COMRADE IHKRATA

There will be a lot in the news this week about the goings-on with the San Diego Association of Governments and its embattled Executive director Hasan Ihkrata. Rather than bombard readers with one long piece to explain, I'm going to divide a long narrative into parts to try to clarify some of the issues. 

I covered a lot of ground in this Facebook live piece the other night, and have received requests to explain more about who what SANDAG is all about, and why it's Executive Director matters to you. In this piece, I'll be addressing some background on Mr. Ihkrata, and address two of the more controversial aspects of his policies. 

Wikipedia has a very workable explanation, which I'll quote here. "The San Diego Association of Governments (abbreviated SANDAG) is our association of local San Diego County governments. It is the metropolitan planning organization for the County, with policymakers consisting of mayors, councilmembers, and County Supervisors, and also has capital planning and fare setting powers for the county's transit systems, the San Diego Metropolitan Transit System and North County Transit District, some of which was assumed by the Metropolitan Transit Development Board (became MTS in 1986). SANDAG, along with the Southern California Association of Governments, is the only metropolitan planning agencies in Southern California."

BACK IN THE USSR

In 1982 Leonid Brezhnev's body reportedly sustained two falls. As the coffin was lifted into place for the lying in state at the Column Hall of the House of the Unions, Brezhnev's body fell through the bottom of the cheaply made Soviet coffin.  

After that, a new, metal-plated coffin was made, and as it was lowered into the grave, the funeral servants could not handle its weight and the coffin fell with a loud crash into the grave hole. Accounts differ if the bottom had fallen out again happened again. 

Let's just say that Soviet Central Economic Planning earned a reputation for incompetence and corruption. 

The head of SANDAG is Hasan Ihkrata. He is a recovering Soviet Central Economic Planner. Here is his biography  "Hasan also worked abroad for the Government of USSR, Mosco Metro Corporation, where he conducted subway ridership forecasting, engineering design, and analysis of TDM programs for the Moscow Subway system...."

Here is a brief review of Ihkrata's Moscow Metro that says "pickpockets, thieves, and drunken travelers can darken an unwary passenger’s mood"

Hasan Ihkrata wants to bring his trademarked "Five Big Moves" to San Diego like he did in Los Angeles and back in the USSR. I love this quote from one of his LA critics,
"All this time I've been resisting the urge to compare SCAG with the excesses of the grim planning regimes of the Soviet Union. Too easy I thought. Cliched, and what would it really reveal except the same two-dimensional nonsense that anyone could have read in the 1950s? ..... But sometimes the truth is right there in front of you, and all you need to learn to do is recognize it. No matter how unbelievable it might seem" 

ENDING YOUR LOCAL CONTROL OF HOUSING AND CARS

So what does Hasan Ihkrata do? Both SANDAG and its counterpart in Los Angeles (where Comrade Ihkrata was hired from) have definite similarities to the glory days in Moscow.  It starts with the production of those Regional Housing Needs Assessment (RHNA) numbers you hear constantly bantered about at City Council Meetings.  

The "RHNA Process," is how unaccountable urban planners seek to inflict often hideously ill-conceived locally unwanted land uses into communities like those of North County. With the assent of unelected and widely hated bureaucrats, Ihkrata's apparatchiks operate at the pleasure of an increasingly centralizing state government, function completely free from any interference by we the voters, and are salivating to end "local control" of everything. 

As nobody calling the shots is being directly elected by "We the People", urban planning is essentially becoming an activity untouched by citizen input, just like Hasan's old haunts in the USSR. Remember recent campaigns based on citizen initiatives like Oceanside's SOAR? Guess what? The SD County Democratic Party opposes "ballot box planning" nowadays. This opposition is based on flimsy logic like that advanced by leading Ihkrata enablers like Carlsbad's surfer savant, which equates voter concerns with urban sprawl to racist "redlining".   

Obviously, California is a great place to work if you are a recovering Soviet Central planner.  We even live in a  one-party state deep into the process of ending all local authority and consolidating it within our increasingly centralized government in Sacramento.

With legislation like the infamous "Weiner Bill" on the horizon,  one can see the building trade unions salivating until construction is then peddled piecemeal to the highest donors to Democratic coffers. Those who believe in managed growth are destined to end up like many of those who opposed the centralization of Soviet Agriculture in the early 1930s. The term "We will bury you" is not a Cold War relic. 

Neither is the surveillance state. How else to term the presence of a black box in your car? Of course, it's tempting to folks like Comrade Ihkrata, who is desperately seeking ways to recreate the Moscow Metro in San Diego County. Just think, how a device that tracks each mile you travel both raises money and gives the government another way to track your every move. 

Of course, both Libertarians and the ACLU crowd are adamantly opposed. Several states are pouncing on the concept,  exploring how, over the next decade, they can move to a system in which drivers pay per mile of road they rollover. Thousands of motorists have already taken the black boxes, most of which have GPS monitoring, for a test drive.

"This really is a must for our nation. It is not a matter of something we might choose to do...There is going to be a change in how we pay these taxes. The technology is there to do it."  - Hasan Ihkrata

So do you really want a surveillance device in your car?  Yes, it is being sold as necessary in order to raise funds to pay for repairs to the nation’s decayed highway infrastructure,  despite the traditional tax per gallon on gasoline, already a consumption tax. Only a refugee from GOSPLAN would state that the solution to this problem is to install Orwellian tracking devices in your cars.

Look at it this way, perhaps Hasan Ikhrata never really did leave the Soviet Union.

He just brought it here with him.

MANY BLESSINGS- NOEL

TOMORROW NIGHT- PART #2.