From bwl3 at comcast.net Fri Jan 2 09:01:11 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Fri, 2 Jan 2009 09:01:11 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] New York Times Editorial 1 2 09 Message-ID: <4CEF5EE674DD4B949D23DF002779250E@ByronsLaptop> Editorial Is Ken Salazar Too Nice? Published: January 1, 2009 The word on Ken Salazar, tapped by President-elect Barack Obama to run the Interior Department, is that he is friendly, approachable, a good listener, a genial compromiser and a skillful broker of deals. That is also the rap on Ken Salazar. Skip to next paragraphneeds right now is someone willing to bust heads when necessary and draw the line against the powerful commercial groups - developers, ranchers, oil and gas companies, the off-road vehicle industry - that have long treated the department as a public extension of their private interests. Conservationists and pretty much everyone else exhausted by the Bush administration's ideological rigidity and deference to commercial interests have welcomed Mr. Salazar's appointment. The Colorado Democrat has a solid voting record on issues involving wilderness and wildlife protection and can be expected to bring a strong conservation ethic to the top of the department. Yet that will not be nearly enough to reform and reinvigorate the department. The Interior Department is an unusually balkanized agency, with eight separate divisions charged with managing 500 million acres of public land in a way that balances private and public claims. It is essential that Mr. Salazar find the right people to run each of these fiefs, and find ways to make them work intelligently and harmoniously in the nation's interest. We cannot tell Mr. Salazar where to find those people, although there are probably excellent civil servants who might be worth elevating. What we do know is that he should stay far away from the lobbying groups and businesses that his department is sworn to regulate and avoid think tanks with extreme ideologies. Those are the places where Vice President Dick Cheney and President Bush's first interior secretary, Gale Norton, found many of their top political appointees. The results were disastrous. Exhibit A was J. Steven Griles, a lobbyist for the oil and coal industries who, as deputy secretary, basically ran the department until he was snared in the Jack Abramoff bribery scandal in 2004. Three years later, Julie MacDonald resigned from her job as deputy assistant secretary for fish and wildlife after a report accused her of manipulating the work of agency scientists to undermine the Endangered Species Act and slipping internal documents to industry lobbyists. Paul Hoffman, another deputy assistant secretary whose main qualifications were that he had run a chamber of commerce in Wyoming and served on Mr. Cheney's Congressional staff, wrote new rules for managing the national parks that would have weakened environmental protections. Kathleen Clarke, director of the Bureau of Land Management and a favorite of the oil and gas industry, became an ardent cheerleader for Mr. Cheney's drill-now-drill-everywhere policies that put some of the country's most fragile landscapes at risk. There were many more appointments like these, and collectively they have clouded the department's mission and demoralized its employees. Mr. Salazar has a huge reconstruction job ahead. He should surround himself with a core group of dedicated, quality people, and remember that being nice to everyone won't cut it. Byron Leydecker, JcT, Chair Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Fri Jan 2 09:33:02 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Fri, 2 Jan 2009 09:33:02 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] CORRECTION New York Times Editorial 1 2 09 Message-ID: Some material was inadvertently cut from editorial in previous transmittal. _____ From: env-trinity-bounces at velocipede.dcn.davis.ca.us [mailto:env-trinity-bounces at velocipede.dcn.davis.ca.us] On Behalf Of Byron Leydecker Sent: Friday, January 02, 2009 9:01 AM To: Trinity List Subject: [env-trinity] New York Times Editorial 1 2 09 Editorial Is Ken Salazar Too Nice? Published: January 1, 2009 The word on Ken Salazar, tapped by President-elect Barack Obama to run the Interior Department, is that he is friendly, approachable, a good listener, a genial compromiser and a skillful broker of deals. That is also the rap on Ken Salazar. What the Interior Department needs right now needs right now is someone willing to bust heads when necessary and draw the line against the powerful commercial groups - developers, ranchers, oil and gas companies, the off-road vehicle industry - that have long treated the department as a public extension of their private interests. Conservationists and pretty much everyone else exhausted by the Bush administration's ideological rigidity and deference to commercial interests have welcomed Mr. Salazar's appointment. The Colorado Democrat has a solid voting record on issues involving wilderness and wildlife protection and can be expected to bring a strong conservation ethic to the top of the department. Yet that will not be nearly enough to reform and reinvigorate the department. The Interior Department is an unusually balkanized agency, with eight separate divisions charged with managing 500 million acres of public land in a way that balances private and public claims. It is essential that Mr. Salazar find the right people to run each of these fiefs, and find ways to make them work intelligently and harmoniously in the nation's interest. We cannot tell Mr. Salazar where to find those people, although there are probably excellent civil servants who might be worth elevating. What we do know is that he should stay far away from the lobbying groups and businesses that his department is sworn to regulate and avoid think tanks with extreme ideologies. Those are the places where Vice President Dick Cheney and President Bush's first interior secretary, Gale Norton, found many of their top political appointees. The results were disastrous. Exhibit A was J. Steven Griles, a lobbyist for the oil and coal industries who, as deputy secretary, basically ran the department until he was snared in the Jack Abramoff bribery scandal in 2004. Three years later, Julie MacDonald resigned from her job as deputy assistant secretary for fish and wildlife after a report accused her of manipulating the work of agency scientists to undermine the Endangered Species Act and slipping internal documents to industry lobbyists. Paul Hoffman, another deputy assistant secretary whose main qualifications were that he had run a chamber of commerce in Wyoming and served on Mr. Cheney's Congressional staff, wrote new rules for managing the national parks that would have weakened environmental protections. Kathleen Clarke, director of the Bureau of Land Management and a favorite of the oil and gas industry, became an ardent cheerleader for Mr. Cheney's drill-now-drill-everywhere policies that put some of the country's most fragile landscapes at risk. There were many more appointments like these, and collectively they have clouded the department's mission and demoralized its employees. Mr. Salazar has a huge reconstruction job ahead. He should surround himself with a core group of dedicated, quality people, and remember that being nice to everyone won't cut it. Byron Leydecker, JcT, Chair Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: ATT00027.txt URL: From sari at sisqtel.net Fri Jan 2 11:27:34 2009 From: sari at sisqtel.net (Sari Sommarstrom) Date: Fri, 02 Jan 2009 11:27:34 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] 2008 Ocean Conditions for Fish Among Best in Half-Century Message-ID: <5.2.1.1.2.20090102111745.02c86148@pop.sisqtel.net> 12-18-08 OREGON STATE UNIVERSITY Media Release http://oregonstate.edu/dept/ncs/newsarch/2008/Dec08/oceanconditions.html 2008 Ocean Conditions for Fish Among Best in Half-Century NEWPORT, Ore. Ocean conditions during 2008 for many fish species in the Pacific Northwest, including chinook salmon, were greatly improved because of a huge cold water influx that settled in across much of the northern Pacific Ocean a phenomenon not seen on this scale in years. In fact, scientists who surveyed near-shore waters from Newport, Ore., to LaPush, Wash., this year found the highest numbers of juvenile chinook salmon theyve encountered in 11 years of sampling. The reason may be traced to the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, a pattern of climate variability that historically has shifted between warm (positive) and cool (negative) regimes over cycles of 20 to 30 years. During 2008, the PDO was the most negative it has been since 1955, according to Bill Peterson, a NOAA fisheries biologist at Oregon State Universitys Hatfield Marine Science Center. We usually see cold water conditions for a few months once upwelling begins in late spring and early summer,said Peterson, who has a courtesy appointment in OSUs College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences. Since April of 2007, though, we've been in a constant summer-stateocean condition, which is something weve never seen in more than 20 years of sampling. And were not sure why. Strong, continual upwelling has fueled phytoplankton growth that forms the basis of the marine food web. Cold water has drawn a huge biomass of northern copepods from the Gulf of Alaska, and these zooplankton species have high fat reserves that provide a rich diet for anchovies, herring and other baitfish, which in turn become prey for salmon, ling cod and other creatures. The ocean is thick with these large copepods, which accumulate fat as a way to survive the winter,Peterson said. When the Pacific Decadal Oscillation is in a positive phase and warmer water moves into the coast from offshore and the south, the copepods we see are species that are smaller and dont retain lipids. Peterson said anecdotal evidence from other researchers at OSUs Hatfield Marine Science Center suggests that recruitment for juvenile ling cod and other rockfish was extraordinary in 2008. Seabirds, including pelicans and a large murre colony at Yaquina Head, were healthy and well-fed. And there was a large population of sand lances a small baitfish that feeds on copepods. If there is a downside, Peterson says, it is that the survey didn't find as many juvenile coho salmon in 2008 as the scientists had hoped. The number of juvenile chinook, on the other hand, was 2.4 times higher than any other survey recorded in the past 13 years, Peterson said. The scientists used an array of nets in their survey, including a trawling net as tall as a five-story building and as wide as half a football field. Though 2008 has been a banner year for ocean conditions and many fish species it is too early to know what the future holds for ocean conditions or fish runs. The Pacific Decadal Oscillation has been shifting more rapidly between warm and cool phases, possibly in response to climate change. A positive phase, characterized by warm, less-salty water, occurred from 1925 to 1947, followed by a negative phase of cooler, saltier water from 1948 to 1976. Then another positive phase took over and lasted through the powerful El Nino of 1998. Since then, however, the regimes have been much shorter. The PDO was negative from 1999 to 2002, positive from 2003 to 2006, then abruptly shifted to cooler waters during the last two years. Will this latest cold-water regime last two years or two decades? "That's the million dollar question",Peterson said. Peterson and his colleagues have received a grant from NASA to track the source of the cold water to see if it has circulated from the Gulf of Alaska through an advection process, or is the result of a different upwelling pattern, bringing deep water to the surface. However, sea surface temperatures havent dropped as much as temperatures lower in the water column. Temperatures recorded this year at a sampling station five miles west of Newport, at a depth of 50 meters, were the coldest in the 13 years theyve been measured. This suggests to Peterson that the ocean is becoming more stratified, which is consistent with climate change models. Those same models also suggest more annual variability in ocean conditions. The year 2005 was one of the worst in history, as delayed upwelling caused a food shortage that led, among other things, to the collapse of the Sacramento River chinook salmon run,Peterson said. In contrast, 2008 has been one of the best years on record and though its a generality, cold water usually means good things for salmon. We just dont know how long this is going to last. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- from IFR and PCFFA news... 14:27/02. SCIENTISTS REPORT GOOD OCEAN CONDITIONS ON THE WEST COAST: In what may be the best news this year for the West Coast salmon fleet, scientists at the Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport, Oregon are reporting that the ocean is more productive now than it has been in decades. Ocean conditions have improved, according to the scientists, because of a huge influx of cold water which may be the result of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO). The PDO is a climate pattern that shifts between warm and cool cycles every 20 to 30 years. According to Bill Peterson, a fisheries biologist with the National Marine Fisheries Service who participated in the study, the PDO is the coldest it has been since 1955. The cold water influx, a result of sustained upwelling, has led to a large growth of phytoplankton and drawn a large biomass of copepods south from the Gulf of Alaska. For salmon fisheries this is good news. There is a lot of forage species in the ocean and scientists are also reporting large numbers of juvenile chinook salmon. Scientists conducting nearshore trawl surveys from Newport, Oregon to LaPush, Washington of juvenile chinook salmon reported higher numbers than anytime in the past 11 years. There are 2.4 times as many juvenile chinook salmon as there have been in the past 11 years; however, the numbers of coho salmon, which depend more on inland habitat than chinook, are still depressed. The composition of the different chinook stocks from the trawl surveys is not known. The majority of the salmon caught in the Oregon and California salmon fisheries originate from the Sacramento River, a river system that has produced very few juvenile salmon in the past two years. The Columbia River system has seen large numbers of salmon return this year and the Snake River, a tributary of the Columbia, has seen near record levels of sockeye and chinook return. Scientists speculate that increased flows over and around dams may have contributed to the higher numbers of salmon returns to those rivers. The Klamath River too has seen some improvement to salmon returns this year, as compared to 2006 disaster levels. The key question for salmon fisheries in the next few years is whether enough juvenile salmon made it out of the San Francisco Bay-delta in order to take advantage of some of the best ocean conditions in decades. The effect that the current cold phase of the PDO will have on salmon fisheries depends on how long its lasts. Unfortunately, no one knows how long it will last. Scientists speculate that the PDO cycles have been shortening in length in the past 50 years, possibly as the result of climate change. The question of how long this cold phase will last remains, as Bill Peterson the fisheries biologist says, the million dollar question. For an 18 December press release from Oregon State University go to http://oregonstate.edu/dept/ncs/newsarch/2008/Dec08/oceanconditions.html. For a 19 December article in the Oregonian go to www.oregonlive.com/environment/index.ssf/2008/12/ocean_conditions_best_for_fish.html. A WEEKLY QUOTA OF FISHERY SHORTS CAUGHT AND LANDED BY THE INSTITUTE FOR FISHERIES RESOURCES AND THE PACIFIC COAST FEDERATION OF FISHERMEN'S ASSOCIATIONS __________________________________________________________________________________________________ SUBLEGALS ~WE HOOK THE NEWS THAT'S FIT TO NET~ Vol. 14, No. 27 26 December 2008 __________________________________________________________________________________________________ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Fri Jan 2 13:40:50 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Fri, 2 Jan 2009 13:40:50 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] OSU Ocean Conditions Report Message-ID: http://oregonstate.edu/dept/ncs/newsarch/2008/Dec08/oceanconditions.html 2008 Ocean Conditions for Fish Among Best in Half-Century NEWPORT, Ore. Ocean conditions during 2008 for many fish species in the Pacific Northwest, including chinook salmon, were greatly improved because of a huge cold water influx that settled in across much of the northern Pacific Ocean a phenomenon not seen on this scale in years. In fact, scientists who surveyed near-shore waters from Newport, Ore., to LaPush, Wash., this year found the highest numbers of juvenile chinook salmon they've encountered in 11 years of sampling. The reason may be traced to the Pacific Decadal Oscillation , a pattern of climate variability that historically has shifted between warm (positive) and cool (negative) regimes over cycles of 20 to 30 years. During 2008, the PDO was the most negative it has been since 1955, according to Bill Peterson, a NOAA fisheries biologist at Oregon State Universities Hatfield Marine Science Center. We usually see cold water conditions for a few months once upwelling begins in late spring and early summer, said Peterson, who has a courtesy appointment in OSUs College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences. Since April of 2007, though, we've been in a constant summer-state ocean condition, which is something wave never seen in more than 20 years of sampling. And were not sure why. Strong, continual upwelling has fueled phytoplankton growth that forms the basis of the marine food web. Cold water has drawn a huge biomass of northern copepods from the Gulf of Alaska, and these zooplankton species have high fat reserves that provide a rich diet for anchovies, herring and other baitfish, which in turn become prey for salmon, ling cod and other creatures. The ocean is thick with these large copepods, which accumulate fat as a way to survive the winter, Peterson said. When the Pacific Decadal Oscillation is in a positive phase and warmer water moves into the coast from offshore and the south, the copepods we see are species that are smaller and don't retain lipids. Peterson said anecdotal evidence from other researchers at OSUs Hatfield Marine Science Center suggests that recruitment for juvenile ling cod and other rockfish was extraordinary in 2008. Seabirds, including pelicans and a large murre colony at Yaquina Head, were healthy and well-fed. And there was a large population of sand lances a small baitfish that feeds on copepods. If there is a downside, Peterson says, it is that the survey didn't find as many juvenile coho salmon in 2008 as the scientists had hoped. The number of juvenile chinook, on the other hand, was 2.4 times higher than any other survey recorded in the past 13 years, Peterson said. The scientists used an array of nets in their survey, including a trawling net as tall as a five-story building and as wide as half a football field. Though 2008 has been a banner year for ocean conditions and many fish species it is too early to know what the future holds for ocean conditions or fish runs. The Pacific Decadal Oscillation has been shifting more rapidly between warm and cool phases, possibly in response to climate change. A positive phase, characterized by warm, less-salty water, occurred from 1925 to 1947, followed by a negative phase of cooler, saltier water from 1948 to 1976. Then another positive phase took over and lasted through the powerful El Nino of 1998. Since then, however, the regimes have been much shorter. The PDO was negative from 1999 to 2002, positive from 2003 to 2006, then abruptly shifted to cooler waters during the last two years. Will this latest cold-water regime last two years or two decades? "That's the million dollar question", Peterson said. Peterson and his colleagues have received a grant from NASA to track the source of the cold water to see if it has circulated from the Gulf of Alaska through an advection process, or is the result of a different upwelling pattern, bringing deep water to the surface. However, sea surface temperatures haven't dropped as much as temperatures lower in the water column. Temperatures recorded this year at a sampling station five miles west of Newport, at a depth of 50 meters, were the coldest in the 13 years they've been measured. This suggests to Peterson that the ocean is becoming more stratified, which is consistent with climate change models. Those same models also suggest more annual variability in ocean conditions. The year 2005 was one of the worst in history, as delayed upwelling caused a food shortage that led, among other things, to the collapse of the Sacramento River chinook salmon run, Peterson said. In contrast, 2008 has been one of the best years on record and though its a generality, cold water usually means good things for salmon. We just don't know how long this is going to last. Byron Leydecker, JcT, Chair Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From tstokely at att.net Sat Jan 3 14:37:05 2009 From: tstokely at att.net (Tom Stokely) Date: Sat, 3 Jan 2009 14:37:05 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] =?utf-8?q?Fw=3A_Schwarzenegger_Starts_2009_by_Shovi?= =?utf-8?q?ng_Peripheral_Canal_Down_the_California_Taxpayer?= =?utf-8?b?4oCZcyBUaHJvYXQ=?= Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: Dan Bacher Sent: Saturday, January 03, 2009 1:06 PM Subject: Schwarzenegger Starts 2009 by Shoving Peripheral Canal Down the California Taxpayer?s Throat Photo of Governor Schwarzenegger calling for a special session of the California Legislature to deal with the budget deficit while pushing for a canal that would indebt generations of Californians for decades to come. Photo from the Governor's Office. governator_calls_special_... Schwarzenegger Starts New Year by Shoving Peripheral Canal Down the Taxpayer?s Throat? by Dan Bacher? Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who played a villain in the Terminator and other action flicks during his movie career, started the New Year playing the role of the ?Fish Terminator? villain Friday by releasing an environmentally devastating plan to break ground for the peripheral canal in 2011.? Schwarzenegger, realizing the opposition his plan faces in the State Legislature, plans to build the ?dual conveyance? facility without the approval of the Legislature or the voters. The massive infrastructure project would feature a combination of through-Delta flows and outside of the Delta ?peripheral? conveyance, supposedly to achieve the goals of "ecosystem restoration" and "reliable water supply" at the same time.? The Governor?s hand-picked group of advisors, the Delta Vision Task Force, released its plan for the California Delta on January 2, missing the original deadline of December 31. The plan was released at 4:55 p.m. in the classic example of the ?Friday night dump,? where controversial plans and documents are released by government agencies to avoid full scrutiny by reporters and the public, preferably at the end of a long holiday weekend.? ?There is no time to waste and we must accelerate implementation of near-term fundamental actions,? the plan states, in an attempt to convey a sense of urgency. ?Additional delay will only compound the risk to the state and its citizens.?? Fish Flows to be Recommended after Canal Construction Begins!? The plan includes a timeline of proposed actions and associated events for the destruction of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, the largest and most significant estuary on the West Coast of the Americas. One of the amazing things about the plan is the sequence of events and actions it includes. While the plan's goal is to ?break ground? for ?new conveyance in 2011, the timeline doesn?t require the Department of Fish and Game to ?recommend in stream flows? for the Delta until 2012!? Wouldn?t it be more logical to only begin infrastructure construction after in stream flows for fish are recommended and secured? This prioritization of the canal over the needs of fish clearly demonstrates that the plans ?eco language? of restoring the Delta is nothing other than green washing of the most environmentally destructive project in California history.? After setting these and other timelines, the plan claims that the ?Delta ecosystem must be protected and revitalized,? trying to demonstrate that the canal would ?help fish,? in spite of no evidence cited in the document that the conveyance would do this.? ?Fish population crashes are only the most recent manifestations of a long decline in ecosystem health,? it goes on. ?Several factors, including habitat destruction, invasive species and productivity losses to water diversions and flow alterations have together gravely damaged the largest estuary on the West Coast of the United States.?? Unfortunately, the implementation plan does nothing to mention the key role that massive increases of water exports from state and federal projects have played in the collapse of chinook salmon, steelhead, delta smelt, longfin smelt, threadfin shad, striped bass and other Delta fish populations in recent years, only stating that ?water diversions and flow alterations? are among the many factors implicated in the fish decline.? Crucial data on the role of exports and other freshwater factors contained in recent independent scientific reports on the state of trout and salmon fisheries by California Trout, NRDC and other organizations, as well as past scientific reports by DFG biologist Frank Fisher and other experts about the primary role of exports in salmon declines, aren?t heeded by the Delta Vision Blue Ribbon Panel.? There?s No Money For the Canal? The Governor?s advisors also vow to work with the legislature ?to place a comprehensive water bond package on the next statewide ballot so that critical regional and state infrastructure and ecosystem restoration projects can move forward.? Estimates of the real cost of the water bond to the taxpayers would be anywhere from $12 to $24 billion ? yet the Governor and State Legislature have been been battling for months over a massive budget deficit and the Governor has already ordered furloughs of state workers starting in February.? According to Kelly Zito?s article in today?s S.F. Chronicle, ?Delta Vision Committee members acknowledge the financial difficulties facing the state - namely a $41.5 billion budget deficit in 2010, but said the delta - and therefore the state's water system - depends heavily on additional funding.?? "We're going to have to work with Legislature," Michael Chrisman, Delta Vision Committee chairman and secretary of resources told her. "Given the budget situation we're going through right now, it's going to be a challenge."? More than anything else, pushing for an enormously expensive and environmentally destructive plan that creates the infrastructure to export more water out of the Delta - when less water exports through increased conservation are what?s truly needed at a time of severe economic crisis - is pure insanity and a denial of economic reality!? Habitat Restoration: A Green Washing Farce? The plan does have some language about addressing global climate change and ?large scale habitat? restoration that may appeal to some corporate-funded ?environmental? groups that are willing to sell out Delta farmers, recreational fishermen, commercial fishermen, California Indian Tribes and Delta residents in order to have a seat at the table with the Governor and his staff. The plant?s priorities include ?an investment commitment and strategy to restore and sustain a vibrant and diverse Delta ecosystem including the protection and enhancement of agricultural lands that are compatible with Plan goals.?? However, it?s apparent that this is just ?ecologically friendly? language to push through an ecologically unfriendly proposal to drive Delta farmers off their land and push the final nail in the coffin of Delta and Central Valley salmon fisheries.? The ultimate irony of this proposal is that it is designed to convert much of the Delta into salt and brackish marsh by breeching levees and taking some of the most productive alluvial soil on the face of the planet out of agricultural production in order to provide conveyance to irrigate drainage impaired toxic soil on the west of the side of the San Joaquin Valley that should have been taken out of production years ago! Why are the Governor and his ?advisors? willing to destroy Delta farming and fisheries ? and the northern California economy ? to provide subsidized water to corporate agribusiness on land that should have never been farmed?? ?This plan will turn the Delta into a Disneyland-type of park to provide historical reminiscences of what the estuary once was,? said Barbara Barrigan Parrillla, campaign coordinator of Restore the Delta. ?However, it doesn?t matter if you put every piece of land in the Delta into habitat, it won?t make any difference to fish restoration if water is not allowed to flow through the Delta naturally. If the water isn?t there, more habitat won?t help the fish.?? Very well said, Barbara!? New Year Brings New Name For Resources Agency? As the Governor and Delta Vision panel were finishing up their peripheral canal plan, a release from the Resources Agency on December 29 proclaimed that ?The Resources Agency will adopt a new name, the California Natural Resources Agency, on Jan. 1, 2009 to better reflect its primary mission. Since 1961, the Resources Agency has been responsible for the safeguarding and stewardship of California?s precious natural resources.?? In July, Gov. Schwarzenegger signed Senate Bill 1464 (Maldonado) authorizing the Resources Agency to change its name to the California Natural Resources Agency. ?The new Agency logo will remain largely the same and the change will be phased in gradually as new supplies are ordered. In this way there will be little or no cost to the Agency or any of its departments, boards or commissions save for any replacement costs that would normally be incurred,? the release stated.? Wouldn?t it be more appropriate for the Resources Agency to adopt a name that truly reflects its REAL primary mission? Based on my years covering California fisheries, this mission appears to be presiding over the collapse of Central Valley salmon fisheries, engineering the decline of the Delta?s pelagic fish populations, building a peripheral canal, constructing more dams, slashing funds for salmon and steelhead restoration, and instituting massive closures of public trust fisheries throughout the state?s ocean waters.? ?If the goal of this agency is to promote a peripheral canal, the agency should be renamed the Natural Destruction Agency,? quipped Parrilla.? Other potential names for the former Resources Agency could be ?Bureau of Corporate Greenwashing,? ?Raping of Natural Resources Agency,? ?No More Natural Resorurces Agency,? ?The Fish Termination Agency,? or the ?Water Exports Agency.? Hey, if you have any ideas for names for the former Resources Agency befitting its current ?mission,? email me at danielbacher [at] fishsniffer.com.? Here?s the link to the Delta Vision?s final plan: http://resources.ca.gov/docs/Delta_Vision_Committee_Implementation_Report.pdf? Delta Vision Priorities:? The priorities that form the foundation for a sustainable Delta include the following ?fundamental actions?:? ? A new system of dual water conveyance through and around the Delta to protect municipal, agricultural, environmental, and the other beneficial uses of water;? ? An investment commitment and strategy to restore and sustain a vibrant and diverse Delta ecosystem including the protection and enhancement of agricultural lands that are compatible with Plan goals;? ? Additional storage to allow greater system operational flexibility that will benefit water supplies for both humans and the environment and adapt to a changing climate;? ? An investment plan to protect and enhance unique and important characteristics of the Delta region.? ? A comprehensive Delta emergency preparedness strategy and a fully integrated Delta emergency response plan;? ? A plan to significantly improve and provide incentives for water conservation ? through both wise use and reuse ? in both urban and agricultural sectors throughout the state;? ? Strong incentives for local and regional efforts to make better use of new sources of water such as brackish water cleanup and seawater desalination; and? ? An improved governance system that has reliable funding, clear authority to determine priorities and strong performance measures to ensure accountability to the new governing doctrine of the Delta: operation for the coequal goals. Completion of this fundamental action is absolutely essential to the sustained operation and maintenance of all of these recommendations. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: governator_calls_special_session.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 28086 bytes Desc: not available URL: From tstokely at att.net Tue Jan 6 18:24:48 2009 From: tstokely at att.net (Tom Stokely) Date: Tue, 6 Jan 2009 18:24:48 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Draft CVP Program Assessment Report available online Message-ID: <67E4C3750CEC431FAFDB9728B708EDF0@homeuserPC> I haven't read it yet, but it's my understanding that there is discussion of the Trinity River Restoration Program in the draft CPAR report below. I don't know what the process for accepting comments of finalization of the document is. Maybe somebody else knows? http://www.usbr.gov/mp/cvpia/docs_reports/docs/cpar_rpt_dft_fnl_12-22-08.pdf Happy New Year! Tom Stokely Water Policy Coordinator California Water Impact Network 504A Lennon St. (USPS and UPS) Mt Shasta, CA 96067 V/FAX 530-926-9727 Cell 530-524-0315 tstokely at att.net http://www.c-win.org/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From trinityjosh at gmail.com Tue Jan 6 18:46:15 2009 From: trinityjosh at gmail.com (Joshua Allen) Date: Tue, 6 Jan 2009 18:46:15 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Wish me luck! Message-ID: Just FYI: I was called up by the Yurok Tribe and asked to specifically apply for a transportation planner position within a Transportation Department they are starting up. After a few weeks of waiting I heard back from them last Friday, and now have a interview with them this Thursday for that position. This is the first interview I have been called for since being laid off last August and is a great opportunity to not only learn and work for a tribal entity; but also get back up north out of Stockton, get back to work on my career, and also work on a second bachleor degree in environmental engineering (just need major courses since most of my core is already done inder the Natural Resources Planning major at Humboldt) So wish me luck, I shall need it! Joshua Allen P.S. Tom, Susie, Pat, Diana, Ed, anyone at TRRP, Dave H., & Tim if you are asked about me, this is what it is in refernce to. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: New River.jpeg Type: image/jpeg Size: 96414 bytes Desc: not available URL: From skaplan at mp.usbr.gov Wed Jan 7 08:50:07 2009 From: skaplan at mp.usbr.gov (Shana Kaplan) Date: Wed, 07 Jan 2009 08:50:07 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Draft CVP Program Assessment Report available online Message-ID: Tom - you will receive an official letter later this week with instructions on commenting. Thanks! :~) Shana Kaplan CVPIA Program Manager Bureau of Reclamation Division of Resources Management (916) 978-5190 Fax 978-5290 skaplan at mp.usbr.gov >>> "Tom Stokely" 01/06 6:24 PM >>> I haven't read it yet, but it's my understanding that there is discussion of the Trinity River Restoration Program in the draft CPAR report below. I don't know what the process for accepting comments of finalization of the document is. Maybe somebody else knows? http://www.usbr.gov/mp/cvpia/docs_reports/docs/cpar_rpt_dft_fnl_12-22-08.pdf Happy New Year! Tom Stokely Water Policy Coordinator California Water Impact Network 504A Lennon St. (USPS and UPS) Mt Shasta, CA 96067 V/FAX 530-926-9727 Cell 530-524-0315 tstokely at att.net http://www.c-win.org/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From tstokely at att.net Wed Jan 7 10:09:13 2009 From: tstokely at att.net (Tom Stokely) Date: Wed, 7 Jan 2009 10:09:13 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Press Release on Draft CPAR Report Message-ID: Mid-Pacific Region Sacramento, Calif. Media Contact: Released On: December 29, 2008 Bureau of Reclamation and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Release Draft CPAR Report for Public Review and Comment Media Contacts: Reclamation - Lynnette Wirth, 916-978-5100, lwirth at mp.usbr.gov U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service - Scott Flaherty, 916-978-6156, scott_flaherty at fws.gov -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Bureau of Reclamation and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (Service) have released the Draft Central Valley Project Improvement Act (CVPIA) Program Activity Review (CPAR) report for public review and comment. At the direction of the Department of the Interior's Assistant Secretary for Water and Science (ASWS) in January 2006, Reclamation, in coordination with the Service, initiated the CPAR process to determine performance goals and funding reduction criteria for the fish and wildlife provisions of CVPIA. Development of the report was prompted in part by stakeholder concerns about CVPIA Section 3407(d)(2), which describes a mechanism by which the Secretary of the Interior could reduce the Restoration Fund contributions from water and power contractors. A Working Group of stakeholders, tribal representatives, and other interested parties and agencies provided information for Reclamation and the Service and participated in developing the report. The draft CPAR Report is now available for review and comment by the Working Group and other interested parties. Following this review, the report will be submitted for final policy review to the ASWS, the Commissioner of Reclamation, and the Director of the Service. Reclamation and the Service anticipate releasing the final CPAR report in spring or early summer 2009. The preliminary recommended decision of the report is that there is insufficient basis at this time to justify a reduction in Restoration Funds collection. The draft report is available at http://www.usbr.gov/mp/cvpia/docs_reports/index.html Written comments are due by close of business Friday, February 27, 2009, to the Bureau of Reclamation, Division of Resources Management (MP-400), Attention: CPAR, 2800 Cottage Way, Sacramento CA 95825, or by e-mail to mheaton at mp.usbr.gov. For additional information, please contact Mr. Mike Heaton at 916-978-5556 (TDD 916-978-5608). -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The mission of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is working with others to conserve, protect and enhance fish, wildlife, plants and their habitats for the continuing benefit of the American people. We are both a leader and trusted partner in fish and wildlife conservation, known for our scientific excellence, stewardship of lands and natural resources, dedicated professionals and commitment to public service. For more information on our work and the people who make it happen, visit www.fws.gov. # # # Reclamation is the largest wholesale water supplier and the second largest producer of hydroelectric power in the United States, with operations and facilities in the 17 Western States. Its facilities also provide substantial flood control, recreation, and fish and wildlife benefits. Visit our website at www.usbr.gov. Relevant Links: Draft CPAR Report -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From tstokely at att.net Wed Jan 7 11:58:15 2009 From: tstokely at att.net (Tom Stokely) Date: Wed, 7 Jan 2009 11:58:15 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] An different viewpoint on the new Interior Secretary Message-ID: <7C3E0F9ADF32472B801653DD5AF0ADD4@homeuserPC> An interesting viewpoint on the new Interior Secretary. Most of the statements about him have been positive so far. TS from: http://www.counterpunch.org/stclair12192008.html Weekend Edition December 19 - 21, 2008 How to Make Bruce Babbitt Look Like Ed Abbey Salazar and the Tragedy of the Common Ground By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR Although America's greatest Interior Secretary, Harold Ickes, who had the post for nearly a decade under FDR, was from Chicago, the playbook for presidential transitions calls for picking a Westerner for Interior, as long as the nominee isn't a Californian. Pick someone from Arizona or New Mexico or Colorado. Of course, Colorado has produced two of the worst recent Interior Secretaries: James Watt and Gale Norton. Ken Salazar may make it three. And why not? After all, Salazar was one of the first to endorse Gale Norton's nomination as Bush's Interior Secretary. By almost any standard, it's hard to imagine a more uninspired or uninspiring choice for the job than professional middle-of-the-roader Ken Salazar, the conservative Democrat from Colorado. This pal of Alberto Gonzalez is a meek politician, who has never demonstrated the stomach for confronting the corporate bullies of the west: the mining, timber and oil companies who have been feasting on Interior Department handouts for the past eight years. Even as attorney general of Colorado, Salazar built a record of timidity when it came to going after renegade mining companies. The editorial pages of western papers have largely hailed Salazar's nomination. The common theme seems to be that Salazar will be "an honest broker." But broker of what? Mining claims and oil leases, most likely. Less defensible are the dial-o-matic press releases faxed out by the mainstream groups, greenwashing Salazar's dismal record. Here's Carl Pope, CEO of the Sierra Club, who fine-tuned this kind of rhetorical airbrushing during the many traumas of the Clinton years: "The Sierra Club is very pleased with the nomination of Ken Salazar to head the Interior Department. As a Westerner and a rancher, he understands the value of our public lands, parks, and wildlife and has been a vocal critic of the Bush Administration's reckless efforts to sell-off our public lands to Big Oil and other special interests. Senator Salazar has been a leader in protecting places like the Roan Plateau and he has stood up against the Bush's administration's dangerous rush to develop oil shale in Colorado and across the West. "Senator Salazar has also been a leading voice in calling for the development of the West's vast solar, wind, and geothermal resources. He will make sure that we create the good-paying green jobs that will fuel our economic recovery without harming the public lands he will be charged with protecting." Who knew that strip-mining for coal, an industry Salazar resolutely promotes, was a green job? Hold on tight, here we go once more down the rabbit hole. The Sierra Club had thrown its organizational heft behind Mike Thompson, the hook-and-rifle Democratic congressman from northern California. Obama stiffed them and got away with it without enduring even a whimper of disappointment. In the exhaust-stream, not far beyond Pope, came an organization (you can't call them a group, since they don't really have any members) called the Campaign for American Wilderness, lavishly endowed by the centrist Pew Charitable Trusts, to fete Salazar. According to Mike Matz, the Campaign's executive director, Salazar "has been a strong proponent of protecting federal lands as wilderness.As a farmer, a rancher, and a conservationist, Sen. Salazar understands the importance of balancing traditional uses of our public lands with the need to protect them. His knowledge of land management issues in the West, coupled with his ability to work with diverse groups and coalitions to find common ground, will serve him well at the Department of the Interior." Whenever seasoned greens see the word "common ground" invoked as a solution for thorny land use issues in the Interior West it sets off an early warning alarm. "Common ground" is another flex-phrase like, "win-win" solution that indicates greens will be handed a few low-calorie crumbs while business will proceed to gorge as usual. In Salazar's case, these morsels have been a few measly wilderness areas inside non-contentious areas, such as Rocky Mountain National Park. Designating a wilderness inside a national park is about as risky as placing the National Mall off-limits to oil drilling. But Salazar's green gifts haven't come without a cost. In the calculus of common ground politics, trade-offs come with the territory. For example, Salazar, under intense pressure from Coloradoans, issued a tepid remonstrance against the Bush administration's maniacal plan to open up the Roan Plateau in western Colorado to oil drilling. But he voted to authorize oil drilling off the coast of Florida, voted against increased fuel-efficiency standards for cars and trucks and voted against the repeal of tax breaks for Exxon-Mobil when the company was shattering records for quarterly profits. On the very day that Salazar's nomination was leaked to the press, the Inspector General for the Interior Department released a devastating report on the demolition of the Endangered Species Act under the Bush administration, largely at the hands of the disgraced Julie MacDonald, former Deputy Secretary of Interior for Fish and Wildlife. The IG report, written by Earl Devaney, detailed how MacDonald personally interfered with 13 different endangered species rulings, bullying agency scientists and rewriting biological opinions. "MacDonald injected herself personally and profoundly in a number of ESA decisions," Devaney wrote in a letter to Oregon Senator Ron Wyden. "We determined that MacDonald's management style was abrupt and abrasive, if not abusive, and that her conduct demoralized and frustrated her staff as well as her subordinate managers." What McDonald did covertly, Salazar might attempt openly in the name of, yes, common ground. Take the case of the white-tailed prairie dog, one of the declining species that MacDonald went to nefarious lengths to keep from enjoying the protections of the Endangered Species Act. Prairie dogs are viewed as pests by ranchers and their populations have been remorselessly targeted for elimination on rangelands across the Interior West. Ken Salazar, former rancher, once threatened to sue the Fish and Wildlife Service to keep the similarly imperiled black-tailed prairie dog off the endangered species list. The senator also fiercely opposed efforts to inscribe stronger protections for endangered species in the 2008 Farm Bill. "The Department of the Interior desperately needs a strong, forward looking, reform-minded Secretary," says Kieran Suckling, executive director of the Tucson-based Center for Biological Diversity. "Unfortunately, Ken Salazar is not that man. He endorsed George Bush's selection of Gale Norton as Secretary of Interior, the very woman who initiated and encouraged the scandals that have rocked the Department of the Interior. Virtually all of the misdeeds described in the Inspector General's expose occurred during the tenure of the person Ken Salazar advocated for the position he is now seeking." As a leading indicator of just how bad Salazar may turn out to be, an environmentalist need only bushwhack through the few remaining daily papers to the stock market pages, where energy speculators, cheered at the Salazar pick, drove up the share price of coal companies, such as Peabody, Massey Energy and Arch Coal. The battered S&P Coal index rose by three per cent on the day Obama introduced the coal-friendly Salazar as his nominee. Say this much for Salazar: he's not a Clinton retread. In fact, he makes Clinton Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt look like Ed Abbey. The only way to redeem Clinton's sorry record on the environment is for Obama to be worse. As Hot Rod Blajogevich demonstrated in his earthy vernacular, politics is a pay-to-play sport. Like Ken Salazar, Barack Obama's political underwriters included oil-and-gas companies, utilities, financial houses, agribusiness giants, such as Archer Daniels Midlands, and coal companies. These bundled campaign contributions dwarfed the money given to Obama by environmentalists, many of whom backed Hillary in the Democratic Party primaries. Environmentalists made no demands of Obama during the election and sat silently as he backed off-shore oil drilling, pledged to build new nuclear plants and sang the virtues of the oxymoron known as clean-coal technology. At this point, the president-elect probably feels he owes them no favors. And he gave them none. The environmental establishment cheered. So the environmental movement has once again been left out in the cold, begging Rahm Emmanuel for a few sub-cabinet appointments. They may get one or two positions out of a couple hundred slots. But Big Green's docile genuflections to Salazar won't make those table-scraps go down any smoother. Jeffrey St. Clair is the author of Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: the Politics of Nature and Grand Theft Pentagon. His newest book, Born Under a Bad Sky, is just out from AK Press / CounterPunch books. He can be reached at: sitka at comcast.net. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Thu Jan 8 09:33:30 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Thu, 8 Jan 2009 09:33:30 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Congressman George Miller's OpEd in SF Chron 1 7 09 Message-ID: <001101c971b7$3a0d3df0$ae27b9d0$@net> cid:image001.jpg at 01C9717B.76B4B440 In the drying West, dams are no longer the answer George Miller Thursday, January 8, 2009 In the 1960s, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation began planning a reservoir on the American River, hoping it would become a major element of California's extensive system of dams and canals that ships water across the state. The bureau studied the proposal, to be called Auburn Dam, for decades only to find the dam would cost $10 billion to construct - if it ever survived environmental review and if earthquakes didn't render the site useless in the interim. This fall, the State of California finally revoked the federal government's unused water right for the project. Ultimately, the Bureau of Reclamation spent more than 40 years and $300 million studying a dam that would never be built and would never deliver a drop of water. The Auburn Dam boondoggle is not an outlier. The Bureau of Reclamation is a billion-dollar-a-year water management agency created for a different era, when our nation had different needs. Enormous water infrastructure projects like dams and reservoirs once drove agricultural and urban development, but no longer. Today, the serious water challenges facing the American West have been exacerbated by climate change, and the largest water manager in the country hasn't adapted. The Bureau of Reclamation has constantly convinced themselves that building one more big dam - or one more canal - would finally solve our water problems. In some cases, reservoirs help to meet our new water needs, but such expensive and time-consuming projects only make sense in the context of an agency that follows the science and the law, is a wise steward of the resource, and promotes cost-effective solutions. It's hard to say that the Bureau of Reclamation is that agency, and to remain relevant in the coming years the agency will have to reinvent itself. President-elect Barack Obama has articulated a clear and compelling vision of a government that, in sharp contrast to the last eight years, addresses real-world problems. As he said last month, "This isn't about big government or small government. It's about building a smarter government that focuses on what works." Smart government, when it comes to supplying water to cities, farms and the environment in the 21st century, will mean leaving behind the dam-building and pipeline-laying federal bureaucracy of the last hundred years. If we put our money into proven and cost-effective strategies like groundwater cleanup and better coordination between reservoirs, then we can dramatically improve the reliability of our existing clean water supplies without wasting time and energy chasing the cumbersome and expensive infrastructure dreams of the past century. Instead of spending time and money we can't afford to study dams that will never be built, the federal government should work with local water managers who have cost-effective plans to stretch their existing water supplies. In the city of Pittsburg, in my congressional district, and in other parts of the Bay Area, for example, water managers are actively pursuing alternative water supplies through water recycling, where wastewater is treated and the clean result is reused for commercial irrigation and industrial processes. This allows us to add water to the system - quickly, reliably and without causing environmental damage or depending on increasingly unreliable snowpack. Congress authorized the San Francisco Bay Area Regional Water Recycling Program last year, which will pump nearly $30 million in federal seed money into the system that will be matched many times over by local entities. Congress will be pursuing similar efforts in the years to come. Under the Bush administration, the Bureau of Reclamation fought these proposals every step of the way. Federal agencies also need to do much more to help businesses, farms and cities adjust to a new, more water-constrained future by becoming more efficient. California has already proved it can rise to such a challenge with energy use: We use 40 percent less electricity per capita than the national average, and a recent UC Berkeley study found that our investments in energy efficiency have created more than a million jobs while saving Californians $56 billion in energy costs. We can take that model and apply it to our world of water. Significantly improving the water-use efficiency of major appliances and fixtures could save billions of gallons of water per day, yet today there are no tax incentives targeted specifically at water conservation. Expanded federal incentives, improved research and development, and stronger federal efficiency requirements can help us reduce our reliance on dwindling or unstable water supplies, while driving innovation, saving money and adding to the economy. Now is the time to have a serious conversation about whether we will still need a $1 billion-a-year federal dam construction and water management agency in the 21st century. The president-elect and his team clearly understand the challenges posed by a warming and more variable climate, and they recognize that a smarter government can help America meet its challenges. It's time to insist that an old bureaucracy learn new tricks so that we can meet our clean water needs without breaking the bank or wreaking havoc on our natural waterways. Rep. George Miller, D-Martinez, is a member of the House Democratic Leadership and the former chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 6440 bytes Desc: not available URL: From tstokely at att.net Thu Jan 8 16:58:33 2009 From: tstokely at att.net (Tom Stokely) Date: Thu, 8 Jan 2009 16:58:33 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Groups File Petition to Limit Gold Mining Message-ID: Groups File Petition to Limit Gold Mining to Save Struggling Fisheries In Wake of Fisheries Closures, Tribe, Fishermen, and Conservationists Urge California Fish and Game to protect critical habitats from Suction Dredge Mining Yubanet.com By: Karuk Tribe Sacramento, CA Jan. 7, 2009 - The Karuk Tribe, California Trout, and Friends of the North Fork have formally petitioned California Fish and Game to restrict the controversial gold mining technique known as suction dredge mining. The groups' call to limit the recreational mining technique comes as California faces the worst fisheries collapse in history. The petition was immediately supported by the Tsi-Akim Maidu Tribe, the Sierra Fund, and PCFFA. "Last April, the state and federal government took unprecedented emergency actions to completely close California's coast to recreational and commercial salmon fishing, something that is causing severe economic harm to businesses and communities," said Glen Spain, Northwest Regional Director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations. "That is why it is critical for California Fish and Game to act now to limit recreational suction dredge mining operations and protect threatened and endangered species like coho salmon." The groups want Department of Fish and Game Director Don Koch to use his authority to implement immediate emergency restrictions on where and when suction dredging can take place - the same authority used to restrict recreational and commercial fishing when fish runs are low. Suction dredges are powered by gas or diesel engines that are mounted on floating pontoons in the river. Attached to the engine is a powerful vacuum hose which the dredger uses to suction up the gravel and sand (sediment) from the bottom of the river. The material passes through a sluice box where heavier gold particles can settle into a series of riffles. The rest of the gravel and potentially toxic sediment is simply dumped back into the river. Depending on size, location and density of these machines they can turn a clear running mountain stream into a murky watercourse unfit for swimming. "Dredging disturbs spawning gravels and kills salmon eggs and immature lamprey that reside in the gravel for up to seven years before maturing. In a system like the Klamath where salmon can be stressed due to poor water quality, having a dredge running in the middle of the stream affects the fishes ability to reach their spawning grounds," according to Toz Soto, lead fisheries biologist for the Karuk Tribe. In addition, dredging reintroduces toxic mercury into the environment. According to Izzy Martin, Director of the Sierra Fund, "There is a lot of mercury settled on the bottom of these rivers as the result of gold mining operations in the 1800's. Dredging reintroduces mercury to the stream creating a toxic hazard for fish and people." Exposure to mercury can lead to mental retardation and birth defects. These groups have been working for years to limit suction dredging in order to protect the most important habitats for spawning coho, green sturgeon, and lamprey. Currently the Department of Fish and Game is revising (DFG) its regulations in compliance with a 2006 court order but the funding to perform the necessary CEQA hearings may disappear from the budget in the wake of the current budget impasse. At any rate the rule making could take years and groups say that the protective measures are needed immediately. Fish and Game oversees suction dredge permits at a significant financial loss as mining fees fail to cover expenses. According to petitioners, this amounts to spending $1.25 million per year to subsidize the destruction of California fisheries by gold mining hobbyists. Many of these hobby miners are from out of state as California's mining laws are less restrictive than those of neighboring states. "It's absurd that in the midst of the state's worst financial crisis that we are subsidizing the destruction of our fisheries for the sake of recreational dredge mining. Tax payer dollars are being used to kill fish and the jobs they provide," added Spain. In California, fishermen buy 2.4 million fishing licenses each year. The sportfishing industry supports a total of 43,000 jobs amounting to $1.3 billion in wages and salaries annually. Fishing equipment sales total over $2.4 billion per year. By comparison, DFG only issues 3,000 permits for suction dredging each year. "The 2.4 million Californians that buy fishing licenses every year expect the Governor to protect both our natural resources as well as our rural economies," said Spain. For the Karuk Tribe the threat is even greater. "Suction dredge mining is nothing more than recreational genocide. The first gold rush killed more than half our people in 10 years. This modern gold rush continues to kill our fish and our culture," says Leaf Hillman of the Karuk Tribe. "While we cannot harvest enough salmon for our ceremonies or to meet our families' food needs, miners are allowed to rip and tear our river bottoms to shreds. We need California Fish and Game to take a stand with Native People and the 2.4 million anglers in California - not 3,000 recreational gold miners," added Hillman. Fish and Game Don Koch will have to consider the groups' petition to limit mining and make a ruling before the end of the month.# http://yubanet.com/regional/Groups-File-Petition-to-Limit-Gold-Mining-to-Save-Struggling-Fisheries.php -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From tstokely at att.net Fri Jan 9 10:34:41 2009 From: tstokely at att.net (Tom Stokely) Date: Fri, 9 Jan 2009 10:34:41 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Federal draft report: Delta system imperils fish Message-ID: If there isn't enough cold water for fish in the Sacramento River and the Trinity is plumbed to the Sacramento River, doesn't this mean that there isn't enough cold water for Trinity salmon either? Tom Stokely Water Policy Coordinator California Water Impact Network 504A Lennon St. (USPS and UPS) Mt Shasta, CA 96067 V/FAX 530-926-9727 Cell 530-524-0315 tstokely at att.net http://www.c-win.org/ Federal draft report: Delta system imperils fish The Sacramento Bee - 1/09/09 By Matt Weiser Salmon, steelhead and sturgeon in the Central Valley are being driven to extinction by Delta pumping systems and upstream reservoir operations, according to a draft federal report. The National Marine Fisheries Service has not yet released the report, but it was discussed at a meeting of scientists in Sacramento on Thursday. The impacts are so significant that the agency is also studying whether killer whales in the ocean could be imperiled by declining Central Valley salmon, their primary prey. The grave findings suggest that California's efforts to serve thirsty farms and cities while sustaining healthy fisheries will only get more difficult. A final version of the report, called a biological opinion, is expected by March 2. The Endangered Species Act empowers the fisheries service to impose new rules on state and federal water systems to protect the fish. The state and federal governments operate separate reservoir and canal systems that collect Northern California's snowmelt and distribute it to cities, suburbs and farms statewide. These systems have dammed off hundreds of miles of fish habitat and altered the timing and temperature of river flows. Given the findings, the fisheries service could require the California Department of Water Resources and U.S. Bureau of Reclamation to change reservoir operations, improve river habitat and divert less water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to Southern California. Hatchery practices might have to be changed to protect wild fish. The details of these forthcoming rules were not revealed Thursday. Officials at both water agencies have seen the full draft but declined to comment on the specifics. "To take additional hits (in water supply) will be very problematic for us," said Jerry Johns, deputy director of the state Department of Water Resources. "Our goal is to protect these fish species, and we've got to make sure we do that effectively. But we've got to do it in a reasonable way." The biological opinion has a long and troubled history. A version completed in 2004 reached similar findings. But a regional director at the National Marine Fisheries Service, a political appointee, altered the final report to show, instead, that the species would not be imperiled by water operations. Conservation groups sued, and last year federal district Judge Oliver Wanger ruled the agency's actions were "arbitrary and capricious" and violated the Endangered Species Act. He ordered a new report prepared by March of this year, but allowed water operations to continue unaltered until then. Under current rules, the state Department of Water Resources and U.S. Bureau of Reclamation coordinate their operations to boost water pumped through the Delta to farms and cities south. One of their tools is to manipulate the timing of water releases from reservoirs, including Shasta, Oroville and Folsom. Fisheries Service biologists said Thursday that the current system, with its emphasis on water for people, does not provide adequate cold water for spawning habitat in the Sacramento River. This will worsen as climate change and population growth take hold, the scientists said. "There's not much chance here for spring-run (salmon) in the mainstream Sacramento River," said biologist Bruce Oppenheim. "We just don't have as much water available in Shasta in the future." The discussion took place before an independent panel of scientists conducting a peer review of the findings for the CalFed Bay-Delta Authority, a joint state-federal agency charged with improving the Delta. The meeting was highly technical but offered warnings about four protected species: winter- and spring-run salmon, Central Valley steelhead and green sturgeon. Similar conditions exist in the American River: not enough cold water or habitat for steelhead spawning. "By the time May comes around, it's really not a suitable place for egg incubation," said biologist Brian Ellrott. Providing more cold water for fish would mean saving water behind dams for spawning season. This could mean less water for farms and cities in summer and fall. Under the current system, risks to the fish are numerous. The Bureau of Reclamation, for instance, operates giant gates on the Sacramento River near Walnut Grove to divert freshwater into the interior Delta to freshen supplies available to diversion pumps. When these gates are open, young salmon migrating to sea stray into waters teeming with predators, including foreign species such as striped bass. Federal biologist Jeff Stuart said closing the gates almost doubles salmon survival rates. Other threats include herbicides to control aquatic weeds, entrapment in the suction effect of the water diversion pumps, and rough handling at fish screens near the pumps. "Basically, if you enter the interior Delta, you're not going to survive," Stuart said. The biological opinion does not directly consider effects on fall-run chinook salmon, because this species is not yet protected by the Endangered Species Act. But it is declining steeply and affected by the same threats. The fall-run remains the largest salmon population on the West Coast, vital as ocean-going adults to the commercial fishing industry. It's also a primary food for the southern resident population of killer whale, or orca, an endangered species that ranges from Puget Sound to Monterey. Fewer salmon spawning in Central Valley rivers, then growing into adults in the ocean, could mean hard times for the orca. Maria Rea, Sacramento supervisor for the Fisheries Service, said her team has not finished evaluating whether California water operations threaten the orca. # http://www.sacbee.com/capitolandcalifornia/story/1528201.html ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ DWR's California Water News is distributed to California Department of Water Resources management and staff, for information purposes, by the DWR Public Affairs Office. For reader's services, including new subscriptions, temporary cancellations and address changes, please use the online page: http://listhost2.water.ca.gov/mailman/listinfo/water_news . DWR operates and maintains the State Water Project, provides dam safety and flood control and inspection services, assists local water districts in water management and water conservation planning, and plans for future statewide water needs. Inclusion of materials is not to be construed as an endorsement of any programs, projects, or viewpoints by the Department or the State of California. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Sat Jan 10 08:25:44 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Sat, 10 Jan 2009 08:25:44 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Marin Coho Crisis Message-ID: <000001c97340$173e7480$45bb5d80$@net> Well, for me it's close to home, or rather it is home. Byron San Francisco Chronicle 'Crisis situation' for Marin's coho salmon Peter Fimrite, Chronicle Staff Writer Saturday, January 10, 2009 (01-09) 17:00 PST SAN FRANCISCO -- The lack of rain this winter has contributed to what fisheries biologists say is, so far, the worst return of coho salmon in the recorded history of Marin County's Lagunitas Creek watershed, one of California's most critical ecosystems for the endangered fish. Images A male and a female steelhead salmon swim under a bridge ... Where have the salmon gone? (John Blanchard / The Chronicle) http://imgs.sfgate.com/graphics/utils/plus-green.gifView Larger Images * SAN FRANCISCO / Unabomber's items can be auctioned 01.10.09 Only a smattering of coho were spotted and only 20 egg nests, or redds, were seen in the two main tributaries - Lagunitas and San Geronimo creeks - during the annual winter survey of fish, watershed biologists said this week. The paltry showing of redds represents an 89 percent drop in the number of returning offspring of parents that gave birth in the lush western Marin watershed three years ago. Last year at this time, 148 redds had been counted, then the lowest number in the 14 years that records have been kept, said Paola Bouley, the conservation program director for the Salmon Protection and Watershed Network, or SPAWN. "It's just frightening, actually," Bouley said. "We were expecting 70 redds, which is still a 63 percent decline. It's definitely a crisis situation." The waterway, which winds its way through the picturesque San Geronimo Valley on the northwest side of Mount Tamalpais, typically supports the largest wild run of salmon left in the state, historically about 10 percent of California's coho population. During the first winter rains, the spawning fish swim 33 miles from the open ocean into Tomales Bay and up the creek through the redwood-studded valley to lay their eggs and die. The females lay their eggs only after they've found the place where they were born three years before. The decline this year is alarming given that 190 redds were counted in 2005 when the parents of these coho laid their eggs. The plummeting coho numbers exacerbate a near catastrophic decline in the overall population of salmon along the West Coast. So few chinook salmon returned to spawn in the Sacramento-San Joaquin river system last year that ocean fishing had to be banned in California and Oregon. The number of coho eggs throughout the state declined about 70 percent last year. The low number of coho in the Lagunitas watershed in 2007 was shocking given that a record 496 redds were counted in 2004, the year they were born. "We had our best year class in 2004," Bouley said. "What happened is our best year class turned into our worst year class." This year is looking even worse. Fisheries biologists believe the primary cause is the unusually dry weather in Northern California, which has prevented salmon from swimming up the creeks. The rains in December were barely enough to breach sandbars on most beaches, forcing salmon up and down the coast to circle in the open ocean where they are vulnerable to sea lions and other predators. "It's not looking good," said Sean Hayes, a National Marine Fisheries Service biologist who monitors salmon in Scott Creek, the southernmost coho run in California, north of Davenport (Santa Cruz County). "The fish have been hammered a couple of years in a row now. If it doesn't rain, there could be a spawning failure this year, which would be catastrophic." Threat of extinction Bouley said a big rainstorm could turn things around, but hardly any rain is expected in the next two weeks. If things don't improve, she said, this year's cycle of fish may go extinct. The lack of salmon in Lagunitas Creek is a major concern, she said, because the watershed is a statewide model for fisheries restoration. The first winter rains normally bring schools of coho wriggling up the creeks, drawing tourists, schoolchildren and naturalists to watch the fish leap from the foaming rapids. "The Lagunitas population is critical to the viability of the entire central California coho population. It is the keystone watershed along the coast," Bouley said. "Fisheries agencies look to Lagunitas as the key to the recovery for neighboring watersheds. We won't have any streams left to seed them if this one is gone." The watershed is unique in that the primary spawning grounds are in the middle of developed communities. Since coho were listed as endangered in 2005 under the Endangered Species Act, many residents have taken a proprietary interest in the fish. Schools have become involved, organizing work parties and teaching children about the historic coho migration. More than a century ago, about 6,000 coho spawned in the system of streams every year. At that time, the salmon swam from Tomales Bay virtually to the top of Mount Tamalpais, spawning in tributaries all along the way. But industry started taking a toll almost from the day Joseph Warren Revere spotted the valley in 1846 and saw "a copious stream, fed by mountain brooks." The redwood forests surrounding the creek were logged between 1860 and 1900. Subsequent homes and roads built along the waterway removed about 60 percent of the original riparian habitat. The first major dam, which created Lake Lagunitas, was built in 1873. Six more dams were constructed over the next century, the largest being Peter's Dam at Kent Lake, finished in 1953 and then raised 42 feet in 1982. The dams blocked 50 percent of the historic salmon habitat, reduced the amount of gravel and increased sedimentation in the creeks. But the decline was slow. Old-timers told how they used to spear fish from decks or garage hatches overlooking the creek. In 1959, when the habitat was already in serious decline, the largest recorded coho in state history, a 22-pounder, was fished out of Lagunitas Creek. Lobbying the county The restoration effort began in the early 1980s when a group called Trout Unlimited began lobbying the county to stop the decline of the fishery. SPAWN, which was created in 1996, sponsors salmon-watching creek walks during spawning season and has saved more than 15,000 juvenile salmon and steelhead from drying pools during the summer. The Marin Municipal Water District, which is required by the state to help the coho as mitigation for raising Peter's Dam, started counting coho redds in the early 1990s and now works with SPAWN to monitor releases from the dam, install woody debris in the creeks and replant vegetation. "This is the beacon of hope for the California watershed," Bouley said, but "the fish are missing. They are gone." Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.gif Type: image/gif Size: 5771 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image002.gif Type: image/gif Size: 4431 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image003.gif Type: image/gif Size: 54 bytes Desc: not available URL: From achhome at pacbell.net Sat Jan 10 08:32:28 2009 From: achhome at pacbell.net (Linda Ach) Date: Sat, 10 Jan 2009 08:32:28 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Marin Coho Crisis In-Reply-To: <000001c97340$173e7480$45bb5d80$@net> References: <000001c97340$173e7480$45bb5d80$@net> Message-ID: <61212463-275F-4DD5-B0DD-394F280C02BC@pacbell.net> trout unlimited mentioned big in this article! linda On Jan 10, 2009, at 8:25 AM, Byron Leydecker wrote: > Well, for me it?s close to home, or rather it is home. > > Byron > > San Francisco Chronicle > > 'Crisis situation' for Marin's coho salmon > Peter Fimrite, Chronicle Staff Writer > Saturday, January 10, 2009 > > (01-09) 17:00 PST SAN FRANCISCO -- > > The lack of rain this winter has contributed to what fisheries > biologists say is, so far, the worst return of coho salmon in the > recorded history of MarinCounty's Lagunitas Creek watershed, one of > California's most critical ecosystems for the endangered fish. > > IMAGES > View Larger Images > > Only a smattering of coho were spotted and only 20 egg nests, or > redds, were seen in the two main tributaries - Lagunitas and San > Geronimo creeks - during the annual winter survey of fish, watershed > biologists said this week. > > The paltry showing of redds represents an 89 percent drop in the > number of returning offspring of parents that gave birth in the lush > western Marinwatershed three years ago. Last year at this time, 148 > redds had been counted, then the lowest number in the 14 years that > records have been kept, said Paola Bouley, the conservation program > director for the Salmon Protection and Watershed Network, or SPAWN. > > "It's just frightening, actually," Bouley said. "We were expecting > 70 redds, which is still a 63 percent decline. It's definitely a > crisis situation." > > The waterway, which winds its way through the picturesque San > Geronimo Valley on the northwest side of Mount Tamalpais, typically > supports the largest wild run of salmon left in the state, > historically about 10 percent of California's coho population. > > During the first winter rains, the spawning fish swim 33 miles from > the open ocean into Tomales Bay and up the creek through the redwood- > studded valley to lay their eggs and die. The females lay their eggs > only after they've found the place where they were born three years > before. The decline this year is alarming given that 190 redds were > counted in 2005 when the parents of these coho laid their eggs. > > The plummeting coho numbers exacerbate a near catastrophic decline > in the overall population of salmon along the West Coast. So few > chinook salmon returned to spawn in the Sacramento-San Joaquin river > system last year that ocean fishing had to be banned in California > and Oregon. > > The number of coho eggs throughout the state declined about 70 > percent last year. The low number of coho in the Lagunitas watershed > in 2007 was shocking given that a record 496 redds were counted in > 2004, the year they were born. > > "We had our best year class in 2004," Bouley said. "What happened is > our best year class turned into our worst year class." > > This year is looking even worse. > > Fisheries biologists believe the primary cause is the unusually dry > weather in Northern California, which has prevented salmon from > swimming up the creeks. The rains in December were barely enough to > breach sandbars on most beaches, forcing salmon up and down the > coast to circle in the open ocean where they are vulnerable to sea > lions and other predators. > > "It's not looking good," said Sean Hayes, a National Marine > Fisheries Service biologist who monitors salmon in Scott Creek, the > southernmost coho run in California, north of Davenport (Santa Cruz > County). "The fish have been hammered a couple of years in a row > now. If it doesn't rain, there could be a spawning failure this > year, which would be catastrophic." > > Threat of extinction > > Bouley said a big rainstorm could turn things around, but hardly any > rain is expected in the next two weeks. If things don't improve, she > said, this year's cycle of fish may go extinct. > > The lack of salmon in Lagunitas Creek is a major concern, she said, > because the watershed is a statewide model for fisheries > restoration. The first winter rains normally bring schools of coho > wriggling up the creeks, drawing tourists, schoolchildren and > naturalists to watch the fish leap from the foaming rapids. > > "The Lagunitas population is critical to the viability of the entire > central California coho population. It is the keystone watershed > along the coast," Bouley said. "Fisheries agencies look to Lagunitas > as the key to the recovery for neighboring watersheds. We won't have > any streams left to seed them if this one is gone." > > The watershed is unique in that the primary spawning grounds are in > the middle of developed communities. Since coho were listed as > endangered in 2005 under the Endangered Species Act, many residents > have taken a proprietary interest in the fish. Schools have become > involved, organizing work parties and teaching children about the > historic coho migration. > > More than a century ago, about 6,000 coho spawned in the system of > streams every year. At that time, the salmon swam from Tomales Bay > virtually to the top of Mount Tamalpais, spawning in tributaries all > along the way. But industry started taking a toll almost from the > day Joseph Warren Revere spotted the valley in 1846 and saw "a > copious stream, fed by mountain brooks." > > The redwood forests surrounding the creek were logged between 1860 > and 1900. Subsequent homes and roads built along the waterway > removed about 60 percent of the original riparian habitat. > > The first major dam, which created Lake Lagunitas, was built in > 1873. Six more dams were constructed over the next century, the > largest being Peter's Dam at Kent Lake, finished in 1953 and then > raised 42 feet in 1982. The dams blocked 50 percent of the historic > salmon habitat, reduced the amount of gravel and increased > sedimentation in the creeks. > > But the decline was slow. Old-timers told how they used to spear > fish from decks or garage hatches overlooking the creek. In 1959, > when the habitat was already in serious decline, the largest > recorded coho in state history, a 22-pounder, was fished out of > Lagunitas Creek. > > Lobbying the county > > The restoration effort began in the early 1980s when a group called > Trout Unlimited began lobbying the county to stop the decline of the > fishery. > > SPAWN, which was created in 1996, sponsors salmon-watching creek > walks during spawning season and has saved more than 15,000 juvenile > salmon and steelhead from drying pools during the summer. The Marin > Municipal Water District, which is required by the state to help the > coho as mitigation for raising Peter's Dam, started counting coho > redds in the early 1990s and now works with SPAWN to monitor > releases from the dam, install woody debris in the creeks and > replant vegetation. > > "This is the beacon of hope for the California watershed," Bouley > said, but "the fish are missing. They are gone." > > > > Byron Leydecker, JcT > Chair, Friends of Trinity River > PO Box 2327 > Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 > 415 383 4810 land > 415 519 4810 cell > bwl3 at comcast.net > bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) > http://www.fotr.org > > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.gif Type: image/gif Size: 5771 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image002.gif Type: image/gif Size: 4431 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image003.gif Type: image/gif Size: 54 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Mon Jan 12 11:57:46 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Mon, 12 Jan 2009 11:57:46 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] AP in Fresno Bee 12 11 09 Message-ID: <000601c974f0$0aaf1830$200d4890$@net> Senate moves on San Joaquin River restoration bill Legislation that would also protect wilderness awaits likely approval. As printed in the Fresno Bee - 12/11/2009 The Associated Press WASHINGTON -- In a rare Sunday session, the Senate advanced legislation that would implement the San Joaquin River restoration settlement and set aside more than 2 million acres in nine states as wilderness. Majority Democrats assembled more than enough votes to overcome GOP stalling tactics in an early showdown for the new Congress. Republicans complained that Democrats did not allow amendments on the massive bill, which calls for the largest expansion of wilderness protection in 25 years. But Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and other Democrats said the bill -- a holdover from last year -- was carefully written and included measures sponsored by both Republicans and Democrats. By a 66-12 vote, with only 59 needed to limit debate, lawmakers agreed to clear away procedural hurdles despite partisan wrangling that had threatened pledges by leaders to work cooperatively as the new Obama administration takes office. Senate approval is expected this week. Supporters hope the House will follow suit. "Today is a great day for America's public lands," said the bill's sponsor, Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M. "This big, bipartisan package of bills represents years of work by senators from many states, and both parties, in cooperation with local communities, to enhance places that make America so special." The measure -- actually a collection of about 160 bills -- would confer the government's highest level of protection on land ranging from the Sierra Nevada mountain range to parts of the Jefferson National Forest in Virginia. Besides new wilderness designations, the bill would designate the childhood home of former President Bill Clinton in Hope, Ark., as a national historic site and expand protections for dozens of national parks, rivers and water resources. The measure would implement the 2006 legal settlement to restore the San Joaquin River, bringing water and salmon back to a now-dry stretch of the waterway. The lawsuit stemmed from the opening of Friant Dam in 1949, which transformed the Valley's main artery from a river thick with salmon into an irrigation source for more than a million acres of farmland. The measure also would: Protect about 70,000 acres of wilderness in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, including the new John Krebs Wilderness, named for the former congressman and conservationist who fought to protect these lands in the Mineral King Valley. Preserve nearly 470,00 acres of wilderness in the Eastern Sierra and San Gabriel Wilderness, including lands in the Angeles, Humboldt-Toiyabe and Inyo National Forests. Protect some 190,000 acres in Riverside County as wilderness, including parts of Joshua Tree National Park Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Wed Jan 14 11:27:40 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Wed, 14 Jan 2009 11:27:40 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Record Searchlight 1 14 09 Message-ID: <001901c9767e$2b7fea50$827fbef0$@net> Well.It was my understanding that Trinity River was included in this petition. What needs to be changed is the Wild and Scenic designation of these rivers to a higher class. I believe they're currently Class 3, but I could be incorrect on the exact designation. That would stop the dredging. Byron Tribe seeks to halt suction dredging on parts of the Klamath River The Redding Record Searchlight - 1/14/09 By Dylan Darling An American Indian tribe from the Klamath River has petitioned the state to ban a popular form of recreational gold mining on parts of the river and many of its tributaries. The Karuk Tribe - along with conservation groups California Trout, Friends of the North Fork and the Sierra Fund - filed the petition late last month, asking the California Department of Fish and Game to limit suction dredging for the sake of salmon. "We are not trying to end gold mining or suction dredging, but we are saying, 'Let's not mine in the places that are most important to the fish,' " said Craig Tucker, spokesman for the Happy Camp-based tribe. In the 11-page petition, the tribe asks for a ban on suction dredging where the creeks and other rivers flow into the Klamath. In suction dredging, miners use gasoline- or diesel-powered pumps to suck submerged gravel from the waterway and run it through a sluice box in search of gold. The state has until Jan. 25 to respond to the request, which also includes some creeks in the Sierra Nevada, said Jordan Traverso, deputy director of the DFG's office of communication. "We are reviewing the complex petition from the tribe, and we have not taken a position on this at this time," Traverso said. While the tribe says suction dredging creates harmful conditions for salmon and steelhead by clouding the water with mud and stirs up mercury, those who do the dredging say it actually improves the river for the fish. "The worst thing they could do is ban dredging on the Klamath because of the dams on the river," said Dan Stamps, a Redding man who has been suction dredging for 28 years. The dams hold back flood waters that normally would have flushed the river periodically, shuffling its gravel, he said. Through suction dredging, he said miners break up packed gravel and create spawning habitat. As for the muddy water, Stamps said a strong rainstorm creates much cloudier water than suction dredging. "Mother Nature puts more mud into the rivers than all the miners in California all year long," Stamps said. While dredging does bring up mercury - a heavy liquid metal left on bedrock below gravel bars from 19th century gold mining - Stamps said recreational miners are doing a good thing because they then haul it out. "They don't throw that mercury back into the creek," Stamps said.# Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From tstokely at att.net Wed Jan 14 20:46:34 2009 From: tstokely at att.net (Tom Stokely) Date: Wed, 14 Jan 2009 20:46:34 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Fw: Stop Schwarzenegger's End Run to Build the Peripheral Canal Message-ID: <2C5F55A26B1D44409DFABFA86584DF3B@homeuserPC> ----- Original Message ----- From: Dan Bacher Sent: Wednesday, January 14, 2009 8:19 AM Subject: Stop Schwarzenegger's End Run to Build the Peripheral Canal ? -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- delta_photo_by_dwr.jpg Stop Schwarzenegger's End Run to Build the Peripheral Canal? by Dan Bacher? Barbara Barrigan Parrilla, campaign director of Restore the Delta, fears that two recent moves by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to weaken environmental laws are designed to facilitate the development and construction of the peripheral canal.? Schwarzenegger's obsession with his "Big Ditch," a project that would certainly result in the destruction of imperiled Central Valley chinook salmon, Delta smelt, longfin smelt, threadfin shad and other species, is apparently motivated by his desire to create a "monument" to his gigantic ego - and to sacrifice Delta farms to provide subsidized water to corporate agribusiness on the San Joaquin Valley's west side.? "Governor Schwarzenegger has asked President-elect Obama to suspend or otherwise eliminate National Environmental Impact Review (NEPA) for the economic stimulus package projects for California, including some $8 billion in unnamed water and sewer projects," according to Parrilla. "The Governor has also been attempting to weaken the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) during the state budget process."? "It is the assessment of advisors working with the Restore the Delta staff that the Governor is trying to weaken federal and state environmental review standards in order to ease the development and construction of the peripheral canal, rather than following existing environmental laws and processes," she stated.? While Schwarzenegger constantly grandstands and flies off to "climate change" and "green energy" conferences throughout the country, he is in reality the worst-ever Governor for fish and the environment in California history, receiving the "Outdoor Villain" of 2008 award from Field and Stream magazine. He has presided over the unprecedented collapse of Central Valley fall chinook salmon populations, the dramatic decline of Delta smelt, longfin smelt, threadfin shad, juvenile striped bass and other species and massive fishing closures along the California Coast. He has vetoed suction dredge mining legislation, the fish rescue plans bill and other legislation badly needed to restore California's imperiled fisheries.? The Governor's handpicked team of cabinet level advisors, the so-called "Delta Vision Committee," on January 2 released an environmentally devastating plan to break ground on the peripheral canal in 2011, without the approval of the Legislature and voters.? More recently, the Nature Conservancy, an organization infamous for its corporate greenwashing schemes throughout the world, joined the Governor in his campaign to build the canal when they announced support for his plan. California voters defeated the previous incarnation of the canal by a wide margin in 1982, but Schwarzenegger and his environmental collaborators are trying to market the "new" peripheral canal by including "eco-language" to make it sound like the canal will "restore" the Delta when its only purpose is to increase water exports to Central Valley agribusiness.? The Nature Conservancy is in "good company." The Metropolitan Water District's Board of Directors on January 13 unanimously supported the final report from Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's cabinet-level advisors that proposes the construction of a "dual conveyance" system in the Delta, beginning in 2011. "The committee's final report serves as a road map to implement lasting Delta solutions for habitat restoration, water conservation and system improvements," claimed Metropolitan board Chairman Timothy F. Brick.? As the Governor and his collaborators continue to campaign for the canal, Delta pelagic (open water) fish populations continue to collapse. The delta smelt population has declined to its lowest level ever, according to the latest data from the Department of Fish and Game's fall midwater trawl survey. The DFG studies the health of these populations by compiling an "index," a relative measure of abundance. The index declined to 23 this fall, down from the previous low level of 28 last fall.? American shad also reached a record low level in fall 2008. The index was 271, compared to 533 in 2007 and 9360 in 2003.? Threadfin shad also declined to a record low population level, down to 450 from 3177 in 2007.? The Sacramento splittail, a native minnow, declined to the lowest ever level this fall. In fact, no splittail were observed in this yea'rs survey, while only one fish was documented last year!? Only the striped bass and longfin smelt showed an increase, though the population levels are still precariously low. The striper index rose to 220 from 82 in 2007, both alarming low numbers, according to Bill Jennings, executive director of the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance. In contrast, the index was 9500 in 1971, when the population was still healthy before the fish-killing state and federal pumps went into full operation.? The longfin smelt abundance index rose from a record low of 13 in fall 2007 to 113 this fall. By comparison, the index was 6654 in 1998.? The crisis in Delta fisheries will not be solved by taking more water out of the Delta through a peripheral canal - a canal will only exacerbate the collapse. Parrilla urged everybody concerned about the fate of the California Delta, the West Coast's largest estuary, to call Senator Diane Feinstein and Senator Barbara Boxer today and ask them to protect NEPA and all essential environmental laws while helping to develop the Federal economic stimulus package.? I join Barbara in urging you to call the Senators at the numbers below. And if you have time, please drop her an email to let her know that you called: Barbara [at] restorethedelta.org.? Senator Diane Feinstein Washington Office: 202-224-3841 -- San Francisco: 415-393-0707-- Los Angeles: 310-914-7300--? Senator Barbara Boxer: Washington Office: 202-224-3553 -- San Francisco: 415-403-0100 -- Los Angeles: 213-894-5000 --? About Restore the Delta: Restore the Delta is a grassroots campaign committed to making the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta fishable, swimmable, drinkable, and farmable to benefit all of California. Restore the Delta - a coalition of Delta residents, business leaders, civic organizations, community groups, faith-based communities, union locals, farmers, fishermen, and environmentalists - seeks to strengthen the health of the estuary and the well-being of Delta communities. Restore the Delta works to improve water quality so that fisheries and farming can thrive together again in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.? Website: http://www.restorethedelta.org Restore the Delta: Making the California Delta fishable, swimmable, drinkable, and farmable by 2010!? -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: delta_photo_by_dwr.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 61361 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: Arnold's End Run 2804.doc Type: application/msword Size: 111616 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bgutermuth at mp.usbr.gov Thu Jan 15 12:51:41 2009 From: bgutermuth at mp.usbr.gov (Brandt Gutermuth) Date: Thu, 15 Jan 2009 12:51:41 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Fw: Stop Schwarzenegger's End Run to Build the Peripheral Canal Message-ID: Obviously there are some real problems with the current Delta water management scheme. I certainly would opt for conservation measures rather than dams. However, given California's insatiable demand for water and rising sea levels, some version of a peripheral canal may be warranted. Certainly NEPA impact analyses should be included in review of alternatives. A little detail on delta options is found at: HTTP://www.swrcb.ca.gov/board_info/agendas/2007/march/0320_04pres_lund.pdf Brandt >>> "Tom Stokely" 01/14/09 8:46 PM >>> ----- Original Message ----- From: Dan Bacher Sent: Wednesday, January 14, 2009 8:19 AM Subject: Stop Schwarzenegger's End Run to Build the Peripheral Canal -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- delta_photo_by_dwr.jpg Stop Schwarzenegger's End Run to Build the Peripheral Canal by Dan Bacher Barbara Barrigan Parrilla, campaign director of Restore the Delta, fears that two recent moves by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to weaken environmental laws are designed to facilitate the development and construction of the peripheral canal. Schwarzenegger's obsession with his "Big Ditch," a project that would certainly result in the destruction of imperiled Central Valley chinook salmon, Delta smelt, longfin smelt, threadfin shad and other species, is apparently motivated by his desire to create a "monument" to his gigantic ego - and to sacrifice Delta farms to provide subsidized water to corporate agribusiness on the San Joaquin Valley's west side. "Governor Schwarzenegger has asked President-elect Obama to suspend or otherwise eliminate National Environmental Impact Review (NEPA) for the economic stimulus package projects for California, including some $8 billion in unnamed water and sewer projects," according to Parrilla. "The Governor has also been attempting to weaken the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) during the state budget process." "It is the assessment of advisors working with the Restore the Delta staff that the Governor is trying to weaken federal and state environmental review standards in order to ease the development and construction of the peripheral canal, rather than following existing environmental laws and processes," she stated. While Schwarzenegger constantly grandstands and flies off to "climate change" and "green energy" conferences throughout the country, he is in reality the worst-ever Governor for fish and the environment in California history, receiving the "Outdoor Villain" of 2008 award from Field and Stream magazine. He has presided over the unprecedented collapse of Central Valley fall chinook salmon populations, the dramatic decline of Delta smelt, longfin smelt, threadfin shad, juvenile striped bass and other species and massive fishing closures along the California Coast. He has vetoed suction dredge mining legislation, the fish rescue plans bill and other legislation badly needed to restore California's imperiled fisheries. The Governor's handpicked team of cabinet level advisors, the so-called "Delta Vision Committee," on January 2 released an environmentally devastating plan to break ground on the peripheral canal in 2011, without the approval of the Legislature and voters. More recently, the Nature Conservancy, an organization infamous for its corporate greenwashing schemes throughout the world, joined the Governor in his campaign to build the canal when they announced support for his plan. California voters defeated the previous incarnation of the canal by a wide margin in 1982, but Schwarzenegger and his environmental collaborators are trying to market the "new" peripheral canal by including "eco-language" to make it sound like the canal will "restore" the Delta when its only purpose is to increase water exports to Central Valley agribusiness. The Nature Conservancy is in "good company." The Metropolitan Water District's Board of Directors on January 13 unanimously supported the final report from Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's cabinet-level advisors that proposes the construction of a "dual conveyance" system in the Delta, beginning in 2011. "The committee's final report serves as a road map to implement lasting Delta solutions for habitat restoration, water conservation and system improvements," claimed Metropolitan board Chairman Timothy F. Brick. As the Governor and his collaborators continue to campaign for the canal, Delta pelagic (open water) fish populations continue to collapse. The delta smelt population has declined to its lowest level ever, according to the latest data from the Department of Fish and Game's fall midwater trawl survey. The DFG studies the health of these populations by compiling an "index," a relative measure of abundance. The index declined to 23 this fall, down from the previous low level of 28 last fall. American shad also reached a record low level in fall 2008. The index was 271, compared to 533 in 2007 and 9360 in 2003. Threadfin shad also declined to a record low population level, down to 450 from 3177 in 2007. The Sacramento splittail, a native minnow, declined to the lowest ever level this fall. In fact, no splittail were observed in this yea'rs survey, while only one fish was documented last year! Only the striped bass and longfin smelt showed an increase, though the population levels are still precariously low. The striper index rose to 220 from 82 in 2007, both alarming low numbers, according to Bill Jennings, executive director of the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance. In contrast, the index was 9500 in 1971, when the population was still healthy before the fish-killing state and federal pumps went into full operation. The longfin smelt abundance index rose from a record low of 13 in fall 2007 to 113 this fall. By comparison, the index was 6654 in 1998. The crisis in Delta fisheries will not be solved by taking more water out of the Delta through a peripheral canal - a canal will only exacerbate the collapse. Parrilla urged everybody concerned about the fate of the California Delta, the West Coast's largest estuary, to call Senator Diane Feinstein and Senator Barbara Boxer today and ask them to protect NEPA and all essential environmental laws while helping to develop the Federal economic stimulus package. I join Barbara in urging you to call the Senators at the numbers below. And if you have time, please drop her an email to let her know that you called: Barbara [at] restorethedelta.org. Senator Diane Feinstein Washington Office: 202-224-3841 -- San Francisco: 415-393-0707-- Los Angeles: 310-914-7300-- Senator Barbara Boxer: Washington Office: 202-224-3553 -- San Francisco: 415-403-0100 -- Los Angeles: 213-894-5000 -- About Restore the Delta: Restore the Delta is a grassroots campaign committed to making the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta fishable, swimmable, drinkable, and farmable to benefit all of California. Restore the Delta - a coalition of Delta residents, business leaders, civic organizations, community groups, faith-based communities, union locals, farmers, fishermen, and environmentalists - seeks to strengthen the health of the estuary and the well-being of Delta communities. Restore the Delta works to improve water quality so that fisheries and farming can thrive together again in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. Website: http://www.restorethedelta.org Restore the Delta: Making the California Delta fishable, swimmable, drinkable, and farmable by 2010! -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From bwl3 at comcast.net Thu Jan 15 14:22:51 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Thu, 15 Jan 2009 14:22:51 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Fw: Stop Schwarzenegger's End Run to Build the Peripheral Canal In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <005601c9775f$cde9a650$69bcf2f0$@net> Brandt...You might check this out, along with the PPIC study paid for by Bechtel Corporation. Byron -----Original Message----- From: env-trinity-bounces+bwl3=comcast.net at velocipede.dcn.davis.ca.us [mailto:env-trinity-bounces+bwl3=comcast.net at velocipede.dcn.davis.ca.us] On Behalf Of Brandt Gutermuth Sent: Thursday, January 15, 2009 12:52 PM To: Tom Stokely; Trinity List Subject: Re: [env-trinity] Fw: Stop Schwarzenegger's End Run to Build the Peripheral Canal Obviously there are some real problems with the current Delta water management scheme. I certainly would opt for conservation measures rather than dams. However, given California's insatiable demand for water and rising sea levels, some version of a peripheral canal may be warranted. Certainly NEPA impact analyses should be included in review of alternatives. A little detail on delta options is found at: HTTP://www.swrcb.ca.gov/board_info/agendas/2007/march/0320_04pres_lund.pdf Brandt >>> "Tom Stokely" 01/14/09 8:46 PM >>> ----- Original Message ----- From: Dan Bacher Sent: Wednesday, January 14, 2009 8:19 AM Subject: Stop Schwarzenegger's End Run to Build the Peripheral Canal ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- delta_photo_by_dwr.jpg Stop Schwarzenegger's End Run to Build the Peripheral Canal by Dan Bacher Barbara Barrigan Parrilla, campaign director of Restore the Delta, fears that two recent moves by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to weaken environmental laws are designed to facilitate the development and construction of the peripheral canal. Schwarzenegger's obsession with his "Big Ditch," a project that would certainly result in the destruction of imperiled Central Valley chinook salmon, Delta smelt, longfin smelt, threadfin shad and other species, is apparently motivated by his desire to create a "monument" to his gigantic ego - and to sacrifice Delta farms to provide subsidized water to corporate agribusiness on the San Joaquin Valley's west side. "Governor Schwarzenegger has asked President-elect Obama to suspend or otherwise eliminate National Environmental Impact Review (NEPA) for the economic stimulus package projects for California, including some $8 billion in unnamed water and sewer projects," according to Parrilla. "The Governor has also been attempting to weaken the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) during the state budget process." "It is the assessment of advisors working with the Restore the Delta staff that the Governor is trying to weaken federal and state environmental review standards in order to ease the development and construction of the peripheral canal, rather than following existing environmental laws and processes," she stated. While Schwarzenegger constantly grandstands and flies off to "climate change" and "green energy" conferences throughout the country, he is in reality the worst-ever Governor for fish and the environment in California history, receiving the "Outdoor Villain" of 2008 award from Field and Stream magazine. He has presided over the unprecedented collapse of Central Valley fall chinook salmon populations, the dramatic decline of Delta smelt, longfin smelt, threadfin shad, juvenile striped bass and other species and massive fishing closures along the California Coast. He has vetoed suction dredge mining legislation, the fish rescue plans bill and other legislation badly needed to restore California's imperiled fisheries. The Governor's handpicked team of cabinet level advisors, the so-called "Delta Vision Committee," on January 2 released an environmentally devastating plan to break ground on the peripheral canal in 2011, without the approval of the Legislature and voters. More recently, the Nature Conservancy, an organization infamous for its corporate greenwashing schemes throughout the world, joined the Governor in his campaign to build the canal when they announced support for his plan. California voters defeated the previous incarnation of the canal by a wide margin in 1982, but Schwarzenegger and his environmental collaborators are trying to market the "new" peripheral canal by including "eco-language" to make it sound like the canal will "restore" the Delta when its only purpose is to increase water exports to Central Valley agribusiness. The Nature Conservancy is in "good company." The Metropolitan Water District's Board of Directors on January 13 unanimously supported the final report from Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's cabinet-level advisors that proposes the construction of a "dual conveyance" system in the Delta, beginning in 2011. "The committee's final report serves as a road map to implement lasting Delta solutions for habitat restoration, water conservation and system improvements," claimed Metropolitan board Chairman Timothy F. Brick. As the Governor and his collaborators continue to campaign for the canal, Delta pelagic (open water) fish populations continue to collapse. The delta smelt population has declined to its lowest level ever, according to the latest data from the Department of Fish and Game's fall midwater trawl survey. The DFG studies the health of these populations by compiling an "index," a relative measure of abundance. The index declined to 23 this fall, down from the previous low level of 28 last fall. American shad also reached a record low level in fall 2008. The index was 271, compared to 533 in 2007 and 9360 in 2003. Threadfin shad also declined to a record low population level, down to 450 from 3177 in 2007. The Sacramento splittail, a native minnow, declined to the lowest ever level this fall. In fact, no splittail were observed in this yea'rs survey, while only one fish was documented last year! Only the striped bass and longfin smelt showed an increase, though the population levels are still precariously low. The striper index rose to 220 from 82 in 2007, both alarming low numbers, according to Bill Jennings, executive director of the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance. In contrast, the index was 9500 in 1971, when the population was still healthy before the fish-killing state and federal pumps went into full operation. The longfin smelt abundance index rose from a record low of 13 in fall 2007 to 113 this fall. By comparison, the index was 6654 in 1998. The crisis in Delta fisheries will not be solved by taking more water out of the Delta through a peripheral canal - a canal will only exacerbate the collapse. Parrilla urged everybody concerned about the fate of the California Delta, the West Coast's largest estuary, to call Senator Diane Feinstein and Senator Barbara Boxer today and ask them to protect NEPA and all essential environmental laws while helping to develop the Federal economic stimulus package. I join Barbara in urging you to call the Senators at the numbers below. And if you have time, please drop her an email to let her know that you called: Barbara [at] restorethedelta.org. Senator Diane Feinstein Washington Office: 202-224-3841 -- San Francisco: 415-393-0707-- Los Angeles: 310-914-7300-- Senator Barbara Boxer: Washington Office: 202-224-3553 -- San Francisco: 415-403-0100 -- Los Angeles: 213-894-5000 -- About Restore the Delta: Restore the Delta is a grassroots campaign committed to making the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta fishable, swimmable, drinkable, and farmable to benefit all of California. Restore the Delta - a coalition of Delta residents, business leaders, civic organizations, community groups, faith-based communities, union locals, farmers, fishermen, and environmentalists - seeks to strengthen the health of the estuary and the well-being of Delta communities. Restore the Delta works to improve water quality so that fisheries and farming can thrive together again in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. Website: http://www.restorethedelta.org Restore the Delta: Making the California Delta fishable, swimmable, drinkable, and farmable by 2010! ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- _______________________________________________ env-trinity mailing list env-trinity at velocipede.dcn.davis.ca.us http://www2.dcn.org/mailman/listinfo/env-trinity -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: Dams_vs_Cnsrvtn.pdf Type: application/pdf Size: 75040 bytes Desc: not available URL: From tstokely at att.net Fri Jan 16 19:40:32 2009 From: tstokely at att.net (Tom Stokely) Date: Fri, 16 Jan 2009 19:40:32 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Senate approves bill that would aid San Joaquin River Message-ID: See reference to Trinity River below. Interesting how the locals opposed the Madera Water Bank when Marc Reisner proposed it, but now it's approved and "feasible." Tom Stokely Water Policy Coordinator California Water Impact Network 504A Lennon St. (USPS and UPS) Mt Shasta, CA 96067 V/FAX 530-926-9727 Cell 530-524-0315 tstokely at att.net http://www.c-win.org/ Senate approves bill that would aid San Joaquin River Legislation includes Madera County water bank, John Krebs Wilderness. The Fresno Bee - 1/15/09 By Michael Doyle WASHINGTON -- The Senate on Thursday approved a grab-bag public lands bill that's supposed to save the San Joaquin River, store Madera County groundwater and secure Sierra Nevada wilderness. At 1,296 pages, the public lands bill was stuffed with more than enough goodies to ensure its passage over conservative opposition. The House is expected to take up the bill within the next few weeks. Once approved by the House, it's bound to become one of the first bills signed by President-elect Barack Obama after he takes office. "Restoring the once-mighty San Joaquin River -- and putting an end to the years of legal battles over the river's resources -- has long been one of my top priorities," Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein declared. "The good news is that the Senate today took us one step closer to this vital goal." Lawmakers call the bill the Omnibus Public Lands Management Act of 2009. Skeptics call it pork, but they could not block its 150-plus provisions through a filibuster. The bill passed easily, 73-21. "I believe we're doing this because we're thinking in the very short term," said Republican Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, citing the "blatant, corrupting process of earmarks." Senators constructed the public lands package by combining individual bills, some of which had been floating around for years. The California provisions include: San Joaquin River restoration. The bill directly provides $88 million and the work necessary to restore water flows and the salmon population below Friant Dam. This federal money is a down payment on a highly ambitious effort that settles a lawsuit filed by the Natural Resources Defense Council in 1988. Storing Madera County groundwater. The bill authorizes $22.5 million to help the Madera Irrigation District construct an underground water bank, designed to store up to 250,000 acre-feet of water. Notably, the bill unilaterally declares the project planned for the 13,646-acre Madera Ranch near Highway 99 to be "feasible" and establishes that "no further studies" are needed. Expanding Sierra Nevada wilderness. The bill honors former Fresno-area congressman John Krebs by designating 39,740 acres of land currently in Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks as the "John Krebs Wilderness." This is smaller than original plans, although an additional 45,186 acres in the southern Sierra Nevada will be added to the existing Sequoia-Kings Canyon Wilderness. The legislation adds, as well, new wilderness protection to land in Inyo and Mono counties, on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada. It orders a study of adding the Tule Lake camp, where some Valley Japanese-Americans were confined in World War II, to the national park system. It transfers 66 acres in Tuolumne County to the Me-Wuk Indians. Well beyond California, the bill sets the stage for a potential William Jefferson Clinton Birthplace Home National Historic Site in Arkansas, creates the new Ice Age Floods National Historic Trail in four Northwestern states and adds to the Everglades National Park. The new 39,740-acre Krebs wilderness is smaller than it was in original plans, which would have designated some 69,000 acres. Negotiators also exempted privately owned cabins in the Mineral King Valley and allowed Southern California Edison to use helicopters in maintaining check dams in the otherwise pristine wilderness. Lawmakers, including Reps. Devin Nunes, R-Visalia, and Jim Costa, D-Fresno, took more than a year to negotiate the deal. The wilderness will become one of the very few in the nation named for a still-living individual. Krebs, who turned 82 last month, wrote the 1978 legislation that protected the Mineral King Valley from potential development. Negotiators similarly cut the cost of the San Joaquin River bill after it was first introduced in 2006. They had been having trouble finding the $250 million needed to offset the original price tag. "This is a truly momentous effort," said Monty Schmitt, senior scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council, "because it will result in restoring flows and salmon to one of California's largest rivers while also providing water supplies for farms and cities." Even with the compromises, myriad unanswered questions remain, particularly over long-term costs and consequences. Northern California Indian tribes still worry Trinity River improvements could lose out on money flowing instead to the San Joaquin River. Some farmers in Madera County and elsewhere worry their irrigation supplies will likewise dry up by the time salmon are restored in 2013. "[It] is fiscally irresponsible," Nunes said. "It represents an attack on our local economy during a period of national economic crisis and will deprive our region of precious surface water at a time of critical shortage." The state of California is providing $200 million, and federal spending will almost certainly rise above the $88 million directly provided for restoration. The money will pay for improving the river channel, isolating gravel pits so they don't trap salmon, installing fish screens and building a bypass around the Mendota Pool in western Fresno County. # http://www.fresnobee.com/local/story/1133937.html -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From srosekrans at edf.org Sat Jan 17 10:17:47 2009 From: srosekrans at edf.org (Spreck Rosekrans) Date: Sat, 17 Jan 2009 13:17:47 -0500 Subject: [env-trinity] Senate approves bill that would aid San Joaquin River Message-ID: I have not followed the Madera Water Bank this time around. But last time, EDF opposed it as well since there was no clarity as to how the benefits would be distributed and we felt the environment should be assured benefits from the public funds invested. Spreck Rosekrans -----Original Message----- From: Tom Stokely [mailto:tstokely at att.net] Sent: Friday, January 16, 2009 10:40 PM Eastern Standard Time To: Trinity List Subject: [env-trinity] Senate approves bill that would aid San Joaquin River See reference to Trinity River below. Interesting how the locals opposed the Madera Water Bank when Marc Reisner proposed it, but now it's approved and "feasible." Tom Stokely Water Policy Coordinator California Water Impact Network 504A Lennon St. (USPS and UPS) Mt Shasta, CA 96067 V/FAX 530-926-9727 Cell 530-524-0315 tstokely at att.net http://www.c-win.org/ Senate approves bill that would aid San Joaquin River Legislation includes Madera County water bank, John Krebs Wilderness. The Fresno Bee - 1/15/09 By Michael Doyle WASHINGTON -- The Senate on Thursday approved a grab-bag public lands bill that's supposed to save the San Joaquin River, store Madera County groundwater and secure Sierra Nevada wilderness. At 1,296 pages, the public lands bill was stuffed with more than enough goodies to ensure its passage over conservative opposition. The House is expected to take up the bill within the next few weeks. Once approved by the House, it's bound to become one of the first bills signed by President-elect Barack Obama after he takes office. "Restoring the once-mighty San Joaquin River -- and putting an end to the years of legal battles over the river's resources -- has long been one of my top priorities," Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein declared. "The good news is that the Senate today took us one step closer to this vital goal." Lawmakers call the bill the Omnibus Public Lands Management Act of 2009. Skeptics call it pork, but they could not block its 150-plus provisions through a filibuster. The bill passed easily, 73-21. "I believe we're doing this because we're thinking in the very short term," said Republican Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, citing the "blatant, corrupting process of earmarks." Senators constructed the public lands package by combining individual bills, some of which had been floating around for years. The California provisions include: San Joaquin River restoration. The bill directly provides $88 million and the work necessary to restore water flows and the salmon population below Friant Dam. This federal money is a down payment on a highly ambitious effort that settles a lawsuit filed by the Natural Resources Defense Council in 1988. Storing Madera County groundwater. The bill authorizes $22.5 million to help the Madera Irrigation District construct an underground water bank, designed to store up to 250,000 acre-feet of water. Notably, the bill unilaterally declares the project planned for the 13,646-acre Madera Ranch near Highway 99 to be "feasible" and establishes that "no further studies" are needed. Expanding Sierra Nevada wilderness. The bill honors former Fresno-area congressman John Krebs by designating 39,740 acres of land currently in Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks as the "John Krebs Wilderness." This is smaller than original plans, although an additional 45,186 acres in the southern Sierra Nevada will be added to the existing Sequoia-Kings Canyon Wilderness. The legislation adds, as well, new wilderness protection to land in Inyo and Mono counties, on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada. It orders a study of adding the Tule Lake camp, where some Valley Japanese-Americans were confined in World War II, to the national park system. It transfers 66 acres in Tuolumne County to the Me-Wuk Indians. Well beyond California, the bill sets the stage for a potential William Jefferson Clinton Birthplace Home National Historic Site in Arkansas, creates the new Ice Age Floods National Historic Trail in four Northwestern states and adds to the Everglades National Park. The new 39,740-acre Krebs wilderness is smaller than it was in original plans, which would have designated some 69,000 acres. Negotiators also exempted privately owned cabins in the Mineral King Valley and allowed Southern California Edison to use helicopters in maintaining check dams in the otherwise pristine wilderness. Lawmakers, including Reps. Devin Nunes, R-Visalia, and Jim Costa, D-Fresno, took more than a year to negotiate the deal. The wilderness will become one of the very few in the nation named for a still-living individual. Krebs, who turned 82 last month, wrote the 1978 legislation that protected the Mineral King Valley from potential development. Negotiators similarly cut the cost of the San Joaquin River bill after it was first introduced in 2006. They had been having trouble finding the $250 million needed to offset the original price tag. "This is a truly momentous effort," said Monty Schmitt, senior scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council, "because it will result in restoring flows and salmon to one of California's largest rivers while also providing water supplies for farms and cities." Even with the compromises, myriad unanswered questions remain, particularly over long-term costs and consequences. Northern California Indian tribes still worry Trinity River improvements could lose out on money flowing instead to the San Joaquin River. Some farmers in Madera County and elsewhere worry their irrigation supplies will likewise dry up by the time salmon are restored in 2013. "[It] is fiscally irresponsible," Nunes said. "It represents an attack on our local economy during a period of national economic crisis and will deprive our region of precious surface water at a time of critical shortage." The state of California is providing $200 million, and federal spending will almost certainly rise above the $88 million directly provided for restoration. The money will pay for improving the river channel, isolating gravel pits so they don't trap salmon, installing fish screens and building a bypass around the Mendota Pool in western Fresno County. # http://www.fresnobee.com/local/story/1133937.html ___________________________________________________ This e-mail and any attachments may contain confidential and privileged information. If you are not the intended recipient, please notify the sender immediately by return e-mail, delete this e-mail and destroy any copies. Any dissemination or use of this information by a person other than the intended recipient is unauthorized and may be illegal. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From tstokely at att.net Sun Jan 18 08:06:18 2009 From: tstokely at att.net (Tom Stokely) Date: Sun, 18 Jan 2009 08:06:18 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] What IS the Peripheral Canal ? Message-ID: <600CDADA36924A9E8A1EEA6D2109441F@homeuserPC> There are a number of unanswered questions about the Peripheral Canal. Some have asked me if I would support one and I ask them what is it? There seem to be a number of perspectives on what the PC really is. See article below and Barry Nelson's blog (NRDC) below for some clarification to confuse you more about WHAT IS THE PERIPHERAL CANAL? There are also some issues of honesty regarding some who support a PC, according to the article below. I personally would probably support a pipeline of very limited capacity solely for urban water use, if it were concurrent with SIGNIFICANT reductions in Delta (and Trinity) water exports. For now, it's my understanding that the PC in DWR's plans and cost estimates consists of a big unlined dirt ditch that in some places, goes below sea level. I don't see how that is going to increase reliability in the future world of earthquakes and rising sea levels. Tom Stokely V/FAX 530-926-9727 tstokely at att.net http://www.mercurynews.com/breakingnews/ci_11438885 Tough choices on Delta await state officials By Mike Taugher Contra Costa Times Staff Writer Posted: 01/12/2009 07:53:08 PM PST Pushing hard to build a new canal around the Delta, the Schwarzenegger administration rarely misses an opportunity to point out how rickety California's water system has become. And in their zeal to get the expensive and controversial aqueduct built, they occasionally exaggerate. For example, when federal regulators imposed new rules last month to protect endangered fish, the state's water agency announced, "Delta Water Exports Could Be Reduced By Up to 50 Percent Under New Federal Biological Opinion." It was an alarmist and inflated claim. But state water officials know the more dire the situation appears, the more support they will get to divert billions of gallons of water around, instead of through, the Delta. In fact, the water cuts are significant only when compared to the record-breaking pumping of recent years. Even then, the 50 percent figure represents a theoretical worst case, not a certainty or even a likelihood. Still, no one can deny that California faces tough decisions in the coming months and years. The Delta, as a living estuary, has been pushed to the breaking point by an increase in water pumping and other stressors. And the demand for Delta water continues to grow - it is a growing state that has lost water supplies in the Colorado River to drought and interstate agreements. 2009 looks to be the year policymakers have to grapple with the Delta's central dilemma: How much water can be taken from it for the state's cities and farms and should the flow come through the Delta or go around it? And a related but rarely uttered question: How much environmental damage in the West Coast's largest estuary is acceptable? For the governor and many water agencies, the answer is to build a canal around the Delta even though no one knows how it would be built or operated. In general, a canal would provide cleaner water and it would eliminate the state's reliance on fragile levees to channel water to pumps near Tracy that kill millions of fish every year. With the status quo clearly not working, the idea has at least qualified support from many of the state's water agencies, The Nature Conservancy, the Department of Fish and Game, and a panel of outside experts that have been working under the auspices of the Public Policy Institute of California. The flip side is that the canal would reduce water flowing through the Delta, affecting threatened wildlife there, increasing the concentration of pollutants and possibly causing stagnation. Delta landowners fear that building the canal would evaporate state funding for maintaining Delta levees and islands. Delta residents, Contra Costa County supervisors and others are lining up against it. The issue is moving forward mostly in two plans. One, known as Delta Vision, has been forwarded to Schwarzenegger. It includes a peripheral canal in a sweeping package of water supply and environmental initiatives that was put together by, among others, leading opponents of the original Peripheral Canal, which voters rejected in 1982. Schwarzenegger's advisers have endorsed most of the package, but it is unclear how it would be implemented. The other plan, known as the Bay-Delta Conservation Plan, is a narrower strategy still being negotiated among water users and regulators with strong guidance from the administration. It is meant to get regulatory approval for a canal. Details - especially how big it would be and how it would be used - have yet to be defined, which hasn't stopped many from declaring they are for it or against it. In effect, the battle lines are being drawn but no one knows what the fight is about. Would anyone oppose the canal if it were made into a pipeline that was too small to substantially diminish Delta water flows? What if a large, credibly regulated canal took small amounts of water in most years, but in high-water years took more to refill Southern California reservoirs? Would water users support a small canal? Would they support a big one that was not used much? Would such a tightly controlled big canal make economic sense? Could it be credibly regulated in a state where water interests have long had the power to get their own way? One of the biggest questions has hardly been addressed: How much water can the Delta lose without damaging it? "The peripheral canal is the narcotic to keep you from thinking about the tough decisions that need to be made," said Rep. George Miller, D-Martinez, a leading voice in Congress on western water issues The water supply available to a canal might not be as much as users hope. Federal biologists are now requiring more water to flow through the Delta in wet years to protect Delta smelt habitat. That's water that could otherwise be moved south and stored. Biologists could require that more water flow through the Delta, not the canal, to help the struggling salmon population. Nevertheless, the Schwarzenegger administration appears convinced that the canal is the way to go and state officials have taken every opportunity to remind reporters and the general public about the need for a "comprehensive" fix. Which goes back to that "50 percent" reduction. That applies only to state, as opposed to federal, water contractors in dry years. And it assumes regulators crack down hard any time there's a judgment call to be made. To be fair, the Department of Water Resources also gave reporters a more realistic number: a 17 percent reduction due to the federal biologists' ruling. That's what the agency says would be the most likely loss of water for state and federal water agencies in average years. Even that figure is inflated. The state calculated it by assuming that without the new permit water agencies would pump more water than they ever have - 6.4 million acre-feet. Charts distributed by the agency showed contractors most likely would get about 5.3 million acre-feet in an average year. That is still significantly less than the 6 million acre-feet taken from the Delta in recent years, but it is not a whole lot less than deliveries before 2000, the year that a new Delta water strategy was adopted and pumping increased sharply. In effect, it turns out, the courts and court-ordered environmental protections so far have only modestly turned back the clock on Delta pumping. But more restrictions are possible. Can a growing state accept those limits? Can it get around them with a canal and reservoirs? What further regulatory cutbacks might be ordered? So many questions. Might they be answered this year? Mike Taugher covers natural resources. Reach him at 925-943-8257 or mtaugher at bayareanewsgroup.com. A Tale of Two Peripheral Canals. Or is it Three? Barry Nelson Western Water Project Director, San Francisco Blog | About Posted January 8, 2009 http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/bnelson/a_tale_of_two_peripheral_canal.html On Tuesday, the Sacramento Bee reported that The Nature Conservancy has conditionally endorsed a Peripheral Canal. News about the canal always travels fast. It's one of the most controversial projects in the contentious history of California water. The canal is designed to divert water from the Sacramento River, just south of the state capital, and divert it around the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to the enormous state and federal water pumps on the Delta's southern edge. A previous proposal for the canal was rejected by California voters in 1982. Margins in Northern California, driven by fears of thirsty Central Valley and Southern California water users, reached historic levels. For example, 97 percent of Marin County voters pulled the lever against the canal. For the next 25 years, the canal was ignored. It became a third rail of California water policy. So what's changed to revive this debate? Two things. First, our understanding of the risks facing the Delta has changed. Second, the canal is now more mirage than reality - more a concept than a concrete proposal. Let's take these changes one at a time. Since 1982, remarkably little analysis or critical thinking has been applied to the Peripheral Canal concept. As we learned more about changes in the Delta, the estuary's environment, climate change, water quality, alternative water supplies and more, no one analyzed how a canal would perform. Little thought was given regarding why one would want to build a canal in the first place. This changed in 2007, when the Public Policy Institute of California released an influential report called "Envisioning Futures for the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta". That report built on work done by U.C. Davis professor Jeff Mount, which concluded that there is a 2/3 probability of a catastrophic failure of Delta levees by 2050. These risks are increasing over time, driven by ongoing land subsidence, inadequate levee maintenance, increasing earthquake risk and ongoing sea level rise. The failure of levees on a dozen Delta islands would be a sobering event for hundreds of thousands of Delta residents, for water users South of the Delta, and for the environment. PPIC suggested that a canal could be needed, not to increase water diversions, but rather to decrease the risk of a long-term shut down in Delta pumping as a result of levee failures. This effort helped shape the Delta Vision Task Force's work on a comprehensive Delta plan. Second, today, there is no single canal proposal. In fact, there is a remarkable diversity of ideas about a canal. On the one hand, PPIC suggested that a canal could help reduce the risks posed by earthquakes and sea level rise. In its final Strategic Plan the Delta Vision Task Force agreed in concept, and called for strong new protections for the estuary and a new governance entity to ensure that a canal would be operated in a responsible manner. Neither PPIC nor Delta Vision anticipated that a canal would produce much, if any, new water supply. In fact, both suggested that a reduction in diversions might be needed. They envisioned a canal designed to increase reliability, not supply, with major new environmental protections. This is the kind of canal the Nature Conservancy has in mind. On the other hand, last April, the Department of Water Resources released its own preliminary analysis of a canal. The project analyzed by DWR was very different from that envisioned by PPIC and Delta Vision. It did not include new standards to protect the Delta. In fact, it relied on weakening and violating existing environmental standards. It would, according to DWR, lead to a dramatic increase in pumping. This version of the project would cause major impacts to the Delta environment, water quality and Delta agriculture. It would drain upstream reservoirs, leaving little or no cold water to meet the needs of spawning salmon. This Peripheral Canal could lead to extinctions and the permanent closure of California's salmon fishery. These very different versions of the Peripheral Canal are just the tip of the iceberg. Some have proposed that the "canal" should actually be a pipeline. Others have advocated a thousand-foot wide unlined canal built below sea level on subsided Delta islands. Still others have suggested an alignment on the West side of the Delta, with a massive tunnel under the Western Delta to deliver water to the pumps. Some have argued for "dual conveyance" - pumping through both a new canal and the existing intakes in the southern Delta. Others insist on "full isolation." Yet another proposal calls for armoring levees and separating Delta channels. Delta Vision has called for a new agency to regulate a canal. That proposal, however, is opposed by water users south of the Delta. Finally, after years of study and negotiations, EBMUD is currently building a (much smaller) canal around the Delta - called the Freeport Project. In this case, the hard work paid off. As unlikely as it seems, no one sued to stop EBMUD's project. In short, today, the Peripheral Canal is in the eye of the beholder. Different canal proposals would have dramatically different implications in terms of cost, yield, benefits and impacts. Nearly every stakeholder group could find in this list a version of the canal to oppose. Given this tremendous uncertainty, it's not a surprise that the debate about the "Peripheral Canal" is often unproductive. Without specific projects and careful analysis, this debate is often founded in hunches, history and near-religious faith. Moving this discussion in a more productive direction will require three things - all of which are clearly outlined in the Delta Vision Strategic Plan. First, we need clarity regarding the purpose of a change in the Delta conveyance system. A canal designed to increase reliability and help restore ecosystem health would look very different from one designed to increase diversions. These different projects would have different costs, impacts and benefits. Specifically, water users South of the Delta should abandon the outdated assumption that a canal would automatically result in more water pumped from the Delta. And California must make a dramatic investment in the "virtual river" - consisting of conservation, water recycling, urban stormwater capture and groundwater management. These tools can help California meet its future water needs without more diversions from damaged ecosystems like the Delta. Second, careful scientific analysis must address the unanswered questions regarding Delta conveyance identified by the Delta Vision Task Force. The Task Force concluded that a meaningful, final decision on conveyance is not possible until we answer these tough questions. How much water would be diverted? How would the project affect the Delta environment, water quality and salmon runs? How would the canal's massive fish screens - which would be the world's largest - perform? What new environmental standards would be put in place? Would those standards include new protections called for by Delta Vision? How would the facility fit into a strategy to restore ecosystem health and protect Delta residents and infrastructure? These answers matter, particularly for a facility that could cost $20 billion and take 20 years to build. Water users, regulators, environmentalists, fishermen, the Delta community and others can't judge a canal accurately without answers to these questions. The Bay-Delta Conservation Plan process, which is currently studying a canal, has not yet indicated if or how it will address these unanswered questions or incorporate key Delta Vision recommendations. Third, the legislature must reform the agencies that manage the Delta, as recommended by the Task Force, with particular attention to reforming the regulation of the state and federal water projects. Those projects have, in recent years, been operated with little regard to the needs of the Delta environment or the requirements of state and federal law. That's why a federal judge stepped in, as a result of a lawsuit brought by NRDC, ordering the projects to comply with the ESA. In another lawsuit, a state judge has ruled that the projects are violating California's ESA. There are other violations as well. Governance reform is essential to reestablishing trust that any Delta facility would be operated responsibly. The Delta Vision Task Force's Strategic Plan includes a detailed framework in each of these three areas. The Task Force, however, has no implementation authority. It is now up to the Governor, the legislature, state and federal agencies, and stakeholders to determine if this promising plan will be implemented or if it will simply gather dust. No one defends the status quo in the Delta. The current levees are inadequate. Urban development in the Delta is putting more and more people at risk of flooding. The Delta ecosystem is crashing, in large part because of excessive water diversions. That's the devil we know. On the other hand, we know remarkably little about a Peripheral Canal. No one believes that a canal alone could solve all of the Delta's problems. Most importantly, to date, no one has produced a detailed, credible proposal that meets the test laid out by the Delta Vision Task Force. The quickest road to failure in the Delta would be a premature fight over an ill-defined Peripheral Canal. Such a debate would be more faith-based than fact-driven and would inevitably lead to gridlock. We've been here before. The past several decades are littered with efforts that failed to resolve the issues in the Delta. Our new understanding of the Delta, however, shows that the stakes are higher this time. Extinction is permanent. As is sea level rise. And a massive levee failure event could unalterably change the Delta and threaten thousands of residents. If the Delta Vision effort fails, we may not have another chance. Tags: baydelta, deltavisiontaskforce, peripheralcanal, sacramentoriver, sanjoaquinriver a.. permalink b.. comments (1) c.. trackback url -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From tstokely at att.net Sun Jan 18 11:38:51 2009 From: tstokely at att.net (Tom Stokely) Date: Sun, 18 Jan 2009 11:38:51 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Bill Kier's thoughts etc in re the Peripheral Canal Message-ID: <7509F21CBB084FA0A04CF4F680AFC827@homeuserPC> A forward on the previous e-mail that I sent about the PC. Tom Stokely ----- Original Message ----- From: Kier Associates To: Sent: Sunday, January 18, 2009 9:58 AM Subject: Further thoughts etc in re the Peripheral Canal Tom In my self-anointed role as regimental historian (and you may wish to share this with your Trinity list) let me try to put the Peripheral Canal in some historical context here : In the beginning there was the State Water Project Bond Act. That was 1960. The Peripheral Canal was nowhere to be found among the facilities the Act proposed to fund. The money was needed up on the Oroville site, where they'd broken ground three years earlier (relocation of the Western Pacific RR out of the prospective reservoir site ) on Gov Goodwin Knight's SWP pay-as-you-go policy -- annual legislative appropriations. But the "progressives" like incoming Gov Pat Brown knew you couldn't get there on pay-as-you-go -- too much legislative squabbling, much of it the same then as now So, since there was no entity ( one was later created for the purpose) with which to negotiate Delta issues, and since Delta opposition to the Bond Act was fierce, the Bond Act drafters just mumbled that part : "Delta facilities", words to that effect With the passage (just barely -- there's a whole 'nother story there) of the 1960 Bond Act, DWR's engineers went to work and produced (1962, I believe it was) their Delta Alternatives Rpt. They identified three alternatives, all involving substantial channel closures. (Engineers weren't familiar then with the no-project alternative, they're still not comfy with the concept) I did a briefing on that rpt at a DFG Water Projects Branch (where I was a biologist) training session at Asilomar that winter, calling the alternatives (from a fisheries standpt) "bad, worse, and unthinkable" I was detailed to the brand-new Resources Agency in fall, 1964. Bill Grader, Zeke's dad, arrived a couple of months later to serve as the # 2 guy -- to take the Resources Sec'y, Hugo Fisher's back (they were old comrades from the CA Demo Council, the breakaway group that had grown more powerful than the State Demo Cmte). Fisher and DWR director Bill Warne spent their years together in the new Resources Bldg slicing one another up. (Fisher, by the way, had, as a San Diego State Senator, been the principal mgr of the Burns-Porter Act that put the Bond on the 1960 ballot. Gov Pat Brown had imported Warne, initially as DFG director, as he eased out the beloved Harvey Banks, to get the SWP show on the road) Bill and I convinced Hugo of the need for a fourth Delta alternative -- something that would route SWP and CVP -- water around the Delta w/out requiring the channel closures -- something that could be fish-screened Hugo took us across the street to pitch the Gov. Which we did successfully, with Pat saying "It's going to cost a lot more. You fellas are going to have to hit the trail and round up the support that it's going to take." (this is the kind of stuff that put Fisher and Warne at dagger pts) Which we gladly pledged we'd do. We began with the fishing assn's up and down the coast The years following were spent defining what became the Peripheral Canal and -- here was the super-tough part, that which cost, as it turned out, critical time -- trying to get the Bur Rec to enter into an agreement with us over how a shared Canal would be operated, a needed Operating Agreement (things never seem to change). We short-handed the problem statement as "arguing over whose hand is going to be on the valve" (this, keep in mind, years before CA vs the U.S was decided making clear the CVP's subordinate position to the CWA) I can recall penning in a speech for Pat Brown's ill-starred bid for a third term that "when Man finally does reach the Moon, he'll be able to make out only two works of Man on Earth, the Great Wall of China and California's Peripheral Canal". Woo woo. DWR's engineers had calculated that the width and depth of the Canal would be sufficient to float the Queen Mary (which was still in service at that time) The Reagan years in Sacramento would have been a natural time for launching construction of the Peripheral Canal -- they had the bid specs practically out the door at the end of Reagan's tour -- but it coincided/collided with the dawning of the Age of the Environment. NEPA and CEQA tripped up the Canal at that pt (as they surely will again and again) Which ushers in the Jerry Brown years -- which take the Delta debate in two directions at once, as only Jerry could : 1- his DWR goes through an agonizing, multi-year reappraisal of Delta options, and circles right back to the Peripheral Canal, as 2- his SWRCB begins to introduce some sanity into water quality planning for the Delta -- which begins to rattle the water rights cages The Jerry Brown administration hands off to the Deukmejian administration a bag of garbage, basically -- a stalled out Peripheral Canal and a wad of litigation over the John Bryson SWRCB's forward-looking efforts to define the Delta's water quality protection needs. Those two dozen cases, later consolidated, get us the Racanelli Decision, invoking for the first time, the Public Trust Doctrine in Delta affairs Which ushers in the 1986-88 Bay-Delta water quality/water rights proceedings, which produce a finding - and draft Order, but no final Order (I've told you-all how SWRCB chair Don Maughan dissed the draft Order as "merely a staff draft" in order to get re-appointed, i.e, after the draft Order hit the fan in October, 1988 and Metropolitan Water District stirred up a fire-storm of protest over the draft from its customers/telephone tree) -- that demonstrates, based on a zillion hours of expert testimony, cross-exam, rebuttal, on and on, that 1.6 million afa more Delta outflow, on average, than that required in the Jerry Brown/Bryson-era Bay-Delta Order was needed to support the estuary's beneficial uses One little fisheries note here : DWR never did come up with a workable fish screen for the Peripheral Canal. My brother-in-law put himself through Sac State working as a tech at DWR's PC fish screen mock-up at Hood. When the Jerry Brown folks came in they shut the testing down (the PC was initially anathema to them). The mock-up's parts were stacked up, rusting, at the end of what used to be the pear packing shed there at Hood (It's boat storage now.) Every time I drove by I was struck by that sorry mess and the fact that fish screen technology has never advanced for diversions that huge. Ergo, that which Bill Grader and I visualized 45 years ago, a fish-friendly way of moving water from the Delta without moving baby salmon along with it, is still just a pipe dream So, circling all the way back to your ruminations, Tom, about piping around the Delta, and given my arc in all this, I, too, have maintained that I'd support a Peripheral Whatever -- SO LONG AS SUFFICIENT DELTA OUTFLOW TO SUPPORT THE BENEFICIAL USES OF THE ESTUARY, AS REQUIRED BY LAW, WERE PROVIDED. At which pt, as I've said on numerous occasions, tiresome smart-ass that I am, it might be a 6-inch PVC pipe 'Best to all Bill Kier More from Bill Kier: In addition to the whose-hand-is-going-to-be-on-the-valve issue that I noted below, there was the lesser, but still significant matter of cost-sharing between the State and Bur Rec on the Canal's construction and operation To put it in context, the engineers' estimate for construction of those SWP elements that were spelled out in the 1960 Bond Act -- Oroville, the CA Aqueduct, etc -- was $ 1.76 billion, that was the total amt of the bonds authorized by the Act By the time that there was an engineers' estimate for construction of the Peripheral Canal it was upward of $ 1 billion ('cant recall the precise figure, but it was in that realm) The proposed cost split, 55/45, based on projected use as between the SWP and CVP, didn't sit well with CVP water users/ Bur Rec The haggling over these two intertwined matters -- the physical control of the Canal's operations and the cost-share -- began immediately in 1965 and dragged all the way through the Reagan administration (1967-1975). The Peripheral Canal project that the Reagan administration tried, frantically, to get out the door, to bid, in their dying hours in 1974 (which helped shape the Jerry Brown administration's initially hard opposition to the Canal) was still a $ 1 billion Canal and it was a go-it-alone Canal, if you can believe it, given the continued recalcitrance of the CVP users/ Bur Rec It would have left the Delta with the continuing damage of CVP pumping [ And I was having a senior moment, there, where I said that bit about seeing the Canal from the moon -- I was writing about the prospective Aqueduct in that 1966 speech. 'sorry about that ] I think all this stuff is interesting -- if more than a little disheartening -- because there are these brief moments, typically during droughts, when the smart money appears to know what they're doing, appears to have it all together on their Delta agenda. And then something inevitably intervenes -- rain, or whatever -- and the same ol' factions go back to fighting from the same ol' trenches As the Delta turns green and slowly slips away Bill At 08:06 AM 1/18/2009, Tom Stokely wrote: There are a number of unanswered questions about the Peripheral Canal. Some have asked me if I would support one and I ask them what is it? There seem to be a number of perspectives on what the PC really is. See article below and Barry Nelson's blog (NRDC) below for some clarification to confuse you more about WHAT IS THE PERIPHERAL CANAL? There are also some issues of honesty regarding some who support a PC, according to the article below. I personally would probably support a pipeline of very limited capacity solely for urban water use, if it were concurrent with SIGNIFICANT reductions in Delta (and Trinity) water exports. For now, it's my understanding that the PC in DWR's plans and cost estimates consists of a big unlined dirt ditch that in some places, goes below sea level. I don't see how that is going to increase reliability in the future world of earthquakes and rising sea levels. Tom Stokely V/FAX 530-926-9727 tstokely at att.net http://www.mercurynews.com/breakingnews/ci_11438885 Tough choices on Delta await state officials By Mike Taugher Contra Costa Times Staff Writer Posted: 01/12/2009 07:53:08 PM PST Pushing hard to build a new canal around the Delta, the Schwarzenegger administration rarely misses an opportunity to point out how rickety California's water system has become. And in their zeal to get the expensive and controversial aqueduct built, they occasionally exaggerate. For example, when federal regulators imposed new rules last month to protect endangered fish, the state's water agency announced, "Delta Water Exports Could Be Reduced By Up to 50 Percent Under New Federal Biological Opinion." It was an alarmist and inflated claim. But state water officials know the more dire the situation appears, the more support they will get to divert billions of gallons of water around, instead of through, the Delta. In fact, the water cuts are significant only when compared to the record-breaking pumping of recent years. Even then, the 50 percent figure represents a theoretical worst case, not a certainty or even a likelihood. Still, no one can deny that California faces tough decisions in the coming months and years. The Delta, as a living estuary, has been pushed to the breaking point by an increase in water pumping and other stressors. And the demand for Delta water continues to grow - it is a growing state that has lost water supplies in the Colorado River to drought and interstate agreements. 2009 looks to be the year policymakers have to grapple with the Delta's central dilemma: How much water can be taken from it for the state's cities and farms and should the flow come through the Delta or go around it? And a related but rarely uttered question: How much environmental damage in the West Coast's largest estuary is acceptable? For the governor and many water agencies, the answer is to build a canal around the Delta even though no one knows how it would be built or operated. In general, a canal would provide cleaner water and it would eliminate the state's reliance on fragile levees to channel water to pumps near Tracy that kill millions of fish every year. With the status quo clearly not working, the idea has at least qualified support from many of the state's water agencies, The Nature Conservancy, the Department of Fish and Game, and a panel of outside experts that have been working under the auspices of the Public Policy Institute of California. The flip side is that the canal would reduce water flowing through the Delta, affecting threatened wildlife there, increasing the concentration of pollutants and possibly causing stagnation. Delta landowners fear that building the canal would evaporate state funding for maintaining Delta levees and islands. Delta residents, Contra Costa County supervisors and others are lining up against it. The issue is moving forward mostly in two plans. One, known as Delta Vision, has been forwarded to Schwarzenegger. It includes a peripheral canal in a sweeping package of water supply and environmental initiatives that was put together by, among others, leading opponents of the original Peripheral Canal, which voters rejected in 1982. Schwarzenegger's advisers have endorsed most of the package, but it is unclear how it would be implemented. The other plan, known as the Bay-Delta Conservation Plan, is a narrower strategy still being negotiated among water users and regulators with strong guidance from the administration. It is meant to get regulatory approval for a canal. Details - especially how big it would be and how it would be used - have yet to be defined, which hasn't stopped many from declaring they are for it or against it. In effect, the battle lines are being drawn but no one knows what the fight is about. Would anyone oppose the canal if it were made into a pipeline that was too small to substantially diminish Delta water flows? What if a large, credibly regulated canal took small amounts of water in most years, but in high-water years took more to refill Southern California reservoirs? Would water users support a small canal? Would they support a big one that was not used much? Would such a tightly controlled big canal make economic sense? Could it be credibly regulated in a state where water interests have long had the power to get their own way? One of the biggest questions has hardly been addressed: How much water can the Delta lose without damaging it? "The peripheral canal is the narcotic to keep you from thinking about the tough decisions that need to be made," said Rep. George Miller, D-Martinez, a leading voice in Congress on western water issues The water supply available to a canal might not be as much as users hope. Federal biologists are now requiring more water to flow through the Delta in wet years to protect Delta smelt habitat. That's water that could otherwise be moved south and stored. Biologists could require that more water flow through the Delta, not the canal, to help the struggling salmon population. Nevertheless, the Schwarzenegger administration appears convinced that the canal is the way to go and state officials have taken every opportunity to remind reporters and the general public about the need for a "comprehensive" fix. Which goes back to that "50 percent" reduction. That applies only to state, as opposed to federal, water contractors in dry years. And it assumes regulators crack down hard any time there's a judgment call to be made. To be fair, the Department of Water Resources also gave reporters a more realistic number: a 17 percent reduction due to the federal biologists' ruling. That's what the agency says would be the most likely loss of water for state and federal water agencies in average years. Even that figure is inflated. The state calculated it by assuming that without the new permit water agencies would pump more water than they ever have - 6.4 million acre-feet. Charts distributed by the agency showed contractors most likely would get about 5.3 million acre-feet in an average year. That is still significantly less than the 6 million acre-feet taken from the Delta in recent years, but it is not a whole lot less than deliveries before 2000, the year that a new Delta water strategy was adopted and pumping increased sharply. In effect, it turns out, the courts and court-ordered environmental protections so far have only modestly turned back the clock on Delta pumping. But more restrictions are possible. Can a growing state accept those limits? Can it get around them with a canal and reservoirs? What further regulatory cutbacks might be ordered? So many questions. Might they be answered this year? Mike Taugher covers natural resources. Reach him at 925-943-8257 or mtaugher at bayareanewsgroup.com. A Tale of Two Peripheral Canals. Or is it Three? Barry Nelson Western Water Project Director, San Francisco Blog | About Posted January 8, 2009 http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/bnelson/a_tale_of_two_peripheral_canal.html On Tuesday, the Sacramento Bee reported that The Nature Conservancy has conditionally endorsed a Peripheral Canal. News about the canal always travels fast. It's one of the most controversial projects in the contentious history of California water. The canal is designed to divert water from the Sacramento River, just south of the state capital, and divert it around the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to the enormous state and federal water pumps on the Delta's southern edge. A previous proposal for the canal was rejected by California voters in 1982. Margins in Northern California, driven by fears of thirsty Central Valley and Southern California water users, reached historic levels. For example, 97 percent of Marin County voters pulled the lever against the canal. For the next 25 years, the canal was ignored. It became a third rail of California water policy. So what's changed to revive this debate? Two things. First, our understanding of the risks facing the Delta has changed. Second, the canal is now more mirage than reality - more a concept than a concrete proposal. Let's take these changes one at a time. Since 1982, remarkably little analysis or critical thinking has been applied to the Peripheral Canal concept. As we learned more about changes in the Delta, the estuary's environment, climate change, water quality, alternative water supplies and more, no one analyzed how a canal would perform. Little thought was given regarding why one would want to build a canal in the first place. This changed in 2007, when the Public Policy Institute of California released an influential report called " Envisioning Futures for the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta". That report built on work done by U.C. Davis professor Jeff Mount, which concluded that there is a 2/3 probability of a catastrophic failure of Delta levees by 2050. These risks are increasing over time, driven by ongoing land subsidence, inadequate levee maintenance, increasing earthquake risk and ongoing sea level rise. The failure of levees on a dozen Delta islands would be a sobering event for hundreds of thousands of Delta residents, for water users South of the Delta, and for the environment. PPIC suggested that a canal could be needed, not to increase water diversions, but rather to decrease the risk of a long-term shut down in Delta pumping as a result of levee failures. This effort helped shape the Delta Vision Task Force's work on a comprehensive Delta plan. Second, today, there is no single canal proposal. In fact, there is a remarkable diversity of ideas about a canal. On the one hand, PPIC suggested that a canal could help reduce the risks posed by earthquakes and sea level rise. In its final Strategic Plan the Delta Vision Task Force agreed in concept, and called for strong new protections for the estuary and a new governance entity to ensure that a canal would be operated in a responsible manner. Neither PPIC nor Delta Vision anticipated that a canal would produce much, if any, new water supply. In fact, both suggested that a reduction in diversions might be needed. They envisioned a canal designed to increase reliability, not supply, with major new environmental protections. This is the kind of canal the Nature Conservancy has in mind. On the other hand, last April, the Department of Water Resources released its own preliminary analysis of a canal. The project analyzed by DWR was very different from that envisioned by PPIC and Delta Vision. It did not include new standards to protect the Delta. In fact, it relied on weakening and violating existing environmental standards. It would, according to DWR, lead to a dramatic increase in pumping. This version of the project would cause major impacts to the Delta environment, water quality and Delta agriculture. It would drain upstream reservoirs, leaving little or no cold water to meet the needs of spawning salmon. This Peripheral Canal could lead to extinctions and the permanent closure of California's salmon fishery. These very different versions of the Peripheral Canal are just the tip of the iceberg. Some have proposed that the "canal" should actually be a pipeline. Others have advocated a thousand-foot wide unlined canal built below sea level on subsided Delta islands. Still others have suggested an alignment on the West side of the Delta, with a massive tunnel under the Western Delta to deliver water to the pumps. Some have argued for "dual conveyance" - pumping through both a new canal and the existing intakes in the southern Delta. Others insist on "full isolation." Yet another proposal calls for armoring levees and separating Delta channels. Delta Vision has called for a new agency to regulate a canal. That proposal, however, is opposed by water users south of the Delta. Finally, after years of study and negotiations, EBMUD is currently building a (much smaller) canal around the Delta - called the Freeport Project. In this case, the hard work paid off. As unlikely as it seems, no one sued to stop EBMUD's project. In short, today, the Peripheral Canal is in the eye of the beholder. Different canal proposals would have dramatically different implications in terms of cost, yield, benefits and impacts. Nearly every stakeholder group could find in this list a version of the canal to oppose. Given this tremendous uncertainty, it's not a surprise that the debate about the "Peripheral Canal" is often unproductive. Without specific projects and careful analysis, this debate is often founded in hunches, history and near-religious faith. Moving this discussion in a more productive direction will require three things - all of which are clearly outlined in the Delta Vision Strategic Plan. First, we need clarity regarding the purpose of a change in the Delta conveyance system. A canal designed to increase reliability and help restore ecosystem health would look very different from one designed to increase diversions. These different projects would have different costs, impacts and benefits. Specifically, water users South of the Delta should abandon the outdated assumption that a canal would automatically result in more water pumped from the Delta. And California must make a dramatic investment in the "virtual river" - consisting of conservation, water recycling, urban stormwater capture and groundwater management. These tools can help California meet its future water needs without more diversions from damaged ecosystems like the Delta. Second, careful scientific analysis must address the unanswered questions regarding Delta conveyance identified by the Delta Vision Task Force. The Task Force concluded that a meaningful, final decision on conveyance is not possible until we answer these tough questions. How much water would be diverted? How would the project affect the Delta environment, water quality and salmon runs? How would the canal's massive fish screens - which would be the world's largest - perform? What new environmental standards would be put in place? Would those standards include new protections called for by Delta Vision? How would the facility fit into a strategy to restore ecosystem health and protect Delta residents and infrastructure? These answers matter, particularly for a facility that could cost $20 billion and take 20 years to build. Water users, regulators, environmentalists, fishermen, the Delta community and others can't judge a canal accurately without answers to these questions. The Bay-Delta Conservation Plan process, which is currently studying a canal, has not yet indicated if or how it will address these unanswered questions or incorporate key Delta Vision recommendations. Third, the legislature must reform the agencies that manage the Delta, as recommended by the Task Force, with particular attention to reforming the regulation of the state and federal water projects. Those projects have, in recent years, been operated with little regard to the needs of the Delta environment or the requirements of state and federal law. That's why a federal judge stepped in, as a result of a lawsuit brought by NRDC, ordering the projects to comply with the ESA. In another lawsuit, a state judge has ruled that the projects are violating California's ESA. There are other violations as well. Governance reform is essential to reestablishing trust that any Delta facility would be operated responsibly. The Delta Vision Task Force's Strategic Plan includes a detailed framework in each of these three areas. The Task Force, however, has no implementation authority. It is now up to the Governor, the legislature, state and federal agencies, and stakeholders to determine if this promising plan will be implemented or if it will simply gather dust. No one defends the status quo in the Delta. The current levees are inadequate. Urban development in the Delta is putting more and more people at risk of flooding. The Delta ecosystem is crashing, in large part because of excessive water diversions. That's the devil we know. On the other hand, we know remarkably little about a Peripheral Canal. No one believes that a canal alone could solve all of the Delta's problems. Most importantly, to date, no one has produced a detailed, credible proposal that meets the test laid out by the Delta Vision Task Force. The quickest road to failure in the Delta would be a premature fight over an ill-defined Peripheral Canal. Such a debate would be more faith-based than fact-driven and would inevitably lead to gridlock. We've been here before. The past several decades are littered with efforts that failed to resolve the issues in the Delta. Our new understanding of the Delta, however, shows that the stakes are higher this time. Extinction is permanent. As is sea level rise. And a massive levee failure event could unalterably change the Delta and threaten thousands of residents. If the Delta Vision effort fails, we may not have another chance. Tags: baydelta, deltavisiontaskforce, peripheralcanal, sacramentoriver, sanjoaquinriver a.. permalink b.. comments (1) c.. trackback url _______________________________________________ env-trinity mailing list env-trinity at velocipede.dcn.davis.ca.us http://www2.dcn.org/mailman/listinfo/env-trinity Kier Associates, Fisheries and Watershed Professionals P.O. Box 915 Blue Lake, CA 95525 707.668.1822 mobile: 498.7847 http://www.kierassociates.net -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Tue Jan 20 14:52:19 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Tue, 20 Jan 2009 14:52:19 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Fishing and Hunting License Fees Message-ID: <005d01c97b51$c0866390$41932ab0$@net> Proposed plan irks anglers, hunters Governor to borrow from wildlife programs. Sacramento Bee - 1/16/09 By Matt Weiser Fishermen and hunters are outraged about a plan tucked in the governor's proposed California budget to shift $30 million out of wildlife programs. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger wants to borrow money from the Fish and Game Preservation Fund, which comes from hunting and fishing license fees, and use it to prop up other state programs. The funds would be repaid to wildlife programs by 2013 with interest. Critics, however, want the money to stay where it is and pay for wildlife programs. Click here to find out more! Advertisement "They've made some big blunders and caused problems for themselves, and it shouldn't be fishing licenses that hook them out," said Frank Hashorva, a member of the Rancho Murrietta Fishing Club. "It's totally absurd." The money represents about one-third of the fund's annual receipts from hunting and fishing license sales. It is a key operating fund for the department, supporting law enforcement, habitat and research projects. Fish and Game spokeswoman Jordan Traverso said the loan will not affect department operations. The fund will still have a balance of about $3.1 million at the end of this fiscal year, in June. She said budget language requires the money to be paid back sooner if the department is negatively affected. H.D. Palmer, Department of Finance spokesman, said the loan must be approved as part of a legislative package to adopt the 2009-10 budget. Brett Matzke, wild and native trout manager at the advocacy group California Trout, said fishing groups recently urged the department to spend $1 million from the fund to restore habitat for the Paiute cutthroat trout. He said the request was denied. Some anglers, he said, are considering a "license burning" rally outside the Capitol. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.gif Type: image/gif Size: 800 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Tue Jan 20 15:41:29 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Tue, 20 Jan 2009 15:41:29 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Fresno Bee January 18 09 Message-ID: <008301c97b58$9e2c9470$da85bd50$@net> Valley farmers face deadline to clean toxic drainage Fresno Bee - 1/18/09 By Mark Grossi, staff writer Farmers west of Firebaugh have spent millions of dollars over the last 14 years to cut 90% of the contaminated irrigation water flowing from beneath their fields of tomatoes, garlic and cotton. But the clock runs out in December on the cleanup program, called the Grassland Bypass Project. Farmers in the Grassland Drainage Area need permission from the federal government to finish the job and eliminate all the toxic drainage, which can poison land and wildlife. But some environmentalists have doubts. Some even question whether farming should be allowed on land with such problems, even though agriculture generates an estimated $330 million for the local economy. cid:image007.gif at 01C97AE1.D71DBB50 cid:image008.gif at 01C97AE1.D71DBB50 cid:image009.gif at 01C97AE1.D71DBB50 cid:image010.gif at 01C97AE1.D71DBB50 cid:image012.gif at 01C97AE1.D71DBB50 Advertisement Lloyd Carter, a board member with the activist group California Water Impact Network, noted that the government ordered the cleanup of this region in 1985. "Here we are 24 years later, and we're still talking about it," said Carter, a Clovis resident. "That's ridiculous." Farm officials say they are on the brink of a historic breakthrough -- building and testing a treatment plant to dispose of the remaining drainage from their land. Such remedies have been unsuccessful in the past. "With the plans we have, we're going to take our drainage down to zero," said Dennis Falaschi, general manager of Panoche Water and Drainage District. "Nothing will be going out to the river. We're confident." If the treatment plant works, it could serve as a model for much larger farm areas of the west San Joaquin Valley where the bad water problem persists. The environmental review of the 10-year extension has been produced for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. Comments on the review can be made in person at a Feb. 10 hearing in Los Banos. The California Water Impact Network and the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance will submit their criticisms of the project, but not all environmentalists feel the same. The Environmental Defense Fund, a national group that has been critical of west San Joaquin Valley farming, has supported the project for years. EDF senior counsel Tom Graff said he respects the objections of the Water Impact Network and the Sportfishing Protection Alliance, but his group still backs the project. "There are big, contentious water issues in California," Graff said. "This is not one of them." For farming to continue this century on the west side, options will be needed to dispose of used irrigation water on an estimated 200,000 acres of poorly drained crop fields. The Grassland-area growers, who farm 97,400 acres between Firebaugh and Interstate 5, have eliminated the drainage problem on all but about one-third of their acreage over the past 14 years, officials said. Westlands Water District, south of the Grassland project, faces similar problems on land several times larger, but the district has no solution yet. One government cleanup idea includes broad land retirement at a cost of more than $2 billion. Falaschi said the Grassland farmers so far have spent about $100 million, about half of which was government funded. They've eliminated 85% of the selenium, a natural element that is toxic in high concentrations, and nearly 75% of the salt level that flowed into the San Joaquin River in 1995. "If we hadn't done it, we would have been out of business," he said, because the drainage water would have begun poisoning their fields. The problem is that the water won't percolate deep into the underground. Instead, it perches on clay layers, allowing contaminants to build up and eventually foul the land. It must be drained away and somehow disposed of safely This year, Grassland farmers propose to spend $4 million from a state grant to build and test the treatment plant. They were forced into the cleanup in the 1980s after government wildlife officials found dead and deformed birds at Kesterson Reservoir. The wildlife disaster was created by toxic levels of selenium in irrigation drainage funneled from Westlands through the San Luis Drain, a concrete-lined canal. Authorities closed the federal drain and set thresholds for selenium in the area streams. Westlands lost its outlet for the bad water and still is working to find an adequate disposal method. cid:image001.gif at 01C97AF4.C0921DA0 cid:image002.gif at 01C97AF4.C0921DA0 cid:image003.gif at 01C97AF4.C0921DA0 cid:image004.gif at 01C97AF4.C0921DA0 At the time, the Grassland farmers had been sending their irrigation drainage to the San Joaquin River in canals and sloughs that passed through protected areas, such as San Luis National Wildlife Refuge. With new selenium standards in place, they lost that option. They needed a new way to dispose of the bad water without further contaminating the refuges. And they would have to eventually clean up the bad water before it got to the river. Within a few years, they made a bold proposal: With proper oversight and controls, why not reopen part of the San Luis Drain to send it to the river? Environmentalists and government wildlife agencies didn't like the idea at all. To get this seemingly unlikely proposal on the table, Grassland farm officials started talking to obvious opponents -- environmentalists and wildlife agencies. They hammered out guidelines under which opponents would support reopening the drain. The Environmental Defense Fund and the Bay Institute were among those that joined the process. Their questions were answered with cleanup promises from the Grassland farmers. Years later, the Water Impact Network and the Sportfishing Protection Alliance say the Grassland project has not brought the region into compliance with water standards that apply to the San Joaquin River. They suggest tighter standards on the river and more oversight by the state. Project officials reply that the Grassland farmers have dramatically reduced the amount of drainage they were sending to the river. They met their obligations under the agreement hammered out to reopen the drain, they said. To reduce drainage, about half the Grassland farm acreage now has stingy drip irrigation or sprinklers instead of water-intense irrigation, such as filling furrows with water. Less water means less drainage. Officials further reduce bad water by capturing the drainage in collector systems beneath crop fields or pumping it out of the shallow groundwater table. The bad water then is mixed with fresher water and used again on crops. The next generation of brackish water is captured again and reused on salt-tolerant crops, such as Jose tall wheatgrass. The Grassland project now reduces 40,000 acre-feet of bad water each year to about 4,000 acre-feet. One acre-foot is about 326,000 gallons of water, or an 18-month supply for an average Valley family. Farmers also agreed to pay fines if they didn't reduce the drainage and the contamination year by year. The fines added up to about $250,000 over the past five years, mostly because big storms caused runoff that no one could control. Though the surrounding habitat has improved, wildlife still has elevated levels of selenium, according to federal officials. Grassland project officials say they monitor the wildlife and create islands of fresh water in other areas to attract wildlife and help keep them away from potentially harmful areas. "We are very aware of the wildlife," said engineer Joseph McGahan, who works on the project. "In the 6,000 acres where we reuse drainage water on salt-tolerant crops, there were only six bird nests last year. At Kesterson in the 1980s, there were 240 nests on 1,200 acres. That's a big difference." Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.gif Type: image/gif Size: 580 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image002.gif Type: image/gif Size: 407 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image003.gif Type: image/gif Size: 1056 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image004.gif Type: image/gif Size: 577 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image005.gif Type: image/gif Size: 800 bytes Desc: not available URL: From tstokely at att.net Thu Jan 22 08:50:12 2009 From: tstokely at att.net (Tom Stokely) Date: Thu, 22 Jan 2009 08:50:12 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Chico Enterprise Record- Pointed views on water transfers aired Message-ID: <03A66157A5274858A49DB0A75000F8B4@homeuserPC> http://www.chicoer.com/news/ci_11523255?source=email Pointed views on water transfers aired By HEATHER HACKING - Staff Writer Posted: 01/22/2009 12:00:00 AM PST CHICO - Speakers at a recent Chico meeting sponsored by the Butte-Sutter Basin Area Groundwater Users said the north state should pay attention to ensure that water is not "stolen" for use in other parts of the state. A guest at the meeting was Tom Stokely, of the California Water Impact Network. Stokely previously worked for the Trinity County Planning Department for 23 years, "mostly to restore water taken from us," he said. Stokely shared his views of water projects in Trinity County in the 1960s that he said resulted in water "stolen" from that waterway for use by San Joaquin Valley farmers in the Westlands Water District. "I think they're looking in your direction," Stokely said of the Sacramento Valley. He predicted water managers would "break every promise as they did with us" in the Trinity River watershed. Westlands is an example of what not to do, Stokely said. The 600,000 acres of farmland west of Fresno is an old ocean bed that receives less than 10 inches a year of rain, he said. The region has problems with salinity, which requires more water to leach out salts. Also, the land has subsided 20-30 feet in areas, he said. Northern California currently has sustainable agriculture, Stokely said, so it doesn't make sense to export water from here to other areas. "I strongly encourage you folks to stand up for your groundwater," Stokely said. He referred people to an e-book at the Friends of the River Web site, www.fotr.org, titled "How the Trinity Lost its Water." The discussion comes as the state Department of Water Resources is exploring "conjunctive water use," which is management of water that combines surface water and groundwater sources. Attorney Michael Jackson, who has been involved with numerous environmental lawsuits and works closely with the Butte Environmental Council, reinforced the views expressed by Stokely. "There are very seldom situations where conjunctive use is good for the place that is the source of water," Jackson said. "You may find you have more allies in urban areas than you do here," Jackson said. Locally, he pointed to the Butte Environmental Council as a player in the water issues. BEC has filed lawsuits in the past, and will in the future, to challenge water projects on the basis of the environment and environmental review. As for Sacramento Valley districts interested in selling surface water and pumping groundwater, Jackson said "if they have (surface) water they don't need, it should be taken from them." He said that people who don't have access to surface water but rely only on groundwater, don't have the ability to "double dip." A few people in the audience recommended people see the documentary "Flow" - www.flowtheflim.com - about the world water crisis. In Butte County, voters passed a law that requires the county to approve any transfer of groundwater out of the county as well as transfer of surface water and subsequent use of surface water. For upcoming 2009 Drought Water Bank transfers, there is not enough time for any agency in Butte County thinking of using groundwater to get through the necessary government approval, county leaders have said. Speaker Bob Hennigan noted that only applies to Butte County, and other counties share and can tap into underground water sources. Staff writer Heather Hacking can be reached at 896-7758 or hhacking at chicoer.com. Tom Stokely Water Policy Coordinator California Water Impact Network 504A Lennon St. (USPS and UPS) Mt Shasta, CA 96067 V/FAX 530-926-9727 Cell 530-524-0315 tstokely at att.net http://www.c-win.org/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Thu Jan 22 10:30:06 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Thu, 22 Jan 2009 10:30:06 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Chico Enterprise Record 01 22 09 Message-ID: <00ca01c97cbf$74210a90$5c631fb0$@net> Chico Enterprise Record Pointed views on water transfers aired By HEATHER HACKING - Staff Writer Posted: 01/22/2009 12:00:00 AM PST CHICO - Speakers at a recent Chico meeting sponsored by the Butte-Sutter Basin Area Groundwater Users said the north state should pay attention to ensure that water is not "stolen" for use in other parts of the state. A guest at the meeting was Tom Stokely, of the California Water Impact Network. Stokely previously worked for the Trinity County Planning Department for 23 years, "mostly to restore water taken from us," he said. Stokely shared his views of water projects in Trinity County in the 1960s that he said resulted in water "stolen" from that waterway for use by San Joaquin Valley farmers in the Westlands Water District. "I think they're looking in your direction," Stokely said of the Sacramento Valley. He predicted water managers would "break every promise as they did with us" in the Trinity River watershed. Westlands is an example of what not to do, Stokely said. The 600,000 acres of farmland west of Fresno is an old ocean bed that receives less than 10 inches a year of rain, he said. The region has problems with salinity, which requires more water to leach out salts. Also, the land has subsided 20-30 feet in areas, he said. Northern California currently has sustainable agriculture, Stokely said, so it doesn't make sense to export water from here to other areas. "I strongly encourage you folks to stand up for your groundwater," Stokely said. He referred people to an e-book at the Friends of Trinity River Web site, www.fotr.org, titled "How the Trinity Lost its Water." The discussion comes as the state Department of Water Resources is exploring "conjunctive water use," which is management of water that combines surface water and groundwater sources. Attorney Michael Jackson, who has been involved with numerous environmental lawsuits and works closely with the Butte Environmental Council, reinforced the views expressed by Stokely. "There are very seldom situations where conjunctive use is good for the place that is the source of water," Jackson said. "You may find you have more allies in urban areas than you do here," Jackson said. Locally, he pointed to the Butte Environmental Council as a player in the water issues. BEC has filed lawsuits in the past, and will in the future, to challenge water projects on the basis of the environment and environmental review. As for Sacramento Valley districts interested in selling surface water and pumping groundwater, Jackson said "if they have (surface) water they don't need, it should be taken from them." He said that people who don't have access to surface water but rely only on groundwater, don't have the ability to "double dip." A few people in the audience recommended people see the documentary "Flow" - www.flowtheflim.com - about the world water crisis. In Butte County, voters passed a law that requires the county to approve any transfer of groundwater out of the county as well as transfer of surface water and subsequent use of surface water. For upcoming 2009 Drought Water Bank transfers, there is not enough time for any agency in Butte County thinking of using groundwater to get through the necessary government approval, county leaders have said. Speaker Bob Hennigan noted that only applies to Butte County, and other counties share and can tap into underground water sources. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Thu Jan 22 11:05:33 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Thu, 22 Jan 2009 11:05:33 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Information about the 27th Annual Salmonid Restoration Conference, March 4-7, 2009 Santa Cruz, CA: Please Share Message-ID: <00f701c97cc4$674466a0$35cd33e0$@net> From: Heather Reese [mailto:heather at calsalmon.org] Hello, Please find below and attached information about the up-coming 2009 Salmonid Restoration Conference that will take place March 4th - 7th in lovely Santa Cruz, California. Please feel free to disseminate this information to your constituency and within your organization. We also invite you to post the dates or the attached information on your website, Calendar of Events or newsletter. If you would like to receive SRF's 2009 Winter Newsletter, which includes the conference agenda and registration form, or conference poster(s), please let me know via phone (707-923-7501) or email (heather at calsalmon.org) how many to send and to what address. We are very excited about this year's agenda and encourage you to check out the SRF web site to see the agenda, print a registration form, or register online: www.calsalmon.org. This is California's premier salmonid restoration conference and is an excellent opportunity for networking and sharing information and techniques for watershed restorationists and salmon biologists. The conference is attended by hundreds of federal, state and local agency personnel, fisheries biologists, professional and citizen watershed restorationists, tribal members and students. The conference includes two days of workshops and field tours, followed by two days of concurrent sessions (please see below or check out our web site for a detailed agenda). SRF also offers several evening events. On Thursday evening SRF hosts the Wild and Scenic Environmental Film Festival On Tour. Friday Evening is our Poster Session and Reception (please see below for more information about presenting at the Poster Session). Saturday evening is the Awards Ceremony and Banquet, followed by spicy rhythms of Lo Cura. The information pasted below (and attached) includes: 1) Conference logistics, including hotels, parking and event start times. 2) Poster Session Information 3) Detailed description of the workshops, tours, and presentations being offered at this years conference Thank you! Heather Reese Project Coordinator Salmonid Restoration Federation PO Box 784 Redway, California 95560 (707) 923-7501 heather at calsalmon.org 2009 Salmonid Restoration Conference Logistics: The conference will be held at the Civic Auditorium in downtown Santa Cruz. There is limited parking at the facility so we are encouraging all participants to stay at the host hotels (Best Western Inn and the Continental Inn) that are both walking distance from the conference facility. SRF will also provide numerous daily shuttles from the hotels in the morning and the evening. If you are a local Santa Cruz resident, there will be limited local parking for $5 a day on a first-come, first-serve basis and metered parking. SRF has arranged discounted rates at the Best Western and Continental Inn in Santa Cruz both of which are on Ocean St., walking distance to the conference facility at the Civic Auditorium in downtown Santa Cruz. The Continental Inn (www. continentalinnsantacruz.com) is offering rooms for $75 with a continental breakfast. To receive this rate, please call (831) 429-1221 by February 4 and let them know that you are with SRF. The group rate for the Best Western Inn in Santa Cruz is $106 for single or double rooms with a full breakfast. To receive this rate, please call (831) 429-1221 by February 14 and let them know that you are with the salmon group. All field tours depart from the conference facility at 9 am and return by 5 pm. Please arrive early to register and pack a lunch for the field tours. Please come prepared with walking shoes and a water bottle. All workshops are at the Civic auditorium starting at 9 am and ending at 5pm. Lunch is included. The Friday Plenary session begins at 8:30 am followed by lunch and afternoon concurrent sessions. Saturday concurrent sessions are 9 am to noon and Saturday afternoon concurrent session is 1:15 to 5 pm. Poster Session, Friday March 6th 7p-10p: The Salmonid Restoration Federation (SRF) would like to invite you to participate in the 27th Annual Salmonid Restoration Poster Session that will be held Friday, March 6 from 7 - 10 pm. The Poster Session is a great venue to share information about your work, company, agency or non-profit and to collaborate with your peers. We encourage posters, pamphlet distribution, software exhibits and multimedia (video) presentations. Poster Session Info (also available at http://www.calsalmon.org/) . The poster session will be from 7-10pm on Friday March 6, 2009 in the Civic Auditorium at 307 Church Street in downtown Santa Cruz. There will also be a reception and silent raffle. . This year SRF is hosting a "Restoration Recruitment Center." Please bring job announcements to post and sign-up for a shift where you can do outreach to prospective employees in the restoration field. . Please email Francine at calsalmon.org to reserve a space at the poster session. Please send your contact person's name, affiliation and contact information, and a brief description of your company and/or the information you will be presenting. . Set up for the session will be between 5:15pm -6:45pm on Friday, March 6 after the Friday afternoon concurrent session. If you have special needs, please let us know what they are in advance. Poster session presenters must take their presentation down after the poster session. . SRF will provide table and and access to power if you need it. Please bring your own display boards because there are no walls that we can utilize. Please let us know in advance if you need access to power as electrical outlets are limited at this facility. Please bring your own extension cord, surge protectors, freestanding display if possible, and any AV equipment you need. . You will need to register for the conference to attend. If you don't already have a registration form, please see our website at.http://www.calsalmon.org/ to download a form or you can register online. 27th Annual Salmonid Restoration Conference March 4-7, 2009 in Santa Cruz, CA The 27th Annual Salmonid Restoration Conference will be held March 4-7, 2009 in Santa Cruz, California. This is the premiere habitat restoration conference in the Pacific Northwest and hosting the conference in Santa Cruz affords wonderful opportunities to view projects on the Central Coast and highlight issues that pertain to coastal watershed and coho salmon recovery. Executive Director and Conference Agenda Coordinator reflects, "During this time of economic and water droughts in California, it is more important than ever for restorationists, fisheries biologists, and planners to come together to learn about pioneering habitat restoration techniques and create long-term sustainable solutions to climate and policy issues that affect the restoration field and salmonid recovery." This year the conference will feature workshops on topics including Estuary Restoration, Fish Passage Design and Implementation, Coho Use and Restoration of Off-channel Habitat, Watershed Monitoring and Assessment, and Sustainable Agriculture: Water Quality and Riparian Habitat Restoration. All day field tours will include tours highlighting Resource Management for Steelhead and Coho Salmon Conservation in Santa Cruz county: a Tour of San Lorenzo River and Soquel Creek projects, Carmel River Restoration Projects, Southern Coho Streams and the NOAA lab and Broodstock program, Coho Salmon and Steelhead Enhancement Projects on the Santa Cruz North Coast, Dams and Daylighting: Progress and Opportunities in San Francisquito Creek and half-day tours of fish passage projects and sustainable agriculture projects in conjunction with those morning workshops. The Plenary session will feature Dr. Peter Moyle and Dr. Josh Israel from UC Davis who will discuss the state of California salmonids in California, Mike Furniss from Redwood Sciences Lab who will address climate change and salmonid recovery, Dr. Astrid Scholz of Ecotrust will give a presentation on marine ecology and oceanic conditions affect salmonids, and Dr. Bob Curry of Watershed Systems will highlight the status of restoration efforts in Monterey Bay and adjacent watersheds. SRF has also invited former Assembly Member John Laird of the Santa Cruz region. Concurrent sessions address biological, policy, and environmental and physical issues affecting salmonids. Concurrent sessions include the following topics: Water Diversions & Water Wars in California. FERC Relicensing Restoration Opportunities, Central & South Coast Steelhead: Biology, Genetics, and Recovery Strategies, Fire Ecology, Forests, and Fisheries, Dam Removal and Modifications for Salmonid Recovery Restoration at the Crossroads, Juvenile Steelhead and Coho Salmon: Central Coast Habitat and Population Research, Hydrologic and Geomorphic Legacy Issues: Solutions for the Past and the Future, Coho Salmon Recovery and Restoration: Putting Theory into Practice. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: 2009 SRF Conference Logistics.doc Type: application/msword Size: 29184 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: 2009 Poster Outreach.pdf Type: application/pdf Size: 203466 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: 2009 Poster session info1.doc Type: application/msword Size: 33280 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: 2009 Conf PR_012109.doc Type: application/msword Size: 301568 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Thu Jan 22 11:27:10 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Thu, 22 Jan 2009 11:27:10 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] SF Chron 01 22 09 Message-ID: <00fd01c97cc7$6c4b9a80$44e2cf80$@net> To save salmon, stop subsidizing toxic farming Dave Bitts Thursday, January 22, 2009 State and federal water managers are pumping California's most valuable resource as fast as they can, and the consequence - the ecological crash of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta - is a catastrophe for us all. Especially hard hit are coastal communities, where salmon fishing has been central to the economy and culture for more than a century. Images http://imgs.sfgate.com/c/pictures/2009/01/21/ed-bitts22_ph_0494825828_part1. jpg http://imgs.sfgate.com/graphics/utils/plus-green.gifView Larger Image Federal pumping plant near Tracy draws the Delta water into the Delta-Mendota Canal, where it travels to Western San Joaquin Valley fields. More Open Forum > To bring back salmon and other native fish, we must stop depleting the delta by sending millions of acre feet of water each year to the western San Joaquin Valley, where corporate megafarms pay pennies for taxpayer-subsidized water to irrigate cotton and other thirsty crops on arid lands with toxic soil. The biggest of these farms are in the Westlands Water District, long the most powerful player in the state's water politics. A draft report released last Thursday by the National Marine Fisheries Service confirms that the operations of the federal Central Valley Project and the smaller State Water Project, which pump delta water southward, jeopardize the very existence of the state's spring and winter run of Chinook salmon, steelhead and green sturgeon - all endangered or threatened species. Undoubtedly, pumping is devastating the commercially valuable fall run of Chinook as well. Until two years ago, Chinook from the Sacramento provided most of the year's catch for sports and commercial salmon fishermen in California and Oregon. Historically, the Sacramento has consistently produced far more salmon than any other river south of the Columbia - until the run crashed in the face of record water exports, requiring the closure of all ocean salmon fishing south of Cape Falcon, Ore. Meanwhile, the state Water Resources Control Board, which is supposed to be protecting the delta fishery, has turned a blind eye to the depredations of the water export agencies, as have the state Department of Fish and Game and the governor's office. Westlands Water District irrigates hundreds of thousands of acres of semi-arid land that is tainted with selenium, a highly toxic mineral. Irrigation causes selenium to leach out of the soil. Twenty-five years ago, Westlands dumped its toxic wastewater at the Kesterson National Wildlife Refuge, killing thousands of migratory birds. After the Kesterson disaster came to light, Westlands had a harder time evading the truth about the widespread destruction its irrigation practices caused. But the district farmers haven't learned their lesson. Westlands says about 100,000 of the most poisoned or poorly draining acres have been taken out of production, and wants taxpayers to pay for a Kesterson-like scheme to drain another 100,000 acres. But federal scientists say the amount of contaminated cropland is closer to half a million acres. The cheapest and most environmentally sound answer is to take all of the tainted land out of production, which would greatly reduce the amount of water Westlands needs. But the district is in negotiations with the federal mangers of the Central Valley Project for a 50-year contract that would entitle it to more water, not less, which it could then turn around and sell at great profit to water-scarce cities in Southern California. Westlands has the backing of some of the highest-ranking politicians in Washington and Sacramento. The state Water Resources Control Board has failed to declare irrigation and cultivation of these selenium-tainted soils an unreasonable use of water, although they are now facing a lawsuit brought by sport fishermen over this issue. The state still allows irrigation districts north of Westlands to funnel their wastewater into the lower San Joaquin River. The water board and the Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board have turned the lower San Joaquin River and the delta into a sewer and all but invited generators of waste to use the delta as a toilet. We can't continue to promise more water than nature supplies. California has a finite water supply that is already stretched beyond its limits. When are water users and managers going to face facts? Will our fish disappear forever before they do? Dave Bitts of McKinleyville (Humboldt County) is president of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image021.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 7897 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image022.gif Type: image/gif Size: 54 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Fri Jan 23 12:58:49 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Fri, 23 Jan 2009 12:58:49 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Central Valley Business Times 01-22-09 Message-ID: <002601c97d9d$642b0c10$2c812430$@net> Panel to debate controversial water issues FRESNO January 22, 2009 11:00am . Set for Feb. 4 at Fresno State . U.S District Judge Oliver Wanger to moderate A public debate on water policy in California and the Central Valley will be moderated by U.S District Judge Oliver Wanger at 7 p.m. Feb. 4, at California State University, Fresno. Agricultural and environmental advocates will face off on the issues. The debate, which is free and open to the public, will be held in the Satellite Student Union (2485 E. San Ramon Ave. at Maple Avenue). It is sponsored by Fresno State's Political Science Student Association and the Political Science Department. As the presiding judge for the Eastern District of California, Mr. Wanger has ruled over most of the major water cases recently in the Valley, including the controversy over preserving Delta smelt in the San Joaquin-Sacramento Delta. Mr. Wanger will provide brief opening remarks, says Thomas Holyoke, a political science professor who is coordinating the event. Mr. Holyoke says the debate will focus on Valley East Side, West Side and Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta issues. "The single most important public policy problem confronting California's Central Valley today is the availability of water," Mr. Holyoke says. "The declining snowpack in the Sierra Nevada, the falling groundwater table and decisions to restore Chinook salmon in the San Joaquin River and smelt in the Delta will most likely mean considerably less water in the future for Valley agriculture." He says the issue also is forcing state and local policymakers to develop a broad new policy to strike a balance between supporting the agriculture economy and ensuring the quality of water and the environment that depends on it. The forum will also provide an opportunity for the public to express its concerns, Mr. Holyoke says. Valley agricultural community participants are: . Thomas Birmingham, general manager and general counsel of the Westlands Water District . Kole Upton, former chairman of Friant Water Users Authority . Jim Beck, general manager of Kern County Water Agency Representing environmental concerns are: . Lloyd Carter, board member of the California Water Impact Network and Revive the San Joaquin and president of California Save Our Streams Council . Michael Jackson, board member of California Water Impact Network and former counsel to California Sportfishing Protection Alliance and Regional Council of Rural Counties . Bill Jennings, chairman of the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance Free parking will be available in Lot P at Barstow and Maple avenues and in Lot J off of Woodrow Avenue. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From tstokely at att.net Tue Jan 27 22:03:38 2009 From: tstokely at att.net (Tom Stokely) Date: Tue, 27 Jan 2009 22:03:38 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Fw: Jennings/Jackson debate Birmingham at Fresno State Message-ID: <21D059147FC84214974762FE31B4DC10@homeuserPC> ----- Original Message ----- From: david nesmith To: undisclosed-recipients Sent: Tuesday, January 27, 2009 7:58 PM Subject: Jennings/Jackson debate Birmingham at Fresno State Begin forwarded message: Here's my blurb and the press release about the event. Thanks Dan? Panel will debate Central Valley and Delta water issues Feb. 4 at Fresno State by Dan Bacher? Thursday Jan 22nd, 2009 3:34 PM What promises to be an exciting debate on water policy in California and the Central Valley will be moderated by U.S. District Judge Oliver Wanger at 7 p.m. Feb. 4, at California State University, Fresno. Agricultural and environmental advocates will face off on the issues. Bill Jennings and Mike Jackson from the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance and Lloyd Carter of the California Impact Network will represent the environmental and fishing communities. This panel will debate a number of issues, including Congressional efforts to restore the San Joaquin River, Westlands Water District's toxic drainage problems and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's peripheral canal proposal. This event should be great!? This debate takes place as California fisheries are in their greatest crisis ever, due to massive water exports from the California Delta and the dramatic decline in water quality in recent years. The Central Valley chinook salmon population has collapsed, spurring the closure of recreational and commercial salmon fishing off California and Oregon for the first time in 150 years in 2008. The latest Department of Fish and Game midwater trawl survey on the Delta documented the lowest ever abundance of delta smelt, Sacramento splittail, threadfin shad and American shad and a continuing low abundance of longfin smelt and juvenile striped bass. dwr_delta_photo.jpg Press Release from California State University, Fresno? January 22, 2009? Panel will debate controversial water issues Feb. 4 at Fresno State? A public debate on water policy in California and the Central Valley will be moderated by U.S District Judge Oliver Wanger at 7 p.m. Feb. 4, at California State University, Fresno. Agricultural and environmental advocates will face off on the issues.? The debate, which is free and open to the public, will be held in the Satellite Student Union (2485 E. San Ramon Ave. at Maple Avenue). It is sponsored by Fresno State?s Political Science Student Association and the Political Science Department.? As the presiding judge for the Eastern District of California, Wanger has ruled over most of the major water cases recently in the Valley, including the controversy over preserving Delta smelt in the Sacramento Delta. Wanger will provide brief opening remarks, said Dr. Thomas Holyoke, a political science professor who is coordinating the event.? Holyoke said the debate will focus on Valley East Side, West Side and Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta issues.? ?The single most important public policy problem confronting California?s Central Valley today is the availability of water,? Holyoke said. ?The declining snowpack in the Sierra Nevada, the falling groundwater table and decisions to restore Chinook salmon in the San Joaquin River and smelt in the Delta will most likely mean considerably less water in the future for Valley agriculture.?? He said the issue also is forcing state and local policymakers to develop a broad new policy to strike a balance between supporting the agriculture economy and ensuring the quality of water and the environment that depends on it.? The forum will also provide an opportunity for the public to express its concerns, Holyoke said.? Valley agricultural community participants are:? Thomas Birmingham, general manager and general counsel of the Westlands Water District,? Kole Upton, former chairman of Friant Water Users Authority? Jim Beck, general manager of Kern County Water Agency? Representing environmental concerns are:? Lloyd Carter, board member of the California Water Impact Network and Revive the San Joaquin and president of California Save Our Streams Council? Michael Jackson, board member and counsel to the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance and Regional Council of Rural Counties.? Bill Jennings, chairman of the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance? Free parking will be available in Lot P at Barstow and Maple avenues and in Lot J off of Woodrow Avenue.? For more information, contact Holyoke at 559.278.7580 or by e-mail at tholyoke [at] csufresno.edu.? DEBATE ISSUES? Valley East Side -- Who is likely to win and lose in Congressional efforts to restore the San Joaquin River? The return of salmon, groundwater recharge, potential loss of water for agricultural irrigation, new recreational opportunities, new freshwater for the Delta, groundwater banks, county of origin and watershed of origin statutes, irrigation districts selling water to Valley cities, and the possibility of a new dam at Temperance Flat.? Valley West Side -- Potential damage to agriculture, loss of jobs, dwindling water supplies, Westlands Water District's claim to San Joaquin River water through a county of origin statute, drainage and selenium problems, and a proposed settlement through federal legislation.? Sacramento?San Joaquin River Delta -- Collapse of the smelt population, fragile levees, Northern California users? concerns, potential impact on Native American tribes and re-emergence of the peripheral canal proposal to route water form the Delta to the Valley and Southern California. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: dwr_delta_photo.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 61361 bytes Desc: not available URL: From tstokely at att.net Fri Jan 30 08:01:32 2009 From: tstokely at att.net (Tom Stokely) Date: Fri, 30 Jan 2009 08:01:32 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Fresno Westlands growers get some bad news Message-ID: Fresno Westlands growers get some bad news District likely won't receive federal water deliveries this season. Fresno Bee - 1/28/09 By Robert Rodriguez FIVE POINTS -- West Fresno County farmer Bob Diedrich hoped for good news during a standing-room-only meeting of Westlands Water District growers Wednesday. But Diedrich, a farmer for 45 years, didn't like what he heard. Westlands officials said growers in the district will likely receive no federal water deliveries this season. a.. b.. "Our projections are that our allocations will be zero, absent a significant change in hydrology," said Tom Birmingham, general manager of the Westlands Water District in Fresno. Farmers are heading into their third consecutive dry year. Diedrich was one of about 100 crammed into a shop building at the district's west side office eager to hear details from district officials and Ron Milligan, operations manager for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. "What am I supposed to do, if I have no water?" Diedrich asked. "I have five guys that I employ year-round, and now I may have to tell them they don't have jobs." Diedrich farms 960 acres that at one time grew processing tomatoes, dry beans, cotton and alfalfa. He is contemplating pulling up stakes temporarily and moving to Texas to live with his son. "We are at the point where a lot of us farmers need to make some decisions today about whether we are going to plant this year," Diedrich said. "We don't want to just walk away from this." Birmingham told growers that the district is working on options, including water transfers and accessing water that was not used as part of a water rationing program last year. "We are literally looking all over the state to get water as quickly and inexpensively as possible," Birmingham said. But none of those options is guaranteed. Farmer and Westlands board President Jean Sagouspe sympathized with growers, saying he, too, is having to make tough decisions. But Sagouspe also said the problem is not just the lack of rain and snow. He said environmental policies, including court-ordered pumping restrictions in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta to protect endangered fish, have helped create this current crisis. "People don't have a clue about what is going on," Sagouspe said. "The governor doesn't even care. He will only care when L.A. runs out of water." Although the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation won't announce a water delivery forecast until Feb. 20, Milligan told growers several things are certain: Rainfall is below normal, the state reservoirs are depleted and the snowpack is small. And the short-term weather outlook is not promising. "We do not see a lot of water in the forecast," Milligan said. "And that will make it a very complicated operational season." Westlands growers, who suffered the biggest hit among water districts on the west side of the Valley, are expected to have only about 300,000 acres in production this year, down from 500,000 acres that are farmed. Birmingham said that while he hopes for a solution, he knows it may come too late for some growers. "I pray that I am wrong," he said. "But the reality is that a lot of you in this room may not survive this."# http://www.fresnobee.com/business/story/1161605.html ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ DWR's California Water News is distributed to California Department of Water Resources management and staff, for information purposes, by the DWR Public Affairs Office. For reader's services, including new subscriptions, temporary cancellations and address changes, please use the online page: http://listhost2.water.ca.gov/mailman/listinfo/water_news . DWR operates and maintains the State Water Project, provides dam safety and flood control and inspection services, assists local water districts in water management and water conservation planning, and plans for future statewide water needs. Inclusion of materials is not to be construed as an endorsement of any programs, projects, or viewpoints by the Department or the State of California. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image018.gif Type: image/gif Size: 580 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image019.gif Type: image/gif Size: 407 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image020.gif Type: image/gif Size: 1056 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image021.gif Type: image/gif Size: 577 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image022.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 1260 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image023.