Why so cryptic, Union-Tribune?

Do you get the feeling there’s something the Union-Tribune isn’t telling us in its Sunday editorial urging the Regional Water Quality Control Board to dismiss its staff’s objections and move forward with plans for a Carlsbad desalination plant?

Here are some excerpts that certainly left me wanting more information:

At the Wednesday meeting of the San Diego Regional Water Quality Control Board, Poseidon will present a plan that fulfills all of the board’s directives on mitigating the desalination plant’s nominal impact on marine life. Also before the board will be a flimsy staff report based on the demonstrably erroneous claim that Poseidon has not met all of the board’s directives. On that disinformation, the board staff bases its untenable recommendation that the board reject the mitigation plan, withdraw the agency’s permit and thereby set the project back almost to square one.

How nominal are these impacts? Why is the report flimsy? How is the claim that Poseidon has not met all of the board’s directives demonstrably erroneous? What are these directives? On what basis can the contents of the staff report be called “disinformation”?

More of the same:

In 2006, the board approved Poseidon’s permit against its staff’s advice. Last year, the board conditionally approved the mitigation plan, also against the staff’s advice. On Wednesday, the board must again stand its ground, rejecting the staff’s baseless recommendation.

What was the staff’s advice? Must have been significant—after all, staff gave it more than once. How is the staff’s recommendation “baseless”?

And then there’s this:

Another potential roadblock is intervention by the Attorney General’s Office to void on very iffy grounds the regional water board’s 2006 approval of Poseidon’s permit and require a new vote by the current board, an unnecessarily Draconian remedy.

What are these “iffy grounds” the AG is standing on?

All we know from reading this editorial is that the U-T editorial board wants desalination to begin in the worst way. We have no clue as to what the water board staff is thinking about this project and why it keeps advising the decision makers against approving it. An effective editorial tells its readers what the other side says and then makes a counter-argument.

It feels as though the U-T isn’t confident enough in its stance to let us know what the other side has to say.