The cuckoos are coming! The cuckoos are coming! They’re on their way to hijack billions of dollars intended for California roads and infrastructure that voters approved just a few months ago.
The cuckoo bird is known, of course, as nature’s premier con man. It lays an egg among several others in the nest of another bird. The cuckoo chick hatches first and with its first breath mimics the call of those that built the nest. Then it destroys the other eggs, growing up with parents who never figure out why their recently hatched young one is often six times bigger than they are.
Much like the cuckoos, officials at some of California’s more notorious environmental
Cuckoos at the Sierra Club, the Planning and Conservation League and other so-called environmental groups didn’t support most of the recent ballot initiatives. Instead, they opted to wait until the bond measures passed and then “make sure as much money as possible goes to transit and congestion relief rather than new road construction,” said Capitol Weekly magazine, summing up the attitude of Sierra Club legislative director Bill Allayaud.
Translated, that means no money for where it’s needed the most—new roads and better water systems—and more money for bike paths, bus stops and wetlands. They want us to believe this environmental pork barrel is really “infrastructure” or something they call “smart growth” when it’s nothing of the kind. A classic cuckoo maneuver.
We’ve seen this game before all over California. Major road and water infrastructure projects were delayed and became far more expensive because of the bogus extras environmentalists added to them.
Same with the recent sales tax increases for better infrastructure in San Diego and other counties throughout the state. Environmentalists are siphoning off billions of dollars intended for better roads and spending it instead on bike trails and bus stops.
Voters know our roads are overcrowded and under-funded to an almost criminal degree. We see it every day to and from work. We hardly need to read the studies that confirm California has the worst traffic congestion in the country.
We also see our water and sewer infrastructure crumbling every day on local news shows that feature video with the most recent sewage spill or sinkhole collapse.
Today, more and more people know why: It’s the cuckoos.
That’s why California voters supported the recent infrastructure initiatives by such a strong majority—initiatives that said nothing about wetlands and bike trails and bus stops.
Now it’s time to spend the money, and the cuckoos are flocking.
The cuckoos could have proposed their own initiatives. If their agenda is so important, they could simply ask the voters of California for the money, just like the Governor, but they didn’t because cuckoos are users, not builders.
They aren’t dumb, either. They know no one would believe stopping new roads will really improve traffic, which is what they say, or that delaying and diverting money to protect levees will make California waterways more secure. Or that buses will ever remove even a fraction of traffic from our highways. Because they won’t.
So instead, the cuckoos wait until no one’s watching. They invade our nest, lay their egg and imitate the calls of people who are desperate for better roads, all the while planning to replace what we need with what they want.
Beware the cuckoo!
Mick Pattinson is president and CEO of Barratt American, a Carlsbad, Calif.-based homebuilder. He is also the former president of the California Building Industry Association.
