Reply #18: Ignore the naysayers. I ran a business in Ca. It's a royal pain in the #$$

[Xithras]

Most people who haven't owned businesses genuinely have no clue how stupid this state has become with its regulations. Apply, inspect, deny, inspect, approve, now visit the next office. It isn't TAXES, but all of the silly regulations and hoops you have to jump through to get anything done. Because NONE of the regulatory agencies coordinate with each other, even the simplest processes can take months. Like when we were informed that the toilet in our office bathroom didn't meet ADA requirements. A contractor was hired, who pulled a permit for the toilet, which triggered an inspection, which triggered a mandatory replacement of our buildings main inlet to add a meter, which then required a building water use audit, which eventually mandated that we update our exterior sprinklers, which required another permit, landscaping plans, and two more inspections. In the end, replacing a simple toilet required four months of work, permitting, and inspections, and about $15,000 worth of upgrades to the building. It's just too much.

There's another example happening right now in the Sierra foothills. Company bought a bit of land out in the middle of nowhere, far from any neighbors, and wants to open a basic rock quarry. It's in an area where it will have little environmental impact, and neither the state or private environmental agencies have any problem with it. Given that lack of opposition, and the dozens of jobs it will create, and the fact that the nearest neighbors are miles away, you'd think that a project of this sort would be encouraged, or at least wouldn't be heavily resisted. You'd be wrong on that. The county imposed more than 100 new regulations and "conditions" on them as a prerequisite to opening. Not to be outdone, two cities in a neighboring county are now on the verge of filing suits because THEY want to add regulations of their own. Even though the facility isn't in their county, the outgoing rock will be pulled on trains that run on century old rail lines through these communities. Those rails are already used often, but because the quarry may add more trains to the rails every week, they want a say in its regulation, and are pushing to have the quarry build expensive overpasses and underpasses in their communities and otherwise upgrade all of the crossings. The quarry operators have already indicated that doing so would kill the project...they're a small operation and couldn't possibly afford that sort of expense. These people just want to pull some rocks from the ground, dump them into rail cars, and send them down an existing rail line. It took two years for them to pull the permits from their OWN county to start operation, and now their county has placed the project on hold indefinitely so that neighboring counties have time to draft new regulations and figure out what goodies can be milked from them. It's stupid, and it looks like the 40-60 good paying, permanent (and possibly unionized) jobs that it was to create are going to vanish because the bureaucrats saw a new business opening, and viewed it as a chance to flex their muscles.