cali. was a wide open till oh, the mid 80's, then they started to ratchet things up. The co. I used to work for had an early footprint in silicon valley. Corp. HQ's, manufacturing sites etc. Slowly but surely the state started grinding the reg's, taxes etc.to say nothing of the epa.
One quick story-
One of my jobs was permitting our water and air purification processes for bay air air quality management board. It became almost Orwellian.
we had a manuf. site, 2 acres, we made equip. using some lead and other constituents that can be toxic or are toxic and dangerous IF left unabated. We were very careful, for years we had our permits redone every 4 years, during that time we took samples all according to their regs. The samples came back negative for levels breaching our agreement.
A day came where-in we created a new process and we were going to build a new site closer to another site for collaboration purposes etc. so we put the site up for sale.
When you dismantle processes for site like this you have inspections by everyone, local auth. epa, fire dept. etc etc. to so as to clear the title and ensure you are handing off a site minus any danger etc.
Well turns out after taking the building down, they took ground samples and told us we had a dangerous level of seepage ala a constituent we never used. wtf right?
Turns out the previous owners decades before had used this stuff but thy were long gone and it now became our problem. Forget that for now.
heres thing, cali auth. told us what they wanted us to do, the epa told us another, apparently they could not agree and we had 2 sets of regs we had to follow that were in fact contradictory, cali wanted us to treat the stuff on site and render it inert, the epa said truck it away to a treatment fac. and landfill. we were talking over 300.000 cubic feet of dirt....Cali. says no, don't move it and take a chance on psreading any risk or danger ( which as a envior. guy I totally agree with).
If we didn't satisfy these folks we could not sell,also, we could not wind back the clock, treat it as cali asked render the stuff inert and build anything for ourselves to just move forward,we were stuck. 4 years, lawyers, hearings with the epa in DC, the state auth. in Sacramento.
So, 4 years and over 20 millions dollars later, it just sits there tarped over.
the co. still pays property tax zoned for manufacturing, we still pay for a permit because they would not clear the other permit because we cannot treat as the state asks because the epa says not truck it all away which would cost another 5-8 millions dollars just to get the dirt our of there and treated, then find the dirt to fill it in and all that requires.
The co. built the new plant they were going to here in the valley, intead, in Oregon, they closed the collaboration facility, moved it to Oregon as well. The Co. ( who were pioneers in silicon valley) have NO manufacturing foot print left in cali. period, 5,000 jobs in 5 years, gone. good jobs too, 80-90k a year.
and there ya go, you'd have to be nuts to do anything here.
