By CAL BEVERLY
Publisher

Want a building permit? Apply to a federal bureaucrat at the Building Permit Department of the local U.S. Government Land Use office.

Want to rezone your property? Fill out — in quadruplicate — the request at the same local office, then be prepared to appear before a hearing examiner at the regional office of the U.S. Land Use Department in Atlanta. The hearing date is at least two years from now.

Want to buy and use for your own private enjoyment a sports utility vehicle? Apply to be placed on the 5-year waiting list for the next available slot allotted to Fayette County at the Automobile Permitting section of the joint U.S. Department of Transportation/Environmental Protection Agency.

Sound ridiculous? Think again.

While you sleep, drive, channel-hop, surf the 'net, your ever-vigilant cadre of federal bureaucrats is figuring out ways to regulate your life down to the subdivision — even to the garage — level.

As if we already didn't have enough regulation from the county commission (limit, three dogs to one household) and the city (in Fayetteville, roofs and decorating features in new commercial buildings must be some shade of green), enter the powerful new handmaiden of the federal bureaucracy — the Georgia Regional Transportation Authority, chaired by Peachtree City's own Joel Cowan.

As outlined in Amy Riley's column on this page, GRTA has notified local governments that the superagency intends to “activate jurisdiction” over matters involving land use and transportation in so-called “transportation corridors.”

They delicately skirt the issue — at least currently — of the long-standing constitutional principle of home rule — local citizens making choices about their own communities. GRTA gives lip-service to the notion that local governments still have control over land use, zoning and decisions about road-building.

With even Al Gore taking a presidential campaign stand against “sprawl,” the feds are itching to take over the last bastion of freedom in this country — local governments.

How do the feds control? They dangle federal money in front of GRTA and dictate the unelected federal bureaucrats' demands on the superagency. GRTA dances to the federal tune, just asking, “How high, massa?”

GRTA then “activates jurisdiction” over local governments' historical prerogatives and starts telling counties and cities how land within their boundaries must be used — forget what the local land use plan calls for.

The feds thus extend their tentacles deep into local issues, cloaked behind pious proclamations of “clean air” and “elimination of sprawl” and even “affordable housing.”

Their willing dupes in this massive theft of power are The Atlanta Constitution editorial board and wacko environmentalists, some of whom view agriculture — the people who grow our food — as an air-fouling, water-dirtying “industry” and tourists at national parks as just another kind of pollution.

In fact, “automobile exhaust pollution” has become the Satan of 21st century environmentalism, earth's latest religion, and “clean air, clean water” has become the altar at which we will all be forced to worship if we want those federal dollars — which, by the way, are our own confiscated tax dollars being withheld from us until we promise to be good little “Greens.”

One small step for GRTA, one giant step for federal control over city hall.

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