Monday, May 3, 2010

Saggio Hills Plagiarism

Several years back, when the Healdsburg City Council was negotiating with developers to build a resort for the idle rich in the Saggio Hills, it occurred to me to look at the environmental impact report on Saggio Hills and to compare it with the much older EIR on nearby Parkland Farms. As I expected, I found whole paragraphs in the new report that had been copied word for word from the older report on a different site. Copying saves a lot of time and increases the profit margin. It's apparently a common practice.

At the time I wrote a letter to the editor of our town paper, who published the letter. Local deciders, their brains temporarily stunted by lizardlike greed, ignored me. They hurried by.

Today, at the request of a county judge, a new EIR for Saggio has been ordered up, not because the first one was plagiarized (apparently no one can deal with that) but because the first one forgot to check out water demand and so forth. The new study is supposed to take six months if it isn't copied from the Parkland Farms EIR. My guess is that it will take several days.

----Gary Goss

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