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 2076 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image024.gif Type: image/gif Size: 800 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Sat Jan 31 09:27:34 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Sat, 31 Jan 2009 09:27:34 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Sacramento Bee Editorial 01 29 09 Message-ID: <010a01c983c9$3525e1b0$9f71a510$@net> Editorial: Mining protected as salmon dwindle Sacramento Bee - 1/29/09 The California Department of Fish and Game said "no" to fish this week and "yes" to gold miners. Even though experts within DFG have said that suction dredge gold mining is having "deleterious effects on fish," including endangered coho salmon, the department declined to further restrict gold miners who use giant dredges to vacuum up rock and sand from creek and river bottoms, likely killing fish in the process. In a petition to the state, the Karuk Indian Tribe and several environmental organizations had asked the department to curtail dredging on sensitive stretches of waterway. The department said it could not act until it completed a court-ordered review of the issue. But DFG was supposed to complete that review last July. It hasn't even begun. Meanwhile, so serious is the decline of salmon that federal regulators banned fishing off the coasts of California and Oregon last year. State officials say the mining restriction requested by the Karuks would do nothing to address ocean conditions, which are suspected to be the main cause of the decline. Suction dredge gold miners insist that global warming and dams are the culprits and that their mining operations actually improve fish habitat. No doubt global warming, dams, logging, pesticides and other human activities kill fish and destroy habitat, but the bulk of the science strongly suggests that suction dredge mining harms fish, too. As salmon populations dwindle, the state agency charged with protecting them protects gold miners instead Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From tstokely at att.net Sat Jan 31 10:16:34 2009 From: tstokely at att.net (Tom Stokely) Date: Sat, 31 Jan 2009 10:16:34 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Water crisis has parallels with financial meltdown Message-ID: <1100BD2B3813444CA8D28FD6D6DEEC34@homeuserPC> Water crisis has parallels with financial meltdown Contra Costa Times - 1/11/09 By Mike Taugher To understand how California reached its current water crisis, one could look for an analogy in the financial meltdown. In both cases, credit or water once flowed easily: Four of the five years of highest water deliveries from the Delta's two massive pumping plants were 2003, 2004, 2005 and 2006. In both cases, lax regulatory oversight was a factor in the collapse that followed: The state Department of Water Resources never obtained an endangered-species permit required under state law, and the two federal permits it and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation operated under were invalidated by a judge who found them ineffective and weak. And in both cases, a bubble formed and burst: By 2007, record pumping levels had contributed to an ecological collapse that in turn led to a court order to slow the pumps. Although the causes for the collapse of Delta smelt, salmon and other fish species are complex and hotly debated, the fact is that state water managers, given a loose rein by regulators, cranked up pumps in recent years and the fish species that were supposed to be protected - especially Delta smelt - collapsed. By the time courts stepped in, drastic measures were in order. Water agencies, under a microscope and facing the threat of further cutbacks and shortages, point to other causes for the Delta's demise. They argue that the collapse is not their fault, or at least not entirely their fault. They may be partly right. Scientists are investigating the possibility that ammonia discharged from Sacramento's sewer treatment plant might be contributing to the problems, for example, and no one disputes the role invasive clams, plants and fish are having on the delicate ecological balance in the Delta, the West Coast's largest natural estuary. But the biological analysis that accompanied federal regulators' latest permit, issued last month under court order, concluded that pumping operations lie close to the root of the Delta's problems and the near extinction of Delta smelt. It emphasized that the pumps not only kill fish directly, they also have a dramatic effect on the Delta's flow of water - the hydrodynamics. And that influences everything. So, while pollution, introduced species, habitat quality, food availability and other "stressors" are contributing to the Delta's environmental meltdown, "the extent to which these factors adversely affect Delta smelt is related to hydrodynamic conditions in the Delta, which in turn are controlled to a large extent by (state and federal water project) operations," the analysis concluded. In other words, the other factors that water agencies point to as overlooked contributors to the Delta's demise are, in fact, made worse by agency operations. The permit has alarmed water agencies because it will cut water deliveries to farms and cities throughout the state below the record levels of recent years. And it comes after two dry years, depleted reservoirs and concern that 2009 could be a third consecutive year without much rain or snow. Water agencies are also concerned that further restrictions in the coming months might further crimp the water supply. A second permit, to protect salmon and steelhead, is due in March and another Delta fish, longfin smelt, is being considered for listing under state and federal endangered species laws. As with the financial meltdown, the bursting of a bubble - whether in house prices or water deliveries - is causing pain. Southern California cities have become more dependent on the Delta as the region's Colorado River supplies were cut due to drought and a 2003 agreement to adhere to the limits set in a 1922 compact with other states. Meanwhile, major new reservoirs such as the Kern Water Bank near Bakersfield and Diamond Valley lake in Riverside County, which were largely filled with Delta water in the recent boom years, are being drawn down rapidly. A recent study by a Berkeley consulting firm pegged the cost of restrictions at more than $500 million a year, a cost that could soar to $3 billion in a prolonged drought. Most of that would be felt in Southern California, where water rates could rise and residents see an increased likelihood of water rationing, the study said. Rationing is possible as early as this summer, depending on the weather, of course. And water agencies are supporting costly fixes that would run into the billions, despite the more than $4 billion spent since 2000 for a plan now largely seen as mostly failed. How bad is it? We're looking at what could be "a water supply and delivery crisis the likes of which Californians have not seen in decades," said the state's top water official, Department of Water Resources Director Lester Snow. He might be right.# http://www.insidebayarea.com/oaklandtribune/localnews/ci_11430213?source=rss Tough choices on Delta await state officials Contra Costa Times - 1/12/09 By Mike Taugher Pushing hard to build a new canal around the Delta, the Schwarzenegger administration rarely misses an opportunity to point out how rickety California's water system has become. And in their zeal to get the expensive and controversial aqueduct built, they occasionally exaggerate. For example, when federal regulators imposed new rules last month to protect endangered fish, the state's water agency announced, "Delta Water Exports Could Be Reduced By Up to 50 Percent Under New Federal Biological Opinion." It was an alarmist and inflated claim. But state water officials know the more dire the situation appears, the more support they will get to divert billions of gallons of water around, instead of through, the Delta. In fact, the water cuts are significant only when compared to the record-breaking pumping of recent years. Even then, the 50 percent figure represents a theoretical worst case, not a certainty or even a likelihood. Still, no one can deny that California faces tough decisions in the coming months and years. The Delta, as a living estuary, has been pushed to the breaking point by an increase in water pumping and other stressors. And the demand for Delta water continues to grow - it is a growing state that has lost water supplies in the Colorado River to drought and interstate agreements. 2009 looks to be the year policymakers have to grapple with the Delta's central dilemma: How much water can be taken from it for the state's cities and farms and should the flow come through the Delta or go around it? And a related but rarely uttered question: How much environmental damage in the West Coast's largest estuary is acceptable? For the governor and many water agencies, the answer is to build a canal around the Delta even though no one knows how it would be built or operated. In general, a canal would provide cleaner water and it would eliminate the state's reliance on fragile levees to channel water to pumps near Tracy that kill millions of fish every year. With the status quo clearly not working, the idea has at least qualified support from many of the state's water agencies, The Nature Conservancy, the Department of Fish and Game, and a panel of outside experts that have been working under the auspices of the Public Policy Institute of California. The flip side is that the canal would reduce water flowing through the Delta, affecting threatened wildlife there, increasing the concentration of pollutants and possibly causing stagnation. Delta landowners fear that building the canal would evaporate state funding for maintaining Delta levees and islands. Delta residents, Contra Costa County supervisors and others are lining up against it. The issue is moving forward mostly in two plans. One, known as Delta Vision, has been forwarded to Schwarzenegger. It includes a peripheral canal in a sweeping package of water supply and environmental initiatives that was put together by, among others, leading opponents of the original Peripheral Canal, which voters rejected in 1982. Schwarzenegger's advisers have endorsed most of the package, but it is unclear how it would be implemented. The other plan, known as the Bay-Delta Conservation Plan, is a narrower strategy still being negotiated among water users and regulators with strong guidance from the administration. It is meant to get regulatory approval for a canal. Details - especially how big it would be and how it would be used - have yet to be defined, which hasn't stopped many from declaring they are for it or against it. In effect, the battle lines are being drawn but no one knows what the fight is about. Would anyone oppose the canal if it were made into a pipeline that was too small to substantially diminish Delta water flows? What if a large, credibly regulated canal took small amounts of water in most years, but in high-water years took more to refill Southern California reservoirs? Would water users support a small canal? Would they support a big one that was not used much? Would such a tightly controlled big canal make economic sense? Could it be credibly regulated in a state where water interests have long had the power to get their own way? One of the biggest questions has hardly been addressed: How much water can the Delta lose without damaging it? "The peripheral canal is the narcotic to keep you from thinking about the tough decisions that need to be made," said Rep. George Miller, D-Martinez, a leading voice in Congress on western water issues The water supply available to a canal might not be as much as users hope. Federal biologists are now requiring more water to flow through the Delta in wet years to protect Delta smelt habitat. That's water that could otherwise be moved south and stored. Biologists could require that more water flow through the Delta, not the canal, to help the struggling salmon population. Nevertheless, the Schwarzenegger administration appears convinced that the canal is the way to go and state officials have taken every opportunity to remind reporters and the general public about the need for a "comprehensive" fix. Which goes back to that "50 percent" reduction. That applies only to state, as opposed to federal, water contractors in dry years. And it assumes regulators crack down hard any time there's a judgment call to be made. To be fair, the Department of Water Resources also gave reporters a more realistic number: a 17 percent reduction due to the federal biologists' ruling. That's what the agency says would be the most likely loss of water for state and federal water agencies in average years. Even that figure is inflated. The state calculated it by assuming that without the new permit water agencies would pump more water than they ever have - 6.4 million acre-feet. Charts distributed by the agency showed contractors most likely would get about 5.3 million acre-feet in an average year. That is still significantly less than the 6 million acre-feet taken from the Delta in recent years, but it is not a whole lot less than deliveries before 2000, the year that a new Delta water strategy was adopted and pumping increased sharply. In effect, it turns out, the courts and court-ordered environmental protections so far have only modestly turned back the clock on Delta pumping. But more restrictions are possible. Can a growing state accept those limits? Can it get around them with a canal and reservoirs? What further regulatory cutbacks might be ordered? So many questions. Might they be answered this year?# http://www.contracostatimes.com/california/ci_11438885 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ DWR's California Water News is distributed to California Department of Water Resources management and staff, for information purposes, by the DWR Public Affairs Office. For reader's services, including new subscriptions, temporary cancellations and address changes, please use the online page: http://listhost2.water.ca.gov/mailman/listinfo/water_news . DWR operates and maintains the State Water Project, provides dam safety and flood control and inspection services, assists local water districts in water management and water conservation planning, and plans for future statewide water needs. Inclusion of materials is not to be construed as an endorsement of any programs, projects, or viewpoints by the Department or the State of California. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From tstokely at att.net Wed Feb 4 22:36:29 2009 From: tstokely at att.net (Tom Stokely) Date: Wed, 4 Feb 2009 22:36:29 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] =?iso-8859-1?q?Yubanet=2Ecom_-_Klamath_Bill_in_Oreg?= =?iso-8859-1?q?on_Legislature?= Message-ID: Diverse Groups and Interests Support Klamath Bill in Oregon Legislature Dam removal is first step in realizing comprehensive Klamath Basin Agreement to benefit farms and fish Yubanet.com - 2/4/09 By: Karuk Tribe Salem, OR, Feb. 3, 2009 - Today lawmakers introduced a bill that would direct funds from PacifiCorp power bills to remove dams instead of paying millions more for federally mandated dam upgrades. Affected Tribes, fishermen, conservationists, ratepayer advocacy groups, and even dam owner PacifiCorp, support the legislation. The legislation is a first step to restoring fisheries and stabilizing tribal, agricultural and fishing economies in the Klamath Basin - as mapped out in the Klamath Basin Restoration Agreement. "Governor Kulongoski has helped negotiate a win-win-win situation that we hope legislators will support," said Jeff Mitchell, Klamath Tribal council member and long time dam removal advocate. "Tribes and fishermen win because we will recover salmon runs, farmers win because dam removal is a cornerstone of our water sharing agreement, and PacifiCorp and their customers win because they control costs." The legislation is based on a dam removal "agreement in principle" signed by PacifiCorp, Oregon, California, and the United States last November. The legislation essentially caps PacifiCorp ratepayers' contribution to dam removal at $200 million. Without the legislation PacifiCorp's ratepayers would have to pay the full cost of relicensing the aging dams, including mitigation measures such as fish ladders that, at a minimum, will cost the same as removal. Additional costs for addressing water quality issues such as toxic algal blooms are yet to be determined by regulatory agencies, but could add millions more. Groups argue that dam removal solves these problems in a more cost effective manner. A broad-based coalition of organizations representing diverse interests has been working since 2005 to bring peace and sustainable solutions to the Klamath Basin. This bi-partisan, cooperative effort deserves support, say participants: "Legislative solutions should offer benefits for more than just one interest," says James Honey, Program Director for Sustainable Northwest. "This legislation and the companion Restoration Agreement is the most promising option to end the Klamath crisis." Dam removal is a key feature of the Klamath Basin Restoration Agreement released early last year. However, the Agreement also settles many long standing water disputes between Tribes and farmers, increases flows for fish, invests in rural economic development to support tribal and agricultural communities, and provides a coordinated approach to fisheries restoration, from the Klamath's headwaters to the sea. The Klamath Water Users Association, which represents farmers and ranchers who lost access to irrigation water in 2001, supports the bill. Executive Director Greg Addington explains, "We see the legislation as one component of the Klamath Basin Restoration Agreement, which can bring stability to a region known mostly for its instability. The package of measures provides increased water security for farmers, helps us with energy issues, and provides landowners with tools to ensure that reintroduction of salmon to the Upper Basin doesn't make it even harder to earn a living in agriculture." Oregon fishermen also support the bill: "Oregon's commercial salmon fishery is worth more than the small amount of power these particular dams produce," says Mike Becker, a commercial salmon fisherman from Newport. "We can replace the relatively small number of megawatts from the hydro project. But we can't replace the salmon runs on the Klamath River. When the fish suffer, so do our coastal communities." While not a part of the coalition of groups working in the Basin, the Citizen's Utility Board (CUB), a ratepayer advocacy group, also supports the Governor's legislation.# http://yubanet.com/california/Diverse-Groups-and-Interests-Support-Klamath-Bill-in-Oregon-Legislature.php -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Thu Feb 5 13:46:31 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Thu, 5 Feb 2009 13:46:31 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Yubanet.com 02 05 09 Message-ID: <006501c987db$360e8a80$a22b9f80$@net> Taxpayers Sue to Stop Hobby Mining Taxpayers sue Cal Fish and Game for misuse of tax dollars Yubanet.com ? 2/5/09 By: Karuk Tribe Oakland, CA Feb. 5, 2009 ??? Today taxpayers filed suit against California Fish and Game for using taxpayer dollars to fund an illegal recreational gold mining program in Alameda County Superior Court. "Its morally reprehensible and illegal for California Fish and Game to use tax dollars to subsidize the destruction of our fisheries in the midst of a budget crisis," said Dave Bitts, a commercial salmon fishermen from Humboldt Bay. Suction dredges are powered by gas or diesel engines that are mounted on floating pontoons in the river. Attached to the engine is a powerful vacuum hose which the dredger uses to suction up the gravel and sand (sediment) from the bottom of the river. The material passes through a sluice box where heavier gold particles can settle into a series of riffles. The rest of the gravel is simply dumped back into the river. Often this reintroduces mercury left over from historic mining operations to the water column threatening communities downstream. Depending on size, location and density of these machines they can turn a clear running mountain stream into a murky watercourse unfit for swimming. In 2005 the Karuk Tribe sued Fish and Game for allowing the practice of suction dredge mining to occur in areas known to be critical habitat for endangered and at-risk species such as Coho salmon, Pacific lamprey, and green sturgeon. At the time, Fish and Game officials submitted declarations to the Court admitting that suction dredge mining under its current regulations violates CEQA and Fish and Game Code ????5653 and 5653.9 (the statues which authorize the Department to issue permits for suction dredging under certain conditions) because the activity causes deleterious harm to fish ??? including endangered fish, such as the Coho salmon. The suit ended in a court order directing Fish and Game to conduct a CEQA review and amend its regulations by June 20, 2008. Fish and Game has yet to initiate the process. "Looks like DFG actually stands for Department of Frontier Greed," said Leaf Hillman, Vice Chairman of the Karuk Tribe. "While legislators are cutting basic programs for our children and elders in an effort to balance the budget, DFG is subsidizing hobby mining. Miners should not be allowed to mine in critical habitats and they should pay their own way if they mine at all." Specifically, the suit charges that the suction dredge program violates: (1) the previous court Order; (2) CEQA, for failure to conduct a subsequent or supplemental EIR in order to provide protections for endangered and threatened fish listed since 1994; and (3) Fish and Game Code ????5653 and 5653.9, for failure to promulgate regulations in compliance with CEQA and for issuing permits when it has determined that the activity causes deleterious harm to fish. The suit comes two weeks after Fish and Game Director Don Koch rejected a petition from the Karuk Tribe, PCFFA, and others to use emergency rule making authority to enact modest restrictions on where and when suction dredging could take place. "Fish and Game is quick to kick California's 2.4 million fishermen off the river, but they continually go to bat for 3,000 hobby miners," said plaintiff Craig Tucker. "As a taxpayer I am sick and tired of government handouts to hobby miners that are destroying California's rivers." Arguments for a preliminary injunction will likely be heard in early spring. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From danielbacher at fishsniffer.com Thu Feb 5 09:13:51 2009 From: danielbacher at fishsniffer.com (Dan Bacher) Date: Thu, 5 Feb 2009 09:13:51 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Name Change Won't Alter Resources Agency's Dark Mission In-Reply-To: <85EEFA6B-264D-4368-BA19-0F76D6B96CB0@fishsniffer.com> References: <803876.87469.qm@web32705.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <80816898-B00A-41FA-9356-DE9CF51C326E@fishsniffer.com> <85EEFA6B-264D-4368-BA19-0F76D6B96CB0@fishsniffer.com> Message-ID: <1B7DBFDA-B5C7-4244-86E8-A288CB397835@fishsniffer.com> ? Name Change Won't Alter Resources Agency's Dark Mission by Dan Bacher The Resources Agency on January 1 adopted a new name, the California "Natural" Resources Agency, to give the agency a more "green" veneer. Unfortunately, nothing has changed at the agency that has presided over the collapse of the state's salmon, steelhead and other fish populations. A press release from the agency in late December claimed that the name change was adopted to "better reflect its mission." "Since 1961, the Resources Agency has been responsible for the safeguarding and stewardship of California?s precious natural resources," according to the release. "From water and wildlife management and conservation to wildland fire protection, energy, ocean and coastal policy, land stewardship, climate change adaptation, sustainable living, and the promotion of outdoor recreation, the agency oversees most all of the state?s functions designed to protect California?s natural resources." In July, Governor Arnold "Fish Terminator" Schwarzenegger signed Senate Bill 1464 (Maldonado) authorizing the Resources Agency to change its name. "The new Agency logo will remain largely the same and the change will be phased in gradually as new supplies are ordered," the release stated. "In this way there will be little or no cost to the Agency or any of its departments, boards or commissions save for any replacement costs that would normally be incurred." California?s Natural Resources Agency is responsible for the state?s natural resource policies, programs and activities. It has 17,000 employees and oversees 25 departments, commissions, boards and conservancies, including the Department of Fish and Game, Department of Water Resources and California Water Resources Control Board. However, wouldn?t it be more appropriate for the Resources Agency to adopt a name that truly reflects its REAL primary mission? Based on my years covering California fisheries, this mission appears to be engineering the collapse of Central Valley salmon fisheries, driving the California Delta's pelagic fish populations to the edge of extinction, building a peripheral canal, constructing more dams, slashing funds for salmon and steelhead restoration, and instituting massive closures of public trust fisheries throughout the state?s ocean waters. Considering all of this, wouldn?t ?the Natural Destruction Agency? be a more appropriate name for the agency? Other potential names for the agency could be ?Bureau of Corporate Greenwashing,? ?Raping of Natural Resources Agency,? ?No More Natural Resources Agency,? ?The Fish Termination Agency,? or the ?Water Exports Agency.? Readers of my articles have also suggested the "Final Legislative Usurpation of Significant Habitats, FLUSH," and "The Death Star" as more appropriate names for this agency with such as legacy of environmental destruction behind it. More recently, Karuk Tribe Vice Chair Leaf Hillman proposed that the name of one of the agency's member departments, the Department of Fish and Game (DFG), be changed more accurately to reflect its "mission" after DFG Director Donald Koch rejected a petition by the Tribe, California Trout and Friends of the North Fork to restrict suction dredge gold mining in order to protect salmon and steelhead populations. "I guess DFG really stands for Department of Frontier Greed," Hillman quipped. While the name of the agency has changed, pelagic (open water) fish populations of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta continue to collapse.There is nothing "natural" about this unprecedented and catastrophic species decline. The delta smelt population has declined to its lowest level ever, according to the latest data from the DFG's fall midwater trawl survey. The DFG studies the health of these populations by compiling an "index," a relative measure of abundance. The index declined to 23 in fall 2008, down from the previous low level of 28 in fall 2009. American shad also reached a record low level in 2008. The index was 271, compared to 533 in 2007 and 9360 in 2003. Threadfin shad also declined to a record low population level, down to 450 from 3177 in 2007. The Sacramento splittail, a native minnow, declined to the lowest- ever level this fall. In fact, no splittail were observed in the fall survey, while only one fish was documented the previous autumn. Only the striped bass and longfin smelt showed an increase, though the population levels are still precariously low. The striper index rose to 220 in 2008 from 82 in 2007, both alarmingly low numbers. In contrast, the index was 9500 in 1971, when the population was still healthy before the fish-killing state and federal pumps went into full operation. The longfin smelt abundance index rose from a record low of 13 in fall 2007 to 113 this fall. By comparison, the index was 6654 in 1998. These fish populations have declined to unprecedented low population levels because of the deplorable water and fishery management policies of the California "Natural" Resources Agency under the Schwarzenegger administration, combined with extremely bad management by the federal government. State and federal fishery biologists have pinpointed three major causes of the fishery decline - increased water exports, toxics and invasive species. More recently, increases in ammonia releases through sewage treatment plants have been cited by scientists as a possible factor. Record water export levels occurred in 2003 (6.3 million acre feet), 2004 (6.1 MAF), 2005 (6.5 MAF) and 2006 (6.3 MAF). Exports averaged 4.6 MAF annually between 1990 and 1999 and increased to an average of 6 MAF between 2000 and 2007, a rise of almost 30 percent, according to the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance. The crisis in Delta fisheries will not be solved by changing the agency's name - or taking more water out of the Delta through the peripheral canal proposed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Department of Water Resources, Senator Diane Feinstein and the Nature Conservancy as a "solution" to the Delta's problems. The canal and more dams that Schwarzenegger and Mike Chrisman, Resources Secretary, are campaigning for will only exacerbate the imperiled status of these fish populations, driving them over the precipice of extinction. The only way the Resources Agency can live up to its new "natural" name is to abandon the mad campaign for a peripheral canal and more dams, mandate water conservation by corporate agribusiness, adopt tough agricultural water pollution standards and require the retirement of toxic selenium-filled soil in the Westlands Water District. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: Resources Agency Name Change.doc Type: application/octet-stream Size: 67584 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From danielbacher at fishsniffer.com Fri Feb 6 15:50:39 2009 From: danielbacher at fishsniffer.com (Dan Bacher) Date: Fri, 6 Feb 2009 15:50:39 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Name Change Won't Alter Resources Agency's Dark Mission - Corrected Article In-Reply-To: <5.2.1.1.2.20090205164556.02eebfa0@pop.sisqtel.net> References: <85EEFA6B-264D-4368-BA19-0F76D6B96CB0@fishsniffer.com> <803876.87469.qm@web32705.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <80816898-B00A-41FA-9356-DE9CF51C326E@fishsniffer.com> <85EEFA6B-264D-4368-BA19-0F76D6B96CB0@fishsniffer.com> <5.2.1.1.2.20090205164556.02eebfa0@pop.sisqtel.net> Message-ID: <2FF81AF1-C4CB-4147-96D3-451CC2C89186@fishsniffer.com> The previous version of the article incorrectly stated that the State Water Resources Control Board was under the Resources Agency. That hasn't been true for 15 years Here's the revised version: Dam Name Change Won't Alter Resources Agency's Dark Mission The California "Natural" Resources Agency has presided over the Prospect Island Fish Kill of 2007 and numerous other environmental disasters. Photo by Dan Bacher. ? 640_pile_of_dead_fish_1.jpg Name Change Won't Alter Resources Agency's Dark Mission by Dan Bacher The Resources Agency on January 1 adopted a new name, the California "Natural" Resources Agency, to give the agency a more "green" veneer. Unfortunately, nothing has changed at the agency that has presided over the collapse of the state's salmon, steelhead and other fish populations. A press release from the agency in late December claimed that the name change was adopted to "better reflect its mission." "Since 1961, the Resources Agency has been responsible for the safeguarding and stewardship of California?s precious natural resources," according to the release. "From water and wildlife management and conservation to wildland fire protection, energy, ocean and coastal policy, land stewardship, climate change adaptation, sustainable living, and the promotion of outdoor recreation, the agency oversees most all of the state?s functions designed to protect California?s natural resources." In July, Governor Arnold "Fish Terminator" Schwarzenegger signed Senate Bill 1464 (Maldonado) authorizing the Resources Agency to change its name. "The new Agency logo will remain largely the same and the change will be phased in gradually as new supplies are ordered," the release stated. "In this way there will be little or no cost to the Agency or any of its departments, boards or commissions save for any replacement costs that would normally be incurred." California?s Natural Resources Agency is responsible for the state?s natural resource policies, programs and activities. It has 17,000 employees and oversees 25 departments, commissions, boards and conservancies, including the Department of Fish and Game, Department of Water Resources, CALFED Bay-Delta Program, California Conservation Corps, Department of Boating and Waterways, Department of Conservation, Department of Forestry and Fire Protection and Department of Parks and Recreation. However, wouldn?t it be more appropriate for the Resources Agency to adopt a name that truly reflects its REAL primary mission? Based on my years covering California fisheries, this mission appears to be engineering the collapse of Central Valley salmon fisheries, driving the California Delta's pelagic fish populations to the edge of extinction, building a peripheral canal, constructing more dams, slashing funds for salmon and steelhead restoration, and instituting massive closures of public trust fisheries throughout the state?s ocean waters. Considering all of this, wouldn?t ?the Natural Destruction Agency? be a more appropriate name for the agency? Other potential names for the agency could be ?Bureau of Corporate Greenwashing,? ?Raping of Natural Resources Agency,? ?No More Natural Resources Agency,? ?The Fish Termination Agency,? or the ?Water Exports Agency.? Readers of my articles have also suggested the "Final Legislative Usurpation of Significant Habitats, FLUSH," and "The Death Star" as more appropriate names for this agency with such a legacy of environmental destruction behind it. More recently, Karuk Tribe Vice Chair Leaf Hillman proposed that the name of one of the agency's member departments, the Department of Fish and Game (DFG), be changed more accurately to reflect its "mission" after DFG Director Donald Koch rejected a petition by the Tribe, California Trout and Friends of the North Fork to restrict suction dredge gold mining in order to protect salmon and steelhead populations. "I guess DFG really stands for Department of Frontier Greed," Hillman quipped. While the name of the agency has changed, pelagic (open water) fish populations of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta continue to collapse.There is nothing "natural" about this unprecedented and catastrophic species decline. The delta smelt population has declined to its lowest level ever, according to the latest data from the DFG's fall midwater trawl survey. The DFG studies the health of these populations by compiling an "index," a relative measure of abundance. The index declined to 23 in fall 2008, down from the previous low level of 28 in fall 2009. American shad also reached a record low level in 2008. The index was 271, compared to 533 in 2007 and 9360 in 2003. Threadfin shad also declined to a record low population level, down to 450 from 3177 in 2007. The Sacramento splittail, a native minnow, declined to the lowest- ever level this fall. In fact, no splittail were observed in the fall survey, while only one fish was documented the previous autumn. Only the striped bass and longfin smelt showed an increase, though the population levels are still precariously low. The striper index rose to 220 in 2008 from 82 in 2007, both alarmingly low numbers. In contrast, the index was 9500 in 1971, when the population was still healthy before the fish-killing state and federal pumps went into full operation. The longfin smelt abundance index rose from a record low of 13 in fall 2007 to 113 this fall. By comparison, the index was 6654 in 1998. These fish populations have declined to unprecedented low population levels because of the deplorable water and fishery management policies of the California "Natural" Resources Agency under the Schwarzenegger administration, combined with extremely bad management by the federal government. State and federal fishery biologists have pinpointed three major causes of the fishery decline - increased water exports, toxics and invasive species. More recently, increases in ammonia releases from sewage treatment plants have been cited by scientists as a possible factor. Record water export levels occurred in 2003 (6.3 million acre feet), 2004 (6.1 MAF), 2005 (6.5 MAF) and 2006 (6.3 MAF). Exports averaged 4.6 MAF annually between 1990 and 1999 and increased to an average of 6 MAF between 2000 and 2007, a rise of almost 30 percent, according to the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance. The crisis in Delta fisheries will not be solved by changing the agency's name - or taking more water out of the Delta through the peripheral canal proposed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Department of Water Resources, Senator Diane Feinstein and the Nature Conservancy as a "solution" to the Delta's problems. The canal and more dams that Schwarzenegger and Mike Chrisman, Resources Secretary, are campaigning for will only exacerbate the imperiled status of these fish populations, driving them over the precipice of extinction. The only way the Resources Agency can live up to its new "natural" name is to abandon the mad campaign for a peripheral canal and more dams, mandate water conservation by corporate agribusiness, adopt tough agricultural water pollution standards and require the retirement of toxic selenium-filled soil in the Westlands Water District. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: 640_pile_of_dead_fish_1.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 276946 bytes Desc: not available URL: From Sheli_Wingo at fws.gov Fri Feb 6 23:06:25 2009 From: Sheli_Wingo at fws.gov (Sheli_Wingo at fws.gov) Date: Fri, 6 Feb 2009 23:06:25 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Out of Office Message-ID: I will be out of the office starting 02/06/2009 and will not return until 02/17/2009. If there is something that needs immediate attention, please contact Lyle Lewis at extension 251. thank you, Sheli From bwl3 at comcast.net Tue Feb 10 15:36:56 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Tue, 10 Feb 2009 15:36:56 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Suction Dredging Litigation Message-ID: <009e01c98bd8$7736b2c0$65a41840$@net> By: Karuk Tribe Oakland, CA Feb. 5, 2009? Today taxpayers filed suit against California Fish and Game for using taxpayer dollars to fund an illegal recreational gold mining program in Alameda County Superior Court. "Its morally reprehensible and illegal for California Fish and Game to use tax dollars to subsidize the destruction of our fisheries in the midst of a budget crisis," said Dave Bitts, a commercial salmon fishermen from Humboldt Bay. Suction dredges are powered by gas or diesel engines that are mounted on floating pontoons in the river. Attached to the engine is a powerful vacuum hose which the dredger uses to suction up the gravel and sand (sediment) from the bottom of the river. The material passes through a sluice box where heavier gold particles can settle into a series of riffles. The rest of the gravel is simply dumped back into the river. Often this reintroduces mercury left over from historic mining operations to the water column threatening communities downstream. Depending on size, location and density of these machines they can turn a clear running mountain stream into a murky watercourse unfit for swimming. In 2005 the Karuk Tribe sued Fish and Game for allowing the practice of suction dredge mining to occur in areas known to be critical habitat for endangered and at-risk species such as Coho salmon, Pacific lamprey, and green sturgeon. At the time, Fish and Game officials submitted declarations to the Court admitting that suction dredge mining under its current regulations violates CEQA and Fish and Game Code ????5653 and 5653.9 (the statues which authorize the Department to issue permits for suction dredging under certain conditions) because the activity causes deleterious harm to fish ??? including endangered fish, such as the Coho salmon. The suit ended in a court order directing Fish and Game to conduct a CEQA review and amend its regulations by June 20, 2008. Fish and Game has yet to initiate the process. "Looks like DFG actually stands for Department of Frontier Greed," said Leaf Hillman, Vice Chairman of the Karuk Tribe. "While legislators are cutting basic programs for our children and elders in an effort to balance the budget, DFG is subsidizing hobby mining. Miners should not be allowed to mine in critical habitats and they should pay their own way if they mine at all." Specifically, the suit charges that the suction dredge program violates: (1) the previous court Order; (2) CEQA, for failure to conduct a subsequent or supplemental EIR in order to provide protections for endangered and threatened fish listed since 1994; and (3) Fish and Game Code ????5653 and 5653.9, for failure to promulgate regulations in compliance with CEQA and for issuing permits when it has determined that the activity causes deleterious harm to fish. The suit comes two weeks after Fish and Game Director Don Koch rejected a petition from the Karuk Tribe, PCFFA, and others to use emergency rule making authority to enact modest restrictions on where and when suction dredging could take place. "Fish and Game is quick to kick California's 2.4 million fishermen off the river, but they continually go to bat for 3,000 hobby miners," said plaintiff Craig Tucker. "As a taxpayer I am sick and tired of government handouts to hobby miners that are destroying California's rivers." Arguments for a preliminary injunction will likely be heard in early spring. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Thu Feb 12 10:15:52 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Thu, 12 Feb 2009 10:15:52 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Sac Bee 2 12 09 Hunting and Fishing License Fee Diversion Message-ID: <000501c98d3d$f13b8120$d3b28360$@net> Wildlife fund loan could cost state millions in federal money mweiser at sacbee.com Published Thursday, Feb. 12, 2009 State officials have been warned that California could lose millions in federal funds if they shift revenues out of the Department of Fish and Game to ease the state budget crisis. The Schwarzenegger administration has proposed borrowing $30 million from the Fish and Game Preservation Fund, which comes from hunting and fishing license fees, as one of many measures to balance a huge state budget deficit. The money would be paid back to the fund by 2013, with interest. That money is supposed to be used for wildlife and law enforcement programs at the Department of Fish and Game, not the state general fund. In a Jan. 27 letter to the state, the regional director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said California could lose another $30 million in federal matching funds for wildlife programs if such a loan takes place. "We are deeply concerned about any proposal to remove hunting and fishing license revenues from the Department of Fish and Game Preservation Fund," Ren Lohoefener wrote in the letter, which was triggered by The Bee's Jan. 17 story on the issue. Lohoefener's letter was addressed to California Department of Fish and Game Director Don Koch. He explained that California's ability to receive federal wildlife matching funds depends on honoring legal agreements between the two agencies. Those agreements forbid using state and federal hunting and fishing license money for non-wildlife expenses. H.D. Palmer, deputy director of the state Department of Finance, said the administration has not yet responded to the letter and hopes to discuss it with the Fish and Wildlife Service. He said the administration believes that because the money would be paid back and because it is claimed to have no immediate impact on Fish and Game programs, it would not violate the legal agreements. "It's not a diminution of any program, and that's why we want to talk to the Fish and Wildlife Service," Palmer said. The money is a relatively small sum compared with the state's overall deficit, about $40 billion by June 2010 without major revenue and spending fixes. Yet it's a lot of money for state wildlife programs, which have suffered regular program cuts for many years. The subject came up at last week's meeting in Sacramento of the Fish and Game Commission, a panel appointed by the governor. Game wardens, who number just 200 in the field for the entire state, were not given the same exemption to furloughs that the governor granted to California Highway Patrol officers. The commission called this unacceptable and voted to write a letter to the governor urging him to exempt wardens from furloughs. "We desperately need to protect our wild environment and our critters out there, and I would be very disappointed if our wardens were cut in any way," said Commissioner Richard Rogers of Carpinteria. The commission also took steps to trim its own expenses. Monthly meetings normally rotate around the state so people in different regions can attend. The two-day meetings normally occur on Thursday and Friday. This year, the commission will meet on Wednesday and Thursday to avoid conflict with state employee furloughs. And all its meetings will be held in the Sacramento region. It estimates these changes will save the state $50,000 to $100,000 this year Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From danielbacher at fishsniffer.com Thu Feb 12 10:24:40 2009 From: danielbacher at fishsniffer.com (Dan Bacher) Date: Thu, 12 Feb 2009 10:24:40 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Hearing on Suspension of Delta Protections Set for Feb. 17 In-Reply-To: <911F9056640E450B90A166FB9A51A5B1@CARHP> References: <1982DB32-55E0-4108-82BF-72EE97503281@ewccalifornia.org> <6CE57D9C-06A9-41FE-887A-0B2B3A641952@fishsniffer.com> <9C43B100E8E147B1BDF90F38E6D15860@CARHP> <7E4D7E31-290B-4291-8880-3A2FE605255A@fishsniffer.com> <911F9056640E450B90A166FB9A51A5B1@CARHP> Message-ID: <46B2BB31-8D62-4085-BD6C-374B2D7C81C3@fishsniffer.com> The Department of Water Resources and Bureau of Reclamation are attempting to undermine water standards that protect imperiled Delta smelt, longfin smelt and other species by allowing the state and federal pumps to export more water than would normally be permitted this time of year. ? delta_smelt_usfws_peter_j... Hearing on Suspension of Delta Protections Set for Feb. 17 by Dan Bacher Representatives of fishing and environmental groups are urging the public to attend a public hearing in Sacramento on February 17 regarding a proposal by the California Department of Water Resources (DWR) and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation to relax freshwater flow standards on the California Delta to allow increased water exports to corporate agribusiness out of the estuary in February. DWR and the Bureau are asking the California Water Resources Control Board to temporarily suspend the standards in an effort to protect one endangered species, Central Valley chinook salmon, over the imperiled Delta smelt and longfin smelt. The agencies claim they are trying to "save" water in Central Valley reservoirs for salmon later this year - when it is in fact their pumping of massive amounts of water to Westlands Water District and the Kern Water Bank over the past two years that have led to the extremely low conditions of Shasta, Oroville and Folsom lakes. The Department of Fish and Game?s fall 2008 midwater trawl survey on the California Delta documented the lowest ever recorded abundance of Delta smelt, Sacramento splittail, threadfin shad and American shad and an alarmingly low abundance of longfin smelt and juvenile striped bass. Salmon fishing was closed in 2008 off the California and Oregon coast and in Central Valley rivers, with the exception of a two month season on a short stretch of the Sacramento River, due to the collapse of the Central Valley fall chinook salmon population spurred by record water exports and declining water quality. "Over the last several years, CSPA has repeatedly cautioned the State Water Board that DWR and the Bureau were cannibalizing storage from Northern California Reservoirs without regard for the likelihood of successive dry years," said Bill Jennings, chairman of the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance in a letter to the Board. "We urged the State Water Board to proactively pursue actions that would ensure that threatened and endangered species would not bear the consequences of gross mismanagement by DWR and the Bureau. The state and federal projects are required to operate on a multi-year timeline regarding temporary relaxation of the February Delta Outflow and the San Joaquin River Flow Objectives in response to current dry conditions." "DWR and Bureau contracts anticipate that water deliveries may be reduced or even unavailable under certain circumstances," Jennings continued. "While D-1641 provides for some relaxation of standards during drought conditions, DWR and the Bureau?s mismanagement should not be rewarded by further relaxation, especially considering that several species are hovering on the brink of extinction. CSPA believes there is still storage in San Luis Reservoir that is available to meet X2, San Joaquin flow requirements and southern Delta salinity standards. Finally, any unilateral decision suspending X2 and river flow requirements would contravene fundamental provisions in federal endangered species biological opinions." The State Water Resources Control Board has issued notice of a public hearing "to consider taking an emergency drought-related water rights action on a Petition for Temporary Urgency Change filed by the Department of Water Resources and the United States Bureau of Reclamation regarding temporary relaxation of the February Delta Outflow and the San Joaquin River Flow Objectives in response to current dry conditions." The Public Hearing will commence on Tuesday, February 17, 2009, following the State Water Resources Control Board Meeting, but no earlier than 1 p.m. in the Byron Sher Auditorium at the Joe Serna, Jr./Cal-EPA Building located on 1001 I Street, Sacramento, CA. We can't allow the state and federal governments to pit salmon against smelt - both need a healthy estuary to thrive! The Department of Water Resources and Bureau of Reclamation's release of their cynical proposal to sacrifice smelt to "help" salmon occurred at the same that Congressman George Radanovich (R-Mariposa) introduced legislation, H.R. 856, to temporarily suspend the Endangered Species Act (ESA) as it applies to the California Delta pumping facilities during times of drought. We must stop both attempts to undermine environmental laws in order to deliver subsidized water to drainage- impaired land on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley, land that should have never been irrigated and must be taken out of agricultural production! The public notice and other information regarding this hearing are available for viewing online at: http://www.waterrights.ca.gov/ Hearings/emergency_drought.html For more information on this issue, go to http://www.calsport.org. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: delta_smelt_usfws_peter_johnsen__.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 7525 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Thu Feb 12 15:42:57 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Thu, 12 Feb 2009 15:42:57 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Salmonid Restoration Conference March 4-7 Message-ID: <009c01c98d6b$a29969f0$e7cc3dd0$@net> 27th Annual Salmonid Restoration Conference March 4-7, Santa Cruz, CA The 27th Salmonid Restoration Federation Conference will be held March 4-7 at the Civic Auditorium, 307 Church St. in Santa Cruz. The conference will include watershed tours, workshops, outstanding scientific presentations on coastal streams and coho salmon recovery. The Wild and Scenic Film Festival on tour will be screened Thursday, March 5 and a wild salmon banquet, awards ceremony, cabaret and Latin dance music with Lo Cura will be featured Saturday, March 7. For more info, please see www.calsalmon.org. Advanced registration must be postmarked by Friday, February 13. Also, SRF has arranged group discounts at the Continental Inn and Best Western that expire on Feb 18 & 24 respectively. Please see the attached press release for more info. Heather Reese Project Coordinator Salmonid Restoration Federation PO Box 784 Redway, California 95560 (707) 923-7501 heather at calsalmon.org Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: 2009 Conf PR.PDF Type: application/pdf Size: 209953 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Thu Feb 19 12:32:43 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Thu, 19 Feb 2009 12:32:43 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] SF Chron 02 19 09 Message-ID: <004901c992d1$37e22f00$a7a68d00$@net> Smallest fall run of chinook salmon reported San Francisco Chronicle - 2/19/09 By Jane Kay (02-18) 20:50 PST -- The smallest number of Pacific Ocean salmon ever recorded swam back to the Sacramento River via San Francisco Bay last fall, the latest evidence of the decline of the storied fish along the West Coast, officials said Wednesday. Highlights of plan to close Calif. budget deficit 02.19.09 The Pacific Fishery Management Council, a federal body that regulates commercial and sport fishing, estimated that only 66,286 adult salmon returned to the Sacramento River to spawn. Six years ago, the peak return was 13 times higher. In 2007, only 87,881 of the fish returned to spawn in the river, falling far short of the agency's goal of 122,000 to 180,000 fish. The latest count comes as officials consider imposing fishing restrictions off California's coast again this summer. Chinook - also known as king salmon - are the prized fish of Northern California streams, once proliferating in four genetically distinct runs, or races. For centuries, they have fought their way up the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers and their tributaries to bear young, which hatch in the rivers, swim through the bay and live in the ocean until they return three years later to spawn and die in their natal streams. The fish have supported an economy worth hundreds of millions of dollars and supplied restaurants and retailers with a local source of heart-healthy protein famous for its rich, buttery flavor. The Sacramento River fall run, the bread-and-butter chinook run, is the one facing collapse, although Lagunitas Creek in Marin County this year had its smallest run of coho salmon ever recorded. Scientists believe warmer ocean conditions in 2005 and 2006 led to a lean food supply as young salmon were entering the ocean. That played a part in the low spawning returns in 2007 and 2008. In addition, in 2004 and 2005, the years the chinook were born and traveled to the ocean, the federal Central Valley Project and the State Water Project exported record amounts of Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta water to urban and agricultural customers throughout the state, documents show. Federal researchers also blame 50 years of water management in California for the decline of the fish. The state and federal water projects constructed dams and conveyance systems that separated the fish from their habitats. Pumps, canals and hatcheries built to make up for lost water also depleted once-diverse runs, at one time the pride of the state. Next week, the management council, which is made up of representatives of states and tribes as well as government agencies and fishing groups, is expected to release numbers estimating the chinook salmon available in the ocean, agency spokeswoman Jennifer Guilden said Wednesday. Based on stock assessments from the National Marine Fisheries Service and other federal agencies, the management council then will set quotas for the fishing season, which typically begins in May. Last year, the low estimates resulted in a ban on commercial fishing off California and Oregon, the first time all seasons were closed in California history. Similar restrictions are expected this year, according to officials who have seen the stock assessments. "Almost for certain there will be no fishing this year," said Zeke Grader, executive director of the Pacific Federation of Fishermen's Associations, which represents commercial fishermen. The industry has received some financial aid, which Grader says may have to carry over to this season as well. His group was lead plaintiff in a 2004 lawsuit asking the federal government to deem the winter and spring runs of salmon in jeopardy of extinction. The fish are listed under the federal Endangered Species Act. The system in the Klamath and Trinity rivers had 31,000 returning spawners, a better return than in the Central Valley, but still short of its management goal of 40,700 fish, according to the Pacific Fishery Management Council. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Southwest Fisheries Science Center in Santa Cruz, the fall run appears to have suffered from "poor ocean conditions when the juveniles left the fresh water to enter the ocean," said Churchill Grimes, fishery biologist and a leader of the group preparing a paper on causes of the decline. But the ultimate cause of the decline is "sort of by 1,000 cuts" related to habitat destruction of the delta, once 1,500 square kilometers of rearing habitat, he said. "It was a huge marsh, habitat for all of the runs. Now it's been diked, levied and rip-rapped until it's not more than a big ditch," Grimes said. Dams, pumping water by the state and federal water projects and the operation of hatcheries all contribute to the problem, he said. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Thu Feb 19 20:09:21 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Thu, 19 Feb 2009 20:09:21 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Klamath TMDL Implementation Message-ID: <002301c99311$024b82c0$06e28840$@net> -----Original Message----- From: Ben Zabinsky [mailto:BZabinsky at waterboards.ca.gov] Sent: Thursday, February 19, 2009 7:06 PM To: Subject: Klamath TMDL Implementation Hello all, this email is to notice the upcoming public workshops regarding the development of the Klamath River TMDL Implementation Plan. Regional Water Board staff have completed a scoping document entitled: Water Quality Restoration Plan for the Klamath Basin in California: Draft Scoping for TMDL Implementation. The purpose of this document is solicit comment on the initial approach the Klamath TMDL implementation. Please see the attached notice of availability of the draft document, public comment period, and public workshops. The notice and the draft scoping document can be found here at the Regional Water Board website: http://www.waterboards.ca.gov/northcoast/water_issues/programs/tmdls/klamath _river/ Ben Zabinsky Water Resource Control Engineer North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board 707-576-6750 Ben Zabinsky Water Resource Control Engineer North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board 707-576-6750 Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: March_09_scoping_notice.doc Type: application/msword Size: 187904 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Mon Feb 23 21:34:17 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Mon, 23 Feb 2009 21:34:17 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Strickland Nominated for Asst Secy F&WS Message-ID: <004a01c99641$8a3130d0$9e939270$@net> WASHINGTON, D.C. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar today praised President Obama's announcement that he intends to nominate Thomas Strickland for Interior Assistant Secretary for Fish, Wildlife and Parks. I have known and worked with Tom Strickland for more than twenty years, Salazar said. From the work we did together to create the Great Outdoors Colorado program to his service as U.S. Attorney, his record and devotion to public service is second to none. As my Chief of Staff, he has helped us hit the ground running at the Department of the Interior so that we can restore the trust of the American people in its government and fulfill President Obama's agenda. In addition to serving as the chief of staff for the 67,000 employees of the Department, he would bring to the Assistant Secretary position the type of vision for our parks, wildlife, and open spaces that our country needs right now. The Assistant Secretary for Fish, Wildlife and Parks oversees and coordinates policy decisions for the National Park Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Strickland would serve concurrently in as Chief of Staff for Interior and, if nominated and confirmed, as Assistant Secretary for Fish, Wildlife and Parks. Strickland served as United States Attorney for the District of Colorado from 1999 through 2001. As U.S. Attorney, he represented the United States on a broad range of public land and environmental issues. Together with Secretary Salazar, Strickland was a founder and board member of Great Outdoors Colorado, the lottery-funded endowment for Colorado's public parks system that was created in 1992. >From May 2007 to when he joined Interior as Chief of Staff, Strickland was executive vice president and chief legal officer of United Health Group. Before that, he was a partner of the Hogan & Hartson law firm, serving as Managing Partner for the firm' Colorado offices. He was also a member of Hogan & Hartsons executive committee and worked closely with United Health Group as outside legal counsel on a variety of issues. >From 1982 to 1984 Strickland served as director of policy for Colorado Governor Richard D. Lamm, advising the governor on all policy and intergovernmental issues. He went on to serve and chair the Colorado Transportation Commission from 1985 to 1989. Strickland also served as legal counsel to the Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce. Strickland received his bachelors in English literature, with honors, from Louisiana State University, where he was an All-SEC Academic Football Selection. He received his J.D., with honors, from the University of Texas School of Law. He is a member of the Colorado, Minnesota and Texas Bars. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Wed Feb 25 10:10:37 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Wed, 25 Feb 2009 10:10:37 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] ESPN Outdoors 2 24 09 Message-ID: <003d01c99774$5cd3e180$167ba480$@net> Looks like California could be salmonless again ESPNOutdoors.com - 2/24/09 By James Swan In 2002, 800,000 Chinook salmon passed through San Francisco Bay and up the Sacramento River to their ancestral spawning grounds in the Upper Sacramento and its tributaries. Those were the "good old days" for party boats out of the Bay, plying the ocean. Limits around with big lugs to 40, even 50 pounds as the rule, not the exception. Same for guides fishing the big river. The Kenai River may have some bigger Kings, up to 90 lbs. and more. And the Columbia and Fraser Rivers certainly have decent runs, but historically the Chinook salmon run up the Sacramento River has been the largest on the West Coast, and that has meant big business for commercial fishermen, restaurants, party boats in the ocean, guides along the Sacramento and Feather Rivers, and sport fishermen, as well as a lot of prime salmon on the table. In 2007, only 80,000 Chinooks made their final run up the Sacramento River. As a result, the Fall Run of Chinooks, which has always been the biggest, in April, 2008 was declared off-limits to fishermen by the Pacific Fisheries Management Council - no fishing in the ocean or the Sacramento River and tributaries - with only a Winter Run fishery in the river for about a month remaining. Silver salmon fishing had already been banned and sockeyes and pinks don't get down this far south, so in effect there was virtually no salmon fishery in California last year, except for the Klamath River run. And that meant thousands of people out of work and several hundred million dollars in lost income. According to a meeting between National Marine Fisheries and a coalition of stakeholder groups held last week in Sacramento between National Marine Fisheries and a coalition of stakeholder groups, it's likely that there will be no ocean or fall run salmon fishery this year, also. According to Pro-Troll tackle manufacturer Dick Pool, from Water4Fish, "The primary indicator of catchable salmon in the ocean is the number of 2 year-old jacks that return to the rivers. The jack count in 2008 was at or near an all time low. This means the numbers of mature fish that will return in 2009 will be very low." Pool is predicting there will be no season this year, but that decision is yet to be made as it rests with the California Fish and Game Commission and National Marine Fisheries. However, it looks like Pool's forecast will be right. On February 18, the Pacific Fishery Management Council reported that last year only 66,264 natural and hatchery adult fall chinook salmon were estimated to have returned to the Sacramento River basin for spawning. When the bad news came out last spring, fingers were pointing everywhere to look for reasons for the rapid decline in salmon. Some immediately said it was more example of global warming. Global warming may be a factor in salmon populations, but for such a dramatic decline in five years, it would signal that in five more we should all be frying in triple-digit winters. And besides, the Columbia River and Klamath River runs seem to be doing quite well. (Incidentally, it's in the 30's today on the Coast, with a snow level at 2000' and the road to Tahoe has been blocked most of the day by snow and ice.) Warming is involved in the sorry state of the Sacramento salmon, but it's not the ocean waters so much as those in the river. It's the summer water temperatures upstream in the Sacramento River and in the tributaries, which NMF says is a major problem. Warmer water, associated with dams, water diversions, and drought conditions for the last several years, is killing off eggs and small fish, killing off 10% of the eggs. But that's just the beginning. An even bigger factor for the young fish in the Upper Sacramento is decreased water levels, stress passing through dams, and increased predation, which collectively mean that only 20% of the young fish leaving Red Bluff make it to the Delta. Then when they get to the Delta, pumps, predation and water chemistry kill 65% of the young fish. According to the report, "Overall, when the Sacramento survival of 20% is combined with the Delta survival of 40%, only 8% of the smolts make it to the West Delta," (which connects with San Pablo Bay and San Francisco Bay). You also have to factor in a problem for returning spawners, poaching, which because of the game warden shortage in California has become very significant. In 2007 game wardens cited over 400 people for snagging salmon in and around the state capitol, Sacramento. And the wardens believe they are only able to catch about 10% of the violators as California has the worst per capita wardens of any state or Canadian province. As a result of the studies reported at the meeting, "NMFS currently concludes jeopardy for all salmon species, green sturgeon, and the southern resident killer whale species." In addition, in the San Joaquin River, a tributary of the Sacramento that once had a salmon run approaching 300,000 fish a year, due to low flows and predation, "endangered steelhead survival out of the San Joaquin is near zero." Without drastic measures, the report finds: "there is no question that several runs are now headed to extinction." Problems with dams, diversions, water temperatures and poaching, have made the future of Sacramento River salmon heavily tied to hatcheries. This increases costs, but it does result in some control that can be helpful to circumvent the gauntlet of problems salmon face currently in the Sacramento River. One strategy that offers some hope is carrying smolts from the hatcheries in tank trucks to holding pens in San Francisco Bay, thus avoiding contact with the Delta, and its hungry stripers and diversion pumps. And then when the young salmon are ready to be released into the wild, they are released in deeper water offshore, which minimizes feeding frenzies by sea birds and seals. To be a fisherman is to always cultivate hope. With salmon runs, you always have to think 2-3 years ahead of time. Dick Pool observes wistfully, "We are hoping for a 2010 season based on the 23 million smolts that were trucked around the delta in 2008." To keep abreast of developments in the California salmon struggle, visit the websites for Water4Fish, the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance, and the National Marine Fisheries Pacific Northwest Division. A copy of a recent presentation by NMFS to CAL-FED with many graphic charts and graphs describing the salmon situation in California, can also be viewed online Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Wed Feb 25 10:14:14 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Wed, 25 Feb 2009 10:14:14 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Sac Bee Editorial 2 24 09 Message-ID: <004201c99774$dde12490$99a36db0$@net> Editorial: Fish and Game: No longer a bit player? The Sacramento Bee - 2/24/09 Californians who care about the outdoors should also care what happens to the California Department of Fish and Game in coming years. This state agency has an annual budget of $475 million. It owns or manages more than 1million acres of land. It is charged with conserving fisheries and other wildlife. It responds to oil spills and reviews permits for various projects, from logging to the pumping of water through the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. More than any other agency, the Department of Fish and Game is the designated steward of California's natural bounty - its coastlines, its mountains, its 7,000 species of plants and 100,000 varieties of animal life. Yet it is fair to say that, despite hard work from many of its employees, the DFG hasn't been the effective and respected steward that California needs or deserves. In the Delta, the department has been a bit player in preventing the decline of Delta smelt and other fish. Within the top policy circles of the governor's office, the DFG is consistently trumped by the Department of Water Resources, which is aligned with big water agencies that pump water from the Delta. In Northern California, the department has too often capitulated to the timber and mining interests that have strong friends in the Legislature. A recent example is the department's decision not to further restrict gold miners who use giant dredges in salmon streams. Today, the Senate Rules Committee will consider whether to approve the appointment of Donald Koch, the interim DFG director who made that dredging decision. Some environmental groups are urging the committee to reject Koch. Others are more supportive of his appointment, noting his depth of experience as a DFG biologist and administrator. Frankly, we don't think Koch's confirmation should be based on a handful of recent decisions that displeased certain environmental groups. But we do think lawmakers should examine those decisions in assessing several key questions: Did Koch make the dredging decision himself, or was he pressured to do so by higher-ups? If he claims it was his decision, and his alone, can he defend it? If he can, that's a point in his favor. What is Koch's overall vision for modernizing DFG and making it more functional? Will he elevate DFG's standing in debates over the Delta and other high-profile issues? Does he have the support and ear of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger? One encouraging sign is that, in reaching a budget deal, the governor dropped a disputed plan to borrow $30 million from a Fish and Game wildlife fund. If Koch had something to do with that move, that's another point in his favor. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From Vina_Frye at fws.gov Wed Feb 25 14:14:24 2009 From: Vina_Frye at fws.gov (Vina_Frye at fws.gov) Date: Wed, 25 Feb 2009 14:14:24 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Trinity Adaptive Management Working Group (TAMWG) meeting 3/18-19/2009 Message-ID: Hello Folks, The Trinity Adaptive Management Working Group (TAMWG) meeting notice for March 18-19, 2009 was published in the Federal Register on February 19, 2009. Best regards, Vina Vina Frye U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Arcata FWO 1655 Heindon Road Arcata, CA 95521 Telephone: (707) 822-7201 Fax: (707) 822-8411 vina_frye at fws.gov 2009 Federal Register, 74 FR 7699; Centralized Library: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service - ... Page 1 of 2 [Federal Register: February 19, 2009 (Volume 74, Number 32) 1 [Notices] J [Page 76991 >From the Federal Register Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov] [DOCID:fr19fe09-631 DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR Fish and Wildlife Service Trinity Adaptive Management Working Group AGENCY: Fish and Wildlife Service, Interior. ACTION: Notice of meetingJ; correction of dates. SUMMARY: The Trinity Adaptive Management Working Group (TAMWG) affords stakeholders the opportunity to give policy, management, and technical input concerning Trinity River (California) restoration efforts to the Trinity Management Council (TMC) . This notice corrects the dates for our recently announced TAMWG meeting, which is open to the public. DATES: TAMWG will meet from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. on Wednesday, March 18, 2009, and from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Thursday, March 19, 2009. ADDRESSES: The meeting will be held at the Weaverville Victorian Inn, 1709 Main St., 299 West, Weaverville, CA 96093. FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT: Randy A. Brown of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, 1655 Heindon Road, Arcata, CA 95521; telephone: (707) 822-7201. Randy A. Brown is the TAMWG Designated Federal Officer. For background information and questions regarding the Trinity River Restoration Program (TRRP), please contact Mike Hamman, Executive Director, Trinity River Restoration Program, P.O. Box 1300, 1313 South Main Street, Weaverville, CA 96093; telephone: (530) 623-1800; e-mail: mhamman at mp.usbr.gov. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Under section 10(a)(2) of the Federal Advisory Committee Act (5 U.S.C. ~pp.),w e recently announced an upcoming meeting of the T W G in a February 9, 2009, Federal Register notice (74 FR 6415). After publishing that notice, we have had to change the dates of this meeting. Please see the DATES section for our corrected dates. Primary objectives and agenda items of the meeting remain the same. See 74 FR 6415 for the agenda. Dated: February 12, 2009. Randy A. Brown, Designated Federal Officer, Arcata Fish and Wildlife Office, Arcata, CA . I [FR Doc. E9-3517 Filed 2-18-09; 8:45 am] From bhill at igc.org Thu Feb 26 12:15:52 2009 From: bhill at igc.org (Brian Hill) Date: Thu, 26 Feb 2009 12:15:52 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] FW: AFWH Transition News Message-ID: <014d01c9984f$073238e0$1596aaa0$@org> From: "Alliance of Forest Workers and Harvesters" ALLIANCE OF FOREST WORKERS & HARVESTERS PO Box 1257~ Willow Creek, CA 95573 ~(530) 629-3353~alliancefwh at asis.com February 25, 2009 Dear Friends and Colleagues, The Alliance of Forest Workers and Harvesters is pleased to announce that at the beginning of March Carl Wilmsen will assume leadership of the organization as the executive director. Having served on the board of directors for the past five years, Carl is no stranger to the Alliance. His experience on the board provides him with deep familiarity with the Alliances actions and goals, and strong enthusiasm for its mission. Carl has been an exemplary board member, not only by maintaining a level-headedness through pressures, but also by bringing aboard a new board member with different, but very relevant, knowledge, skills and networks that have contributed positively to the AFWH. Carl comes to his new position with a broad set of skills. For the past eight years he managed the Community Forestry and Environmental Research Partnerships at the University of California, Berkeley, where he focused on training graduate students, faculty and community members throughout the United States in the principles and practice of participatory research. He has also evaluated sustainable agriculture programs, worked as an oral historian, studied conflict over management of U.S. public lands, and (before college) worked as an apple picker and orchard hand, landscape laborer, school bus driver, and truck driver. A strong supporter of worker rights, Carl has, except for periods when he lived in right-to-work states, held union membership since he first started working. The board of directors is looking forward to working with Carl in building on past successes.With his combination of experience and his knowledge and familiarity with the AFWH he is uniquely suited to take over this position and the AFWH is extremely fortunate to welcome him. At this time the board would also like to express our heartfelt gratitude to Denise Smith for the exemplary job she has done as the Alliances executive director for the past six years. The AFWH has been truly blessed to have her as our leader. Denise has worked tirelessly in organizing workers, facilitating mushroom monitoring, educating policy makers about worker rights and current working conditions, and assuring enforcement of labor laws. Under Denises leadership, the organization has matured to have an effective voice in the decisions that shape the everyday realities of forest workers and harvesters. Her participation in and monitoring of Community Based Forestry have been invaluable. She gained the respect and admiration of our membership, constituency of workers and harvesters and other grassroots folks and organization.From Latino contract forest workers, to SE Asian and other race mushroom harvesters, to Native American NTFP cultural harvesters, she is recognized as someone who is always accessible, willing and able to address their needs and concerns. She has brought hope to those who never believed that anyone would be interested.She always treats everyone with respect and dignity, acknowledges and respects cultural customs and differences and thereby helped to establish the AFWH as a trusted and respected organization. We sincerely appreciate Denises dedication, hard work, leadership, and the good humor and sincerity she brings to every task. Fortunately, we do not have to say we will miss her, because she will stay involved with the Alliance as a board member and as a leader of specific projects. For the month of March 2009 our contact information will remain the same.We will notify you of the changes before they take place in April 2009.Please join us in a smooth transition period. Marko Bey, President -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: 204CECE5055549A99AD043557068DA21.gif Type: image/gif Size: 94 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Thu Feb 26 14:18:37 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Thu, 26 Feb 2009 14:18:37 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] SF Chronicle 2 26 09 Message-ID: <009d01c99860$2cdd6900$86983b00$@net> California ban on salmon fishing likely for '09 San Francisco Chronicle - 2/26/09 By Peter Fimrite, staff writer (02-25) 20:26 PST -- Prospects are not good this year for the folks who fish for salmon off the California coast - or for the people who like to eat it. Mission District rally for immigrant rights 02.26.09 The number of chinook in the ocean right now is barely enough to meet the minimum sustainable goal when the fish return to spawn in the Sacramento River system this fall - and that's assuming no fishing is allowed this year, according to a forecast Wednesday by a federal agency. The ominous news, contained in the Pacific Fishery Management Council's report on ocean salmon fisheries, comes on the tail fins of last week's announcement that fewer salmon than ever recorded swam through San Francisco Bay last fall to spawn in the Sacramento River. "This is grim news for the state of California," said Don Hansen, chairman of the council, a federal body that regulates commercial and sport fishing. "We won't be able to talk about this without using the word 'disaster.' " Last year only 66,286 adult salmon returned to the Sacramento River to spawn, only the second time in 16 years that the number of fall run chinook failed to meet the council's goal of between 122,000 and 180,000 adult fish. Six years ago, the peak return was 13 times higher. The dismal showing forced a ban on commercial salmon fishing off the California and Oregon coasts, the first total closure in California history. Wednesday's report projects a return of 122,196 fish next fall, assuming no salmon are hooked and reeled in for food in the meantime. The chinook that spawn in the fall are the same ones that are normally fished out of the ocean during the summer. The council will discuss another possible ban during its annual meeting March 7-13 in Seattle, and things aren't looking good, said Chuck Tracy, a staff officer for the council. "Certainly fisheries are going to be very restricted at the best," he said. One positive sign in the council report is that the number of salmon returning to the Klamath River is expected to exceed the council's goal. Chinook and coho salmon runs in the Columbia River, which empties into the ocean on the Oregon-Washington border, are expected to be strong this year, meaning fishing restrictions there are likely to be less severe. Chinook, also known as king salmon, are the prized fish of Northern California. They were once abundant in the ocean and in almost every river and stream along the coast throughout the year. They have struggled for centuries against the powerful currents of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers, laying eggs in the gravel. Their young would hatch in the rivers, swim out the bay and live in the ocean, returning to their birthplace three years later. The mighty fish, which was the primary food of many Native American communities, are now worth millions of dollars to the economies of fishing communities up and down the coast. Scientists believe warmer ocean conditions have reduced the food supply for the fish, while record exports of water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta coincided with major declines in chinook. The National Marine Fisheries Service is expected to make a final decision on fishing quotas by May 1, when California's salmon fishing season begins. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Thu Feb 26 14:22:19 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Thu, 26 Feb 2009 14:22:19 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Sacramento Bee 2 26 09 Message-ID: <00a201c99860$b0de4990$129adcb0$@net> Senators delay confirmation of California Fish and Game chief Sacramento Bee - 2/26/09 By Matt Weiser State senators Wednesday postponed the confirmation of Fish and Game Director Donald Koch, saying a hearing on the matter raised bigger issues about the department itself - and how regulators are managing California's beleaguered environment. The Senate Rules Committee instead wants to question Koch's boss, Natural Resources Secretary Mike Chrisman, about whether the Schwarzenegger administration is truly committed to protecting the state's waterways and fish species. "People respect you, and rightfully so," committee Chairman Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, told Koch. "But it's not just about you. It's about the direction of the department." Koch was appointed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in April 2008. A 30-year veteran of the department, Koch is former director of the Fish and Game's North Coast region and came out of retirement to accept its top position. "Senator Steinberg and Secretary Chrisman have a great relationship, and we look forward to talking in the next few weeks," said Sandy Cooney, spokesman for the state's Natural Resources Agency. The decision to put off Koch's confirmation came after a three-hour hearing in which little direct opposition emerged to Koch's appointment. In fact, more than a dozen witnesses spoke in his favor. "The association believes that with Mr. Koch, the department will be in very good hands," said Anthony Thomas, vice president of government affairs for the California Forestry Association. But many also raised concerns about whether Koch, even with the best intentions, would be able to do right by the state's environment. Koch steps into the Fish and Game spotlight amid great turmoil in the department and throughout the state. Several witnesses complained the department has failed to fulfill its law-enforcement responsibilities, whether by not hiring enough game wardens or by not asserting its permit authority over matters such as timber harvesting and stream alterations. Of particular concern to some was the department's recent refusal to halt recreational suction-dredge mining, which the department's own scientists assert damages fish habitat. Another raised by several witnesses is inadequate protection of endangered salmon populations. Few speakers blamed Koch for these problems. But they said the department has been starved of the money and authority it needs to carry out its responsibilities. "It's tragic our state professes to be a leader in the 'green' movement, but will not hire or maintain enough staffing to protect our natural resources," said Jerry Karnow, a game warden and legislative liaison to the California Fish and Game Wardens Association. "At this time, the wardens association will not offer an endorsement of any director appointed by this governor." Karnow noted the department employs only about 220 field-level game wardens to police wildlife crimes statewide. And last week, more than 90 of them got layoff notices as part of the administration's effort to balance the state budget. Whether those layoffs go forward remains unclear. "You may have a good man in a bad department," said Zeke Grader, executive director of Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From Sheli_Wingo at fws.gov Fri Feb 27 12:04:26 2009 From: Sheli_Wingo at fws.gov (Sheli_Wingo at fws.gov) Date: Fri, 27 Feb 2009 12:04:26 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Out of Office Message-ID: I will be out of the office starting 02/27/2009 and will not return until 03/09/2009. I will be checking e-mail messages while away from the office and replying when necessary. Also, you may reach me by phone during this time at: (530) 527-3488. thank you, Sheli thank you, Sheli From bwl3 at comcast.net Tue Mar 3 10:49:16 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Tue, 3 Mar 2009 10:49:16 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Los Angeles Times March 3 2009 Message-ID: <001b01c99c30$c199dfa0$44cd9ee0$@net> Endangered Species Act change under review Obama may reverse a Bush-era revision that loosened environmental rules for federal projects. Los Angeles Times - 3/3/09 By Jim Tankersley Reporting from Washington -- The White House will announce today that it is reconsidering another controversial last-minute environmental rule by President George W. Bush, an Obama administration official said Monday night. The Bush-era rule loosened the way the Endangered Species Act guides federal projects, such as roads and dams. The change, finalized in December, eliminated a requirement that federal agencies consult with experts about potential effects on endangered plants and wildlife before allowing projects to go ahead. Instead, federal agencies can determine on their own whether their projects would harm protected species. A major spending bill speeding through Congress includes language that would empower President Obama to reverse the rule. Without congressional action, the administration would need to undertake a lengthy process to roll back the rule. The move is Obama's latest step toward reversing Bush's environmental policies. Shortly after his inauguration, Obama ordered all pending Bush regulations to be frozen, including the loosening of some air quality standards and the removal of the gray wolf from the endangered species list. Obama's Interior Department has canceled oil and gas drilling leases near national parks and paused efforts to open coastal areas for drilling and Mountain West oil shale for development. Obama also directed the Environmental Protection Agency to reconsider its denial of California's request to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from automobiles. The EPA will hold a public hearing this week, which could result in the state imposing stricter regulations on automakers. The chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, Rep. Nick J. Rahall II (D-W. Va.), lauded Obama on Monday night for moving "to restore the protections for endangered species that the Bush administration spent so many years trying to undermine." Environmentalists said Bush's decision removed a crucial layer of protection for endangered species. Business and industry lobbyists countered that it eliminated unnecessary delays in projects without harming species. Then-Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne admitted that the move divided Interior officials. The new Interior secretary, Ken Salazar, said in a January interview that he wanted to reconsider the rule. http://www.latimes.com/news/science/environment/la-na-epa-species3-2009mar03 ,0,5920274.story?track=rss Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Tue Mar 3 14:53:48 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Tue, 3 Mar 2009 14:53:48 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Klamath Water Quality Planning Message-ID: <005401c99c52$ea724b20$bf56e160$@net> Friends, Most of you are aware that, in addition to dams, water quality poses a most significant challenge to recovery of salmon on the Klamath River. Farming and ranching on more than 500,000 acres in the upper Klamath River basin seriously pollutes the Klamath. It's so bad that even if we get the dams out the salmon will continue to suffer tremendously. Under the U.S. Clean Water Act, the Klamath River is listed as "Impaired" due to excessive amounts of nutrients and organic matter being dumped into the river, high water temperatures, low dissolved oxygen concentrations, and the blue-green algae toxin microcystin. This week and next the Northcoast Regional Water Quality Control Board will roll out its Klamath Water Quality Restoration Plan, and will hold five public "scoping" meetings to hear comments from the public. The first meetings are today, March 3. Here is the schedule: ? March 3, 12:30 PM, Yurok Tribal Office, Klamath, CA. ? March 3, 6:30 PM, Humboldt State U., BSS Building, Room 162, Arcata, CA ? March 4, 6 PM, Tulelake Butte V. Fairgrounds, Floriculture Room., Tulelake, CA. ? March 5, 6 PM, Willow Creek School, Montague, CA. ? March 12, 2 PM, Hearing Room, NCWQCB Office, Santa Rosa, CA If you can, attend a scoping session. Tell the water board to insist that livestock be kept out of streams, that farmers not be allowed to dewater the Klamath and pump back into the river water that is warm and toxic from heavy applications of fertilizer and pesticides. You can read or download various TMDL ("total maximum daily load") and background information at the NCWQCB?s web site: http://www.swrcb.ca.gov/northcoast/water_issues/programs/tmdls/klamath_river /. Comments may be submitted until 5 PM on March 27th to: . Thanks, Greg King Klamath Campaign Coordinator Northcoast Environmental Center gking at asis.com Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Tue Mar 3 15:28:02 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Tue, 3 Mar 2009 15:28:02 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] FW: Klamath Riverkeeper eNews - March 3rd, 2009 - Eeling season in full swing! Message-ID: <005e01c99c57$b2e9e2d0$18bda870$@net> Check out information on March 10 workshop in first section of Klamath Riverkeeper eNews below. From: Malena at Klamath Riverkeeper [mailto:malena at klamathriver.org] Sent: Tuesday, March 03, 2009 1:23 PM Subject: Klamath Riverkeeper eNews - March 3rd, 2009 - Eeling season in full swing! Klamath Riverkeeper eNews March 3rd, 2009 Headlines & Action Alerts Clean Water Workshop Klamath Calendar Water Board sticks with 401 KRK on SB 76 Hobby miners attack Karuk fishery Klamath report outdated Another ban on salmon fishing Fish food supply threatened Pesticides combine to kill fish Using the Clean Water Act to Save Our River KRK hosts TMDL teach-in at the Panamnik Panamnik Building, Orleans, CA Join Klamath Riverkeeper and our allies the California Coastkeepers for a dynamic workshop on how to make the Clean Water Act work for us. Learn what TMDLs are, and how to use them to advocate for clean water on the Klamath. >>more info Klamath Calendar Clean water 3/2 - 3/12 Public Meetings: TMDL Implementation Plans. Attend these meetings and/or comment on the Regional Water Board's plan to clean up the Klamath River. * 3/3/09 12:30 p.m., Yurok Tribal Office, Klamath, CA * 3/3/09 6:30 p.m., BSS Building Native Forum Room 160, HSU Arcata, CA * 3/4/09 6:00 p.m. * Tulelake-Butte Valley Fairgrounds Floriculture Room * Tulelake, CA * 3/5/09 6:00 p.m. Willow Creek School 5321 York Rd. Montague, CA * 3/12/09 2:00 p.m.DCJ Hearing Room Regional Water Board Office 5550 Skylane Blvd, Ste A Santa Rosa, CA 2/10 Using the Clean Water Act to Save our River , a public workshop put on by KRK and the California Coastkeepers. 6:00 at the Panamnik Building in Orleans, CA 3/14 California Rivers Festival in Sacramento. Come down and meet KRK! Pacific lamprey by Thomas Dunklin, www.thomasbdunklin.com Pacific lamprey after harvest near the mouth of the Klamath River. Photo by Thomas Dunklin. www.thomasbdunklin.com Greetings! The height of "eeling" (or lamprey harvest) season reminds us of what we're fighting for here on the Klamath: amazing biodiversity, diverse Native cultures, and a rural way of life. The Clean Water Act is a key tool in our kit for this fight, and KRK is committed to helping the public use it effectively. Here's a few opportunities in the next week or so: * The Clean Water Act is full of complicated terms like "TMDLs". Please join us and our allies the California Coastkeepers in Orleans on March 10th for a workshop intended to demystify the jargon, and help us take action for clean water on the Klamath River. * The Regional Water Board is gearing up to implement a water quality restoration plan for the Klamath, and is currently gathering feedback before it releases a final plan. Check out one of their presentations this week, and get ready to submit comments by March 27th (we'll have talking points next eNews). Thanks everyone, and welcome to all the supporters we met in Eugene last weekend! Malena Marvin Outreach and Science Director Klamath Riverkeeper Cal Water Board holds PacifiCorp to 401 process The state has struck a balance between making way for continued negotiations to remove four dams on the Klamath River and moving ahead with a regulatory process to deal with some of the river's worst water quality problems. The State Water Resources Control Board's Executive Director Dorothy Rice issued a memorandum this weekend announcing its intent to prepare the environmental document concerning water quality certification for Pacificorp's Klamath dams. The decision comes after a request by parties trying to negotiate removal of the dams asked the state for a delay. Eureka Times-Standard - 2/24/09 Klamath Riverkeeper: SB 76 is best for ratepayers The PacifiCorp ratepayer hike proposed in the Oregon legislature for Klamath dam removal is the best way to save ratepayers money. Engineering estimates so far suggest that federally mandated fish ladders and water quality improvements would cost the company millions of dollars MORE than dam removal, making SB76 the cheapest and most prudent solution. Siskiyou Daily News Letter to the Editor - 2/27/09 Recreational miners attack traditional Indian salmon fishing Since the arrival of miners in the mid 1800's the Karuk Tribe has lost nearly everything. Once the lone occupants of over 1.4 million acres of the Middle Klamath Basin, the Karuk had over 100 villages and associated fishing sites. A peaceful society blessed with an abundance of acorns, fish, and game, early observers described the Karuk as the wealthiest people in North America. Today, nearly 90% of Karuks living in ancestral territory live below the poverty level and Tribal members have access to only one fishery. Yesterday, a recreational gold mining club called The New 49ers challenged the Tribe's right to fish there. Karuk Tribe Press Release - 3/3/09 Klamath report outdated, flawed The Siskiyou Daily News recently described a report developed for the Department of the Interior by a consulting firm on the costs and liabilities of removing Klamath River dams ("Report identifies data gaps, possible added removal costs", Friday, February 13). The report offers little value to anyone interested in understanding the potential costs and benefits of removing Klamath River dams or keeping them in place under a new license. Below are just a few of the report's shortcomings... Siskiyou Daily News Letter to the Editor- 2/20/09 California ban on salmon fishing likely for '09 Prospects are not good this year for the folks who fish for salmon off the California coast - or for the people who like to eat it. The number of chinook in the ocean right now is barely enough to meet the minimum sustainable goal when the fish return to spawn in the Sacramento River system this fall - and that's assuming no fishing is allowed this year, according to a forecast Wednesday by a federal agency. San Francisco Chronicle - 2/26/09 Wild salmon losing ocean food supply to aquaculture Fish farming operations are driving increased demand worldwide for prey fish such as anchovy, krill and sardines -- depleting the food supply of salmon, seabirds and other wild predators, the conservation group Oceana said in a report issued this morning. The report, "Hungry Oceans: What Happens When the Prey is Gone?," is timed to coincide with a new United Nations evaluation of ocean health. It pins declining prey populations primarily on fish farming: "Increasingly, the driver behind overfishing of prey species is aquaculture," the report says Oregonian - 3/2/09 Read the Hungry Oceans Report Pesticides combine to kill salmon Common agricultural pesticides that attack the nervous systems of salmon can turn more deadly when they combine with other pesticides, researchers have found. Scientists from the NOAA Fisheries Service and Washington State University were expecting that the harmful effects would add up as they accumulated in the water. They were surprised to find a deadly synergy occurred with some combinations, which made the mix more harmful and at lower levels of exposure than the sum of the parts. Business Week - 3/3/09 Klamath Riverkeeper restores water quality in the Klamath watershed, bringing vitality and abundance back to the river and its people. Sign up for Klamath Riverkeeper eNews Join Our Mailing List Forward email Safe Unsubscribe This email was sent to bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org by malena at klamathriver.org. Update Profile/Email Address | Instant removal with SafeUnsubscribe T | Privacy Policy . Email Marketing by Klamath Riverkeeper | PO Box 751 | Somes Bar | CA | 95568 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Tue Mar 3 15:40:17 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Tue, 3 Mar 2009 15:40:17 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Klamath River Pollution Workshop In Orleans Next Week Message-ID: <007f01c99c59$6b250360$416f0a20$@net> From: Erica Terence [mailto:erica at klamathriver.org] Sent: Tuesday, March 03, 2009 3:24 PM Subject: Klamath River Pollution Workshop In Orleans Next Week Hey folks, Apologies for any cross postings. I'm writing to make sure you know about a cool workshop coming up next week that we're co-hosting with the California Coastkeeper's Alliance about proposed new water pollution listings for the Klamath River, including one that would set limits for algae below Iron Gate dam. Another proposed listing would set limits for mercury in Lake Shastina behind Dwinnell dam in the Shasta River watershed. The workshop not only covers newly proposed Klamath River listings, but also the legal and scientific nuts and bolts of how these listings work and how to comment on them as members of the public. What: Workshop about polluted waterbodies list and listings on the Klamath (including toxic algae, temperature and mercury) Where: Panamnik building in downtown Orleans When: Tuesday, March 10 from 6 p.m.-8 p.m. Info about what to comment on and where to send comments by March 20--including a sample letter-- will be on hand at the meeting (it's also attached in PDF form and pasted below), as will food and beverages generously supplied by the California Coastkeepers Alliance. The workshop is free, and we hope to see you and your friends and family there! Please feel free to call or e-mail me with any questions. Also, please forward to anyone you know who may be interested. Thanks! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: KRK 303d Workshop Handout.pdf Type: application/pdf Size: 5507796 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: Klamath-Riverkeeper.gif Type: image/gif Size: 3211 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: Klamath-Riverkeeper.gif Type: image/gif Size: 3211 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Wed Mar 4 10:00:28 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Wed, 4 Mar 2009 10:00:28 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] SF Chron 3 4 09 Message-ID: <000e01c99cf3$1af416c0$50dc4440$@net> Fishermen brace for new ban on ocean salmon Peter Fimrite, Chronicle Staff Writer Wednesday, March 4, 2009 (03-03) 17:05 PST SANTA ROSA -- The bad news about fishing was couched in numbers and graphs, study results and scientific jargon, but there was no mistaking the message: Californians won't be eating much local salmon this year. http://imgs.sfgate.com/c/pictures/2009/03/03/ba-disappearing__0499843157_par t1.jpg http://imgs.sfgate.com/graphics/utils/plus-green.gifView Larger Image * Water employee arrested in cat-abuse attempt 03.04.09 That was the gist of a day-long meeting in Santa Rosa Tuesday at which state Department of Fish and Game biologists told fishermen, conservationists and others that surveys and studies show the state's salmon fishery in near-complete ruin. Biologists estimated only 66,000 adult salmon returned to the Sacramento River to spawn last fall - only the second time in 16 years that the number of fall-run chinook failed to meet the Pacific Fishery Management Council's goal of 122,000 to 180,000 adult fish. In 2007, a similar count was so dismal that federal regulators banned ocean fishing in California and most of Oregon last spring and summer, the first total closure in California history. Experts are predicting barely enough spawning fish next fall to meet the 122,000 goal - and that's only if ocean fishing is banned this year. It is crushing news for a fishing industry that was in trouble even before the nation went into recession. Fort Bragg fisherman Bill Forkner argued Tuesday that salmon hatcheries were supposed to ensure that fishing would continue in exchange for the dams that state and federal governments put up on the Sacramento and San Joaquin river systems. "Fishermen are ecologists. We want things right, and we don't want to catch the last fish," said Forkner, 54. "But we also want a chance to make a living at what we've done all our lives. They knew the wild fish wouldn't survive when they put up the dams, but they promised us that we would have something to fish." Chinook that spawn in the fall, traditionally the largest salmon run of the year, are the same ones that are fished out of the ocean during the spring and summer. The fabled fall run has been in steady decline since 2005, according to data released Tuesday, despite the addition of hundreds of millions of hatchery-raised chinook, including 32 million last year. There are no reliable studies showing how many of the surviving fish in the ocean and rivers are from hatcheries. But a study last year of fish caught by sport fishermen found that 71 percent of them were raised in hatcheries. Regardless of the influence of hatcheries, very few chinook of any kind are surviving. State and federal scientists believe that warmer ocean conditions have reduced the food supply for the fish. Record exports of water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta coincided with major declines in chinook, a factor that environmentalists and fishing representatives believe is the major culprit. Studies are being done on stream flow, water oxygen levels, temperature, gravel, toxic substances, food, predation and chemical contamination in an attempt to isolate problems in the Sacramento River system. The answers can't come soon enough for those whose livelihoods depend on it. "It is taking them a real long time to figure out what the problems are," said Don Platt, a 49-year-old fisherman from Fort Bragg. "In the meantime, we're not fishing and a whole lot of fishermen are going out of business." The Pacific Fishery Management Council will discuss another possible salmon fishing ban during its annual meeting that begins Sunday in Seattle. The National Marine Fisheries Service is expected to make a final decision on fishing quotas by May 1, when California's salmon fishing season normally begins. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 14366 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image002.gif Type: image/gif Size: 54 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Wed Mar 4 11:37:32 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Wed, 4 Mar 2009 11:37:32 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Fresno Bee March 3 09 Message-ID: <005601c99d00$aa764bd0$ff62e370$@net> Suit seeks to block delta smelt rules Westlands, San Luis districts cite water needs. The Fresno Bee - 3/3/09 By John Ellis The Westlands Water District on Tuesday joined forces with the San Luis & Delta-Mendota Water Authority to stop the federal government from enforcing a new set of rules governing the endangered delta smelt. A lawsuit filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Fresno says the new rules, issued in December by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, "will result in significant harm to Californians who depend on [Central Valley Project] water supply." The suit seeks to have the new rules governing management of the delta smelt rewritten. While that takes place, the suit asks for "relief from the pumping restrictions" in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta that were implemented as a result of the new rules. "We understand the need to save the species," said Westlands spokeswoman Sarah Woolf. "However, there is zero balance" between the needs of water users and protection of the delta smelt. Last month, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation announced that west Valley farmers would receive no federal water this season. The state's persistent drought is partly to blame, Woolf said, but without the new smelt rules, some water would have been delivered. Instead, she said, an enormous amount of water flows through the delta and into the ocean to satisfy requirements for the smelt rules. The California Department of Water Resources estimated in December that in an average weather year, the water-delivery cuts could range from 20% to 30%. Environmentalists said Tuesday that Westlands and the San Luis & Delta-Mendota Water Authority were trying to capitalize on the state's current drought conditions to turn back the new smelt rules. Trent Orr, an attorney for the environmental group Earthjustice, said Tuesday that the rules are well written. "We expect the federal government to defend this [lawsuit] rigorously," he said. The rules, called a biological opinion, govern water-pumping operations by the state Department of Water Resources and U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. The two agencies operate massive water pumps that send delta water to Bay Area urban users, San Joaquin Valley farmers and south to Los Angeles and San Diego. Environmentalists say the effects of delta pumping have forced the delta smelt to the brink of extinction, and they sued the federal government under the Endangered Species Act. In May 2007, U.S. District Judge Oliver W. Wanger found that rules governing the smelt were flawed and needed to be rewritten. Those are the new rules that were issued in December. But Tuesday's lawsuit says the newly minted opinion "ignores contrary scientific data, misstates and misapplies the data it cites" and makes claims that Central Valley Project operations are hurting the smelt, when it is actually other factors such as industrial pollution and invasive species of clams that are interfering with the food supply for the smelt. The suit also says the new rules restrict delta pumping operations, but offer no "meaningful benefit to delta smelt survival or recovery." Tuesday's 36-page lawsuit is similar to one filed in December over the longfin smelt, a cousin of the delta smelt. That suit says California Department of Fish & Game regulations protecting the longfin smelt are hurting the state's water supply. Taken together, Woolf said, rules governing the delta and longfin smelt show the lack of a coherent strategy to manage the delta and protect the species that dwell there. Named in the lawsuit were several federal agencies, including the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. Spokeswoman Lynnette Wirth said the bureau has not seen the lawsuit and could not comment. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From trinityjosh at gmail.com Thu Mar 5 00:10:52 2009 From: trinityjosh at gmail.com (Joshua Allen) Date: Thu, 5 Mar 2009 00:10:52 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Navy EIS for Training within Klamath Salmon Run Ocean Habitat - March 11 deadline for comments Message-ID: You may find this interesting, or not. But the Navy is planning on doing a bunch of testing and training within the areas that the Klamath salmon fishery is located. It seems, from a brief glossing over of the 1,000+ page Draft Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), is that the Navy is planning on war-games involving submarines, subsurface explosives, and a wide range of different action under a ruling of "No Significant Impact". If you look at the website and much of the "easy read" literature devised for the public, there are a lot of pictures of wildlife to show that they are thinking about effects to wildlife (really?), and lots of patriotic slogans to make one think that it has to be done. Maybe you don't care, maybe you think that your patriotic duty is just to let it be. *But maybe you may be thinking, "How is this going to affect our fishery &/or my way of life?" That probably is a good question and you may want to comment on this document. * Well, if you have any comments to make on this document, you better do it soon, as *you only have 5 days remaining to comment*, and this document was not widely advertised to the public. In California there was a public scoping meeting held Monday February 2 at the Eureka Women?s Club. Did you hear.know about it? If not, you did now. The website for this EIS is here: http://www.nwtrangecomplexeis.com/default.aspx The EIS documents can be found here: http://www.nwtrangecomplexeis.com/Documents.aspx You can comment here: http://www.nwtrangecomplexeis.com/NtrcCommentForm.aspx or http://www.nwtrangecomplexeis.com/NtrcCommentForm.aspx Good luck! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From trinityjosh at gmail.com Thu Mar 5 09:53:12 2009 From: trinityjosh at gmail.com (Joshua Allen) Date: Thu, 5 Mar 2009 09:53:12 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Navy EIS for Training within Klamath Salmon Run Ocean Habitat - March 11 deadline for comments In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: > > Greg, > > Yes, as I understand it, the deadline was extended due to the Navy not > publicizing the EIS enough as well as some public outcry. I only found out > about it yesterday due to the Oregon Agriculture Defense Coalition posting > the info on the Portland Independent Media Center website. > > http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2009/02/386774.shtml > > Being that the fishery is something I have worked on and knowing that > others still working on it probably did not hear about this proposed action, > I figured that you all should be notified. It's as new to me as it is you. > > From what I can tell, the plan is one of two actions, both consisting of > war-gaming submarines, subsurface electronic warfare, and explosive > detonation in the water. > > You may want to look it over and at least say something, if you wish to > have standing in court, should something arise to the fishery. > > Basically, it was FYI. > > Josh > > On Thu, Mar 5, 2009 at 12:30 AM, Greg King wrote: > >> Hi Josh, >> The first link you provide says the comment period has been extended. Is >> this the same project? >> >> Thanks, >> >> Greg King >> >> On Mar 5, 2009, at 12:10 AM, Joshua Allen wrote: >> >> You may find this interesting, or not. But the Navy is planning on doing a >> bunch of testing and training within the areas that the Klamath salmon >> fishery is located. >> >> It seems, from a brief glossing over of the 1,000+ page Draft >> Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), is that the Navy is planning on >> war-games involving submarines, subsurface explosives, and a wide range of >> different action under a ruling of "No Significant Impact". >> >> If you look at the website and much of the "easy read" literature devised >> for the public, there are a lot of pictures of wildlife to show that they >> are thinking about effects to wildlife (really?), and lots of patriotic >> slogans to make one think that it has to be done. >> >> Maybe you don't care, maybe you think that your patriotic duty is just to >> let it be. >> >> *But maybe you may be thinking, "How is this going to affect our fishery >> &/or my way of life?" That probably is a good question and you may want to >> comment on this document. >> * >> Well, if you have any comments to make on this document, you better do it >> soon, as *you only have 5 days remaining to comment*, and this document >> was not widely advertised to the public. In California there was a public >> scoping meeting held Monday February 2 at the Eureka Women?s Club. Did >> you hear.know about it? If not, you did now. >> >> The website for this EIS is here: >> http://www.nwtrangecomplexeis.com/default.aspx >> >> The EIS documents can be found here: >> http://www.nwtrangecomplexeis.com/Documents.aspx >> >> You can comment here: >> http://www.nwtrangecomplexeis.com/NtrcCommentForm.aspx or >> http://www.nwtrangecomplexeis.com/NtrcCommentForm.aspx >> >> Good luck! >> _______________________________________________ >> env-trinity mailing list >> env-trinity at velocipede.dcn.davis.ca.us >> http://www2.dcn.org/mailman/listinfo/env-trinity >> >> >> -- >> Greg King >> Klamath Campaign Coordinator >> Northcoast Environmental Center >> gking at asis.com >> 707-498-4900 >> >> >> >> >> > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Thu Mar 5 14:52:58 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Thu, 5 Mar 2009 14:52:58 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] AP 3 5 09 Message-ID: <003f01c99de5$21a56990$64f03cb0$@net> State gives delta smelt species new protections Associated Press - 3/5/09 (03-05) 04:00 PST Fresno -- California fish and wildlife managers gave new protections Wednesday to two fish species that play a crucial ecological role in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. * Oakland: Rough spots on East 33rd Street 03.05.09 The Fish and Game Commission voted unanimously to list the longfin smelt as a threatened species under the California Endangered Species Act. Commissioners also voted to classify the longfin's cousin, the tiny delta smelt, as an endangered species. In recent years, court decisions aimed at protecting the delta smelt have restricted water deliveries from the delta, a freshwater estuary where both fish live. Federal scientists say the delta smelt are on the brink of extinction. State officials did not immediately return a call for comment. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Mon Mar 9 12:11:54 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Mon, 9 Mar 2009 12:11:54 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] NOAA Restoration Project Funding Message-ID: <001201c9a0ea$e96a2990$bc3e7cb0$@net> -----Original Message----- From: Tanya.Dobrzynski [ mailto:Tanya.Dobrzynski at noaa.gov] Sent: Monday, March 09, 2009 1:09 PM To: Tanya Dobrzynski Subject: NOAA Seeks Proposals to Restore Coastal Habitat, Create Jobs, Stimulate Economy Hello, The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced on Friday that it is seeking proposals for coastal habitat restoration projects under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 in an unprecedented effort to jumpstart the economy. The effort is designed to create resilient and healthy American communities by generating and saving jobs, employing several thousand people, and restoring valuable coastal and marine habitat. NOAA is formally seeking proposals for a variety of habitat restoration projects - including wetlands restoration, dam removals, shellfish restoration, and coral reef restoration. To ensure relevance, readiness and accountability to the American public, the 30-day solicitation requires that projects be "shovel-ready." Proposals are due by April 6, 2009. For more information about this federal funding opportunity or to see the Federal Funding Opportunity, please visit: http://www.habitat.noaa.gov/recovery. Please let me know if you have any questions. Tanya Tanya Dobrzynski Congressional Affairs Specialist U.S. Dept. of Commerce 14th and Constitution Ave., NW Washington, DC 20230 Direct line (office): 202-482-7940 Main line (office): 202-482-4981 Cell: 240-723-6321 Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Mon Mar 9 12:20:39 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Mon, 9 Mar 2009 12:20:39 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Santa Cruz Sentinel On Peter Moyle on Salmon Message-ID: <001c01c9a0ec$229b0300$67d10900$@net> Top salmon researcher says outlook for fish is grim The Santa Cruz Sentinel - 3/07/09 By Kurtis Alexander SANTA CRUZ -- The author of last year's landmark report on California's salmon decline repeated his call or protective action Friday and said the Central Coast's coho would be among the first fish to vanish if nothing is done. "Extinction is not an abstract thing," said Peter Moyle, speaking before hundreds of researchers at this week's Salmonid Restoration Conference, held at the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium. The warning, which Moyle sounded for most of the state's 31 salmon, steelhead and trout species, comes as regulators consider closing the fishing season yet another year for the California chinook -- the state's foremost salmon fishery and a standard catch for local anglers and restaurants alike. "This is a crisis," said Moyle, a UC Davis professor who led the research behind last year's grim California Trout report. Moyle attributes the dwindling number of salmon, from chinook to coho, to excessive water diversions, construction of dams and other changes to the rivers where the fish spawn. Global warming, and its effect on stream temperatures and food supplies, may be another factor. Restoring streams and rivers to their natural flows, and coming up with the money and political will to do so, would set the stage for recovery, Moyle says. Without action, he estimates, 65 percent of the state's salmon species will go extinct within 100 years. Monterey Bay fishermen know the dim outlook all too well. "It makes it impossible for the guys trying to hang in there and do this for a living," said Tom Canale, 62, who sold his fishing boat at the Santa Cruz harbor just a few years ago. "There really isn't much opportunity now." The Santa Cruz Commercial Fishermen's Association counts about 70 members, according to Canale, about 40 of whom rely primarily on salmon. This fall, the state's largest run of chinook fell short for the second straight year, numbering about 66,000 of the normal 122,000 when they returned to spawn in the Sacramento River. The figure almost certainly means federal regulators next month will curtail or cancel the salmon season, which normally begins May 1. Last year's closure, the first in history, cost the state $255 million and 2,263 jobs, according to the state Department of Fish and Game. The Central Coast coho salmon, meanwhile, has been federally protected since 1996. While it's never had the commercial viability of the Sacramento River chinook, researchers are trying to ensure its recovery by improving the health of the local rivers and streams where the fish spawn. A spawning pool was recently built on San Vicente Creek, and earlier this week the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors eliminated a log-removal program to increase the number of naturally forming pools so coho can thrive.# Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Tue Mar 10 09:31:09 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Tue, 10 Mar 2009 09:31:09 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] (no subject) Message-ID: <000d01c9a19d$9f0e6d30$dd2b4790$@net> Salmon season may shut down again this year Peter Fimrite, Chronicle Staff Writer Tuesday, March 10, 2009 (03-09) 18:07 PST San Francisco -- You know the fish aren't jumpin' when the very people who make their living reeling in chinook salmon are proposing a ban on ocean fishing for a second straight year. Images http://imgs.sfgate.com/c/pictures/2009/01/01/mn-cohosalmon03_0499552414_part 1.jpg http://imgs.sfgate.com/graphics/utils/plus-green.gifView Larger Image * Gov't forcing wildlife group to ID leak's source 03.10.09 That is exactly what happened Monday at the annual Pacific Fishery Management Council meetings in Seattle, where the gory details of the catastrophic decline of California's salmon has become woefully apparent. Fishing-industry representatives on a council advisory panel looked at the dismal state of the fall run of Sacramento River salmon and proposed closing the 2009 ocean salmon fishing season, except, perhaps, for a bit of recreational fishing near the Oregon border. "It is pretty simple in California," said Peter Dygert, a fishery biologist for the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration's fisheries service. "Both the recreational and commercial trollers on the advisory panel have proposed no fishing." The management council, a 14-member federal panel that manages the Pacific Coast fishery, is expected to come up with three options for ocean fishing after a week of testimony and the digestion of mounds of documents and studies. There isn't much mystery about what the council will propose, given that the folks most likely to lobby for more fishing are proposing the elimination of the season. The only thing to decide, really, is whether to allow recreational fishing on certain dates in the summer from the Oregon border south to a spot near the mouth of the Klamath River, which had a slightly better salmon return than the Central Valley river system. The current proposals would allow sportfishing over the July 4 weekend and from Aug. 15 to Sept. 7. An alternate plan would allow it only from Aug. 29 to Sept. 7. Biologists estimated only 66,000 adult salmon returned to spawn last fall in the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers, based on a count of egg nests in the river bed. It was the lowest return on record. The collapse caused regulators to ban ocean salmon fishing in California and most of Oregon last year. The collapse led to an emergency declaration and appropriation of federal disaster assistance to keep fishing businesses alive. The dismal spawning numbers are expected to continue this year. Fisheries biologists are projecting that the fall run of chinook in the system this year will be a little bit higher than last year. Still, the numbers will barely reach the council's spawning goals even if there is no fishing, according to the projections. Both the Klamath and Sacramento rivers have suffered recently from extremely low returns. Declines have also been seen in the Columbia-Snake River System over the past several years. Last year, more than 2,200 fishermen and fishing-related business workers lost their jobs. Fishing communities and fishing-related businesses lost more than $250 million, according to some estimates. Indirect economic impacts were even higher, according to fishing industry representatives. The collapse in California is especially troubling because the Central Valley fall run of chinook has for many years been the backbone of the West Coast fishing industry. Big salmon from the Sacramento River have been reeled in as far north as Alaska, according to biologists. The council is considering allowing fishing of only hatchery fish - identifiable because their fleshy adipose fins are removed - off the Oregon coast. Meanwhile, more than 75 commercial and recreational fishing associations and conservation organizations signed a letter Monday urging President Obama to create a new position of salmon director to help restore the West Coast salmon populations, protect fishing jobs and rebuild the salmon economy. A final decision on the ban and the hatchery fishing is expected in early April. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 11906 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image002.gif Type: image/gif Size: 54 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Tue Mar 10 13:52:17 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Tue, 10 Mar 2009 13:52:17 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] AP 3 10 09 Steelhead Get Help from CalTrout Message-ID: <003001c9a1c2$1aa5f160$4ff1d420$@net> Steelhead trout getting migration help Associated Press - 3/10/09 SATICOY, Calif. -- The United Water Conservation District is changing the flow from a Ventura County diversion dam to give migrating steelhead trout a better chance at getting upstream. The 30-foot Vern Freeman Diversion dam in Saticoy prevented the few hundred remaining steelhead from migrating up the Ventura River to spawn. An ineffective fish ladder was installed in 1991. The National Marine Fisheries Service ruled last year that the dam jeopardized the federally protected fish and CalTrout environmentalists sued to force United Water to comply with agency recommendations, including stream flow changes and a new fish passage. United Water agreed to the recommended water-flow changes and CalTrout agreed Monday to withdraw its lawsuit during the migration season ending May 31. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From tstokely at att.net Thu Mar 12 01:11:22 2009 From: tstokely at att.net (Tom Stokely) Date: Thu, 12 Mar 2009 01:11:22 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] California's claims of three-year drought are all wet Message-ID: <2E20024791F94F96A9F08BC9BC3A3534@homeuserPC> Courtesy of Mr. Bill Kier Tom Stokely Water Policy Coordinator California Water Impact Network 504A Lennon St. (USPS and UPS) Mt Shasta, CA 96067 V/FAX 530-926-9727 Cell 530-524-0315 tstokely at att.net http://www.c-win.org/ California's claims of three-year drought are all wet By Michael Fitzgerald Record Columnist March 11, 2009 6:00 AM California's "drought" is overblown. The alarmists calling it a historic disaster are trying to pull a fast one. Rain fell constantly through February. The drought broke. Yet at month's end, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger ominously declared a "drought emergency." Earlier, Lester Snow, head of the state Department of Water Resources, proclaimed, "We may be at the start of the worst California drought in modern history." Not even close. In reality - a word seldom placed in the same sentence as water in California - rainfall is nearly normal for this time of year. Don't take my word for it. Here are the current 15-year average watershed precipitation levels, according to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation: ? Sacramento River: 77 percent ? American River: 102 percent ? Stanislaus River: 96 percent ? San Joaquin River: 91 percent That is not a drought. That is below-average rainfall. And not far below average: 91.5 percent. But it is true Stockton's only at 75 percent. Officials say the snowpack is critically low. False. The snow-water equivalent, according to the DWR itself, is 90 percent. Officials say rainfall has been below average for three years. That is true. There should be water anyway. More on that later. Officials say there are more people in California now. Well, yes. The addition of more people, however, does not constitute a drought, only perhaps an expansion beyond resources. Officials say reservoirs are dry. False. Here are the 15-year average percentages for regional reservoirs. ? Shasta: 69 ? Oroville: 68 ? Folsom: 108 ? New Melones: 74 ? Millerton: 88. The average is 81.4 percent of normal - and rising. The inflow into Lake Shasta as of midnight Saturday was 13,239 cubic feet per second. Reservoirs are filling. They may not fill brimful. But that is far from "the worst California drought in modern history." Besides, state officials, SoCal water importers and other Chicken Littles don't mention they drained Northern California reservoirs prior to February's storms. "In the first year of the drought, we passed water like a drunken sailor," said Bill Jennings, head of the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance. Some perspective: In the 1990s, the state and feds exported 4 million acre-feet of Delta water annually. In this decade - and well into the drought - officials imprudently powered up exports to more than 6 million acre-feet a year. They irresponsibly sucked reservoirs down. They nearly killed the Delta. They stopped only when a federal judge called a halt. "We cannibalized Northern California to sock it away in the Kern water bank and Diamond Valley water bank down south," Jennings said, "giving no thought to the question of a second or third year." This controversy is about more than a peripheral canal. It is about a state that forgot how water rights work. Or special interests who are attempting to overthrow them. Many of these distant users are last in line. Their contracts promise surplus in wet years. Yet they now feel entitled to water deliveries every year. The irony is, the entitlements are bogus. Be they big metropolitan water agencies or small farmers, they've been had. Or they've been foolish. The 80-year average for Delta water is 29 million acre-feet annually. The state and feds wrote contracts promising 130 million acre-feet: 41/2 times reality. Other contracts bring total export contracts to an insane 245 million acre-feet, an ocean of paper water promised to people who gauged their farms, businesses or urban water consumption accordingly. This delusion has been abetted by a series of governors from Southern California, misguided regulators and politicians caving to constituents. So the "solution" to the ginned-up drought really amounts to an old-fashioned California water grab based on the failure to face nature's limits. The Delta and the law be damned. "It's an attempt to rewrite 150 years of California water law and legal precedent," declared Jennings, "by giving the most junior and inferior water rights equal footing with the most senior water rights. And to do that, its screws the Delta and Northern California." Contact columnist Michael Fitzgerald at (209) 546-8270 or michaelf at recordnet.com. Kier Associates, Fisheries and Watershed Professionals P.O. Box 915 Blue Lake, CA 95525 707.668.1822 mobile: 498.7847 http://www.kierassociates.net -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: Stktn Rcrd_031109_drought claims all wet.doc Type: application/msword Size: 32256 bytes Desc: not available URL: From truman at jeffnet.org Thu Mar 12 10:11:17 2009 From: truman at jeffnet.org (Patrick Truman) Date: Thu, 12 Mar 2009 10:11:17 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] USFS to Interior? Message-ID: House Subcommittee Holds Hearing on Potential Agency Transfer The House Interior Appropriations Subcommittee held a hearing today to review the potential effects of transferring the Forest Service from the Department of Agriculture to the Department of the Interior. The hearing addressed several reasons for a possible transfer, including the fact that the Forest Service and several Interior agencies, including the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), have budgets for wildfire. Interest was expressed by the Subcommittee regarding the agencies' missions, cultures, responsibilities, shared policies, as well as potential management practices if such a transfer were implemented. One key piece of information presented at the hearing was a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report, which is based on a year-long study of the issue and was developed at the request of the Subcommittee chair and ranking member. The Subcommittee did not recommend immediate action. Follow-up to the hearing will likely be considered by both of the departments involved and the Subcommittee over the next few weeks and months. Many conservation districts work with both agencies on a host of projects and programs. Transfer of the Forest Service to Interior would likely affect work at the local level during a prospective transition period. The full GAO report is available on the GAO's website at http://www.gao.gov/products/gao-09-223, and GAO witness testimony focusing on the potential effects and factors to consider is available at http://www.gao.gov/products/gao-09-412T. Other witness' testimony will also be available from the House Appropriations Subcommittee once the hearing record is completed. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Thu Mar 12 11:42:07 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Thu, 12 Mar 2009 11:42:07 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] NY Times Editorial on Interior Secretary Message-ID: <003a01c9a342$3f1f8890$bd5e99b0$@net> New York Times Editorial Mr. Salazar's Repair Mission Published: March 11, 2009 Ken Salazar, the new secretary of the interior, has been working overtime amending or suspending bad policies dumped on the public during the Bush administration's waning days. That may not be entirely fulfilling for someone eager to put his stamp on policy. But it is necessary work and, with one disappointing exception - his decision to uphold a Bush rule removing protections from certain wolf populations - very welcome. Mr. Salazar's efforts have received strong support from President Obama. At the Interior Department's 160th anniversary celebration, the president pledged that the department's scientists - muzzled and overruled during the Bush years - would be respected. He directed Mr. Salazar to review a Bush rule giving federal agencies far too much latitude to move ahead with projects that could harm threatened or endangered species without first consulting departmental scientists. Mr. Salazar can't reverse the rule, but he can ignore it while he decides whether to ask Congress to overturn it or begin a new rulemaking process. In the interim, species will receive the protections they always have. Mr. Salazar has made real progress on other fronts. He has already cancelled some environmentally unsound oil and gas leases in Utah, and he has put the brakes on oil shale and offshore oil drilling initiatives. Oil shale is seen by some as a kind of energy holy grail, even though nobody has figured out a clean, cost-effective way to extract it. Mr. Salazar has suspended some small leases and pledged to rethink the Bush plan to set aside two million acres of public land for future production. He says he is open to research, but dismissed as "fantasy" the idea that oil shale is a "panacea." He also rejected Bush administration plans to open vast coastal waters to oil and gas drilling. He agreed that some drilling was inevitable but ordered more time for public comment, promised an updated assessment of reserves and insisted on a broader strategy that would harness power from wind, waves and currents. We hope that in the course of setting his new strategy Mr. Salazar will halt plans for drilling in sensitive and previously untapped Alaskan waters, especially Bristol Bay. We also urge him not to forget the wolf. The Interior Department's scientists say that wolf populations are healthy enough, and state protections strong enough, to take the animal off the endangered species list in Montana and Idaho. We do not share their confidence in the states. De-listing allows for some hunting, and hunters in both places are itching to start firing away. Mr. Salazar should be ready to restore protections the instant the long-term survival of the species seems at risk. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.gif Type: image/gif Size: 1877 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Thu Mar 12 12:07:29 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Thu, 12 Mar 2009 12:07:29 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Stockton Record 3 11 09 Message-ID: <005401c9a345$cb16cdb0$61446910$@net> California's claims of three-year drought are all wet By Michael Fitzgerald Stockton Record Columnist March 11, 2009 6:00 AM California's "drought" is overblown. The alarmists calling it a historic disaster are trying to pull a fast one. Rain fell constantly through February. The drought broke. Yet at month's end, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger ominously declared a "drought emergency." Earlier, Lester Snow, head of the state Department of Water Resources, proclaimed, "We may be at the start of the worst California drought in modern history." Not even close. In reality - a word seldom placed in the same sentence as water in California - rainfall is nearly normal for this time of year. Don't take my word for it. Here are the current 15-year average watershed precipitation levels, according to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation: > Sacramento River: 77 percent > American River: 102 percent > Stanislaus River: 96 percent > San Joaquin River: 91 percent That is not a drought. That is below-average rainfall. And not far below average: 91.5 percent. But it is true Stockton's only at 75 percent. Officials say the snowpack is critically low. False. The snow-water equivalent, according to the DWR itself, is 90 percent. Officials say rainfall has been below average for three years. That is true. There should be water anyway. More on that later. Officials say there are more people in California now. Well, yes. The addition of more people, however, does not constitute a drought, only perhaps an expansion beyond resources. Officials say reservoirs are dry. False. Here are the 15-year average percentages for regional reservoirs. > Shasta: 69 > Oroville: 68 > Folsom: 108 > New Melones: 74 > Millerton: 88. The average is 81.4 percent of normal - and rising. The inflow into Lake Shasta as of midnight Saturday was 13,239 cubic feet per second. Reservoirs are filling. They may not fill brimful. But that is far from "the worst California drought in modern history." Besides, state officials, SoCal water importers and other Chicken Littles don't mention they drained Northern California reservoirs prior to February's storms. "In the first year of the drought, we passed water like a drunken sailor," said Bill Jennings, head of the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance. Some perspective: In the 1990s, the state and feds exported 4 million acre-feet of Delta water annually. In this decade - and well into the drought - officials imprudently powered up exports to more than 6 million acre-feet a year. They irresponsibly sucked reservoirs down. They nearly killed the Delta. They stopped only when a federal judge called a halt. "We cannibalized Northern California to sock it away in the Kern water bank and Diamond Valley water bank down south," Jennings said, "giving no thought to the question of a second or third year." This controversy is about more than a peripheral canal. It is about a state that forgot how water rights work. Or special interests who are attempting to overthrow them. Many of these distant users are last in line. Their contracts promise surplus in wet years. Yet they now feel entitled to water deliveries every year. The irony is, the entitlements are bogus. Be they big metropolitan water agencies or small farmers, they've been had. Or they've been foolish. The 80-year average for Delta water is 29 million acre-feet annually. The state and feds wrote contracts promising 130 million acre-feet: 41/2 times reality. Other contracts bring total export contracts to an insane 245 million acre-feet, an ocean of paper water promised to people who gauged their farms, businesses or urban water consumption accordingly. This delusion has been abetted by a series of governors from Southern California, misguided regulators and politicians caving to constituents. So the "solution" to the ginned-up drought really amounts to an old-fashioned California water grab based on the failure to face nature's limits. The Delta and the law be damned. "It's an attempt to rewrite 150 years of California water law and legal precedent," declared Jennings, "by giving the most junior and inferior water rights equal footing with the most senior water rights. And to do that, its screws the Delta and Northern California." Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Fri Mar 13 08:51:41 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Fri, 13 Mar 2009 08:51:41 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] SF Chron 3 13 09 Message-ID: <001b01c9a3f3$9adfd2f0$d09f78d0$@net> Ban on commercial fishing of chinook extended Peter Fimrite, Chronicle Staff Writer Friday, March 13, 2009 The grim reality of a devastated salmon fishery hit home Thursday when the Pacific Fishery Management Council agreed to another ban on commercial fishing of chinook in California and Oregon. * S.F.: Time lags for clock tower repairs 03.13.09 It is the second straight year that the sea salts who make their living off the fabled fall run of Sacramento River king salmon will be grounded. None of the three options approved by the 14-member panel made up of fishing interests, tribal representatives and conservation groups from California, Oregon and Washington included any commercial fishing in the two states. The decision came after a week of testimony in Seattle that included mounting bad news about the California fishery. Severe restrictions and bans on sportfishing were also included in the package, which will be narrowed down to a final option early next month. "It's grim," said Dave Bitts, president of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations. "The ocean conditions were supposed to have turned around and gotten a lot better, so I'm kind of baffled, frankly." The blame falls directly on the Central Valley fall run of chinook. Only about 66,000 adult salmon returned to spawn last fall in the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers, according to biologists whose estimates are based on a count of egg nests in the riverbed. It was the lowest return on record. The collapse forced regulators to ban ocean salmon fishing in California and most of Oregon last year, the first time that had ever been done. Fisheries biologists are projecting that the fall run of chinook this year will be almost twice as plentiful as last year, a fact that experts characterized as a thin thread of a silver lining. Still, the numbers will barely reach the council's minimum goal of 122,000 fish even if there is no fishing, according to the projections. The council, which was established three decades ago to manage the Pacific Coast fishery, did include a little sportfishing in California in one of the options. If that option eventually gets approved, it would mean recreational fishermen could take chinook between Aug. 29 and Sept. 7 only in an area extending from the mouth of the Klamath River to southern Oregon. Disastrous fall run All three options would allow some commercial and sportfishing of hatchery-raised coho salmon - identifiable because the fleshy adipose fins have been removed - in Oregon during July and August. Chinook, or king, salmon, pass through San Francisco Bay and roam the Pacific Ocean as far away as Alaska before returning three years later to spawn where they were born in the Sacramento River and its tributaries. The fall run - in September and October - has for decades been the backbone of the West Coast fishing industry. At its peak, it exceeded 800,000 fish. Over the past decade, the numbers had consistently topped 250,000. Until last year, the worst run on record was in 1992, when only 81,000 chinook returned to spawn. Various possible causes Changing ocean conditions, diversions of freshwater in the delta to cities and farms, pumping operations and exposure to pollutants have all been trotted out as culprits in the demise of the salmon. Some fishermen believe ravenous sea lions are to blame, but most environmentalists have consistently pointed to increases in water exports out of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta as the primary reason for the decline. Whatever the cause, more than 2,200 fishermen and fishing industry workers lost their jobs as a result of last year's ban. Fishing communities and fishing-related businesses lost more than $250 million. Indirect economic impacts were even larger, according to fishing industry representatives. Report forthcoming Federal fishery scientists are expected to release a report next week on possible reasons for the collapse, but it is already too late for the salmon this year. The council will make a final recommendation to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries Service in early April. The final decision on the restrictions is expected to be made by May 1. Restrictions on river fishing will be made at a later date by the California Department of Fish and Game, which allowed some 600 chinook to be caught last year, angering many commercial fishermen who felt it was wrong to allow any fishing. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Mon Mar 16 09:40:28 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Mon, 16 Mar 2009 09:40:28 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] SF Chron Editorial 3 16 09 Message-ID: <000001c9a655$eab0b510$c0121f30$@net> Editorial Where are the salmon solutions? Monday, March 16, 2009 First it was a one-year ban, and now it's likely to be a second year with virtually no salmon fishing in California's ocean waters. This losing streak may continue if a predicted bare minimum of returning fish don't swim up the Sacramento River this fall. The affected interest groups - commercial fishermen, sports and environmental groups, plus government agencies - are showing remarkable patience and discipline in going along with a costly, job-killing timeout. It's a united front built on the hope that once-plentiful stocks will return. But other than keeping fish hooks out of the water, where are the solutions to this crisis? This week there may be answers when a federal study is released on the decline. So far, the explanations have ranged across a spread of human intrusions: pesticide runoff, water diversions and bankside development. There's another culprit that's drawn special attention: changing ocean currents that have carried off the food that sustain young fish to maturity. But nature's hand gives Sacramento an easy pass. For years the state Fish and Game Department has been starved of wardens, who monitor illegal water diversions and poaching. By one count there are 200 to cover the entire state, a figure so small it invites law-breaking. Also, the department staff oversees building plans and timber cuts in river corridors. With fewer hands, this work can't be done carefully. Salmon may live a hazardous life at sea where forage is scarce, but none of the young fish will ever get there if salmon-rearing conditions in the Sacramento and scores of other rivers and creeks aren't protected. This neglect has lasted for years, and it didn't begin with this year's monumental budget battle. But it can't be allowed to continue for the health of either the salmon or the California Department of Fish and Game. A stable funding source must be found. A state Assembly hearing last week in Sacramento heard these arguments from legal and environmental voices. There are plenty of laws, policy studies and scientific advice on easing the salmon crisis, these experts said. What's needed is resolve and money, much of it directed to the state's wildlife agencies, to produce results. Unless this commitment is found, an iconic fish - and the human industry built around it - could slowly die out. California can't allow its native salmon to be a memory. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Tue Mar 17 08:31:12 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Tue, 17 Mar 2009 08:31:12 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] SF Chron March 17 2009 Message-ID: <001601c9a715$683f9900$38becb00$@net> Nature Conservancy land buy to help revive coho Peter Fimrite, Chronicle Staff Writer Tuesday, March 17, 2009 03-17) 04:00 PDT Mount Shasta, Siskiyou County -- The cold, nutrient-rich waters of Big Springs Creek once were so full of coho salmon during spawning season that a former ranch owner said he was kept awake at night by the noise of splashing fish. Images Big Springs Creek winds through the ranch, taking cold wa... Henry Little, Klamath River Project director, tests the t... http://imgs.sfgate.com/c/pictures/2009/03/16_t/ba-coho0317_gr_SFCG1237250506 _t.gif http://imgs.sfgate.com/graphics/utils/plus-green.gifView More Images . Obama pushes Congress to pass $3.6 trillion budget 03.17.09 The coho's fertile history in the creek, now only a distant memory, is why the Nature Conservancy paid $14.2 million for the 4,136-acre Shasta Big Springs Ranch, including the entire 2.2-mile length of the creek. The group's purchase of the lush valley in the shadow of snow-capped Mount Shasta, which will be announced today, is part of an ambitious effort to protect and restore what might be the most important coho spawning ground in the western United States. "My goal is to be kept awake at night, not by the knowledge that the salmon are dying, but because they are spawning again," said Amy Hoss, the project manager for the Nature Conservancy's Klamath River Project. The sale, which closed March 6, is being hailed by biologists as a crucial step in the ongoing effort to restore salmon in the Shasta River and ultimately the entire Klamath River system. The land is covered with springs from which cold, mineral-rich water burbles up through underground lava tubes. Water collects in the creek and flows down into the Shasta River, which eventually meets the Klamath. Just below the headwaters at Big Springs Lake, the creek once produced as much as half the salmon in the Klamath River system, which once was the third-largest source of salmon in the lower 48 states behind the Columbia and Sacramento rivers. Then the fish went away. This winter only about 30 coho returned to spawn in Big Springs Creek, Hoss said. Coho now make up about 1 percent of their historic population on the North Coast. So few spawning chinook salmon have been returning to the Sacramento River and its tributaries that ocean fishing for salmon was prohibited in California and Oregon last year and is almost certain to be banned again this year. Coho, which are more sensitive to water temperature and quality than other salmonid species, were listed as endangered in California in 2005 under the Endangered Species Act. In addition, fisheries analysts in 2007-08 reported a 73 percent decline in coho returning to the creeks and tributaries along California's coast compared to the previous spawning season. The issues at Big Springs Creek must be looked at in the context of the wider collapse, but more immediate problems on the ranch are making life harder on the fish, said Henry Little, director of the Klamath River Project. "As you can see, it is denuded of vegetation," Little said as he approached the creek Monday. The banks of the creek were little more than a muddy wallow pocked with the hoof prints of cows. Both sides were lined with fresh piles of manure, no doubt containing the digested remnants of the riparian plants that once protected juvenile fish. Cattle had been grazing in the spring-fed wetlands since 1850. Ellis Louie, a descendant of the first homesteader, used to tell people that as a child he was awakened at night by the sound of thousands of thrashing salmon. Conservationists had been trying to get hold of the land for 30 years, but it was only in the last year and a half that biologists noticed a deadly plume of warm water flowing down from the ranch. Cattle had tramped the banks so much that the creek spread out, making it shallow and slow-moving. The summer heat warmed the water, and there was no vegetation left to shade it from the blazing sun. That's when the conservancy stepped up efforts to persuade the last owner, Irene Busk, to sell. Besides the ranch, the conservancy purchased a conservation easement on 407 acres where Busk will continue her ranching operation. The purchase, which was made with private funds, also will protect 3 miles of salmon and steelhead habitat along the upper Shasta River. Little said the first task is to remove cows from the creek. He said cattle will be kept off all sensitive areas and fenced into grazing areas. The conservancy hopes to restore the native plants that historically grew along the waterway. In addition to supporting coho salmon, the restoration work is expected to provide habitat for other struggling species, including chinook salmon, steelhead trout, Pacific and Klamath River lamprey, Western pond turtles, greater sandhill cranes, bank swallows, neo-tropical migratory birds and bald eagles. "Restoring Big Springs Creek as spawning and rearing habitat for coho salmon is the best single action that can be taken to bring wild coho back from the brink of extinction in the Klamath Basin," said Peter Moyle, a nationally known UC Davis professor of conservation biology. Moyle recently authored a study warning that 20 of the 31 species of California native salmon, steelhead and trout will face extinction by the end of the century unless something is done to provide adequate freshwater and habitat. Little said a successful restoration program on Big Springs Creek could serve as a model for similar programs all along the Klamath River system, where, if conservationists get their way, four dams will be removed by 2020, freeing salmon migration for the first time in a century. "This is the largest run of coho in the Klamath system, so if you can restore the coho here, it would be the founding population for the rest of the system," Little said "Hopefully we'll be able to build both a track record and an applicable model for the restoration of much of the West." Reviving a species Peak: The 2.2-mile-long Big Springs Creek once produced as much as half the salmon in the Klamath River, which was the third-largest source of salmon in the continental United States. Decline: Dams, pollution and global warming cut the number of coho in California by 73 percent in 2007-08 from the previous year. Only 30 coho returned to the creek this winter. Restoration: The Nature Conservancy, which purchased land along the creek, plans to keep grazing cattle away, allow native plants to thrive and cool temperatures in the creek. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2009/03/17/MNKA16F5S6.DT L Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.gif Type: image/gif Size: 3713 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image002.gif Type: image/gif Size: 5108 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image003.gif Type: image/gif Size: 4876 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image004.gif Type: image/gif Size: 54 bytes Desc: not available URL: From danielbacher at fishsniffer.com Tue Mar 17 10:38:56 2009 From: danielbacher at fishsniffer.com (Dan Bacher) Date: Tue, 17 Mar 2009 10:38:56 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Schwarzenegger Launches Green Corps As California Fisheries Collapse In-Reply-To: <007701c9a725$360a8f20$a21fad60$@com> References: <4C24E7B867CD024B9A9BC761C61FC559DB4020@pclf.PCLF.local> <203B47CB-FF6A-4ACD-91A2-F40CC8C3B0B0@fishsniffer.com> <006301c9a722$862a8530$927f8f90$@com> <007701c9a725$360a8f20$a21fad60$@com> Message-ID: <63B1574D-A587-4F9D-8A97-57714145FDA4@fishsniffer.com> Schwarzenegger Launches Green Corps As California Fisheries Collapse by Dan Bacher Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has presided over the unprecedented collapse of Central Valley Chinook salmon, delta smelt, longfin smelt, green sturgeon and other fish populations while gutting the Department of Fish and Game, tried yet again to cast himself in the role of the "Green Governor" by launching the "California Green Corps" Tuesday. Schwarzenegger announced the formation of the corps immediately after meeting with President Obama?s Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis in Sacramento to discuss federal economic stimulus funding and job creation. In yet another cynical attempt to add a green veneer to the worst-ever administration for fish and the environment in California history, Schwarzenegger claimed that the California Green Corps "will place at-risk young adults aged 16-24 into jobs in California?s emerging green economy." ?President Obama and I share similar priorities right now when it comes to helping the economy rebound and creating a greener California and America,? contended Governor Schwarzenegger. ?In California we will utilize federal economic stimulus funds and public- private partnerships to help stimulate our economy while initiating actions to improve our environment. Green jobs are exactly what our economy and environment need right now ? and the California Green Corps targets that need while helping at-risk young adults realize a brighter future.? He said the "initial phase" of the California Green Corps will consist of a 20-month pilot program reaching at least 1,000 of California?s at-risk young adults. It will invest "at least $10 million in federal economic stimulus funding from the U.S. Department of Labor and an additional $10 million from public-private partnerships." The program will consist of a minimum of 10 regional Green Corps throughout the state ? with at least one regional Green Corps located in each of California?s nine economic regions. All programs will be "public-private partnerships" that include green job training, a stipend, an educational requirement and community service. "To help ensure the success of the Green Corps, it will be housed under CaliforniaVolunteers ? an agency in a unique position to leverage federal economic stimulus funding and to work with public- private partnerships and across state agencies," according to the Governor. "This program furthers the goals of California?s Green Collar Jobs Council which was created when the Governor signed Assembly Bill 3018 in September 2008. The Council is charged with developing a comprehensive approach to address the workforce needs associated with California?s emerging green economy." "We will need construction workers, cost estimators, energy analysts, computer technicians, salespersons, scientists, engineers, and many others," according to a corps facts sheet. I'm a big supporter of "green jobs," but under this Governor, what will the young "Green Corps" members be forced to do? Will he force them to fulfill his "Delta Vision" of a creating a dead estuary by training them as construction workers, engineers and cost estimators engaged in building a peripheral canal and more dams as part of a "public-private partnership? Will they be trained as salespersons and scientists to market the "need" to build the canal and dams to the media and the public? Will they be forced to work as engineers and construction workers on cosmetic, greenwashing "habitat restoration" projects that make streams look pretty while their fish populations die as the water is diverted for corporate agriculture and urban development? Will they go distribute notices to Delta farmers informing them that their lands are going to be seized by eminent domain because they are on the route of the peripheral canal? Will the Governator have them take down levees to make sections of the Delta into salt marsh, rather than the fresh and brackish water habitat the Delta has been historically? Since the governor has vetoed legislation twice limiting the environmentally destructive practice of suction dredge gold mining mining, will he order corps members to conduct "outreach" on the state's rivers and streams to promote suction dredging regardless of its impact on endangered salmon, lampreys and green sturgeon? Will Schwarzenegger command the corps to clean up all of the dead, rotting chinook salmon, coho salmon, steelhead, delta smelt, longfin smelt, striped bass, green sturgeon and other species that will result from his persistent advancing of the interests of the timber industry, corporate agribusiness and developers over fish and wildlife? Will the corps members be hired to serve as de facto enforcement officers to patrol the state's growing marine protected areas that kick sustainable fishermen and seaweed harvesters off the water? After all, California already has the worst wardens per capita ratio in the United and 98 wardens and cadets recently received layoff notices, resulting in an epidemic of fish and wildlife poaching, and patrolling redundant MPAs would be a "wise" use of the corps members time! Of course, I know that many will laud the Governor for launching the "Green Corps." However, anybody that takes even a cursory look at the state of California's fish populations will realize that there is nothing "green" about Arnold Schwarzenegger. Federal and state scientists estimate that only 66,264 natural and hatchery adult fall Chinooks returned to the Sacramento River basin in 2008, the lowest spawning escapement on record. Recreational and commercial fishing in ocean waters off California and most of Oregon and was closed for the first time in history in 2008 and is expected to be closed again this year. While the Bush and Schwarzenegger administrations claimed "ocean conditions" were the cause of the collapse, respected scientists, recreational anglers, commercial fishermen, environmentalists and members of California Indian Tribes point to massive increases in water exports and the mismanagement of Central Valley dam operations as key factors behind the decline. The DFG's 2008 fall mid-water trawl survey shows abundance estimates for delta smelt, American shad, Sacramento splittail and threadfin shad to be the lowest in 41 years. The longfin smelt indices are the fourth lowest on record and young of the year striped bass abundance estimates are the sixth lowest. (For more information, go to http:// www.calsport.org). Again, record water exports and mismanagement of dam operations under the Bush and Schwarzenegger administrations, along with increases in toxics and invasive species, are the primary reasons behind the collapse of these species. It will be interesting to see what the Governor and his staff really mean by training people in "green jobs." If Schwarzenegger's past performance is any indication, the California Green Corps will end up being yet one more carefully calculated greenwashing scheme by the Governor to divert attention from his deplorable management of California fish and the environment! For additional information about the California Green Corps please visit: http://gov.ca.gov/fact-sheet/11753. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Sat Mar 21 10:50:27 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Sat, 21 Mar 2009 10:50:27 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Sac Bee 3 20 09 Message-ID: Storms allow slight boost in federal water supply The Associated Press Published: Friday, Mar. 20, 2009 - 3:06 pm Last Modified: Friday, Mar. 20, 2009 - 4:57 pm FRESNO, Calif. -- Many farmers, cities and industries in California that buy water from the federal government can expect to get a little more this summer. The Bureau of Reclamation says recent storms will allow them to boost the amount of water shipped to customers north of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. But farmers on the San Joaquin Valley's parched west side still will get none of their federal water allotments this year. The cutbacks have already led to jobs losses, fallowed fields and water rationing. A recent study from the University of California, Davis estimated that $1.6 billion in agriculture-related wages and as many as 60,000 jobs across the valley will be lost in the coming months due to dwindling water. Up to two-thirds of the 600,000 acres in Westlands Water District will be left barren this year, said Sarah Woolf, a spokeswoman for the district, which provides irrigation to about 600 valley farms. More than half of the normal lettuce crop grown in the district won't be planted, and there will be a significant drop in cantaloupe, broccoli, cauliflower and asparagus crops as well, Woolf said. February rain and snow storms boosted reservoirs and brought the Sierra Nevada snowpack to about 90 percent of normal. Still, state officials warn California remains in a dangerous drought. Water also must be reserved for fish in the fragile delta ecosystem. Byron Leydecker, JcT, Chair Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Sat Mar 21 11:52:14 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Sat, 21 Mar 2009 11:52:14 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] CVP 2009 Water Allocation as of March 20 Message-ID: <000d01c9aa56$2695ca30$73c15e90$@net> Press Release Bureau of Reclamation Updates 2009 Central Valley Project Water Supply Allocation USBR - 3/20/09 Today, the Bureau of Reclamation announced the March update to Water Year 2009 allocations for the Federal Central Valley Project. This water supply update is based on the March 1 runoff forecast from the California Department of Water Resources. Reclamation prepared two forecasts: a conservative forecast with a 90-percent chance of having runoff greater than forecasted (90-percent probability of exceedence) and a median forecast with a 50-percent chance of having runoff greater than forecasted (50-percent probability of exceedence). In the 90-percent exceedence runoff forecast, the unimpaired water year inflow into Shasta Reservoir is about 3.18 million acre-feet. Shasta Reservoir unimpaired inflow is the criteria used to determine shortages to water right settlement contractors, including the Exchange Contractors, and refuges. Reclamation traditionally expresses the monthly forecast as a percentage (see summary table) of the contract total for each of the contract categories. The official allocation is based on the 90-percent exceedence forecast. The 50-percent exceedence forecast is provided for informational and planning purposes. Mid-Pacific Region Water Year 2009 Supply Forecast Update March 20, 2009 Probability of Exceedence Forecasts Sacramento Valley Index* (Percent of Average/Water Year Classification) North of Delta Allocation South of Delta Allocation Ag M&I R WR Ag M&I R WR Dry Forecast (90%) 51% / Critical 5% 55%** 75% 75% 0% 50%** 75% 77% Median Forecast (50%) 61% / Critical 15% 65%** 100% 100% 15% 65%** 100% 100% Ag = Agriculture M&I = Municipal & Industrial (supply based on historical deliveries) R = Refuges WR = Water Rights *The Sacramento Valley Index is a calculated estimate of the unimpaired runoff from the Sacramento River and its major tributaries and is used to determine the water year type. **The allocation percentage for M&I is approximate and may be adjusted to meet public health and safety needs. The allocation for the Friant Division Contractors will be 65 percent Class 1 water and 0 percent Class 2 water based on the 90-percent exceedence forecast. Reclamation continues to coordinate with the State of California, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Marine Fisheries Service, and other Federal, State, and local organizations to fulfill its water supply obligations, which include senior water rights, water quality, and the protection of fish and wildlife and associated habitats. "Reclamation will continue to monitor runoff and reservoir storage conditions in the event changing conditions will support higher allocations," stated Donald Glaser, Regional Director for the Mid-Pacific Region. "In the meantime, Reclamation will use all water management tools at our disposal to meet our obligation to deliver water responsibly." In the coming months, updates to this forecast will be announced as circumstances warrant. Information will be posted on the Region's website at http://www.usbr.gov/mp. Please contact the Public Affairs Office at 916-978-5100 or e-mail ibr2mprpao at mp.usbr.gov for additional information Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Mon Mar 23 14:08:20 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Mon, 23 Mar 2009 14:08:20 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] U.S. House Resources Committee hearing on drought 3/31 Message-ID: <00f001c9abfb$7f1b3400$7d519c00$@net> Auditable via webcast: http://resourcescommittee.house.gov/index.php?option=com_jcalpro &Itemid=54&extmode=view&extid=238 Event: 'Full Committee Oversight Hearing On "The California Drought: Actions By Federal And State Agencies To Address Impacts On Lands, Fisheries, And Water Users"' Full Committee Hearing Date: Tuesday, March 31, 2009 At 10:00:00 AM The House Natural Resources Committee, led by Chairman Nick J. Rahall (D-WV), will hold an oversight hearing on "The California Drought: Actions by Federal and State agencies to address impacts on lands, fisheries, and water users." Subject: House Natural Resources Committee Full Committee Oversight Hearing on "The California Drought: Actions by Federal and State agencies to address impacts on lands, fisheries, and water users" When: Tuesday, March 31, 2009, at 10:00 a.m. Where: Room 1324 Longworth House Office Building Witnesses: TBA The hearing will be webcast live on the Committee's Web site at: http://resourcescommittee.house.gov. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.gif Type: image/gif Size: 1043 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image002.gif Type: image/gif Size: 73 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image003.gif Type: image/gif Size: 73 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Tue Mar 24 09:20:10 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Tue, 24 Mar 2009 09:20:10 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Suction Dredge Mining Message-ID: <001501c9ac9c$67e92ca0$37bb85e0$@net> CSPA Joins Karuk Tribe in Lawsuit Against Suction Dredge Mining by Dan Bacher The California Sportfishing Protection Alliance (CSPA) has joined in a lawsuit by the Karuk Tribe of the Klamath River and a coalition of environmental and fishing groups against the California Department of Fish and Game's use of State General Fund money to support suction dredge mining. The suit is asking for an injunction until California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) review is completed and other mitigations take place. "An injunction halting mining at this time of the year would be fantastic," said Jerry Neuburger, CSPA webmaster. "Most trout spawn in the spring. A halt to suction dredge mining would mean that redds will not be buried with layers of silt, killing the eggs. The court needs to act and act NOW!" CSPA is a longstanding nonprofit organization working for the conservation of California's fisheries and their aquatic habitat. Other organizations filing the second amended complaint against the DFG include the Center for Biological Diversity, Friends of the River, Klamath Riverkeeper, Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations and Institute for Fisheries Resources. "Suction dredge mining has seriously degraded habitat and fisheries where it is conducted," said Neuburger. "Although DFG is on record as acknowledging that suction dredge mining harms fish, it does not have valid regulations controlling the activity. Despite the lack of necessary regulations, DFG continues to issue approximately 3,000 permits each year." The lawsuit takes place as California fisheries are in their greatest crisis ever. Salmon fishing in ocean waters off California and Oregon is expected to be closed again this year, due to the collapse of Central Valley chinook salmon populations, while coho salmon populations in coastal streams have reached record lows. Meanwhile, delta smelt, longfin smelt, juvenile striped bass, threadfin shad and other California Delta fish population have also reached record low population levels, due to massive increases in water exports, increasing levels of toxic chemicals in Central Valley rivers, and invasive species. A court order in 2006 required the DFG to conduct a CEQA review of its regulations and to mitigate harms through formal rulemaking. This process was supposed to have been completed by June 2008, but the DFG has not yet begun the CEQA process and claims they lack the money to bring the program into compliance. However, over the last two years, the Department has continued to spend state General Funds to operate the program, which has already been found to be out of compliance with the law. "CSPA and the other plaintiffs are seeking an injunction to prevent DFG from continuing to use General Funds to operate the suction dredge mining program until the Court's 2006 order is satisfied, the required environmental reviews are completed, the harms are mitigated through a formal rulemaking process and the new regulations are in place," said Neuburger. The dredgers pay $150,000 into the Fish and Game Preservation Fund. "The DFG claims they don't know exactly how much is spent administering the dredge program, including processing and issuing permits and enforcement activities related to dredging, but we assert that it's much more than $150,000 which would barely pay salary and benefits of one staff equivalent," said Craig Tucker, spokesman for the Karuk Tribe. "We expect a more detailed accounting to be revealed in the course of the lawsuit." "The fact that they are not publishing a detailed accounting of how the program is run suggests to us that they don't want anyone to know exactly how much is being spent," emphasized Tucker. Tucker said the real issue is that DFG is failing to comply with its own regulations. Fish and Game Code 5653 allows the DFG to grant permits for the use of any vacuum or suction dredge equipment only if their operation "will not be deleterious to fish." The plaintiffs have testimony from DFG biologists as well as Dr. Peter Moyle, one of the nation's prominent fishery scientists, stating under oath that dredging is deleterious to fish. "Suction dredging represents a chronic unnatural disturbance of natural habitats that are already likely to be stressed by other factors and can therefore have a negative impact on fishes that use the reach being dredged," said Moyle. "All anadromous fishes in the Klamath basin should be considered to be in decline and ultimately threatened with extirpation. Section dredging through a combination of disturbance of resident fish, alteration of substrates, and indirect effects on heavy human use of small areas, especially thermal refugia (side creeks), will further contribute to the decline of the fishes." The miners also fail to comply with section 404 of the federal Clean Water Act that compels them to have a discharge permit to operate. "There are no suction dredgers with a 404 permit in CA, since the State Water Resources Control Board has never established a permit process," added Tucker. Miners Attack Traditional Karuk Fishery Meanwhile, the New 49'ers Prospecting Club and a coalition of mining and "wise use" groups from northern California, Oregon and Washington have submitted a petition to the DFG demanding that they ban the Karuk Tribe from dip netting salmon below Ishi Pish Falls on the Klamath River, as they have done for thousands of years. The petition claims the tribe is engaged in the "widespread and wanton destruction" of the coho salmon and other fish in the Klamath River. "At a time when the federal government is poised to ban ocean salmon fishing for the second year in a row, it makes no sense for the State to turn a blind eye to the wholesale slaughter of salmon by the Tribe," claimed Mike Higbee of Grants Pass, Oregon. However, Leaf Hillman, Vice-chair of the Karuk Tribe, said these accusations are "ridiculous." "Our fishery is gear limited," said Hillman. "This means that because we use traditional dip nets, we can only catch a very small percentage of fish that are coming up the falls. This is by design." To the tribe, catching the salmon is not just a means of feeding themselves, but vital to the preservation of their religion and culture. "The creator taught us to use dip nets in order to not over harvest fish," said Hillman. "We would not have survived here for thousands of years had we abused this privilege granted to us by the Creator." Hillman explained that although many Tribes in the Pacific Northwest use gill nets that are strung across the river in subsistence and commercial fisheries, the Karuk do not. Karuk fishermen stand on rocks and dip large nets on poles into the river to catch fish as generations before them have done. "Our fishery is non-lethal," said Hillman. "This allows us to selectively harvest fish. In other words, we release ESA listed Coho and smaller chinook back into the river unharmed and we eat the rest. It also provides opportunities to tag fish for purposes of conducting scientific studies." Hilllman believes that the New 49'ers petition to Fish and Game "comes in retribution" to the Tribe's effort to restrict suction dredge mining in areas that serve as critical habitat for ESA listed coho salmon, Pacific lamprey, green sturgeon and other fish listed as 'species of special concern' under the Endangered Species Act. For more information on the lawsuit and suction dredge mining, go to http://www.karuk.us and http://www.calsport.org. The Fish and Game Code on Suction Dredge Mining: Section 5653.9. "Before any person uses any vacuum or suction dredge equipment in any river, stream, or lake of this state, that person shall submit an application for a permit for a vacuum or suction dredge to the department, specifying the type and size of equipment to be used and other information as the department may require. (b) Under the regulations adopted pursuant to Section 5653.9, the department shall designate waters or areas wherein vacuum or suction dredges may be used pursuant to a permit, waters or areas closed to those dredges, the maximum size of those dredges that may be used, and the time of year when those dredges may be used. If the department determines, pursuant to the regulations adopted pursuant to Section 5653.9, that the operation will not be deleterious to fish, it shall issue a permit to the applicant. If any person operates any equipment other than that authorized by the permit or conducts the operation in any waters or area or at any time that is not authorized by the permit, or if any person conducts the operation without securing the permit, that person is guilty of a misdemeanor." Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Tue Mar 24 09:17:15 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Tue, 24 Mar 2009 09:17:15 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Nominee Message-ID: <000f01c9ac9b$ffb6fae0$ff24f0a0$@net> Date: March 18, 2009 Contact: Joan Moody (202) 208-6416 Secretary Salazar Commends President Obama's Intention to Nominate Michael L. Connor to Lead the Bureau of Reclamation WASHINGTON, D.C.-Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar today commended President Obama's announcement that he intends to nominate Michael L. Connor as Commissioner of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. Connor has more than 15 years of experience in the public sector, including having served as Counsel to the U.S. Senate and Natural Resources Committee since May 2001. "With growing water challenges facing communities across the country, Mike Connor's deep background in water, Indian rights and energy issues will help us find common sense solutions," said Secretary Salazar. "Mike has a proven track record of building consensus with a wide range of stakeholders and is the right pick for Commissioner. I look forward to working with him to ensure that we are wisely managing our nation's precious water resources." At the Senate Energy and Natural Resources committee, Connor has managed legislation for both the Bureau of Reclamation and the U.S. Geological Survey, developed water resources legislation and handled Native American issues that are within the Energy Committee's jurisdiction. From 1993 to 2001, Connor served in the Department of the Interior, including as deputy director and then director of the Secretary's Indian Water Rights Office from 1998 to 2001. In this capacity, Connor represented the Secretary of the Interior in negotiations with Indian tribes, state representatives, and private water users to secure water rights settlements consistent with the federal trust responsibility to tribes. Before joining the Secretary's Office, he was employed with the Interior Solicitor's Office in Washington, DC and in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He began his Interior career in the Solicitor's Honors Program in 1993. Connor received his J.D. from the University of Colorado School of Law, and is admitted to the bars of Colorado and New Mexico. He previously received a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from New Mexico State University and worked for General Electric. The agency he will lead if confirmed by the Senate-the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation-is a contemporary water management agency and the largest wholesale provider of water in the country. It brings water to more than 31 million people, and provides one out of five Western farmers with irrigation water for farmland that produces much of the nation's produce. Reclamation is also the second largest producer of hydroelectric power in the western United States with 58 power plants. --www.doi.gov-- Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image003.png Type: image/png Size: 57382 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Tue Mar 24 16:10:23 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Tue, 24 Mar 2009 16:10:23 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] WSJ 3 24 09 California Gold Message-ID: <00b201c9acd5$b64c1220$22e43660$@net> Drought Turns Water Into a Cash Crop Wall Street Journal - 3/24/09 By Peter Sanders As Don Bransford prepares for his spring planting season, he is debating which is worth more: the rice he grows on his 700-acre farm north of Sacramento, or the water he uses to cultivate it. After three years of drought in California, water is now a potential cash crop. Last fall, the state activated its Drought Water Bank program for the first time since 1994. Under the program, farmers can choose to sell some of the water they would usually use to grow their crops to parched cities, counties and agriculture districts. Water -- or the lack of it -- has been costing the state dearly. According to Richard Howitt, a professor at the University of California, Davis, the drought and resulting water restrictions could cost as much as $1.4 billion in lost income and about 53,000 lost jobs, mostly in the agriculture sector. In the water market, demand is already outstripping supply. Water agencies, worried about being left high and dry in the hot summer months, are expected to request at least twice the amount of water as the bank will have to sell. "The state is offering about $275 per acre-foot of water, which is a reasonable deal," said Mr. Bransford, who has been growing rice for 29 years. An acre-foot, equal to slightly less than 326,000 gallons, is roughly the amount two suburban households consume in a year. He is considering taking 100 acres out of cultivation and selling the water he would have used to irrigate it to the state water bank. It is a move that could bring him roughly $90,000. As water has grown scarce, cities have tried to spur conservation by increasing the price to consumers. Last Tuesday, the Los Angeles water utility agreed to raise rates on consumers who fail to reduce their water usage by 15%. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa suggested earlier this year that Angelenos begin using lawn sprinklers only twice a week. For farmers such as Mr. Bransford, figuring how much to plant and how much water to sell is a tricky calculation. Last year, with the price of medium-grain rice at record highs, farmers were eager to grow as much as they could. Prices haven't been set this year, but will likely remain high. In addition, the water bank is still wending its way through a complicated approval process from state and federal agencies. The bank can't formally open for business until those kinks get worked out. If the approvals don't happen soon, farmers like Mr. Bransford will have no choice but to plant their crops instead of selling their water. "We're going to make it happen," said a federal official involved in the process, while declining to specify when. Though a series of powerful storms in the past few months have brought rain and snow, the statewide snow pack is at 88% of normal and many major state reservoirs remain only about half full. Last month, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declared a statewide drought emergency. "The situation is a lot more favorable now than it was a few weeks ago, but we don't know what the rest of the spring is going to look like," said Debra Man, assistant general manager and chief operating officer of the Metropolitan Water District, which provides water to 26 Southern California cities, including Los Angeles. Her agency has been authorized to purchase up to 300,000 acre-feet of water from the state. That was intended as a safeguard so her region would have "water in the bank," she said. Ms. Man said the drought has forced her agency to secure water earlier than usual, reconfigure various water lines and spread the word about conservation. "Last year we took steps to have a very aggressive outreach plan to educate consumers to get ready, because things are getting serious." Drawing from the water bank, however, is no mean feat. Moving water from the verdant northern part of the state to the dry south requires navigating myriad state, federal and local regulations, environmental concerns and the availability of pumping stations. "The state has been working with exporters since last October trying to develop an agreement on how to get this done, but we're still mired in a regulatory morass," said Mr. Bransford, the rice farmer. State officials said the water bank is a crucial tool to ensure adequate supplies into the dry summer and fall months. "We have to make sure we have the proper coordination for water and health and safety needs, and we want to ensure that communities with those critical needs will have access to water," said Lester Snow, director of the state's Department of Water Resources. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Wed Mar 25 16:49:38 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Wed, 25 Mar 2009 16:49:38 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Stockton Record 3 25 09 Message-ID: <004401c9ada4$5cc3fe00$164bfa00$@net> Crowd unleashes flood of comments at peripheral canal meeting Stockton Record - 3/25/09 By Alex Breitler STOCKTON - Same issue, same building, different decade. About 120 people gathered Tuesday night at the Stockton Memorial Civic Auditorium for a chance to vent to the powers that be over plans to build a peripheral canal. Fifteen years ago, some of the same folks met in the same auditorium as part of the CALFED process, which was supposed to fix the ailing Delta but today is viewed by many as a failure. On Tuesday, state officials displayed new maps showing a proposed canal taking water from the Sacramento River and shipping it down the east side of the Delta, tunneling under the San Joaquin River at Rindge Tract, west of Stockton, on its way to the massive pumps near Tracy, and from there to the Bay Area and Southern California. "Didn't most of that land use to be desert anyway?" asked 25-year-old Blake Joaquin, a wakeboarder. "Why should we give them our water? I don't understand." The meeting was one in a series hosted by state officials and water users as part of the Bay-Delta Conservation Plan, which would basically give water users continued authority to divert water from the Delta. The plan includes restoring habitat and funneling water around, rather than through, the heart of the estuary. "It's an effort that impacts all of us, you in particular," California Secretary of Resources Mike Chrisman told the largely unhappy audience before fielding questions and pointed comments. Dante Nomellini Jr., representing Delta farmers, asked state Department of Water Resources Deputy Director Jerry Johns what assurance he would give that only surplus water would be diverted into the canal, even during a drought. "We are a system of laws," Johns said, at which the crowd laughed. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Wed Mar 25 19:04:41 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Wed, 25 Mar 2009 19:04:41 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Eureka Times Standard 3 25 09 Message-ID: <006301c9adb7$39d5c0a0$ad8141e0$@net> What's ailing the Klamath's salmon? John Driscoll/The Times-Standard Posted: 03/25/2009 01:24:16 AM PDT FORTUNA -- Researchers struggling to understand an epidemic of parasites infecting the Klamath River's salmon raised questions and offered some answers at a gathering of biologists Tuesday. Among the findings were that significantly more young salmon died faster from the parasite called Ceratomyxa shasta during tests in the river's disease hot spots in 2008 than the year before. Rich Holt with Oregon State University told a conference that chinook and coho salmon exposed to the parasite in the most infested areas below Iron Gate Dam to the Scott River, then taken to a lab, died faster than even rainbow trout with no immunity. A higher proportion of salmon died, too, nearly twice that of 2007, Holt said. C. shasta targets the intestines of salmon and trout. Adult fish release the parasite's spores when they die, and the spores then move into an interim host, a tiny polychaete worm. The worm then releases spores that are taken in by young salmon, which often die from the parasite. The worm is especially prevalent just below Iron Gate Dam, and the percentage of polychaete worms infected by C. shasta are also highest in the reach around Beaver Creek and the Seiad Valley. Exactly why the stretch is so rife with the parasite isn't known, said OSU researcher Jerri Bartholomew, but it's possible that the large number of adult fish that spawn just below the dam spread huge amounts of spores. "We have a situation whether the host-parasite balance is out of synch," Bartholomew said. The Klamath's salmon fishery has struggled in recent years, but last year saw a strong run of chinook and this year's expected run is expected to be a boom. C. shasta exists in a number of large western rivers, but in few smaller coastal streams, but is particularly pervasive in the Klamath. In many cases, the work done in recent years has posed more questions than it has answered. California-Nevada Fish Health Center researcher Scott Foott and others in 2007 released 121 young chinook salmon implanted with radio tags into the river below Iron Gate Dam. The salmon moved quickly downriver, covering the 196 miles from the dam to Blake's Riffle near the mouth of the Klamath in just 10 days. Only 7.4 percent survived the trip. Considering another study by colleague Kimberly True that found exposure of fish to C. shasta at the hot spot could be expected to kill them within about 20 days, Foott's work suggested that the tagged fish were killed by something else. But there are a number of complicating factors. In order to be able to perform the tag surgery on the salmon, they had to be grown to a size larger than thousands of other hatchery fish released around the same time. That may have given them a better survival rate, especially when considering their potential as food for predators like trout. It also remains to be seen whether fish that travel quickly through an infested area may avoid getting seriously ill, compared to those that linger. Rapid migration, lower polychaete worm density and lower water temperatures, True found, could improve survival. Much more information -- even simple fisheries information -- is needed on the river, Foott said. "There's so little basic fisheries survival data in the basin," Foott said. A recent federal spending bill earmarked some $640,000 for the National Marine Fisheries Service to study fish diseases in the Klamath, which should give that effort a boost. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Thu Mar 26 09:09:23 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Thu, 26 Mar 2009 09:09:23 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] SF Chronicle 3 26 09 Message-ID: <000601c9ae2d$3beae160$b3c0a420$@net> Plan to restore San Joaquin River approved Kelly Zito, Chronicle Staff Writer Thursday, March 26, 2009 In one of the boldest river restorations in the Western United States, a 63-mile stretch of the San Joaquin River will be transformed from a dusty ditch into a fish-friendly waterway under legislation approved Wednesday that ends a decades-long dispute between farmers and environmentalists. Images http://imgs.sfgate.com/c/pictures/2009/03/25/ba-wilderness032_SFCG1238037671 _part1.jpg http://imgs.sfgate.com/graphics/utils/plus-green.gifView Larger Image * Obama turns to Web to take questions from public 03.26.09 The $400 million project, approved by Congress as part of a landmark wilderness bill, will increase the amount of water released from the Friant Dam near Fresno into the San Joaquin River. The flows are intended to resurrect the river's salmon fishery, decimated in the years following the dam's construction in 1942. The 15,000 farms in the region will receive between 15 and 19 percent less water from the reserves stored behind the dam. Funds from the measure will help water districts offset that loss with new storage facilities and repairs to existing canals. President Obama is expected to sign the legislation, sponsored by California Democratic Sens. Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein. It seals a settlement reached in 2006 that followed two decades of battles between environmentalists and fishing groups - who filed a lawsuit in 1988 - and agricultural interests. Both sides praised the bill, which spells out funding for the program and authorizes a timetable for water releases beginning this fall. "After recent dry years and a collapsing salmon fishery, passage of this bill is good news for fisherman, farmers, and the more than 22 million Californians who rely on the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta for their water supply," said Monty Schmitt, senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, one of the plaintiffs in the 1980s suit. The San Joaquin River, California's second-longest behind the Sacramento River, once maintained plentiful runs of spring and fall salmon and fed pristine freshwater into the delta. Old-timers remember when the river surged with so many salmon they were scooped up and used as hog feed. Once the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation built the 319-foot-tall Friant Dam, however, the river became a seasonal dribble. Farms and communities - including the city of Fresno - grew up across 1 million acres of fertile land, employing thousands of people and producing millions of dollars worth of produce. Farmers argued that re-establishing the salmon populations would destroy their livelihood. But when it became clear that a federal judge overseeing the lawsuit could enact severe water cutbacks, the farmers came to the table. "Having a federal court serve as a water master on our river system was disconcerting to our folks," said Ron Jacobsma, general manager of the Friant Water Users Authority, which serves the 15,000 farms in the region. "The water supply certainty, money certainty and opportunity to get additional water drove our folks to stay on board with the settlement." Of the $400 million to be doled out over the next decade, about $200 million will come from California, with the rest coming from the federal government and special fees paid by the area's water districts. The funds will pay for environmental studies on increasing river flows (large-scale releases are to begin in 2014), bolstering levees along the river, fixing damaged canals and recharging underground aquifers. The plans target a section of San Joaquin River between Friant Dam and where the Merced River merges with it. Peter Moyle, a nationally known UC Davis professor of conservation biology, acknowledged the challenges in replenishing a river that some have compared to an agricultural drainage ditch. But he is optimistic. "I really think this can be done," said Moyle, who has worked in the San Joaquin region on fish restoration since 1969. "For the past few years, a lot of work by many people has been put into figuring out how to restore flows and fish to the river. Now it looks like it will actually happen. Amazing. "Think of it: A 150-mile-long river that has been dry or heavily polluted for much of its length may actually support salmon runs again," he added. Moyle said the river bed just below the dam - where the last chinook salmon in the river spawned - is an ideal spot for the salmon's return because it has deep, cold gravel pools where the fish need to rest in between May and September before they spawn. In the late 1940s, the last chinook spawned there after being trucked by the hundreds up the river. Their progeny died that year, Moyle said, because the Bureau of Reclamation refused a request by the state Department of Fish and Game to release more water so the fish could return to the ocean. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2009/03/26/MNTD16N3QD.DT L Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 12474 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image002.gif Type: image/gif Size: 54 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Fri Mar 27 12:56:08 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Fri, 27 Mar 2009 12:56:08 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Capitol Press 3 27 09 Message-ID: <003201c9af16$126b4110$3741c330$@net> Conditions improve, but state reservoirs still below average Capital Press - 3/27/09 By Tim Hearden California farmers and ranchers stand a better chance of getting at least some federal water than they did a month ago. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation issued its updated allocation forecast March 20, predicting that as much as 15 percent of average agricultural deliveries may be available for Central Valley Project contractors. Pete Lucero, the bureau's spokesman in Sacramento, said the allocations could improve again when the agency issues its next updated allocation forecast on or about April 20. "This one just takes into account the March 1 snow surveys and runoff data. It doesn't take into account this month so far," Lucero said. "We had pretty significant rainfall early in the month and that data wasn't used." But as they've been warning all winter, state water officials insist there's still a long way to go before water levels are anything like normal. If the state Department of Water Resources' prediction of 65 percent of normal runoff for the year comes true, the three-year period ending this year would still be among the driest 8 percent on record, said Steve Nemeth, a civil engineer and water supply forecaster for the agency. Unfortunately, help in the form of abundant rainstorms doesn't appear to be on the horizon. California has returned to a drier-than-normal weather pattern, and only one model is predicting significant rainfall next week, National Weather Service meteorologist Cindy Palmer said. Long-term forecasts suggest both above-average temperatures and a pattern of periodic atmospheric troughs that produce rainfall, Palmer said. "I'm not ready to say the rainy season's over," she said. "It's still only April, but we are looking at a dry forecast for the next week." In its latest update of allocations for CVP contractors, the Bureau of Reclamation predicted March 20 that 5 percent to 15 percent of normal water deliveries would be available for agriculture north of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. In the San Joaquin Valley, a zero-water scenario is still possible unless runoff levels reach 61 percent of average, at which point all Central Valley Project contractors would get 15 percent of what they would normally expect for agriculture. North of the Delta, urban areas would get 55 percent of their water under the dry forecast or 65 percent if the median runoff amount is reached - an achievement that the Bureau predicts has a 50 percent chance of coming true. South of the delta, residential areas would received 50 percent to 65 percent of their water. Wildlife reserves and water rights holders everywhere would receive between 75 percent and 100 percent of their normal allocations, depending on the amount of runoff that accumulates this spring. The bureau will continue to issue monthly updates through May or later, depending on how much new information on runoff it receives from the state, Lucero said. The March 20 update followed the state Department of Water Resources' announcement that it will increase water from state reservoirs from 15 percent of what was requested to 20 percent. Despite recent rains, state officials have been warning that the state remains in a dangerous drought. Much of California received above-average rainfall and copious amounts of mountain snow in February and early March, increasing the Sierra Nevada snowpack to about 90 percent of normal. But state reservoirs are still well below average and precipitation totals in March have fallen below normal in many areas. As of Tuesday, March 24, Redding's 1.15 inches of rainfall for the month was well below the normal amount of 4.05 inches, while Fresno's 0.24 inches lag well below the 1.75 inches the city usually records by this time of the month. Meanwhile, Shasta Lake was at 63 percent of its capacity, while Lake Oroville was at 53 percent and Millerton Lake was at 71 percent as of midnight Monday, March 23, according to the state Department of Water Resources California Data Exchange Center. Court-ordered cutbacks in diversions of water from the delta already had farmers in the San Joaquin Valley scrambling for alternative water sources while planning for a dry year. The Bureau of Reclamation made farmers' prospects even bleaker on Feb. 20, when it announced there would likely be no agricultural water available for Central Valley Project contractors. The best the bureau could hope for at the time was to deliver 10 percent of average allocations to farmers. The state's latest forecast comes after the State Department of Water Resources on March 10 predicted that California would record 65 percent of normal runoff for the current water year and 75 percent of average runoff from April through July. That's 10 percent more water than the state had foreseen when looking at Feb. 1 runoff totals, which Reclamation used as the basis for its zero-water scenario. State officials said they still expected the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers to finish the season with flow levels at critical - the driest of six designations assigned by the state. Though February precipitation was well above average statewide, runoff was only 65 percent of average for the month, according to the Department of Water Resources' report. Even a little water is better than none, said Ivar Amen, a Cottonwood hay and livestock grower and president of the Shasta County Farm Bureau. "It will (make a difference) for some guys," Amen said. "Any water can make a difference. ... I just hope the rest of the state can get more than 10 percent." Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Fri Mar 27 16:35:28 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Fri, 27 Mar 2009 16:35:28 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Salmon Closures Message-ID: <006101c9af34$b6df7db0$249e7910$@net> Salmon Fishing Ban to Continue Off California, Oregon by Dan Bacher Commercial and recreational salmon fishermen face another year of fishing closures in ocean waters off California and most of Oregon, due to the collapse of the Central Valley Fall Chinook salmon population. The Pacific Fishery Management Council (PFMC), a federal body that sets fishing regulations for ocean fisheries, on March 12 adopted three public review options for the 2009 salmon season off the West Coast. The Council will consult with scientists, hear public comment, and revise preliminary decisions until it chooses a final option at its meeting during the week of April 5 in Millbrae, California. While fisheries in the north improved as Chinook and coho stocks rebounded, fisheries in the south will be closed or very limited because of the dramatic decline of Sacramento River Chinooks. "California ocean sport fishing options range from entirely closed to 10 open days in August and September in the Eureka/Crescent City area," according to Dr. Donald McIsaac, executive director of the PMFC. "Options for Oregon ocean Chinook fishing in the Brookings area range from closed to open for 10 days in August and September, while Season options for the Tillamook, Newport, and Coos Bay areas range from closed to open in September. The 10 open day option does not require an "emergency rule" from the U.S. Commerce Department and there is a "real good chance" it will be approved, said Jim Martin, West Coast Director of the Recreational Fishing Alliance. This very limited option would target only Klamath River fall Chinook salmon. Oregon ocean recreational options also include mark-selective coho fishing seasons starting in June or July and running into September. One of those options includes a three fish daily bag limit to take advantage of a large abundance of hatchery coho. Commercial ocean salmon fishing will be closed in California in 2009, according to McIsaac. Oregon commercial season options in the Brookings area range from closed to a season with a 1,000 Chinook quota in September. Season options in the Tillamook, Newport, and Coos Bay area range from closed to open for Chinook and coho in September, with quotas on coho catch. In 2008, an unprecedented low return of 66,264 adult Fall Chinooks on the Sacramento River led to the closure of both recreational and salmon fishing off the California and Oregon coast for the first time in 150 years. While this year's returns are better than last year's, the season options are still limited. Even without any fishing, only 122,196 fish are expected to return to the Sacramento River this year. The minimum conservation goal for the once robust run is 122,000-180,000 spawning adult salmon. The Sacramento River Fall Chinook is the driver of West Coast salmon fisheries. Recreational and commercial fishermen support the ocean salmon closure this year to protect the imperiled population of fall Chinooks, although they are quick to point out that fishing didn't cause the unprecedented decline. "I would be surprised that anybody who has looked at the Sacramento River returns believes that a season could be sustained," said Dick Pool, administrator of water4fish.org. "We're still crossing our figures on the possibility of having a 2010 season because of the massive trucking program and acclimation of over 23 million hatchery salmon in pens in San Pablo Bay that took place last year. However, without solving the problems that salmon encounter on the Delta and Central Valley rivers, we won't be able to rebuild the natural stocks." Although last year officials with the Bush and Schwarzenegger administrations claimed that "ocean conditions" spurred the collapse, a coalition of recreational, commercial fishermen, Indian Tribes, conservationists and independent scientists pointed to increased water exports from the California Delta, declining water quality and other freshwater habitat problems as the key factors in the collapse. A report released by the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) on March 18 said the salmon collapse is the result of a combination of both poor ocean and river conditions. To read the report, "What caused the Sacramento River fall Chinook stock collapse?" go to: http://swr.nmfs.noaa.gov/media/SalmonDeclineReport.pdf The collapse of salmon fisheries has led to economic devastation to coastal and inland communities dependent upon recreational and commercial salmon fishing. Fish advocates charge that fishing jobs have been sacrificed to provide massive amounts of water to subsidized, junior water rights holders in the Westlands Water District and Kern County that irrigate toxic, drainage-impaired land. "The collapse of salmonid fisheries has led to a corresponding depression in the recreational fishing industry," said California Sportfishing Protection Alliance (CSPA) Executive Director Bill Jennings. "The number of anglers declined from 2.7 million in 1996 to 1.7 million in 2006." The economic consequences of last year's closure of the salmon fishing season amounted to $255 million, along with the loss of 2,263 jobs. "It makes no sense to sacrifice California's historic fishing industry in order to supply subsidized water to grow subsidized non-food crops on impaired desert lands that by design discharge toxic wastes back to Central Valley waterways," emphasized Jennings. "While farmers now face a drought brought on by Mother Nature, fishermen are facing a disaster brought on by water agency greed." California's freshwater recreational fishery generates $1.5 billion in retail sales, $2.5 billion in trip related expenses and almost 27,000 jobs, according to economic data from the American Sportfishing Association. The marine recreational fishery generates $3.7 billion in retail sales, $1.9 billion in value-added impacts and almost 23,000 jobs. The results of a rewritten "biological opinion" by the National Marine Fisheries Services agree largely with Jennings, Pool and other fishery advocates. The court-mandated report concludes that increases in freshwater exports out of the California Delta amd the operation of Shasta Dam and other reservoirs have led to the collapse of Central Valley spring run and winter run salmon, Central Valley steelhead, green sturgeon and the southern resident orca population. The killer whales, now estimated to number less than 90 individuals, feed heavily upon Sacramento Chinooks and other runs of salmon. Scientists and representatives of recreational angling, commercial fishing, tribal and environmental groups spoke about the urgent need to restore salmon fisheries before the California State Assembly's Committee on Water, Parks & Wildlife, convened by Assemblyman Jared Huffman, at an informational hearing on the salmon crisis Tuesday, March 10 at the State Capitol. "The fish don't lie," said Peter Moyle, PhD, author of a January 2008 report commissioned by California Trout on the status of California's native salmon, steelhead and trout populations. "The story they tell is that California's environment is unraveling. Their demise is symptomatic of a much larger water crisis that, unless addressed, will severely impact every Californian." They urged immediate and long term actions to deal with degraded water quality, dysfunctional management of the Delta, insufficient instream flow, and degraded inland habitat. "There are a myriad of problems facing salmon, but what has to be done before anything else, and above all else - is restoring water flows in the Delta and our coastal streams," said Zeke Grader of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations (PCFFA), which represents commercial fishing men and women. "It's critical the state not get lost in the weeds trying to restore salmon; water flow and water quality are at the foundation of rebuilding our salmon fishery. Fish gotta swim." In addition to dramatic improvements in Delta flows, water quality and habitat, environmental and fishing groups believe that improvements in California's water management and aggressive development of locally based water supplies are an important way to curb pressure on our imperiled salmon. "We can save our California salmon by being more reasonable and innovative with our water use," said Mindy McIntyre of the Planning and Conservation League. "Certainly salmon are more integrally a part of California than our lawns, and we shouldn't be sacrificing California's salmon legacy when we can be smarter about water use." She said the salmon decline is a call to action to "quickly develop recycled water, increase water use efficiency and clean up streams and waterways." On a more positive note, the PFMC forecasts that the Klamath River Fall Chinook run will meet the minimum natural spawning goal of 35,000 and the 2009 management objective of 40,700. This will mean good recreational and fishing opportunities for salmon on the Klamath and Trinity rivers again this season. Also, Oregon coastal coho had much better returns in 2008 than forecast, with a total of 165,700 natural spawners ascending the streams, according to PFMC data. This was the best return in four years and the fifth best since at least 1970. Public hearings to receive input on the options (as dismal as they are) are scheduled for March 30 in Westport, Washington and Coos Bay, Oregon; and for March 31 in Eureka, California. At its April 5-9 meeting in Millbrae, the Council will narrow these options to a single season recommendation to be forwarded to the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) for their final approval before May 1. All Council meetings are open to the public. For more information, go to: http://www.pcouncil.org Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From trinityjosh at gmail.com Sat Mar 28 23:26:30 2009 From: trinityjosh at gmail.com (Joshua Allen) Date: Sat, 28 Mar 2009 23:26:30 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] MARINE MAMMALS WILL DIE IN NAVY WARFARE TESTING PROGRAM ON NORTHCOAST Message-ID: *MARINE MAMMALS WILL DIE IN NAVY WARFARE TESTING PROGRAM http://newswithviews.com/Peterson/rosalind115.htm * By Rosalind Peterson March 28, 2009 NewsWithViews.com The United States Navy requests permissions from the United States Department of Commerce (NOAA), to kill thirty two species of marine mammalsover five years in their Pacific Ocean Warfare testing program. The Navy and the U.S. Department of Defense have decided that their Northwest Training Range Complex, in the State of Washington, should be expanded, and have devised a draft Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), dated December 2008, for public review and comment. The expansion of their area of operation will include the State of Washington, the State of Oregon, part of the state of Idaho, and Northern California. The final date for public comment is April 13, 2009. These designated areas will also include large areas of the Pacific Ocean from California to the State of Washington and areas along the border between the United States and Canada. (The extent map designating this program area also extends throughout Northern California to the San Francisco Bay Area under an ?Extent Map Warning Area? designation.) Once implemented there is no date specified in E.I.S. for this Navy Warfare Testing Program to end although various documents show that this is a five-year Navy Warfare Testing program. The U.S. Commander of the Pacific Fleet has given American citizens and residents of these states only a very short time to comment on their draft EIS: Published on December 30, 2008, with the final public comment ?stay of execution? deadline moved to April 13, 2009. U.S. citizens in four states demanded this extension and more public hearings and are opposing this catastrophic program. (This document is approximately 1,000+/- pages in length with attachments.) The United States Navy has also published an application, as an addendum to their program, in the U.S. Federal Register, dated March 11, 2009. This application from the Navy ??requests authorization to take individuals of 32 species of marine mammalsduring upcoming Navy Warfare testing and training to be conducted in the NWTR areas (off the Pacific coasts of Washington, Oregon, and northern California) over the course of 5 years?? Final public comment date is April 10, 2009. The Navy Warfare Testing Program will ??utilize mid- and high frequency active sonar sources and explosive detonations. These sonar and explosive sources will be utilized during Antisubmarine Warfare (ASW) Tracking Exercises, Mine Avoidance Training, Extended Echo Ranging and Improved Extended Echo Ranging (EER/IEER) events, Missile Exercises, Gunnery Exercises, Bombing Exercises, Sinking Exercises, and Mine Warfare Training?? According to Navy Public Relations Officer Sheila Murray the United States Navy is already conducting warfare testing programs throughout the United States. During the last two years, it is alleged that the Navy has issued nearly identical environmental impact statements for Navy Warfare Training Range Complexes in the following areas: the Mariana Islands, the Hawaiian Islands, Jacksonville Florida, Cherry Point, North Carolina, the Gulf of Alaska and Southern California. It is unknown, at this time, how many marine mammals have been killed in these programs since their inception. The Pacific and Atlantic Ocean belong to all the people of the world not just the United States. This ?taking? of marine mammals negatively impacts the entire ecology of our oceans and the life in them which feeds large numbers of people and other species around the world. Now the United States government has decided that California, Oregon, Washington, and Idaho, and the Pacific Ocean marine life in those areas, are expendable in order to test more war weapons of mass destruction. It should be noted that the list of toxic chemicals is a long one as noted in the Navy E.I.S. Depleted uranium, red and white phosphorus, and a whole host of chemicals known to be toxic not only to man, but to marine life, are being served up on the ?Navy Warfare Chemical Menu? that will contaminate our air, water, and soil. White Phosphorus is just one of the chemicals on Navy Toxic Menu: Berkowitz et.al (1981), in assessing the potential hazards associated with the use of phosphorus smoke munitions, reported that White Phosphorus residues in aquatic systems can be extremely toxic. Berkowitz stated that the deposition of washout of?White Phosphorus, especially in water bodies may create exposure risks to resident finfish, invertebrates and waterfowl, even if resultant White Phosphorus concentrations are in the low ppb range. 