Clearlake City Council’s obstinate stance to move ahead with a new shopping mall across from Wal-mart, featuring Lowe's hardware as an anchor client, demonstrates to what extent the council has written off the merchants and taxpayers of Clearlake.

They say this proposal will help the city by bringing in sales tax dollars. This belief that big business always equals big bucks is simple-minded and adolescent (it acknowledges only income and denies the cost spent to get there).

For instance, the council wants to invest $7 million of the city’s own money to subsidize the development, which means the city would pay a percent of every wrench or hammer bought at the new store. Or your fast food might cost a dollar less because the city helped pay the mall tenants’ rent. That is not free market.

In the second place, the mitigated negative declaration report by the Sierra Club, including data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and sales projections by Lowe's itself, shows that Lowe's expects to take over an existing market – a market that is already 100-percent serviced – eating away two-thirds of the profits of already established businesses, many of whom will go out of business. The study concludes: “there is virtually no market support whatsoever for a new major home improvement business.”

Follow the logic. Clearlake customers already have all the hardware they need. And who in surrounding communities will drive to Clearlake to shop at Lowe's? No one. Why not provide something not currently available like a Macy’s, Sears, Penney's, Best Buy or Ikea? My favorite would be a Big 5 to enhance vacationing.

The stores mentioned above might also encourage shopping in the older sections of Clearlake. Imagine what $2 million worth of sidewalks, a few paint jobs and a trolley would do for Lakeshore Drive! This could be a thriving tourist area of confections, crafts, and customized products that would draw out-of-towners to Lake County.

Clearlake should invest redevelopment funds to fix walkways on Lakeshore and repair the potholed side streets that lower property values for everyone in the area. As for new construction, city council members should not bribe new business, but let market forces govern. If developers want a mall – let them pay for it. Odds are we’d get a better anchor store … would Lowe's come to a saturated market if it weren’t being paid millions to do so?

Keep in mind that “redevelopment” (as in the redevelopment money the city wants to give away) means to improve already existing neighborhoods … not pioneer new areas that cause traffic, environmental and economic problems.

Economically, individual employees will suffer. Lowes propose's three times as many part-time jobs as it does full time – 131 to 44. Instead of organizing full-time employees into split shifts, Lowe's will keep everyone unpredictably scheduled, underpaid and without adequate benefits.

I’m hoping that local businesses get together and hire a lawyer to investigate suing the city for conflict of interest, favoritism and misappropriation of funds.

Three of the five council members live in the area that is projected to have higher property values near a new shopping mall. At the Jan. 14 council meeting, these three members drew cards to see which one would pretend they didn’t have a conflict of interest so that a quorum could vote for the shopping center.

As for favoritism, how far back did the city have the property and redevelopment funds available, but failed to make this known? The city council did not offer redevelopment money to Mendo Mill when the company invested millions in expansion and complied with paying for developments properly belonging to the city, like improving the street. It is as if the city used Mendo Mill as a guinea pig, building a clientele that could be offered to Lowe's on a silver platter.

And is it not misappropriation of funds to bullheadedly give the new enterprise money when the council has been warned by the impact report that vacancies and blight will surely result in other areas of Clearlake? And that many existing businesses will go under?

Council members, three of five of you have a conflict of interest. Before you are sued and cost the taxpayers of Clearlake a bundle, back out and save face.

Janis Paris lives in Clearlake Oaks.

Someone actually told me this yesterday after a brief conversation about religion and spirituality.

Sadly, I have to admit that the comment did not come as a surprise. If you are Christian and you are surprised, I invite you to think deeply about the stark underlying reason for this person's ignorance: The Body of Christ is preaching a lot of things, but Love is not overwhelmingly one of them.

The fact is that for far too long, the defining voice of Christianity has been left to divisive, hurtful individuals whose witness leaves a lot to be desired. Rev. Pat Robertson comes to mind currently as a perfect example of this.

The unfortunate result of the prevailing misguided evangelism is that a lot of Christians won't even mention Jesus' name outside of church, not wanting to risk the "fanatic" label. Instead, they quietly live their lives, being perfectly nice people, but never linking their compassionate actions or humanistic values to Jesus.

Others opt out of church altogether, thinking it has simply become a place of hatred and discrimination, and in many cases they are right. Though the song says so, society today does not “know we are Christians by our love.”

