks.

It's really a shame that states are forced into such cost cutting actions. And with the downward spiral of the American economy, i.e., the concentration of wealth in the top few percent, and the steadily worsening standard of living for the majority of American workers, I can't see California being able to re-open these parks in the foreseeable future. Unlike highways, streets, fire and ambulance service, health care, etc., parklands are luxuries. Parklands are what the uber wealthy surround their estates with, to isolate them from us great unwashed masses.

corporations for the property while locking out the public?

This does not bode well for game trails, water quality of streams, ponds, etc., not to mention the roads necessary to haul in millions of gallons of water& toxic chemicals in huge tank trucks. If the poisoned water and toxic fumes from fracking does not kill the wildlife first, the noise of thousands of trucks will scare them away. Give it a year or two and the states' sportsmen will start finding interesting oddities - two headed rabbits and deer with three eyes? Why not? Between several hundred kinds of toxic chemicals and radiation found in fracking waste water, it will be a veritable freak show. As the song goes, "If you go out in the woods today, you're sure of a big surprise!"

Apparently the majority of deer hunters & other outdoors persons in the state are clueless as to how fracking for natural gas on state lands will affect them. Most of these - especially in central PA, are lifelong republicans. The cognitive dissonance of their GOP governor selling out to the oil/gas industry, and the destruction of Pennsylvania's woodlands & their outdoor activities will blow their tiny GOP brains.

Then there's the Cub Scouts on their weekend camping trips. Good times? Not any more.

GUNS. GUNS. That's their big dumb issue.

Shale drilling: Not a single well goes into production without a network of pipelines to take the gas to market.

Here's an interesting recipe for disaster:
Start with thousands of Pennsylvania deer hunters. These guys - at least the ones I know - go hunting once a year, for "their" deer. They aren't practicing their marksmanship every week at a shooting range. They stock up with lots of beer and booze for their hunting trip. Not exactly sniper-quality shooters.

Put these hunters in off-road vehicles/ATVs, careening through the woods.

Add in thousands of gas wells in the woods.

Connect these wells via thousands of pipelines to collection points.

Are the pipelines painted bright orange and cleared of brush/trees on either side? Don't think so. And there's no federal regulation of pipelines unless they are interstate. So no regulation in the PA. woods.

One or two nasty accidents/explosions and the all powerful shale drillers will get Governor Corbett, the Frackers' Friend, to make a lot of state owned land unavailable for hunting.

Maybe not much from the parks, but from local businesses, restaurants, gas stations, etc? California's parks are a big attraction for the state.

This seems like the wrong thing to do.