1996) Water Quality Criteria for White Phosphorus? Authors? Kowetha A. Davidson; Patricia S. Hovatter, Catherine F. Sigmon, Oak Ridge National Lab TN: Abstract: Data obtained from a review of the literature concerning the environmental fate and aquatic and mammalian toxicity of *white phosphorus* are presented?Laboratory and field studies indicate that white phosphorus is quite toxic to aquatic organisms, with fish being the most sensitive?bioaccumulation is rapid and extensive, with the greatest uptake in the liver and muscle of fish and the hepatopancreas of lobster?other toxic effects to aquatic organism include cardiovascular and histological changes. (1987) (White Phosphorus is an airborne contaminant ? used in fog oil and smoke obscurants.) Mammalian Toxicology and Toxicity to Aquatic Organism of White Phosphorus and ?Phossy Water? by Authors Dickinson Burrows; Jack C. Dacre: AWARE INC Nashville TN ? Abstract: ??*white phosphorus* is highly toxic to both experimental animals and man?white phosphorus is also highly toxic to aquatic animals?? Concerned citizens in Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and California, along with citizens across the United States are protesting this action by the United States government and the United States Navy. Almost all of our elected representatives are silent when it comes to opposing this disastrous program. The major news media has elected not to cover this story leaving coverage to a few small newspapers located in remote areas. A Navy public hearing will be held in Mendocino County, California on Tuesday, March 31, 2009. We hope that everyone will join us in demanding that the current ongoing Navy weapons program in Oregon is suspended permanently and that the new proposed Navy Warfare Testing Program expansion is stopped. Public protests should be filed with your elected representatives, the President of the United States, and to both the United States Navy and NOAA (United States Department of Commerce). *1,* United States Navy Environment Impact Statement(Download one chapter at a time ? works the best.) *2,* U.S. Navy Public Comment Form Online *3,* Write to: Naval Facilities Engineering Command Northwest, 1101 Tautog Circle, Suite 203 Silverdale, Washington 98315 ATTN: Mrs. Kimberly Kier ? NWTRC EIS Deadline: April 13, 2009 *4,* NOAA Public Comments Address to: Michael Payne, Chief, Permits Conservation and Education Division, Office of Protected Resources National Marine Fisheries Service 1315 East-West Highway, Silver Spring, MD 20910?3225. Deadline: April 10, 2009 *5,* E-Mail Rosalind Peterson (707) 485-7520 For More Information click here: *6,* PETITION TO STOP NAVY PROGRAM : *7,* The Peterson Perspective *8,* Northwest Training Range Complex Draft EIS/OEIS *9, *Northwest Training Range Complex Draft EIS/OEIS The following Notice is in the United States Federal Register / Vol. 74, No. 46 / Wednesday, March 11, 2009 / Notices 10557: ?DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration RIN 0648?XN87 Taking and Importing Marine Mammals; Navy Training and Research, Development, Testing, and Evaluation Activities Conducted within the Northwest Training Range Complex AGENCY: National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Commerce. ACTION: Notice; receipt of application for letter of authorization; request for comments and information. SUMMARY: NMFS has received a request from the U.S. Navy for authorization to take marine mammals incidental to military readiness training activities and research, development, testing and evaluation (RDT&E) to be conducted in the Northwest Training Range Complex (NWTRC) for the period beginning September 2009 and ending September 2014. *1 -* NOAA Definition: ?TAKE? *2 -* Defined under the MMPA as "harass, hunt, capture, kill or collect, or attempt to harass, hunt, capture, kill or collect." *3 -* Defined under the ESA as "to harass, harm, pursue, hunt, shoot, wound, kill, trap, capture, or collect, or to attempt to engage in any such conduct." Pursuant to the implementing regulations of the Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA), NMFS is announcing our receipt of the Navy?s request for the development and implementation of regulations governing the incidental taking of marine mammals and inviting information, suggestions, and comments on the Navy?s application and request. DATES: Comments and information to NMFS must be received no later than April 10, 2009. ADDRESSES: Comments on the application should be addressed to: Michael Payne, Chief, Permits, Conservation and Education Division, Office of Protected Resources, National Marine Fisheries Service 1315 East-West Highway, Silver Spring, MD 20910?3225. The mailbox address for providing email comments is PR1.0648?XN87 at noaa.gov. NMFS is not responsible for e-mail comments sent to 10558 Federal Register / Vol. 74, No. 46 / Wednesday, March 11, 2009 / Notices addresses other than the one provided here. Comments sent via e-mail, including all attachments, must not exceed a 10?megabyte file size. FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT: Jolie Harrison, Office of Protected Resources, NMFS, (301) 713?2289, ext. 166. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: *Availability* A copy of the Navy?s application may be obtained by writing to the address specified above (See ADDRESSES), telephoning the contact listed above (see FOR FURTHER CONTACT INFORMATION ). The Navy?s Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) for NWTRC was made available to the public on December 26, 2008, and may be viewed here. With respect to military readiness activities, the MMPA defines ??harassment?? as: (i) any act that injures or has the significant potential to injure a marine mammal or marine mammal stock in the wild [Level A Harassment]; or (ii) any act that disturbs or is likely to disturb a marine mammal or marine mammal stock in the wild by causing disruption of natural behavioral patterns, including, but not limited to, migration, surfacing, nursing, breeding, feeding, or sheltering, to a point where such behavioral patterns are abandoned or significantly altered [Level B Harassment]. *Summary of Request* In September, 2008, NMFS received an application from the Navy requesting authorization to take individuals of 32 species of marine mammals (4 pinniped and 28 cetacean) incidental to upcoming training and RDT&E activities to be conducted in the NWTRC (off the coasts of Washington, Oregon, and northern California) over the course of 5 years. These training and RDT&E activities are classified as military readiness activities. The Navy states that these training activities may expose some of the marine mammals present in the area to sound from various mid-frequency and high-frequency active tactical sonar sources or to pressure from underwater detonations. The Navy requests authorization to take individuals of 32 species of marine mammals by Level B Harassment. *Specified Activities* In the application submitted to NMFS, the Navy requests authorization to take marine mammals incidental to conducting training events and RDT&E utilizing mid- and high frequency active sonar sources and explosive detonations. These sonar and explosive sources will be utilized during Antisubmarine Warfare (ASW) Tracking Exercises, Mine Avoidance Training, Extended Echo Ranging and Improved Extended Echo Ranging (EER/IEER) events, Missile Exercises, Gunnery Exercises, Bombing Exercises, Sinking Exercises, and Mine Warfare Training. Table 1?1 in the application lists the activity types, the equipment and platforms involved, and the duration and potential locations of the activities. Information Solicited Interested persons may submit information, suggestions, and comments concerning the Navy?s request (see ADDRESSES). All information, suggestions, and comments related to the Navy?s NWTRC request and NMFS? potential development and implementation of regulations governing the incidental taking of marine mammals by the Navy?s NWTRC activities will be considered by NMFS in developing, if appropriate, the most effective regulations governing the issuance of letters of authorization. Dated: March 6, 2009. P. Michael Payne, Chief, Division of Permits, Conservation, and Education, Office of Protected Resources, National Marine Fisheries Service. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Tue Mar 31 16:23:01 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Tue, 31 Mar 2009 16:23:01 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Salazar Hosted Offshore Oil Drilling Meetings SF included Message-ID: <005901c9b257$a31e7170$e95b5450$@net> Thought many would be interested in attending one of these meetings. San Francisco meeting is a great opportunity to give the Interior Dept. your input on oil and gas drilling off the California coast. The below is from the Earth Island Institute. Mark Rockwell Endangered Species Coalition Conservation Chair, Northern California Council Federation of Fly Fishers A Call for Ocean Voices: Speak Out Now for Your Coast! Your voice is urgently needed right now to prevent the sacrifice of your favorite coastline to dangerous offshore oil drilling impacts. An upcoming public hearing will determine what actions the Obama Administration will be taking this fall with regard to allowing, for the first time, new offshore oil and gas drilling in our most sensitive coastal waters, and for approval of renewable energy industry proposals off of our coast. After the recent lapse of twenty-seven years of bipartisan congressional and presidential protection, the entire Atlantic shoreline and the coast of California are now suddenly exposed to new offshore oil drilling proposals. Interior Secretary Salazar has extended the comment period for these controversial Bush offshore oil drilling plans and will be holding what he calls "an open, honest conversation with the American people" during an upcoming series of four public hearings to be conducted during the first two weeks of April (see dates and locations at the end of this message). These hearings will also focus on the rapid expansion of offshore renewable energy proposals, such as offshore windfarms, wave energy arrays, and tidal energy projects, now being proposed in coastal waters around the country. To let the Interior Department know that you wish to testify at one of these hearings, please reply directly via email to this address: DOI_Events at ios.doi.gov You can also sign in to testify upon arrival. At each of these locations, doors will open at 8:00 a.m. and the meetings will begin at 9:00 a.m. with a presentation by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar.. The hearings will conclude by 8:00 p.m. each evening, with lunch and dinner breaks tentatively scheduled from 12:00 noon to 1:00 p.m. and from 4:00 p.m. - 6:00 p.m. THE MEETING DATES AND LOCATIONS ARE AS FOLLOWS: Monday, April 6 in Atlantic City, NJ Atlantic City Convention Center One Convention Boulevard Atlantic City, NJ Wednesday, April 8 in New Orleans, LA Tulane University McAlister Auditorium McAlister Drive between Freret and Willow Streets 6823 St. Charles Avenue New Orleans, LA Tuesday, April 14 in Anchorage, AK Dena'ina Civic & Convention Center 600 W. Seventh Ave Anchorage, AK Thursday, April 16 in San Francisco, CA Mission Bay Conference Center at UCSF Robertson Auditorium 1675 Owens Street San Francisco, CA (a colorful "Ocean Voices" rally at noon will be held at this same location, please join us for music and fun) As you arrive for each hearing, you will be asked to submit a comment card. In addition, all attendees at the site who wish to deliver comments orally will be offered an opportunity to do so, time permitting. Please refer to http://www.mms.gov/5-year/ for final detailed schedule information for each hearing. Drilling Targets or Beloved Beaches? In California, the Mendocino and Humboldt coastlines, as well as Santa Monica Bay, Malibu, the Palos Verdes Penninsula, the Orange County coast, and nearshore La Jolla are the primary targets for offshore oil and gas drilling, and several expansive wave energy array projects are also being proposed on California's Sonoma, Mendocino, and Humboldt coastlines and in Oregon and Washington State. On the Atlantic coast, the fishing grounds of Georges Bank, the New Jersey shore, Virginia's coastal waters, North Carolina's Outer Banks, and Georgia's Sea Island are the primary offshore oil drilling targets. In addition, a series of offshore wind energy installations are being pursued at several locations along the Atlantic coast. Your message to the visiting officials from the Obama Administration might request that no coastal waters previously set aside by the congressional or presidential moratorium protections be opened for offshore drilling, and you may also want to request that sound science to be applied to any decisions about risky drilling plans for oil and gas offshore, and you can also include a call for intelligent, safe, science-based siting of coastal wind, wave, or tidal installations. And on a personal note, share with them what the living ocean means to you.. Mark J. Palmer Associate Director International Marine Mammal Project Director, Wildlife Alive Earth Island Institute 300 Broadway, Suite 28 San Francisco, CA 94133 (415) 788-3666 x139 (530) 758-6022 (Davis Office) (415) 788-7324 (Fax) http://www.earthisland.org/immp Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From Seth.Naman at noaa.gov Wed Apr 1 09:34:37 2009 From: Seth.Naman at noaa.gov (Seth Naman) Date: Wed, 01 Apr 2009 09:34:37 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] thesis Message-ID: <49D3979D.3020004@noaa.gov> Trinity Folks, My thesis was finalized this past winter. It is titled Predation by hatchery steelhead on natural salmon fry in the upper-Trinity River, California. It's attached and can also be found at the link below: http://dscholar.humboldt.edu:8080/dspace/handle/2148/449 Seth -- Seth Naman Fisheries Biologist NOAA Fisheries Southwest Region 1655 Heindon Rd. Arcata, CA 95521 707-825-5180 fax: 707-825-4840 -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: sethnaman_thesis.pdf Type: application/pdf Size: 466905 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Thu Apr 2 10:55:45 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Thu, 2 Apr 2009 10:55:45 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Sac Bee Editorial 4 2 09 Message-ID: <003901c9b3bc$405d2700$c1177500$@net> Editorial: Governor needs salmon agenda The Sacramento Bee - 4/02/09 Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger wants to leave office having achieved what he calls "comprehensive water reform." This includes improved water conveyance and habitat restoration in the Sacramento- San Joaquin Delta, and increased water storage and conservation for the entire state. This is a worthy and ambitious to-do list. Yet it doesn't go far enough. Along with advancing a water agenda, Schwarzenegger needs to advance a salmon agenda. Otherwise, the governor could leave office with the state's prized salmon fisheries sinking into oblivion. During Schwarzenegger's tenure, he has supported Klamath River restoration and aid to salmon fishermen who have been put out of work. But his administration hasn't done enough to improve conditions for salmon in the Central Valley, where these magnificent fish confront a range of perils. The giant pumps in the Delta, which kill fish directly and also alter the flows of the estuary, are one of these perils. Unscreened water diversions are another. Extremely warm, polluted water from the San Joaquin River hurts salmon in that part of the Delta. Upstream on the Sacramento River, irregular flows in dammed tributaries such as the American River harm salmon trying to spawn. To be sure, conditions in the ocean have much to do with recent salmon declines. Scientists have documented a reduction in the usual "upwelling" of nutrient-rich currents that generate food for salmon while they are in the ocean. Yet as biologists have pointed out, the decline of chinook salmon has been ongoing for 150 years, even during periods when ocean conditions were favorable. As UC Davis biologist Peter Moyle points out, blaming ocean conditions for salmon declines is like blaming an iceberg for sinking the Titanic. Such a view, he says, "ignores the many human errors that put the ship on course for the fatal collision." With the change in the White House, there's an opportunity for California and the Obama administration to pursue the goals of salmon recovery. The 1992 Central Valley Project Improvement Act, viewed with hostility by the second Bush administration, calls for at least a doubling of salmon populations on a "long-term sustainable basis." To meet this goal, California must learn from successes. These include the dismantling of obsolete dams on Butte Creek and Clear Creek that previously blocked salmon from important habitat. Congressional approval of the San Joaquin River restoration settlement also offers potential for restoring salmon. The Yolo Bypass is an even bigger prize. For years, scientists have known that young salmon rearing in the floodplains of the bypass grow faster and fatter than their counterparts in the Sacramento River. If the state were to better manage the bypass for salmon - by putting more water down it in non-flood years and improving fish passage - it could reap a huge return for very little investment. None of this comes easily. Flooding more of the bypass for salmon means less for agriculture or other forms of habitat. All that must worked through, with affected parties adequately compensated. Yet these and other salmon restoration goals can't stay on the back burner any longer. With state's fishing industry on the ropes, Schwarzenegger must make salmon a centerpiece of his water agenda. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Thu Apr 2 10:57:32 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Thu, 2 Apr 2009 10:57:32 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] House Hearing Article Riverside Press 4 2 09 Message-ID: <003e01c9b3bc$7fb4d1f0$7f1e75d0$@net> Lift water restrictions, Southern California lawmakers tell Congress The Riverside Press - Enterprise - 4/02/09 By Ben Goad WASHINGTON - With California in the throes of drought, Congress must act quickly to ease federal pumping restrictions that are negatively affecting the state's already shrinking water supply, Inland Rep. Ken Calvert testified Tuesday. Calvert, R-Corona, was among a handful of California Republicans who spoke out in favor of easing the restrictions. Pumps in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, the core of the state's water system, have been virtually halted under a federal ruling to protect threatened and endangered fish species, including the Delta smelt. The tiny silver smelt, found only in that estuary, are sucked into the powerful pumps that move water uphill into canals that carry it south. Federal scientists say the smelt, believed to be an indicator of the overall health of the Delta, are close to extinction. Calvert and other House Republicans said the restrictions amount to the federal government putting the well-being of fish before people, who are suffering from the affects of a third consecutive year of drought in the Golden State. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Feb. 27 declared a statewide emergency due to drought and warned of the possibility of water rationing. Meanwhile, recent estimates show that about 250,000 acre-feet -- more than 83 billion gallons -- of water have been lost to the Pacific Ocean because of the smelt ruling, Calvert said. "Absent the federal restrictions, the quarter-million acre-feet of water could have been exported to water users throughout the state," Calvert said. "This is enough water to meet the water needs of half a million people for a year." Calvert made his remarks during a House Natural Resources Committee hearing to address the state's drought. Democrats, who control Congress, appeared unlikely to lift the restrictions, which were grounded in the Endangered Species Act. Instead, the panel's Democrats pressed for a multifaceted strategy to combat the drought through water recycling, desalination and better water-storage programs. "We must look toward a comprehensive solution," said Rep. Joe Baca, D-Rialto. "We're at a critical time right now with the drought. We have to look at the effect it's having on California right now . . . and especially the Inland Empire." Still, Calvert and others said turning the pumps back on is a needed short-term solution for a problem that is only getting worse. He said water rationing will probably occur, and that will drive up the cost of water at a time when the state and national economies are already in crisis. "Folks, get ready, your water prices are going to skyrocket," Calvert told reporters before the hearing. To drive home their point, the Republican witnesses at the hearing -- who included Reps. Devin Nunes, R-Visalia, George Radonovich, R-Fresno, and Wally Herger, R-Chico -- brought with them a fishbowl containing several Delta smelt and placed it on the table during the hearing. As he finished his testimony, Nunes said he wanted to submit the fish for the official record. "You can have them, we don't want them," Nunes told Rep. Grace Napolitano, D-Santa Fe Springs, who headed the meeting. Napolitano responded, "Thank you for your testimony, and I suggest you take the cover off so they can get some air." Staff writer Janet Zimmerman contributed to this report. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Thu Apr 2 14:24:59 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Thu, 2 Apr 2009 14:24:59 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Redding Record Searchlight 4 2 09 Message-ID: <002401c9b3d9$7b27c990$71775cb0$@net> Officials worried that Fresno water district may want to shift Shasta County water rights south By Kimberly Ross (Contact ) Thursday, April 2, 2009 Some Shasta County officials are worried that a Fresno-area water district may ask to annex almost 3,000 acres it owns along the McCloud River - a possible move to shift the water rights hundreds of miles south. The issue will be discussed this morning at the Shasta Local Agency Formation Commission (LAFCO) meeting. So far, no annexation proposal has been filed by the Westlands Water District, Shasta LAFCO Executive Officer Amy Mickelson said. Westlands, the largest water district in the nation, includes farmland in western Fresno County and Kings County. But both she and LAFCO Commissioner Irwin Fust said they and others wonder if annexation would enable Westlands to claim area-of-origin water rights for its farmers hundreds of miles away. "That is what some folks around here have put forth as a possible scenario," Fust said. "Why else would you spend $35 million for 3,000 acres of land if you didn't want to get something substantial in return?" Westlands spokeswoman Sarah Woolf said the district bought the Bollibokka Land Co. property bordering 13 miles of the McCloud River in northern Shasta County about two years ago. By purchasing it, the district can ensure the land won't be developed, Woolf said. If houses were built on it, they would drastically hinder a proposal to raise Shasta Dam and increase California's water storage capacity - a move the water district strongly supports, she said. The McCloud River property would likely be under water if the dam is raised. "So we've kept it in its natural state and intend to do so until there's a decision on the dam," she said. Woolf sidestepped a question about why Westlands might also be interested in annexing that land into its water district, hundreds of miles to the south, however. She stressed that no decision had been made. "I honestly don't know if we would be pursuing that or not. It hasn't been done at this point in time," she said of annexation. Shasta LAFCO's Mickelson said she took a brief call in January from a Westlands representative about possible annexation of the land, but like hundreds of calls the district takes each year, nothing has come of it since, nor does she think anything ever will develop. "I truly think this was just a stab in the dark, (to ask) how easy would it be?" she said of Westland's inquiry. "I think we're quite a ways from seeing anything formally filed, if and when they opt to do that." Mickelson mentioned the call in a staff report to Shasta's commissioners to keep them informed, and she's watching Westland's agendas to see if the water district takes further action, she said. After its call to Shasta LAFCO, the water district called Fresno LAFCO to see if it could decide an annexation request of the Shasta County land, Mickelson said. Shasta's commission opposes that move and Mickelson has sent an e-mail to the Fresno agency saying so, she said. Woolf said Westlands' board hasn't discussed which LAFCO agency should handle the annexation request, if it is ever brought, and said she wasn't aware of calls made to either Shasta or Fresno LAFCOs. Although the issue isn't settled, the law appears to indicate that if Westlands sought annexation, the LAFCO board in which the district is based would handle its request, Shasta LAFCO legal counsel Liz Johnson said. In this case, that would be Fresno LAFCO. "I think it's a long shot" for Shasta LAFCO to have jurisdiction, she said. However, the Fresno agency could honor Shasta LAFCO's request to let it decide the matter, she said. Regardless of which agency would handle the land's potential annexation, LAFCO agencies try to avoid creating "islands" of annexed land, Johnson said. Granting such non-contiguous requests are rare, but not unheard of, Johnson said. The Metropolitan Water District of Los Angeles has annexed land in Inyo County, and a Tahoe basin district had a similar annexation in Truckee, she said. Meanwhile, with no real action taken by Westlands, there's little else to do unless an annexation proposal is filed, Mickelson said. "The first question we (would) ask is what is the purpose of this annexation, and because there isn't anything filed, I don't have an answer to that," she said. Fust disagrees, and requested the item be placed on today's Shasta LAFCO agenda. He thinks the commission might decide to send a letter to Westlands and Fresno LAFCO stating its position. "Even though nothing has happened yet ... it would probably behoove us to get a little proactive on this and decide whether we in Shasta County feel that this is an ethical way to go, and what we can do at this stage to telegraph our feelings to Westlands Water District and Fresno LAFCO," he said. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From danielbacher at fishsniffer.com Fri Apr 3 09:34:02 2009 From: danielbacher at fishsniffer.com (Dan Bacher) Date: Fri, 3 Apr 2009 09:34:02 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] California Drought Is A Big Snow Job In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20DA4809-1423-4B67-9856-FEBC1AEE9D79@fishsniffer.com> Lester Snow, the Director of the State Department of Water Resources (DWR), used the announcement of today's snow survey as yet another opportunity to promote Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's proposal to build a peripheral canal and more dams. Photo of snow survey from DWR. ? 030209snowontreespic_thum... Schwarzenegger Official Tries to 'Snow' Public with Drought Claims by Dan Bacher Lester Snow, the State Department of Water Resources' Director, tried to "snow" the public by making false claims of a "drought" scenario in the Central Valley in an announcement on April 2. The fourth snow survey of the winter season by DWR indicates that snow pack water content statewide is 81 percent of normal for the date. True to form, Snow cynically used the announcement to whip up fears about a "drought" in order to boost Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's campaign to build a peripheral canal and more dams. ?A below-average snow pack at this time of year, especially following two consecutive dry years, is a cause for concern,? said Snow in a news release. ?Our most critical storage reservoirs remain low, and we face severe water supply problems in many parts of our state. Californians must continue to save water at home and in their businesses.? On February 27, 2009, Governor Schwarzenegger declared a "drought state of emergency," directing DWR and other state agencies to provide assistance to people and communities impacted by the drought. On March 30, 2009, DWR provided the Governor an update on drought conditions and recommended strategies. The report and transmittal letter are available for viewing at http://www.water.ca.gov/news/. Snow touted Schwarzenegger's plan to build a peripheral canal ("improved conveyance") and Temperance Flat and Sites reservoirs as the "solution" to California's water problems. "Governor Schwarzenegger has outlined steps to safeguard the state?s water supply through a comprehensive plan that includes water conservation, more surface and groundwater storage, new investments in the state?s aging water infrastructure, and improved water conveyance to protect the environment and provide a reliable water supply," the release stated. "Today?s drought and regulatory restrictions underscore the need to take action to safeguard tomorrow?s water supply." However, a careful review of DWR data reveals that he is not telling the entire truth about California?s water ?crisis,? but is carefully selecting the data to cultivate unfounded fears of a ?drought? and to promote Schwarzenegger's peripheral canal and dams proposal. Manual survey results taken on April 2 at four locations near Lake Tahoe, combined with electronic readings, documented statewide snow pack water content of 81 percent. The water content is 87 percent in the Northern Sierra, 80 percent in the Central Sierra, and 77 percent in the Southern Sierra. "Last year at this time, snowpack was 95 percent of normal, reflecting a drop of over 20 percent from March 2008 caused by the driest spring on record,? according to DWR. " DWR blamed restrictions on Delta water exports needed to protect delta smelt and Sacramento River chinook salmon for depriving farmers and urban residents of their water. "Continuing dry conditions and regulatory agency restrictions on Delta water exports are limiting water deliveries to farms and urban areas," DWR claimed. "A forthcoming Biological Opinion from the National Marine Fisheries Service to protect salmon and steelhead may further reduce pumping capability. DWR expects it will only be able to deliver only 20 percent of requested State Water Project water this year to the Bay Area, San Joaquin Valley, Central Coast and Southern California." What Snow failed to mention was the reason why many reservoirs were at record low levels until the February rains was because DWR and the Bureau of Reclamation nearly drained Shasta, Folsom and Oroville reservoirs in 2007 and 2008 to supply Westlands Water District, the Kern County Water Bank and Southern California, including Diamond Valley Reservoir, with northern California water. Fortunately, the February and March rain and snow runoff raised reservoir levels to much higher levels than they were at the beginning of 2009. The DWR release also stated, ?Storage in California?s major reservoirs is low. Lake Oroville, the principal storage reservoir for the State Water Project (SWP), is only at 56 percent of capacity.? However, Bill Jennings, executive director of the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance (CSPA), noted that Lake Oroville is actually 75% of the 15-year average, by no means a catastrophic level for this time of year. DWR also failed to mention the other reservoirs that supply water for the state and federal water projects. Central Valley Project reservoirs are in relatively good shape, with Shasta at 77 percent of the 15-year average, Folsom at 117 percent of the 15-year average, New Melones at 74 percent of the 15-year average and Millerton at 95 percent of the 15-year average. The actual precipitation in state and federal project watersheds also tells a different tale than the one that Snow is spinning. Precipitation on the Sacramento River at Shasta Dam is 77 percent of average, the American River watershed at Blue Canyon is 93 percent, the Stanislaus River at New Melones is 88 percent, and the San Joaquin River at Huntington Lake is 83 percent. ?This is a slightly below average water year, but it is not a dry year and not a critically dry year,? said Jennings. The doomsday scenario that DWR has conjured up is completely inaccurate, since most Central Valley contractors will receive 100 percent of their water. "The Central Valley Project (CVP) contractors north of the Delta and Friant Unit contractors in the San Joaquin Valley are receiving 100 percent of their water,? emphasized Jennings. ?The only people not receiving their full water allocations are Westlands and the Metropolitan Water District (MWD). And MWD is receiving a reduced amount of water because they gave up the urban preference in the Monterey Agreement." The corporate agribusiness operations that are being hurt the most are the most junior water rights holders in Westlands, who chose to convert from annual row crops to permanent crops. ?If there is an is economic impact to Westlands, it?s from farmers changing from planting the row crops of the past to planting permanent crops like fruit and nut trees - crops that can?t handle drought years and require constant water to keep them alive,? said Jennings. ?Westlands Water District deliberately planted crops that would suffer the most in dry years in an effort to have their junior water rights trump the senior water rights holders and public trust resources of rivers, streams and estuaries.? Thus, the claims of a "drought" by Lester Snow and the Governor are false and are being used to bolster Schwarzenegger?s claims that a peripheral canal and dams are needed to create a ?win-win? scenario of ?ecosystem restoration? and ?solving? water supply needs at the same time. Snow?s announcement takes place as California fisheries are in their greatest crisis ever. Salmon fishing in ocean waters off California and Oregon will close again this year, with only the possibility of a token recreational 10-day season off Eureka and Crescent City, due to the collapse of Central Valley Chinook salmon populations. Coho salmon populations in coastal streams have reached record lows because years of clear cutting and other habitat destruction, combined with poor ocean conditions. Delta smelt, longfin smelt, juvenile striped bass, threadfin shad and other California Delta fish have also reached record low population levels, due to massive increases in water exports, increasing levels of toxic chemicals in Central Valley rivers, and invasive species. ?There is no win, win solution,? Jennings emphasized after receiving the ?Delta Advocate? award at the Restore the Delta Symposium in Lodi on February 28. ?We live in a water-limited state where there is only an average of 29 million acre feet of runoff in the Central Valley, while the State Water Resources Control Board has allocated 245 million acre feet of water rights.? He condemned the campaign by the Governor, DWR and Senator Dianne Feinstein to build a peripheral canal ? and said that we need to compel our regulatory agencies to enforce the water code and Clean Water Act. ?The canal would transfer pumping impacts to the last viable salmonid river in the Valley (the Sacramento), eliminate critical habitat and send numerous species into oblivion, and increase the concentration and bioaccumulation of pollutants,? he said. ?It would increase salinity, severely reducing yields of hundreds of thousands of productive farmland, and eliminate tens of thousands of fishing, recreational and agricultural jobs.? I hope that the public and mainstream media is not "snowed" by Lester Snow's claims of a "drought" in his announcement of the results of the April 2 snow survey. The peripheral canal and more dams would only drive the final nail into the coffin of collapsing salmon, delta smelt, longfin smelt, green sturgeon, striped bass and other fish populations - and cost an estimated $12 billion to $24 billion to the taypayers in a state already hit by the economic crash and a spiraling deficit. For more information on DWR?s "overblown" drought, read Mike Fitzergerald?s superb article in the Stockton record. http:// www.recordnet.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090311/ A_NEWS0803/903110320 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: 030209snowontreespic_thumb.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 7240 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Fri Apr 3 10:42:35 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Fri, 3 Apr 2009 10:42:35 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] (no subject) Message-ID: <005501c9b483$93915320$bab3f960$@net> Sierra snowpack's water is no drought-buster this year The Sacramento Bee - 4/02/09 By Matt Weiser California's crucial mountain snowpack stands at 81 percent of average after a monthly snow survey conducted today. That's essentially unchanged from the March survey and a long way from breaking the state's three-year drought. The snow survey measures water content of the snowpack, mostly in the Sierra Nevada, the natural water bank for most of the state's farms and cities. "A below-average snowpack at this time of year, especially following two consecutive dry years, is a cause for concern," Lester Snow, director of the state Department of Water Resources, said in a statement. "Californians must continue to save water at home and in their businesses." March was relatively wet across the state, enabling DWR to increase its water delivery forecast from 15 percent to 20 percent of normal. Federal officials, who also rely on the snow survey, increased their forecast in some areas as well. But federal water users south of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta continue to face the prospect of zero water deliveries this summer. Winter is effectively over, and it was dry overall. The state needed an extra-wet winter to overcome two preceding dry years. That's because reservoirs are depleted and soil conditions are very dry. Lake Oroville, the largest reservoir in the State Water Project system, stands at 72 percent of average capacity. Lake Shasta, the largest federal reservoir, is at 77 percent of average. Officials later this month will make a runoff forecast based on the snow survey, which will determine whether they can again increase the water delivery forecast. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From danielbacher at fishsniffer.com Fri Apr 3 13:25:56 2009 From: danielbacher at fishsniffer.com (Dan Bacher) Date: Fri, 3 Apr 2009 13:25:56 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Urgent Action Alert to Ban Suction Dredge Mining! Message-ID: Action Alert! Action Alert! Action Alert! Action Alert! Action Alert! Action Alert! From the Karuk Tribe Support Ban on Motorized Suction Dredge Mining in California Streams! Support SB670 California?s native fish populations are in a state of crisis. Tribes depending on salmon runs cannot harvest enough fish to conduct ceremonies much less feed their members or make a living. Non-native people are affected as well. This year commercial and sport salmon fishing bans will cripple our coastal economies and many species teeter on the brink of extinction. We must act now to protect our fisheries! Senator Wiggins (D, Santa Rosa) has introduced a bill that will make a dent in the problem by banning the controversial recreational activity known as suction dredge mining. Miners use motorized suction pumps to vacuum up the river bottom (along with small fish, salmon eggs, etc.) run through a sluice to find flakes of gold, and dump the debris back into the river. This practice has a negative impact on fish, negatively alters spawning habitat, and reintroduces mercury deposits that have lain dormant on the river bottom since the last gold rush back into the water column. Groups such as the New 49ers have worked hard to popularize this ?recreational activity? in places such as the Klamath Basin by buying up mining claims and then soliciting membership into their ?club.? These clubs offer a new ?frontier experience? for their members. After 150 years of genocide, gold miners are still working to destroy Tribal fisheries and cultures. SB 670 would ban this practice until the California Department of Fish and Game can perform a scientific review of the practice and write new rules dictating where and when suction dredging can take place. Support healthy rivers and Tribal and fishing communities by sending in your letter of support for SB 670 today! FOR MORE INFORMATION CONTACT: S. Craig Tucker Klamath Coordinator Karuk Tribe ctucker at karuk.us Address letters of support the Governor Schwarzenegger but email to ctucker at karuk.us so all letters can be compiled and circulated to legislators and the Governor Sample Letter of Support for SB 670 Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger: State Capitol Building Sacramento, CA 95814 RE: Support for SB 670 Dear Governor: Many of California?s salmon and native trout populations are at risk of extinction in our lifetime. For most Californians, the loss of our fisheries represents a tragic loss of recreational opportunities or a chance to eat healthy local seafood. But for Tribes, the loss of salmon and other native fish species represents a loss of cultural identity. Native people have served as the steward of California?s rivers and streams since the beginning of time. Tribes learned over millennia how to harvest fish without risk of extinction. For many Tribes, ceremonies are based on the annual returns of salmon. Tribes? cultural and spiritual identities are linked to the salmon, trout, and other fishes. If we don?t take action today to reverse the current downward spiral, it may be too late. SB 670 is not a solution to the problem, but it?s a start. Miners and other users of the resource should have to limit their activities for the sake of the fish just as fishermen have to. Please support a temporary moratorium on suction dredging until a scientific review is complete and new regulations that protect fish are in place. Sincerely, Name address S. Craig Tucker, Ph.D. Klamath Campaign Coordinator Karuk Tribe of California NEW NUMBER home office: 707-839-1982 Tribal office in Orleans: 530-627-3446 x3027 cell: 916-207-8294 ctucker at karuk.us www.karuk.us -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From danielbacher at fishsniffer.com Fri Apr 3 13:38:46 2009 From: danielbacher at fishsniffer.com (Dan Bacher) Date: Fri, 3 Apr 2009 13:38:46 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Fisheries Forum Questions Point Arena Closures: What Role is the Oil Industry Playing? Message-ID: http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2009/04/03/18585780.php Fisheries Forum Questions Point Arena Closures: What Role is the Oil Industry Playing? by John Lewallen ?Why is Catherine Reheis-Boyd, CEO and Chief of Staff for the Western States Petroleum Association, a key member of the five-member MLPA Blue Ribbon Task Force which has decreed new zones where people can take no food from state waters?? John Lewallen, longtime North Coast environmental activist and seaweed harvester asks. ?Is it coincidence that the Point Arena Basin offshore from Point Arena is the area of highest oil industry interest in Northern California, and the only tract here now open to Minerals Management Service offshore oil leasing process? John and Barbara Stephens-Lewallen Mendocino Sea Vegetable Company Box 455, Philo,CA 95466 (707)895-2996 fax 895-3270 Press Release April 1, 2009 Contact: John Lewallen Fisheries Forum: Chesbro Tells Blue Ribbon Panel to ?show me the science? requiring new no-take Marine Reserves at Point Arena Assemblyman Wes Chesbro challenged the Blue Ribbon Task Force which proposes to close about forty per cent of offshore fishing areas and shore access in the Point Arena area to subsistence fishing and ocean food harvesting to ?show me the science? driving this push to deny Point Arena residents access to sustainable ocean food. The occasion was the Fisheries Forum on March 26 at the California State Capitol, where a delegation of Mendocino fishermen, abalone divers and seaweed harvesters went to tell the legislature?s Fisheries Committee about the combined threats of livelihood loss and offshore oil drilling currently facing the Point Arena community. Senator Patricia Wiggins, fisheries committee chair, and Assemblyman Wes Chesbro, listened to all testimony. Point Arena resident Allan Jacobs presented a petition signed by hundreds of people whose businesses and livelihoods would be affected if proposed new State Marine Reserves and Protected Areas are adopted by the California State Fish and Game Commission. Jacobs described a community whose fisheries experience and observation was ignored by a process determined to prevent Point Arena residents from taking food from the intertidal zone or ocean in places harmoniously harvested for centuries. In written and oral testimony, Jim Martin, Mendocino County Fish & Game Commissioner, called for the outright ?abolition? of the Blue Ribbon Task Force which runs the Marine Life Protection Act (MLPA) process of setting up new no-take zones where nobody can harvest ocean food. ?Special interest groups have hijacked the Marine Life Protection Act,? testified Commissioner Martin. ?The Packard Foundation has picked up most of the tab for the public meetings and has influenced key policy decisions....the Department of Fish & Game has been completely marginalized in the MLPA process.... ?Point Arena Pier stands to lose more than any harbor in the north- central coast study region? if the Fish & Game Commission carries out its declared intention to accept the ?Integrated Preferred Alternative?(IPA) at an August, 2009 meeting, testified Commissioner Martin. ?Point Arena Pier is teetering on the brink of survival....Hemmed in by closures to the north and south, the IPA creates a tiny ?box? open to rockfishing in front of Arena Cove. This box is about four square miles. That will be the only area open to commercial and recreational groundfish out of Point Arena.? Assemblyman Wes Chesbro said he had been part of earlier effots directed by the Fish and Game Commission to set up the no-take zones required by the 1999 Marine Life Protection Act. Assemblyman Chesbro said that the marine science required to back the need for no-take zones was questionable or absent, so the process had been abandoned. ?Now you propose to close areas to seaweed harvest, affecting the livelihood of a seaweed harvesting couple,? Assemblyman Chesbro told the advocates of the Integrated Preferred Alternative. ?All I?m saying is, show me the science.? ?The proposed regulations close nearly half of the shore-based public access sites in the region,? testified Mendocino County Fish & Game Commissioner Jim Martin. ?Our abalone fishery is managed sustainably and is one of the world?s last viable abalone fisheries.? Seaweed harvester John Lewallen declared that ?seaweed is not an endangered fishery,? and called for suspension of any new no-take zones in intertidal areas sustainably harvested for food by people for centuries. ?We need to continue the collaborative stewardship management of edible seaweed, abalone, and other ocean food resources which have worked here, not impose senseless new no-take zones from above,? Lewallen said. Lewallen described the whole MLPA process as a ?divide and drill? strategy where the only winners are oil companies who want to drill for oil off Point Arena. ?Why is Catherine Reheis-Boyd, CEO and Chief of Staff for the Western States Petroleum Association, a key member of the five-member MLPA Blue Ribbon Task Force which has decreed new zones where people can take no food from state waters?? Lewallen asks. ?Is it coincidence that the Point Arena Basin offshore from Point Arena is the area of highest oil industry interest in Northern California, and the only tract here now open to Minerals Management Service offshore oil leasing process? ? People wishing to contact the Legislative Fisheries Committee with relevant information or opinion can send your comment to: Senator Patricia Wiggins, http://dist02.casen.govoffice.com/ or write State Capital, Room 4081 Sacramento, CA 95814 916-323-6958 Assemblyman Wes Chesbro at: http://democrats.assembly.ca.gov/members/ a01/ or write State Capital P.O. Box 942849, Sacramento, CA 94249-0001 916-319-2001 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sari at sisqtel.net Fri Apr 3 14:29:03 2009 From: sari at sisqtel.net (Sari Sommarstrom) Date: Fri, 03 Apr 2009 13:29:03 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] What caused the Sacramento River fall Chinook stock collapse? Message-ID: <5.2.1.1.2.20090330165624.02d69f30@pop.sisqtel.net> Helpful to read the official summary... NMFS Report on the Sacramento River Fall Chinook Salmon Decline - 2009 Report to the Pacific Fishery Management Council (PFMC) http://swr.nmfs.noaa.gov/media/SalmonDeclineReport.pdf Executive summary In April 2008, in response to the sudden collapse of Sacramento River fall Chinook salmon (SRFC) and the poor status of many west coast coho salmon populations, the Pacific Fishery Management Council (PFMC) adopted the most restrictive salmon fisheries in the history of the west coast of the U.S. The regulations included a complete closure of commercial and recreational Chinook salmon fisheries south of Cape Falcon, Oregon. Spawning escapement of SRFC in 2007 is estimated to have been 88,000, well below the PFMC's escapement conservation goal of 122,000-180,000 for the first time since the early 1990s. The situation was even more dire in 2008, when 66,000 spawners are estimated to have returned to natural areas and hatcheries. For the SRFC stock, which is an aggregate of hatchery and natural production, many factors have been suggested as potential causes of the poor escapements, including freshwater withdrawals (including pumping of water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin delta), unusual hatchery events, pollution, elimination of net-pen acclimatization facilities coincident with one of the two failed brood years, and large-scale bridge construction during the smolt outmigration (CDFG, 2008). In this report we review possible causes for the decline in SRFC for which reliable data were available. Our investigation was guided by a conceptual model of the life history of fall Chinook salmon in the wild and in the hatchery. Our approach was to identify where and when in the life cycle abundance became anomalously low, and where and when poor environmental conditions occurred due to natural or human-induced causes. The likely cause of the SRFC collapse lies at the intersection of an unusually large drop in abundance and poor environmental conditions. Using this framework, all of the evidence that we could find points to ocean conditions as being the proximate cause of the poor performance of the 2004 and 2005 broods of SRFC.We recognize, however, that the rapid and likely temporary deterioration in ocean conditions is acting on top of a long-term, steady degradation of the freshwater and estuarine environment. The evidence pointed to ocean conditions as the proximate cause because conditions in freshwater were not unusual, and a measure of abundance at the entrance to the estuary showed that, up until that point, these broods were at or near normal levels of abundance. At some time and place between this point and recruitment to the fishery at age two, unusually large fractions of these broods perished. A broad body of evidence suggests that anomalous conditions in the coastal ocean in 2005 and 2006 resulted in unusually poor survival of the 2004 and 2005 broods of SRFC. Both broods entered the ocean during periods of weak upwelling, warm sea surface temperatures, and low densities of prey items. Individuals from the 2004 brood sampled in the Gulf of the Farallones were in poor physical condition, indicating that feeding conditions were poor in the spring of 2005 (unfortunately, comparable data do not exist for the 2005 brood). Pelagic seabirds in this region with diets similar to juvenile Chinook salmon also experienced very poor reproduction in these years. In addition, the cessation of net-pen acclimatization in the estuary in 2006 may have contributed to the especially poor estuarine and marine survival of the 2005 brood. Fishery management also played a role in the low escapement of 2007. The PFMC (2007) forecast an escapement of 265,000 SRFC adults in 2007 based on the escapement of 14,500 Central Valley Chinook salmon jacks in 2006. The realized escapement of SRFC adults was 87,900. The large discrepancy between the forecast and realized abundance was due to a bias in the forecast model that has since been corrected. Had the pre-season ocean abundance forecast been more accurate and fishing opportunity further constrained by management regulation, the SRFC escapement goal could have been met in 2007. Thus, fishery management, while not the cause of the 2004 brood weak year-class strength, contributed to the failure to achieve the SRFC escapement goal in 2007. The long-standing and ongoing degradation of freshwater and estuarine habitats and the subsequent heavy reliance on hatchery production were also likely contributors to the collapse of the stock. Degradation and simplification of freshwater and estuary habitats over a century and a half of development have changed the Central Valley Chinook salmon complex from a highly diverse collection of numerous wild populations to one dominated by fall Chinook salmon from four large hatcheries. Naturally-spawning populations of fall Chinook salmon are now genetically homogeneous in the Central Valley, and their population dynamics have been synchronous over the past few decades. In contrast, some remnant populations of late-fall, winter and spring Chinook salmon have not been as strongly affected by recent changes in ocean conditions, illustrating that life-history diversity can buffer environmental variation. The situation is analogous to managing a financial portfolio: a well-diversified portfolio will be buffeted less by fluctuating market conditions than one concentrated on just a few stocks; the SRFC seems to be quite concentrated indeed. Climate variability plays an important role in the inter-annual variation in abundance of Pacific salmon, including SRFC. We have observed a trend of increasing variability over the past several decades in climate indices related to salmon survival. This is a coast-wide pattern, but may be particularly important in California, where salmon are near the southern end of their range. These more extreme climate fluctuations put additional strain on salmon populations that are at low abundance and have little life-history or habitat diversity. If the trend of increasing climate variability continues, then we can expect to see more extreme variation in the abundance of SRFC and salmon stocks coast wide. In conclusion, the development of the Sacramento-San Joaquin watershed has greatly simplified and truncated the once-diverse habitats that historically supported a highly diverse assemblage of populations. The life history diversity of this historical assemblage would have buffered the overall abundance of Chinook salmon in the Central Valley under varying climate conditions. We are now left with a fishery that is supported largely by four hatcheries that produce mostly fall Chinook salmon. Because the survival of fall Chinook salmon hatchery release groups is highly correlated among nearby hatcheries, and highly variable among years, we can expect to see more booms and busts in this fishery in the future in response to variation in the ocean environment. Simply increasing the production of fall Chinook salmon from hatcheries as they are currently operated may aggravate this situation by further concentrating production in time and space. Rather, the key to reducing variation in production is increasing the diversity of SRFC. There are few direct actions available to the PFMC to improve this situation, but there are actions the PFMC can support that would lead to increased diversity of SRFC and increased stability. Mid-term solutions include continued advocacy for more fish-friendly water management and the examination of hatchery practices to improve the survival of hatchery releases while reducing adverse interactions with natural fish. In the longer-term, increased habitat quantity, quality, and diversity, and modified hatchery practices could allow life history diversity to increase in SRFC. Increased diversity in SRFC life histories should lead to increased stability and resilience in a dynamic, changing environment. Using an ecosystem based management and ecological risk assessment framework to engage the many agencies and stakeholder groups with interests in the ecosystems supporting SRFC would aid implementation of these solutions. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Mon Apr 6 12:08:18 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Mon, 6 Apr 2009 12:08:18 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Eureka Times-Standard - 4-5-09 Message-ID: <003301c9b6eb$0cb3a780$261af680$@net> Additional observations: Based upon information indicating the highest probability being a "dry water-type year" the Trinity Adaptive Management Working Group (TAMWG) (3/19/09) and Trinity Management Council (TMC) (4/2/09) made recommendations to implement a dry water-type year hydrograph with minor alterations. The Regional Directors of the Bureau of Reclamation and U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service (BOR/USFWS) will make the final call. It is to be made as of April 1. The recommendations are predicated upon the April forecast remaining a dry year. It appears we are solidly in a dry year but have a higher probability of a normal year than a critically dry year. Additionally, both TAMWG and TMC are very concerned about lake levels and the cold water supply and have requested BOR Central Valley Operations (CVO) to adjust operations and/or explain how they plan to comply with Water Right Order 90-05. In short, there are concerns that CVO and diversions to the Sacramento side, which are not clearly explained anywhere, may deplete cold water resources in Trinity Lake and violate 90-05. CVO currently makes annual plans without adequate concern for the future and often exports too much water betting that the reservoir will be full at the beginning of next year (an extremely low probability this year). Byron Trinity Lake level low, but resorts and Forest Service optimistic The Eureka Times-Standard - 4/5/09 By John Driscoll The state's system of reservoirs is trending toward bone dry, and the popular Northern California summer-time haunt of Trinity Lake is no exception. Trinity Lake is 94 feet below high water -- 61 percent of the average since 1962. Going into a warm season following last year's wildfire-smoke choked summer with one of the most refreshing assets of the region so depleted has some people worried. "People are just not booking because of that," said Amy Kasper at Trinity Lake Resorts and Marina. But even with the lake as low as it is, the Trinity County reservoir is still huge. Full, it can store 2.4 million acre feet -- enough water to cover 2.4 million acres one foot deep. At its current level, it is holding 1.2 million acre feet. That means that six of seven boat ramps on the lake are well out of water and are likely to stay that way this season. The Minersville boat ramp has plenty of leeway, usable to about 200 feet below high water, said Shasta-Trinity National Recreation Area Recreation Resource Officer Mary Ellen Grigsby. Grigsby added that the 17,000-acre lake still has 8,000 to 10,000 acres of surface water even at its low stage -- plenty to fish, swim and boat. "Once you get out on it, it's still a big lake," Grigsby said. Those concerned about Trinity Lake's levels can also hit the smaller Lewiston and Whiskytown lakes, Grigsby said, both of which are kept full to serve hydropower operations. The state Department of Water Resources last week released the results of its snowpack surveys, which found California little better off than when Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declared a drought state of emergency at the end of February. The snowpack average is 81 percent of normal, not nearly enough to replenish the state's reservoirs after two years of drought. Some of those storage facilities are perilously low, like Lake Oroville at 56 percent capacity, which has prompted water conservation measures in many areas. While the Trinity River watershed's snowpack measurements were being completed Friday, it appears that they will come in at between 75 and 80 percent. "It's certainly in that ballpark," said Frank Gehrke, chief of California's Cooperative Snow Surveys Program. Gehrke said that up to 10 percent of the runoff from that snowmelt will likely be absorbed by soils parched from the dry fall. That means less water to fill the lake. While the forecast used to determine how releases from Lewiston Dam into the Trinity River will be managed is still being drawn up, the amount of water sent to the river for salmon -- and how much is diverted to the Sacramento River for Central Valley farms -- can also affect the level of Trinity Lake. That schedule should be finalized in mid-April. The year is so far being considered "critically dry," in which the least water is let down the river, said Pete Lucero, spokesman for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. But the river flows and diversion to the Sacramento could also draw down the reservoir to some 720,000 acre feet, dropping the elevation of the lake even farther. However, Lucero said, February and March wet weather may push that to a slightly damper forecast which would come close to maintaining the lake level through the season. "Things could change if April brings us major weather events," Lucero said. "I've looked at the long-term forecast and I haven't seen anything like that." It's almost certain that, barring big storms, Trinity Lake will remain low. Grigsby said, however, that she expects campgrounds to be more full than they were during last year's smoky summer. Without wildfires, and with gas prices far below last year's, Grigsby said, people will undoubtedly show up. "We still have plenty of water to go boating and all that other stuff," Kasper said. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Tue Apr 7 10:37:52 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Tue, 7 Apr 2009 10:37:52 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers Most Endangered 4 7 09 Message-ID: <002501c9b7a7$952bd8f0$bf838ad0$@net> AP, Sacramento Bee and SF Chronicle stories on Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers as nation's most endangered waterways. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/04/07/BA9N16U6S0.DTL &feed=rss.bayarea http://www.sacbee.com/topstories/story/1760320.html?mi_rss=Top%20Stories http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2009/04/06/state/n210133D22 .DTL &hw=rivers&sn=001&sc=1000 Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Tue Apr 7 10:40:30 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Tue, 7 Apr 2009 10:40:30 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Mercury News 4 07 09 Message-ID: <003901c9b7a7$f2a12bc0$d7e38340$@net> California salmon fishing season likely shut down for second straight year The San Jose Mercury News - 4/7/09 By Julia Scott MILLBRAE - The California Chinook salmon fishery will be shut down for the second year in a row because of near-record salmon population losses in the Sacramento River basin system, fishery regulators decided on Monday. The Pacific Fishery Management Council tentatively voted to close all waters south of Eureka to salmon fishermen for the second consecutive year to protect the dwindling population of Sacramento River Chinook projected to spawn upriver this fall. The council will take a final vote on Wednesday but is expected to uphold Monday's decision. Historically low salmon returns prompted fishery officials to shut down all forms of salmon fishing off nearly the entire West Coast for the first time last year. That action led Congress to appropriate $170 million in federal disaster funds to compensate salmon fishermen and fishery-reliant coastal industries for their losses. Roughly $120 million of that was directed to California. Scientists predict that only 122,000 salmon will return to the Sacramento this autumn to spawn, twice as many as last year's record-low 66,000 but still a fraction of the 800,000 that have returned in healthier years. Maria Vojkovich, who represents California on the council, acknowledged the pain the restrictions will cause but said they were necessary to preserve the long-term survival of the species in the Sacramento River system, the San Francisco-San Joaquin Delta and the Bay. "This is less emotional than last year, but it's not better at all. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that I have something else to say next year. It's the best we could do," Vojkovich said. Half Moon Bay fisherman and salmon advisory council member Duncan MacLean said the closure was necessary given the numbers, but he is worried about the survival of the industry and his livelihood. "I fear for my future in fishing," MacLean said. "I just hope I get to do it again in my lifetime." MacLean is leading an effort to get another round of federal subsidies for small fishermen hard-hit by the closure. About $48 million may be left over in last year's fund. Monday's decision allows for very limited commercial and recreational salmon fishing between Eureka and northern Oregon. The season remains normal in Washington state, where adult salmon are more plentiful. Scientists testified that Sacramento Chinook salmon runs were likely to rebound slightly in 2010 and 2011, at least enough to allow for some fishing. The current Central Valley salmon crisis is blamed on a combination of factors, including natural ocean variations and a host of problems in the Sacramento River Basin, such as dams, loss of natural ecosystems and damaging fish hatchery practices. Fishermen and biologists advising the council lined up to criticize a report presented at Monday's meeting that mainly attributed the 2008 and 2009 Chinook mortality rate to unexplained ocean conditions that did not provide enough food for juvenile salmon and other species in 2005 and 2006. As a result, few salmon survived to adulthood to spawn upstream three years later. Critics of the report said it discounted evidence of young salmon smolts dying in the Sacramento River system before they reach the Golden Gate. Ninety-five percent of tidal wetlands, a key salmon habitat, have disappeared from the system over time, according to one salmon biologist at the meeting. Delta levees and dikes also can impede fish rearing. Natural predators like striped bass take their toll, as does water being pumped out of the Delta to Southern California. Fish hatcheries on the Sacramento, originally conceived as a solution to the problem of dams blocking salmon from spawning upstream, have created a new kind of problem, according to the report submitted by the National Marine Fisheries Service. The juvenile fish are raised in pens and trucked around the dams, but grow up with a depleted natural immunity to changes in temperature and forms of disease. The real question of the day was how to craft a salmon management policy that takes all these problems into account and highlights the interconnectedness of rivers, the Bay and the ocean for a species that spends parts of its life in each environment. The Pacific Fishery Management Council only has the power to regulate fishing, and only out at sea. Everyone acknowledged that banning salmon fishing in California wasn't going to solve the long-term problem. "We could do a lot more if we thought in a more holistic fashion," said Churchill Grimes, director of the Fisheries Ecology Division of the National Marine Fisheries Service. "The PFMC doesn't have control over what the Department of Water Resources and others do, and they have authority over the areas in which their other life stages occur." Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Tue Apr 7 10:44:35 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Tue, 7 Apr 2009 10:44:35 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Commentary in Sacramento Bee Message-ID: <003e01c9b7a8$84f07670$8ed16350$@net> My View: New canal would not help the 'ailing' Delta The Sacramento Bee - 4/7/09 Commentary by Mark Wilson Mark Wilson co-manages Wilson Farms and Vineyards in the Clarksburg District of the Delta. He served on the Stakeholders' Advisory Group to the Delta Vision Blue Ribbon Task Force and was appointed by the governor to the Delta Protection Commission in January 2008 as an agricultural production representative. The recent Viewpoint by Jeffrey Knightlinger of the Metropolitan Water District and the Northern California Water Association's Donn Zea ("Canal would help ailing Delta to recover," March 20), purporting a consensus around a peripheral canal as a means to "help the Delta to recover," and former MWD executive Timothy Quinn's letter ("Delta left out of climate scenario," March 20) present a one-sided view of a multifaceted situation that affects Delta residents and the entire state. >From co-managing a family farming operation in the Delta that dates back to 1922, I am gravely concerned that the plans being made to benefit water exporters would negatively impact the people, economy, natural resources and ecology of the Delta. George Orwell would grimace at the claim that a canal built through five tributary rivers to the Delta, thousands of acres of prime farmland, a national wildlife refuge, American Indian burial sites, migratory corridors and other sensitive resources, and that significantly reduces freshwater inflow into the Delta somehow helps the Delta. A canal does not create any new water and is first and foremost a new northern diversion point for those with contractual rights to Delta water. The canal would secure better-quality water for out-of-watershed users and potentially avoid some of the endangered species problems plaguing the pumping of water from the south Delta. Yet this would be accomplished at the expense of the Delta watershed and long-standing beneficial uses. While new intakes south of Sacramento would decrease intake of Delta smelt at the current pumps, the potential effects caused at the new diversion points are unknown. What other species may be affected by the new diversions? What effects will the resulting changes in water quality and hydrology have on existing natural and human communities in Northern California and the Delta? The reference to "isolation of a recovering ecosystem from the movement of the water supply" as some kind of favor to the Delta is self-serving. A canal does nothing to address the underlying problems caused by the vast distance between most of our state's surface water supply and the bulk of water demand to the south. Some may point to the benefits of the tens of thousands of acres of habitat "restoration" that is another element of the Bay Delta Conservation (peripheral canal) Plan. Creating new marshes on working farms and other landscapes is a disruptive and dangerous experiment, not good science. Little is known, about the effectiveness of these activities to avoid, minimize or mitigate take of listed species like the coho salmon and Delta smelt, which is what a habitat conservation plan is supposed to do. And what about the destruction of existing habitats when new habitat is constructed? Pointing to restoration projects of little known benefit that will certainly harm existing ecosystems and economies is also a farce. We need to address a host of problems, including rising sea levels, seismic risks, water pollution and invasive species, while protecting endangered species, improving water quality within the Delta, sustaining agricultural economies within and outside of the Delta, all while providing a sustainable water supply to a growing population. It is no small task, and has been called a "wicked" problem. To address these challenges, we need an "all hands on deck" approach. We need a process that respects all interests and draws on the entire body of available knowledge. As a participant in the various processes, I can attest that substantive in-Delta concerns have been treated primarily as an outreach issue. Surprisingly, the Bay Delta Conservation Plan is not a collaborative process built on consensus as one might expect, given the massive support for watershed-based planning that emerged from the CalFED process. Despite the well-known fact that the best way to protect endangered species would be to reduce water exports, the Bay Delta Conservation Plan's only real core component is, and always has been, the canal. Serious consideration of water use efficiency and conservation, alternative supplies such as desalination, wastewater re-use, rainwater collection, groundwater banking, conjunctive use and additional storage south of the Delta are all apparently being relegated to the EIR alternative analysis, where there is little chance they will become project elements. Calling a canal a help to the Delta is illogical doublespeak and should be rejected, as it was in 1982. The Delta is more than the state's plumbing system. Though not in a purely natural state, it hosts an incredible variety of ecosystems as well as vibrant human communities. We all need to be part of the conversation about conservation of this unique place on earth while continuing to supply at least some of the water needed by our agricultural and urban neighbors to the south. We all must do more to conserve water, protect water quality and respect the myriad species that depend on the Delta for survival. It is obvious that the biggest loser in the current plan will be the Delta itself. In the short term, this may meet the needs of the water exporters, but in the long term we will all lose because the so-called solutions are neither comprehensive nor sustainable. We can and should do better. # Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Tue Apr 7 16:23:57 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Tue, 7 Apr 2009 16:23:57 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Trinity 2009 Flow Schedule Message-ID: <009401c9b7d7$ede26a60$c9a73f20$@net> The 2009 water-type year for Trinity River has been designated "Dry." The official decision is made annually as of April 1. A copy of the Flow Schedule is attached. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: 2009_Trinity_Release_DRY.XLS Type: application/vnd.ms-excel Size: 124416 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Tue Apr 7 17:11:38 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Tue, 7 Apr 2009 17:11:38 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Trinity 2009 Flow Schedule Message-ID: <00b401c9b7de$963554b0$c29ffe10$@net> The 2009 water-type year for Trinity River has been designated "Dry." The official decision is made annually as of April 1. A copy of the Flow Schedule is attached. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: 2009_Trinity_Release_DRY.XLS Type: application/vnd.ms-excel Size: 124416 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Wed Apr 8 10:09:21 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Wed, 8 Apr 2009 10:09:21 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] A Principal Westlands Landowner Dies Message-ID: <000901c9b86c$c3223ef0$4966bcd0$@net> James G. Boswell II dies; farming tycoon Jerry Hirsch, Los Angeles Times Wednesday, April 8, 2009 (04-08) 04:00 PDT Los Angeles - -- James G. Boswell II, the intensely private businessman who transformed his family's cotton holdings into California's first giant agribusiness and one of the nation's great farming empires, has died. He was 86. Mr. Boswell died of natural causes Friday at his desert home in Indian Wells (Riverside County), according to a statement from the family. As head of the family-owned J.G. Boswell Co., Mr. Boswell ran a company that has dominated California cotton growing for generations and its clout to influence land and water resource policy throughout much of the state. Mr. Boswell was just 29 when he inherited 50,000 acres after the death of his uncle and family patriarch, J.G. Boswell. Over the next half century, he transformed the family farm in Corcoran (Kings County) in the San Joaquin Valley. Mr. Boswell's labs created new, more productive seeds. Historians and agriculture economists credit Mr. Boswell for creating the template for large agribusiness concerns. The Boswell business remains one of the world's top sellers of "the extra long staple cotton that goes into fabric blends and both soft and high-end apparel," said Don Villarejo, director emeritus of California Institute for Rural Studies in Davis. "His legacy is quite impressive," said Villarejo. "He was a brilliant business leader beloved by many of his employees. At the same time, his company was able to be ahead of and often acquire his chief farming competitors." Mr. Boswell also was famous for using a combination of political clout and legal strategy "to outwit many of the environmental groups that have tried to restrict water deliveries to California agriculture," Villarejo said. He was an innovative water user, one of the first to employ lasers to level fields so that water flowed evenly and efficiently, said Richard Howitt, an agriculture economist at the UC Davis. Mr. Boswell grew the business from about 50,000 acres to a peak of about 200,000. It's now about 150,000 acres. The company used its political clout to encourage the building of the Pine Flat Dam to shut the flow of water to Tulare Lake - which, at one point, was the largest freshwater lake west of the Mississippi River - and into farmland. The drained lake bed is the heart of Mr. Boswell's sprawling enterprise. Mr. Boswell was born March 10, 1923, in Greensboro, Ga., the son of William Whittier Boswell Sr. and Kate Hall Boswell, and moved west with his parents and his uncles. He was named after his uncle J.G. Boswell. With no children of his own, J.G. Boswell chose his nephew to take control of the company. The company was founded in 1921 by the older J.G. Boswell, with help from William Boswell and J.G. Boswell II's father. In the early 1980s, Mr. Boswell and the company would spend $1 million to defeat the Peripheral Canal, a proposed system to move water to Southern California. During the same period, Mr. Boswell helped farmers outflank state and game regulators and pump water from excessive snowmelt into the north fork of the Kings River. The move prevented farmland from flooding but also threatened to introduce the nonnative predatory white bass into the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. The bass now lives in the delta. He served as chairman, president and chief executive of his company from 1952 until his retirement in 1984. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Wed Apr 8 11:02:26 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Wed, 8 Apr 2009 11:02:26 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Another version of the King of California's Death Message-ID: <002001c9b874$2d0fff30$872ffd90$@net> James G. Boswell II dies at 86; cotton magnate built family farm into agribusiness giant The Los Angeles Times - 4/7/09 By Jerry Hirsch Email Picture Boswell built the state's first giant agribusiness, and played an influential role in shaping the state's water and land policies. Heralded as 'The King of California,' Boswell at one point oversaw an empire spanning 200,000 acres in the San Joaquin Valley, transforming the industry and influencing pivotal state water policies. James G. Boswell II, the intensely private businessman who transformed his family's cotton holdings into California's first giant agribusiness and one of the nation's great farming empires, has died. He was 86. Boswell died of natural causes Friday at his home in Indian Wells, Calif., according to a statement from the family. As head of the family-owned J.G. Boswell Co., Boswell ran a company that has dominated California cotton growing for generations and has used its clout to influence land- and water-resource policy throughout much of the state. He was just 29 when he inherited the company following the death of his uncle J.G. Boswell, the family patriarch. Over the next half-century, he transformed the business and more than tripled the size of the family farm, which peaked about 200,000 acres and now spans 150,000 in the San Joaquin Valley town of Corcoran. Boswell's labs created new, more productive seeds. Technological improvements to his gins boosted their capacity to 400 bales of cotton a day -- enough to produce 840,000 pairs of boxer shorts, according to a 2003 Times article. Historians and agriculture economists credit Boswell with creating the template for large agribusiness concerns. The Boswell business remains one of the world's top sellers of "the extra-long staple cotton that goes into fabric blends and both soft and high-end apparel," said Don Villarejo, director emeritus of the California Institute for Rural Studies in Davis. "His legacy is quite impressive," said Villarejo. "He was a brilliant business leader beloved by many of his employees. At the same time, his company was able to be ahead of and often acquire his chief farming competitors." Boswell also was legendary for using a combination of political clout and legal strategy "to outwit many of the environmental groups that have tried to restrict water deliveries to California agriculture," Villarejo said. He was an innovative water user, one of the first to employ lasers to level fields so that water flowed evenly and efficiently, said Richard Howitt, an agriculture economist at UC Davis. Careful water management, including employing agronomists to determine when and how to water, allowed Boswell's farms to produce more cotton with less water than competitors, Howitt said. Many of his techniques were later adopted by other farms. But even during this period of growth and success for the enterprise, which included diversification into tomatoes and other crops, real estate development and farming in distant Australia, Boswell remained an intensely private man at the head of an intensely private family business. A rare 1999 interview with two now-former Los Angeles Times writers gave outsiders a sense of Boswell's character. For years staff writer Mark Arax and business editor Rick Wartzman had attempted to meet the cotton patriarch. But each letter and call was rejected. The two were writing "The King of California: J.G. Boswell and the Making of a Secret American Empire," a book about the family's cotton business, and they needed to talk to him. Finally he agreed. J.G., as Boswell liked to be called, wanted to meet them on his land rather than in some sterile office. His intent was to show them that the business was only as good as its earth. Boswell, the pair wrote, "wore a Cal Poly Ag hat tucked low, frayed khaki pants, a flannel shirt and Rockport shoes." "It was all part of an image that Boswell loved to play up. He had earned an economics degree at Stanford and sat on the board of General Electric and other big corporations, but he fancied himself a cowboy," they wrote in a 2003 Times article. Boswell attended the Thacher School, an exclusive private boarding school in Ojai, graduating in 1941. He served in the Army during World War II in the South Pacific before graduating from Stanford in 1946. That's where he met his first wife, Rosalind Murray. They raised their three children in Pasadena, far from the farm. She died in 2000. The company remains headquartered in Pasadena. Fancying himself a cowboy and living like a city boy, J.G. proved to be a complex figure. When he reached out to shake the writers' hands, they noticed the missing fingers on his right hand, the result of a cattle-roping accident. They jumped into an aged Chevy truck for a tour of his holdings. The writers said they traveled half a day and 150 miles but never left the farm. When they asked Boswell how much land he really owned, he responded, "What are you, a tax collector?" "I'm the bad guy in agriculture because I'm big," he said later. "I'm not going to try to fight it. I can't change an image and say, 'Well, I'm righteous and good and all that.' But I'm telling you . . . I'm not going to apologize for our size." Wartzman, now director of the Drucker Institute at Claremont Graduate University, said he was sad to learn of Boswell's death. "He was an immensely complicated guy, someone who knew every inch of his land but whose company did some pretty awful things to the land," Wartzman said. "It is just hard to farm in an environmentally sound manner at that scale." The company used its political clout to encourage the building of the Pine Flat Dam to shut the flow of water to Tulare Lake, which at one point was the largest freshwater lake west of the Mississippi River. The drained lake bed is now farmland, located at the heart of Boswell's sprawling enterprise. Boswell was born March 10, 1923, in Greensboro, Ga., the son of William Whittier Boswell Sr. and Kate Hall Boswell, and moved west with his parents and his uncles. He was named after his uncle J.G. Boswell, who married Ruth Chandler, the daughter of Los Angeles Times Publisher and real estate baron Harry Chandler. With no children of his own, J.G. Boswell picked his nephew to take control of the company he had founded in 1921 with the help of his brothers. In the early 1980s, Boswell and the company would spend $1 million to defeat the Peripheral Canal, a system proposed to move water to Southern California. He thought it would hurt farming interests. During the same period, Boswell helped farmers outflank state and game regulators and pump water from excessive snowmelt into the north fork of the Kings River. The move prevented farmland from flooding but also introduced the nonnative predatory white bass into the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. At times profane, Boswell liked to be in control. For many years his company extended its influence throughout the San Joaquin Valley by lending money to other growers. He served as chairman, president and chief executive of the company from 1952 until his retirement in 1984. He remained on the company's board of directors until his death. His son James W. Boswell now runs the business. In addition to his son, he is survived by his wife, Barbara Wallace Boswell; daughters Jody Hall and Lorraine Wilcox; and five grandchildren. A memorial service is planned for April 22 at 1 p.m. at the Corcoran High School Memorial Stadium. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Thu Apr 9 10:40:41 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Thu, 9 Apr 2009 10:40:41 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] SF Chron 4 8 09 Message-ID: <005501c9b93a$4deeff00$e9ccfd00$@net> U.S. to ban commercial salmon season Peter Fimrite, Chronicle Staff Writer Thursday, April 9, 2009 (04-08) 19:52 PDT Millbrae -- Lovers of king salmon will have to settle for fish hooked in the Pacific Northwest this year under a federal agency's recommendation Wednesday to ban the commercial catching of salmon off California and much of Oregon in an attempt to save the fabled fish. Images Fisherman Steve Crotty, who used to go out after chinook ... Offshore salmon fishing ban area (Chronicle Graphic) http://imgs.sfgate.com/graphics/utils/plus-green.gifView Larger Images * FBI joins effort in hostage standoff with pirates 04.09.09 The move, which the National Marine Fisheries Service is expected to make final by May 1, comes after the fewest chinook salmon ever recorded made their way up the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers last fall. "There are just no fish," said Zeke Grader, executive director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations. "If they allowed any fishing, they would be putting at risk future fishing." Wednesday's decision by the 14-member Pacific Fishery Management Council, meeting in Millbrae, marks the second year in a row that commercial fishermen will not be allowed to reel in chinook. Only 87,881 0f the fish returned to the once-thriving salmon factory known as the Sacramento-San Joaquin River system in 2007, and a record low of 66,286 returned last year, according to estimates extrapolated from a count of egg nests in riverbeds. Fisheries biologists are projecting that, even without fishing this summer, the fall run of chinook will be almost twice as plentiful as last year's, but the numbers will barely reach the council's minimum goal of 122,000 fish. A fishing ban this summer had been expected since March, when none of the three options outlined by the council included commercial fishing in the two states. The council, established three decades ago to manage the Pacific Coast fishery, advised that some sport fishing be allowed in California and Oregon, mostly where the much-improved Klamath River salmon runs are located. The Klamath and Trinity river runs were declared a disaster in 2006, but runs there are looking better than the Sacramento this year. Recreational fishermen would be allowed to take chinook from Aug. 29 to Sept. 7 from the mouth of the Klamath River to southern Oregon. Some commercial and sportfishing of hatchery-raised coho salmon - identifiable because the fleshy adipose fins have been removed - will be allowed in Oregon during July and August. The Sacramento River's spawning run was the last great salmon run along the giant Central Valley river system, which includes the San Joaquin River, where leaping, wriggling chinook were once so plentiful that old-timers recalled reaching in and plucking fish right out of the water. Chinook, known scientifically as Oncorhynchus tshawytscha, hatch in rivers and streams. Also known as king, spring or tyee salmon, they pass through San Francisco Bay and roam the Pacific Ocean as far away as Alaska before returning three years later to spawn where they were born in the Sacramento River and its tributaries. The fall run in September and October has for decades been the backbone of the West Coast fishing industry. At its peak, it exceeded 800,000 fish. Over the past decade, the number of spawners had consistently topped 250,000. A study last month by federal, state and academic scientists blamed the collapse of the fishery on poor conditions in both the ocean and river. Destruction of river habitat, water diversions and dams in the Central Valley so weakened the fall run that it couldn't withstand two recent years of scanty food supply in the warming Pacific Ocean, according to the study commissioned by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Exacerbating the problem, researchers said, was the demise of three other distinct runs of salmon - winter, spring and late fall - and the reliance on less genetically diverse hatchery fish instead of naturally spawning wild populations of chinook. Whatever the cause, more than 2,200 fishermen and fishing industry workers lost their jobs as a result of last year's ban. While they received federal disaster aid, fishing communities and fishing-related businesses lost more than $250 million. "We just need to decide that we value wild California king salmon," said Larry Collins, a San Francisco salmon and crab fisherman. "We know what to do to make these runs healthier. Until we leave enough water in the rivers for the salmon, we're going to continue to be up against it." Restrictions on river fishing will be decided in May or June by the California Department of Fish and Game, which allowed about 600 chinook to be caught last year, angering commercial fishermen who opposed any fishing. "The best thing fishermen can do this year is attend all the water board hearings and let the governor know how his water policies are hurting our industry," Grader said. "In the meantime, it's going to be a struggle." Salmon peril by the numbers 250,000 Number of chinook that spawned in Northern California each year for much of the past decade 87,881 Number of salmon that returned to the Sacramento-San Joaquin River system in 2007 66,286 Record-low number of the fish that returned last year 2,200 Number of workers who lost their jobs as a result of last year's fishing ban Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.gif Type: image/gif Size: 4861 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image002.gif Type: image/gif Size: 4130 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image003.gif Type: image/gif Size: 54 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Thu Apr 9 11:27:49 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Thu, 9 Apr 2009 11:27:49 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] LA Times 4 9 09 Message-ID: <007601c9b940$e38d65f0$aaa831d0$@net> Federal officials ban salmon fishing off California coast Dwindling populations of Chinook salmon force fishery managers to severely limit commercial salmon fishing in California and Oregon for the second year in a row. Future of the industry is dubious. The Los Angeles Times - 4/9/09 By Maria L. La Ganga Reporting from Millbrae, Calif. - Federal fishery managers voted unanimously Wednesday to ban commercial salmon fishing off the coast of California for the second year in a row, a move some fishermen fear could imperil the industry's future in the name of saving it. The Pacific Fishery Management Council also severely limited commercial fishing off the coast of Oregon for the second year and took a deep bite out of recreational salmon fishing in California, restricting that popular pastime to a 10-day window and a 130-mile stretch from the Oregon border south. Canceling the commercial season was the only tack to take "when your bread-and-butter stock is not producing," said David Bitts, president of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Assns. "But if we don't go fishing next year," warned Bitts, a fisherman from Eureka, Calif., "we have to start thinking that salmon fishing in California is over." Only about 122,000 of the prized Chinook -- also known as wild king salmon -- are expected to journey up the Sacramento River to spawn this fall. Although that's nearly twice as many as in last year's dismal season, it is barely enough to sustain the salmon population. "It's terrible, to say the least," said David Goldenberg, chief executive of the California Salmon Council. "But we're going to have to deal with it, if the numbers of returning salmon are so low fishermen don't want to fish it." But "dealing with it" could be easier said than done, and fishermen are not the only ones affected by the shutdown. The whole salmon infrastructure will take yet another hit, from gear stores and ice houses to fuel docks and processing plants. State officials estimated that the 2008 fishing ban resulted in a loss of $255 million and 2,263 jobs. "Things are very fragile as far as the infrastructure is concerned," said Duncan MacLean, a Half Moon Bay, Calif., commercial fisherman and salmon advisor to the management council. "There's a lot of support businesses that will either relocate or go under." The salmon industry received a miniature federal bailout after the 2008 season was canceled -- $170 million in emergency aid, of which about $120 million was disbursed to everyone from fishermen to charter boat owners. "It's been a godsend for the entire industry," said MacLean, who traveled with others in the industry to Washington last year to lobby Congress for assistance. "We wouldn't be considering ourselves still fishermen right now if it wasn't for that." It is unclear whether more aid will be available to help assuage a second year of pain. At the very least, the industry hopes last year's leftovers will be distributed to keep fishermen and others afloat. There is no single reason for California and Oregon's flagging Chinook fishery, but rather a plethora of unfortunate circumstances. Recent ocean conditions have been too warm and there has not been enough food for so-called juvenile fall-run Chinook salmon, according to a National Marine Fisheries Service report. MacLean also points to record water deliveries to Southern California, habitat destruction caused by urbanization, pollution from agricultural chemicals and mismanagement of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. "There's no one smoking gun," MacLean said, "but there are a lot of spent shell casings all over the place." Washington's fisheries are healthy enough this season for commercial and recreational fishing of both Chinook and coho salmon, although there are quotas in place. The big question is whether the salmon population will rebound enough in 2010 for salmon fishing to resume in California and Oregon. Peter Moyle, a professor of fish biology at UC Davis, is dubious. "Ocean conditions are pretty good right now, and salmon numbers are creeping up again," he wrote in an e-mail, "but there is no guarantee such trends will lead to fishable populations in the next 2-3 years, or beyond." Just before the unanimous vote, the council's California representative said she hoped 2010 would be a better year. "It's very unfortunate we have no real ocean fisheries in California," said Marija Vojkovich of the California Department of Fish and Game, ruing what she called the state's "commercial nonseason." "I'm keeping my fingers crossed that this is not what we deal with next year." http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-salmon9-2009apr09,0,2167233.story Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Fri Apr 10 10:19:03 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Fri, 10 Apr 2009 10:19:03 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] New York Times 4 10 0-9 More Boswell Message-ID: <002501c9ba00$72c5ecf0$5851c6d0$@net> Well, he got a BA in Economics from Stanford four years before I got a BA in Economics from Stanford, he went to Thacher School in Ojai (a great school) which my children attended and a grandson just was admitted as a freshman this fall. Other than that.I'm just struggling with the Trinity River. Byron James G. Boswell II, 86, Owner of Cotton Empire, Dies at 86 o Linkedin o Digg o Facebook o Mixx o My Space o Yahoo! Buzz o Permalink o o By DENNIS HEVESI Published: April 9, 2009 James G. Boswell II, who inherited a huge expanse of farmland in the San Joaquin Valley of California, then quadrupled its acreage to create a cotton-growing empire, died last Friday at his home in Indian Wells, Calif. He was 86. Skip to next paragraph http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/04/10/us/10boswell190.jpg Matt Black James G. Boswell II on some of his property in California. He died of natural causes, according to a statement from his family. It was the boll weevil's decimation of the cotton fields of Georgia that sent Mr. Boswell's uncle James Griffin Boswell, for whom he was named, across the country in 1921. Outside Corcoran, a rural town in Central California, Colonel Boswell (as the uncle preferred to be called) bought the first of what gradually became 50,000 acres. In 1952 he bequeathed his cotton fields to his nephew. James Boswell II eventually expanded the family's holdings to approximately 200,000 acres, including 60,000 in the Australian outback but not including the 20,000 acres in Arizona that he sold in the late 1950s to the Del Webb Development Company. Those 20,000 acres were transformed, with Mr. Boswell as a development partner, into Sun City, one of the nation's first retirement communities. "It speaks to his incredible business sense that when his Arizona land was no longer good for growing cotton he was savvy enough to grow houses," Rick Wartzman, the director of the Drucker Institute at Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, Calif., said Tuesday in an interview. Mr. Wartzman, a former business editor at The Los Angeles Times, is the author, with Mark Arax, of "The King of California: J. G. Boswell and the Making of a Secret American Empire" (PublicAffairs, 2003). The J. G. Boswell Company currently owns about 150,000 acres in California and, according to Hoover's Inc., a business analysis company, is the largest producer of cotton in the United States. It supplies textile mills worldwide and has annual sales of more than $150 million. The company's expansion has not been without controversy. Its vast, well-tended lands and network of irrigation canals stretch across the bed of Tulare Lake, which was once the largest freshwater lake west of the Mississippi, four times the size of Lake Tahoe. Early pioneers encroached on the lake to irrigate their farms, a process that Mr. Boswell's uncle accelerated as he bought more property. Four rivers feed Tulare Lake. The Boswells forcefully and successfully lobbied for the construction of dams that largely diminished the lake, draining its bed for more farmland. "He re-engineered the landscape, much to the consternation of environmentalists," Mr. Wartzman said of the younger James Boswell. "He was a titan with a lot of power in Sacramento and Washington. He genuinely loved the land, and yet he left an environmental record that was very mixed at best." Mr. Boswell also introduced techniques that became a model for large-scale farming: lasers that ensured level fields for even water distribution; bioengineering of new and pest-resistant seeds; computerized cotton gins with a capacity to produce 400 bales a day - enough to produce 840,000 pairs of boxer shorts, according to a 2003 article in The Los Angeles Times. "There was an antiseptic cleanliness to the whole operation," Mr. Wartzman said. "He pushed the industry in terms of modernizing, from seed to field to gin." Born on March 10, 1923, in Greensboro, Ga., Mr. Boswell was the son of William Boswell Sr. and Kate Hall Boswell. When he was a child, the family moved to California to join in his uncle's enterprise. After serving in the Army in the Pacific during World War II, Mr. Boswell returned to Stanford University in 1946 to complete his bachelor's degree in economics. There he met Rosalind Murray; they married and had three children. She died in 2000. Mr. Boswell is survived by his second wife, the former Barbara Wallace; his son, James, who now runs the business; two daughters, Jody Hall and Lorraine Wilcox; and five grandchildren. Mr. Boswell was a complicated, reticent man. He saw himself as a cowboy and was proud that he had lost two fingers in a cattle-roping accident. He golfed with Arnold Palmer. He sat on the boards of General Electric, the Security Pacific Bank and the Safeway supermarket chain. He was chairman, president and chief executive of his company from 1952 until he retired in 1984. Mr. Boswell did not like to talk about himself or his business. When Mr. Wartzman and Mr. Arax were doing research for "The King of California," Mr. Boswell spurned many requests for an interview. "We finally decided to appeal to his mortality," they wrote in the book, "a sales pitch he cut short like this: 'You don't seem to understand. It won't bother me in the least if I die and this story is never told.' " Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 14143 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Fri Apr 10 17:49:51 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Fri, 10 Apr 2009 17:49:51 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Winnemem Wintu Press Release Message-ID: <006501c9ba3f$6c3aab20$44b00160$@net> *** Media Advisory *** Tribal War Dance and March Next Steps in Winnemem Wintu Tribe's Journey to Justice Ceremonies Initiate Federal Lawsuit on behalf of Tribe Who: The Winnemem Wintu Tribe, a traditional California Tribe. The Winnemem have been fighting for years to sustain their culture and address generations of broken promises by the federal government. What: War Dance, March and press conference from Sacramento River to the State Capitol. Winnemem war dancers and tribal leaders will perform a traditional ceremonial War Dance next to the Sacramento River and will then march to the State Capitol building. The March and War Dance initiate the federal lawsuit the Tribe is filing, asking for compensation for damages done by federal land management policies, including the construction of the Shasta Dam. Schedule of events: Sunday, April 19th: War Dance begins in the evening on the Sacramento River Location: West Sacramento TBA. Monday, April 20th: Ceremony and address by Tribal leaders West Sacramento. Exact location and time TBA March from Sacramento River to State Capitol ROUTE AND TIME FOR MARCH TBA Press Conference with Tribal leaders and community members 12:00 Noon to 1 PM State Capitol Location 27 West side of capitol building More Information: The Winnemem Wintu Tribe is filing a lawsuit against Department of The Interior; Department of Agriculture; United States Forest Service; Bureau of Reclamation; Bureau of Indian Affairs; Bureau of Land Management; Ken Salazar, Secretary of The Interior; Assistant Secretary for Water and Science; Assistant Secretary for Fish and Wildlife and Parks in The Department of Agriculture; and Tom Vilsack, Secretary of Agriculture asking for redress for decades of injustices and harm related to federal land management policies which have destroyed Winnemem cultural practices and sacred places. The Winnemem began a journey to justice in 2004 with a War Dance at Shasta Dam. Today we continue that journey with another War Dance and this lawsuit. Our people are a traditional people, steeped in our culture and traditional lifeways, who have continued our cultural practices throughout the written history of the state of California. With this lawsuit and War Dance, we continue our journey to ensure our basic quality of life and freedom to maintain our traditions and culture. Winnemem Wintu Tribe 14840 bear mountain road . Redding, CA . 96003 Phone: 530-275-2737 . Fax: 530-275-4193 http://www.winnememwintu.us Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Sat Apr 11 06:40:28 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Sat, 11 Apr 2009 06:40:28 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] NY Times Editorial 4 10 09 Message-ID: <000001c9baab$1381afd0$3a850f70$@net> Editorial Dr. Lubchenco and the Salmon o Linkedin o Digg o Facebook o Mixx o My Space o Yahoo! Buzz o Permalink o April 10, 2009 Jane Lubchenco, the new leader of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, will have more to say than anyone else in Washington about the health of fish species in America's coastal waters. A career marine ecologist, she is widely regarded as tough, smart, respectful of science and deeply committed to the survival and growth of America's fisheries. Skip to next paragraph She will need all of those qualities and more when she confronts what could be her first major test - possibly the most vexing of her tenure - devising a workable and broadly acceptable solution to the grave threats facing the salmon runs of the Pacific Northwest. In a matter of weeks, a federal judge in Seattle will rule on the adequacy of the Bush administration's last recovery plan for a dozen or so endangered or threatened salmon runs in the Columbia-Snake River Basin. Judge James Redden has already rejected two earlier plans. He tossed out a Clinton plan because he found its prescriptions too vague and predictions about the recovery rate for salmon species too speculative. He then tossed out a Bush plan because it did too little to increase water flows over the dams to help move young salmon downstream to the ocean. It was also illegal: The Endangered Species Act requires the recovery of a species, whereas the Bush plan promised little more than allowing the fish to go extinct at a slower rate. This latest plan is an improvement, but it asks only that the fish be "trending toward recovery" - which could mean almost anything, and certainly does not point toward full recovery. It is opposed by environmental groups and the state of Oregon, from which Dr. Lubchenco hails. It also is unlikely to pass muster with the judge. That would set the stage for intervention by the Obama administration and, one hopes, a much better recovery plan. As part of that plan, we urge the administration to consider removing the four dams on the Lower Snake River, which many scientists see as critical to the species' recovery. The Clinton plan held open that possibility; the Bush plan did not. Encouragingly, Dr. Lubchenco has already shown a capacity to confront tough problems. Last week, she asked the hidebound and suspicious fishermen of New England to entertain a radical shift in the way they manage their fisheries. Instead of the current race to catch the last fish, Dr. Lubchenco is calling on them instead to submit to an ownership system known as "catch shares" under which they would be given a fixed share of the fishery and, with it, a strong financial interest in having the fishery survive and grow. The idea has worked well in several countries, like Australia. It also captured the attention of Congress and the Bush administration. Getting New England's traditionalists to accept a new idea will not be easy, but it is necessary. New England's fisheries suffer from overfishing, the Pacific Northwest's from habitat loss. What both places suffer from is a failure to act. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Sun Apr 12 09:48:30 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Sun, 12 Apr 2009 09:48:30 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] SF Chronicle 4 12 09 Message-ID: <000001c9bb8e$83217d50$896477f0$@net> State must rescue delta from crisis Congressman George Miller, State Senator Lois Wolk Sunday, April 12, 2009 California's Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, the largest estuary on the Pacific Coast of the Americas, is in crisis. Multiple species of fish are in rapid decline. First the delta smelt, and then the steelhead and salmon that once migrated through the estuary by the tens of thousands. Now, even the orcas that feed on the salmon are threatened. The dominoes are falling every day. * California water resources 04.12.09 This crisis didn't happen overnight. It came after years of mismanagement by the federal and state water and wildlife agencies that ignored what the science was telling them and resisted new realities about climate change. Fortunately, change in Washington is giving Californians new opportunities to rescue our delta from the failed policies of the past. With a new administration committed to sustainable energy and environmental policy, it is time to form a new state-federal-local partnership to save the delta. We need this vital region - its ecosystem and its economy - to thrive. Working together, we can use new tools to meet our clean water needs, overhaul the responsible agencies, and implement a new management plan that is grounded in science - and gets results. But first we must realize that there are no silver bullets that will solve all of California's water woes. Suspending the federal Endangered Species Act certainly won't do it. Nor will sprinting to commit billions of taxpayer dollars to dig a water supply ditch the size of the Panama Canal around the delta. Our years in California water policy have taught us that you've got to put the right policies in place before you decide to build expensive and divisive water infrastructure. Yet the state Department of Water Resources is now spending more than $1.1 billion on canal and water project planning - off budget, with no legislative oversight or public accountability - while Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's Cabinet has asserted that the state could break ground on a canal before the governor's term expires. There are better answers, both short and long term, that have a greater chance to bring back our fisheries, deliver reliable clean water, and bolster, not threaten, the delta region, including its $35 billion economy with more than 200,000 jobs. These solutions include the region's communities as partners, not adversaries. Immediately, we should expand proven and cost-effective water supply strategies such as conservation, recycling, groundwater cleanup, desalination, enhanced coordination between reservoirs, and regional water supply projects in Southern California and the Bay Area. President Obama's economic recovery package included a record $126 million for water reuse projects across the West: a good start, but only a drop in the bucket given the demands we face. In the longer term, we believe that the delta needs a steward, an entity whose sole responsibility is the recovery and health of the delta. We propose a Delta Stewardship Council, which will include representation from different perspectives, all bound by a legal obligation to restore and protect the delta ecosystem. This would help resolve the confusion of 200 federal, state, and local agencies bumping into one another, often at cross purposes, while decision-makers' primary obligations are to outside interests with no responsibility for this critical estuary's survival. The delta and its watershed also need funding, a conservancy like those California has established to preserve other natural treasures: the coast, the Sierra Nevada and Lake Tahoe. Much like the Florida Everglades, the delta is a vital economic and environmental resource - not just a plumbing fixture that two-thirds of the state relies upon for its water supply. Several months ago, the Delta Vision Task Force took an important first step by identifying two co-equal goals for delta policy: water supply reliability and restoring the ecosystem. We believe in elevating a third goal, the delta itself as a place, including the communities, economy, culture, historic, recreational and environmental values that make it valuable to all Californians. We recognize California's water supply challenges are real and interconnected to the crisis in the delta. Both issues demand action and results. As residents and elected representatives of the region, we urge all Californians to work together to get the policy right before we make the problem worse. Rep. George Miller, D-Martinez, is a member of the House leadership and the former chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee. State Sen. Lois Wolk, D-Davis, is chair of Senate Select Committee on Delta Stewardship and Sustainability, and a member of Delta Protection Commission. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Sun Apr 12 09:53:06 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Sun, 12 Apr 2009 09:53:06 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Eureka Times Standard 4 12 09 Message-ID: <002001c9bb8f$2751cec0$75f56c40$@net> For want of water: Another dry winter could push Trinity River too far John Driscoll/The Times-Standard Posted: 04/12/2009 01:23:56 AM PDT California's drought may push the Trinity River close to crisis this year, and it will take a lot of rain next winter to prevent that plight from getting far worse. When Trinity Lake falls below a certain level, it may no longer be able to provide the frigid water to the river that's needed to keep salmon and steelhead healthy during a hot summer. Depending on whether the region sees more rain this spring, the lake could be drained close to that critical point -- but probably not until, fall when temperatures drop. It is this coming winter that may spell real trouble. Should the drought continue, Trinity Lake won't fill up enough to meet demands on the system: the diversion to the Sacramento River and the Central Valley, the electricity that diversion produces, and fish in the river. What water there is may be too warm to ensure that salmon are protected in the river, as well. "It will be difficult to meet all the requirements next year throughout the system," said Brian Person, area manager for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which operates the project. The Trinity River Division of the Central Valley Project was completed in the 1960s to ship water to the Sacramento River, which is tapped for farms in the San Joaquin Valley. Early on, the diversion was as much as 90 percent, leaving the Trinity's fisheries in jeopardy. After years of deliberations and litigation, a federal record of decision was put in place in 2001 that mandated the diversion be no more than 52 percent in an effort to restore salmon and steelhead. That decision calls for a yearly determination on how much water should be released down the river and when. Extremely wet years call for huge releases of water in the spring meant to reshape the river and improve fish habitat, while dry years are meant to provide enough cold water for spawning and rearing needs. Last week, the Trinity Management Council, which makes that determination based on a series of forecasts on snow and rain figures, classified the year as a "dry year." That means 453,000 acre feet -- or 147 billion gallons -- is scheduled to be sent down the river, most of it during the spring. If there is no more rain this year, that and the diversion to the Sacramento River will draw Trinity Lake down to about 600,000 acre feet by late fall. That's not likely to trigger a problem this year. But with the lake that low, it will take millions of acre feet of water flowing into the lake over the winter to bring the lake up far enough to keep it from falling below that level in the summer of 2010. It's happened twice before. In 1977, the lake was far below that 600,000-acre-foot level and thousands of fish at Trinity River Hatchery died from diseases. In 1991, it dipped just below that level. The wetter years that followed, however, replenished the reservoir. "You have to tackle these things on a year-to-year basis," said Mike Hamman, executive director of the Trinity River Restoration Program run by the Bureau of Reclamation. Some familiar with the complex operation of the project, however, are concerned that there is no real contingency plan to deal with an extended drought in the face of possible climate change. There are so many operational and regulatory constraints on the project that balancing them could be increasingly challenging in the future. Among them are that the bureau must make sure that the water released down the river from Lewiston Dam is cold -- about 48 to 50 degrees -- in order to protect fish. It also has temperature requirements on the Sacramento River, and Trinity River water is used to help keep that river cold, too. The plumbing of the project creates problems for meeting those requirements. Because water released to the Trinity River must first move through shallow Lewiston Lake, where it warms up during hot weather, more cold water must be released to dampen that effect. So summer flows of about 450 cubic feet per second to the river require that 1,500 to 1,800 cfs be released into Lewiston Lake. The warmer the water released from Trinity Lake, the more difficult it is to keep that water cool. It may be possible to take water from the bottom of Trinity Lake, where it's coldest, but that bypasses the power plant. Even that won't be effective if Trinity Lake gets too low and too warm. Trinity River fisheries advocates say that the problem could be avoided by keeping more in the lake each year, something they say the bureau is reluctant to do. "There is no plan for the future to avoid a crisis," said Tom Weseloh with California Trout. Weseloh said that the group of stakeholders that make recommendations on operations recently suggested that the Trinity Management Council ask the bureau how it intends to comply with a 1990 State Water Resources Control Board order intended to protect the river. It demands that temperature requirements must first be met on the Trinity River. National Marine Fisheries Service Arcata Area Office Supervisor Irma Lagomarsino said that if the lake is drawn down to below that 600,000-acre-foot level, the Bureau of Reclamation must confer with her agency and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. But there is no hard-wired process to follow beyond that, Lagomarsino said. Lagomarsino said that long-term discussions are necessary to address how much water is flowing to the Sacramento River and the Central Valley, adding that the diversion and river flows have exceeded the amount of water flowing into Trinity Lake for the past two years, which may constrain the operation of the system in the future. "All of this is risk management," Lagomarsino said. The current scenario is something that former Trinity County Senior Planner Tom Stokely was warning about several years ago. Stokely now works with the California Water Impact Network, and said that the bureau has a number of regulatory issues that need to be cleared up before there is assurance that the Trinity River is protected in dire circumstances. Included in those, he said, are that the releases called for in the 2001 record of decision have not been written into key water rights permits. "Until that's done," Stokely said, "the Trinity's cold water supply remains at great risk." John Driscoll can be reached at 441-0504 or jdriscoll at times-standard.com. THE PROJECT: Trinity Lake, behind Trinity Dam, stores water from the Trinity River for release through Trinity Powerplant. Downstream, Lewiston Dam diverts water from the Trinity River, through the Lewiston Powerplant, into Clear Creek Tunnel for the 11-mile trip through the Trinity Mountains. Water enters Whiskeytown Lake through Judge Francis Carr Powerhouse. Some of the water diverts from the lake into the Clear Creek Unit South Main Aqueduct to irrigate lands in the Clear Creek Unit. The rest flows through the Spring Creek Power Conduit and Powerplant into Keswick Reservoir in the Shasta Division. From there, it goes through Keswick Powerplant, then south in the Sacramento River. The Wintu Pumping Plant diverts irrigation water from the Sacramento River into the Cow Creek Aqueduct and Unit. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Sun Apr 12 12:36:52 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Sun, 12 Apr 2009 12:36:52 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Klamath Riverkeeper Press Release Message-ID: <005e01c9bba6$08930d70$19b92850$@net> PRESS RELEASE FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: March 24, 2009 Contact: Scott Harding, Executive Director, Klamath Riverkeeper (541) 488?3553, scott at klamathriver.org Klamath Riverkeeper Joins Suit to Stop Harmful Recreational Gold Mining Lawsuit targets California Fish and Game for using tax dollars to fund illegal mining program Oakland, CA - Klamath Riverkeeper has joined a recent lawsuit against California Fish and Game for using taxpayer dollars to fund an illegal recreational gold mining program. ?California is spending taxpayers? dollars to issue permits that allow recreational gold miners to harm the Klamath?s imperiled fisheries in the name of a few flakes of gold,? says Scott Harding, the Executive Director of Klamath Riverkeeper. Weekend and hobby gold miners once used low?impact pans, shovels, and picks to search for gold but in recent years there has been a proliferation of suction dredges on the Klamath River and its tributaries. A suction dredge is a gas or diesel?powered vacuum placed on a floating platform in the river or stream. The miner uses the vacuum to suck up the river bottom, sort the gold out in a sluice, and dump the leftover gravel, sand, and silt back into the river. The practice of suction dredging has been shown to disrupt spawning beds, force fish into areas of dangerously warm water, muddy river water, alter the course of stream channels, and hurt or kill aquatic organisms living in the river bottom. At times, ten or more suction dredges can be found in one river mile on the Klamath. The California Department of Fish and Game has previously admitted in court that its current suction dredge mining regulations violate the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) and Fish and Game Codes ??5653 and 5653.9 (the statues which authorize the Department to issue permits for suction dredging under certain, limited conditions) because the activity causes deleterious harm to fish - including endangered species, such as the coho salmon. California?s taxpayers heavily subsidize the suction dredge mining permit program. The state spends $1.25 million more per year on the suction dredge mining permit program than it receives in permit fees, amounting to a $400 subsidy for each of the 3,200 miners that obtain permits. ?We find it hard to believe that the State of California is using taxpayer money to fund a recreational gold mining program during a severe fiscal crisis and during a sustained fisheries emergency. It makes no sense.? says Harding. The lawsuit seeks to halt suction dredge mining until the Department of Fish and Game completes an existing court?ordered revision of its suction dredge regulations that brings it into compliance with CEQA and relevant Fish and Game Code provisions. Recreational mining businesses, such as the New 49?ers in Happy Camp, CA, are bringing hundreds of suction dredgers to the Klamath and its tributaries each year. California?s regulations of the mining practice are more lax than in other states, making it a popular destination for hobby miners. In addition to the environmental impact of this influx of miners, social tensions have emerged as well. In retaliation against the Karuk Tribe for joining this lawsuit, the New 49?ers recently petitioned the California Department of Fish and Game to eliminate the Tribe?s traditional practice of dip net fishing on the Klamath River. The Karuk have been dip? netting salmon for thousands of years. The suit was originally filed in Alameda County Superior Court on February 5, 2009 and amended to on March 20 to add Klamath Riverkeeper as a plaintiff. Other plaintiffs include the Karuk Tribe, Center for Biological Diversity, Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Association, Friends of the River, Institute for Fisheries Resources, California Sportfishing Protection Alliance, Craig Tucker, David Bitts, and Leonn Hillman. Arguments for a preliminary injunction will be heard this spring. Klamath Riverkeeper is a 501(c)(3) non?profit organization dedicated to restoring the Klamath River and its tributaries, fisheries, and communities. Klamath Riverkeeper has offices in Orleans, California and Ashland, Oregon. For more information please visit www.klamathriver.org. For photos of suction dredging on the Klamath, please email scott at klamathriver.org. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From danielbacher at fishsniffer.com Sun Apr 12 14:50:05 2009 From: danielbacher at fishsniffer.com (Dan Bacher) Date: Sun, 12 Apr 2009 14:50:05 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Article Submission: Senate Majority Leader Calls for Oversight Hearing on MLPA Process (Revised) In-Reply-To: <49E25AF2.8070805@comcast.net> References: <49E25AF2.8070805@comcast.net> Message-ID: <70DA33F4-E7FF-4934-A1F3-3498435855EA@fishsniffer.com> ? Senate Majority Leader Calls for Oversight Hearing on MLPA Process by Dan Bacher Dean Florez (D-Shafter), the California Senate Majority Leader, said he will conduct a Senate Oversight Hearing this year about conflict of interest and ?mission creep? in the Marine Life Protection Act (MLPA) process during his keynote address at the Coastside Fishing Club dinner in San Mateo on March 28. Florez said that he and other Senators plan to ask some ?very tough? questions of Resources Secretary Mike Chrisman and Mike Sutton, Fish and Game Commission member, about the Marine Life Protection Act (MLPA) process. These questions include why the MLPA has been expanded from a $250,000 process to a $35 million fiasco that is threatening the economy and fisheries on the North Central Coast. ?I?ve found that when you call a hearing, things get fixed really quickly,? said Florez. ?For example, when we announced a hearing in response to complaints about EDD?s processing of unemployment claims, the department changed its operations, including opening on weekends. Imagine what will happen will happened when we hold a hearing on the MLPA process.? He emphasized that the Senators had a lot of questions for Mike Sutton including asking, ?Who do you work for?? Many recreational and commercial fishermen and grassroots environmentalists believe that it?s wrong for Sutton to make decisions about the MLPA when Julie Packard?s Monterey Bay Aquarium employs him. The Aquarium is funded by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, as is the MLPA process. ?We believe in transparency and the Legislature was told that science would guide the MPLA process,? said Florez. ?I believe that plain, old fashioned oversight will turn this situation around.? He said that the funding of the MLPA by a private entity, the Resource Legacy Foundation, ?really has to be looked at.? ?We have to look at all of the relationships,? said Florez. ?Nobody thought the MLPA would become a process where the coast is closed first and the science is done later. Politics, not policy, have led this issue. I believe that your cause is right.? He urged anglers to write letters about their concerns and to attend the hearings when they are announced. ?If one-quarter of the people in this room went to the hearing, we would have every Senator there,? Florez emphasized. ?What changes policy are the people who show up. The people who show up win!? He said that he would come to the dinner next year, get back on stage and inform Coastside membership how ?far we got? in addressing the inequities in the MLPA. In the meantime, he urged anglers to send him letters about their concerns with the MLPA at dflorez [at] yahoo.com. ?MPAs can have a place,? said Gordon Robertson, vice-president of the American Sportfishing Association, who spoke after Florez, ?but they must be steeped in science. The MLPA has to be a public process with no hidden agenda.? During the dinner, Coastside founder Bob Franko presented a $14,000 check to the San Francisco Tyee Club, founded in 1938, for their years of work on behalf of restoring salmon. The group raises Chinook salmon in pens for release into San Francisco Bay. ?This is our best year ever, with 85,000 fish to be released,? said Brook Halsey of the San Francisco Tyee Foundation. ?Up until now we have released 60,000 fish in grow-out pens every year.? Note: Although Senator Florez' call for an investigation into the MLPA process is very good news, his recently introduced $15 billion water bond bill, SB 301, must be opposed because it would fund "conveyance" - a peripheral canal - and more dams. Grassroots Enviros, Fishermen Protest MLPA Greenwashing at Fisheries Forum The MLPA greenwashing process was the most contentious issue during the Joint Legislative Committee on Fisheries & Aquaculture, chaired by State Senator Patricia Wiggins (D ? Santa Rosa) on March 26 at the State Capitol. The forum took place while California's fish populations are in their greatest crisis ever. Central Valley Chinook salmon, delta smelt, longfin smelt, green sturgeon and other fish populations have declined to record low population levels, largely due to policies pursued by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who portrays himself as the ?Green Governor" and has promoted the peripheral canal and no fishing zones as the "solutions" to collapsing fisheries. It is no coincidence that the same guy, Phil Isenberg, was the chair of both Schwarzenegger's MLPA Blue Ribbon Task Force and the Delta Vision Task Force. Ken Wiseman, executive director of the MLPA Initiative, Cindy Gustafson, Chair of the Fish and Game Commission, and Kaitlin Gaffney of the Ocean Conservancy all gushed about Schwarzenegger?s MLPA process as supposedly being ?open and transparent.? However, the real environmentalists in the room ? as opposed to some corporate-funded "environmental" groups that support massive fishery closures ? ripped the process for being an out-of control process that lacked any form of accountability to the public and the Legislature. Jim Martin, West Coast Regional Director of the Recreational Fishing Alliance, in blistering testimony, slammed the MLPA process for causing disproportionate economic impacts to Point Arena, proposing regulations far exceeding the funding available and for using private funding has biased the process and circumvents the Legislature?s oversight. He urged the Committee to restore the role of the Department of Fish and Game, abolish the Blue Ribbon Task Force and to amend the MLPA. ?The legislation you passed in 1999 was not supposed to be a financial disaster for coastal communities,? Martin said. ?It was not supposed to close 40% of the best fishing grounds. It was not supposed to threaten the $1.3 billion dollar saltwater recreational fishery or the $130 million commercial fishery. It was not supposed to cost California thousands of jobs." ?It was not supposed to cost $400 million in the next ten years, and on into eternity,? he continued. ?It was not supposed to cut off so much shore-based access that it threatens to destroy the $10 million abalone fishery. Finally, it was not supposed to be a biased process that ignores the social and financial losses to fishing communities, or assume that endless amounts of bag money will be available to fund this experiment.? John Lewallen, longtime North Coast environmentalist and sustainable seaweed harvester, and others testified how the proposed fishing closures would devastate a coastal economy already ripped apart by salmon and rockfish season closures. He also urged the Committee to investigate conflict of interest in the MLPA process. Lewallen described the whole MLPA process as a ?divide and drill? strategy where the only winners are oil companies who want to drill for oil off Point Arena. "Why is Catherine Reheis-Boyd, CEO and Chief of Staff for the Western States Petroleum Association, a key member of the five-member MLPA Blue Ribbon Task Force that has decreed new zones where people can take no food from state waters?," asked Lewallen. "Is it coincidence that the Point Arena Basin offshore from Point Arena is the area of highest oil industry interest in Northern California, and the only tract here now open to Minerals Management Service offshore oil leasing process?" Assemblyman Wes Chesbro agreed with the concerns posed by Martin, Lewallen and others. ?I?m skeptical of this process,? he said. ?I?ve spent my whole time defending the North Coast and the people who are most impacted by the marine protected areas do more to restore the environment than anybody. I worry what will happen when the people who do the most to protect our fisheries and environment are gone.? Chesbro said he had been part of earlier efforts directed by the Fish and Game Commission to set up the no-take zones required by the 1999 Marine Life Protection Act. Chesbro also stated that the marine science required to back the need for no-take zones was questionable or absent, so the process had been abandoned. ?Now you propose to close areas to seaweed harvest, affecting the livelihood of a seaweed harvesting couple,? Assemblyman Chesbro told the advocates of the "Integrated Preferred Alternative." ?All I?m saying is, show me the science.? People wishing to contact the Legislative Fisheries Committee with relevant information or your opinion can send your comments to: Senator Patricia Wiggins, http://dist02.casen.govoffice.com/ or write State Capitol, Room 4081 Sacramento, CA 95814 916-323-6958 Assemblyman Wes Chesbro at: http://democrats.assembly.ca.gov/members/ a01/ or write State Capitol P.O. Box 942849, Sacramento, CA 94249-0001 916-319-2001 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: MLPA Investigation Article.doc Type: application/octet-stream Size: 210432 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Tue Apr 14 17:03:38 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Tue, 14 Apr 2009 17:03:38 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] CC Times 4 13 09 Message-ID: Delta farmers sue to block Delta canal plan The Contra Costa Times - 4/13/09 By Mike Taugher Delta farmers have sued to block plans to build an aqueduct that would divert Sacramento River water around the Delta. It is the latest in a flurry of about a dozen active lawsuits over California's most important and fought over source of water, but it appears to be the first to directly take on new plans to build a peripheral canal like the one voters defeated in 1982. "This is a life-and-death struggle for us, and we're not giving up," said John Herrick, a lawyer for the South Delta Water Agency, one of two water districts that filed the lawsuit last week in federal court in Sacramento. At issue is a mammoth planning effort that seeks, by the end of next year, to have a detailed plan and permit to build a peripheral canal around the Delta that would also help conserve fish and other wildlife that are in danger of extinction. The plan, called the Bay Delta Conservation Plan, would be the largest and most complex habitat conservation plan ever under state and federal endangered species laws. It is also on a schedule that would also make it one of the fastest. The lawsuit, filed late last week in federal court in Sacramento, says the plan violates planning laws because the environmental review has begun even though there is no specific plan for critics to analyze. "Because of that lack of information, the public and impacted agencies and jurisdictions ... cannot determine what impacts the (conservation plan) will have nor whether it complies with the law," the lawsuit said. Supporters of the plan say the urgency is warranted because of the collapse of several fish populations and the effect of the environmental crisis on water supplies. "They are sort of grasping at straws," said Laura King Moon, assistant general manager of the State Water Contractors, an association of water agencies. "We have a huge fishery crisis that needs to be dealt with. We have a water supply crisis that needs to be dealt with." For water officials, the conservation plan could solve two problems with a single stroke: . First, water managers would be relieved of traditional regulations under endangered species laws because the plan is supposed to be a more comprehensive approach to environmental protection. . Second, by taking the view that building a canal around the Delta would prevent fish from being killed at Delta pumps, water officials could get regulatory approval for a highly contested structure. The environmental study of the plan, which would include a canal but also wetlands restoration and other measures, is underway even though the state has not detailed proposal for the project. Delta farmers have the most to lose from a canal because it would deprive the Delta of fresh water that now flows from the Sacramento River south to the vicinity of pumps near Tracy. If the Sacramento River water were diverted to a canal, the water used by Delta farmers would become more polluted with pesticides and salts from irrigation in the San Joaquin Valley, along with more salt from inflows from San Francisco Bay. That also would affect water quality near the intakes used by the Contra Costa Water district. "We will go out of business if they build and operate a peripheral canal," said Herrick. "We will salt up. ... It's simple physics." The lawsuit, filed by two Delta farming districts - the Central Delta Water Agency and the South Delta Water Agency - also serves notice that the Delta agencies are preparing another lawsuit that says the conservation plan violates endangered species laws. Byron Leydecker, JcT, Chair Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Tue Apr 14 19:43:01 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Tue, 14 Apr 2009 19:43:01 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] FW: Updated Advisory: War Dance and March Next Steps in Winnemem Wintu Tribe's Journey to Justice Message-ID: _____ From: Dan Bacher [mailto:danielbacher at fishsniffer.com] Sent: Tuesday, April 14, 2009 11:11 AM Subject: Updated Advisory: War Dance and March Next Steps in Winnemem Wintu Tribe's Journey to Justice Updated to include exact times and locations. *** Media Advisory *** Tribal War Dance and March Next Steps in Winnemem Wintu Tribe's Journey to Justice Ceremonies Initiate Federal Lawsuit on behalf of Tribe. Who: The Winnemem Wintu Tribe, a traditional California Tribe. The Winnemem have been fighting for years to sustain their culture and address generations of broken promises by the federal government. What: War Dance, march and press conference from Sacramento River to the State Capitol. Winnemem war dancers and tribal leaders will perform a traditional ceremonial War Dance next to the Sacramento River and will then march to the State Capitol building. The march and War Dance initiate the federal lawsuit the Tribe is filing, asking for compensation for damages done by federal land management policies, including the construction of the Shasta Dam. Schedule of events: Sunday, April 19th: War Dance begins at 6:00 PM on Sacramento River at the site of the proposed California Indian Heritage Center, across the river from Discovery Park on the west side of the confluence of Sacramento and American Rivers: On Levee Road, off Marina Way from Lighthouse Dr, West Sacramento. Monday, April 20th: Ceremony and address by Tribal leaders. California Indian Heritage Center site, Levee Rd, West Sacramento 10:00 AM March from Sacramento River to State Capitol, from Levee Road to Capitol 12:00 to 1:00 PM Press Conference with Tribal leaders and community members State Capitol Location 27 West side of capitol building More Information The Winnemem Wintu Tribe is filing a lawsuit against Department of The Interior; Department of Agriculture; United States Forest Service; Bureau of Reclamation; Bureau of Indian Affairs; Bureau of Land Management; Ken Salazar, Secretary of The Interior; Assistant Secretary for Water and Science; Assistant Secretary for Fish and Wildlife and Parks in The Department of Agriculture; and Tom Vilsack, Secretary of Agriculture asking for redress for decades of injustices and harm related to federal land management policies which have destroyed Winnemem cultural practices and sacred places. The Winnemem began a journey to justice in 2004 with a War Dance at Shasta Dam. Today we continue that journey with another War Dance and this lawsuit. Our people are a traditional people, steeped in our culture and traditional lifeways, who have continued our cultural practices throughout the written history of the state of California. With this lawsuit and War Dance, we continue our journey to ensure our basic quality of life and freedom to maintain our traditions and culture. Winnemem Wintu Tribe 14840 Bear Mountain Road, Redding, CA 96003 530-275-2737 Office 530-275-4193 Facsimile www.winnememwintu.us winnemem at msn.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Wed Apr 15 19:57:30 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Wed, 15 Apr 2009 19:57:30 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] (no subject) Message-ID: <00ab01c9be3f$15ef2120$41cd6360$@net> Trinity and Klamath Funds are included in this Stimulus Package. See red underlined below. Byron U.S. Department of the Interior Office of the Secretary - U.S. Department of the Interior - www.doi.gov - News Release FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Date: April 15, 2009 Contact: Joan Moody (202) 208-6416 Secretary Salazar Announces $260 Million in Economic Recovery Investments to Help California Address Long-Term Water Supply Challenges and Devastating Drought Conditions Water-Related Economic Investments Total $1 Billion in the West SACRAMENTO, CA - Today, at a press conference with Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and California congressional leaders, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar announced the Department of the Interior will invest $1 billion under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) in America's water infrastructure to create jobs and get the economy moving again. Overall, the Department of the Interior will manage $3 billion in investments as part of the recovery plan signed by the President to jumpstart our economy, create or save jobs, and put a down payment on addressing long-neglected challenges so our country can thrive in the 21st Century. Of the $1 billion that Interior's Bureau of Reclamation is investing in water projects across the country, $260 million will go to projects in California that will expand water supplies, repair aging water infrastructure, and mitigate the effects of a devastating drought the state is currently experiencing. An additional $135 million is available for grants for water reuse and recycling projects; California is emerging as a leader in the development of these projects and is expected to also significantly benefit from this funding. "In the midst of one of the deepest economic crises in our history, Californians have been saddled with a drought that is putting tens of thousands of people out of work and devastating entire communities," said Secretary Salazar. "President Obama's economic recovery plan will not only create jobs on basic water infrastructure projects, but it will help address both the short- and long-term water supply challenges the Golden State is facing. From boosting water supplies and improving conservation to improving safety at our dams, these shovel-ready projects will make a real and immediate difference in the lives of farmers, businesses, Native American Tribes and communities across California." Secretary Salazar, who earlier in the day toured the Sacramento Delta with Governor Schwarzenegger, announced that more than 30 Bureau of Reclamation water infrastructure projects will be funded in California under the ARRA, including: * $40 million for immediate emergency drought relief in the West, focused on California. These investments will allow for the installation of groundwater wells to boost water supplies to agricultural and urban contractors, the facilitation of the delivery of Federal water to Reclamation contractors through water transfers and exchanges, and the installation of rock barriers in the Sacramento Delta to meet water quality standards during low flows; * $109.8 million to build a screened pumping plant at the Red Bluff Diversion Dam to protect fish populations while delivering water to agricultural users irrigating approximately 150,000 acres; * $22.3 million to address dam safety concerns at the Folsom Dam near Sacramento, which is currently among the highest risk dams in the country for public safety; * $8.5 million to repair water-related infrastructure at Folsom Dam; * $20 million for the Contra Costa Canal to protect water supplies for 500,000 Californians and to build fish screens to restore winter-run Chinook salmon and the endangered Delta smelt; * $4.5 million to restore the Trinity River and honor the Federal government's responsibility to the Native American Tribes; * $26 million for Battle Creek Salmon/Steelhead Restoration project, which will help restore fisheries that support thousands of jobs in northern California. * $4 million to the Bay Delta Conservation Plan for conveyance systems to move Central Valley Project and State Water Project water, habitat restoration and adaptive management; * $4 million to broaden scientific knowledge of Klamath River sedimentation for future management decision-making; * $20.7 million in smaller water infrastructure and related projects across California. With an array of projects identified by stakeholders as critical, the Bureau of Reclamation worked through a rigorous merit-based process to identify investments that met the criteria put forth in the Recovery Act: namely, that the project addresses the Department's highest priority mission needs; generates the largest number of jobs in the shortest period of time; and creates lasting value for the American public. The $1 billion announced by Secretary Salazar today will go to programs including: * Meeting Future Water Supply Needs (including Title XVI water recycling projects and rural water projects) - $450 million * Improving Infrastructure Reliability and Safety - $165 million * Environmental and Ecosystem Restoration - $235 million * Water Conservation Initiative (Challenge Grants) - $40 million * Green Buildings - $14 million * Delivering water from the Colorado River to users in central Utah under the Central Utah Project Completion Act - $50 million * Emergency drought relief in the West, primarily in California - $40 "President Obama and this Department have ambitious goals to build America's new energy future, to protect and restore our treasured landscapes, to create a 21st Century Youth Conservation Corps," added Salazar. "These Bureau of Reclamation projects will help us fulfill these goals while helping American families and their communities prosper again." Secretary Salazar has pledged unprecedented levels of transparency and accountability in the implementation of the Department of the Interior's economic recovery projects. The public will be able to follow the progress of each project on www.recovery.gov and on www.interior.gov/recovery . Secretary Salazar has appointed a Senior Advisor for Economic Recovery, Chris Henderson , and an Interior Economic Recovery Task Force. Henderson and the Task Force will work closely with the Department of the Interior's Inspector General to ensure that the recovery program is meeting the high standards for accountability, responsibility, and transparency that President Obama has set. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Thu Apr 16 20:41:12 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Thu, 16 Apr 2009 20:41:12 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Weaverville Fire Department Volunteer's Essay Message-ID: <6838E926F096488994311264C6FE6B88@ByronsLaptop> Maybe you could vote for this volunteer's essay as the winning entry and get Weaverville a new fire engine. It takes a little work, but not much. http://www.wfdca.org Contest could yield new engine Weaverville VFD needs your online vote to win By AMY GITTELSOHN Your vote could help to get the Weaverville Volunteer Fire Department a new fire engine. An essay written by Weaverville firefighter Gus Kormeier is one of the final seven out of more than 600 essays submitted to E-One, a company that manufactures rescue vehicles. Byron Leydecker, JcT, Chair Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From Bill_Pinnix at fws.gov Thu Apr 16 16:25:51 2009 From: Bill_Pinnix at fws.gov (Bill_Pinnix at fws.gov) Date: Thu, 16 Apr 2009 16:25:51 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Willow Creek Downstream Migrant Trap 2009 Catch Summary Message-ID: Hello, Here is the 2009 catch summary for the Willow Creek Downstream Migrant Trap on the mainstem Trinity River. Please feel free to distribute. PDF file of text and catch table are attached. Willow Creek Downstream Migrant Trap Site 2009 In-Season Trapping Update ?April 16, 2009 Synopsis: The 2009 Downstream Migrant trapping season at the Willow Creek Trap Site (river kilometer 34) is being conducted jointly by the USFWS Arcata Fish and Wildlife Office (AFWO) and the Yurok Tribal Fisheries Program (YTFP) on the mainstem Trinity River near Willow Creek, California. The season began March 12, 2009 with the installation of two traps. A third trap was installed March 14, 2009. See attached catch summary for details of this narrative. This summary includes data from March 12th, 2009 through March 31st, 2009 and is presented as raw catch. No expansions have been calculated at this time. Data entry is not complete for Julian Weeks 13-15, April 1st to April 16th. Heavy debris load and high flows have occasionally resulted in null sets, causing less than 21 trap days (3 traps x 7 days) in some weeks. Raw daily catches of Chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha) have been captured each day sampling has occurred and most have been young-of-the-year (YOY), with more age 1+ natural Chinook salmon than in past years. Weekly mean Fulton?s K values of YOY Chinook salmon began the season lower than 1.0 with an increase in condition evident over the 3 weeks summarized. Efficiency calibrations were conducted during this summary period with freeze-branded hatchery Chinook salmon on March 13, March 19, and March 26. Raw daily catches of steelhead (Oncorhynchus mykiss) smolts (age 1+) have been steady since the beginning of trapping with hatchery steelhead showing up in Julian Week 13. Steelhead smolts captured JW 11-13 had weekly mean Fulton?s K values slightly higher than 1.0. Steelhead YOY numbers are present in the catch, but have yet to show signs of a peak. Raw daily catches of coho salmon (Oncorhynchus kisutch) are low compared to the past 6 years, especially for natural smolts. Weekly mean Fulton?s K value of natural coho salmon smolts have been higher than 1.0. Hatchery coho smolt catch occurred in the catch during Julian Week 12. If you have any questions regarding this summary, don't hesitate to contact Bill Pinnix at (707) 822-7201. (See attached file: WCT_Catch_Summary_04_16_09.pdf) William Pinnix USFWS, AFWO 1655 Heindon Rd Arcata, CA 95521 (707) 822-7201 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: WCT_Catch_Summary_04_16_09.pdf Type: application/pdf Size: 28003 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Fri Apr 17 15:26:26 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Fri, 17 Apr 2009 15:26:26 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Urgent! Site Change for Winnemem Wintu War Dance 4/20-21 Message-ID: <009a01c9bfab$8c3c1370$a4b43a50$@net> From: Dan Bacher [mailto:danielbacher at fishsniffer.com] Sent: Friday, April 17, 2009 1:42 PM Subject: Urgent! Site Change for Winnemem Wintu War Dance 4/20-21 Please Forward Widely! We apologize for the inconvenience, but the site of the wardance had to be changed due to political issues. This is the last change we promise:) The place is Camp Pollock - street address is 1501 Northgate Blvd, Sacramento. Attached is a site map (weare in"Miwok" adjacent to the fire area). We have been asked if folks walking with us are to be in regalia or street clothes: if you have "Indian indicators" wear them, banners etc. fine. We are going to caravan to Old Sac (in the parking area) and then we will walk up to Capitol Mall (we are looking at the best routes now). This is an historic event in the history of the tribe and I am glad to share it with you all. Respectfully, Michael Preston (530) 209-1235 cell *** Media Advisory *** Tribal War Dance and March Next Steps in Winnemem Wintu Tribes Journey to Justice Ceremonies Initiate Federal Lawsuit on behalf of Tribe. Who: The Winnemem Wintu Tribe, a traditional California Tribe. The Winnemem have been fighting for years to sustain their culture and address generations of broken promises by the federal government. What: War Dance, march and press conference from Sacramento River to the State Capitol.. Winnemem war dancers and tribal leaders will perform a traditional ceremonial War Dance next to the Sacramento River and will then march to the State Capitol building. The march and War Dance initiate the federal lawsuit the Tribe is filing, asking for compensation for damages done by federal land management policies, including the construction of the Shasta Dam. Schedule of events: Sunday, April 19th: 6:00pm War Dance begins at 1501 Northgate Blvd. Camp Pollock Monday, April 20th: Ceremony continues on from the night before followed by address by Tribal leaders at Camp Pollock. 10:00 AM March from Old Sacramento to Capitol Building 12:00 to 1:00 PM Press Conference with Tribal leaders and community members State Capitol Location 27 West side of capitol building More Information The Winnemem Wintu Tribe is filing a lawsuit against Department of The Interior; Department of Agriculture; United States Forest Service; Bureau of Reclamation; Bureau of Indian Affairs; Bureau of Land Management; Ken Salazar, Secretary of The Interior; Assistant Secretary for Water and Science; Assistant Secretary for Fish and Wildlife and Parks in The Department of Agriculture; and Tom Vilsack, Secretary of Agriculture asking for redress for decades of injustices and harm related to federal land management policies which have destroyed Winnemem cultural practices and sacred places. The Winnemem began a journey to justice in 2004 with a War Dance at Shasta Dam. Today we continue that journey with another War Dance and this lawsuit. Our people are a traditional people, steeped in our culture and traditional lifeways, who have continued our cultural practices throughout the written history of the state of California. With this lawsuit and War Dance, we continue our journey to ensure our basic quality of life and freedom to maintain our traditions and culture. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: pollockdirections.pdf Type: application/pdf Size: 152763 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From danielbacher at fishsniffer.com Fri Apr 17 15:53:08 2009 From: danielbacher at fishsniffer.com (Dan Bacher) Date: Fri, 17 Apr 2009 15:53:08 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Urgent! Site Change for Winnemem Wintu War Dance Sunday 4/19 (starts 6 pm) to Monday 4/20 In-Reply-To: <009a01c9bfab$8c3c1370$a4b43a50$@net> References: <009a01c9bfab$8c3c1370$a4b43a50$@net> Message-ID: <237BFA4C-5624-4483-BC34-1BBAF655B982@fishsniffer.com> Hey Byron Thanks for sending the release out. Please note that the subject line date should be 4/19-4/20, not 4/20-21. That was my typo. Again, thanks! Dan Please Forward Widely! We apologize for the inconvenience, but the site of the war dance had to be changed due to political issues. This is the last change we promise:) The place is Camp Pollock - street address is 1501 Northgate Blvd, Sacramento. Attached is a site map (we are in"Miwok" adjacent to the fire area). We have been asked if folks walking with us are to be in regalia or street clothes: if you have "Indian indicators" wear them, banners etc. fine. We are going to caravan to Old Sac (in the parking area) and then we will walk up to Capitol Mall (we are looking at the best routes now). This is an historic event in the history of the tribe and I am glad to share it with you all. Respectfully, Michael Preston (530) 209-1235 cell *** Media Advisory *** Tribal War Dance and March Next Steps in Winnemem Wintu Tribe?s Journey to Justice Ceremonies Initiate Federal Lawsuit on behalf of Tribe. Who: The Winnemem Wintu Tribe, a traditional California Tribe. The Winnemem have been fighting for years to sustain their culture and address generations of broken promises by the federal government. What: War Dance, march and press conference from Sacramento River to the State Capitol.. Winnemem war dancers and tribal leaders will perform a traditional ceremonial War Dance next to the Sacramento River and will then march to the State Capitol building. The march and War Dance initiate the federal lawsuit the Tribe is filing, asking for compensation for damages done by federal land management policies, including the construction of the Shasta Dam. Schedule of events: Sunday, April 19th: 6:00pm War Dance begins at 1501 Northgate Blvd. Camp Pollock Monday, April 20th: Ceremony continues on from the night before followed by address by Tribal leaders at Camp Pollock. 10:00 AM March from Old Sacramento to Capitol Building 12:00 to 1:00 PM Press Conference with Tribal leaders and community members State Capitol Location 27 West side of capitol building More Information The Winnemem Wintu Tribe is filing a lawsuit against Department of The Interior; Department of Agriculture; United States Forest Service; Bureau of Reclamation; Bureau of Indian Affairs; Bureau of Land Management; Ken Salazar, Secretary of The Interior; Assistant Secretary for Water and Science; Assistant Secretary for Fish and Wildlife and Parks in The Department of Agriculture; and Tom Vilsack, Secretary of Agriculture asking for redress for decades of injustices and harm related to federal land management policies which have destroyed Winnemem cultural practices and sacred places. The Winnemem began a journey to justice in 2004 with a War Dance at Shasta Dam. Today we continue that journey with another War Dance and this lawsuit. Our people are a traditional people, steeped in our culture and traditional lifeways, who have continued our cultural practices throughout the written history of the state of California. With this lawsuit and War Dance, we continue our journey to ensure our basic quality of life and freedom to maintain our traditions and culture. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Fri Apr 17 16:39:39 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Fri, 17 Apr 2009 16:39:39 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Correction Winnemem Wintu War Dance Message-ID: <00c801c9bfb5$c7009620$5501c260$@net> On the Winnemem Wintu War Dance site change message I just sent, the dates are April 19 and 20, not April 20 and 21. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Tue Apr 21 14:05:08 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Tue, 21 Apr 2009 14:05:08 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] CalTrout ED Position Message-ID: <004601c9c2c4$da4da530$8ee8ef90$@net> CalTrout Executive Director position: http://www.ecojobs.com/jobs_details2.php?AID=22753 Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Tue Apr 21 14:13:38 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Tue, 21 Apr 2009 14:13:38 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Record Searchlight 4 19 09 Shasta and Trinity Message-ID: <005001c9c2c6$0a6627f0$1f3277d0$@net> Wet March may improve Central Valley water allocations The Redding Record Searchlight - 4/19/09 By Dylan Darling The biggest rush of water into Lake Shasta in almost three years could lead to increased water allocations for north state agriculture. "We are anticipating an upward bump," said Brian Person, manager of the Bureau of Reclamation's Northern California Office at Shasta Dam. Early this week, bureau officials plan to release updated allocations for the Central Valley Project - which runs 500 miles from Lake Shasta to Bakersfield - based on weather, lake inflow and other factors in March. Snowfall in February and rain in March gave the lake its biggest boost in years. More than 1 million acre-feet, or enough water to flood a million acres a foot deep, flowed into Lake Shasta in March, according to state Department of Water Resources data. It's the biggest influx into the 4.5 million acre-foot capacity reservoir since April 2006. After a dry December and January, the bureau had announced in February that the Central Valley Project could receive only half of its usual 6 million acre-foot allocation - the most drastic cutback since a drought in the early 1990s. The projected allocations included no water for agriculture land north of Sacramento supplied through contracts made after Shasta Dam was finished in 1945. But stormy weather in February brought revised allocations last month, providing those contracts with 5 percent of the normal supply. Now bureau officials are analyzing weather, snowpack and storage changes in March to determine if and how to revise the allocations. "There's a possibility (they) could change," said Pete Lucero, bureau spokesman in Sacramento. The rush of inflow into Lake Shasta brought a big rise to the lake that had hit a 16-year low last fall. In March, the lake rose about 48 feet, bringing it to 66 percent full, said Larry Ball, operations chief for the bureau at Keswick Dam. March brought the lake to the same level it was at this time last year, about 60 feet below its high waterline. Ball said this year's allocations will still be lower than last because less water is available from the Trinity River. Along with the likely increase in allocations, the wet March also has improved the outlook for the lake at the end of the summer. Ball said the lake is expected to bottom out at about the same 157 feet below crest next fall. Earlier in the year, he had said the lake could hit 200 feet below. "That's far better than the original estimates were in that dry January," Lucero said. A workshop for growers looking to keep their crops going with reduced water supplies is set for Tuesday evening at Shasta College. The workshop, hosted by the University of California Cooperative Extension, starts at 6:30 p.m. in Room 1632, said Larry Forero, extension director in Shasta County. Topics for discussion include maintaining pasture, preserving nut and fruit trees, and saving vines despite reduced irrigation deliveries. There also will be a discussion on federal drought aid, Forero said, but the workshop will not be a forum to debate water policy, endangered species or water deliveries in the past year.# http://www.redding.com/news/2009/apr/19/wet-march-may-improve-central-valley -water/ Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Tue Apr 21 15:19:25 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Tue, 21 Apr 2009 15:19:25 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] CalTrout ED Position Message-ID: <008a01c9c2cf$3ad339b0$b079ad10$@net> CalTrout Executive Director position: http://www.ecojobs.com/jobs_details2.php?AID=22753 Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Wed Apr 22 09:52:32 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Wed, 22 Apr 2009 09:52:32 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Water Challenge Grants Message-ID: <000501c9c36a$bb4b1720$31e14560$@net> Challenge Grants: Water Marketing and Efficiency Grants for the American Recovery Reinvestment Act of 2009 Department of the Interior _____ Synopsis Full Announcement Application _____ The synopsis for this grant opportunity is detailed below, following this paragraph. This synopsis contains all of the updates to this document that have been posted as of 03/10/2009 . If updates have been made to the opportunity synopsis, update information is provided below the synopsis. If you would like to receive notifications of changes to the grant opportunity click send me change notification emails . The only thing you need to provide for this service is your email address. No other information is requested. Any inconsistency between the original printed document and the disk or electronic document shall be resolved by giving precedence to the printed document. Description of Modification Modification to clarify that the previous modification modified both the synopsis and the full funding opportunity announcement to update the total program funding, estimated amount of awards, and add the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 standard terms and conditions. Document Type: Modification to Previous Grants Notice Funding Opportunity Number: 09SF811499 Opportunity Category: Discretionary Posted Date: Mar 10, 2009 Creation Date: Apr 20, 2009 Original Closing Date for Applications: May 22, 2009 Current Closing Date for Applications: May 22, 2009 Archive Date: Jun 22, 2009 Funding Instrument Type: Cooperative Agreement Grant Category of Funding Activity: Recovery Act Category Explanation: Expected Number of Awards: 22 Estimated Total Program Funding: $40,000,000 Award Ceiling: $5,000,000 Award Floor: $1,000,000 CFDA Number(s): 15.507 -- Water 2025 Cost Sharing or Matching Requirement: Yes Eligible Applicants Others (see text field entitled "Additional Information on Eligibility" for clarification) Additional Information on Eligibility: Eligible applicants include: irrigation and water districts, water authorities of Federally recognized tribes, entities created under State or Territorial law with water management authority, which may include water user associations, water conservancy districts, canal, ditch and reservoir companies, municipal water authorities, State or Territory agencies or departments with water management authority. i.e., State departments of water resources, State engineer's offices, and other State or Territory agencies, departments, and boards with water management authority. Applicants must also be located in the Western United States or Territories as identified in the Reclamation Act of June 17, 1902, as amended and supplemented; specifically, Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Washington, Wyoming, American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, and the Virgin Islands. Those not eligible include entities without water delivery authority, such as: other State governmental entities Federal governmental entities universities or individuals. Agency Name Bureau of Reclamation, Denver Office Description With recent enactment of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (Recovery Act), the Bureau of Reclamation will be accepting new applications for RECOVERY ACT Funding under the Challenge Grant Program for Water Marketing and Efficiency Grants. The objective of this Announcement will be to invite irrigation and water districts, United States Territories, States in the West, and other local entities with water delivery authority to leverage their money and resources by cost sharing with Reclamation on projects that bank water, market water, conserve water, or generally make more efficient use of existing water supplies and that will preserve and create jobs, assist those impacted by the recession, provide investments in infrastructure that will provide long-term economic benefits, and complete a project that will provide a useful service. Projects will be selected through a competitive process. The Department of the Interior (Interior) believes that water banks and markets are essential to secure water supplies in water-short areas of the West. Interior strongly supports the use of these mechanisms, providing that State law allows for them, to enable water to be shifted to address competing water uses while recognizing existing water rights. Accordingly, Water Marketing and Efficiency Grants applications proposing water banking or marketing elements are given priority in the selection process. Applications under this activity for Recovery Act funding are different from applications previously submitted for Water Marketing and Efficiency Grants on January 14, 2009. To be considered previous applicants must reapply. Projects using Recovery Act Funding will be subject to additional reporting requirements, Davis Bacon Wage Rate Determinations, and the Buy American Act. Link to Full Announcement If you have difficulty accessing the full announcement electronically, please contact: Stephanie Bartlett 303.445.2025 Grants Officer Synopsis Modification History The following files represent the modifications to this synopsis with the changes noted within the documents. The list of files is arranged from newest to oldest with the newest file representing the current synopsis. Changed sections from the previous document are shown in a light grey background. File Name Date Modification #4 Apr 17, 2009 Modification #3 Apr 07, 2009 Modification #2 Mar 11, 2009 Modification #1 Mar 11, 2009 Original Synopsis Mar 10, 2009 Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image002.png Type: image/png Size: 187 bytes Desc: not available URL: From Matt_Brown at fws.gov Wed Apr 22 14:35:41 2009 From: Matt_Brown at fws.gov (Matt_Brown at fws.gov) Date: Wed, 22 Apr 2009 14:35:41 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Restarting of More than 5, 000 California Infrastructure Projects Message-ID: http://www.gov.ca.gov/index.php?/text/press-release/12099/ Gov. Schwarzenegger Announces Restarting of More than 5,000 California Infrastructure Projects Following the sale of $6.85 billion in bonds, including $5.2 billion in Recovery Act-backed bonds, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger announced today more than 5,000 projects will be restarted in California, reviving economic activity and creating jobs. Restarted projects include everything from transportation to school construction to environmental and park projects and many more. These projects had been on hold since December 2008. California is the first state in the nation to sell Build America Bonds, taking advantage of this new opportunity provided by the federal Recovery Act. ?California is restarting thousands of critical infrastructure projects that have been frozen because of tight credit markets and the state?s cash crisis,? Governor Schwarzenegger said. ?And that, in turn, means that we can retain jobs, create jobs, and give California?s economy an additional boost at a time when it needs it the most.? ?I want to especially commend State Treasurer Lockyer and his staff for executing a successful sale of bonds. Their hard work will now be translated into more jobs and a stronger economy.? Specifically, Gov. Schwarzenegger said that California will now have the necessary funding to restart all general obligation bond funded projects that had been frozen. The funding will be allocated as follows: $1.7 billion for the ? ? state?s taxable general obligation bonds to fund?stem cell research ? ? and stem cell related projects, various housing programs, and additional ? ? needs for High Speed Rail. $5.2 billion from newly ? ? authorized Build America Bonds will provide funding to restart the balance ? ? of all state projects that had either been stopped and for those that have ? ? been proceeding with non-state funding. This includes projects for ? ? California State University, the University of California, California Community Colleges, Caltrans and the Department of Water Resources. In ? ? addition, this bond sale will fund grants that had been frozen, including ? ? school construction projects, environmental and park projects, grant ? ? programs to support clean air (engine retrofits and clean port projects), ? ? wastewater treatments projects, improvements to drinking water ? ? infrastructure, children?s hospitals, public safety grants and local ? ? library grant projects. Finally, all outstanding bills not previously funded will be paid. A complete list of the more than 5,000 projects will be available shortly at www.dof.ca.gov. Created by the federal stimulus legislation enacted in February, Build America Bonds are a new financing tool for state and local governments, designed to assist state and local governments in financing capital projects at lower borrowing costs and to stimulate the economy and create jobs.? The program allows issuers to either sell taxable bonds and receive a direct payment from the U.S. government equivalent to 35 percent of the interest costs on the bonds, or sell taxable bonds that offer purchasers a tax credit. The state plans to issue the bonds and receive the direct reimbursement for repayment of the interest costs From bwl3 at comcast.net Thu Apr 23 09:35:47 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Thu, 23 Apr 2009 09:35:47 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] CVPIA Review CC Times April 23 2009 Message-ID: <001f01c9c431$8f353400$ad9f9c00$@net> Scientists rip federal agencies for implementation of landmark Delta, salmon protection law By Mike Taugher Contra Costa Times Updated: 04/23/2009 06:17:01 AM PDT California's federal water managers favored farmers over the needs of salmon and failed to take seriously a law that was supposed to overhaul the state's water delivery system and improve the environment, an independent scientific review of the 17-year-old law says. The report casts a harsh light on the two federal agencies charged with implementing the 1992 Central Valley Project Improvement Act and said the science panel was "flabbergasted" at how agencies reduced the amount of water that was supposed to shift under the law from farms to fish. Nearly $1 billion spent led to some improvements, the panel said. But while salmon populations collapsed and the Delta ecosystem spiraled downward, federal agencies let the programs that might have slowed or reversed the declines languish at low levels in their bureaucracies, isolated from each other and from state-led efforts to address the Delta's numerous problems. "This suggests the CVPIA program is not viewed as a high priority within either agency or Department of Interior as a whole," said the report, which was requested by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The act, signed by the first President Bush, was meant to be a sweeping reform of the 76-year-old Central Valley Project that should have doubled salmon populations, redirected water to environmental purposes and created a fund for habitat improvements. It was considered the top environmental achievement in Rep. George Miller's 34 years in Congress. Miller, D-Martinez, has made environmental protection in the Delta and reform of federal water projects in the West one of his highest priorities. He could not be reached for comment Wednesday. A spokesman for the reclamation bureau, which received the harshest criticism in the report, did not return a phone call by deadline. "The independent panel confirms what we've known for some time, that the environmental water authorized by the CVPIA has not provided the environmental protection originally intended by the law," said Spreck Rosekrans, a senior analyst at the Environmental Defense Fund in San Francisco. One of the key tools to double salmon populations was a provision that redirected 800,000 acre-feet of water a year from San Joaquin Valley farms to environmental purposes. That provision led to bitter resentment among farm districts, and how that water is accounted for has been the subject of years of litigation with the most significant ruling to date going in favor of water users. The panel assumed, however, that the provision meant 800,000 acre-feet of water would be moved from reservoirs and through the Delta to improve conditions for fish. "We were flabbergasted to learn this is not how the agencies implement this provision," the report said. Instead, the agencies never determined how much water should flow through the river and Delta system and does not even ensure that water released into the environment stays there. About half of the water is released from dams to increase river flows, but then taken back out of the Delta later for use on farms or in cities. The rest of the requirement is satisfied when other environmental rules restrict the bureau's ability to pump water out of the Delta. The bureau's method of satisfying the law has passed muster in the courts, but the science panel said it did not make sense. "This approach seems fundamentally at odds with the intent and language of the legislation," the panel concluded. The report, "Listen to the River: An Independent Review of the CVPIA Fisheries Program," is available at www.cvpiaindependentreview.com Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From PMANZA at mp.usbr.gov Thu Apr 23 09:39:05 2009 From: PMANZA at mp.usbr.gov (PEGGY MANZA) Date: Thu, 23 Apr 2009 09:39:05 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Trinity River Release Change Message-ID: Please make the following release changes to the Trinity River: date time from (cfs) to (cfs) 4-26-09 2100 300 400 4-26-09 2300 400 500 4-27-09 0100 500 700 4-27-09 0300 700 900 4-27-09 2300 900 1100 4-28-09 0100 1100 1300 4-28-09 0300 1300 1500 4-28-09 1900 1500 1750 4-28-09 2100 1750 2000 4-28-09 2300 2000 2250 4-29-09 0100 2250 2500 4-29-09 2300 2500 3000 4-30-09 0100 3000 3500 4-30-09 2300 3500 4000 5-01-09 0100 4000 4500 Ordered by: Peggy Manza Note: Trinity River ROD pulse flow ramp-up From bwl3 at comcast.net Thu Apr 23 09:49:18 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Thu, 23 Apr 2009 09:49:18 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Trinity River Flow Increases Message-ID: <003d01c9c433$71a90bd0$54fb2370$@net> Trinity River flow changes: date time from (cfs) to (cfs) 4-26-09 2100 300 400 4-26-09 2300 400 500 4-27-09 0100 500 700 4-27-09 0300 700 900 4-27-09 2300 900 1100 4-28-09 0100 1100 1300 4-28-09 0300 1300 1500 4-28-09 1900 1500 1750 4-28-09 2100 1750 2000 4-28-09 2300 2000 2250 4-29-09 0100 2250 2500 4-29-09 2300 2500 3000 4-30-09 0100 3000 3500 4-30-09 2300 3500 4000 5-01-09 0100 4000 4500 Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From tstokely at att.net Thu Apr 23 18:30:18 2009 From: tstokely at att.net (Tom Stokely) Date: Thu, 23 Apr 2009 18:30:18 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] On the Edge Video Message-ID: <2C1AE7E6C9BA410C91603AEAED92B98F@homeuserPC> This is a good video for those interested in California's salmon and steelhead. Tom Stokely ----- Original Message ----- From: "Barbara Stickel" To: > With Katherine Domeny's permission, the 1989 video "On the Edge" is now > available online at http://www.fishcalendar.net/cac/cac.htm -- > > Barbara > > Tom Stokely Water Policy Coordinator California Water Impact Network 504A Lennon St. (USPS and UPS) Mt Shasta, CA 96067 V/FAX 530-926-9727 Cell 530-524-0315 tstokely at att.net http://www.c-win.org/ From bwl3 at comcast.net Fri Apr 24 05:18:58 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Fri, 24 Apr 2009 05:18:58 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] CalTrout ED Position Message-ID: <001d01c9c4d6$d8a75460$89f5fd20$@net> Apparently, the link I sent regarding the vacant ED position at CalTrout indicated the position was filled. That is incorrect. To view information related to this position, use this site: http://www.caltrout.org/pages/about/Job_Opportunities.asp Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bgutermuth at mp.usbr.gov Fri Apr 24 16:51:22 2009 From: bgutermuth at mp.usbr.gov (Brandt Gutermuth) Date: Fri, 24 Apr 2009 16:51:22 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] With High Trinity River Flows Comes Gravel (Coarse Sediment) Message-ID: Hi All - The Trinity River Restoration Program is getting ready to implement our high flow coarse sediment (gravel) injections to the Trinity River next week, starting on April 29th. Gravel of 3/8 to 4 inches in diameter will be added to the river from two high velocity locations just downriver of the Lewiston dam: 1) Sawmill site (on California Department of Fish and Game managed lands) and 2) the Diversion pool (by the weir on U.S. Forest Service managed lands). From these locations, the gravel will be swept downriver and distributed by high flows. The gravel will meet spawning and habitat needs in the reach as it is moved by the river to create river features (e.g., point and mid-channel river bars) and complex habitat in downstream areas. A local Trinity County contractor is already delivering the gravel for storage at the sites. Approximately 1,000 tons will be pushed into the river at the Diversion pool and 2,500 tons will be placed by conveyor belt at the Sawmill site. Actual dates, timing, and quantities of injected gravel will vary as the different contractors at the two sites get their systems for delivery in place and flows increase. The entire quantity of gravel, 3,500 tons, will be placed between April 30th and May 4th when flows are between 3,500 and 4,500 cubic feet per second. No gravel will be placed on Sunday, May 3rd. This year?s coarse sediment addition will meet long-term habitat requirements for anadromous fishes and meets the conditions for long-term gravel additions that were included in permits acquired for implementation of the 2008 Lewiston-Dark Gulch channel rehabilitation project. If you have any questions, please give me a call. Best Regards- Brandt ____________________________ Brandt Gutermuth Environmental Specialist Trinity River Restoration Program PO Box 1300 (mailing) 1313 S. Main Street (physical) Weaverville, CA 96093 530.623.1806 (voice) 530.623.5944 (fax) www.trrp.net (website) ___________________________ From trinityjosh at gmail.com Mon Apr 27 12:03:33 2009 From: trinityjosh at gmail.com (Joshua Allen) Date: Mon, 27 Apr 2009 12:03:33 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Could other north state communities follow example of Weaverville Community Forest? Message-ID: Could other north state communities follow example of Weaverville Community Forest? By Dylan Darling (Contact ) Sunday, April 26, 2009 [image: A group of mountain bike riders gets ready to head off into the Weaverville Basin Trail system off Ridge Road. The area is part of the Weaverville Community Forest.] A group of mountain bike riders gets ready to head off into the Weaverville Basin Trail system off Ridge Road. The area is part of the Weaverville Community Forest. [image: Pat Frost, District Manager for the Trinity County Resource Conservation District speaks during a Weaverville Community Forest meeting in Weaverville on April 15.] Pat Frost, District Manager for the Trinity County Resource Conservation District speaks during a Weaverville Community Forest meeting in Weaverville on April 15. http://www.redding.com/news/2009/apr/26/could-other-north-state-communities-follow-of/?partner=yahoo_headlines The best way to reduce fire danger in the woods close to a town is to put the community in control of forest management. That's the theory behind a unique program called the Weaverville Community Forest in Trinity County. "We went at it with the point of view, 'How can we make this forest more fire-safe?' " said Pat Frost, manager of the Trinity County Resource Conservation District. The community forest has garnered national praise, with the U.S. Department of the Interior set to give its founders the Cooperation Conservation Award next month. Each year the department honors four groups with the award. The involvement of the community has made the forest successful, said Steve Anderson, manager of the Bureau of Land Management's Redding office. He said the fact that money from any timber sales on the land is spent on further forest projects and the relatively small size of the forest have added to its success. "It gets to be too challenging if it gets too big," he said. The BLM and the conservation district established the forest's first 1,000 acres southwest of town through a stewardship contract in 2005. Late last year a similar contract between the district and the U.S. Forest Service added another 12,000 acres to the community forest, sandwiching the town with its own woods to the north and south. Such contracts typically are created between federal agencies and timber companies to guide the management of timberland. The contract is what makes the forest unique, and a model for what could be done in other north state communities close to federal land, Anderson said. There is another community forest in Northern California, Arcata's Community Forest on the North Coast. There the city of Arcata formed the 793-acre forest by purchasing 622 acres between 1905 and 1955 and then adding another 171 acres in 2006, according to the city's Web site. Anderson said he thinks there is the potential of establishing more community forests around the north state similar to the Weaverville project. For the community forests to be successful, he said, people in the community need to be willing to work together and there should be a commodity that can be sold from the forest - be it timber, sand or gravel. "You have to have something that you (can sell and) have enough money to go back and do other projects," Anderson said. In the Weaverville forest, the commodity is timber. Though there are timber harvests in the forest, those managing the acreage say their first priority is not to produce lumber, but to reduce fire danger. In late summer 2001, Weaverville residents learned just how dangerous fire can be. The 1,680-acre Oregon Fire destroyed 13 homes and threatened the historic downtown. The green, tree-covered hills of the community forest now stand in contrast to the still-recovering land charred by the fast-moving, hot-burning Oregon Fire. Frost said the group aims to keep future fires from doing such damage through thinning, prescribed fire and other projects close to the community. "You can't make a forest immune to fire," Frost said. "Fires are going to happen, but you can do things to make fires less severe." Reporter Dylan Darling can be reached at 225-8266 or ddarling at redding.com. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bgutermuth at mp.usbr.gov Wed Apr 29 12:28:50 2009 From: bgutermuth at mp.usbr.gov (Brandt Gutermuth) Date: Wed, 29 Apr 2009 12:28:50 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] With High Trinity River Flows Comes Gravel (Coarse Sediment) Message-ID: I understand that some folks on the Trinity List serve did not receive this - My apologies for dual postings Hi All - The Trinity River Restoration Program is getting ready to implement our high flow coarse sediment (gravel) injections to the Trinity River next week, starting on April 29th. Gravel of 3/8 to 4 inches in diameter will be added to the river from two high velocity locations just downriver of the Lewiston dam: 1) Sawmill site (on California Department of Fish and Game managed lands) and 2) the Diversion pool (by the weir on U.S. Forest Service managed lands). From these locations, the gravel will be swept downriver and distributed by high flows. The gravel will meet spawning and habitat needs in the reach as it is moved by the river to create river features (e.g., point and mid-channel river bars) and complex habitat in downstream areas. A local Trinity County contractor is already delivering the gravel for storage at the sites. Approximately 1,000 tons will be pushed into the river at the Diversion pool and 2,500 tons will be placed by conveyor belt at the Sawmill site. Actual dates, timing, and quantities of injected gravel will vary as the different contractors at the two sites get their systems for delivery in place and flows increase. The entire quantity of gravel, 3,500 tons, will be placed between April 30th and May 4th when flows are between 3,500 and 4,500 cubic feet per second. No gravel will be placed on Sunday, May 3rd. This year?s coarse sediment addition will meet long-term habitat requirements for anadromous fishes and meets the conditions for long-term gravel additions that were included in permits acquired for implementation of the 2008 Lewiston-Dark Gulch channel rehabilitation project. If you have any questions, please give me a call. Best Regards- Brandt ____________________________ Brandt Gutermuth Environmental Specialist Trinity River Restoration Program PO Box 1300 (mailing) 1313 S. Main Street (physical) Weaverville, CA 96093 530.623.1806 (voice) 530.623.5944 (fax) www.trrp.net (website) ___________________________ From bwl3 at comcast.net Thu Apr 30 15:14:21 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Thu, 30 Apr 2009 15:14:21 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Stockton Record 4 30 09 Message-ID: <001401c9c9e1$033e02f0$09ba08d0$@net> Hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billions with no progress, this assess where we are. Byron Delta fix a must, speaker warns The Stockton Record - 4/30/09 By The Record Staff STOCKTON - Someone must make a hard decision about how to fix the Delta, a decision that will likely involve trade-offs, a Stanford University professor of civil engineering told alumni and community leaders on Wednesday. Delta smelt are "definitely on the way out," Stephen G. Monismith said during a luncheon address, while other species such as striped bass and salmon also have declined. Changes to the state's water delivery system - such as a peripheral canal, the "$10 billion experiment" - may not be enough, he said. "We seem to be getting more and more questions," Monismith said. "I wish it was as simple as re-plumbing the Delta." A key issue, he said, is how much fresh water flows through the Delta and out into San Francisco Bay. When flows are high, saltwater is pushed back to the west; during low flows, salt creeps into the Delta and potentially affects the amount of food available for fish, not to mention water quality for farmers. He said a holistic approach to the Delta is needed, rather than considering its many parts piece by piece. "At least people are starting to think about what we want the Delta to be," he said.# Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kierassociates at suddenlink.net Thu Apr 30 15:39:47 2009 From: kierassociates at suddenlink.net (Kier Associates) Date: Thu, 30 Apr 2009 15:39:47 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Stockton Record 4 30 09 In-Reply-To: <001401c9c9e1$033e02f0$09ba08d0$@net> References: <001401c9c9e1$033e02f0$09ba08d0$@net> Message-ID: <20090430223950.BRGZ882.omta01.suddenlink.net@kier.suddenlink.net> An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Thu Apr 30 16:20:12 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Thu, 30 Apr 2009 16:20:12 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Hatchery v. Wild Fish Trinity Journal 4 29 09 Message-ID: <00b301c9c9ea$374fb2b0$a5ef1810$@net> There are numerous scientific studies that conclude similarly.I have several of these, If anyone would like these, let me know, Byron Swimming for their lives Wild fish face added threat from hatchery steelhead, study says By AMY GITTELSOHN Researchers have warned that hatchery-produced fish can harm wild stocks by competing for food and habitat. http://www.trinityjournal.com/news/2009/0429/front_page/001p1_lg.jpg Allen Houston, fish culturist at the Trinity River Hatchery, right, examines newly hatched steelhead in the incubator and steelhead fingerlings to be reared at the hatchery and released to the Trinity River in March of next year. A recent study sought to determine the impact of hatchery fish on the native fish population; the results are currently being debated. In a study on the Trinity River, a fisheries biologist reported a more direct impact that Trinity River Hatchery steelhead have on wild fish. They eat them. Seth Naman conducted his research in 2007 in a study funded by the Yurok Tribal Fisheries Program. Naman and his crew caught fin-clipped hatchery steelhead on a two-mile section of the Trinity River downstream of the Lewiston Dam, anesthetizing them, pumping their bellies and recording the results before reviving them and sending them on their way. Prior to the 2007 release of hatchery steelhead in March, they caught 315 "residualized" steelhead released from the hatchery in 2006 which stayed in the river rather than migrating to the ocean. Those hangers-on had 435 salmonid fry and 2,685 salmonid eggs in their stomachs. http://www.trinityjournal.com/news/2009/0429/front_page/001p2_lg.jpg In March 2007, the hatchery released yearling steelhead, and about half swam out to the river on their own volition. Naman and crew began catching the juvenile hatchery steelhead in the upper reach of the river as the stragglers were forced out. They caught 1,636 juvenile hatchery steelhead, finding that they had consumed 882 salmonid fry. Using population estimates and predation rates, Naman estimated that 24,194 salmonid fry and 171,018 salmonid eggs were consumed by 2,302 residualized hatchery steelhead in 21 days from Feb. 10 to March 2, 2007. He estimated that 110,659 salmonid fry were eaten by 439,197 juvenile hatchery steelhead in 30 days from March 28 to April 26, 2007. Naman, now a fisheries biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries Service, wrote up the results of his Yurok study in his master's thesis for Humboldt State University finalized over last winter. It has been distributed widely over a Trinity River list server. http://www.trinityjournal.com/news/2009/0429/front_page/001p3_lg.jpg Photos by PHIL NELSON "This study documents the highest rate of predation by hatchery salmonids on naturally produced salmonids that has been reported," Naman states in his thesis. Reaction from a supervisor with the state Department of Fish and Game, which operates the hatchery, is mixed. "We do feel this study has merit, and it's an area that deserves more attention," said Larry Hanson, senior biologist supervisor with the DFG's Klamath/Trinity Program. "We don't necessarily agree with his conclusions." For example, Hanson noted that the estimates for the daily population of hatchery steelhead in the study area - and hence the extent of predation - could have been high because, as acknowledged in Naman's report, one of two antennas used to count 1,000 microchipped hatchery steelhead failed during the study period. During the spring high flow, "It would seem intuitive that a certain number of those fish he believed residualized washed or migrated out of the study reach," Hanson said. However, in his report Naman lists several ways in which his predation estimates are conservative, noting that almost half of the hatchery's 800,000 steelhead release was not included in the study. He also noted that the hook and line method used to catch the steelhead may have skewed the results toward individuals more likely to go after insects than fish. The hatchery, funded by the federal Bureau of Reclamation and operated by the DFG, is meant to mitigate for the loss of fish habitat upstream from Lewiston Dam. It releases Chinook and coho salmon as well as steelhead. Naman suggests the agencies look into several issues regarding steelhead. He notes that fishing regulations on the river from the Old Lewiston Bridge to the dam are "fly only" and "catch and release only." These regulations have no apparent biological justification, Naman stated, and angler harvest of the hatchery steelhead could help eliminate those that stay in the river. >From the DFG, Hanson said allowing anglers to keep steelhead in the upper Trinity River would go against the hatchery's goals for returning adults. "The department can't support that," he said. Naman noted that each year a significant percentage of the 800,000 steelhead released annually are on the small side - small enough that they have no chance of returning as adults. In 2007, 175,210 small steelhead were released, Naman said, and the stunted fish likely die or residualize in the river to compete with naturally produced fish. While Naman did not study the impact on wild fish from competition by hatchery fish for food and habitat, he noted that other studies have, and competition may be more harmful than predation. "The end result of the competition may be dead naturally produced fish," Naman wrote, "which cannot be held in hand and counted as in this study." Given the Trinity River Restoration Program goal of restoring naturally produced salmonids, those goals "may be in conflict with the current management regime of hatchery fish," Naman stated. But Hanson noted that the hatchery is meant to mitigate for habitat lost due to the dam, using the best science as to how many steelhead were produced in that habitat. If neither the dam nor the hatchery existed, there would still be predation by the natural steelhead, Hanson said. He acknowledged that the dam does concentrate the fry. Naman indicates in his report that the overlap of predator and prey is occurring at a crucial time. He noted that wild Chinook and coho salmon fry emerge from the gravel at the same time the 800,000 larger steelhead smolts are released in the important wild spawning area, at a time when the river is low and clear. The consumed Chinook and coho salmon fry and eggs that would have hatched make up 9 percent of production for the area during the study period, he wrote. Although it does not have regulatory authority over the hatchery, the Trinity Management Council has discussed the issue. Hanson said the management council has written the Bureau of Reclamation to see if fish mitigation goals can be changed. There has not been a response from Reclamation. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 9091 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image002.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 15683 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image003.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 17134 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Thu Apr 30 16:43:43 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Thu, 30 Apr 2009 16:43:43 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Hatchery v. Wild Fish Trinity Journal 4 29 09 Message-ID: <00ee01c9c9ed$7ff1b970$7fd52c50$@net> There are numerous scientific studies that conclude similarly.I have several of these, If anyone would like these, let me know. Byron Swimming for their lives Wild fish face added threat from hatchery steelhead, study says By AMY GITTELSOHN Researchers have warned that hatchery-produced fish can harm wild stocks by competing for food and habitat. http://www.trinityjournal.com/news/2009/0429/front_page/001p1_lg.jpg Allen Houston, fish culturist at the Trinity River Hatchery, right, examines newly hatched steelhead in the incubator and steelhead fingerlings to be reared at the hatchery and released to the Trinity River in March of next year. A recent study sought to determine the impact of hatchery fish on the native fish population; the results are currently being debated. In a study on the Trinity River, a fisheries biologist reported a more direct impact that Trinity River Hatchery steelhead have on wild fish. They eat them. Seth Naman conducted his research in 2007 in a study funded by the Yurok Tribal Fisheries Program. Naman and his crew caught fin-clipped hatchery steelhead on a two-mile section of the Trinity River downstream of the Lewiston Dam, anesthetizing them, pumping their bellies and recording the results before reviving them and sending them on their way. Prior to the 2007 release of hatchery steelhead in March, they caught 315 "residualized" steelhead released from the hatchery in 2006 which stayed in the river rather than migrating to the ocean. Those hangers-on had 435 salmonid fry and 2,685 salmonid eggs in their stomachs. http://www.trinityjournal.com/news/2009/0429/front_page/001p2_lg.jpg In March 2007, the hatchery released yearling steelhead, and about half swam out to the river on their own volition. Naman and crew began catching the juvenile hatchery steelhead in the upper reach of the river as the stragglers were forced out. They caught 1,636 juvenile hatchery steelhead, finding that they had consumed 882 salmonid fry. Using population estimates and predation rates, Naman estimated that 24,194 salmonid fry and 171,018 salmonid eggs were consumed by 2,302 residualized hatchery steelhead in 21 days from Feb. 10 to March 2, 2007. He estimated that 110,659 salmonid fry were eaten by 439,197 juvenile hatchery steelhead in 30 days from March 28 to April 26, 2007. Naman, now a fisheries biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries Service, wrote up the results of his Yurok study in his master's thesis for Humboldt State University finalized over last winter. It has been distributed widely over a Trinity River list server. http://www.trinityjournal.com/news/2009/0429/front_page/001p3_lg.jpg Photos by PHIL NELSON "This study documents the highest rate of predation by hatchery salmonids on naturally produced salmonids that has been reported," Naman states in his thesis. Reaction from a supervisor with the state Department of Fish and Game, which operates the hatchery, is mixed. "We do feel this study has merit, and it's an area that deserves more attention," said Larry Hanson, senior biologist supervisor with the DFG's Klamath/Trinity Program. "We don't necessarily agree with his conclusions." For example, Hanson noted that the estimates for the daily population of hatchery steelhead in the study area - and hence the extent of predation - could have been high because, as acknowledged in Naman's report, one of two antennas used to count 1,000 microchipped hatchery steelhead failed during the study period. During the spring high flow, "It would seem intuitive that a certain number of those fish he believed residualized washed or migrated out of the study reach," Hanson said. However, in his report Naman lists several ways in which his predation estimates are conservative, noting that almost half of the hatchery's 800,000 steelhead release was not included in the study. He also noted that the hook and line method used to catch the steelhead may have skewed the results toward individuals more likely to go after insects than fish. The hatchery, funded by the federal Bureau of Reclamation and operated by the DFG, is meant to mitigate for the loss of fish habitat upstream from Lewiston Dam. It releases Chinook and coho salmon as well as steelhead. Naman suggests the agencies look into several issues regarding steelhead. He notes that fishing regulations on the river from the Old Lewiston Bridge to the dam are "fly only" and "catch and release only." These regulations have no apparent biological justification, Naman stated, and angler harvest of the hatchery steelhead could help eliminate those that stay in the river. >From the DFG, Hanson said allowing anglers to keep steelhead in the upper Trinity River would go against the hatchery's goals for returning adults. "The department can't support that," he said. Naman noted that each year a significant percentage of the 800,000 steelhead released annually are on the small side - small enough that they have no chance of returning as adults. In 2007, 175,210 small steelhead were released, Naman said, and the stunted fish likely die or residualize in the river to compete with naturally produced fish. While Naman did not study the impact on wild fish from competition by hatchery fish for food and habitat, he noted that other studies have, and competition may be more harmful than predation. "The end result of the competition may be dead naturally produced fish," Naman wrote, "which cannot be held in hand and counted as in this study." Given the Trinity River Restoration Program goal of restoring naturally produced salmonids, those goals "may be in conflict with the current management regime of hatchery fish," Naman stated. But Hanson noted that the hatchery is meant to mitigate for habitat lost due to the dam, using the best science as to how many steelhead were produced in that habitat. If neither the dam nor the hatchery existed, there would still be predation by the natural steelhead, Hanson said. He acknowledged that the dam does concentrate the fry. Naman indicates in his report that the overlap of predator and prey is occurring at a crucial time. He noted that wild Chinook and coho salmon fry emerge from the gravel at the same time the 800,000 larger steelhead smolts are released in the important wild spawning area, at a time when the river is low and clear. The consumed Chinook and coho salmon fry and eggs that would have hatched make up 9 percent of production for the area during the study period, he wrote. Although it does not have regulatory authority over the hatchery, the Trinity Management Council has discussed the issue. Hanson said the management council has written the Bureau of Reclamation to see if fish mitigation goals can be changed. There has not been a response from Reclamation. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 9091 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image002.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 15683 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image003.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 17134 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Fri May 1 09:54:50 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Fri, 1 May 2009 09:54:50 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] AP 5 1 09 Message-ID: <001901c9ca7d$8b3db690$a1b923b0$@net> California to get $46.4 million to help salmon fishermen The Associated Press - 5/1/09 Washington -- The Commerce Department released $53 million to Oregon and California on Thursday to help West Coast salmon fishermen after the third fishery failure in four years. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke declared the latest disaster in a letter to the governors of the two states. He cited a continued low number of fish returning to the Sacramento River in California. The river is the second-largest producer of salmon on the West Coast. Locke released $53.1 million in unspent money from a fishery disaster declared last year. A total of $46.4 million will go to California and $6.7 million to Oregon. Locke's decision opens the way for Congress to allocate more money for salmon fishermen. Congress appropriated $170 million in disaster aid in 2008 and $60 million in 2006. Fishing for chinook salmon, also known as king salmon, has been closed for months off California and most of Oregon because dangerously low numbers of fish are returning to spawn in the Sacramento.# Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Fri May 1 09:59:00 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Fri, 1 May 2009 09:59:00 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Opinion Sac Bee 5 1 09 Message-ID: <002d01c9ca7e$2023d8c0$606b8a40$@net> Opinion: Water won't wash away Valley's recession The Sacramento Bee - 5/1/09 By Jeffrey Michael Jeffrey Michael is the director of the Business Forecasting Center and an associate professor at the University of the Pacific in Stockton What is causing unemployment in the San Joaquin Valley? According to water contractors and their political supporters, a "regulatory drought" has eliminated water-dependent farm jobs, and they point to high unemployment rates in farming communities as proof. Their solution is to suspend the Endangered Species Act and build a multibillion-dollar peripheral canal around the Delta. However, the facts don't support the water contractors' view. The latest payroll data through March finds that farm jobs have grown faster than any other sector of the economy in the past 12 months, even outpacing health care. In fact, farm jobs have been growing throughout the three-year drought. Compared with 2006, farm jobs have increased 5 percent in California, while private nonfarm jobs have decreased 5 percent. The same is true in Fresno County, home to communities such as Mendota that have been the focus of water exporters' news releases. In Fresno County, farm payrolls increased 3.2 percent in the past 12 months, compared with a 3.4 percent decrease in private, nonfarm payrolls. Since the drought began three years ago, Fresno County farm payrolls have increased by 12 percent, while nonfarm employment has crashed, led by a loss of more than 7,000 construction jobs. In light of these statistics, how can water exporters, politicians and others claim that rising unemployment in the Valley is a result of water shortages for farms rather than the broader recession? The foreclosure crisis is at the heart of the recession, and the Central Valley has the highest foreclosure rates in the United States. Homebuilding has shut down, and service sectors have cratered, costing many former farmworkers their higher paying, nonseasonal jobs. Water contractors point to 40 percent unemployment in Mendota as evidence of the water crisis. These unemployment estimates for towns aren't a current survey, but are crude extrapolations from the 2000 Census, the last time any real data were compiled for these areas. The 2000 census gives a good picture of the prosperity that increased water pumping would bring to Mendota's hard-working residents. Delta water exports were above average in 2000, and local farm employment was at a nine-year peak. Despite this, the 2000 census found unemployment in Mendota exceeded 32 percent, highest of the state's 494 towns. Per-capita income was below $8,000, the lowest level in the state, nearly 20 percent lower than Mexico and many developing nations in Africa, Eastern Europe and South America. Not surprisingly, water contractors don't issue news releases about unemployment when they have water. In fact, growers have been complaining about shortages in recent years, even as Mendota's unemployment estimate was 25 to 30 percent. There will be substantially fewer seasonal farm jobs this year as thousands of acres are idled, and this will further increase the pain of the recession in farming areas south of the Delta water pumps. As these impacts appear, it is important to consider them over the entire three-year span of the drought, rather than treat agriculture's recent unsustainable peak as normal. In the early years of the drought, agriculture expanded in response to a commodity bubble that more than doubled crop prices, farm profits, and farmland values in a span of a few years. Much of the increase is attributed to permanent crops in desert regions with interruptible junior water rights. Between 2006 and 2008, more than 50,000 acres of new almond orchards were planted, mostly south of the Delta pumps, while a nut glut led to a price collapse for all growers. Similarly, California's enormous dairy industry expanded rapidly, and now taxpayers are spending millions to buy surplus milk and prop up prices in an oversupplied market. Taxpayers are the forgotten stakeholders in the various Delta planning processes. With no one protecting taxpayer interests, it's no surprise that Delta Vision recommended the most costly options to the governor. The Bay Delta Conservation Plan does not plan to make a cost estimate of their plan until after it is complete. Recent state tax increases are hurting families, businesses and private sector job creation, while California has the lowest bond rating of any state. Water contractors think the state should borrow billions for their cause, crowding out investments in education, energy, transportation and other critical areas that will support the high-paying jobs of the future. Their plan would also have adverse impacts on Delta agriculture, recreation and tourism, commercial fishing and the jobs supported by these industries. Delta Vision, water contractors and now the Bay Delta Conservation Plan are primarily making economic arguments for their plans. While spending millions on engineering studies and public relations, the state is not sponsoring any serious research to comprehensively evaluate economic effects of the water plan. California's overburdened taxpayers deserve better. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From frankemerson at redshift.com Fri May 1 10:54:38 2009 From: frankemerson at redshift.com (frankemerson at redshift.com) Date: Fri, 1 May 2009 10:54:38 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [env-trinity] Hatchery v. Wild Fish Trinity Journal 4 29 09 In-Reply-To: <00b301c9c9ea$374fb2b0$a5ef1810$@net> References: <00b301c9c9ea$374fb2b0$a5ef1810$@net> Message-ID: <2161.216.228.19.205.1241200478.squirrel@webmail.redshift.com> I am not very impressed with the conclusions of this study. If there was a natural healthy population of steelead in comparable numbers as the hatchery numbers there would be similar predation. The eggs being consumed are presumably free floaters which is natural, fry predation is normal. The student had a hook and line catch method? Sounds like a great gig if you can get it. Predation could likely be reduced greatly if the hatchery steelhead were released after the spring restoration flows have peaked. As an additional benefit the higher flow would reduce residualization and cause better Ocean survival of hatchery smolts due to more robust size. If it were not for brown trout in upper river there would likely be even more residnet trout in the natural spawning section. Frank Emerson CRSA > There are numerous scientific studies that conclude similarly.I have > several > of these, If anyone would like these, let me know, > > Byron > > Swimming for their lives > Wild fish face added threat from hatchery steelhead, study says > By AMY GITTELSOHN > > > > Researchers have warned that hatchery-produced fish can harm wild stocks > by > competing for food and habitat. > > > > > http://www.trinityjournal.com/news/2009/0429/front_page/001p1_lg.jpg > > > Allen Houston, fish culturist at the Trinity River Hatchery, right, > examines > newly hatched steelhead in the incubator and steelhead fingerlings to be > reared at the hatchery and released to the Trinity River in March of next > year. A recent study sought to determine the impact of hatchery fish on > the > native fish population; the results are currently being debated. > > In a study on the Trinity River, a fisheries biologist reported a more > direct impact that Trinity River Hatchery steelhead have on wild fish. > They > eat them. > > Seth Naman conducted his research in 2007 in a study funded by the Yurok > Tribal Fisheries Program. Naman and his crew caught fin-clipped hatchery > steelhead on a two-mile section of the Trinity River downstream of the > Lewiston Dam, anesthetizing them, pumping their bellies and recording the > results before reviving them and sending them on their way. > > Prior to the 2007 release of hatchery steelhead in March, they caught 315 > "residualized" steelhead released from the hatchery in 2006 which stayed > in > the river rather than migrating to the ocean. Those hangers-on had 435 > salmonid fry and 2,685 salmonid eggs in their stomachs. > > > > > http://www.trinityjournal.com/news/2009/0429/front_page/001p2_lg.jpg > > > > > In March 2007, the hatchery released yearling steelhead, and about half > swam > out to the river on their own volition. Naman and crew began catching the > juvenile hatchery steelhead in the upper reach of the river as the > stragglers were forced out. They caught 1,636 juvenile hatchery steelhead, > finding that they had consumed 882 salmonid fry. > > Using population estimates and predation rates, Naman estimated that > 24,194 > salmonid fry and 171,018 salmonid eggs were consumed by 2,302 residualized > hatchery steelhead in 21 days from Feb. 10 to March 2, 2007. He estimated > that 110,659 salmonid fry were eaten by 439,197 juvenile hatchery > steelhead > in 30 days from March 28 to April 26, 2007. > > Naman, now a fisheries biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric > Administration Fisheries Service, wrote up the results of his Yurok study > in > his master's thesis for Humboldt State University finalized over last > winter. It has been distributed widely over a Trinity River list server. > > > > > http://www.trinityjournal.com/news/2009/0429/front_page/001p3_lg.jpg > > > Photos by PHIL NELSON > > "This study documents the highest rate of predation by hatchery salmonids > on > naturally produced salmonids that has been reported," Naman states in his > thesis. > > Reaction from a supervisor with the state Department of Fish and Game, > which > operates the hatchery, is mixed. > > "We do feel this study has merit, and it's an area that deserves more > attention," said Larry Hanson, senior biologist supervisor with the DFG's > Klamath/Trinity Program. "We don't necessarily agree with his > conclusions." > > For example, Hanson noted that the estimates for the daily population of > hatchery steelhead in the study area - and hence the extent of predation - > could have been high because, as acknowledged in Naman's report, one of > two > antennas used to count 1,000 microchipped hatchery steelhead failed during > the study period. > > During the spring high flow, "It would seem intuitive that a certain > number > of those fish he believed residualized washed or migrated out of the study > reach," Hanson said. > > However, in his report Naman lists several ways in which his predation > estimates are conservative, noting that almost half of the hatchery's > 800,000 steelhead release was not included in the study. > > He also noted that the hook and line method used to catch the steelhead > may > have skewed the results toward individuals more likely to go after insects > than fish. > > The hatchery, funded by the federal Bureau of Reclamation and operated by > the DFG, is meant to mitigate for the loss of fish habitat upstream from > Lewiston Dam. It releases Chinook and coho salmon as well as steelhead. > > Naman suggests the agencies look into several issues regarding steelhead. > > He notes that fishing regulations on the river from the Old Lewiston > Bridge > to the dam are "fly only" and "catch and release only." These regulations > have no apparent biological justification, Naman stated, and angler > harvest > of the hatchery steelhead could help eliminate those that stay in the > river. > >>From the DFG, Hanson said allowing anglers to keep steelhead in the upper > Trinity River would go against the hatchery's goals for returning adults. > > "The department can't support that," he said. > > Naman noted that each year a significant percentage of the 800,000 > steelhead > released annually are on the small side - small enough that they have no > chance of returning as adults. In 2007, 175,210 small steelhead were > released, Naman said, and the stunted fish likely die or residualize in > the > river to compete with naturally produced fish. > > While Naman did not study the impact on wild fish from competition by > hatchery fish for food and habitat, he noted that other studies have, and > competition may be more harmful than predation. > > "The end result of the competition may be dead naturally produced fish," > Naman wrote, "which cannot be held in hand and counted as in this study." > > Given the Trinity River Restoration Program goal of restoring naturally > produced salmonids, those goals "may be in conflict with the current > management regime of hatchery fish," Naman stated. > > But Hanson noted that the hatchery is meant to mitigate for habitat lost > due > to the dam, using the best science as to how many steelhead were produced > in > that habitat. If neither the dam nor the hatchery existed, there would > still > be predation by the natural steelhead, Hanson said. He acknowledged that > the > dam does concentrate the fry. > > Naman indicates in his report that the overlap of predator and prey is > occurring at a crucial time. He noted that wild Chinook and coho salmon > fry > emerge from the gravel at the same time the 800,000 larger steelhead > smolts > are released in the important wild spawning area, at a time when the river > is low and clear. > > The consumed Chinook and coho salmon fry and eggs that would have hatched > make up 9 percent of production for the area during the study period, he > wrote. > > Although it does not have regulatory authority over the hatchery, the > Trinity Management Council has discussed the issue. Hanson said the > management council has written the Bureau of Reclamation to see if fish > mitigation goals can be changed. There has not been a response from > Reclamation. > > > > > > Byron Leydecker, JcT > > Chair, Friends of Trinity River > > PO Box 2327 > > Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 > > 415 383 4810 land > > 415 519 4810 cell > > bwl3 at comcast.net > > bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org > (secondary) > > http://www.fotr.org > > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > env-trinity mailing list > env-trinity at velocipede.dcn.davis.ca.us > http://www2.dcn.org/mailman/listinfo/env-trinity > From ema.berol at yahoo.com Fri May 1 13:47:48 2009 From: ema.berol at yahoo.com (Emelia Berol) Date: Fri, 1 May 2009 13:47:48 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [env-trinity] Hatchery v. Wild Fish Trinity Journal 4 29 09 In-Reply-To: <2161.216.228.19.205.1241200478.squirrel@webmail.redshift.com> References: <00b301c9c9ea$374fb2b0$a5ef1810$@net> <2161.216.228.19.205.1241200478.squirrel@webmail.redshift.com> Message-ID: <729939.95242.qm@web46215.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> Frank E, With regards to your comment, "If there was a natural healthy population of steelead in comparable numbers as the hatchery numbers there would be similar predation..." It seems that this amount of predation makes sense when the natural healthy population of chinook and coho is in proportion to that of steelhead - which, if there were a healthy pop. of wild steelhead there might also be a healthy pop. of wild salmon - but is not the problem here that there is an over abundance of hatchery steelhead relative to the low numbers of wild salmon stocks ... ? Emelia Berol ________________________________ From: "frankemerson at redshift.com" To: Byron Leydecker Cc: FOTR List ; Trinity List Sent: Friday, May 1, 2009 10:54:38 AM Subject: Re: [env-trinity] Hatchery v. Wild Fish Trinity Journal 4 29 09 I am not very impressed with the conclusions of this study. If there was a natural healthy population of steelead in comparable numbers as the hatchery numbers there would be similar predation. The eggs being consumed are presumably free floaters which is natural, fry predation is normal. The student had a hook and line catch method? Sounds like a great gig if you can get it. Predation could likely be reduced greatly if the hatchery steelhead were released after the spring restoration flows have peaked. As an additional benefit the higher flow would reduce residualization and cause better Ocean survival of hatchery smolts due to more robust size. If it were not for brown trout in upper river there would likely be even more residnet trout in the natural spawning section. Frank Emerson CRSA > There are numerous scientific studies that conclude similarly.I have > several > of these, If anyone would like these, let me know, > > Byron > > Swimming for their lives > Wild fish face added threat from hatchery steelhead, study says > By AMY GITTELSOHN > > > > Researchers have warned that hatchery-produced fish can harm wild stocks > by > competing for food and habitat. > > > > > http://www.trinityjournal.com/news/2009/0429/front_page/001p1_lg.jpg > > > Allen Houston, fish culturist at the Trinity River Hatchery, right, > examines > newly hatched steelhead in the incubator and steelhead fingerlings to be > reared at the hatchery and released to the Trinity River in March of next > year. A recent study sought to determine the impact of hatchery fish on > the > native fish population; the results are currently being debated. > > In a study on the Trinity River, a fisheries biologist reported a more > direct impact that Trinity River Hatchery steelhead have on wild fish. > They > eat them. > > Seth Naman conducted his research in 2007 in a study funded by the Yurok > Tribal Fisheries Program. Naman and his crew caught fin-clipped hatchery > steelhead on a two-mile section of the Trinity River downstream of the > Lewiston Dam, anesthetizing them, pumping their bellies and recording the > results before reviving them and sending them on their way. > > Prior to the 2007 release of hatchery steelhead in March, they caught 315 > "residualized" steelhead released from the hatchery in 2006 which stayed > in > the river rather than migrating to the ocean. Those hangers-on had 435 > salmonid fry and 2,685 salmonid eggs in their stomachs. > > > > > http://www.trinityjournal.com/news/2009/0429/front_page/001p2_lg.jpg > > > > > In March 2007, the hatchery released yearling steelhead, and about half > swam > out to the river on their own volition. Naman and crew began catching the > juvenile hatchery steelhead in the upper reach of the river as the > stragglers were forced out. They caught 1,636 juvenile hatchery steelhead, > finding that they had consumed 882 salmonid fry. > > Using population estimates and predation rates, Naman estimated that > 24,194 > salmonid fry and 171,018 salmonid eggs were consumed by 2,302 residualized > hatchery steelhead in 21 days from Feb. 10 to March 2, 2007. He estimated > that 110,659 salmonid fry were eaten by 439,197 juvenile hatchery > steelhead > in 30 days from March 28 to April 26, 2007. > > Naman, now a fisheries biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric > Administration Fisheries Service, wrote up the results of his Yurok study > in > his master's thesis for Humboldt State University finalized over last > winter. It has been distributed widely over a Trinity River list server. > > > > > http://www.trinityjournal.com/news/2009/0429/front_page/001p3_lg.jpg > > > Photos by PHIL NELSON > > "This study documents the highest rate of predation by hatchery salmonids > on > naturally produced salmonids that has been reported," Naman states in his > thesis. > > Reaction from a supervisor with the state Department of Fish and Game, > which > operates the hatchery, is mixed. > > "We do feel this study has merit, and it's an area that deserves more > attention," said Larry Hanson, senior biologist supervisor with the DFG's > Klamath/Trinity Program. "We don't necessarily agree with his > conclusions." > > For example, Hanson noted that the estimates for the daily population of > hatchery steelhead in the study area - and hence the extent of predation - > could have been high because, as acknowledged in Naman's report, one of > two > antennas used to count 1,000 microchipped hatchery steelhead failed during > the study period. > > During the spring high flow, "It would seem intuitive that a certain > number > of those fish he believed residualized washed or migrated out of the study > reach," Hanson said.. > > However, in his report Naman lists several ways in which his predation > estimates are conservative, noting that almost half of the hatchery's > 800,000 steelhead release was not included in the study. > > He also noted that the hook and line method used to catch the steelhead > may > have skewed the results toward individuals more likely to go after insects > than fish. > > The hatchery, funded by the federal Bureau of Reclamation and operated by > the DFG, is meant to mitigate for the loss of fish habitat upstream from > Lewiston Dam. It releases Chinook and coho salmon as well as steelhead. > > Naman suggests the agencies look into several issues regarding steelhead. > > He notes that fishing regulations on the river from the Old Lewiston > Bridge > to the dam are "fly only" and "catch and release only." These regulations > have no apparent biological justification, Naman stated, and angler > harvest > of the hatchery steelhead could help eliminate those that stay in the > river. > >>From the DFG, Hanson said allowing anglers to keep steelhead in the upper > Trinity River would go against the hatchery's goals for returning adults. > > "The department can't support that," he said. > > Naman noted that each year a significant percentage of the 800,000 > steelhead > released annually are on the small side - small enough that they have no > chance of returning as adults. In 2007, 175,210 small steelhead were > released, Naman said, and the stunted fish likely die or residualize in > the > river to compete with naturally produced fish. > > While Naman did not study the impact on wild fish from competition by > hatchery fish for food and habitat, he noted that other studies have, and > competition may be more harmful than predation. > > "The end result of the competition may be dead naturally produced fish," > Naman wrote, "which cannot be held in hand and counted as in this study." > > Given the Trinity River Restoration Program goal of restoring naturally > produced salmonids, those goals "may be in conflict with the current > management regime of hatchery fish," Naman stated. > > But Hanson noted that the hatchery is meant to mitigate for habitat lost > due > to the dam, using the best science as to how many steelhead were produced > in > that habitat. If neither the dam nor the hatchery existed, there would > still > be predation by the natural steelhead, Hanson said. He acknowledged that > the > dam does concentrate the fry. > > Naman indicates in his report that the overlap of predator and prey is > occurring at a crucial time. He noted that wild Chinook and coho salmon > fry > emerge from the gravel at the same time the 800,000 larger steelhead > smolts > are released in the important wild spawning area, at a time when the river > is low and clear. > > The consumed Chinook and coho salmon fry and eggs that would have hatched > make up 9 percent of production for the area during the study period, he > wrote. > > Although it does not have regulatory authority over the hatchery, the > Trinity Management Council has discussed the issue. Hanson said the > management council has written the Bureau of Reclamation to see if fish > mitigation goals can be changed. There has not been a response from > Reclamation. > > > > > > Byron Leydecker, JcT > > Chair, Friends of Trinity River > > PO Box 2327 > > Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 > > 415 383 4810 land > > 415 519 4810 cell > > bwl3 at comcast.net > > bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org > (secondary) > > http://www.fotr.org > > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > env-trinity mailing list > env-trinity at velocipede.dcn.davis.ca.us > http://www2.dcn.org/mailman/listinfo/env-trinity > _______________________________________________ env-trinity mailing list env-trinity at velocipede.dcn.davis.ca.us http://www2.dcn.org/mailman/listinfo/env-trinity -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Fri May 1 15:04:57 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Fri, 1 May 2009 15:04:57 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Hatchery v. Wild Fish Trinity Journal 4 29 09 In-Reply-To: <729939.95242.qm@web46215.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> References: <00b301c9c9ea$374fb2b0$a5ef1810$@net> <2161.216.228.19.205.1241200478.squirrel@webmail.redshift.com> <729939.95242.qm@web46215.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <002901c9caa8$dd8fb8f0$98af2ad0$@net> Suffice to say, there is an overwhelming body of scientific evidence supporting the conclusions reached in the Naman study and report. One's opinion, however individually well informed, does not negate or overturn a mountain of scientific evidence. Byron From: Emelia Berol [mailto:ema.berol at yahoo.com] Sent: Friday, May 01, 2009 1:48 PM To: frankemerson at redshift.com; Byron Leydecker Cc: FOTR List; Trinity List Subject: Re: [env-trinity] Hatchery v. Wild Fish Trinity Journal 4 29 09 Frank E, With regards to your comment, "If there was a natural healthy population of steelead in comparable numbers as the hatchery numbers there would be similar predation..." It seems that this amount of predation makes sense when the natural healthy population of chinook and coho is in proportion to that of steelhead - which, if there were a healthy pop. of wild steelhead there might also be a healthy pop. of wild salmon - but is not the problem here that there is an over abundance of hatchery steelhead relative to the low numbers of wild salmon stocks ... ? Emelia Berol _____ From: "frankemerson at redshift.com" To: Byron Leydecker Cc: FOTR List ; Trinity List Sent: Friday, May 1, 2009 10:54:38 AM Subject: Re: [env-trinity] Hatchery v. Wild Fish Trinity Journal 4 29 09 I am not very impressed with the conclusions of this study. If there was a natural healthy population of steelead in comparable numbers as the hatchery numbers there would be similar predation. The eggs being consumed are presumably free floaters which is natural, fry predation is normal. The student had a hook and line catch method? Sounds like a great gig if you can get it. Predation could likely be reduced greatly if the hatchery steelhead were released after the spring restoration flows have peaked. As an additional benefit the higher flow would reduce residualization and cause better Ocean survival of hatchery smolts due to more robust size. If it were not for brown trout in upper river there would likely be even more residnet trout in the natural spawning section. Frank Emerson CRSA > There are numerous scientific studies that conclude similarly.I have > several > of these, If anyone would like these, let me know, > > Byron > > Swimming for their lives > Wild fish face added threat from hatchery steelhead, study says > By AMY GITTELSOHN > > > > Researchers have warned that hatchery-produced fish can harm wild stocks > by > competing for food and habitat. > > > > > http://www.trinityjournal.com/news/2009/0429/front_page/001p1_lg.jpg > > > Allen Houston, fish culturist at the Trinity River Hatchery, right, > examines > newly hatched steelhead in the incubator and steelhead fingerlings to be > reared at the hatchery and released to the Trinity River in March of next > year. A recent study sought to determine the impact of hatchery fish on > the > native fish population; the results are currently being debated. > > In a study on the Trinity River, a fisheries biologist reported a more > direct impact that Trinity River Hatchery steelhead have on wild fish. > They > eat them. > > Seth Naman conducted his research in 2007 in a study funded by the Yurok > Tribal Fisheries Program. Naman and his crew caught fin-clipped hatchery > steelhead on a two-mile section of the Trinity River downstream of the > Lewiston Dam, anesthetizing them, pumping their bellies and recording the > results before reviving them and sending them on their way. > > Prior to the 2007 release of hatchery steelhead in March, they caught 315 > "residualized" steelhead released from the hatchery in 2006 which stayed > in > the river rather than migrating to the ocean. Those hangers-on had 435 > salmonid fry and 2,685 salmonid eggs in their stomachs. > > > > > http://www.trinityjournal.com/news/2009/0429/front_page/001p2_lg.jpg > > > > > In March 2007, the hatchery released yearling steelhead, and about half > swam > out to the river on their own volition. Naman and crew began catching the > juvenile hatchery steelhead in the upper reach of the river as the > stragglers were forced out. They caught 1,636 juvenile hatchery steelhead, > finding that they had consumed 882 salmonid fry. > > Using population estimates and predation rates, Naman estimated that > 24,194 > salmonid fry and 171,018 salmonid eggs were consumed by 2,302 residualized > hatchery steelhead in 21 days from Feb. 10 to March 2, 2007. He estimated > that 110,659 salmonid fry were eaten by 439,197 juvenile hatchery > steelhead > in 30 days from March 28 to April 26, 2007. > > Naman, now a fisheries biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric > Administration Fisheries Service, wrote up the results of his Yurok study > in > his master's thesis for Humboldt State University finalized over last > winter. It has been distributed widely over a Trinity River list server. > > > > > http://www.trinityjournal.com/news/2009/0429/front_page/001p3_lg.jpg > > > Photos by PHIL NELSON > > "This study documents the highest rate of predation by hatchery salmonids > on > naturally produced salmonids that has been reported," Naman states in his > thesis. > > Reaction from a supervisor with the state Department of Fish and Game, > which > operates the hatchery, is mixed. > > "We do feel this study has merit, and it's an area that deserves more > attention," said Larry Hanson, senior biologist supervisor with the DFG's > Klamath/Trinity Program. "We don't necessarily agree with his > conclusions." > > For example, Hanson noted that the estimates for the daily population of > hatchery steelhead in the study area - and hence the extent of predation - > could have been high because, as acknowledged in Naman's report, one of > two > antennas used to count 1,000 microchipped hatchery steelhead failed during > the study period. > > During the spring high flow, "It would seem intuitive that a certain > number > of those fish he believed residualized washed or migrated out of the study > reach," Hanson said. > > However, in his report Naman lists several ways in which his predation > estimates are conservative, noting that almost half of the hatchery's > 800,000 steelhead release was not included in the study. > > He also noted that the hook and line method used to catch the steelhead > may > have skewed the results toward individuals more likely to go after insects > than fish. > > The hatchery, funded by the federal Bureau of Reclamation and operated by > the DFG, is meant to mitigate for the loss of fish habitat upstream from > Lewiston Dam. It releases Chinook and coho salmon as well as steelhead. > > Naman suggests the agencies look into several issues regarding steelhead. > > He notes that fishing regulations on the river from the Old Lewiston > Bridge > to the dam are "fly only" and "catch and release only." These regulations > have no apparent biological justification, Naman stated, and angler > harvest > of the hatchery steelhead could help eliminate those that stay in the > river. > >>From the DFG, Hanson said allowing anglers to keep steelhead in the upper > Trinity River would go against the hatchery's goals for returning adults. > > "The department can't support that," he said. > > Naman noted that each year a significant percentage of the 800,000 > steelhead > released annually are on the small side - small enough that they have no > chance of returning as adults. In 2007, 175,210 small steelhead were > released, Naman said, and the stunted fish likely die or residualize in > the > river to compete with naturally produced fish. > > While Naman did not study the impact on wild fish from competition by > hatchery fish for food and habitat, he noted that other studies have, and > competition may be more harmful than predation. > > "The end result of the competition may be dead naturally produced fish," > Naman wrote, "which cannot be held in hand and counted as in this study." > > Given the Trinity River Restoration Program goal of restoring naturally > produced salmonids, those goals "may be in conflict with the current > management regime of hatchery fish," Naman stated. > > But Hanson noted that the hatchery is meant to mitigate for habitat lost > due > to the dam, using the best science as to how many steelhead were produced > in > that habitat. If neither the dam nor the hatchery existed, there would > still > be predation by the natural steelhead, Hanson said. He acknowledged that > the > dam does concentrate the fry. > > Naman indicates in his report that the overlap of predator and prey is > occurring at a crucial time. He noted that wild Chinook and coho salmon > fry > emerge from the gravel at the same time the 800,000 larger steelhead > smolts > are released in the important wild spawning area, at a time when the river > is low and clear. > > The consumed Chinook and coho salmon fry and eggs that would have hatched > make up 9 percent of production for the area during the study period, he > wrote. > > Although it does not have regulatory authority over the hatchery, the > Trinity Management Council has discussed the issue. Hanson said the > management council has written the Bureau of Reclamation to see if fish > mitigation goals can be changed. There has not been a response from > Reclamation. > > > > > > Byron Leydecker, JcT > > Chair, Friends of Trinity River > > PO Box 2327 > > Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 > > 415 383 4810 land > > 415 519 4810 cell > > bwl3 at comcast.net > > bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org > (secondary) > > http://www.fotr.org > > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > env-trinity mailing list > env-trinity at velocipede.dcn.davis..ca.us > http://www2.dcn.org/mailman/listinfo/env-trinity > _______________________________________________ env-trinity mailing list env-trinity at velocipede.dcn.davis.ca.us http://www2.dcn.org/mailman/listinfo/env-trinity -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From WSinnen at dfg.ca.gov Fri May 1 16:48:41 2009 From: WSinnen at dfg.ca.gov (Wade Sinnen) Date: Fri, 01 May 2009 16:48:41 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Hatchery v. Wild Fish Trinity Journal 4 29 09 In-Reply-To: <729939.95242.qm@web46215.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> References: <00b301c9c9ea$374fb2b0$a5ef1810$@net> <2161.216.228.19.205.1241200478.squirrel@webmail.redshift.com> <729939.95242.qm@web46215.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <49FB27E6.1B1D.0039.0@dfg.ca.gov> Emelia and others, I just want to add my two cents worth to this issue as I have worked with fish populations on the Trinity River for quite a while. I do not wish to engage in a string of email questions and replies, rather I offer up my perspective for your own evaluation of this issue. Folks should keep in mind that the hatchery and hatchery fish are present as mitigation for the 109 miles of lost habitat and fish production that would be present if it were not for construction of the dams. At issue for many hatchery programs and managers are: what are proper mitigation levels and what is the best way to minimize impacts to wild stocks. Trinity River hatchery currently has federally mandated mitigation requirements and operations are geared towards survival of their stock and release timing that works biologically for the particular species and minimizes, to the extent possible, interactions with wild stocks. However, since natal stock are always present some interaction is inevitable. A long retired biologist once told me "big fish eat little fish", a very obvious maxim and one that applies to wild as well as hatchery fish. I think some folks may have the expectation that the lower Trinity (below the dam) is going to be restored to the point that it will produce as many natural fish as the entire basin did pre-dam. In my opinion this is unlikely given the fact that flows, although restored to some degree, are still only about half the inflow, the other half is still being exported out of the basin. Additionally, the bulk of habitat restoration takes place on the main stem Trinity which benefits all species, but Chinook salmon primarily. Natural steelhead and coho salmon are heavily reliant on tributary habitats. Lastly, in the case of spring Chinook, summer steelhead and probably inland coho populations, the habitat lost (snow fed streams, higher elevation thermal regimes) can not be easily replicated or provided below the current dam (see current CVPIA scientific review for analysis on the Sacramento system). One other point to remember is that the location of the study was directly below the hatchery. This area, as the author points out in his study, is heavily utilized by hatchery salmonids and has been for many years. One could make a point that hatchery steelhead releases are preying primarily on fry progeny of hatchery origin fish. In any event, this section of the river can not be considered typical of the whole river by any means. This issue (hatchery production and mitigation goals) has come up in several different forums, including the Fish and Game Commission and the Trinity Management Council (TRRP). However, I believe one of the core issues is determining what is the most beneficial yield for the basin in terms of both natural and hatchery production and how to meet differing values of our society. If for example, the hatchery were "turned off" all current runs would diminish by 50 -90% in the short run. Over time runs may increase to some degree because there would be less inter and intra specific competition from hatchery fish, however it is not likely (in my opinion) the runs would have enough habitat to increase by fish numbers by 50 to 90% to replace what the hatchery currently provides. During the short run, society would have to "bite the bullet" in terms fishing opportunity as we may not have fishable populations. This would impact tribal and non-tribal entities alike. The long term prognosis would have a lot of uncertainty (thus the hesitancy to make large scale changes without risk/benefit types of analyses). The current study should be considered along with other studies to more effectively manage hatchery and wild populations. As the body of science grows within the Trinity Basin we hopefully will gain the knowledge to answer the tough questions and make informed and meaningful management decisions. Regards, Wade Wade Sinnen Associate Biologist Trinity River Project CA Dept. of Fish and Game Northern California - North Coast District 5341 Ericson Way Arcata, CA 95521 (707) 822-5119 >>> Emelia Berol 5/1/2009 1:47 PM >>> Frank E, With regards to your comment, "If there was a natural healthy population of steelead in comparable numbers as the hatchery numbers there would be similar predation..." It seems that this amount of predation makes sense when the natural healthy population of chinook and coho is in proportion to that of steelhead - which, if there were a healthy pop. of wild steelhead there might also be a healthy pop. of wild salmon - but is not the problem here that there is an over abundance of hatchery steelhead relative to the low numbers of wild salmon stocks ... ? Emelia Berol ________________________________ From: "frankemerson at redshift.com" To: Byron Leydecker Cc: FOTR List ; Trinity List Sent: Friday, May 1, 2009 10:54:38 AM Subject: Re: [env-trinity] Hatchery v. Wild Fish Trinity Journal 4 29 09 I am not very impressed with the conclusions of this study. If there was a natural healthy population of steelead in comparable numbers as the hatchery numbers there would be similar predation. The eggs being consumed are presumably free floaters which is natural, fry predation is normal. The student had a hook and line catch method? Sounds like a great gig if you can get it. Predation could likely be reduced greatly if the hatchery steelhead were released after the spring restoration flows have peaked. As an additional benefit the higher flow would reduce residualization and cause better Ocean survival of hatchery smolts due to more robust size. If it were not for brown trout in upper river there would likely be even more residnet trout in the natural spawning section. Frank Emerson CRSA > There are numerous scientific studies that conclude similarly.I have > several > of these, If anyone would like these, let me know, > > Byron > > Swimming for their lives > Wild fish face added threat from hatchery steelhead, study says > By AMY GITTELSOHN > > > > Researchers have warned that hatchery-produced fish can harm wild stocks > by > competing for food and habitat. > > > > > http://www.trinityjournal.com/news/2009/0429/front_page/001p1_lg.jpg > > > Allen Houston, fish culturist at the Trinity River Hatchery, right, > examines > newly hatched steelhead in the incubator and steelhead fingerlings to be > reared at the hatchery and released to the Trinity River in March of next > year. A recent study sought to determine the impact of hatchery fish on > the > native fish population; the results are currently being debated. > > In a study on the Trinity River, a fisheries biologist reported a more > direct impact that Trinity River Hatchery steelhead have on wild fish. > They > eat them. > > Seth Naman conducted his research in 2007 in a study funded by the Yurok > Tribal Fisheries Program. Naman and his crew caught fin-clipped hatchery > steelhead on a two-mile section of the Trinity River downstream of the > Lewiston Dam, anesthetizing them, pumping their bellies and recording the > results before reviving them and sending them on their way. > > Prior to the 2007 release of hatchery steelhead in March, they caught 315 > "residualized" steelhead released from the hatchery in 2006 which stayed > in > the river rather than migrating to the ocean. Those hangers-on had 435 > salmonid fry and 2,685 salmonid eggs in their stomachs. > > > > > http://www.trinityjournal.com/news/2009/0429/front_page/001p2_lg.jpg > > > > > In March 2007, the hatchery released yearling steelhead, and about half > swam > out to the river on their own volition. Naman and crew began catching the > juvenile hatchery steelhead in the upper reach of the river as the > stragglers were forced out. They caught 1,636 juvenile hatchery steelhead, > finding that they had consumed 882 salmonid fry. > > Using population estimates and predation rates, Naman estimated that > 24,194 > salmonid fry and 171,018 salmonid eggs were consumed by 2,302 residualized > hatchery steelhead in 21 days from Feb. 10 to March 2, 2007. He estimated > that 110,659 salmonid fry were eaten by 439,197 juvenile hatchery > steelhead > in 30 days from March 28 to April 26, 2007. > > Naman, now a fisheries biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric > Administration Fisheries Service, wrote up the results of his Yurok study > in > his master's thesis for Humboldt State University finalized over last > winter. It has been distributed widely over a Trinity River list server. > > > > > http://www.trinityjournal.com/news/2009/0429/front_page/001p3_lg.jpg > > > Photos by PHIL NELSON > > "This study documents the highest rate of predation by hatchery salmonids > on > naturally produced salmonids that has been reported," Naman states in his > thesis. > > Reaction from a supervisor with the state Department of Fish and Game, > which > operates the hatchery, is mixed. > > "We do feel this study has merit, and it's an area that deserves more > attention," said Larry Hanson, senior biologist supervisor with the DFG's > Klamath/Trinity Program. "We don't necessarily agree with his > conclusions." > > For example, Hanson noted that the estimates for the daily population of > hatchery steelhead in the study area - and hence the extent of predation - > could have been high because, as acknowledged in Naman's report, one of > two > antennas used to count 1,000 microchipped hatchery steelhead failed during > the study period. > > During the spring high flow, "It would seem intuitive that a certain > number > of those fish he believed residualized washed or migrated out of the study > reach," Hanson said.. > > However, in his report Naman lists several ways in which his predation > estimates are conservative, noting that almost half of the hatchery's > 800,000 steelhead release was not included in the study. > > He also noted that the hook and line method used to catch the steelhead > may > have skewed the results toward individuals more likely to go after insects > than fish. > > The hatchery, funded by the federal Bureau of Reclamation and operated by > the DFG, is meant to mitigate for the loss of fish habitat upstream from > Lewiston Dam. It releases Chinook and coho salmon as well as steelhead. > > Naman suggests the agencies look into several issues regarding steelhead. > > He notes that fishing regulations on the river from the Old Lewiston > Bridge > to the dam are "fly only" and "catch and release only." These regulations > have no apparent biological justification, Naman stated, and angler > harvest > of the hatchery steelhead could help eliminate those that stay in the > river. > >>From the DFG, Hanson said allowing anglers to keep steelhead in the upper > Trinity River would go against the hatchery's goals for returning adults. > > "The department can't support that," he said. > > Naman noted that each year a significant percentage of the 800,000 > steelhead > released annually are on the small side - small enough that they have no > chance of returning as adults. In 2007, 175,210 small steelhead were > released, Naman said, and the stunted fish likely die or residualize in > the > river to compete with naturally produced fish. > > While Naman did not study the impact on wild fish from competition by > hatchery fish for food and habitat, he noted that other studies have, and > competition may be more harmful than predation. > > "The end result of the competition may be dead naturally produced fish," > Naman wrote, "which cannot be held in hand and counted as in this study." > > Given the Trinity River Restoration Program goal of restoring naturally > produced salmonids, those goals "may be in conflict with the current > management regime of hatchery fish," Naman stated. > > But Hanson noted that the hatchery is meant to mitigate for habitat lost > due > to the dam, using the best science as to how many steelhead were produced > in > that habitat. If neither the dam nor the hatchery existed, there would > still > be predation by the natural steelhead, Hanson said. He acknowledged that > the > dam does concentrate the fry. > > Naman indicates in his report that the overlap of predator and prey is > occurring at a crucial time. He noted that wild Chinook and coho salmon > fry > emerge from the gravel at the same time the 800,000 larger steelhead > smolts > are released in the important wild spawning area, at a time when the river > is low and clear. > > The consumed Chinook and coho salmon fry and eggs that would have hatched > make up 9 percent of production for the area during the study period, he > wrote. > > Although it does not have regulatory authority over the hatchery, the > Trinity Management Council has discussed the issue. Hanson said the > management council has written the Bureau of Reclamation to see if fish > mitigation goals can be changed. There has not been a response from > Reclamation. > > > > > > Byron Leydecker, JcT > > Chair, Friends of Trinity River > > PO Box 2327 > > Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 > > 415 383 4810 land > > 415 519 4810 cell > > bwl3 at comcast.net > > bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org > (secondary) > > http://www.fotr.org > > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > env-trinity mailing list > env-trinity at velocipede.dcn.davis.ca.us > http://www2.dcn.org/mailman/listinfo/env-trinity > _______________________________________________ env-trinity mailing list env-trinity at velocipede.dcn.davis.ca.us http://www2.dcn.org/mailman/listinfo/env-trinity From bwl3 at comcast.net Fri May 1 19:11:29 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Fri, 1 May 2009 19:11:29 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Eureka Times Standard 4 30 09 Message-ID: <052C8B75795A494F93558C4D3BEB2100@ByronsLaptop> State-commissioned study looks deep into commercial fisheries John Driscoll/The Times-Standard Posted: 04/30/2009 01:30:18 AM PDT Click photo to enlarge * < * 1 * > The first comprehensive economic study of the state's commercial fisheries shows an industry with promise but also in peril. The value of most fisheries isn't keeping up with the costs needed to harness them, found the California Department of Fish and Game-commissioned study released this week. The snapshot of the wide range of fisheries shows an industry vulnerable to globalization, regulation and competition from other food production industries. "It doesn't paint a very nice picture of what's going on out there," said Humboldt State University economist Steve Hackett. HSU and consultant King and Associates out of Maryland prepared the report. The report doesn't measure trends over time, but instead focuses on 2006. For example, limited fishing for salmon on the North Coast that year shows a depressed fishery that would look better, perhaps, if earlier data were used and averaged. But there have also been recent years in which there was no salmon fishing at all. Dungeness crab was a moneymaker, according to the report, although it's subject to natural, cyclical fluctuations in catch. In contrast, the 500 people in the hook-and-line fishery, Hackett said, split a meager $1 million among them in 2006. The economic report is meant to inform regulators of the effects policy changes and other factors can have on commercial fisheries. For example, it can help quantify the costs and possible benefits of establishing marine reserves under the Marine Life Protection Act, whose implementation is a continuing concern for commercial fishermen. It can also help understand the effects of wave energy projects and climate change on fisheries, Hackett said. The report breaks down the elements of the various fisheries in the state by county and region, and attaches multipliers -- an economic tool to measure the total effects of an industry -- to the fisheries. The trawl fishery was found to have a multiplier of nearly 1.6, which means that for every $1 million a fishery gains or loses over the status quo, $1.6 million is generated or lost in the local economy. That includes factors like purchases of fuel, bait, gear and other necessities. Eureka fisherman Dave Bitts, also president of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations, said that the report will ideally allow the state to question actions that might harm the fishing industry. Among the concepts being weighed that may have an effect are revisions of landing fees to help fund Fish and Game's ongoing operations. "The state has to be careful," Bitts said. "If you set fees that put people out of business, then you don't collect anything. I would hope that they'd consider that at a minimum." Hackett said that globalization is one reason many fisheries are suffering from reduced prices. Cheaper products from out of state -- and from aquaculture operations -- often end up on diners' plates in California. Fish also competes with other "luxury gourmet" items like high-quality beef and free-range chicken, Hackett said. He pointed out that agriculture has an advantage in that it can tap innovations to increase yields, but fisheries are dependent on what the environment can produce naturally. Department of Fish and Game fisheries economist Terry Tillman said that there is currently abundant information on sport fisheries from the federal government, but data on the state's commercial fisheries was lacking. "There was a real vacuum for information on commercial uses," Tillman said. "We needed to fill that gap." He called the study a "treasure trove of information" that can help the agency and legislators make better decisions in the future, and allow the department to satisfy its requirements to consider economic impacts to businesses when addressing resource issues. Byron Leydecker, JcT, Chair Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 9840 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Sat May 2 10:19:49 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Sat, 2 May 2009 10:19:49 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Lost Salmon SF Bay Area Public TV Message-ID: <003201c9cb4a$331a9b90$994fd2b0$@net> KQED Channel 9 and 709 San Francisco Bay Area Salmon California's Lost Salmon Because of a sharp decline in their numbers, the entire salmon fishing season was canceled in 2008 for the first time in the ocean off California and Oregon. Where did the salmon go? QUEST explores California's salmon runs, where they go, what their lifecycle is, and how we might save them. Tuesday, May 12 at 7:30pm on KQED Channel 9. Watch the story online the day before it airs. Byron Leydecker, JcT, Chair Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 11301 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Sat May 2 13:34:39 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Sat, 2 May 2009 13:34:39 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Sac Bee OpEd May 1 2009 Message-ID: <004401c9cb65$6b93e600$42bbb200$@net> Jeffrey Michael: Water won't wash away Valley's recession By Jeffrey Michael Special to The Bee Published: Friday, May. 1, 2009 - 12:00 am What is causing unemployment in the San Joaquin Valley? According to water contractors and their political supporters, a "regulatory drought" has eliminated water-dependent farm jobs, and they point to high unemployment rates in farming communities as proof. Their solution is to suspend the Endangered Species Act and build a multibillion-dollar peripheral canal around the Delta. However, the facts don't support the water contractors' view. The latest payroll data through March finds that farm jobs have grown faster than any other sector of the economy in the past 12 months, even outpacing health care. In fact, farm jobs have been growing throughout the three-year drought. Compared with 2006, farm jobs have increased 5 percent in California, while private nonfarm jobs have decreased 5 percent. The same is true in Fresno County, home to communities such as Mendota that have been the focus of water exporters' news releases. In Fresno County, farm payrolls increased 3.2 percent in the past 12 months, compared with a 3.4 percent decrease in private, nonfarm payrolls. Since the drought began three years ago, Fresno County farm payrolls have increased by 12 percent, while nonfarm employment has crashed, led by a loss of more than 7,000 construction jobs. In light of these statistics, how can water exporters, politicians and others claim that rising unemployment in the Valley is a result of water shortages for farms rather than the broader recession? The foreclosure crisis is at the heart of the recession, and the Central Valley has the highest foreclosure rates in the United States. Homebuilding has shut down, and service sectors have cratered, costing many former farmworkers their higher paying, nonseasonal jobs. Water contractors point to 40 percent unemployment in Mendota as evidence of the water crisis. These unemployment estimates for towns aren't a current survey, but are crude extrapolations from the 2000 Census, the last time any real data were compiled for these areas. The 2000 census gives a good picture of the prosperity that increased water pumping would bring to Mendota's hard-working residents. Delta water exports were above average in 2000, and local farm employment was at a nine-year peak. Despite this, the 2000 census found unemployment in Mendota exceeded 32 percent, highest of the state's 494 towns. Per-capita income was below $8,000, the lowest level in the state, nearly 20 percent lower than Mexico and many developing nations in Africa, Eastern Europe and South America. Not surprisingly, water contractors don't issue news releases about unemployment when they have water. In fact, growers have been complaining about shortages in recent years, even as Mendota's unemployment estimate was 25 to 30 percent. There will be substantially fewer seasonal farm jobs this year as thousands of acres are idled, and this will further increase the pain of the recession in farming areas south of the Delta water pumps. As these impacts appear, it is important to consider them over the entire three-year span of the drought, rather than treat agriculture's recent unsustainable peak as normal. In the early years of the drought, agriculture expanded in response to a commodity bubble that more than doubled crop prices, farm profits, and farmland values in a span of a few years. Much of the increase is attributed to permanent crops in desert regions with interruptible junior water rights. Between 2006 and 2008, more than 50,000 acres of new almond orchards were planted, mostly south of the Delta pumps, while a nut glut led to a price collapse for all growers. Similarly, California's enormous dairy industry expanded rapidly, and now taxpayers are spending millions to buy surplus milk and prop up prices in an oversupplied market. Taxpayers are the forgotten stakeholders in the various Delta planning processes. With no one protecting taxpayer interests, it's no surprise that Delta Vision recommended the most costly options to the governor. The Bay Delta Conservation Plan does not plan to make a cost estimate of their plan until after it is complete. Recent state tax increases are hurting families, businesses and private sector job creation, while California has the lowest bond rating of any state. Water contractors think the state should borrow billions for their cause, crowding out investments in education, energy, transportation and other critical areas that will support the high-paying jobs of the future. Their plan would also have adverse impacts on Delta agriculture, recreation and tourism, commercial fishing and the jobs supported by these industries. Delta Vision, water contractors and now the Bay Delta Conservation Plan are primarily making economic arguments for their plans. While spending millions on engineering studies and public relations, the state is not sponsoring any serious research to comprehensively evaluate economic effects of the water plan. California's overburdened taxpayers deserve better. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Mon May 4 11:20:09 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Mon, 4 May 2009 11:20:09 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Trinity Flow Schedule Message-ID: <003a01c9cce4$f649a0c0$e2dce240$@net> Please make the following release changes to the Trinity River: date time from (cfs) to (cfs) 5-06-09 0100 4500 4250 5-07-09 0100 4250 4000 5-08-09 0100 4000 3800 5-09-09 0100 3800 3600 5-09-09 2200 3600 3400 5-10-09 0200 3400 3300 5-10-09 2200 3300 3100 5-11-09 0200 3100 3000 5-12-09 0100 3000 2800 5-13-09 0100 2800 2600 5-14-09 0100 2600 2500 5-15-09 0100 2500 2400 5-16-09 0100 2400 2300 5-17-09 0100 2300 2200 5-18-09 0100 2200 2000 5-29-09 2200 2000 1900 5-30-09 0200 1900 1800 5-30-09 0600 1800 1750 5-30-09 2200 1750 1650 5-31-09 0200 1650 1550 5-31-09 2200 1550 1450 6-01-09 0200 1450 1350 6-01-09 2200 1350 1250 6-02-09 0200 1250 1200 6-12-09 2200 1200 1100 6-13-09 0200 1100 1050 6-13-09 2200 1050 950 6-14-09 0200 950 900 6-15-09 0100 900 800 6-16-09 0100 800 700 6-26-09 0100 700 670 6-27-09 0100 670 640 6-28-09 0100 640 630 6-29-09 0100 630 621 6-30-09 0100 621 594 7-01-09 0100 594 568 7-02-09 0100 568 544 7-03-09 0100 544 521 7-04-09 0100 521 498 7-05-09 0100 498 477 7-06-09 0100 477 450 Hold 450 cfs through Sep 30, 2009 Ordered by: Peggy Manza Note: Trinity ROD pulse flow ramp-down schedule Ordered by: Peggy Manza Note: Trinity River ROD pulse flow ramp-up Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From tstokely at att.net Mon May 4 13:39:18 2009 From: tstokely at att.net (Tom Stokely) Date: Mon, 4 May 2009 13:39:18 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] CalLawyer- Old adversaries agree to remove dams in the Klamath River Message-ID: http://www.callawyer.com/story.cfm?eid=901298&evid=1 Features A River Runs Through It Old adversaries agree to remove dams in the Klamath River basin, hoping to save farms, fish, and tribal culture. Photographs by David McLain / Aurora Photos Indians use a handmade dip net at rapids in the Klamath River to fish for salmon in the fall 2007 run. By Glen Martin It's an unseasonably warm winter day at the mouth of the Klamath River, a few miles south of Crescent City near the northern edge of California. The jade-green waters surge into the Pacific, creating a chaotic zone of swells and wave trains. A pair of gray whales appear just beyond the surf line, their spouts framed in white filigree against the deep cerulean sky. On a sandbar, two Yurok Indians-members of the tribe that holds this land and the fishing rights to the river-patrol the water's edge with gaffs: lengths of hooked steel rod fitted with an elegant, carved wooden handle. They are hunting lampreys, eel-like fish that enter the river each winter to spawn. This same scene has played out for the past 10,000 years-roughly the period the Yurok have lived on the lower Klamath River. Almost nothing has changed but the men's clothes and the forged metal that now makes up the business end of their lamprey hooks. It's precisely this point that Troy Fletcher makes at the Yurok nation's headquarters, a mile or so upriver. Fletcher says his people have been fishing this river, subsisting off its largesse, for a very long time. To the Yurok, the watershed of the lower Klamath is not only their homeland but also the focal point of their culture, religion, and identity. To a significant degree, Fletcher explains, the Yurok are the Klamath. Hundreds of miles upriver, farmer Steve Kandra feels the same way about the Klamath's upper basin. For almost a century his family has been cultivating the rich peat bottomlands. The fields, in an area that once was marsh, are irrigated by water transported from Oregon's Upper Klamath Lake through an extensive system of dams and hundreds of miles of canals begun in 1906 by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. Today, the Klamath Reclamation Project irrigates more than 200,000 acres in the river's basin. Kandra raises alfalfa, wheat, onions, and potatoes on 600 acres near Tule Lake, California, and Merrill, Oregon. "We don't go as far back as the Yurok, of course," says Kandra. "But we have the same attachments to the Klamath watershed and the seasonal manifestations we see on it. This land is very much who we are." The region's farmers get electricity from the river as well. Between 1917 and 1962, the California Oregon Power Co. built four hydropower dams-three in California, one in Oregon-on the main stem of the river below the basin. Though modest in size, the dams produce roughly 170 megawatts of power, enough to light about 70,000 homes. But the dams wreaked havoc on the pristine ecosystem: They cut off salmon and steelhead from spawning in the upper Klamath, and the shallow reservoirs they created became brood sites for toxic algae and Ceratomyxa shasta, a minute aquatic parasite that preys on young salmon and trout. By the 1970s it was obvious the four dams were harming the river's fish species-not only salmon and steelhead but also white and green sturgeon and Pacific lampreys. As the fish numbers declined, the Yurok, Hoopa, Karuk, and other Klamath tribes joined commercial fishermen, sports anglers, and environmentalists in an ad hoc coalition to preserve the river's habitat. That partnership also brought in lawyers-enough to match the formidable attorneys representing the river's farming communities. For the next two decades suits and countersuits volleyed along the Klamath like artillery barrages. The skirmishing ramped up in 1997, when coho salmon and two species of suckerfish were listed under the federal Endangered Species Act (ESA). Then, in the midst of a drought in 2001, the skirmishing became all-out war. The Bureau of Reclamation terminated irrigation contracts to some 1,400 upper basin farmers to protect the endangered fish, on the basis of biological opinions issued under the ESA. The farmers and their supporters staged street protests in Klamath Falls, Oregon, and some took control of the head gates on the project's canals. When local police refused to arrest them, federal agents had to patrol the canals to prevent further water seizures. Kandra-a board member of the Klamath Water Users Association-filed suit against the bureau, challenging the scientific basis of the biological opinions (Kandra v. United States, 145 F. Supp. 2d 1192 (D. Or. 2001)). Though the court denied injunctive relief to block the bureau's plan, the farmers found political support at the highest levels of the Bush administration. A year later, a controversial new biological opinion determined that water diversions were "not likely to adversely affect" coho salmon for a below-average water year. The bureau halved the amount of water it would release downriver, diverting the balance to farmers through the project's canals. In April 2002, Secretary of Agriculture Ann Veneman, Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton, and Sen. Gordon Smith of Oregon posed at a ceremonial opening of the Klamath head gates. By September of that year the low flows, warm water temperatures, and an exploding population of parasites killed as many as 64,000 fish in the lower Klamath. It was one of the largest fish kills in the history of the Northwest. This time the bureau was sued by commercial fishermen, the Klamath tribes, and environmental groups. (See Pacific Coast Fed'n of Fishermen's Ass'ns v. U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, 426 F.3d 1082 (9th Cir. 2005).) For the Yurok, the great salmon die-off was profoundly traumatic, tantamount to an assault on their very existence. Framed news clippings of the event are still posted on the walls of the tribal headquarters. "We went into mourning," Fletcher says. "It seemed like the world was dying." But the disaster convinced the Yurok that they had to find another way to resolve the water conflict. "We had gone through decades of lawsuits. We'd get one decision that would seem to help us, and then another that moved us back," Fletcher says. "Meanwhile, things on the river kept getting worse. We just came to a point when we realized that litigation wasn't going to solve anything. We had to reach out." So the Yurok began informal talks with the farmers, leading to creation of the Klamath Settlement Group in 2005. More than 20 stakeholders participated: the Klamath River tribes; farmers and irrigation districts; federal agencies within the Departments of Agriculture, Interior, and Commerce; state agencies in Oregon and California; county governments; environmental groups; the commercial fishing industry and sports anglers; and PacifiCorp, owner of the hydropower dams. The goal, Fletcher says, wasn't simply to mitigate fish mortality or increase water flows downriver. It involved much more: reaching an agreement, once and for all, that would keep all the parties whole while guaranteeing a restored, ecologically stable, biologically rich river. And the hope was to achieve that outside the courts. In 2008 the groups' talks produced a proposed settlement and, later in the year, an agreement to remove the hydropower dams from the river. But with years of work still ahead on cost-benefit studies, federal and state authorization, and funding for the dams' removal, the biggest question is whether there is enough time to save the river. The Yurok feel their backs are against the wall. Everything they have-their whole way of being-is at stake. "It's not a matter of wanting to restore the river," Fletcher says. "We have to restore the river. We believe we are charged to protect the river, and to serve as its stewards. As a people, it's our primary responsibility." Steve Kandra has known Troy Fletcher a long time, and though he says their relationship is marked by respect, he admits it hasn't always been harmonious. "There have been plenty of times Troy and I sat across a table, throwing spears at each other," Kandra recalls with a laugh. "So let me tell you, when he had his epiphany [after the fish kill], I saw it as a welcome alternative." Scott W. Williams, attorney for the Yurok and a partner with Alexander, Berkey, Williams & Weathers in Berkeley, says Fletcher based his overture to the farmers on an offer to not oppose their bid for a new source of low-cost power. Williams says that, after negotiations between the lawyers, the farmers responded with a letter confirming a general, ambiguous statement of support for the tribe. "We went through a period where we had to do some trust building, some testing to make sure we could really do this," Kandra says. "Sometimes it was easy, sometimes it was contentious. But it was always honest. Just that fact connected people, made us feel we were really on to something." In fact, the Yurok feel a kinship with the farmers, says Fletcher. "Like us, they are people who are close to the land. Like us, they are a spiritual people," he says. "And we both depend on the same river for our survival. There is more that brings us together than separates us." For the many participants in what became the Klamath Settlement Group, the prospect of a definitive agreement was alluring, promising to resolve a conflict that had long seemed intractable. "It really resonated with us," says Jeff Mitchell, a council member of the Klamath Tribes-a coalition of the Klamath, Modoc, and Yahooskin that has fought nearly a century for the return of salmon and steelhead, absent from the upper river since completion of the first dam in 1917. According to Mitchell, a series of federal court cases dating from the 1970s established the Klamath Tribes' senior water rights on the river. But those cases quantified neither the amount of water the tribes may claim nor the amount allocated to holders of subsidiary water rights. That has been left to the Oregon courts, and those state cases are still ongoing. "State adjudication is time-consuming and incredibly costly," Mitchell says. "Meanwhile, people continue to take as much water as they can. So if we can get a comprehensive settlement that meets our criteria-protecting the fish, terrestrial fauna, and plant life in and along the river-we'll pursue it." Commercial fishermen also participated in the settlement group. Glen Spain, Northwest regional director for the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations in Eugene, Oregon, says the salmon kill of 2002 brought them to the negotiating table. "Like the other stakeholders, it became obvious to us that the status quo wasn't sustainable," Spain says. And with operating licenses for the Klamath dams set to expire, "[w]e saw this as a chance to actually get something done." Spain recalls the initial talks as difficult. "The first meetings were almost like encounter groups-people spent a lot of time talking about their feelings," he says. "Everybody who depends on the river-from the farmers to the tribes to the salmon trollers-had gone through a lot of trauma." But once the emotional aspects played out, he says, "we started to see that if we did this right, we could bring down the dams, restore the watershed, and keep the farmers whole." Key to removing the dams, of course, is consent of the utility that owns them, PacifiCorp Energy of Portland, Oregon. At the time of the Klamath fish kill, PacifiCorp was a subsidiary of ScottishPower of Glasgow, Scotland, and it was planning to apply to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) for a 50-year renewal of its operating license, scheduled to expire in 2006. So a protest group from the Klamath Tribes traveled to Scotland in 2004 for the company's annual meeting, receiving favorable coverage in the local press and sympathy from Scottish citizens. Chastened, ScottishPower agreed to negotiate with the tribes. But in 2006 PacifiCorp was acquired by MidAmerican Energy Holdings, owned by Warren Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway. The new owner indicated it wasn't interested in dam removal. But no new license could be issued without retrofitting the dams to meet federal wildlife protections enacted in the 1970s. This time the Klamath Tribes traveled to Omaha, Nebraska, to protest at a Berkshire Hathaway meeting. Although the parent company didn't respond, eventually PacifiCorp participated in the Klamath Settlement Group talks, and it agreed in principle to removing the dams. Dean S. Brockbank, vice president and general counsel of PacifiCorp, notes that the company continues to operate the Klamath dams under annual licenses that renew automatically-even though the settlement makes clear that Oregon, California, and the federal government all want the dams removed. "As a utility, we don't make policy; we implement it," Brockbank says. "So at the point the preferred policy of the state and federal governments became clear, we shifted from an emphasis on relicensing to settlement." Williams, the Yurok's attorney, says that under PacificCorp's former license, the utility had supplied power to upper basin farmers at below-market rates. In the settlement, the tribes propose that the farmers be provided with submarket rates on energy from alternative sources, possibly including the Bonneville Power Administration on the Columbia River. Says Kandra, "We'd also be looking at renewable energy: biomass, solar, wind, and small hydro units on streams without fish-bearing capacity. This could be a real opportunity for promoting sustainable power." In January 2008 the settlement group released the Klamath Basin Restoration Agreement, a 256-page document signed by 28 parties-though not by PacifiCorp. The agreement proposes 50-year contractual commitments and estimates restoration costs at $1 billion over a 10-year period. Its significance is captured in a single sentence: "The Parties have negotiated this Agreement to achieve peace on the river and end conflict." Last November the parties executed a separate Agreement in Principle-this one signed by PacifiCorp-documenting their intention to take out the four hydropower dams. About 25 percent less water would be allocated for irrigation. For each year, a firm cap would be placed on water diversions. Storage capacity would be increased in Upper Klamath Lake to create significant new tracts of wetlands that would benefit the lake's endangered suckerfish, as well as the millions of waterfowl that use the upper basin as a wintering ground. And restoration projects along the river's primary watershed would improve water quality, fisheries, and wildlife. In exchange, the farmers would be guaranteed low-cost power, as well as protection from enforcement of the Endangered Species Act if coho and other listed fish return to the upper basin. The agreement also has provisions for the voluntary retirement of farmland, paying farmers who return irrigated land to wildlife habitat. Greg Addington, executive director of the Klamath Water Users Association, says that reducing the demand for irrigation water was critical to making the settlement work. To avoid permanently idling land, the settlement proposes conservation easements. During drier years, farmers would be compensated-with either cash or water guarantees-for keeping land as wildlife habitat. In wetter years, the same pieces of land could be irrigated and farmed. Addington says such incentives could go a long way toward making more water available downriver without a court judgment. Conservation easements have other benefits as well. According to Addington, temporary marshes, known as walking wetlands, would benefit waterfowl and fish and improve general water quality. "Marshes serve as filters, removing nutrients and pollutants from the water," he says. And fallowing land as marsh for a year or more fertilizes the soil with waterfowl waste and humus from aquatic plants. It also eliminates the disease spores that accumulate in regularly cultivated cropland. Despite the many benefits of a comprehensive Klamath settlement, the devil remains in the details. PacifiCorp, for instance, is willing to go along only if a number of conditions are met. "First, there has to be a $200 million cap on costs [to the utility]," says Brockbank. "Second, the secretary of the Interior has to conduct a feasibility study to determine if it is generally advisable to remove the dams. Third, PacifiCorp would transfer ownership of the dams to a third party, and the company and its customers would be immune from any liability associated with removal. And finally, our customers would continue to get power at favorable rates." Given those terms and others, Brockbank says, the dams probably couldn't be removed before 2020. In the meantime, PacifiCorp will continue to operate the facilities. "For some people, that timeline is a problem," he acknowledges. "But given the scope of this situation, taking out the dams and fully implementing watershed restoration is unlikely any time sooner." A bigger roadblock is likely to be obtaining government approval and appropriations. Congress must authorize and fund first a cost-benefit study and then the deconstruction itself. The actual dam removal would be paid for with federal taxes, a $200 million customer surcharge assessed by the Oregon Public Utilities Commission, and $250 million in general obligation bonds that California voters must approve. Those obstacles seem daunting, admits Pablo Arroyave, a technical-services manager for the Bureau of Reclamation in Sacramento. But he says the potential snags are fairly standard for water-project agreements of such size and complexity. "Look at the San Joaquin River settlement," Arroyave says, referring to a pending deal to restore native salmon and provide continuous water flows to dry sections of the San Joaquin River. "It's taken a very long time, and enabling federal legislation has yet to be passed. But I would say that in the Klamath River basin, most stakeholders are generally pleased with the way things are going. When you have very complicated negotiations, you can't expect things to be simple." Arroyave points out that the Obama administration has yet to address dam removal on the Klamath and the costs associated with it. But he seems confident of approval, even in the midst of a recession. "The federal government remains invested in the current process, and we're anticipating a determination [on the cost-benefit study] that is unbiased and looks at all the elements carefully." Some environmentalists, however, are less sanguine. Oregon Wild, a Portland-based group dedicated to preserving the state's wild lands and waterways, at first participated in settlement negotiations but was later excluded when its staffers expressed deep unease at the direction of the talks. "People have been so blinded by the prospect of dam removal that they're willing to sacrifice other goals, such as overall water flows in the river," says Sean Stevens, a spokesperson for the group. "The target date for taking down the dams is the first problem-the fish may not have eleven years to wait. There's too much potential for side-stepping the Endangered Species Act and the Clean Water Act. Water allocations aren't specified clearly enough. And the agreement allows for continued farming in the Tule Lake and Lower Klamath National Wildlife refuges-the only federal refuges where large-scale commercial agriculture is permitted. It compromises the very rationale for establishing them." Those positions, Oregon Wild's critics say, risk setting off another round of litigation. But Stevens doubts that will happen-and he says a bad settlement is worse than no settlement. "We don't support lawsuits simply because we like them," Stevens says. "We worked with PacifiCorp for a settlement on decommissioning Link River Dam [on Upper Klamath Lake] to save endangered suckerfish. But we have to remember what got us to the point where settlement became feasible: It was people going to court. Rushing through a flawed process just to get a settlement today as opposed to five or six years from now is simply wrongheaded." Another opponent of the settlement, the Hoopa Valley Tribe, has a large reservation at the juncture of the Klamath and its major tributary, the Trinity River. Tom Schlosser, an attorney for the tribe and a partner in the Seattle firm of Morisset, Schlosser & Jozwiak, says that removing the dams to save fisheries is a laudable goal, but he doubts the Agreement in Principle can achieve it. For one thing, downriver flows during many of the years between now and 2020 won't be enough to sustain coho salmon, Schlosser says. "By the time the dams come out, we could very well have lost the coho completely," he says. "For the Hoopa Valley Tribe, that is not acceptable." Schlosser also questions the requirement for the Department of Interior to conduct a cost-benefit analysis of dam removal. "Under such an analysis, it's possible that Indian fisheries may not carry the same weight as hydropower," he says. "We have no way of knowing how existing standards to protect tribal fisheries will be applied." Eric Garner, coauthor of a book on California water law, says Schlosser's concerns are understandable but may not reflect reality. "Cost-benefit analysis is significant, but the useful precedent is limited because each river system is unique," says Garner, managing partner of Best Best & Krieger in Riverside. "I think Interior would give a lot of weight to stakeholder consensus on whether dam removal is appropriate." Spain of the Federation of Fishermen's Associations says he respectfully disagrees with critics of the settlement. As the agreement is shaping up, he says, an average of 130,000 acre-feet of additional water will be released downriver each year, except in the worst drought periods. Combined with dam removal and stipulated habitat and water-quality improvement projects, he contends, the river not only will have more water, but it will be colder and cleaner. "Is it enough?" Spain asks rhetorically. "Well, it wouldn't be enough in a major drought, and the critics have hammered on that point. But there's a proviso in the Agreement in Principle calling for a separate drought plan. That will take some years and considerable funding to accomplish, but it's integral to the settlement. Ultimately, we'll have a drought plan." Another concern is that silt lodged in the reservoirs behind the dams could irreparably harm the Klamath's fisheries when it is released. But Spain, noting scientific studies prepared for the California State Coastal Conservancy, responds that the negative effects are likely to be minimal and transitory. "The studies showed there was no significant contamination of sediments from upstream agricultural activity," Spain says. "And while there will be a sediment plume when the dams are removed, most of the silt will move through the river in a year or two." Meanwhile, Spain notes, the increased water flows will carry gravel downstream. "Salmon need gravel and cobble for spawning," he says. "So once the dams are out, we'll actually see miles and miles of new spawning habitat." For all the measured optimism of the parties in the Klamath Settlement Group, it's also true that the signed agreements have no legal force. If one party or another gets its hackles up or abruptly decides its interests are not being served, the legal battle could begin again. Indeed, litigation brought by upper basin farmers never really ended. After the district court dismissed Steve Kandra's suit in 2001, for instance, two irrigation districts refiled the complaint in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims. That suit raised two takings claims, and in 2003 a breach of contract count was added. In 2005 the court of claims found no compensable property interests under the Fifth Amendment (Klamath Irr. Dist. v. United States, 67 Fed. Cl. 504 (2005) (Klamath I)). Two years later the same court also rejected the contracts claim, holding that the Endangered Species Act took precedence over the bureau's water-delivery agreements (Klamath II, 75 Fed. Cl. 677 (2007)). The plaintiffs then appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. "The threshold issue is whether the plaintiffs have any property interest in Klamath water," says John Echeverria, executive director of the Georgetown Environmental Law and Policy Institute in Washington, D.C. "In our view, based on long-standing Oregon law, they do not. Under the special development deal that allowed the Klamath Project to proceed, the water belongs to the federal government. The irrigators have a contractual right to it, and they may be able to make a case for breach of contract, but not for takings." Echeverria, together with the Natural Resources Defense Council, filed an amicus brief in 2007 urging the appellate court to affirm the court of claims rulings. Instead, the Federal Circuit certified questions last July to the Oregon Supreme Court, asking the state court to rule on whether the irrigation districts had obtained a property interest in water rights conferred on them by the Klamath Reclamation Project (Klamath III, 532 F.3d 1376 (Fed. Cir. 2008)). The Oregon Supreme Court wasn't required to respond. The state's Department of Water Resources and most environmentalists hoped it wouldn't, fearing that upper basin farmers might abandon the settlement process if the court found a property right inherent in Bureau of Reclamation contracts. But the Oregon Supreme Court did respond, agreeing to consider the certified property rights questions (Klamath IV, 2009 WL 197566 (Jan. 29, 2009)). It has scheduled oral arguments for the middle of this month in the Klamath Falls High School gymnasium. Another pending takings case, this one in Southern California, also could complicate the Klamath settlement. It involves a dispute over irrigation diversions from the Ventura River that threaten endangered steelhead trout. The Casitas Municipal Water District-represented by the lead attorney for the Klamath irrigators, Roger Marzulla, cofounder of Marzulla & Marzulla in Washington, D.C.-claimed the ESA's requirement that it install a fish ladder and increase water flows for the steelhead's benefit amounted to a compensable taking of its property right in the use of river water. The court of claims found for the federal government, analyzing the case as a regulatory taking (Casitas Mun. Water Dist. v. United States, 76 Fed. Cl. 100 (2007) (Casitas I)). But last year the Federal Circuit reversed, holding in a 21 opinion that the claim must be evaluated as a physical taking rather than a regulatory taking (Casitas II, 543 F.3d 1276 (Fed. Cir. 2008)). In February the appellate court declined to rehear the case en banc, despite amici support from Defenders of Wildlife, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Sierra Club, California Trout, and a phalanx of fisheries scientists (Casitas III, 2009 WL 367528 (Feb. 17, 2009)). Though Casitas II could give cause for irrigators to abandon the Klamath settlement, Marzulla expresses a conciliatory tone. "No matter how these cases turn out, I don't think it will screw up the [Klamath] negotiations," he says. "The fact is that 2001 was a very unusual year on the Klamath River. The reservoirs were full, but the farmers basically got no water. Emotions were very high. At this point, people really want to work toward a solution. I would not expect favorable determinations for us [in the Casitas cases] to have a negative impact." One thing missing from the Klamath settlement is the active support of the country's largest environmental groups. Most are waiting to see whether the final agreement conforms to the ESA and the Clean Water Act. "With the Klamath, the ESA is really the big gun," says Kristen Boyles, a staff attorney in the Seattle office of Earth-justice, which specializes in environmental litigation. "When I look at the drafts of the Klamath settlement, I'm concentrating on whether there's any attempt to circumvent federal laws, including the ESA. So far there isn't. But that's the crucial metric we will apply throughout this process. Any final deal absolutely must conform to the ESA and the Clean Water Act, because that's where the science lies." According to Fletcher, the settlement agreement explicitly guarantees compliance with federal laws. Asked to respond to settlement critics, a faint, pained look crosses his face, and his voice-usually deep and measured-tightens. "The main thing I ask them," Fletcher says, "is what's the alternative? Unending litigation? Sure, the settlement involves compromise. It doesn't treat the river as a zero-sum game. But that's not a bad thing. This is our first real chance to solve this problem, and we need to move on it." Will it take too long to remove the dams? At this question, Fletcher acknowledges that the Yurok view time differently than the larger society does. "We have occupied the lands along this river for thousands of years," he says. "And we anticipate occupying them for thousands more. To us, ten years isn't a terribly long time-especially considering the payoff. We aren't doing this for us. We're doing it for our grandchildren, and our grandchildren's grandchildren. A restored river will be our legacy to them." Glen Martin is a freelance environmental writer based in Santa Rosa. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Mon May 4 14:25:44 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Mon, 4 May 2009 14:25:44 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Flow Schedule Message-ID: <00a001c9ccfe$e2ee7e50$a8cb7af0$@net> The Trinity River 2009 Flow Schedule I forwarded this morning was incorrect. A corrected schedule has been requested and will be forwarded to you as soon as it is available. Meanwhile, the schedule on the TRRP website http://www.trrp.net is correct. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Mon May 4 15:06:01 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Mon, 4 May 2009 15:06:01 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Trinity Flow Schedule Message-ID: <00b801c9cd04$89eb9210$9dc2b630$@net> Disregard my last message stating the flow schedule "ordered" by Peggy Manza and forwarded to you this morning was incorrect. It was and is correct. The mistake was mine, and I apologize. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Mon May 4 15:34:01 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Mon, 4 May 2009 15:34:01 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Grass Valley Union April 28 2009 Message-ID: <00e501c9cd08$6d382bc0$47a88340$@net> Suction dredge bill wins approval California's Senate Natural Resources Committee today passed SB 670, placing a temporary moratorium on the issuance of recreational suction dredge mining permits by the Department of Fish and Game until a thorough scientific review of the impacts is completed and regulations are revised. The bill will next go to Senate Appropriations for consideration and approval before going before the full Senate. The bill includes an urgency clause, requiring 2/3 vote to pass in each house, which would result in the law going into effect immediately upon signing by the Governor. Suction dredging disturbs fish habitat and puts species such as Coho salmon and green sturgeon at risk, said Elizabeth "Izzy" Martin, CEO of The Sierra Fund based in Nevada City and former county supervisor who testified at the hearing. Those who use suction dredge operations to look for gold often encounter mercury in the sediment of rivers left behind from the Gold Rush. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Mon May 4 15:37:05 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Mon, 4 May 2009 15:37:05 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Medford TV KDRV Message-ID: <00ea01c9cd08$da555e30$8f001a90$@net> Calif. bill to ban dredge mining moves forward By Mike Nelson May 1, 2009 SACRAMENTO, Ca. - A bill which would ban suction dredge mining on California's rivers is moving forward. SB 670 would end the practice of suction dredge mining within riverbeds, lakes, and streams, without an environmental impact study. The California Senate Committee on Natural Resources voted to approve the measure this week. It now goes to the Senate Appropriations Committee. Senator Patricia Wiggins, who introduced the bill, says it is unfair to ban commercial salmon fishing while allowing the practice of suction mining to continue. Wiggins says it harms fish and habitat. Wiggins has the support of Northern California tribes such as the Karuk, who filed a lawsuit to stop suction dredge mining on the Klamath River until its impact is fully understood. Miners from the group the 'New 49ers' say they do not harm the Klamath River system, and believe further studies would prove it. They say members also help support Siskiyou County's economy. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From ljacobson at redwoodenergy.org Tue May 5 12:46:09 2009 From: ljacobson at redwoodenergy.org (Lou Jacobson) Date: Tue, 5 May 2009 12:46:09 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Energy Efficiency Intern opportunity Message-ID: <002c01c9cdba$23be6060$6b3b2120$@org> Hi all, I know for most of you t his may not be that great of an opportunity however, if you have a relative or friend interested in energy, The Redwood Coast Energy Authority (RCEA) currently has openings for Energy Efficiency Interns. The intern will be working within the Redwood Coast Energy Watch program. This is a great opportunity to get your feet wet in regards to the emerging renewable/efficiency energy economy. Please take a look at the attachment for further details. Lou Jacobson Program Specialist Redwood Coast Energy Authority Office: 707.269.1700 Fax: 707.269.1777 www.redwoodenergy.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: Position Description - Energy Efficiency Intern.doc Type: application/msword Size: 88064 bytes Desc: not available URL: From tstokely at att.net Wed May 6 10:08:54 2009 From: tstokely at att.net (Tom Stokely) Date: Wed, 6 May 2009 10:08:54 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Fw: The Big Lie of Schwarzenegger and Corporate Agribusiness: Fish Vs. Jobs Message-ID: <0FDEBAEC7AFC4A669F986C8D99337071@homeuserPC> Interesting statistics below about how farm labor has mostly gone up in San Joaquin Valley communities between March 2008 and March 2009. Tom Stokely Water Policy Coordinator California Water Impact Network 504A Lennon St. (USPS and UPS) Mt Shasta, CA 96067 V/FAX 530-926-9727 Cell 530-524-0315 tstokely at att.net http://www.c-win.org/ ----- Original Message ----- From: Dan Bacher Sent: Monday, May 04, 2009 6:32 PM Subject: The Big Lie of Schwarzenegger and Corporate Agribusiness: Fish Vs. Jobs -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ? Photo: Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, worshipped as the "Green Governor" by the mainstream media and corporate-funded "environmental" groups such as the Nature Conservancy, engages in a corporate greenwashing opportunity on Earth Day, just a couple days before campaigning for a peripheral canal and more dams at a "March for Water" organized by the "Latino Water Coalition," a front for Corporate Agribusiness. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- governor_greenwash.jpeg The Big Lie of Schwarzenegger and Corporate Agribusiness: Fish Vs. Jobs? by Dan Bacher? ?The Big Lie? is a propaganda technique developed by Josef Goebbels, Nazi Minister of Propaganda, and Adolph Hitler in the 1920s prior to their taking power in Germany in 1933.? ?If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it,? said Goebbels, in explaining the technique that he helped perfect. ?The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie.?? In his autobiography Mein Kampf, Hitler defined the ?Big Lie" as a lie so colossal that no one would believe that anybody "could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.?? Since the Nazis came to power in 1933, many governments, corporations, and corrupt individuals throughout the world have used this tried and proven propaganda technique to seize power and to brainwash the population into believing unsubstantiated ?facts? to further their goals.? In California, the greatest practitioners of the ?Big Lie? are Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, Lester Snow, the Director of the Department of Water Resources, the state water contractors and their accomplices who have spread outrageous claims about the ?need? for a peripheral canal and more dams in order to increase water exports to unsustainable subsidized agribusiness. Their most recent use of the classic ?Big Lie? propaganda technique is to blame ?fish? and ?drought? for farm ?unemployment? to further their campaign to build a peripheral canal and more dams.? As part of the preparation for the State Water Board hearing on the DWR/Bureau petition, Bill Jennings, chairman of the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance, researched the claims made by DWR and various water agencies and politicians that the drought had a huge impact upon farm labor unemployment. He found that the contention that the ?drought? has been devastating for farmworkers is a classic case of ?The Big Lie,? with no basis whatsoever in fact.? For example, Schwarzenegger portrayed a false crisis of farmworker unemployment "skyrocketing," due to the supposed favoring of ?fish? over ?jobs? by state and federal agencies, when he addressed the recent ?March for Water? organized by corporate agribusiness without the support of the United Farmworkers Union or farmworker advocacy groups.? This is similar to ?The Big Lie? spouted by Schwarzenegger in the summer of 2007- that "no dams had been built" in California during a 30-year period - until myself and others exposed his lies and he finally stopped telling them.? ?This march is about opening our eyes to the reality of California?s water crisis ? and the reality is that farmers do not have a reliable water supply they can count on, farm workers fear losing their jobs because crops are not being planted, and in towns across the Central Valley, unemployment is skyrocketing,? claimed Governor Schwarzenegger. ?I am determined to getting a comprehensive solution done once and for all that will update our water infrastructure, increase our water storage and restore our Delta.?? Likewise, actor and comedian Paul Rodriguez claimed, "We cannot ask a tree to wait a week, Governor," trying to convey a gloom and doom scenario for west side San Joaquin Valley agribusiness unless exports into the Delta pumps are increased. "The tree has to have water. Our fields are turning into kindling wood.?? The Corporate Agribusiness Big Lie was repeated as scriptural truth by the corporate media, with little if any critical analysis of actual economic data as Jennings has done.? ?Water agencies and politicians have been relentlessly claiming that the drought and environmental restrictions have had a devastating impact on farm worker employment,? said Jennings. ?These claims have been widely reported in numerous newspapers and broadcast media articles. Unfortunately, they are substantially lies; facilitated by those seeking to relax environmental protection and facilitate a peripheral canal.?? Contrary to the claims that farmworker jobs have decreased, the fact is that farm labor employment in the San Joaquin Valley has increased since the "drought" began three years ago, according to Jennings.? ?In fact, agricultural employment in the San Joaquin Valley has generally outpaced all other economic sectors,? said Jennings. ?The rise in unemployment is recession-based and focused primarily on the construction, manufacturing and leisure and hospitality sectors.?? Jennings reviewed files from the State of California Employment Development Department (EDD) Labor Market Information Division between March 2008 and March 2009. These files revealed that there was no basis for claims that farm labor "unemployment" was caused by the ?drought? and court-ordered restrictions on pumping.? Here is the startling data that the Governor, DWR and the state water contractors didn?t want you to know:? ? Fresno County total farm employment increased by 1,100 while nonfarm employment decreased by 8,900.? ? Kern County total farm employment increased by 1,300 while nonfarm employment decreased by 2,500.? ? Kings County total farm employment increased by 100 while nonfarm employment decreased by 700.? ? Tulare County total farm employment increased by 1,200 while nonfarm employment decreased by 3,200.? ? Merced County total farm employment decreased by only 200 while nonfarm employment decreased by 2,100.? ? Stanislaus County total farm employment decreased by only 300 while nonfarm employment decreased by 4,900.? The same is true between 2006 and 2008, according to Jennings. Total farm employment increased by 2,600 in Fresno County, 4,000 in Kern County, 3,400 in Tulare County, 100 in Merced County, and 500 in Stanislaus County. Only in Kings County, the smallest of all valley agricultural counties, did agricultural employment drop - and then only by 600.? ?The trends are the same, whether you're comparing annual farm and nonfarm employment between 2000 and 2008 or historical monthly employment data (2000-current),? said Jennings. ?The significant rise in unemployment in the San Joaquin Valley over the last few years is clearly not due to a loss of farm labor jobs, with the possible exception of King County where farm labor unemployment averaged over 10% between 2000 and 2008 Kings County has, by far, the smallest farm and nonfarm employment of any county in the San Joaquin Valley.?? Jennings noted that much has been written about the exceptionally high unemployment in the town of Mendota, as evidence of impacts from the ?water crisis.? However, he emphasized that ?unemployment in Mendota has always been high.?? ?It exceeded 32% in 2000 and was the highest of the state's 494 towns,? added Jennings. ?Per capita income was below $8,000, which was the lowest level in the state. Unemployment is a serious problem in areas like Mendota and begs to be addressed. However, it is a structural long-existing problem not primarily caused by reductions in water deliveries.?? The unemployment numbers may change during the course of the coming year but, for now, ?they shout lies? to the claims by agencies and water districts, Jennings concluded.? On the other hand, state and federal water policies that favor subsidized corporate agribusiness have helped to devastate Central Valley Chinook salmon, striped bass, sturgeon and other fish populations that the recreational and commercial fishing businesses depend on. Delta smelt, longfin smelt, threadfin shad and juvenile striped bass have declined to record low population levels in recent years, due to massive increases in water exports out of the California Delta, toxic chemicals and invasive species.? ?The Big Lie? that the ?drought? and court-ordered restrictions of pumping to protect delta smelt and endangered winter-run Chinook salmon have led to massive unemployment in the farmworker community is a cynical attempt by Corporate Agribusiness and their allies, Schwarzenegger and Snow, to pit fishermen against farmworkers, and Delta farmworkers, who are threatened by the peripheral canal, against San Joaquin Valley farmworkers.? As Barbara Barrigan-Parrilla, campaign director of Restore the Delta, so eloquently said, ?Pitting the needs of one farm worker community against another is wrong. Environmental justice advocates, who address environmental impacts on the poor and people of color, do not advocate for the benefit of one environmental justice community against the needs of other environmental justice communities.? ?Solving the economic challenges of farm worker communities in the Central Valley and the Delta must be done in a compassionate and moral way so as to recognize the dignity of the work that farm workers perform in the present, while providing them with new opportunities to become productive members of a diverse middle class California economy,? she concluded. ?In addition, numerous workers in the fishing and recreation industries are workers of color who must also be protected by environmental justice advocacy.?? Jennings has exposed Corporate Agribusiness and Schwarzenegger for the "Big Liars" they are, but in the classic tradition of "The Big Lie," they will probably come back with an even more outrageous lie to replace the one they are spinning in the mainstream media now.? The charts extracted from EDD data by Jennings include: 1) March 2009 employment data, 2) annual nonfarm employment, 2000-2008; 3) monthly farm employment, January 2000 - March 2009 and 4) annual industry employment by labor force (including unemployment percentages), 2000 - 2008. The data are available at: http://www.labormarketinfo.edd.ca.gov/?pageid=131 and http://www.labormarketinfo.edd.ca.gov/?pageid=166? -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ? Photo: Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, worshipped as the "Green Governor" by the mainstream media and corporate-funded "environmental" groups such as the Nature Conservancy, engages in a corporate greenwashing opportunity on Earth Day, just a couple days before campaigning for a peripheral canal and more dams at a "March for Water" organized by the "Latino Water Coalition," a front for Corporate Agribusiness. ? governor_greenwash.jpeg The Big Lie of Schwarzenegger and Corporate Agribusiness: Fish Vs. Jobs by Dan Bacher ?The Big Lie? is a propaganda technique developed by Josef Goebbels, Nazi Minister of Propaganda, and Adolph Hitler in the 1920s prior to their taking power in Germany in 1933. ?If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it,? said Goebbels, in explaining the technique that he helped perfect. ?The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie.? In his autobiography Mein Kampf, Hitler defined the ?Big Lie" as a lie so colossal that no one would believe that anybody "could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.? Since the Nazis came to power in 1933, many governments, corporations, and corrupt individuals throughout the world have used this tried and proven propaganda technique to seize power and to brainwash the population into believing unsubstantiated ?facts? to further their goals. In California, the greatest practitioners of the ?Big Lie? are Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, Lester Snow, the Director of the Department of Water Resources, the state water contractors and their accomplices who have spread outrageous claims about the ?need? for a peripheral canal and more dams in order to increase water exports to unsustainable subsidized agribusiness. Their most recent use of the classic ?Big Lie? propaganda technique is to blame ?fish? and ?drought? for farm ?unemployment? to further their campaign to build a peripheral canal and more dams. As part of the preparation for the State Water Board hearing on the DWR/Bureau petition, Bill Jennings, chairman of the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance, researched the claims made by DWR and various water agencies and politicians that the drought had a huge impact upon farm labor unemployment. He found that the contention that the ?drought? has been devastating for farmworkers is a classic case of ?The Big Lie,? with no basis whatsoever in fact. For example, Schwarzenegger portrayed a false crisis of farmworker unemployment "skyrocketing," due to the supposed favoring of ?fish? over ?jobs? by state and federal agencies, when he addressed the recent ?March for Water? organized by corporate agribusiness without the support of the United Farmworkers Union or farmworker advocacy groups. This is similar to ?The Big Lie? spouted by Schwarzenegger in the summer of 2007- that "no dams had been built" in California during a 30-year period - until myself and others exposed his lies and he finally stopped telling them. ?This march is about opening our eyes to the reality of California?s water crisis ? and the reality is that farmers do not have a reliable water supply they can count on, farm workers fear losing their jobs because crops are not being planted, and in towns across the Central Valley, unemployment is skyrocketing,? claimed Governor Schwarzenegger. ?I am determined to getting a comprehensive solution done once and for all that will update our water infrastructure, increase our water storage and restore our Delta.? Likewise, actor and comedian Paul Rodriguez claimed, "We cannot ask a tree to wait a week, Governor," trying to convey a gloom and doom scenario for west side San Joaquin Valley agribusiness unless exports into the Delta pumps are increased. "The tree has to have water. Our fields are turning into kindling wood.? The Corporate Agribusiness Big Lie was repeated as scriptural truth by the corporate media, with little if any critical analysis of actual economic data as Jennings has done. ?Water agencies and politicians have been relentlessly claiming that the drought and environmental restrictions have had a devastating impact on farm worker employment,? said Jennings. ?These claims have been widely reported in numerous newspapers and broadcast media articles. Unfortunately, they are substantially lies; facilitated by those seeking to relax environmental protection and facilitate a peripheral canal.? Contrary to the claims that farmworker jobs have decreased, the fact is that farm labor employment in the San Joaquin Valley has increased since the "drought" began three years ago, according to Jennings. ?In fact, agricultural employment in the San Joaquin Valley has generally outpaced all other economic sectors,? said Jennings. ?The rise in unemployment is recession-based and focused primarily on the construction, manufacturing and leisure and hospitality sectors.? Jennings reviewed files from the State of California Employment Development Department (EDD) Labor Market Information Division between March 2008 and March 2009. These files revealed that there was no basis for claims that farm labor "unemployment" was caused by the ?drought? and court-ordered restrictions on pumping. Here is the startling data that the Governor, DWR and the state water contractors didn?t want you to know: ? Fresno County total farm employment increased by 1,100 while nonfarm employment decreased by 8,900. ? Kern County total farm employment increased by 1,300 while nonfarm employment decreased by 2,500. ? Kings County total farm employment increased by 100 while nonfarm employment decreased by 700. ? Tulare County total farm employment increased by 1,200 while nonfarm employment decreased by 3,200. ? Merced County total farm employment decreased by only 200 while nonfarm employment decreased by 2,100. ? Stanislaus County total farm employment decreased by only 300 while nonfarm employment decreased by 4,900. The same is true between 2006 and 2008, according to Jennings. Total farm employment increased by 2,600 in Fresno County, 4,000 in Kern County, 3,400 in Tulare County, 100 in Merced County, and 500 in Stanislaus County. Only in Kings County, the smallest of all valley agricultural counties, did agricultural employment drop - and then only by 600. ?The trends are the same, whether you're comparing annual farm and nonfarm employment between 2000 and 2008 or historical monthly employment data (2000-current),? said Jennings. ?The significant rise in unemployment in the San Joaquin Valley over the last few years is clearly not due to a loss of farm labor jobs, with the possible exception of King County where farm labor unemployment averaged over 10% between 2000 and 2008 Kings County has, by far, the smallest farm and nonfarm employment of any county in the San Joaquin Valley.? Jennings noted that much has been written about the exceptionally high unemployment in the town of Mendota, as evidence of impacts from the ?water crisis.? However, he emphasized that ?unemployment in Mendota has always been high.? ?It exceeded 32% in 2000 and was the highest of the state's 494 towns,? added Jennings. ?Per capita income was below $8,000, which was the lowest level in the state. Unemployment is a serious problem in areas like Mendota and begs to be addressed. However, it is a structural long-existing problem not primarily caused by reductions in water deliveries.? The unemployment numbers may change during the course of the coming year but, for now, ?they shout lies? to the claims by agencies and water districts, Jennings concluded. On the other hand, state and federal water policies that favor subsidized corporate agribusiness have helped to devastate Central Valley Chinook salmon, striped bass, sturgeon and other fish populations that the recreational and commercial fishing businesses depend on. Delta smelt, longfin smelt, threadfin shad and juvenile striped bass have declined to record low population levels in recent years, due to massive increases in water exports out of the California Delta, toxic chemicals and invasive species. ?The Big Lie? that the ?drought? and court-ordered restrictions of pumping to protect delta smelt and endangered winter- run Chinook salmon have led to massive unemployment in the farmworker community is a cynical attempt by Corporate Agribusiness and their allies, Schwarzenegger and Snow, to pit fishermen against farmworkers, and Delta farmworkers, who are threatened by the peripheral canal, against San Joaquin Valley farmworkers. As Barbara Barrigan-Parrilla, campaign director of Restore the Delta, so eloquently said, ?Pitting the needs of one farm worker community against another is wrong. Environmental justice advocates, who address environmental impacts on the poor and people of color, do not advocate for the benefit of one environmental justice community against the needs of other environmental justice communities. ?Solving the economic challenges of farm worker communities in the Central Valley and the Delta must be done in a compassionate and moral way so as to recognize the dignity of the work that farm workers perform in the present, while providing them with new opportunities to become productive members of a diverse middle class California economy,? she concluded. ?In addition, numerous workers in the fishing and recreation industries are workers of color who must also be protected by environmental justice advocacy.? Jennings has exposed Corporate Agribusiness and Schwarzenegger for the "Big Liars" they are, but in the classic tradition of "The Big Lie," they will probably come back with an even more outrageous lie to replace the one they are spinning in the mainstream media now. The charts extracted from EDD data by Jennings include: 1) March 2009 employment data, 2) annual nonfarm employment, 2000-2008; 3) monthly farm employment, January 2000 - March 2009 and 4) annual industry employment by labor force (including unemployment percentages), 2000 - 2008. The data are available at: http:// www.labormarketinfo.edd.ca.gov/?pageid=131 and http:// www.labormarketinfo.edd.ca.gov/?pageid=166 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: The Big Lie.txt URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: governor_greenwash.jpeg Type: image/jpeg Size: 31687 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bgutermuth at mp.usbr.gov Wed May 6 12:24:32 2009 From: bgutermuth at mp.usbr.gov (Brandt Gutermuth) Date: Wed, 06 May 2009 12:24:32 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Redding BLM and TCRCD receive national award for conservation Message-ID: ALL - A big thanks to the Trinity County Resource Conservation District and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) for all their good work on the Trinity River AND in the Community Forest in Weaverville. The TCRCD's Manager, Pat Frost, will be in Washington DC with BLM Redding folks (Steve Anderson and Walter Herzog) receiving a partners in conservation award from the Secretary of Interior tomorrow. Way to go! I bet that Pat will even be wearing a tie! Brandt Memorandum To: All DOI Employees From: Pamela K. Haze Acting Assistant Secretary - Policy, Management and Budget Subject: Partners in Conservation Awards Ceremony, May 7, 10:00 a.m., MIB Auditorium I am pleased to announce that Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar will present the Partners in Conservation Awards at 10 a.m., May 7, 2009, in the Sidney R. Yates Auditorium at the Main Interior Building. These awards recognize conservation achievements through partnerships involving a diverse range of entities. This year, 26 awards will be presented to more than 600 groups and individuals. Award recipients include: ? Giacomini Wetlands Restoration (California) Nominated by the National Park Service ? Making Friends? Guidebook (NPS Midwest Region) Nominated by the National Park Service ? Potomac River Gorge Partnership (Maryland and Virginia) Nominated by the National Park Service ? Three Mountain Alliance Watershed Partnership (Hawaii) Nominated by the National Park Service ? Operation Migration (United States and Canada) Nominated by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service ? Rappahannock Land Protection Partnership (Virginia) Nominated by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service ? Rat Island Restoration (Alaska) Nominated by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service ? Southwest Alaska Salmon Habitat Partnership (Alaska) Nominated by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service ? Apache Trout Habitat Restoration (Arizona) Nominated by the Bureau of Indian Affairs ? Casting Light Upon the Waters (Wisconsin) Nominated by the Bureau of Indian Affairs ? Sheldon Sankey (Oklahoma) Nominated by the Bureau of Indian Affairs ? Bayhorse Mining District Cooperative Conservation Partnership (Idaho) Nominated by the Bureau of Land Management ? Glenn Harkleroad (Oregon) Nominated by the Bureau of Land Management ? Milford Flat Fire Restoration Project (Utah) Nominated by the Bureau of Land Management ? Weaverville Community Forest (California) Nominated by the Bureau of Land Management ? West Eugene Wetlands Partnership (Oregon) Nominated by the Bureau of Land Management ? Battle of the Atlantic Expedition (North Carolina coast) Nominated by the Minerals Management Service ? Flower Garden Banks Long-Term Monitoring (Texas and Louisiana coast) Nominated by the Minerals Management Service ? West Virginia Watershed Network (West Virginia) Nominated by the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement ? Colorado River Interim Guidelines (multi-state) Nominated by the Bureau of Reclamation ? John W. Keys III Partnership Program (Bureau of Reclamation Pacific NW Region) Nominated by the Bureau of Reclamation ? Missouri River Bank Stabilization (South Dakota) Nominated by the Bureau of Reclamation ? Outdoor Recreation Business Plan Guidebook Team (Utah) Nominated by the Bureau of Reclamation ? Protection of Aquifer Resources in Oklahoma (Oklahoma) Nominated by the Bureau of Reclamation ? Advanced Invasive Species Modeling Room (Colorado) Nominated by the U.S. Geological Survey ? Coast Salish (Washington) Nominated by the U.S. Geological Survey Please join the Secretary in congratulating these outstanding partnerships. For more information, please contact Olivia Barton Ferriter, Director, Office of Conservation, Partnerships and Management Policy, at Olivia_Ferriter at ios.doi.gov, or 202-208-7966. From truman at jeffnet.org Wed May 6 18:03:35 2009 From: truman at jeffnet.org (Patrick Truman) Date: Wed, 6 May 2009 18:03:35 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Redding BLM and TCRCD receive national award forconservation References: Message-ID: <928D08FD2D33450E846A9427E82E7862@HAL> Colleen O'Sullivan, TCRCD board chairwomen is also in DC along with a representative of the National Association of Conservation Districts (NACD). Patrick Truman, TCRCD board member since 1984, also represents CA on the NACD board of directors. Thanks Brandt ----- Original Message ----- From: Brandt Gutermuth To: env-trinity Sent: Wednesday, May 06, 2009 12:24 PM Subject: [env-trinity] Redding BLM and TCRCD receive national award forconservation ALL - A big thanks to the Trinity County Resource Conservation District and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) for all their good work on the Trinity River AND in the Community Forest in Weaverville. The TCRCD's Manager, Pat Frost, will be in Washington DC with BLM Redding folks (Steve Anderson and Walter Herzog) receiving a partners in conservation award from the Secretary of Interior tomorrow. Way to go! I bet that Pat will even be wearing a tie! Brandt Memorandum To: All DOI Employees From: Pamela K. Haze Acting Assistant Secretary - Policy, Management and Budget Subject: Partners in Conservation Awards Ceremony, May 7, 10:00 a.m., MIB Auditorium I am pleased to announce that Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar will present the Partners in Conservation Awards at 10 a.m., May 7, 2009, in the Sidney R. Yates Auditorium at the Main Interior Building. These awards recognize conservation achievements through partnerships involving a diverse range of entities. This year, 26 awards will be presented to more than 600 groups and individuals. Award recipients include: ? Giacomini Wetlands Restoration (California) Nominated by the National Park Service ? Making Friends? Guidebook (NPS Midwest Region) Nominated by the National Park Service ? Potomac River Gorge Partnership (Maryland and Virginia) Nominated by the National Park Service ? Three Mountain Alliance Watershed Partnership (Hawaii) Nominated by the National Park Service ? Operation Migration (United States and Canada) Nominated by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service ? Rappahannock Land Protection Partnership (Virginia) Nominated by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service ? Rat Island Restoration (Alaska) Nominated by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service ? Southwest Alaska Salmon Habitat Partnership (Alaska) Nominated by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service ? Apache Trout Habitat Restoration (Arizona) Nominated by the Bureau of Indian Affairs ? Casting Light Upon the Waters (Wisconsin) Nominated by the Bureau of Indian Affairs ? Sheldon Sankey (Oklahoma) Nominated by the Bureau of Indian Affairs ? Bayhorse Mining District Cooperative Conservation Partnership (Idaho) Nominated by the Bureau of Land Management ? Glenn Harkleroad (Oregon) Nominated by the Bureau of Land Management ? Milford Flat Fire Restoration Project (Utah) Nominated by the Bureau of Land Management ? Weaverville Community Forest (California) Nominated by the Bureau of Land Management ? West Eugene Wetlands Partnership (Oregon) Nominated by the Bureau of Land Management ? Battle of the Atlantic Expedition (North Carolina coast) Nominated by the Minerals Management Service ? Flower Garden Banks Long-Term Monitoring (Texas and Louisiana coast) Nominated by the Minerals Management Service ? West Virginia Watershed Network (West Virginia) Nominated by the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement ? Colorado River Interim Guidelines (multi-state) Nominated by the Bureau of Reclamation ? John W. Keys III Partnership Program (Bureau of Reclamation Pacific NW Region) Nominated by the Bureau of Reclamation ? Missouri River Bank Stabilization (South Dakota) Nominated by the Bureau of Reclamation ? Outdoor Recreation Business Plan Guidebook Team (Utah) Nominated by the Bureau of Reclamation ? Protection of Aquifer Resources in Oklahoma (Oklahoma) Nominated by the Bureau of Reclamation ? Advanced Invasive Species Modeling Room (Colorado) Nominated by the U.S. Geological Survey ? Coast Salish (Washington) Nominated by the U.S. Geological Survey Please join the Secretary in congratulating these outstanding partnerships. For more information, please contact Olivia Barton Ferriter, Director, Office of Conservation, Partnerships and Management Policy, at Olivia_Ferriter at ios.doi.gov, or 202-208-7966. _______________________________________________ env-trinity mailing list env-trinity at velocipede.dcn.davis.ca.us http://www2.dcn.org/mailman/listinfo/env-trinity -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Thu May 7 14:58:56 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Thu, 7 May 2009 14:58:56 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Salmonid Restoration Federation Message-ID: <001501c9cf5f$04f46ca0$0edd45e0$@net> Hello, Please find below, PSAs on SRF's 2009 Summer events. We are very excited about this summer's events and hope you can participate. Please feel free to share this information with your constituents and co-workers. Also, we would greatly appreciate it if you would include these PSA's in your newsletters, blogs, or on-line calendars. Thank you so much, Heather Reese Project Coordinator Salmonid Restoration Federation PO Box 784 Redway, California 95560 (707) 923-7501 heather at calsalmon.org 4th Annual Spring-run Chinook Symposium July 23-24 on the Salmon River Following the annual Salmon River dives, SRF and Salmon River Restoration Council will host the 4th Annual Spring-run Chinook Symposium featuring rafting tours of Creek Mouth Enhancement Projects on the Mid Klamath tributaries, field trips to fish passage projects on the Salmon River; hands-on restoration workshop about invasive species control and panel discussions on the Klamath Dam removal process. Please check out the agenda and registration form at www.calsalmon.org 12th Annual Coho Confab August 28-30 on the Big River on the Mendocino Coast SRF, Trees Foundation, the Mendocino Land Trust and Jughandle Farm will host the 12th Annual Coho Confab featuring tours of Caspar Creek fish ladders and road work, underwater fish identification, macro-invertebrate sampling and other habitat restoration tours along the Coast. Please check out the SRF web site at www.calsalmon.org for more information or to register for this event. SRF Central Coast Bioengineering Field School September 15 -18 Salmonid Restoration Federation will host a Central Coast Bioengineering Field School September 15-18, 2009 in Arroyo Grande. The course will include classroom instruction with John McCullah of Salix Applied Earthcare http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdcYUo1rqzc who will teach techniques to restore riparian habitat, control erosion and stabilize banks. Participants will tour projects in San Luis Obispo and learn how to build willow mattresses and live siltation baffles as well as other structures. Growers can receive eight hours of Ag Waiver Education Credits through the Central Coast Water Quality Control Board for this course. Participants will tour Camp San Luis Obispo to see upland erosion control where roads were improved and brush check dams installed to retain sediment. We will also visit the San Luis Creek Project to view the stabilized creek channel and banks where different methods were employed included willow mattresses, coir biologs, and brush bank protection. Please see the registration form on the SRF website , www.ca.salmon.org. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From trinityjosh at gmail.com Fri May 8 11:37:34 2009 From: trinityjosh at gmail.com (Joshua Allen) Date: Fri, 8 May 2009 11:37:34 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Clean Water Restoration Act to Amend CWA "Navigable" Clause to "Waters of the US" in Committee Message-ID: *http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c111:S.787: S.787* *Title:* A bill to amend the Federal Water Pollution Control Act to clarify the jurisdiction of the United States over waters of the United States. *Sponsor: *Sen Feingold, Russell D.[WI] (introduced 4/2/2009) Cosponsors(24) *Latest Major Action: *4/2/2009 Referred to Senate committee. Status: Read twice and referred to the Committee on Environment and Public Works. *SUMMARY:* ***NONE*** ------------------------------ *MAJOR ACTIONS:* ***NONE*** ------------------------------ *ALL ACTIONS:* See also: Related House Committee Documents *4/2/2009:*Sponsor introductory remarks on measure. (CR S4317-4318) *4/2/2009:*Read twice and referred to the Committee on Environment and Public Works. ------------------------------ *TITLE(S):* (*italics indicate a title for a portion of a bill*) - SHORT TITLE(S) AS INTRODUCED: Clean Water Restoration Act - OFFICIAL TITLE AS INTRODUCED: A bill to amend the Federal Water Pollution Control Act to clarify the jurisdiction of the United States over waters of the United States. ------------------------------ * COSPONSORS(24), ALPHABETICAL* [followed by Cosponsors withdrawn]: (Sort: by date ) Sen Boxer, Barbara[CA] - 4/2/2009 Sen Brown, Sherrod[OH] - 4/2/2009 Sen Cantwell, Maria[WA] - 4/2/2009 Sen Cardin, Benjamin L.[MD] - 4/2/2009 Sen Carper, Thomas R.[DE] - 4/2/2009 Sen Dodd, Christopher J.[CT] - 4/2/2009 Sen Durbin, Richard[IL] - 4/2/2009 Sen Gillibrand, Kirsten E.[NY] - 4/2/2009 Sen Kaufman, Edward E.[DE] - 4/27/2009 Sen Kerry, John F.[MA] - 4/2/2009 Sen Kohl, Herb[WI] - 4/2/2009 Sen Lautenberg, Frank R.[NJ] - 4/2/2009 Sen Leahy, Patrick J.[VT] - 4/2/2009 Sen Levin, Carl[MI] - 4/2/2009 Sen Lieberman, Joseph I.[CT] - 4/2/2009 Sen Menendez, Robert[NJ] - 4/2/2009 Sen Merkley, Jeff[OR] - 4/2/2009 Sen Reed, Jack[RI] - 4/2/2009 Sen Sanders, Bernard[VT] - 4/2/2009 Sen Schumer, Charles E.[NY] - 4/2/2009 Sen Shaheen, Jeanne[NH] - 4/2/2009 Sen Stabenow, Debbie[MI] - 4/2/2009 Sen Whitehouse, Sheldon[RI] - 4/2/2009 Sen Wyden, Ron[OR] - 4/2/2009 ------------------------------ *COMMITTEE(S):* *Committee/Subcommittee:* *Activity:* Senate Environment and Public Works Referral, In Committee ------------------------------ *RELATED BILL DETAILS:* ***NONE*** ------------------------------ *AMENDMENT(S):* ***NONE*** *Clean Water Restoration Act (Introduced in Senate)* S 787 IS 111th CONGRESS 1st Session *S. 787* To amend the Federal Water Pollution Control Act to clarify the jurisdiction of the United States over waters of the United States. *IN THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES* April 2, 2009 Mr. FEINGOLD (for himself, Mrs. BOXER, Mr. CARDIN, Mr. BROWN, Ms. CANTWELL, Mr. CARPER, Mr. DODD, Mr. DURBIN, Mrs. GILLIBRAND, Mr. KERRY, Mr. KOHL, Mr. LAUTENBERG, Mr. LEAHY, Mr. LEVIN, Mr. LIEBERMAN, Mr. MENENDEZ, Mr. MERKLEY, Mr. REED, Mr. SANDERS, Mr. SCHUMER, Mrs. SHAHEEN, Ms. STABENOW, Mr. WHITEHOUSE, and Mr. WYDEN) introduced the following bill; which was read twice and referred to the Committee on Environment and Public Works ------------------------------ *A BILL* To amend the Federal Water Pollution Control Act to clarify the jurisdiction of the United States over waters of the United States. * Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,* SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE. This Act may be cited as the `Clean Water Restoration Act'. SEC. 2. PURPOSES. The purposes of this Act are-- (1) to reaffirm the original intent of Congress in enacting the Federal Water Pollution Control Act Amendments of 1972 (Public Law 92-500; 86 Stat. 816) to restore and maintain the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of the waters of the United States; (2) to clearly define the waters of the United States that are subject to the Federal Water Pollution Control Act (33 U.S.C. 1251 et seq.); and (3) to provide protection to the waters of the United States to the maximum extent of the legislative authority of Congress under the Constitution. SEC. 3. FINDINGS. Congress finds that-- (1) water is a unique and precious resource used not only to sustain human, animal, and plant life, but is also economically important for agriculture, transportation, flood control, energy production, recreation, fishing and shellfishing, and municipal and commercial uses; (2) water is transported through interconnected hydrological cycles, and the pollution, impairment, or destruction of any part of an aquatic system may affect the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of other parts of the aquatic system; (3) in 1972, Congress enacted the Federal Water Pollution Control Act Amendments of 1972 (Public Law 92-500; 86 Stat. 816), which amended the Federal Water Pollution Act (33 U.S.C. 1251 et seq.) in its entirety, in order to meet the national objective of restoring and maintaining the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of the Nation's waters; (4) prior to the date of enactment of that Act in 1972, State approaches and previous Federal legislation proved ineffective in protecting the Nation's waters; (5) the enactment of that Act in 1972 established uniform, minimum national water quality and other clean water protection programs to restore and maintain aquatic ecosystems of the United States that serve as critical drinking water sources, water supplies for municipal, industrial, and agricultural uses, flood reduction, recreation, habitat for fish and wildlife, and many other uses; (6) in establishing broad, uniform, and minimum Federal standards and programs under the Federal Water Pollution Control Act (33 U.S.C. 1251 et seq.) in 1972, Congress recognized, preserved, and protected the responsibility and right of the States and Indian tribes to prevent, reduce, and eliminate pollution of waters by preserving for States and Indian tribes the ability to manage grant, research, and permitting programs by assuming implementation of portions of the Act to prevent, reduce, and eliminate pollution, and to establish standards and programs that are more protective than Federal standards and programs, for waters of the United States within the borders of each State or on land under the jurisdiction of the Indian tribe; (7) since the 1970s, the definitions of `waters of the United States' in regulations of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Corps of Engineers have properly established the scope of waters that require protection by the Federal Water Pollution Control Act in order to meet the national objective described in paragraph (3); (8) this Act will treat, as `waters of the United States', those features that were treated as such pursuant to the regulations of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Corps of Engineers in existence before the dates of the decisions referred to in paragraph (10), including-- (A) all waters which are subject to the ebb and flow of the tide; (B) all interstate waters, including interstate wetlands; (C) all other waters, such as intrastate lakes, rivers, streams (including intermittent streams), mudflats, sandflats, wetlands, sloughs, prairie potholes, wet meadows, playa lakes, or natural ponds; (D) all impoundments of waters of the United States; (E) tributaries of the aforementioned waters; (F) the territorial seas; and (G) wetlands adjacent to the aforementioned waters; (9) `ground waters' are treated separately from `waters of the United States' for purposes of the Federal Water Pollution Control Act and are not considered `waters of the United States' under this Act; (10) the ability to meet the national objective described in paragraph (3) has been undermined by the decisions of the United States Supreme Court in Solid Waste Agency of Northern Cook County v. United States Army Corps of Engineers, 531 U.S. 159 (January 9, 2001) and Rapanos v. United States, 547 U.S. 715 (June 19, 2006), which have resulted in confusion, permitting delays, increased costs, litigation, and reduced protections for waters of the United States described in paragraph (8); (11) to restore original protections, Congress is the only entity that can reaffirm the geographical scope of waters that are protected under the Federal Water Pollution Control Act; (12) the intent of Congress with the enactment of this Act is to restore geographical jurisdiction of the Federal Water Pollution Control Act to that which was in existence before the dates of the decisions referred to in paragraph (10); (13)(A) as set forth in section 6, nothing in this Act modifies or otherwise affects the amendments made by the Clean Water Act of 1977 (Public Law 95-217; 91 Stat. 1566) to the Federal Water Pollution Control Act that exempted certain activities, such as farming, silviculture, and ranching activities, as well as agricultural stormwater discharges and return flows from oil, gas, and mining operations and irrigated agriculture, from particular permitting requirements; (B) furthermore, the definition of the term `point source' under section 502 of that Act (33 U.S.C. 1362) excludes agricultural stormwater discharges and return flows from irrigated agriculture; and (C) this Act does not modify or otherwise affect any of the provisions described in subparagraphs (A) and (B); (14)(A) through agency rulemaking, the term `waters of the United States' did not include-- (i) prior converted cropland used for agriculture; or (ii) manmade waste treatment systems neither created in waters of the United States nor resulting from the impoundment of waters of the United States; and (B) this Act does not modify or otherwise affect either of the provisions described in subparagraph (A); (15) Congress supports the policy in effect under section 101(g) of the Federal Water Pollution Control Act (33 U.S.C. 1251(g)), which states that `the authority of each State to allocate quantities of water within its jurisdiction shall not be superseded, abrogated or otherwise impaired by this Act. It is the further policy of Congress that nothing in this Act shall be construed to supersede or abrogate rights to quantities of water which have been established by any State. Federal agencies shall co-operate with State and local agencies to develop comprehensive solutions to prevent, reduce and eliminate pollution in concert with programs for managing water resources.'; (16) protection of intrastate waters is necessary to restore and maintain the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of all waters in the United States; (17) the regulation of discharges of pollutants into intrastate waters is an integral part of the comprehensive clean water regulatory program of the United States; (18) small and intermittent streams, including ephemeral and seasonal streams, which have been jeopardized by the decisions referred to in paragraph (10)-- (A) comprise the majority of all stream miles in the United States; (B) serve critical biological and hydrological functions that affect entire watersheds; (C) reduce the introduction of pollutants to large streams and rivers; (D) provide and purify drinking water supplies; (E) are especially important to the life cycles of aquatic organisms; and (F) aid in flood prevention, including reducing the flow of higher-order streams; (19) the pollution or other degradation of waters of the United States, individually and in the aggregate, has a substantial relation to and effect on interstate commerce; (20) protection of intrastate waters is necessary to prevent significant harm to interstate commerce and sustain a robust system of interstate commerce in the future; (21)(A) waters, including streams and wetlands, provide protection from flooding; and (B) draining or filling intrastate wetlands and channelizing or filling intrastate streams can cause or exacerbate flooding that causes billions of dollars of damages annually, placing a significant burden on interstate commerce; (22) millions of individuals in the United States depend on streams, wetlands, and other waters of the United States to filter water and recharge surface and subsurface drinking water supplies, protect human health, and create economic opportunity; (23) source water protection areas containing small or intermittent streams provide water to public drinking water supplies serving more than 110,000,000 individuals in the United States; (24)(A) millions of individuals in the United States enjoy recreational activities that depend on intrastate waters, such as waterfowl hunting, bird watching, fishing, and photography; (B) those activities and associated travel generate hundreds of billions of dollars of income each year for the travel, tourism, recreation, and sporting sectors of the economy of the United States; (C) annually, 34,000,000 hunters and anglers spend more than $76,600,000,000 on hunting- and fishing-related products and activities, including approximately 2,000,000 waterfowl hunters who account for about $2,300,000,000 in annual economic growth; (25) activities that result in the discharge of pollutants into waters of the United States are commercial or economic in nature, and, in the aggregate, have a substantial effect on interstate commerce; (26) a substantial number of the sources regulated under the Federal Water Pollution Control Act discharge into headwater streams that may be intermittent or seasonal; (27) more than 40 percent of those sources, or 14,800 facilities with individual permits issued in accordance with the Federal Water Pollution Control Act (33 U.S.C. 1251 et seq.), including industrial plants and municipal sewage treatment systems, discharge into small or intermittent streams; (28) protecting the quality of and regulating activities affecting the waters of the United States is a necessary and proper means of implementing treaties to which the United States is a party, including treaties protecting species of fish, birds, and other wildlife; (29) approximately half of North American migratory birds depend upon or are associated with wetlands and intermittent or ephemeral streams; (30) approximately half of all threatened and endangered species in the United States depend on wetlands; (31) for those reasons, the protection of wetlands and other waters providing breeding, feeding, and sheltering habitat for migratory birds and endangered species is essential to enable the United States to fulfill the obligations of the United States under international treaties for the conservation of those species; (32) protecting the quality of and regulating activities affecting the waters of the United States is a necessary and proper means of protecting Federal land, including hundreds of millions of acres of parkland, refuge land, and other land under Federal ownership and the wide array of waters encompassed by that land; and (33) protecting the quality of and regulating activities affecting the waters of the United States is necessary to protect Federal land and waters from discharges of pollutants and other forms of degradation. SEC. 4. DEFINITION OF WATERS OF THE UNITED STATES. Section 502 of the Federal Water Pollution Control Act (33 U.S.C. 1362) is amended-- (1) by striking paragraph (7); (2) by redesignating paragraphs (8) through (25) as paragraphs (7) through (24), respectively; and (3) by adding at the end the following: `(25) WATERS OF THE UNITED STATES- The term `waters of the United States' means all waters subject to the ebb and flow of the tide, the territorial seas, and all interstate and intrastate waters and their tributaries, including lakes, rivers, streams (including intermittent streams), mudflats, sandflats, wetlands, sloughs, prairie potholes, wet meadows, playa lakes, natural ponds, and all impoundments of the foregoing, to the fullest extent that these waters, or activities affecting these waters, are subject to the legislative power of Congress under the Constitution.'. SEC. 5. CONFORMING AMENDMENTS. The Federal Water Pollution Control Act (33 U.S.C. 1251 et seq.) is amended-- (1) by striking `navigable waters of the United States' each place it appears and inserting `waters of the United States'; (2) in section 304(l)(1) by striking `NAVIGABLE WATERS' in the heading and inserting `WATERS OF THE UNITED STATES'; and (3) by striking `navigable waters' each place it appears and inserting `waters of the United States'. SEC. 6. SAVINGS CLAUSE. Nothing in this Act affects the authority of the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency or the Secretary of the Army under the following provisions of the Federal Water Pollution Control Act: (1) Section 402(l)(1) (33 U.S.C. 1342(l)(1)), relating to discharges composed entirely of return flows from irrigated agriculture. (2) Section 402(l)(2) (33 U.S.C. 1342(l)(2)), relating to discharges of stormwater runoff from certain oil, gas, and mining operations composed entirely of flows from precipitation runoff conveyances, which are not contaminated by or in contact with specified materials. (3) Section 404(f)(1)(A) (33 U.S.C. 1344(f)(1)(A)), relating to discharges of dredged or fill materials from normal farming, silviculture, and ranching activities, such as plowing, seeding, cultivating, minor drainage, harvesting for the production of food, fiber, and forest products, or upland soil and water conservation practices. (4) Section 404(f)(1)(B) (33 U.S.C. 1344(f)(1)(B)), relating to discharges of dredged or fill materials for the purpose of maintenance of currently serviceable structures. (5) Section 404(f)(1)(C) (33 U.S.C. 1344(f)(1)(C)), relating to discharges of dredged or fill materials for the purpose of construction or maintenance of farm or stock ponds or irrigation ditches and maintenance of drainage ditches. (6) Section 404(f)(1)(D) (33 U.S.C. 1344(f)(1)(D)), relating to discharges of dredged or fill materials for the purpose of construction of temporary sedimentation basins on construction sites, which do not include placement of fill material into the waters of the United States. (7) Section 404(f)(1)(E) (33 U.S.C. 1344(f)(1)(E)), relating to discharges of dredged or fill materials for the purpose of construction or maintenance of farm roads or forest roads or temporary roads for moving mining equipment in accordance with best management practices. (8) Section 404(f)(1)(F) (33 U.S.C. 1344(f)(1)(F)), relating to discharges of dredged or fill materials resulting from activities with respect to which a State has an approved program under section 208(b)(4) of that Act (33 U.S.C. 1288(b)(4)) meeting the requirements of subparagraphs (B) and (C) of that section. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Fri May 8 16:10:40 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Fri, 8 May 2009 16:10:40 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Klamath River Message-ID: <005101c9d032$3b289f70$b179de50$@net> Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: River of Renewal_ema#265FEB.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 193617 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Fri May 8 16:25:49 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Fri, 8 May 2009 16:25:49 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Klamath River Message-ID: <006a01c9d034$52a60aa0$f7f21fe0$@net> Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: River of Renewal_ema#265FEB.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 193617 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: ATT00091.txt URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Mon May 11 15:17:20 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Mon, 11 May 2009 15:17:20 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Hatchery Fish Destruction of Wild Fish Message-ID: <001301c9d286$42031a40$c6094ec0$@net> In connection with Seth Naman's recent Master's Thesis on hatchery salmonids destroying wild fish, several people have asked me for the additional body of scientific evidence to which I have referred that also support his conclusions. This is an issue TAMWG has been attempting to pursue aggressively for almost two years, and TMC has taken some modest action - in effect, asking the Bureau of Reclamation to review the issue. The Bureau owns the Trinity Hatchery and the California Department of Fish and Game operates it. Gary Stacey, Northern Region Manager of the Department of Fish and Game and a member of TMC, has expressed interest, willingness and support in dealing with and resolving the current problem of Trinity hatchery over production and wild fish destruction - a problem that is exactly counter to the Restoration Program's objectives. The scientific evidence - studies and conclusions to which I referred in my previous email are studies at the Native Fish Society's Conservation site: http://www.nativefishsociety.org/conservation/annotated.html You can see papers by Kostow, Reisenbichler, Chilcote, Araki Hitoshi, Fleming, Blouin, Waples, ISRP, and Lichatowich. You also can search the NMFS science center web page and the Power Planning and Conservation Council web page going to reports by the IEAB, ISAB, SRG. A lot of hatchery impact on wild fish review has been undertaken and the work is published on those web pages. This is an issue that we will continue to pursue, and for those of you involved in the Restoration Program, I do not want to print out all of this scientific evidence. It is available on the internet. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Mon May 11 16:30:45 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Mon, 11 May 2009 16:30:45 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Hatchery v. Wild Fish Message-ID: <005601c9d290$8316c180$89444480$@net> Tom Weseloh has been good enough to send additional studies on hatchery wild fish interaction. These are attached. Again, I do not want to print out all of this. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: Hatchery problems compilation.doc Type: application/msword Size: 52736 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: Hatchery_interactions_lit_review.pdf Type: application/pdf Size: 192797 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: HatcheryReviewPublicDraft2.pdf Type: application/pdf Size: 317300 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: hsrg_report_12 2009-2.pdf Type: application/pdf Size: 1949092 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: NMFS hatchery web site and info.doc Type: application/msword Size: 74240 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: NMFS ISAB report on hatcheries May 12 2003.pdf Type: application/pdf Size: 584425 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Mon May 11 16:52:28 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Mon, 11 May 2009 16:52:28 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Hatchery v. Wild Fish Message-ID: <008d01c9d293$8af5cd80$a0e16880$@net> Tom Weseloh has been good enough to send additional studies on hatchery wild fish interaction. These are attached. Again, I do not want to print out all of this. Additionally, Seth Naman's literature review contains more than 50 citations. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: Hatchery problems compilation.doc Type: application/msword Size: 52736 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: Hatchery_interactions_lit_review.pdf Type: application/pdf Size: 192797 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: HatcheryReviewPublicDraft2.pdf Type: application/pdf Size: 317300 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: hsrg_report_12 2009-2.pdf Type: application/pdf Size: 1949092 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: NMFS hatchery web site and info.doc Type: application/msword Size: 74240 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: NMFS ISAB report on hatcheries May 12 2003.pdf Type: application/pdf Size: 584425 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Mon May 11 18:04:12 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Mon, 11 May 2009 18:04:12 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] CA Water Issues Message-ID: <00c901c9d29d$91277370$b3765a50$@net> Tuesday night, May 12, on its 10 PM newscast, Fox News (Channel 2 or 702 HD on Comcast cable) is airing what it says is a major story on California water issues. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From Vina_Frye at fws.gov Wed May 13 15:27:53 2009 From: Vina_Frye at fws.gov (Vina_Frye at fws.gov) Date: Wed, 13 May 2009 15:27:53 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Trinity Adaptive Management Working Group Meeting Message-ID: Hi Folks, The Trinity Adaptive Management Working Group (TAMWG) meeting notice for June 10-11, 2009 was published in the Federal Register today. Best regards, Vina 2009 Federal Register, 74 FR 22586; Centralized Library: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service ... Page 1 of 2 [Federal Register: May 13, 2009 (Volume 74, Number 9111 [Notices] [Page 225861 >From the Federal Register .Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.govl [DOCID:fr13my09-851 DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR Fish and Wildlife Service Trinity Adaptive Management Working Group AGENCY: Fish and Wildlife Service, Interior. ACTION: Notice of meeting. SUMMAFtY: The Trinity Adaptive Management Working Group (TAMWG) affords stakeholders the opportunity to give policy, management, and technical input concerning Trinity River (California) restoration efforts to the Trinity Management Council (TMC) . The TMC interprets and recommends policy, coordinates and reviews management actions, and provides organizational budget oversight. This notice announces a TAMWG meeting, which is open to the public. DATES: TAMWG will meet from 12 p.m. (noon) to 5 p.m. on Wednesday, June 10, 2009, and from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Thursday, June 11, 2009. ADDRESSES: The meeting will be held at the Trinity County Library, 211 Main St., Weaverville, CA 96093. FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT: Meeting information: Randy A. Brown, TAMWG Designated Federal Officer, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, 1655 Heindon Road, Arcata, CA 95521; telephone: (707) 822-7201. TRRP information: Mike Hamman, Executive Director, Trinity River Restoration Program, P.O. Box 1300, 1313 South Main Street, Weaverville, CA 96093; telephone: (530) 623-1800; e-mail: -.usbr.qov. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Under section 10(a)(2) of the Federal Advisory Committee Act (5 U.S.C. App.), this notice announces a meeting of the TAMWG. The meeting will include discussion of the following topics : TRRP structure and TAMWG/TMC/TRRP relationships; Budget update ; Channel rehabilitation program; Reservoir management: Temperature issues, carryover storage, minimum pool criteria; Hatchery goals and practices; Sediment monitoring; Progress towards an RFP-based science program; and Integrated Information Management System (IIMS) . Completion of the agenda is dependent on the amount of time each item takes. The meeting could end early if the agenda has been 2009 Federal Register, 74 FR 22586; Centralized Library: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service ... Page 2 of 2 completed. Dated: May 7, 2009. Randy A. Brown, Designated Federal Officer, Arcata Fish and wildlife Office, Arcata, CA . [FR Doc. E9-11137 Filed 5-12-09; 8:45 am] BILLING CODE 4310-55-P Vina Frye U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Arcata FWO 1655 Heindon Road Arcata, CA 95521 Telephone: (707) 822-7201 Fax: (707) 822-8411 vina_frye at fws.gov -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Wed May 13 15:50:37 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Wed, 13 May 2009 15:50:37 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Channel 2 "Special Report" on Water Message-ID: <008d01c9d41d$3c59fbc0$b50df340$@net> Just a brief update on Fox's Bay Area Channel 2 "Special Report" on California water last night about which I alerted you in a message Monday. The "Special Report" consisted mainly of answers to questions and remarks of John Sutton of the Glenn Colusa Irrigation District and a rice farmer and of Peter Vorster, an hydrologist with The Bay Institute. It focused on the amount of water that this one district receives, uses and the excess of its water allocation that it sells. It is receiving 100 percent of its contract amount this year. The reporter indicated that water delivered to the district from the Bureau of Reclamation was free and that it was profiting at the expense of the taxpayer/owners of a public resource. The reporter indicated that the Bureau has contracted to deliver far more water than exists to its contractors in Northern California and the San Joaquin Valley. It also was indicated that acreage planted to rice in Northern California has decreased steadily in recent years. Sutton indicated - which is well known to those familiar with water issues - that rice is not as intensive a user of water as several other crops. He mentioned alfalfa and permanent pasture, but there are others, as most of you know. The "report" seemed to concentrate on water used for rice farming in this district and the excess water provided the district under a contracted full delivery that it sells to others for a profit. Editorializing.It seemed to me that focusing on this one district and water used for rice growing was unfortunate - it could lead people to believe that water provided this district is an isolated problem when, in fact, it is a minor issue in the overall California water picture. The "report" was not at all encompassing of major water issues facing California. The "report" did not deal with the major implications of the problem of the allocation or mis-allocation of developed water resources throughout the state and other significant water issues the state faces. If others watched the program and have different thoughts, or if I have unintentionally misstated something, please offer your further comments or corrections. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kierassociates at suddenlink.net Wed May 13 17:33:27 2009 From: kierassociates at suddenlink.net (Kier Associates) Date: Wed, 13 May 2009 17:33:27 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] [FOTR] Channel 2 "Special Report" on Water In-Reply-To: <008d01c9d41d$3c59fbc0$b50df340$@net> References: <008d01c9d41d$3c59fbc0$b50df340$@net> Message-ID: <20090514003330.BRPK13503.omta02.suddenlink.net@kier.suddenlink.net> An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Thu May 14 16:23:39 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Thu, 14 May 2009 16:23:39 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] [Waterjusticenews] (Radio)The War Dance of the Winnemem Wintu Message-ID: <00bf01c9d4eb$039fd7e0$0adf87a0$@net> Having problems with the display of this email? Click here to view it in your web browser. National Radio Project, producers of Making Contact Home | Where to Listen | For Stations | Desks | Production | About Us | Get Involved | Donate | Podcast Help support National Radio Project Donate Online Members of the Winnemem Wintu tribe Members of the Winnemem Wintu Tribe in Northern California . Photo Source: Portland Indymedia Send us feedback More Environmental Desk shows Browse Archives Making Contact Staff: Executive Producer/Host: Tena Rubio Contributing Producers: Rachel Gelfand and Michael Preston Producer/Online Editor: Pauline Bartolone Producer: Andrew Stelzer Executive Director: Lisa Rudman Associate Director: Khanh Pham Production Intern: Megan Martenyi NRP Interns: Asma Mohseni, Patti Restaino , Keisha Thomas Super Volunteers: Ron Rucker and Dan Turner Audio Harvesters: Simin Yahaghi and Rita Daniels Thank you to all of our voiceover talent. Hey New Friend! To join this list... click here and complete the double opt-in process. Next week 5/20 A Chronology of Capitalism Browse Programs by Topic . Hurricane Katrina . Media and Democracy . War, Peace, Real Security . Civil Liberties Visit our Desks or Specials for more programs by topic. MAKING CONTACT - a weekly international radio program The War Dance of the Winnemem Wintu May 13, 2009 Listen Live (29-minute streaming mp3) Download 128k mp3 (broadcast quality) Download 64k mp3 (faster download) Download :59 promo (mp3) Order CD/Tape of this show [#19-09] Listening Online Help The genocide of Native Americans was one of the largest mass killings in human history. Very few tribes survived and were able to maintain their languages and traditions, and for many, the threat to their culture continues even to this day. On this edition, Making Contact intern producers Rachel Gelfand and Michael Preston bring us the story of the Winnemem Wintu, a small Indian tribe in Northern California , and tell the story of their struggle to prevent the flooding of the sacred land they have called home for centuries. Featuring: Caleen Sisk-Franco, Winnemem Wintu spiritual leader and chief; Mark Franco, Winnemem Wintu tribal headman and spokesperson; Jill Ward, Heleen Sisk and Sarah Haase, Winnemem Wintu tribal members; Debbie Davis, Environmental Justice Coalition water analyst; Jonas Minton, Planning and Conservation League water policy advisor for Sacramento; Sarah Woolf, Westlands Water District spokesperson. As part of our commitment to train and air the work of young producers, this program was produced by Data Center interns Rachel Gelfand and Michael Preston. The Data Center received financial support from the Jesse Smith Noyes Foundation for this radio work. For more information: Environmental Justice Coalition for Water 1201 Martin Luther King Jr. Way Oakland CA , 94612 510-286-8400 http://ejcw.org/contact_us/staff.html Planning and Conservation League & PCL Foundation 1107 9th Street, Suite 360 Sacramento , CA 95814 916-444-8726 pclmail at pcl.org www.pcl.org Westlands Water District Public Affairs Office PO Box 6056 Fresno , CA 93703 559-241-6233 pubaffairs at westlandswater.org www.westlandswater.org Winnemem Wintu Tribe: The Long Journey to Justice winnemem at msn.com http://winnememwintu.us/ For Additional Information: Bureau of Indian Affairs Department of the Interior 1849 C Street, NW Washington , DC 20240 feedback at ios.doi.gov www.doi.gov/bia California Department of Water Resources 1416 9th Street Sacramento , CA 95814 916-653-5791 http://www.water.ca.gov/ Data Center 1904 Franklin Street, Suite 900 Oakland, CA 94612 510-835-4692 datacenter at datacenter.org www.datacenter.org Office of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger State Capitol Building Sacramento , CA 95814 916-445-2841 http://www.gov.ca.gov The Nature Conservancy Worldwide Office 4245 North Fairfax Drive, Suite 100 Arlington , VA 22203 703-841-5300 www.nature.org U.S. Department of Reclamation 1849 C Street, NW Washington , DC 20240 202-513-0574 www.usbr.gov Other Articles and Books: Shasta Lake Water Resources Investigation www.water.ca.gov/storage/shasta/index.cfm This message was sent to womensdesk at radioproject.org. Click here to unsubscribe, or send email to unsubscribe.356547.276566060.6284439139476346512-womensdesk_radioproject.org @en.groundspring.org National Radio Project heightens public consciousness, broadens debate on critical social issues and encourages civic participation, by giving voice to diverse perspectives and opinions underrepresented in the mass media. Our mailing address is: 1714 Franklin Street #100-251 Oakland, California 94612 United States Web Bug from http://ent.groundspring.org/EmailNow/spacer.gif?se=276566060 _______________________________________________ Waterjusticenews mailing list Waterjusticenews at ejcw.org http://ejcw.org/mailman/listinfo/waterjusticenews_ejcw.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Fri May 15 13:22:02 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Fri, 15 May 2009 13:22:02 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Trinity Journal May 13, 2009 Message-ID: <004001c9d59a$cecde650$6c69b2f0$@net> Little hope for lake levels Talk will focus on Trinity County, place in state water supply Tom Stokely will speak on "Trinity County's Place in the Future of California's Water Supply" at 6 p.m. Thursday, May 14, at the Weaverville library conference room. The event is hosted by the Friends of the Library, Trinity County Library and the Trinity County Resource Conservation District. Refreshments will be provided. Stokely was natural resources planner for Trinity County for 23 years and is now serving on the board of directors of California Water Impact Network and on the California Advisory Committee on Salmon and Steelhead Trout, which advises the California Legislature's Joint Committee on Fisheries and Aquaculture. A significant amount of Trinity River water is exported to other parts of California via the Central Valley Project to the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, from where it is pumped farther south for agriculture and urban populations. The Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta system is on the verge of physical and ecological collapse. Water pumped from it supplies more than 23 million Californians in the southern part of the state. Pending and future legal decisions and ballot measures may determine what happens to the Delta and how Trinity County's water is used. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.png Type: image/png Size: 37003 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Fri May 15 13:24:22 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Fri, 15 May 2009 13:24:22 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Trinity Journal May 13, 2009 Message-ID: <004601c9d59b$223c3cb0$66b4b610$@net> Only two boat ramps will reach water this summer By SALLY MORRIS It's shaping up to be a challenging summer for recreation on Trinity Lake. As of last week, the water level in Trinity Lake was nearly 88 feet from the crest and rising, but current projections by the Bureau of Reclamation show the level dropping to 105 feet below a full pool by the end of May. As fishery flows are released to the Trinity River through the summer and diversions are made to supply irrigators and cities in the Central Valley, the lake will continue to fall. The level is predicted to drop to 137 feet below the crest by the end of August and 162 feet down by the end of October. The lowest point in 2008 was approximately 130 feet below the crest. Of seven boat launch ramps on Trinity Lake, only two will be in the water this summer - Minersville which extends down to 200 feet below the lake's crest and Cedar Stock which is useable down to approximately 140 feet. The Trinity Lakes Marina at Trinity Center will be closed and out of service, but the marina at Cedar Stock is expected to be in full operation with boat moorage available. Trinity Alps Marina at Fairview is expected to be open with partial operations. The U.S. Forest Service campground at Stoney Point and the Clark Springs campground and swim beach will be closed due to low water, but all other Forest Service campgrounds at Trinity and Lewiston lakes and along the upper Trinity River will be open. "We are lacking in boat ramps on Trinity during low water so we will focus on Minersville and hopefully make that work," said the National Recreation Area District Ranger Kristy Cottini in a report to the Trinity County Board of Supervisors last week. Asked if there are any plans to improve capacity at the Minersville ramp, Cottini noted that as the lake level drops, "there's lots of parking, but I have had the pleasure of trying to break up fights on the boat ramp itself with 20 boats lined up trying to get in the water. We're definitely thinking about how we'll handle that and will focus on the high use weekends. I'm not anticipating too much trouble." She added that overall, use is expected to be off judging from conversations with marina owners who say reservations are down. There are some improvement projects planned at the Forest Service sites including replacement of a vault toilet building at Pine Cove Boat Ramp on Lewiston Lake and replacement of four flush restrooms at Tannery Gulch campground this fall. The Forest Service has also obtained a $4 million grant from the California Department of Boating and Water- ways to fund improvements at Bowerman, Clark Springs and the Trinity Center boat ramp slated for construction in 2011. Supervisor Judy Pflueger from Trinity Center asked if there is any possibility of extending the Trinity Center boat ramp that is currently about 50 feet from the water. Cottini said the opportunities to develop low water ramps on both Trinity and Shasta lakes are extremely limited by many factors including topography, existing infrastructure such as power and road access, and environmental issues. "In most cases, where it could have been done, it was done back in the drought of the 1970s. It's not unusual for us to open up past low water ramps, but I'm not aware of any on Trinity," she said. "But we have a town and businesses at the upper end that thrive on recreation and we are starving," Pflueger said, asking that extending the ramp at Trinity Center at least be considered. Cottini said she would look into the feasibility of it "to see whether it's even possible there. Some of our sites just don't work well." Noting that the Forest Service started a feasibility study on adding another marina two years ago when Estrellita was closed, Pflueger asked "are we waiting for the water to come up to study the demand for another marina on the lake? We picked a very bad time. We have no water, so what is the status of our study?" Cottini said the current focus is on evaluating how existing marinas may be expanded, noting it makes sense to maximize the use of areas that are already developed, "but a lot of the burden of that is on the marina owners and it's not a great year to expect it of them. We are working with them. We are not pushing because economically it's not a great time and we don't need to, but it's not stagnant." She added that if people know of any areas on Trinity they think could be developed "I'd like to know where they are because when you start overlaying all the other development and environmental issues, it really starts limiting the possibilities. We are planning for the next 50 to 100 years, not the next two, so we want to take our time and make the right decisions." On a positive note, Cottini reported that the area's bald eagle population is "doing very well" with three nests on Lewiston Lake and 14 on Trinity. The fishing is also anticipated to be good this summer thanks to a stocking program that will release about 750 rainbow trout into Trinity and approximately 700 in Lewiston Lake this summer. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.png Type: image/png Size: 37003 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Mon May 18 10:10:33 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Mon, 18 May 2009 10:10:33 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Times Standard May 18, 2009 Message-ID: <000701c9d7db$8f5546b0$adffd410$@net> Fish food: Trinity River study looks into how hatchery fish eat wild fish John Driscoll/The Times-Standard Posted: 05/18/2009 01:30:13 AM PDT http://extras.mnginteractive.com/live/media/site127/2009/0518/20090518__loca l_steelheadeatsjf_Viewer.jpg The debate over how hatchery-produced salmon and steelhead can be used to bolster runs of wild fish has long been the source of controversy -- and a new study on the Trinity River has reawakened that discussion. There is a long list of troubles biologists assign to mixing hatchery fish with wild fish. They can compete for food, pass on disease and genetically mingle with naturally-produced fish. A recently completed Humboldt State University master's thesis also looks at how many young wild fish are eaten by the relatively large, voracious steelhead released from Trinity River Hatchery each year. It's prompted many involved with the restoration of the Trinity River and its fishery to question how the hatchery is operated, and whether that operation may be running counter to some of the goals of its restoration program. The Trinity River Restoration Program, authorized in a 2001 U.S. Interior Secretary's decision, sets goals to get 40,000 naturally spawned steelhead to return to the river, and 10,000 hatchery fish to return to the hatchery. Since 2002, the numbers of both wild and hatchery fish have been generally rising. But hatchery fish have far outpaced wild fish in terms of production. For example, in 2006, about 8,000 wild fish returned to the river, while about 32,000 hatchery fish returned. In 2007, about 47,000 hatchery fish returned compared to 7,000 wild fish. The hatchery was built to make up for the loss of 109 miles of prime spawning habitat above Trinity Dam. The restoration program, among many other things, looks to improve habitat below the dam and release more water than was released in the decades after the dam was built. HSU fisheries graduate Seth Naman found in his short-term study that tens of thousands of fry produced by fish spawning in the river are eaten by hatchery steelhead released by the hundreds of thousands just below the dam in March, as eggs are hatching in the river. About 9 percent of the fry of natural chinook and coho salmon and steelhead are consumed in the 2-mile reach of river Naman studied -- a stretch where particularly high concentrations of fish spawn. Naman points out that he didn't account for hatchery-produced coho salmon, which also likely eat salmon and steelhead fry. About 61,000 wild fry were eaten by some 437,000 hatchery steelhead from late March to late April, according to Naman's estimate, with more likely consumed in the following weeks. "What I was trying to show is the potential for conflict between hatchery fish and attempting to restore the river for naturally-produced fish," Naman said in an interview. Naman now works for the National Marine Fisheries Service, one of the agencies involved in recommending policy for the hatchery, which is funded by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation but operated by the California Department of Fish and Game. Fish and Game associate fishery biologist Wade Sinnen raised some concerns about the study, but also said it has merit. In many ways, the study backs up what biologists have long known: "When you put a predator like a steelhead out in the river, they will eat fry," Sinnen said. Sinnen said the hatchery tries to release steelhead when they are large enough to begin making their way to the ocean, so they aren't hanging around eating wild fish fry and competing for food and space. He said there's been lots of discussion about how the Reclamation Bureau's goals for the hatchery might be changed to make it more dynamic. That complex question runs up against the fact that the spawning habitat above the dam is cut off, and it's unlikely that the remaining river habitat can produce, on its own, enough fish to meet the goals of the restoration program. National Marine Fisheries Service Area Office Supervisor Irma Lagomarcino said that she's concerned that the operation of the hatchery may be working against the restoration program's goals. "Are we building a system just for hatchery fish to occupy?" Lagomarcino said. A plan to examine the effects of the hatchery has been the topic of talks between state and federal agencies, the Hoopa Valley and Yurok tribes, and fishing and environmental groups, Lagomarcino said. How the hatchery's operations could be changed is an open question. The timing of hatchery fish releases, the number of fish released, the size at which they are released, the species of fish released and other factors are all possible considerations. A recent report commissioned by Congress on the Columbia River basin recommended that hatcheries not harm habitat, that hatchery fish should be either genetically separated or integrated with wild fish, and that their success should be judged by adult returns, not how many fry are released. Conservation groups and the Trinity Management Council -- agencies and tribes that advise the restoration program -- and a stakeholder's working group last spring asked Fish and Game leadership and the Reclamation Bureau to develop a list of changes that might be considered at the Trinity River Hatchery. Reclamation Bureau Mid-Pacific Region Area Manager Brian Person said that a response is long overdue, but that the issue has proven particularly complicated. As of now, Person said, there does not appear to be any conflict with the agency's contract with Fish and Game in changing hatchery operations. However, the complicated scientific issues -- and trying to find some consensus on them -- are particularly delicate, he said. "It's just not that simple," Person said, adding that a response is being crafted. Tom Weseloh with California Trout said Naman's study outlines one of a slew of problems associated with hatcheries. But while the goals of the Trinity River Restoration Program are to allow for predominately wild fish, there is a reality to deal with: The existence of the dam, the amount and timing of water diversions to the Sacramento River and flows to the Trinity River all make for a significantly different system than existed before the dam was built, he said. Ideally, hatchery fish should have as little effect on wild fish as possible, he said, while still yielding fishery benefits. While both hatchery and wild fish both began to increase in numbers for several years after flows were increased early this decade, last year was a particularly poor year, introducing more complexity to the issue. Weseloh said it may be prudent to make some minor adjustments to hatchery operations instead of wholesale changes, and adjust as the effects are realized. "That's not that radical an idea," Weseloh said. Naman's study is one of few done on hatchery fish eating wild fish fry, and HSU fisheries department chairman Dave Hankin said it's difficult to determine the impacts on the Trinity River's entire wild salmon and steelhead populations. Naman's study is likely to raise awareness and concern about predation, and how to avoid the effects of it, Hankin said. "The issue of competition between wild fish and releases of hatchery fish requires lots more attention than has been given it," Hankin said. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 3810 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Wed May 20 11:35:50 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Wed, 20 May 2009 11:35:50 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Trinity Journal May 20, 2009 Message-ID: <005601c9d979$cddcce40$69966ac0$@net> Speaker: State's water woes certain to impact Trinity By AMY GITTELSOHN http://www.trinityjournal.com/news/2009/0520/front_page/005p1_lg.jpg by PHIL NELSON Tom Stokely discusses the state of California's water management and its future impact on Trinity County. Poor water management made California's three-year drought worse than it had to be, and proposed fixes - including revival of the peripheral canal concept - could drain Trinity Lake even further, a guest speaker in Weaverville said. There will always be droughts - what is needed is better planning, said Tom Stokely, a former Trinity County planner now working for a water advocacy organization. "They sent record amounts of water south," Stokely said. "If you drain your reservoirs in the early part of the drought, it's really not going to do much for you." Last Thursday at the Trinity County Library in Weaverville, Stokely was the first speaker in a series of water talks to be held in Trinity County. Stokely is a water policy coordinator for the California Water Impact Network (C-WIN). C-WIN's Web site states that it is a nonprofit which advocates for the equitable and environmentally sensitive use of California's water. http://www.trinityjournal.com/news/2009/0520/front_page/005p2_lg.jpg Water exports from the North State have increased, going from 5 million acre-feet in the 1980s to approximately 4.6 million acre feet in the 1990s to 6 million acre-feet from 2000 to 2007. 2008, the diversion was 556,000 acre-feet and the river release was 641,000. The diversions do benefit Trinity County in one way, Stokely said, in a nod to the Trinity Public Utilities District. "The Trinity River is the largest tributary of Clear Creek on the Sacramento River," he said, "unfortunately for the Trinity River but good for our power supply here." Attempting to deliver full water allocations to agricultural and municipal water users while complying with the record of decision has drained the slow-filling Trinity Lake, Stokely said. Overheated water from the low lake could add up to another salmon kill, he said. Cutbacks due to low reservoirs have affected farmers and caused water rationing in some areas this year. The drought is being used to push for more dams, a peripheral canal, more water transported from Sacramento to the San Joaquin Valley and Southern California, less water regulation, and less area of origin protection, Stokely said, and "that's one of the big things Trinity's had in its favor." "What we have now is a big scare going on," he said. "We don't think it was an accident." The idea of a peripheral canal to take water around the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, the largest estuary on the west coast of the Americas, was rejected by California voters in 1982, but it has been revived by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's Delta Vision Task Force. Proponents contend that it will protect endangered species harmed by pumping water through the Delta for agricultural and urban use, while providing more reliable water deliveries. Opponents see that as an attempt to grab more North State water. A peripheral canal will draw down Trinity Lake, Stokely said. The State Water Resources Control Board has admitted over-allocating by four to eight times the amount of water that exists, Stokely said, adding that works fine in wet years, but in dry years it creates "a run on the bank." The five-member water board is appointed and "one hundred percent controlled by the governor of the State of California," he said. Stokely also took aim at the Westlands Water District, which encompasses more than 600,000 acres of farmland in western Fresno and Kings counties. The Trinity River Division was completed in 1963, the same year Westlands signed a 40-year water contract with the federal government. Irrigation on the poorly draining lands has brought naturally occurring selenium and other substances damaging to crops and wildlife to the surface, and the federal government is on the hook to solve this problem under the Westlands contract. "The government stupidly signed a contract they couldn't fulfill", Stokely said. "They've spent all their money Congress gave them to solve this problem." But a deal was proposed to permanently guarantee Westlands 1 million acre-feet of CVP water annually in return for Westlands solving the problem itself. That deal is stalled at the moment, but Sen. Dianne Feinstein has made reaching an agreement with Westlands a priority, he said. "These people are the junior water users in the state and they want to put themselves at the first of the line," Stokely said. Even during this drought year, he noted, farmers with longstanding water rights are getting their full CVP allocations, while Westlands is getting 10 percent (up from preliminary forecasts after recent rains). Ken Baldwin of Weaverville asked if wildlife is a public trust why the projects that are harming wildlife aren't shut down by the state. "They could but they won't," Stokely responded, reiterating that the water board must be reformed. Stokely said things to fight for include an enforceable minimum pool at Trinity Lake during drought years so the lake is not drawn down too quickly. He suggested that people against the idea of a peripheral canal write their state and federal legislators and let them know they don't want to see that in a water bond. Instead, he said, there should be measures that promote regional self sufficiency for water, conservation and taking toxic lands out of commission. Diversions from the Trinity River via the Clear Creek tunnel, in the past as high as 90 percent, have gone in the other direction with environmental requirements such as the 2000 Trinity River Record of Decision. But a significant amount is still diverted. Figures from the federal Bureau of Reclamation show that in 2007, 615,500 acre-feet of water was diverted while release to the river was 470,100. In Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 11031 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image002.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 15359 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Sat May 23 13:11:19 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Sat, 23 May 2009 13:11:19 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Wanger ruling on Delta smelt OCAP biop: feds must consider effects to humans-- not just fish-- when allocating delta water Message-ID: <000601c9dbe2$a333c2a0$e99b47e0$@net> Does this mean that BOR/DWR needs to consider the impacts of pumping on the economic viability of fisherman and fishing communties? How about the economic viability of Trinity County? If anyone has a copy of Wanger's Order, I'd appreciate your sending me a copy. Thanks. Byron The Fresno Bee Ruling: Humans, not just fish, to factor in divvying delta water Published online on Friday, May. 22, 2009 By John Ellis A federal judge stunned and delighted west-side farmers on Friday, ruling that the federal government must consider the effect on humans -- not just fish -- when allocating delta water. U.S. District Judge Oliver W. Wanger did not tell officials how to operate the Central Valley Project, and he said it was up to them to manage the massive water pumps in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. But Wanger said officials must focus not just on protecting the endangered delta smelt when discussing these issues. They also must take into account "the harm being visited upon humans, the community and the environment." He also said officials must explain and justify how they reached their water-allocation decisions. A few months ago, the federal government in effect reduced the volume of water pumped out of the delta by issuing new rules to protect the smelt. That means west-side growers are receiving less water for crops. Wanger's ruling Friday raised growers' hopes of getting some of that water back, although the case is far from over. As Wanger prepared to rule Friday, west-side farmers and members of the Westlands Water District and the San Luis & Delta-Mendota Water Authority sat in the courtroom with long faces, expecting the worst. But after a series of losses to environmentalists, they instead found themselves on the winning side. "The long and short of it for us today is this is a good thing, for the simple fact that it recognizes the impact that is being felt" by farmers and residents of the San Joaquin Valley's west side, said Westlands Water District spokeswoman Sarah Woolf. Wanger's ruling followed a four-hour hearing on a lawsuit by Westlands and the San Luis & Delta-Mendota Water Authority to stop the federal government from enforcing a new management plan for the delta smelt. The lawsuit was filed in March, more than two months after the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service released a new set of federal rules to protect the smelt. The updated rules -- known as a biological opinion -- were drafted after Wanger had invalidated earlier regulations because they did not comply with the federal Endangered Species Act. A central piece of the lawsuit sought to nullify the updated smelt-management plan. Wanger made no ruling on that part of the lawsuit. But he found that a second claim -- that the new smelt plan lacked an assessment on the environmental effect on humans -- was valid. The updated smelt-management plan resulted in a sharp reduction in water deliveries for agricultural and urban users, not only in the San Joaquin Valley, but also in the Bay Area and Southern California. It's not known if Wanger's order will prompt the federal government to increase water deliveries from the delta. But Wanger made it clear that if the water exports stay at current levels -- which west-side officials say are too low and give no consideration to human needs -- federal officials must explain why. Wanger said the delta smelt remains endangered and at risk of extinction, but he also said Valley residents are facing adverse environmental effects driven by a persistent drought and a cut in water deliveries. He said the adverse environmental effects include dust rising from fallowed fields that could lead to a decline in air quality. High unemployment rates in west-side Valley towns also are an effect of the water decisions, Wanger said. Wanger's order is in effect through June 30, or when the water temperature in two delta channels -- Old River and Middle River -- reaches 77 degrees Fahrenheit for three days. Higher temperatures can adversely affect the smelt. The order's temporary nature almost certainly sets up more legal battles between the two sides. James Maysonett, who represented the federal government, asked Wanger on Friday to hold off on his order while it is appealed. Wanger denied the motion. Kate Poole, an attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, said she didn't like Wanger's ruling, but she said no decision had been made on seeking an appeal. Friday's hearing set up a strange twist: Daniel O'Hanlon, who represented Westlands and the San Luis & Delta-Mendota Water Authority, found himself pitted against federal attorneys who for years were his allies against environmental groups. This time, federal and environmental attorneys were allied against Westlands and San Luis. The reporter can be reached at jellis at fresnobee.com or (559) 441-6320. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Tue May 26 14:39:54 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Tue, 26 May 2009 14:39:54 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] RSVPs Required, Movie Screening: River of Renewal Message-ID: <003401c9de4a$821fad30$865f0790$@net> Friends of the River the voice of California Rivers Become a "Friend of the River" | Donate Now | email2 Tell A Friend You're Invited... Thank you for your Friends of the River Membership! You are invited to a private screening of the award-winning documentary about the Klamath River, River of Renewal, for this Friday, May 29th at 6pm. Seats are extremely limited and reservations are required. To RSVP email: harriet at moss.net To learn more about Klamath River issues, watch the movie trailer, or to take action to restore this river, click here. River of Renewal Poster Powered by Convio Homepage | Unsubscribe -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Tue May 26 20:08:00 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Tue, 26 May 2009 20:08:00 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Suction Dredge Mining Message-ID: <008401c9de78$58d14000$0a73c000$@net> Suction Dredge Mining Bill Breezes Through State Senate by Dan Bacher (Sacramento) The California Senate today approved a bill requiring the California Department of Fish and Game (DFG) to temporarily halt issuing all suction dredge mining permits by a vote of 31 to 8, including bi-partisan support from Democrats and Republicans throughout the state. The bill easily garnered the 2/3 aye votes needed to be adopted as an urgency measure, meaning it will take effect immediately upon the Governor's signature. Representatives of California Indian Tribes, recreational fishing organizations, commercial fishing groups and environmental organizations consider the vote to be a big victory for fish and the environment, while mining advocacy organizations and the Regional Council of Rural Counties view the legislation as unnecessary and a violation of private property rights. The Governor vetoed previous legislation restricting suction dredge mining sponsored by then Assemblywoman Lois Wolk in October 2007, but suction dredging opponents are hoping that the strong bi-partisan support for this bill, as well as the urgency of the current salmon fishery crisis, will spur Schwarzenegger to sign the bill this time. Senate Bill 670 prohibits the use of suction dredge mining equipment in rivers and streams that provide critical habitat to spawning salmon and steelhead until the DFG completes its court-ordered overhaul of regulations governing the controversial recreational activity. Suction dredge mining, a recreational mining activity that disturbs streambeds, is heavily regulated in other states including Oregon. However, California suffers from surprisingly slack regulation, according to Higgins. Suction dredge gold mining involves sucking up sediment from rivers or streams and spitting it out again. "Current California regulations permit monster-sized dredges capable of moving thousands of yards of river bottom in a summer season," Wiggins said. "This kills fish eggs, immature eels and churns up long-buried mercury left over from the gold mining era. In short, it's harmful to fish at a time when they need our help the most." Wiggins said the DFG has been ordered by the courts to overhaul regulations governing suction dredge mining on streams. In 2005, the Karuk Tribe sued DFG to force the department to overhaul its suction dredging rules. Pushed by suction dredge miners, the courts ordered the department to complete a California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) review before it acted. That review was supposed to take 18 months and be completed by July 2008, but DFG has yet to begin. That led the Karuk Tribe, California Trout, Friends of the North Fork and the Sierra Fund to petition DFG to issue emergency regulations to limit dredging on Klamath tributaries and five other streams in the Sierra Nevada while it completes its EIR. DFG officials refused to issue regulations, arguing that they cannot do so under current law, stated Wiggins. Last year, all salmon fishing was banned along the Pacific coast of California and Oregon, due to the unprecedented collapse of Central Valley fall Chinook salmon, the driver of West Coast salmon fisheries. In 2006, commercial salmon fishing was severely restricted because of low numbers of salmon returning to the Klamath River. "The crisis is so dire that the commercial and recreational salmon fishing ban has been placed again this year," Wiggins stated. "This is affecting the livelihoods of thousands of commercial fishermen, fish processors and charter boat operators, and eliminating hundreds of thousands of dollars in economic activity." Wiggins emphasized that while fishermen are being told to stop fishing, suction dredge mining is allowed to continue. "SB 670 is about equity. We simply cannot ask an entire fishing industry to stop their work while a small group of hobbyists are allowed to continue," she stated. "We are very pleased with today's vote," commented Bob Goodwin, Karuk Self Governance Coordinator and Tribal member. "We have had to suffer through 150 years of watching gold miners rip apart our river; today we begin the slow process of putting it back together." Elizabeth "Izzy" Martin, CEO of The Sierra Fund, added, "We are so pleased with the bipartisan support that this bill has earned, reflecting the clear consensus on the importance of protecting fish and water quality. The Sierra Fund thanks Senator Wiggins as well as the Senators that spoke on behalf of the bill including Senate President Pro Tem Steinberg, and Senators Ducheny, Wolk, and Oropeza." "It's good to see California stop spending taxpayer money on a mining program that puts a few flakes of gold in 3,000 hobby miners' pockets while harming fisheries and those who depend upon clean, healthy rivers," agreed Scott Harding, Executive Director of Klamath Riverkeeper. "SB 670 is a step forward for better protection for salmon in their rivers than they have today," said Glen Spain, Northwest Regional Director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations. "There's no excuse to allow practices that destroy salmon habitat while we are all desperately trying to increase devastated runs and put fishermen back to work." Senator Sam Aanestad (R- Grass Valley) argued against the bill, suggesting that it amounted to a "taking of property rights." In response, Senator Wiggins pointed out that SB 670 takes no one's property and miners can still mine using other mining techniques that are less environmentally destructive. The bill will next move to the State Assembly, which will likely assign the bill to the Assembly Water, Parks & Wildlife Committee chaired by Assemblymember Jared Huffman. Mr. Huffman is a co-author of the bill, along with Assemblymembers Evans and Jones. If SB 670 passes, the moratorium on issuing permits would last until DFG completes its court-ordered environmental review and resulting overhaul of regulations governing the practice. "It is estimated that this will save the Department nearly $1 million in costs to administer a program that does not pay for itself, and allow it to dedicate saved funding toward paying for the EIR necessary to complete regulatory review," said Izzy Martin. The bill is supported by a broad coalition of Indian Tribes, fishing groups and environmental groups. Supporters include the California Coastkeeper Alliance, California Tribal Business Alliance, California Trout, Clean Water Action, Friends of the River, Karuk Tribe, Klamath Riverkeeper, Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations, Planning and Conservation League, Ramona Band of Cahuila, San Manuel Band of Mission Indians, Sierra Club California, Sierra Fund, Sierra Nevada Alliance and Sycuan Band of the Kumeyaay Nation. The bill's opponents include the County of Siskiyou, New 49'ers and Regional Council of Rural Counties. Earlier this year the New 49'ers, a mining advocacy group, and other mining organizations filed a petition with the California Fish and Game Commission to ban the Karuk Tribe from fishing for salmon on the Klamath, but the petition was rejected. The New 49'ers argue that no scientific information points to suction dredging as a cause in the collapse of salmon, that the collapse is due to ocean conditions and an over-reliance on hatchery fish. They claim that a moratorium would violate the private property rights of those who have federal mining claims and create "takings" liability on the part of the state The Regional Council of Rural Counties argues that the existing regulations are sufficiently restrictive and protective and allow individuals to legally mine their claims of precious minerals. It points to parts of rural California where mining remains an important part of the culture, history, and economy of some local communities. Siskiyou County separately asserted these same concerns. "The scientific evidence against suction dredging doesn't pass the laugh test," said James Buchal, attorney for the New 49'ers. "If passed through the Legislature, this bill will put hundreds of people out of work and destroy the vacation plans of thousands of people for no purpose whatsoever." However, Steve Evans, conservation director of Friends of the River, notes that this legislation will not impact recreational gold panning or non-motorized mining, "just motorized suction dredge mining that disturbs salmon spawning beds, fish and frog habitat, and pollutes the water with sediment and mercury." The Karuk Tribe, California Sportfishing Protection Alliance (CSPA), Klamath Riverkeeper and other environmental and fishing groups recently filed a lawsuit against the DFG's use of General Fund money to support suction dredge mining. The suit is asking for an injunction until California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) review is completed and other mitigations take place. To download The Sierra Fund's groundbreaking report "Mining's Toxic Legacy," go to sierrafund.org/campaigns/mining. For more information about suction dredge mining, please visit http://www.klamathriver.org, http://www.friendsoftheriver.org or http://www.karuk.us/press/mining.php. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From tstokely at att.net Thu May 28 11:40:07 2009 From: tstokely at att.net (Tom Stokely) Date: Thu, 28 May 2009 11:40:07 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] CC Times- Paper shuffle allows for vast supply of easy money Message-ID: Pumping water and cash from Delta Contra Costa Times Gaming the water system Contra Costa Times Water ownership murky, complicated Contra Costa Times Paper shuffle allows for vast supply of easy money Contra Costa Times +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Pumping water and cash from Delta Contra Costa Times - 5/23/09 By Mike Taugher As the West Coast's largest estuary plunged to the brink of collapse from 2000 to 2007, state water officials pumped unprecedented amounts of water out of the Delta only to effectively buy some of it back at taxpayer expense for a failed environmental protection plan, a MediaNews investigation has found. The "environmental water account" set up in 2000 to improve the Delta ecosystem spent nearly $200 million mostly to benefit water users while also creating a cash stream for private landowners and water agencies in the Bakersfield area. Financed with taxpayer-backed environment and water bonds, the program spent most of its money in Kern County, a largely agricultural region at the southern end of the San Joaquin Valley. There, water was purchased from the state and then traded back to the account for a higher price. The proceeds were used to fund an employee retirement plan, buy land and groundwater storage facilities and pay miscellaneous costs to keep water bills low, documents and interviews show. Revenues from those sales also might have helped finance a lawsuit against the Department of Water Resources, the same agency that wrote the checks, documents show. No one appears to have benefitted more than companies owned or controlled by Stewart Resnick, a Beverly Hills billionaire, philanthropist and major political donor whose companies, including Paramount Farms, own more than 115,000 acres in Kern County. Resnick's water and farm companies collected about 20 cents of every dollar spent by the program. Those companies sold $30.6 million of water to the state program, participated as a partner in an additional $16 million in sales and received an additional $3.8 million in checks and credits for sales through public water agencies, documents show. "For a program that was supposed to benefit the environment, it apparently did two things - it didn't benefit the environment and it appears to have enriched private individuals using public money," said Jonas Minton, a water policy adviser to the Planning and Conservation League, a California environmental advocacy group. Representatives of Resnick's farm and water companies did not respond to repeated requests for interviews. A woman who answered the phone at the Resnick's holding company last week said, "We don't talk to the press. It's company policy." She transferred the call to a company official who did not respond for an interview request. The state Department of Water Resources also declined to comment for this story. A paper accounting thing The idea behind the environmental water account was to protect the Delta ecosystem without taking water away from people, farms and agencies that held growing expectations - and contracts - for water. By setting aside water that could supplement flows from the Delta, biologists would be able to slow Delta pumps at sensitive times, thereby protecting imperiled fish such as Delta smelt. The water account was meant to enhance existing environmental protections and protect water users from the possibility that regulators might force them to give up more water to protect fish. Despite good intentions, however, the program lacked the resources to provide the environmental benefits it promised. Traditional users got their water, but the environment suffered. Delta smelt dropped to levels near extinction. Even the backbone of the state's commercial salmon industry, Sacramento River fall-run chinook salmon, broke under the combined strain of ocean fluctuations and a variety of Delta-related problems, possibly including water management. That salmon fishery, which had never before been closed, is now off-limits to anglers for the second consecutive year, leaving supermarkets temporarily devoid of wild California salmon. The way it was supposed to work was novel. If fish were in danger of being sucked into massive Delta pumping stations, for example, biologists could invoke the account to slow the pumps down. Then, contractors who would otherwise be deprived of water from the slowdown would be made whole with water from the account. In order to provide that replacement water to contractors, the water account needed water stored south of Delta pumps. The underground water storage facilities in Kern County's aquifers and ancient river formations proved to be its most important source. But the location at the southern end of the San Joaquin Valley was not ideal. It made more sense to store the water closer to the Delta, where distribution would be easier to a wider variety of places. So the water in Kern County was "exchanged" for Delta water that was being pumped at record high - and environmentally damaging - rates. The Delta water was then deposited in the environmental water account at San Luis Reservoir near Gilroy. The exchange legally moved the water that was stored underground in Kern County to San Luis, but the water was still there. To complete the trade, then, the underground water had to be treated as if it were being delivered from the Delta. Sometimes, Kern County water agencies retrieved the "Delta" water from underground for irrigation, but in most cases, the state was delivering so much water they did not need to. Instead, most of the time all they had to do was simply forego storing the excess Delta water and pocket the difference between the low rates they paid to the state and the higher market rates they collected from the sale to the water account. "I wouldn't pump that water to sell the (environmental water account)," said Dennis Atkinson, general manager of the Tejon Castaic Water District, which sold about $2 million worth of water to the account. "How are you going to make any money? ... It's a paper accounting thing. We never turned on a pump." The price of water The cost to taxpayers for Kern County water averaged $196 per acre-foot. The price Kern County paid for Delta water varied, but in 2007, the last year the environmental water account was operating, Kern County water users paid an average of $86 for Delta water. Some of that water was purchased for as little as $28 from a discount program. The environmental water account was administered by the state Department of Water Resources, which also operates the state-owned pumps near Tracy. It bought most of its water from the Kern County Water Agency, whose general manager insisted the prices charged to taxpayers were fair and necessary to offset the cost of buying, storing and managing the water. "The prices were in line with what we felt were the appropriate costs," said general manager James Beck. Still, Beck acknowledged, there was nothing in contracts to prevent sellers from making money. Of course, selling reserves can be risky, and Beck said market prices this year are $350 per acre-foot or more. Given this year's water shortages, he said that if Kern County landowners could go back in time and undo those sales, they would "in a heartbeat." To Atkinson, of the Tejon-Castaic Water District, it made sense for water districts to reap a return on the sales because water contractors have been paying for the state's dams, pumps and canals since the 1960s, while the demand that more Delta water be dedicated to the environment is more recent. "These guys have showed up lately and want something someone else has," Atkinson said. "Since they don't have infrastructure, they have to get it from the people who made the investment." The vast majority of the financing for the nearly $200 million program came from state environment and water bonds that will be repaid with interest over the coming years. Of that total, about 70 percent was used to buy water from entities in Kern County. And of the Kern County sales, the $30.6 million sold directly by Resnick's Westside Mutual Water Company was more than twice the sales of any other entity, records show. Open spigot The environmental water account's effectiveness was hampered by the fact it was perpetually short of the 380,000 acre-feet a year envisioned when it was set up. In addition, a 2002 court decision favorable to water users reduced a separate source of environmental water, a cut that had to be made up by the environmental account, according to a 2005 report by the Environmental Defense Fund. Also in 2005, three years into the fish collapse but the first year scientists could be sure that what they were seeing was a statistically valid plunge, the Contra Costa Times detailed how biologists worried about Delta smelt near the pumps were unable to get water managers to fully accept recommendations to slow the pumps because of concerns about driving the environmental water account into debt. A study published last fall in the scientific journal Environmental Management concluded the account improved the reliability of water supplies for Delta water users but it was unclear whether it provided any meaningful environmental benefit. Meanwhile, while the water account was meant to offset the environmental damage done by pumping water out of the Delta, it was being relied upon during a period when the state Department of Water Resources was ramping Delta water deliveries up to record levels. The environmental water account went into effect in 2000, and the five highest water deliveries from the Delta were 2000, 2003, 2004, 2005 and 2006, years in which, along with 2007, state water officials also sold large volumes of discount water that Kern County agencies would buy in 2007 for $28 per acre-foot. The sharp decline in fish populations began around the same time, starting in about 2002. And while there are likely numerous factors that caused the collapse, most scientists studying the problem believe pumping patterns contributed. Water officials have argued that the increase in discount water deliveries through a program known as Article 21 made no difference, since the price of water has no biological effect and because the amount of water pumped annually was below the maximum authorized by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. But regulators disagree. A permit from the Fish and Wildlife Service, first issued in 2004, contained restrictions that were supposed to protect Delta smelt from going extinct due to water pumping. It was issued based on regulators' understanding that the use of Article 21 would be much less than it turned out to be. In a 400-page analysis accompanying a replacement permit issued in December, the service's biologists noted that the Article 21 program was used far more extensively than they had been told when they issued the 2004 permit. And that, in turn, helped drive up overall pumping rates from the Delta, which regulators tied to the environmental decline. A coalition points elsewhere Most of the water sold through the Kern County Water Agency originated with about a dozen smaller public water district "member units" and a handful of private interests who previously stored water, mostly from the Delta, in underground reservoirs. Several of those entities are members of the Coalition for a Sustainable Delta, a group that banded together to fight back against pumping restrictions imposed in late 2007 by courts and regulators. The coalition has filed three lawsuits and threatened to file several more to shift blame away from water pumping's role in the Delta's collapse. The group contends other environmental threats are also to blame for the Delta's demise, including housing development in Delta floodplains, pesticide use, dredging, power plants, sportfishing and pollution from mothballed ships near Benicia. The Coalition for a Sustainable Delta's phone number is the same as Paramount Farms, and of the four coalition officers listed on tax documents, three are Resnick employees: William Phillimore, chief financial officer and executive vice president for Westside Mutual and Paramount Farming; Scott Hamilton, resource planning manager for Paramount Farming; and Craig B. Cooper, chief legal officer for Roll International, Resnick's holding company. A spokesman for the coalition said that although it has an employee working out of the Paramount Farms office, the group is governed by dues paying members and not Resnick. He attributed the heavy presence of Resnick's companies on the group's tax returns to issues associated with getting the new coalition up and running. "It's an ad hoc coalition. You have to organize that way," said spokesman Michael Boccadoro.# http://www.contracostatimes.com/search/ci_12439808?IADID=Search-www.contracostatimes.com-www.contracostatimes.com Gaming the water system Contra Costa Times - 5/25/09 By Mike Taugher Just before Interstate 5 climbs the Grapevine out of the San Joaquin Valley is a massive underground reservoir that its owners say is the largest water banking project of its kind in the world. Here among the tumbleweeds, sand and scrub, 15 miles west of Bakersfield, the gush of crystal-clear water appears as curiously out of place as the great blue herons cruising along the bank's six-mile canal. The Kern Water Bank, which was owned by the state Department of Water Resources from 1988 to 1995, is now in the hands of Kern County interests and is 48 percent owned by Westside Mutual Water Company, a private water company controlled by Beverly Hills billionaire Stewart Resnick. It is 32 square miles of desert where one natural river and two artificial ones pass: the Kern River, which originates in the southern Sierra Nevada; the California Aqueduct, which carries Delta water more than 400 miles to a reservoir in Riverside County; and the Friant-Kern Canal, which takes water to valley farmers from behind a dam on the San Joaquin River. "We have lots of water conveyance facilities that bring water past the Kern Water Bank," said Jonathan Parker, general manager of the Kern Water Bank Authority. "That makes this location pretty unique." In wet years, the water bankers deposit water from the rivers into ponds where it percolates into the Kern River's alluvial fan. In dry years, they make withdrawals, which is why on a tour of the bank earlier this year water was gushing out of the ground from pipes and bubbling up into the canal from underground structures. Kern County water users, thanks in part to local ownership of the Kern Water Bank, became the biggest source of water for CalFed's "environmental water account" that cost taxpayers nearly $200 million. The account was in effect during a period when record amounts of water were pumped out of the Delta and fish populations staggered to record lows. One species, Delta smelt, could be near extinction in large part because of Delta water pumping. Roughly one-fifth of all the money spent to buy water for the program went to companies owned or controlled by Resnick, one of the state's largest farmers. More than half of Kern County's water sales to the environmental water account - and all of Westside Mutual's sales - came from the Kern Water Bank. And thanks to the magic of paper water trades, less than half of the water sold from here was actually pumped out of the ground. Representatives of Resnick's farm and water companies did not respond to repeated requests for interviews over a two-month period. The state Department of Water Resources also declined to comment. Deal's 'linchpin' The deals worked by letting sellers trade the underground water they were selling at market prices for water the state was delivering to them at much lower prices. Instead of going to Kern County, then, Delta water went to San Luis Reservoir east of Gilroy. The state got the Delta water at the reservoir, while in Kern County the water was either pumped out of the ground for farmers' use or, more often, simply reclassified as if it were delivered from the Delta. The sellers then pocketed the price difference. The exchanges made some sense because, by taking delivery of the water upstream, the state could deliver it almost anywhere it would want to without unnecessary pumping. But it also meant that at a time when the state Department of Water Resources was pumping record amounts of water out of the Delta - in some cases exceeding conditions regulators had approved as safe for Delta fish - it was delivering some of that water to itself for a program that was supposed to protect the same fish populations that were damaged by the high pumping levels. And it paid Kern County interests with taxpayer money for the ability to do so. The general manager of the Kern County Water Agency, James Beck, said the program was a way for the state to ensure those buying water in Kern County got the water to which they were entitled. "The environmental water account was a good example where water was provided to the state at a reasonable price ... to assist the state to meet its contractual obligations to its contractors," Beck said. For many sellers to the environmental water account, including Resnick's companies, the key was ownership of the Kern Water Bank. The deal that transferred the Kern Water Bank from state ownership to Kern County interests has its roots in the last big California drought, from 1987 to 1992. As have been the past three dry years, the last drought featured water cutbacks and severe environmental strains in the Delta, where fish were being added to the lists of threatened and endangered species. In Kern County, the last drought was particularly acute because contract rules at the time required Kern County's farmers to take deeper cuts to their Delta water supply than Southern California cities. To avoid a court fight, water officials representing the state, Kern County and Southern California reached a deal with ramifications that linger today. Among other things, the deal transferred the Kern Water Bank from the state to local interests. The "Monterey Agreement," named for the city where the negotiations took place, along with the CalFed plan that followed, laid much of the groundwork for how the state's water supplies would be managed and how the Delta environment would be protected. The results were mostly good for big water users, and almost entirely bad for taxpayers and the environment. "The environmental water account was in some respects the linchpin to close the deal for the CalFed plan," said Spreck Rosekrans, a co-author of a 2005 Environmental Defense Fund study that showed how the account lacked the resources it was expected to get while it also was required to do more than planned. "It involved buying some of the water that had been overpromised. It allowed folks to game the system and gain profits that were unwarranted," Rosekrans said. State denied At the time of the last drought, Resnick was expanding his farm holdings near Bakersfield. Kern County property tax records show his companies appear to own more than 115,000 acres - nearly four times the size of San Francisco and more than all the parks in the East Bay Regional Park District combined. The water supply for those farms and orchards, which his companies boast include the largest pistachio and almond growing and processing operations in the world, was secured in part by the Kern Water Bank. With a capacity of at least 1 million acre-feet, it is like having a reservoir the size of Folsom Lake, near Sacramento, or 10 reservoirs the size of Los Vaqueros, near Brentwood. There are other advantages too. Little water is lost to evaporation. Terrestrial habitat is not flooded. The water is easy to get out of the ground: It only costs $35 to $40 to pump an acre-foot - nearly 326,000 gallons, Parker said. Though the state invested a total of $74 million in buying and developing the Kern Water Bank, it could never get the groundwater storage operations up and running, partly because of a state law that requires the Department of Water Resources to receive local approval for groundwater projects. Kern County never granted that approval. As a result of the negotiations in Monterey, the bank was transferred from the state to the Kern County Water Agency in exchange for Kern County interests giving up a small portion of their claim to water. The agency immediately turned the bank over to a joint powers authority made up of a handful of water districts and Westside Mutual Water Company, which has a 48 percent stake. Another 10 percent is owned by Dudley Ridge Water District, where Resnick's farming company, which owns more than 40 percent of the district's irrigated acreage, is the largest landowner. Dudley Ridge's board president, Joseph MacIlvaine, is also president of Resnick's farm company, Paramount Farms. The agreement made in Monterey also forced Southern California cities to share equally with Kern County farmers in the pain of drought. And it created a new program that allowed agencies in Kern County, Southern California and elsewhere to buy so-called surplus water for cheap - discount water that flowed so freely that, until the Delta ecosystem hit the skids, it amounted to more than the cut they took in their water contracts to obtain the water bank. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, in a December analysis, said delivery of "Article 21" water was also much more than what they approved when they issued a permit in 2004 meant to protect Delta smelt from the effects of Delta water pumping.# http://www.contracostatimes.com/news/ci_12443070 Water ownership murky, complicated Contra Costa Times - 5/23/09 By Mike Taugher Kern County water users who sold millions of dollars worth of water to a program meant to help the environment said the arrangement made sense because the water was rightfully theirs. Few would dispute that water that was purchased and stored in Kern County could be sold to the environmental water account. But the sales were made easier by the fact that the state Department of Water Resources was cranking up water deliveries to unprecedented heights at the same time it was buying water back for the environment. The general manager of one of the agencies that sold water through the program, Dennis Atkinson of the Tejon-Castaic Water District, acknowledged that the sales only made sense to him if state pumps were delivering more water than his district could immediately use. In other words, the higher pumping levels not only took an environmental toll on the Delta, they also made water available to buy back to protect the Delta. Was the state required to deliver all that water or could it have pumped less and potentially saved the cost of buying it back? Put another way, does Delta water belong to contractors or do environmental needs have priority? The answer is unclear. Kern County water districts have a contract that awards them about 1 million acre-feet of water a year. And as customers of the State Water Project, they have to make the same payments on the project's dams, pumps and canals no matter how much water they get. The state's water customers contend the contract obligates the state to make water available, and the contracts and simple fairness support that, at least to some degree. On the other hand, a consolidated version of the full contract - which runs 348 pages and has nearly 40 amendments - appears to recognize that water shortages can develop "due to drought or any other cause whatsoever." And the right to water in arid states is always conditional. The government can promise all the water it wants, but it can't make it rain. Environmental laws, a constitutional requirement that water use be reasonable and beneficial and an ancient legal doctrine that ensures water is used in a way that considers public trust values - including the health of natural resources such as the Delta - further limit the use of water, making the question of who "owns" water complicated. "Because it's called a right, people tend to think of it like the First Amendment," said Phil Isenberg, a former legislative leader and chairman of a Delta Vision task force appointed in 2007 by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to figure out how to fix the Delta. "The water rights system is a way of figuring out who is first in line when supplies aren't enough to satisfy all of the water needs." One of the state's biggest difficulties in delivering water to users while protecting the environment is the fact that water has been dramatically overpromised, Isenberg said. As the Delta Vision committee was wrapping up its work last year, a memo arrived that members had requested from the state agency that administers water rights. It carried this sobering comparison: The average natural flow of water in the Delta watershed is 29 million acre-feet per year, while the face value of water rights in the same watershed is 245 million acre-feet, or more than eight times the average flow. "I was dumbfounded," Isenberg said. Not all of the water in those rights is actually used, some of the rights are double-counted and much of the water that is used finds its way back into rivers where it can be used again. Nevertheless, the figures are convincing evidence to Isenberg and others that the state has promised far more water than it can deliver. Further complicating matters, the State Water Project signed contracts with Kern County, Southern California and others at a time when plans called for dams to be built on North Coast rivers that would produce millions of additional acre-feet a year to spill into the Delta for contractors to use. Those dams were never built. Faced with overpromised water, population growth, a sensitive environment and periodic droughts, it is no surprise California has difficulties managing water. Those difficulties also are not new. After the last major drought ended in 1992 a series of deals were struck to fix the system, culminating in 2000 with a plan known as "CalFed." There may not have been enough water to satisfy farmers, cities and the environment, but when the deal was signed in 2000, the state was awash in money thanks to soaring real estate, stocks and dot-com enterprises. One of the keys to the CalFed deal was the environmental water account. The idea was to use the market to strike a new balance between the needs of the environment and people. The account would be used by regulators to enhance the environment by buying water from willing sellers, thereby reducing conflicts that arise when regulators take it away from water users. In the absence of an environmental water account, water users faced the possibility of additional environmental restrictions, according to a 2001 report by the Legislative Analyst's Office. For that reason, the LAO said water users should help pay for the program. "Since compliance with endangered species laws is a responsibility of the state and federal water projects, (the environmental water account) in effect reduces the compliance burden for these projects," the LAO found. Instead, the environmental water account ended up relying almost exclusively on taxpayer-backed bond funds, and most of that money was spent to buy water stored in Kern County.