I doubt Jesus himself would be welcomed in many churches today. He'd be pegged, rightly, as a radical religious socio-political subversive. “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly" Jesus said (John 10.10).

Why do so many of today's Christians find that acceptable 2,000 years ago, but not now? Would Jesus even recognize his church, where Jesus-type behavior or attitudes result in heretics, censures, and excommunications? It's as if the Pharisees have been reincarnated into the present-day Christian Church Establishment.

What a mess.

The time has come to take back Christianity, get unified, and both live-out and boldly proclaim the Gospel. The health of humankind and this planet depends on it.

To do this, we need a radical new reformation of the church itself, that can then make possible a similar reformation among those outside the church; people who simply don’t know that the Way of Jesus is one of equality, justice, love, and service.

Since Christians are called to be “light to the world” (Matthew 5.14), the change must begin with those inside the faith. The sole purpose of our discipleship must be to help bring about a better world – not necessarily a biblical world.

Bringing forth the Kingdom of love and abundant wholeness envisioned by Jesus, even if it goes against our comfort levels or our wallets, is surely an essential goal that can not be met unless every Christian rethinks his role as a follower of the one we call the Prince of Peace. A mighty reformation is in order; one in which the Church and by extension the world, can emerge better, stronger, and more unified.

Will you accept the invitation? If so, let's explore and try to embrace some basic principles that might serve as a bridge to Christian unity and discipleship.

I commit myself to the following concepts, and I hope you will too:

1. Understanding that the one to whom we look for guidance in living in and building the Kingdom is Jesus Christ. We are not called to worship or idolize any political party, any flag, or any book – and certainly not one that has been so greatly tampered with and modified by flawed humans throughout the centuries.

Christ was the living answer to the frustrated author of Psalm 119 who struggled to make sense of Scripture. If just reading the Bible and following the laws were all that was required, then, as Paul says, “Christ died unnecessarily.” (Galatians 2.21)

Certainly, conflicting sayings of Christ must be compared in light of his overall Message and interpreted in reference to the particular history and agenda of the author or community for which it was written. To neglect to recognize these things is to dishonor both the Bible and God Himself.

2. Setting aside once and for all the notion that everyone in the faith can or should agree about everything. This is not the way it was in the earliest days of Christianity or throughout the last 20 centuries, and it certainly isn’t this way now.

The Bible itself is rife with contradictions and evidence of disagreements between even the Apostles themselves. Even within Judaism, from which the sect of Christianity grew, arguing about interpretations of scripture was a commonplace activity.

So, instead of Christians seeing differences of interpretation as something to fear, pride in this diversity should be celebrated. Today when disagreements arise, the overwhelming love and wholeness of Christ interacting with the voice of the Holy Spirit must naturally prevail.

Extraneous details should be left alone if they don’t violate the command to love; i.e., no one is hurt by someone else’s belief that the Red Sea either parted or didn’t part, and no one is hurt thinking that Jesus either did or did not turn actual water into wine.

Similarly, no one’s dignity is stripped away if someone is allowed to believe or not believe in the virgin birth (after all, Apostle Paul, the earliest Christian theologian, did not appear to know anything about it anyway).

On the contrary, the dignity and even safety of others is surely at risk from convictions that God sanctions and demands allegiance to any government authority or that gay people should be put to death. (Romans 13 and Leviticus 20.13) Such things do not pass the test of living up to Christ’s overall Message of Love in action.

3. Being guided into a deeper sense of the Holy as a way to reach the internal, fear-free peace that is available within and that connects us to all others. Knowing about God by reading human biblical writings is nowhere close to the same thing as being in mystical or spiritual relationship with God. (It's really no wonder so many are looking to the East for their "New Age" spirituality; the Church has very effectively quashed its treasure trove of ancient mystics, so almost no one thinks to look right here in our own backyard.)

Never did Jesus proclaim that his disciples would be known by how well they could memorize and force their literal interpretation of scriptures (especially ones that were as yet unwritten!) upon the world.

The defining characteristic he gave them, modeled for them, and subsequently died for, was love. Love and fear are simply incompatible, and since the Spirit is present within every person, we can feel extra secure giving our love selflessly to friend and stranger alike. A hungry person is Jesus in disguise, and he needs a meal, not judgment and a Bible lecture.

