Urgent plea, call to action to save Santa Barbara County’s economy

September 21, 2024

OPINION BY ANDY CALDWELL

“Atlas Shrugged” came to life in the chambers of the Santa Barbara County supervisors on Aug. 21, a day that will long live in infamy for the people who produce our food, build our communities, and deliver our goods. County supervisors Joan Hartmann, Laura Capps and Das Williams set in motion that day two multi-billion-dollar actions that is causing every sector of our economy to writhe in anticipatory agony, especially our farmers.

The two actions? The approval of the county’s climate action plan and the future consideration of a $26 minimum wage for farmworkers.

If you are not familiar with Ayn Rand’s seminal work “Atlas Shrugged”, you soon will be.  The novel warned of a day when the producers of the world, who carry the weight of the world on their shoulders, would shrug off the burden, thereby debilitating every segment of our economy and society.

Regarding the climate action plan, the supervisors had their staff calculate the cost of the plan for the first six years of implementation to the county itself, i.e., how much would it cost county operations to go all electric, including replacing vehicle fleets, including heavy construction equipment, along with furnaces, water heaters, etc. The answer was over $300 million.

So, how much will it cost the private sector? We don’t know because the board admitted that it did not consider or bother to estimate the costs to the private sector, including the cost to every business and every homeowner, every construction company, every trucking company, and every farmer. That is, money was no object!

How can they pass a mandate and not reveal the costs? I can assure you it is going to cost billions. In fact, the largest trucking company and the largest winery in the county have already closed due to similar mandates being imposed by other agencies.

The second item, the proposed $26 per hour labor rate for farmworkers was suggested by some social justice activists who are economic illiterates.

Please consider the fact that the largest sector of our local economy (over $2 billion per year) is agriculture and that agriculture in the form of wineries is also the largest tourist draw to our region. Tourism, too, generates over $2 billion per year in our county.

Farmers in every sector of our economy have told me in no uncertain terms that a $26-hour minimum wage for farmworkers would create their immediate and certain bankruptcy and the certain layoff of their entire workforce! The truth is strawberry producers have already been losing money for the past two years and so have wine grape and flower growers. This would be the last straw.

Unlike the fast-food operators who have a mandated $20-hour minimum wage, farmers do not have the luxury of simply raising their prices and passing the costs on to their customers. The buyers of produce, including grocery stores and restaurant chains, dictate the price they will pay daily based on global competition.

That is, farmers are price-takers, not price-makers. The market prices have not kept up with the costs of inflation for growers, especially in California, as our farmers already have some of the highest labor, water, land, and fuel costs in the country, if not the world.

Farmers would be taking a double hit with these two board actions. Supervisors Hartmann, Capps, and especially Williams (Williams is a lame duck with a mere four months left in this, his last term) have no business setting a unique minimum wage for any sector of our local economy, least of all the most vulnerable to state, national, and international competition.

Moreover, as was pointed out by Supervisor Bob Nelson, the county hypocritically has some 400 of their own employees, nearly 10% of the county workforce, that don’t make $26 per hour!

One of the most famous lines in “Atlas Shrugged” was from Karl Marx, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”

Our supervisors have decided that due to the inflationary policies they themselves supported (read that Bidenomics!), farmworkers need a “living wage,” regardless of their ability to produce associative value for their employers, and the farmers should be able to give it to them, as if money was no object, again!

Please ask the supervisors to save our farmers by refraining from devastating the entire north county economy here.

Andy Caldwell is the executive director of COLAB and host of The Andy Caldwell Radio Show, weekdays from 3-5 p.m. on News-Press Radio AM 1290.