4. Becoming bold and courageous in our walk with God. We must lose the negative association with words such as liberal or rebel. Jesus Christ was the greatest rebel the world has ever seen. Not only that, but he rebelled precisely to bring us liberty (note the root of that word).

Christians should not create enemies out of liberal people. It’s all-too-common in some faith communities for people to be afraid to let others know that they voted for a Democrat, afraid to admit they believe in evolution, afraid to admit that they don’t accept the scripture-based age of the earth, afraid to admit that they really have no problem with gay people – or are gay themselves, and afraid to admit that they have serious doubts about God’s dislike of birth control or His supposed preference for women‘s subordination to men.

These Believers remain silent, fearful that their liberal views will be seen as rebelling against God and result in being either shunned or kicked out of their faith community. The silence speaks volumes to thinking people outside of Christianity; it gives them the false impression that all Christians are mindless Bible thumpers who are either incapable of or unwilling to be partners in effecting real change in the world.

5. Discerning the voice of the Spirit – whether from science or any other source – and proclaiming this to all. God is still speaking! Our faith is unfolding, changing, and growing just like any living organism.

It is unrealistic and not expected by God for Christians to carry around and live life with the mindset, fears, superstitions, assumptions and knowledge-base of the first century. When critical knowledge that enhances biblical understanding, human dignity, and planetary stewardship enters our world, it should be embraced by Christians as being the voice of the Spirit, not feared as being ungodly or somehow sinful. Using such knowledge to bring healing to the world is the modern-day equivalent of driving out demons.

6. Realizing that to build the kind of Kingdom that Jesus envisioned, all must reach out in love and respect to peoples of other faiths (and denominations). God is not Christian, Jesus was not Christian, none of the attendees at the Last Supper were Christians.

Intolerance only begets intolerance, and such behavior is contrary to the nature and will of God as revealed through Jesus Christ. He is the logos; the underlying fabric of all of life, and therefore his nature can be found everywhere we look – if we have the eyes to see.

If you are one of those who believes that the skies will soon open and Jesus will arrive to judge humanity, you may not be able to embrace most or any of what you’ve just read. Why worry about such things, since any time now we’ll have the satisfaction of seeing, among others, Hitler sentenced to Hell.

Well, if fear is keeping you among the crowd who is “so heavenly minded that they’re no earthly good,” as Oliver Wendell Holmes put it, you may want to ponder for a while what your own day of judgment will look like when Jesus asks why you didn’t love, serve or heal during your time on the earth. I doubt he’ll care about how hard anyone worked to discredit Charles Darwin, and I’m certain he’ll find it disgusting that his followers supported political structures that prey on the weakest and neediest in society.

I am an optimist. I think that as faith communities develop the courage to embrace even mere fragments of crucial reformation concepts, the rest will start to naturally fall into place and worldwide liberty and charity will soon follow.

I am personally convinced that when the church as a whole begins to awaken from its slumber, loudly proclaiming and acting not on misunderstood or archaic scripture or the words of fear-mongering preachers, but rather on the Love of Jesus that is the foundation of our faith, the rest of the secular and religious world will relax its defenses and take another look at our Message.

While the Bible will always be respected as a source of wisdom, history and an essential map of our understanding of God, idolatry of the scriptures and turning a blind eye to injustice will be abandoned and replaced by actively following Jesus’ Way. His Way is the one in which no division, destruction or inaction is possible. It is the Way in which Love wins out every time.

"Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire."

– Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Gale Tompkins-Bischel attends United Christian Parish in Lakeport.

A number of serious environmental effects have been identified. To mention only a few of the most significant, the project will require the disturbance of a half million cubic yards of soil and rock, much of it asbestos-laden serpentine.

Nearly a hundred acres of oak woodlands will be destroyed, with no mitigation beyond the planting of saplings that cannot even begin to resemble the lost habitat for generations.

Since appropriate preliminary surveys have not yet been conducted for either biological or cultural resources, the potential loss of rare plants and hitherto undiscovered archaeological sites is impossible to estimate.

The intense darkness of the night skies and equally intense silence of this rural neighborhood will be lost forever. Increased traffic will burden adjacent streets, and add to the load in downtown Lakeport and elsewhere in a manner that has not been analyzed. 600 acre-feet of Clear Lake water – nearly a quarter of the entire Community Service Area 21 allocation – will be used to irrigate a golf course.

Possible sedimentation impacts on Scotts Creek and Lyons Creek, and by extension on Clear Lake itself, have not yet been fully investigated.

Worst of all, the growth pattern for the whole north Lakeport region will be distorted: rather than expanding in the orderly manner prescribed by sound planning principles and defined by a community growth boundary, development will leapfrog out into open countryside adjacent to ongoing agricultural operations. Cristallago is a poster child for sprawl, and the antithesis of modern smart growth principles.

Nor does the analysis provided by the environmental impact report (EIR) offer the Board of Supervisors a sound basis for reaching a decision. Many of its defects stem from an inherent structural confusion between a “project” and a “programmatic” EIR, which has resulted in analysis of many highly significant impacts being deferred under the pretext of being programmatic, with others evaluated on a project level, while the distinction between the two is never made clear.

Several specific inadequacies are particularly glaring:

• Water supply. Neither possible conflicts with the obligation to supply water to the Geysers nor effects of using Clear Lake water for golf course irrigation are evaluated.

• Traffic. Both cumulative impact analysis and proposed impact fees are inadequate.

• Air Quality. The EIR unreasonably finds cumulative contributions to greenhouse gases to be insignificant, contrary to State of California standards, and it disregards comments from the Air Quality Management District warning that cumulative impacts from this project could result in the loss of attainment status for the air basin as a whole, meaning among other consequences a requirement for annual smog inspections.

• Cultural and biological resources. Both preliminary investigations and proposed mitigations are inadequate.

• Alternatives analysis. Essential information about land use conflicts is not provided, even though these impacts have been identified as significant and unavoidable.

• General Plan inconsistencies. The EIR unreasonably fails to admit many policy inconsistencies that were identified by planning staff and members of the public.

Some of these environmental impacts are still subject to debate – and if the Board of Supervisors does not reject the project outright it should allow that debate to continue by decertifying the EIR, substantively addressing the many questions that have been raised, and recirculating it for public review – but unquestionably “significant and unavoidable” impacts have been identified to scenic views, to woodland habitat, and to surrounding land uses. A finding of “overriding considerations” will thus be a necessary pre-condition to project approval, and such a finding cannot reasonably be supported.

It has been repeatedly asserted that Cristallago would provide an economic engine not only for the Lakeport area but also for the whole of Lake County. This assertion, dubious even during the unprecedented housing bubble that prevailed at the time of the original application, has become absurd.

• Nationwide, golf clubs are closing and the resorts and residential developments tied to them falling into bankruptcy – even before recent scandals involving Tiger Woods that are predicted to result in a 50 percent decline in the audience for televised golf.

• The economic evaluation of Cristallago’s resort component was based on the assumption that dedicated marina facilities would be provided to resort guests and home owners, but now the lakeshore property intended for those amenities has gone into foreclosure.

• The overwhelming majority of jobs created by the project would be in the service sector, with low pay and few if any benefits, and their number will be greatly reduced if the resort component fails to meet the improbably rosy projections that have been offered.

• The shaky financial condition of the developers raises the specter of a project that has been begun but which cannot be completed. This scenario has been repeated far too often in Lake County already, with a previous example on this very project site. We cannot afford another paper subdivision, especially not on this massive scale.

Leaving the worst for last, Cristallago conflicts grossly with the Lake County General Plan. The most obvious defect – residential densities forbidden outside Community Growth Boundaries – is only one among dozens of acknowledged inconsistencies. For a list, see the Sierra Club comment letter posted on line at http://www.lakelive.info/cristallago/pdffiles/SCBOS1.20.10.pdf .

State Planning and Zoning law explicitly forbids approval of a project which conflicts with general plan policies or which renders the general plan internally inconsistent. No exception can be made to this requirement, nor do any “overriding considerations” apply.

Amending the general plan for the sake of the project is not an option. This is commonly done with designations on particular parcels, but these conflicts stem from fundamental policies that are the very backbone of the document.

It is inconceivable that for any reasons the Board of Supervisors would choose to dismantle an excellent general plan that was recently adopted after years of effort and the expenditure of millions of dollars, and certainly not in order to facilitate a tenuous project that offers so little in the way of tangible benefits to the community.

In short, approval of this application would eviscerate our general plan, set devastating precedents for the rest of Lake County, distort growth patterns in the Lakeport region, and create environmental havoc, all without a viable expectation of realizing the compensatory benefits that have been promised.

Please call or write your supervisors and urge them to reject this application.

Victoria Brandon is chair of the Sierra Club Lake Group.

To say that this development should scare each and every citizen in Lake County is an understatement. These houses will be packed in like sardines from Park Way all the way along Highway 29 heading north from Lakeport, clustered together as if we were in Manteca, Stockton or Rio Vista, which is why the Lake County General Plan was developed in order to stop this urban sprawl from happening in our county.

This project will put the lake, the environment, the neighbors in the vicinity and the watershed of Scotts Creek in jeopardy. They want us to believe that they can take care of any problems that might result from the subdivision; all for the sake of money.

They want to start the grading and cutting in of home sites right away, leaving the landscape looking like one large construction site for 20 years without one home even purchased. If you look at an aerial view of Rio Vista you would be appalled at all the home site pads with no homes. Is this what our general plan is about?

The developers are from Gridley and Ft. Bragg. The owners are from Ripon, Ft. Bragg and Pleasanton, Calif. They will all become millionaires and want this subdivision to be built no matter how much lying to the public they have to do in order to make it happen. They picked our county because they thought we were an easy mark. I could go on and on about how they have tried to mislead the Planning Commission and now the Board of Supervisors. Because of constraints on how much I can write, I’ll keep it to one example.

I have previously written to the paper outlining my concerns about the large amount of asbestos in the soil. In the Planning Commission meeting of Sept. 10, 2009, I told them the land was rampant with asbestos. To the credit of some of the planning commissioners, they too were concerned. At that time, the developers told us not to worry; only 5 percent to 10 percent of the soil had asbestos. This was a clear cut lie to all of us.

In the memo to the Board of Supervisors from the Planning Department it states: “At least 300 of the home sites, two neighborhood parks, conference facility, community center, community commercial village and golf course holes 10 through 17 and a portion of 18” have asbestos in the soil at the “high end range.” This is clearly the most toxic site in all of Lake County.

This sure seems like a lot more than 5 percent to 10 percent to me. I ask you, are they telling the truth?

Their plan to handle this toxic site is to cover the soil in most areas with 3 inches of uncontaminated soil and the home sites with 12 inches of soil. This is woefully inadequate. Placing more top soil on the home sites will create serious erosion problems as most of theses sites are on a grade of over 30 percent, thus the homes will be sliding down the hillsides.

Imagine if your child were to go out in the backyard to play and digs a hole in the soil, she is now contaminated with asbestos fibers. If a dog digs a hole anywhere in the above-mentioned areas and gets in your car, both you and your car are now contaminated. Children have a much higher health risk and exposure at an early age may well lead to diseases and cancer earlier in life. These asbestos fibers are so small that they can only be seen with a microscope. They cause cancer and other lung diseases. The incubation time for these diseases is about 10 to 40 years That we know is a fact and there are still many lawsuits concerning families, miners and construction workers getting cancer on the books throughout the country. The asbestos exposure epidemic is in full swing in the US. Approximately 30 people a day are dying of these awful diseases and our Planning Department thinks you can build right on top of it.

How the Board of Supervisors could possibly consider approving this subdivision is beyond me. They are supposed to look out for the best interests of their neighbors in the county. By approving this subdivision, they will being putting every adult and child who lives there directly in harm's way.

This whole project needs to be sent back to the drawing board and be redone, omitting the areas of asbestos from any home sites or high foot traffic areas.

Please join me at 1:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Jan. 16, at the Board of Supervisors meeting to watch these developers use “smoke and mirrors” to try and convince us that our families lives and our way of life will be better for us all, just trust them.

These men have already lied and fooled the Planning Commission. The question now is will the Board of Supervisors have the courage and integrity to send this mess back to the drawing board or will they fail to protect the current and new citizens of Lake County and approve this high risk subdivision?

I say that these men cannot be trusted. This needs to go to a vote of the people in the next election in November. I’m very concerned that the Board of Supervisors will “roll over” all for the sake of money.

Norm Ihle lives in north Lakeport.