# http://www.contracostatimes.com/news/ci_12437097 Paper shuffle allows for vast supply of easy money Contra Costa Times - 5/23/09 By Mike Taugher It must have seemed like easy money. The state was delivering more water than ever to its customers, and in Kern County some of those customers sold some of it back, through a simple trade, at a higher price. Tens of millions of dollars in sales to the "environmental water account" were little more than paper shuffles. It was all perfectly legal. But the environment lost while Kern County water agencies collected $138 million in sales to the program, the vast majority of which was paid for with the proceeds from taxpayer backed environment and water bonds. Public water agencies in Kern County used money from sales to an environmental water account to fund an employee retirement plan, buy land and pay for miscellaneous repairs, documents and interviews show. One document shows that the Kern County Water Agency used revenue from the sales to help finance a lawsuit against the Department of Water Resources - the same agency that wrote the taxpayer-backed check to the agency - to lower its water bills. The head of the Kern County Water Agency, James Beck, denied the lawsuit was funded with the sales revenue, but he could not explain why the general manager of one of his agency's member districts recounted that version of events to his board of directors. Beck said revenues from the sales were used to cover the cost districts paid to buy, store and deliver the water. He also said funds were set aside to cover the cost of future purchases to replace water that was sold. But documents and interviews show the sales were seen by the water agency's "member units," at least in some cases, as a source of revenue that could be used for a wide variety of purposes: In 2003, the Buena Vista Water Storage District, based in Buttonwillow, put $500,000 in revenues from the environmental water account sales into its employee retirement plan, documents show. Water districts put environmental water account revenues into their coffers to offset miscellaneous repairs and other costs in order to keep customers' water bills down, said Dennis Atkinson, general manager of the Tejon Castaic Water District. "We take that money and apply it against our bills," Atkinson said. One district participated only marginally - selling small amounts of water at a relatively low price to the account's precursor one year and participating as a partner to help other water districts complete their sales in another. The Rosedale-Rio Bravo Water Storage District, based in Bakersfield, still was able to buy land to expand its groundwater storage capacity and build facilities with the proceeds, said general manager Eric Averett. Increasing the groundwater banking capacity is arguably consistent with managing water for the account, although the district did not sell any water to the account after 2001. MediaNews identified $8.6 million worth of checks, refunds and credits, presumably to offset water purchases and pumping costs, including more than $3 million to Paramount Farms, that were paid to landowners in public water districts that sold to the water account. Blackwell Land LLC also received more than $3 million in refunds from the sales, while the remainder went to fewer than 10 other private landowners. In 2003, Westside Mutual Water Company and the Wheeler Ridge-Maricopa Water Storage District negotiated a $600,000 payment to the water company, controlled by Beverly Hills billionaire Stewart Resnick, after a change in circumstances shifted a portion of the sales from Westside Mutual to the water district. At a meeting of sellers to the account, there was "a plea from Westside MWC that some compromise be worked out to adjust for the windfall" to the Wheeler Ridge-Maricopa district, which gained a greater share of the sales at Westside's expense, according to a memorandum from the water district's general manager, William Taube. Wheeler Ridge, which serves water to about 90,000 acres of farmland south of Bakersfield, shifted $600,000 in sales to Westside Mutual, which still left the district with $1.4 million in "net revenue." The most unusual use of environmental water account money may have been its apparent use to sue the state Department of Water Resources - the agency that wrote the check for the purchases - to lower Kern County's water bills. Beck denied that happened, but that is what Taube told his board of directors in May 2007. In an interview, Taube said that while it was possible he was mistaken, the point he made was that Kern's "member units" would not have to contribute attorneys' fees because enough revenue had been generated from the water sales. The lawsuit, known as the "Hyatt-Thermalito litigation," is a dispute over how the state prices power from turbines at Lake Oroville. Kern County Water Agency and other water districts north of the Tehachapis, including Bay Area districts, want the prices to reflect market rates, which would increase the cost of water in Southern California - where it takes more electricity to deliver Delta water because of the greater distance and the need to pump the water over the Tehachapis. The power sales are applied to contractors' debt for the State Water Project's dams, pumps and aqueducts, so raising the price of the electricity would reduce debt for contractors north of the Tehachapis at Southern California's expense. In May 2007, Taube told his board that at the Kern agency's April board meeting he attended, the Kern board "directed that 2007 EWA sale proceeds accruing to the Agency would be used to fund the Hyatt-Thermalito litigation. This will reduce the litigation cost borne by Member Units and delay the time when Member Unit contributions to this litigation will be necessary," according to minutes of the Wheeler Ridge-Maricopa district's meeting. Beck said that was incorrect but did not offer an explanation for how a misunderstanding might have occurred. "That was my understanding at the time," Taube said. "If he (Beck) disagrees, maybe I misunderstood something." Asked to clarify what his understanding was at the time, Taube said it was that, "They weren't going to need to call on member units ... because of the EWA." Department of Water Resources Director Lester Snow, through a spokesman, declined to comment on the possibility that the proceeds from taxpayer-financed water sales to his agency may have been used to sue his agency. In response to a formal request under the state Public Records Act, the Kern agency said it had no records showing environmental water account revenues being used to pay for lawyers. The official minutes of the Kern agency's April 2007 meeting contain no mention of the Hyatt-Thermalito lawsuit and its meetings are not recorded.# http://www.contracostatimes.com/news/ci_12437335 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ DWR's California Water News is distributed to California Department of Water Resources management and staff, for information purposes, by the DWR Public Affairs Office. For reader's services, including new subscriptions, temporary cancellations and address changes, please use the online page: http://listhost2.water.ca.gov/mailman/listinfo/water_news . DWR operates and maintains the State Water Project, provides dam safety and flood control and inspection services, assists local water districts in water management and water conservation planning, and plans for future statewide water needs. Inclusion of materials is not to be construed as an endorsement of any programs, projects, or viewpoints by the Department or the State of California. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Wed Jun 3 09:33:51 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Wed, 3 Jun 2009 09:33:51 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Eureka Times Standard June 3 2009 Message-ID: <003601c9e469$163ceb80$42b6c280$@net> Senate approves Wiggins' salmon bill The Times-Standard-6/03/09 The state Senate voted 23-10 Monday to approve legislation by North Coast Sen. Patricia Wiggins, D-Eureka, that aims to enhance efforts to save the state's imperiled salmon and steelhead populations. Currently, the state Ocean Protection Council (OPC) is authorized to make grants and loans for a variety of projects to improve coastal water quality, improve fisheries, protect ocean ecosystems and similar purposes. These projects are funded through the Ocean Protection Trust Fund, which is largely supported by Proposition 84, and has about $45 million in unallocated funds. Wiggins' bill, Senate Bill 539, would add projects to restore native salmon and steelhead trout populations to the list of eligible uses of the Ocean Protection Trust Fund. "For the second year in a row, California's oceans are closed to commercial salmon fishing," Wiggins said while presenting the bill, according to a press release. "This bill will give the OPC the clarity it needs to dedicate existing funding to salmon restoration, and to coordinate with the state Department of Fish and Game, the state and local water boards, the Coastal Conservancy and others to concentrate before it is too late." Wiggins said that while the OPC has engaged in fisheries management issues, it has not yet focused much attention on the collapse of California's salmon which is not only a commercial disaster but indicative of a water-related environmental disaster as well. A recent report by CalTrout, authored in part by Peter Moyle of U.C. Davis, said that the state's native salmonids are in unprecedented decline, and are teetering toward the brink of extinction, according to a release from Wiggins' office. The report concluded that if present trends continue, 65 percent of native salmon, steelhead and other trout species will be extinct within the next century. With Senate approval, S.B. 539 is headed to the Assembly for consideration. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Thu Jun 4 09:18:55 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Thu, 4 Jun 2009 09:18:55 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] NMFS Changes in Reservoir CVP Operations Message-ID: <000601c9e530$33903710$9ab0a530$@net> Maybe the Trinity ultimately will get carryover storage/a minimum pool to protect against possibility of lethal fish water temperatures in late summer if several consecutive low water years occur in other parts of the state. My apologies for any multiple postings. Byron For Immediate Release: June 4, 2009 Contacts: Paul Pierce, Coastside Fishing Club, (510) 432-8820 Dick Pool, Water4Fish (925) 963-6350 Roger Thomas, Golden Gate Fishermen's Assn. (415) 760-9362 Dave Bitts, PCFFA, (707) 498-3512 Mike Hudson, SalmonAid Foundation, (510) 407-2000 Federal Government Announces Salmon Restoration Actions Salmon Fishing Industry Hopeful San Francisco, CA -- The federal National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) today announces changes the agency will require in the operations of the state and federal Central Valley Water Projects to protect the salmon listed under the Federal Endangered Species Act. The new rules, primarily governing movement of water through the Sacramento River and Bay-Delta Estuary, are designed to protect both the Spring and Winter Run Chinook Salmon runs as well as other species. The actions are expected to require changes in the state's reservoir operations, changes in river flows and changes in the way delta water is unnaturally redirected to giant pumps that send it hundreds of miles to the south of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. Members of the salmon fishing industry are hopeful for better results after years of steady declines in the salmon populations and no ocean salmon fishing seasons in 2008 and 2009 due to a lack of fish. Paul Pierce represents The Coastside Fishing Club and serves on the Pacific Fishery Management Council Salmon Advisory Subpanel. Pierce said, "We are hopeful the actions of the National Marine Fishery Service will begin the turnaround of these species which are nearing extinction. The courts demanded a better plan and the agency has responded. With three years of scientific work by NMFS, we now have a better idea how and where the destruction of the salmon is occurring. Based on this science, the agency should direct the changes necessary to see that these fish survive. We support their decisions and we look forward to seeing positive changes." Dick Pool is a manufacturer of salmon fishing equipment and leads the Water4Fish advocacy program which now has 70,000 supporters who have been asking for changes in the states water management to benefit salmon. Pool echoed Paul Pierce's thanks and congratulations to the National Marine Fisheries Service and added, "These changes are exactly what we have been looking for. We have been operating on an environmental disaster course for salmon and these actions are the beginning of the turnaround." Pool added, "Fishing is big business in California. There are 4.2 million recreational fishermen in the state generating $4.8 billion in economic impact and supporting 41,000 jobs. Salmon are a big part of this. There are 904 retailers and 327 other businesses that drive their income from the $1 billion salmon industry. These businesses and their leaders join us in supporting the leadership provided by NMFS and the other fishery agencies in mapping some solutions." Roger Thomas is President of the Golden Gate Fishermen's Association. The charter boats of this organization carry 200,000 salmon fishermen a year in their pursuit of catching a salmon. Roger says, "There are approximately 500,000 recreational salmon fishermen in California. They are passionate about their sport and are livid about what has happened. I am sure they all join me in congratulating the National Marine Fisheries Service in the bold actions to begin the restoration process." Roger cautioned, "These actions are designed to protect only two of the four salmon runs of the Central Valley. We hope the Fall Run which has been the largest and the backbone of the ocean and river fishery for decades will also benefit from the new rules to be announced today. Dave Bitts, President of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations, said, "This year I can't fish at all, mainly because water in California follows money, and fishermen don't have the megabucks available to the San Joaquin grower interests. This isn't about either fish or farms. It's about how we use our limited, vastly oversubscribed water resources wisely in order to have both. Continuing to hand out huge volumes of public water dirt cheap is not the answer. If you continue taking so much water that salmon go extinct in the California, what wild creatures will be next?" Most of the problems of the salmon runs have resulted from the over subscription of water from California's rivers, reservoirs and the delta. These problems have to be solved not only for the environment but for all sectors of the California economy. The vast majority of natural water sources have already been tapped. Climate change will compound the problems. The fishery groups are strong supporters of the major new sources of water that have been identified but are not being implemented fast enough. These include water conservation, water recycling and groundwater management. We urge the state and federal governments to provide the leadership, incentives and financial resources to significantly speed up these developments. Mike Hudson, commercial fisherman and executive director of the SalmonAid Foundation, adds "Today we will find out if we ever will get our salmon back in any numbers to speak of. We have had all the laws on the books for decades now, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, and others. Sometimes it's not that the rules are not in place, but the lack of commitment to enforce them. It is not too late to bring our salmon back. I'm cautiously optimistic that today is the day that may start meaningful restoration of this fantastic fish. If the fisheries service decides to do the right thing today, I and thousands of my fellow fishermen will applaud them." Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Thu Jun 4 12:53:37 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Thu, 4 Jun 2009 12:53:37 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] NOAA's News Release on CVP and Salmon Message-ID: <002801c9e54e$2d9ea030$88dbe090$@net> Again.My apologies for any multiple postings Byron NOAA Releases New Biological Opinion on Salmon NOAA News Release-6/04/09 NOAA released its final biological opinion today that finds the water pumping operations in California's Central Valley by the federal Bureau of Reclamation jeopardize the continued existence of several threatened and endangered species under the jurisdiction of NOAA's Fisheries Service. The bureau has provisionally accepted NOAA's recommended changes to its water pumping operations, and said it will begin to implement its near-term elements as it carefully evaluates the overall opinion. Federal biologists and hydrologists concluded that current water pumping operations in the Federal Central Valley Project and the California State Water Project should be changed to ensure survival of winter and spring-run Chinook salmon, Central Valley steelhead, the southern population of North American green sturgeon and Southern Resident killer whales, which rely on Chinook salmon runs for food. Two independent peer review panels were conducted to ensure the opinion is solidly grounded in the best available science. The package was peer reviewed by the CalFed Independent Science Board and the Center for Independent Experts. "What is at stake here is not just the survival of species but the health of entire ecosystems and the economies that depend on them," said Rod Mcinnis, southwest regional director for NOAA's Fisheries Service. "We are ready to work with our federal and state partners, farmers and residents to find solutions that benefit the economy, environment and Central Valley families." As part of the final opinion, NOAA's Fisheries Service has provided a number of ways the bureau can operate the water system to benefit the species, including increasing the cold water storage and flow rates. Such methods will enhance egg incubation and juvenile fish rearing, as well as improve the spawning habitat and the downstream migration of juvenile fish. Changing water operations will impact an estimated five to seven percent of the available annual water on average moved by the federal and state pumps, or about 330,000 acre feet per year. Agricultural water use in California is roughly 30 million acre feet per year. Water operations will not be affected by the opinion immediately and will be tiered to water year type. The opinion includes exception procedures for drought and health and safety issues. In addition, the opinion calls for the bureau to develop a genetics management plan and an acoustic tagging program to evaluate the effectiveness of the actions and pilot passage programs at Folsom and Shasta reservoirs to reintroduce fish to historic habitat. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act will mitigate some costs resulting from the opinion's recommended actions. The Department of the Interior identified $109 million to construct a Red Bluff Pumping Plant that will allow the old Red Bluff Diversion Dam to be operated in a "gates out" position to allow salmon and green sturgeon unimpeded passage. In addition, the Act contains $26 million to restore Battle Creek, a salmon tributary to the Sacramento River. The water projects included in the opinion are Shasta Dam at the upper headwaters of the Sacramento River, Folsom and Nimbus dams on the American River, and New Melones Dam on the Stanislaus River. The opinion also covers the state and federal export facilities in the Delta, the Nimbus hatchery on the American River, and the operations of diversion structures, including the Red Bluff Diversion Dam on the mainstem Sacramento and the Delta Cross Channel gates in the Delta. The bureau initiated the formal phase of consultation in May 2008 and then cooperated with NOAA's Fisheries Service throughout the development of the biological opinion and alternative actions in coordination with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the California Departments of Water Resources and Fish and Game. A copy of the final biological opinion and alternative actions may be found at http://swr.nmfs.noaa.gov/ocap.htm. NOAA understands and predicts changes in the Earth's environment, from the depths of the ocean to the surface of the sun, and conserves and manages our coastal and marine resources.# Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Thu Jun 4 15:44:58 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Thu, 4 Jun 2009 15:44:58 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] NEWS - Federal Scientists Announce New Requirements that will Improve Long-term Survival of Salmon Populations Message-ID: <004601c9e566$18644860$492cd920$@net> Apologies again for any multiple postings of this message. Byron NEWS _____ Congressman George Miller _____ For Immediate Release: June 4, 2009 Press Office: 202-225-2095 Federal Scientists Announce New Requirements that will Improve Long-term Survival of Salmon Populations Miller instrumental in securing key review of earlier politically-tainted policy Washington, DC - Congressman George Miller (D-Martinez), Mike Thompson (D- Napa Valley) and Doris Matsui (D-Sacramento) released the following statements in response to today's federal decision that the operation of the Federal Central Valley Project and the California State Water Project will need to be changed in order to protect and restore California's winter and spring-run Chinook salmon, steelhead, green sturgeon and killer whales: "With today's announcement, the Obama administration has set a science-based course toward recovering the populations of wild salmon and steelhead that are so critical to California's economy and environment," said Rep. George Miller (D-Martinez), an expert in Congress on California water policy. "After years of costly litigation and negligence and political tampering by the Bush Administration, this is an important step towards the recovery of California's fisheries and the environmental health of the Bay-Delta. It is refreshing to see water management decisions that are based on science, not on the whims of tainted political appointees like Julie MacDonald." "This is an important step for restoring California's fisheries," said Congressman Mike Thompson (D- Napa Valley). "Salmon and steelhead are a vital part of our ecosystem and contribute to our state's economy up and down the coast. Today's report is a breath of fresh air for Californians who have grown used to water policies based on politics rather than on science. Moving forward, we need to use this as a first step towards building a water policy in California that is based on science and includes all stakeholders at the table." "I am glad to see that the Administration is taking critical action based on sound science," said Representative Doris Matsui (D-Sacramento). "Today's opinion will go a long way towards preservation of not only a number of threatened species, but also will play a role in the protection of the entire watershed on which so many Californians rely. It is key that as the federal government moves forward to protect and restore California's fisheries, water supply and the future of the Delta, that decisions are based on sound science." Today's announcement replaces a controversial 2004 biological opinion stating that the state and federal agencies' plans to pump water to the Central Valley would not harm wild fisheries. After the release of that opinion, Reps. George Miller, Mike Thompson, Ellen Tauscher and other members of Congress asked the Commerce Department's Inspector General to investigate. That audit found that the Bush Administration violated standard procedures and compromised the integrity of the biological opinion. Reports from the Interior Department's Inspector General found that over the same time period, several endangered species decisions were "inappropriately influenced" by Julie MacDonald, the Bush administration's Deputy Assistant Secretary for Fish and Wildlife and Parks. # # # -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From awhitridge at snowcrest.net Fri Jun 5 09:20:53 2009 From: awhitridge at snowcrest.net (Arnold Whitridge) Date: Fri, 5 Jun 2009 09:20:53 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] TAMWG meeting June 10-11 Message-ID: <4AE16E3EFF7F4E33A640EB8AAD7ABAF4@arnPC> Here's the agenda for the June 10-11 meeting of the Trinity Adaptive Management Working Group, which advises the Trinity Management Council on Trinity River Restoration Program matters. All TAMWG meetings are open to the public. Arnold Whitridge, TAMWG chair Proposed Agenda TRINITY ADAPTIVE MANAGEMENT WORKING GROUP Trinity County Library, Main Street, Weaverville, CA June 10 and 11, 2009 Time Presentation, Discussion, and/or Action on: Presenter Wednesday, June 10 1. 12:00 pm Adopt agenda; approve March minutes 2. 12:10 Open forum; public comment 3. 12:20 TRRP organization and decisionmaking- Clair Stalnaker, original concept, present status, possible improvements Byron Leydecker, Brian Person, Mike Hamman 4. 2:30 Hatchery goals, practices, and effects on wild fish Larry Hansen, DFG 5. 4:00 Reservoir management; temperature issues Mike Hamman 5:00 Adjourn for the day Thursday, June 11 6. 8:15 Designated Federal Officer topics Randy Brown 7. 8:30 Channel rehabilitation program update Mike Hamman 8. 9:00 Progress towards an RFP-based science program Mike Hamman 9. 9:30 Sediment monitoring activities Dave Gaeuman 10. 10:15 Integrated Information Management System (IIMS) Eric Peterson 11. 11:00 Executive Director's Report, budget update Mike Hamman 12. 11:45 Tentative date and agenda topics for next meeting noon lunch 13. 1:00 Field visit to channel rehabilitation site(s) 4:00 Adjourn -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Fri Jun 5 09:35:55 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Fri, 5 Jun 2009 09:35:55 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] NOAA Biological Opinion Newspaper Stories Message-ID: <004401c9e5fb$b443bd20$1ccb3760$@net> Attached are links to several newspaper stories on NOAA's Biological Opinion on water operations. My apologies again for any multiple postings. http://www.sacbee.com/topstories/story/1920924.html http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2009/06/05/MNV618119E.DT L http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-salmon5-2009jun05,0,2494915.story http://www3.signonsandiego.com/stories/2009/jun/05/1n5fish23161-federal-ruli ng-could-limit-water-cali/?california &zIndex=111324 http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_12521665?IADID=Search-www.mercurynews.com-www. mercurynews.com http://www.fresnobee.com/263/story/1451724.html http://www.recordnet.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090605/A_NEWS/90605031 1 http://www.contracostatimes.com/localnews/ci_12520360 Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Tue Jun 9 21:18:18 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Tue, 9 Jun 2009 21:18:18 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] FWS Regional Director Sam Hamilton will be nominee to head FWS Message-ID: <65290D1C3BB04941B47646BFFDAE8E70@ByronsLaptop> FWS Southeast Regional Director Sam Hamilton will be nominated to be the next director of the Fish and Wildlife Service, the Interior Department announced today. The text of DOI's press release follows. It has not yet been posted online. Date: June 9, 2009 Contact: Hugh Vickery (202) 208-6416 Secretary Salazar Lauds President's Intent to Nominate Sam Hamilton as Director of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar today praised President Obama's announcement that he intends to nominate Sam D. Hamilton to be the next Director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Hamilton, a career senior biologist and manager with the Service, currently is director of the agency's Southeast Region, The nomination requires Senate confirmation. "Sam has vast experience with every aspect of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's mission, making him an ideal nominee to direct the agency," Salazar said. "Throughout his career, he has been an innovative leader in developing new conservation initiatives and resolving complex and controversial environmental issues. He will be a strong advocate for sound science and effective management of our nation's fish and wildlife." Hamilton, who has been with the Service for 30 years, was appointed Southeast Regional Director in Atlanta, Georgia in 1997, serving as senior operating executive with full strategic planning and management responsibility for a $484 million budget and a 1,500-person work-force that operates in 10 states and the Caribbean. As regional director, Hamilton has been responsible for the oversight and management of more than 350 federally listed threatened and endangered species and 128 national wildlife refuges. He has provided leadership and oversight to the department's restoration work in the Everglades, the largest ecosystem restoration project in the country, and oversaw recovery and restoration work following Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, which devastated coastal wetlands, wildlife refuges, and other wildlife habitat along the Gulf of Mexico. Hamilton's leadership fostered creative solutions and innovation that led to the establishment of a carbon sequestration program that has helped biologists in the Southeast restore roughly 80,000 acres of wildlife habitat. His emphasis on partnership bolstered the Service's fisheries program and helped establish the Southeast Aquatic Resources Partnership to restore vital aquatic habitats across the region. This partnership is a key piece of the National Fish Habitat Action Plan. Prior to becoming regional director, Hamilton served as assistant regional director of the ecological services in Atlanta and the Service's Texas state administrator in Austin. Hamilton graduated from Mississippi State University with a Bachelor of Science degree in biology in 1977. ### From bwl3 at comcast.net Tue Jun 9 21:22:29 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Tue, 9 Jun 2009 21:22:29 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Westlands Water Supply this year Message-ID: From: http://blogs.edf.org/waterfront/2009/06/08/water-supply-improvements-in-the- san-joaquin-valley/ Water supply improvements in the San Joaquin Valley June 8, 2009 | Posted by Spreck Rosekrans in Water Supply Spreck Rosekrans is an Economic Analyst at EDF. Anybody reading newspapers or watching television news over the last two months has heard frightening stories of water shortages that threaten the viability of agriculture in the San Joaquin Valley. But information compiled by the California Department of Water Resources reveals that in 2009 water supply in most parts of the valley will be in excess of 80% of average. Central Valley Project deliveries to Westlands Water District, for example, were forecast to be zero as recently as March. Westlands now projects they expect to use 86% of average annual supplies this year. Their total supply is a combination of deliveries from the Delta, water banked last year, groundwater pumping and purchases. The data, compiled last month by the Department of Water Resources and based on a series of interviews with staff from each of the districts, was attached to a letter from DWR Director Lester Snow to U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein on May 15 . As the table notes, the information is subject to change. The information paints a very different picture for agriculture this year than we have seen reported this spring. The water shortages are much lower than previously reported. This year's supplies do, of course, rely on levels of groundwater pumping that would not be possible every year. Still, one can only conclude that the water supply situation is not as dire as previously reported and that San Joaquin Valley farms will still be able to grow food for our kitchen tables this year. Byron Leydecker, JcT, Chair Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From snowgoose at pulsarco.com Tue Jun 9 21:47:46 2009 From: snowgoose at pulsarco.com (Sandy Denn) Date: Tue, 9 Jun 2009 21:47:46 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Westlands Water Supply this year References: Message-ID: <132D0A880586401B9015DAD92688618A@acer6e395d0925> This is +80% of AVERAGE I would like to point out, not +80% of their entitlement. which has not been 100% for many, many years...Sandy Denn ----- Original Message ----- From: Byron Leydecker To: FOTR List ; Trinity List Sent: Tuesday, June 09, 2009 9:22 PM Subject: [env-trinity] Westlands Water Supply this year From: http://blogs.edf.org/waterfront/2009/06/08/water-supply-improvements-in-the-san-joaquin-valley/ Water supply improvements in the San Joaquin Valley June 8, 2009 | Posted by Spreck Rosekrans in Water Supply Spreck Rosekrans is an Economic Analyst at EDF. Anybody reading newspapers or watching television news over the last two months has heard frightening stories of water shortages that threaten the viability of agriculture in the San Joaquin Valley. But information compiled by the California Department of Water Resources reveals that in 2009 water supply in most parts of the valley will be in excess of 80% of average. Central Valley Project deliveries to Westlands Water District, for example, were forecast to be zero as recently as March. Westlands now projects they expect to use 86% of average annual supplies this year. Their total supply is a combination of deliveries from the Delta, water banked last year, groundwater pumping and purchases. The data, compiled last month by the Department of Water Resources and based on a series of interviews with staff from each of the districts, was attached to a letter from DWR Director Lester Snow to U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein on May 15 . As the table notes, the information is subject to change. The information paints a very different picture for agriculture this year than we have seen reported this spring. The water shortages are much lower than previously reported. This year's supplies do, of course, rely on levels of groundwater pumping that would not be possible every year. Still, one can only conclude that the water supply situation is not as dire as previously reported and that San Joaquin Valley farms will still be able to grow food for our kitchen tables this year. Byron Leydecker, JcT, Chair Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org www.fotr.org ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ env-trinity mailing list env-trinity at velocipede.dcn.davis.ca.us http://www2.dcn.org/mailman/listinfo/env-trinity ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ No virus found in this incoming message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com Version: 8.5.339 / Virus Database: 270.12.59/2165 - Release Date: 06/09/09 05:53:00 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From trinityjosh at gmail.com Wed Jun 10 10:18:35 2009 From: trinityjosh at gmail.com (Joshua Allen) Date: Wed, 10 Jun 2009 10:18:35 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Westlands Water Supply this year In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: 15.23 acre ft last chance water - $100 (Hanford) ------------------------------ Reply to: sale-pb9ap-1207220918 at craigslist.org [Errors when replying to ads? ] Date: 2009-06-06, 9:03AM PDT 15.23 acre foot of last chance water for sale. $100 per acre foot. - Location: Hanford - it's NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests PostingID: 1207220918 http://visalia.craigslist.org/grd/1207220918.html 2009/6/9 Byron Leydecker > From: > > http://blogs.edf.org/waterfront/2009/06/08/water-supply-improvements-in-the-san-joaquin-valley/ > > Water supply improvements in the San Joaquin Valley > > June 8, 2009 | Posted by Spreck Rosekrans in Water Supply > > Spreck Rosekrans is an Economic Analyst at EDF. > > Anybody reading newspapers or watching television news over the last two > months has heard frightening stories of water shortages that threaten the > viability of agriculture in the San Joaquin Valley. But information compiled > by the California Department of Water Resources reveals that in 2009 water > supply in most parts of the valley will be in excess of 80% of average. > > Central Valley Project deliveries to Westlands Water District, for example, > *were forecast to be zero* as recently as March.* Westlands now projects > they expect to use 86% of average annual supplies this year.* Their total > supply is a combination of deliveries from the Delta, water banked last > year, groundwater pumping and purchases. > > The data, compiled last month by the Department of Water Resources and > based on a series of interviews with staff from each of the districts, was > attached to a letter from DWR Director Lester Snow to U.S. Senator Dianne > Feinstein on May 15 . As the table notes, the information is subject to > change. > > The information paints a very different picture for agriculture this year > than we have seen reported this spring. The water shortages are much lower > than previously reported. This year's supplies do, of course, rely on levels > of groundwater pumping that would not be possible every year. Still, one can > only conclude that the water supply situation is not as dire as previously > reported and that San Joaquin Valley farms will still be able to grow food > for our kitchen tables this year. ** > > * * > > *Byron Leydecker**, JcT, Chair* > > *Friends of Trinity River* > > *PO Box** 2327* > > *Mill Valley**, CA 94942-2327* > > *415 383 4810 * > > *415 519 4810 cell* > > *bwl3 at comcast.net* > > *bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org* > > *www.fotr.org * > > > > _______________________________________________ > env-trinity mailing list > env-trinity at velocipede.dcn.davis.ca.us > http://www2.dcn.org/mailman/listinfo/env-trinity > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Wed Jun 10 10:41:01 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Wed, 10 Jun 2009 10:41:01 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] FW: Westlands Water Supply this year Message-ID: <066B908FAED94FC08E148B40B957F663@ByronsLaptop> _____ From: Sandy Denn [mailto:snowgoose at pulsarco.com] Sent: Tuesday, June 09, 2009 9:48 PM Subject: Re: [env-trinity] Westlands Water Supply this year This is +80% of AVERAGE I would like to point out, not +80% of their entitlement. which has not been 100% for many, many years...Sandy Denn ----- Original Message ----- From: Byron Leydecker To: FOTR List ; Trinity List Sent: Tuesday, June 09, 2009 9:22 PM Subject: [env-trinity] Westlands Water Supply this year From: http://blogs.edf.org/waterfront/2009/06/08/water-supply-improvements-in-the- san-joaquin-valley/ Water supply improvements in the San Joaquin Valley June 8, 2009 | Posted by Spreck Rosekrans in Water Supply Spreck Rosekrans is an Economic Analyst at EDF. Anybody reading newspapers or watching television news over the last two months has heard frightening stories of water shortages that threaten the viability of agriculture in the San Joaquin Valley. But information compiled by the California Department of Water Resources reveals that in 2009 water supply in most parts of the valley will be in excess of 80% of average. Central Valley Project deliveries to Westlands Water District, for example, were forecast to be zero as recently as March. Westlands now projects they expect to use 86% of average annual supplies this year. Their total supply is a combination of deliveries from the Delta, water banked last year, groundwater pumping and purchases. The data, compiled last month by the Department of Water Resources and based on a series of interviews with staff from each of the districts, was attached to a letter from DWR Director Lester Snow to U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein on May 15 . As the table notes, the information is subject to change. The information paints a very different picture for agriculture this year than we have seen reported this spring. The water shortages are much lower than previously reported. This year's supplies do, of course, rely on levels of groundwater pumping that would not be possible every year. Still, one can only conclude that the water supply situation is not as dire as previously reported and that San Joaquin Valley farms will still be able to grow food for our kitchen tables this year. Byron Leydecker, JcT, Chair Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org www.fotr.org _____ _______________________________________________ env-trinity mailing list env-trinity at velocipede.dcn.davis.ca.us http://www2.dcn.org/mailman/listinfo/env-trinity _____ No virus found in this incoming message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com Version: 8.5.339 / Virus Database: 270.12.59/2165 - Release Date: 06/09/09 05:53:00 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Fri Jun 12 10:01:38 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Fri, 12 Jun 2009 10:01:38 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Capitol Press 6 11 09 Message-ID: <001501c9eb7f$74899f40$5d9cddc0$@net> Water managers: Federal fish plan flawed Plan would reduce Delta pumping by about 330,000 acre feet per year Capital Press-6/11/09 By Wes Sander Local water managers are calling a new federal plan aimed at protecting fish misguided and illegal. Westlands Water District says the National Marine Fisheries Service bypassed the required environmental-review process, including an examination of impacts to industry, for the biological opinion it released last week. The plan would mean greater restrictions on Central Valley water deliveries as water managers release more water down rivers and into the ocean through the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. The long-awaited document lays out water-temperature and flow guidelines that the service says are necessary for protecting winter and spring-run Chinook salmon, Central Valley steelhead, green sturgeon and the killer wales that eat salmon. "We don't even know how devastating it's going to be at this point," said Westlands spokeswoman Sarah Woolf. "We've been trying to do calculations on our own, but they're very ambiguous about when their cutbacks are going to occur." The current opinion is itself the result of a lawsuit. It was ordered last year by federal Judge Oliver Wanger in Fresno, who found that Delta pumping would harm fish under the agency's previous plan. The plan calls for reducing Delta pumping by about 330,000 acre-feet per year, or 5 to 7 percent of water pumped by the federal Central Valley Project and California's State Water Project, the agency says. Agricultural water use in California is roughly 30 million acre feet per year. NMFS says the plan underwent peer review by the CalFed Independent Science Board and the Center for Independent Experts, making it "solidly grounded in the best available science." "What is at stake here is not just the survival of species but the health of entire ecosystems and the economies that depend on them," said Rod Mcinnis, southwest regional director for NOAA's Fisheries Service, in a statement. The plan won't take effect immediately, the agency says. It factors drought conditions and health-and-safety concerns into its water restrictions from year to year, the agency says. U.S. Sen. Diane Feinstein called the opinion a reason to focus on a long-term water plan that includes new infrastructure for conveyance, storage and desalination, along with conservation measures. "The longer we wait, the worse the crisis gets," Feinstein said in a statement. "So, I firmly believe the solution must be agreed to this year." Westlands agreed, calling for completion of the Bay Delta Conservation Plan, which would cover many of those bases. But the "patchwork" of NMFS's biological opinion is flawed, and "a violation of the National Environmental Policy Act and of federal endangered species law," the district said in a statement. Westlands is planning to sue, as it did last year over a similar biological opinion targeting the Delta smelt, likely charging the agency with inadequate environmental review, Woolf said. "They were notified by other agencies and by (the court) that they needed to do an environmental review, and they still did not do one," Woolf said. "What this means moving forward is that our devastating economic situation ... will only continue into the future regardless of hydrology." Curtis Creel, water resources manager with Kern County Water Agency, objects to the plan's focus on water flows, saying other factors - like habitat loss, local Delta diversions, and pollutants from power plants and discharged water - play parts in fish survival. Meanwhile, growers already suffering drought conditions will see greater cuts, Creel said. "They're ignoring the fact that this has a huge impact on both agricultural and industrial users in the Bay Area, Central Valley and Southern California," he said. Further cutbacks in wet years would compromise the district's ability to bank water underground, a practice that brings a measure of reliability to the district's supplies, Creel said. "We're disappointed, he said. "We still have a lot of analysis to do, but our first (impression) is that they could have done a better job on the science. I don't have any confidence that the actions they're proposing will have any benefit to the fish, but they will definitely have an adverse impact on agriculture." Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Fri Jun 12 18:57:01 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Fri, 12 Jun 2009 18:57:01 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Sacramento Bee June 12 09 Message-ID: <004d01c9ebca$3e644690$bb2cd3b0$@net> Sacramento meeting to kick off overhaul of federal forests plan Sacramento Bee-6/12/09 By Matt Weiser A major overhaul of the federal government's plans to manage forest lands in California is likely to affect recreation, logging and habitat for a generation to come. Yet the process is freighted with legal conflict and shifting political winds stretching back to the Reagan administration. The forest-plan makeover kicks off at a public meeting in Sacramento July 1, at which the U.S. Forest Service will launch a three-year process to revise the management plans for 14 national forests. All federal timberland from the Sequoia National Forest north to the Oregon border is involved. Four forests in Southern California are not affected because their plans were updated in 2005. "It's just important for people to understand that we're inviting them in at all phases," said Ron Pugh, acting deputy planning director for the Forest Service Pacific Southwest region. The plans are supposed to be updated every 15 years, but many are overdue, Pugh said. Like a city's general plan, they serve as policy guidance for all activities in each forest, from camping and other recreation to habitat restoration, stream management and logging practices. The process begins at the regional level, and then shifts to each forest as details are refined. Changes to the National Forest Management Act in 2008 require the Forest Service to adopt a more collaborative approach to public involvement. But other changes prompted legal action by environmental groups. Greg Loarie, an attorney at the nonprofit law firm Earthjustice, said the Bush administration changed the law in 2001, removing a Reagan-era requirement for each forest plan to be vetted by an environmental impact study. This change, he said, eliminated requirements for each forest to meet clear targets to improve habitat and water quality, for example. A federal lawsuit is under way on this issue, and Loarie said it might not make sense to revise plans while this conflict exists. The July 1 meeting is from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the McClellan Wildland Fire Training Center, 3237 Peacekeeper Way, at the former McClellan Air Force Base. Attendees should register in advance by contacting Martha Maciel at (916) 930-3994 or mmaciel at fs.fed.us Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bgutermuth at mp.usbr.gov Fri Jun 12 19:17:40 2009 From: bgutermuth at mp.usbr.gov (Brandt Gutermuth) Date: Fri, 12 Jun 2009 19:17:40 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Draft Master EIR and Site Specific EA/EIR available for TRRP Projects Message-ID: The Draft Master EIR for Trinity River Restoration Program (TRRP) Channel Rehabilitation and Sediment Management is now available. I hope and believe that this California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) document will facilitate getting TRRP work on the river in a more efficient fashion. Thank you to all who helped put this document together and especially to the North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board, our California Environmental Quality Act lead for the Master EIR. Please check it out at: http://www.trrp.net/implementation/remainingP1.htm Brandt Gutermuth Environmental Specialist Trinity River Restoration Program PO Box 1300 (mailing) 1313 S. Main Street (physical) Weaverville, CA 96093 530.623.1806 (voice) 530.623.5944 (fax) www.trrp.net (website) _______________________________________________________________________________ The official press release follows: The US Bureau of Reclamation and the North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board Announce Availability of Environmental Documents for the Trinity River Restoration Program?s Channel Rehabilitation Activities In collaboration with the Trinity River Restoration Program (TRRP), the Bureau of Reclamation and the California Regional Water Quality Control Board, North Coast Region (Regional Water Board) announce the availability of a Draft Master (Programmatic) Environmental Impact Report (DMEIR) that evaluates proposed Trinity River restoration and sediment management activities at future TRRP channel rehabilitation locations. A part of the document also serves as a combined site-specific Environmental Assessment/Draft Environmental Impact Report (EA/DEIR) that assesses project specific impacts of proposed channel rehabilitation and sediment management activities at remaining Phase 1 river rehabilitation sites. The DMEIR and EA/DEIR, in combination with the 2000 Trinity River Mainstem Fisheries Restoration Program Final Environmental Impact Statement, meet National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) requirements. When certified by the Regional Water Board, the Final MEIR will provide programmatic level review from which site-specific project reviews may tier from. The mechanical channel rehabilitation and sediment management activities evaluated by the DMEIR were identified in the Department of the Interior Secretary?s December 19, 2000, Record of Decision (ROD) as a necessary step towards restoration of the Trinity River?s anadromous fishery. The TRRP?s focus is on increasing habitat for all life stages of wild salmon and steelhead. The activities described in the DMEIR would create additional fish and wildlife habitat at various locations and would increase habitat as riverine processes are restored. Activities include re-contouring bank and floodplain features, developing re-vegetation, and conducting in-river gravel placement and grade control removal. The DMEIR-EA/DEIR also provides additional analysis of on-going activities such as gravel addition during high spring flows and control of fine sediment on an annual basis. Construction activities within the channel and in the river are scheduled to begin in late summer 2009. The documents are available on the Reclamation website at http://www.usbr.gov/mp/nepa/nepa_projdetails.cfm?Project_ID=3138 and on the TRRP website at http://www.trrp.net/implementation/remainingP1.htm. If you encounter problems accessing Reclamation?s documents online, please call 916-978-5100 or e-mail ibr2mprpao at usbr.gov. Hard copies are also available in Weaverville, California, at the TRRP Office, 1313 South Main Street and at the Trinity County Library, 211 N. Main Street. Comments must be received by close of business, Tuesday, July 28, 2009, and sent to Mr. Brandt Gutermuth, Trinity River Restoration Program, P.O. Box 1300, Weaverville, CA 96093 or e-mailed to bgutermuth at mp.usbr.gov. For further information or to request a copy of the DMEIR and/or EA/EIR, please contact Mr. Gutermuth at 530-623-1806. From bgutermuth at mp.usbr.gov Fri Jun 12 19:24:44 2009 From: bgutermuth at mp.usbr.gov (Brandt Gutermuth) Date: Fri, 12 Jun 2009 19:24:44 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] TRRP and Water Board Draft Master EIR and site specific EA/EIR available Message-ID: My apologies for duplicate postings: The Draft Master EIR for Trinity River Restoration Program (TRRP) Channel Rehabilitation and Sediment Management is now available. Accompanying the programmatic EIR is also a site specific EA/EIR for the remaining Phase 1 TRRP activities (including coarse sediment augmentation). I hope and believe that this California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) document will facilitate getting TRRP work on the river in a more efficient fashion. Thank you to all who helped put this document together and especially to the North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board, our CEQA lead for the Master EIR. Please check it out at: http://www.trrp.net/implementation/remainingP1.htm Brandt Gutermuth Environmental Specialist Trinity River Restoration Program PO Box 1300 (mailing) 1313 S. Main Street (physical) Weaverville, CA 96093 530.623.1806 (voice) 530.623.5944 (fax) www.trrp.net (website) _______________________________________________________________________________ The official press release follows: The US Bureau of Reclamation and the North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board Announce Availability of Environmental Documents for the Trinity River Restoration Program?s Channel Rehabilitation Activities In collaboration with the Trinity River Restoration Program (TRRP), the Bureau of Reclamation and the California Regional Water Quality Control Board, North Coast Region (Regional Water Board) announce the availability of a Draft Master (Programmatic) Environmental Impact Report (DMEIR) that evaluates proposed Trinity River restoration and sediment management activities at future TRRP channel rehabilitation locations. A part of the document also serves as a combined site-specific Environmental Assessment/Draft Environmental Impact Report (EA/DEIR) that assesses project specific impacts of proposed channel rehabilitation and sediment management activities at remaining Phase 1 river rehabilitation sites. The DMEIR and EA/DEIR, in combination with the 2000 Trinity River Mainstem Fisheries Restoration Program Final Environmental Impact Statement, meet National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) requirements. When certified by the Regional Water Board, the Final MEIR will provide programmatic level review from which site-specific project reviews may tier from. The mechanical channel rehabilitation and sediment management activities evaluated by the DMEIR were identified in the Department of the Interior Secretary?s December 19, 2000, Record of Decision (ROD) as a necessary step towards restoration of the Trinity River?s anadromous fishery. The TRRP?s focus is on increasing habitat for all life stages of wild salmon and steelhead. The activities described in the DMEIR would create additional fish and wildlife habitat at various locations and would increase habitat as riverine processes are restored. Activities include re-contouring bank and floodplain features, developing re-vegetation, and conducting in-river gravel placement and grade control removal. The DMEIR-EA/DEIR also provides additional analysis of on-going activities such as gravel addition during high spring flows and control of fine sediment on an annual basis. Construction activities within the channel and in the river are scheduled to begin in late summer 2009. The documents are available on the Reclamation website at http://www.usbr.gov/mp/nepa/nepa_projdetails.cfm?Project_ID=3138 and on the TRRP website at http://www.trrp.net/implementation/remainingP1.htm. If you encounter problems accessing Reclamation?s documents online, please call 916-978-5100 or e-mail ibr2mprpao at usbr.gov. Hard copies are also available in Weaverville, California, at the TRRP Office, 1313 South Main Street and at the Trinity County Library, 211 N. Main Street. Comments must be received by close of business, Tuesday, July 28, 2009, and sent to Mr. Brandt Gutermuth, Trinity River Restoration Program, P.O. Box 1300, Weaverville, CA 96093 or e-mailed to bgutermuth at mp.usbr.gov. For further information or to request a copy of the DMEIR and/or EA/EIR, please contact Mr. Gutermuth at 530-623-1806. From caltrout at sbcglobal.net Sun Jun 14 11:50:03 2009 From: caltrout at sbcglobal.net (Thomas Weseloh) Date: Sun, 14 Jun 2009 11:50:03 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Hatchery Fish May Hurt Efforts To Sustain Wild Salmon Runs - Science Daily - June 10, 2009 In-Reply-To: <004d01c9ebca$3e644690$bb2cd3b0$@net> References: <004d01c9ebca$3e644690$bb2cd3b0$@net> Message-ID: <003301c9ed20$edddeb10$c999c130$@net> Hatchery Fish May Hurt Efforts To Sustain Wild Salmon Runs ScienceDaily June 10, 2009 Steelhead trout return to spawn. (Credit: John McMillan) Steelhead trout that are originally bred in hatcheries are so genetically impaired that, even if they survive and reproduce in the wild, their offspring will also be significantly less successful at reproducing, according to a new study published today by researchers from Oregon State University. The poor reproductive fitness - the ability to survive and reproduce - of the wild-born offspring of hatchery fish means that adding hatchery fish to wild populations may ultimately be hurting efforts to sustain those wild runs, scientists said. The study found that a fish born in the wild as the offspring of two hatchery-reared steelhead averaged only 37 percent the reproductive fitness of a fish with two wild parents, and 87 percent the fitness if one parent was wild and one was from a hatchery. Most importantly, these differences were still detectable after a full generation of natural selection in the wild. The effect of hatcheries on reproductive fitness in succeeding generations had been predicted in theory, experts say, but until now had never been demonstrated in actual field experiments. "If anyone ever had any doubts about the genetic differences between hatchery and wild fish, the data are now pretty clear," said Michael Blouin, an OSU professor of zoology. "The effect is so strong that it carries over into the first wild-born generation. Even if fish are born in the wild and survive to reproduce, those adults that had hatchery parents still produce substantially fewer surviving offspring than those with wild parents. That's pretty remarkable." An earlier report, published in 2007 in the journal Science, had already shown that hatchery fish that migrate to the ocean and return to spawn leave far fewer offspring than their wild relatives. The newest findings suggest the problem does not end there, but carries over into their wild-born descendants. The implication, Blouin said, is that hatchery salmonids - many of which do survive to reproduce in the wild- could be gradually reducing the fitness of the wild populations with which they interbreed. Those hatchery fish provide one more hurdle to overcome in the goal of sustaining wild runs, along with problems caused by dams, loss or degradation of habitat, pollution, overfishing and other causes. Aside from weakening the wild gene pool, the release of captive-bred fish also raises the risk of introducing diseases and increasing competition for limited resources, the report noted. This research, which was just published in Biology Letters, was supported by grants from the Bonneville Power Administration and the Oregon Department of Fish & Wildlife. It was based on years of genetic analysis of thousands of steelhead trout in Oregon's Hood River, in field work dating back to 1991. Scientists have been able to genetically "fingerprint" three generations of returning fish to determine who their parents were, and whether or not they were wild or hatchery fish. The underlying problem, experts say, is Darwinian natural selection. Fish that do well in the safe, quiet world of the hatcheries are selected to be different than those that do well in a much more hostile and predatory real-world environment. Using wild fish as brood stock each year should lessen the problem, but it was just that type of hatchery fish that were used in the Hood River study. This demonstrates that even a single generation of hatchery culture can still have strong effects. Although this study was done with steelhead trout, it would be reasonable to extrapolate its results to other salmonids, researchers said. It's less clear what the findings mean to the many other species that are now being bred in captivity in efforts to help wild populations recover, Blouin said, but it's possible that similar effects could be found. Captive breeding is now a cornerstone of recovery efforts by conservation programs for many threatened or endangered species, the researchers noted in their report. Thousands of species may require captive breeding to prevent their extinction in the next 200 years - which makes it particularly important to find out if such programs will ultimately work. This study raises doubts. "The message should be clear," the researchers wrote in their report's conclusion. "Captive breeding for reintroduction or supplementation can have a serious, long-term downside in some taxa, and so should not be considered as a panacea for the recovery of all endangered populations." ### -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 17328 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Mon Jun 15 10:25:19 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Mon, 15 Jun 2009 10:25:19 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] SF Chron June 15 2009 Message-ID: <003701c9edde$421c66d0$c6553470$@net> Western governors dip into growing water demand San Francisco Chronicle-6/15/09 By Mike Stark It's an old quip in the West: Whiskey's for drinkin' and water's for fightin'. Only these days, there's more people with a stake in the fight for water and a dwindling supply. Quenching the growing demand for water in the warming West will require a bigger push for conservation, innovative technology and a rethinking of supply and demand, Western governors and water experts said Sunday. The three-day Western Governors' Association meeting that began Sunday focuses on key issues that affect states throughout the West, including water use, climate change and energy. This year - with several cabinet members from the Obama administration and a record attendance - the political landscape has shifted and there's a renewed urgency for swapping ideas and working together, attendees said. Sunday's main discussion, which included Canadian officials and experts from the Middle East and Australia, focused on managing water amid changing climate conditions. Although many of the controversies in the West center around urbanization, natural resources and energy development, water - and often the lack of it - comes up again and again. "Water is connected to all those things," said panelist Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute, an environmental think tank based in Oakland, Calif. Gleick said there's evidence of intensified water disputes, ecosystem collapse in some places and a population growth that's driving a sometimes-fractured water management system. States can no longer rely on simply building more storage capacity, which can be expensive and "politically challenging," he said. The West needs to consider other supply options such as rainwater, use of treated wastewater and desalination plants, Gleick said. Climate change - which will alter precipitation and the timing of mountain snow melt - also needs to be incorporated into all water management decisions, he said. Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter said the region needs to do more to protect the water that's already available. "Conservation has to become an ethic in the West," he said. Inevitably, though, there will be hard decisions to make about who gets water and who doesn't, said Doug Miell, an Australian water consultant and former leader of an irrigation council during some of the country's worst drought conditions. "The bad news is there's no silver bullet," said Miell, who advocated for more information gathering and sharing among resource managers. Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer, the incoming WGA chairman, agreed that water needs to be better measured, moved more efficiently and conserved on a larger scale. "Those of us who are managing water in the West know how important this is," he said. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Mon Jun 15 14:30:42 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Mon, 15 Jun 2009 14:30:42 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] News Release Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility Message-ID: <006201c9ee00$8a2a79e0$9e7f6da0$@net> Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility News Release (www.peer.org) For Immediate Release: June 15, 2009 Contact: Carol Goldberg (202) 265-7337 POLITICAL MANIPULATION OF SCIENCE RIFE DURING NOMINEE'S TENURE - Fish & Wildlife Service Southeast Region Employees Saw Interference and Reprisal Washington, DC - President Obama's nominee to lead the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service did not protect science from political interference or scientists from retaliation, according to a survey of his employees conducted by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). Last week, the White House announced its intent to nominate Sam Hamilton to head the Fish & Wildlife Service (FWS), which has been the focus of intense criticism for allowing political officials to improperly alter scientific findings. For the past dozen years, Sam Hamilton has overseen the 10-state FWS Southeastern Region of the Fish & Wildlife Service, home to endangered species ranging from the American crocodile to the Florida panther. In 2005, PEER surveyed more than 1,400 FWS biologists, ecologists and botanists working on Endangered Species Act and other wildlife protection programs across the country. Those survey results for scientists working within Hamilton's region found that - Nearly half (49%) of FWS respondents cited cases where "commercial interests have inappropriately induced the reversal or withdrawal of scientific conclusions or decisions through political intervention"; A similar percentage (46%) said they had been "directed, for non-scientific reasons, to refrain from making . . . findings that are protective of species"; and More than a third (36%) feared "retaliation" for merely expressing "concerns about the biological needs of species and habitats" and a similar number felt they were "not allowed to do my job as a scientist". "Where was Sam Hamilton when all this was going on?" asked PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch noting that Hamilton did not inquire or request any investigation into widespread complaints by his staff. "Why would anyone expect Mr. Hamilton to protect scientists when he previously has not?" A prime example illustrating this concern is the manipulation of science by Hamilton's leadership team to green-light sprawl in shrinking panther habitat. In 2005, the FWS Director under Bush, Steve Williams, rebuked Hamilton's region for making false assumptions designed to inflate panther numbers and viability, in response to a formal complaint by PEER and an FWS panther biologist. Hamilton took no disciplinary action against any of his managers and several of the scientific deficiencies persist today. The White House announcement cited Hamilton's record for "delivering significant wildlife conservation" but his employees reflect a less positive view: More than two thirds (68%) did not feel the region was "acting effectively to maintain or enhance species and their habitats, so as to avoid possible listings under the Endangered Species Act" and Less than one in four (24%) believed that Hamilton would "stand up for scientific staff or supervisors who take controversial stands". One FWS supervisor succinctly summed up what Hamilton's operation needs this way: "More backbone, less dog-and-pony show." In the PEER national survey, Hamilton's region ranked better than some and worse than others on key issues. More than one in four (29%) of all FWS ecological scientists participated in the survey. "Hamilton's record as a senior official does not offer much to brag on," Ruch added. "We hope the Senate, particularly its Democratic members, look carefully into this record and interview employees." Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Wed Jun 17 14:07:44 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Wed, 17 Jun 2009 14:07:44 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] PBS Program Sacramento River Message-ID: <002301c9ef8f$a9da5630$fd8f0290$@net> On Tue, 6/16/09, Robert Dixon wrote: From: Robert Dixon Subject: Sacramento: River of Life - PBS Broadcast To: "Byron Leydecker" Date: Tuesday, June 16, 2009, 10:33 AM Byron, this was an interesting program. I'm sure it will repeat on another PBS station. http://www.kqed.org/tv/programs/index.jsp?pgmid=14572 (You may have to copy and paste this link) Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From Seth.Naman at noaa.gov Mon Jun 15 13:01:14 2009 From: Seth.Naman at noaa.gov (Seth Naman) Date: Mon, 15 Jun 2009 13:01:14 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Hatchery Fish May Hurt Efforts To Sustain Wild Salmon Runs - Science Daily - June 10, 2009 In-Reply-To: <003301c9ed20$edddeb10$c999c130$@net> References: <004d01c9ebca$3e644690$bb2cd3b0$@net> <003301c9ed20$edddeb10$c999c130$@net> Message-ID: <4A36A88A.8050704@noaa.gov> The paper is attached if you don't already have it. Thomas Weseloh wrote: > > > Hatchery Fish May Hurt Efforts To Sustain Wild Salmon Runs > > */ScienceDaily /* > > June 10, 2009 > > ** > /*Steelhead > trout return to spawn.*//* (Credit: John McMillan)*/** > > Steelhead trout that are originally bred in hatcheries are so > genetically impaired that, even if they survive and reproduce in the > wild, their offspring will also be significantly less successful at > reproducing, according to a new study published today by researchers > from Oregon State University. > > The poor reproductive fitness - the ability to survive and reproduce - > of the wild-born offspring of hatchery fish means that adding hatchery > fish to wild populations may ultimately be hurting efforts to sustain > those wild runs, scientists said. > > The study found that a fish born in the wild as the offspring of two > hatchery-reared steelhead averaged only 37 percent the reproductive > fitness of a fish with two wild parents, and 87 percent the fitness if > one parent was wild and one was from a hatchery. Most importantly, > these differences were still detectable after a full generation of > natural selection in the wild. > > The effect of hatcheries on reproductive fitness in succeeding > generations had been predicted in theory, experts say, but until now > had never been demonstrated in actual field experiments. > > "If anyone ever had any doubts about the genetic differences between > hatchery and wild fish, the data are now pretty clear," said Michael > Blouin, an OSU professor of zoology. "The effect is so strong that it > carries over into the first wild-born generation. Even if fish are > born in the wild and survive to reproduce, those adults that had > hatchery parents still produce substantially fewer surviving offspring > than those with wild parents. That's pretty remarkable." > > An earlier report, published in 2007 in the journal Science, had > already shown that hatchery fish that migrate to the ocean and return > to spawn leave far fewer offspring than their wild relatives. The > newest findings suggest the problem does not end there, but carries > over into their wild-born descendants. > > The implication, Blouin said, is that hatchery salmonids - many of > which do survive to reproduce in the wild- could be gradually reducing > the fitness of the wild populations with which they interbreed. Those > hatchery fish provide one more hurdle to overcome in the goal of > sustaining wild runs, along with problems caused by dams, loss or > degradation of habitat, pollution, overfishing and other causes. > > Aside from weakening the wild gene pool, the release of captive-bred > fish also raises the risk of introducing diseases and increasing > competition for limited resources, the report noted. > > This research, which was just published in Biology Letters, was > supported by grants from the Bonneville Power Administration and the > Oregon Department of Fish & Wildlife. It was based on years of genetic > analysis of thousands of steelhead trout in Oregon's Hood River, in > field work dating back to 1991. Scientists have been able to > genetically "fingerprint" three generations of returning fish to > determine who their parents were, and whether or not they were wild or > hatchery fish. > > The underlying problem, experts say, is Darwinian natural selection. > > Fish that do well in the safe, quiet world of the hatcheries are > selected to be different than those that do well in a much more > hostile and predatory real-world environment. Using wild fish as brood > stock each year should lessen the problem, but it was just that type > of hatchery fish that were used in the Hood River study. This > demonstrates that even a single generation of hatchery culture can > still have strong effects. > > Although this study was done with steelhead trout, it would be > reasonable to extrapolate its results to other salmonids, researchers > said. It's less clear what the findings mean to the many other species > that are now being bred in captivity in efforts to help wild > populations recover, Blouin said, but it's possible that similar > effects could be found. > > Captive breeding is now a cornerstone of recovery efforts by > conservation programs for many threatened or endangered species, the > researchers noted in their report. Thousands of species may require > captive breeding to prevent their extinction in the next 200 years - > which makes it particularly important to find out if such programs > will ultimately work. This study raises doubts. > > "The message should be clear," the researchers wrote in their report's > conclusion. "Captive breeding for reintroduction or supplementation > can have a serious, long-term downside in some taxa, and so should not > be considered as a panacea for the recovery of all endangered > populations." > > *###* > > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > _______________________________________________ > env-trinity mailing list > env-trinity at velocipede.dcn.davis.ca.us > http://www2.dcn.org/mailman/listinfo/env-trinity > -- Seth Naman Fisheries Biologist NOAA Fisheries Southwest Region 1655 Heindon Rd. Arcata, CA 95521 707-825-5180 fax: 707-825-4840 -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: arakai et al 2009.pdf Type: application/pdf Size: 223238 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Wed Jun 17 14:09:48 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Wed, 17 Jun 2009 14:09:48 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Klamath Riverkeeper News Message-ID: <002801c9ef8f$f2d6e060$d884a120$@net> Read a webpage version of Klamath River eNews Webpage newsletter You're receiving this email because of your relationship with Klamath Riverkeeper. You may unsubscribe if you no longer wish to receive our emails. Klamath Riverkeeper eNews June 5th, 2009 Headlines & Action Alerts Keep up the fight on 670 Klamath Calendar Suction mining bill moves forward Activists drop banners over river More Omaha coverage Tribes & Irrigators settle Savage Rapids dam goes down Pacificorp delays dam removal Oregon dam bill moves ahead Open houses on KNF "motorized travel" Keep up the fight for SB 670 & limits on suction dredging Suction Dredge Miner on the Klamath Salmon River Let California's State Assembly know that it's time to stop suction mining until appropriate regulations are developed. Send a one-click letter on our website! Stand up for salmon in the White House! SalmonAid Festival Take 10 seconds to send an email through the SalmonAid Festival website asking Pres. Obama and NOAA Chief Jane Lubchenco to restore West Coast salmon. You can also support KRK and the SalmonAid Festival by joining our Facebook cause , and of course, rockin' out with us at Oakland's Jack London Square June 20-21 . Klamath Calendar Clean water 6/20-6/21 SalmonAid Festival in Oakland, CA June-July KRK Upriver|Downriver Outings program continues 6/27 Tree of Heaven Rafting 7/11 Paddle Upper Klamath Lake 7/25 Kayak Lake Ewauna Two Step rapid on the Mid-Klamath River by ScottHardingPhoto.com Two Step Rapid on the Mid-Klamath River. Join us for our final Spring Outings : Klamath River rafting June 27, Upper Klamath Lake kayak July 11, and Lake Ewauna kayak July 25. Greetings! Thanks to over 300 of your letters, California SB 670 shot through the Senate last week and is on to the Assembly. Your help is needed to urge Assembly members to support the bill with equal speed and enthusiasm - please take 10 seconds to send a new one-click letter supporting limits on harmful suction dredge mining. I'm also inviting all you Bay Areans to volunteer at the 2009 SalmonAid Festival in Oakland's Jack London Square June 20-21st. Rumor has it a fun-filled four-hour shift at this festival of fish, food, and music could result in free beer for you! Send me an email if you can help out... Keep up the good work everyone! Malena Marvin Outreach and Science Director Klamath Riverkeeper Bill limiting suction mining breezes through CA Assembly Showing its concern for the state's ailing fisheries, the California Senate passed SB 670 with a 31-8 bipartisan vote. Senator Patricia Wiggins (D-Santa Rosa) introduced the bill that places a moratorium on recreational suction dredge mining until a scientific review of the mining practice is completed and new rules protecting fisheries, water quality and public health are in effect. Mt. Shasta Daily News - 6/3/09 | Indymedia - 5/26/09 | Eureka Times-Standard - 5/27/09 Sierra Fund on suction mining & mercury Grass Valley Union - 5/30/09 Hobby miner blames "enviros and Indians" need for control Grass Valley Union - 5/27/09 Klamath activists grab Obama administration's eye Klamath Justice Coalition activists took matters into their own hands when they learned that Obama administration officials and a host of other negotiators would be touring the river, dropping banners off a local bridge near the mouth of the Klamath to send their message to the settlement group. The banners demanded dam removal. Indymedia - 5/20/09 Indian Country covers Un-Dam the Klamath in Omaha For the third year, the tribes sent representatives to Omaha. Last year, the tribes aimed at disrupting the meeting. They clogged question-and-answer lines for the "Oracle of Omaha." They dropped banners in the massive auditorium. And the convention center's security ejected more than half of the 24 representatives. This year, the tribes came with a different message: "The salmon isn't in the smokehouse, yet." ..."We want to let the company know that the dams are destroying our culture, they are destroying our people, destroying our watershed," said Georgiana Myers, with the Klamath Riverkeeper organization. Indian Country - 5/30/09 Tribes and irrigators settle Upper Klamath water rights issue One of the most contested issues between irrigators and American Indian tribes in the Upper Klamath Basin has effectively been resolved, potentially simplifying talks on a much larger dam removal and restoration deal. On Thursday, Klamath water users and the Klamath Tribes announced a settlement of water rights claims that stretch back nearly 30 years. Eureka Times-Standard - 5/22/09 | Associated Press - 5/22/09 Demolition of Rogue's Savage Rapids Dam begins Construction crews this week are literally doing to Savage Rapids Dam what wild salmon advocates have been doing figuratively for decades - punching holes in the Rogue River's biggest fish-killer.Workers unceremoniously began the demolition of the 88-year-old dam Monday, jackhammering away part of one of the dam's eight concrete bays and trucking away the debris. Medford Mail Tribune - 6/03/09 Breaching Northwest dams: Push comes to shove Crosscut - 5/29/09 Pacificorp delays Condit Dam removal PacifiCorp is delaying plans to remove Condit Dam on southwest Washington's White Salmon River until next year. The utility owns and operates the dam built in 1913 about three miles upstream of the confluence of the White Salmon and Columbia rivers. It wants to remove it rather than pay for expensive upgrades needed. Seattle Times - 5/29/09 House panel moves dam removal bill forward A House committee on Thursday moved forward a bill that sets in motion a plan to remove four Klamath River dams. Senate Bill 76 authorizes the dams' owner, PacifiCorp, to raise rates to acquire funds to pay for removing the structures. Under the bill, the monthly rate for an average residential customer is expected to increase $1.50 to $1.80. Eastern Oregonian - 5/30/09 Open houses scheduled for KNF motorized travel DEIS The Klamath National Forest will release a Motorized Travel Management Draft Environmental Impact Statement on June 5, beginning a 45-day comment period for the KNF proposal to designate roads, trails and areas for motorized use. The public may review maps and discuss the alternatives for motorized travel with Forest resource specialists at open houses around the basin... Mt. Shasta Herald and News - 6/3/09 http://origin.ih.constantcontact.com/fs029/1102224435880/img/3.jpg?a=1102602 802943 Klamath Riverkeeper restores water quality in the Klamath watershed, bringing vitality and abundance back to the river and its people. Sign up for Klamath Riverkeeper eNews Join Our Mailing List Forward email Safe Unsubscribe This email was sent to bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org by malena at klamathriver.org. Update Profile/Email Address | Instant removal with SafeUnsubscribe T | Privacy Policy . Email Marketing by http://img.constantcontact.com/letters/images/cc-logo-color-sm.gif Klamath Riverkeeper | PO Box 751 | Somes Bar | CA | 95568 Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 37048 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image006.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 34393 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image009.gif Type: image/gif Size: 1066 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image010.gif Type: image/gif Size: 218 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image011.gif Type: image/gif Size: 1852 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image012.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 5195 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image013.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 2840 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image014.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 1928 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Thu Jun 18 10:47:04 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Thu, 18 Jun 2009 10:47:04 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] FW: Stop...allow environmental regulations Message-ID: <002f01c9f03c$cb295f40$617c1dc0$@net> Please DO act as suggested by Friends of the River. It's very easy - see "Take Action" below. Byron From: Friends of the River [mailto:info at friendsoftheriver.org] Sent: Thursday, June 18, 2009 10:00 AM To: bwl3 at comcast.net Subject: Stop...allow enviromental regulations Action Alert Header email2 Tell A Friend Emails from FOR supporters encouraged Senators to pass SB 670. Now the Assembly members will decide whether also move this bill closer to becoming law. Now is an opportunity for you to speak out - send an email to your Assembly member today. Take Action Red White Button "Stop...we need regulations" to safeguard water quality Take Action Today! Your Assembly member will vote on a key bill within days. The California State Assembly will soon vote on a bill that will protect California rivers from the ravages of suction dredge mining. Write a letter TODAY urging your State Assembly member to support SB 670 (Wiggins), which will place a moratorium on suction dredge gold mining in rivers throughout California, until the California Department of Fish and Game develops and implements regulations to protect water quality and river habitat and endangered salmon, frogs, and other species. Dredge Mining Home | Tell A Friend | Unsubscribe Friends Of The River, 1418 20th St., Suite 100, Sacramento CA 95811 888.464.2477 Powered by Convio -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Thu Jun 18 14:11:04 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Thu, 18 Jun 2009 14:11:04 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] NMFS's Biological Opinion Message-ID: <006701c9f059$4b22d7a0$e16886e0$@net> Tightening the tap Feds order state to cut water project flows By Dan Bacher More stories by this author... cid:9712FF98-4E42-4618-A3D7-BE93392C9492 at local Killer whales once roamed the West Coast from Puget Sound to California by the thousands. Today, there are only 85 orcas left in the region. PHOTO COURTESY OFNATIONAL MARINE FISHERIES SERVICE Dan Bacher is the editor of the Elk Grove-based Fish Sniffer magazine and a longtime advocate for fishery restoration in California and the West. In a court-ordered plan released on June 4, scientists from the National Marine Fisheries Service concluded that current water-pumping operations of the federal Central Valley Project and the California State Water Project should be changed to ensure survival of four imperiled fish species and one orca population. The biological opinion lists a number of steps the state and federal governments must take to protect winter- and spring-run chinook salmon, Central Valley steelhead, southern green sturgeon and southern resident killer whales from going over the abyss of extinction. The whales, now numbering only 85 individuals along the coast from Puget Sound to California, rely on Sacramento River salmon for food. Changing water operations will impact an estimated 5 to 7 percent of the water exported annually to San Joaquin Valley water contractors and Southern California by the federal and state pumps. That 330,000 acre feet per year, according to Maria Rea, the NMFS area supervisor. The opinion also calls for pilot passage programs at Folsom, Nimbus and Shasta dams to reintroduce salmon and steelhead to historic cold-water habitat above the dams. We want to get winter-run chinook back to habitat in the McCloud River and steelhead back to habitat in the upper American River, said Rea. Other key measures of the plan include: Requiring more cold water held behind Shasta Dam for release during salmon migration and spawning seasons. Reducing the amount of time the Red Bluff Diversion Dam gates are closed. Requiring better flows and colder water to enhance salmon spawning and habitat in the American and Stanislaus rivers. Reducing pumping when juvenile salmon are migrating through the Delta. The biological opinion doesn't take a position pro or con regarding the proposed peripheral canal, but cautions that careful planning must be conducted to avoid jeopardy to endangered species. The scientists also said the opinion would have to be reinitiated if the canal is authorized for construction. Sarah Woolf, spokesperson for the Westlands Water District, called the opinion a death sentence for large parts of California's economy. She said the district intends to file a lawsuit to have this opinion set aside and compel the National Marine Fisheries Service to go back and perform the careful analysis it should have done to assess the potential harm this plan could do to public health and safety, communities and the environment. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger also attacked the plan for its alleged economic impacts. This federal biological opinion puts fish above the needs of millions of Californians and the health and security of the world's eighth largest economy, claimed Schwarzenegger. The piling on of one federal court decision after another in a species-by-species approach is killing our economy and undermining the integrity of the Endangered Species Act. In contrast to Schwarzenegger's attack on the peer-reviewed opinion, U.S. Reps. George Miller, Mike Thompson and Doris Matsui applauded the decision. With this announcement, the Obama administration has set a science-based course toward recovering the populations of wild salmon and steelhead that are so critical to California's economy and environment, said Miller. Representatives of fishing organizations and California American Indian tribes reacted to the plans release with mixed assessments, ranging from outright praise to skepticism. These changes are exactly what we have been looking for, said Dick Pool, administrator of Water for Fish. We have been operating on an environmental disaster course for salmon, and these actions are the beginning of the turnaround. The biological opinion is a long overdue but welcome initial step in protecting species hovering on the brink of extinction, stated Bill Jennings, executive director of the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance. However, it is not a recovery plan that will restore seriously degraded fisheries; much more will be required. Gary Mulcahy, governmental liaison for the Winnemem Wintu tribe, was less optimistic. Though this biological opinion may set out new rules and guidelines that seek to protect our water and fisheries, I truly expect the big agribusiness and water buffaloes to use their power to find some way around it, and complete the extinction they so readily pursue in the name of progress, commerce and economic growth, he concluded. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 38279 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Fri Jun 19 14:14:52 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Fri, 19 Jun 2009 14:14:52 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Fresno Bee June 18 2009 Message-ID: <002c01c9f122$fd5862e0$f80928a0$@net> Valley lawmakers narrowly lose House vote on irrigation water Fresno Bee - published online 6/18/09 By Michael Doyle / Bee Washington Bureau reporter WASHINGTON - Central Valley lawmakers this week briefly summoned House attention to the region's water shortages, challenging the environmental rules that have curtailed irrigation deliveries. Legislatively, the Valley lawmakers failed. By a 208-218 vote Thursday afternoon, the House rejected an amendment by Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Visalia, that would have blocked a federal decision steering more irrigation water into fish habitat protection. Still, Nunes and his allies insist they put a useful spotlight on a region they believe has been ignored too long. "It's OK to value fish, that's OK," Nunes said during House debate, "but understand you're starving families while you value fish." The vote Thursday was closer than some expected, with 37 Democrats joining most Republicans in supporting Nunes. Democratic Reps. Jim Costa of Fresno and Dennis Cardoza of Merced voted for the amendment, with Cardoza using his House Rules Committee position to ensure the amendment got a vote on the floor. The amendment offered to a $65 billion spending bill would have prohibited federal funds from paying for a set of rules issued June 4 called a "biological opinion." The National Marine Fisheries Service rules in question cut Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta water diversions by up to 7% to protect endangered Chinook salmon and steelhead. The federal agency ordered the reduction in pumping, which amounts to about 330,000 acre-feet a year, after concluding that current operations were killing too many fish. The agency also directed that more water be stored behind Shasta Dam, among other changes. The agency was compelled to complete its 844-page biological opinion by U.S. District Judge Oliver W. Wanger, who was appointed to the bench by former President George H.W. Bush. Wanger determined last year that the agency's previous plan failed to adequately protect fish. "I appreciate the frustration of my friends who live in the Valley, who are undergoing very serious economic times," said Rep. George Miller, D-Martinez, "but to throw out this biological opinion makes nothing better.' Rod McInnis, Southwest regional director of the fisheries service, added when the biological opinion was issued that "what is at stake here is not just the survival of species but the health of entire ecosystems and the economies that depend on them." The California water amendment, debated for about 16 minutes on Wednesday and rejected on Thursday, will come back again. Nunes said he will keep offering similar amendments on the appropriations bills needed to fund the federal government in Fiscal 2010. "This isn't a solution to the problem," Nunes said, "but it's all we can do." The Nunes amendment was one of several dozen offered to the appropriations bill funding the commerce and justice departments and other agencies. The Senate and House will still have to reconcile differing versions of the bill. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Mon Jun 22 12:21:30 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Mon, 22 Jun 2009 12:21:30 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Oakland Tribune June 21 2009 SalmonAid Festival Message-ID: <003201c9f36e$a6be47d0$f43ad770$@net> SalmonAid organizes to fight threat of extinction Oakland Tribune-6/21/09 By Sean Maher The plight of declining salmon populations and the commercial fishers they support up and down the West Coast drew hundreds of people to Jack London Square on Saturday and Sunday for the second annual SalmonAid Festival, organizers said. The festival featured food, music and a message of conservation. Some salmon populations around the Central Valley are down 90 percent over the past eight years, SalmonAid Foundation President Jonathan Rosenfield said. The issues facing wild salmon throughout California and as far north as Alaska involve many local interests represented by more than 2,000 small nonprofit organizations. The foundation first put together the event last year to unite their voices and help consumers, politicians and the media understand the enormity of the issue, Rosenfield said. "One of the major issues we're asking the state and federal governments to tackle is water management in the state of California," Rosenfield said. "We have huge amounts of water being diverted from the greater Bay Area into the Central Valley for big agricultural corporations to grow crops out there that don't make sense. "For example, you're seeing a lot of water used to grow grapes, which need a constant water supply to grow," he said. "We don't need to be growing grapes in the desert during a drought." Salmon don't need a lot of tender care to survive, Rosenfield said - they are "a hearty, tenacious, adaptable species." They just need access to their spawning grounds and relatively clean water in the rivers they travel to get there. But as rivers dry up or are blocked by dams, or are even pushed into reversed flows by powerful pumps, that access gets cut off, and generations fail to reproduce. "It's hard to predict extinctions to some degree, or sometimes to know if it's not already too late to stop them from happening," Rosenfield said. "But as a Ph.D. conservation biologist, I think that unless we seriously turn things around in the next four or five years, we'll begin to see extinctions occur on a grand scale, across an entire family of species. We're witnessing an ecosystem in collapse." Meanwhile, the rise in farmed salmon has begun to threaten natural food supplies and an industry and tradition of outdoor, open-seas fishing, said restaurant owner Kenny Belov of the nonprofit Fish or Cut Bait. The nonprofit began with four partner restaurants last year and has expanded to 26, including Baja Taqueria in Piedmont. All the eateries have committed to buying only wild salmon, he said. "Salmon are carnivorous fish, so to feed them in farms, we're going out into the ocean and pulling out millions of anchovies, herring and smelt to feed the salmon. These are fish we could be using to feed the world - they're very healthy for you," Belov said. "But instead we're using them to feed farmed salmon, which either escape or end up on people's plates full of chemicals and hormones that aren't healthy." Wild salmon is much more expensive than farmed salmon, and Belov conceded that may make choosing wild salmon a harder choice for restaurants and consumers in a troubled economy. As a partial solution he suggested buying other locally caught wild fish as they come in season, such as halibut and albacore tuna. A full list of sustainable fish and the calendar for their seasons is available online at www.focb.org. The SalmonAid Foundation's Web site is www.salmonaid.org Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Wed Jun 24 09:42:01 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Wed, 24 Jun 2009 09:42:01 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Employment figures for Fresno Co, and other rural counties in Calif. Message-ID: <001b01c9f4ea$b3446b60$19cd4220$@net> From: Felix Smith Date: June 23, 2009 6:52:24 PM PDT Here are some interesting facts. In 1978 the tax payer subsidy to the Federal San Luis Unit of the CVP was estimated at $770 million or about $1,540.00 per acre (USBR figures. ) Today that values would be about $5,227 00 per acre using the Cost of Living Calculator for 2007. Another interesting fact is that people in Madera, Merced and Fresno Counties received about $132 million in farm subsidies in 2006. People in Trinity County received $585.00 (USDA Environmental Working Group Website Feb 16, 2009.) Who is getting screwed here? Of course it is the federal taxpayer and the public trust. Felix From: summerhillfarmpv at aol.com Date: June 23, 2009 6:10:24 PM PDT This covers some info taken from the link below on unemployment figures in the S.J. valley and around California. Found it interesting to counter some of Nunes/Costa/Cardoza/Radanovich and company on the regulatory drought question. This is the "people vs. fish" argument now going on. Perhaps some can share with media. Mark Rockwell ESC California' NCCFFF If you take the numbers as given for all counties in California for 2009 (May), and then look at the 9 previous years as well it is quite revealing. * For Mendota (the town given as the worst, and where the governor has been twice to rile against the ESA and regulation caused unemployment) it shows 38.8% unemployment for May 2009. * For Mendota the 9 year previous average is 28.1%. Mendota always leads Fresno County in unemployment for the past 10 years (all I looked at). * Fresno county, Nunes country (includes Mendota) shows a 15.4% unemployment for May 2009, with a 9 year average of 10.5%. * Of the 18 most agriculture driven counties in California the average unemployment is 15.6% for May 2009. Seven other counties have worse unemployment than Fresno, with the highest in Imperial County in the So. Calif. desert at 26.8%. * Six of the seven with bigger unemployment are not affected by the CVP water cutbacks, and four have 100% water deliveries from the CVP (above Delta ag). * Lastly, when looking at the 2008 unemployment figures and averages, Fresno county has the seventh highest increase in unemployment (2008 to May 2009), meaning six other counties have worse unemployment change over last year than Fresno. Six of these are outside the CVP area for water delivery. I think it is tough to say that it is water that is causing all the problem. It appears to be a drought that is affecting all of the rural counties, along with the recession. As Lester Snow, DWR Director said in D.C. a month or so ago, "if we had no court ordered cut back, S.J. Ag would still only receive 5% more water. It is a drought caused problem." http://valleyecon.blogspot.com/2009/03/sacramento-bee-owes-delta-advocates.h tml Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From damon_goodman at fws.gov Wed Jun 24 13:13:32 2009 From: damon_goodman at fws.gov (damon_goodman at fws.gov) Date: Wed, 24 Jun 2009 13:13:32 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Pacific Lamprey Conservation Initiative Regional Meetings Message-ID: The Pacific Lamprey Conservation Initiative is an effort coordinated by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (Service) to facilitate communication and coordination relative to the conservation of Pacific lamprey throughout their range. The goal of the initiative is to develop a Pacific Lamprey Conservation Plan (Plan) that will lead to restored Pacific lamprey populations and improvement of their habitat. In 2009, the Conservation Initiative Team will be hosting a set of regional work sessions to develop regional components of the Plan. The Service will be hosting regional meetings to cover California, Idaho, Oregon, Washington, and Alaska. The purpose of these meetings is to gather information on distribution, abundance, ongoing research, and threats specific to these regions. We are planning to hold two regional meetings for California, including the Oregon component of the Klamath Basin. One meeting will be held in Arcata, CA, and will cover the coastal drainages from Cape Mendocino to the Oregon Border and the entire Klamath Basin. The second meeting will be held in Sacramento, CA and will cover from Cape Mendocino south including the Sacramento and San Joaquin river basins. I am sending out this email to evaluate the level of interest in each of these meetings and will determine the venue and duration of each meeting. Please follow the links below to show your interest in participating in each of the meetings. Exact locations and dates for the meeting will be sent in the near future. Sacramento, CA: http://doodle.com/6qqqwkkccsmsttks Arcata, CA: http://doodle.com/iz7na5hpvepyd3mk Thank you for your help and please let me know if you have any questions and feel free to forward this email to any others who may be interested in these meetings. See the USFWS Pacific Lamprey Conservation Initiative website for more information at: http://www.fws.gov/pacific/fisheries/sp_habcon/lamprey/ Damon Goodman Fish Biologist Arcata Fish and Wildlife Service 1655 Heindon Road Arcata, CA 95521 email: damon_goodman at fws.gov phone: (707) 825-5155 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Wed Jun 24 22:06:16 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Wed, 24 Jun 2009 22:06:16 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] People AND Fish Message-ID: <000001c9f552$ac5fe960$051fbc20$@net> For Immediate Release From: Dr. C. Mark Rockwell, D.C. 19737 Wildwood West Drive Penn Valley, CA 95946-9547 530 432 9198 California State Representative for the Endangered Species Coalition Drought and the San Joaquin Valley Unemployment problem Is it really "fish vs. people" as the Governor and Representative Nunes say? To listen to all the rhetoric these days you'd think that people are suffering only because a federal judge and the federal wildlife agencies decided to protect fish. Representative Nunes and our Governor are calling it a regulatory drought and families are suffering as a result. Articles in the L.A. Times and many other papers in California have picked up the story without really checking on data available from the state Employment Development Department records. Here is a link that shows the data pretty clearly: http://www.labormarketinfo.edd.ca.gov/?pageid=133 However, the raw data doesn't tell the story unless you dig into it. So, here are some of the facts from the data that brings some clarity to the issue. Make no mistake; unemployment is a problem in Mendota and Fresno County. However, it is a problem in almost all of California's agricultural counties, and Fresno is by far not the worst. If you take the numbers as given for all counties in California for May 2009, and then look at the 9 previous years as well it is quite revealing. * For Mendota (the town given as the worst and where the governor has visited twice to rile against the Endangered Species Act and his claim of regulation caused unemployment) it shows 38.8% unemployment for May 2009. * For Mendota, the 9 year previous average is 28.1%. Mendota has led Fresno County in unemployment for the past 10 years (all I reviewed). * Fresno County, (Rep. Nunes country, including Mendota) shows 15.4% unemployment for May 2009, with a 9 year average of 10.5%. * Of the 18 most agriculture dependent counties in California the average unemployment rate is 15.6% for May 2009. Seven other counties have worse unemployment than Fresno (Imperial, Sutter, Alpine, Colusa, Merced, Yuba and Stanislaus), with the highest in Imperial County in the Southern California desert at 26.8%. * Six of the seven with greater unemployment than Fresno are not heavily affected by the Central Valley Project water cutbacks, and many are able to compensate via groundwater and use cutbacks. * Lastly, when looking at the 2008 unemployment figures and averages, Fresno county has the eighth highest increase in unemployment (2008 to May 2009), meaning seven other counties have a greater increase in unemployment over the last year than Fresno ( Imperial, Colusa, Merced, Sutter, Yuba, Stanislaus, Tulare). Six of these have limited impact from Central Valley Project reductions or are not affected at all by them. What this data clearly shows is that unemployment is chronic in Mendota (28.1% average), worsened by the drought, as with all other agriculture dependent counties The owners of the big farms there are certainly not sharing their profits well with the labor community that serves them. There is much to be done to improve their plight, and it should not include disaster relief from the tax payers (as requested by the Governor and our Senators). DWR director Lester Snow testified before Congress nearly two months ago essentially saying if there was no court order to protect fish, there would only be a 5% increase in CVP water to the San Joaquin Valley. This shortage is drought caused, not regulation caused. An interesting side note regarding subsidies to these farms. In 1978 the taxpayer subsidy to the Federal San Luis Unit of the CVP (which supplies water to the west side San Joaquin) was estimated at $770 million or about $1,540.00 per acre (United States Bureau of Reclamation figures). Today that value would be about $5,227.00 per acre using the Cost of Living Calculator for 2007. Another interesting fact is that people in Madera, Merced and Fresno Counties received about $132 million in farm subsidies in 2006. People in Trinity County, where the water for the Western San Joaquin Valley comes from, received $585.00 ( United States Department of Agriculture figures on the Environmental Working Group's Website Feb 16, 2009). Who really gets left holding the proverbial bag? Of course it is the federal taxpayer and the public trust. It is time agri-business took more responsibility for the problem and started to work for a solution, not for the drought but to help the farm workers they sometimes employ. This isn't "fish vs. people", it is "fish and people." Both are suffering in this is the third consecutive low water year.# Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Thu Jun 25 11:47:19 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Thu, 25 Jun 2009 11:47:19 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] FW: New Study: Hatchery fish may hurt efforts to sustain wild salmon runs Message-ID: <002101c9f5c5$5f597370$1e0c5a50$@net> From: Richard Kennon [mailto:tightlines at centurytel.net] Sent: Thursday, June 25, 2009 11:16 AM Subject: New Study: Hatchery fish may hurt efforts to sustain wild salmon runs New Study: Hatchery fish may hurt efforts to sustain wild salmon runs Posted: Tuesday, Jun 23rd, 2009 By David Stauth Steelhead trout that are originally bred in hatcheries are so genetically impaired that, even if they survive and reproduce in the wild, their offspring will also be significantly less successful at reproducing, according to a new study published today by researchers from Oregon State University. The poor reproductive fitness - the ability to survive and reproduce - of the wild-born offspring of hatchery fish means that adding hatchery fish to wild populations may ultimately be hurting efforts to sustain those wild runs, scientists said. The study found that a fish born in the wild as the offspring of two hatchery-reared steelhead averaged only 37 percent the reproductive fitness of a fish with two wild parents and 87 percent the fitness if one parent was wild and one was from a hatchery. Most importantly, these differences were still detectable after a full generation of natural selection in the wild. The effect of hatcheries on reproductive fitness in succeeding generations had been predicted in theory, experts say, but until now had never been demonstrated in actual field experiments. "If anyone ever had any doubts about the genetic differences between hatchery and wild fish, the data are now pretty clear," said Michael Blouin, an OSU professor of zoology. "The effect is so strong that it carries over into the first wild-born generation. Even if fish are born in the wild and survive to reproduce, those adults that had hatchery parents still produce substantially fewer surviving offspring than those with wild parents. That's pretty remarkable." An earlier report, published in 2007 in the journal Science, had already shown that hatchery fish that migrate to the ocean and return to spawn leave far fewer offspring than their wild relatives do. The newest findings suggest the problem does not end there, but carries over into their wild-born descendants. The implication, Blouin said, is that hatchery salmonids - many of which do survive to reproduce in the wild- could be gradually reducing the fitness of the wild populations with which they interbreed. Those hatchery fish provide one more hurdle to overcome in the goal of sustaining wild runs, along with problems caused by dams, loss or degradation of habitat, pollution, over fishing and other causes. Aside from weakening the wild gene pool, the release of captive-bred fish also raises the risk of introducing diseases and increasing competition for limited resources, the report noted. This research, which was just published in Biology Letters, was supported by grants from the Bonneville Power Administration and the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. It was based on years of genetic analysis of thousands of steelhead trout in Oregon's Hood River, in fieldwork dating back to 1991. Scientists have been able to genetically "fingerprint" three generations of returning fish to determine who their parents were, and whether or not they were wild or hatchery fish. The underlying problem, experts say, is Darwinian natural selection. Fish that do well in the safe, quiet world of the hatcheries are selected to be different than those that do well in a much more hostile and predatory real-world environment. Using wild fish as brood stock each year should lessen the problem, but it was just that type of hatchery fish that were used in the Hood River study. This demonstrates that even a single generation of hatchery culture can still have strong effects. Although this study was done with steelhead trout, it would be reasonable to extrapolate its results to other salmonids, researchers said. It's less clear what the findings mean to the many other species that are now being bred in captivity in efforts to help wild populations recover, Blouin said, but it's possible that similar effects could be found. Captive breeding is now a cornerstone of recovery efforts by conservation programs for many threatened or endangered species, the researchers noted in their report. Thousands of species may require captive breeding to prevent their extinction in the next 200 years - which makes it particularly important to find out if such programs will ultimately work. This study raises doubts. "The message should be clear," the researchers wrote in their report's conclusion. "Captive breeding for reintroduction or supplementation can have a serious, long-term downside in some taxa, and so should not be considered as a panacea for the recovery of all endangered populations." http://www.southlincolncountynews.com/V2_news_articles.php?heading=0 &page=73&story_id=928 Tightlines_____________________________Richard -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: Outlook.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 21572 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 41856 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Thu Jun 25 14:57:38 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Thu, 25 Jun 2009 14:57:38 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] San Joaquin Valley Water Issues on Radio Message-ID: <005c01c9f5df$f544aac0$dfce0040$@net> Bill McEwen, a Fresno Bee columnist, has started a new radio show. Lloyd Carter, a former journalist and now an attorney, is a very long time observer of events in the Western San Joaquin Valley. He has written and commented extensively on issues in the Valley and their impacts upon people, the environment and irrigators. Carter will be McEwen's guest on Monday to discuss current water and related issues affecting the Valley. The show airs at noon on Monday at KYNO 1300 AM in Fresno. For those of you outside of the Fresno area, you can listen over the Internet. at http://1300kyno.com Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Thu Jun 25 15:02:11 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Thu, 25 Jun 2009 15:02:11 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Fresno Bee June 25 2009 Message-ID: <006701c9f5e0$97e841b0$c7b8c510$@net> Water draws Interior chief to Fresno for hearing; Salazar, congressional leaders at town hall meeting Sunday Fresno Bee - 6/25/09 By Tim Sheehan and Michael Doyle MENDOTA -- Under increasing political pressure to address California's water crisis, the Obama administration said Wednesday it will dispatch Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to a hastily organized town hall meeting Sunday in Fresno. Interior Department officials have not yet identified a location for the meeting, which is scheduled to run from 2:30 to 4 p.m. But it will be Salazar's first official on-the-ground visit to the region. On Wednesday, meanwhile, state agriculture officials said that a combination of drought and federal environmental regulations have the potential to turn a short-term water crisis into a long-term agricultural and economic disaster. During a hearing Wednesday of the state Board of Food and Agriculture at Mendota High School, panelists raised many of the same issues as at rallies this spring: Less water for west-side growers means less acreage planted, creating a spike in unemployment and economic hardship for farm laborers and their communities. "With this regulatory and geologic drought, we've seen really how agriculture touches every life," state Agriculture Secretary A.G. Kawamura said. "Especially in this region, so many lives are being affected beyond the farmers and farmworkers. ... The communities impacted go well beyond the farm sector." Agriculture on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley relies largely on water transferred through the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta from Northern California. But the effects of a three-year drought, coupled with federal environmental decisions to protect the delta smelt and salmon, have severely narrowed the periods in which massive pumps can be used to move water from north to south. Now, there is a window of less than 90 days in which the pumps can operate; other proposed regulations threaten to reduce that to about a month out of the year, officials said. "We can have a lot of rain next year and still have these problems," said Dan Nelson, executive director of the San Luis & Delta Mendota Water Authority. "We had chronic shortages even before the smelt and salmon decisions; these regulations just exacerbated them." Mendota Mayor Robert Silva and Firebaugh City Manager Jose Antonio Ramirez both described high unemployment and lower sales taxes that are forcing them to make painful cuts to their cities' services. "It's survival mode for west-side cities," Silva said. "If farmers don't have water, there's no future for farm towns on the west side." Fresno County Supervisor Phil Larson agreed, adding that farm woes are driving unemployment higher and sales tax and property tax revenues lower in the county. "Farmers are getting frustrated, even to the point of losing their farms," he said. "But forget about the farmers -- look at the people, the school kids, the food lines." And the worst of the unemployment may be yet to come. West-side farmers Shawn Coburn and Bob Diedrich said the farm labor picture will become clearer as the harvest season progresses with far fewer crops to harvest. Coburn said he's being forced to rely on low-quality, salty water pumped from underground just to keep his almond trees alive. "I've got 100 people coming out every couple of days looking for work, and we're just fighting for our lives out here," he said. Wednesday's hearing won't render immediate relief, but Kawamura said he hopes it will encourage the U.S. Department of the Interior to incorporate flexibility and balance in its regulation of the delta pumps. "This should not be 'state vs. federal,' " Kawamura said. "This should be the federal government understanding that this is an issue of the food supply, of food security for the nation. "This state, more than any other in the nation, believes in environmental protection," he said. "But there is a need for flexibility, both for infrastructure and for regulations, and for federal agencies to move away from black-and-white to what works in a crisis." The water emergency has prompted California to ask the Obama administration for everything from federal funding and streamlined rules to approve new water projects. But Rep. Dennis Cardoza, D-Merced, warned against high expectations for Salazar's visit Sunday. "He isn't going to solve every California water problem on this trip," Cardoza cautioned. "It's a fact-finding trip." Salazar will be accompanied by Deputy Interior Secretary David Hayes, Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Mike Connor and several Valley lawmakers. Cardoza and Rep. Jim Costa, D-Fresno, both met Wednesday with Interior officials and plan to attend the Fresno meeting. "Ever since we first met with Secretary Salazar in March, we've been telling him he needed to get involved in this," Costa said. "We've been hammering on them every week." Republicans have also urged Interior officials to pay greater heed to the Valley's water problems. Spencer Pederson, spokesman for Rep. George Radanovich, R-Mariposa, said late Wednesday that Salazar "needs to see for himself what's going on out there." Neither Radanovich nor Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Visalia, had been informed of Salazar's visit. In recent weeks, the Valley legislators lined up behind an amendment by Nunes to block a federal decision steering more water into fish habitat protection. Though the amendment failed by a 218-208 vote last week, lawmakers suggested it sent a signal that could not be ignored. "It's OK to value fish, that's OK," Nunes said during House debate, "but understand you're starving families while you value fish." Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Sat Jun 27 08:48:34 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2009 08:48:34 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Press Release - Fishermen Tell Salazar - Don't Make Salmon Scapegoat Message-ID: <000601c9f73e$bb6a2ae0$323e80a0$@net> From: Zeke Grader [mailto:zgrader at ifrfish.org] Sent: Saturday, June 27, 2009 6:38 AM Subject: Press Release - Fishermen Tell Salazar - Don't Make Salmon Scapegoat Press Release For Immediate Release: Saturday, June 27, 2009 Contact: Dick Pool (925) 963-6350 Dr. Mark Rockwell (530) 559-5759 Captain Mike Hudson (510) 407-0046 Captain Roger Thomas (415) 760-9362 Zeke Grader (415) 606-5140 Fishermen to Interior Secretary: Don't Make Fish the Scapegoat For Valley Unemployment and Water Woes SAN FRANCISCO, June 27 - A coalition of commercial and recreational fishermen and allied businesses are calling on Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to let science and facts be his guide when he meets with growers and water agencies on Sunday in Fresno. The fishing groups warn that protections for fish in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and San Francisco Bay are critical for the livelihoods of thousands of Californian's along the coast. Some agricultural leaders and water contractors, along with a few members of Congress, have blamed the San Joaquin Valley's high unemployment and economic woes on protections for fish - including measures to make sure there is enough water for fish survival. "We feel the pain of unemployed farm workers. Salmon fishermen have been out of work for two years now because of the total closure of the fishery," said Zeke Grader, Executive Director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations (PCFFA), which represents working men and women in the West Coast commercial fishing fleet. "But don't make the fish or their protections a scapegoat for the problems of the San Joaquin Valley." Experts have pointed out that the San Joaquin Valley's unemployment rates have historically been much higher than the rest of the State. A switch to less labor-intensive crops has added to the problem while cutbacks in water deliveries to growers are mainly due to the current drought, not protections for fish, say fishing groups. "We've had a long history of political meddling with fishery protections by water interests that have left fish vulnerable and resulted in tremendous losses to our fishing economy and the jobs it represents. We're sympathetic with those in the Valley currently without jobs, but we've had tremendous job losses in recreational fishing businesses and among commercial fishermen over the years because no one was looking out for the water needs of the fish," noted Dr. Mark Rockwell of the Northern California Federation of Fly Fishers. "This is a fish and people problem, not a fish versus people problem," continued Rockwell. In June the National Marine Fisheries Service put in place its scientifically-peer reviewed biological opinion for state-federal water operations in the Delta to protect endangered winter and spring-run chinook salmon and sturgeon. That BiOp establishes fish protection measures including some restrictions on the diversion of fresh water flows critical for fish survival and essential for maintaining the Delta estuarine ecosystem. The fishing groups point out that past efforts to put in place science-based protections have been overridden by water politics including the killing of the State Water Resources Control Board's October 1988 draft order for Delta flows and, more recently, 2004 biological opinions for salmon and Delta smelt that were found inadequate, when Bush Administration officials overruled scientists in favor of state and federal water contractors. "The issue here is not jobs versus fish, it is jobs versus jobs and food versus food," emphasized Dick Pool, a fishing gear manufacturer and head of Water 4 Fish. "Currently there are 23,000 commercial and recreational people unemployed because California's salmon fishery is shut down. This has taken$1.4 billion out of the State's economy." The Central Valley historically has been the second-largest salmon producing river system in the lower 48 states - second only to the Columbia. Its salmon, include four runs of chinook, the most valuable of the five runs of Pacific Salmon. Wild-caught salmon are considered among the top 10 foods for nutritional value, along with various vegetables, fruits and nuts. "Fish are our livelihood. Our coastal communities and people depend on sustainable fisheries to support families and the infrastructure of communities," according to Captain Roger Thomas, a charter fishing boat skipper and president of the Golden Gate Fishermen's Association. The fishing groups whose main emphasis has been with the protection of those fish having commercial and recreational value, also warn that even the tiny Delta Smelt, protected by a biological opinion issued by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, has a beneficial role in the ecosystem. "These small fish are our warning light about the health of the estuary. They tell us whether the system is well or dying," explained Grader. "Allowing their extinction would be as foolish as ripping warning lights out of the cockpit of a jet airliner. In both instances it would be putting people's lives in danger." At the meeting in Fresno with Secretary Salazar on Sunday, fishing representatives are offering to work with growers to find solutions to farm water problems without sacrificing science-based fish protection. Fishing groups have worked successfully with farmers in the Sacramento Valley. They also plan to invite Secretary Salazar to affected fishing communities, allowing him to see the full breadth of the problem. "I want our farms to have all the water they need to grow their broccoli, lettuce, bell peppers and other great veggies for us. We cannot have a good salmon dinner without vegetables," said Captain Mike Hudson, a commercial fisherman who regularly sells his catch at Farmer's Markets. "But we all need to come to a solution that will allow our fish to thrive along with farmers." -30- -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: PR-Interior Fresno Meeting - 27Jun09.doc Type: application/msword Size: 763904 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Sat Jun 27 08:55:52 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2009 08:55:52 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Press Release - Fishermen Tell Salazar - Don't Make Salmon Scapegoat Message-ID: <001501c9f73f$bfad5d60$3f081820$@net> Press Release For Immediate Release: Saturday, June 27, 2009 Contact: Dick Pool (925) 963-6350 Dr. Mark Rockwell (530) 559-5759 Captain Mike Hudson (510) 407-0046 Captain Roger Thomas (415) 760-9362 Zeke Grader (415) 606-5140 Fishermen to Interior Secretary: Don't Make Fish the Scapegoat For Valley Unemployment and Water Woes SAN FRANCISCO, June 27 - A coalition of commercial and recreational fishermen and allied businesses are calling on Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to let science and facts be his guide when he meets with growers and water agencies on Sunday in Fresno. The fishing groups warn that protections for fish in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and San Francisco Bay are critical for the livelihoods of thousands of Californian's along the coast. Some agricultural leaders and water contractors, along with a few members of Congress, have blamed the San Joaquin Valley's high unemployment and economic woes on protections for fish - including measures to make sure there is enough water for fish survival. "We feel the pain of unemployed farm workers. Salmon fishermen have been out of work for two years now because of the total closure of the fishery," said Zeke Grader, Executive Director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations (PCFFA), which represents working men and women in the West Coast commercial fishing fleet. "But don't make the fish or their protections a scapegoat for the problems of the San Joaquin Valley." Experts have pointed out that the San Joaquin Valley's unemployment rates have historically been much higher than the rest of the State. A switch to less labor-intensive crops has added to the problem while cutbacks in water deliveries to growers are mainly due to the current drought, not protections for fish, say fishing groups. "We've had a long history of political meddling with fishery protections by water interests that have left fish vulnerable and resulted in tremendous losses to our fishing economy and the jobs it represents. We're sympathetic with those in the Valley currently without jobs, but we've had tremendous job losses in recreational fishing businesses and among commercial fishermen over the years because no one was looking out for the water needs of the fish," noted Dr. Mark Rockwell of the Northern California Federation of Fly Fishers. "This is a fish and people problem, not a fish versus people problem," continued Rockwell. In June the National Marine Fisheries Service put in place its scientifically-peer reviewed biological opinion for state-federal water operations in the Delta to protect endangered winter and spring-run chinook salmon and sturgeon. That BiOp establishes fish protection measures including some restrictions on the diversion of fresh water flows critical for fish survival and essential for maintaining the Delta estuarine ecosystem. The fishing groups point out that past efforts to put in place science-based protections have been overridden by water politics including the killing of the State Water Resources Control Board's October 1988 draft order for Delta flows and, more recently, 2004 biological opinions for salmon and Delta smelt that were found inadequate, when Bush Administration officials overruled scientists in favor of state and federal water contractors. "The issue here is not jobs versus fish, it is jobs versus jobs and food versus food," emphasized Dick Pool, a fishing gear manufacturer and head of Water 4 Fish. "Currently there are 23,000 commercial and recreational people unemployed because California's salmon fishery is shut down. This has taken$1.4 billion out of the State's economy." The Central Valley historically has been the second-largest salmon producing river system in the lower 48 states - second only to the Columbia. Its salmon, include four runs of chinook, the most valuable of the five runs of Pacific Salmon. Wild-caught salmon are considered among the top 10 foods for nutritional value, along with various vegetables, fruits and nuts. "Fish are our livelihood. Our coastal communities and people depend on sustainable fisheries to support families and the infrastructure of communities," according to Captain Roger Thomas, a charter fishing boat skipper and president of the Golden Gate Fishermen's Association. The fishing groups whose main emphasis has been with the protection of those fish having commercial and recreational value, also warn that even the tiny Delta Smelt, protected by a biological opinion issued by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, has a beneficial role in the ecosystem. "These small fish are our warning light about the health of the estuary. They tell us whether the system is well or dying," explained Grader. "Allowing their extinction would be as foolish as ripping warning lights out of the cockpit of a jet airliner. In both instances it would be putting people's lives in danger." At the meeting in Fresno with Secretary Salazar on Sunday, fishing representatives are offering to work with growers to find solutions to farm water problems without sacrificing science-based fish protection. Fishing groups have worked successfully with farmers in the Sacramento Valley. They also plan to invite Secretary Salazar to affected fishing communities, allowing him to see the full breadth of the problem. "I want our farms to have all the water they need to grow their broccoli, lettuce, bell peppers and other great veggies for us. We cannot have a good salmon dinner without vegetables," said Captain Mike Hudson, a commercial fisherman who regularly sells his catch at Farmer's Markets. "But we all need to come to a solution that will allow our fish to thrive along with farmers." -30- -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: PR-Interior Fresno Meeting - 27Jun09.doc Type: application/msword Size: 763904 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Sun Jun 28 10:38:07 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Sun, 28 Jun 2009 10:38:07 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] San Joaquin Valley Employment and Related Facts Message-ID: <001201c9f817$33ea2910$9bbe7b30$@net> See attached CSPA press release on San Joaquin Valley employment and related facts. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: CSPA PressRelease, Myths.pdf Type: application/pdf Size: 273237 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Sun Jun 28 10:48:23 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Sun, 28 Jun 2009 10:48:23 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] San Joaquin Valley Employment and Related Facts Message-ID: <002301c9f818$a208a970$e619fc50$@net> California Sportfishing Protection Alliance "An Advocate for Fisheries, Habitat and Water Quality" 3536 Rainier Avenue, Stockton, CA 95204 T: 209-464-5067, F: 209-464-1028, E: deltakeep at aol.com, W: www.calsport.org FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact Information Bill Jennings, CSPA Executive Director: 209-464-5067, Cell 209-938-9053, deltakeep at aol.com Myths, Lies and Damn Lies Despite drought, Valley agriculture doing far better than rest of economy Stockton, CA - Sunday, June 28, 2009. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar is in Fresno today to attend a meeting and listen to the economic woes of the south Valley. Newspapers and airways are awash with accusations that a three-inch fish has caused a man-made drought in California and that environmentalists and fishermen seek to "starve people in order to save whales." Congressmen, farmers and water agencies claim that 450,000 or more acres of land have been fallowed and 35-50,000 people have been put out of work: all because of Delta smelt and the Endangered Species Act. But, facts are stubborn things. And the facts tell us that these accusations are lies - bald-face lies. "We hope Secretary Salazar will seek out the facts and see through the transparent efforts by Governor Schwarzenegger, Valley elected officials and the hydrologic brotherhood to use the red-herring of economic recession as justification for depriving the Delta of essential water," said CSPA Executive Director Bill Jennings. "Their efforts can only be successful if the Secretary, reporters and the general public ignore the facts," he said, adding, "The truth is more water won't wash away the Valley's recession and endangered species are the victims, not the problem." According to official data collected by the California Economic Development Department, during three years of drought, between May of 2006 and May of 2009, farm employment went up 13.7% in Kern County, 12.1% in Fresno County, 19.3% in Tulare County, 2% in Merced County, 5.3% in Madera and 8.4% in Stanislaus County.1 Only in the smallest agricultural county of Kings, did we find a decline. While we're told that 262,000 acres have been fallowed in Fresno County, the County's Department of Agriculture was releasing a report that revealed 2008 was another record year with agricultural production dollars up 5.9% over the previous record year of 2007.2 San Joaquin Valley farm unemployment has always been high and, while the present economic disaster has exacerbated conditions, farm unemployment has not fluctuated according to wet and 1 CSPA Table, Monthly Farm Employment (attached) extracted from EED Data, http://www.labormarketinfo.edd.ca.gov/?pageid=166. 2 2008 Agricultural Crop and Livestock Report, Fresno Department of Agriculture, page I, available on CSPA website: www.calsport.org. CSPA Press Release, Myths, Lies and Damn Lies, Despite drought, Valley agriculture doing better than economy 28 June 2009, page 2. dry years.3 Indeed, agriculture has fared far better in the current recession than other segments of the economy. While May 08 to May 09 construction, manufacturing, trade & transportation and financial employment in Fresno County dropped by 3,000, 2,300, 1,200 and 900, respectively: agricultural employment actually increased by 100.4 Tulare County reports that while, agricultural employment increased by 2,100 between May 08 and May 09, construction, manufacturing, trade & transportation, hospitality and financial employment was down 800, 1,100, 1,300, 400 and 500, respectively.5 Even in counties reporting slight declines in agricultural employment: other employment sectors experienced far greater drops. In the last year of a three-year drought (May 08-May09), statewide farm employment dropped by only 9,600 while nonfarm employment plunged 744,400.6 Indeed, employment figures for counties for north-of-Delta counties that are receiving full water allotments are showing similar employment impacts. Who is not telling the truth: our elected representatives or the California Employment Development Department? And, who is distorting the truth about actual water shortages? As Department of Water Resources Director Lester Snow pointed out in a 15 May 2009 letter to Senator Dianne Feinstein, Westlands Water District is expected to receive 86% of its normal water supplies in this third year of drought; Kern County Water Agency is expecting 85% and the San Joaquin River Exchange Contractors will receive 100% of its non-drought supplies.7 The chart attached to Snow's letter claims that Westlands' 14% shortfall will force it to fallow 225,000 acres rather than its normal fallowing of 78,000 acres and Kern County Water Agency's 15% shortfall will compel it to fallow 220,000 acres rather than the normal 100,000 acres.8 The numbers simply don't add up. Mr. Snow was candid when he wrote Senator Feinstein that, "I believe many have lost sight of the plain fact that we are in a hydrologic drought, and as such water supplies are simply limited for all users"9 and when he testified to Congress that, if there was no court order protecting fish, there would only be a 5% increase in water to the Central Valley. Unfortunately, Mr. Snow and those who scapegoat fisheries seem unable to admit that water supplies in a drought are also limited for fish and wildlife and that recent biological opinions provide less water for the environment during shortages. Nor can they acknowledge that California has issued water rights for 8 _ times the average amount of water in the Bay-Delta watershed or that Valley farmers have recently planted hundreds of thousands of acres of 3 CSPA Table, Industry Employment & Labor Force by Annual Average, 2000-2008, extracted from EED data, http://www.labormarketinfo.edd.ca.gov/?pageid=166. 4 CSPA Table, Farm and Nonfarm Employment May 08 v. May 09, extracted from EED Data, http://www.labormarketinfo.edd.ca.gov/?pageid=166. 5 Ibid. 6 Industry Employment & Labor Force, Employment Development Department, Labor Market Information Division, June 19, 2009. (Attached) 7 Letter from Lester Snow, DWR, to Honorable Dianne Feinstein, May 15, 2009. Available on CSPA website: www.calsport.org. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid. CSPA Press Release, Myths, Lies and Damn Lies, Despite drought, Valley agriculture doing better than economy 28 June 2009, page 3. perennial crops based upon the most junior water rights that assume interrupted supplies during the inevitable droughts that occur more than a third of the time in the state. Those who accuse fishermen and environmentalists of trying to "starve families to protect whales" appear incapable of exhibiting compassion for the depressed communities along the coast and wrecked livelihoods of commercial fishermen whose boats are either dry-docked or repossessed by the bank or lamenting the 23,000 people out of work or the $1.4 billion lost to the state's economy because of fishing closures. And what of those on the Westside of the Valley who irrigate selenium laced soils that discharge toxic wastes back to the river and Delta? Do they believe they have a prerogative to water that leaves the Delta with salinity levels that threaten the existence of generations of Delta farmers who cultivate over 400,000 acres of some of the finest prime soils on earth? There is enough water in California to provide for people and rivers, if it's used wisely. Reclamation, recycling, groundwater banking, conservation and desalination offer a virtual river far larger than any additional supplies secured via new surface storage or a peripheral canal. Fish are not the problem. "A dysfunctional water delivery system, greed and failure to comply with existing laws have brought us to the edge of disaster," observed Jennings. "Common sense, sound science and a proper respect for law can lead us back from the abyss," he said. __________________________________________________________________ CSPA is a non-profit public benefit conservation and research organization established in 1983 for the purpose of conserving, restoring, and enhancing the state's water quality and fishery resources and their aquatic ecosystems and riparian habitats. CSPA's website is: www.calsport.org. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Mon Jun 29 09:06:09 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Mon, 29 Jun 2009 09:06:09 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Sacramento Bee June 29 2009 Message-ID: <000b01c9f8d3$85198580$8f4c9080$@net> Editorial: It's not only fish vs. people Published: Monday, Jun. 29, 2009 - 12:00 am | Page 15A The National Marine Fisheries Service has issued a wake-up call on the dangers facing the Central Valley's salmon and, ultimately, the water system they depend on. It should be mulled and acted upon. The wake-up call came in the form of a "biological opinion" that the fisheries service filed earlier this month. Prompted by a federal court ruling on a lawsuit by environmentalists and fishermen, it found that the ways the state and federal water projects operate threaten the survival of endangered chinook salmon and steelhead, and it required that they change their policies. The changes the agency envisions include finding ways to get the fish around the dams and other barriers that currently stop them as they migrate upstream to spawn. With immense structures like Shasta Dam spanning the Sacramento River, and Folsom Dam the American, this will not be a simple task. It will require the construction of fish ladders, or elevators, or perhaps truck-and-haul operations. Experts aren't sure if any are feasible. The estimated price tag starts at $1 billion. The price of not acting, however, will likely be steeper. To begin with, the winter- and spring-run chinook salmon of the Sacramento River and the steelhead of the American are almost certainly doomed if their journeys to spawning habitat continue to be blocked. That probably won't take salmon off diners' plates, although there are persistent questions about the taste, healthfulness and environmental impact of what's produced on fish farms. But if these natural populations vanish, they will likely take with them the state's commercial salmon industry, which has already been shut for two years in the wake of the fish population's crash. The Fish and Game Department estimates that in 2008, the shutdown cost $255 million in revenue and more than 2,200 jobs. Beyond that, the federal fisheries service's opinion is a wake-up call on the need for a major reassessment of state water policy. Pretty much everyone involved in the current system recognizes that it's broken, unable to store excess supply in wet years or deliver needed supply in dry ones. The new federal rules, which will likely face a court challenge, don't require an immediate solution. The current blueprint requires studies starting later this year, trials of fish-moving procedures by 2012 and a decision on an ultimate answer by 2020. Water officials should use that time not only to find the best way to get the fish around the dams but to explore cheaper ways to save them. One possibility being pushed by a Placer County group called Save Auburn Ravine Salmon and Steelhead seeks the restoration of 600 small creeks between Modesto and Redding. The group says these creeks were once the sites of significant fish runs and offer a much less expensive way to provide spawning habitat than laboriously transporting fish around dams. Whatever solution is ultimately embraced, the region will likely never return to the days when so many salmon choked the Sacramento River that Indians and settlers could catch dinner with their hands. But a revived commercial fishing industry, and an answer to one relatively small piece of the state's water policy puzzle, is a pretty good consolation prize. We should try to seize it. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Mon Jun 29 09:24:58 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Mon, 29 Jun 2009 09:24:58 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] San Francisco Chronicle June 29 2009 Message-ID: <003d01c9f8d6$2c786fb0$85694f10$@net> Water czar named to help state deal with drought Tracie Cone, Associated Press Monday, June 29, 2009 (06-29) 04:00 PDT Fresno -- Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced several steps on Sunday that he hopes would ease the toll of the state's water shortage on farmers, and said he would assign a top deputy to help find solutions. Images http://imgs.sfgate.com/c/pictures/2009/06/28/mn-drought29_ph1_0500318388_par t1.jpg http://imgs.sfgate.com/graphics/utils/plus-green.gifView Larger Image * S.F.: 'Eyesore' cleaned up on Masonic Avenue 06.29.09 At a spirited town hall meeting in California's agricultural heartland, Salazar told a packed auditorium that Deputy Interior Secretary David J. Hayes will "bring all of the key federal agencies to the table" to coordinate efforts. Salazar said he wanted to direct $160 million in Recovery Act funds for the federal Central Valley Project, which manages the dams and canals that move water around the state, and will expedite water transfers from other areas. Members of the San Joaquin Valley congressional delegation told Salazar that three years of drought were forcing farmers to fallow hundreds of thousands of acres and to idle farmworkers. "The time for meetings and talk is over," said Rep. George Radanovich, R-Fresno. "We need action now." Farmers packed into the auditorium at Cal State Fresno erupted into loud applause. The congressional delegates and other agriculture industry representatives asked Salazar to hasten the environmental review of the so-called Two Gates proposal, which would place removable gates in the central Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to block threatened fish, such as the tiny smelt, from getting killed by the pumps. "We hope to make an expedited review of that project," Salazar said after the meeting. The cause of the state's water shortages is not simply due to three years of below-average rainfall. Federal protections for threatened fish has limited the transfer of water from lakes Shasta and Oroville through the Delta into the state's system of aqueducts. Searing 109-degree temperatures on Sunday underscored the need for water, and farmers appealed for action. On the west side of Fresno County, the most prolific agricultural county in the nation, farmers have been told they would receive just 10 percent of their allocation this year, news that forced them to fallow hundreds of thousands of acres. The farmers argued that cutting water deliveries to farms in the San Joaquin Valley oversimplifies the problems threatening salmon and smelt in the largest freshwater estuary in the west. They have asked for Salazar to ease enforcement of the Endangered Species Act, something he said he was reluctant to do. "At this time, that would be admitting failure," Salazar said. Rep. Jim Costa, D-Fresno, told Salazar that farmers were bearing full responsibility for environmental problems also caused by wastewater discharges from cities and by invasive species that eat native fish. Lost in the chorus of catcalls and applause were the voices of environmental groups, fishermen and coastal communities impacted by the collapse of the salmon season. They were there to remind Salazar that the North Coast fishing industry had been hard hit by a decline of salmon in the delta, which has resulted in the cancellation of commercial fishing season for the past two years. Zeke Grader, executive director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations, said that 23,000 commercial and recreational people were unemployed because California's salmon fishery is shut down, which has cost the economy $1.4 billion. Researchers at UC Davis estimate that as of May, water shortages in the San Joaquin Valley have cost roughly 35,000 jobs and $830 million in farm revenue. Comedian Paul Rodriguez, who owns 40 acres of nectarines near Dinuba and heads the Latino Water Coalition, mocked environmentalists' argument that the decline in smelt is the "canary in the coal mine" warning of a declining ecosystem. "The canary is there so it will perish and the miner can live, but these people got it backward: They want the fish to live so we can die," Rodriguez said as audience members stood and cheered. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 7094 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image002.gif Type: image/gif Size: 54 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Tue Jun 30 09:07:28 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Tue, 30 Jun 2009 09:07:28 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Peter Gleick on San Joaquin Valley Irrigators' Flat Out Lies Message-ID: <000601c9f99c$de6e3a30$9b4aae90$@net> Peter Gleick, President, Pacific Institute http://imgs.sfgate.com/graphics/utils/rss_icon_citybrights2.gif| Read Bio City Brights: Peter Gleick Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar came to California on Sunday to hear firsthand about California's drought. Unfortunately, some of what he heard was misleading or false. Certainly farms and farmers... Truth drought: California's real shortfall Tuesday, June 30, 2009 Truth drought: California's real shortfall Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar came to California on Sunday to hear firsthand about California's drought. Unfortunately, some of what he heard was misleading or false. Certainly farms and farmers are suffering, so are fish and ecosystems. But so is the truth. Here are three oft-repeated falsehoods. Myth 1: Farmers on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley are receiving "just 10 percent of their allocation this year." Myth 2: Water shortages are causing massive new farm unemployment. Myth 3: Farmers are bearing disproportional impacts of water shortfalls because of court rulings in favor of fish. All three of these statements are false, and they've been shown to be false so many times that continuing to repeat them verges on intentional deception on the part of those who repeat them to gullible politicians or lazy reporters. 1. Farmers in the Central Valley get water from many places, and when one source dries up, another temporarily takes its place. In a remarkable letter sent by DWR Director Lester Snow to Senator Dianne Feinstein on May 15th, official data show that the major Central Valley districts will use at least 75% of their average water use by mixing sources, using stored groundwater, participating in water transfers, and so on. Not 10%. And the biggest moaner is the Westlands Water District. Yet Snow points out that they will apply at least 86% of their normal water. On the other hand, the San Joaquin Valley wildlife refuges will get 75% of its promised water, less than many of the agricultural districts. Some farmers get less than others in dry years because of their junior water rights -- and they always have. Are they arguing to revamp the water rights system? That would be a worthy discussion to have. 2. The overall job problem is not a water problem -- it is a result of a global and national economic crisis. Increases in unemployment are worse, by far, in non-farm industries. In Fresno County, unemployment today is substantially lower than it was just five and ten years ago (see Figure 1) and farm employment grew; non-farm employment shrunk. Indeed, the only sector showing increases in employment in May 2009 (see http://www.calmis.ca.gov/file/lfmonth/frsn.pdf) was the farm sector. In some of the hardest hit areas, unemployment is much higher -- but it is always much higher. Unemployment rates in Mendota are above 30% now. But you know what? Nine years ago, unemployment in Mendota was 30%. Six years ago, it was 36%. The problem in Mendota isn't just the current drought. The Central Valley of California has been plagued by poverty and lack of access to reliable jobs and basic services, like clean drinking water, for decades. Turning the pumps back on will do little, if anything, to address the systemic injustice that farm worker communities endure in both wet years and dry. Figure 1. Fresno County civilian unemployment rate from 1990 to 2008, from the California Employment Development Department, Sacramento, California. While unemployment has grown in the past two years, it is far below what it was in the past decade. California EDD data, 2009 Figure 1. Fresno County civilian unemployment rate from 1990 to 2008, from the California Employment Development Department, Sacramento, California. While unemployment has grown in the past two years, it is far below what it was in the past decade. 3. It's not the fish. Two months ago, DWR director Lester Snow testified before Congress that if there had been no court order to protect fish, CVP deliveries to the San Joaquin Valley would only be 5% higher . The problems farmers are facing aren't due to the tiny portions of water offered up for ecosystems; they are due to a drought and a dysfunctional water management system that has been slowly collapsing for decades. The longer misleading arguments and facts are put forth to politicians and the media, the longer it will be before a serious and effective solution can be found to our water challenges. Posted By: Peter Gleick (Email ) | Jun 30 at 05:25 AM Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.gif Type: image/gif Size: 1014 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image002.gif Type: image/gif Size: 74990 bytes Desc: not available URL: From tstokely at att.net Tue Jun 30 09:53:26 2009 From: tstokely at att.net (Tom Stokely) Date: Tue, 30 Jun 2009 09:53:26 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Fresno Bee: Anger Alone won't solve the Valley's water woes Message-ID: <2204D3AB4B9F4519B0DF51A2BE82EA18@homeuserPC> Anger alone won't solve the Valley's water woes Published online on Saturday, Jun. 27, 2009 By Bill McEwen / The Fresno Bee (http://www.fresnobee.com/columnists/mcewen/story/1501334.html) It was a warm October night, and the hall on 13th Street in Firebaugh was packed with people. They had come to voice frustration about the "man-made drought," fallowed land and lost jobs. That was five years ago. Little has changed. Once-fertile land in the Westlands Water District is ruined by salty irrigation water trapped between the soil surface and layers of clay. Farmers scramble for water. Their deliveries are cut because of below-average rainfall and attempts to protect the delta smelt and salmon. People, again, are mad as hell about lost jobs, food lines and government indifference to poverty on the west side. And agriculture -- along with its political allies -- again is writing an angry narrative of fish vs. people. It's a sturdy tale, I admit. I've fallen for it a time or two. This script reduces a complex situation to black hats and white hats. And it inspires good people to take action on behalf of the hungry and unemployed. The problem is, life isn't simple. Anger alone isn't a solution. And idle delta pumps are only partly responsible for 41% unemployment in a town such as Mendota. Largely unspoken is the fact that foreign competition, retired land and a move to mechanically harvested crops are reducing the need for seasonal farmworkers. Also unspoken is the paradox of the Valley's reliance on agriculture: the world's most bountiful farm belt always has had some of America's highest unemployment. Nine years ago, 30% of Mendota was jobless. Six years ago, it was 36%. Now, two questions: What will it take for agriculture -- Westlands, in particular -- to shed its reactive, panic-driven skin? And when will our political leadership join with agriculture to focus on sustainable economic solutions? Westlands, as constituted, isn't sustainable. Not with the state continuing to grow in population, and the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta turned into an environmental nightmare. The district never again will get all the water it wants. But, Steve Geil, president of Economic Development Corp. serving Fresno County, says that the west side is poised for an economic turnaround. He envisions energy "farms" -- solar, wind, thermal, biomass -- and, eventually, a nuclear energy plant -- complementing traditional agriculture. "Fresno is the only place in the world with these six elements -- land, air, water, sun, a metropolitan city and a reliable, convenient transportation system," Geil says. "We can be a center for clean energy jobs." Geil says the revolution already is taking shape on the west side, with scores of well-paying jobs added to the Firebaugh/Mendota area. He points out that farm jobs are increasing in Fresno County and that the county economy "outperformed" the state economy in March and April. Granted, Geil is a salesman. But I'd rather buy into his upbeat assessment of the future than to listen to more of the doom-and-gloom-holding-on-to-yesterday mantra of the Westlands crowd. For once, let's get ahead of the game. Let's think more, vent less. Let's behave like adults instead of railing against ourselves and the world. "We have been a fragmented county for too long," Geil says. "It's almost like we create our own problems. We have to move to a higher level of thinking, where we debate our differences and then come together to support solutions." The columnist can be reached at bmcewen at fresnobee.com or (559) 441-6632. Check out his blog at fresnobeehive.com/news. Listen to his talk show at noon daily on KYNO (AM 1300). -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Wed Jul 1 10:43:29 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Wed, 1 Jul 2009 10:43:29 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Fresno Bee July 1 2009 Message-ID: <000b01c9fa73$72e78b90$58b6a2b0$@net> See highlighted sections of article Fresno wraps up rain year at 69% normal Published online on Tuesday, Jun. 30, 2009 By Paula Lloyd / The Fresno Bee Louisiana farmers struggle with dry conditions Louisiana got some welcome rain this week, but farmers were still worrying about vulnerable crops in drought conditions that even threatened to cancel their Fourth of July fireworks displays. "So far, we're 4 1/2 inches (of rain) behind for the year, and for the month, we're almost every bit of that - 3 1/2 inches," said Gary Chatelain, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service. "We were doing pretty good through May. June's been a real disappointment." Price Bundy of Ida, who grows cotton and corn, said corn ears are just starting to fill out and may be stunted without more rain. On Sunday, you needed an umbrella to ward off the scorching heat. Tuesday morning, as Fresno awoke to overcast skies, it looked like you might need one to fend off raindrops. But the clouds were only for show. A weather spotter for the National Weather Service reported a few sprinkles in Clovis overnight, but no measurable rainfall. "There was not even enough to splash the rain gauge at the airport," said Gary Sanger, meteorologist at the weather service office in Hanford. Fresno ended the official rain year at 87% of normal rainfall for the month of June. Normal rainfall for June is 0.23 of an inch. http://media.fresnobee.com/static/images/mi/story_detail/cycle_gallery/previ ous.png http://media.fresnobee.com/static/images/mi/story_detail/cycle_gallery/pause .png http://media.fresnobee.com/static/images/mi/story_detail/cycle_gallery/play. png http://media.fresnobee.com/static/images/mi/story_detail/cycle_gallery/next. png Fresno ends rain year at 69% normal MARK CROSSE / THE FRESNO BEE Wispy clouds dissipate slowly after a cool, cloudy morning Tuesday gives way to mostly clear skies following a hot Monday that reached 106 degrees. Tuesday's high temperature was 101. Three thunderstorms rumbled over Fresno in June. The first one on June 3 slid past Fresno leaving a trace of rain. Storms on June 4 and June 5 made a lot of racket but dropped only 0.20 of an inch of rain, measured at the Fresno Yosemite International Airport. The rain season ended Tuesday with Fresno standing at 69% of normal rainfall for the year, some 3.46 inches below normal. Fresno had 7.77 inches of rain from July 1, 2008, to June 30, 2009. Normal annual rainfall is 11.23 inches. Like Fresno's rainfall, the state's water supply also is below normal. Statewide, water levels in reservoirs are about 16% below normal, said Elissa Lynn, senior meteorologist with the State Department of Water Resources. Water storage in the state's reservoirs was at 72% of normal on March 1, but had risen to about 83% of normal by Tuesday. "We've seen some improvement over the spring," she said. "We were looking at a dire situation." Still, the improvement is not enough to end the state's drought conditions, Lynn said. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has declared a statewide drought emergency. The state's water system still is getting water from mountain runoff, Lynn said. While the snowmelt has ended, she said, there still is high runoff during the summer due to the lag time it takes for water to travel through the mountains to watersheds. But for the third straight year, runoff from the mountains is below normal, Lynn said. This year, runoff is projected to be 70% of average by Sept. 30, when the state's water year ends. "After three dry years, it would certainly be bad to have a fourth," Lynn said. If Fresno's recent cloud layer didn't deliver any rain, it did bring relief from the "bone-searing" high temperatures that baked Fresno over the weekend. Sunday's 108-degree high tied a record for the date. Tuesday's high was 101. Today's high should be 99, with 97 on Thursday, 101 on Friday and back to 97 degrees for the Fourth of July. Skies will be clear. The overnight lows are forecast in the high 60s for the rest of the week. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.png Type: image/png Size: 708 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image002.png Type: image/png Size: 481 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image003.png Type: image/png Size: 1028 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image004.png Type: image/png Size: 724 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image005.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 9991 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Wed Jul 1 12:37:40 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Wed, 1 Jul 2009 12:37:40 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Eureka Times-Standard July 1 2009 Message-ID: <002c01c9fa83$6c3e6ce0$44bb46a0$@net> Klamath restoration negotiations delayed Eureka Times-Standard-7/1/09 By Donna Tam Dam removal negotiators were unable to come to an agreement Tuesday, missing the deadline set for finalizing a plan to remove four aging dams on the Klamath River. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar said Tuesday that an agreement is "within reach" and should be completed by the end of summer, according to a press release from the U.S. Department of the Interior. Negotiators from Oregon, California, the U.S. Department of Interior, and the utility company PacifiCorp, had tentatively agreed to a dam removal deal in November 2008, with a deadline for a finalized agreement set for Tuesday. The efforts aim to rebuild the Klamath fishery and sustain agricultural communities who rely on the Klamath River. All parties have agreed to extend the deadline for a final agreement on the future of the Klamath Hydroelectric Project to September 2009. The tentative agreement from last year has since been joined by 22 other stakeholders. Under the proposed agreements, the Department of the Interior and its agencies -- including the Bureau of Reclamation, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Bureau of Land Management, Bureau of Indian Affairs, and U.S. Geological Survey -- would be joined by the National Marine Fisheries Service, the U.S. Forest Service, and state and local agencies to implement restoration measures. "I am pleased that the good faith efforts of the parties to reach common ground in decades-old water conflicts have put a final deal within reach," Salazar said in the press release. "With one more push, and with the continued personal engagement of Gov. Kulongoski, Gov. Schwarzenegger and PacifiCorp President Greg Abel, we will have a final agreement by the end of the summer. This final stretch represents an historic opportunity for all parties to pursue their shared interests over the damaging water wars of the past." The conservation organization Oregon Wild said since negotiations began, the situation in the Upper Basin continues to worsen with harmful agricultural business practices. Steve Pedery, the organization's conservation director, said the most recent delay is proof that a new discussion process is needed or the river will never be restored. Oregon Wild said it is also concerned with the tentative dam removal timeline. The November agreement called for dam removal to begin no sooner than 2020 with a feasibility study to be conducted before a 2012 deadline. Since independent studies regarding economic and ecological rationale behind dam removal have already been done, Oregon Wild said the additional study and delayed discussion is "worrisome." "It is time to hold PacifiCorp accountable instead of letting them pull the strings while everyone holds their breath for six years," Pedery said in a press release. "If I had a dollar for every time I've heard backers of this deal say that a final agreement is 'right around the corner,' I'd have enough money to pay for dam removal myself." According to the DOI press release, Kulongoski and Schwarzenegger said they are satisfied with the discussions and optimistic that they will come to an end by summer. A PacifiCorp spokesman said the organization would not comment further on the issue. In the press release, CEO Greg Abel of PacifiCorp asked for patience as the groups work through a complex process. "The passionate environmental and economic perspectives and diverse cultural heritage that embody the Klamath Basin present an immense challenge to reaching reasonable peace and compromise," he said. "We remain committed to achieving the best possible balanced and pragmatic outcome for our customers on all sides of these diverse issues." Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Thu Jul 2 10:12:59 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Thu, 2 Jul 2009 10:12:59 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] SF Chronicle July 2 1009 Message-ID: <002c01c9fb38$5b535ca0$11fa15e0$@net> Thousands rally to protest water cuts in Fresno Tracie Cone, Associated Press Writer Thursday, July 2, 2009 (07-02) 04:00 PDT Fresno -- Thousands of farmers, farmworkers and their supporters rallied at City Hall on Wednesday, calling on federal officials to ease regulations that have cut water supplies to the nation's most prolific growing region. Images http://imgs.sfgate.com/c/pictures/2009/07/01/ba-watermarch02__0500328559_par t1.jpg http://imgs.sfgate.com/graphics/utils/plus-green.gifView Larger Image * Transit riders ante up on 1st day of fare hikes 07.02.09 "Water makes the difference between the Garden of Eden and Death Valley," said comedian Paul Rodriguez, who acts as a spokesman for the Latino Water Coalition, a group lobbying for changes in water delivery policy regarding the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. The noon rally was organized by the grower-funded group, which also organized an April march from Mendota (Fresno County) to the San Luis Reservoir hoping to draw national attention to the issue. On Wednesday, nearly 4,000 people carrying professionally printed signs proclaiming, "No water, no jobs, no hope, no future," marched through downtown. One man who declined to give us name said his Kettleman City (Kings County) employer had driven him and other workers there and were paying them for their time. Another woman said she came with 50 other employees of a Tulare agriculture contractor for free, to protect their jobs. Speakers stressed the importance of San Joaquin Valley agriculture, which they said produces more than half of the domestically grown U.S. food supply. "If you like foreign oil, you'll love foreign food," some signs read. The rally came on the heels of a visit Sunday by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, who assigned his chief deputy to stay in California to work full-time on solving the delta's many problems. Growers, with the help of congressional delegates from the region, have asked officials to ease federal protections for threatened fish that have drastically reduced supplies pumped into the state's vast canal system. Federal agencies have ordered reduced pumping in the delta when the delta smelt are spawning in the area, leaving nearly empty the San Luis Reservoir that stores water for farmers and Southern California municipal users. Farmers on the west side of Fresno County, the top-producing agriculture county in the U.S., will receive 10 percent of their federal water allocation this year as a result of cutbacks and drought that has led to idled land and layoffs. Environmental activists and fishing groups say that without protections for the delta, the fishing industry will continue to suffer, as will the ocean species that depend on those fish for survival. A.G. Kawamura, the director of the California Department of Food and Agriculture, said he came to march because "without a water system that has predictability," the state's agriculture infrastructure will collapse. Farmer Joe Del Bosque, who owns 2,500 acres in western Madera County, said he had planted only half of his land this year because he doesn't have a well to supplement this year's water allocation. "I don't know what I'm going to do," he said. "I'm completely dependent on surface water." Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 15397 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image002.gif Type: image/gif Size: 54 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Thu Jul 2 10:17:00 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Thu, 2 Jul 2009 10:17:00 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Peripheral Canal: Panama Canal North? Message-ID: <003e01c9fb38$ea086990$be193cb0$@net> From: Dan Bacher Date: July 1, 2009 11:24:17 AM PDT Subject: Peripheral Canal: Panama Canal North? The peripheral canal proposed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and corporate agribusiness will appoximate the width and length of the Panama Canal, according to Assemblymember Joan Buchanan (D-Alamo). Photo of Panama Canal from http://www.gijontour.com/ 2009/04/panama-canal.html panama_canal_03.jpg Peripheral Canal: Panama Canal North? Proposed Government Boondoggle Would Be Width of 100 Lane Freeway! by Dan Bacher Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, Senator Dianne Feinstein, corporate agribusiness and other supporters of the peripheral canal around the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta have carefully avoided discussing what an actual canal would look like, as well as its enormous environmental impacts and budget-busting cost to the taxpayers. However, in width and length the peripheral canal would be very similar to the Panama Canal, according to recent comments by Assemblywoman Joan Buchanan on the floor on the floor when she and other legislators were asked to vote on a bill to fund a committee to develop a plan to implement the Delta Vision recommendations. The recommendations call for a "conveyance" that will transport 15,000 cubic feet of water per second (cfs) from the Sacramento River around the Delta, according to Buchanan. This is smaller than the proposed 1982 peripheral canal that was intended to transport 22,000 cfs. During drought years, the Sacramento River does not have 15,000 cfs. flow for over half the year. In 2007, the flow exceeded 15,000 cfs. in three months with the highest month at 22,500 cfs. "Based on an engineering report completed in 2006, a conveyance to transport 15,000 cfs. would be between 500 and 700 feet wide requiring a 1300 foot right-of-way," said Buchanan. "That's the width of a 100 lane freeway! The length of the conveyance would be 48 miles. By comparison the Panama Canal is between 500 and 1000 feet wide and is 50 miles long." "I'm not going to vote for a plan that builds a Panama Canal down the middle of the 15th Assembly District!" concluded Buchanan. The Governor's Delta Vision Task Force and Bay Delta Conservation Plan both recommend the construction of a "peripheral canal" and more reservoirs designed to export more water from senior water rights holders in the Delta and Sacramento Valley to junior water rights holders that irrigate drainage-impaired, selenium-filled land on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley. Although the Delta Vision Task Force's report recommended that less water be exported out of the Delta to help the estuary's collapsing ecosystem, canal opponents note that the construction of a canal with increased water export capacity would inevitably be used to export more water out of the system. I have repeatedly asked canal advocates to give me one example, in U.S. or world history, where the construction of a big diversion canal has resulted in less water being taken out of a river system. I have also asked them to give me one example, in U.S. or world history, where the construction of a big diversion canal has resulted in a restored or improved ecosystem. None of the canal backers have been able to answer either one of these two questions. The push to build a peripheral canal occurs as Central Valley and Delta fish populations are in their greatest-ever crisis. Sacramento River Chinook salmon, Delta smelt, longfin smelt, green sturgeon and other fish populations have declined to record low population levels in recent years, due to increased water exports and declining water quality. A broad coalition of Delta family farmers, recreational anglers, commercial fishermen, grassroots environmentalists and California Indian Tribes are opposing the peripheral canal because it is expected to push imperiled fish species over the abyss of extinction. Schwarzenegger has cynically tried to link a deal to remove four aging dams on the Klamath River, owned by Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Corporation, to a water bond including a peripheral canal and more dams. However, the Klamath Riverkeeper and other Klamath Basin stakeholders oppose tying the dam removal project to the construction of new dams in the Central Valley and a peripheral canal as a proposed general obligation water bond would do. "California must support Klamath dam removal on its own merits," said Georgiana Myers, Klamath Riverkeeper Community Organizer and Yurok Tribal Member. The Klamath dam removal deal has received support from Oregon with Senate Bill 76, and now we need Governor Schwarzenegger to step up." Meanwhile, the word from the California State Capitol last week was that a combined hearing by the Assembly Water, Parks and Wildlife Committee and the Senate Natural Resources Committee regarding a host of water bills would take place on July 7, in Room 4202 at 9 a.m. However, now there is talk of the committee meeting being rescheduled for July 9. "Neither date has been finalized, making the date a 'moving target,' intentionally making it difficult for the public to plan to attend the hearing," said John Beuttler, conservation director of the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance. "These committees plan to establish a 'Delta Water Package' that would lay the groundwork for a Dual Conveyance Facility to move water both through and around the Delta," said Beuttler. "Unfortunately, as of now, we havent been told exactly what bills will make the final package. However, it is understood that the bill or bills will contain a $15-20 billion dollar water bond to pay for infrastructure improvements that are likely to include the peripheral canal and at least two dams." A big turnout of people opposed to the canal and more dams is needed at the upcoming hearing. For the latest action alerts on the movement to stop the peripheral canal and more dams, go to the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance (CSPA) website at www.calsport.org. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: panama_canal_03.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 57121 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Fri Jul 3 11:11:23 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Fri, 3 Jul 2009 11:11:23 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Stockton Record July 3 2009 Message-ID: <000901c9fc09$adf3efc0$09dbcf40$@net> Delta advocates plan Capitol rally Stockton Record-7/3/09 By Alex Breitler Hundreds of Delta advocates plan to rally next week at the state Capitol, fearing that behind-the-scenes negotiations by legislators over the future of the estuary will shut them out of the debate until it is too late. Earlier this week, it appeared a key committee hearing would take place next week, on Tuesday or Thursday. Grass-roots group Restore the Delta sent an alert to its members, warning that the proposed legislation - perhaps a combination of existing bills - could include authorization of a peripheral canal. That hearing is now in question as legislators grapple with the state budget. Some advocates are concerned there could be no hearing at all. "One public hearing for a set of water policies that has far-reaching and expensive implications for the entire state is a mockery of the democratic process," Restore the Delta director Barbara Barrigan-Parrilla said in her message to members. "We are tired of the decisions being made without our consent and involvement," she wrote. Hearing or no, advocates plan a rally and news conference at 11 a.m. Tuesday on the north steps of the Capitol. Sen. Lois Wolk, D-Davis, whose 5th District includes portions of San Joaquin County, is expected to attend. Wolk said Thursday that discussion and negotiations on the water bills were ongoing. "The budget is taking center stage, as it should," she said. "Everything is in flux, and it changes from day to day." A spokesman for Sen. Joe Simitian, D-Palo Alto, a canal supporter whose Senate Bill 12 is one of those set for discussion at the proposed hearing, declined to comment on the specifics of the negotiations. While draft documents have apparently been circulated, Delta advocates say they've been left out of the loop and will therefore have little time to respond. "Frankly, the voices of the Delta - the fishermen, the farmers, Delta interests and communities - have not been involved in this process," said Stockton environmentalist Bill Jennings, head of the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance. A canal would skirt the Sacramento River around, rather than through, the Delta to giant pumps near Tracy. Those pumps send water to cities and farms from the Bay Area to San Diego. Supporters say a canal could be operated to take more river water during wet years and less during dry years, but opponents say it will ultimately lead to increased water exports and turn the Delta into a stagnant swamp. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Fri Jul 3 16:10:02 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Fri, 3 Jul 2009 16:10:02 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Rally July 7 to Protect Delta Message-ID: <001001c9fc33$65e52ee0$31af8ca0$@net> Local legislators will join hundreds of members of environmental organizations, sportfishing groups, farmers and community activists as they hold a rally at the State Capitol in Sacramento on Tuesday, July 7th, 2009 at 11 a.m. to voice concerns around a package of yet-unreleased water bills. Delta advocates fear that this bill package will include a enormously costly and environmentally destructive peripheral canal and more dams to export more water to corporate agribusiness on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley. The hearing on the water bills originally scheduled for July 7 has been cancelled and no new date has been set. The canal and dams are expected to exacerbate the collapse of Central Valley Chinook salmon, Central Valley steelhead, longfin smelt, Delta smelt, green sturgeon, striped bass and other Delta fish populations. Dan Bacher FOR PLANNING PURPOSES Press Contact: Andrew Acosta andrew [at] acostasalazar.com , (916) 444-8897 ***MEDIA ADVISORY*** Delta Community Groups and Legislative Leaders Call for Transparency in Water Policy Negotiations Hundreds Plan to Rally at the State Capitol to Ensure the Delta has a Voice SACRAMENTO - Local legislators will join hundreds of members of environmental organizations, sport fishing groups, farmers and community activists as they hold a rally at the State Capitol on Tuesday, July 7th, 2009 to voice concerns around a package of yet-unreleased water bills. WHO: Senator Lois Wolk and other members of the California State Legislature Rudy Mussi, Central Delta Farmer Bill Jennings, Chairman, California Sportfishing Protection Alliance Zeke Grader, Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations Robert Johnson, Contra Costa Delta Fisherman's Group Charlotte Hodde, Planning and Conservation League Debbie Davis, Environmental Justice Coalition for Water Steve Evans, Friends of the River Barbara Barrigan-Parrilla, Restore the Delta *Spanish speakers will be present WHAT: Delta Water Policy Press Conference and Rally WHERE: California State Capitol, North Steps Sacramento, CA WHEN: Tuesday, July 7, 2009 11:00 a.m. The closed door negotiations on this water package are reported to include several contentious water issues including the governance structure of the Bay-Delta region, water storage and an updated version of the multi-billion dollar Peripheral Canal, which was overwhelmingly rejected by California voters in 1982. Participants will express the Delta's need for a voice in these negotiations and the responsibility of the State Legislature to allow for a full and public debate on these important issues. # # # Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Sat Jul 4 10:36:55 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Sat, 4 Jul 2009 10:36:55 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] New York Times Editorial July 3 2009 Message-ID: <000501c9fcce$0b344fd0$219cef70$@net> New York Times Opinion Editorial 10 Years, 430 Dams Published: July 3, 2009 Ten years have gone by since a modest but important moment in American environmental history: the dismantling of the 917-foot-wide Edwards Dam on Maine's Kennebec River. The Edwards Dam was the first privately owned hydroelectric dam torn down for environmental reasons (and against the owner's wishes) by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Bruce Babbitt, the interior secretary at the time, showed up at the demolition ceremony to promote what had become a personal crusade against obsolete dams. The publicity generated a national discussion about dams and the potential environmental benefits - to water quality and fish species - of removing them. It certainly helped the Kennebec and its fish, and dams have been falling ever since. According to American Rivers, an advocacy group and a major player in the Edwards Dam campaign, about 430 outdated dams (some of them small hydropower dams like Edwards) have been removed with both public and private funding. In one case, the removal of a small, 50-foot dam on Oregon's Sandy River was paid for entirely by the electric utility that owned it in order to improve salmon runs. More lies ahead. Three dams that have severely damaged salmon runs in Washington State are scheduled to come down in 2011. A tentative agreement has been reached among farmers, native tribes and a power company to remove dams on California's Klamath River, the site of a huge fish kill several years ago attributed mainly to low water flows caused by dams. Maine, where this all began, will be the site of a spectacular restoration project. Under an agreement involving the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, a coalition called the Penobscot River Restoration Trust and PPL, a power company, two dams will be removed and a fish ladder built at a third to open up 1,000 miles of the Penobscot River and its tributaries so that fish can return to their traditional spawning grounds. A half-dozen species should benefit, including endangered Atlantic salmon. The federal government has now imposed "critical habitat" protections in nine Maine rivers where the salmon return to spawn. NOAA's heightened interest in Atlantic salmon has raised hopes that it may now take aggressive - if politically risky - steps to protect salmon on the West Coast by ordering the removal of four big dams on the Lower Snake River. This page has recommended such a move, which two previous administrations have ducked. It seems now within the realm of possibility. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.gif Type: image/gif Size: 1110 bytes Desc: not available URL: From kierassociates at suddenlink.net Sun Jul 5 08:32:39 2009 From: kierassociates at suddenlink.net (Kier Associates) Date: Sun, 05 Jul 2009 08:32:39 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Edwards Dam and the Klamath In-Reply-To: <000501c9fcce$0b344fd0$219cef70$@net> References: <000501c9fcce$0b344fd0$219cef70$@net> Message-ID: <20090705153255.PITM13503.omta02.suddenlink.net@kier.suddenlink.net> An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: 39c761.jpg Type: application/octet-stream Size: 5556 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Sun Jul 5 08:37:19 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Sun, 5 Jul 2009 08:37:19 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Front Page San Francisco Chronicle July 5 2009 Message-ID: <005101c9fd86$7f29a350$7d7ce9f0$@net> Warning on trout hatcheries could force changes Peter Fimrite, Chronicle Staff Writer Sunday, July 5, 2009 Hatchery-raised steelhead trout pass on genetic defects that hamper survival of even their wild-born offspring, according to a study that biologists say could lead to a radical shift in the way salmon breeding programs operate on the West Coast. Images Ben White, the head biologist at Warm Springs Hatchery in... Hatchery-raised steelhead trout can pass on genetic defec... Head biologist Ben White checks on young trout at Warm Sp... http://imgs.sfgate.com/graphics/utils/plus-green.gifView More Images * Fireworks set off blaze that destroys home 07.02.09 The recent Oregon State University study found that even hatchery fish whose parents were wild develop and pass on genetic defects severe enough to hamper the reproductive ability of their offspring. The implication, scientists said, is that hatchery programs for all salmonid species, including steelhead, chinook and coho, could actually be harming the natural balance and contributing to the demise of the once plentiful salmon runs in California, Oregon and Washington. "Past studies have always suggested that hatchery-produced fish are of lesser quality, but this study shows it is more disturbing than we thought," said Tina Swanson, a fishery scientist and the executive director of the Bay Institute. "This is the clearest indication that hatchery-produced fish can actually harm wild stocks. It underscores my suspicion that hatcheries are not the solution." The issue is critically important to biologists, fishermen and water managers in California, where the commercial salmon fishing season was shut down for a second straight year after another paltry return of spawning fall run chinook. The Sacramento-San Joaquin River fall run is historically the largest run of salmon on the West Coast and the vast majority of those fish are mass produced in hatcheries. Scientists point to a host of environmental and habitat problems, including a warming ocean, for the decline. A biological review this month by the National Marine Fisheries Service placed much of the blame on diversions by the state and federal water systems. Hatcheries, though, have always been seen as part of the solution. The Oregon study released in June shows that they may instead be part of the problem. Michael Blouin, a professor of zoology at Oregon State and the lead author of the study, said the genetic fingerprints of three generations of wild and hatchery-raised fish from Oregon's Hood River, in the Columbia River system, were studied for how well they reproduced in the wild. The analysis involved genetic data on thousands of fish dating back to 1991. On average, he said, the offspring of two hatchery-reared steelhead were only 37 percent as reproductively fit as fish whose parents were both wild. The fish with two hatchery parents were 87 percent as fit as the offspring of one wild parent and one hatchery parent. Meticulous standards These differences were detectable even after a full generation of natural selection in the wild, Blouin said. "What's surprising is how poorly the first generation of fish do," Blouin said. "There's a rapid decline in the fitness of those fish when they go out and spawn in the wild." The results are important because until now most biologists thought genetic problems developed over several generations and only in hatcheries that were lax in their efforts to ensure genetic variability. But the Hood River hatchery is used for conservation purposes, meaning the fish are meticulously bred, are fed in a way that is as natural as possible and are regularly interbred with wild fish in an attempt to help with genetic diversity. A previous Oregon State study published in the journal Science in 2007 showed that hatchery fish that migrate to the ocean and return to spawn leave far fewer offspring than their wild relatives. This latest study, Blouin said, strongly suggests that hatchery salmonids are also reducing the fitness of wild populations when they interbreed. 40 million salmon per year The potential ramifications are frightening when one considers that 40 million hatchery-raised salmon are released into California river systems every year. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service releases 12 million chinook smolt and the California Department of Fish and Game releases 20 million smolt annually into the Sacramento-San Joaquin River system. The rest are dumped into the Klamath River. Of the four big hatcheries run by the state and two by the federal government, only the federally run Livingston Stone National Fish Hatchery at the base of Shasta Dam and the state's Warm Springs Hatchery for coho in the Russian River Basin have the same quality standards as the Hood River hatchery. In fact, the vast majority of the California chinook are farmed for the fishing industry as mitigation for construction of dams and other diversions by the state and federal water projects. "The purpose is not to restore wild fall run chinook to the Sacramento," said Bob Clarke, the acting regional fisheries manager for the Fish and Wildlife Service. "It is to help support a commercial and recreational fishery." The Oregon study, which shows that even cautious breeding of fish can be harmful, means that the mass production of salmon in California hatcheries could be much more damaging than previously thought, according to scientists. "If steelhead are at all similar to chinook then this is very, very, very worrisome," said Swanson, adding that nobody even really knows if any wild fall run chinook still exist. "We're doing a bunch of things that we already know are wrong and this study has identified another flawed practice." The study acknowledges that steelhead trout may react to captive breeding differently than chinook, but it nevertheless warns fishery managers not to rely on hatcheries for the recovery of salmonids. A growing movement "There is a lot circumstantial evidence that what we have shown is also happening to other species," Blouin said. "What it means is that if you are trying to help a wild population recover then putting hatchery fish in there is probably not a good idea." The study gives credence to a growing movement to change the way hatcheries operate. One proposal is to mandate removal of the adipose fins on all hatchery fish for identification purposes. Another is to make hatchery conditions more riverlike and feed young fish underwater instead of using the unnatural method of throwing pellets on the top of the water. "Even hatchery reform is not a solution, which is why no matter what you do in the short term, the goal must be self-sustaining populations of wild fish," said Steve Mashuda, an environmental attorney for Earth Justice. The positive thing about the study, Blouin said, is that it shows how quickly fish adapt. If steelhead can change their genetics and behavior to out compete others in the unnatural environment of a hatchery, he said, they can certainly do it in the wild. "If you fix the habitat and leave it alone," he said, "natural selection will very quickly create a locally adapted population." E-mail Peter Fimrite at pfimrite at sfchronicle.com. This article appeared on page A - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.gif Type: image/gif Size: 5339 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image002.gif Type: image/gif Size: 5723 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image003.gif Type: image/gif Size: 5382 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image004.gif Type: image/gif Size: 54 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Sun Jul 5 09:19:47 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Sun, 5 Jul 2009 09:19:47 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Table Associated with SF Chronicle Hatchery Article July 5 09 Message-ID: <008101c9fd8c$6ac31b70$40495250$@net> Attached Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: Hatchery Production SF Chron.pdf Type: application/pdf Size: 415003 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Sun Jul 5 09:52:11 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Sun, 5 Jul 2009 09:52:11 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] SF Chronicle Editorial Opinions July 5 2009 Message-ID: <00a701c9fd90$f18fa250$d4aee6f0$@net> Editorial opinion pieces on Delta and water issues. Here are three inks and one story copied in full. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/07/05/INBM18I79J.DTL http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/07/05/INBM18I6SM.DTL http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/07/05/INUL18HM0G.DTL http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/07/05/INGV18GJGP.DTL This one printed in full below Limit agribusiness - for salmon's sake Paul Johnson Sunday, July 5, 2009 When I look at a salmon, I don't just see a silver fish, I see California. Salmon fishing is part of our heritage, a way of life that has been passed down for generations, deeply connected to the community and tradition. The forests, streams and wildlife of California depend on the return of the salmon for food and nutrients. Newspaper helps make connections 07.05.09 Salmon is one of our last great wild foods, a pillar of the healthy, sustainable and delicious cuisine that we all have come to know and love in California. A fat, fresh piece of salmon pulled from the sea, passed over the coals and into your mouth, will light your senses and let you know that this is real food. Wild salmon have been tied to the heritage, culture and history of California since the first people crossed the land bridge connecting Asia to the new world some 12,000 years ago. Those first North Americans built a rich culture and economy based on the annual return of salmon to their natal streams. Many of California's indigenous peoples, such as the Miwok, Yurok, Wintun and others, were dependent on salmon to provide a substantial part of their staple diet and economic stability. Their cultural and religious ceremonies reinforced the central role that salmon played in their natural view of the world. Early explorers such as Lewis and Clark considered salmon "the West's greatest source of wealth" and made note of the abundance of salmon in every stream and river and its importance to local peoples. As the West was settled, salmon was to become an important cog in its economic engine. The first Pacific Coast salmon cannery was on a barge moored on the banks of the Sacramento River. This small canning operation was the beginning of an industry that would spread to all the great rivers of the West, leaving a legacy of jobs and wealth based on the natural cycle of the salmon's return. This is a heritage we are in danger of losing forever. For the second year in a row, the Pacific Coast has been closed to salmon fishing, both commercial and recreational, because of the collapse of Sacramento River runs. But it is not only the salmon and the salmon community that are suffering, it is the entire Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta ecosystem, the most important and productive wetlands on the West Coast, that is threatened. In five years, we've seen the complete collapse of the food web in the delta. Populations of plankton and fish that feed on them - delta smelt, longfin smelt, shad, immature striped bass and salmon - have declined by 90 percent or more. We are experiencing a catastrophic collapse of the entire delta ecosystem. The reason for this is plain and simple: water exports. Not enough water is flowing through the delta. Water issues in California are often framed as "water needed for agriculture, jobs and cities is being sacrificed for an inconsequential little fish, the delta smelt." The truth is, water that could be used to the benefit of wildlife, cities, family farmers, fishermen and California's Indian tribes has been appropriated by corporate agribusiness. Tens of thousands of jobs and billions of dollars are being lost because of the delta crisis, and the treasured salmon runs of California are in real danger of disappearing. In coming weeks, the California Legislature will address legislation on one of the state's most important issues, the management of our water. We need to ask our legislators some questions before they make the difficult decisions that will determine the future of the delta ecosystem, our water and our fisheries: Do we really believe that more dams, reservoirs and a $25 billion peripheral canal (a pipe three football fields wide), to pump water around the delta, will save the delta? Why do we as taxpayers subsidize water for agribusiness to grow water-intensive cotton and alfalfa in the desert? How did it come to be that 10 percent of California's farmers use 70 percent of California's water? Maybe we need to consider conservation incentives rather than water subsidies. Instead of more reservoirs, we should talk about recharging the ground water aquifers that already exist, recycling, desalination and retiring drainage-impaired agricultural land in the San Joaquin Valley. At 9 a.m. Tuesday, the Assembly Water, Parks and Wildlife Committee will hold a hearing on proposed delta solutions legislation in Room 4202 of the state Capitol in Sacramento. Possibly this will be the one and only hearing for the public to comment on policies that could permanently shape the delta's future and water use in California. Paul Johnson is president of Monterey Fish Market of San Francisco and Berkeley and the author of "Fish Forever" (Wiley, 2007). http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/07/05/INBM18I79J.DTL http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/07/05/INBM18I6SM.DTL http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/07/05/INUL18HM0G.DTL Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Mon Jul 6 13:44:16 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Mon, 6 Jul 2009 13:44:16 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Eureka Times Standard July 5 2009 Message-ID: <005f01c9fe7a$87fcd9d0$97f68d70$@net> More resources being sent to Trinity Alps fire Eureka Times-Standard-7/5/09 Six Rivers National Forest announced Saturday that more aircrafts have been ordered to support crews on a forest fire in the Trinity Alps Wilderness, according to a press release. The fire, located 36 miles northeast of Willow Creek, became more active and grew to a little over 30 acres in size Friday. Fire crews needed more helicopter water drops to support line construction. "We ordered two Type I helicopters that should arrive early this afternoon to help the crews on the ground," Mike Beasley, Fire Management Officer, said in the release. "The fire is about 15 percent contained and we hope the added air support helps us make the progress we need to make today." The fire outlook for Saturday was warmer and drier conditions with slightly cooler temperatures expected for today. Thirteen of the 14 fires being staffed by the Six Rivers National Forest are contained, with seven controlled. For additional fire information, call (530) 629-2118. FIRE FACTS: Number of fires: 14 Size: Fires range from a 1/10 of an acre to 30 acres in size Started: Wednesday Containment status: Seven controlled, six contained Resources threatened: No structures are threatened Active fire location: 36 miles northeast of Willow Creek in Trinity Alps Wilderness Resources: - 2 hotshot crews - 2 hand crews - 1 Type 3 helicopter; 1 Type 2 helicopter, 2 Type I Helicopters arriving Saturday - 6 engines - 3 water tenders Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Tue Jul 7 14:32:47 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Tue, 7 Jul 2009 14:32:47 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Eureka Times Standard July 7 2009 Message-ID: <002c01c9ff4a$7916a600$6b43f200$@net> Wilderness fire spreads Eureka Times-Standard-7/7/09 By John Driscoll A wildfire in the Trinity Alps Wilderness expanded swiftly to 3,300 acres Sunday afternoon and Monday despite cooler temperatures, fire officials said. While the fire is still far from most communities, it's burning on the hot dry southwest slopes in trees burned by the 1999 Megram Fire, presenting a challenge to firefighters. Winds and topography -- and in part better mapping -- is cited as the reason the blaze grew from 300 to 3,300 acres in a day, said fire information officer Kerry Greene. The Backbone Fire on the Six Rivers National Forest and the Trinity Fire on the Shasta-Trinity National Forest have merged. The Atlanta-based National Incident Management Organization is expected to take over management of the fire on Wednesday. Six Rivers National Forest Supervisor Tyrone Kelley was scheduled to meet with Hoopa Valley Tribe Chairman Leonard Masten Monday to discuss protection of cultural sites in the area. Officials have called in significant resources to quell the blaze, including nine hotshot crews, attack and helitack crews, eight helicopters and four engines. Some 290 personnel are assigned to the fire. Roads and trails in the fire area are closed to the public. Rafting on the Trinity River is still allowed, but officials are asking rafters to proceed with caution near the helibase in Willow Creek. National Weather Service meteorologist Michael Stroz said the next few days are forecast to be cool and breezy due to a weather system lingering over the West Coast. Wind at higher elevations could gust to 20 miles per hour today, Stroz said, but humidity should increase at night. "That should help them to hopefully get a better handle on it," Stroz said. By the weekend, temperatures are expected to increase, and are forecast to be in the 90s by early next week, Stroz said. FIRE FACTS Size: About 3,300 acres Started: July 1, 2009 Resources threatened: No structures are threatened. Location: 36 miles northeast of Willow Creek in Trinity Alps Wilderness Resources: 9 hotshot crews 1 Type II initial attack crew 1 helitack crew 1 Type 3 helicopter; 2 Type 2 helicopter, 5 Type I helicopters 4 engines 3 water tenders Total personnel: 290# http://www.times-standard.com/ci_12767167?IADID=Search-www.times-standard.co m-www.times-standard.com Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Tue Jul 7 14:35:52 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Tue, 7 Jul 2009 14:35:52 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Fresno Bee July 6 2009 Message-ID: <003101c9ff4a$e80208c0$b8061a40$@net> Lawyer again plumbs depths of state water issues Fresno Bee-7/6/09 By Michael Doyle David J. Hayes is once again No. 2 at the Interior Department and No. 1 for California water. Call it political d?j? vu. After an eight-year absence, the Stanford-trained environmental lawyer has reclaimed both the California water portfolio and the title as deputy secretary of the Interior. The high-profile, high-risk assignment puts him back in the middle of the Central Valley?s interminable fish-vs.-farm water disputes. ?I expect I?ll have to pay taxes in California, I?ll be spending so much time out there,? Hayes said, half-jokingly. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar introduced Hayes as his department?s go-to California water guy at a Fresno town hall meeting a week ago. Beyond serving as what he calls the ?chief operating officer? of the $10 billion-a-year Interior Department, Hayes will coordinate the Obama administration?s role in California water use. When Valley congressmen are unhappy, they?ll call Hayes. When irrigation district officials want their concerns really heard, Hayes is their man. When decisions get made on protecting species or approving projects, Hayes will be in the middle of things. Unsolved dilemmas are now his problem, including what to do about irrigation drainage on the San Joaquin Valley?s west side. Specific proposals will now float across his desk. These might range from a proposed ?Inter-tie? connecting California?s state and federal aqueducts to a proposed $26 million ?Two Gates? project that would permit more irrigation deliveries by protecting fish from being sucked into Delta-area water pumps. ?Both projects are on our radar screen,? Hayes said, adding that ?we?re going to give a vigorous review? to the Two Gates proposal widely promoted by Valley lawmakers. California?s complex water challenges have long invited the appointment of special emissaries. ?I?m pleased the president has assigned somebody to California water,? said Rep. George Radanovich, R-Mariposa. ?That offers a little bit of hope they will actually do something.? For Hayes, the burden is a familiar one. A 55-year-old native of New York state, Hayes graduated from the University of Notre Dame and Stanford Law School. Active in environmental issues, and a former vice chair of the board of American Rivers, Hayes was deputy Interior secretary during the Clinton administration. Between 1999 and 2001, Hayes focused on Colorado River conflicts and California?s Bay-Delta problems, among others. Hayes returned to the law firm Latham & Watkins after his Clinton administration job expired. There, public records show, he was registered as a lobbyist for San Diego Gas & Electric, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California and a handful of other firms. The lobbying registrations temporarily impeded Hayes? confirmation for the Interior Department post, as did some of his commentary about Republican environmental postures. ?Like Ronald Reagan before him, President Bush has embraced the Western stereotype to the point of adopting some of its affectations, the boots, brush-clearing and get-the-government-off-our-backs bravado,? Hayes wrote in April 2006 for the Progressive Policy Institute. Under questioning by Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona, Hayes conceded his anti-Bush language was ?overly florid.? Hayes? 11-page article, though, also promoted what he termed a ?moderate? Western agenda that included more federal flexibility in dealing with private landowners and avoidance of a ?Washington-is-always-right model? of decision-making. Now, overseeing 70,000 Interior Department employees, Hayes will get a chance to put his stated principles into practice.# http://www.fresnobee.com/local/story/1517810.html Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Wed Jul 8 11:19:22 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Wed, 8 Jul 2009 11:19:22 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Delta Canal Protests Message-ID: <001201c9fff8$9f515690$ddf403b0$@net> Three newspaper articles on Delta Canal Protest Rally in Sacramento http://www.recordnet.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090708/A_NEWS/90708031 4 http://www.fresnobee.com/263/story/1520555.html http://www.sacbee.com/ourregion/story/2008478.html Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Wed Jul 8 11:22:37 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Wed, 8 Jul 2009 11:22:37 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Sac Bee July 8 2009 Message-ID: <002c01c9fff9$1390dc10$3ab29430$@net> We might need salmon czar, too Sacramento Bee-7/8/09 Editorial Faced with a pitchfork rebellion in the San Joaquin Valley, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar last month appointed a "water czar" to deliver extra water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to farmers in certain districts south of the Delta. That prompts a question: Will the Obama administration also appoint a "salmon czar" to help bring relief to the North Coast fishing industry, which is dependent on healthy flows in the Delta so salmon can migrate and spawn? So far, Salazar's water agenda in California has focused almost completely on Fresno-area farmers, whose wealth and clout tend to demand attention. That's why Deputy Interior Secretary David Hayes has been tasked to bring together federal agencies to expedite certain Delta projects, including a pair of gates that would block imperiled smelt and salmon from being sucked into pumps that deliver water to the south. It's commendable that Salazar, a former congressman from Colorado, would want to wade into the swamp of Delta politics. For the last four years, the Bush administration barely got its toes wet. Yet because they are not from this place, Salazar and Obama may not understand the need for a balanced approach to resolving conflicts over water and natural resources. They also should be careful not to fuel certain myths that make resolution more complicated. Some of these myths: . The Endangered Species Act and related court rulings are the main causes of the water shortages in the San Joaquin Valley. Not true. As of the end of April, the water content in the state's snowpack was 66 percent of normal, the third dry year in a row. Drought is the main cause of water cutbacks in the San Joaquin Valley. . All water districts in the Valley are suffering. Again, not true. Some water districts have senior water rights, meaning they get first dibs on available supplies. While holders of junior water rights, such as the Westlands Water District, have been cut back severely, other districts are close to their normal allotments. . Central Valley salmon are suffering only because of ocean conditions. Another falsehood. Salmon runs have bounced around but have generally declined since the 1960s, even with gyrating ocean conditions. Clearly, their habitat in the Valley has degraded - a habitat that is dependent on clear, cold, abundant water. Through improved conservation, water banking, groundwater storage and other projects, California can help its farms and cities weather the dry periods while rebuilding a healthy fishery. That will take a cooperative approach. Yet if certain farm districts and their congressional representatives choose to point fingers and inflame myths, cooperation will be hard to come by. The challenge for the Obama administration will be to bust through those falsehoods and serve as a moderating force for a more efficient and equitable use of water in California.# http://www.sacbee.com/opinion/story/2008146.html Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Thu Jul 9 14:11:59 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Thu, 9 Jul 2009 14:11:59 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Capitol Weekly July 9 2009 Message-ID: <004301ca00d9$e666a3f0$b333ebd0$@net> Peripheral Canal, crux of state water wars, draws fire Capitol Weekly-7/9/09 By Kevin Hefner Legislators backed by farmers, fisherman, environmentalists, and community activists rallied at the Capitol this week against the proposed Peripheral Canal, which would shift Northern California water to the south around the Delta. Protesters feared the canal would damage the heart of the Delta, through which most of California's drinking water flows. The canal has not been officially approved, but there are persistent rumors in the Capitol that the project is gaining new traction. The group's main concerns were that they have had no say in the process, citing the Bay Delta Conservation Plan (BDCP), which has not yet been made available to the public. "You can't fix the Delta without the people of the Delta as your partner," said Assemblywoman Lois Wolk, D-Davis. "Some say it's a roadblock for progress, but the Delta is our home, and we have a right to be involved in the discussions." Lt. Governor John Garamendi, a candidate for Congress in the 10th C.D., also spoke out against the plan saying, "This is too critical of a public policy issue to be done in secret. There needs to be light and transparency brought to this process. We aren't trying to stop the process entirely; we just want to be involved." Also under scrutiny were the possible impacts on the region of the canal. Assemblywoman Joan Buchanan, D-Alamo, said that the proposed canal would, "redirect 15,000 cubic feet of water a second through a 500-700 foot wide, 47-mile-long canal, into the southern part of the state. More often than not, the Delta cannot sustain that kind of diversion, for example, the Delta would have only been able to achieve that kind of output only 3 months out of the entire year in 2007." A BDCP spokesperson, responding to Buchanan, said that "15,000 would be the maximum capacity that could be redirected by the canal. Environmental laws prevent the canal from moving that much at any one time." Delta resident Bob Kirtlan responded, "If you build it, they'll use it. Once it's built, they'll always change the law." Bill Jennings, Chairman of the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance said that "discarding prudent legislative deliberation and oversight is likely to lead to wasting tens of billions of dollars constructing a massive white elephant that will destroy Delta fisheries and water quality, gravely damage the Delta economy. and cause increased litigation because of legal flaws and bad science. They treat the Delta like a reservoir, when it is really a delicate ecosystem." In response, the BDCP was quick to add that the canal would redirect the flow of water so that the Delta would become more natural and environmentally friendly. The Delta community group estimated the project would cost taxpayers $20 billion to $40 billion dollars including taxes, and would affect more than 6,000 people. They also contend that an estimated $100 million dollars would be lost from the Delta economy every year, should the canal be built. "At a time when we are making the most regrettable cuts to basic health programs, the public must be told how much they will be asked to pay." said Charlotte Hodde of the Planning and Conservation League, "(and) how many in-home services or classrooms it costs to pay for this expensive project." "The canal would be the biggest public constructions ever made in the United States, equivalent to the Panama Canal" said Assemblywoman Buchanan, "and I want to make it clear I will not vote for a Panama Canal." Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Thu Jul 9 14:13:48 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Thu, 9 Jul 2009 14:13:48 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Vacaville Reporter July 9 2009 Message-ID: <004801ca00da$277378f0$765a6ad0$@net> Wolk, farmers call for Delta input Vacaville Reporter-7/9/09 State Sen. Lois Wolk, D-Solano, and a broad coalition of Delta farmers, fisherman, community advocates, environmentalists, state and local elected representatives converged on the steps of the State Capitol Tuesday to demand that the voice of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta community be heard as plans are written and carried out to restore the Delta. "You can't fix the Delta without the people of the Delta as your partners," said Wolk, chair of Senate Select Committee on Delta Stewardship and Sustainability. "Nobody is more concerned about the decline of the Delta than those who live in the Delta, the people who work, farm, fish, and recreate here. We know the Delta is not a blank slate. We love the Delta's many facets, not just the water that flows through it. We love the Delta for the place that it is and the people who live, work, and play here, and we are committed to preserving and protecting it." Along with Lt. Gov. John Garamendi, Sen. Mark DeSaulnier, and Assembly members Joan Buchanan, Alyson Huber, and Mariko Yamada, Solano County Supervisors John Vasquez joined the gathering along with supervisors from Yolo, Sacramento and Contra Costa counties. The event was coordinated by Restore the Delta, a coalition of farmers, environmentalists, fisherman and Delta advocates. The Delta encompasses five counties, 27 cities and two ports. It provides world-class birding, hunting, wind-surfing and hiking. It is home to 500,000 acres of small family farms that produce prized pears, asparagus, wine grapes, and contributes $2 billion to California's economy. It provides habitat for 90 percent of California's salmon, which not only support the West Coast's $1 billion salmon fishery but are also a critical food source for killer whales. "All that depends on the health of the Delta and its watershed," Wolk said. "Those of us that live in and love the Delta are tired of failed attempts, we need real solutions. It is time that the Delta voice is heard, and that the health of the Delta is restored." Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Thu Jul 9 14:15:49 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Thu, 9 Jul 2009 14:15:49 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Fresno Bee July 8 2009 Message-ID: <004d01ca00da$6f7af4c0$4e70de40$@net> House panel rejects Nunes protest of water diversions Fresno Bee-7/8/09 By Michael Doyle A key House committee has slapped down the latest effort by Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Visalia, to protest the diversion of Central Valley water for environmental protection. On Tuesday night, the House Appropriations Committee rejected Nunes' recurring water amendment by a 33-25 vote. If it had passed, the amendment would have blocked federal spending on decisions that divert irrigation water to protect salmon, the delta smelt and other species. "People and communities have been replaced by a parade of extreme environmental activists and their misguided causes," Nunes said Wednesday in a statement. The committee voting on the proposed amendment for the fiscal 2010 energy and water spending bill fell largely along party lines, with all Republicans supporting Nunes and all but three Democrats opposing him. In recent weeks, Nunes has brought similar amendments to the House floor and to the House Rules Committee. In each case, the amendments lost. Nunes has threatened to keep offering similar amendments wherever possible. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From danielbacher at fishsniffer.com Thu Jul 9 14:45:14 2009 From: danielbacher at fishsniffer.com (Dan Bacher) Date: Thu, 9 Jul 2009 14:45:14 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Delta Groups Rally Against The Panama Canal North In-Reply-To: <004d01ca00da$6f7af4c0$4e70de40$@net> References: <004d01ca00da$6f7af4c0$4e70de40$@net> Message-ID: <50987AA4-A078-404D-8FBE-985BA1FC0388@fishsniffer.com> ? The exporting of more water out of the Delta not only dooms agriculture in the Delta, but also dooms one of the largest estuaries on the North American west coast,? stated Rudy Mussi, Central Delta farmer and Member of the Central Delta Water Agency. Photo: Family farmers from North Delta Cares hold up a banner opposing the construction of "The Panama Canal North." Photo by Dan Bacher. ? img_5828_1.jpg Delta Groups Rally Against The Panama Canal North by Dan Bacher Legislators and hundreds of Delta advocates held a rally at the State Capitol in Sacramento on Tuesday to oppose the peripheral canal, a budget-busting and environmentally destructive project that would approximate the Panama Canal in width and length. "I'm not going to vote for a plan that builds a Panama Canal down the middle of the 15th Assembly District,? exclaimed Assembly Member Joan Buchanan to loud applause from a crowd of recreational anglers, commercial fishermen, Delta farmers, farmworkers, Indian Tribal members and community activists. ?I will do all I can to make that the Delta is protected.? As she spoke, Delta family farmers from North Delta Cares and others held up banners proclaiming ?The Peripheral Canal=Panama Canal North,? along with signs saying, ?Fewer Water Exports, Not Fewer Delta Fish? and ?Give the Delta a Voice!? Buchanan said Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger?s Delta Vision Process calls for "improved conveyance" that will transport 15,000 cubic feet of water per second (cfs) from the Sacramento River around the Delta. This is smaller than the proposed 1982 peripheral canal, defeated overwhelmingly by the voters, that was intended to transport 22,000 cfs. A conveyance to transport 15,000 cfs. would be between 500 and 700 feet wide, requiring a 1300 foot right-of-way, based on an engineering report completed in August 2006 by Washington Group International for the State Water Contractors, ?Isolated Facility, Incised Bay-Delta System ? Estimate of Construction Costs.? ?That's the width of a 100 lane freeway,? said Buchanan. ?The length of the conveyance would be between 47 and 48 miles.? By comparison, the Panama Canal is between 500 and 1000 feet wide and is 50 miles long. The rally was held not only to oppose the ?Panama Canal North,? but to demand that Delta residents have a voice in ongoing water policy negotiations in the Legislature. ?The message today is quite simple,? said State Senator Lois Wolk D-Davis), who opened the rally. ?You can?t fix the Delta without the people of the Delta as your partners.? Wolk stated that changes to the Delta proposed by the Legislature and the Governor?s Bay Delta Conservation Plan and Delta Vision processes could mean increased exposure to pollutants in the waters, increased costs for water and water treatment, reduced farm production, greater loss of commercial fishing and a higher risk of flooding. The rally took place on the day that a hearing regarding a package of water bills was originally scheduled. However, the hearing, which hundreds were expecting to attend, was cancelled and has not been rescheduled. The coalition of canal opponents fears that the final package, developed through secret negotiations with no input from Delta residents, would fund the budget-busting canal at a time when California has a $24.3 billion deficit. Peripheral Canal: A Bad Idea In 1982 and Even Worse Now ?The peripheral canal was a bad idea in 1982 and it?s an even worse idea today,? said Steve Evans, Conservation Director, Friends of the River. ?Several court rulings have proven that the government can?t be trusted to operate a Peripheral Canal in a way that benefits the Delta. Instead it will be used to suck most of the fresh water from the Sacramento River for export to southern Central Valley agribusiness and southern California developers.? Fisheries advocates said the canal must stopped because it will only exacerbate the collapse of Central Valley Chinook salmon, Delta smelt, longfin smelt, juvenile striped bass, threadfin shad, Sacramento splittail and other Delta fish populations. Bill Jennings, Chairman/Executive Director of the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance, described the canal and dams proposal as ?a legislative dash to the worst environmental disaster in American history? ? and noted that the Delta is dying because existing environmental laws are being ignored. ?Discarding prudent legislative deliberation and oversight is likely to lead to wasting tens of billions of dollars constructing a massive white elephant that will destroy Delta fisheries and water quality,? said Jennings. ?It will gravely damage the Delta economy, deliver less water than presently exported and cause increased litigation because of legal flaws and bad science.? ?The water exporters look at the Delta as a reservoir, but it is actually a living ecosystem,? said Zeke Grader, executive director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen?s Associations (PCFFA). ?The life blood of California?s commercial salmon fishery is being drained out of the Delta as the freshwater is exported to San Joaquin Valley agribusiness.? Farmers from throughout the Delta came in force to the rally. Farmers oppose the canal because increasing salinity caused by the canal would both destroy agriculture on one of the world's most fertile estuaries and devastate fish populations in order to export water to subsidized water to drainage impaired land on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley. ?The exporting of more water out of the Delta not only dooms agriculture in the Delta, but also dooms one of the largest estuaries on the North American West Coast,? stated Rudy Mussi, Central Delta farmer and Member of the Central Delta Water Agency. Winnemem Wintu Tribe Fights for the Delta Mark Franko, headman of the Winnemem Wintu (McCloud River) Tribe, held up a sign proclaiming, ?Tribes Support Saving the Delta.? The Winnemem Wintu has been forefront in the battle to save the Delta and stop the peripheral canal. They are strongly opposing a federal plan to raise Shasta Dam that is a linchpin in the plan to export more water out of the Delta through the canal. ?The peripheral canal is a big, stupid idea that doesn?t make any sense from a tribal environmental perspective,? said Franco. ?Building a canal to save the Delta is like a doctor installing an arterial bypass from your shoulder to your hand? it will cause your elbow to die just like taking water out of the Delta through a peripheral canal will cause the Delta to die.? Robert Johnson, Delta fly fishing enthusiast and founder of Californians Against the Canal, pointed out the absurdity of the state funding the enormously expensive canal and more dams at a time when the state is laying off teachers and nurses and mandating three unpaid furlough days a month for state employees. He urged the state to find sustainable alternatives to meet California's water needs. ?The Peripheral Canal and Sites and Temperance Flat Dams will cost over $40 billion, including interest, and not provide a DROP of additional water,? said Johnson. ?How can state legislators allow this secretive, hugely expensive bond measure to be jammed through without rigorous debate exploring the alternative Alternatives that will provide over 10 million acre feet of water for the state ? more water than has ever been exported from NorCal?? Likewise, Barbara Barrigan-Parrilla, campaign director of Restore the Delta, said, ?We want real solutions ? programs and projects that will capture, recycle, and treat water ? programs that are cost effective and environmentally sound ? programs that will stop the insanity of moving water from north to south through or around the Delta. Freddie Morales, a young farmworker from Alpaugh in the San Joaquin Valley, illustrated the irony of corporate agribusiness campaigning to export more water from the Delta when they continually deny clean drinking water to farmworkers in rural communities. ?We need clean drinking water and the water is bad in my community,? he said. ?People get sick from it.? Elected officials who spoke at the rally included Lt. Governor John Garamendi, State Senator Mark DeSaulnier, Assemblymembers Alyson Huber and Mariko Yamada, and Contra Costa County Board of Supervisors representative Mary Piepho, speaking for the assembled County Supervisors from the five Delta counties. Other speakers included Charlotte Hodde, Water Program Manager of the Planning and Conservation League, Debbie Davis, Legislative Analyst for the Environmental Justice Coalition for Water and Jim Metropulos, Senior Advocate for Sierra Club California. The Delta?s Voice Must Be Heard! Canal opponents emphasized that while the Legislature is on the verge of considering a massive and costly restructuring of California?s water laws and water infrastructure, there have been no public hearings even as the Legislative policy committees are set to complete their work. ?A series of secret bills, not yet in official language, are set to be merged and will cover several contentious water issues including governance of the Bay-Delta region, water conservation, new dams and an updated version of the multi-billion dollar Peripheral Canal, which was overwhelming rejected by California voters in 1982,? according to a statement from Restore the Delta. Expressing concern that the public and most legislators have not seen the legislative language and the bills are only scheduled for a cursory policy committee hearing instead of allowing for public input, the group called for public hearings where the voices of Delta residents, farmers and fishermen are heard and acted upon in a spirit of openness and transparency. ?Delta communities need to have a major voice in the process,? concluded Barbara Barrigan-Parrilla. ?Without public hearings, the more than 500,000 Californians who live and work in the Delta are being denied the opportunity to hold a major voice in the process.? For more information about what you can do to stop the peripheral canal, go to http://www.calsport.org, http://www.restorethedelta.org and http://www.stopcanal.org. ? Assemblymember Lois Wolk by Dan Bacher Thursday Jul 9th, 2009 11:56 AM ? img_5779.jpg ? Assemblymember Mariko Yamada by Dan Bacher Thursday Jul 9th, 2009 11:56 AM ? img_5797.jpg ? Lieutenant Governor John Garamendi by Dan Bacher Thursday Jul 9th, 2009 11:56 AM ? img_5782.jpg ? Bill Jennings, California Sportfishing Protection Alliance by Dan Bacher Thursday Jul 9th, 2009 11:56 AM ? img_5817.jpg ? Zeke Grader, PCFFA by Dan Bacher Thursday Jul 9th, 2009 11:56 AM ? img_5814.jpg ? Robert Johnson, Californians Against the Canal by Dan Bacher Thursday Jul 9th, 2009 11:56 AM ? img_5826.jpg ? Charlotte Hodde, Planning & Conservation League by Dan Bacher Thursday Jul 9th, 2009 11:56 AM ? img_5838.jpg ? Mark Franko, headman of Winnemem Wintu Tribe by Dan Bacher Thursday Jul 9th, 2009 11:56 AM ? img_5807.jpg ? Members of North Delta Cares at the Rally by Dan Bacher Thursday Jul 9th, 2009 11:56 AM ? img_5774.jpg ? Jim Cox and other members of the California Striped Bass Association (CSPA) by Dan Bacher Thursday Jul 9th, 2009 11:56 AM ? img_5800.jpg -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: Rally at Capitol Story.doc Type: application/octet-stream Size: 188416 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: img_5828_1.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 209132 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: img_5779.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 181894 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: img_5797.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 164819 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: img_5782.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 152156 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: img_5817.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 150953 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: img_5814.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 164019 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: img_5826.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 192183 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: img_5838.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 166591 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: img_5807.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 167343 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: img_5774.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 191035 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: img_5800.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 165034 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Fri Jul 10 13:56:46 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Fri, 10 Jul 2009 13:56:46 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Sacramento Rally Article by Dan Bacher Message-ID: <01f501ca01a0$f103be70$d30b3b50$@net> Good Morning I'm sending a revised version of this article. I corrected several typos, as well as just pasting just one photo to my email since a number of email messages bounced back to me because of the size of the files I attached Thanks Dan Bacher Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: Rally at Capitol Story.doc Type: application/msword Size: 202240 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: img_5828_1.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 209132 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Fri Jul 10 19:19:44 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Fri, 10 Jul 2009 19:19:44 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Fly Fisherman Magazine - analysis the "Klamath Basin Restoration Agreement" Message-ID: <001101ca01ce$0e6dfb60$2b49f220$@net> Great, interesting article. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: Dissecting the Klamath - Fly Fisherman Mag - July 09.pdf Type: application/pdf Size: 500828 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Fri Jul 10 20:17:29 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Fri, 10 Jul 2009 20:17:29 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Fly Fisherman Magazine - analysis the "Klamath Basin Restoration Agreement" Message-ID: <003401ca01d6$200ca850$6025f8f0$@net> It has been suggested to me that this article does not represent the Agreement accurately. As it's been said to me, "This article is far from great. It completely misrepresents the history of this negotiation, where Oregon Wild, the Bush and Obama Administrations and others are concerned, as well as the substance regarding fish flows, groundwater, ESA. etc." The suggestion also is offered that people should both read the agreement and if possible discuss the matter with persons involved including Yurok members. Byron From: Byron Leydecker [mailto:bwl3 at comcast.net] Sent: Friday, July 10, 2009 7:20 PM To: FOTR List (fotr at mailman.dcn.org); Klamath Restoration List (klamath at klamathrestoration.org); Trinity List (env-trinity at mailman.dcn.org) Subject: Fly Fisherman Magazine - analysis the "Klamath Basin Restoration Agreement" Great, interesting article. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Wed Jul 15 10:46:54 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Wed, 15 Jul 2009 10:46:54 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] SF Chronicle July 14 2009 Message-ID: <006301ca0574$3e6d82f0$bb4888d0$@net> Kulongoski signs bill to pay for removal of dams S.F. Chronicle-7/14/09 By Jeff Barnard The state of Oregon will finance most of the cost of removing four Klamath River dams to help salmon under a bill signed by Gov. Ted Kulongoski Tuesday. Meanwhile, federal officials met in Klamath Falls with representatives of Pacificorp and the states of California and Oregon. The parties must have a binding agreement by September to restore 300 miles of spawning habitat on what was once the third biggest salmon producer on the West Coast. A preliminary agreement that serves as a framework for the negotiations both guarantees and limits the amount of irrigation water that will be available to farmers in the Klamath Basin, and offers hundreds of millions of dollars for salmon restoration work and research. In recent decades, the needs of farms and fish in the area have been pitted against each other while declining salmon runs have triggered cutbacks in commercial and recreational fishing. "Signing this bill into law is a critical step in ensuring that all of the Klamath's diverse rural communities have an economically viable future," Kulongoski said in a release. "Every farmer and fisherman whose livelihood depends on a healthy river system will benefit from the restoration of the Klamath Basin." Long an opponent of dam removal, PacifiCorp shifted after it became clear the idea had strong public support and the utility could end up paying far more to continue trying to relicense the aged dams. "We said all along if public policy dictates dam removal, we need to do everything we can to provide our customers with legal and financial protection," Pacificorp spokesman Art Sasse said. Sasse, as well as representatives of Indian tribes, farmers, and salmon fishermen, who have long battled over balancing scarce water in the Klamath Basin between fish and farms, all praised the governor for his work to make dam removal a reality. Oregon Wild, however, continues to oppose the deal. The conservation group argues that it gives too much to farmers and too little to fish and wildlife. Water wars have long simmered in the Klamath Basin, where the first of the dams and a federal irrigation project built in the early 20th century turned the natural water distribution upside down, draining marshes and lakes and tapping rivers for electricity to put water on dry farmland that grows potatoes, horseradish, grain, alfalfa and cattle. A drought in 2001 forced a shut-off of irrigation water to sustain threatened and endangered fish, and when the irrigation was restored the next year, tens of thousands of salmon died trying to spawn in the Klamath River, which was too low and too warm to sustain them. Besides blocking salmon from the upper basin, the dams raise water temperatures to levels unhealthy for fish. Their reservoirs produce toxic algae. The fish are beset by parasites. The law calls for building up a trust fund of $180 million over the next 10 years through a surcharge on PacifiCorp costumers in Oregon, which amounts to about $1.50 a month for a residential customer. California pays $20 million. If dam removal falls through, the money goes back to ratepayers. If a federal feasibility study shows the dams can be safely torn down, work begins around 2020.# Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Wed Jul 15 10:48:43 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Wed, 15 Jul 2009 10:48:43 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Sacramento Bee July 14 2009 Message-ID: <006801ca0574$7f6a0440$7e3e0cc0$@net> State lawmakers OK temporary dredging ban targeting salmon habitat Sacramento Bee-7/14/09 By Matt Weiser The state Legislature has approved a bill to temporarily ban suction dredge mining in the state's rivers, a largely recreational practice blamed for harming salmon spawning habitat. The state Senate on Monday voted 28-7 to approve the bill, SB 670 by Sen. Patricia Wiggins, D-Santa Rosa. It was approved by an even wider margin in the Assembly last week. The bill contains an urgency clause, meaning it becomes law immediately upon signing by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. It would ban suction dredge mining until the Department of Fish and Game completes a court-ordered update of regulations governing the practice. "In addition to being essential to saving salmon and steelhead fisheries," Wiggins said in a statement, "this bill will save the department an estimated $1 million in costs to administer a program that does not pay for itself." The regulatory review was supposed to be finished by July 2008, but Wiggins said the department has yet to begin. As a result, a new court order last week prevents the department from using general fund money to operate the dredge permitting program. Supporters say the bill includes language negotiated with the Schwarzenegger administration, so they expect him to sign it. Those negotiations followed a February confirmation hearing for Fish and Game Director Don Koch, during which the administration's handling of suction dredge mining came under attack.# Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kierassociates at suddenlink.net Wed Jul 15 12:13:46 2009 From: kierassociates at suddenlink.net (Kier Associates) Date: Wed, 15 Jul 2009 12:13:46 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Kulongoski signs bill to pay for removal of dams In-Reply-To: <006301ca0574$3e6d82f0$bb4888d0$@net> References: <006301ca0574$3e6d82f0$bb4888d0$@net> Message-ID: <20090715191354.LOQ13503.omta02.suddenlink.net@kier.suddenlink.net> An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Wed Jul 15 14:17:09 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Wed, 15 Jul 2009 14:17:09 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] (no subject) Message-ID: <00ab01ca0591$9e1fee50$da5fcaf0$@net> John Stewart is on Comedy Central channel and times of his program vary somewhat on the West Coast. In the Bay Area on Comcast cable, he's on at 11 PM and the next day the show is repeated at noon, I believe. It may even be repeated again at another time. Byron Island Press E-News July 14 Our national water crisis is massive, but we've yet to see it get the kind of widespread attention it deserves. Island Press has been working hard to put this issue onto the national stage, and now I am excited to tell you that Robert Glennon, author of Unquenchable, will be appearing on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart this Thursday, July 16, 2009 (rebroadcast at 8PM EST Friday, July 17). We hope his appearance on the show that Rolling Stone called "The Most Trusted Name in News" will help catapult a more prominent discussion on how to solve our water crisis. The timing couldn't be more important, as the water crisis is getting steadily worse. Just recently, droughts have become so bad that a Los Angeles "water conservation team" is now patrolling neighborhoods to keep residents from violating water restrictions; the Dallas-Ft. Worth area is using marketing strategies to convince Oklahoma to sell them some of their water; and this year Northern California fishermen and farmers are losing $2.69 billion because water levels are so low that fish populations have dwindled and water can't be pumped to farms. Even water-rich areas of the country like New England and the Southeast are facing challenges in finding and allocating enough water among the many users who demand it. As we look to what the future holds for all of our natural resources, we must realize that water is a commodity we can't replace. I hope you can tune in and hear Glennon's message. Reaching over 1.5 million people on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Glennon, one of the foremost experts on freshwater resources, will bring powerful attention to an issue that affects us all. Sincerely, Charles Savitt President, Island Press Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Wed Jul 15 17:00:39 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Wed, 15 Jul 2009 17:00:39 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] California's Looming Groundwater Catastrophe Message-ID: <00c601ca05a8$751b04b0$5f510e10$@net> You can read Dr. Gleick's bio, but simply stated he is unquestionably the leading non-financially involved, knowledgeable and objective student, scientist and writer on California water issues. Byron http://imgs.sfgate.com/graphics/blogs/luminaries/gleick.jpg Dr. Peter Gleick President, Pacific Institute http://imgs.sfgate.com/graphics/utils/rss_icon_citybrights2.gif| Read Bio City Brights: Peter Gleick : California's looming groundwater catastrophe California is one of the only states in the United States with almost completely unregulated groundwater use. Groundwater users are, with few exceptions, not required to report how much water they pump... California's looming groundwater catastrophe California's looming groundwater catastrophe California is one of the only states in the United States with almost completely unregulated groundwater use. Groundwater users are, with few exceptions, not required to report how much water they pump. Further, groundwater levels are irregularly and incompletely monitored, leaving these withdrawals unmeasured and policymakers in the dark. In part, this is a legacy from the old days when groundwater and surface water were considered separate. We have known for a long time, however, that they are connected, and that the use of one affects the availability of the other. Pretending that we only need to allocate and monitor surface water use and rights, while unlimited groundwater use is permitted, is a recipe for disaster. Some people like it this way. And these people do whatever they can to prevent any move to get the state to regulate, or even measure, groundwater use. If their groundwater use affects their neighbor's well or a nearby stream, tough luck. This isn't sustainable. Sooner or later, bad things happen when the use of common resources, such as air or water, is left completely unmanaged. For groundwater in California, bad things are already happening. Water Number: 60 million acre-feet. This is the amount of groundwater that a new study from the US Geological Survey estimates has been lost in California's Central Valley since 1961. Lost. Consumed and not replenished. In some places, groundwater levels have dropped 400 feet or more. The vast majority of this overpumping has been in the Tulare Basin, though the last few years of drought have led to significant increases in overdraft in the San Joaquin Basin as well. As a result of some overpumping, land subsides and compacts. Buildings and roads subside and crack. Drainage patterns change. And ironically, the California aqueduct systems run by the State and Federal governments may be damaged, threatening the delivery of water to other urban and agricultural users. The truth is, there is not enough surface water to satisfy Central Valley growers, and so they pump groundwater. In an average year in the Central Valley, groundwater provides nearly half of irrigation water demand. In a dry year, such as we've experienced for the past three years, some users pump even more groundwater and groundwater may provide 60% or more of irrigation demand. If this water is then replenished in wet years, groundwater use over time is sustainable - groundwater acts like any other reservoir (only without many of the adverse consequences of surface reservoirs). If not fully replenished, however, groundwater levels inevitably fall. The primary cost of using groundwater is to drill a well or to run a pump on an existing well - the water itself is not priced. The costs for drilling and running pumps, however, are beginning to rise. Costs for drilling new wells, especially given the depths to which groundwater has fallen, can be hundreds of thousands of dollars. The cost of electricity or diesel to run groundwater pumps is rising as well. Eventually, the damage caused by subsidence, or the conflict among users sharing the same aquifers, or the cost of pumping will increase to the point where pumping must decrease or even stop. And when that happens, our food supply may go the way of the Delta smelt and California's salmon, and we will end up with neither fish nor farms. Let's stop pretending that pumping groundwater without constraint is a reasonable use of our limited freshwater resources. In some areas of the state, local entities have formed groundwater management authorities to manage this important resource for the benefit of all users. This should be required everywhere, but especially in areas of severe overdraft. Anything less will mean growing confusion and chaos for California water and inevitably diminishing returns for California agriculture. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 4075 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image002.gif Type: image/gif Size: 1014 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Wed Jul 15 19:17:43 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Wed, 15 Jul 2009 19:17:43 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Robert Glennon Message-ID: <00e301ca05bb$9a9b9070$cfd2b150$@net> A very thoughtful person has let us know that hulu will provide replays of the Robert Glennon appearance, author of Unquenchable, on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart a few day after the television show. It will be here: http://www.hulu.com/search?query=The+Daily+Show+with+Jon+Stewart Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Thu Jul 16 19:30:22 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Thu, 16 Jul 2009 19:30:22 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] River of Renewal Message-ID: <005201ca0686$8961c1f0$9c2545d0$@net> The film, River of Renewal, will be shown in Weaverville tomorrow, that is Friday night. Thanks so very much to Christine Jordan of the Five Counties Salmonid Conservation Program for this information. For more info on this film, a documentary on the Klamath Basin crisis: http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/documentary-film-program/film/river-of-renewal Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From Bill_Pinnix at fws.gov Fri Jul 17 13:32:54 2009 From: Bill_Pinnix at fws.gov (Bill_Pinnix at fws.gov) Date: Fri, 17 Jul 2009 13:32:54 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] 2009 Trinity River Outmigrant Monitoring Update -- Willow Creek Trap Site Message-ID: Hello Everyone, Here is the most recent 2009 Trinity River Outmigrant Monitoring Update for the Willow Creek Trap Site. See the attached pdf for catch table and text. Willow Creek Downstream Migrant Trap Site 2009 In-Season Trapping Update ?July 17, 2009 Synopsis: The 2009 Downstream Migrant trapping season at the Willow Creek Trap Site (river kilometer 34) is being conducted jointly by the USFWS Arcata Fish and Wildlife Office (AFWO) and the Yurok Tribal Fisheries Program (YTFP) on the mainstem Trinity River near Willow Creek, California. The season began March 12, 2009 with the installation of two traps. A third trap was installed March 14, 2009. See attached catch summary for details of this narrative. This summary includes data from March 12th, 2009 through July 9th, 2009 and is presented as raw catch. No expansions have been calculated at this time. Data entry is not complete for Julian Week (JW) 28, July 9th to July 15th. Heavy debris load and high flows have occasionally resulted in null sets, causing less than 21 trap days (3 traps x 7 days) in some weeks (particularly weeks 18-23 when spring rains coincided with high dam releases). Raw daily catches of Chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha) have been captured each day sampling has occurred and most have been young-of-the-year (YOY), with more age 1+ natural Chinook salmon than in past years. Raw catch to date is almost twice the raw catch of the previous yearly high?.and the season is still underway! Weekly mean Fulton?s K values of YOY Chinook salmon early in the season were lower than 1.0 with an increase in condition evident over the first 4 weeks and stabilizing at slightly higher than 1.0 in the later weeks. Efficiency calibrations were conducted with freeze-branded hatchery Chinook salmon during all weeks sampled, with numerous batches of fish to address assumptions and recommendations of the downstream migrant monitoring review. Raw daily catches of steelhead (Oncorhynchus mykiss) smolts (age 1+) have been steady since the beginning of trapping with hatchery steelhead showing up in JW 13 and peaking in JW 17, while natural steelhead peaked in JW 14. Steelhead smolts began the season with weekly mean Fulton?s K values slightly higher than 1.0, which has dropped to lower than 1.0 as the season has progressed; this drop in condition is typical for smolts as they ready for ocean entry. Steelhead YOY numbers are present in the catch, but have yet to show signs of a peak. Raw daily catches of coho salmon (Oncorhynchus kisutch) are low compared to the past 6 years, especially for natural smolts. In addition, it appears that the emigration period is later for natural coho smolts compared to previous years. Weekly mean Fulton?s K value of natural coho salmon smolts have been higher than 1.0 with a slight drop in later weeks indication that the smolting process is underway. Hatchery coho smolts occurred in the catch beginning Julian Week 12 with a somewhat later peak in catch compared to previous years. If you have any questions regarding this summary, don't hesitate to contact Bill Pinnix at (707) 822-7201. (See attached file: WCT_Catch_Summary_07_17_09.pdf) William Pinnix USFWS, AFWO 1655 Heindon Rd Arcata, CA 95521 (707) 822-7201 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: WCT_Catch_Summary_07_17_09.pdf Type: application/pdf Size: 30129 bytes Desc: not available URL: From damon_goodman at fws.gov Wed Jul 15 14:25:01 2009 From: damon_goodman at fws.gov (damon_goodman at fws.gov) Date: Wed, 15 Jul 2009 14:25:01 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Invitation to the Pacific Lamprey Conservation Initiative Regional Meetings Message-ID: This email is a follow-up to the email sent out on June 24th, 2009, notifying interested parties about the dates and locations of the two regional meeting that will be held in California for the Pacific lamprey Conservation Initiative. The Pacific Lamprey Conservation Initiative is an effort coordinated by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (Service) to facilitate communication and coordination relative to the conservation of Pacific lamprey throughout their range. The goal of the initiative is to develop a Pacific Lamprey Conservation Plan (Plan) that will lead to restored Pacific lamprey populations and improvement of their habitat. In 2009, the Conservation Initiative Team will be hosting a set of regional work sessions to develop regional components of the Plan. The Service will be hosting regional meetings to cover California, Idaho, Oregon, Washington, and Alaska. The purpose of these meetings is to gather information on distribution, abundance, ongoing research, and threats specific to these regions. We are planning to hold two regional meetings for California, including the Oregon component of the Klamath Basin. One meeting will be held in Arcata, CA, and will cover the coastal drainages from Cape Mendocino to the Oregon Border and the entire Klamath Basin. The second meeting will be held in Sacramento, CA and will cover from Cape Mendocino south including the Sacramento and San Joaquin river basins. The Pacific Lamprey Conservation Initiative Team is encouraged by the level of interest indicated by the previous doodle survey. The California regional meetings are as follows: Arcata, CA Location: Humboldt Bay Aquatic Center, Room 211 & 212 921 Waterfront Drive, Eureka, CA Date/time: September 1st 9am-4pm and 2nd 9am-12pm Sacramento, CA Location: CALFED Bay-Delta Room John Moss Federal Building 650 Capitol Mall, 5th Floor, Sacramento, CA Date/time: September 15th 9am-5pm and 16th 9am-12pm Please send me an email with your name, affiliation and contact information if you plan to attend. In August, I plan to send out more specifics about the meeting agenda and other details. Thank you for your participation. Please let me know if you have any questions or need a list of local accommodations and feel free to forward this email to any others who may be interested in these meetings. See the USFWS Pacific Lamprey Conservation Initiative website for more information at: http://www.fws.gov/pacific/fisheries/sp_habcon/lamprey/ Damon Goodman Fish Biologist Arcata Fish and Wildlife Service 1655 Heindon Road Arcata, CA 95521 Phone: (707) 825-5155 Email: Damon_goodman at fws.gov -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From gking at asis.com Sun Jul 19 09:00:47 2009 From: gking at asis.com (Greg King) Date: Sun, 19 Jul 2009 09:00:47 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Kulongoski signs bill to pay for removal of dams In-Reply-To: <20090715191354.LOQ13503.omta02.suddenlink.net@kier.suddenlink.net> References: <006301ca0574$3e6d82f0$bb4888d0$@net> <20090715191354.LOQ13503.omta02.suddenlink.net@kier.suddenlink.net> Message-ID: It's worth noting that many state and national conservation organizations that would normally support dam removal could find themselves in the odd position of opposing the CA bond designed to make it happen if that bond includes Schwarzenegger's dam and peripheral canal proposals, as he has already hinted it would. It's a major weak link, one among many, in the list of provisions for dam removal being negotiated with PacifiCorp. Greg King President/Program Director Siskiyou Land Conservancy 707-498-4900 gking at asis.com On Jul 15, 2009, at 12:13 PM, Kier Associates wrote: >> 'little typo in the AP copy : > >> California will pay $200 million, not $20 million -- if 1- CA >> voters have one more "safe, clean, reliable" water bond left in >> them, which they may not -- and 2- some idiot CA governor doesn't >> try to tie the Klamath dam decom bond proposition to building some >> 700-ft-wide canal from the SF Bay-Delta to his developer friends >> in the south > >> Good for the Oregonians. > >> A little iffy from our end. > > Bill Kier > >> Kulongoski signs bill to pay for removal of dams >> S.F. Chronicle-7/14/09 >> By Jeff Barnard >> >> The state of Oregon will finance most of the cost of removing four >> Klamath River dams to help salmon under a bill signed by Gov. Ted >> Kulongoski Tuesday. >> >> Meanwhile, federal officials met in Klamath Falls with >> representatives of Pacificorp and the states of California and >> Oregon. The parties must have a binding agreement by September to >> restore 300 miles of spawning habitat on what was once the third >> biggest salmon producer on the West Coast. >> >> A preliminary agreement that serves as a framework for the >> negotiations both guarantees and limits the amount of irrigation >> water that will be available to farmers in the Klamath Basin, and >> offers hundreds of millions of dollars for salmon restoration work >> and research. >> >> In recent decades, the needs of farms and fish in the area have >> been pitted against each other while declining salmon runs have >> triggered cutbacks in commercial and recreational fishing. >> >> "Signing this bill into law is a critical step in ensuring that >> all of the Klamath's diverse rural communities have an >> economically viable future," Kulongoski said in a release. "Every >> farmer and fisherman whose livelihood depends on a healthy river >> system will benefit from the restoration of the Klamath Basin." >> >> Long an opponent of dam removal, PacifiCorp shifted after it >> became clear the idea had strong public support and the utility >> could end up paying far more to continue trying to relicense the >> aged dams. >> >> "We said all along if public policy dictates dam removal, we need >> to do everything we can to provide our customers with legal and >> financial protection," Pacificorp spokesman Art Sasse said. >> >> Sasse, as well as representatives of Indian tribes, farmers, and >> salmon fishermen, who have long battled over balancing scarce >> water in the Klamath Basin between fish and farms, all praised the >> governor for his work to make dam removal a reality. >> >> Oregon Wild, however, continues to oppose the deal. The >> conservation group argues that it gives too much to farmers and >> too little to fish and wildlife. >> >> Water wars have long simmered in the Klamath Basin, where the >> first of the dams and a federal irrigation project built in the >> early 20th century turned the natural water distribution upside >> down, draining marshes and lakes and tapping rivers for >> electricity to put water on dry farmland that grows potatoes, >> horseradish, grain, alfalfa and cattle. >> >> A drought in 2001 forced a shut-off of irrigation water to sustain >> threatened and endangered fish, and when the irrigation was >> restored the next year, tens of thousands of salmon died trying to >> spawn in the Klamath River, which was too low and too warm to >> sustain them. >> >> Besides blocking salmon from the upper basin, the dams raise water >> temperatures to levels unhealthy for fish. Their reservoirs >> produce toxic algae. The fish are beset by parasites. >> >> The law calls for building up a trust fund of $180 million over >> the next 10 years through a surcharge on PacifiCorp costumers in >> Oregon, which amounts to about $1.50 a month for a residential >> customer. California pays $20 million. If dam removal falls >> through, the money goes back to ratepayers. >> >> If a federal feasibility study shows the dams can be safely torn >> down, work begins around 2020.# >> >> >> Byron Leydecker, JcT >> Chair, Friends of Trinity River >> PO Box 2327 >> Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 >> 415 383 4810 land >> 415 519 4810 cell >> bwl3 at comcast.net >> bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) >> http://www.fotr.org >> >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> env-trinity mailing list >> env-trinity at velocipede.dcn.davis.ca.us >> http://www2.dcn.org/mailman/listinfo/env-trinity > Kier Associates, Fisheries and Watershed Professionals > P.O. Box 915 > Blue Lake, CA 95525 > 707.668.1822 > mobile: 498.7847 > http://www.kierassociates.net > GSA Advantage Contractor GS-10F-0124U > > _______________________________________________ > env-trinity mailing list > env-trinity at velocipede.dcn.davis.ca.us > http://www2.dcn.org/mailman/listinfo/env-trinity -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Tue Jul 21 17:22:58 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Tue, 21 Jul 2009 17:22:58 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] CBS July 21 2009 Message-ID: <007c01ca0a62$91f13fa0$b5d3bee0$@net> Jul 21, 2009 4:46 pm US/Pacific Study Finds Pesticides Travel, Kill Sierra Frogs http://static.cbslocal.com/Themes/CBS/_resources/img/images_image_281095702. jpg Environment & The Green Beat FRESNO (CBS 5 / AP) ? http://llnw.image.cbslocal.com/23/2009/07/21/175x131/yellow_legged_frog_0721 09.jpgClick to enlarge 1 of 1 Foothill Yellow-Legged Frog. ? Request Full Text From Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry A new study shows frogs in the high Sierra are threatened by airborne pesticides sprayed hundreds of miles away in the Central Valley. Researchers at Southern Illinois University and the U.S. Geological Survey measured toxicity levels of two pesticides, chlorpyrifos and endosulfan, to Pacific treefrogs and foothill yellow-legged frogs. Both species native to the mountain meadows have seen their populations decline. The tadpoles developed abnormalities that could increase their vulnerability to predators, flood and drought. The report said that airborne pesticides catch easterly winds and fall during rain and snow, then are spread by runoff. The study was published in the August 2009 issue of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry . Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.gif Type: image/gif Size: 91 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image002.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 9976 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Wed Jul 22 10:58:28 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Wed, 22 Jul 2009 10:58:28 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] SF Chronicle July 22 2009 Message-ID: <002901ca0af6$08e2bbf0$1aa833d0$@net> Farmers told how to save huge amounts of water Kelly Zito, Chronicle Staff Writer Wednesday, July 22, 2009 California farmers could save enough water each year to fill Yosemite's Hetch Hetchy reservoir 16 times by using more efficient irrigation techniques, according to a study that is bound to be highly controversial among the state's powerful agriculture interests. Images http://imgs.sfgate.com/c/pictures/2009/07/21/in-agwater22_ph1_0422947661_par t1.jpg http://imgs.sfgate.com/graphics/utils/plus-green.gifView Larger Image S.F. garden isn't dead - just in transition 07.22.09 The report, released today by the Pacific Institute, an Oakland water policy group, also recommends that the state rethink its historic water rights system and boost water prices. Both measures, in theory, would spur agricultural users to use less water at a time when climate change, urban growth and ecological restoration are expected to further cramp water supplies. "If we want to have a healthy agriculture economy, the only real option is to figure out how to produce more food with less water," said Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute and co-author of "Sustaining California Agriculture in an Uncertain Future." Farmers agree water supplies are stretched, but they disagree on the cause. During recent "fish vs. farm" rallies in the Central Valley, protesters decried environmental rules that have cut water exports from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta to protect endangered fish species. What's more, farmers say, they are doing their part. For instance, California growers in 2000 produced double the volume of crops in 1967 with only 2 percent more water, according to Mike Wade, executive director of the California Farm Water Coalition. Further, sweeping changes to water prices or supplies would simply hammer an industry reeling from a three-year drought, he added. "You can't just wave a magic wand," Wade said. "There are consequences. It affects things like ... what consumers can put their hands on at the grocery store." But maintaining the status quo isn't an option, Gleick argues. "California agriculture is in trouble," Gleick said. "If we continue doing the things the way we've always done them ... there's not going to be enough water - that's indisputable." California's produce growers, cattle ranchers, and rice farmers use about 34 million acre-feet of water each year (one acre-foot equals about 326,000 gallons), compared with 8 million acre-feet used in cities, according to Gleick. In a 2003 study, Gleick found cities could save 2.3 million acre-feet - nearly 30 percent, compared with the 16 percent prescription for agriculture (the report said farms could save 4.5 million to 6 million acre-feet a year). Gleick's recommendations for the agriculture sector range from relatively simple to positively thorny. In addition to increasing drip rather than "flood" irrigation, Gleick proposed re-examining state water rights and renegotiating higher prices for long-term federal water contracts as ways to promote conservation. The report also called for better monitoring of water supplies. "There are a lot of districts that have no idea how much water they use," said David Sunding, co-director of the Berkeley Water Center. "That needs to change. We're past that point in California." Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 24288 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image002.gif Type: image/gif Size: 54 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Wed Jul 22 15:20:15 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Wed, 22 Jul 2009 15:20:15 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] AP July 22 1009 Message-ID: <008701ca0b1a$96f515e0$c4df41a0$@net> Report: Farmers must think small to save water Written by TRACIE CONE, Associated Press Writer Wednesday, 22 July 2009 09:16 sprinkler(AP) - By investing in water-saving technology, California's drought-burdened farmers could save enough water annually to fill four times over a reservoir Gov. Schwarzenegger supports building, according to a report released Wednesday. The study by the nonprofit Pacific Institute urges regulatory agencies and lawmakers to focus on farm investments rather than large infrastructure projects such as the Temperance Flat Reservoir. Those could ensure more reliable water supplies as a warming planet increases the length and frequency of droughts, the report suggested. "We need to start thinking of investing in these efficiency improvements," said lead author Heather Cooley. "That's what will give the biggest bang for the buck." As California suffers its third year of drought and critical fish species decline in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta estuary, reductions in pumping to farmers and municipal users have some clamoring for new reservoirs and canal systems to protect the state's $39 billion agriculture industry. "This is one of the pieces that needs to be dealt with as we look at our water future, but it's not the piece that's going to save us," said Doug Mosebar, president of the California Farm Bureau. "We need water storage, conservation and desalination." The report said water-intensive flood irrigation has certainly declined since 2001, when 60 percent of farmers used it, but the method still is widely used in some areas. >From 2003 to 2005, San Joaquin Valley farmers spent $1.5 billion on water-saving technology, Mosebar said. Many farmers with historic water rights have no incentive to conserve, the report said, because they get their full allocation of canal water every year no matter the weather conditions, while others get none. The report said water contracts should be renegotiated to reflect the new reality of a dwindling supply. "This sounds like the Mother Teresa approach," said Shawn Coburn, a farmer who helped found the Latino Water Coalition. "These guys are living in a fantasy world. When you're talking about reappropriating water rights, you're messing with the value of property and it's enormous. It's Socialism 101." The new report suggests that farmers who conserve should be rewarded with lower water rates, while large users should pay more, like the two-tiered systems that exist in many municipal water districts. The money raised could pay for conversion to drip and other water-saving systems. The report said the government could encourage switching to expensive water conservation systems by offering reduced property taxes or a waiver of sales taxes for equipment purchases. Some changes, the report said, will be more difficult to make, such devising a system that allows farmers to receive water deliveries from canals when their crops need it, not simply when the district schedules them to take it. "We need to move beyond the status quo, because it's clearly not working for farmers," Cooley said. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 36257 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Mon Jul 27 16:50:56 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Mon, 27 Jul 2009 16:50:56 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Sacramento Bee July 27, 2009 Message-ID: <002c01ca0f15$15fc5a30$41f50e90$@net> 'Million boat' protest planned over Delta canal Sacramento Bee - 7/27/09 By Matt Weiser Drilling soil samples in Delta river bottoms is expected in September as California begins planning a controversial water diversion canal - a canal that also has a fleet of Delta boaters planning to weigh anchor in protest. Oakley City Councilman Bruce Connelley launched the "Million Boat Float" idea, to protest drilling and what he calls a consistent exclusion of local residents from the canal planning process. "The state government involved in this Delta plan has not listened to the people," he said. "There is no choice other than a public display." The proposed canal has been endorsed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and a task force he assembled to study the issue. The task force said a canal could help restore the Delta's strained environment. The canal is a centerpiece of the Bay Delta Conservation Plan - the BDCP - which includes state and federal agencies, water users and environmental groups. Its goal is to obtain approval for the canal, and habitat protection projects, under the Endangered Species Act. The group's steering committee, however, has no local government representatives. Its meetings are public, but its outreach has been limited. Karla Nemeth, state liaison to the BDCP, said a number of community workshops are planned in the Delta this fall. "The loud and clear message we heard was that folks needed more detail," she said. Nonetheless, Connelley's protest is set to begin Sunday, Aug. 16. He expects to see thousands of boaters cruising upriver to Sacramento for an overnight stay. On Monday, Aug. 17, the Legislature will reconvene after a recess, and the boaters will take their protest to the Capitol steps. Connelley's goal is a million boats, but he acknowledged he probably won't get there. "You ever seen a million boats on the Sacramento River before? I don't think we ever will, but it ought to be pretty impressive." The protest is not likely to stall state Department of Water Resources plans to drill in the Delta in September. That work involves taking soil samples as deep as 200 feet in the river bottom at 16 locations, from Sacramento's Pocket neighborhood and the town of Walnut Grove on the Sacramento River, to remote sloughs near Bethel Island and Stockton. With land-based sampling already under way, testing is estimated to cost $4.5 million, paid for by water contractors that depend on the Delta. A yet-to-be-hired contractor will work from either a barge or a ship. In addition to drilling, the crew will test soil density by using a hammer-like device to pound into the river bottom, said Mark Pagenkopp, a DWR senior engineering geologist overseeing the project. The goal is to test suitability of soils for construction of a canal and its intakes, tunnels and siphons. "This data will help in determining which alignment would be the best alignment to do," Pagenkopp said. He said work is likely to start near Sacramento's Pocket neighborhood, and then move south. The aim is to finish by the end of September, but it could stretch into 2010. The canal would divert a portion of the Sacramento River's flow directly to the Delta's state and federal water export pumps near Tracy. Isolating freshwater in a canal would prevent the pumps from killing fish, and would protect the water from floods and earthquakes. A canal would also end the need to maintain the Delta as a freshwater environment to serve water diverters. Biologists say the Delta should have more frequent pulses of salt water, an idea that worries Delta residents. What's envisioned are actually two canals: a completely contained canal skirting one edge of the Delta, and a "through- Delta" canal assembled from existing levees running down the estuary. Each canal would be enormous - at least 1,000 feet wide and 40 miles long - with potential environmental effects that remain unknown. The project is similar to the ill-fated Peripheral Canal rejected by California voters in 1982. This time, the Schwarzenegger administration claims it doesn't need voter approval to build the canal, which is likely to cost $10 billion. Many property owners are protesting DWR's demand for access to conduct land-based soil sampling. About 35 lawsuits are pending as a result. Dante Nomellini Sr., a lawyer representing some property owners, said the drilling is likely to draw more lawsuits. Connelley said his "Million Boat Float" will be civil. Participating boats will fly unique flags to identify them as part of the flotilla. "There's no intent to do anything radical that would hurt, harm or demean anybody," he said. "Our focus is to bring this to national attention." Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From Vina_Frye at fws.gov Tue Jul 28 15:51:28 2009 From: Vina_Frye at fws.gov (Vina_Frye at fws.gov) Date: Tue, 28 Jul 2009 15:51:28 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Trinity Adaptive Management Working Group Meeting (TAMWG) Message-ID: Hi Folks, The Trinity Adaptive Management Working Group (TAMWG) meeting notice for September 10, 2009 was published in the Federal Register today. Best regards, Vina FR Doc E9-17888[Federal Register: July 28, 2009 (Volume 74, Number 143)] [Notices] [Page 37240] >From the Federal Register Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov] [DOCID:fr28jy09-60] ======================================================================= ----------------------------------------------------------------------- DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR Fish and Wildlife Service [FWS-R8-FHC-2009-N152; 81331-1334-8TWG-W4] Trinity Adaptive Management Working Group AGENCY: Fish and Wildlife Service, Interior. ACTION: Notice of meeting. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- SUMMARY: The Trinity Adaptive Management Working Group (TAMWG) affords stakeholders the opportunity to give policy, management, and technical input concerning Trinity River (California) restoration efforts to the Trinity Management Council (TMC). The TMC interprets and recommends policy, coordinates and reviews management actions, and provides organizational budget oversight. This notice announces a TAMWG meeting, which is open to the public. DATES: TAMWG will meet from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Thursday, September 10, 2009. ADDRESSES: The meeting will be held at the Trinity County Library, 211 Main St., Weaverville, CA 96093. FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT: Meeting information: Randy A. Brown, TAMWG Designated Federal Officer, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, 1655 Heindon Road, Arcata, CA 95521; telephone: (707) 822-7201. Trinity River Restoration Program (TRRP) information: Mike Hamman, Executive Director, Trinity River Restoration Program, P.O. Box 1300, 1313 South Main Street, Weaverville, CA 96093; telephone: (530) 623-1800; e-mail: mhamman at mp.usbr.gov. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Under section 10(a)(2) of the Federal Advisory Committee Act (5 U.S.C. App.), this notice announces a meeting of the TAMWG. The meeting will include discussion of the following topics: Perspectives from Grand Canyon and Platte River restoration; Status of TAMWG recommendations; Progress towards a Request for Proposal (RFP) based science program; Channel rehabilitation program; Evaluation of hatchery goals and practices; Fish population trends; and Watershed work program. Completion of the agenda is dependent on the amount of time each item takes. The meeting could end early if the agenda has been completed. Dated: July 22, 2009. Randy A. Brown, Designated Federal Officer, Arcata Fish and Wildlife Office, Arcata, CA. [FR Doc. E9-17888 Filed 7-27-09; 8:45 am] BILLING CODE 4310-55-P Vina Frye U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Arcata FWO 1655 Heindon Road Arcata, CA 95521 Telephone: (707) 822-7201 Fax: (707) 822-8411 vina_frye at fws.gov -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Wed Jul 29 15:51:31 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Wed, 29 Jul 2009 15:51:31 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Sacramento Bee July 29 2009 Message-ID: <005f01ca109f$1e883d50$5b98b7f0$@net> Moratorium on gold dredging permits in California Sacramento Bee - 7/29/09 By Jeff Barnard The California Department of Fish and Game has stopped issuing permits for gold miners to use suction dredges in rivers until it develops new rules to protect salmon. The moratorium announced Tuesday stems from an injunction out of Alameda County Superior Court barring the department from spending state general funds to issue the permits after it missed a June 2008 deadline to develop new rules protecting threatened and endangered salmon. Department spokeswoman Kirsten Macintyre said that rulemaking process has now begun. Meanwhile, a bill that would go even farther and stop suction dredge mining until a scientific review is conducted is awaiting the governor's signature. The injunction stems from continuing efforts by the Karuk Tribe, salmon fishermen and conservationists to force Fish and Game to enforce regulations barring suction dredge mining where it harms fish. "It is morally reprehensible and illegal for California Fish and Game to continue to use tax dollars to subsidize the destruction of our salmon fisheries, especially so in the midst of a budget crisis," said Glen Spain of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations, which represents California salmon fishermen and was a plaintiff in the latest lawsuit. Since 1994, state regulations have barred suction dredge mining unless it can be shown it does not harm fish. About 3,500 permits are issued each year. A 2005 lawsuit from the Karuk tribe argued that the department was violating that regulation, and a judge ordered Fish and Game to conduct an environmental review and write new rules, if necessary, to protect fish listed as threatened or endangered by June 20, 2008. But it was not done. Arguing there was no line item in their budget concerning the mining permits, the department did not stop issuing them after the injunction was originally issued July 10. The moratorium was imposed after Judge Frank Roesch told the department that the injunction covered any expenditure of state funds, including turning on the office lights, in conjunction with the permits. Telephone calls and an e-mail to the New 49'ers gold mining club in Happy Camp, Calif., and a telephone call to their attorney in Portland, Ore., were not immediately returned. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Tue Aug 4 10:28:34 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Tue, 4 Aug 2009 10:28:34 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] SF Chronicle August 3 09 Message-ID: <000301ca1529$00daeb70$0290c250$@net> Calif. water officials study building delta tunnel S.F. Chronicle-8/3/09 Monday, August 3, 2009 State engineers are studying a proposal to send water supplies to Southern California through a tunnel under the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, rather than through a peripheral canal. The Department of Water Resources is considering the tunnel option as part of a broader, long-term effort to lower pressure on the beleaguered estuary. Proponents say routing water underground could help protect endangered fish species while securing supplies for San Joaquin Valley farmers and southern cities. But opponents fear diverting water would turn the delta into a swamp. By year's end, officials with the Bay Delta Conservation Plan are expected to release a draft conservation plan that could include options both above and below ground. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Tue Aug 4 11:36:42 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Tue, 4 Aug 2009 11:36:42 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] EENews August 4 09 Message-ID: <002901ca1532$83e065f0$8ba131d0$@net> Obama admin won't relax ESA to aid Calif. farmers -- Interior official (08/04/2009) Colin Sullivan, E&E reporter SAN FRANCISCO -- The Obama administration won't ease enforcement of the Endangered Species Act to help California farmers struggling with three straight years of drought and decades of water mismanagement, a top Interior Department official said yesterday in an interview. Deputy Secretary David Hayes, Interior's point person on California water issues, said the administration's commitment to the law is firm despite the intense pressure from the San Joaquin Valley to lift pumping restrictions ordered to protect salmon and the delta smelt in Northern California. "Compliance with the ESA is obviously something that's required," Hayes said. In a recent town hall-style meeting in Fresno, a farming community hit hard by the recession, Hayes' boss, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, told frustrated workers that rolling back the law would be "admitting failure" ( Greenwire, June 29). But farmers, water districts and some members of California's congressional delegation have continued taking shots at the law, given the state's tough economic conditions, the drought and limited pumping in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta region to restore salmon runs and protect the delta smelt. ESA protections have reduced water deliveries from lakes Shasta and Oroville through the delta into the state's aqueducts. Hayes stressed that he is "sympathetic" with farmers and others suffering from a water supply crisis that by one estimate has cost the state 35,000 agricultural jobs and $830 million in revenue. He is leading an Interior task force to address the multiple problems facing the state, which is also reeling from a collapsed salmon fishing industry to the tune of $1.4 billion, in addition to acres of fallowed fields, the prospect of rationing in urban areas and degraded ecosystems. "It's important to dial back the rhetoric here," Hayes said. "The major stakeholders on all sides have recognized that the status quo is unsustainable." Stimulus first Hayes, a veteran environmental attorney who worked at Interior during the Clinton administration before taking a job at Latham and Watkins, was handpicked by Salazar earlier this summer to plummet into the worst of the California water maze and start fashioning a federal response. How's it going? Until now, Hayes has focused on how to spend $160 million from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act earmarked specifically for the federal Central Valley Project, which is a primary source of water for farmers and municipalities near the delta. Interior last week released $40 million in stimulus funds for a number of infrastructure projects, including the installation of pipelines, pumps and water wells. Elsewhere, the Bureau of Reclamation has been busy lining up willing buyers and sellers to move about 250,000 acre-feet of water around the state. "There are a lot of areas in California that are doing relatively well in terms of water supply," Hayes said. "We've been working hard on water transfers." Hayes added that the department will continue to identify projects to back financially, to include water reuse and conservation efforts. In all, stimulus funding for California's drought-related activities is $391 million. 'Very daunting' Looking forward, Hayes admitted that the prospect of cutting through red tape to bring competing commercial interests, environmentalists and the suite of government agencies involved to the table to somehow work toward a solution to California's perennial water problems couldn't be more difficult. Add to that mix a surging population and climate change likely causing decreased snowpack in the Sierra Nevada in the years ahead. "It is very daunting," Hayes said. "It's the perfect storm of challenging problems." Among the solutions often cited in the state are building more dams to increase storage capacity or constructing a canal around the delta to avoid having to pump water through from reservoirs and rivers to the north. Salazar and others have been cold toward the prospect of new dams, but the canal idea may have legs, Hayes said. "All the analytical work and evaluation work associated with [the canal] is just getting under way," Hayes said. "It's certainly premature to have a position." Another shorter-term answer is the "Two Gates" plan, which would drop gates into the delta to prevent the smelt from getting sucked into the pumps. Members of Congress have urged Salazar to speed up an environmental review of the plan, but Hayes said the proposal needs further examination. "That project just appeared on our radar screen," he said. "We're very interested in it, and we're analyzing it." Looking at the bigger picture, Hayes said, Interior is working with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) to advance the Bay Delta Conservation Plan, which aims to improve ecosystem health in the delta while balancing deliveries to 25 million Californians. Hayes said the priority is to "co-prioritize" and not alienate any interest. "The point is, the system has been operated in a way that is not sustainable either for reliable water supplies or for the environment," he said. "There's a structural challenge that needs to be addressed." Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Tue Aug 4 11:48:30 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Tue, 4 Aug 2009 11:48:30 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Info on Business Journal Article August 4 09 Message-ID: <002e01ca1534$29ac2270$7d046750$@net> See press release following these observations: "Water For All" http://www.thewaterforall.com is organizing a rally outside of Congressman Miller's office next week. It's pretty clear that this is not a grassroots protest of any kind- this group shares an address with the "Latino Water Coalition," and it seems to be a front group run by Piedad Ayala, a labor contractor in Fresno who also receives cotton subsidies for a farm in Avenal, CA http://farm.ewg.org/farm/persondetail.php?custnumber=009875240 He's also running the same announcement on his labor contractor's corporate website: http://theayalacorporation.com According to the press release below, this effort is coordinated with the right-wing "central valley tea party," not exactly a sign that they're interested in constructive solutions to California's water problems. It's worthwhile knowing what's in the works and who and what is behind it. ****** Water group plans protest at Miller office Written by Business Journal staff Tuesday, 04 August 2009 08:04 George MillerA group called Water for All is organizing a protest rally at the Bay Area office of Democrat George Miller on Aug. 13 at 10 a.m. in Concord. As a member of the House Natural Resources Committee, Miller has been a critic of irrigated agriculture on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley. Protesters plan to oppose Miller's stance on the Endangered Species Act that has led to protections of Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta fish species and reduced water deliveries to local farmers. Miller's office is located at 1333 Willow Pass Rd., Ste 203, in Concord. For details about the rally, call (559) 229-9034, extension 35, or email piedad at thewaterforall.com This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it or ben at centralvalleyteaparty.com This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . Last Updated on Tuesday, 04 August 2009 08:19 Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 8450 bytes Desc: not available URL: From tstokely at att.net Tue Aug 4 18:46:28 2009 From: tstokely at att.net (Tom Stokely) Date: Tue, 4 Aug 2009 18:46:28 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Browns Appeal by American Forest Resource Council Message-ID: <18CADBCA2DB94FF590656C79C4E4B9EA@homeuserPC> FYI, this is an administrative appeal to the US Forest Service on a forestry project in the Weaverville area. Tom Stokely Water Policy Coordinator California Water Impact Network 504A Lennon St. (USPS and UPS) Mt Shasta, CA 96067 V/FAX 530-926-9727 Cell 530-524-0315 tstokely at att.net http://www.c-win.org/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: Appeal #09-05-00-0030-A215, Browns, American Forest Resource Council 7 28 2009.pdf Type: application/pdf Size: 60841 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Wed Aug 5 12:46:19 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Wed, 5 Aug 2009 12:46:19 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] LA Times August 5 2009 Message-ID: <007d01ca1605$67bbf820$3733e860$@net> Democratic lawmakers introduce bills to deal with California water policy L.A. Times-8/5/09 By Bettina Boxall Democratic lawmakers unveiled a package of water bills Tuesday that would create a politically appointed council with power to push through projects dealing with the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, the troubled hub of California's waterworks. The legislation, which deals with issues including conservation, ecosystem restoration and water rights, aims to break the stalemate over state water policy. But the proposals are already under fire from some interests that fear the bills are a blueprint for jamming through big construction projects, such as a canal that would carry water around the delta. The legislation, which is to be fleshed out in a conference committee when lawmakers return to Sacramento later this month, does not specifically authorize any projects. Rather, it creates the Delta Stewardship Council, which would have the authority to pursue delta restoration work and a "water conveyance facility." Four of the council's seven members would be appointed by the governor and two by the Legislature. The seventh would be the chair of the Delta Protection Commission. The bills call for water conservation and delta protections. They would also set in motion a potentially explosive examination of water rights in the delta watershed. "Neither the delta ecosystem nor the state's water needs have been well served by decades of benign neglect," said Silicon Valley Sen. Joe Simitian, author of one of five bills in the package and chair of the Senate Environmental Quality Committee. "The system of governance is broken and the system of conveyance is broken." Backers hope that a confluence of factors has created a window for action on the state's water problems, pushed into headlines this year by drought and environmental restrictions on delta pumping. They aim to get the package to the Assembly and Senate for floor votes before the Legislature's adjournment in mid-September. Only majority approval is required for the bills, meaning Democrats would need little Republican support. But that does not necessarily mean smooth sailing. Delta farm interests and some environmentalists are wary of anything that could clear the way for a delta canal, a version of which was killed by California voters in the early 1980s. "It's a fairly global, comprehensive package," said Jeffrey Kightlinger, general manager of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which imports water from the delta. "Whenever you do that, you're taking on a lot of sacred cows." Kightlinger said he was glad the bills dealt with "most of the major issues that need to be addressed. The large 'but' is we have concerns with quite a few of the mechanics of how they want to do it." Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has called for construction of new reservoirs and indicated support for a delta canal, said in a statement that "fixing California's broken water system cannot be put off any longer; we must get it done this session. "I look forward to reviewing their proposal and working in a quick and bipartisan way toward a comprehensive water plan that focuses on water supply reliability, conservation, environmental protection and increased storage." Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Wed Aug 5 13:03:04 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Wed, 5 Aug 2009 13:03:04 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Crescent City Triplicate August 1 2009 Message-ID: Klamath's fall run of chinook promising Crescent City Triplicate-8/1/09 By Kurt Madar This fall's Klamath River run of chinook salmon is projected to be slightly better than in recent years, experts say. Their views reinforce a report released by the Klamath River Technical Advisory Team in the spring that estimated the number of 2-year-old Klamath-spawned chinook in the ocean at about 500,000. California Department of Fish and Game fisheries biologist Sara Borok said that while not all of these fish would be returning as 3-year-olds, the run would be slightly higher than average. "We are predicting 131,000 to 139,000 3-year-olds in the Klamath," Borok said. "If you consider that the average for the last 29 years was 121,000, this is a slightly higher run than normal." Borok said despite early optimism, last year's run ended up being smaller than average, with less than 100,000 fish. "We've had a couple of good years of ocean conditions for salmon," Borok said to explain why the numbers are looking better. Fish and game senior biologist Larry Hanson cautiously predicted last spring that the area might be looking at the start of an upswing in salmon populations. Based on the current projections, Hanson is still optimistic nearly five months later. "For the first time in two years we are going to have a recreational ocean salmon fishing season," Hanson said. The limited ocean fishing season runs from Aug. 29 to Sept. 7. Commercial salmon fishing on the ocean will be closed for another season. Added to the recreational fishing in the ocean is a large allocation for in-river sport fishing. Allocation is the number of adult salmon allowed to be harvested; in the case of sport fishing fishermen are allowed to take three year old fish. "We have a record level allocation for this season on the Klamath," Hanson said. "The in-river sport fishery has been allocated 30,800 fish and the tribes have been allocated 30,900." Byron Leydecker, JcT, Chair Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Wed Aug 5 17:15:28 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Wed, 5 Aug 2009 17:15:28 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] CA Water Issues Dep Sec David Hayes Message-ID: <000801ca162b$01970640$04c512c0$@net> cid:image001.jpg at 01CA15EE.5B9C9A70 Meeting Notice August 5, 2009 Contacts: Ted Thomas, DWR Information Officer (916) 653-9712 . Kendra Barkoff, DOI Press Secretary (202) 208-6416 . U.S. Deputy Interior Secretary Hayes, Department of Water Resources Director Lester Snow to Hold Public Meeting on California's Water Challenges SACRAMENTO, CA -U.S. Deputy Secretary of the Interior David J. Hayes and the Director of California Department of Water Resources Lester Snow will hold a public meeting to discuss California's water challenges and Delta related issues on Wednesday, August 12, 2009, in Sacramento, Calif. Who: Deputy Secretary David J. Hayes Water Resources Director Lester Snow What: Public meeting on water issues in California When: Wednesday, August 12, 1:00pm - 5:00 p.m. Where: Capitol Plaza Holiday Inn in downtown Sacramento 300 J St Sacramento, CA Additional information on the agenda and scheduled speakers will be posted on DWR's website. www.water.ca.gov when available. ### _____ The Department of Water Resources operates and maintains the State Water Project, provides dam safety and flood control and inspection services, assists local water districts in water management and water conservation planning, and plans for future statewide water needs. Contact the DWR Public Affairs Office for more information about DWR's water activities. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 10571 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Thu Aug 6 09:52:33 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Thu, 6 Aug 2009 09:52:33 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Mercury News August 6 2009 Message-ID: <001c01ca16b6$4b5a2ba0$e20e82e0$@net> Fishermen cast some hope for a 2010 salmon season Mercury News-8/5/09 By Cathy Kelly Salmon fishing may just materialize here next year, regulators say, for recreational fishermen anyway. The state Department of Fish and Game recently posted an April 3, 2010 opening date for recreational salmon fishing south of Humboldt County's Horse Mountain, which would allow Monterey Bay anglers to catch two fish per day of any salmon species other than coho. The statement comes with a definite caveat, however, which is that a final decision will not be made until March, once the final fish counts roll in. But Dana Michaels, a spokeswoman for the Department of Fish and Game, said there is cause for some optimism, calling the announcement of the planned season "an educated guess." "It is based on several indicators, including reports from commercial and recreational anglers and others who spend a lot of time on the ocean," Michaels said. "Apparently, they say they've seen more salmon this year than last." Michael Mohr of the National Marine Fisheries Service, who heads the agency's Santa Cruz-based Salmon Assessment Team, agreed, while cautioning it's too early to tell for sure. "There are some encouraging signs, but it really depends on the number of fish returning to rivers in September," Mohr said. Sacramento River salmon are the ones local fisherman pray for most fervently, and that population largely failed last year. The poor showing resulted in the largest fishery closure on record. This year, California salmon fishing was banned commercially and largely banned for sports fishing too, except for a 10-day opening later this month in the Crescent City area. But hope persists. Mike Baxter, a longtime Santa Cruz fisherman and sometimes charter captain of the Velocity, said most people he speaks to are thinking there will be some limited recreational fishing of salmon next year. "It's kind of good news," Baxter said. "It's not all gloom and doom." In May, regulators opened recreational salmon fishing from Humbug Mountain in Oregon to Horse Mountain in Humboldt County, from Aug. 29 to Sept. 7. Some area fishermen are heading up north for that, Baxter said. At the Santa Cruz Small Craft Harbor Wednesday, the current targets were cod, halibut or albacore. Longtime fisherman Bill Schuette was buying bait at Bayside Marine in a plan to hook some halibut. "I think they're optimistic for some salmon next year," he said. "We're hopeful. But they shouldn't open it unless it's the right thing for the resource." Tom Faulk of the Paloma, a commercial salmon boat, said the lack of salmon has taken a big chunk out of his wallet. "But we might have a season too next year," he said. "We usually don't hear until late fall. It's just another uncertainty." Commercial Fisherman Greg Ambiel said he was heading to Oregon to catch albacore and that sports fisherman seem to be "luckier" than their commercial brethren as far as getting a green light on salmon fishing. Ambiel said some good years should be coming, as a lot of salmon were planted last year. And ocean conditions are "incredible" for salmon this year, he added, it's the water use in the Central Valley that is killing them. A large system to keep the salmon out of deadly San Joaquin River pumps was recently installed, though, he said. The Central Valley problem was echoed in May by the Santa Cruz-based director of the Fisheries Ecology Division of the National Marine Fisheries Service, Churchill Grimes. According to the agency's Web site, Grimes gave a presentation stating that the poor showing of Sacramento River fall Chinook fishery last year was due to poor ocean conditions in the 2004 and 2005 brood years, but that the big problem is found onshore. "Ultimate blame was attributed to longstanding and ongoing degradation of freshwater and estuarine habitats and the subsequent heavy reliance on hatchery production," Grimes stated. "Degradation and simplification of freshwater and estuary habitats over a century and a half of development have changed the Central Valley Chinook salmon complex from a highly diverse collection of numerous wild populations to one dominated by fall Chinook salmon from four large hatcheries." The state Department of Fish and Game gives recommendations on salmon season, but the final determination is made by vote of the 14-member Pacific Fisheries Management Council. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From truman at jeffnet.org Thu Aug 6 12:02:11 2009 From: truman at jeffnet.org (Patrick Truman) Date: Thu, 6 Aug 2009 12:02:11 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Court Upholds Ban on Roads in NF Message-ID: <5C1E2AC55A2446218C3945C36AEC8645@HAL> http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2009/08/06/MNEK194ED1.DTL --------------------------------------------------------------------- Thursday, August 6, 2009 (SF Chronicle) Court upholds ban on roads in national forests Bob Egelko, Chronicle Staff Writer In a major victory for environmentalists, a federal appeals court upheld a ban Wednesday on most new road-building in 40 million acres of national forests and said the Bush administration's repeal of the so-called roadless rule was illegal. The decision by the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco restores a regulation passed in the final days of President Bill Clinton's administration, in January 2001, designed to protect trees and resources in remote forest areas by prohibiting construction of new roads as well as logging. The fate of the roadless rule is still unsettled, as a judge has declared the Clinton regulation invalid in a suit by the state of Wyoming, now pending before a federal appeals court in Denver. The Ninth Circuit court did not discuss the potential impact of that case Wednesday. But in contrast to the Bush administration, which argued against the roadless rule in court, President Obama's administration praised the court for reinstating the rule. "The Obama administration supports conservation of roadless areas in our national forests and this decision today reaffirms the protection of those resources," the U.S. Department of Agriculture said in a statement. While the case was pending, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced in May that he would personally approve or veto all road-building and logging plans in roadless forest areas for the next year. Clinton's regulation contained some exemptions for emergencies, such as areas damaged by fires, but it was opposed by timber companies and groups of off-road vehicle users. In May 2001, before the rule was to take effect, President George W. Bush's administration suspended it and said each state would be allowed to propose its own roadless plan, subject to federal approval, with no nationwide prohibition on road-building. The Bush regulation took effect in May 2005 and was halted by a federal magistrate in September 2006. The administration did not approve any state plans during that period, but allowed logging on 535 acres of previously roadless forest land in Oregon and permitted some oil and gas leases in Rocky Mountain states that the Clinton rule would have prevented, said Kristen Boyles, a lawyer for environmental groups in the case. In October, under separate legal authority, the Bush administration approved Idaho's plan for 9 million acres that allowed new road-building in some areas. Boyles said road-building is also permitted in Alaska's Tongass National Forest, with nearly 10 million acres, under a 2003 settlement of a suit by the state of Alaska against the federal government. In Wednesday's ruling, the appeals court upheld U.S. Magistrate Elizabeth Laporte's 2006 decision that the Bush administration's state-by-state rule was invalid because the government had not studied its impact on the forests, endangered species or their habitat. The ruling applies nationwide, except for Idaho and the Tongass forest, which were removed from the case after the Bush administration approved their individual road-restriction plans. The magistrate's decision had been limited to a group of Western states. Wednesday's ruling "turns back an assault on areas that we value as national treasures ... pristine areas of public forests, where people spoke out about how they wanted to preserve hiking and hunting and fishing and bird-watching," said attorney Kristen Boyles of Earthjustice, which represented numerous environmental groups in the case. They were joined by California, New Mexico, Oregon and Wyoming in support of the Clinton rule. A timber industry group expressed disappointment. The Bush administration's state-by-state planning process "lets the people who are most impacted have a say in the disposition of those lands," rather than subjecting them to "blanket policies coming out of the government," said Tom Partin, president of the American Forest Resource Council, which represents nearly 100 forest products companies. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Fri Aug 7 09:34:36 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Fri, 7 Aug 2009 09:34:36 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Watersheds Message-ID: <001801ca177c$f413c3c0$dc3b4b40$@net> E&E Daily An E&E Publishing Service WATER: T&I panel floats bill to form resource management council (Friday, August 7, 2009) Taryn Luntz, E&E reporter Congressional aides, conservation advocates and water stakeholders are gearing up to tackle the increasingly thorny issue of water management, seeking to transform a system of piecemeal project approvals into one that plans comprehensively for all aspects of watersheds. With water conflicts surfacing throughout the country, House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee staffers are working on a water planning bill that they have circulated among stakeholders over the past two months. A June 12 draft of the legislation would create a Cabinet-level council and a president-appointed director charged with "carrying out the policies and programs of the federal government affecting sustainable water resources management." The bill also would establish regional watershed planning boards that would produce five-year plans for water use and conservation, targeting "increased water efficiency, increased water quality and improved ecological health and resiliency for federal, interstate, state, tribal and local governmental and non-governmental stakeholder actions with regard to water resource decisions across the watershed." The legislation seeks to overcome one of the most significant challenges facing water managers. Currently, water management is split among local, state, regional and federal agencies, often with several bodies dividing responsibility for different aspects -- and sections -- of watersheds. This approach can lead to unfortunate consequences, advocates say, as projects planned for one area can fail to account for downstream effects or wider regional issues. Lawmakers on the Water Resources and Environment Subcommittee noted the need for broad-level water planning at a hearing on the issue in June 2008. "At present, several regions of the country face significant water resource challenges ranging from droughts in the Southeast and Southwest to the recent flooding in the Midwest," Chairwoman Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas) said. "Watershed planning and management can be an important tool to help make better decisions in resolving these water resource needs." Ranking member John Boozman (R-Ark.) said Congress should consider devising a way for the federal government to provide technical assistance and guidance to state and local water planning efforts. "More and more often we are seeing growing cities' needs for municipal and industrial water supplies at odds with similar needs for that same water downstream," Boozman said. "It conflicts with environmental, recreation, navigation or flood control needs elsewhere in the watershed. What has been missing in most cases is a comprehensive watershed plan against which more focused local feasibility plans can be measured." The " Sustainable Watershed Planning Act" aims to address these varied concerns with water management. The bill was scheduled for a committee markup June 4 but was pulled from the schedule to allow staff to gather more feedback, a T&I legislative aide said. The draft is a work in progress with no firm date set for completion, he said. Under the draft legislation, the sustainable watershed planning council would consist of the U.S. EPA administrator; the secretaries of Agriculture, Commerce, Energy, Housing and Urban Development, Transportation, Interior and U.S. Army; the chiefs of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission; and state and tribal leaders. Regional watershed planning boards, based on the boundaries of Army Corps of Engineers civil works districts, would have federal, state, local and stakeholder representatives. States would be eligible for grants of up to $1.5 million a year to set up their own water planning boards or to support existing planning efforts. Questions, concerns raised Water experts agree some type of planning fix is necessary. "At this stage, progress on water resources at the federal level is frustrating just about everybody," said David Conrad, senior water resources specialist for the National Wildlife Federation. "There's definitely a need for better planning and better coordination, both among federal agencies working on water resources and with states and regional interests -- especially to sort out roles and needs at all different levels." On the federal level, agencies frequently fail to coordinate with each other, and Congress approves water projects on a project-by-project basis. "The Congress has been dealing with water projects by approving them in 'eaches,'" said Gerald Galloway, a civil engineering professor at the University of Maryland and former Army Corps member. "As a result, there is no coordination among projects and the priority system is not based on any analysis of how they impact each other." The draft bill says it would not interfere with interstate water compacts or state management of groundwater resources, but stakeholders and state water planners are fretting about what exactly the bill would affect. "What it appears to do is create an infrastructure for watershed planning, but it is unclear what type of watershed planning is intended," said Marcia Willhite, chief of the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency's water bureau. "You can plan to manage water quality, to manage water quantity, to make sure you have intact ecosystems, you can plan for wildlife habitat, even appropriate navigation," Willhite said. "But it's unclear from the bill that I've seen what the focus of the planning is to be." Water industry groups also are hoping subsequent drafts will clarify the reach of the proposed watershed council. "We understand that the draft legislation does not give the federal government ultimate power to accept or reject specific watershed plans or projects," the American Shore & Beach Preservation Association wrote in its analysis of the draft. "Ours is a federal system of government in which states have the paramount role to implement watershed policies. We are concerned that the structure established in the draft legislation may actually be too cumbersome to achieve the desired result." Water experts agree that for legislation to be successful, it must foster collaboration among the various planning bodies, encourage consensus-building, and give private stakeholders an incentive to buy in to the plan. "Collaboration in planning for water projects is critical," Galloway said. "Collaboration means you start together and work together. You don't have one party write a plan and give it to the others when you're finished." White House dips into water management The push to improve water management has gained considerable steam this year, with the Obama administration tackling two new initiatives. The White House is rewriting standards for federal water projects, expanding the scope of 26-year-old rules that guide the Army Corps of Engineers in an effort to consider environmental and social goals as well as economic ones. The broader scope represents a shift from the economic emphasis in the current Army Corps principles and guidelines. In addition, the administration is considering expanding the scope of the principles and guidelines to cover all federal agencies that undertake water resource projects ( Greenwire, July 14). The administration also is crafting an executive order aimed at toughening federal policies restricting the construction of dams, levees, roads and other structures in flood-prone areas. President Obama's draft order would direct agencies to use nonstructural approaches -- typically, building codes, planning laws and education campaigns -- to manage floodplains and protect public safety, wetlands and other natural resources ( Greenwire, July 21). Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 17817 bytes Desc: not available URL: From kierassociates at suddenlink.net Fri Aug 7 10:24:02 2009 From: kierassociates at suddenlink.net (Kier Associates) Date: Fri, 07 Aug 2009 10:24:02 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] [FOTR] Watersheds In-Reply-To: <001801ca177c$f413c3c0$dc3b4b40$@net> References: <001801ca177c$f413c3c0$dc3b4b40$@net> Message-ID: <20090807172411.KZTU13503.omta02.suddenlink.net@kier.suddenlink.net> An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: a70802.jpg Type: application/octet-stream Size: 17817 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Fri Aug 7 12:00:27 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Fri, 7 Aug 2009 12:00:27 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Suction Dredge Ban Signed by Schwarzie Message-ID: <004101ca1791$54b1ddc0$fe159940$@net> Karuk Tribe . Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations . Institute for Fisheries Resources . Klamath Riverkeeper . Center For Biological Diversity . Friends of the River . California Tribal Business Alliance . The Sierra Fund . California Trout . Environmental Law Foundation . Environmental Justice Coalition for Water . Friends of the North Fork American . California Sportfishing Protection Alliance P R E S S R E L E A S E For Immediate Release: August 6, 2009 For more information: Craig Tucker, Litigant and Spokesman, Karuk Tribe, cell 916-207-8294 Glen Spain, PCFFA, 541-521-8655 cell Mike Thornton The Sierra Fund 530-262-7335 cell Governor signs bill banning in stream dredge mining for gold Ban will remain in place until new dredge mining rules protective of fish are developed Sacramento, CA - Today Governor Schwarzenegger signed a bill to temporarily ban the destructive form of recreational gold mining known as suction dredging. Other forms of mining are not affected. With its signing, the bill places an immediate moratorium on all suction dredge mining until the California Department of Fish and Game develops and implements new suction dredge regulations that are protective of fisheries and water quality. Introduced by North coast Senator Pat Wiggins (D-Santa Rosa), the bill attracted broad bi-partisan support and passed both houses of the legislature with a 2/3 majority. The signing marked a major victory by a diverse coalition of Tribes, fishermen, and conservation groups from around the state. It comes a week after an Alameda County Superior Court ordered a moratorium on the issuance of new dredge permits pending resolution of a complaint charging that tax payer money is illegally subsidizing issuance of dredging permits by the California Department of Fish and Games (DFG). "We've been working to protect our fisheries from destructive mining practices for 150 years," said Bob Goodwin, Karuk Self Governance Coordinator. "This law requires the state use the best available science in determining where and when hobby miners can operate their dredges without harming our fisheries. Until then, no dredging will be allowed in California." According to California Trout's Tom Wesloh, ""California's rivers and streams are suffering from increasing degradation, and the endangered and threatened fish species face ever more obstacles to survival. Suction dredging disturbs spawning beds of trout, steelhead and salmon. Healthy spawning beds are essential to the long-term survival of these species." Groups hope that at the end of the rule making process, the size of dredges will be limited and critical habitats and spawning areas for threatened species will be off limits while allowing dredgers access to areas less vital for the survival of at-risk species. This recent struggle over dredge mining started in 1997 when Coho salmon were added to the state and federal endangered species list. At that point California Fish and Game Department regulations required that mining rules be re-examined. They were not. In 2005, the Karuk Tribe sued the Department which admitted that a rule change was in order. "In 2006 we actually proposed some modest restrictions limited to the Klamath Basin. The Department agreed, but the New 49ers and other local mining groups intervened and blocked implementation of the settlement," explains Goodwin. The judge did order the Department to go through a public rule making process consistent with the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) by June 2008. However, the Department failed to comply with the court order.. "We kept trying to get the money in the Department's budget, but the New 49ers kept lobbying against it. We had little recourse other than legislating the ban to protect our fishery," concluded Goodwin. Now the moratorium is statewide and protects not just Northern California Coho, but at-risk species from coastal rivers to high Sierra streams to the few remaining natural waterways in southern California. "Our native fish, frogs, and other at-risk species are declining statewide," explains Steve Evans, Conservation Director of Friends of the River. "Banning dredge mining is not a silver bullet solution for protecting these species, but it's a good start." Other groups see dredging as a public health issue because it remobilizes toxic mercury left behind by 19th century gold miners. According to Elizabeth (Izzy) Martin, Executive Director of the Sierra Fund, "Dredges suck up mercury buried in river sediment and remobilizes that mercury in our river and streams. This creates a significant health threat to subsistence fishermen, pregnant women and children as well as wildlife." Fishermen have taken on miners to preserve jobs. According to Glen Spain, Northwest Regional Director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations, a major trade organization representing commercial fishing families, "Commercial fishermen are out of work again this year due to the fishing ban put in place in response to salmon declines from habitat destruction and flow loss. Everyone whose activities harm salmon habitat must share the conservation burden, including the suction dredgers." All the groups praised Governor Schwarzenegger for signing the bill. "We call on the Governor to seize every opportunity to protect and rebuild our great salmon fishery and the economies throughout California these fish have supported," concluded Spain. Although the moratorium does spare rivers from dredges, other forms of mining are unaffected and miners will still have access to their claims. McCracken, President of the New 49ers on his website, "the other types of prospecting or mining that we do are not being challenged. These include panning, sniping & Vack-mining, sluicing & high-banking, booming, electronic prospecting and other types of prospecting that do not use a suction nozzle within an active stream, river or creek. So SB 670 does not affect most of the activity which we do, including our group weekend projects." ( http://www.goldgold.com/newsletterlatest.htm) What is a Dredge? Suction dredges are powered by gas or diesel engines that are mounted on floating pontoons in the river. Attached to the engine is a powerful vacuum hose which the dredger uses to suction up the gravel and sand (sediment) from the bottom of the river. The material passes through a sluice box where heavier gold particles can settle into a series of riffles. The rest of the gravel is simply dumped back into the river. Often this reintroduces mercury left over from historic mining operations to the water column, threatening communities downstream and getting into the human food chain. Depending on size, location and density of these machines they can turn a clear running mountain stream into a murky watercourse unfit for swimming. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Fri Aug 7 17:13:12 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Fri, 7 Aug 2009 17:13:12 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Salmon Water Now Message-ID: <756DB04065EB410EBF0697A88E9EF02C@ByronsLaptop> This developing project is very special, AND very badly needed. Check it out. From: Zeke Grader [mailto:zgrader at ifrfish.org] Sent: Friday, August 07, 2009 4:15 PM Subject: Salmon Water Now All: I thought you'd like to see Duck's (with brother-in-law and filmmaker Bruce Tokars) work in progress on the video on salmon water. They plan to do some more filming in Fort Bragg and Eureka and include, in addition to the commercial fishermen, some recreational and tribal representatives as well. A website is being established and bumper stickers are on the way. Just in time for the Million Boat Flotilla to converge on Sacramento on 16 August as the Legislature takes up debate on a Peripheral Canal and the State presses the Feds to weaken the protections in the BiOp for Central Valley salmon. - Zeke btokars at pacbell.net Salmon Water, Now! http://vimeo.com/5930504 August 4, 2009 "California's commercial salmon fishing fleet and sport fishermen have not been allowed to fish for wild California King Salmon for two years. Previous to that, restrictions on when and where salmon could be caught had been in place, imposed by governmental agencies. The reason given for closing the salmon runs to fishing were based on a severe decline in the numbers of salmon successfully returning to their native river beginnings to spawn and for their offspring to return to the ocean. This video explains the need to share limited water resources to allow enough water to flow into the rivers so the Salmon and get back up river to spawn." View it at: http://vimeo.com/5930504 Byron Leydecker, JcT, Chair Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 4702 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Mon Aug 10 10:20:07 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Mon, 10 Aug 2009 10:20:07 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] SF Chron Aug 9 09 Message-ID: <002e01ca19de$d00fa200$702ee600$@net> Spotlight on delta in coming state water fight S.F. Chronicle-8/9/09 By Kelly Zito With the bruising battle over the state budget barely over, a new fight looming in the Capitol promises to be just as ugly. At stake is nothing less than the replumbing of California's water system, a complicated, aging network of pipes, canals and pumps that has watered America's breadbasket, fueled the largest population in the union and given rise to one of the world's most prosperous economies. Perhaps never before in the Golden State's history has it been more clear that the system is profoundly broken and at risk of outright collapse. And experts agree that this may be the year the state's leaders finally dole out much-needed fixes. The anticipated debate centers on the deteriorating Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, the scenic network of islands, channels and wetlands that funnels water to two-thirds of California, including much of the Bay Area. Over-pumping at the confluence of the two rivers, rising pollution levels and the decline of several key fish species have pushed the heart of the state's waterworks to the brink, according to a parade of experts. Add to that an ongoing drought and hairline cracks in the system have become gaping faults: Cities across the state have imposed mandatory rationing, hundreds of thousands of farmland acres have gone unplanted and water managers are scrambling to find new supplies. Against that backdrop, officials at nearly every level of government are now paying attention: local officials, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and President Obama, who sent Interior Secretary Ken Salazar in April to tour the delta. Later this month, Sacramento lawmakers are set to hold hearings on five bills intended to increase water conservation, improve the monitoring of who uses water and how much, and to create a politically appointed council that would have broad authority over the delta, including the ability to approve a controversial pipeline around the estuary. "There's never been a moment where there was more uncertainty and more focus on the future of the delta and the water system," said Barry Nelson, water policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council. "The stars only align on a complicated issue like water every decade. We're at one of those moments." Gold miners, ranchers and urban dwellers for generations have scuffled over divvying up the precious drops that fall in the Sierra Nevada. In this round, however, the ante is far higher - an ecosystem in free fall, an erratic water supply and potentially billions of taxpayer dollars. Scientists, water managers, businesses and lawmakers agree any solution to the water crisis must achieve two goals: Repair the delta ecosystem and bolster the reliability of California's water supply. That's where the agreement ends. Schwarzenegger has embraced an ambitious project that would route water around the delta. Such a "peripheral canal" would be the biggest overhaul of the system since the massive state and federal water projects were undertaken 50 and 75 years ago, respectively. Backers include Southern California cities and the agriculture industry, which hope such a system would boost water supplies after three parched years and pumping restrictions designed to protect a disappearing delta fish. Though there are no firm details on location or size, some cost estimates for the project run as high as $15 billion. "We need to have a comprehensive delta plan, and conveyance has to be a part of it," said Joe Grindstaff, deputy secretary for water policy in the state's Natural Resources Agency. Others say the state must pursue water conservation, recycling and desalting ocean water just as aggressively. What's more, they charge the governor with using the plight of some Central Valley farmers - whose fallowed fields and out-of-work field workers have garnered nationwide media attention - to advance his case for a canal. "The idea that some pipe or canal is a silver bullet to our problems in the delta is misguided. The governor has been fixated on that in a way that's not helpful," said Assemblyman Jared Huffman, D-San Rafael. State Sen. Lois Wolk, D-Davis, represents four of the five delta counties. Building a canal through the region of 500,000 residents could potentially wreak havoc on the economic, cultural and social fabric of the community, she said. In theory, rerouting water through a pipe from the Sacramento River at the northern delta to pumps in the southern delta would reduce man-made pressures on the ecosystem- sucking fewer fish into giant water outtake pipes, for instance - while at the same time creating a dedicated pipeline that would send water to cities from San Jose to San Diego. Wolk and others fear that redirecting the Sacramento River would allow saltwater to overwhelm the delta, provide less freshwater to flush pollutants out of the estuary, ruin recreational boating and fishing and destroy a major source of irrigation water for delta farmers. "For most people in the Legislature and the state, the delta is a blank slate on the map," Wolk said. "It's my job to argue for the delta's complexity and for assurances that the delta will survive." State Democrats last week introduced a set of five bills intended to fix California's water crisis: SB12 (Sen. Joe Simitian, D-Palo Alto) - The bill would create the Delta Stewardship Council, a seven-member body that would have broad oversight of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta and the ability to approve a so-called peripheral canal. Four of the members would be appointed by the governor; one each by the state Assembly and Senate. The remaining member would represent the delta community. AB39 (Assemblyman Jared Huffman, D-San Rafael) - The bill would require the council to adopt a management plan for the delta with two main goals: repairing the ecosystem and improving the state's water supply. AB49 (Assemblymen Mike Feuer, D-Los Angeles, and Huffman) - This bill would require more aggressive water conservation statewide, including a 20 percent reduction in urban per capita water use by Dec. 31, 2020. SB229 (Sen. Fran Pavley, D-Agoura Hills (Los Angeles County) - This bill would strengthen monitoring of groundwater use as well as water diversions from rivers and streams. SB458 (Sen. Lois Wolk, D-Davis) - The bill would establish the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta Conservancy to protect the environment and economy of the delta community Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Mon Aug 10 10:35:54 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Mon, 10 Aug 2009 10:35:54 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Water Legislation Message-ID: <003301ca19e1$0430bf40$0c923dc0$@net> Below are links to the five bills initiated in the state legislature for "solutions" for San Francisco Bay Delta problems. "Solutions "will be THE issue on the agenda when the legislature reconvenes - Peripheral Canal, Dams, Super Delta Agency, whatever. The Delta Package includes: . Preprint Assembly #1 (Huffman) - Delta Plan . Preprint Assembly #2 (Feuer) - Water Efficiency . Preprint Senate #1 (Simitian) - Delta Stewardship Council . Preprint Senate #2 (Pavley) - Delta Interim Actions, Water Rights & Groundwater . Preprint Senate# 3 (Wolk) - Delta Conservancy, Delta Protection Commission Revisions Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Mon Aug 10 13:56:29 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Mon, 10 Aug 2009 13:56:29 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] EWC California Water Solutions Now Message-ID: <007601ca19fd$09499d00$1bdcd700$@net> The Environmental Water Caucus' report: CALIFORNIA WATER SOLUTIONS NOW, is now completed and on the EWC web site at http://ewccalifornia.org You can view either the full report or just the Executive Summary. We would appreciate your informing your associates who might be interested in seeing the web version of the report. We believe it important for those - anyone - interested in California water issues to see - read - this report. And, we thank you for helping us get the word out that this report is available. If you would like a hard copy of the report which should be available after Wednesday (August 12), contact David Nesmith, EWC Facilitator, at ewc at davidnesmith.com Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Mon Aug 10 16:51:55 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Mon, 10 Aug 2009 16:51:55 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Barry Nelson NRDC: California's Five New Water Bills Message-ID: <1F4D8279B16841D28894CCD2CA70B067@ByronsLaptop> A Rare Opportunity for Change: California's Five New Water Bills A Rare Opportunity for Change: California's Five New Water Bills Barry Nelson Western Water Project Director, San Francisco Blog | About Posted August 10, 2009 in Health and the Environment , Solving Global Warming I have been working on California water issues for 25 years, and I've learned that major opportunities for transformative change doesn't come around too often. Now is one of those times. Late last week, the California Legislature released a package of five major water reform bills (find links to each bill here ). Like many others who work on water issues, I'm still combing through them. But I can already sense that this is an opportunity to lift California out of our current water crisis and into an economically and environmentally sustainable future. Why is this happening now? For starters, the state finally has a budget, and lawmakers are turning to other pressing issues. What is interesting is that water has now risen to the top two or three priorities of our legislature. Three things are driving this new sense of urgency: * California has had three consecutive dry years. * Californians have a growing awareness that global warming is threatening our fragile water resources. Sea level rise threatens the Delta and the prospect of reduced runoff and more severe droughts is expected to reduce existing supplies. * The San Francisco Bay-Delta ecosystem has cratered and our salmon fishery has been closed. We have clearly reached the limit on how much we can take from it--the largest single source of water in California. Today, it's a challenge to find anyone who believes that the course of California water policy over the past decade will be sustainable in the future. This emerging reality has prompted some high-level reaction. In September of 2006, the governor and the legislature commissioned the Delta Vision Task Force to write an ambitious new plan for the future of the Delta. That plan was completed and submitted to the legislature in December of 2007. In February of 2008, Governor Schwarzenegger also announced that he wants California to decrease per capita water use 20 percent by 2020. Assembly Speaker Karen Bass and Senate President pro Tem Darrel Steinberg responded to these developments by convening a small legislative working group. After lengthy discussions within that group, Bass and Steinberg released a package of five heavily amended water bills. The package includes cost-effective measures for conserving and using California's water more efficiently in order to achieve the governor's water conservation goal. NRDC and the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California are co-sponsoring this legislation, which is being carried by Assemblymembers Mike Feuer and Jared Huffman. The package also takes the bold and much-needed step of proposing major reforms to the state's water agencies. The Delta Vision Task Force concluded that "governance reform" is required to resolve issues in the Delta because the California's current fractured and antiquated agencies are simply not up to the job. The bills would create a new Stewardship Council to manage the Delta, require the development of a comprehensive Delta plan to address ecosystem, water supply and flood management issues, establish a new Delta Conservancy to implement restoration projects, and strengthen the powers of the Delta Protection Commission to regulate inappropriate land use in the Delta. As I study the bills more closely, I'll have more detailed recommendations for improvements. But I welcome this opportunity for reform. You see, we really can change the way water management works in California. I have seen it before, although not on such a sweeping scale. Back in 1992, Congress passed the Central Valley Project Improvement Act to make the project more responsive to the environmental and economic needs of the state. The CVPIA changed the landscape pretty substantially. Prior to the law, the Bureau of Reclamation claimed it did not have the authority to protect endangered species. Now we have two new federal biological opinions requiring the CVP to protect Delta species listed under the ESA (see my colleague Doug Obegi's post about this here ). Today, no one at the Bureau questions the need to protect these vanishing species. The law was also designed to promote water transfers. Today, there is a thriving water transfer system among agricultural water agencies south of the Delta. The package of five bills before the legislature has the potential to have an even bigger impact - but on a broader set of water issues. AB 49, for example, could make water conservation strategies--things like smart irrigation controllers-- business as usual. And all Californians would benefit from agency reform that allowed the resolution of difficult Delta issues. These times don't come around too often. I hope our lawmakers seize the moment. Byron Leydecker, JcT, Chair Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 2051 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Wed Aug 12 21:54:09 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Wed, 12 Aug 2009 21:54:09 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Congressman George Miller Thanked For Protecting Fishing and Farming Jobs Message-ID: <006001ca1bd2$18b90060$4a2b0120$@net> PRESS RELEASE Water 4Fish ? Small Boat Commercial Salmon Fishermen?s Association Northern California Federation of Fly Fishers ? Crab Boat Owners Association American Sportfishing Association ? Northern California Federation of Fly Fishers Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen?s Associations ? Salmon Aid Foundation California Sportfishing Protection Alliance ? California Striped Bass Association ? Fish Sniffer Magazine FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: August 13, 2009 CONTACT: Dick Pool (925) 963-6350 Robert Johnson (925) 580-4480 Mike Hudson (510) 407-2000 Zeke Grader (415) 606-5140 Congressman George Miller Thanked For Protecting Fishing and Farming Jobs Sustainable Farms and Fisheries Critical for Nation?s Food Security, Economy Say Fishing Leaders Praising Miller?s Leadership Concord, CA - Leaders from California?s recreational and commercial fishing fleets met this morning at U.S. Representative George Miller?s Concord field office to praise the Northern California Congressman?s three plus decades of work to protect fishery resources and sustainable farm lands and the jobs, food production and economic benefit they represent. ?No one in America has worked harder on behalf of those who toil in the fields or at sea - those who bring to the tables of the nation the bounty of our lands and waters - than Congressman George Miller,? said Zeke Grader, Executive Director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen?s Associations representing working men and women in the West Coast commercial fishing fleet. ?We felt it was time to express our gratitude during a time when America?s oldest industry -fishing - and the very fish it relies on are under attack.? Miller, who was past chairman of the old House Interior Committee and currently a member of the House Resources Committee has championed sustainable food production, including the protection of the nation?s fish and the jobs they represent, along with fair wages for labor working in fish processing plants in the U.S. and its territories. ?Today we offer a special thanks to Congressman George Miller for his three decades of leadership on California water and environmental issues. He has worked tirelessly to see that we have clean water, a healthy delta and water policies that will ensure future supplies for all sectors of the economy. We support George 100 percent in his continuing efforts to enact these policies,? said Dick Pool, a fishing gear manufacturer, board member of the American Sportfishing Association and leader of the Water4fish campaign. Pool continued, saying ?the salmon industry is one of the leading food and economic producers in the state. Yet, there are many who advocate that the salmon are unworthy of having the water and conditions they need to survive and prosper. We beg to differ. A new economic study shows that the state is already losing $1.4 billion annually and 23,000 jobs because the salmon industry is shut down for lack of the water and habitat these fish need to survive. If the salmon industry is brought back to full production, 94,000 new jobs will be created and $5.6 billion of economic benefit will accrue to the state. We know of no other food sector that can match this opportunity without severe environmental damage. ? Mike Hudson is the President of the Small Boat Commercial Salmon Fishermen's Association, representing the interests of small family owned fishing businesses along the California Coast, and is Executive Director of the SalmonAid Foundation, uniting commercial, recreational and tribal fishermen with environmental organizations, chefs and the American consumer. "Salmon are a renewable resource - just add water!" Hudson added to Pool?s comments. ?Okay, it's not quite as simple as that, but it's the first step we must take in order to recover our thriving salmon populations - put water back in our rivers and the salmon will rebound. We have all supported the fishing closures over the last 2 years, and suffered massive economic deprivation to do our part to save the salmon and hopefully some day our own way of life - but without water in our rivers, our sacrifice may have been for naught." Dr. Mark Rockwell, who is a member of the Northern California Council of Fly Fishers and the Endangered Species Coalition, stated "the Salmon fishery has been closed for the past two years because of imbalances in the way we have managed water. The Endangered Species Act (ESA) is America's most popular environmental law, with more than 89 percent of Americans favorable to it. It is designed to guide us in our land and water use actions so we don't cause extinction to fish or wildlife,? said Rockwell. ?Our salmon fisheries are close to extinction today, and it is all of our responsibility to take the actions necessary to recovery them." Congressman Miller has been stalwart standing up for the nation?s environmental laws that are essential to the protection of the nation?s waters, its fish and farmlands, including the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water Act and the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation & Management Act. Those natural resource laws in turn protect fishing and farming jobs and the food production, economies and enjoyment they represent, according to the fishing groups. Gary R. Adams, who is Vice President of the California Striped Bass Association State Board, said, ?how soon we forget the true meaning of Public Trust doctrine found in our constitution. It is George Miller that has epitomized the very essence that all of our fisheries and citizens must have adequate clean water to survive and thrive,? said Adams. ?It is he that understands that when a fishermen fishes for fish, that it is much more than the fish he seeks. It is a piece of heritage that extends beyond the first time that man broke the soil with a plough.? "Salmon is the best food,? said community organizer and active Delta recreational fisherman Robert Johnson, Jr. ?Ultimately salmon are about people and they rely on healthy water flows and when in trouble, the Endangered Species Act. Congressman Miller has long recognized that and we thank him today for his great leadership.? Attention Press: Fishing groups that have signed on to this press release will be available for interviews at Congressman George Miller?s Concord office. The groups will be outside the office at 0900 on 13 August 2009. Congressman Miller?s Office is located at 1333 Willow Pass Road, Suite 203, Concord, CA 94520. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Thu Aug 13 10:29:42 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Thu, 13 Aug 2009 10:29:42 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Redding Record Searchlight 8 13 09 Message-ID: <007101ca1c3b$a522a600$ef67f200$@net> Trinity County fire now 40 percent contained; still 1,200 acres Redding Record Searchlight-8/13/09 By Ryan Sabalow, Amanda Winters Fire crews Wednesday confronted a wildland fire in the Lewiston area that erupted in just a few minutes from a small spot to a rapidly spreading blaze that eventually charred at least 1,200 acres. By 7 a.m. today, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection reported that the fire was 40 percent contained, a 10 percent jump in containment from the night before. Firefighters were able to keep the fire at 1,200 acres during the night. Pushed by gusting winds, the flames threatened at least 25 homes in the Trinity County mountain valley community of 1,300 people west of Redding. Many mandatory evacuation orders were lifted as of 8 p.m. Wednesday, said Trinity County Sheriff Lorrac Craig. At one point, the fire was moving so quickly that the county's telephone emergency notification system was unable to keep up, said Lynn Ward, a Trinity County Sheriff's Department spokeswoman. Craig said no homes had burned as of 8 p.m., though at least 25 structures had been threatened. Flames licked perilously close to one home, but aggressive fire retardant drops saved the structure, Craig said. "It was a white house," Craig said. "I don't know if it's white anymore." Though evacuations had been ordered for residents living north of Highway 299 on roads including Lewiston, Trinity Dam, Coffin, Oak, Wellock, Fawn Lodge, Oak Ridge, Lockhart Ranch and Dead Mule, the only mandatory evacuations still in effect as of 8 p.m. were in the Fawn Lodge area, Craig said. Residents there were being ordered to stay away as firefighters were planning a back burn in the Fawn Lodge area around midnight, Craig said. Earlier in the evening, Peggy Wellock, who lives on the road that shares her last name, was told she might soon have to evacuate. "If we have to, I'll put my cattle in the river," Wellock said as she stood with several neighbors next to a sheriff's patrol car listening to its scanner. An evacuation center had been set up at Weaverville Elementary School on Highway 3 in Weaverville. The fire at one point was burning on the ridge above Lewiston Elementary School. Several spot fires spread down the hillside throughout the early evening, crawling closer to the town. The fire, originally dispatched near Old Lewiston and Coffin roads, was first reported at 2:27 p.m. Because of its location, it was dubbed the Coffin Fire. As of this morning, there were 658 firefighters fighting the fire, 52 fire engines, 17 bulldozers and 25 hand crews, according to Cal Fire officials. Four air tankers, three helicopters and six water tenders also were assigned to the blaze. The cost to date was estimated at more than $513,000. At another point Wednesday evening, pilots attacking the blaze from the air reported being worried about flying near high-voltage power lines, and they requested the power company cut the voltage. Commanders on the ground reported back that doing so would shut down power for most of California's north coast. The power was not shut down. The smoke plume from the fire was clearly visible above the hills west of Redding. Ash from the fire could be seen falling at the Central Valley High School football practice in Shasta Lake. Trinity Dam Boulevard was closed Wednesday night from Highway 299 to the Plug and Jug store, a Cal Fire spokeswoman said. The fire had burned all the way to Trinity Dam Boulevard, and spot fires were springing up nearby, said John Bruno, a Cal Fire spokesman. Lewiston Road between Highway 299 and Trinity Dam Boulevard was temporarily closed because of the fire, said Sgt. Pete Baraga of the Trinity County Sheriff's Department. Soon after the blaze started, Tony Miller, 35, a partner at the One Maple Winery at 4271 Lewiston Road, said he and his wife, Heidi, watched from their back porch as the fire spread. Miller said the flames came dangerously close his neighbors' homes. "There's fire all the way around them," Miller said. "It's probably right on them." He said the blaze appeared to have started at the end of Coffin Road, near the Lowden Ranch and the sediment ponds, a local landmark. Part of the fire was burning along the southern edge of the 1999 Lowden Fire, said Gary Mixon, the 53-year-old owner of the Plug and Jug at 4591 Trinity Dam Blvd. Mixon said Wednesday that he could see flames on the ridge above his store. He said the fire was eerily similar to the Lowden Fire, even moving in the same direction as that blaze, which burned for a week, torching 2,000 acres and burning 23 homes. After the 1999 fire, nearly 250 families filed claims against the Bureau of Land Management, which eventually paid more than $6.1 million to compensate for property lost when a firefighter-set controlled burn escaped containment. Firefighters were expected to face similar gusty conditions today. Weather forecasts indicate that though winds would die off Wednesday night, they'll kick back up today with westerly gusts blowing up to 20 mph in Trinity County and western Shasta County Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From truman at jeffnet.org Thu Aug 13 11:51:53 2009 From: truman at jeffnet.org (Patrick Truman) Date: Thu, 13 Aug 2009 11:51:53 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Latest Coffin Fire News Message-ID: <1083C1B7FD8C4394A1F2FF35B17210BD@HAL> http://www.redding.com/news/2009/aug/13/smoker-may-have-started-coffin-fire-authorities-sa/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Fri Aug 14 21:51:28 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Fri, 14 Aug 2009 21:51:28 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] California Water Issues Forum Message-ID: The entire and recent California Water Issues Forum headed by U. S. Deputy Interior Secretary Davis Hayes and Director of the California Department of Water Resources Lester Snow is available online at http://cawater.rmxpres.com/webcast/data/dwrexec081209/msh.htm The presentations and comments are lengthy - about four hours. Yet if you want to learn more about water issues in California generally and decisions that will be made in the next few months particularly, it's worth your time investment. Upcoming decisions will have a major effect upon our state's future - its residents, its environment, its economy, and our way of life. Byron Leydecker, JcT, Chair Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Fri Aug 14 23:25:28 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Fri, 14 Aug 2009 23:25:28 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] CSPA Action Alert Message-ID: <001801ca1d71$2fb17770$8f146650$@net> BannerBanner CSPA Action Alert 8.15.09 Greetings! This Monday and Tuesday are fast becoming the two most important days of this year for the future of the Delta. The Million Boat Float Rally, scheduled for 11:00 am, Monday, August 17th is the most visible way that we can show our support for the Delta and our opposition to the governor's peripheral canal. You don't need a boat to participate in the rally, just come to the north steps of the Capitol at 11:00 am and be counted. If 500 people show up, we'll be noticed, if a thousand show up we'll be considered and if two thousand show up, we'll be a force to be reckoned with. If you work in Sacramento take the two hours off. If you live out of town, call your fishing friends and carpool. If you're a Conservation Director for your fishing club, get your phone tree started and have your club people turn out. If you're married, bring your spouse. If you have kids, bring them. Tell your neighbor you'll buy him/her lunch, but be there. Tuesday is just as important as Monday. On Tuesday the Assembly Water, Parks and Wildlife Committee and the Senate Natural Resources Committee will conduct a joint hearing on the package of five Delta bills. Passage of these bills as they are currently written would give the governor complete control of the delta's future and the construction of a peripheral canal. If we care about the future of the Delta we can't allow this to happen. You presence will let the legislature know that you will not stand for this backroom dealing and abdication of legislative responsibility. Don't give up on our Delta now. Although it is stressed and badly damaged, it is possible, with our commitment, to bring it back to health. Atlantic Salmon now swim past the Cathedral of Notre Dame in the Seine and upstream past castles on the Rhine after being absent since World War One. It's taken ninety years to bring them back. Let's not wait ninety years, let's start our Delta's recovery NOW! Bill Jennings, CSPA Executive Director Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.gif Type: image/gif Size: 4334 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image003.png Type: image/png Size: 8150 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image005.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 29610 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image006.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 9283 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Mon Aug 17 15:23:14 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Mon, 17 Aug 2009 15:23:14 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] FW: Northern California Pacific Lamprey Conservation Initiative Meeting on Sept 1-2 in Eureka, CA Message-ID: <000801ca1f89$504d6330$f0e82990$@net> From: damon_goodman at fws.gov [mailto:damon_goodman at fws.gov] Sent: Monday, August 17, 2009 2:40 PM Subject: Northern California Pacific Lamprey Conservation Initiative Meeting on Sept 1-2 in Eureka, CA The northern California regional meeting of the Pacific Lamprey Conservation Initiative will be held on September 1st from 9am to 4pm and the 2nd from 9am to 12 pm at the Humboldt Bay Aquatic Center in Eureka, CA (see attachment). This meeting will cover coastal northern California drainages from Cape Mendocino (including the Mattole River) to the Oregon border (including the Oregon portion of the Klamath Basin). At this meeting, we will be having special presentations by the Hoopa, Karuk and Yurok tribes on the Tribal perspectives of Pacific Lamprey conservation. At the meeting, we will be collecting information on: 1. Distribution 2. Abundance 3. Population trends 4. Threats 5. Conservation actions 6. Research, monitoring and evaluation activities and needs If you have information on any of these categories please bring copies of the documents, citations, and/or a point of contact to the meeting. The information we collect will be used in the development of a modified NatureServe model to assess the extirpation risk and relative ranking of risk to Pacific lamprey populations in North America. Furthermore, we will incorporate this information into a Pacific Lamprey Conservation Plan, which will help guide future conservation efforts. I have included an attachment that summarizes the NatureServe model and the questions we will be reviewing at the meeting. There will be a regional meeting for the Central Valley and coastal drainages south of Cape Mendocino on September 15-16 in Sacramento, CA. I will distribute additional information about the Sacramento meeting in the near future. Thank you for your interest and participation in conservation of this native species. If you have any questions please email damon_goodman at fws.gov or call 707-825-5155. Damon Goodman Fish Biologist Arcata Fish and Wildlife Service 1655 Heindon Road Arcata, CA 95521 phone: (707) 825-5155 (See attached file: HBAC Brochure with directions.pdf)(See attached file: Eureka_natureserve.pdf) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: HBAC Brochure with directions.pdf Type: application/pdf Size: 3123369 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: Eureka_natureserve.pdf Type: application/pdf Size: 153117 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Mon Aug 17 16:41:40 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Mon, 17 Aug 2009 16:41:40 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] California Water Solutions Now Message-ID: <002201ca1f94$46042ca0$d20c85e0$@net> Today the Environmental Water Caucus just completed a Delta press conference with Restore the Delta and the circulation of California Water Solutions Now to the legislature. The press release for California Water Solutions Now is attached to this email. Hard copies are available upon request. For hard copies, please contact Nick Di Croce Troutnk at aol.com and indicate the of copies needed. The document is also available online on the EWC website: http://www.ewccalifornia.org/reports/ Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Mon Aug 17 18:14:21 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Mon, 17 Aug 2009 18:14:21 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Upcoming SRF Events Reminder and First Call for Abstracts for 2010 Joint Conference Message-ID: 12th Annual Coho Confab August 28-30, Mendocino Coast SRF, Trees Foundation, the Mendocino Land Trust and Jughandle Farm will host the 12th Annual Coho Confab featuring tours of Caspar Creek fish ladders and road work, underwater fish identification, macro-invertebrate sampling and other habitat restoration tours along the Coast including post-fire erosion control, fish passage projects, and large woody debris recruitment. Tours will visit the Garcia River, Usal Forest, Caspar Creek, Jackson State Demonstration Forest, and the Sinkyone. Saturday night will include a BBQ dinner and concert with singer Dana Lyons. Please visit the SRF website for more information or call (707) 923-7501. SRF Central Coast Bioengineering Field School Salmonid Restoration Federation will host a Central Coast Bioengineering Field School September 15-18, 2009 in Arroyo Grande. The course will include classroom instruction with John McCullah of Salix Applied Earthcare http://www.salixaec.com/ who will teach techniques to restore riparian habitat, control erosion and stabilize banks. Participants will learn about various bioengineering techniques, grade and erosion control, and site planning and preparation. Please visit the SRF website for more information. SRF Road Maintenance & Erosion Control Field School October 13-16 2009, Garcia River The Salmonid Restoration Federation, CA Department of Fish & Game and Pacific Watershed Associates will offer a field school to learn techniques to address culvert and road drainage practices as well as erosion control techniques. This field school will be held at / www.oz-farm.com/"> Oz Farm on the Garcia River. All meals and lodging are included in the course fees. The curriculum includes conducting road sediment assessments (problem identification and prescription development); implementing fish-friendly road upgrading practices (stream crossing upgrades and improved road drainage practices to protect water quality); proper road decommissioning practices; road inspection, and maintenance practices; erosion control and erosion prevention practices, and spoils management. Throughout the course we will emphasize the concepts of making our road systems as "hydrologically invisible" and as resilient to storm events as possible. We will also focus on educating participants about how best to address the root causes of observed erosion problems, through both maintenance and repair practices at each potential work site. Please visit the SRF website to see the field school registration form or call (707) 923-7501. SRF & Cal-Neva AFS First Call for Abstracts for Joint Salmonid Restoration Conference Session Coordinator Abstracts are due September 18 In 2010 the Salmonid Restoration Federation and the California-Nevada American Fisheries Society chapter will co-host the 28th Annual Salmonid Restoration Conference and the 44th Annual Cal-Neva AFS Conference in Redding, California. We are truly excited about this new collaborative effort. The first two days of the conference will be filled with symposia, full-day workshops and field tours. A half-day plenary session will be followed by 1.5 days of technical, biological, and policy-related concurrent sessions. To see the first call, please visit the SRF website Salmonid Restoration Federation www.calsalmon.org (707) 923-7501 (707) 923-3135 fax Byron Leydecker, JcT, Chair Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Mon Aug 17 18:59:35 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Mon, 17 Aug 2009 18:59:35 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] California Water Solutions Now - Dan Bacher Article Message-ID: Coalition Unveils California Water Solutions Now Report at Million Boat Float by Dan Bacher A broad coalition of 23 fishing, public health, conservation, environmental justice and tribal organizations today unveiled a ground breaking report, California Water Solutions Now, at a rally against the peripheral canal at the State Capitol, the final event of the Million Boat Float from Antioch to Sacramento. "California Water Solutions Now is presented to show that, with real reforms, California can have a sustainable water future," said Nick Di Croce, Lead Author. "It's a game-changing report. The report is unique in that it marries reduction in water usage to the ability to reduce water exports." Based on multiple scientific and engineering studies, it demonstrates how sustainable water management, including groundwater cleanup, water recycling, local storm water capture and cost-effective water conservation can provide the water needed to serve California's projected population, economy and environment through 2050, according to Di Croce. The cost of the actions detailed in the report by the Environmental Water Caucus (EWC) will provide water to people and the environment "almost immediately," at far lower costs and with significantly fewer greenhouse gas emissions than new dams and their associated infrastructure, said Di Croce. The report also expresses strong concerns about the proposed Peripheral Canal, which could route even higher levels of water away from the Delta than the already-harmful export levels of recent years. The groups have produced this report as the legislature is rushing to consider a package of bills that fails to include fundamental improvements in how we manage our water supplies. Canal opponents fear that the bill package, developed with little input from the people of the Delta, will serve as a road map to the building of a peripheral canal that Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and his allies in the Legislature are promoting as the "solution" to California's water supply problems. The report contends that savings in urban water conservation alone will carry California through the expected population increases through 2050. "It calls for Delta exports to be reduced by half from the recent levels in order to save, protect and restore the Delta," said Di Croce. "The report is based on existing, authenticated studies and data produced by the Department of Water Resources, the Pacific Institute and Planning and Conservation League and is assembled in a way that tells the game charging story." The report also recommends fish passage over major dams, improved instream flows, and cold water releases for fish. All of these measures have been reinforced and supported by the last two biological opinions from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Marine Fisheries Service regarding Delta smelt and Sacramento River Chinook salmon. The report was released as Central Valley salmon, Delta smelt, longfin smelt, green sturgeon, Sacramento splittail and other species are in an unprecedented state of collapse, due to increased water exports to San Joaquin Valley corporate agribusiness and southern California, poor management of Central Valley dam operations and declining water quality. The 42-page report highlights 10 Strategic Goals and 65 specific Recommendations that can carry California into the future, and in particular describes how the state can use current supplies and existing sustainable strategies more efficiently and cost-effectively. The report also shows how we can improve our valuable river habitats, eliminate discharges from contaminated agricultural lands, and improve other water quality problems, increase regional water self-sufficiency, and provide funding for environmental agencies. Croce was one of a group of speakers who condemned the mad rush of the legislature to build a peripheral canal when many other solutions to solving California's environmental and water supply needs are available. The other speakers included Senator Mark DeSaulnier, Assemblymember Alyson Huber, Assemblymember Mariko Yamada, Bill Jennings, California Sportfishing Alliance, Barbara Barrigan-Parrilla, Restore the Delta, Debbie Davis, Environmental Justice Coalition, Jonas Minton, Planning and Conservation League, Larry Collins, salmon fisherman and President of the SF Crab Boat Association; Mike Hudson, President, Small Boat Commercial Salmon Fishermen's Association, Robert Johnson, Jr., Californians against the Canal, and Bruce Connelley, Chairman of the Million Boat Float. Over 200 people including recreational anglers, Delta farmers, commercial fishermen, recreational boaters, environmental activists and Delta residents attended today's rally. Today's event was preceded by a rally on Sacramento River at the Delta King last night after a flotilla of canal opponents converged on Sacramento. "We are here today to convey the story of the people of the Delta, who are being excluded from input into this legislature process," said Barbara Daly, who owns farmland in the Clarksburg and Rio Vista areas. "They are not hearing or considering better alternatives to a peripheral canal or tunnel in the Delta to address California water problems." Bruce Connelley, an Oakley City Councilman, organized the two-day flotilla to show that boaters, fishermen and Delta residents are united in the defense of the Delta against plans by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and Legislators to build the peripheral canal. "We organized this flotilla because we felt it was time for the people to speak and have their voices heard," said Connelley. "Legislators here in Sacramento seem determined to push through this legislation that will destroy the greatest estuary in the western hemisphere." The California Legislature will be holding a joint hearing of the Assembly Parks and Wildlife and Senate Resources and Water Committees to review the controversial package of water bills on Tuesday, August 18 at the State Capitol, Room 4202, at 9 a.m. The document is available online on the EWC website: http://www.ewccalifornia.org/reports/ For hard copies, please contact Nick Di Croce Troutnk at aol.com and note the number of copies needed. Fore more information about the report, contact: David Nesmith, Facilitator, Environmental Water Caucus ewc at davidnesmith.com, 510-893-1330 Nick Di Croce, Lead Author: California Water Solutions Now troutnk at aol.com, 805-688-7813 Steve Evans, Friends of the River sevans at friendsoftheriver.org, 916-442-3155 x221 Bill Jennings, California Sportfishing Protection Alliance deltakeep at aol.com, 209-464-5067 Linda Sheehan, California Coastkeeper Alliance lsheehan at cacoastkeeper.org, 510-219-7330 Byron Leydecker, JcT, Chair Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Tue Aug 18 10:10:27 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Tue, 18 Aug 2009 10:10:27 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] California Water Issues Message-ID: <002401ca2026$c9586520$5c092f60$@net> Articles from various newspapers on aspects of California water issues now underway by the State Legislature or on actions by others. http://www.sacbee.com/politics/story/2117532.html?mi_rss=State%2520Politics http://www.mercurynews.com/california/ci_13146086?source=rss &nclick_check=1 http://www.dailydemocrat.com/ci_13149732 http://hanfordsentinel.com/articles/2009/08/17/newsupdates/doc4a899d9834ff13 68661545.txt http://www.recordnet.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090818/A_NEWS/90817998 4/-1/A_NEWS Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Wed Aug 19 11:25:02 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Wed, 19 Aug 2009 11:25:02 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Suction Dredge Mining in Trinity River Message-ID: <002101ca20fa$5e50d8f0$1af28ad0$@net> This was sent to me by a friend who. If anyone sees someone suction dredging in the Trinity River, please call the California Department of Fish and Game (DFG) hotline (Cal-TIP) 1 888 334-2258 and report the violation of law. Also, the Cal-TIP website is http://www.dfg.ca.gov/enforcement/caltip.aspx You also might follow up to make certain that DFG actually pursues a successful stop to the illegal activity. Also, please let me know if you see any such activity - bwl3 at comcast.net A person is encouraging this illegal activity on the Trinity publicly so it is extremely important to report any violation. Byron Leydecker Byron: We're trying to keep the heat on DFG to enforce the suction dredge ban signed into law with SB 670 (Wiggins) which was an urgency bill and went into effect immediately. Folks are using the DFG CalTIP hotline to report violations, and this seems to be working on the Klamath and possibly on the North Yuba River in Sierra Co. (Wardens are following up). The Klamath River Keeper's folks are reporting violations and say that DFG is following up with wardens citing miners who are still operating. Earl Crosby of the Karuk tribe regularly monitors the miners' internet forums and chat rooms, and there's some evidence suggesting that miner scofflaws are targeting the Trinity due to zero enforcement by DFG. Do you have any local contacts who could check to see what's going on along the Trinity? Thanks. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Wed Aug 19 11:46:59 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Wed, 19 Aug 2009 11:46:59 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Westlands Water District Hording Water Message-ID: <004501ca20fd$6fab1c20$4f015460$@net> Westlands hordes surplus water while fish die and unemployed farm workers beg for food and work CSPA calls for investigation into surplus water by Westlands and others Delta standards continue to be violated Stockton, CA - Wednesday, August 19, 2009. As broadcast and print media report heart-rendering stories about Westlands Water District having to fallow fields thus putting people out of work and placing farms in jeopardy because of a lack of water, the District has been squirreling away surplus water it can't use. The California Sportfishing Protection Alliance (CSPA) has discovered a Westlands' information bulletin dated 23 July 2009 revealing that the giant irrigation district has been hiding considerable carryover storage from last year and is adding even more this year. CSPA is calling for an investigation into Westlands' surplus water and possible surplus water hidden away by other water districts. At the end of 2008, Westlands had some 233,998 acre-feet (AF) of water stored in other facilities that it didn't need. Some 93,700 AF of that stored water was used through June 2009. However, the export pumping restrictions caused by the Delta Smelt Biological Opinion ended 30 June and the State and Federal Projects have ramped up pumping. Westlands has made firm commitments to acquire 141,522 AF of supplemental water and is requesting additional supplies. Consequently, Westlands staff projects that the District will end the water year with approximately 275,000 AF of water it is unable to use. CSPA Executive Director Bill Jennings said, "The idea that Westlands Water District has been hording surplus water it can't use while farm workers have been paid to hold vocal protests around the Central Valley accusing Congressman George Miller and federal agencies of starving farmers in order to protect Delta smelt is outrageous." "Perhaps Congressmen Devin Nunes and Dennis Cardoza can use their influence to persuade Westlands to share some of their stored water wealth to benefit those less fortunate," he said, adding "clearly an investigation is needed to see who else might be hording surplus water." The bulletin also points out that the Banks pumping plant of the State Water Project has been pumping about 1,000 AF of Central Valley Project daily. Of course use of the "Joint Point of Diversion" (JPOD) is illegal and violates D-1641, the State Water Resource Control Board's (State Board) order implementing the Bay-Delta Plan. D-1641 explicitly prohibits use of JPOD when south Delta salinity standards are being violated. Presently the running 30-day average for electrical conductivity, the measure of salinity, at Old River near Tracy is 1.02 umhos/cm. The water quality standard for this period is 0.7 umhos/cm to protect Delta agriculture. South Delta salinity standards have been continually violated the last seven months. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (USBR) and California Department of Water Resources (DWR) have been ignoring the Cease & Deist Order issued by the State Board in 2006 for violation of south Delta salinity standards. Recently, they requested an extension of the compliance schedule for that Cease & Deist Order beyond the 1 July 2009 deadline. CSPA was a party in the June 2009 State Board evidentiary hearing regarding the DWR/USBR request. Even though the State Board declared in 2006 they would not again extend the compliance schedule, they are expected to shortly issue a decision extending the schedule and excusing past violations. CSPA is prepared to sue over the Board's continued refusal to enforce the Cease & Desist Order. However, the prohibition against using JPOD while standards are violated was neither raised nor discussed in that hearing. Earlier this year, the State Board held hearings to consider a relaxation of Delta outflow standards because they were being violated. While April rains eliminated the need for relaxed standards the Board refused to penalize the USBR and DWR for violating existing standards. In June, the USBR acknowledged that Vernalis flows were only about 59% of required flow. Again, the State Board took no action. Water quality standards in the southern Delta have been consistently exceeded since last December. Jennings observed that, "the State Board continues to look the other way as virtually all of the standards protecting the Delta and its collapsing fisheries are ignored and DWR and USBR violate the law in order to supply Westlands with water they can't use." CSPA remains concerned about the plight of unemployed farm workers, even as we note that data from the California Economic Development Department and annual reports from County Agricultural Commissioners reveal that both farm labor employment and the value of agricultural production has increased in the seven south-of-Delta counties over the course of the drought. __________________________________________________________________ CSPA is a non-profit public benefit conservation and research organization established in 1983 for the purpose of conserving, restoring, and enhancing the state's water quality and fishery resources and their aquatic ecosystems and riparian habitats. CSPA's website is: www.calsport.org. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Wed Aug 19 13:50:26 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Wed, 19 Aug 2009 13:50:26 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Water the Delta and More Message-ID: <008f01ca210e$aee60790$0cb216b0$@net> Newspaper articles on Water/Delta legislation are below. My opinion, which I never before have stated in these postings of newspaper articles, is that if this issue is rushed to a conclusion, our entire state and Delta will be changed disastrously forever - everything north of the Delta and the Delta and its estuary particularly will be changed forever. In addition, the water issues/problems we face in our state will not be solved by this rushed legislation. It's more important to get these issues resolved intelligently and rationally as opposed to rapidly. http://www.sacbee.com/politics/story/2120742.html?mi_rss=State%2520Politics http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-water19-2009aug19,0,1010531.story?tr ack=rss http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/08/18/BA4419ADV1.DTL &feed=rss.bayarea http://www.recordnet.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090819/A_NEWS14/908190 318/-1/rss14 Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Wed Aug 19 13:53:32 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Wed, 19 Aug 2009 13:53:32 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Schwarzenegger on dams Message-ID: <009401ca210f$1da88590$58f990b0$@net> http://www.fresnobee.com/384/story/1604257.html Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Thu Aug 20 14:08:06 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Thu, 20 Aug 2009 14:08:06 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] (no subject) Message-ID: <004701ca21da$50b2e950$f218bbf0$@net> For the Hoopa Ceremonial Boat Dance - every other year. Byron From: Manza, Peggy L Sent: Tuesday, August 18, 2009 9:56 AM Subject: Trinity River Release Change Please make the following release changes at Lewiston Dam: Date time from (cfs) to (cfs) 8-23-09 0800 450 550 8-23-09 1000 550 650 8-23-09 1200 650 900 8-23-09 1400 900 1,150 8-23-09 1600 1,150 1,400 8-23-09 1800 1,400 1,650 8-23-09 2000 1,650 1,900 8-23-09 2200 1,900 2,150 8-23-09 2400 2,150 2,650 8-25-09 0001 2,650 2,450 8-25-09 0400 2,450 2,250 8-25-09 0800 2,250 2,050 8-25-09 1200 2,050 1,850 8-25-09 1600 1,850 1,750 8-25-09 2000 1,750 1,650 8-25-09 2400 1,650 1,550 8-26-09 0400 1,550 1,450 8-26-09 0800 1,450 1,350 8-26-09 1200 1,350 1,250 8-26-09 1600 1,250 1,150 8-26-09 2000 1,150 1,050 8-26-09 2400 1,050 950 8-27-09 0400 950 850 8-27-09 0800 850 750 8-27-09 1200 750 650 8-27-09 1600 650 550 8-27-09 2000 550 450 Ordered by: Peggy Manza Note: Ceremonial use Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Thu Aug 20 14:32:55 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Thu, 20 Aug 2009 14:32:55 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Ten-Day Recreational Ocean Salmon Season Opens August 29 Message-ID: <005b01ca21dd$c8a954f0$59fbfed0$@net> On 8/20/2009 at 11:23 AM, in message DFG News wrote: California Department of Fish and Game News Release August 20, 2009 Contact: Joe Duran, Associate Marine Biologist, (707) 576-3456 Harry Morse, Public Information Officer, (916) 322-8962 Ten-Day Recreational Ocean Salmon Season to Open in Northern California Aug. 29 California's only 2009 recreational ocean salmon season will be open Aug 29 through Sept. 7 in the Klamath Management Zone along the north coast. The brief season was authorized by the Pacific Fishery Management Council and California Fish and Game Commission, based on data collected by the Department of Fish and Game (DFG) showing enough adult Klamath fall run Chinook will return to the Klamath River Basin to allow for a limited ocean harvest while maintaining conservation goals. Since 2008, commercial and recreational fishing for salmon has been closed in all other ocean areas off California in order to protect Sacramento River fall run Chinook, which have been at historically low numbers the last two years. This northern California season was specifically designed to minimize the incidental take of Sacramento River fall Chinook, said Marija Vojkovich, Marine Region Manager and DFGs representative to the Pacific Fishery Management Council. The boundaries of the open ocean fishing area extend from north of Horse Mt. (40? 05 00 N. latitude) to the California - Oregon border. The retention of coho salmon or steelhead trout is prohibited in all California ocean fisheries. Anglers are required to use barbless hooks and are limited to one rod per person when fishing for salmon, or when fishing from a boat with salmon on board. The daily bag and possession limit is two salmon of any species except coho, with a minimum size limit of 24 inches total length. A salmon report card is no longer required when fishing for salmon in the ocean. The opening of this salmon season is expected to provide some relief to businesses that cater to the salmon anglers. According to DFG economist Terry Tillman, the 10-day ocean salmon sport fishing season could boost economic output by $2 million statewide. Locally, in Humboldt and Del Norte counties, the season could contribute an additional $370,000 to total economic output for the region. The 2009-2010 Freshwater and Ocean Sport Fishing Supplement, published by DFG, lists all current regulations and restrictions. The supplement is available at sport fishing licenses dealers, DFG offices and online at www.dfg.ca.gov/regulations. Anglers may also call the Ocean Salmon Hotline at (707) 576-3429 for additional information. Salmon news and related information compiled by DFG is online at: www.dfg.ca.gov/news/issues/salmon. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From AKrause at usbr.gov Thu Aug 20 11:03:51 2009 From: AKrause at usbr.gov (Krause, Andreas F) Date: Thu, 20 Aug 2009 12:03:51 -0600 Subject: [env-trinity] FW: Trinity River Release Change In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <469C3D002DBB944BBEAEC89CBE8D1DF7CE0CDA00@IBR5DENMXCMX01.bor.doi.net> ________________________________________ From: Manza, Peggy L Sent: Tuesday, August 18, 2009 9:56 AM Subject: Trinity River Release Change Please make the following release changes at Lewiston Dam: Date time from (cfs) to (cfs) 8-23-09 0800 450 550 8-23-09 1000 550 650 8-23-09 1200 650 900 8-23-09 1400 900 1,150 8-23-09 1600 1,150 1,400 8-23-09 1800 1,400 1,650 8-23-09 2000 1,650 1,900 8-23-09 2200 1,900 2,150 8-23-09 2400 2,150 2,650 8-25-09 0001 2,650 2,450 8-25-09 0400 2,450 2,250 8-25-09 0800 2,250 2,050 8-25-09 1200 2,050 1,850 8-25-09 1600 1,850 1,750 8-25-09 2000 1,750 1,650 8-25-09 2400 1,650 1,550 8-26-09 0400 1,550 1,450 8-26-09 0800 1,450 1,350 8-26-09 1200 1,350 1,250 8-26-09 1600 1,250 1,150 8-26-09 2000 1,150 1,050 8-26-09 2400 1,050 950 8-27-09 0400 950 850 8-27-09 0800 850 750 8-27-09 1200 750 650 8-27-09 1600 650 550 8-27-09 2000 550 450 Ordered by: Peggy Manza Note: Ceremonial use From BGutermuth at usbr.gov Thu Aug 20 22:51:49 2009 From: BGutermuth at usbr.gov (Gutermuth, F. Brandt) Date: Thu, 20 Aug 2009 23:51:49 -0600 Subject: [env-trinity] Final Master EIR available Message-ID: <469C3D002DBB944BBEAEC89CBE8D1DF7CE247ED5@IBR5DENMXCMX01.bor.doi.net> Dear Trinity River Enthusiasts - The Final Master Environmental Impact Report for Trinity River Restoration Program (TRRP) Channel Rehabilitation and Sediment Management is now available. The final incorporates the Draft by reference so - you'll have to read the entire document - but it should be worth it! I hope and believe that this California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) document will facilitate getting TRRP work on the river in a more efficient fashion. Thank you to all who helped put this document together and especially to the North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board, our California Environmental Quality Act lead for the Master EIR. Please check it out at: http://www.trrp.net/implementation/remainingP1.htm Brandt Gutermuth Environmental Specialist Trinity River Restoration Program PO Box 1300 (mailing) 1313 S. Main Street (physical) Weaverville, CA 96093 530.623.1806 (voice) 530.623.5944 (fax) www.trrp.net (website) THE OFFICIAL COVER LETTER for the EIR follows: ____________________________________________________________________ Subject: Final Master Environmental Impact Report for Trinity River Restoration Program Channel Rehabilitation and Sediment Management at Remaining Phase 1 and Phase 2 sites Dear Interested Parties: Under guidance of the Trinity River Restoration Program (TRRP), the Bureau of Reclamation has acted as the Project Proponent in preparation of a programmatic Master Environmental Impact Report (Master EIR) and site specific Final Environmental Impact Report (Final EIR) to evaluate impacts of proposed TRRP activities for Channel Rehabilitation and Sediment Management at Remaining Phase 1 and Phase 2 sites. The California Regional Water Quality Control Board, North Coast Region (Regional Water Board), is the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) lead agency for preparation of these documents. The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) component of the original joint CEQA/NEPA EA/Draft EIR for Remaining Phase 1 Rehabilitation Activities has been completed with the signing of a federal Finding of No Significant Impact (FONSI) for these activities. When the Final Master EIR is certified under CEQA by the Regional Water Board, it will serve similar functions under CEQA, as the Trinity River Mainstem Fishery Restoration Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS) under NEPA. The Final Master EIR will provide programmatic CEQA level review from which site-specific project reviews may tier from. Both the FEIS, and now the Final Master EIR, are meant to support and facilitate implementation of the Secretary of Interior?s December 2000 Record of Decision (ROD) for Trinity River Restoration. The mechanical channel rehabilitation and sediment management activities evaluated by these environmental documents were originally identified in the ROD as necessary steps towards restoration of the Trinity River?s anadromous fishery. To this end, the TRRP?s efforts are intended to increase habitat for all life stages of wild salmon and steelhead native to the Trinity River. River restoration activities, as described in the Final Master EIR-Final EIR would create additional fish and wildlife habitat at a number of discrete locations; and over time, further increases in habitat are anticipated as riverine processes are restored. Work to be performed includes re-contouring bank and floodplain features, as well as conducting in-river work such as gravel placement and grade control removal. In addition to various construction activities, the Final Master EIR - Final EIR completes the analyses necessary to authorize ongoing restoration activities such as gravel addition during high spring flows and control of fine sediment. Construction activities, evaluated in the Final Master EIR ? Final EIR, are scheduled to begin in late-summer 2009 at the Sawmill Restoration site, near Cemetery hole on the mainstem Trinity. The attached Final Master EIR - Final EIR includes the Draft Master EIR - Draft EIR (incorporated by reference), a list of persons and agencies commenting on the Draft environmental documents, written comments, Lead Agency responses to comments, revised Draft Master EIR ? Draft EIR text, and a Mitigation Monitoring and Reporting Program (MMRP) for the proposed Project. Prior to approving the Project, the Water Control Board will certify that the Final Master EIR- Final EIR is in compliance with CEQA. The document will then be used to support necessary permit applications as well as to identify and adopt appropriate monitoring and mitigation plans. Electronic copies of the fore-mentioned environmental documents, as well as the signed federal Finding of No Significant Impact (FONSI), are available on the TRRP?s website at: http://www.trrp.net/implementation/remainingP1.htm , or on Reclamation?s Mid-Pacific Region website at: http://www.usbr.gov/mp/nepa/nepa_projdetails.cfm?Project_ID=3138. Hard copies of the documents may also be reviewed at the TRRP Office at 1313 South Main Street (next to Tops grocery) or at the Trinity County library, 211 North Main Street; in Weaverville, California. If you have any questions concerning this document or the Project, please contact Mr. Brandt Gutermuth, TRRP, at 530-623-1806 or bgutermuth at mp.usbr.gov. or Mr. Dean Prat, of the Water Quality Control Board, at 707-576-2801 or dprat at waterboards.ca.gov. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Mon Aug 24 10:57:36 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Mon, 24 Aug 2009 10:57:36 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Delta and Water Issues Message-ID: <008701ca24e4$5dd39050$197ab0f0$@net> Five more news and opinion articles on Delta and water issues: http://www.contracostatimes.com/news/ci_13182092?source=rss &nclick_check=1 http://www.sacbee.com/opinion/story/2130249.html?mi_rss=Opinion http://www.sacbee.com/740/story/2130207.html http://www.sacbee.com/740/story/2130209.html http://www.mercedsunstar.com/181/story/1014270.html Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From danielbacher at fishsniffer.com Mon Aug 24 11:43:04 2009 From: danielbacher at fishsniffer.com (Dan Bacher) Date: Mon, 24 Aug 2009 11:43:04 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Counterpunch Article on Westlands Water Hoarding In-Reply-To: <008701ca24e4$5dd39050$197ab0f0$@net> References: <008701ca24e4$5dd39050$197ab0f0$@net> Message-ID: A Burson-Marsteller Greenwash Westlands Hoards Surplus Water While Farmworkers Suffer By DAN BACHER Over the past several months, the mainstream media and right wing demagogues such as Sean Hannity have reported "heart rending" stories about the Westlands Water District having to fallow fields, putting farmworkers out of work and farms in jeopardy because of a lack of water, supposedly caused by pumping restrictions protecting Delta smelt and Sacramento River Chinook salmon. The movement by a broad coalition of commercial fishermen, recreational fishermen, Delta family farmers, California Indian Tribes and environmental justice advocates to restore the Delta and its collapsing fish populations has been falsely cast by Westlands and San Joaquin Valley agribusiness interests as favoring "fish over people." The California Sportfishing Protection Alliance District (CSPA) has countered the lies behind this cynical campaign by revealing that the district has been "squirreling away" surplus water it can't use. CSPA has discovered a Westlands' information bulletin dated July 23, 2009 revealing that the giant irrigation district, considered the "Darth Vader" of California water politics by fish restoration advocates, has been hiding considerable carryover storage from last year and is adding even more this year. The group is calling for an investigation into Westlands' surplus water and possible surplus water hidden away by other water districts. ?The idea that Westlands Water District has been hoarding surplus water it can't use while farm workers have been paid to hold vocal protests around the Central Valley accusing Congressman George Miller and federal agencies of starving farmers in order to protect Delta smelt is outrageous," said Bill Jennings, CSPA executive director. ?Perhaps Congressmen Devin Nunes and Dennis Cardoza can use their influence to persuade Westlands to share some of their stored water wealth to benefit those less fortunate. Clearly an investigation is needed to see who else might be hoarding surplus water.? At the end of 2008, Westlands had some 233,998 acre-feet (AF) of water stored in other facilities that it didn't need, according to Jennings. Some 93,700 AF of that stored water were used through June 2009. However, the export pumping restrictions caused by the Delta Smelt Biological Opinion ended June 30 and the State and Federal Projects have ramped up pumping. Westlands has made firm commitments to acquire 141,522 AF of supplemental water and is requesting additional supplies. "Consequently, Westlands staff projects that the District will end the water year with approximately 275,000 AF of water it is unable to use," Jennings disclosed. The disclosure of the hoarding of water by Westlands occurs as the district and its front group, the Latino Water Coalition, have been campaigning to give a "human face" to corporate agribusiness by busing hundreds of farmworkers to "rallies" and "marches" in Fresno, Sacramento and Concord demanding increased pumping of water from the Delta. However, no legitimate farmworker organizations are supporting these efforts, organized by the public relations firm Burson- Marsteller, notorious for campaigns to cast a "democratic" image to dictatorships around the world for decades and for numerous corporate greenwashing campaigns. Paul Rodriguez, a comedian and grower who frequently appears at rallies and marches with Governor Arnold Schwarzengger in support of increasing water exports out of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta in total disregard for Delta farmers, farmworkers, recreational fishing businesss and commercial fishermen that depend upon a healthy Delta for their livelihoods, is the chair of the Latino Water Coalition. The coalition includes three co-chairs - Orange Cove Mayor Victor P. Lopez, Ruben Guerra of the Latin Business Association and Tony Estremera, a director of the Santa Clara Valley Water District. Arturo Rodriguez, president of the United Farm Workers of America, the 27,000-member union founded by Cesar Chavez, blasted the Latino Water Coalition's so-called "March for Water" this April for being an event organized by corporate agribusiness, completely stripping away the coalition's claims that it was lobbying on behalf of farmworkers. "In reality, this is not a farm worker march,'' Rodriguez told the New Work Times on April 17. ''This is a farmer march orchestrated and financed by growers.'' Ironically, the corporate farmers claiming to stand up for their workers against "radical environmentalists" represent the same San Joaquin agribusiness interests that have ruthlessly exploited farmworkers, crushed their right to organize and denied them their right to clean drinking water in the fields for decade after decade. Last year alone 6 farmworkers died due to heat exposure in unsafe working conditions imposed upon them by growers. The disclosure of the hoarding of water by Westlands occurs as Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, Senator Diane Feinstein and California Legislators, pressured by corporate agribusiness, are pushing for the construction of a peripheral canal to increase water exports to Westlands and southern California. A coalition of fishing groups, Delta family farmers, Indian Tribes and principled environmentalists is fighting the canal, an enormously costly government boondoggle that would result in pushing Central Valley salmon, Delta smelt, longfin smelt, striped bass, green sturgeon and other California Delta fish populations into the abyss of extinction. On August 18, the California Legislature held a joint hearing of the Assembly Parks and Wildlife and Senate Resources and Water Committees to review a controversial package of five water bills that Jennings describes as a "road map" to the construction of the peripheral canal as Schwarzenegger, Westlands growers and the Latino Water Coalition held a rally pushing for a peripheral canal and more dams at the capitol. Canal opponents, including Barbara Barrigan-Parrilla, campaign director of Restore the Delta, Mark Franco, headman of the Winnemem Wintu Tribe, and Zeke Grader, executive director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations, and others at the hearing spoke against the mad rush by the Legislature to push through a package that would result in the destruction of the Delta estuary and its fish. "The peripheral canal is a big, stupid idea that doesn?t make any sense from a tribal environmental perspective,? Franco said during a rally at the Capitol on July 7. ?Building a canal to save the Delta is like a doctor inserting an arterial bypass from your shoulder to your hand? it will cause your elbow to die just like taking water out of the Delta through a peripheral canal will cause the Delta to die.? During a recent town hall meeting in Fresno featuring Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, the UFW's Arturo Rodriguez was the only member of the meeting panel who didn?t call for the construction of the peripheral canal and more dams or overturning the biological opinions under the Endangered Species Act. In an interview with me, Rodriguez pointed out the contradiction between agribusiness asking for new water infrastructure when farmworkers are denied clean drinking water in the fields. ?We have no thoughts on the peripheral canal or dams at this time,? Rodriguez said. ?We are looking at the plans and proposals to ensure that what is done takes into account the needs of farmworkers, including making sure that farmworkers have sufficient water to drink in the fields. This is about more than just ensuring water for agriculture ? we want to sure that workers have good jobs with good wages and access to representation.? Ironically, when Salazar randomly selected comment cards from the farmworkers to speak at the microphone before the crowd, not one of the workers themselves complained about unemployment. Their concerns were the same as those voiced by Rodriguez - the urgent need for clean drinking water in the fields, improved wages and working conditions and access to union representation. While the growers bemoaned the "loss" of farmworker jobs due to the favoring of "fish versus people," not one of the workers themselves brought this issue up! State water standards violated to deliver Westlands surplus water! The Westlands bulletin also points out that the Banks pumping plant of the State Water Project in the South Delta has been pumping about 1,000 AF of Central Valley Project daily. "Of course use of the 'Joint Point of Diversion' (JPOD) is illegal and violates D-1641, the State Water Resource Control Board's (State Board) order implementing the Bay-Delta Plan. D-1641 explicitly prohibits use of JPOD when south Delta salinity standards are being violated," Jennings pointed out. Presently the running 30-day average for electrical conductivity, the measure of salinity, at Old River near Tracy is 1.02 umhos/cm. The water quality standard for this period is 0.7 umhos/cm to protect Delta agriculture. "South Delta salinity standards have been continually violated the last seven months, imperiling Delta fish populations and Delta farms," Jennings stated. Jennings said the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (USBR) and California Department of Water Resources (DWR) have been ignoring the Cease & Deist Order issued by the State Board in 2006 for violation of south Delta salinity standards. Recently, they requested an extension of the compliance schedule for that Cease & Deist Order beyond the 1 July 2009 deadline. CSPA was a party in the June 2009 State Board evidentiary hearing regarding the DWR/USBR request. Even though the State Board declared in 2006 they would not again extend the compliance schedule, they are expected to shortly issue a decision extending the schedule and excusing past violations. CSPA is prepared to sue over the Board's continued refusal to enforce the Cease & Desist Order. However, the prohibition against using JPOD while standards are violated was neither raised nor discussed in that hearing. "Earlier this year, the State Board held hearings to consider a relaxation of Delta outflow standards because they were being violated," Jennings stated. "While April rains eliminated the need for relaxed standards, the Board refused to penalize the USBR and DWR for violating existing standards. In June, the USBR acknowledged that Vernalis flows were only about 59 per cent of required flow. Again, the State Board took no action. Water quality standards in the southern Delta have been consistently exceeded since last December." Jennings observed that, ?the State Board continues to look the other way as virtually all of the standards protecting the Delta and its collapsing fisheries are ignored and DWR and USBR violate the law in order to supply Westlands with water they can't use?.CSPA remains concerned about the plight of unemployed farm workers, even as we note that data from the California Economic Development Department and annual reports from County Agricultural Commissioners reveal that both farm labor employment and the value of agricultural production has increased in the seven south-of-Delta counties over the course of the drought.? I applaud Jennings and the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance for exposing Westlands' hoarding of water while corporate agribusiness and the Latino Water Coalition engage in a false and misleading campaign portraying themselves as the "voice" of the "poor farmworker" while they clearly care nothing about farmworkers nor the thousands of people in the recreational and commercial fishing industries that are now unemployed, due to the collapse of Central Valley salmon and Delta fish populations spurred by increasing water exports from the Delta in recent years. For more information and to read the Westlands report that Jennings based his analysis on, go to http://www.calsport.org/8-19-09.htm. Dan Bacher can be reached at: Danielbacher at fishsniffer.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Mon Aug 24 17:20:29 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Mon, 24 Aug 2009 17:20:29 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Fresno Bee Message-ID: <012d01ca2519$dadbabc0$90930340$@net> Fresno County jobless rate drops in July Seasonal growth in farm work, food industry cited. Seasonal job growth in farm employment and food manufacturing fueled a slight drop in Fresno County's unemployment rate last month, despite an overall decline in the number of wage-paying jobs. The county's jobless rate in July was 15%, down from 15.3% in June, according to figures made public Friday by the state Employment Development Department. Elsewhere in the Valley, the unemployment rate was down in Kings County and unchanged in Madera County but rose in both Tulare and Merced counties. The summer harvest season accounted for about 3,000 additional jobs in Fresno County, state labor market analyst Steven Gutierrez said. Another 800 jobs were added in manufacturing, Gutierrez said, all in food manufacturing. But those gains were outpaced by job losses in other sectors, especially in government employment -- also due to seasonal patterns, Gutierrez said. Local governments -- cities, counties and other local agencies -- lost about 3,600 jobs, while state and federal government agencies shed a combined 1,200 jobs in July. Overall, EDD analysts estimated about 348,000 jobs among all industries in Fresno County in July, down 1,600 from June's estimate. The job-count figures are based on surveys of employers. One surprise was the loss of an estimated 5,200 farm jobs in Tulare County in what is typically the peak of harvest season throughout the San Joaquin Valley. But while the county has lost farm jobs between June and July in all but one of the last nine years, this year's drop -- from 47,600 jobs in June to 42,400 in July -- is the largest month-to-month decline in that period. "That surprised me too, because I went back and looked at the numbers," said Sheila Urdesich, an EDD labor market analyst. "But the good news is, there are still 1,800 more farm jobs than a year ago," Urdesich said. Across the five-county region, about 136,600 people in the labor force are out of work. That's about 1,300 fewer than last month, but nearly 47,000 more than were unemployed a year ago. Jobless rates in each of the five counties are about 5 percentage points above ahead of where they were in July 2008. An idiosyncracy of the state's figures is there are two sets of numbers: one estimating the number of wage- and salary-paying jobs, the second calculating the number of people employed. The two figures don't necessarily match because some people may hold more than one job. The estimates of paying jobs don't count the self-employed, unpaid family help, household domestic workers or workers on strike, but those people do count as employed when calculating the overall unemployment rate. People who have left the labor force for whatever reason -- discouraged workers who have stopped looking for jobs, retirees or students who returned to school -- are not part of the unemployment calculations. California's statewide unemployment rate was up for the month, climbing to 11.9%, compared to 11.6% in June. Nationally, the unemployment rate in July was 9.7%. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Tue Aug 25 13:56:47 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Tue, 25 Aug 2009 13:56:47 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Crescent City Triplicate 8/22/09 Message-ID: <000f01ca25c6$908e5600$b1ab0200$@net> Ocean salmon season looms Recreational season to last just 10 days Crescent City Triplicate-8/22/09 By Kurt Madar The North Coast is gearing up for a recreational ocean salmon fishing season for the first time in two years. Starting next Saturday, Aug. 29, and running through Monday, Sept. 7, recreational ocean salmon fishermen will be allowed to catch two salmon daily of any species other than coho. According to the California Department of Fish and Game Web site, the minimum size fish is 24 inches. Local officials and fishing-related business owners are already seeing a little more action as the season nears. "Harbors all along the North Coast are experiencing an increase in calls for slips," said Crescent City Harbormaster Richard Young. "We are definitely expecting larger numbers than last year at this time." Young said the 10-day season is "a lot better than no season." He can thank a larger-than-average Klamath River chinook run, according to California Fish and Game biologists. "We are predicting 131,000 to 139,000 3-year-olds in the Klamath," said fisheries biologist Sara BorokBorok. "If you consider that the average for the last 29 years was 121,000, this is a slightly higher run than normal." Even the Coast Guard is ramping up for the upcoming short season. "Group Humboldt Bay is prepared for a large increase in maritime activity in the area due to the salmon season bringing in many boats from outside the immediate area," a Coast Guard press release states. The Coast Guard requests that boaters file a float plan with a family member or friend who is ashore. "A good float plan includes a description of the vessel, names of the crew, a list of safety equipment on board, your destination and time of arrival at the fishing grounds and your ultimate destination," the Coast Guard advises. Added to the recreational ocean fishing is a large allocation of adult salmon for in-river sport fishing. Sport fishermen are allowed to take 3-year-old fish. "We have a record level allocation for this season on the Klamath," said Fish and game senior biologist Larry Hanson. "The in-river sport fishery has been allocated 30,800 fish and the tribes have been allocated 30,900." According to Leonard Carter of Englund Marine Supply Co, recreational fishermen have just starting getting salmon in local rivers. Carter said that river fishing is currently allowed on the whole Klamath River and just in the mouth of the Smith River.# Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Wed Aug 26 16:05:42 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Wed, 26 Aug 2009 16:05:42 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Hanford Sentinel 8 25 09 Message-ID: <004701ca26a1$bd39c370$37ad4a50$@net> Westside farmer sells water for $77 million By Seth Nidever snidever at HanfordSentinel.com Forget gold. In Kings County, water gets most of the attention. More specifically, it's the prospect of losing local water rights to outside entities that gets everybody's dander up. That's why the Kings County Water Commission spent a good chunk of a Monday night meeting talking about a Westside landowner who plans to sell 14,000 acre-feet of water a year to the Mojave Water Agency in San Bernardino County for $5,500 per acre-foot. That's $77 million of the wet stuff headed out of the county for likely urban development (an acre-foot is enough water to supply a typical home for a year, according to Wikipedia). The tradeoff is that the unnamed landowner - a member of a Bay Area company called Sandridge Partners, based in Sunnyvale - plans to cut down 2,500 acres of his almond trees along Interstate 5 near Kettleman City. Normally, that probably wouldn't rank high on the concerns of the water commission - The land is far away from Hanford, it doesn't affect Kings River water users and it's California Aqueduct water coming from the Sacramento River, anyway. But the concern is that the pattern could become more common as scarce water becomes more valuable as a commodity than as a way of growing crops. "Higher bidders are bidding for the water and are willing to pay more," said Don Mills, commission member. Mills said he'd like to stop Sandridge from selling the water, but that Kings County "has no legal authority (to stop it)." Dudley Ridge Water District, where Sandridge's land is located, has adopted a policy divvying its water among member property owners. That gives each the right to sell their share. No representatives from Sandridge Partners or Dudley Ridge Water District spoke at Monday's meeting. According to Mills, however, Sandridge plans to use part of the $77 million to buy groundwater rights on adjacent land in Kings and Tulare counties in order to keep at least some of its almond trees alive. The groundwater might be lower quality, but it is a more reliable water supply than Aqueduct water, which has been reduced severely due to drought and environmental issues in the Sacramento River delta. "It's a matter of economics," said Mark Gilkey, general manager of the Tulare Lake Basin Water Storage District, in an interview. Property owners in his water district have done the same thing in the past, Gilkey said. As with most water discussions in Kings County, Monday's comments quickly turned to the topic of new dams - a sore point in Sacramento as Democratic legislators balk at new storage projects and Republican lawmakers, along with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, say they won't support anything that doesn't include new dams. "The answer's got to be more [water] contracts," said commission member John Howe, adding that the reshuffling of the existing water supply is "delaying the inevitable." Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From trinityjosh at gmail.com Wed Aug 26 21:15:41 2009 From: trinityjosh at gmail.com (Joshua Allen) Date: Wed, 26 Aug 2009 21:15:41 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Hanford Sentinel 8 25 09 In-Reply-To: <004701ca26a1$bd39c370$37ad4a50$@net> References: <004701ca26a1$bd39c370$37ad4a50$@net> Message-ID: Ah, the Hanford Sentinel. I sometimes miss reading the paper of my so-called "hometown"...but then again, I don't miss it. Funny though, the Westside farmers are running a new ad campaign. Have you seen it? It's everywhere posted along roads in the Westlands, specifically in the I-5 corridor. I took a picture of this ad last month - and for your pleasure, it's attached! This was taken at the corner of West Oakland Avenue (in Kings Co it's called Grangeville Blvd.) and State Route 145 (Fresno Coalinga Road). Funny thing though, the place didn't look like much of a dustbowel to me. Actually from Tulare between to the I-5 it looked down right productive while I was living there from April to just a few weeks ago before moving to Chico. Corn was even sprouting up in 90 days, which is something I don't remember seeing growing up! Just unreal... The only place I noticed were approaching dustbowl status were a few orchards along I-5 that looked like they were purposely dried up; which after reading this article makes a lot of sense. So the question I have is this; "How do I get into this water business of buying water for pennies on the dollar from the government, say at $50 or less an acre foot, at taxpayer expense and from someone else's backyard, nonetheless of course, and then sell it to some other goverenmental agency for an obscene sum?" Hey Brian or somebody at the BOR, can you help me figure out how I too can get rich? I'm really poor, especially being a masters student now, due to your government's budget cuts, and would like my 60 acres and a mule too! Plus the water... God, if only Bernie knew! He'd be out of jail as we speak still getting rich, with a legal ponzi scheme. But alas, he got too greedy... Just a little something to make you go, hmmm... 2009/8/26 Byron Leydecker > Westside farmer sells water for $77 million > > By Seth Nidever > snidever at HanfordSentinel.com > > *Forget gold. In Kings County, water gets most of the attention. More > specifically, it?s the prospect of losing local water rights to outside > entities that gets everybody?s dander up. > > That's why the Kings County Water Commission spent a good chunk of a Monday > night meeting talking about a Westside landowner who plans to sell 14,000 > acre-feet of water a year to the Mojave Water Agency in San Bernardino > County for $5,500 per acre-foot. > > That?s $77 million of the wet stuff headed out of the county for likely > urban development (an acre-foot is enough water to supply a typical home for > a year, according to Wikipedia). > > The tradeoff is that the unnamed landowner ? a member of a Bay Area company > called Sandridge Partners, based in Sunnyvale ? plans to cut down 2,500 > acres of his almond trees along Interstate 5 near Kettleman City. > > Normally, that probably wouldn?t rank high on the concerns of the water > commission ? The land is far away from Hanford, it doesn?t affect Kings > River water users and it?s California Aqueduct water coming from the > Sacramento River, anyway. > > * > > *But the concern is that the pattern could become more common as scarce > water becomes more valuable as a commodity than as a way of growing crops. > > ?Higher bidders are bidding for the water and are willing to pay more,? > said Don Mills, commission member. > > Mills said he?d like to stop Sandridge from selling the water, but that > Kings County ?has no legal authority (to stop it).? > > Dudley Ridge Water District, where Sandridge?s land is located, has adopted > a policy divvying its water among member property owners. That gives each > the right to sell their share. > > No representatives from Sandridge Partners or Dudley Ridge Water District > spoke at Monday?s meeting. > > According to Mills, however, Sandridge plans to use part of the $77 million > to buy groundwater rights on adjacent land in Kings and Tulare counties in > order to keep at least some of its almond trees alive. > > The groundwater might be lower quality, but it is a more reliable water > supply than Aqueduct water, which has been reduced severely due to drought > and environmental issues in the Sacramento River delta. > > ?It?s a matter of economics,? said Mark Gilkey, general manager of the > Tulare Lake Basin Water Storage District, in an interview. > > Property owners in his water district have done the same thing in the past, > Gilkey said. > > As with most water discussions in Kings County, Monday?s comments quickly > turned to the topic of new dams ? a sore point in Sacramento as Democratic > legislators balk at new storage projects and Republican lawmakers, along > with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, say they won?t support anything that > doesn?t include new dams. > > ?The answer?s got to be more [water] contracts,? said commission member > John Howe, adding that the reshuffling of the existing water supply is > ?delaying the inevitable.?* > > * * > > * * > > *Byron Leydecker, JcT* > > *Chair, Friends of Trinity River* > > *PO Box 2327* > > *Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327* > > *415 383 4810 land* > > *415 519 4810 cell* > > *bwl3 at comcast.net*** > > *bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org **(secondary)*** > > *http://www.fotr.org *** > > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > env-trinity mailing list > env-trinity at velocipede.dcn.davis.ca.us > http://www2.dcn.org/mailman/listinfo/env-trinity > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: 0728090928.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 196820 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Wed Aug 26 22:14:01 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Wed, 26 Aug 2009 22:14:01 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] FW: Emailing: MODIS Rapid Response System - AERONET_Moss_Landing Subset - Aqua 1km True Color image for 2009-236 (08-24-09) Message-ID: <002e01ca26d5$31012a90$93037fb0$@net> From: Lloyd Carter [mailto:lcarter0i at comcast.net] Sent: Wednesday, August 26, 2009 9:12 PM To: Lloyd Carter Subject: Emailing: MODIS Rapid Response System - AERONET_Moss_Landing Subset - Aqua 1km True Color image for 2009-236 (08-24-09) Okay folks, Here is a NASA satellite photo in true color taken today, Wednesday, August 27, 2009, of the San Joaquin Valley. There are some dry areas, for sure, but judge for yourself whether the entire "Valley" looks like a Dust Bowl. Looks like most farmers are doing okay. One picture is worth a thousand words. CHECK OUT THE LINK JUST BELOW. Lloyd http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/subsets/?subset=AERONET_Moss_Landing.2009236.aqua.1km AERONET_Moss_Landing.2009236.aqua.1km.jpg -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 322891 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Wed Aug 26 22:36:05 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Wed, 26 Aug 2009 22:36:05 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] FW: [FOTR] FW: Emailing: MODIS Rapid Response System - AERONET_Moss_Landing Subset - Aqua 1km True Color image for 2009-236 (08-24-09) Message-ID: <005f01ca26d8$4622fd10$d268f730$@net> From: John Leydecker [mailto:johnleydecker at comcast.net] Sent: Wednesday, August 26, 2009 10:26 PM To: 'Byron Leydecker' Subject: RE: [FOTR] FW: Emailing: MODIS Rapid Response System - AERONET_Moss_Landing Subset - Aqua 1km True Color image for 2009-236 (08-24-09) Their water maps are even more telling: From: fotr-bounces+johnleydecker=comcast.net at velocipede.dcn.davis.ca.us [mailto:fotr-bounces+johnleydecker=comcast.net at velocipede.dcn.davis.ca.us] On Behalf Of Byron Leydecker Sent: Wednesday, August 26, 2009 10:14 PM To: FOTR List; Trinity List Subject: [FOTR] FW: Emailing: MODIS Rapid Response System - AERONET_Moss_Landing Subset - Aqua 1km True Color image for 2009-236 (08-24-09) From: Lloyd Carter [mailto:lcarter0i at comcast.net] Sent: Wednesday, August 26, 2009 9:12 PM To: Lloyd Carter Subject: Emailing: MODIS Rapid Response System - AERONET_Moss_Landing Subset - Aqua 1km True Color image for 2009-236 (08-24-09) Okay folks, Here is a NASA satellite photo in true color taken today, Wednesday, August 27, 2009, of the San Joaquin Valley. There are some dry areas, for sure, but judge for yourself whether the entire "Valley" looks like a Dust Bowl. Looks like most farmers are doing okay. One picture is worth a thousand words. CHECK OUT THE LINK JUST BELOW. Lloyd http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/subsets/?subset=AERONET_Moss_Landing.2009236.aqua.1km AERONET_Moss_Landing.2009236.aqua.1km.jpg -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image002.png Type: image/png Size: 1462407 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image003.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 322891 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Fri Aug 28 11:04:41 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Fri, 28 Aug 2009 11:04:41 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Capitol Weekly 8/27/09 Message-ID: <002401ca280a$04bd4fa0$0e37eee0$@net> Major water bond proposed in the Capitol Capitol Weekly-8/27/09 By John Howard A plan to get voter approval on $11.7 billion in new water projects that include reservoirs, Delta environmental protections and even a massive canal is under consideration in the Capitol, the latest in a series of proposals targeting California's water problems. The plan - not yet in the form of a bill - would place a bond issue before voters in November 2010. It is being pushed by Assemblymember Anna Caballero, D-Salinas. Lawmakers in both parties and the governor have been attempting to negotiate a water package that includes new storage and greater deliveries of water into the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta east of San Francisco and to the San Joaquin Valley and Central California. They also are considering the construction of a canal to carry water from the Sacramento River in the north around the Delta to the California Aqueduct, which would move the water southward. Some environmentalists oppose the proposal as harmful to the Delta, and Delta interests are fearful of being frozen out of the discussions. The Delta, a vast estuary under court-ordered environmental protections, is crucial to the negotiations because most of the state's drinking comes through the delta. The notion of going to the ballot for voter-approved borrowing is controversial, partly because the state's weak economy may not be conducive to a bond sale and partly because lawmakers are hesitant to take on more state debt. Supporters of the storage projects and canal, including the public water agencies, believe a fee schedule is more efficient and politically feasible than borrowing.# Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From danielbacher at fishsniffer.com Sun Aug 30 15:40:14 2009 From: danielbacher at fishsniffer.com (Dan Bacher) Date: Sun, 30 Aug 2009 15:40:14 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Today's Chronicle Editorial on $54 billion water bill/My letter in response In-Reply-To: <0EC678A9-E75C-40C4-A4F4-8E4153E33A7D@fishsniffer.com> References: <7AB81A37-5481-45BD-BDF4-FA30B3D51FB4@fishsniffer.com> <4C24E7B867CD024B9A9BC761C61FC55980025E@pclf.PCLF.local> <0EC678A9-E75C-40C4-A4F4-8E4153E33A7D@fishsniffer.com> Message-ID: <035F1397-4320-435C-A997-2BD9DE86DC10@fishsniffer.com> Today's S.F. Chronicle editorial: A $54 billion water bill: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/08/29/ EDJ019DHLC.DTL My Letter in Response Stop the Canal It is absurd for the state to authorize a water project that could cost up to $54 billion (editorial, August 30) at a time when our state parks, teachers and childrens? health care are in great jeopardy because of budget cuts. I find it appalling that Senator Joe Simitian and Assemblyman Jared Huffman are sponsoring legislation that serves as a road map to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's peripheral canal. This proposed government boondoggle wouldn't create any new water - it would only take water from senior water rights holders to be delivered to junior water rights holders on the San Joaquin Valley's west side. In spite of the Governor?s claim that the canal will result in ?ecosystem restoration," this dangerous bill package will only exacerbate the unprecedented collapse of Central Valley salmon, delta smelt, longfin smelt, green sturgeon, Sacramento splittail, American shad, striped bass and other California Delta fish populations by removing more water from the imperiled estuary. Does it make any sense for the state to build a giant canal that will destroy Delta fisheries and Delta farmland while indebting Californians for decades to come? For action alerts, go to www.calsport.org. DAN BACHER, Sacramento -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Sun Aug 30 20:02:59 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Sun, 30 Aug 2009 20:02:59 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Tom Stokely - Friends of Trinity River Message-ID: <003f01ca29e7$8cb07840$a61168c0$@net> It's a genuine pleasure to let you know that Tom Stokely has become a member of the board of directors of Friends of Trinity River. Tom's knowledge of the Trinity, of all of the facts about the river and related issues from pre-dam to present day, and its various restoration programs and efforts for more than two decades is unparalleled. He also has played a significant role in many of the various restoration programs' activities and of the activities leading up to significant decisions affecting the river's restoration including the Interior Secretary's December 2000 Record of Decision that returned 47 percent of the river's water to it. Tom's service on FOTR's board enhances our resources and will benefit our efforts to achieve a restored Trinity River basin ecosystem, its fisheries, its wildlife and its economy for you, for me and for all future generations. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From srosekrans at edf.org Sun Aug 30 22:24:02 2009 From: srosekrans at edf.org (Spreck Rosekrans) Date: Mon, 31 Aug 2009 01:24:02 -0400 Subject: [env-trinity] Tom Stokely - Friends of Trinity River, and Byron too! In-Reply-To: <003f01ca29e7$8cb07840$a61168c0$@net> References: <003f01ca29e7$8cb07840$a61168c0$@net> Message-ID: <28C46596EFBBFE408300CFCF58C1E8812DAE2E@ny-exchange.environmentaldefense.local> Congratulations to Tom and FOTR for making an obvious and great partnership official. And, by the way all you folks out there in cyberspace, do we all appreciate what a champion for the river Byron has been? ________________________________ From: fotr-bounces+spreck_rosekrans=environmentaldefense.org at velocipede.dcn.da vis.ca.us [mailto:fotr-bounces+spreck_rosekrans=environmentaldefense.org at velociped e.dcn.davis.ca.us] On Behalf Of Byron Leydecker Sent: Sunday, August 30, 2009 8:03 PM To: FOTR List; Trinity List Subject: [FOTR] Tom Stokely - Friends of Trinity River It's a genuine pleasure to let you know that Tom Stokely has become a member of the board of directors of Friends of Trinity River. Tom's knowledge of the Trinity, of all of the facts about the river and related issues from pre-dam to present day, and its various restoration programs and efforts for more than two decades is unparalleled. He also has played a significant role in many of the various restoration programs' activities and of the activities leading up to significant decisions affecting the river's restoration including the Interior Secretary's December 2000 Record of Decision that returned 47 percent of the river's water to it. Tom's service on FOTR's board enhances our resources and will benefit our efforts to achieve a restored Trinity River basin ecosystem, its fisheries, its wildlife and its economy for you, for me and for all future generations. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org This e-mail and any attachments may contain confidential and privileged information. If you are not the intended recipient, please notify the sender immediately by return e-mail, delete this e-mail and destroy any copies. Any dissemination or use of this information by a person other than the intended recipient is unauthorized and may be illegal. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From summerhillfarmpv at aol.com Mon Aug 31 07:30:48 2009 From: summerhillfarmpv at aol.com (summerhillfarmpv at aol.com) Date: Mon, 31 Aug 2009 10:30:48 EDT Subject: [env-trinity] [FOTR] Tom Stokely - Friends of Trinity River Message-ID: Byron, this is great news. Tom will be a great asset to future decision making. Thank goodness he still wants to be involved! He's a terrific guy! Mark Rockwell In a message dated 8/30/2009 8:03:22 P.M. Pacific Daylight Time, bwl3 at comcast.net writes: It's a genuine pleasure to let you know that Tom Stokely has become a member of the board of directors of Friends of Trinity River. Tom's knowledge of the Trinity, of all of the facts about the river and related issues from pre-dam to present day, and its various restoration programs and efforts for more than two decades is unparalleled. He also has played a significant role in many of the various restoration programs' activities and of the activities leading up to significant decisions affecting the river's restoration including the Interior Secretary's December 2000 Record of Decision that returned 47 percent of the river's water to it. Tom's service on FOTR's board enhances our resources and will benefit our efforts to achieve a restored Trinity River basin ecosystem, its fisheries, its wildlife and its economy for you, for me and for all future generations. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell _bwl3 at comcast.net_ (mailto:bwl3 at comcast.net) _bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org_ (mailto:bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org) (secondary) _http://www.fotr.org_ (http://fotr.org/) _______________________________________________ FOTR mailing list FOTR at velocipede.dcn.davis.ca.us http://www2.dcn.org/mailman/listinfo/fotr **************A Good Credit Score is 700 or Above. See yours in just 2 easy steps! (http://pr.atwola.com/promoclk/100126575x1222846709x1201493018/aol?redir=http://www.freecreditreport.com/pm/default.aspx?sc=668072&hmpgID=115&bcd =JulystepsfooterNO115) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From summerhillfarmpv at aol.com Mon Aug 31 07:38:02 2009 From: summerhillfarmpv at aol.com (summerhillfarmpv at aol.com) Date: Mon, 31 Aug 2009 10:38:02 EDT Subject: [env-trinity] [FOTR] Tom Stokely - Friends of Trinity River, and Byron too! Message-ID: Thanks, Spreck, and Byron has been like few others in his advocacy for our rivers, and particularly the Trinity! The Endangered Species Coalition recognized Byron last year with our wildlife stewardship award for his work on the Trinity. We had a special reception and ceremony in Sebastopol, at the home of one of our Board members. He's a special guy! Mark Rockwell In a message dated 8/31/2009 7:37:29 A.M. Pacific Daylight Time, srosekrans at edf.org writes: Congratulations to Tom and FOTR for making an obvious and great partnership official. And, by the way all you folks out there in cyberspace, do we all appreciate what a champion for the river Byron has been? ____________________________________ From: fotr-bounces+spreck_rosekrans=environmentaldefense.org at velocipede.dcn.davis.ca.us [mailto:fotr-bounces+spreck_rosekrans=environmentaldefense.org at velocipede.dcn.davis.ca.us] On Behalf Of Byron Leydecker Sent: Sunday, August 30, 2009 8:03 PM To: FOTR List; Trinity List Subject: [FOTR] Tom Stokely - Friends of Trinity River It's a genuine pleasure to let you know that Tom Stokely has become a member of the board of directors of Friends of Trinity River. Tom's knowledge of the Trinity, of all of the facts about the river and related issues from pre-dam to present day, and its various restoration programs and efforts for more than two decades is unparalleled. He also has played a significant role in many of the various restoration programs' activities and of the activities leading up to significant decisions affecting the river's restoration including the Interior Secretary's December 2000 Record of Decision that returned 47 percent of the river's water to it. Tom's service on FOTR's board enhances our resources and will benefit our efforts to achieve a restored Trinity River basin ecosystem, its fisheries, its wildlife and its economy for you, for me and for all future generations. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell _bwl3 at comcast.net_ (mailto:bwl3 at comcast.net) _bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org_ (mailto:bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org) (secondary) _http://www.fotr.org_ (http://fotr.org/) This e-mail and any attachments may contain confidential and privileged information. If you are not the intended recipient, please notify the sender immediately by return e-mail, delete this e-mail and destroy any copies. Any dissemination or use of this information by a person other than the intended recipient is unauthorized and may be illegal. _______________________________________________ FOTR mailing list FOTR at velocipede.dcn.davis.ca.us http://www2.dcn.org/mailman/listinfo/fotr **************A Good Credit Score is 700 or Above. See yours in just 2 easy steps! (http://pr.atwola.com/promoclk/100126575x1222846709x1201493018/aol?redir=http://www.freecreditreport.com/pm/default.aspx?sc=668072&hmpgID=115&bcd =JulystepsfooterNO115) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jpowell at usc.edu Mon Aug 31 08:22:54 2009 From: jpowell at usc.edu (James Powell) Date: Mon, 31 Aug 2009 08:22:54 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] [FOTR] Tom Stokely - Friends of Trinity River, and Byron too! In-Reply-To: <28C46596EFBBFE408300CFCF58C1E8812DAE2E@ny-exchange.environmentaldefense.local> References: <003f01ca29e7$8cb07840$a61168c0$@net> <28C46596EFBBFE408300CFCF58C1E8812DAE2E@ny-exchange.environmentaldefense.local> Message-ID: <96E05DE1-98A5-4674-8235-3427C9D51F59@usc.edu> Who speaks for the river? Byron. Jim Powell On Aug 30, 2009, at 10:24 PM, Spreck Rosekrans wrote: > > > Congratulations to Tom and FOTR for making an obvious and great > partnership official. > > And, by the way all you folks out there in cyberspace, do we all > appreciate what a champion for the river Byron has been? > > From: fotr-bounces > + > spreck_rosekrans=environmentaldefense.org at velocipede.dcn.davis.ca.us > [mailto:fotr-bounces > + > spreck_rosekrans > =environmentaldefense.org at velocipede.dcn.davis.ca.us] On Behalf Of > Byron Leydecker > Sent: Sunday, August 30, 2009 8:03 PM > To: FOTR List; Trinity List > Subject: [FOTR] Tom Stokely - Friends of Trinity River > > It's a genuine pleasure to let you know that Tom Stokely has become > a member of the board of directors of Friends of Trinity River. > > Tom's knowledge of the Trinity, of all of the facts about the river > and related issues from pre-dam to present day, and its various > restoration programs and efforts for more than two decades is > unparalleled. He also has played a significant role in many of the > various restoration programs' activities and of the activities > leading up to significant decisions affecting the river's > restoration including the Interior Secretary's December 2000 Record > of Decision that returned 47 percent of the river's water to it. > > Tom's service on FOTR's board enhances our resources and will > benefit our efforts to achieve a restored Trinity River basin > ecosystem, its fisheries, its wildlife and its economy for you, for > me and for all future generations. > > Byron Leydecker, JcT > Chair, Friends of Trinity River > PO Box 2327 > Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 > 415 383 4810 land > 415 519 4810 cell > bwl3 at comcast.net > bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) > http://www.fotr.org > > > > > > This e-mail and any attachments may contain confidential and > privileged information. If you are not the intended recipient, > please notify the sender immediately by return e-mail, delete this e- > mail and destroy any copies. Any dissemination or use of this > information by a person other than the intended recipient is > unauthorized and may be illegal. > _______________________________________________ > FOTR mailing list > FOTR at velocipede.dcn.davis.ca.us > http://www2.dcn.org/mailman/listinfo/fotr -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From danielbacher at fishsniffer.com Mon Aug 31 10:16:47 2009 From: danielbacher at fishsniffer.com (Dan Bacher) Date: Mon, 31 Aug 2009 10:16:47 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] [FOTR] Tom Stokely - Friends of Trinity River In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <9578BF80-19F9-4BD7-A992-EF3E0A309DD7@fishsniffer.com> Byron Tom is definitely a great addition to the board. He gave a superb presentation at the Salmonid Restoration Conference in Santa Cruz in the spring. Dan Bacher On Aug 31, 2009, at 7:30 AM, summerhillfarmpv at aol.com wrote: > Byron, this is great news. Tom will be a great asset to future > decision making. Thank goodness he still wants to be involved! > He's a terrific guy! > Mark Rockwell > > In a message dated 8/30/2009 8:03:22 P.M. Pacific Daylight Time, > bwl3 at comcast.net writes: > It's a genuine pleasure to let you know that Tom Stokely has become > a member of the board of directors of Friends of Trinity River. > > > > Tom's knowledge of the Trinity, of all of the facts about the river > and related issues from pre-dam to present day, and its various > restoration programs and efforts for more than two decades is > unparalleled. He also has played a significant role in many of the > various restoration programs' activities and of the activities > leading up to significant decisions affecting the river's > restoration including the Interior Secretary's December 2000 Record > of Decision that returned 47 percent of the river's water to it. > > > > Tom's service on FOTR's board enhances our resources and will > benefit our efforts to achieve a restored Trinity River basin > ecosystem, its fisheries, its wildlife and its economy for you, for > me and for all future generations. > > > > Byron Leydecker, JcT > > Chair, Friends of Trinity River > > PO Box 2327 > > Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 > > 415 383 4810 land > > 415 519 4810 cell > > bwl3 at comcast.net > > bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) > > http://www.fotr.org > > > > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > FOTR mailing list > FOTR at velocipede.dcn.davis.ca.us > http://www2.dcn.org/mailman/listinfo/fotr > > _______________________________________________ > env-trinity mailing list > env-trinity at velocipede.dcn.davis.ca.us > http://www2.dcn.org/mailman/listinfo/env-trinity -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Mon Aug 31 12:09:54 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Mon, 31 Aug 2009 12:09:54 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] FW: Final Master EIR available Message-ID: <007201ca2a6e$a00ebcd0$e02c3670$@net> From: Gutermuth, F. Brandt [mailto:BGutermuth at usbr.gov] Sent: Monday, August 31, 2009 11:34 AM To: Byron Leydecker Subject: FW: Final Master EIR available Byron- Awesome to have Tom S. on the FOTR board. Could you please cut and paste the emails below and post on the list serve. For some reason I am not able to post to the list serve. Do you know how I can talk to someone about this list serve? Tom S. used to be the moderator - but I don't know who does it now. Thanks for your help. Brandt 530-623-1806 From: Gutermuth, F. Brandt Sent: Monday, August 31, 2009 11:24 AM To: Trinity List serve (env-trinity at velocipede.dcn.davis.ca.us) Subject: FW: Final Master EIR available I was just informed that my emails to the list serve have not been coming through. I apologize. Please be aware that the Final Master EIR is available and that In-channel work is being done now at the Sawmill site. If you have any questions - please reply to me at this email or call at 530.623.1806 Thanks - Brandt From: Gutermuth, F. Brandt Sent: Thursday, August 20, 2009 10:52 PM To: Trinity List serve Subject: Final Master EIR available Dear Trinity River Enthusiasts - The Final Master Environmental Impact Report for Trinity River Restoration Program (TRRP) Channel Rehabilitation and Sediment Management is now available. The final incorporates the Draft by reference so - you'll have to read the entire document - but it should be worth it! I hope and believe that this California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) document will facilitate getting TRRP work on the river in a more efficient fashion. Thank you to all who helped put this document together and especially to the North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board, our California Environmental Quality Act lead for the Master EIR. Please check it out at: http://www.trrp.net/implementation/remainingP1.htm Brandt Gutermuth Environmental Specialist Trinity River Restoration Program PO Box 1300 (mailing) 1313 S. Main Street (physical) Weaverville, CA 96093 530.623.1806 (voice) 530.623.5944 (fax) www.trrp.net (website) THE OFFICIAL COVER LETTER for the EIR follows: ____________________________________________________________________ Subject: Final Master Environmental Impact Report for Trinity River Restoration Program Channel Rehabilitation and Sediment Management at Remaining Phase 1 and Phase 2 sites Dear Interested Parties: Under guidance of the Trinity River Restoration Program (TRRP), the Bureau of Reclamation has acted as the Project Proponent in preparation of a programmatic Master Environmental Impact Report (Master EIR) and site specific Final Environmental Impact Report (Final EIR) to evaluate impacts of proposed TRRP activities for Channel Rehabilitation and Sediment Management at Remaining Phase 1 and Phase 2 sites. The California Regional Water Quality Control Board, North Coast Region (Regional Water Board), is the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) lead agency for preparation of these documents. The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) component of the original joint CEQA/NEPA EA/Draft EIR for Remaining Phase 1 Rehabilitation Activities has been completed with the signing of a federal Finding of No Significant Impact (FONSI) for these activities. When the Final Master EIR is certified under CEQA by the Regional Water Board, it will serve similar functions under CEQA, as the Trinity River Mainstem Fishery Restoration Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS) under NEPA. The Final Master EIR will provide programmatic CEQA level review from which site-specific project reviews may tier from. Both the FEIS, and now the Final Master EIR, are meant to support and facilitate implementation of the Secretary of Interior's December 2000 Record of Decision (ROD) for Trinity River Restoration. The mechanical channel rehabilitation and sediment management activities evaluated by these environmental documents were originally identified in the ROD as necessary steps towards restoration of the Trinity River's anadromous fishery. To this end, the TRRP's efforts are intended to increase habitat for all life stages of wild salmon and steelhead native to the Trinity River. River restoration activities, as described in the Final Master EIR-Final EIR would create additional fish and wildlife habitat at a number of discrete locations; and over time, further increases in habitat are anticipated as riverine processes are restored. Work to be performed includes re-contouring bank and floodplain features, as well as conducting in-river work such as gravel placement and grade control removal. In addition to various construction activities, the Final Master EIR - Final EIR completes the analyses necessary to authorize ongoing restoration activities such as gravel addition during high spring flows and control of fine sediment. Construction activities, evaluated in the Final Master EIR - Final EIR, are scheduled to begin in late-summer 2009 at the Sawmill Restoration site, near Cemetery hole on the mainstem Trinity. The attached Final Master EIR - Final EIR includes the Draft Master EIR - Draft EIR (incorporated by reference), a list of persons and agencies commenting on the Draft environmental documents, written comments, Lead Agency responses to comments, revised Draft Master EIR - Draft EIR text, and a Mitigation Monitoring and Reporting Program (MMRP) for the proposed Project. Prior to approving the Project, the Water Control Board will certify that the Final Master EIR- Final EIR is in compliance with CEQA. The document will then be used to support necessary permit applications as well as to identify and adopt appropriate monitoring and mitigation plans. Electronic copies of the fore-mentioned environmental documents, as well as the signed federal Finding of No Significant Impact (FONSI), are available on the TRRP's website at: http://www.trrp.net/implementation/remainingP1.htm , or on Reclamation's Mid-Pacific Region website at: http://www.usbr.gov/mp/nepa/nepa_projdetails.cfm?Project_ID=3138. Hard copies of the documents may also be reviewed at the TRRP Office at 1313 South Main Street (next to Tops grocery) or at the Trinity County library, 211 North Main Street; in Weaverville, California. If you have any questions concerning this document or the Project, please contact Mr. Brandt Gutermuth, TRRP, at 530-623-1806 or bgutermuth at mp.usbr.gov. or Mr. Dean Prat, of the Water Quality Control Board, at 707-576-2801 or dprat at waterboards.ca.gov. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Mon Aug 31 13:05:48 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Mon, 31 Aug 2009 13:05:48 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] FW: TRRP Sawmill Site under construction Message-ID: <009601ca2a76$6f3bd4a0$4db37de0$@net> -----Original Message----- From: Gutermuth, F. Brandt [mailto:BGutermuth at usbr.gov] Sent: Wednesday, August 26, 2009 10:20 AM To: Trinity List serve Cc: Ammerman, David A SPN; Prat, Dean; Olson, Samantha; Bonomini, Jeanne; Berg, Francis; Diridoni, Gary; Cook, David; Paul Uncapher; Robert Franklin (fishwater at hoopa-nsn.gov); Hamman, Mike A; Stokely, Tom; Cousins, Alex; Patrick Frost; Faler, Jennifer A.; Berry, Mike; Hanson, Larry; Naman, Seth; Brock, Bill; serwin at fs.fed.us Subject: TRRP Sawmill Site under construction Trinity River Permitters and Enthusiasts - I am happy to announce that the Sawmill Project is under construction now! The contractor, Erick Ammon, Inc. is on-site and will be doing "in-channel" work until September 15, 2009. They're processing gravel from BLM managed lands on the left bank of the river and will be placing gravel bars in the Cemetery Hole area. Use caution if you're boating through. After September 15 construction work will focus on floodplain, upland, and revegetation until finished. Thanks for all the help we received in meeting the environmental and permitting requirements for this project. In particular thanks to our CEQA lead, the Water Quality Control Board, and their staff members - Dean Prat and Samantha Olson, for completing the Master EIR. The Programmatic CEQA document is available at: http://www.trrp.net/implementation/remainingP1.htm . Best Regards - Brandt Gutermuth Environmental Specialist Trinity River Restoration Program PO Box 1300, 1313 S Main St Weaverville, CA 96093 530.623.1806 (voice) 530.623.5944 (fax) www.trrp.net >From the Trinity Journal - Sawmill (Cemetery Hole) Channel Rehabilitation Project to Start In-River Construction This Week In-River Construction starts the week of August 24 at the Sawmill Channel Rehabilitation Project on the Trinity River. The Project will use heavy equipment to create alternating gravel bars and to reconnect the Trinity River with its floodplain along portions of approximately 2 miles of river between the old bridge in Lewiston and the Rush Creek boat launch, near Cemetery Hole. The Project will increase juvenile salmonid rearing habitat and will add coarse sediment (gravel) made from locally processed excavation and tailings material. In-river work will be completed by September 15, 2009 while floodplain construction activities will continue until finished in the fall. Boaters are cautioned to be aware of construction equipment that may be working in the river between August 24 and September 15 This project is being implemented under direction of the Trinity River Restoration Program (TRRP) and the California Regional Water Quality Control Board, North Coast Region (Regional Water Board). For more information on the TRRP, visit our website at: http://www.trrp.net/ for project details visit: http://www.trrp.net/implementation/remainingP1.htm or contact Mr. Brandt Gutermuth at the TRRP, at 530-623-1806 or bgutermuth at mp.usbr.gov . From bwl3 at comcast.net Mon Aug 31 13:09:23 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Mon, 31 Aug 2009 13:09:23 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] ACT NOW: Stop the Delta Bills Message-ID: <009701ca2a76$ef9b4b80$ced1e280$@net> C-WIN Logo C-WIN Board and Staff For immediate release. For information: Carolee Krieger, Executive Director and Board President, California Water Impact Network, (805) 969-0824, caroleeekrieger at cox.net Stop the Delta Bills! With the state budget now held together with bobby pins and paper clips, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has turned to arm-twisting the Legislature to pass bills that would establish another new water agency, the Delta Stewardship Council, to govern water rights and environmental conditions in the Delta. The Council?a majority of whose members would be appointed by the Governor?would in turn appoint a Delta watermaster, under the proposed legislation, who would have sweeping new powers over the Delta region and its ecology. ?AB 1 and SB 1 create the path to the Peripheral Canal,?? says Carolee Krieger, president and executive director of the California Water Impact Network, ?It means life or death for several important salmon species and for thousands of farmers there.? ?The governor is doing an end run around the people and fisheries of the Delta and around California voters to get these projects up and running,? says Tom Stokely, C-WIN board member and water policy coordinator. ?But we?ve sent a letter telling the Legislature that there is no new water for these projects. If they get funded and built, it would be an ecological and economic catastrophe for the Delta and for all of California.? The letter may be obtained online at www.c-win.org . The Delta bills would benefit primarily western San Joaquin Valley growers, junior priority water contractors who are using low water allocations and endangered species court decisions as opportunities to finance a misleading "fish vs. farmers" publicity campaign managed by the notorious propaganda PR firm Burston Marsteller, The Governor visits the area frequently to show support, and recently vowed to get them new dams. ?The canal and new dams would essentially be ?subprime? projects,? says Stokely, calling up the recent specter of America?s financial meltdown, ?intended to supply water to low-priority growers. Doing this would take water away from other more senior water users up and down the Central Valley, provoking lawsuits everywhere.? ?The time is now,? urges Krieger, ?to call your legislator immediately and urge them to vote no on all of the Delta bills.? END ACT NOW (HERE'S HOW)! C-WIN Address --Powered By Sunny Day Online, www.sunnydayonline.com-- If you do not want to receive any more newsletters, this link To update your preferences and to unsubscribe visit this link Forward a Message to Someone this link powered by phplist v 2.10.9, ? tincan ltd -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Mon Aug 31 13:17:15 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Mon, 31 Aug 2009 13:17:15 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] FW: TRRP Sawmill Site under construction Message-ID: <00ab01ca2a78$08752ee0$195f8ca0$@net> This message was sent by Brandt on August 26 but did not get posted to the env-trinity list unfortunately. Byron From: Gutermuth, F. Brandt [mailto:BGutermuth at usbr.gov] Sent: Wednesday, August 26, 2009 10:20 AM To: Trinity List serve (env-trinity at velocipede.dcn.davis.ca.us) Patrick Frost; Faler, Jennifer A.; Berry, Mike; Hanson, Larry; Naman, Seth; Brock, Bill; serwin at fs.fed.us Subject: TRRP Sawmill Site under construction Trinity River Permitters and Enthusiasts - I am happy to announce that the Sawmill Project is under construction now! The contractor, Erick Ammon, Inc. is on-site and will be doing "in-channel" work until September 15, 2009. They're processing gravel from BLM managed lands on the left bank of the river and will be placing gravel bars in the Cemetery Hole area. Use caution if you're boating through. After September 15 construction work will focus on floodplain, upland, and revegetation until finished. Thanks for all the help we received in meeting the environmental and permitting requirements for this project. In particular thanks to our CEQA lead, the Water Quality Control Board, and their staff members - Dean Prat and Samantha Olson, for completing the Master EIR. The Programmatic CEQA document is available at: http://www.trrp.net/implementation/remainingP1.htm . Best Regards - Brandt Gutermuth Environmental Specialist Trinity River Restoration Program PO Box 1300, 1313 S Main St Weaverville, CA 96093 530.623.1806 (voice) 530.623.5944 (fax) www.trrp.net >From the Trinity Journal - Sawmill (Cemetery Hole) Channel Rehabilitation Project to Start In-River Construction This Week In-River Construction starts the week of August 24 at the Sawmill Channel Rehabilitation Project on the Trinity River. The Project will use heavy equipment to create alternating gravel bars and to reconnect the Trinity River with its floodplain along portions of approximately 2 miles of river between the old bridge in Lewiston and the Rush Creek boat launch, near Cemetery Hole. The Project will increase juvenile salmonid rearing habitat and will add coarse sediment (gravel) made from locally processed excavation and tailings material. In-river work will be completed by September 15, 2009 while floodplain construction activities will continue until finished in the fall. Boaters are cautioned to be aware of construction equipment that may be working in the river between August 24 and September 15 This project is being implemented under direction of the Trinity River Restoration Program (TRRP) and the California Regional Water Quality Control Board, North Coast Region (Regional Water Board). For more information on the TRRP, visit our website at: http://www.trrp.net/ for project details visit: http://www.trrp.net/implementation/remainingP1.htm or contact Mr. Brandt Gutermuth at the TRRP, at 530-623-1806 or bgutermuth at mp.usbr.gov . -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From BGutermuth at usbr.gov Mon Aug 31 11:24:28 2009 From: BGutermuth at usbr.gov (Gutermuth, F. Brandt) Date: Mon, 31 Aug 2009 12:24:28 -0600 Subject: [env-trinity] FW: Final Master EIR available Message-ID: <469C3D002DBB944BBEAEC89CBE8D1DF703D61113A9@IBR5DENMXCMX01.bor.doi.net> I was just informed that my emails to the list serve have not been coming through. I apologize. Please be aware that the Final Master EIR is available and that In-channel work is being done now at the Sawmill site. If you have any questions - please reply to me at this email or call at 530.623.1806 Thanks - Brandt From: Gutermuth, F. Brandt Sent: Thursday, August 20, 2009 10:52 PM To: Trinity List serve Subject: Final Master EIR available Dear Trinity River Enthusiasts - The Final Master Environmental Impact Report for Trinity River Restoration Program (TRRP) Channel Rehabilitation and Sediment Management is now available. The final incorporates the Draft by reference so - you'll have to read the entire document - but it should be worth it! I hope and believe that this California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) document will facilitate getting TRRP work on the river in a more efficient fashion. Thank you to all who helped put this document together and especially to the North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board, our California Environmental Quality Act lead for the Master EIR. Please check it out at: http://www.trrp.net/implementation/remainingP1.htm Brandt Gutermuth Environmental Specialist Trinity River Restoration Program PO Box 1300 (mailing) 1313 S. Main Street (physical) Weaverville, CA 96093 530.623.1806 (voice) 530.623.5944 (fax) www.trrp.net (website) THE OFFICIAL COVER LETTER for the EIR follows: ____________________________________________________________________ Subject: Final Master Environmental Impact Report for Trinity River Restoration Program Channel Rehabilitation and Sediment Management at Remaining Phase 1 and Phase 2 sites Dear Interested Parties: Under guidance of the Trinity River Restoration Program (TRRP), the Bureau of Reclamation has acted as the Project Proponent in preparation of a programmatic Master Environmental Impact Report (Master EIR) and site specific Final Environmental Impact Report (Final EIR) to evaluate impacts of proposed TRRP activities for Channel Rehabilitation and Sediment Management at Remaining Phase 1 and Phase 2 sites. The California Regional Water Quality Control Board, North Coast Region (Regional Water Board), is the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) lead agency for preparation of these documents. The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) component of the original joint CEQA/NEPA EA/Draft EIR for Remaining Phase 1 Rehabilitation Activities has been completed with the signing of a federal Finding of No Significant Impact (FONSI) for these activities. When the Final Master EIR is certified under CEQA by the Regional Water Board, it will serve similar functions under CEQA, as the Trinity River Mainstem Fishery Restoration Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS) under NEPA. The Final Master EIR will provide programmatic CEQA level review from which site-specific project reviews may tier from. Both the FEIS, and now the Final Master EIR, are meant to support and facilitate implementation of the Secretary of Interior's December 2000 Record of Decision (ROD) for Trinity River Restoration. The mechanical channel rehabilitation and sediment management activities evaluated by these environmental documents were originally identified in the ROD as necessary steps towards restoration of the Trinity River's anadromous fishery. To this end, the TRRP's efforts are intended to increase habitat for all life stages of wild salmon and steelhead native to the Trinity River. River restoration activities, as described in the Final Master EIR-Final EIR would create additional fish and wildlife habitat at a number of discrete locations; and over time, further increases in habitat are anticipated as riverine processes are restored. Work to be performed includes re-contouring bank and floodplain features, as well as conducting in-river work such as gravel placement and grade control removal. In addition to various construction activities, the Final Master EIR - Final EIR completes the analyses necessary to authorize ongoing restoration activities such as gravel addition during high spring flows and control of fine sediment. Construction activities, evaluated in the Final Master EIR - Final EIR, are scheduled to begin in late-summer 2009 at the Sawmill Restoration site, near Cemetery hole on the mainstem Trinity. The attached Final Master EIR - Final EIR includes the Draft Master EIR - Draft EIR (incorporated by reference), a list of persons and agencies commenting on the Draft environmental documents, written comments, Lead Agency responses to comments, revised Draft Master EIR - Draft EIR text, and a Mitigation Monitoring and Reporting Program (MMRP) for the proposed Project. Prior to approving the Project, the Water Control Board will certify that the Final Master EIR- Final EIR is in compliance with CEQA. The document will then be used to support necessary permit applications as well as to identify and adopt appropriate monitoring and mitigation plans. Electronic copies of the fore-mentioned environmental documents, as well as the signed federal Finding of No Significant Impact (FONSI), are available on the TRRP's website at: http://www.trrp.net/implementation/remainingP1.htm , or on Reclamation's Mid-Pacific Region website at: http://www.usbr.gov/mp/nepa/nepa_projdetails.cfm?Project_ID=3138. Hard copies of the documents may also be reviewed at the TRRP Office at 1313 South Main Street (next to Tops grocery) or at the Trinity County library, 211 North Main Street; in Weaverville, California. If you have any questions concerning this document or the Project, please contact Mr. Brandt Gutermuth, TRRP, at 530-623-1806 or bgutermuth at mp.usbr.gov. or Mr. Dean Prat, of the Water Quality Control Board, at 707-576-2801 or dprat at waterboards.ca.gov. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From BGutermuth at usbr.gov Mon Aug 31 11:49:27 2009 From: BGutermuth at usbr.gov (Gutermuth, F. Brandt) Date: Mon, 31 Aug 2009 12:49:27 -0600 Subject: [env-trinity] Sawmill Project at Cemetery hole in Construction Message-ID: <469C3D002DBB944BBEAEC89CBE8D1DF703D6111437@IBR5DENMXCMX01.bor.doi.net> originally - Sent on August 26: Resending today 8/31/09 ---- I apologize for any dual postings Subject: TRRP Sawmill Site under construction Trinity River Permitters and Enthusiasts - I am happy to announce that the Sawmill Project is under construction now! The contractor, Erick Ammon, Inc. is on-site and will be doing "in-channel" work until September 15, 2009. They're processing gravel from BLM managed lands on the left bank of the river and will be placing gravel bars in the Cemetery Hole area. Use caution if you're boating through. After September 15 construction work will focus on floodplain, upland, and revegetation until finished. Thanks for all the help we received in meeting the environmental and permitting requirements for this project. In particular thanks to our CEQA lead, the Water Quality Control Board, and their staff members - Dean Prat and Samantha Olson, for completing the Master EIR. The Programmatic CEQA document is available at: http://www.trrp.net/implementation/remainingP1.htm -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Tue Sep 1 10:00:27 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Tue, 1 Sep 2009 10:00:27 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] (no subject) Message-ID: <002f01ca2b25$b4c871e0$1e5955a0$@net> Water negotiations moving ahead in Capitol Capitol Weekly-8/31/09 By John Howard Negotiations over a massive overhaul of California's water system picked up steam Monday in the Capitol amid an array of meetings that included a closed-door briefing for lawmakers by the Schwarzenegger administration's top water officials. The final proposal, an historic attempt to achieve a compromise in the state's seemingly endless water wars, is intended to be completed by the end of this week, with floor votes next week, said sources in both houses and participants in the discussions. They face a ticking clock: The Legislature adjourns for the year on Sept. 11. Ultimately, the plan is envisioned as providing environmental protections to the delta east of San Francisco, a canal through or around the delta to move more Northern California water to the south, new storage structures, perhaps even reservoirs, and major conservation programs. Environmentalists are opposed to the reservoirs, but the Schwarzenegger administration and the construction industry view them favorably. Fishing interests and delta partisans oppose any plan that does not contain ironclad environmental protections for the delta, and environmentalists support conservation programs. Southern California water interests, Central Valley farmers and hundreds of public water agencies tend to favor construction of the capital projects. There has been limited environmental support for the canal, but strong support for conservation. The Legislature's Latino Caucus favors a water system overhaul that includes a canal and new construction - adding a new political dimension to the negotiations. The active participation of the Latino Caucus is a departure from earlier years. Agreement on financing for the programs remains elusive. There may be a multibillion-dollar bond package requiring voter approval, a mechanism called "continuous appropriation" in which money automatically is directed to the water system year-by-year and a system in which big customers - the water and irrigation districts - are charged fees on a sliding scale. The dollars involved are huge: Estimates vary wildly, but a canal alone could cost $5 billion to $10 billion, or more, and reservoirs carry similar price tags. Last year, California voters rejected nearly $10 billion in water bonds. A poll released by EMC Research showed nearly half of those surveyed opposed bonds for new reservoirs, and perhaps a third voice opposition to the construction of a canal. The survey was conducted by telephone Aug. 23-27 of 800 people. The margin of error is plus or minus 3.45 percent. The poll was commissioned by Restore the Delta, an environmental group. A sticking point in the water discussions is the creation of a two-house conference committee to write the legislation. Sources in both houses said the committee likely will be composed of 10 or 12 members, instead of the usual six members, three from each house. The names of the committee members have not been announced, although they are expected to include Assembly members Jean Fuller, R-Bakersfield; Jared Huffman, D-San Rafael; and Anna Caballero, D-Salinas. On the Senate side, the members may include Democratic Sens. Gil Cedillo or Alex Padilla of Los Angeles, and Fran Pavley of Agoura Hills. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From tstokely at att.net Tue Sep 1 11:38:55 2009 From: tstokely at att.net (Tom Stokely) Date: Tue, 1 Sep 2009 11:38:55 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Newsweek Article on Western San Joaquin Valley Message-ID: <0D080C74C88E43D5BC088839949FFDA8@homeuserPC> http://www.newsweek.com/id/211381 ? 2009 Dying on the Vine As another water war rages, the west side of California's storied San Joaquin Valley waits for relief that may not come. By Katie Paul | Newsweek Web Exclusive Aug 24, 2009 | Updated: 2:08 p.m. ET Aug 24, 2009 Playing cards and a small wad of dollar bills sit on a pool table at Los Kiki, a dusty pool hall at the end of the main drag in Mendota, Calif. A breeze blows through a broken window, past six men hunched over the table, beer bottles in their hands. It is middle of a Wednesday afternoon. A year ago, they would have been out planting and pruning in the vast fields of grapes, tomatoes, onions, and nut trees that fan out from the city limits. But this year, many of those fields are lying fallow, and the men at Los Kiki are out of work. "Before, it was good. There were jobs eight months, 10 months out of the year. Now, nothing," says Luis Cortez, 52. Others nod in agreement. Cortez says he has worked just three days all year. Mendota touts itself as the cantaloupe capital of the world, but its de facto motto is far less optimistic. "No water, no work" is the refrain repeated everywhere here in the western reaches of the San Joaquin Valley. The unemployment rate in this 10,000-person town was an unfathomable 38 percent in July (including documented and undocumented workers). Nearly all those who have lost their jobs are farm workers, who often straddle the poverty line even in boom times. The result is a cruel irony: in the region that produces more food than anywhere else in the country, food lines have become regular fixtures, drawing hundreds, sometimes thousands. After three years of drought, California's legendary water wars are flaring once again, and towns like Mendota, San Joaquin, and Firebaugh are getting a first glimpse of what their future might look like. Farmers blame the area's blight on a "man-made drought" brought on by increasingly strict environmental regulations, but that is only the beginning of the story. There's also the crushing confluence of political negligence, drought, and a century's worth of unbridled growth. Now, as residents wonder if normalcy will ever return, planners are forced to consider a far uglier question: should it? Is a new "normal" required? That towns like Mendota even exist reflects the extraordinary ambition that built the American West. A century ago, much of the San Joaquin Valley was an undeveloped dust bowl, its few small farming communities clustered around natural water sources. Today, it is a green expanse of agricultural empires. Most of the water that has irrigated these seemingly endless fields comes from northern California, diverted by an epic system of dams and canals born from New Deal funds. It was one of the most ambitious water systems ever built, and the San Joaquin Valley became, in the words of historian Kevin Starr, "the most productive unnatural environment on Earth." The valley is home to a $20 billion crop industry; the San Joaquin region alone produces more in farm sales than any other individual state in the country. Mark Borba, 59, has a big stake in that business, just as his grandparents did in the valley's development. Borba Farms started off with about 20 milk cows and 30 acres of land in 1910, at a time when farmers who had tapped an underground aquifer were kicking off a race to cultivate. The farm now covers 10,000 acres, and Mark Borba is only one of 600 growers in the Westlands Water District, a water-contracting group of farmers and landowners on the far west side of the valley where Mendota and other towns sit. By the time Borba took over his family's operation in the 1970s, the valley was already supplying 25 percent of the country's food. Making that explosive growth possible is access to water delivered through an increasingly byzantine system centered on the Sacramento?San Joaquin Delta, a thousand-square-mile web of channels, islands, and levees where the two rivers meet before flowing into the San Francisco Bay. From there, giant dams and pumps suck the water southward through veinlike aqueducts to 25 million people and more than 5 million acres of farmland. But not all water consumers are created equally. In fact, access to the water is essentially based on a squatters' rights notion: "First in rights, first in time." In other words, whoever signed up for a water contract first got the best guarantees. Latecomers got junior rights, meaning they'd be the first to get cut in a dry. Westlands, which has a contract for water delivery with the federal government, is the most junior of the bunch. It was complicated and costly, but for a long time, the system worked. Over the last three decades, however, the valley's explosive growth has caused rivers to run dry, dead fish to accumulate near the water pumps, and chronic water shortages. The levees near the bay are old, prompting worries that a failure, perhaps following an earthquake, could cause salt water from the bay to rush into the delta, crippling the water supply for the entire state. And the delta smelt, an endangered species of fish no bigger than an index finger, began disappearing as the massive pumps sucked up fish along with the water it was sending south. Lawsuits over the fish filed by environmental groups and water contractors multiplied, and court-imposed restrictions and regulations began siphoning off more and more of the 6 million acre-feet of water exported through the river basin each year. Most people in the valley blame their water woes on those lawsuits and the fish. Since 1992, when Congress established new federal ecosystem standards, increasing amounts of water have been set aside for wildlife restoration. Since then, Westlands has received on average about half as much water as the 1.2 million acre-feet per year it ordered up in its contract, forcing farmers to rely on expensive pumps that suck up water from the aquefier and water transfers from their better-connected competitors to the east. This year, Westlands is down to nearly nothing, and its farmers are livid. Federal officials slashed the district's allocation to zero at the beginning of the season; only after a furious lobbying campaign did they succeed in bumping it up to 10 percent of the water deliveries stipulated in their contract. A University of California, Berkeley analysis claims that the economic impact of the water reductions on the valley's agricultural production tops $48 million. That figure will likely get worse once the water agencies begin implementing new rules this summer designed to protect other fish such as sturgeon, salmon, and steelhead trout. In a normal year, such a hit is difficult, says Sarah Woolf, a Westlands District spokeswoman. After three years of natural drought, she says, it's ruinous. But Barry Nelson, the Natural Resources Defense Council advocate behind the fish lawsuits, says the fish vs. people argument is nonsense. Even after three years of drought, the Central Valley Project (CVP) is still making half of its water deliveries to farms in the valley. Westlands just isn't getting that water. "There's a myth in the valley about the delta smelt, and it's really a tragedy," he says. "I don't mean for a moment to suggest that those small communities on the west side aren't seeing impacts; they are. They're seeing the impact of drought, and those impacts are real and they're hard." Nelson contends that the fish aren't the problem; it's the way the system is set up. Just adjacent to Westlands, he says, four other contractors are getting a full 100 percent of their water allocation this year, despite the drought. And while Westlands has adopted some of the most water-efficient irrigation methods in the business, other farmers in the valley with senior water rights are under no pressure to conserve. The result is a patchwork valley, where a Westlands farmer like Mark Borba is forced to fallow land while his neighbor has excess water that he can sell at a hefty profit. Buying that excess and pumping water from underground is sustainable to a point, says Borba. But the expenses of the underground water long term. But that may be all that the Westlands district can hope for. Climate models by the U.S. Global Change Research Program, the state's water resources agency, and researchers at the University of California, Davis all point to the same trend: the Sierra snowcaps that supply the state's water are disappearing. If that's the case, farmers should expect droughts more frequently, and Westlands may have to come around to the notion that they will never receive all the water that their contracts call for. "No drought comes to you with a label that says, 'Brought to you by climate change,' " says Nelson. "But in the American Southwest and in California, we should be prepared for a drier future." To at least a few teams of researchers, ending the conversation with a doomsday prediction for agriculture on the west side of the valley is insufficient. Like the farmers and engineers who, a century ago, looked at the desert and imagined farms, these teams, which pull together researchers at federal and state agencies, California universities, and think tanks into a planning group called the Bay Delta Conservation Plan (BDCP), say a good plan and some new hardware is all the valley needs to conquer its water challenge. They are likely to suggest building a new "peripheral" canal that would transport northern water around the delta, rather than through it, to restore its battered ecosystem. To farmers like Borba, that's the kind of investment worth making. "I've traveled all over the world seen an agricultural resource like we have in the San Joaquin Valley. The soils, the climate, the crop variability. We've got 300 crops we can grow here. You can't find that just anywhere," he says. "So I have a hard time saying, for lack of the will, that we should neuter the most productive agricultural resource in the world. I don't think that's where America wants to go." North of the valley, where the canal would be built, not everyone is so enthusiastic. Opponents, who beat back the idea in a 1982 referendum, see it as a destructive, expensive water grab by southern users. They have a point; according to the BDCP and the federal Bureau of Reclamation, preliminary construction-cost estimates for the two biggest projects under consideration are $13 billion, a price tag California is hardly in a position to bear in its present state. Other critics, like Nelson, say the drop in water supply caused by climate change would render such mega-investments moot. The better bet, they argue, is an aggressive push for water-conservation standards. Yet others, like the University of the Pacific's Jeffrey Michael, who does business forecasting, note that the issues facing Westlands are hardly valley-wide problems. Rather, he says, farm employment this year has actually gone up, making it one of the few success stories in a region pummeled by the mortgage crisis. Still, support for the idea might be building steam. The BDCP has missed benchmarks, but there's evidence the governor's office is behind the idea. State officials recently announced they intend to start preliminary drilling for ground tests this month, while state lawmakers recently unveiled five new major water bills focused on the delta. Even if that comes through, though, there's no guarantee all of Westlands would reap the benefits. As productive as the farms in the district have been, bad drainage underneath means the soil fills up with salt, boron, selenium, and other minerals quickly as a drought. A drainage system could address the problem, but, again, nobody seems to want to pay for one. Instead, starting in 2000, Westlands and the Bureau of Reclamation negotiated a deal to permanently retire from farming 100,000 acres of land in the district in return for compensation from the federal government. "There's a reason some of the land in Westlands was the last land in California to be irrigated," says Nelson, the NRDC analyst. "The land that was retired a few years ago has already salted up. It looks like it snowed." That might be just the beginning; federal agencies estimate the number should be two to four times that amount. All of this leaves the valley's west side caught in a painful limbo until California answers big questions about where and how it wants to make use of its resources. In the meantime, some economic planners are eyeing the area as a potential clean energy source where almond farms could be transformed into solar farms. Those plans, too, are preliminary. "It took a century of bad decisions to get us here. The good news is, we are on the verge of making some major changes on what we're going to do about it," says Jeff Mount, a water-geology researcher at UC Davis who supports the peripheral canal proposal. "So, yes, the valley's farm economy itself is probably going to shrink some. But that may not be a bad thing in the long run. And it may be an inevitable thing." Such talk makes 34-year-old Dora Chavarria wonder about her future. She was born in Mendota, the daughter of a field worker who arrived there 38 years ago, worked the fields, and saved enough money to open up an auto shop. She's climbed the social ladder yet another rung, working at a program for immigrant families in the Firebaugh school system. Chavarria recalls a time when she could be proud of Mendota; when people filled the streets, when her father would drive her around in trucks filled with tomatoes from the surrounding fields, when musical acts would pass through town, and when the melon-capital claim rang true. It's been a long time since that was the case; for more than a decade, the streets have been empty and dangerous, she says, and getting worse as people head for Las Vegas and Los Angeles in search of work. Chavarria doesn't let her children out alone, and now her husband wants to leave, too. To keep the town alive, Mendota's leaders have, in their own way, started to think about alternatives to agriculture. Mayor Robert Silva says the best bet is the federal prison under construction on the outskirts of town, a project he courted, thinking it will spark an economic revival as hotels and restaurants spring up to accommodate prison visitors.As the town waits to see if Silva's development predictions come true, residents face a crushing tide. This summer, the town's only bank announced it was shutting down because of insufficient deposits. As the public schools lose students, officials worry funding cuts will follow. Most eerily, around the outskirts of town, billboards and flags advertise the empty, unfinished development of single-family homes with bright green lawns, constant reminders that, on more than one front, foresight has been hard to come by in the valley. Still, Chavarria is not ready to give up on Mendota just yet. "It's just slowly dying, and we can't let that happen. This is my heritage," she says. "Change is good, and hopefully something better comes along. But if we don't stay here to make that change, then the change is never going to happen." -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Tue Sep 1 14:00:28 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Tue, 1 Sep 2009 14:00:28 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Fresno Business Journal 9 1 09 Message-ID: <001701ca2b47$3d1b6b80$b7524280$@net> And, the Western San Joaquin Valley is being returned to its once desert condition because of fish? Record processing tomato crop forecasted Written by Fresno Business Journal staff Tuesday, 01 September 2009 11:10 tomatoesIt's shaping up to be a record year for California's processing tomato contracted production with a forecast of 13.5 million tons, 13 percent above the previous record year of 1990. Planted and harvest acres are forecast at 308,000 and 307,000, respectively, according to statistics from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Acreage drifted from areas where there wasn't adequate water supplies, with acreage up significantly in Kern and San Joaquin counties. Fresno County still leads the state with the most 2009 contracted production with 102,000 acres. San Joaquin County is second with 44,000 acres and Yolo County rounds out the top-3 with 34,000 acres. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 15058 bytes Desc: not available URL: From Laurie_Stafford at fws.gov Tue Sep 1 16:01:33 2009 From: Laurie_Stafford at fws.gov (Laurie_Stafford at fws.gov) Date: Tue, 1 Sep 2009 16:01:33 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Laurie A Stafford is out of the office. Message-ID: I will be out of the office starting 09/01/2009 and will not return until 09/16/2009. I will respond to your message when I return. From tstokely at att.net Wed Sep 2 22:22:28 2009 From: tstokely at att.net (Tom Stokely) Date: Wed, 2 Sep 2009 22:22:28 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Senator Aanestad Works for "Equal Vision" in Proposed Water Bond Message-ID: FW: Editors/Producers: Aanestad Works for "Equal Vision" in Proposed Water Bond------ Forwarded Message From: William Bird Date: Wed, 2 Sep 2009 12:56:11 -0700 To: William Bird Subject: Editors/Producers: Aanestad Works for "Equal Vision" in Proposed Water Bond FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE CONTACT: Bill Bird September 2, 2009 (916) 651-4004 Aanestad Works for Equal Vision in Proposed Water Bond "I'm Going to Represent My Regional Interests," says North State Leader SACRAMENTO: Senator Sam Aanestad (R-Grass Valley) issued the following statement this morning during the first meeting of the Legislative Conference Committee on Water: "We're all in this together - of that there is no doubt. But Northern California, the Delta and Central and Southern California have very different needs, very different resources and very different problems. Some of these problems can be helped by government and some cannot. I am not going to forget for one minute that the area that I represent, where 80% of California's water supply comes from, has very different problems than the central and southern parts of the state. This Conference Committee, therefore, must address the needs and concerns of all stakeholders. That includes those rural areas that are not heavily represented on a population basis, but certainly play a role due to the concerns of area of origin and because of geography. Bottom line: The problems north of the Delta are much different than the problems south of the Delta. One of my misgivings - or disappointments - in the language that will be presented today is an abridgement of some of the needs in my area of origin. Some key language has been removed from the process over the course of the last 24 hours. I will not accept this. I'm not here to throw a monkey wrench into the equation but I want to tell you that I'm not going to take off my regional hat. We all have regional hats. We all want to fix the Delta. And yet, it's not going to be at the expense of abrogating area of origin water rights from the north. It's not going to be at the expense of having faucets go dry in the south. So - there actually has to be co-equal results. And when we use the term "co-equal," I am talking about all of the stakeholders involved." The Legislative Conference Committee on Water is charged with creating a series of reforms that will lead to a reliable supply of water for all Californians. Senator Aanestad brings more than a decade of legislative experience to the committee and a unique understanding of California's water issues. RADIO & TV STATIONS: .mp3 sound to follow! HOME PAGE | BIOGRAPHY | CONTACT ME | CSSRC -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- CLICK HERE TO UNSUBSCRIBE ------ End of Forwarded Message -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From danielbacher at fishsniffer.com Wed Sep 2 11:11:54 2009 From: danielbacher at fishsniffer.com (Dan Bacher) Date: Wed, 2 Sep 2009 11:11:54 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Steinberg, Bass Pick Conference Committee/UFW Joins Fight Against Water Bond! In-Reply-To: <3B80E0F7-58D1-49B0-B907-643EA9E6553A@fishsniffer.com> References: <688157.45203.qm@web82006.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <8CBF9EDED5AF88F-EF4-2315@webmail-d053.sysops.aol.com> <3B80E0F7-58D1-49B0-B907-643EA9E6553A@fishsniffer.com> Message-ID: <0DC9B46D-F03C-49CD-91A3-2203AF9E6747@fishsniffer.com> Here is my article on the conference committee for the water bills, followed by a LA Times article about the UFW joining the fight against water bond. Thanks dan Photo of Bass and Steinberg courtesy of Darrell Steinberg's office. ? bass_and_steinberg_1.jpg Steinberg, Bass Pick Conference Committee to Push Peripheral Canal by Dan Bacher Senate President pro Tem Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento) and Assembly Speaker Karen Bass yesterday (September 1) named the conferees to a politically stacked conference committee to ?reform? California?s water system in what appears to be a thinly-veiled attempt to build the multi-billion dollar Peripheral Canal. The conference committee will vote on a package of five water bills that Delta advocates believe will serve as a ?road map? to the canal. Conspicuously missing from the 14 member committee are Delta Legislators critical of the canal and water package including Senator Lois Wolk (D-Davis), Assemblymember Mariko Yamada (D-Davis), Senator Mark DeSaulnier (D-Concord), and Assemblymember Alyson Huber (D-El Dorado Hills). The vast majority of committee members are from southern California and the San Joaquin Valley. The Senate conferees are Senate President pro Tem Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento), Senate Majority Leader Dean Florez (D-Bakersfield), Senator Alex Padilla (D- Pacoima), Senator Fran Pavley (D- Agoura Hills), Senator Dave Cogdill (R- Modesto), Senator Sam Aanestad (R- Grass Valley) and Senator Bob Huff (R- Diamond Bar). Steinberg will chair the committee. The Assembly conferees are Speaker Karen Bass (D-Los Angeles), Assemblymember Anna Caballero (D-Salinas), Assemblymember Jean Fuller (R-Bakersfield), Assemblymember Jared Huffman (D-San Rafael), Assemblymember Kevin Jeffries (R-Lake Elsinore), Assemblymember Jim Nielsen (R-Gerber), Assemblymember Jose Solorio (D-Anaheim). ?I?m confident the Assembly?s conference committee members will attack the decades-old challenge before us with gusto and with the goal of producing a responsible and comprehensive plan that ensures a safe, clean and sufficient water supply for California that meets the needs of our environment and our economy,? Karen Bass said. ?It?s a difficult challenge but do-able -- and do-able in the right way.? However, opponents of the canal were outraged that the committee appears to be stacked to produce a pre-determined outcome ? the peripheral canal and increased water diversions to corporate agribusiness and southern California at the expense of Delta farms and collapsing Central Valley salmon and Delta fish populations. Sacramento River chinook salmon, green sturgeon, Delta smelt, longfin smelt, striped bass, Sacramento splittail, American shad and striped bass have declined to record low population levels in recent years, due to massive increases in Delta water exports and declining water quality. ?There are no legislators from the Delta region on the committee other than Steinberg," said Barbara Barrigan-Parrilla, campaign director of Restore the Delta (http://www.restorethedelta.org). ?It also appears that the majority of the Senate appointments are not only pro-canal, but they support making large expenditures for water infrastructure at a time when the state is in a great economic crisis.? ?The omission of Legislators from the Delta is a grievous oversight,? said Bill Jennings, excecutive director of the California Sportfishing Protection Allianch (http://www.calsport.org). Steinberg yesterday announced that the first conference committee meeting Tuesday would take place at 3 p.m. Tueday, but that hearing was cancelled. The committee was rescheduled to meet today September 2, at 9:00 a.m. in State Capitol room 4203. It will also meet Wednesday, Thursday and Friday upon call of the chair in the same room, room 4203. ?The conference has until Tuesday, September 8 to bring a final conference report to the floor of both houses,? according to a news release from Steinberg's office. ?A conference report can only be brought to the floor if eight conferees (four from the Senate and four from the Assembly) sign the conference report.? A broad coalition of recreational fishing groups, commercial fishing organizations, environmental groups, Delta farmers and California Indian Tribes is opposing the Legislature's attempt to push through a water package that they say would reshape California water policy and support the construction of a peripheral canal, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger?s ?Big Ditch.? They characterize the water deal as ?backdoor attack? on 130 years of California water law and legal precedent and the Public Trust Doctrine. ?The similarities between this backroom water deal, which has left Delta communities and fishing representatives out of the process, and energy deregulation are startling,? said Barrigan-Parrilla. ?The proposed package would allow the legislature to give up their authority on oversight and costs regarding future decision regarding the Delta (including new conveyance) to a seven member appointed council, with six of the appointees coming from outside the Delta.? The Council would have the authority to authorize the construction of the peripheral canal. A draft economic report by Steven Kasower of the Strategic Economic Applications Company, released to the California Legislature last Tuesday, reveals that the costs for the construction of a peripheral canal around the California Delta or a tunnel under the estuary would be much higher than previously estimated, ranging from $23 billion to $53.8 billion depending upon the conveyance facility. ?The canal, a 48-mile long ditch comparable in size to the Panama Canal, won't make more water for California,? Barrigan-Parrilla stated. ?It will just ship water from the north to Western Central Valley Agribusiness - at the expense of Delta fisheries and Delta family farmers.? Jennings slammed Steinberg's cynical attempt to ram the water bills through the Legislature for political gain. "Steinberg seems to believe that, given the Legislature's current 9-11% approval rating, a water package is essential in order to improve the public's perception of the Legislature - regardless of merits of the bills - regardless of their effects on one of the great estuarine treasures of the world," he said. Jennings also said the push for the canal is "sadly reminiscent" of the "mad rush" to the $50 billion energy deregulation fiasco. "If Steinberg wishes to avoid becoming the Senator Peace, of energy deregulation fame, perhaps he should consider that a vast majority of his constituents are opposed to a peripheral canal,? he concluded. A poll of 800 registered voters throughout California released Monday indicates all segments of voters are strongly opposed to a Peripheral Canal and nearly half oppose a bond for new dams, reservoirs or other water infrastructure projects. The poll also disclosed that voters believe that ensuring a long-term reliable water supply is a "very high priority." Ruth Bernstein and Tom Patras of EMC Research in Oakland, CA conducted the statewide voter survey on water issues on behalf of Restore the Delta from August 23-27, 2009. For a full copy of the report, go to http://www.calsport.org/DeltaWaterPollMemo.pdf ?There are better ways in terms of cost and environmental effectiveness to make more water for California, such as water recycling, floodplain restoration, groundwater cleanup and desalinization, stormwater capture and reuse,? stated Barrigan- Parrilla. ?This needs to be the center of California's water policy, especially in an era of excessive deficits.? Barrigan-Parrilla and Jennings urged everybody concerned about the future of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and its imperiled fish populations, farms and people to immediately contact Senate President pro Tem Darrell Steinberg to make clear their displeasure with his promotion of this water package. His Capitol office number is (916) 651-4006. To sign an on line petition against the peripheral canal and to send a quick email to committee chairs, go to http://www.calsport.org. From Yesterday's LA Times: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/ 2009/09/farm-workers-union-has-1-million-war-chest-to-fight-water- bonds.html Farmworkers union has $1-million war chest to fight water bonds September 1, 2009 | 5:52 pm A new ripple appeared today in the fragile negotiations to overhaul California?s water system, as the United Farm Workers union reported receiving a $1-million donation that it could use to fight a possible water bond. With 10 days left before the end of the legislative year, lawmakers and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger are scurrying to forge agreement on measures to stabilize the state?s water supply and restore the delicate ecosystem in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. Schwarzenegger has insisted that a water bond be part of any overhaul, to fund new storage capability underground and through dams. Farming interests also support a bond. The farmworkers union, which historically has not been flush with cash, reported that the $1-million donation was made to a political action committee called ?United Farm Workers? Committee to Oppose Statewide Water Bonds.? The union declined to comment about the money, which came from Change to Win, a national labor coalition. A water bond proposal would require voter approval. Earlier today, state Senate leader Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento), said a water overhaul was his No. 1 priority now. "I want to get water done," he said. "The administration wants to get it done. Many of the stakeholders want to get it done." --Shane Goldmacher in Sacramento -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: bass_and_steinberg_1.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 44577 bytes Desc: not available URL: From tstokely at att.net Fri Sep 4 11:25:40 2009 From: tstokely at att.net (Tom Stokely) Date: Fri, 4 Sep 2009 11:25:40 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] AP News- Feds: Calif. water crisis isn't Washington's fault Message-ID: <262DCEACAB554988AF042EB6BFB724C7@homeuserPC> http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5g3dGm4ERH7MBw69suqcXcfqDAvpAD9AG6PKO1 Feds: Calif. water crisis isn't Washington's fault By GARANCE BURKE (AP) - 16 hours ago FRESNO, Calif. - Top Obama administration officials took California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to task Thursday for blaming the state's water crisis on federal environmental restrictions. The governor sent a letter to Washington on Wednesday demanding a response to "catastrophic impacts" he said were caused by federal environmental rules that have slashed water deliveries. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Commerce Secretary Gary Locke countered that a three-year drought is responsible for most of the state's water shortages, not agency scientists. A Schwarzenegger spokesman said the governor's office was reviewing the secretaries' written response. Tight water supplies have caused cities throughout the state to ration supplies and farmers to abandon a quarter-million acres of croplands. The state's failure to restore the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, the freshwater estuary that forms the heart of the state's outdated water delivery system, has only compounded the problem, the secretaries said. "We are disappointed that your letter would attempt to lay the California water crisis at the feet of agency scientists," the letter read. "You can be assured that the federal government will be a full partner to help implement any comprehensive plan that the state enacts into law." The officials also said they were open to independent scientific reviews of the restrictions, which were designed to protect fish native to the delta, the main conduit for shipping water from north to south. Federal water managers also have expressed support for exploring environmental problems caused by wastewater discharges from cities, another source of threats to salmon and other fish that rely on the delta for their habitat. Copyright ? 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From awhitridge at snowcrest.net Fri Sep 4 13:53:51 2009 From: awhitridge at snowcrest.net (Arnold Whitridge) Date: Fri, 4 Sep 2009 13:53:51 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] TAMWG meeting Thursday, September 10 Message-ID: <5ECB599C49A546B581102CE9E6B3827C@arnPC> Here's the proposed agenda for the September 10 meeting of the Trinity Adaptive Management Working Group. All TAMWG meetings are open to the public, and most are educational. Arnold Whitridge, TAMWG chair Proposed Agenda TRINITY ADAPTIVE MANAGEMENT WORKING GROUP Trinity County Library, Main Street, Weaverville, CA Thursday, September 10, 2009 Time Presentation, Discussion, and/or Action on: Presenter 1. 9:00 a.m. Adopt agenda; approve June minutes 2. 9:10 Open forum; public comment 3. 9:20 Designated Federal Officer topics Randy Brown 4. 9:30 History & evolution of Trinity River restoration efforts Andreas Krause 5. 10:15 Channel rehabilitation program update Jennifer Faler 6. 10:45 Program realignment; status of TAMWG recommendations Brian Person 7. 11:30 Trinity reservoir operations & river temperature issues Brian Person, Mike Hamman 12:00 Lunch 8. 1:00 p.m. Evaluation of hatchery goals and practices Larry Hanson 9. 1:30 Past and potential watershed restoration projects Mark Lancaster 10. 2:15 Executive Director topics- progress towards Mike Hamman RFP-based science program, five-year budget plan, and Program Operating Agreement; program activities, annual report process 11. 3:15 TAMWG recommendations 12. 4:00 Tentative date and agenda topics for next meeting 5:00 Adjourn -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Mon Sep 7 09:53:39 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Mon, 7 Sep 2009 09:53:39 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] CC Times 9 6 09 Message-ID: <000b01ca2fdb$c04d86d0$40e89470$@net> Editorial: Water reform legislation leaves doubts about Delta protection MediaNews editorial Posted: 09/06/2009 12:01:00 AM PDT AFTER FAILING to pass a balanced budget and failing to reach a workable state prisoner-reduction plan, legislative leaders and the governor are now rushing to pass a water reform package that also is flirting with failure. It appears that the underlying purpose of the legislation is to build an updated version of the Peripheral Canal around the Delta to divert water to the Central Valley and Southern California. We understand that some new form of conveyance is needed to assure reliable deliveries of fresh water to the 25 million Californians who rely on trans-Delta water, whether it be a canal or underground aqueduct. However, we have grave concerns about whether the Delta's delicate ecosystem will be adequately protected or if water quality in the Delta will be safeguarded. There also is a question about who will pay for a conveyance and two modest reservoirs. Will water users, particularly agricultural interests, pay their fair share? Or will too much of the cost be borne by taxpayers through another mammoth water bond measure? The reason we have such doubts about the water legislation is that Assembly Speaker Karen Bass and Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg have created a 14-member conference committee that lacks a single legislator from the Delta. It is also disturbing that one of the Legislature's strongest voices on Delta protection, Sen. Lois Wolk, D-Davis, was omitted from the committee. Steinberg arrogantly stated that she was left off because he could not be assured she would vote for the final legislative package. Does that mean the 14 members on the conference committee are all sure votes? Steinberg said that as a Sacramento lawmaker, he would represent Delta interests. Really? He already has shown his hand with a stacked conference committee. Another reason to worry about protecting the Delta's interest is the provision setting up a Delta Stewardship Council that would be in charge of planning, financing, building and operating new water facilities. The council would consist of seven members, four appointed by the governor, one by the Senate Committee on Rules and one by the Assembly speaker. The seventh member would be the chairperson of the Delta Protection Commission. In other words, there would be scant Delta representation on the governing council and no representation on the key legislative conference committee, which has been carefully assembled even before any legislation has passed. This newspaper has long held that the state's water policy must protect the Delta environment with guaranteed continuous flows of fresh water, regardless of whether a peripheral aqueduct or canal is built. We also believe significant increases in aboveground storage are needed to assure enough year-round water for the Delta environment as well as agricultural, commercial and residential users. While some modest increase in storage is included in the legislative water package, it is not enough to fully meet the demands of both users and the Delta ecology. Steinberg may well be correct in calling the water legislation "historic." But that does not bode well for success. Historically, California's water policies have favored large agricultural and development interests at the expense of the environment. Without solid guarantees of adequate water for the Delta, it appears history will be repeated. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Mon Sep 7 10:55:15 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Mon, 7 Sep 2009 10:55:15 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Water Message-ID: <000901ca2fe4$64295600$2c7c0200$@net> Sacramento Bee editorial and a Letter to its Editor from Jeff Shellito: Editorial: Steinberg should protect the Delta Published Saturday, Sep. 05, 2009 That ominous sound you hear coming from the Capitol this week is the rumble of water buffaloes stampeding toward a possible deal to keep Northern California water flowing to farms, businesses and homes in the south. We understand the Legislature's new-found sense of urgency on this issue, but we're concerned that the interests of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta will get trampled in the process. The legislation is a moving target, and it's impossible to know how it will turn out. But a couple of hints give us pause. First, there's only one seat on the proposed seven-member Delta Stewardship Council for a representative from the five Delta counties. The council, if it's created, will have tremendous power to decide the region's future, up to and including whether a massive new canal should be built to route water through or around the Delta. This is a big state, but it seems to us that more local representation on such a body would be prudent. Second, only one lawmaker representing the Delta was among the 14 members appointed by legislative leaders to negotiate this package. Presumably, this is because those legislators cannot be counted on to back a bill that doesn't protect the Delta. The one member from these parts is Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, the Democrat from Sacramento. But Steinberg, has divided loyalties, because he was elected leader by and must be responsive to the needs of all the Democrats in his house, not just those from the Delta. In addition to assurances that any new governing body will give the Delta counties an adequate voice at the table, the counties need protections for their water supply and its quality, and guarantees that the financing needed to repair and maintain the Delta as water is shunted south will be sufficient to meet the need. Steinberg understandably wants to chalk up a major legislative achievement in his first year as leader. We wish him well. But that drive shouldn't blind him to the needs of his own constituents Letter to the Editor Don't tap us for water project Re " State parks are economic engine" (Editorial, Sept. 2): What state government spends taxpayer dollars on is about making choices and setting priorities. Our legislative leaders recently created a conference committee on water where, among other things, a $5 billion to $11 billion general obligation bond is under active consideration to pay for construction of new water storage projects (dams). The governor has already threatened to veto any water reform package if it doesn't include such a bond. If the Legislature goes along and the voters approve even a $5 billion water bond measure, it will annually cost California $325 million over 30 years to service the debt. Closing state parks to save $14 million while our political leaders are seriously considering taking on hundreds of millions of dollars in new debt is insanity. We should not be asked to annually pay $10 more to register our cars to avoid park closures if political leaders think state taxpayers should subsidize construction of new dam projects that many believe are unneeded. Let the beneficiaries pay for that water. That's how the State Water Project got built. Jeff Shellito Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From danielbacher at fishsniffer.com Mon Sep 7 11:35:06 2009 From: danielbacher at fishsniffer.com (Dan Bacher) Date: Mon, 7 Sep 2009 11:35:06 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Water Agencies, Enviros and Tribes Unite to Delay Water Bills In-Reply-To: <000901ca2fe4$64295600$2c7c0200$@net> References: <000901ca2fe4$64295600$2c7c0200$@net> Message-ID: <3D612AFB-2152-45F0-8EFC-4D07EE6C36F7@fishsniffer.com> ? Water Agencies, Enviros and Tribes Unite to Delay Water Bills by Dan Bacher One of the largest and most diverse coalitions of water agencies, environmentalists, Indian Tribes, fishermen and environmental justice groups in California history has assembled to oppose Senate President pro Tem Darrell Steinberg's mad rush to enact a dangerous package of water bills before the end of the legislative session, September 11. The 42 groups from both northern and southern California sent a letter to the Water Conference Committee and other members of the Legislature on September 2 stating that "the few days left in this session are simply insufficient to ensure that passage of the package of bills will not result in unintended consequences that could prove even more harmful than the current situation presents." "The Delta package of bills that is now being considered proposes fundamental changes in California water policy that will require careful and broad consultation to ensure undisrupted implementation," the letter says. "More importantly, to be successful, the policy will require confidence and buy in from a broad constituency. Rushing this process risks producing unintended consequences that will not benefit California in the long term." Bill Jennings, executive director of the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance, one of the groups signing the letter, described the water deal as "a combination of the Sorcerer's Apprentice and Faust's bargain with the Devil." "Not satisfied with simply giving the Governor the power to appoint the majority of a Council that has the power to approve a peripheral canal, bonds and new dams are now part of the equation," noted Jennings. The letter was preceded by numerous letters by organizations opposing the peripheral canal, including a strongly written letter sent by the Center for Biological Diversity and many fishing groups: http:// www.biologicaldiversity.org/campaigns/ san_francisco_bay_area_and_delta_protection/pdfs/ Delta_Bill_Package_opposition_letter.pdf Labor has also joined the battle against the canal and water bond. The United Farmworkers Union, founded by Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, reported that a $1-million donation was made to a political action committee called ?United Farm Workers? Committee to Oppose Statewide Water Bonds," according to the LA Times on September 1. The donation came from the Change to Win Coalition, a national labor coalition including SEIU and the Teamsters Union. The opposition of groups from throughout the state is accompanied on the local level by a grassroots uprising of Steinberg's constituents and Delta residents. A group of 40 people held a demonstration outside of Steinberg's office on Friday, September 4 in opposition to Steinberg's push for the peripheral canal (http://www.indybay.org/ newsitems/2009/09/05/18620933.php). "We are alarmed at how the current package of five water bills is being pushed through the Legislature without consideration for the many concerns of Delta and northern California residents," said Barbara Daly, Delta farmland owner, of Save the Delta. "We are protesting the legislation's ceding of control of our water to only 7 political appointees on a governance committee that could approve the building of a peripheral canal." Meanwhile, deals are apparently being made behind closed doors regarding the peripheral canal and the future of the West Coast's largest estuary. "I'm informed that the fate of the Delta estuary is being horse-traded in backroom meetings between Lester Snow (DWR), Senator Steinberg (D-Sacrament) Assemblymember Jared Huffman (D-San Rafael), Senator Dave Cogdill (R-Modesto), Barry Nelson (NRDC), Tom Birmingham (Westlands Water District), Tim Brick (Metropolitan Water District) and Joe Caves (Nature Conservancy)," said Jennings. Saturday and Sunday's legislative meetings over the water bills were canceled and the next meeting will take place at 1:00 PM today (Monday) in room 4203 of the Capitol. Today's meeting will focus on AB 49 (Feuer/Huffman) regarding outstanding issues on water conservation, SB 261 (Dutton/Ducheny), and SB 229 (Pavley) regarding water diversion reporting. The public will be able to comment on the legislation. What can you do to stop the peripheral canal and delay the water bill package? First, make phone calls and emails to Senator Darrell Steinberg through the Friends of the River Acton Alert to urge him not rush into the kind of potential policy disaster that created California?s unsuccessful and costly experiment in energy deregulation! The link is: https://secure2.convio.net/fotr/site/Advocacy? cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=225 After you make your phone call and emails, please sign the petition against the peripheral canal on the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance (CSPA) Website at http://www.calsport.org. Here is the letter, starting with the list of organizations and tribes signing on to the letter. Anahuak Youth Sports Butte Environmental Council Calaveras Public Utility District California Indian Heritage Council California Sportfishing Protection Alliance Central Delta Water Agency Citrus Heights Water District City of Folsom City of Roseville Clean Water Action East Bay Municipal Utility District El Dorado Irrigation District Environmental Justice Coalition for Water Food and Water Watch Foothill Conservancy Friends of the Los Angeles River Friends of the River Glenn-Colusa Irrigation District Heal the Bay Jackson Valley Irrigation District Mono Lake Committee Northern California Water Association Orangevale Water Company Organic Sacramento Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations Planning and Conservation League Restore the Delta Sacramento Suburban Water District San Diego Coastkeeper San Francisco Public Utilities Commission San Joaquin County San Juan Water District Sierra Club California Sierra Nevada Alliance South Delta Water Agency Southern California Watershed Alliance Stockton East Water District The River Project Tuolumne Utilities District Urban Semillas Winnemem Wintu Tribe September 2, 2009 Honorable Darrell Steinberg Honorable Karen Bass Honorable Dean Florez Honorable Anna Caballero Honorable Alex Padilla Honorable Jean Fuller Honorable Fran Pavley Honorable Jared Huffman Honorable Dave Cogdill Honorable Kevin Jeffries Honorable Sam Aanestad Honorable Jim Nielsen Honorable Bob Huff Honorable Jose Solorio Dear Water Conference Committee Members: We the undersigned are pleased to see the Legislature committing its time and staff to addressing the declining situation in California statewide water management. As the hub of California?s engineered water system, the Delta is a critical resource to everyone in the state. As the largest estuary on the west coast of the Americas, the Delta is also one of the most endangered ecosystems in the United States. We stand committed to working with the Legislature and its appointed conference committee through the remainder of this legislative session and beyond to arrive at a solution that improves the health of the Delta. The few days left in this session are simply insufficient to ensure that passage of the package of bills will not result in unintended consequences that could prove even more harmful than the current situation presents. These Delta bills have not yet been amended with only nine days left. Please do not mistake our views as being opposed to change. We understand that systemic changes will be needed to fix the Delta. However, we feel that in order to move past the stalemate surrounding the Delta, the Legislature and conference committee must find solutions to the most controversial issues. Unless those are discussed and resolved, the legislation will result in an ineffective package that will result only in a lifetime of litigation and no new water, jobs or protections for the environment. The Delta package of bills that is now being considered proposes fundamental changes in California water policy that will require careful and broad consultation to ensure undisrupted implementation. More importantly, to be successful, the policy will require confidence and buyin from a broad constituency. Rushing this process risks producing unintended consequences that will not benefit California in the long term. At this juncture, water is one of the highest priority policy issues for California. It is important that any deal for the Delta promotes real and reliable improvements in the health of the Delta itself and promotes responsible statewide management of our water resources. Sincerely, Raul Macias, Executive Director Anahuak Youth Sports Association Lynn Barris Butte Environmental Council John Ornellas, District Manager Calaveras Public Utility District Evon Chambers signing on behalf of: Randy Yonemura, Project Director California Indian Heritage Council Bill Jennings, Executive Director California Sportfishing Protection Alliance Dante Nomellini, Manager and Counsel Central Delta Water Agency Robert Churchill, General Manager Citrus Heights Water District Kenneth Payne, Utilities Director City of Folsom Derrick Whitehead, Utilities Director City of Roseville Jennifer Clary, Water Policy Analyst Clean Water Action Dennis M. Diemer, General Manager East Bay Municipal Utility District Thomas D. Cumpston, Acting General Manager El Dorado Irrigation District Debbie Davis, Legislative Analyst Environmental Justice Coalition for Water Mark Schlosberg, California Director Food and Water Watch Chris Wright, Executive Director Foothill Conservancy Shelly Backlar, Executive Director Friends of the Los Angeles River Steve Evans, Conservation Director Friends of the River Thaddeus Bettner, Glenn-Colusa Irrigation District Mark Gold, Executive Director Heal the Bay Thomas Hoover, General Manager Jackson Valley Irrigation District Jonas Minton signing on behalf of: Geoff McQuilken, Executive Director Mono Lake Committee Donn Zea, President & CEO Northern California Water Association Sharon Wilcox, General Manager Orange Vale Water Company Organic Sacramento Zeke Grader, Executive Director Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations Charlotte Hodde, Water Program Manager Planning and Conservation League Restore the Delta Robert Roscoe, General Manager Sacramento Suburban Water District Ms. Gabriel Solmer, Legal Director San Diego Coastkeeper Michael Carlin, Deputy General Manager San Francisco Public Utilities Commission Ken Vogel, Supervisor San Joaquin County Shauna Lorance, General Manager San Juan Water District Jim Metropulos, Senior Advocate Sierra Club California Joan Clayburgh, Executive Director Sierra Nevada Alliance John Herrick, Manager and Counsel South Delta Water Agency Conner Everts, Executive Director Southern California Watershed Alliance Kevin M. Kauffman, General Manager Stockton East Water District The River Project Pete Kampa, General Manager Tuolumne Utilities District Miguel Luna, Executive Director Urban Semillas Mark Franco, Headman Winnemem Wintu Tribe cc: Members of the Legislature -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: Water Bill Article 9:7:09.doc Type: application/octet-stream Size: 98304 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From tstokely at att.net Wed Sep 9 17:40:23 2009 From: tstokely at att.net (Tom Stokely) Date: Wed, 9 Sep 2009 17:40:23 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Salazar responds to WSJ Editorial on smelt Message-ID: <2D627DF043C74FE3A7EB423F5740B629@homeuserPC> I think Mr. Salazar is right on. Tom Stokely Water Policy Coordinator California Water Impact Network 504A Lennon St. (USPS and UPS) Mt Shasta, CA 96067 V/FAX 530-926-9727 Cell 530-524-0315 tstokely at att.net http://www.c-win.org/ Begin forwarded message: From: Brian Smith Date: September 9, 2009 3:52:49 PM PDT To: "David Nesmith (dnesmith at ewccalifornia.org)" Subject: Salazar responds to WSJ Editorial on smelt Excerpt from Wall Street Journal Letters to the Editor: Your editorial "California's Man-Made Drought" (Sept. 2) about the severe drought and water crisis in California argues that California's water problems could be wished away if our nation were only willing to sacrifice an endangered three-inch fish, turn on a few pumps to move water from Northern California to the Central Valley, and wave a magic wand. The trouble is: The fish are a sliver of the problem, the pumps are already on, and pointed fingers can't make it rain. California's water crisis is far more troubling than your editorial suggests. The state is in its third year of a devastating drought, caused by a lack of precipitation. In California's Central Valley, where half the nation's produce is grown, many farms and fields are bone dry, unemployment has surged, and the state's inadequate water infrastructure?built 50 years ago for a population half as large?cannot handle the stress. Moreover, California's Bay Delta, upon which 25 million Californians depend for drinking water, is in a state of full environmental collapse. As a proposed response, your editorial asks the Obama administration to ignore science and convene a so-called "God Squad" that would override protections on watersheds and turn California's water crisis over to the courts. Trying to force more water out of a dying system will only cause more human tragedy, while diverting attention from the governor and the legislature, who face a Sept. 11 legislative deadline to decide whether to fix the broken water system in California after decades of neglect. Rather than more finger pointing, we need real solutions. After eight years on the sidelines, the federal government has stepped in to help. The Obama administration is investing over $400 million through the president's economic recovery plan to help modernize California's water infrastructure, including over $40 million in emergency assistance to help water-short Central Valley farmers. We have helped move record amounts of water to communities in most need and are taking steps to prepare for a potential fourth year of drought. And perhaps most importantly, the federal government is now engaging as a full partner in the collaborative process that the governor launched two years ago to restore the Bay Delta, and modernize the state's woefully outdated water infrastructure. Though what we need most is rain and snow to fill the reservoirs, these actions will help mitigate the devastating impact of the ongoing drought and deliver help to the families and communities suffering most. This is the type of locally-driven, solution-oriented, collaborative approach that we must all support?and to which we must all contribute. Ken Salazar Secretary of the Interior Washington -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From tstokely at att.net Wed Sep 9 18:14:48 2009 From: tstokely at att.net (Tom Stokely) Date: Wed, 9 Sep 2009 18:14:48 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Water Bill Update and Stop the Canal Action Alerts! Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: Dan Bacher Sent: Wednesday, September 09, 2009 5:23 PM Subject: Water Bill Update and Stop the Canal Action Alerts! Good Afternoon Here are three breaking news updates on the water bill package, including (1) an action alert from Bill Jennings of CSPA, (2) an action alert from Barbara Barrigan-Parrilla of Restore the Delta and (3) my article on Senator Lois Wolk withdrawing her authorship of the Delta Conservancy Bill. Today was the third day since Friday that Sacramento and Delta residents held a protest outside Senator Darrell Steinberg's office against his campaign to push the water bill package, a road map to the peripheral canal, through the Legislature by Friday.? Please call Steinberg and your Legislators ?to halt what Jennings aptly describes as a "Legislative Descent into Madness." Steinberg's phone number is?916-651- 4006. Thanks? Dan? 1. CSPA Action Alert! Time is short if you give a damn about the Delta.? Cheers Legislative Descent into Madness ?But I don't want to go among mad people,? Alice remarked. ?Oh, you can't help that,? said the Cat: ?we're all mad here.? Senate pro Tempore Darrell Steinberg is leading the California Legislature down the rabbit hole into Lewis Carroll's strange land believing, in the words of the Cheshire cat, ?if you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there.? After ignoring the state's water problems for years and faced with 9% approval ratings, Steinberg decided to solve the water crisis in the waning days of the legislative session.? Bringing together 5 seriously flawed water bills, he circumvented the normal policy committee legislative process and created a joint conference committee to review and approve the bill package. As Sacramento Bee columnist Dan Walters put it, ?legislators, their staffers and hundreds of lobbyists are acting as if they're snorting meth, frantically trying to write and enact hundreds of bills in the 2000 session's final hours.?? Together, the water bills represent an unprecedented modification of the water code and an attack upon 130 years of water law and legal opinion.? They establish water exports as coequal goals with restoration of the Delta estuary, give a politically appointed council the supreme authority to approve and fund a peripheral canal and exclude fishermen, environmentalist and Delta communities from the process.? They will essentially institutionalize the estuary's collapse and forestall effort to restore it. Steinberg stacked the conference committee with representatives from the southern San Joaquin Valley and LA area and excluded representatives from the Delta counties because he couldn't count on their approval.? Multiple bond issues to fund conveyance and new dams were introduced. Amazing coalitions of environmentalists, fishermen, Delta farmers and water agencies have come out in opposition to the Mad Hatter's rush to enact something, what ever it is.? CSPA agrees that the state's water crisis needs to be addressed but we believe it must be done right - not just right away. After a dysfunctional series of show hearings over the last week while horse-trading was occurring in he backroom, the conference committee was unable to reach agreement by the Tuesday deadline.? Republicans characterized the process as a ?dog and pony show.? >From there the process became, as Alice put it, ?curiouser and curiouser.?? Steinberg, faced with the possibility of being deposed as Senate pro Tem desperately began discussion with Governor and subsequently announced that he would introduce a bill on the floors of the Assembly and Senate on Friday for a vote later that evening. Now we have discovered that a secret 61-page bill is circulating among water agencies and we have been told that it represents the results of the discussions between Steinberg and the Governor.? It includes a $12.6 billion bond for water projects, excludes the Delta from County of Origin laws and gives the Governor the power to appoint all members of the Delta Stewardship Council.? Water exports will be coequal with Delta restoration but it doesn't define any measures related to recovery of the environment.? The State Water Project will be removed from under the Department of Water Resources.? We're informed this bill will be introduced on Friday for enactment the same day. The bill represents an abdication of responsible legislative oversight and due diligence.? It is fiscally irresponsible.? It will increase debt service for bonds to 9% of the state's deficit budget.? It provides subsidies to water agencies as basic health, education and public security services are being slashed.? It's simply, a descent into legislative madness. The time to avert this train wreck is short.? All who believe in the Delta and its fisheries as national treasures that deserve protection need to take a moment to call your State Senate and Assembly representatives and let them know that they must not only vote against Steinberg's water bill, but they need to tell their colleagues to do the same.? All who believe in good government and deliberative process should call Senate President pro Tempore Steinberg and let him know what you think of policy legislation that is being written in the middle of the night without input from the Delta farming and fishing communities.? Let him know what you think of a new water bond at a time when the state is billions of dollars in debt and education is being gutted. He can be reached at 916-651- 4006. And don't forget to go to the CSPA website at www.calsport.org and sign the petition and letters to your representatives.? Bill Jennings, Chairman Executive Director California Sportfishing Protection Alliance 3536 Rainier Avenue Stockton, CA 95204 p: 209-464-5067 c: 209-938-9053 f: 209-464-1028 e: deltakeep at aol.com www.calsport.org Restore the Delta News & Action Alert 9/9/09 "Darkness is only driven out with light, not more darkness." ---Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Steinberg Moves to Revamp California Water Policy in the Dark of Night ? Restore the Delta staff members have been busy attending Conference Committee meetings on water policy and the five bill package reshaping the future of the Delta this last week. The end result: the Conference Committee failed to meet its own deadline yesterday. The Conference Committee report might be published later on today. This, however, has not slowed down Senate President pro Tempore Darrell Steinberg who political insiders say is trying to push through a last minute water bill that will have elements from the previous bills and a new water bond. It is our understanding that Senate President Steinberg will introduce the bill on the floor this week to be voted on at the last minute without public vetting. The bill will require a 2/3 vote so that a referendum cannot be set into motion by the public. Here's what we need each and every one of you to do. Call your State Senate and Assembly representatives and let them know that they must not only vote against Steinberg's water bill, but they need to tell their colleagues to do the same. Also, call Senate President pro Tempore Steinberg and let him know what you think of policy legislation that is being written in the middle of the night without input from the Delta farming and fishing communities. Let him know what you think of a new water bond at a time when the state is billions of dollars in debt and education is being gutted. He can be reached at 916-651- 4006. To say that Restore the Delta is exasperated by the events of the last two weeks is an understatement. Through the Conference Committee process it became apparent that not only were our expert Delta legislators, like Senator Lois Wolk (5th Senate District), shut out of the process, but that testimony committees were stacked with "experts" from outside the Delta, and that testimony from in-Delta interests was being ignored by the Conference Committee. Even more disturbing was a point during Monday's hearing when some Delta advocates were actually taken to task by Senator Flores and Senate President Steinberg for calling into question the behind-the- scenes negotiations process. Never mind that representatives from the Westlands Water District and the Metropolitan Water District were busy working a deal with Senator Steinberg and a limited number of legislators and representatives from the Governor's administration. Never mind this was happening behind closed doors, as a way to safeguard authorization of new conveyance that would deplete the Delta of the freshwater that it needs all under the banner of co-equal goals for water management in California. Never mind that these policies are being crafted so that Western Central Valley Agribusiness can have all the water it wants, despite its junior water rights, and contracts written years ago indicating that they were only entitled to extra Delta water during wet years. Take action today. Let your legislator know that the people of the Delta want real solutions that will create regional self-sufficient water supplies throughout California, reduced Delta exports, and an equal seat at the governance table for our region. 3. Lois Wolk Article: Senator Wolk Withdraws Authorship of Delta Conservancy Bill? by Dan Bacher ? In a strongly worded statement, Senator Lois Wolk (D-Davis) today withdrew her authorship of Senate Bill 458, legislation that would establish a Delta Conservancy, because of her concern than the bill's amended version would serve as a "tool to assist water exporters who are primarily responsible for the Delta's decline."? Wolk took this action after being notified by Senate Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento) that her legislation would be amended in a Water Conference Committee with provisions Senator Wolk and the five Delta counties opposed. Wolk has been replaced with Senators Steinberg and Joe Simitian (D-Palo Alto) as the authors of SB 458.? "When I learned that the Conference Committee intended to alter key provisions of the bill, as well as other pieces of the water package, it was clear I could no longer carry this legislation," said Senator Wolk. "What began as a sincere effort to create a state and local partnership to restore the Delta and sustain the Delta communities and economy is becoming, day by day, amendment by amendment, a tool to assist water exporters who are primarily responsible for the Delta's decline." Wolk's withdrawal of the legislation authorship comes as a huge, diverse coalition of northern California water agencies, Delta farmers, fishermen, conservationists, environmental justice advocates, California Indian Tribes and others are opposing Steinberg's mad rush to push water legislation through the Capitol by Friday, the last day of the legislative session. They are asking Steinberg and the Committee to delay the legislation, a thinly-veiled road road map to the peripheral canal that greatly undermines the public trust and California water rights law, until next session. Democrats and Republicans failed to come up with a water deal? by the 5 p.m. deadline yesterday that Steinberg had arbitrarily set. Steinberg, in an effort to push a peripheral canal and water bond that would result in increased water exports out of the Delta, excluded Wolk, Assemblymember Mariko Yamada (D-Davis) and other Delta Legislators from the politically-stacked 14 member Water Conference Committee. "It is regrettable," said Wolk of the amendments to her bill and the exclusion of Delta legislators and residents from the water bill process. "Without the Delta communities as working partners in this effort it is unlikely to succeed."? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: delta_plane.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 9058 bytes Desc: not available URL: From ema.berol at yahoo.com Thu Sep 10 17:21:35 2009 From: ema.berol at yahoo.com (Emelia Berol) Date: Thu, 10 Sep 2009 17:21:35 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [env-trinity] Salazar responds to WSJ Editorial on smelt In-Reply-To: <2D627DF043C74FE3A7EB423F5740B629@homeuserPC> References: <2D627DF043C74FE3A7EB423F5740B629@homeuserPC> Message-ID: <74398.73646.qm@web46210.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> I am glad to read Mr. Salazar's reasoned response to the WSJ editorial. He writes that the Central Valley grows half the nation's produce. Over the past 10 years I have noticed that whether I am in Albuquerque, Washington D.C., or New York City, at least all the organic produce I can find is from California. Why is that? Am I the only one who thinks it strange that half the country is incapable of growing its own produce? Could it be that our national ag policies need rebuilding as much as our outdated state water delivery systems? Emelia Berol ________________________________ From: Tom Stokely To: Trinity List Sent: Wednesday, September 9, 2009 5:40:23 PM Subject: [env-trinity] Salazar responds to WSJ Editorial on smelt I think Mr. Salazar is right on. Tom Stokely Water Policy Coordinator California Water Impact Network 504A Lennon St. (USPS and UPS) Mt Shasta, CA 96067 V/FAX 530-926-9727 Cell 530-524-0315 tstokely at att.net http://www.c-win.org/ Begin forwarded message: From: Brian Smith >Date: September 9, 2009 3:52:49 > PM PDT >To: "David Nesmith (dnesmith at ewccalifornia.org)" > >Subject: Salazar responds to WSJ > Editorial on smelt > >Excerpt from Wall Street > Journal Letters to the Editor: >Your editorial "California's Man-Made Drought" (Sept. 2) about > the severe drought and water crisis in California argues that California's > water problems could be wished away if our nation were only willing to > sacrifice an endangered three-inch fish, turn on a few pumps to move water > from Northern California to the Central Valley, and wave a magic wand. The > trouble is: The fish are a sliver of the problem, the pumps are already on, > and pointed fingers can't make it rain. >California's water crisis is > far more troubling than your editorial suggests. The state is in its third > year of a devastating drought, caused by a lack of precipitation. In > California's Central Valley, where half the nation's produce is grown, many > farms and fields are bone dry, unemployment has surged, and the state's > inadequate water infrastructure?built > 50 years ago for a population half as large?cannot handle the stress. Moreover, > California's Bay Delta, upon which 25 million Californians depend for drinking > water, is in a state of full environmental collapse. >As a proposed response, your > editorial asks the Obama administration to ignore science and convene a > so-called "God Squad" that would override protections on watersheds and turn > California's water crisis over to the courts. Trying to force more water out > of a dying system will only cause more human tragedy, while diverting > attention from the governor and the legislature, who face a Sept. 11 > legislative deadline to decide whether to fix the broken water system in > California after decades of neglect. >Rather than more finger > pointing, we need real solutions. After eight years on the sidelines, the > federal government has stepped in to help. The Obama administration is > investing over $400 million through the president's economic recovery plan to > help modernize California's water infrastructure, including over $40 million > in emergency assistance to help water-short Central Valley farmers. We have > helped move record amounts of water to communities in most need and are taking > steps to prepare for a potential fourth year of drought. And perhaps most > importantly, the federal government is now engaging as a full partner in the > collaborative process that the governor launched two years ago to restore the > Bay Delta, and modernize the state's woefully outdated water infrastructure. > Though what we need most is rain and snow to fill the reservoirs, these > actions will help mitigate the devastating impact of the ongoing drought and > deliver help to the families and communities suffering most. >This is the type of > locally-driven, solution-oriented, collaborative approach that we must all > support?and to which we must all > contribute. >Ken Salazar >Secretary of the > Interior >Washington > > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From tstokely at att.net Fri Sep 11 08:42:20 2009 From: tstokely at att.net (Tom Stokely) Date: Fri, 11 Sep 2009 08:42:20 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Urgent Action Alert: Stop the Water Bill Package! Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: Dan Bacher Sent: Friday, September 11, 2009 8:12 AM Subject: Urgent Action Alert: Stop the Water Bill Package! Good Morning Below is an ultra-urgent action alert from Robert Johnson of Californians Against the Canal that I urge you to participate in RIGHT NOW to stop the Delta water package and $12 billion water bond from going through the Legislature today. Below that is a link to my article on alternet.org about the Grassroots Uprising against Senator Darrell Steinberg's mad rush to push the water bill through the Legislature. Circulate this alert widely! Thanks Dan This $12.4 billion bond bill - yes - General Obligation Bond bill -- is just not what California needs now. Not only does the bill provide no explicit protections for the estuary, this give the Governor power to appoint ALL 7 Delta Stewardship Council Members! This group has the power of Kings. The bill will elevate junior water rights holders in the desert - the west side of the San Joaquin Valley from Los Banos all the way to Bakersfield -- to equal those of people and farms proximate to the SF Bay Delta! This is a rushed bond package that was heavily influenced by lobbyists for the BILLIONAIRE water districts, Westlands Water District, Delta Mendota Water Authority, and the Kern County Water Authority, who just booked a $77 million water sale and profited most of $. Please take 3 minutes and follow instructions below email ALL assembly and senate members. Thanks! ? Oppose Delta Water Package and $12 Billion Water Bond Send letters to all legislators with 6 easy clicks Restore the Delta, CSPA, Californians against the Canal and others are asking you to take special action on behalf of protecting the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and San Francisco Bay. Dear Friends, Whether you are a concerned citizen, environmentalist, Delta farmer, member of the SF Bay Delta business community, commercial/recreational fisherman-gal or outdoor sports enthusiast, the current water policy and bond package if implemented will deal the final death blow to the our beloved Delta, the largest estuary in the western hemisphere. The vote on these crucially important matters is hours away. That is why we are asking each and every one of you to send the following letter drafted by the Environmental Water Caucus to our California Assembly and Senate members. The text of the letter can be found at the following clicks. You need to fill it out six times to send to all of California's legislators.? Please do this! Thank you for your ongoing support. http://citizenspeak.org/node/1750 http://citizenspeak.org/node/1751 http://citizenspeak.org/node/1752 http://citizenspeak.org/node/1753 http://citizenspeak.org/node/1754 http://citizenspeak.org/node/1755 ? Sincerely, ? Robert Johnson, Jr. Californians against the Canal www.StopCanal.org ? Push for Peripheral Canal in California Ignites Grassroots Uprising? http://www.alternet.org/water/142537/push_for_peripheral_canal_in_california_ignites_grassroots_uprising_/ ? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: unknown.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 16659 bytes Desc: not available URL: From truman at jeffnet.org Sat Sep 12 14:29:24 2009 From: truman at jeffnet.org (Patrick Truman) Date: Sat, 12 Sep 2009 14:29:24 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Trinity River Mill Burns Message-ID: http://www.redding.com/news/2009/sep/12/fire-destroys-weaverville-lumber-mill-building/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From tstokely at att.net Sun Sep 13 22:47:16 2009 From: tstokely at att.net (Tom Stokely) Date: Sun, 13 Sep 2009 22:47:16 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Steinberg's Water Bill Package Defeated by Grassroots Uprising Message-ID: <29DBAE9FD26D45F3A87E3AB54A62A3B6@homeuserPC> ----- Original Message ----- From: Dan Bacher Sent: Sunday, September 13, 2009 6:33 PM Subject: Steinberg's Water Bill Package Defeated by Grassroots Uprising Steinberg's Water Bill Package Defeated by Grassroots Uprising by Dan Bacher Faced with overwhelming and wide-ranging opposition by the people of California, Senate Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento) and other Legislators abandoned their attempt to rush a controversial water policy and bond package through the Capitol in the final hours of the Legislative Session Friday. Delta advocates said the passage of the bill would have resulted in the construction of a peripheral canal and an increase in water exports out of the imperiled Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, sealing the doom of the collapsing Central Valley salmon and Delta fish populations as well as Delta agriculture. They also contended the legislation would have greatly weakened California water rights and Public Trust law. Although this was a great victory for the broad coalition of fishing, conservation, environmental justice, tribal, labor and farming groups and Delta counties and cities that opposed the legislation, the war to save and restore the Delta has just begun, according to bill opponents. "We're not finished yet," said Assemblymember Lois Wolk (D-Davis). "We need to focus now on what we need to do to save the Delta. We have a lot of work to do to restore our fisheries and protect habitat and Delta agriculture." "We won," said Barbara Barrigan-Parrilla, campaign director of Restore the Delta. "Thank Lois Wolk." Senator Wolk on Wednesday withdrew her authorship of Senate Bill 458, legislation that would establish a Delta Conservancy, because of her concern that the bill's amended version would serve as a "tool to assist water exporters who are primarily responsible for the Delta's decline." Wolk took this unusual action after being notified by Steinberg that her legislation would be amended in a Water Conference Committee with provisions Senator Wolk and the five Delta counties opposed. Wolk was replaced with Senators Steinberg and Joe Simitian (D-Palo Alto) as the authors of SB 458. Robert Johnson of Californians Against the Canal emphasized that the problems of the Delta and northern California fisheries cannot be solved without addressing the retirement of selenium-filled lands in the San Joaquin Valley's west side that would free upwards of 1.5 million acre feet of water for fish and the environment. "The resources saved by funding 21st Century water solutions, including the retirement of drainage impaired land and increased water conservation, would be far more effective and less costly than the current water scenario," said Johnson. "These solutions would also free up tremendous resources to deal with the humanitarian crisis caused by unrestrained agriculture growth in Kings, Kern, Fresno and Madera counties in recent decades." "It took a massive effort by the fishing, conservation and environmental community to stand up to the multimillion dollar lobbying of the Southern California water districts but we did it," summed up Jerry Neuburger of the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance (CSPA). "Your letters, faxes, and phone calls made the difference. With your help, CSPA was the tip of the arrow aimed at this destructive bill's heart." "The bad news is, like Arnold, they'll be back," he quipped. "A special session is in the works so please don't think this is over. But for now, smell the roses, drink the champagne and take a trip to Disneyland!" Over the past week, Steinberg's attempt to ram the bill package through the Capitol ignited a grass roots uprising of Steinberg's constituents and Delta residents. Barbara Daly of Save the Delta and Kim Glazzard of Organic Sacramento organized three days of protests outside of Steinberg's office to put political pressure on Steinberg. The broad-spread opposition was evidenced Friday night during the final hearing on SB 68 (AB 893). While several people, including representatives of NRDC, Environmental Defense, the Nature Conservancy, the Bay Institute and Metropolitan Water District spoke in favor of the water bill package, over 50 people spoke against it. The wide ranging opponents of the legislation included the California Farm Bureau, Sierra Club, Planning and Conservation League, the SEIU State Council, the Teamsters Union, Winnemem Wintu Tribe and City of Sacramento. Even Phil Isenberg, the chairman of the Delta Vision Task Form, opposed the legislation in a letter hand delivered to Legislators. Many speakers complained that the legislation was rushed, failed to include proper input from Delta legislators and residents and would actually worsen, rather than help, the imperiled California Delta. "The crisis on the Delta is universally acknowledged," said Barry Nelson, senior policy analyst for NRDC, in urging the Legislators to pass the bill. "The status quo, the way the Delta is managed now, is not sustainable. "This legislation will do nothing to help the Delta," countered Jim Metropolous, Senior Advocate of the Sierra Club California. "What's the rush to pass this bill package when the legislation states that it will take two years to come up with a plan? What we need is for the DFG and State Water Board to do their job enforcing the law." Senator Steinberg made a last minute appeal to garner support for the legislation. "I'm willing to concede and compromise on water storage, continuous appropriations and general obligation bonds because if we want to solve California's water problems, we have to compromise," he said. "My bill offers the best effort to compromise. We brought Environmental Defense, NRDC, the Audubon Society, Westlands Water District and the Metropolitan Water District together to negotiate this compromise." However, by late Friday evening, massive opposition to the bill by both Republican and Democratic legislators became clear to Steinberg, Assemblymember Jared Huffman (D-San Rafael) and Assembly Speaker Karen Bass and they shelved the legislation before it went to a floor vote. The defeat of both the water policy bill and $11.8 billion water bond on September 11 was a clear victory by grassroots environmentalists, fishermen, farmers and Delta residents over the corporate environmentalists who collaborated with Westlands Water District, the Metropolitan Water District and Legislators in their attempt to push a package through the Legislature that would have resulted in the building of a peripheral canal and more dams. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From tstokely at att.net Mon Sep 14 08:13:09 2009 From: tstokely at att.net (Tom Stokely) Date: Mon, 14 Sep 2009 08:13:09 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] SFGate: Key salmon spawning rivers all but dry Message-ID: <5C1FA0D69239430CA0FE14F83C245338@homeuserPC> > The original article can be found on SFGate.com here: > http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2009/09/13/MN5I19CVKD.DTL > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > Sunday, September 13, 2009 (SF Chronicle) > Key salmon spawning rivers all but dry > Peter Fimrite, Chronicle Staff Writer > > > The key spawning grounds for what was once the greatest run of salmon on > the North Coast are close to being as dry as they have ever been, > according to biologists and the U.S. Geological Survey. > As California bakes under a third year of drought, the Scott and Shasta > rivers, near the California-Oregon border, have become little more than > dry beds of rock and dirt. > Recent measurements showed the water volume in both rivers approaching > record lows for this time of year. The two tributaries of the Klamath > River are historic breeding grounds for salmon and are considered critical > to the recovery of the species. > "Large areas of the (Scott) River have gone completely dry, stranding > endangered coho salmon as well as chinook and steelhead in shallow, > disconnected pools of water," said Greg King, president of the nonprofit > Siskiyou Land Conservancy, which has fought to protect the salmon runs in > the Klamath River system. > "This could be the year that causes the coho to go extinct if they can't > get upstream in the Scott and Shasta." > > Salmon once abundant > The Klamath River system, historically the third-largest source of > salmon in the lower 48 states behind the Columbia and Sacramento rivers, > once supported hundreds of thousands of wriggling chinook salmon, coho > salmon and steelhead trout. Chinook once swam all the way up to Klamath > Lake in Oregon, providing crucial sustenance to American Indians, > including the Yurok, Karuk and Klamath tribes. > The teeming salmon runs were so abundant that old-timers remember being > awakened at night by the sound of thrashing fish. Legend has it the big > spawners were so crowded together that they could be harvested with a > pitch fork during peak season. > Their numbers began declining in the mid-20th century as a result of > dams, agricultural irrigation and logging. By the mid-1980s, only a few > thousand fish were left - mostly on the Scott and Shasta. > The number of salmon now in the river is a tiny fraction of what it was > a century ago, and California coho are listed as endangered - which is why > the water level in their breeding grounds is so important. > The U.S. Geological Survey gauge on the Scott River near Snow Creek > measured an average water volume of only 5.1 cubic feet per second on Aug. > 30, with a low that day of 3.5 cfs. > That's compared to the median flow of 47 cfs on that date based on 67 > years of measurements. The lowest average volume recorded in one day on > the Scott was 3.4 cfs on Sept. 20, 2001. Measurements are recorded 96 > times a day. > A flow of 3 cubic feet per second is the equivalent of 22.44 gallons of > water rolling between the banks. In an average-size riverbed, it is barely > a trickle. > > Shasta River levels > The Shasta River hit a low daily average of 5.0 cfs on July 29, dipping > that day to 3.0 cfs near where it empties into the Klamath. > The record low for the Shasta was 1.5 cubic feet on Aug 24, 1981. The > normal flow on the Shasta at this time of year is between 25 and 30 cfs > based on more than 70 years of data. > Al Caldwell, the geological survey's deputy chief of California's > hydrologic monitoring program, said river volumes fluctuate wildly, so it > is impossible to get a complete picture until the season averages are > calculated. Although the flows increased slightly this past week - > possibly as a result of less irrigation by farmers along the banks - > Caldwell said water levels overall are still abysmally low. > "The important thing here is that we are very close to a minimum of > record at the Scott River," Caldwell said. "We're practically at the > minimum on the Shasta River and if it continues to go down we'll break the > record." > > Troubling time > The situation is particularly troubling for anglers, Indian tribes and > environmentalists given the dismal state of the California fishery. > Devastating declines in the number of spawning salmon in both the Klamath > and Sacramento river basins forced regulators to ban almost all ocean > fishing of chinook salmon in California and Oregon for the past two years. > The Scott and Shasta rivers are important not just as spawning grounds, > but because the two tributaries are a main source of cold water for the > Klamath, which is having terrible problems with algae blooms associated > with warm, pooling water. > Low water isn't just a problem on the far North Coast. A declining > snowpack has meant the Russian, Eel, Napa, Salinas and Gualala rivers and > many tributaries around the state are hurting for water. But it is a > particular problem along the Klamath, where the consequences are > comparatively dire. > Environmentalists and local Indian tribes have been fighting for years > to stop water diversions for irrigation. In 2002, 33,000 fish went > belly-up after the Bush administration slashed releases to the river. > Still, ranchers exercising water rights adjudicated in the 1930s > typically lower the rivers by sucking up groundwater during the summer. > "It's been a chronically bad problem," said Pat Higgins, a fisheries > biologist who works for five lower basin Indian tribes on water- and > dam-related issues. "It's worse this year than it has been in the last 10 > years." > > Restoration work > But there has been progress. Over the past decade, many ranchers have > joined efforts to screen agricultural pump intakes to avoid sucking in > baby fish. They've also made efforts to stop soil erosion, which can silt > up rocky spawning grounds, and restore shady riverside forests that help > lower water temperatures. Some help transport fish trapped in "dewatered" > streambeds. > Negotiations are under way between U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar > and the various stakeholders to remove four small dams - Iron Gate, Copco > I, Copco II and J.C. Boyle - built on the Klamath starting in 1909. The > enormously complicated deal would restore 300 miles of spawning habitat. > But the dams probably won't be removed for another 12 years. With the > expectation of at least one more month of hot, dry conditions, time may be > running out. > "Until you fix the passage problem and take out the four dams, it's > those tributaries where we really ought to be focusing our restoration > efforts," > said Chuck Bonham, the senior attorney for Trout Unlimited in Berkeley. > "We're going to have to round the corner here and start doing the tough > stuff." > > For a USGS graph showing flows in real time, go to links.sfgate.com/ZIBY > or links.sfgate.com/ZIBZ. > > E-mail Peter Fimrite at > pfimrite at sfchronicle.com. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > Copyright 2009 SF Chronicle > > > From tstokely at att.net Mon Sep 14 11:09:19 2009 From: tstokely at att.net (Tom Stokely) Date: Mon, 14 Sep 2009 11:09:19 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Good News- They're Hopping on the Klamath! Message-ID: <4351900D0F0F42419FBD5E98E4C8BC49@homeuserPC> They're Hopping on the Klamath Crescent City Triplicate-9/11/09 By Kurt Madar The Klamath River is back, with fishermen from all over hoping to catch a big fall-run chinook. After a couple of years of lower-than-expected catches, the Klamath is once again full of salmon. The run is so strong that the Yurok tribe has already pulled its allocation of 30,900 fish. "Fishing on the river hasn't been this good in a long time," said Rick Nielsen, of Sacramento, who has been fishing the mouth of the Klamath for the last 30 years. Oh, and there are steelhead trout to be caught in the Klamath as well. "Today hasn't been as good as this weekend," Nielsen said. "I haven't seen anyone even get a bite." The fish were coming upriver in droves over the weekend, he said, with anglers hooking 150 fish Saturday and 125 Sunday. That number dropped to only seven fish Monday, according to officials. But Nielsen isn't worried because the salmon were expected to start running again within a day or two. According to California Department of Fish and Game fisheries biologist Sara Borok, 1,409 adult fall-run chinook salmon and 749 2-year-olds (jacks) had been harvested by sport fishermen as of Wednesday. "Jacks are not counted as part of the quota," Borok said. "We keep track because they predict next year's returning 3-year-olds." Last year the adult harvest for the same time period was much lower, with only 662 fall-run chinook caught as of Sep. 9.? The jack catch was 1,292 by the same point, a predictor of this year's higher catch of 3-year-olds. But Borok said that despite the jack total being down, it is "still a good number, very promising." Borok does not believe that the in-river sport fishing quota of 30,800 fish is going to be caught by the time the season is over Dec. 31. That is not because people aren't trying. The parking area that fishermen use to make the half-hour soft-sand trudge to the mouth of the Klamath was packed Tuesday with cars and trucks sporting license plates from all three West Coast states and beyond. The "bankies" (a nickname given by charter boat companies to shore-bound anglers) aren't the only fishermen vying for salmon. Numerous charter companies are also operating, and according to Fish and Game officials, catching 15-20 fish a day. "The reason that you are seeing people from all over is that the Klamath/Trinity drainage is it in California right now for salmon fishing,"?Borok said. The Smith River is also open for fall-run fishing, but until a good rainfall raises the flow rate, fish won't be starting upriver. Little Ray's Tackle Box owner Tommy Chew said that this is the best season he has seen since 2002. "It's going really well," Chew said from his Klamath Glen store. "This is sort of like my Christmas." Chew agrees with Borok that "there is no way the quota will be caught." "Not because it's a bad run, or that we don't have a lot of fishermen, 30,800 salmon is just a lot of fish," Chew said. "To be honest we have a lot more fishermen here than in years past." Aaron Funk, owner of the Kamp Klamath RV park near the mouth of the Klamath, has seen a "tremendous amount of fish coming through." Despite the fact that salmon fishing helps to extend the tourist season past Labor Day and even into October, Funk feels that the area isn't taking full advantage of having the only fishable salmon river in California. "We need to get the word out that we are the only river in California where people can fish," Funk said. "We definitely get people from all over, I have one guest from Germany that is here specifically for the salmon, but we need to advertise that we are the only game in town."# http://www.triplicate.com/20090911106924/News/Local-News/Theyer-Hopping-on-the-Klamath -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sari at sisqtel.net Wed Sep 16 17:28:13 2009 From: sari at sisqtel.net (Sari Sommarstrom) Date: Wed, 16 Sep 2009 16:28:13 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Research: What Is The Impact of Prolonged Fish Harvest on Fish Population Genetics? Message-ID: <5.2.1.1.2.20090916162651.02e8edd8@pop.sisqtel.net> THE COLUMBIA BASIN BULLETIN: Weekly Fish and Wildlife News www.cbbulletin.com September 11, 2009 Issue No. 499 ------------------------ * Research: What Is The Impact Of Prolonged Fish Harvest On Fish Population Genetics? What are the long-term evolutionary implications of prolonged fishing for the fish that humans and, perhaps more importantly, diverse ecosystems depend on? Researchers say that for many of the types of fish bought in stores or ordered in restaurants, the chance that an individual fish dies from fishing is several times higher than dying of natural causes. This may seem obvious to most (they had to get to the table somehow), but what may not be apparent is that the pursuit of consumer-friendly fish products is having a massive impact on fish populations around the world. By repeatedly choosing only the biggest fish, or only those found in certain habitats, the fisheries industry may be permanently altering the genetic composition of fish populations, researchers say. A group of international scientists convened at the 2008 American Fisheries Society Annual Meeting to address this issue, and contributions to the symposium are now available online in an August 2009 special issue of Evolutionary Applications. Articles from Toward Darwinian Fisheries Management, a special issue of Evolutionary Applications (2:3), can be freely downloaded at www.evolutionaryapplications.org or http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/119423602/home Several groups of scientists focused on teasing apart how much of the shift in fish morphology, development and behavior that has been documented over the years is due to genetic versus non-genetic changes. Long-term genetic changes may be more problematic since these may not be reversible and they make predicting the composition of fish stocks in the future very difficult. Equally contentious among scientists was distinguishing between changes that were caused by artificial selection due to fishing per se, versus environmental influences such as habitat destruction or climate change. The articles in the special issue use multiple approaches to address these concerns and together come to the conclusion that in many cases, fish stocks are indeed evolving in response to the artificial selection pressure imposed by fishing. Shifts in yield-determining traits such as growth and maturation are evident, and how quickly these changes manifest depends on the type of fishing gear and the rate of harvest. Given the uncertainty surrounding the future sustainability of wild fish stocks, fisheries evolution scientists in the August 2009 Evolutionary Applications issue make several key recommendations, including: -- protect a portion of the stock through the creation of non-fished marine protected areas, -- protect late-maturing and slow-growing individuals, -- fish less. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Fri Sep 18 13:32:55 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Fri, 18 Sep 2009 13:32:55 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] California Agricultural Employment Message-ID: <002701ca389f$351785d0$9f469170$@net> According to today's report from California's Employment Development Department, statewide agricultural employment declined 0.4% in the past year. Overall statewide employment declined 5.0%, with the biggest drop in construction employment at 18.5%. Rather interesting in considering the fallacious claims of Western San Joaquin agri-businesses and their paid demonstrators. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From tstokely at att.net Tue Sep 22 10:04:18 2009 From: tstokely at att.net (Tom Stokely) Date: Tue, 22 Sep 2009 10:04:18 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Farm baron gets high-level help Message-ID: Farm baron gets high-level help Contra Costa Times-9/19/09 By Mike Taugher Acting at the request of Beverly Hills billionaire and Kern County water baron Stewart Resnick, U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein is seeking a high-level scientific review of new endangered-species permits that farmers and others blame for water shortages. The Sept. 11 request to two members of President Barack Obama's Cabinet carries striking parallels to a 2001 gambit, reportedly initiated by former Vice President Dick Cheney, to seek a similar review in hopes of relieving pressure on water supplies for farmers in the Klamath River basin. That review sowed initial doubt about the environmental permits on the Klamath and led to a temporary, and controversial, increase in water supplies. Critics say Resnick is trying to use the science review process to expose potential flaws that can be used to challenge the Delta permits, known as "biological opinions," in court, or the court of public opinion, as part of a campaign to loosen permit conditions and increase the flow of Delta water to San Joaquin Valley farmers. "Part of what he's asking is questions that will give him leverage to overturn the biological opinions," said Glen Spain, northwest regional director for the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Association, a commercial salmon group. "We're not afraid of a science review. But you have to ask the questions that have to be asked but never have been answered - how much water do we have to leave in the Delta, not how much water do we take out." The request, which follows the Obama administration's refusal to rewrite the two biological opinions that regulate water deliveries from the Delta, specifically tells Cabinet secretaries of Resnick's desire to complete an initial study within six months and encloses his team's ideas on how a series of three studies could be designed. In addition to being one of the state's most influential individual farmers, Resnick is a major campaign contributor and owns the largest share of the Kern Water Bank, an underground storage facility that the state Department of Water Resources turned over to Resnick and other Kern County water interests in the mid-1990s. Resnick has a huge stake in the outcome of numerous lawsuits swirling over environmental regulations in the Delta. One group that has filed some of those lawsuits, the Coalition for a Sustainable Delta, is housed in Resnick's Bakersfield offices. "He's an individual with very deep ties to a number of politicians, and obviously he's using those connections to get something he wants," said Dave Levinthal, a spokesman for the Center of Responsive Politics, which monitors money in politics. "It's a lot easier for you to do what's being done here because you have status, and you've purchased that status." In a letter forwarded by Feinstein to the Obama administration, Resnick accuses the agencies of using "sloppy science" to inappropriately attribute the Delta's environmental problems to state and federal water projects. "I believe that the (National Research Council) is the only body that has the reputation, credibility and expertise to conduct a truly independent science review in the requisite time frame," Resnick wrote. The research council's reputation for credibility, rigor, integrity and independence is hardly in question, but several experts raised concerns about the advisability of a research council review. "It's a completely reasonable thing to do, but we've done it," said Bruce Herbold, a fisheries biologist with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, who was on a panel of scientists that reviewed the Delta smelt permit issued in December. Convening another science panel would either take Delta experts away from important ongoing work or would take a long time to bring outside scientists up to speed on a highly complex problem, Herbold said. The new Delta permits were issued last December and in June after previous versions were invalidated by a federal court because they failed to protect Delta smelt, salmon and other fish from extinction. Despite claims to the contrary, those permits have had relatively little impact this year, having cost water users several hundred thousand acre-feet of water in a year when their overall supply is down more than 1 million acre-feet. The bigger problem this year is a run of three dry years. Still, the permits will cut deeper into water supplies in average years and wet years and will, over the long term, substantially reduce water supplies to California's farms and cities. A panel of the National Research Council would likely hold the permits to a higher standard than is required by endangered species laws, something farmers say is a good idea given the potential economic impact they carry. Endangered-species laws require the "best available" science be used, while a research council review could demand more certainty in any conclusions that are reached. "If every decision made under the Endangered Species Act had to withstand that rigorous level of review, there would be no decisions under the Endangered Species Act," said J.B. Ruhl, a Florida State University law professor who was part of the research council committee that studied the Klamath permits. "The Endangered Species Act would grind to a complete halt," he added. Before issuing the permits in December and in June, federal agency managers went beyond the law's requirements by seeking outside peer reviews, at least in part because of the certainty that any decision they reached would be challenged in court. Like the conflict in the Delta, the Klamath was the scene of massive farmer protests in the early 2000s after endangered species permits for salmon and suckers cut into farmers' water supplies by requiring, on one hand, that water be kept in storage to benefit one kind of fish and, on the other, that river flows be increased for other kinds of fish. Either of those requirements can affect water supply, but in the Klamath and in the Delta both of them are in play, further cutting into how much water goes to farms. Lacking options to get around the Klamath permits' conditions and increase water deliveries to farms, Cheney opted in 2001 to get an outside scientific review, The Washington Post reported six years later. It paid off in increased farm deliveries in 2002. In the Klamath, the research council made an initial finding in 2002 that the regulations were too focused on the level of river flows, a conclusion that water managers interpreted to mean they could reduce river flows further. That decision was blamed for a salmon kill-off later that year. "The Bureau of Reclamation did not faithfully apply ... the NRC's conclusions," Ruhl said. Courts have since been running the river. "The genius of the Klamath thing was the way they asked the questions," said Jeff Mount, a UC Davis geologist who also was on the NRC committee. "Someone who is clever can design the questions in a way they can get the answer they're looking for, or that they're hoping for." "I hate it that I feel like we were manipulated for political reasons," Mount said, adding that the panel's final report was comprehensive. Mount and others praised the NRC's independence, but he said a study that relied on scientists not familiar with the Delta would take too long. A critical scientific review could find flaws, but there is little opportunity in the Delta for "advocacy science" to creep into permits as it did in the Klamath because Delta science takes place is a more rigorous environment, Mount said"I believe that A Feinstein spokesman said there was nothing unusual about forwarding Resnick's concerns and recommendations for a study design because he "has been acting as a spokesman for many of the farmers here." Feinstein is seeking $750,000 in next year's budget for the study, but she asked Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Commerce Secretary Gary Locke to begin work on a study now. "She thinks it's good to have an independent study," said Gil Duran, the Feinstein spokesman. He rejected any comparisons to the Klamath or Cheney's involvement. The final report on the Klamath by the National Research Council concluded, among other things, that endangered fish could not recover unless regulators broadened their focus to include other environmental threats. That is exactly the case that many of the Delta's largest water users have been making - that they are bearing the brunt of regulators' rules even though there are plenty of other problems to deal with. They might be right. The Delta is under assault by many environmental threats. But the permits acknowledge that water deliveries from the federal Central Valley Project and the state-owned State Water Project are not the sole cause of the Delta's decline. And the Delta smelt permit makes the case that the projects worsen other environmental problems, like pollution and invasive species, by reducing and altering flows. Still, relatively little attention is paid to upstream water diverters. The projects cranked about 6 million acre-feet of water a year out of the Delta in a series of record-breaking years recently that coincided with the collapse of fish populations, but about 9 million acre-feet of water is taken out each year before it ever reaches the Delta by San Francisco, the East Bay Municipal Utility District, Sacramento and upstream farm districts, all of which have so far remained unaffected by the Delta's crisis.# http://www.contracostatimes.com/california/ci_13377530?nclick_check=1http://www.c-win.org/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From PManza at usbr.gov Fri Sep 25 10:06:03 2009 From: PManza at usbr.gov (Manza, Peggy L) Date: Fri, 25 Sep 2009 11:06:03 -0600 Subject: [env-trinity] Trinity River Release Message-ID: Beginning Monday Sep 28, 2009, please make all releases from Trinity Reservoir through the Auxiliary Outlet Works. Ordered by: Peggy Manza Note: Temperature control -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mdowdle at tcrcd.net Mon Sep 28 10:04:52 2009 From: mdowdle at tcrcd.net (Mark Dowdle - TCRCD) Date: Mon, 28 Sep 2009 10:04:52 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Low flows in Shasta River stalling chinook in pools Message-ID: <4AC0ECB4.8070606@tcrcd.net> ** *Concerns pool over salmon* *Eureka Times-Standard-9/26/09* *By John Driscoll* A heavy run of Chinook salmon into a parched Klamath River tributary have fishery managers watching for signs of a possible fish kill and working to get additional water into the river. Since Sept. 4, at least 1,200 fall Chinook have passed through the Shasta River weir, with another 100 per day expected. Radio tags on some of the fish have shown that all of the fish are packed into pools in a 1.5- to 2-mile section of the river, said California Department of Fish and Game biologist Mark Pisano. The Shasta River has seen very low flows this year, at least partly because of an ongoing drought. But conservation groups have also pointed to regular irrigation withdrawals as depleting flows, and Fish and Game has worked out agreements with irrigators to cut back on the amount of water they use before the end of the season on Oct. 1. ?We're very near a tipping point,? Pisano said. The concern is that if warm-water-related diseases were to break out, crowded conditions could spread the diseases through the fish rapidly and devastate a strong run of salmon. Pisano said that cool mornings have helped prevent the water from being unbearable for fish. He said that a handful of fish have died -- but not more than what is typically associated with natural mortality from the rigors of the migration from the ocean into the middle Klamath River. California Department of Water Resources Shasta Valley Water Master Ira Alexander said that his hands are tied by court adjudication over water rights in the basin, called the Shasta River Decree. ?We only have the authority to enforce the decree,? Alexander said. Shasta Valley Resource Conservation District Administrator Adriane Garayalde said that some irrigators are scaling back their diversions, which is easier with new systems than old systems. She said that another diverter shut off last night, and the water reduction should begin to show in the lower river soon. ?We've been trying to do more,? Garayalde said, ?but the problem is we're just in a really, really dry year.? There are about 30,000 irrigated acres in the Shasta River Valley, most of which are planted with alfalfa and grain. Agreements brokered by Fish and Game with irrigators to leave more water in the river may now be beginning to take effect, Pisano said, and the department will continue to seek more water. Pisano said that those actions should help improve conditions. ?As conditions are right now, we're at the higher end of what they can deal with,? said Malena Marvin with Klamath Riverkeeper, a conservation group monitoring the situation. The group raised concerns about extremely low flows in the Shasta and Scott rivers in late summer before salmon began moving into the Klamath tributaries. Marvin said that it's critical to do something before a fish kill starts. Marvin said that such a strong run of fish should not be squandered by poor water management, especially in light of the recent restrictions on ocean salmon fishing over the past two years. Biologists have been on higher alert for the possibility of a fish kill in the Klamath River basin since 2002, when low flows and warm water kept a big run of salmon packed into cold-water pools. A disease outbreak that followed killed at least 68,000 Chinook salmon that year.# http://www.times-standard.com/ci_13426809?IADID=Search-www.times-standard.com-www.times-standard.com From Charles_Chamberlain at fws.gov Mon Sep 28 13:21:05 2009 From: Charles_Chamberlain at fws.gov (Charles_Chamberlain at fws.gov) Date: Mon, 28 Sep 2009 13:21:05 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Mainstem Trinity River redd survey update 09/28/2009 Message-ID: Hi all, Fall 2009 salmon spawning surveys of the mainstem Trinity River are underway. These are conducted collaboratively by the Arcata Fish and Wildlife Office, California Department of Fish and Game, Yurok Tribal Fisheries Program, Hoopa Valley Tribal Fisheries Department, and the Shasta-Trinity National Forest. Our first within-season update for the 2009 redd survey is available from the Arcata Fish and Wildlife Office Website at the link below. Click on "Trinity River 2009 Redd Survey Update" near the bottom of the page. http://www.fws.gov/arcata/fisheries/projectUpdates.html Cheers! Charlie Charlie Chamberlain Fish Biologist - U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Arcata Fish & Wildlife Office 1655 Heindon Road Arcata, CA 95521 Charles_Chamberlain at fws.gov Phone: (707) 825-5110 Fax: (707) 822-8411 www.fws.gov/arcata/fisheries -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sari at sisqtel.net Mon Sep 28 15:48:53 2009 From: sari at sisqtel.net (Sari Sommarstrom) Date: Mon, 28 Sep 2009 14:48:53 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Oregonian op-ed: Facing the facts on the future of Northwest salmon Message-ID: <5.2.1.1.2.20090928144446.02d5d1b0@pop.sisqtel.net> >The Oregonian >Op-Ed >September 28, 2009 > > >http://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/index.ssf/2009/09/facing_the_facts_on_the_future.html > oped ? Facing the facts on the future of Northwest salmon By Guest Opinion September 28, 2009, 9:30AM THE OREGONIAN What does the future hold for West Coast salmon as the population continues to grow? Over the past 135 years there have been many salmon recovery plans. During the past two decades their frequency has increased. The Clinton administration offered several detailed plans. The Bush administration tweaked the Clinton plans and offered several even more detailed ones. Now the Obama administration has tweaked the final Bush plan and offered its own with a few new wrinkles. Good luck. Not one of these plans has much of a chance of achieving its publicly stated goal. Why is it that experts, behind closed doors and off the record, pretty much agree that they will not be successful? To find out why, we need to consider what we learned from Joe Friday. Radio, television and movie detective extraordinaire Joe Friday demanded and provided "just the facts" as he sleuthed out truth amid the gossip and hearsay of criminal investigations. Scientists (the experts) who are tasked with informing the public and policy-makers about natural policy issues should attempt to do the same -- just the facts -- the straightforward, inflexible, sometimes unpleasant realities. Let's use a Joe Friday approach to the salmon crisis. Fact 1: Wild salmon in California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho and southern British Columbia are in serious trouble. South of the Canadian border, most runs are less than 10 percent of their pre-1850 levels and more than two dozen are listed as threatened or endangered under the U.S. Endangered Species Act. Similarly, several runs in British Columbia are candidates for listing under the Canadian Species at Risk Act. Worse, from California to British Columbia, many runs have disappeared, and more will follow unless there is a reversal of the long-term downward trajectory. Fact 2: The meager state of salmon runs along the West Coast is not a new situation. The decline in wild salmon numbers started with the California gold rush in 1848; the causes included water pollution, habitat loss, over-fishing, dams, irrigation projects, predation on salmon by many species, competition with hatchery-produced salmon and non-native fish species, and many others. Fact 3: If society wishes to do anything meaningful about moving wild salmon off their current long-term downward trend, then something must be done about the unrelenting growth in the human population level along the West Coast. Currently, Oregon, Washington, Idaho and British Columbia are home to 15 million humans. Assuming likely reproductive rates and continuing immigration to the Pacific Northwest, in 2100 this region's human population will be somewhere between 50 million and 100 million: a quadrupling by the end of this century, barely 90 years from now. Similarly, extrapolating population growth rates for California, by 2100 that state alone will be home to over 160 million people. Fact 4: If the population levels in California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho and British Columbia increase as expected, the options for restoring salmon runs to significant, sustainable levels are greatly constrained. By 2100, from California to British Columbia, there could easily be 200 million to 250 million people. With so many more people inhabiting the West Coast, consider the demand for houses, schools, stadiums, expressways, planes, trains, automobiles, coffee shops, fast-food restaurants, malls, air conditioning, drinking water, pipelines, computer chips, home entertainment systems, ski resorts, golf courses, sewer treatment plants and office buildings for government employees. Society's options for sustaining wild salmon in significant numbers would be just about nonexistent. Good water quality would be achievable, as would maintaining prosperous populations of many non-native fish species (walleye, smallmouth bass and American shad) better adapted to altered aquatic environments, but the possibilities for abundant wild salmon would be severely constrained. Whatever policy-makers propose to do about the 2009 collapse of West Coast salmon runs, these four facts cannot be ignored. Policy-makers should demand from scientists realistic and honest assessments of the current and future conditions for salmon. Joe Friday was a tough, no-nonsense professional. Those of us who provide the public and policy-makers with the best available information about salmon ought to follow his lead: "just the facts." Robert Lackey is a professor in the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife at Oregon State University and is a former senior scientist with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From acaswr at yahoo.com Mon Sep 28 18:35:04 2009 From: acaswr at yahoo.com (lou jacobson) Date: Mon, 28 Sep 2009 18:35:04 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [env-trinity] Redwood Coast Energy Authority Now Hiring Message-ID: <568646.53627.qm@web32105.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Hello all, This is a great opportunity and I wanted to share it with everyone on this list. The turn around is a bit quick but hey most of us are familiar with this type of thing :) Lou RCEA Energy Alert [Note: You are receiving this Energy Alert because at some point you requested information from the Redwood Coast Energy Authority. If you would like to be removed from the RCEA Energy Alertdistribution list please click the link at the bottom of the page or e-mail us at remove at redwoodenergy.org] Redwood Coast Energy Authority Now Hiring RCEA is accepting applications for one new full-time four-month limited-term position who will assist in the preparation of a regional application for a California Energy Commission ARRA-funded Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant (EECBG) for small cities and counties. This application will be submitted on behalf of eligible jurisdictions in a seven-county area under the coordination of the North Coast Regional Integrated Water Management Plan Collaboration. This Energy Specialist (ARRA) position is responsible for performing desktop project reviews of multiple municipal energy efficiency projects involving complex energy use and efficiency calculations; preparing project feasibility documents; ranking projects for cost effectivenes; determining available rebates and incentives for eligible projects; and preparing this information for integration into the overall EECBG application. This position requires education to at least a Bachelor Degree in Engineering, Energy Management or related discipline/coursework from a four-year college; and a minimum of two years experience in energy efficiency project analysis or implementation. Interviews will be held during the week of October 5, 2009, and the position is expected to start by mid-October. Click to Download: * Application * Position Description Resume, application, & cover letter must be received at RCEA (517 5th Street, Eureka) by 5:00 pm on Monday, October 5, 2009. Emailed applications are acceptable, and should be sent to dboyd at redwoodenergy.orgby the above deadline. This email was sent to ljacobson at redwoodenergy.org. To cancel your subscription to this eMail campaign, click hereor copy the following link and paste it into your browser. http://www.redwoodenergy.org/RemoveMe.asp?ContactID=2974&CampID=25&MsgID=240&SubmitRequest=Delete This email is sent via: -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: ~WRD000.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 823 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Tue Sep 29 18:42:22 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Tue, 29 Sep 2009 18:42:22 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] SF Chronicle 09 29 09 Message-ID: <005401ca416f$428b6f50$c7a24df0$@net> Water interests argue new state dam proposals S.F. Chronicle-9/29/09 By Kelly Zito Thirty years ago, a chunk of chain, an eyebolt and Mark Dubois helped end the era of big dam building in California. Dubois, a bearded, 6-foot-8, 30-year-old river guide from Sacramento, chained himself to a rocky outcropping on the north bank of the Stanislaus River and stayed there for a week, determined to prevent the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers from filling the canyons behind New Melones Dam and submerging the limestone caves, verdant meadows and petroglyphs of the river valley. Dubois lost that fight: New Melones had been approved in the 1940s and was well under way when he and the nascent Friends of the River got involved. But he and hundreds of others who celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Stanislaus Campaign next month believe their work is echoing through a new generation as another dam debate emerges in California. "We didn't win 30 years ago, but the world has changed," Dubois said in a telephone interview from his home on Bainbridge Island in Washington state. "Even though (Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger) is pushing these dams, people know they don't make sense." As California grapples with an aging water-delivery network, growing population, worsening water quality, a drought and the potentially far-reaching effects of global climate change, dams are again on the table. Last month Schwarzenegger insisted he would not sign off on any major overhaul of the water system without money for new dams and reservoirs. The governor has the support of conservatives and the vast Central Valley, where many farmers are convinced that new, man-made lakes will help offset dry spells and ease the federal rulings that have cut water pumped through the ailing Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. But environmentalists and their liberal backers contend dams are a costly, ecologically dicey option set against the backdrop of California's unprecedented budget cuts and alarms over the decline of fisheries, waterways and water quality. By most accounts, New Melones was not the boon promised. When federal engineers studied the project, they far overestimated the water supply and underestimated demand. As a result, for years much of the water has gone to flush out the delta and to fulfill contracts in Stockton and elsewhere; little went to local water suppliers. "It wasn't surprising to us at all," said Steve Evans, conservation director at Friends of the River. "New Melones was a project looking for a purpose." The several dams under consideration do not have quite the same scenic or recreational pull as the Stanislaus River. But memories of landscapes lost behind dams die hard. River advocates point to the flooding of picturesque Hetch Hetchy Valley for San Francisco's water interests and Friant Dam's catastrophic effect on salmon in the San Joaquin River. Dams "make sense if you don't care about taking care of the natural world," according to Ronald Stork, senior policy advocate for Friends of the River. These days, however, the debate has shifted to the economics of dam building. California already has upward of 1,000 dams that provide water supply, flood control and hydropower - built on the most productive and accessible sites, experts say. Each time another dam is added to a river, billions are spent and the water supplied is minimal. "We have to look further than this reflexive, historical impulse that says building dams will solve all our problems," said Assemblyman Jared Huffman, D-San Rafael. "It's not true. Water recycling, conservation, efficiency... dwarf the amount of water we could get through any (reservoirs) we build." Conservatives and their supporters however, think they've forged a reasonable compromise that, though expensive, will add an important tool for managing the state's water system. "The magnitude of the problem is so enormous that we can't afford to say no to one solution," said Chris Scheuring, environmental attorney for the California Farm Bureau. Scheuring's group and others stand behind three big projects they argue would not inflict the environmental harm of past dams: The expansion of Los Vaqueros Reservoir in Contra Costa County, the Temperance Flat dam on the San Joaquin River above Friant Dam, and Sites Reservoir, which would flood the Antelope Valley in Colusa County. The $3.8 billion Sites proposal, in particular, marks a departure from the norm because it is an off-stream reservoir that does not obstruct a river. Through canals connected to the Sacramento River, the Department of Water Resources says, water would be pumped into the lake where it would be used to supplement flows into the delta or allow deeper, colder reservoirs to hold back water for critical salmon runs. Reservoir supporters say Sites presents the best of all worlds. And they seem determined to ensure that Sites and similar projects make it into any water legislation package. "We're not going to approve another water bond package for billions that haven't improved water reliability," said state Sen. Dave Cogdill, R-Modesto. "These are not high dams on wild and scenic rivers. We're talking about a very responsible approach." Peter Gleick, president of Oakland's Pacific Institute, a nonpartisan water think tank, acknowledges that Sites or Temperance Flat could add a certain amount of flexibility to the system. But, he says, that slight improvement simply isn't worth the economic, environmental and political cost. "Many of dams we built in the last century brought us great benefit," Gleick said. "But I think the era of new dams is over in California." Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Tue Sep 29 19:02:45 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Tue, 29 Sep 2009 19:02:45 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Eureka Times Standard 09 26 09 Message-ID: <006e01ca4172$1b19e700$514db500$@net> Concerns pool over salmon Eureka Times-Standard-9/26/09 By John Driscoll A heavy run of chinook salmon into a parched Klamath River tributary have fishery managers watching for signs of a possible fish kill and working to get additional water into the river. Since Sept. 4, at least 1,200 fall chinook have passed through the Shasta River weir, with another 100 per day expected. Radio tags on some of the fish have shown that all of the fish are packed into pools in a 1.5- to 2-mile section of the river, said California Department of Fish and Game biologist Mark Pisano. The Shasta River has seen very low flows this year, at least partly because of an ongoing drought. But conservation groups have also pointed to regular irrigation withdrawals as depleting flows, and Fish and Game has worked out agreements with irrigators to cut back on the amount of water they use before the end of the season on Oct. 1. "We're very near a tipping point," Pisano said. The concern is that if warm-water-related diseases were to break out, crowded conditions could spread the diseases through the fish rapidly and devastate a strong run of salmon. Pisano said that cool mornings have helped prevent the water from being unbearable for fish. He said that a handful of fish have died -- but not more than what is typically associated with natural mortality from the rigors of the migration from the ocean into the middle Klamath River. California Department of Water Resources Shasta Valley Water Master Ira Alexander said that his hands are tied by court adjudication over water rights in the basin, called the Shasta River Decree. "We only have the authority to enforce the decree," Alexander said. Shasta Valley Resource Conservation District Administrator Adriane Garayalde said that some irrigators are scaling back their diversions, which is easier with new systems than old systems. She said that another diverter shut off last night, and the water reduction should begin to show in the lower river soon. "We've been trying to do more," Garayalde said, "but the problem is we're just in a really, really dry year." There are about 30,000 irrigated acres in the Shasta River Valley, most of which are planted with alfalfa and grain. Agreements brokered by Fish and Game with irrigators to leave more water in the river may now be beginning to take effect, Pisano said, and the department will continue to seek more water. Pisano said that those actions should help improve conditions. "As conditions are right now, we're at the higher end of what they can deal with," said Malena Marvin with Klamath Riverkeeper, a conservation group monitoring the situation. The group raised concerns about extremely low flows in the Shasta and Scott rivers in late summer before salmon began moving into the Klamath tributaries. Marvin said that it's critical to do something before a fish kill starts. Marvin said that such a strong run of fish should not be squandered by poor water management, especially in light of the recent restrictions on ocean salmon fishing over the past two years. Biologists have been on higher alert for the possibility of a fish kill in the Klamath River basin since 2002, when low flows and warm water kept a big run of salmon packed into cold-water pools. A disease outbreak that followed killed at least 68,000 chinook salmon that year. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From tstokely at att.net Tue Sep 29 16:17:29 2009 From: tstokely at att.net (Tom Stokely) Date: Tue, 29 Sep 2009 16:17:29 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] SRF Roads Maintenance & Erosion Control Field School annc & agenda, & First Call Message-ID: <0A0D1E51EFFF45BB929EE10C3C6F04E0@homeuserPC> ----- Original Message ----- From: Dana Stolzman To: Tom Stokely Sent: Tuesday, September 29, 2009 10:47 AM Subject: SRF Roads Maintenance & Erosion Control Field School annc & agenda, & First Call SRF Road Maintenance & Erosion Control Field School -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- October 13-16 2009, Garcia River The Salmonid Restoration Federation, CA Department of Fish & Game and Pacific Watershed Associates will offer a field school to learn techniques to address culvert and road drainage practices as well as erosion control techniques. This field school will be held at Oz Farm on the Garcia River. All meals and lodging are included in the course fees. The curriculum includes conducting road sediment assessments (problem identification and prescription development); implementing fish-friendly road upgrading practices (stream crossing upgrades and improved road drainage practices to protect water quality); proper road decommissioning practices; road inspection, and maintenance practices; erosion control and erosion prevention practices, and spoils management. Throughout the course we will emphasize the concepts of making our road systems as ?hydrologically invisible? and as resilient to storm events as possible. We will also focus on educating participants about how best to address the root causes of observed erosion problems, through both maintenance and repair practices at each potential work site. Please visit the SRF website to see the field school registration form or call (707) 923-7501.? Dana Stolzman Executive Director Salmonid Restoration Federation www.calsalmon.org (707) 923-7501 (707) 923-3135 fax -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- SRF Road Maintenance & Erosion Control Field School? October 13-16 2009, Garcia River The Salmonid Restoration Federation, CA Department of Fish & Game and Pacific Watershed Associates will offer a field school to learn techniques to address culvert and road drainage practices as well as erosion control techniques. This field school will be held at Oz Farm on the Garcia River. All meals and lodging are included in the course fees. The curriculum includes conducting road sediment assessments (problem identification and prescription development); implementing fish-friendly road upgrading practices (stream crossing upgrades and improved road drainage practices to protect water quality); proper road decommissioning practices; road inspection, and maintenance practices; erosion control and erosion prevention practices, and spoils management. Throughout the course we will emphasize the concepts of making our road systems as ?hydrologically invisible? and as resilient to storm events as possible. We will also focus on educating participants about how best to address the root causes of observed erosion problems, through both maintenance and repair practices at each potential work site. Please visit the SRF website to see the field school registration form or call (707) 923-7501. Dana Stolzman Executive Director Salmonid Restoration Federation www.calsalmon.org (707) 923-7501 (707) 923-3135 fax ? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: 2009 Field School Agenda.doc Type: application/msword Size: 386 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: 2009 Field School Agenda.doc Type: application/msword Size: 39424 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: SRF & AFS First Call.pdf Type: application/pdf Size: 207613 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Wed Sep 30 08:24:59 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Wed, 30 Sep 2009 08:24:59 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] SF Chronicle 9 30 09 Klamath Dam Removal Message-ID: <001b01ca41e2$2d79ece0$886dc6a0$@net> Deal to raze 4 Klamath dams Peter Fimrite, Chronicle Staff Writer Wednesday, September 30, 2009 In what is being touted as the world's biggest dam-removal project, an agreement was reached Tuesday to remove four dams on the Klamath River and restore a 300-mile migratory route for California's beleaguered salmon. Images Thomas Willson, a Yurok Tribe member, fishes in the Klama... http://imgs.sfgate.com/c/pictures/2009/09/29_t/ba-klamath0930_g_SFCG12542648 75_t.gif Copco 1 is one of four dams on the Klamath River that wou... http://imgs.sfgate.com/graphics/utils/plus-green.gifView Larger Images * Commission proposes dramatic state tax overhaul 09.29.09 The tentative agreement was reached after a decade of negotiations among 28 parties, including American Indian tribes, farmers, fishermen and the hydroelectric company that operates the dams and distributes the water. The plan would set in motion one of the most ambitious efforts in U.S. history to restore the habitat of a federally protected species if it receives final approval by the parties in December, as expected. The dams - Iron Gate, Copco 1, Copco 2 and J.C. Boyle - have blocked salmon migration for a century along the California-Oregon border and have been blamed for much of the historic decline of chinook and coho salmon and steelhead trout in the Klamath. Under the plan, the dams operated by the utility, PacificCorp, would be dismantled beginning in 2020. The ultimate goal of the so-called Klamath Hydroelectric Settlement Agreement is to restore what has historically been the third-largest source of salmon in the lower 48 states, behind the Columbia and Sacramento rivers. Chinook once swam all the way up to Upper Klamath Lake in Oregon, providing crucial sustenance to American Indians, including the Yurok, Karuk, Klamath and Hoopa Valley tribes. "This is the deal that we have all been working on for 10 years," said Steve Rothert, the California director of American Rivers, a national nonprofit river conservation group. "There were a lot of people who didn't think we could do this, and some groups that worked actively to prevent it. It's fantastic that we've reached this spot." The groups involved in the negotiations agreed Tuesday to take the proposal to their various boards and commissions for approval and then have everybody sign the final document in December. The project, which would cost an estimated $450 million, is then expected to go through nearly three years of study and cost analysis before it lands on the desk of Interior Secretary Ken Salazar in 2012. "This agreement marks the beginning of a new chapter for the Klamath River and for the communities whose health and way of life depend on it," Salazar said Tuesday in a written statement. "This agreement would establish an open, scientifically grounded process that will help me make a fully informed decision about whether dam removal is in the public interest." Serious talk of removing the dams began in 2002 after a federally ordered change in water flow led to the death of 33,000 salmon in the river. The effort picked up momentum over the past few years after devastating declines in the number of spawning salmon in both the Klamath and Sacramento river basins. The paltry number of fish forced regulators to ban virtually all ocean fishing of chinook salmon in California and Oregon over the past two years. The four midsize dams were built along the Klamath's main stem starting in 1909, blocking off about 300 miles of salmon-spawning habitat. The dams warmed the river water, allowing destructive parasites and blooms of toxic, blue-green algae to contaminate the water. Water diversions to cities and for agriculture exacerbated the problem, according to fishery biologists. The various tribes with rights to the river have been battling for years to get the dams removed. Fishermen and environmentalists rallied to their side, but PacifiCorp and farmers along the Upper Klamath Basin fought the effort and even sought to extend the hydropower lease. Some agricultural groups still oppose the plan out of fear that it would limit irrigation and raise the cost of energy, and a few claim it is little more than a giveaway to environmental interests, but most of the stakeholders now at least support moving forward. "I cannot adequately say how impressed I am by everyone's ability to put aside their differences," said Craig Tucker, spokesman for the Karuk Tribe. "There is a long history of not getting along, of fighting over water rights. Now we are optimistic." PacifiCorp has pledged to raise $200 million of the cost of removing the dams by implementing a surcharge on its customers in California and Oregon, but the bulk of the money would come from Oregon. Tearing down the dams is expected to cost less than making the improvements necessary to comply with the federal Clean Water Act and Fish and Wildlife Agency regulations, which would require, among other things, the construction of fish ladders and screens. The utility would have to get certification from both states under the Clean Water Act to continue operating the dams, a potentially difficult proposition given the algae problems. "We've really looked at this as a business deal, and we believe it is in the best interests of our customers," said Dean Brockbank, vice president and general counsel for PacifiCorp. "The agreement we have now is a collaborative effort, and we believe it beats all of the alternatives." California would raise another $250 million from voter-approved general obligation bonds. Coming thursday: Decades after decimating salmon and spurring numerous lawsuits, Friant Dam will begin releasing more water into the San Joaquin River - California's second largest. Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/09/30/MNMM19UDKH.DTL#i xzz0SbUNA6BN Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.gif Type: image/gif Size: 4945 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image002.gif Type: image/gif Size: 4336 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image003.gif Type: image/gif Size: 6035 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image004.gif Type: image/gif Size: 54 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Wed Sep 30 09:31:08 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Wed, 30 Sep 2009 09:31:08 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] LA Times 9 30 09 Klamath Dam Removal Message-ID: <003401ca41eb$6b0d1560$41274020$@net> Utility agrees to removal of 4 Klamath River dams It won't happen until after 2020, but is seen as vital to restoring California's dwindling salmon stocks. The decommissioning would be the nation's largest and most complex dam removal project. Klamath River dam The Copco No. 1 dam near Hornbrook, Calif., and three others on the Klamath River could be removed. (Jeff Barnard / Associated Press) . Related . Map Map By Bettina Boxall September 30, 2009 | 6:06 a.m. In a major boost for California's dwindling salmon stocks, a utility company has agreed to the removal of four hydroelectric dams that for decades have blocked fish migrations on one of the West Coast's most important salmon rivers. The dam decommissioning is vital to restoring the Klamath River, which for years has been the subject of bitter feuding among farmers, fishermen and tribal interests. It would open historic salmon spawning and rearing grounds on the upper reaches of the river, which winds from southern Oregon through the Cascades and Coast Ranges to California's Pacific Coast. "We can't restore the river solely by removing the dams, but we can't restore the Klamath without removing the dams," said Steve Rothert of the environmental group American Rivers, one of 29 parties negotiating the dam settlement. Backers say the decommissioning -- which still must be approved by the federal government -- would be the nation's largest and most complex dam removal project. "We're about to make changes to the Klamath Basin that will be observable from space," said Craig Tucker of the Karuk tribe, which traditionally fished for salmon. For PacifiCorp, the Portland, Ore., utility that owns the dams, consenting to the end of the J.C. Boyle, Copco No. 1 and 2 and Iron Gate dams ultimately was a business decision. The utility, a subsidiary of billionaire Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway empire, faced litigation and expensive relicensing requirements for the dams, the oldest of which dates to 1918. "As a utility, we don't typically take dams out," said Dean Brockbank, PacifiCorp's lead negotiator. "We have achieved an agreement that is in the best interest of our customers -- the lowest cost and risk compared to the alternative." Under the draft settlement, which the parties hope to sign by the end of the year, PacifiCorp would continue to operate the dams until 2020. Then they would transfer the hydropower facilities to another entity, likely the federal government, for dismantling. The Interior Department has to make a determination that the dams' removal will be in the public interest, a sign-off that Brockbank said is not guaranteed but that the company expects to get. "This agreement marks the beginning of a new chapter for the Klamath River and for the communities whose health and way of life depend on it," Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said in a statement. The settlement terms call for PacifiCorp ratepayers in Oregon and California to pay a surcharge to finance a company contribution of up to $200 million for dam removal and river restoration. California also would provide as much as $250 million in bond money. "We're hopeful this will result in dam removal, but a number of things have to occur before that can happen," said Kirk Miller, deputy secretary of the California Natural Resources Agency. "It is a complicated matter." The dams, which range in height from 33 feet to 173 feet and are spread across 65 miles of the Klamath, haven't just kept chinook and coho salmon out of the upper river and its tributaries. They also have hurt water quality. In the summer, stagnant pools of warm water behind the dams become a breeding ground for toxic algae. The Klamath Basin made national headlines early this decade when federal water managers cut irrigation deliveries to preserve fish flows, sparking protests from irate farmers. The following year, when more water was released to agriculture, tens of thousands of salmon died, floating in the river's shallow waters and washing up on its banks. "We are redefining what restoration and collaboration means in a place that has historically been the West's most notorious watershed for lawsuits, civil strife, guns in public," said Chuck Bonham of Trout Unlimited, an environmental group that works to preserve fish habitat. Along with the Columbia and the Sacramento rivers, the Klamath has traditionally been one of the country's most productive salmon rivers. But the West Coast salmon stocks have been in such poor shape that for the last three years, California has canceled its commercial salmon fishing season. The Klamath has "been dammed and polluted nearly to death," said Glen Spain, northwest regional director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Assns. The dam settlement follows an earlier restoration agreement that also is due to be signed by the end of the year. The restoration proposal has come under fire from some environmental groups that complain it preserves irrigation deliveries for Klamath Basin farms at the expense of fish and also allows continued farming in wildlife refuges with critical wetlands. "Dam removal is still tied to this albatross," said Steve Pedery of Oregon Wild. Jeffrey Mount, founding director of the UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences and a member of the American Rivers board, warned that tearing down the dams would not solve all of the Klamath's water quality problems. "There is this assumption that a miracle will occur when the dams come down," he said. "Removal of the dams does not address the broader problems of the basin." He described Upper Klamath Lake, which feeds the river, as a "big, warm, green pile of goo" that could make things worse for the fish once the dams are gone. Still, he added, "This is incredibly exciting." Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 108440 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image004.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 1543 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Wed Sep 30 09:51:36 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Wed, 30 Sep 2009 09:51:36 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Associated Press 9 30 09 Klamath Dam Removal Message-ID: <005001ca41ee$475c1780$d6144680$@net> Utility agrees to terms removing Klamath dams By JEFF BARNARD AP Environmental Writer Posted: 09/30/2009 04:08:17 AM PDT Updated: 09/30/2009 06:19:18 AM PDT MEDFORD, Ore.-The utility that owns four hydroelectric dams on the Klamath River has agreed to terms for their removal, a key milestone in efforts to restore what was once the third biggest salmon run on the West Coast and end decades of battles over scarce water. PacifiCorp, the states of California and Oregon, American Indian tribes, federal agencies, irrigators and conservation groups announced the draft agreement Wednesday. Signing is expected by the end of the year. Actual removal is not scheduled to start until 2020, and depends on full funding of the removal, a determination by the U.S. Secretary of Interior that it will actually help salmon and is in the public interest, and authorization from Congress. "This agreement marks the beginning of a new chapter for the Klamath River and for the communities whose health and way of life depend on it," Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said in a statement. "Hats off to all the stakeholders who have worked so hard to find common ground on one of the most challenging water issues of our time." PacifiCorp will not bear the estimated $450 million cost of removing the dams. Oregon has approved $180 million in surcharges on state ratepayers. Another $250 million depends on California approving general obligation bonds. "If the federal government and the states of California and Oregon sign onto this negotiated final settlement, then we will join with them and all the other stakeholder groups that may choose to sign the agreement," PacifiCorp Chairman and CEO Greg Abel said in a statement. The utility serves 1.6 million customers in Oregon, California, Washington, Idaho, Utah and Wyoming, and is owned by MidAmerican Energy Holdings Co., a unit of Warren Buffett's Omaha, Neb.-based Berkshire Hathaway Inc. "When the Klamath dams come down, it will be the biggest dam removal project the world has ever seen," Steve Rothert, California director for the conservation groups American Rivers, said in a statement. "We will be able to watch on a grand scale as a river comes back to life." Water wars have long simmered in the Klamath Basin, where the first of the dams and a federal irrigation project built in the early 20th century turned the natural water distribution upside down, draining marshes and lakes and tapping rivers for electricity to put water on dry farmland that grows potatoes, horseradish, grain, alfalfa and cattle. A drought in 2001 forced a shutoff of irrigation water to sustain threatened and endangered fish. When the irrigation was restored the next year, tens of thousands of salmon died trying to spawn in the Klamath River, which was too low and too warm to sustain them. Besides blocking salmon from the upper basin, the dams raise water temperatures to levels unhealthy for fish. Their reservoirs produce toxic algae. The fish are beset by parasites. The four dams-Copco J.P. Doyle, Copco 1, Copco 2, and Iron Gate-together produce enough electricity for 70,000 customers. Pressure has been building since PacifiCorp applied for a new 50-year federal operating license in 2004 and made no provision for fish passage, which stops at Iron Gate near the Oregon-California border. California and Oregon's governors pressed for dam removal after West Coast commercial salmon fisheries collapsed in 2006 because of declines in Klamath River returns, triggering a disaster declaration. Federal biologists mandated that fish ladders and other improvements costing $300 million be added to the dams before a federal operating license could be renewed. California water authorities have been taking a hard look at the dams' role in toxic algae plaguing the river, and river advocates have sued PacifiCorp to fix the algae problem. Final approval of the dam removal agreement is key to authorization of a separate agreement to spend $1 billion over the next decade on environmental restoration in the Klamath Basin. Some conservation groups were not happy that dam removal continues to be linked to letting farming continue on the Lower Klamath and Tule Lake national wildlife refuges, preventing restoration of wetlands that would contribute to better water quality, and guaranteed irrigation levels for farmers in the upper basin. "It's fantastic that we have attention on the Klamath Basin and might get a shot at dam removal," said Steve Pedery, conservation director of Oregon Wild in Portland. "But we really can't afford to allow dam removal be linked to making other environmental problems in the basin worse." Some details remain unresolved. It is not certain, for example, whether the federal government or some other entity will take possession of the dams to remove them. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Wed Sep 30 10:16:31 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Wed, 30 Sep 2009 10:16:31 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Sacramento Bee 09 17 09 Water District Buying Yolo Land Message-ID: <006501ca41f1$c22c08f0$46841ad0$@net> Bollibokka and Yolo and Yolo officials fear big water districts will buy up revenue-rich ag lands to aid smelt By Hudson Sangree hsangree at sacbee.com Published: Thursday, Sep. 17, 2009 - 12:00 am | Page 3B Over the years, Yolo County residents have taken pride in their restored wetlands. The Yolo Bypass Wildlife Area, for example, lines Interstate 80 between Davis and West Sacramento, its reed beds filled with migrating waterfowl. Now, however, Yolo officials see the restoration of other wetlands as a potential threat - and are taking steps to prevent it. They're worried that powerful water districts from Southern California, which draw water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, will buy up tracts of Yolo open land and flood them to create habitat for the endangered Delta smelt. Yolo County leaders fear the efforts could take farmland out of production and eliminate tax dollars, while the county is desperate for revenue. This week, Yolo County supervisors held a workshop on a proposed ordinance that would give them authority over the conversion of farmland to wetlands. "We have to have some protection," Supervisor Jim Provenza of Davis said at the meeting. Anxiety in Yolo has increased as water districts eye the rural county as a prime spot for habitat restoration. The water districts are under pressure from the state and federal governments to provide aquatic habitat for the smelt or risk losing their water supplies. " Yolo County's going to be fertile ground for these projects," Supervisor Mike McGowan said. "We're ground zero. We're the bull's-eye." The water districts care only about keeping "the plumbing moving down south," he said. The county was caught off guard in December 2007 when the Westlands Water District - which irrigates more than 600,000 acres of farmland in the San Joaquin Valley - purchased a 3,400-acre ranch in the Yolo Bypass. The bypass is a low-lying area used for flood protection, farming and habitat. Its southern portion is deemed prime for smelt because its elevation allows natural tides to sweep up the Sacramento River and inundate the land. The smelt, tiny fish key to the Delta's food chain and ecosystem, are thought to be nearing extinction. They thrive in tidal wetlands. Westlands spokeswoman Sarah Woolf said the water district has no plans to purchase any more land in Yolo. "We don't have any intention to purchase additional acreage of any kind," she said. "We want to see if this project works - to improve the health of the Delta and the species." She said she wasn't familiar with the proposed ordinance but didn't think it was necessary. "It's unfortunate, because I think everyone is trying to find a way to save the health of the Delta," she said. Yolo leaders are also worried that the Metropolitan Water District, which supplies water to 18 million people in Los Angeles and San Diego, would try to buy up swaths of land. District spokesman Bob Muir said he hadn't heard about the proposed Yolo ordinance but believed a collaborative approach is needed. That was also the message of those who spoke against the ordinance at Tuesday's workshop, including representatives of Ducks Unlimited and the California Waterfowl Association. Robin Kulakow is executive director of the Yolo Basin Foundation, a group that provides educational programs in the Yolo Bypass Wildlife Area. The area was established through public-private cooperation, she said. She told the supervisors that the ordinance would be "a step backward" and encouraged them to work with various groups to come up with solutions. "Now is not the time to make conservation efforts more complicated," she said. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Wed Sep 30 12:49:04 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Wed, 30 Sep 2009 12:49:04 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Recycling voted down Message-ID: <002601ca4207$11a571e0$34f055a0$@net> For Immediate Release: September 30, 2009 Press Office: 202-225-2095 Republicans vote against expanded water supply for drought-stricken California Attempt to score political points delays House passage of non-controversial bill to provide enough water for 24,000 households WASHINGTON, DC - Rep. George Miller (D-Martinez) issued the following statement after congressional Republicans voted against his non-controversial legislation to provide alternative water supplies to California: "When it comes to providing clean water to California, congressional Republicans have now shown their true colors. The legislation that the House voted on today would supply California with much-needed funding for alternative water supplies -- but congressional Republicans just said no. "The water projects authorized in this bill will provide 2.6 billion gallons of water per year for drought-stricken California, adding enough water to the system to meet the needs of 24,225 households. But 169 Republicans voted against it. "Instead, congressional Republicans decided to pull the same old political games and showed a complete lack of understanding of the issues at hand - the measure they defeated today could have added significant water supplies to California's Central Valley Project system. "California is in the third year of a serious drought and we're putting an inordinate amount of pressure on the Bay-Delta and on the water system as a whole. Finding solutions for these issues are too important for political stunts. "We will bring up the bill again and pass it, but Rep. Nunes and his fellow obstructionists have delayed progress for California water issues - they have voted against jobs for Californians, they have voted against expanding water supplies, they have voted against developing new technology, and they have voted against expanding our economy. They have nothing to offer California but partisan stunts. They may have delayed this bill, but they will not defeat it." H.R. 2442, the Bay Area Regional Water Recycling Program Expansion Act of 2009, builds on a successful partnership that Congress has already authorized - adding six additional water recycling projects for the Bay Area that would provide 7.2 million gallons of water per day. Water recycling projects allow local water managers to treat wastewater and use the clean, recycled water for landscape irrigation and other uses, including at golf courses, and city parks. For more information on the bill, go to: http://georgemiller.house.gov/news/2009/05/new_legislation_would_expand_i.ht ml Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Thu Oct 1 09:51:30 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Thu, 1 Oct 2009 09:51:30 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] New York Times October 1, 2009 Klamath Dams Message-ID: <002301ca42b7$6deae740$49c0b5c0$@net> Plan Outlines Removal of Four Dams on Klamath River o Linkedin o Digg o Facebook o Mixx o MySpace o Yahoo! Buzz o Permalink o Article Tools Sponsored Byhttp://graphics8.nytimes.com/adx/images/ADS/21/27/ad.212759/GB_120x60.gif By JESSE McKINLEY SAN FRANCISCO - A draft plan to remove four aging dams along the Klamath River in Oregon and California was released Wednesday, a long-awaited step toward ending a protracted dispute over the waterway. Skip to next paragraph Enlarge This Image http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/10/01/us/klamath190.jpg Jeff Barnard/Associated Press Iron Gate Dam near Hornbrook, Calif., is one of four that would be removed from the Klamath River. The dams are used to generate electricity but have been the subject of a protracted dispute. The Klamath dams, built from 1918 to 1961 along an upstream stretch of the river, are owned by PacifiCorp, which uses them to generate electricity. But they have angered Indian tribes along the river, as well as fishermen and environmentalists, who blamed them for a decline in salmon populations and subsequent economic hardships. Last year, federal and other officials announced a nonbinding agreement to remove the dams, and Wednesday's draft plan added a specific, nuts-and-bolts dimension to that agreement. In releasing the draft plan, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar called the Klamath "one of the most challenging water issues of our time." Competing interests have long debated how to manage the Klamath, a river whose salmon populations once rivaled any in the world. Environmentalists argue that the fish populations have declined because of the dams preventing upstream spawning, while farmers have pleaded for more water for irrigation and others for more electric power. The federal government has often played the unhappy role of referee. In 2002, environmentalists asserted that a significant die-off of fish had resulted from a diversion of water to farmers that was ordered by the Interior Department. Four years later, fishermen complained when low levels of salmon in the river led to government restrictions on commercial fishing. The draft plan, which was developed by representatives from about two dozen federal, state and tribal agencies, environmental groups and irrigators in discussions with officials from PacifiCorp, will go to stakeholders and the public for review. Kirk Miller, the deputy secretary and chief counsel of California Natural Resources Agency, which represented the state in negotiations, said he hoped for approval by year's end. Under the agreement, the Interior Department would study the cost and environmental impact of removing the dams, including the effect on fish populations and downstream river conditions, to help Mr. Salazar make what he called "a full informed decision." In a nod to PacifiCorp, the company would continue to operate the dams until their removal and would not be liable for any effects of the demolition. Greg Abel, the company's chief executive, said in a statement that "this is a balanced and reasonable outcome that best protects the interests of our customers," as well as "helping to peacefully resolve numerous conflicts in the Klamath basin." About $200 million of the estimated $450 million cost of removing the dams would be covered by a small surcharge on PacifiCorp's customers, most of whom reside in Oregon. The rest of the money would come from the company's customers in California and the sale of bonds there. The federal government would be required to prepare timetables for the dams' removal and plans to reduce cost overruns and dispose of sediment and debris. "The agreement calls on each of us to do our part," said Gov. Theodore R. Kulongoski of Oregon, where lawmakers have approved the PacifiCorp surcharge. Mr. Salazar has until March 2012 to decide whether to go forward with the plan. If approved, removal of the dams would begin in 2020. "We haven't seen salmon in our country for 90 years," said Jeff Mitchell, a council member for the Klamath Tribes of Oregon. "This agreement represents our best chance of finally bringing the salmon home." Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.gif Type: image/gif Size: 437 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image002.gif Type: image/gif Size: 22276 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image003.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 21452 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Fri Oct 2 10:32:09 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Fri, 2 Oct 2009 10:32:09 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Sacramento Bee 10 1 09 Clear Cutting? Message-ID: <001001ca4386$458f2c50$d0ad84f0$@net> Schwarzenegger, Sierra Pacific agree on carbon-offset project By Jim Downing jdowning at sacbee.com Published: Thursday, Oct. 1, 2009 - 12:00 am | Page 8B Last Modified: Thursday, Oct. 1, 2009 - 8:08 am Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and timber giant Sierra Pacific Industries on Wednesday evening announced the nation's largest forest carbon-offset project, meant to keep millions of tons of climate-warming gases out of the atmosphere over the next century. Forestry and some conservation groups said the deal shows the state's new rules on forest offsets, adopted last week by the Air Resources Board,will be attractive to landowners. But some environmental advocates said it's a sign that the timber industry is poised to capitalize on a provision that allows clear-cutting on land enrolled in carbon-offset programs. "This is the thing we were worried about," said Michael Endicott, resource sustainability advocate at Sierra Club California. The deal coincides with a high-profile international climate summit Schwarzenegger is hosting in Los Angeles this week. On four plots totaling 60,000 acres in Tuolumne, Tehama, Shasta and Siskiyou counties, Sierra Pacific is committing to timber management strategies that should store more carbon compared with "business as usual." "We can still manage our forests, but we have to meet or exceed the baseline conditions," said Mark Pawlicki, a spokesman for the company. Over the next five years, Sierra Pacific expects the new management practices will keep 1.5 million metric tons of carbon dioxide stored in the trees and soil that would otherwise be released into the atmosphere. That's equivalent to what's generated by burning 170 million gallons of gasoline. Additional carbon would be stored in subsequent years, with the deal constraining what Sierra Pacific can do with the land for 100 years. That stored carbon could likely be purchased as an "offset" by industrial polluters or electricity generators needing to reduce emissions under the state's "cap and trade" system. That program is slated to take effect in 2012, though details have yet to be finalized. Clear-cutting, or removing all the trees in a plot, is allowed on sections of up to 40 acres on private land in California. The offset policy doesn't change that. Land registered for a forest-offset program could be clear-cut if that represented an improvement over how the land would have been managed otherwise. For instance, a forest in an area that has been cleared every 40 years might instead be allowed to grow for 80 years before logging, a cycle that would likely store more carbon. Groups like the Sierra Club and the Center for Biological Diversity oppose clear-cutting mainly because it can damage wildlife habitat, erode forest soils and pollute waterways. By making carbon-offset revenue available only for lands logged less invasively - by cutting some trees but leaving others, for instance - the state could have discouraged clear-cutting, they argue. But other groups like the Nature Conservancy support the new rules and say they balance the need to have a program that is attractive to landowners while still maintaining environmental standards. "There's a fine line with how far you should go with additional (environmental) requirements," said Michelle Passero, the group's senior climate policy adviser, who helped craft the rules approved last week. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Fri Oct 2 10:38:28 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Fri, 2 Oct 2009 10:38:28 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] FW: Treasurer finds that water infrastructure should be paid by users, not General Fund. Message-ID: <001f01ca4387$27e38ab0$77aaa010$@net> From: "Jonas Minton" Date: October 1, 2009 8:56:57 PM PDT Subject: Treasurer finds that water infrastructure should be paid by users, not General Fund. Today State Treasurere BIl Lockyer released the 2009 Debt Affordability Report. The report finds that."further increasing the General Fund's debt burden, especially in the next three difficult budgets, would require cutting even deeper into crucial services already reeling from billions of dollars in reductions." The Treasurer therefore found that water infrastructure should be paid for by users, not the General Fund. http://www.treasurer.ca.gov/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Sun Oct 4 12:14:21 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Sun, 4 Oct 2009 12:14:21 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] New York Times Editorial October 3 2009 Message-ID: <003801ca4526$e1aee610$a50cb230$@net> Editorial End to the Klamath War Published: October 3, 2009 The announcement that four dams on the Klamath River will be removed to restore imperiled salmon runs is a victory for fish, farmers, Indian tribes and the much-maligned Endangered Species Act. The dams in Oregon and California will not come down until 2020. In the meantime, PacifiCorp, the Portland utility that owns them, has promised to improve water quality and salmon habitat. The cost could run as high as $200 million, which is roughly what the company would have been obliged to pay anyway to construct fish passage around the dams to increase the salmon's chances of survival. All sides will also benefit from a separate agreement that will divvy up scarce water flows in the Klamath. Taken together, the two agreements mean that we can finally see the end of a dispute that grabbed national headlines in 2001, when federal water managers cut irrigation deliveries to farmers to preserve water flows for two threatened or endangered fish species - coho salmon and a less majestic critter known as the suckerfish. Cries that farmers were being sacrificed to the lowly suckerfish drew Karl Rove and other Bush politicos into the fray. More water was released to the farmers, at which point 33,000 fish died downstream. At which point, too, wiser heads began to see that what was needed was a water-sharing plan that - coupled with federal aid to farmers who agreed to let their land go fallow in dry seasons - would guarantee everyone enough to survive. Neither the restoration plan nor the plan to remove the dams would have been possible without the Endangered Species Act. The act requires the federal government to identify species at severe risk and then devise ways to shape human behavior to give these species a chance to survive. In this case it has worked brilliantly. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From Charles_Chamberlain at fws.gov Mon Oct 5 13:08:29 2009 From: Charles_Chamberlain at fws.gov (Charles_Chamberlain at fws.gov) Date: Mon, 5 Oct 2009 13:08:29 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Mainstem Trinity River redd survey update 10/05/2009 In-Reply-To: Message-ID: The spawning survey project update available on our website (linked in the message below) has been refreshed to reflect addition of last week's data (September 28 to October 2). Enjoy! Charlie Charles Chamberlain/AFWO/ R1/FWS/DOI To env trinity 09/28/2009 01:21 cc PM Subject Mainstem Trinity River redd survey update 09/28/2009 Hi all, Fall 2009 salmon spawning surveys of the mainstem Trinity River are underway. These are conducted collaboratively by the Arcata Fish and Wildlife Office, California Department of Fish and Game, Yurok Tribal Fisheries Program, Hoopa Valley Tribal Fisheries Department, and the Shasta-Trinity National Forest. Our first within-season update for the 2009 redd survey is available from the Arcata Fish and Wildlife Office Website at the link below. Click on "Trinity River 2009 Redd Survey Update" near the bottom of the page. http://www.fws.gov/arcata/fisheries/projectUpdates.html Cheers! Charlie Charlie Chamberlain Fish Biologist - U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Arcata Fish & Wildlife Office 1655 Heindon Road Arcata, CA 95521 Charles_Chamberlain at fws.gov Phone: (707) 825-5110 Fax: (707) 822-8411 www.fws.gov/arcata/fisheries -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: graycol.gif Type: image/gif Size: 105 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: ecblank.gif Type: image/gif Size: 45 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Tue Oct 6 14:49:40 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Tue, 6 Oct 2009 14:49:40 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Salmonid Restoration Federation Outreach Updates for October 2009 Message-ID: <003d01ca46ce$e9568810$bc039830$@net> SRF & Cal-Neva AFS Second Call for Abstracts for Joint Salmonid Restoration Conference Session Coordinator Abstracts are due October 18 In 2010 the Salmonid Restoration Federation and the California-Nevada American Fisheries Society chapter will co-host the 28th Annual Salmonid Restoration Conference and the 44th Annual Cal-Neva AFS Conference in Redding, California. We are truly excited about this new collaborative effort. The first two days of the conference will be filled with symposia, full-day workshops and field tours. A half-day plenary session will be followed by 1.5 days of technical, biological, and policy-related concurrent sessions. This conference will focus on a broad range of salmonid and watershed restoration topics of concern to restoration practitioners, watershed scientists, fisheries bioliogists, resource agency personnel, land-use planners, and landowners. This year the conference will feature symposia on bionengineering techniques and status of new conservation approaches to California fishes, workshops on topics including floodplain restoration, water conservation and agricultural planning, water quality and TMDLs, and storm water pollution runoff. All day field tours will include tours of Clear Creek restoration, Lower Battle Creek restoration projects, the Upper Trinity River, Shasta River, the Sacramento River and a Redding tour that will highlight projects in Silver Creek, Salt Creek, and Gravel Augmentation. Concurrent sessions include: * Planning, Documenting, and Evaluating Fish Restoration Activities * Anadromous Salmonid Monitoring * Stream Channel Restoration * Central Valley Salmonid Recovery Planning and Biological Opinions * Marine and Estuarine Fisheries Research: Conservation and Management * Water Diversions and Fish Impediments * Biology & Management of Native Fishes * Trout Restoration and Conservation * FERC Relicensing and Restoration Opportunities * The State of California Salmonid Fisheries * Climate Change and Salmonid Recovery * Effects of Ground-water Withdrawals on Aquatic Ecosystems * Hatchery Management Please click here to see the first call for abstracts or call (707) 923-7501. _____ SRF Roads Maintenance & Erosion Control Field School October 13-16 2009, Garcia River The Salmonid Restoration Federation, CA Department of Fish & Game and Pacific Watershed Associates will offer a field school to learn techniques to address culvert and road drainage practices as well as erosion control techniques. This field school will be held at Oz Farm on the Garcia River. All meals and lodging are included in the course fees. The curriculum includes conducting road sediment assessments (problem identification and prescription development); implementing fish-friendly road upgrading practices (stream crossing upgrades and improved road drainage practices to protect water quality); proper road decommissioning practices; road inspection, and maintenance practices; erosion control and erosion prevention practices, and spoils management. Throughout the course we will emphasize the concepts of making our road systems as "hydrologically invisible" and as resilient to storm events as possible. We will also focus on educating participants about how best to address the root causes of observed erosion problems, through both maintenance and repair practices at each potential work site. Please visit the SRF website to see the field school registration form or call (707) 923-7501. Heather Reese heather at calsalmon.org Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From tstokely at att.net Wed Oct 7 15:11:19 2009 From: tstokely at att.net (Tom Stokely) Date: Wed, 7 Oct 2009 15:11:19 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Stokely's Change of Address Message-ID: <0535FD73F992410796C863066DE6462E@homeuserPC> Please note that I've changed my physical address to 201 Terry Lynn Ave (USPS and UPS) Mt Shasta, CA 96067 My phone numbers and e-mail remain the same. Sincerely, Tom Stokely Water Policy Coordinator California Water Impact Network 201 Terry Lynn Ave (USPS and UPS) Mt Shasta, CA 96067 V/FAX 530-926-9727 Cell 530-524-0315 tstokely at att.net http://www.c-win.org/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Thu Oct 8 10:29:57 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Thu, 8 Oct 2009 10:29:57 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Trinity Journal 10-7-09 Message-ID: <001e01ca483c$f5b8ff60$e12afe20$@net> Current SWRCB Water Permits granted the Bureau allow it to divert 90 percent of Trinity's water. They need to be amended to reflect flows contained in the ROD - a 53 percent diversion of Trinity water with 47 percent returned to Trinity River. Byron County protests water rights request BY SALLY MORRIS THE TRINITY JOURNAL Trinity County supervisors voted 5-0 last week to hire well-known California water attorney Michael Jackson of Quincy to file a protest on the county's behalf concerning Trinity River water rights hearings currently pending before the State Water Resources Control Board in Sacramento. The Bureau of Reclamation has petitioned the State Water Board for an extension to the year 2030 on certain Central Valley Project water rights permits, including seven on the Trinity River, allowing more time to put the water allocated under the permits to what it calls "full beneficial use." Originally granted to Reclamation in 1959, but never developed, the Trinity River permits in question promise allocations amounting to millions of acre-feet of water in addition to what is already diverted to the CVP for irrigation, municipal and industrial deliveries, fish and wildlife enhancement, water quality control and power generation. An acre-foot is enough water to cover an acre of land to a depth of 1 foot. A notice of the petition for time extension on the permits was published Sept. 3 and with a deadline of Oct. 5 for the filing of any protests, the Trinity County Board of Supervisors met in a special session last week in order to take timely action. In a closed session, board members voted to protest the requested extension of CVP water rights filed by Reclamation. They then agreed to retain attorney Michael Jackson to file the protest on the county's behalf. Jackson is an environmental lawyer who has spent many years specializing in Northern California water rights, serving as legal counsel to the Regional Council of Rural Counties, the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance and numerous other government and environmental entities including the nonprofit advocacy group California Water Impact Network. County Administrative Officer Dero Forslund estimated the county's legal fees to initiate the protest will amount to approximately $5,000. If there is further action required, additional compensation would have to be negotiated in a separate agreement. Forslund said the Bureau of Reclamation has rights to a significant amount of Trinity River water in the CVP, some of which has not been used since the permits were originally applied for "and now they want to extend those permits 30 years. In our protest, we're saying 'no - if you haven't used the permits, they shouldn't be left sitting at the will of the Bureau of Reclamation.'" "We are concerned about county of origin rights and we want a seat at the table," he added, noting a major problem with the permits issued in 1959 is that they bear no relation to the in-stream flows set forth years later in the Trinity River Fishery Restoration Record of Decision. The permits in question are based on minimum in-stream flows amounting to just 120,500 acre feet of water a year, or 10 percent of the Trinity's water. The Trinity ROD, signed in 2000 by Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, increased the minimum in-stream flow to an average of 594,500 acre-feet of water a year which is approximately 48 percent of the river's water. Forslund said Reclamation has not changed its sale and distribution of water relative to the ROD, "and we think they should - they are selling more water than they have." Reclamation indicates it is in the public interest for the State Water Board to grant the requested extension of time it says is needed to put all the water appropriated under the permits to full beneficial use. The agency cites increasing municipal and industrial water demands within the CVP and the need for additional diversions of water to comply with possible environmental conditions that may be applied in the future under the Bay Delta Conservation Program and Federal Endangered Species Act. Supervisor Judy Pflueger said the requested time extension on the permits provides Trinity County "with a rare opportunity to get involved in the water issue. I feel we've been uncompensated for our water going down the hill. We're looking for a seat at the table and perhaps compensation down the road." Supervisor Roger Jaegel said he thinks the "beneficial uses" of Trinity River water within the boundaries of Trinity County "are extremely important and these extensions would extend those permits for water to be used outside of Trinity County." He added that if the county doesn't speak up now concerning the permit extensions, it won't likely get another opportunity to comment. During a previous discussion about the water permits, Supervisor Howard Freeman suggested legal recourse, saying "many times the only way to a seat at that table is not by issuing a position, but by throwing a big monkey wrench in." Trinity County's retired senior resource planner Tom Stokely commented later that the board's protest "gets the county's foot in the door so it will have official standing in future proceedings. It's also a great opportunity to demonstrate issues with the Trinity River that the state board needs to pay attention to and I've been harping about for years - the ROD's minimum flows and the minimum temperature objectives that have never been implemented through a water rights hearing. That all needs to be tidied up." He added the state has appropriated 8.5 times more water through approved permits than actually exists in the state and with a three-year drought "and the rapid drawdown of Trinity Lake, it's apparent to anyone who sees it that the Trinity River is already more than fully appropriated." Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From tstokely at att.net Thu Oct 8 13:19:55 2009 From: tstokely at att.net (Tom Stokely) Date: Thu, 8 Oct 2009 13:19:55 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Trinity Journal 10-7-09 In-Reply-To: <001e01ca483c$f5b8ff60$e12afe20$@net> References: <001e01ca483c$f5b8ff60$e12afe20$@net> Message-ID: <47FE797699A048F2B12503E9959B01F1@homeuserPC> For some context on this issue, the Bureau of Reclamation holds water permits for the Trinity River amounting to over 16 MILLION acre-feet of water, which is over 12 times the average annual runoff to Trinity and Lewiston reservoirs. Tom Stokely Water Policy Coordinator California Water Impact Network 201 Terry Lynn Ave (USPS and UPS) Mt Shasta, CA 96067 V/FAX 530-926-9727 Cell 530-524-0315 tstokely at att.net http://www.c-win.org/ ----- Original Message ----- From: Byron Leydecker To: FOTR List ; Trinity List Sent: Thursday, October 08, 2009 10:29 AM Subject: [env-trinity] Trinity Journal 10-7-09 Current SWRCB Water Permits granted the Bureau allow it to divert 90 percent of Trinity's water. They need to be amended to reflect flows contained in the ROD - a 53 percent diversion of Trinity water with 47 percent returned to Trinity River. Byron County protests water rights request BY SALLY MORRIS THE TRINITY JOURNAL Trinity County supervisors voted 5-0 last week to hire well-known California water attorney Michael Jackson of Quincy to file a protest on the county's behalf concerning Trinity River water rights hearings currently pending before the State Water Resources Control Board in Sacramento. The Bureau of Reclamation has petitioned the State Water Board for an extension to the year 2030 on certain Central Valley Project water rights permits, including seven on the Trinity River, allowing more time to put the water allocated under the permits to what it calls "full beneficial use." Originally granted to Reclamation in 1959, but never developed, the Trinity River permits in question promise allocations amounting to millions of acre-feet of water in addition to what is already diverted to the CVP for irrigation, municipal and industrial deliveries, fish and wildlife enhancement, water quality control and power generation. An acre-foot is enough water to cover an acre of land to a depth of 1 foot. A notice of the petition for time extension on the permits was published Sept. 3 and with a deadline of Oct. 5 for the filing of any protests, the Trinity County Board of Supervisors met in a special session last week in order to take timely action. In a closed session, board members voted to protest the requested extension of CVP water rights filed by Reclamation. They then agreed to retain attorney Michael Jackson to file the protest on the county's behalf. Jackson is an environmental lawyer who has spent many years specializing in Northern California water rights, serving as legal counsel to the Regional Council of Rural Counties, the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance and numerous other government and environmental entities including the nonprofit advocacy group California Water Impact Network. County Administrative Officer Dero Forslund estimated the county's legal fees to initiate the protest will amount to approximately $5,000. If there is further action required, additional compensation would have to be negotiated in a separate agreement. Forslund said the Bureau of Reclamation has rights to a significant amount of Trinity River water in the CVP, some of which has not been used since the permits were originally applied for "and now they want to extend those permits 30 years. In our protest, we're saying 'no - if you haven't used the permits, they shouldn't be left sitting at the will of the Bureau of Reclamation.'" "We are concerned about county of origin rights and we want a seat at the table," he added, noting a major problem with the permits issued in 1959 is that they bear no relation to the in-stream flows set forth years later in the Trinity River Fishery Restoration Record of Decision. The permits in question are based on minimum in-stream flows amounting to just 120,500 acre feet of water a year, or 10 percent of the Trinity's water. The Trinity ROD, signed in 2000 by Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, increased the minimum in-stream flow to an average of 594,500 acre-feet of water a year which is approximately 48 percent of the river's water. Forslund said Reclamation has not changed its sale and distribution of water relative to the ROD, "and we think they should - they are selling more water than they have." Reclamation indicates it is in the public interest for the State Water Board to grant the requested extension of time it says is needed to put all the water appropriated under the permits to full beneficial use. The agency cites increasing municipal and industrial water demands within the CVP and the need for additional diversions of water to comply with possible environmental conditions that may be applied in the future under the Bay Delta Conservation Program and Federal Endangered Species Act. Supervisor Judy Pflueger said the requested time extension on the permits provides Trinity County "with a rare opportunity to get involved in the water issue. I feel we've been uncompensated for our water going down the hill. We're looking for a seat at the table and perhaps compensation down the road." Supervisor Roger Jaegel said he thinks the "beneficial uses" of Trinity River water within the boundaries of Trinity County "are extremely important and these extensions would extend those permits for water to be used outside of Trinity County." He added that if the county doesn't speak up now concerning the permit extensions, it won't likely get another opportunity to comment. During a previous discussion about the water permits, Supervisor Howard Freeman suggested legal recourse, saying "many times the only way to a seat at that table is not by issuing a position, but by throwing a big monkey wrench in." Trinity County's retired senior resource planner Tom Stokely commented later that the board's protest "gets the county's foot in the door so it will have official standing in future proceedings. It's also a great opportunity to demonstrate issues with the Trinity River that the state board needs to pay attention to and I've been harping about for years - the ROD's minimum flows and the minimum temperature objectives that have never been implemented through a water rights hearing. That all needs to be tidied up." He added the state has appropriated 8.5 times more water through approved permits than actually exists in the state and with a three-year drought "and the rapid drawdown of Trinity Lake, it's apparent to anyone who sees it that the Trinity River is already more than fully appropriated." Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ env-trinity mailing list env-trinity at velocipede.dcn.davis.ca.us http://www2.dcn.org/mailman/listinfo/env-trinity -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Fri Oct 9 21:15:15 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Fri, 9 Oct 2009 21:15:15 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] KQED Forum On Klamath Dam Removal Monday, 10 12 09 Message-ID: <005e01ca4960$45af39c0$d10dad40$@net> http://kteh.kqed.org/images/content/pagebuilder/11188.gif On KQED Public Radio's Forum for Monday, 10/12 9am Forum with Michael Krasny Dam Removal After years of legal battles, negotiators have reached an agreement to remove four dams along the Klamath River in California and Oregon. It's being called one of the biggest removal projects in the nation. We talk with stake holders, including some local officials who say "not so fast." Guests include Troy Fletcher, policy analyst, Yurok Tribe member and lead negotiator for the Yurok Tribe; Steve Rothert, California director for American Rivers; Michael Kobseff, chair of the Siskiyou County Board of Supervisors; and Dean Brockbank, vice president and general counsel lead negotiator for Pacificorp, which owns the four dams in question. 10am Forum with Michael Krasny Alan Cheuse Author and National Public Radio contributor Alan Cheuse joins us to discuss his two new books: "A Trance After Breakfast," a collection of travel essays, and the novel "To Catch the Lightning." Cheuse is a book critic for NPR's All things Considered. Change your email preferences or unsubscribe Copyright 2009 KQED. All Rights Reserved. http://kteh.kqed.org/site/PixelServer?j=N1406YB_IBme92YVHMdSBQ.. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.gif Type: image/gif Size: 5168 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image002.gif Type: image/gif Size: 43 bytes Desc: not available URL: From tstokely at att.net Mon Oct 12 11:35:54 2009 From: tstokely at att.net (Tom Stokely) Date: Mon, 12 Oct 2009 11:35:54 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Traditional Yurok-Karuk leader speaks out against the Dam and Water Deals Message-ID: http://www.klamblog.blogspot.com/ Saturday, October 10, 2009 Traditional Yurok-Karuk leader speaks out against the Dam and Water Deals Traditional Yurok-Karuk leader Christopher (Chris) Peters recently sent an e-mail to members of the Yurok, Karuk and Hoopa Tribes concerning the draft Klamath Hydroelectric Settlement Agreement (KHSA) and the proposed Klamath Basin Restoration (sic) Agreement (KBRA). Chris is the president of the Seventh Generation Fund, an international Indigenous not-for-profit organization with offices in Arcata, California. His past accomplishments include founding and serving as the first executive director of the Northern California Indian Development Council. Along with other young Karuk, Yurok and Hoopa Indians and elders Chris is involved in the movement which began in the early 1970s to restore Indigenous ceremonies within the ancestral homelands of the Yurok, Karuk and Hoopa Peoples. In his e-mail Chris states that the Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians (ATNI) is very concerned about language in the Deals which would grant to the Department of Interior the right to sign waivers of tribal water rights and federal trust obligations for four of the five federally recognized tribes located within the Klamath River Basin. The four tribes are the Yurok, Hoopa, Karuk and Klamath Tribes. A fifth federal tribe - the Quartz Valley Indian Reservation based in the Scott River Sub-basin - is not involved with the KHSA or KBRA. KlamBlog presents the entire call to action by Chris Peters below. _____________________________________ Auth, We need to think about what "our" tribal council is doing and the impact of their action on Federal Indian policy. - Housed within the Klamath Basin Restoration Agreement (KBRA) is TERMINATION language. If the Yurok Tribe should decide not to sign the "agreement" can we back out now? That a very good question to ask candidates for the Yurok Council - Because the federal government recently added language that stipulates that the Department of the Interior can sign the waiver of claims on behalf of tribes. You may recall from my last communication that the Yurok Tribe must sign the agreement stating we will NOT ASSERT OUR TRUST OR WATER RIGHTS. This is how they are going to "deal" with Hoopas and This is TERMINATION of Tribal Sovereign authority and it has generated MAJOR concerns among the Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians (ATNI). ATNI is a regional organization comprised of Indian Tribes of Washington. Oregon, Idaho, Nevada, Northern California and Alaska, who just signed a resolution expressing their opposition to ------ "any policy of the United States to terminate the rights of or impose adverse consequences upon a tribe that chooses to retain its water rights instead of settling on terms desired by the Federal Government" They, as well as other tribal Governments nation wide are very concerned about the National significance of the "agreement" and how its termination provisions will impact federal Indian policy. ATNI intends to take their resolution to the upcoming meeting of the National Congress of American Indians that will gather in Palms Springs next week. Below are a few other things we need to discuss with candidates seeking to be elected or re-elected to leadership positions in the Yurok Tribe. FIRST have they read and do they understand the Klamath Basin Restoration Agreement (KBRA) or the Klamath Hydroelectric Settlement Agreement (KHA)? Because if they have read and if they do understand these "agreements" they would know that there is a lot of CRAZZZZZY stuff in them - below are a few examples. Please read All our Relations Chris Peters 1. The water balance, guaranteeing diversion of 330,000 acre-feet for irrigators, has no scientific basis and will, in 40% of water years, leave too little water in the Klamath River to meet the Coho Salmon flow requirements. There are no guaranteed flows for fish. Sec. 15.1.1.B and App. E-5. THIS WILL ALSO LEGALLY GIVE WATER RIGHT TO IRRIGATION CORPORATIONS - OUR INDIAN WATER RIGHTS!!! 2. The KBRA has no restoration goals. It establishes no target salmon run sizes or harvest goals. Thus its success can't be measured. 3. Neither the KBRA nor the KHA requires removal of any dam. The KHA is a planning process that merely might, after 12+ years, lead to dam removal. WE NEED ACTION NOW -IN 12+ YEARS ALL THE FISH COULD BE GONE!! - ALSO IN 12 YEARS WE MIGHT HAVE ANOTHER REPUBLICAN ADMINISTRATION. 4. The KBRA requires Indian Tribes to waive claims of violation of trust water and fishing rights regardless of the success of restoration. Sec. 15.3.7 5. The $985 million federal appropriations called for in the KBRA will enable irrigators to increase ground water pumping, which will further deplete surface water flows in the Klamath. Sec. 15.3.1, 15.2.4, 25-28. None of this funding goes to dam removal!!!! 6. The KBRA requires parties to support water diversions and follow procedures that will weaken the effect of the Endangered Species Act. Sec. 20.3. This is critical - the Coho runs are getting so low that we need to think hard about listing them as an ENDANGERED!! IF WE WANT WILD FISH FOR FUTURE GENERATIONS OF YUROKS. 7. If funds are appropriated to purchase water to augment instream flows for the benefit of fish, the Bureau of Reclamation, not a fisheries Technical Team, will decide whether OR NOT to use the money. Sec. 19.4.4. Or maybe Gail Norton will return or al least someone equally as sinister within future Republican administrations and make the decisions. 8. The KHA gives to the Interior Secretary the Determination whether dam removal is "in the public interest," thus delaying action while unnecessarily duplicative NEPA analysis and state CEQA analysis occurs. Sec. 3.3.1. AGAIN, A REPUBLICAN ADMINISTRATION MAY ASSERT THAT DAM REMOVAL IN NOT IN THE PUBLIC'S BEST INTEREST. 9. The KHA prohibits the Secretary from choosing dam removal until, among other things, two States and Congress pass legislation to fund it. Sec. 3.3.4. WITH GROWING FINANCIAL PROBLEMS OF STATE GOVERNMENTS, CLIMATE CHANGE, YEARS OF DROUGHT AND MAJOR PROBLEMS WITH THE SACRAMENTO DELTA AND CENTRAL VALLEY FARMERS - YUROK TRIBAL LEADERS SHOULD BE ASKING -WHAT ARE FEINSTEIN AND SCHWARZENEGGER UP TO THESE DAYS? ALSO THEY NEED TO ASK SALAZAR ABOUT THE "CALIFORNIA WATER PLAN" AND IF HE MIGHT BE PLANNING TO USE THE KLAMATH "AGREEMENT" TO LEVERAGE MORE WATER FROM THE TRINITY RIVER FOR THE FARMERS. 10. The KHA minimizes PacifiCorp's required operational changes until at least 2021, strips FERC of jurisdiction while the agreement remains in place, and also protects the utility from compliance with any other measures to improve water quality. Sec. 6.1.1 and 6.3.4.A. 11. The KHA halts State water quality certification proceedings, which now are the only remaining step before FERC would force dam removal. Sec. 6.5. WE CAN NOT FORCE DAM REMOVAL WITH THE AGREEMENTS 12. The KHA sets a mere "target" of 2020 to begin dam removal but also demands $27 million in extra payments to PacifiCorp if removal begins before 2021. Sec. 7.3.3. NOW ASK YOURSELVES - WHAT THE HELL IS UP WITH THIS!!!! PLEASE JOIN WITH THE GROWING NUMBERS OF YUROK AND KARUK AND SAY ---HELL NO TO BOTH THE KLAMATH BASIN RESTORATION AGREEMENT (KBRA) AND THE KLAMATH HYDROELECTRIC SETTLEMENT AGREEMENT (KHSA)!!!!! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From Charles_Chamberlain at fws.gov Tue Oct 13 08:40:11 2009 From: Charles_Chamberlain at fws.gov (Charles_Chamberlain at fws.gov) Date: Tue, 13 Oct 2009 08:40:11 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Mainstem Trinity River redd survey update 10/13/2009 Message-ID: The spawning survey project update available on our website (linked in the message below) has been refreshed to reflect addition of last week's data (October 5 to October 9). Wish our crews luck this week.... they're out in pretty nasty weather right now!. Cheers! Charlie Charles Chamberlain/AFWO/ R1/FWS/DOI To env trinity 09/28/2009 01:21 cc PM Subject Mainstem Trinity River redd survey update 09/28/2009 Hi all, Fall 2009 salmon spawning surveys of the mainstem Trinity River are underway. These are conducted collaboratively by the Arcata Fish and Wildlife Office, California Department of Fish and Game, Yurok Tribal Fisheries Program, Hoopa Valley Tribal Fisheries Department, and the Shasta-Trinity National Forest. Our first within-season update for the 2009 redd survey is available from the Arcata Fish and Wildlife Office Website at the link below. Click on "Trinity River 2009 Redd Survey Update" near the bottom of the page. http://www.fws.gov/arcata/fisheries/projectUpdates.html Cheers! Charlie Charlie Chamberlain Fish Biologist - U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Arcata Fish & Wildlife Office 1655 Heindon Road Arcata, CA 95521 Charles_Chamberlain at fws.gov Phone: (707) 825-5110 Fax: (707) 822-8411 www.fws.gov/arcata/fisheries -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: graycol.gif Type: image/gif Size: 105 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: ecblank.gif Type: image/gif Size: 45 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Tue Oct 13 14:16:16 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Tue, 13 Oct 2009 14:16:16 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Redding Record Searchlight 10 13 09 Message-ID: <004b01ca4c4a$6870e340$3952a9c0$@net> Thursday talk to address ways to live without Lake Red Bluff Redding Record Searchlight-10/13/09 By Janet O'Neill Zach Whitten's ties to Tehama County go back generations. Ninety years ago, his family started a little farm west of town, and he lives next door with his wife and children. But when it comes to what should be done about the loss of Lake Red Bluff, he opposes dwelling on the past and supports preparing for the future. "Now's the time to start planning when we have about two years ahead of us when we still have the lake," Whitten said. "The main thing is to try to get people talking." Whitten, 31, will share his ideas at 7 p.m. Thursday, when the Sacramento River Discovery Center launches its monthly program series for the year with "Life Without Lake Red Bluff." Legal challenges to the Red Bluff Diversion Dam, which over decades has annually diverted water for irrigation while forming a temporary lake, have culminated in its planned replacement by a pumping station scheduled for completion in 2013. A popular Memorial Day drag boat event has been one of the casualties, and the city has estimated that losing the lake means a $4 million hit each year. But Whitten believes discussion about the problem has been too narrow, focusing too much on past mistakes. He'd like to see a series of workshops that come together in a conference with economic, recreational, environmental and quality-of-life issues addressed. "We'd like to solicit as many different ideas and voices in the community to really get people talking about how we take advantage of these new opportunities, rather than bemoan what was lost," he said. When he's not working at Whittenberg Farms, which sells pasture-raised pork and lamb, Whitten is substitute teaching, directing summer camps at the center where he began as an intern in 1996, and leading the youth group at his church. "This is really the first time I'm putting it out there," he said of Thursday's talk. "It's helpful to try to bring the disparate conversations under one roof." The nonprofit discovery center offers numerous educational programs and sits within Mendocino National Forest's Red Bluff Recreation Area, with support from 48 government agencies and private groups. "Lake Red Bluff affects everybody," said Carlene Cramer, the center's manager. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Tue Oct 13 14:20:40 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Tue, 13 Oct 2009 14:20:40 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] New York Times 10 13 09 Message-ID: <005001ca4c4b$05748160$105d8420$@net> California Tries to Solve Water Woes By JENNIFER STEINHAUER Published: October 12, 2009 LOS ANGELES - In a sign that a deal addressing California's longstanding water supply problems may be near, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger convened a special session of the Legislature on Monday to revisit a package of water bills. Skip to next paragraph Enlarge This Image http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/10/13/us/13calif_190.jpg David McNew/Getty Images Dry fields near Buttonwillow are signs of the water problems a special legislative session is intended to address in California. Enlarge This Image http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/10/12/us/13calif1_190.jpg David McNew/Getty Images Aging pipes in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. A three-year drought, federal environmental regulations restricting water flows and the fixation of Mr. Schwarzenegger - who has said he is determined to leave a mark on one of the state's most intractable problems before leaving office next year - have heightened the urgency for an agreement. Mr. Schwarzenegger, a Republican, had threatened to veto some 700 bills if lawmakers did not reach a water deal by Sunday, the end of the regular legislative session. But he backed off that threat on Monday, citing progress as lawmakers and members of his staff hunkered down to work on the issue. The special session is expected to last until the end of the week, and both Republicans and Democrats expressed optimism on Monday that a deal was in the offing. "While we still need to hammer out remaining issues," Darrell Steinberg, a Democrat and Senate president pro tem, said in a statement, "we are on the verge of the most comprehensive advance on water in California in decades. We've made significant breakthroughs on many of the sticking points that have plagued past attempts to stabilize the state's water supply." The negotiations are focused on repairing the state's fragile water ecosystem, unleashing new water supplies and increasing water conservation throughout the state. More specifically, negotiators hope to seal a deal that would make equal the goals of restoring the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta - a collection of channels, natural habitats and islands at the confluence of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers that is a major source of the state's drinking water - and increasing the supply of water to residents, businesses and farms. State officials say the restoration of the delta, as envisioned in the negotiations, would be the largest environmental restoration project in the United States, surpassing the effort under way in the Florida Everglades. But the battle over how to distribute California's water is generations old - it was Mark Twain who was believed to have said, "Whiskey is for drinking; water is for fighting over" - and when it comes to water legislation, close to done never means done. In the delta alone, myriad efforts have sought to change how water flows and to whom, including a package of five policy and bond bills that never made it to a vote in the Democratic-controlled Legislature this year. Yet many factors have made the need to fix California's water system problems all the more pressing. The drought has led to water restrictions and increased prices for water around the state. And along with the drought, a federal order last year forcing water authorities to curtail the use of large pumps in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to help preserve dying smelt has reduced water flows to agriculture and resulted in dust-bowl-like conditions for many of the state's farms. In 2008, over 100,000 acres of the 4.7 million acres in the Central Valley were left unplanted, and experts expect that number to grow this year. In addition, environmental problems in the Sacramento River have resulted in a collapse of the Chinook salmon population, closing salmon season off the coast of California and much of Oregon for two years in a row. Among the bills in the making is one that would issue roughly $9 billion in bonds, including $3 billion to build at least one dam. Some of the money would also be used to help restore the delta ecosystem and fortify levies to withstand natural disasters like floods and earthquakes. The bonds would require voter approval. What remains to be worked out, negotiators say, is whether any money would be set aside to build a peripheral canal that would transport water from the Sacramento River around the delta to federal and state aqueducts for use in urban and agricultural areas in the southern part of the state. The canal, long a contentious issue among California water managers and politicians, is favored by Mr. Schwarzenegger and Senator Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat. Another disputed piece of the negotiations involves the monitoring of groundwater levels. Without monitoring groundwater usage, it is impossible to tell whether aquifers are being stressed, which can lead to weakened levees and damage to the surrounding environment. As the drought has persisted, tapping into groundwater supplies has increased, especially among farmers - and in some areas, state officials say, dangerously so. While roughly 70 percent of the state's water districts voluntarily measure groundwater levels, reporting the levels is not mandatory, and Democrats had sought to make it so. Republican lawmakers staunchly opposed state government "trespassing" on private property to do so. A compromise would make a water district's failure to voluntarily report levels result in the loss of billions of dollars from state bonds. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 6733 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image002.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 12847 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Tue Oct 13 14:24:41 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Tue, 13 Oct 2009 14:24:41 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Capitol Weekly 10 13 09 (Interesting) Message-ID: <005601ca4c4b$946ed4b0$bd4c7e10$@net> http://dl5.activatedirect.com/fs/distribution:letterFile/_a_/max_width=&max_ height=/_a_/xukxsu48645hvu_tmpl_files/xwlgu4961e6tgk Two-step bond eyed in water talks By John Howard | 10/13/09 12:00 AM PST The closed-door negotiations over California's water future between Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Legislature's leaders include a plan to borrow $9.4 billion with voter approval -- but use only half the funds through 2015 and the rest later. About a third the money, perhaps $3 billion, would be used to develop storage, but whether that would be performed by dams or through groundwater storage has not yet been spelled out. The bond money would be spent in conjunction with matching funds from the locals and money derived from the rates of water consumers. The money would not be used to build a canal through or around the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta east of San Francisco. "Generally, we support what the Democrats came out with yesterday," said Schwarzenegger spokesman Aaron McLear. "Hopefully, we are in a position to have a vote soon." There is no agreement on the finance piece of the water proposal, but sources in both houses believe the political leadership appeared closer on this section than on other sections of the complex water puzzle. And by mid-day Tuesday, a potential agreement loomed, according to Capitol sources. Earlier, state Treasurer Bill Lockyer questioned the wisdom of adding more bond indebtedness. "If we're not careful, rising debt service payments soon will consume more than 10 percent of General Fund revenues," he noted. "The days of blithely heaping more and more debt burden on the General Fund are over - at least they should be." He said improvements in the state's water works should be financed mainly by users, not the state's General Fund, which is backed by all taxpayers. At issue is a plan to overhaul California aging water delivery system that would move more water from rain-rich northern California to mid-state farmers and the vast population centers of the arid south. The plan would include environmental protections for the delta east of San Francisco and a create a new body called the Stewardship Council. Its seven members -- including four gubernatorial appointees -- would make critical decisions on water projects. Potentially, the plan could lead to the construction of two new reservoirs - thus far, however, they are not spelled out in the proposed legislation and none are guaranteed -- and increase the water level of a third. Similarly, the hotly contested building of a canal to move water through or around the delta to the south is not specifically spelled out in the latest negotiations but is included in separate state planning. If ultimately approved, the proposals would mark the most significant water development in California since voters approved the State Water Project a half-century ago. The governor and legislative leaders said that they were close to an agreement last year and earlier this year, but negotiations collapsed as time ran out and partisanship kicked in. Major players in the latest political fight over water, including environmentalists and an array of water agencies, say they have been excluded from the Capitol negotiations, which have been tightly held in the governor's office. The construction of billions of dollars in projects has drawn fire from environmentalists, who contend that too little attention is being directed at conservation, groundwater storage, species protection, groundwater monitoring and other issues. They questioned provisions in the latest proposals, still under discussion, that could lessen monitoring and lower the amount of set aside to protect wildlife. The governor has called a special session on water to begin Wednesday, but Capitol sources in both houses said it was unlikely that lawmakers would be able to act this week, in part because any newly drafted legislation reflecting the a deal would need to be in print and vetted. A north-south, bipartisan agreement on water, a rarity in the Capitol, is the culmination of months of negotiations and a bitter, three-pronged fight between environmentalists, northern water interests and the powerful public water districts of the Central Valley and Southern California. Despite legal hurdles, two reservoirs have figured in the discussions. One is the 1.9 million acre-foot Sites Reservoir near Maxwell in Colusa County in the Antelope Valley. The other is Temperance Flat complex above Fresno, a $3.3 billion project that would store about 2 million acre-feet. A third reservoir, Los Vaqueros run by Contra Costa water officials, could have its level raised. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.gif Type: image/gif Size: 5361 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Tue Oct 13 17:07:55 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Tue, 13 Oct 2009 17:07:55 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Annual Trinity Flow Reduction Message-ID: <00e401ca4c62$623e3370$26ba9a50$@net> Please make the following release changes to the Trinity River: date time from (cfs) to (cfs) 10-16-09 0100 450 400 10-16-09 0500 400 350 10-16-09 0900 350 300 Ordered by: Peggy Manza Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From PManza at usbr.gov Tue Oct 13 16:47:40 2009 From: PManza at usbr.gov (Manza, Peggy L) Date: Tue, 13 Oct 2009 17:47:40 -0600 Subject: [env-trinity] Trinity River Release Change Message-ID: Please make the following release changes to the Trinity River: date time from (cfs) to (cfs) 10-16-09 0100 450 400 10-16-09 0500 400 350 10-16-09 0900 350 300 Ordered by: Peggy Manza Note: ROD flow -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Wed Oct 14 10:29:58 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Wed, 14 Oct 2009 10:29:58 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Sac Bee 10 14 09 Message-ID: <003501ca4cf3$f539a4c0$dfacee40$@net> California Legislature plans hearings on water bills Sacramento Bee-10/14/09 By Matt Weiser Legislative leaders say they intend to hold hearings on controversial water bills next week, a move that should appease complaints that the process has been too secret. A special legislative session on the subject is technically under way now, after being called Sunday by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Jim Evans, spokesman for Senate leader Darrell Steinberg, said legislative staff is drafting bill language based on discussions held so far. "We plan on public hearings next week and hopefully a vote on the floor of each respective house next week as well," Evans said. Management of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta remains a major focus. Lawmakers aim to create a streamlined government structure to manage the estuary, build major new plumbing to improve water deliveries and restore thousands of acres of habitat. The estuary is a transit point for water diversions to Southern California and a nursery for several of the state's most important and imperiled fish species. Major differences continue to block a bipartisan package: ? Democrats want monitoring and regulation of groundwater resources. California is unique in that it does not require this. Republicans are wary of imposing this on farmers suffering from drought. ? Republicans want billions of dollars included in a proposed bond measure to build dams, saying only new surface storage can resolve shortages. Democrats say aggressive conservation and groundwater storage can do the job. ? Both sides want the price of a bond measure whittled down. At one point it stood at $12 billion. ? Northern California water agencies want assurances they won't have to give up water for a controversial canal proposed to divert Sacramento River water across the Delta. ? The five Delta counties are concerned about how the canal will be approved, how thousands of acres of proposed restoration lands will be managed, and whether they'll have an adequate role in both. Even majority-party leaders have expressed concern that the bills have so far been negotiated in secret meetings among the top two lawmakers from each house and the governor ? the so-called "Big 5." No specific bill language has been made public since the regular legislative session ended. In a move toward greater openness, party leaders met with their respective caucuses Tuesday to brief them. "It certainly has the feel of a very, very bizarre negotiating dynamic to me, and it makes me uncomfortable," said Jared Huffman, D-San Rafael, chairman of the Assembly Water, Parks and Wildlife Committee. "This is a 50- or 100-year solution, so certainly taking a few weeks to make sure that (legislative) members are informed, to make sure the right questions are asked, is warranted."# Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Wed Oct 14 10:34:27 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Wed, 14 Oct 2009 10:34:27 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Ecological Interactions Hatchery/Wild Message-ID: <003f01ca4cf4$94f6e4a0$bee4ade0$@net> State of the Salmon 2010 Conference State of the Salmon 2010 Conference May 4?7, 2010 Hilton Portland, OR Registration begins Fall 2009 www.stateofthesalmon.org Save the date for State of the Salmon's international conference. Please join State of the Salmon for Ecological Interactions between Wild & Hatchery Salmon ? the first international effort to explore the scale and magnitude of the ecological effects of hatcheries, identify important gaps in our knowledge and work towards resolving key issues. The agenda and expected outcomes from the conference are being shaped by a steering committee composed of agency and academic experts from the United States, Canada, Russia and Japan. The conference will feature: Presentations from throughout the North Pacific A special welcoming reception at the Jean Vollum Natural Capital Center Active dialogue facilitated among participants A panel discussion focused on managing risk to wild salmon Visit our website for more information www.stateofthesalmon.org Wild Salmon Center Ecotrust _____ If you no longer wish to receive these emails, please reply to this message with "Unsubscribe" in the subject line or simply click on the following link: Unsubscribe _____ State of the Salmon 721 NW 9th Ave, Suite 300 Portland, Or 97209 Read the VerticalResponse marketing policy. Try Email Marketing with VerticalResponse! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Wed Oct 14 17:37:14 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Wed, 14 Oct 2009 17:37:14 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Public meetings DFG/US&FFS Hatchey - Wild Message-ID: <8620A1DD6795495AB0AEAB9630E587EE@ByronsLaptop> DFG News Release Public Meetings Held to Receive Comments on Hatchery and Stocking Program Draft EIR/EIS Oct. 6, 2009 Contact: Jim Starr, Staff Environmental Scientist, (916) 327-0713 Kirsten Macintyre, DFG Communications, (916) 322-8988 The Department of Fish and Game (DFG), with U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), is holding public meetings for input on its hatchery and stocking program. The four meetings will allow DFG to hear public comment on a draft Environmental Impact Report/Environmental Impact Statement (EIR/EIS) that was released Sept. 29. The EIR/EIS discloses the environmental effects associated with the program. A recent court order required DFG to produce this environmental analysis under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). It was jointly prepared by DFG and FWS, which provides funding for the inland trout and Mad River steelhead portions of the program. Members of the public can provide comments in person at any of the following locations and times: * Wednesday, Oct. 21: Sacramento 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. Elk's Lodge, Riverside Hall 6446 Riverside Blvd. * Monday, Oct. 26: Redding 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. Shasta Builders Exchange Training Facility, Shasta Room 2985 Innsbruck Dr. * Wednesday, Oct. 28: Bakersfield 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. Doubletree Hotel, California Grill Room 3100 Camino Del Rio Ct. * Thursday, Oct. 29: Carson 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. Carson Community Center, Main Hall 3 Civic Plaza Dr. Written comments may also be submitted, either by e-mail at dfghatcheryeir at dfg.ca.gov or by regular mail sent to: Jim Starr California Department of Fish and Game 830 S St. Sacramento, CA 95811 All comments to DFG must be postmarked by Nov. 16, 2009 and all comments to FWS must be postmarked by Nov. 30, 2009. For more information about these meetings, the hatchery and stocking program or to view the EIR/EIS and supporting documents, please visit www.dfg.ca.gov/news/pubnotice/hatchery . Byron Leydecker, JcT, Chair Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Thu Oct 15 17:56:27 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Thu, 15 Oct 2009 17:56:27 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Shasta River - DFG Pres Release Message-ID: DFG News Release Shasta Irrigators Commended for Efforts to Assist Chinook Spawning Run Oct. 15, 2009 Contact: Mark Pisano, Senior Fishery Biologist, (530) 842-9322 Harry Morse, DFG Communications, (916) 322-8962 The California Department of Fish and Game (DFG) commends Shasta River irrigators for their recent timely action to protect Chinook salmon. Their voluntary decision to reduce or cease legal water diversions during the irrigation season allowed more than 1,000 Chinook salmon congregated in the lower portion of the Shasta River to successfully continue their spawning run. DFG has been monitoring the return of Chinook salmon to the Shasta River since 1930. This year's fish count began on September 4; when DFG scientists reviewed the data, it became clear that low flows and warm weather, along with disease and unusually high predation rates, were threatening the spawning run. "Once irrigators were notified of the situation, many responded without hesitation," said DFG Senior Fishery Biologist Mark Pisano. "Although they could have continued their legal water diversions upstream, some chose to release more water to aid the fish holding in the canyon. DFG believes this action helped minimize the potential for a major fish die-off." Adjudicated water diversions in the Shasta River are governed by a complex set of rules identified in the Shasta River Decree (#7035). Irrigation is allowed from April 1 through October 1 each year and water rights holders are not legally required to alter their operations to assist the fish runs. The voluntary decisions made by these water rights holders - such as Shasta Big Springs Ranch, which shut off ranch irrigation entirely - contributed an estimated 13 cubic feet per second to the river flow. Byron Leydecker, JcT, Chair Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sari at sisqtel.net Fri Oct 16 12:46:13 2009 From: sari at sisqtel.net (Sari Sommarstrom) Date: Fri, 16 Oct 2009 11:46:13 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Study: Fisheries Mgt Too Slow To Account For Climate Change, Human Behavior Message-ID: <20091016194610.80FBDFA5805@mx.dcn.davis.ca.us> THE COLUMBIA BASIN BULLETIN: Weekly Fish and Wildlife News www.cbbulletin.com October 16, 2009 Issue No. 504 * Study: Fisheries Management Too Slow To Account For Climate Change, Human Behavior A new analysis of fisheries management concludes that climate change will significantly increase the variability of the size and location of many fish populations, creating uncertainty for fisheries managers -- and the need for greater flexibility. Most management processes are slow and cumbersome, as well as rigid, the authors say, and don't adequately take climate change and human behavior into account. "What climate change will do is pit the increased resource variability against the rigidity of the process," said Susan Hanna, a fishery economist from Oregon State University and co-author of the report. "Over time, managers will have to become more conservative to account for the greater uncertainty, and we will need to do a better job of understanding the effect of uncertainty on human behavior." The study focuses on seven short international case studies in fisheries management -- including Columbia River basin salmon. It is being published in the journal Marine Policy. Hanna said that while most fishery management models incorporate the latest data on fish populations and distribution, they are not adapted to incorporate climate data. That can be problematic when an El Ni?o looms, or other oceanic conditions have a negative impact on fisheries. Such was the case in 2005, when a delay in the spring upwelling had a catastrophic effect on ocean production, which many biologists say caused the recent collapse of salmon runs on the Klamath and Sacramento rivers. Shorter fishing seasons and lower quotas are understandably frustrating for commercial and recreational fishermen, Hanna said. "Human psychology can work against fishery management because our expectations are based on the high range of fish populations, not the low end," she said. "In salmon fisheries, the conditions of the 1970s may be taken as the norm, when in fact they represented an all-time high." Hanna is a professor in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics who works out of OSU's Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport. She is affiliated with the Coastal Oregon Marine Experiment Station and Oregon Sea Grant, and has served as a science adviser to the Pacific Fishery Management Council, the Northwest Power and Conservation Council, the National Marine Fisheries Service, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy. The need for better human behavioral data is acute, Hanna said. While resource managers have plenty of information about numbers of fishermen, where they fish and what they fish for, there is less knowledge about how people will react to changes in regulation -- or how they will adapt to climate change. "We have a history of implementing regulations that have unintended consequences," Hanna said. She cites as an example what happens when managers limit the number of boats in a fishery with the idea of limiting fishing effort. The result can be just the opposite, Hanna points out. "A boat limit as the single control over a fishing effort will give those who have the permits the incentive to invest in more speed and more gear to boost their fishing power and become more effective at catching fish. "Managing resources," she said, "is all about incentives." Management also is becoming more complicated -- a situation that may be exacerbated by changes in ocean conditions, whether natural or triggered by humans. There are many groups with claims on salmon resources, Hanna pointed out, from ocean trollers and river gill netters, to Native American tribes and recreational anglers. And management cuts across many boundaries. In the past, Hanna said, fishermen could adjust to closures or shortened seasons by switching to different species. Now, she says, most fisheries are fully subscribed. "If it's a bad year for salmon, you can't just switch to crabbing or fishing for rockfish unless you have the permits," Hanna pointed out. "It's not a question of gear, but of access." Hanna said West Coast fishermen are progressive. They contribute to the knowledge base through cooperative research and participate in management decision-making processes. While some may grumble about regulations, she said, they generally see the need for management and are often in the lead in proposing new management approaches. "Fishing operations are regulated businesses that fare more successfully the better they are understood," Hanna said. "We need to do a better job of knowing how fishermen will respond to changes in catch rates and length of season if we want to continue to have sustainable fisheries -- because greater uncertainty lies ahead." Other authors on the study include Alistair McIlgorm of Southern Cross University in Australia; Gunnar Knapp, the University of Alaska-Anchorage; Pascal Le Floc'H, University of Brest in France; Frank Millerd, Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada; and Minling Pan, of NOAA Fisheries Service in Hawaii. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Fri Oct 16 13:39:45 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Fri, 16 Oct 2009 13:39:45 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] FW: 5 Counties E Newsletter Message-ID: <002a01ca4ea0$cc65d4c0$65317e40$@net> From: Mark Lancaster [mailto:mlancaster at 5counties.org] Sent: Friday, October 16, 2009 1:22 PM Subject: 5 Counties E Newsletter Please find attached our program's enews letter. I hope you find it interesting and useful. You can also go to our website (www.5counties .org) for more information. We generate an enews letter one, or twice, a year. If you would like to be removed from this list serve please send me an email indicating that and I will be happy to accommodate you. Take Care, Mark Lancaster Five Counties Salmonid Conservation Program P.O. Box 2571 Weaverville, CA 96093 (530) 623-3967 x. 111 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: enews Vol 4 9_09.pdf Type: application/pdf Size: 2758699 bytes Desc: not available URL: From thayden at yuroktribe.nsn.us Fri Oct 16 14:55:08 2009 From: thayden at yuroktribe.nsn.us (Tim Hayden) Date: Fri, 16 Oct 2009 14:55:08 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Yurok Tribal Fisheries Program: Fisheries Biologist I position Message-ID: <07968F55C4B6674AAB697ABE5DFD21F818A5B8AF55@exchange.yuroktribe.nsn.us> The Yurok Tribal Fisheries Program is currently recruiting for a Fisheries Biologist I to work on various fisheries related assessments on the Trinity River. Closing: 10/23 or until filled Responsibilities: Weitchpec Tribal Office, Weitchpec, CA. Implement tribal fisheries related monitoring and research projects, including adult salmonind spawning surveys, juvenile outmigration monitoring, juvenile fish disease monitoring, hatchery/natural interactions research, and fish habitat assessments. Oversee field crews conducting fisheries project work, ensure smooth running operations, and provide feedback to project leaders on project status and potential improvements. Coordinate field investigations with representatives from cooperating agencies including federal, state and tribal entities. Compile collected field data. Assist in written data analysis, summaries and final reports. Stay in the field 10 or more overnight stays per month as necessary to conduct work. May be assigned other duties as required to meet the needs of the organization. Qualifications: Ability to supervise field crews in an organized, productive manner while maintaining a positive and safe work environment. Professional knowledge of biology and management of anadromous salmonids and other fisheries, water and related resources important to the Yurok Tribe. Excellent verbal and written communication skills. Knowledge of, and skill in performing a wide variety of fisheries and water quality field sampling techniques such as juvenile and adult salmonid population estimation, redd and carcass survey techniques, fish habitat assessment, and hatchery practices and management, and radio telemetry techniques. Possess a valid California Drivers License. Strong swimming skills and ability to conduct work safely in a swift-water environment. Experience operating both motorized jet boats and inflatable rafts. Minimum requirement is a Bachelors degree in Fisheries Biology, Biological Sciences, Natural Resource Management or closely related field. OR Combination of applicable work experience see and education to equal four years, with at least two years of college in Fisheries Biology, Biological Sciences, Natural Resources or a closely related field. Contact: Yurok Tribe HR Department, Oscar Gensaw, 7074821350 Weitchpec Office Trinity Fisheries, Nathan Harris, 7074984180, 5306254130 x1609, njharris30 at gmail.com Tim Hayden Senior Fisheries Biologist Yurok Tribal Fisheries Program Trinity River Fisheries Division 23001 Hwy 96, Hoopa, CA. 95546 (530)625-4130 x1612 (707)498-8258 thayden at yuroktribe.nsn.us From Charles_Chamberlain at fws.gov Mon Oct 19 14:56:45 2009 From: Charles_Chamberlain at fws.gov (Charles_Chamberlain at fws.gov) Date: Mon, 19 Oct 2009 14:56:45 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Fw: Mainstem Trinity River redd survey update 10/13/2009 Message-ID: The spawning survey project update available on our website (linked in the message below) has been refreshed to reflect addition of last week's data (October 12 to October 16). We experienced our first significant storm of the season last week. Because of resultant turbid conditions, we were not able to survey Reaches 5 (Douglas City to the upper end of Sky Ranch Road), or Reaches 8-9 (North Fork Trinity to Cedar Flat). There's more weather on the way and we'll keep doing the best we can. Nice to see some moisture! Cheers! Charlie Charles Chamberlain/AFWO/ R1/FWS/DOI To env trinity 09/28/2009 01:21 cc PM Subject Mainstem Trinity River redd survey update 09/28/2009 Hi all, Fall 2009 salmon spawning surveys of the mainstem Trinity River are underway. These are conducted collaboratively by the Arcata Fish and Wildlife Office, California Department of Fish and Game, Yurok Tribal Fisheries Program, Hoopa Valley Tribal Fisheries Department, and the Shasta-Trinity National Forest. Our first within-season update for the 2009 redd survey is available from the Arcata Fish and Wildlife Office Website at the link below. Click on "Trinity River 2009 Redd Survey Update" near the bottom of the page. http://www.fws.gov/arcata/fisheries/projectUpdates.html Cheers! Charlie Charlie Chamberlain Fish Biologist - U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Arcata Fish & Wildlife Office 1655 Heindon Road Arcata, CA 95521 Charles_Chamberlain at fws.gov Phone: (707) 825-5110 Fax: (707) 822-8411 www.fws.gov/arcata/fisheries -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: graycol.gif Type: image/gif Size: 105 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: ecblank.gif Type: image/gif Size: 45 bytes Desc: not available URL: From tstokely at att.net Mon Oct 19 20:32:30 2009 From: tstokely at att.net (Tom Stokely) Date: Mon, 19 Oct 2009 20:32:30 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Leonard Masten- Klamath agreement helps dam owners, not fish Message-ID: <238536C414F44F4A8EB69A412BB27C08@homeuserPC> Klamath agreement helps dam owners, not fish Sacramento Bee-10/18/09 By Leonard Masten Opinion As chairman of the Hoopa Valley Tribe, I was sadly struck by the reality of Rex Rabin's Oct. 6 political cartoon depicting one dying salmon telling another, "Dams on the Klamath are coming down! Pass it on." This scene of mass salmon death in the water-starved Klamath River and its largest tributary, the Trinity River, could be a recollection of the 2002 fish kill of 68,000 spawning salmon that did not get enough water. The cartoon also could predict the future if the Klamath Hydroelectric Settlement Agreement announced by Department of Interior Secretary Ken Salazar on Sept. 30 is implemented as written. The Bee's Oct. 4 editorial, "Klamath pact could be a start toward peace," said the agreement will, "simultaneously help fish and farmers." I disagree. This agreement has so many loopholes and delays that naturally spawning salmon in the Klamath and Trinity rivers may be dead before one brick is removed from the dams. The agreement proclaims good goals, but gives the owners of the dams, PacifiCorp, more time to devise legal and legislative plans to stall the removal of the dams until they are exonerated from liability and paid generously by taxpayers. The years of Klamath settlement talks came only after PacifiCorp realized they were on the verge of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's order to put expensive fish ladders at the four turn-of-last-century dams. Our reservation has the Klamath and Trinity rivers flowing through it. We hope the agreement will help the salmon, but although we have been part of the negotiations we must dissent until more salmon protections are incorporated in the agreement. No other tribe has spent more time and money defending the Trinity River. The other "environmental" negotiators in the settlement who have embraced this agreement should focus less on the desirability of agreement, and more on objective, good science for the rivers. Agreement should come only after the Klamath Hydroelectric Settlement Agreement can protect fish in these rivers. We must fight, if even alone, because this is our home and our culture. The Bee's editorial noted that "critics are missing the big picture." When it comes to the big picture our tribe has given decades and millions of dollars to river restoration. We have fished salmon from the Trinity River for thousands of years. The river and the fish are part of us. We don't have another ancestral homeland to move to. The salmon do not have another river to spawn in.# Leonard Masten is chairman of the Hoopa Valley Tribe. http://www.sacbee.com/325/story/2259505.html Tom Stokely Water Policy Coordinator California Water Impact Network 201 Terry Lynn Ave (USPS and UPS) Mt Shasta, CA 96067 V/FAX 530-926-9727 Cell 530-524-0315 tstokely at att.net http://www.c-win.org/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Wed Oct 21 16:56:16 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Wed, 21 Oct 2009 16:56:16 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] DFG Director resigns Message-ID: <001d01ca52aa$14cd3070$3e679150$@net> Koch resignation attached Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: GAS signed resignation letter 10-21-09.pdf Type: application/pdf Size: 719103 bytes Desc: not available URL: From Charles_Chamberlain at fws.gov Tue Oct 27 08:07:14 2009 From: Charles_Chamberlain at fws.gov (Charles_Chamberlain at fws.gov) Date: Tue, 27 Oct 2009 08:07:14 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Fw: Mainstem Trinity River redd survey update 10/27/2009 Message-ID: Guys and gals, The spawning survey project update on our website (linked in the message below) has been refreshed to reflect addition of another week's data (calendar week 43 - October 19 to October 23). Redd construction slowed a bit last week, but things are still on a pretty good pace. Our tenacious crews are doing a great job getting data through the weather that keeps coming! Cheers! Charlie Charles Chamberlain/AFWO/ R1/FWS/DOI To env trinity 09/28/2009 01:21 cc PM Subject Mainstem Trinity River redd survey update 09/28/2009 Hi all, Fall 2009 salmon spawning surveys of the mainstem Trinity River are underway. These are conducted collaboratively by the Arcata Fish and Wildlife Office, California Department of Fish and Game, Yurok Tribal Fisheries Program, Hoopa Valley Tribal Fisheries Department, and the Shasta-Trinity National Forest. Our first within-season update for the 2009 redd survey is available from the Arcata Fish and Wildlife Office Website at the link below. Click on "Trinity River 2009 Redd Survey Update" near the bottom of the page. http://www.fws.gov/arcata/fisheries/projectUpdates.html Cheers! Charlie Charlie Chamberlain Fish Biologist - U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Arcata Fish & Wildlife Office 1655 Heindon Road Arcata, CA 95521 Charles_Chamberlain at fws.gov Phone: (707) 825-5110 Fax: (707) 822-8411 www.fws.gov/arcata/fisheries -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: graycol.gif Type: image/gif Size: 105 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: ecblank.gif Type: image/gif Size: 45 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Tue Oct 27 09:34:14 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Tue, 27 Oct 2009 09:34:14 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Eureka Times Standard 10 27 2009 Message-ID: <001601ca5723$528748b0$f795da10$@net> Feds looking for extension on Trinity water permits until 2030 John Driscoll/The Times-Standard Posted: 10/27/2009 01:48:17 AM PDT Click photo to enlarge . < .1 . > The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation is asking for a decades-long extension of state water permits on the Trinity River to give it more time to find uses for the water -- a move river advocates say could threaten the water available for salmon and steelhead. The petition to the State Water Resources Control Board was first filed in 1985, but the bureau never acted further on it. Reclamation has revived the application for an extension of its water rights on the Trinity and other Central Valley rivers until 2030, but didn't identify in the application what water projects are on tap that would allow it to use the water. The request also does not include the 2000 U.S. Interior Department's decision to reduce diversions to the Sacramento River from the Trinity River to aid salmon. It has led some conservationists to voice concern that Reclamation might continue to divert large amounts of water from Trinity Lake reservoir and risk the availability of cold water for fish. "I think what it shows is the bureau is not really serious about protecting the Trinity River fishery," said Tom Stokely with the California Water Impact Network. The network and Trinity County are among the parties protesting the petition. The Trinity River, like most rivers in California, has more water rights attached to it than it has water. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation holds rights to some 16 million acre feet of Trinity water -- enough to cover 16 million acres to the depth of one foot -- even though the annual runoff into the river averages less than 1.4 million acre feet. Applying the full allocation of Reclamation's water rights, wrote Trinity County in its protests, could deplete cold water needed for fish and prevent development of local water projects. The watershed would suffer "grave harm" if Trinity River water is used to fill in the huge deficit of water in the Central Valley Project, into which Trinity River water is diverted. Reclamation's Deputy Regional Resources Manager Richard Stevenson said that the larger project is declared "integrated" by Congress, and that the Trinity permits and their proposed extensions can't be separated from the permits and extensions of the other elements of the project. The extensions are being requested because the extent of the larger project hasn't yet been realized, Stevenson said, and can't yet be put forward for licensing. "We're not ready because we don't think the usage of the Central Valley Project as a whole has been developed and defined," Stevenson said. State water law is based on the use-it-or-lose it concept. In Reclamation's request, it holds that construction of projects to put the full amount of water to use is complete, but also said that it's unable to determine what the ultimate diversions from the Central Valley Project will be. Permitting, conservation plans and requirements of the federal Endangered Species Act all make such a prediction uncertain, Reclamation said. State Water Resources Control Board spokesman Dave Clegern said that extensions are granted if the applicant has been diligent in trying to find uses for the water, if progress has been delayed due to circumstances beyond its control and whether it can provide a detailed road map of how it intends to use the water in the near future. Diversions from Trinity Lake last fall and winter lowered the amount of water to about half the reservoir's capacity. Spring rains improved the situation slightly. Reclamation has begun diverting water to the Sacramento River, lowering an already low reservoir, with the expectation that the past three dry years will be the last of a drought and that winter rains will replenish the reservoir. That same strategy last year was in part what pushed the reservoir so low this summer. The bureau must make sure that the water it releases down the river is around 50 degrees to protect salmon and steelhead. But when the lake level drops, water at the surface is too warm to send downstream, and it must look to the diversion's lowermost outlet to tap cold water, bypassing the project's power plant. Trinity River water is also used to keep temperatures down in the Sacramento River. While Reclamation has to confer with the National Marine Fisheries Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service when the lake gets that low, there is no strict procedure in place to handle the issue. That's led critics to claim there is no plan to deal with extended drought, and question whether water for salmon could be sacrificed in extreme circumstances. Mike Orcutt, senior fisheries biologist with the Hoopa Valley Tribe, said that Reclamation is betting on a good water year to refill the reservoir. "Nobody has a crystal ball to predict that," Orcutt said. Because of that, the California Water Impact Network and Trinity County want to see the interior secretary's 2000 decision included in Reclamation's water rights extension. Trinity County holds that Reclamation also shouldn't be allowed to continue to hold onto water rights for water it cannot prove it will use in the future Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 7443 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Tue Oct 27 09:36:19 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Tue, 27 Oct 2009 09:36:19 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] SF Chronicle 10 27 09 Message-ID: <001c01ca5723$9d614570$d823d050$@net> Delta water plan emerges for public to view S.F. Chronicle-10/27/09 By Wyatt Buchanan Strict conservation, new dams and a peripheral canal are all on the table after six weeks of closed-door negotiations to solve the state's water crisis and restore the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta ecosystem. Leaders in the state Senate and Assembly are still discussing how to pay for the plan, which could cost $9.4 billion. The Legislature could vote on the plan as soon as the end of the week. State Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, said that he did not want the proposal to "linger" and that the overhaul that has been decades in the making has a "momentum that did not exist before." "There is no question the status quo is unacceptable, and there is no other ... package in our respective houses that would allow us to move forward in a comprehensive way," Steinberg said. Water for 24 million people in California - about two-thirds of the state's population - flows through the delta system, which has a series of levees and canals at great risk of failing in a natural disaster such as an earthquake. The plan has several parts, including the creation of a Delta Stewardship Council that would have broad oversight of the delta and the ability to approve a peripheral canal. It would lead the effort to restore the delta and improve the state's water supply. Additionally, the plan would mandate a 20 percent reduction in urban per capita water use by 2020, though there may be exceptions for cities including San Francisco that have aggressive conservation practices. Also included are groundwater monitoring and increased penalties for illegal water diversion. The negotiations during the past six weeks did not change the overall framework of the plan, but they resulted in added legal language on specific issues, such as assurances sought by the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission that existing water rights on the Tuolumne River would not be jeopardized. Also added were tiered penalties of up to $5,000 per day for illegal water diversions. But Republican leaders said that several issues remain unresolved, including procedures for groundwater monitoring and potential penalties for missing conservation goals. They said they want those issues resolved before legislation moves to the floor. "There are few, but also very significant, issues that need to be addressed before this is anything that anybody would bless as a deal," said Senate Minority Leader Dennis Hollingsworth, R-Murrieta (Riverside County). Republican support is critical for the two-thirds vote to put a bond on the ballot to pay for the overhaul, which could include dam construction as well. Leaders said they are discussing a $9.4 billion bond that would be issued in two stages because of the state's precarious budget situation. As much as $3 billion of those funds could be authorized for new dams. Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has said he would not sign any water legislation that did not include money for dams. Assembly Republican Leader Sam Blakeslee of San Luis Obispo said he thinks California could face a $20 billion deficit in January. Bill's highlights Cutbacks: Mandates a 20 percent per capita reduction in urban water use by 2020. Oversight: Creates the Delta Stewardship Council to oversee the delta and approve, if warranted, a canal around the delta. Dams: Opens the door for construction of dams. Fines: Imposes penalties for illegal water diversions of up to $5,000 per day. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Tue Oct 27 09:39:40 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Tue, 27 Oct 2009 09:39:40 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Stockton Record 10 27 09 Message-ID: <002701ca5724$15b800e0$412802a0$@net> 'Clear path' proposed for Delta Stockton Record-10/27/09 By Alex Breitler A Wetlands Water District representative said in a hearing Monday that new Delta legislation would provide "a clear path toward building new conveyance" to send more water to the south San Joaquin Valley and Southern California. "Conveyance" likely means some kind of peripheral canal. While the 116-page bill legislators began dissecting Monday does not directly authorize a canal, it would establish a new "Delta Stewardship Council" with the power to approve or veto such a project if proposed by the state. The seven-member council would include four members appointed by the governor, two by the Legislature and one from the Delta Protection Commission. At a glance The Delta bill, SBX7 1, would: . Establish a seven-member Delta council with broad authority, including approval or disapproval of a peripheral canal. . Establish a Delta conservancy to restore habitat in the Delta, buying land from willing sellers. . Require a 20 percent reduction in urban water use by 2020. . Increase fines for those who illegally divert water from rivers or streams. . Require groundwater monitoring by local districts or counties. The council would consider approving the state's current study of a canal if it meets certain criteria. That study, known as the Bay Delta Conservation Plan, is already under way and focuses on a canal through the eastern Delta, slicing past Stockton on its way to pumps that ship Delta water to the far reaches of the state. If that plan is adopted by the council, "The BDCP would be implemented and would begin restoration of the Delta and with that have a clear path toward building new conveyance," said Ed Manning, representing Westlands, which relies on Delta exports and has been forced to fallow hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland in the south Valley due to drought and protections for endangered species. "We're happy with the package and the Delta piece the way it is," said Manning, whose comments came during a joint Senate and Assembly committee hearing. The bill, authored by Senate Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, is substantially similar to earlier legislation that almost made it to the Senate and Assembly floors late Sept. 11, at the end of legislators' regular session. Now the bill is back, and will earn more attention as legislators, this time in special session, try to resolve the three-decade stalemate over water. Many who rely on water taken upstream of the Delta remain opposed to the latest bill, although the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission - which takes its supply from Hetch Hetchy in the Sierra Nevada - is now in support, saying its concerns have been resolved. Canal opponents at Monday's hearing hammered on the reported over-allocation of water in California; more water has been promised than can be delivered. "The legislation fails to solve the water supply issues," said Tom Zuckerman, Delta landowner. "It dances all around them. It engages in a 21st-century alchemy to try and make water out of... something, I'm not entirely sure." The message from supporters of the bill is a need for compromise from all sides. "The Delta is one earthquake, one flood away from collapse, and 24 million people could potentially lose their drinking water," Steinberg said. "The Legislature has attempted to grapple with these issues for many years, and unsuccessfully," he said. "Now is our opportunity." The legislation goes far beyond the new council. It would also create a conservancy to oversee habitat restoration in the Delta, and would mandate water conservation and crack down on those who divert water illegally. A multi-billion dollar bond measure to pay for these actions is expected to be introduced later this week, followed by more hearings. Monday's bill says that those who receive exported Delta water would pay for a canal. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From truman at jeffnet.org Tue Oct 27 09:25:48 2009 From: truman at jeffnet.org (Patrick Truman) Date: Tue, 27 Oct 2009 09:25:48 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] =?iso-8859-1?q?Editorial=3A_Nestl=E9_ordinance_a_ba?= =?iso-8859-1?q?d_precedent?= Message-ID: http://www.sacbee.com/opinion/story/2283717.html -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From tstokely at att.net Wed Oct 28 10:16:50 2009 From: tstokely at att.net (Tom Stokely) Date: Wed, 28 Oct 2009 10:16:50 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] The Economist: Oct. 22 Message-ID: <359A0B2B37124EF195D7ED68FA09D5C6@homeuserPC> The Economist // www.economist.com OF FARMS, FOLKS AND FISH Oct 22nd 2009 A truce in California's long and bitter fight over water at last appears possible IN 2007 Oliver Wanger, a federal judge in California, ordered the huge pumping stations of the Sacramento Delta, the largest estuary on the west coast of the Americas, to reduce by a third the water they delivered to two aqueducts that run south to the farms of the San Joaquin Valley and onward to the vast conurbations of southern California. His reason was the delta smelt, a translucent fish less than eight centimetres (three inches) long that lives only in the delta and is considered endangered under federal law. The pumping plants were sucking in the fish and grinding them up. The next year, a "biological opinion" by the federal Fish and Wildlife Service reinforced Judge Wanger's order. Pumping from the delta remains restricted. The consequences of these restrictions, which coincided with a drought that is now in its third year, reach far beyond one small population of fish. About two-thirds of Californians get at least some of their water from the delta, so with the stroke of a judicial pen the entire state, the world's eighth-largest economy and America's "fruit basket", entered an economic and political crisis. Water has divided Californians since Mark Twain remarked that "whiskey's for drinking, water's for fighting over." But this latest conflict comes as America's largest state is politically gridlocked and holding back a national economic recovery. From Australia to Israel, parched places all over the world are now looking to California to see whether, and how, it solves one of the most intractable problems of thirsty civilisations in dry regions. The pumping restrictions were a huge victory for environmentalists, who fill the ranks of one of the three armies in California's perennial water wars. With increasing success since the 1970s, greens have argued that the delta in particular, and California's dammed rivers and wetlands in general, are on the verge of ecological collapse and must be saved. For the other two armies, the restrictions amounted to a stinging defeat. One army consists of urban consumers in the dry south, represented by the Metropolitan Water District, which supplies water to about 19m people, over half the state's population, and gets 30% of its supply from one of the two delta aqueducts. The authority has had to pay farmers in the Central Valley to give up their allocations and let their fields lie fallow, says Jeffrey Kightlinger, its boss. This year it also had to impose mandatory conservation measures. The pain has been far worse, however, for the third force: agriculture. The farmers and farm workers who have been hardest hit live in the western San Joaquin Valley, which is supplied by the Westlands Water District, America's largest irrigation authority. Westlands has contracts to draw water from the other (federally financed) aqueduct. Tom Birmingham, its boss, says that, because of the drought and the pumping restrictions, it is receiving only 10% of its entitlement this year. The result, says Mr Birmingham, is fallow land, farm workers being laid off and "people standing in food lines for hours". In some areas unemployment runs at 40%. There are scenes reminiscent of John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath", though most of the poor and jobless are not white "Okies", but Latinos. Just as the "dust bowl" swept across the Great Plains in the 1930s, so in the San Joaquin Valley, fields are reverting to desert and signs read, "Congress created this dust bowl". "All my almond trees are going to die," says Shawn Coburn, a farmer in the area. He began farming in 1992 and has done everything he can to use water more wisely. He has planted fewer tomatoes and melons and more almonds and wine grapes because these crops drink less and yield more. He says he has conserved all he can with technology. Like other farmers, he has also dug wells to tap the shrinking aquifers, even though he knows he is making the entire valley floor sink. In one place, he says, the ground around a telephone pole has dropped by six feet (nearly 2 metres). The environmentalists are not denying that their victory has cost agricultural jobs. But Jonas Minton of the Planning and Conservation League, a Californian non-profit outfit, thinks that a public-relations firm paid by the farmers has been exaggerating their misery. In any event, he says, the problem is not a court ruling but a system in which the state has pledged eight times as much water to title-holders as exists in nature and therefore cannot, of necessity, give everybody his due. Jim Metropulos, a lobbyist at the Sierra Club, another environmental group, agrees. "I cannot control a drought," he says. Westlands' Mr Birmingham can complain, he says, but, "Why do we have to give him more water?" It so happens that Westlands' water rights rank below those of other title-holders and "there is simply not enough water to go around." Angry and bitter words are thus flying on all sides, which is as it has always been in California. But this time the crisis has become so severe that the state's legislators in Sacramento, notoriously incapable of agreeing on anything serious, including a punctual budget, appear on the brink of a breakthrough. A complex package of legislation was almost passed in September and failed only because time ran out in that session. The legislators are now talking again. A deal could emerge for a vote within weeks. PEACE AMONG COEQUALS? Timothy Quinn, director of the Association of California Water Agencies, which represents the suppliers of about 90% of the water consumed in California, credits the pumping restrictions for this progress. He says Judge Wanger forced all sides to acknowledge the seriousness of the situation. His decision was the "equivalent of an earthquake" whose shock was severe enough to shake California's democracy. Therein lies, perhaps, the opportunity. The details of the legislation negotiated so far are complex, but its main feature is a phrase, "coequal goals"--though how coequal goals differ from equal ones is not clear. For most of the previous century, says Mr Quinn, California and the entire West had an "extraction mindset" according to which man was meant to subdue and exploit nature. In water matters, this meant ever more dams, reservoirs and aqueducts. However, over the past four decades the environmentalist mentality grew up as an alternative, emphasising "sustainable" use of nature. California's water policy in the past has swung "like a pendulum" between these two principles, depending on which lobbyists have won the latest victory, says Lester Snow, the director of California's water department. Enshrining the objectives of both sides as "coequal" in state law would thus mean progress, by requiring all factions to consider both fish and farms, both nature and the economy, both sustainability and reliability. "It's a huge step," agrees Mr Kightlinger of the Metropolitan Water District. In practice, most water managers in the state already take sustainability seriously, but making equality official would force all sides to "play nicely", he thinks. The old rivalry between urban and agricultural water use has already faded, he says, and today's animosity between both of them and the greens may also subside. Westlands' Mr Birmingham says that, in practice, water usage has already become equal. Whereas agriculture used to consume 80% of the state's water supply, today 46% of captured and stored water goes to environmental purposes, such as rebuilding wetlands. Meanwhile 43% goes to farming and 11% to municipal uses. The environmentalists, as today's top dogs, are less excited about equal goals. At present the state's water infrastructure is run with a single goal, which is to protect nature, and this, says Mr Metropulos of the Sierra Club, provides complete clarity of purpose. Equality, he thinks, will only lead to new conflicts and litigation. When the time comes for trade-offs, he asks, "Who's going to make the decision? It is undefined." He is lobbying against the legislation, although he is unlikely to prevent it. DEALING WITH THE DELTA The next layer of legislative proposals will concern the Sacramento Delta, the inland network of streams and rivers, many contained by dykes and levees, that form the hub of California's water infrastructure. Californians hate rain but love water, so three-quarters of them live in the arid south, spurn the wet north where three-quarters of the rain falls, and expect water to come to them by pipe, canal or aquifer, preferably courtesy of the taxpayer. The Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers and their tributaries, carrying the rain from the north and the melting snowpack from the Sierra Nevada in the east, meet in the delta and flow out through San Francisco's Golden Gate. The trick has always been to intercept the fresh water in the delta before it gets salty and to send it south as well as west to the San Francisco Bay area. Those in the south get it through two huge infrastructure networks. The federal Central Valley Project, dating from 1937, uses 20 upstream reservoirs and two pumps to take water to the southern Central Valley, largely for farmers. The State Water Project, begun in 1960 by Pat Brown, a visionary governor, uses another 22 upstream dams and reservoirs and its own pumping plant to send water into the other aqueduct, largely for urban use. By pumping fresh water south, however, these two projects wreak ecological havoc. Sceptics like to inveigh against the unprepossessing delta smelt, which George Radanovich, a Republican congressman, has called "a worthless little worm that needs to go the way of the dinosaur". But other fish species such as the Chinook salmon, the steelhead and the longfin smelt are also threatened, and each species is a part of a complex food chain. About 25% of the state's sporting fish and 80% of its commercial fish live in or migrate through the delta. PUMPS KILL, LEVEES LEAK The pumps kill fish and other species, and not just by grinding them up. They also change, and occasionally reverse, the water flow of the small rivers in the delta's vast labyrinth of streams, creeks, sluices, islands and marshes. In natural circumstances, the delta is brackish and its salinity changes with the tides. The pumps, by drawing in river water, keep the delta water artificially fresh. Native species die, invasive species thrive. Beyond that, the ageing delta's levees are a human disaster in the making. The delta sits on top of seismic faults that may rupture, and many of the islands that make it up are below sea level. A large earthquake could disrupt the state's water supply and inundate the delta itself. The best answer, says Ellen Hanak, a water expert at the non-partisan Public Policy Institute of California, is to build either a canal or a tunnel around the delta. Fresh water could then be tapped upstream on the Sacramento River and conveyed round the delta to the aqueducts without grinding up fish, reversing river flows or changing the delta's salinity, which would again fluctuate with the tides. The water going south would be fresher too. A canal would thus "separate the water for the fish from the water for the economy and the people," says Mr Quinn. The trouble is that such a peripheral canal is a political hot button. In 1982 Jerry Brown, Pat Brown's son and California's governor at the time, put a canal on the ballot but the voters rejected it. Even now, many people are passionately against it. Farmers and residents in the delta itself fear that a bypass would mean that politicians and public money would abandon them amid their disintegrating levees, and others would grab their water. The Sierra Club is against a canal because "it is not going to make new water" and "we want to reduce exports from the delta" rather than reroute its flows, says Mr Metropulos. The legislation under negotiation is therefore taking a different approach. Instead of decreeing a bypass canal or tunnel outright, it seeks to establish a new authority with the power to take this decision itself. This is sorely needed. Mr Snow at the water department has counted more than 200 entities, from cities and counties to fisheries and reclamation or irrigation districts and even mosquito-abatement boards, that share responsibility in such a way that nobody has any. A new and nimble "Delta Council" would seize authority from all of them and actively manage the delta for the first time. And it could do this by building a canal. DAM MONEY One sign of progress by Californian standards is that, if the deal gets stuck, it will be largely over relatively banal issues such as money. The legislation is likely to mandate investment in new dams and reservoirs, which appeal to Republicans, and also in waste-water recycling, desalination and groundwater storage, which are the environmentalists' and Democrats' preferred sources of water. But Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Republican governor, has said that he will veto any legislation that does not include billions of dollars in new bonds to pay for these new projects. State Republicans, allied to farmers, are pushing for "general-obligation" bonds that would be put to the voters on a ballot and, if approved, paid out of general state tax revenues. Democrats are concerned that the interest on such bonds would aggravate California's continuing budget dispute and come at the expense of education, health care and other things they mind about. They prefer bonds that would be repaid by the users of new dams, ie, the water agencies that can pass costs on to their customers. Water thus trumps ordinary politics. Republicans, who usually claim to be against big government, want taxpayers to pay; Democrats, generally accused of being big spenders, want to match infrastructure costs with water revenues to send the right price signals. The legislation is likely to encourage water conservation by setting targets for reducing consumption. One guess is that it may call for a cut of 20% per person by 2020. That cannot be a bad idea. On the other hand, little progress is being made on monitoring groundwater levels, even though many aquifers are shrinking. Some of the state's water districts voluntarily measure groundwater levels, but Republican legislators have opposed making such reporting mandatory on the ground that it would mean trespassing on private property. "California is the last bastion of the Wild West when it comes to groundwater," says Ms Hanak. It may stay that way. Whatever happens, the legislation will not deal with the long-term threats to California and its neighbours. Climate change is already showing up "in the data", says Mr Quinn. The snowpack of the Sierra Nevada, California's most reliable water-storage system, is shrinking and may stop yielding predictable run-off in the spring and start producing sporadic and unusable, not to mention disastrous, floods. The delta is already below sea level and, as the sea rises, it may be submerged. Even today the south is a desert wherever irrigation does not reach. It will become even drier. For professional water managers such as Mr Kightlinger, this makes the continuing talks in Sacramento frustrating. "'I'm for screwdrivers but not for hammers': that's how they talk," he says. But he thinks all the tools are needed if California's population and economy are to keep growing. Of those tools, water recycling, a euphemism for cleaning up sewage, is perhaps the most promising. Recycled water is local and does not disappear in a drought. But many consumers continue to struggle with the idea that what they are drinking today someone else restored to the water system yesterday. Desalination, which removes minerals from seawater or, more often, brackish groundwater, is an alternative. But it takes a lot of energy to push water through the dense filters that remove unwanted salts and other molecules. Water markets, which allow those with too much water to trade it easily with those who have too little, could also help. If there is to be any progress, however, Californians first have to bury their hatchets. If the talks stall, the political fallout will be big. Tom Campbell, the most thoughtful Republican candidate for governor in next year's election, thinks water is by far the most important issue facing the state. Willie Brown, a former speaker of California's Assembly and mayor of San Francisco, believes "a political earthquake is rumbling in the Central Valley over water, and it could cause a real tsunami for the Democrats in the 2010 elections if they don't handle it well," since Democrats are more associated with environmentalists and several of them face re-election. A CHANCE TO MAKE HISTORY For the same reason, if the negotiations succeed, even a mediocre deal would amount to the most important water legislation since the era of Pat Brown, says Mr Quinn. Westlands' Mr Birmingham feels that many environmental groups, such as the Natural Resources Defence Council and the Nature Conservancy, have become "genuinely interested in working with water agencies", even though others are "using water as a means to limit housing development". "I am very optimistic for the long term," says Mr Birmingham. "The real question is how are we going to survive between now and the time when new conveyance facilities become available," which could be a decade or more. "If we continue to live under the existing biological opinions, irrigated agriculture in the western San Joaquin Valley cannot be sustained," he says. For farmers such as Mr Coburn and his 26 Latino workers, never mind his almonds and wine grapes, the help may arrive too late. This is perhaps the only thing they have in common with the delta smelt. See this article with graphics and related items at http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14699639 Go to http://www.economist.com for more global news, views and analysis from the Economist Group. - ABOUT ECONOMIST.COM - Economist.com is the online version of The Economist newspaper, an independent weekly international news and business publication offering clear reporting, commentary and analysis on world politics, business, finance, science & technology, culture, society and the arts. Economist.com also offers exclusive content online, including additional articles throughout the week. - SUBSCRIBE NOW AND SAVE 25% - Click here: http://www.economist.com/subscriptions/offer.cfm?campaign=168-XLMT Subscribe now with 25% off and receive full access to: * all the articles published in The Economist newspaper * the online archive - allowing you to search and retrieve over 33,000 articles published in The Economist since 1997 * The World in - The Economist's outlook on the year * Business encyclopedia - allows you to find a definition and explanation for any business term - ABOUT THIS E-MAIL - This e-mail was sent to you by the person at the e-mail address listed above through a link found on Economist.com. We will not send you any future messages as a result of your being the recipient of this e-mail. - COPYRIGHT - This e-mail message and Economist articles linked from it are copyright (c) 2009 The Economist Newspaper Group Limited. All rights reserved. http://www.economist.com/help/copy_general.cfm Economist.com privacy policy: http://www.economist.com/about/privacy.cfm The Economist, Economist.com and CFO Europe are trading names of: The Economist Newspaper Limited Registered in England and Wales. No.236383 VAT no: GB 340 436 876 Registered office: 25 St James's Street, London, SW1A 1HG -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From tstokely at att.net Wed Oct 28 20:36:01 2009 From: tstokely at att.net (Tom Stokely) Date: Wed, 28 Oct 2009 20:36:01 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Join Hoopa on National Radio Oct. 29 Message-ID: <3F2396D51C91468EB348F558AD58E213@homeuserPC> ----- Original Message ----- From: Allie Hostler Sent: Wednesday, October 28, 2009 6:57 PM Subject: Join Hoopa on National Radio Oct. 29 Hi Friends, There will be an hour-long national broadcast featuring the Hoopa and Karuk perspective on the Klamath deals tomorrow, Thursday, October 29 at 10a.m. pacific. The guests will be Mike Orcutt, Danny Jordan and I from Hoopa Tribal Fisheries and Bob Goodwin and Craig Tucker from the Karuk Tribe. The show is Native America Calling. It is aired on most tribal radio stations in the Nation. The good news is members of the public can CALL IN and ask questions. Please help us out by listening and/or calling in with a question. This is also a great opportunity to briefly state your position and why. To listen to a live stream on the internet click the link below. At the bottom of the menu on the left side of the screen will be a "now airing" link. http://knba.org/ You may also visit their website for a list of stations that carry their show. One might be in your area. http://www.nativeamericacalling.com/ For those of you in Hoopa, tune in to KIDE 91.3FM Native America Calling Program Description: Thursday October 29, 2009 - Damming the Flow: The controversy over the waters of the Klamath River is once again spawning new questions. In the past, fall salmon runs on the river in Northern California were devastated and salmon were found bloated and dead in the river. Another part of the story includes farmers and irrigation. And recently the much awaited word of the removal of the dams came as a big relief as much as a new puzzle on how to manage the water. As this story continues to be written, what are the new issues that are damming up the flow of water and quality of life for all involved? Guests TBA. Allie Hostler Hoopa Valley Tribe - Fisheries Department (530)625-4267 x12 (707)739-2323 cell -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From tstokely at att.net Fri Oct 30 20:34:50 2009 From: tstokely at att.net (Tom Stokely) Date: Fri, 30 Oct 2009 20:34:50 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Lloyd Carter Law review article Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Lloyd Carter" To: "Byron Leydecker" Sent: Friday, October 30, 2009 6:11 PM Subject: Law review article Lloyd Carter -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: GGU-ELJ.pdf Type: application/pdf Size: 1874558 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Sat Oct 31 14:47:41 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Sat, 31 Oct 2009 14:47:41 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Trinity Journal 10 28 09 Hatchery v. Wild Trinity Fish Message-ID: <005701ca5a73$c6681810$53384830$@net> CASTING ABOUT FOR HATCHERY CHANGES Agencies seek optimum use for Lewiston facility BY AMY GITTELSOHN THE TRINITY JOURNAL http://www.trinityjournal.com/news/2009/1028/front_page/001p1_lg.jpg A Trinity River Hatchery worker Monday handles a wild coho which entered hatchery waters. The fish was saved for later spawning. The Trinity River Hatchery may be too successful in producing fish, at the expense of wild fish in the Trinity River. That concern has resulted in formation of a multi-agency technical advisory group to review operations at the hatchery, which is owned by the federal Bureau of Reclamation and run by the state Department of Fish and Game. "There are genetic concerns, ecological and competition concerns," said Wade Sinnen, a DFG associate biologist and member of the advisory group. "It's a balancing act to not eliminate the hatchery but make it fit better with the whole ecosystem." The group will make recommendations to higher-ups in the agencies involved. This worries some who fear that drastic reductions in hatchery production will be implemented, to the detriment of the sports fishery. However, Sinnen said the first recommendation is likely to address the least controversial fish produced at the hatchery, coho salmon. Coho are a listed species which must be released if caught (with the exception of some tribal fisheries), whether hatchery or wild. http://www.trinityjournal.com/news/2009/1028/front_page/001p2_lg.jpg Trinity River Hatchery workers on Monday prepare fish for spawning. The procedure involves anesthetizing and killing the fish, removing eggs from the female and sperm from the male. The hatchery production goal is to release 500,000 coho each year and get back 2,100, reflecting numbers thought to have been produced naturally before Trinity Dam blocked 109 miles of habitat. Those goals were established in an era when returns were lower - before the ban on sports harvest and improved disease prevention technology at the hatchery, Sinnen said. Hatchery coho returns far exceed the goal now, averaging about 6,600 annually. The hatchery is thought to account for 80 to 90 percent of the Trinity River coho run. Meanwhile, the Trinity River Restoration Program is charged with restoring wild fish populations. "That's a little out of balance, it appears to us," Sinnen said, adding that possible recommendations regarding coho could include reduced production or allowing a limited harvest of the hatchery coho. In addition to coho, the hatchery releases 800,000 steelhead and 4.3 million chinook salmon annually. "The plan is to review the steelhead and chinook production as well," Sinnen said. Changes in hatchery operations have been advocated by the Friends of the Trinity River for several years and gained steam with the release of a master's thesis on predation of wild fish by hatchery steelhead. Through catch and release and stomach pumping, Seth Naman, now a fisheries biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries Service, found that the hatchery steelhead released as yearlings consumed a significant number of the smaller salmon fry within two miles of the dam. DFG officials have said the study has merit and warrants further research, but also noted that the hatchery is to mitigate for habitat upstream which itself would be producing predator fish if not blocked by the dam. >From the DFG, Sinnen reiterated that point recently - but noted that interbreeding is another issue. "Some of these hatchery fish do stray and spawn with wild fish," he said. "There's a plethora of studies that suggest hatchery fish interbreeding with wild fish in the wild reduces the fitness of those fish. They don't necessarily need the same traits to survive." The advisory group could make recommendations ranging from production levels, timing of releases, ideas for further research or maybe no change at all. "Everything is up for discussion," Sinnen said. >From the Friends of the Trinity River, Chairman Byron Leydecker said he sees progress on this issue. He stressed that no one wants to hurt the fishing industry, and from the discussions he's had, any changes would be incremental. "People are concerned about their livelihoods because they think there's some effort afoot to demolish hatchery production of fish. That isn't the case at all," he said. "What we do want to see is that over a period of years - not in my lifetime, we're talking about decades - a fishery comprised mainly of wild fish, not hatchery fish . We want to see action taken so there's a sustained fishery on that river." He's right about the concerns. Fishing guide Ed Duggan of Willow Creek worries that hatchery fish releases will be changed without enough research into how many wild fish there are. Weirs are not in operation in December when the wild steelhead are coming in fast, he noted, and there are no studies on wild steelhead production in tributaries to the Trinity River. "So how can we say we're overburdening the system with hatchery fish?" he asked. Regarding hatchery coho, Duggan is in favor of some harvest to reduce those numbers. "We need to keep supplying the river with chinook," he said. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 11390 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image002.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 23149 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Sat Oct 31 14:24:35 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Sat, 31 Oct 2009 14:24:35 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Law Journal Report Message-ID: <004101ca5a70$8c3f8310$a4be8930$@net> Attached is a Golden Gate University Law Journal Report by Lloyd Carter, a former UPI and Fresno Bee reporter and now attorney and follower of agricultural practices for decades, that deals with subsidized farming and its perpetual link to poverty. It is a valuable contribution to our understanding of current developments in water allocation issues in California and related issues. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: GGU-ELJ.PDF Type: application/pdf Size: 1874558 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Sat Oct 31 14:29:31 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Sat, 31 Oct 2009 14:29:31 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Westlands' Poisoned Drainage Issue Message-ID: <004701ca5a71$3cd53350$b67f99f0$@net> Yesterday afternoon Westlands announced it is moving for a Contempt of Court order against Obama's Secretary of the Interior for failing to solve the Westlands drainage problems. See attached. The poisoned drainage issue is of enormous significance in the current California Water War and initiatives now being considered by the state legislature. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: Westlands Status Report 10-30-09.pdf Type: application/pdf Size: 74346 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Mon Nov 2 13:45:15 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Mon, 2 Nov 2009 13:45:15 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Capitol Weekly - Water Legislation Message-ID: <007901ca5c05$d4eaa5e0$7ebff1a0$@net> http://dl5.activatedirect.com/fs/distribution:letterFile/_a_/max_width=&max_ height=/_a_/xukxsu48645hvu_tmpl_files/xwlgu4961e6tgk Visit CapitolWeekly.net | View this article on Capitol Weekly | Forward to Friends Water reform package moving forward, but conflicts remain By Capitol Weekly Staff | 10/29/09 12:00 AM PST The promise of a water deal moved closer this week as a diverse coalition of agricultural, urban and environmental groups rallied behind a policy proposal authored by Senate leader Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento. But Republicans balked at the measure, citing concerns over how the bill would impact small farmers. What it all means for those hoping for a comprehensive water package is unclear. The Steinberg and Assembly GOP proposals only deal with changes in water policy. They do not address the other major part of these negotiations - a bond that would have to be put before voters to pay for new water storage and infrastructure projects. Democrats and Republicans introduced separate water bond proposals Wednesday. In addition to the intricate policy details, politics has complicated the water talks throughout this months-long process. With the state's budget facing what Assembly GOP leader Sam Blakeslee, R-San Luis Obispo, said could be a $20 billion deficit next year, taking on more debt to pay for water storage and upgrades may be a tough sell to voters. Republicans are aware of those political realities, and want to ensure that the changes to state water policy - which do not need to go before voter, and can be passed through the Legislature on a majority vote - are still good for the state, with or without a water bond. Republicans seek stand-alone policy. "We want to make sure this policy stands on its own," said Assembly Republican leader Sam Blakeslee. Blakeslee noted he wants to break from the conventional wisdom about water negotiations, in which Democrats would get changes they want in water policy in exchange for a water bond that would ensure the construction of at least one new reservoir. Speaking at the 2009 California Water Conference, sponsored by the Society of American Military Engineers, Department of Water Resources director Lester Snow said there was the "attention and momentum" to move a deal now. While some vocal critics remain, there is major agreement among those actually shaping the package. "Every stakeholder assumes someone else has an advantage and they're getting screwed," Snow said. "There are no substantive issues anymore. It's in the 'black helicopter phase.'" Steinberg presented his bill, SB 1 7x, in a joint hearing of the Assembly Water, Parks and Wildlife and Senate Natural Resources Committees Monday. He was joined by a diverse coalition of disparate interests, including lobbyists for the state's largest urban and agricultural water agencies and the Natural Resources Defense Council. What about the Peripheral Canal? The unprecedented coalition built by Steinberg came together after major concessions that could lead to the construction of a canal that would divert water out of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta and through the San Joaquin Valley. Asked after his speech on Wednesday morning, DWR director Snow said the state already has the legal authority to start building the canal. "We clearly have the authority to do that," he said. "That's not something that's a mystery to us." But if the state were to simply start construction on a structure that moved water around the delta, lawsuits would be inevitable. Those lawsuits may still come, even if this bill is passed. But advocates for the canal say the language in the bill makes their legal case stronger. The agencies themselves say they would pay for the huge project, using the money from the rate increases paid by their customers. "All the agencies will share the cost of conveyance," said Jeff Kightlinger, Chief Executive Officer of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which provides water to the Los Angeles basin. Kightlinger said the cost of the canal could cost between $6 billion and $12 billion, and would be funded by urban and agricultural rate payers. Rate hikes could total 10 percent to 12 percent for urban and industrial users, and perhaps 50 percent to 100 percent for agricultural customers, he said. The environmentalists say no authorization for a canal. But environmentalists who support the legislation authored by Sen. Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, said the bill does not give a green-light to construction of the canal, or any other capital projects. The bill, focuses on governance of the delta, environmental safeguards, water supply reliability and other issues. Funding for those issues, perhaps in the $9 billion range, will be addressed separately, he said. "The bill does not authorize a canal," Ann Notthoff of the Natural Resources Defense Council testified during Monday's hearing. The divergence reflects the fragile nature of the group supporting the water-reform package, which includes environmentalists and others long opposed to a canal, or conveyance. Whether or not the bill actually eases the possibility of a canal is apparently still a matter of dispute among some coalition members. But Assembly Republicans say they are unhappy with the bill, and they have introduced their own water plan that they said would curb the authority over groundwater monitoring contained in the Senate plan. The Republican bill, AB 1 7x, was introduced hours after a closed-door meeting Monday of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Republican and Democratic leaders of both houses. During the meeting, Senate Republican leader Dennis Hollingsworth, R-Murrieta, and Assembly Republican leader Sam Blakeslee, R-San Luis Obispo, said they were unhappy over the regulatory powers that the Steinberg bill authorized for groundwater monitoring and new conservation provisions. Republicans said the provisions were particularly difficult for small farmers. The authors of the bill are three of the Assembly Republican negotiators on water -- Jean Fuller of Bakersfield, Jim Nielsen of Yolo and Kevin Jeffries of Riverside. Assembly Republicans said the bill was intended to provide a platform for future negotiations, and was "a work in progress," but it was put forward as a potential alternative to the Steinberg proposal. A look at the bills. The Senate and Assembly bills are similar in some respects, but differ in others. One key difference is in the penalties and fines for improper diversions of water. *The Senate bill calls for fines up to $5,000 per day or the amount of "the highest market value of water," a level that could far exceed $5,000 per day if the diversion was on a large scale. The Assembly plan's language caps the penalty at $5,000, according to the language in the bill. The Assembly Republicans bill, which deals with policy and not fiscal issues, was introduced on the same day that legislative hearings began on the Steinberg bill, which was the product of months of negotiations between water interests and environmental groups. But some of the largest water players in the state remain supportive of the Steinberg measure. The fact that both water agencies, among the most powerful political players in state water issues, back the bill reflects their belief that the legislation assists them in their ultimate goal. The bill provides "a clear path to conveyance," said lobbyist Ed Manning, representing Westlands Water District. "It's a heck of a lot better than the status quo." The bill itself does not contain language explicitly authorizing the Peripheral Canal, nor does it contain any of three above-ground storage projects associated with the negotiations - Temperance Flat near Fresno and Sites in Colusa County, and raising the level at Los Vaqueros Reservoir in Contra Costa County. But analyses by MWD and Westlands suggest that language deep in the 116-page bill helps expedite development of the canal over time - a project already authorized in state law. The state has begun studying the environmental impacts of canal, although it has not settled on whether the channel should go through or around the delta. The above-ground storage issues are expected to be addressed in the bond proposal. The canal is a flashpoint in the debate over California water policy. The multibillion-dollar canal - rejected by voters in 1982 - would move water from the Sacramento River around the delta and into the California Aqueduct. One goal is to get more water to the south without having huge pumps pull it out of the delta, an action that damages the fisheries and has drawn court rulings. Opponents believe the canal could choke off water to the delta, worsening the environmental hazard. The governance of the delta. Steinberg has proposed a top-to-bottom overhaul of the management of the delta by setting up a new panel to decide critical policy, expand the power of California's water-use enforcers and create the position of Delta Watermaster to ride herd over the delta protections. It establishes a policy that is protecting the environment and assuring reliable water supplies are of equal importance - a finding that is a departure from the past. It would set up an independent scientific panel to examine the delta's needs. It includes fines of up to $5,000 per day for illegal diversions of water. It authorizes the State Water Resources Control Board to initiate investigations on its own, rather than in response to complaints, and it requires the state to put into effect an aggressive groundwater management program. The legislation would repeal the California Bay-Delta Authority Act, currently the principal statute governing the delta, and shifts key authority to a seven-member Delta Stewardship Council that would decide delta policy. The Council would be an independent state agency and have authority over delta development. The council also would have a say-so over the Peripheral Canal, a regulatory hurdle that does not exist in current law. But the council also would be required to follow the proposed statute, which says delta policy "should improve the water conveyance system and expand statewide water storage" and provide a "reliable water supply." The bill also contains stringent conservation and groundwater management programs, details how delta-area local governments will participate in the management of the delta. It includes conservation requiring a per capita, 20 percent cut in water use by 2020. The water districts' participation in the program is voluntary, although districts face losses in funding if they don't participate. [Home ] [View this article on Capitol Weekly] [Forward to Friends] Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.gif Type: image/gif Size: 5361 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Mon Nov 2 19:25:25 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Mon, 2 Nov 2009 19:25:25 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Public Scoping for EIR Suction Dredging Message-ID: <010c01ca5c35$499f9e20$dcdeda60$@net> DFG News Release Public Scoping Meetings Held to Receive Comments on Suction Dredge Permitting Program Nov. 2, 2009 Contact: Mark Stopher, Environmental Program Manager, (530) 225-2275 Jordan Traverso, Deputy Director, Office of Communications, Education and Outreach, (916) 654-9937 The Department of Fish and Game (DFG) is holding public scoping meetings for input on its suction dredge permitting program. Three meetings will provide an opportunity for the public, interested groups, and local, state and federal agencies to comment on potential issues or concerns with the program. The outcome of the scoping meetings and the public comment period following the scoping meetings will help shape what is studied in the Subsequent Environmental Impact Report (SEIR). A court order requires DFG to conduct an environmental review of the program under the California Environmental Quality Act. DFG is currently prohibited from issuing suction dredge permits under a court order issued July 9. In addition, as of Aug. 6, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's signing of SB 670 (Wiggins) places a moratorium on all California instream suction dredge mining or the use of any such equipment in any California river, stream or lake, regardless of whether the operator has an existing permit issued by DFG. The moratorium will remain in effect until DFG completes the environmental review of its permitting program and makes any necessary updates to the existing regulations. The scoping meetings will be held in Fresno, Sacramento and Redding. Members of the public can provide comments in person at any of the following locations and times: . Fresno: Monday, Nov. 16, 5 p.m. California Retired Teachers Association Building 3930 E. Saginaw Way Fresno, CA 93726 . Sacramento: Tuesday, Nov. 17, 5 p.m. City of West Sacramento Galleria 1110 West Capitol Ave. West Sacramento, CA 95691 . Redding: Wednesday, Nov. 18, 5 p.m. Shasta Senior Nutrition Program Center 100 Mercy Oaks Drive Redding, CA 96003 Written comments must be postmarked by Dec. 3, 2009 and may be submitted, either by e-mail to dfgsuctiondredge at dfg.ca.gov or by regular mail to: Mark Stopher California Department of Fish and Game 601 Locust Street Redding, CA 96001 For more information about these meetings, the suction dredge program or to view the Initial Study and supporting documents, please visit www.dfg.ca.gov/suctiondredge . Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Tue Nov 3 10:24:46 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Tue, 3 Nov 2009 10:24:46 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Water Legislation Message-ID: <000e01ca5cb2$ec80ab70$c5820250$@net> There are so many print articles on current water legislation developments that I have not posted them. I don't want to clog up your email. However, if anyone wants links to each newspaper story on this (these) issue (issues), let me know and I'll send the links to you. They're from every newspaper in the state virtually and some from outside the state. The number of articles is substantial putting it mildly. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kierassociates at suddenlink.net Tue Nov 3 11:01:11 2009 From: kierassociates at suddenlink.net (Kier Associates) Date: Tue, 03 Nov 2009 11:01:11 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] [FOTR] Water Legislation In-Reply-To: <000e01ca5cb2$ec80ab70$c5820250$@net> References: <000e01ca5cb2$ec80ab70$c5820250$@net> Message-ID: <20091103190118.AJV21622.omta02.suddenlink.net@kier.suddenlink.net> An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Tue Nov 3 21:35:44 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Tue, 3 Nov 2009 21:35:44 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Mistake Message-ID: <00ed01ca5d10$a880e580$f982b080$@net> My very genuine apologies for the last email with the DFG News Release totally unrelated to Trinity or fish. That was a mistake. Mistake? Who me? Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From Charles_Chamberlain at fws.gov Wed Nov 4 05:49:59 2009 From: Charles_Chamberlain at fws.gov (Charles_Chamberlain at fws.gov) Date: Wed, 4 Nov 2009 05:49:59 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Fw: Mainstem Trinity River redd survey update 11/04/2009 Message-ID: It's me again. The Trinity River redd survey update available at the link in the message below has been updated to reflect addition of another week's data. Thanks for tuning in! Charlie Charles Chamberlain/AFWO/ R1/FWS/DOI To env trinity 09/28/2009 01:21 cc PM Subject Mainstem Trinity River redd survey update 09/28/2009 Hi all, Fall 2009 salmon spawning surveys of the mainstem Trinity River are underway. These are conducted collaboratively by the Arcata Fish and Wildlife Office, California Department of Fish and Game, Yurok Tribal Fisheries Program, Hoopa Valley Tribal Fisheries Department, and the Shasta-Trinity National Forest. Our first within-season update for the 2009 redd survey is available from the Arcata Fish and Wildlife Office Website at the link below. Click on "Trinity River 2009 Redd Survey Update" near the bottom of the page. http://www.fws.gov/arcata/fisheries/projectUpdates.html Cheers! Charlie Charlie Chamberlain Fish Biologist - U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Arcata Fish & Wildlife Office 1655 Heindon Road Arcata, CA 95521 Charles_Chamberlain at fws.gov Phone: (707) 825-5110 Fax: (707) 822-8411 www.fws.gov/arcata/fisheries -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: graycol.gif Type: image/gif Size: 105 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: ecblank.gif Type: image/gif Size: 45 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Wed Nov 4 08:26:38 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Wed, 4 Nov 2009 08:26:38 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] DFG News Release Message-ID: <001001ca5d6b$96cde440$c469acc0$@net> My apologies again.The suction dredging News Release was not a mistake. I thought a DFG News Release on mammal hunting had been sent out. Had that been the case, it would have been a mistake. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Wed Nov 4 09:43:27 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Wed, 4 Nov 2009 09:43:27 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Water Legislation Message-ID: <87C6BD227A8041E59CDD389EA1CE6F9B@ByronsLaptop> A few of the print media stories today on the water legislation that has been passed by the State Legislature: LA Times http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-water4-2009nov04,0,3695225.story Sacramento Bee http://www.sacbee.com/topstories/story/2304544.html Sacramento Bee Opinion http://www.sacbee.com/walters/story/2303856.html Ventura County Star http://www.vcstar.com/news/2009/nov/04/water-peripheral-issue-should-be-fron t-and/?partner=RSS Central Valley Business Times http://www.centralvalleybusinesstimes.com/stories/001/?ID=13510 Byron Leydecker, JcT, Chair Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jsutton at tccanal.com Wed Nov 4 10:26:26 2009 From: jsutton at tccanal.com (Jeff Sutton) Date: Wed, 4 Nov 2009 10:26:26 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] DFG News Release In-Reply-To: <001001ca5d6b$96cde440$c469acc0$@net> References: <001001ca5d6b$96cde440$c469acc0$@net> Message-ID: <00a701ca5d7c$51d657d0$f5830770$@com> "Byron thought he was wrong once, but then realized he was mistaken." Way to go Byron. I love it. Jeffrey P. Sutton General Manager Tehama-Colusa Canal Authority 5513 State Highway 162/ P. O. Box 1025 Willows, CA 95988 530.934.2125 530.934.2355 (fax) From: env-trinity-bounces at velocipede.dcn.davis.ca.us [mailto:env-trinity-bounces at velocipede.dcn.davis.ca.us] On Behalf Of Byron Leydecker Sent: Wednesday, November 04, 2009 8:27 AM To: FOTR List; Trinity List Subject: [env-trinity] DFG News Release My apologies again.The suction dredging News Release was not a mistake. I thought a DFG News Release on mammal hunting had been sent out. Had that been the case, it would have been a mistake. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org No virus found in this incoming message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com Version: 8.5.424 / Virus Database: 270.14.49/2480 - Release Date: 11/04/09 07:37:00 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com Version: 8.5.424 / Virus Database: 270.14.49/2480 - Release Date: 11/04/09 07:37:00 From bwl3 at comcast.net Wed Nov 4 10:43:05 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Wed, 4 Nov 2009 10:43:05 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] DFG News Release In-Reply-To: <00a701ca5d7c$51d657d0$f5830770$@com> References: <001001ca5d6b$96cde440$c469acc0$@net> <00a701ca5d7c$51d657d0$f5830770$@com> Message-ID: <615C9A001B8644F8A832A08E9FC6FB07@ByronsLaptop> So what you're saying, Jeff, is that I'm never mistaken. But surely I must have made a mistake once in my life although at the moment I can't recall what it was. I will do my best to recall it. Oh yeah.the DFG mammal News Release that didn't go out anyway. Byron _____ From: Jeff Sutton [mailto:jsutton at tccanal.com] Sent: Wednesday, November 04, 2009 10:26 AM To: 'Byron Leydecker'; 'FOTR List'; 'Trinity List' Subject: RE: [env-trinity] DFG News Release "Byron thought he was wrong once, but then realized he was mistaken." Way to go Byron. I love it. Jeffrey P. Sutton General Manager Tehama-Colusa Canal Authority 5513 State Highway 162/ P. O. Box 1025 Willows, CA 95988 530.934.2125 530.934.2355 (fax) From: env-trinity-bounces at velocipede.dcn.davis.ca.us [mailto:env-trinity-bounces at velocipede.dcn.davis.ca.us] On Behalf Of Byron Leydecker Sent: Wednesday, November 04, 2009 8:27 AM To: FOTR List; Trinity List Subject: [env-trinity] DFG News Release My apologies again.The suction dredging News Release was not a mistake. I thought a DFG News Release on mammal hunting had been sent out. Had that been the case, it would have been a mistake. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org No virus found in this incoming message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com Version: 8.5.424 / Virus Database: 270.14.49/2480 - Release Date: 11/04/09 07:37:00 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Wed Nov 4 10:49:11 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Wed, 4 Nov 2009 10:49:11 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] FW: SFGate: Legislature passes water-system overhaul Message-ID: Thanks to Jeff Shellito for sending this SF Chronicle website article. Byron -----Original Message----- From: Jeff Shellito [mailto:jshellito at comcast.net] Sent: Wednesday, November 04, 2009 10:35 AM To: byron leydecker Subject: SFGate: Legislature passes water-system overhaul SF Chron story about passage of water package, from the paper's website (not in print edition) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- This article was sent to you by someone who found it on SFGate. The original article can be found on SFGate.com here: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2009/11/04/BA0O1AETO1.DT L --------------------------------------------------------------------- Wednesday, November 4, 2009 (SF Chronicle) Legislature passes water-system overhaul Wyatt Buchanan,Marisa Lagos, Chronicle Sacramento Bureau (11-04) 09:01 PST SACRAMENTO -- The state Legislature passed a sweeping, multibillion-dollar overhaul of California's water system this morning, after an all-night session on a plan that has been years in the making. The package of legislation will affect how Californians will receive and use water and won immediate praise from Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. "Water is the lifeblood of everything we do in California," Schwarzenegger said. "Without clean, reliable water, we cannot build, we cannot farm, we cannot grow and we cannot prosper. That is why I am so proud that the Legislature, Democrats and Republicans, came together and tackled one of the most complicated issues in our state's history." Legislative leaders have worked almost nonstop for weeks on the final deal, which includes an $11 billion bond that passed by slim margins in both the Senate and Assembly. The bond must go before the voters to win approval. "This Legislature did something that no Legislature has been able to accomplish in decades," said Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento. The package's success, he said, shows that the Legislature "can tackle the biggest and most intractable problems in the state." The water package consists of five major parts: -- A new seven-member board to oversee the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. The board would consist of gubernatorial and legislative appointees, along with the head of an existing delta commission. The board could approve a controversial peripheral canal to channel water around the delta. -- A 20 percent conservation mandate for urban areas, with credits for cities that have made significant conservation efforts. Agricultural entities will have to follow best practices for water use. -- New regulations to monitor groundwater levels throughout the state. -- Increased penalties for illegal water diversions, although the penalties and enforcement were significantly weakened from an earlier plan. -- A $11.1 billion bond to pay for the overhaul. Of the total, $3 billion would be set aside for new water storage, which could be reservoirs, and more than $2 billion would go toward restoration of the delta ecosystem. Other money in the bond would pay for water recycling, drought relief, conservation and watershed protection projects. E-mail the writers at wbuchanan at sfchronicle.com and mlagos at sfchronicle.com. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright 2009 SF Chronicle From bwl3 at comcast.net Wed Nov 4 10:53:18 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Wed, 4 Nov 2009 10:53:18 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] FW: NY Times website: "Historic Water Reform package Passes Calif. Legislature" Message-ID: More help from Jeff in trying to understand what the legislation does and doesn't include. Byron _____ From: Jeff Shellito [mailto:jshellito at comcast.net] Sent: Wednesday, November 04, 2009 10:47 AM To: bwl3 at comcast.net Subject: NY Times website: "Historic Water Reform package Passes Calif. Legislature" See dueling quotes between Steve Evans (Friends of the River) and Barry Nelson (NRDC). The New York Times _____ November 4, 2009 Historic Water Reform Package Passes Calif. Legislature By COLIN SULLIVAN of Greenwire The California Legislature voted early this morning to overhaul the state's governance of water supply, sending a five-part reform package to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R). A day after the water effort seemed near collapse, Senate leaders managed to negotiate a settlement to finish their half of the work as the clock ticked well beyond midnight. Crucially, the Senate passed revised legislation to enact a groundwater monitoring program, clearing a key roadblock. With the Senate's work done, the action turned to the lower chamber, where lawmakers traded blows until about 4 a.m. PST over a comprehensive package that opponents called an unprecedented expansion of a state bureaucracy that is already the nation's most extensive. But the Assembly overcame the protests to pass the four policy sections of the omnibus effort, along with an $11.14 billion bond measure to finance water projects. If the governor signs the package, the bond would be placed on the November ballot next year, as any new debt must be approved directly by voters. The bond was raised at the last minute in the Assembly from a previous level of $9.99 billion. The increase brought a round of reprisals from critics who cited the state's economic woes and recent budget cuts to core programs like education and health care. Assemblymember Chuck DeVore (R), a candidate for Sen. Barbara Boxer's (D) seat in Washington, said the bond measure had been "so bulked up with pork" it would fail next year. "This is not the time to put an $11.14 billion bond before the voters," Assemblymember Mariko Yamada (D) added. Schwarzenegger, a supporter of the bond, is expected to sign the entire package. Core details The bills moved by the Legislature are nothing if not complex, but they would essentially accomplish five key goals. The package would: * Do away with the long-troubled CalFed program and the Bay Delta Authority to establish a seven-member governing council to oversee both restoration of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, which supplies water to 23 million Californians, and future construction of levees, dams, canals or other water projects. * Mandate a 20 percent reduction in urban per capita water use by Dec. 31, 2020. * Begin the first-ever groundwater monitoring program in the state, wresting control of the process from local authorities. * Prevent illegal diversions and increase fines for those found stealing water. * Pursue funding for all of the above. Water monitoring had threatened to derail negotiations this week, but Senate Democratic leader Darrell Steinberg offered a concession to Republicans who feared regulators would encroach on private property, writing language into the final bill that would prohibit regulators from accessing private land without prior approval. "It's a fair balance," Steinberg said minutes before the Senate passed the bill. Elsewhere, many proponents hope the new governing council, with members appointed by the governor and the Legislature, will be able to cut through red tape and slow-moving environmental reviews to expand conveyance and storage facilities. Among the options the council would likely consider once created is construction of a multibillion-dollar peripheral canal around the delta to farms and urban users in the south. Intense debate splits environmentalists The votes yesterday came after an intense round of lobbying that saw prominent environmental groups in Sacramento working against each other. In support of the policy provisions (but not necessarily the bond) were the Nature Conservancy, Environmental Defense Fund, Natural Resources Defense Council and California League of Conservation Voters, among others. Firmly against it were the Sierra Club, Friends of the River, and Planning and Conservation League. To Steve Evans, conservation director of Friends of the River, the backing of NRDC, in particular, meant implicit support for building a peripheral canal around the delta. Moreover, Evans took issue with NRDC's claim that it has no position on the bond, calling it a politically convenient calculation. "NRDC claims that they oppose the bond, but if you pass policy without funding, it's just a piece of paper," Evans said. NRDC's Barry Nelson, head of the group's Western Water Project, countered that his coalition of environmental groups had formed the first "growing middle" on water legislation in a generation. He noted that the groups had joined with the Westland Water District, the Orange County Business Council and others to back Steinberg's package in what amounts to a cease-fire among common enemies. "Suffice it to say that NRDC and the Westlands Water District have disagreed about many things over the years, frequently before a federal judge," Nelson wrote in a blog post. "But perhaps it is a sign that a truce is possible, giving us time and breathing room to develop workable solutions." In a subsequent interview, Nelson said Evans has misrepresented his position on the bond, for one, and failed to see the big picture in terms of the environmental restoration provisions that survived into Steinberg's bill. "This is the most ambitious water reform bill the state has considered in a quarter-century," Nelson said. "There are a number of new protections for the delta that we don't have under current law that make this a far stronger bill." Among those protections is a provision that would require the state to determine how much water the delta needs to keep fish alive and save the ecosystem from further destruction. "Environmentalists have been trying to get that determination made for 23 years," Nelson said. "It's enormously important." But Evans said the legislation would drag water lawyers into court for a decade and result in more infrastructure, more debt and less water for all parties concerned. He also claims the politically appointed council of seven would tend to favor throwing money at the problem, to build new infrastructure instead of advancing aggressive conservation, desalination, recycling and groundwater management measures. "A $9 billion bond will cost the taxpayers $576 million a year for 30 years," Evans said. "It's just not feasible, because the state's debt service on bonds already authorized by the voters will grow to about 10 percent of the state's budget and will contribute to more state funding cuts." Lawmakers were caught in the same debate. A vocal opponent, Sen. Lois Wolk (D), called the legislation a "litigation haven" that could cost the state anywhere from $52 billion to $78 billion in new water projects. But Steinberg, in remarks on the Senate floor, countered that the peripheral canal was anything but assure, as the council would have to consider all alternatives and subject its review to the "co-equal" goals of environmental protection and water supply. Sullivan, E&E's West Coast bureau chief, is based in San Francisco. Copyright 2009 E&E Publishing. All Rights Reserved. For more news on energy and the environment, visit www.greenwire.com . DCSIMG -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: nojavascript&WT.js=No&WT.tv=1.0.7 Type: application/octet-stream Size: 67 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: 6453576bQ2FPTzQ2B4WcQ2BCe40UeZ0X4I04cZ0.dat Type: application/octet-stream Size: 45 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.gif Type: image/gif Size: 1877 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image002.gif Type: image/gif Size: 73 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image003.gif Type: image/gif Size: 67 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image004.gif Type: image/gif Size: 73 bytes Desc: not available URL: From ema.berol at yahoo.com Wed Nov 4 13:57:22 2009 From: ema.berol at yahoo.com (Emelia Berol) Date: Wed, 4 Nov 2009 13:57:22 -0800 (PST) Subject: [env-trinity] DFG News Release In-Reply-To: <615C9A001B8644F8A832A08E9FC6FB07@ByronsLaptop> References: <001001ca5d6b$96cde440$c469acc0$@net> <00a701ca5d7c$51d657d0$f5830770$@com> <615C9A001B8644F8A832A08E9FC6FB07@ByronsLaptop> Message-ID: <652011.63252.qm@web46203.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> This is really funny, thanks Jeff and Byron for making me laugh today ... ________________________________ From: Byron Leydecker To: Jeff Sutton ; FOTR List ; Trinity List Sent: Wed, November 4, 2009 10:43:05 AM Subject: Re: [env-trinity] DFG News Release So what you?re saying, Jeff, is that I?m never mistaken. But surely I must have made a mistake once in my life although at the moment I can?t recall what it was. I will do my best to recall it. Oh yeah?the DFG mammal News Release that didn?t go out anyway. Byron ________________________________ From:Jeff Sutton [mailto:jsutton at tccanal.com] Sent: Wednesday, November 04, 2009 10:26 AM To: ' Byron Leydecker '; ' FOTR List '; ' Trinity List ' Subject: RE: [env-trinity] DFG News Release ?Byron thought he was wrong once, but then realized he was mistaken.? Way to go Byron. I love it. Jeffrey P. Sutton General Manager Tehama-ColusaCanalAuthority 5513 State Highway162/ P. O. Box 1025 Willows, CA 95988 530.934.2125 530.934.2355 (fax) From:env-trinity-bounces at velocipede.dcn.davis.ca.us [mailto:env-trinity-bounces at velocipede.dcn.davis.ca.us] On Behalf Of Byron Leydecker Sent: Wednesday, November 04, 2009 8:27 AM To: FOTR List ; Trinity List Subject: [env-trinity] DFG News Release My apologies again?The suction dredging News Release was not a mistake. I thought a DFG News Release on mammal hunting had been sent out. Had that been the case, it would have been a mistake. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://fotr.org/ No virus found in this incoming message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com Version: 8.5.424 / Virus Database: 270.14.49/2480 - Release Date: 11/04/09 07:37:00 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From BGutermuth at usbr.gov Wed Nov 4 14:13:20 2009 From: BGutermuth at usbr.gov (Gutermuth, F. Brandt) Date: Wed, 4 Nov 2009 15:13:20 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Trinity River Restoration Program - Sawmill Site Tour: Nov 14 Message-ID: <469C3D002DBB944BBEAEC89CBE8D1DF703DDE78C9E@IBR5DENMXCMX01.bor.doi.net> Dear Trinity River advocates - The Trinity River Restoration Program has completed this year's earthwork at our current Channel Rehabilitation Site at Sawmill. Only revegetation efforts remain to be completed. Now we'd like to take the opportunity on Nov 14 (between 12 and 3 pm) to walk the site with interested parties and to answer any questions or address any concerns that you might have with the Trinity River Restoration Program and our river activities - especially our physical channel restoration work. Attached (and pasted below) is a copy of an ad for the event that will be placed in the Trinity Journal. If you have any questions, please call me. Hope to see you there. Sincerely, Brandt Gutermuth Environmental Specialist Trinity River Restoration Program PO Box 1300, 1313 S Main St Weaverville, CA 96093 530.623.1806 (voice) 530.623.5944 (fax) www.trrp.net _________________________DISPLAY AD FROM TRINITY JOURNAL FOR SAWMILL TOUR______________________________ WHAT: Trinity River Restoration Program (TRRP) Sawmill Project Channel Rehabilitation Site Tour WHERE: End of Cemetery Road off of Rush Creek Road in Lewiston: starts at the California Department of Fish and Game (CDFG) Sawmill Site parking lot, near the old Lewiston Bridge, across the River from Cemetery Hole. WHEN: November 14, 2009 from 12:00 until 3:00 PM. WHY: TRRP Construction work (floodplain excavation, vegetation removal, large wood placement, etc.) is nearing completion so it is a great time to visit newly constructed Trinity fish habitat and river improvements, answer questions, and discuss future projects. Bring clothes to walk around in, rain or shine For more information regarding the Tour, please contact Brandt Gutermuth at 530-623-1806 or bgutermuth at mp.usbr.gov -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: SawmillSiteTourDisplayAd.pdf Type: application/pdf Size: 20798 bytes Desc: SawmillSiteTourDisplayAd.pdf URL: From snowgoose at pulsarco.com Wed Nov 4 14:51:35 2009 From: snowgoose at pulsarco.com (Sandy Denn) Date: Wed, 4 Nov 2009 14:51:35 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] DFG News Release References: <001001ca5d6b$96cde440$c469acc0$@net><00a701ca5d7c$51d657d0$f5830770$@com><615C9A001B8644F8A832A08E9FC6FB07@ByronsLaptop> <652011.63252.qm@web46203.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <71B4C47093914ACB92DEA25E8198AB22@acer6e395d0925> Ditto Emelia's remarks! This has been fun to follow, and personally Byron, I have given this matter thorough review and have determined that in this instance a double negative does indeed result in a positive which in English means you STILL have never made a mistake!....best to all, Sandy Denn ----- Original Message ----- From: Emelia Berol To: Byron Leydecker ; Jeff Sutton ; FOTR List ; Trinity List Sent: Wednesday, November 04, 2009 1:57 PM Subject: Re: [env-trinity] DFG News Release This is really funny, thanks Jeff and Byron for making me laugh today ... ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ From: Byron Leydecker To: Jeff Sutton ; FOTR List ; Trinity List Sent: Wed, November 4, 2009 10:43:05 AM Subject: Re: [env-trinity] DFG News Release So what you?re saying, Jeff, is that I?m never mistaken. But surely I must have made a mistake once in my life although at the moment I can?t recall what it was. I will do my best to recall it. Oh yeah?the DFG mammal News Release that didn?t go out anyway. Byron ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ From: Jeff Sutton [mailto:jsutton at tccanal.com] Sent: Wednesday, November 04, 2009 10:26 AM To: ' Byron Leydecker '; ' FOTR List '; ' Trinity List ' Subject: RE: [env-trinity] DFG News Release ?Byron thought he was wrong once, but then realized he was mistaken.? Way to go Byron. I love it. Jeffrey P. Sutton General Manager Tehama-Colusa Canal Authority 5513 State Highway 162/ P. O. Box 1025 Willows, CA 95988 530.934.2125 530.934.2355 (fax) From: env-trinity-bounces at velocipede.dcn.davis.ca.us [mailto:env-trinity-bounces at velocipede.dcn.davis.ca.us] On Behalf Of Byron Leydecker Sent: Wednesday, November 04, 2009 8:27 AM To: FOTR List ; Trinity List Subject: [env-trinity] DFG News Release My apologies again?The suction dredging News Release was not a mistake. I thought a DFG News Release on mammal hunting had been sent out. Had that been the case, it would have been a mistake. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://fotr.org/ No virus found in this incoming message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com Version: 8.5.424 / Virus Database: 270.14.49/2480 - Release Date: 11/04/09 07:37:00 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ env-trinity mailing list env-trinity at velocipede.dcn.davis.ca.us http://www2.dcn.org/mailman/listinfo/env-trinity ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ No virus found in this incoming message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com Version: 8.5.424 / Virus Database: 270.14.49/2480 - Release Date: 11/04/09 07:37:00 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From windhorse at jeffnet.org Wed Nov 4 15:00:20 2009 From: windhorse at jeffnet.org (Jim Carpenter) Date: Wed, 4 Nov 2009 15:00:20 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] unsubscribe Message-ID: <000001ca5da2$959a6850$c0cf38f0$@org> Greetings, I'm not sure how I am listed for emails, but I get everything twice. Can you delete either jim at carpenterdesign.com or windhorse @jeffnet.org? Thanks, Jim www.CarpenterDesign.com 541 885 5450 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.gif Type: image/gif Size: 862 bytes Desc: not available URL: From tstokely at att.net Fri Nov 6 10:47:21 2009 From: tstokely at att.net (Tom Stokely) Date: Fri, 6 Nov 2009 10:47:21 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] http://www.times-standard.com/ci_13727983 Message-ID: http://www.times-standard.com/ci_13727983 Water bond presents puzzle for North Coast John Driscoll/The Times-Standard Posted: 11/06/2009 01:30:25 AM PST A massive water bond developed by state legislators for the November 2010 election presents a conundrum for supporters of removing the Klamath River's dams. In the $11.1 billion bond measure is $250 million that would satisfy California's portion of funding to remove four dams on the Klamath. The legislative package passed Wednesday contains provisions for water conservation and even groundwater monitoring -- elements that could drastically change the state's notorious water policies. But the lion's share of the bond money, if approved by voters, would go toward new dams, water projects and development of a peripheral canal to pump water around the Sacramento River delta to cities and farms to the south. Serious concerns are being voiced by Northern California river advocates that the bill loosens restrictions on water transfers in the Central Valley Project -- CVP -- that could tap cold water supplies in Trinity Lake, Shasta Lake and Folsom Reservoir. That puts Klamath Dam removal proponents in the position of supporting a bill that could harm the Klamath's main tributary, the Trinity River, and its fisheries. "We don't want to rob Peter to pay Paul," said Craig Tucker, Klamath campaign coordinator for the Karuk Tribe. A draft agreement reached among 28 agencies, tribes, and fishing and environmental groups to remove the Klamath's four hydroelectric dams was released in September. The organizations' governing bodies are now reviewing the deal, which calls for California to put up $250 million, to be added to $200 million from electricity ratepayers in Oregon, for dam removal costs. Dam owner Pacificorp has agreed to give up the dams and transfer them to a federal agency for dam removal beginning in 2020. The dams block migration of salmon to the upper 300 miles of the Klamath River and its tributaries and its reservoirs have severe water quality problems. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation is asking the State Water Resources Control Board for extensions of its water permits on the Trinity River and other Central Valley rivers. But it doesn't include in its application restrictions on water diversions to the Sacramento River called for in a 2000 U.S. Interior Secretary's order to improve conditions for salmon and steelhead. Tom Stokely with the California Water Impact Network wrote in a letter to federal and state legislators this week that the legislative package just approved could make more Trinity River water available for transfer to other parts of the state -- water needed for fish. "This appears to be another effort by the CVP water contractors to wring every last drop of water from CVP reservoirs that they can't currently get their hands on," Stokely wrote. The National Marine Fisheries Service has also taken notice of Reclamation's water permit applications. In a response to them, NMFS wrote that the petitions call for much lower flows to the Trinity River than allowed under the 2000 decision, which could breach temperature restrictions. Concerns about the legislative package's possible effects on Northern California prompted Assemblyman Wesley Chesbro to vote against the bills. "In an era of drought and climate change, California should be maximizing water recycling, reuse and restoration as the pathway to solving our water problems," the Arcata Democrat said. "Despite efforts to make it better, this legislation only puts off the day of reckoning when we will be forced to radically change the way we use water in California." The enormity of the bond alone is also likely to generate opposition from a wide range of interests. Spreck Rosekrans with the Environmental Defense Fund said that his group supported the bills, which he said contain measures to secure water for farms and cities while finally requiring the monitoring of groundwater. But the organization has not taken a position on the bond. "The voters of California will have to decide whether it's something California can afford," Rosekrans said, "and whether it's good policy to put $11 billion into these projects." He said that there will likely be other opportunities to seek money to remove the Klamath River's dams if the bond fails in November. The September agreement does not require that signatories of a final dam removal deal support a bond measure, but some are concerned that there may not be another good opportunity to introduce money for Klamath dam removal any time soon. John Driscoll can be reached at 441-0504 or jdriscoll at times-standard.com. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From tstokely at att.net Fri Nov 6 12:32:34 2009 From: tstokely at att.net (Tom Stokely) Date: Fri, 6 Nov 2009 12:32:34 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] How taking out dams splits environmental groups Message-ID: <39316075CFE4498F80E4EF8A2DA3574B@homeuserPC> http://crosscut.com/2009/11/03/science-environment/19322/ How taking out dams splits environmental groups The issues are maddeningly complex and politically explosive. Here's a close look at the bedeviled Klamath River basin, where a seeming agreement is dividing the greens. By Daniel Jack Chasan November 03, 2009. The mighty are falling. Right now, they're toppling one after another - those dams and dikes that have altered the natural flow of Northwestern waters for the past century. Consider: On October 9, the 500-foot-long earthen Savage Rapids Dam, which had blocked the lower Rogue River since 1921 bit the dust. A week before, contractors breached the last of the dikes that had kept Puget Sound tides from most of the Nisqually River estuary since the turn of the 20th century. Next year, PacifiCorp will take down its 125-foot concrete Condit Dam, which has blocked southwest Washington's White Salmon River just north of the Columbia Gorge since 1913. The Elwha dams, which have kept salmon from the watershed that forms 20 percent of Olympic National Park since long before the park was created, will start coming down in 2011. And 25 government agencies, state governments, tribes, and interest groups have agreed with PacifiCorp on a process that may lead to removal of four dams that have blocked the Klamath River for most of the past century. These are not minor projects. The Nisqually project is the biggest estuary restoration in the Northwest. The Condit project will be the biggest dam removal in the United States, and the Elwa dam removal will be even bigger. And the Klamath? "When the Klamath dams come down it will be the biggest dam removal project the world has ever seen," said Steve Rothert of American Rivers. Rothert, whose group was at the negotiating table, said that when the dams come down, "we will be able to watch on a grand scale as a river comes back to life." Need more? Some environmental groups also hope that the Klamath agreement points the way toward a decision to breach the lower Snake River dams. As you can easily imagine, the factors in such massive alterations of the landscape cut in many directions. That has meant environmental groups are lined up on opposing sides of some of the disputes. Take the Klamath River, for starters. Virtually no one claims that taking out the Klamath dams would be a bad idea. But will the Klamath agreement hold up? That remains to be seen. And would the benefits of dam removal outweigh the environmental costs imposed on the Klamath Basin by the agreement? Some environmental groups say they won't. They argue that if you're fixated on the welfare of salmon and the principle of dam removal, then you may not look too closely at the price tag. If price is a consideration, though, you may decide that the rewards are too uncertain and the known costs are too high. PacifiCorp owns the Klamath dams, the first of which went up in 1918, the last in 1962. The company itself, which operates in Washington, Oregon, California, and Utah, is owned by MidAmerican Energy Holdings Company, which in turn is largely owned by Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway. It had been owned by Glasgow-based Scottish Power. But representatives of the Hoopa Valley, Yurok, Karuk and Klamath tribes demonstrated against the dams' effect on Klamath River salmon outside the company's annual meeting in 2004, and the next year, Scottish Power unloaded its American subsidiary. Federal licenses to operate the dams expired in 2006, and more than a decade ago, PacifiCorp started the relicensing process. NOAA Fisheries and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service insisted that the company install fish ladders. The California Energy Commission, the Interior Department, and FERC concluded that if fish ladders were the price of relicensing, PacifiCorp and its customers would save money if the utility just took the dams down. The Hoopa Valley tribe, which occupies a reservation along the Klamath's largest tributary, the Trinity River, northeast of Eureka, would love to see the Klamath dams come down. But the Hoopas don't like the proposed agreement. Seattle attorney Tom Schlosser, who represents the tribe, explains that "it's not a dam-removal agreement. It's a planning process." Dam removal is discussed as a done deal, but that's not what the agreement says. For openers, members of negotiating groups have yet to ratify it. If the agreement goes forward, it requires the Secretary of the Interior to decide in 2012 whether or not the benefits of dam removal would outweigh the costs. If he decides they would, dam removal could start in 2020, but there are many other contingencies. The states of Oregon and California can back out. The whole agreement is linked to a complex settlement of disputes over water in the Klamath Basin, upstream from the dams. Such settlements would require Congressional blessing - and a Congressional appropriation of $985 million. Schlosser doubts all this is going to happen. Without the agreement, FERC could tell PacifiCorp to take down the dams. With the agreement in place, however, FERC will effectively be unable to do that. The utility "has gotten the parties to agree that it will take an act of Congress to remove those dams," Schlosser says. "They've gotten themselves thrown into the briar patch." American Rivers' Steve Rothert acknowledges that the agreement is "not a guarantee." He says "American Rivers would prefer that dam removal was certain and sooner." However, he says, "we are confident . . . that removal will be determined to be in the public interest and will happen." The biggest hurdle, he notes, was getting all the participants to agree. With that accomplished, "there are no real show-stoppers to date." Assuming the dams will eventually come out, PacifiCorp can keep operating them, with no significant operating changes, for more than a decade. Critics say the utility is getting a long free pass. They also point out that the agreement does not help fish that try to spawn in the Klamath's tributary Shasta and Scott rivers, which are virtually sucked dry to irrigate farms in central California. "The Scott and the Shasta rivers are basically de-watered," says WaterWatch of Oregon's executive director John De Voe. "This deal won't do a damn thing to address those problems." The deal also locks in allocations of water and money that critics say will prevent rational water management in the Klamath Basin for another 50 years. Oregon Wild conservation director Steve Pedery says it will "cement Bush priorities in the basin." (The Bush administration's approach to the basin had less to do with helping farmers grow potatoes than with helping Karl Rove grow votes.) The Klamath Basin made national headlines in 2001, when the Bureau of Reclamation had refused to let water flow to its Klamath irrigation project. The Bureau was under court order to protect two endangered species of bottom-dwelling fish called suckers, which inhabit Upper Klamath Lake and several smaller local water bodies, as well as a threatened population of coho salmon that spawns in California tributaries of the Klamath River. The farmers who raised potatoes, alfalfa, and other crops on the 220,000 acres of the federal irrigation project had already borrowed money to plant this year's crops. They were left high and dry. That May, a "bucket brigade" drew an estimated 12,000 people to Klamath Falls. Protesters chainsawed the locks off the headgates and let water flow into the irrigation canals. They also laid pipe around the headgates. In August, a caravan of sympathizers from towns all over the west arrived in Klamath Falls bearing food for the local farmers. The following March, the secretaries of Agriculture and the Interior flew to Klamath Falls, ceremonially opened the headgate, and let water flow once again. That fall,, thousands of chinook salmon died in the mouth of the Klamath River, waiting for enough water to move upstream. They were crowded tightly together. The water got warm. Diseases spread. More than 30,000 mature fish perished. Seattle attorney Tom Schlosser, who represents the Hoopa tribe, calls it " the largest adult salmon die-off in recorded history." The California Department of Fish and Game laid the blame for the massive fish kill squarely on the diversion of irrigation water. Under the proposed settlement, farmers in the irrigation district would get water, no questions asked, for the next half century. The proposed agreement also "calls for federal appropriations of $985 million and confers many benefits on Klamath Project irrigaters," writes Schlosser, "including $41 million in power subsidies; $92.5 million to implement their own water plan that they develop without public oversight; [and] preferential Columbia River hydro-system power rates." Water flowing to the irrigation project won't help fish negotiate the river. Critics argue that the proposed Klamath dam agreement therefore wouldn't guarantee an adequate flow at key times of the year. Schlosser has written that the basin agreement "guarantees irrigation diversions of water for the Klamath Irrigation District Project in Oregon. Those diversions - 330,000 to 385,000 acre-feet per year-- would trump the in-stream flow needs of fish and other aquatic organisms. Fish would get whatever water flow remains." The Hoopas won a long legal battle with the big Westlands Irrigation District to get more water left in the Trinity, which had been de-watered just as the Scott and Shasta have been. They worry that low flows will make it harder for adult fish to swim upstream to the mouth of the Trinity and for smolts to survive the journey downstream. De Voe says modeling shows that if the irrigaters get their guarantee, then in 40 percent of water-year types, there will actually be less water in the river than there is now. "We have a hard time rationalizing less water in the river," he says. "I've been describing this thing as 'faith-based conservation,'" Rothert counters that "at one point, . . . scientists had expressed some concerns about flows," but their concerns have been answered. "I'm afraid that some of he other conservation groups have not kept up with the science," he says. They may be "holding on to ghosts." Another vexing problem lies with birds. The basin's national wildlife refuges, which provide vital feeding and resting stops for the millions of birds that follow the Pacific Flyway north and south, get some water, but their water rights remain junior, so in a pinch, potatoes will get water before birds do. On the other hand, Rothert says, "for more than 100 years, the refuges have been a neglected stepchild," entitled only to leftovers from the irrigation district. Now, for the first time, they would be guaranteed water in perpetuity. Critics concede that. They just say the refuges still won't get enough water. They also point out that farmers who currently cultivate some 22,000 acres in the refuges retain the right to do so for another 50 years. Crops take up so much acreage, says Pedery, that if you look at a satellite photograph of the Tule Lake National Wildlife Refuge, "you can't find the refuge." "If you look at a map of the Pacific Flyway," Pedery says, you see that "it's shaped like an hourglass, and the thinnest part of the hourglass is the Klamath Basin." An estimated 90 percent of the birds that use the flyway stop there. And the largest collection of wintering eagles outside Alaska shows up every year to feast on them. As land has been developed in northern California, the migratory birds' alternatives have disappeared. Given the importance of the Basin and its refuges, Pedery says, and in the face of both climate change and increasing development in California, how can you lock in a 50-year commitment to provide a fixed amount of water to irrigation? "From a science point of view," he suggests, "that's the Achilles heel of the settlement." Oregon Wild and Water Watch were forced out of the negotiations a couple of years ago. All the participants were told that the price of staying in was agreeing to everything already on the table, which included parts of the Klamath Basin deal that they hadn't discussed. Basically, Pedery says, they were told, "if you want to stay in the process, you have to support the Bush priorities." Other folks "felt the precedent of dam removal was so important that the details of the deal didn't matter," Pedery says. His group did not. On the surface all was amicable. In private, says Pedery, "my staff was told at some point: 'we're going to kick you out, and no one will care.'" He says it was all "quite a shock to us." If the agreement goes forward, expect more litigation. The Hoopas have already asked FERC to impose conditions on the year-to-year operating licenses it grants PacifiCorp. Turned down, they have filed an appeal in D.C. Circuit Court. The appeal was stayed as a price of being in on the negotiations. Now, the Hoopas must decide whether or not to go on with it. Whatever they decide, this issue will wind up in court, and environmental groups will presumably line up on both sides. Daniel Jack Chasan is an author, attorney, and writer of many articles about Northwest environmental issues. You can reach him in care of editor at crosscut.com. View this story online at: http://crosscut.com/2009/11/03/science-environment/19322/ ? 2009 Crosscut Public Media. All rights reserved. Printed on November 06, 2009 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sari at sisqtel.net Fri Nov 6 16:06:08 2009 From: sari at sisqtel.net (Sari Sommarstrom) Date: Fri, 06 Nov 2009 16:06:08 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Siskiyou Daily News 11-5-09 Message-ID: <20091107000606.9E8671191EB3@mx.dcn.davis.ca.us> http://www.siskiyoudaily.com/news/x1312014872/Scott-River-Water-Trust-Chinook-spawning-in-previously-dry-reaches?popular=true Scott River Water Trust: Chinook spawning in previously dry reaches ETNA ? The Scott River Water Trust announced in a news release this week that its efforts to secure over 400 acre?feet of water in early October from Scott Valley ranchers have helped Chinook salmon migrate up one of the Klamath River?s most important salmon and steel?head tributaries. ?An extremely dry year has created challenging flow conditions for fish passage,? the release stated. ?The Water Trust?s effort is significant because the amount of added water helped the flows reconnect through the dry reaches of the Scott River in Scott Valley. Some water users are also donating water.? This week, Chinook salmon successfully started spawning far upstream of the pre?viously dry reaches, with steelhead also moving up. The Scott River Water Trust, the first water trust in California, is a local non-profit....[see full article] SUBMITTED PHOTOS Above, a Chinook salmon spawner in the Scott River at river mile 43, October 22, 2009. The Scott River Water Trust has added more water instream during this extremely dry fall to help this fish run migrate upstream by leasing water from ranchers. Inset, spawning Chinook salmon are counted by Erich Yokel and Preston Harris of the Siskiyou RCD on Oct. 22 in the Scott River river mile 43 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Fri Nov 6 19:23:40 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Fri, 6 Nov 2009 19:23:40 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Water Message-ID: <002401ca5f59$b40428e0$1c0c7aa0$@net> A couple of worthwhile articles on the water legislation. Peter Gleick is at the top as a scientist, in my opinion, and he has no obligation to any other - completely non-partisan. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org California water bills. Is the new water legislation better than nothing? A lot of people have asked me my opinion about the new water legislation just passed in Sacramento. Here is a longer version of my piece in the New York Times Bay Area blog page. --Peter Gleick, Pacific Institute After months of negotiations, wrangling, lobbying, and deal-making, much of it behind closed doors and out of public view, the California legislature has just passed a major new water package that includes both complex policy changes and a huge bond request that the voters will be asked to approve. Despite the happy face being put on by some of the bill's supporters, including Governor Schwarzenegger, I doubt anyone is truly happy with the end result. Perhaps that's too much to expect for a topic as complex as California water and for a bill that tries to do so much at once. I'm certainly not happy, but I believe there was a (mostly) good faith effort on the part of the governor and the legislators and all the other water interest groups to try and produce something. What will be the ultimate outcome? Are we going to be better off with this bill than with no bill? Will California legislators now say they are done dealing with water, and refuse to tackle the unaddressed, partially addressed, or badly addressed issues? If so, then this package isn't going to be nearly enough. But if instead legislators and other water interests treat it as a beginning, not an end, and work to build and improve on the good pieces, it could be a major step forward. We'll have to wait and see how it changes our actual water problems. The worst thing about the bill was the process. Too few powerful interests had too much power to determine the content. Anyone who thinks the days of smoke-filled, back-room deals are over is wrong (except, perhaps, about the smoke). Too many other people, communities, and organizations were left out of the process. And while many of us were pressured to support, or oppose, the bills by various friends and colleagues, it became impossible to even understand what bill we were being asked to support, as day by day, hour by hour, good pieces were cut out or weakened and bad things inserted. Even at the very last minute, the bill was significantly watered down in desperate deals cut by a few special interests. This is bad, bad process. The biggest problems with California water have still not been addressed or fixed in these bills and the most productive question is, how can we move forward from here? Water Number: Here are four key unaddressed issues: 1. The State must still figure out how to measure, monitor, and report every single water use. As stunning as it may seem to outsiders, we still aren't measuring and metering all water uses, and the new legislation doesn't require us to. Imagine that you had a bank account, but you didn't know how much money was in it, you didn't know how much money was going in each month, and you didn't know how much was being taken out. That's our water use situation. And while that ignorance benefits some special interests, it is irresponsible. The modest requirements for comprehensive monitoring groundwater levels in earlier versions of the bill were fatally weakened at the last minute and there are still no requirements for reporting actual groundwater use or all other uses. 2. The State Water Resources Control Board, responsible for overseeing water rights, enforcing allocations, and preventing water theft and unreasonable use is far too weak. I've written about this earlier. The Board is hamstrung by politics and budget constraints. The new bill does not fix those problems and, in the worst case of last minute, back-room dealing, the modest efforts to strengthen the Board's ability to monitor, enforce, and penalize were stripped out or severely weakened. 3. Some bill supporters claim the bill will "implement the Governor's call to improve water use efficiency by 20 percent by 2020." If only that were true. Very modest targets for improving water-use efficiency were set in the bill for urban users only, and even these are not mandatory or enforceable. More outrageously, however, no such targets were set for agriculture, which uses 80% of the water used by humans in California. Agriculture remains largely unaccountable for how they use water. 4. The only sustainable way to support effective water management is through a user fee on water use. In the long run, asking the voters for bond after bond will not work. We pay for electricity; we pay for milk. The more we use, the more we pay. All users should pay a fee for water use based on the volume of water used. This too was stripped out of early versions of the legislation. Two additional key uncertainties stand out in the current bills: - We don't really know how the new institutional management structure for the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta is going to play out or whether the bill's environmental improvements -- strongly supported by some in the environmental community -- will materialize. It's a big unknown. But the health of the Delta is central to the problems we face and while key elements of the bill may lead to ecosystem restoration, they may not. For some supporters, those potential successes were enough to outweigh the other liabilities. But it is a gamble. - We still don't really know if there is going to be a major new "peripheral" canal, what it is going to look like, where it is going to be built, and how it is going to be operated. Nor are there any guarantees that ecosystem protections will be strengthened enough to save the Delta if such a canal is built. Some supporters believe (and some bill opponents fear) this bill will smooth the way for a new canal. Time will tell. If the new California water bill is all there is, it will not be enough to solve our water problems. If this is a first baby step toward fixing problems that have been ignored for a century, then I look forward to the next steps. Soon. Peter H. Gleick Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/gleick/detail?entry_id=51071 &o=3&rv=1257476713921>a=commentslistpos#commentslistpos#ixzz0W2tKtBNl ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------ "Historic" Water Bond Would Contribute to Historic Debt by Greg Lucas Published November 5th, 2009 Passage of an $11 billion water bond by the Legislature comes just a few weeks after the state treasurer warned that lawmakers cannot keep issuing debt willy-nilly and need a master plan to set priorities for its issuance. Apparently, lawmakers didn't read the treasurer's report on debt levels. The water bond, which began at $9.4 billion in the Senate and was inflated to $11 billion in the Assembly, is part of what Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger touts as an "historic, comprehensive" plan to improve the state's water delivery system. Legislators wouldn't have needed to wade too deeply into State Treasurer Bill Lockyer's 2009 Debt Affordability Report. His admonition is contained in the fifth paragraph of the report's first page: "The current debate about how to finance improvement to California's water infrastructure system provides timely and pressing case study," Lockyer writes. "Some have suggested paying the entire cost with state general obligation bonds, which must be repaid from the General Fund. "But this report makes clear that further increasing the General Fund's debt burden, especially in the next three difficult budgets, would require cutting even deeper into crucial services already reeling from billions of dollars in reductions. "The case for user-funding for most water system improvements is compelling, both as a matter of equity and fiscal prudence." Lockyer hasn't taken a position on the water bond but his views about the need to set priorities on issuing bonds hasn't changed nor has his position on who should pay for water system improvements, said Tom Dresslar, Lockyer's press secretary. "It makes more sense, as a matter of budget management and fairness, for users to finance most water works improvements, instead of placing the entire burden on taxpayers and the General Fund," Dresslar said. The water bond stipulates that no more than 50 percent of the $11 billion can be sold during the next five years - assuming the bond measure is approved by voters next November - which reduces the increase in debt service in the short term. However, Lockyer's debt affordability report shows the amount of debt service the cash-starved General Fund pays will already double from $6 billion this year to more than $12 billion in seven years. That $12 billion in debt service in the 2016-2017 state fiscal year represents nearly 10.5 percent of the General Fund, up from 6.7 percent this year. Most of that higher level of debt service stems from already issued bonds so "balancing the budget will have to be accomplished with little help from the debt service side of the ledger," Lockyer's report says. "At a minimum, the passage of this water bond highlights the critical need for a master plan that sets priorities for infrastructure development and lays out a plan to pay for it," Dresslar said, echoing the debt report's conclusions. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Sat Nov 7 12:19:31 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Sat, 7 Nov 2009 12:19:31 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] San Jose Mercury News 11-6-09 Message-ID: <001401ca5fe7$9e4b0080$dae10180$@net> Editorial: Flaws in water deal make bond hard to swallow Mercury News Editorial Posted: 11/06/2009 07:34:02 PM PST Updated: 11/06/2009 07:34:05 PM PST California's comprehensive water package may go down in history as Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's greatest bipartisan accomplishment. But the plan has a deep flaw, and it depends on voter passage of a whopping $11 billion bond measure next November - a stretch indeed if there's any organized opposition and if the economy, especially job growth, is still weak. That any agreement was achieved is little short of a miracle in this political climate in Sacramento. Both Democrats and Republicans compromised, a sadly rare occurrence, so it's painful to second-guess the deal. But one provision does the state a disservice: While urban areas will be asked to cut their water use 20 percent, agriculture, which uses 80 percent of the state's water, is not required to work for conservation. Anyone who has seen the sprinklers spraying into 100-degree sunshine on summer afternoons in the Central Valley knows that ag could save some water. More conservation in the plan could have reduced the need for costly and environmentally damaging dams that ran up the cost of that bond, which will require up to $700 million a year in general fund dollars to service the debt. Of course the danger of doing nothing to fix the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta is greater: some $40 billion in economic impact when a flood or earthquake inevitably brings down the deteriorating levees, more than a thousand of which now protect fertile farmland and thousands of lives. Restoring the health of the delta, which supplies about half of Silicon Valley's water supply, is Job One. But the cost of that is just over $2 billion. It's a shame the bond ballooned so large because the governor and the Legislature did very well on the rest of the reforms, including the idea for a new governing board for the delta, provisions to monitor groundwater throughout the state and the introduction of new conservation targets for urban water users. The groundwater monitoring legislation could eventually lead to smarter controls and better conservation, even for agriculture - but there's a reason that farmers in the Central Valley are among the most enthusiastic supporters of the water deal. They pretty much skate. It was inevitable that any deal trying to please environmentalists, farmers and urban water districts would have some flaws. It's possible that, by next fall, in an improving economy, and with more study to understand just what's included in that massive $11 billion bond - and what possibilities still might exist to press ag for conservation - the plan will seem reasonable overall to ensure a steady and safe water supply. But the risk to the levees is so great that an alternative bond proposal for next November's ballot might be in order. If voters seem unlikely to agree to do it all, including dams and a possible peripheral canal around the delta, surely they'll see the wisdom of at least doing the essentials such as fixing the levees. It's something to think about over the winter. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Sun Nov 8 11:45:08 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Sun, 8 Nov 2009 11:45:08 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Sac Bee Editorial 11 8 09 Message-ID: <001701ca60ab$fae02c70$f0a08550$@net> sacbee.com Editorial: Right water policy, dubious finances Published Sunday, Nov. 08, 2009 In a state as large and fractured as California, it is always cause for celebration when lawmakers can reach some form of agreement on an issue as divisive as water. Water isn't just a precious resource here. It is a theology. Over the decades, various belief systems have formed around subjects such as dams, water exports, conservation and subsidies. Adherents of these theologies have fought so many battles that it is often touchy to gather them in the same room. Seen in this context, what Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, has achieved is momentous. The water-policy package he helped craft pushes the state forward on several fronts. It takes the first steps toward measuring groundwater use - a sacrilege to many farmers. It nudges cities ahead in ending wasteful practices. It also deals a blow against the forces of obstruction in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. For the first time, there is a clear process for examining alternatives to the current fish-killing water pumps that transport water to the south. If you are a California resident - not just a member of a particular interest group - the basic outline of this policy package is worth celebrating. Unfortunately, the Senate and Assembly undermined that achievement by ramming through an $11.1 billion bond proposal that is laden with wasteful spending. Consider some of the earmarks added to win votes in the wee hours on Wednesday: $100 million to raise San Vicente Dam in San Diego County from 220 feet to 337 feet; $8 million for the city of Maywood in Los Angeles County for "water supply upgrades"; $20 million for "habitat projects" in Ventura County; $50 million for the state university system to fund "agricultural water research"; $20 million for Siskiyou County for "economic development." Thanks to alert reporting by The Bee, Steinberg withdrew a $10 million earmark he sought for a pet project, a tolerance museum in Sacramento. Sadly, a similarly harsh spotlight wasn't pointed at other pork - such as hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars that could flow to the Temperance Dam, a gift to Fresno farmers. The conventional wisdom in Sacramento is that contentious policy packages can only be greased with dollars. That may be true, but in this case, voters may balk at the price tag. At its peak, the bond package would obligate the state to spend $809 million yearly in annual debt service. That means $809 million less in future years for schools and social programs, barring an increase in state taxes. In all likelihood, voters will reject this proposal when it appears on the November 2010 ballot. With revenues continuing to decline, the state is poised for another wrenching budget fight. As lawmakers make more cuts to public education and state parks, voters will be in no mood next year to finance water pork, no matter how much money is spent on a media campaign. Phil Isenberg, a former Sacramento mayor and lawmaker who has helped lead the drive for progressive water legislation, sees some bright spots in last week's deal. Californians, he told the Los Angeles Times, are "slowly and painfully coming to terms with a static water supply." That may be so. Unfortunately, lawmakers have yet to come to terms with a static supply of public dollars. As California grapples with its water challenges, fiscal restraint must be a co-equal goal with increasing supplies. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.png Type: image/png Size: 8578 bytes Desc: not available URL: From tstokely at att.net Sun Nov 8 14:18:47 2009 From: tstokely at att.net (Tom Stokely) Date: Sun, 8 Nov 2009 14:18:47 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Westlands Water District is a powerhouse for Valley farmers Message-ID: <81BCDA3A3C4A4A5787EBFE723BADBDFF@homeuserPC> http://www.fresnobee.com/local/v-print/story/1702944.html Westlands Water District is a powerhouse for Valley farmers Published online on Saturday, Nov. 07, 2009 By Mark Grossi / The Fresno Bee The most powerful voices in the state's $11 billion water talks last week might have been two water districts -- one speaking for half the state's population and the other for just 600 San Joaquin Valley farmers. The negotiations led to legislation with the promise of epic change, restoring dying fisheries, building dams and easing gridlock that has dogged water system improvement for decades. It made sense that Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which serves 19 million people, would wield big political clout in those talks. But who are those 600 farmers? They are customers in Westlands Water District, the country's largest federal irrigation district. With crops worth $1 billion a year, this one district produces more than some whole states. The 600,000-acre Westlands -- with a footprint twice the size of Los Angeles -- is no hayseed at any bargaining table. For decades, politicos from Sacramento to Washington, D.C., have heard regularly from Westlands. The district's name appears on dozens of lawsuits. Anytime there's an important statewide discussion of water supply, Westlands is in the room. "This district is a very influential player," said Assembly Member Jared Huffman, D-San Rafael, a Northern California lawmaker who was at the table last week. Westlands is protecting its farmers, who have been losing water to environmental reform efforts since the 1990s and idling land because of soil contamination since the 1980s. This farming giant is in a slow-motion transition, struggling to turn the next page in a 57-year history. The district's past is filled with powerful families -- Giffen, Diener, Harris and Boswell -- who carved success with sweat, guile and ground water on the scrubby prairie in west Fresno and Kings counties. When they tapped into Northern California river water on the federal Central Valley Project in the 1960s, they made enemies. Now those north-state enemies blame Westlands for trashing the ecosystem and ruining the salmon fishing industry. They say the district takes too much water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. They call Westlands a litigious maverick, a greedy agribusiness and an abuser of federal subsidies. Some suggest Westlands should die off and eliminate one of the many water consumers in California. "We should never have allowed farming out there," said Bill Jennings, chairman of the California Sport Fishing Alliance, based in Stockton. "I think we can solve a lot of California's water problems by buying Westlands farmland and taking it out of production." Which Westlands? Farmer Dan Errotabere, a Westlands board member whose family has been on the west side since before the Great Depression, chuckles when he hears critics call him a millionaire with big political muscles. "If that were true, why wouldn't we have more success at getting the water we need?" he asked. "We got only 10% of our federal water this year. Why would we be forced to fallow almost half the district if we had such pull?" But critics say Westlands more often than not gets its way. Westlands quickly goes to federal court when confronted with a roadblock, said Tom Stokely, a member of the nonprofit environmental group California Water Impact Network. And lately, Westlands has been winning more often than not. For instance, Westlands sued over a federal biological study that resulted in a 25% loss of the district's federal supply this year, forcing further consideration of the study. "They're a big bully with lots of money to sue people," said Stokely, a former Trinity County planner who is based in Northern California. Westlands' reputation for hiring the best lawyers and filing many lawsuits comes partly from a time in the 1980s when its well-known irrigation drainage problem worsened. A clay layer beneath the soil prevents irrigation water from sinking far on thousands of Westlands' acres. Minerals build up and eventually poison the land. As a solution in the late 1970s and 1980s, federal officials piped drainage water from Westlands to Kesterson Reservoir in western Merced County. Scientists later discovered the drainage was toxic after it caused a disaster, killing or disfiguring shorebirds and other animals. Federal officials stopped the flow of drainage to Kesterson in 1985. Then, waves of legal action began as officials sorted out how to deal with the dirty water. The solution has eluded authorities, the dirty water remains and drainage issues are still in court. At the time of the drainage flare-up, the district hired a Sacramento law firm with a lawyer named Tom Birmingham, who had represented the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power in issues surrounding the Mono Lake restoration. More than a dozen years later, he would become Westlands general manager. Birmingham is known for precision and toughness in water issues. Benefits for the public Only farmers have reaped the benefits from the investment of public money in Westlands, one environmentalist contends. Fresno lawyer Lloyd Carter, a deputy state attorney general and longtime Westlands critic, wrote in a legal journal this month that over several decades taxpayers have invested more than $1 billion in everything from canal construction to crop subsidies for this district. But residents of Fresno and Kings counties have little to show for it, he concluded. "The wealth created has not trickled down to farmworkers or the surrounding poverty-stricken communities," Carter wrote in the Golden Gate University Environmental Law Journal. "The region is rife with social problems ranging from high unemployment to gang and drug problems, high teen-pregnancy rates [and] an appalling high school dropout rate." Westlands officials reply that farming has created thousands of jobs on the west side and is the basis for many spinoff businesses, such as food processing. Another prominent critic of Westlands is Rep. George Miller, D-Martinez, who co-wrote a broad 1992 irrigation reform law that provided more water for the state's ecosystem. Westlands and other federal farm contractors lost 35% to 50% of their Northern California irrigation water in the process. Miller has said Westlands represents a privileged group of farmers who bought cheap west side land and got rich by using federally subsidized water to grow subsidized cotton. Rep. Jim Costa, D-Fresno, disagrees, saying much has changed in the last 20 years. Westlands farmers are largely out of the cotton business and now pay full price for federal water. He said Westlands' family farms are a critical part of Fresno County agriculture, which leads the nation in farm production. Westlands farmers grow 60 kinds of crops, including almonds, tomatoes, garlic, onions, grapes and cantaloupes. They grow twice as many acres of almonds as cotton. The food is a higher quality coming from California farms because of environmental regulation, Costa said. He does not think other countries could match that quality, nor would he like to see them try. "It would be a tragedy and a blow to national security if we did not have Westlands," Costa said. "Where would the food products come from for Americans' dinner tables?" On the farm With the passage of state reform legislation this week, Westlands officials say there is a clear path to building the canals and reservoirs that could bring more water to west side farms. But it will take years, and there are no assurances. Back on the farm, things look grim. The three-year drought, irrigation water cutbacks to protect delta fish and drainage problems have knocked out of production 260,000 acres -- more than 40% of Westlands land. Growers aren't giving up. They've spent millions of dollars on drip-irrigation systems. Water-intensive flood irrigation -- filling furrows with river water -- has largely been abandoned, said farmer and board member Errotabere. "Water is expensive, and we don't have enough of it," he said. "It has always been that way around here." The district needs about 1.5 million acre-feet of irrigation water each year, or enough to fill Millerton Lake three times. Nature can't replenish more than about 200,000 acre-feet of water that Westlands farmers pump from the ground each year. So in the 1960s, Westlands joined the federal Central Valley Project with the idea of buying Northern California river water to spare the west side's underground water supply from excessive pumping. The district's contract calls for 1.15 million acre-feet annually, leaving growers short even if a full allotment is delivered. Westlands has had full delivery just twice since 1992, officials said. Last summer, the allotment was 10% -- less than 120,000 acre-feet. Farmers bought water from other districts. Many used ground water. But the wells often yield salty water, which eventually will stunt plant growth. District spokeswoman Sarah Woolf, a member of a farming family in the district, said the naturally occurring salts are applied directly to the crop seed beds by drip irrigation. "Every year, that salt is building up," she said. "The water from the delta is a higher quality." Out near Huron in southern Fresno County, farmer Ryan Ferguson, 26, says his family counts on water from Westlands. He grows pistachios, cantaloupes and other crops on about 1,700 acres, but this year his family is having trouble getting by because of curtailed water supplies. "I'll stay in this business as long as I can," he said. "I have a son, and it's my dream to have him farm here, too." -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From Charles_Chamberlain at fws.gov Mon Nov 9 13:10:30 2009 From: Charles_Chamberlain at fws.gov (Charles_Chamberlain at fws.gov) Date: Mon, 9 Nov 2009 13:10:30 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Fw: Mainstem Trinity River redd survey update 11/09/2009 Message-ID: I hope this comes through OK. I goofed it up on first attempt. Whoops! ******************************************************************************* More spawning info for the Trinity River redd survey in the link below. It's been updated to include last week's data. The rain is coming, thankfully so are the fish! Charlie Charles Chamberlain/AFWO/ R1/FWS/DOI To env trinity 09/28/2009 01:21 cc PM Subject Mainstem Trinity River redd survey update 09/28/2009 Hi all, Fall 2009 salmon spawning surveys of the mainstem Trinity River are underway. These are conducted collaboratively by the Arcata Fish and Wildlife Office, California Department of Fish and Game, Yurok Tribal Fisheries Program, Hoopa Valley Tribal Fisheries Department, and the Shasta-Trinity National Forest. Our first within-season update for the 2009 redd survey is available from the Arcata Fish and Wildlife Office Website at the link below. Click on "Trinity River 2009 Redd Survey Update" near the bottom of the page. http://www.fws.gov/arcata/fisheries/projectUpdates.html Cheers! Charlie Charlie Chamberlain Fish Biologist - U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Arcata Fish & Wildlife Office 1655 Heindon Road Arcata, CA 95521 Charles_Chamberlain at fws.gov Phone: (707) 825-5110 Fax: (707) 822-8411 www.fws.gov/arcata/fisheries -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: graycol.gif Type: image/gif Size: 105 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: ecblank.gif Type: image/gif Size: 45 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Wed Nov 11 14:19:45 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Wed, 11 Nov 2009 14:19:45 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Trinity Journal 11 11 09 Message-ID: <003101ca631d$1399ac00$3acd0400$@net> Diversion factor More water flows east than into Trinity River BY AMY GITTELSOHN THE TRINITY JOURNAL http://www.trinityjournal.com/news/2009/1111/front_page/001p1_lg.jpg PHIL NELSON THE TRINITY JOURNAL A boat ramp at Trinity Center falls far short of a lowered Trinity Lake. More Trinity River water was diverted for Central Valley Project use than sent down the river in the last water year. Preliminary figures from the Trinity River Restoration Program indicate that 456,641 acre-feet of water was released from Lewiston Dam to the Trinity River during the 2009 water year which ended in September, while 539,172 acre-feet was diverted via underground tunnel to Whiskeytown Lake and the Sacramento River. It was a dry year, and inflow to Trinity Lake was approximately 800,000 acre-feet, so the lake was drawn down substantially. The split weighted toward diversion goes against former Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt's Trinity River Record of Decision which calls for the river to get the greater proportion of water during a dry year, said Tom Stokely, retired Trinity County senior resource planner and a board member of the California Water Impact Network. In a dry year, the Record of Decision calls for a minimum Trinity River allocation of 452,600 acre-feet and an average Central Valley diversion of 358,400 acre-feet. http://www.trinityjournal.com/news/2009/1111/front_page/001p2_lg.jpg The Trinity River flows toward the north end of Trinity Lake between Trinity Center and Coffee Creek. The lake was drawn down significantly this past year, with nearly 1 million acre-feet released . Regarding last year's much higher diversion, Stokely said, "They're not supposed to under the Record of Decision but there's no one or no controlling authority to tell them to change their ways unless the interior secretary himself intervened to tell them to do so, or someone filed a lawsuit to tell them they weren't in compliance." The Trinity River Restoration Program's executive director, Mike Hamman, disagrees. Hamman is a federal Bureau of Reclamation employee, but the program he heads serves many agencies involved with river restoration. He said the Record of Decision sets firm volumes for water down the river depending on water-year type - and that volume was met - but the amount diverted for agriculture can be tweaked for operational purposes. "The Central Valley office makes that call," he said. "There aren't any hard and fast rules except for the fishery flow." Furthermore, although it sounds counterintuitive, Hamman said the additional water was sent through the tunnels in order to aid Trinity River fish. He explained that a large block of water was diverted due to what is essentially a temperature and plumbing issue: During summer, release to the Trinity River is to be 450 cubic feet per second. With the lake low, in the heat of summer CVP managers must send approximately three times that volume through Lewiston Lake to keep the water cool enough for fish on the other end. Sometimes even that doesn't do the trick and they use Trinity Lake's lower, auxiliary outlet to get the lower, cold water. However, the lower outlet was not originally intended for temperature control and was built to be fully open releasing about 1,800 cfs or fully closed. Otherwise, valve damage could result. Operators have also tried pulsed flows through the lower outlet as one way to use it without releasing as much water, Hamman said. In another issue, water through the lower outlet does not go through the power plant at Trinity Dam, which affects power users, including the Trinity Public Utilities District. Bureau of Reclamation Area Manager Brian Person noted that over time, the water split has been what was called for in the Record of Decision - a 53 percent diversion and 47 percent down the river. He noted that in an extremely wet year much more water is available for diversion, but "would that happen that year? Probably not because you might want to store some of that." >From the California Water Impact Network, Stokely does not think enough water has been stored in good water years in Trinity Lake. Keeping the lake higher would mean more cool water available for fish without sending such large amounts through the system that some must be diverted, he said. "It's pretty obvious if the reservoir gets too low there won't be cold water available to keep spawning fish and incubating eggs in the gravel alive," he said. "It's a very unfortunate plumbing circumstance that they have to send three times more water down the hill to keep the Trinity cold," Stokely added. "They need to have a physical solution to that and they also shouldn't send so much over the hill in the wetter years." In addition to storing more in the lake during wet years, Stokely suggested other solutions could be to put a pipeline around Lewiston Lake to deliver cold water to the river or tear down Lewiston Dam and pump water into the diversion tunnel, providing seven more miles of fish habitat. >From the restoration program, Hamman said it is too early to determine what kind of water year this will be, although the National Weather Service prediction for the next few months is for a 70 percent chance of normal or above normal precipitation. If it is another dry year, he said, "we will be challenged as far as the temperatures go." Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 10262 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image002.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 14421 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Thu Nov 12 15:59:19 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Thu, 12 Nov 2009 15:59:19 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] FW: In memory of Tom Graff Message-ID: <002101ca63f4$272fbb10$758f3130$@net> From: Spreck Rosekrans [mailto:ARosekrans at environmentaldefense.org] Sent: Thursday, November 12, 2009 3:47 PM Subject: In memory of Tom Graff Friends and Colleagues: Word has quickly spread of the passing of Tom Graff this morning after a long battle with cancer. There will be a public celebration of his life in about a month. Some memories and history are posted on EDF's web page and waterfront blog at the URL's below. Feel free to share thoughts of your own on the blog if you like. http://www.edf.org/page.cfm?tagID=49342 http://blogs.edf.org/waterfront/2009/11/12/in-memory-of-tom-graff/ Spreck Rosekrans www.edf.org http://blogs.edf.org/waterfront/ 415-293-6082 This e-mail and any attachments may contain confidential and privileged information. If you are not the intended recipient, please notify the sender immediately by return e-mail, delete this e-mail and destroy any copies. Any dissemination or use of this information by a person other than the intended recipient is unauthorized and may be illegal. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jsutton at tccanal.com Thu Nov 12 16:11:00 2009 From: jsutton at tccanal.com (Jeff Sutton) Date: Thu, 12 Nov 2009 16:11:00 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] FW: In memory of Tom Graff In-Reply-To: <002101ca63f4$272fbb10$758f3130$@net> References: <002101ca63f4$272fbb10$758f3130$@net> Message-ID: <00b501ca63f5$c801d0e0$580572a0$@com> Thanks for sending this out and making us all aware Byron. Sad News, a true loss to the environmental water community. We can all learn from the example he set as an advocate. Jeffrey P. Sutton General Manager Tehama-Colusa Canal Authority 5513 State Highway 162/ P. O. Box 1025 Willows, CA 95988 530.934.2125 530.934.2355 (fax) From: env-trinity-bounces at velocipede.dcn.davis.ca.us [mailto:env-trinity-bounces at velocipede.dcn.davis.ca.us] On Behalf Of Byron Leydecker Sent: Thursday, November 12, 2009 3:59 PM To: FOTR List; Trinity List Subject: [env-trinity] FW: In memory of Tom Graff From: Spreck Rosekrans [mailto:ARosekrans at environmentaldefense.org] Sent: Thursday, November 12, 2009 3:47 PM Subject: In memory of Tom Graff Friends and Colleagues: Word has quickly spread of the passing of Tom Graff this morning after a long battle with cancer. There will be a public celebration of his life in about a month. Some memories and history are posted on EDF's web page and waterfront blog at the URL's below. Feel free to share thoughts of your own on the blog if you like. http://www.edf.org/page.cfm?tagID=49342 http://blogs.edf.org/waterfront/2009/11/12/in-memory-of-tom-graff/ Spreck Rosekrans www.edf.org http://blogs.edf.org/waterfront/ 415-293-6082 This e-mail and any attachments may contain confidential and privileged information. If you are not the intended recipient, please notify the sender immediately by return e-mail, delete this e-mail and destroy any copies. Any dissemination or use of this information by a person other than the intended recipient is unauthorized and may be illegal. No virus found in this incoming message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com Version: 8.5.425 / Virus Database: 270.14.61/2498 - Release Date: 11/12/09 14:33:00 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com Version: 8.5.425 / Virus Database: 270.14.62/2499 - Release Date: 11/12/09 14:33:00 From bwl3 at comcast.net Fri Nov 13 17:04:02 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Fri, 13 Nov 2009 17:04:02 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Lawsuit filed to secure ESA protection for two Delta fish species Message-ID: <005f01ca64c6$5bd81330$13883990$@net> For Immediate Release, November 13, 2009 Contact: Jeff Miller, Center for Biological Diversity, (510) 499-9185 Lawsuits Filed to Secure Endangered Species Act Protection for Two Key Delta Fish Species SAN FRANCISCO- The Center for Biological Diversity today filed two lawsuits against the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for failing to protect two critically imperiled San Francisco Bay-Delta fish species, the longfin smelt and delta smelt. Responding to a 2007 petition under the Endangered Species Act, the Service in April 2009 improperly denied federal listing for the longfin smelt. The agency has also failed to respond to a 2006 petition to change the delta smelt's federal status from threatened to endangered. "Formerly abundant fish at the base of the food chain in the San Francisco estuary are being driven to near extinction, and our once-healthy salmon runs have been crippled by record water diversions," said Jeff Miller, conservation advocate with the Center for Biological Diversity. "Endangered Species Act protection will benefit not just longfin smelt and delta smelt, but also Central Valley salmon, sturgeon, and steelhead populations that are economically important to coastal and Central Valley communities. The public should reject the willful destruction of our fisheries and further mismanagement of the Delta proposed in the water bond and the peripheral canal legislation the governor signed this week." Longfin smelt and delta smelt were once among the most abundant fish in the open waters of the San Francisco estuary and still are an integral part of the San Francisco Bay-Delta food web. In the past decade this important longfin smelt population has fallen to unprecedented low numbers, and the delta smelt, a species already listed as threatened under state and federal endangered species laws, has plummeted to the lowest population levels recorded in more than four decades of surveys. The Center for Biological Diversity petitioned for federal Endangered Species Act protection for the Bay-Delta longfin smelt population in 2007. It also petitioned to change the delta smelt status to endangered in 2006. The Service has failed to make a final determination on the delta smelt petition, now two and a half years overdue. In April 2009 the Service denied listing for the longfin smelt population in the Bay-Delta, claiming it does not qualify for listing as a distinct population. In contrast, the California Fish and Game Commission responded to listing petitions submitted for both species by protecting longfin smelt as a state threatened species and changing the state protected status of delta smelt from threatened to endangered. The Bay-Delta longfin smelt population is clearly distinct from other populations of the species. The Service's determination was criticized by leading scientific experts on longfin smelt as "incomprehensible" and contrary to scientific information. Renowned native fish expert Dr. Peter Moyle urged the Service to reconsider its determination because it is based on misinterpretations of the best available evidence, including his own studies, and recommended an endangered or threatened listing. This week Governor Schwarzenegger signed what is considered by conservation and fishing groups to be a death warrant for the Delta ecosystem, an $11.1 billion water bond bill that could lead to the construction of the peripheral canal and more dams. The bond will go before voters in 2010. "The Delta ecosystem needs less water exported to save collapsing fish populations, but instead the governor has approved a policy package and budget-busting infrastructure that could increase water exports to subsidized corporate agribusiness and Southern California," said Miller. The San Francisco Bay-Delta ecosystem, an ecologically important estuary and a major hub for California's water system, is now rapidly unraveling. Once-abundant fish species are in critical condition due to record-high water diversions, pollutants, and harmful nonnative species that thrive in degraded Delta habitat. Federal and state agencies have allowed record levels of water diversions from the Delta in recent years, leaving insufficient fresh water to sustain native fish and the Delta ecosystem. Since 2002, scientists have documented catastrophic declines of delta smelt, longfin smelt, threadfin shad, Sacramento splittail, and striped bass. The state's largest salmon run of Central Valley fall-run chinook is suffering from record decline. Federal fisheries managers have cancelled commercial and recreational salmon fishing in California the past two years due to low salmon returns. White and green sturgeon numbers in San Francisco Bay and the Sacramento River have also fallen to alarmingly low levels - the southern green sturgeon population was federally listed as threatened in 2006. The Center for Biological Diversity is a nonprofit conservation organization with 240,000 members and online activists dedicated to protecting endangered species and wild places. www.biologicaldiversity.org Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From Charles_Chamberlain at fws.gov Tue Nov 17 13:45:14 2009 From: Charles_Chamberlain at fws.gov (Charles_Chamberlain at fws.gov) Date: Tue, 17 Nov 2009 13:45:14 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Mainstem Trinity River redd survey update 11/17/2009 Message-ID: More spawning info for the Trinity River redd survey at the link below. It has been updated to include last week's data. Enjoy! Charlie Charles Chamberlain/AFWO/ R1/FWS/DOI To env trinity 09/28/2009 01:21 cc PM Subject Mainstem Trinity River redd survey update 09/28/2009 Hi all, Fall 2009 salmon spawning surveys of the mainstem Trinity River are underway. These are conducted collaboratively by the Arcata Fish and Wildlife Office, California Department of Fish and Game, Yurok Tribal Fisheries Program, Hoopa Valley Tribal Fisheries Department, and the Shasta-Trinity National Forest. Our first within-season update for the 2009 redd survey is available from the Arcata Fish and Wildlife Office Website at the link below. Click on "Trinity River 2009 Redd Survey Update" near the bottom of the page. http://www.fws.gov/arcata/fisheries/projectUpdates.html Cheers! Charlie Charlie Chamberlain Fish Biologist - U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Arcata Fish & Wildlife Office 1655 Heindon Road Arcata, CA 95521 Charles_Chamberlain at fws.gov Phone: (707) 825-5110 Fax: (707) 822-8411 www.fws.gov/arcata/fisheries -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: graycol.gif Type: image/gif Size: 105 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: ecblank.gif Type: image/gif Size: 45 bytes Desc: not available URL: From trinityjosh at gmail.com Tue Nov 17 20:33:35 2009 From: trinityjosh at gmail.com (Joshua Allen) Date: Tue, 17 Nov 2009 20:33:35 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Salmon could be enjoying their vanilla-enhanced habitat... Message-ID: Cocaine, Spices, Hormones Found in Drinking Water http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/11/091112-drinking-water-cocaine.html Christine Dell'Amore National Geographic News November 12, 2009 *This story is part of a special series that explores the global water crisis. For more clean water news, photos, and information, visit National Geographic's Freshwater Web site. * How's this for a sweet surprise? A team of researchers in Washington State has found traces of cooking spices and flavorings in the waters of Puget Sound. (See map.) Digg StumbleUpon Reddit RELATED - Insects Key Indicators of Water Health, Experts Say - Sunlight Not the Solution for Clean Water?New Study - Australia's Dry Run in *National Geographic* magazine University of Washington associate professor Richard Keil heads the Sound Citizen program, which investigates how what we do on land affects our waters. Keil and his team have tracked "pulses" of food ingredients that enter the sound during certain holidays. For instance, thyme and sage spike during Thanksgiving, cinnamon surges all winter, chocolate and vanilla show up during weekends (presumably from party-related goodies), and waffle-cone and caramel-corn remnants skyrocket around the Fourth of July. The Puget Sound study is one of several ongoing efforts to investigate the unexpected ingredients that find their way into the global water supply. Around the world, scientists are finding trace amounts of substances?from sugar and spice to heroin, rocket fuel, and birth control?that might be having unintended consequences for humans and wildlife alike. *Vanilla Seas?* When spices and flavorings are flushed out of a U.S. home, they travel to a sewage-treatment facility, where most of them are removed. In the area around Puget Sound, the University of Washington team found, the spicy residues that remain in wastewater end up flowing into the sound's inland waterways. Of all the flavors trickling downstream, artificial vanilla dominates the sound, Keil said. For instance, the team found an average of about six milligrams of artificial vanilla per liter of water sampled. The region's sewage runoff contains more than 14 milligrams of vanilla per liter. This would be like spiking an Olympic-size swimming pool with approximately ten 4-ounce (113.4-gram) bottles of artificial vanilla. For now, there's no evidence that a sweeter and spicier sound is a bad thing?salmon, which can smell such flavors, could be enjoying their vanilla-enhanced habitat, Keil said. In an attempt to understand some of the consequences of spice in the water, Keil and colleagues plan to study whether cooking ingredients harm the reproduction of octopuses in Puget Sound. Overall, he added, the spice project has become a successful recipe for educating people, especially schoolkids, "that everything you do is connected to the watershed." *Illegal Drugs* The link from kitchen or bathroom to coast can also grease the path for some rather unsavory substances, such as illegal drugs, experts have discovered. After a person has taken drugs such as cocaine, heroin, marijuana, and ecstasy, active byproducts of these substances are released into the sewage stream through that person's urine and feces. These byproducts, or metabolites, are often not completely removed during the sewage-treatment process, at least in Europe, said Sara Castiglioni of the Mario Negri Institute for Pharmacological Research in Milan, Italy. That means the drug-tainted wastewater can enter groundwater and surface water, which are collectively the major sources of drinking water for most people. (Related: "Cocaine on Money: Drug Found on 90% of U.S. Bills.") In a new review study, Castiglioni and colleague Ettore Zuccato found that illegal drugs have become "widespread" in surface water in some of Europe's populated areas. For instance, in a 2008 study scientists discovered a byproduct of cocaine in 22 of 24 samples of drinking water at a Spanish water-treatment plant?despite a rigorous filtering and treatment process. Likewise, in 2005, Zuccato found that a daily influx of cocaine travels down the Po River, Italy's longest river. Though these drug traces are still tiny, it's possible that the potent residues could be toxic to freshwater animals, according to the study, which will be published in an upcoming issue of the journal *Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A.* For this reason, the "risks for human health and the environment cannot be excluded," the study warns. *Pharmaceuticals* Scientists are also developing a clearer picture of how legal pharmaceuticals and personal-care products?from antibiotics and morphine to fragrances and sunscreen?are flooding our waterways. For example, previous research had revealed that up to 44.1 pounds (20 kilograms) of pharmaceuticals flow down Italy's Po River each day. Much like illegal drugs, traces of pharmaceuticals often filter through traditional sewage-treatment processes. These products are also found in many U.S. waterways, and studies have shown that certain drugs may cause harm to the environment?though no evidence to date has shown effects in people, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Some of the drugs that mimic hormones, such as birth control, may also throw off an animal's endocrine, or hormone-regulating, system. Some male fish in the U.S., for example, have been growing female parts due to exposure to estrogenin the water. Researching these substances is important, Castiglioni said, "because [these] are quite unknown contaminants, and they are present in the environment in huge amounts, especially for pharmaceuticals." To control the flow of these substances, some experts have suggested creating "green pharmacies," which would allow a consumer to send back their drugs to a pharmacist or manufacturer instead of flushing them down the toilet and into the wild. *Contaminants* Current EPA regulations say that more than 90 contaminants must be filtered out of drinking-water systems, said Cynthia Dougherty, director of EPA's Office of Groundwater and Drinking Water. Viruses and other microorganisms are kept at bay, as are inorganic substances such as lead, cyanide, copper, and mercury. Pollutants from fertilizer runoff, such as nitrate and nitrite, are also removed. In addition, the agency regularly studies new chemicals that may need regulation. Of particular interest right now is perchlorate, a natural and human-made chemical used in fireworks and rocket fuel, Dougherty said. At sufficiently high doses, the chemical?found in at least 4 percent of U.S drinking water?can reduce iodine uptake into a person's thyroid gland. If continued long-term, reduced iodine can lead to hypothyroidism, according to the agency, which is now seeking input on whether to regulate perchlorate. Ultimately, "what you really want is to not ever have things you're concerned about in drinking water in the first place," Dougherty said. That's why it's crucial for local communities to keep a close eye on what runs into their waterways, she said. "If you have an understanding of what your source of drinking water is and what can happen to it," Dougherty said, "you can be a more educated citizen in engaging in those issues." -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Wed Nov 18 07:24:21 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Wed, 18 Nov 2009 07:24:21 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] DFG New Release North Coast MLPA Message-ID: <002c01ca6863$347e64b0$9d7b2e10$@net> DFG News Release for the California Natural Resources Agency Blue Ribbon Task Force Named For MLPA North Coast Study Region Nov. 16, 2009 Contact: Sandy Cooney, (916) 653-9402 Panel's First Meeting Nov. 18 and 19 in Eureka Sacramento, Calif. - Secretary for Natural Resources Mike Chrisman today announced Blue Ribbon Task Force (BRTF) membership for the Marine Life Protection (MLPA) Initiative's North Coast Study Region. Former Assemblywoman Virginia Strom-Martin (D-1), current Humboldt County Supervisor Jimmy Smith and Lawyer/Mediator and Chumash Maritime Association Co-Founder Roberta Cordero were named to the panel. Cindy Gustafson, general manager for the Tahoe City Public Utility District was named to serve as task force chair. These four new members join four others (below) who have previous MLPA Task Force experience. "We have continually stressed that local participation and involvement is key," said Chrisman. "This diverse and knowledgeable group, that includes local public leaders, will ensure that all interests are heard as the MLPA planning process moves to the north coast," said Chrisman. The eight-member BRTF will develop alternative marine protected area proposals along California's MLPA North Coast Study Region through scientific analysis and expanded public input. They are expected to make recommendations to the Fish and Game Commission late next year. The panel will work closely with scientists, fishermen, elected officials, conservationists, stakeholders and the public during this process. The task force will also work to develop information and recommendations for coordinating management of marine protected areas with federal agencies, and provide direction for the expenditure of MLPA Initiative funds. The BRTF will hold its first meeting Wednesday, Nov. 18 at 9:30 a.m. and Thursday, Nov. 19 at 8:30 a.m. at the Red Lion Hotel, 1929 Fourth Street in Eureka. The MLPA North Coast Study Region BRTF includes: . William W. Anderson*, President, Westrec Marina Management, Inc. . Meg Caldwell*, Director and Senior Lecturer on Law, Stanford Law School's Environment and Natural Resources Law and Policy Program . Roberta R. Cordero, Lawyer/Mediator, Co-Founder Chumash Maritime Association . Cindy Gustafson, District General Manager, Tahoe City Public Utility District . Catherine Reheis-Boyd*, Chief Operating Officer and Chief of Staff, Western States Petroleum Association . Gregory F. Schem*, President and Chief Executive Officer, Harbor Real Estate Group . Jimmy Smith, Chair, Humboldt County Board of Supervisors . Virginia Strom-Martin, Advocate, Los Angeles Unified School District and Sonoma coast resident * Members who have previous MLPA Blue Ribbon Task Force service. For more information about the task force members, MLPA meetings, or the MLPA Initiative, visit the MLPA Web site at www.dfg.ca.gov/mlpa . Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Wed Nov 18 07:39:18 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Wed, 18 Nov 2009 07:39:18 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Lake County News 11 16 09 Message-ID: <003601ca6865$4b4948c0$e1dbda40$@net> Battle over suction dredge mining headed for court Lake County News-11/16/09 By Elizabeth Larson The ongoing battle over suction dredge mining is headed to federal court, as a group of miners plans to challenge a state-imposed moratorium on the practice which went into effect in August. The topic of suction dredge mining is a complex one, complete with proponents and opponents with fiercely held views, each bringing to the table science that backs their stances and a deep ideological divide about the use of natural resources. In August, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed SB 670, emergency legislation written by North Coast Sen. Patricia Wiggins (D-Santa Rosa). Two years previously, he had vetoed a bill to limit the practice. The bill put into effect an immediate moratorium on all instream suction dredge mining, which involves a vacuum system run by a small engine that runs gravel and materials from the bottom of a stream through a system to strain out gold. Suction dredging operations performed for the regular maintenance of energy or water supply management infrastructure, flood control or navigational purposes are allowed to continue. The suction dredging ban will be in effect until the California Department of Fish and Game (DFG) completes a court-ordered environmental review of its permitting program, expected in late summer 2011. In the wake of the North Coast fisheries closure, Wiggins said the measure was needed while the impacts of the practice on the salmon were studied. Scientific studies completed to date have had varying conclusions about suction dredge mining, which both sides in the debate point to in defending their stances. However, miners and business owners in California's far northern reaches believe the legislation is doing them real harm, as they watch their income shrink to nothing in the wake of the moratorium. "We are seriously considering a preliminary injunction," said attorney David Young, who has filed a lawsuit against the state on behalf of Public Lands for the People. That injunction, said Young, could lift the state's moratorium if the court finds the state is infringing on federal rights, particularly under federal mining law established in 1872. "The state has gone into an area that is preempted by the federal government," Young said. S. Craig Tucker, PhD, campaign coordinator for the Karuk Tribe, said the tribe is intervening on behalf of the state in the case. The law invalidated approximately 3,624 mining permits around the state and made suction dredge mining a misdemeanor, according to DFG. Miners who violate the moratorium could face a fine of up to $1,000 and six months in jail. Jordan Traverso, a DFG spokesperson, said the agency doesn't know for certain if any citations have been issued, but they believe that most miners have complied and switched "to other legal methods of mining." However, Gerald Hobbs, president of Public Lands for the People, said, "There are many still out there dredging." He added, "I can't advocate that - I can't blame them, either." Revenues from the permit program, said Traverso, weren't sufficient to meet its expenditures. She said permits cost $47 for residents and $185.25 for nonresidents. Hobbs said suction dredge mining primarily takes place in and around the Yuba, Klamath, Scott and Salmon rivers. The mother lode, he said is farther south, near Sacramento. On Nov. 2, DFG announced that it planned to host a series of scoping meetings this month in Fresno, Sacramento and Redding to take public comment on the study. An environmental impact review on the agency's suction dredge mining permit program also is under way, with comments due by Dec. 3. DFG already has released a 122-page literature review on the permitting program, which can be found at http://www.dfg.ca.gov/suctiondredge/ . Tucker said the tribe expects to be "intimately involved" in the scoping process. He said the hope is that the best available science will be brought to the table, and that new regulations will be crafted that will allow dredging in certain circumstances and certain places, and done in such a way that it won't harm fish. It's not fair to say that every place that's dredged impacts fish, said Tucker. "It's going to be different for every reach of river," and impacts from river to river need to be considered. "I don't think the science would show that you can't put any dredges anywhere in the river," he said. "It's about where and when." But for some miners there's little trust in the public process, and they plan to challenge the state's right to, in their view, infringe on federally granted mining rights. "Our position is, it's not going to be satisfactory to begin with," said Hobbs. He said if the findings aren't restrictive enough, he expects environmentalists and the Karuk Tribe will sue. If the proposed regulations are too restrictive, Hobbs said his group will sue. Traverso said DFG released a final EIR in 1994 and adopted the existing suction dredge mining regulations. The agency also prepared a draft EIR to reconsider the regulations in 1997, but she said that process was not completed. Another review had begun as the result of a 2005 lawsuit filed against the state by the Karuk Tribe, a major sponsor of Wiggins' legislation, in an effort to force DFG to overhaul its suction dredging rules. The tribe, California Trout, Friends of the North Fork and the Sierra Fund then petitioned DFG to issue emergency regulations to limit dredging on Klamath tributaries and five other streams in the Sierra as they worked on the environmental impact report (EIR). DFG officials reportedly refused to issue regulations, arguing that they cannot do so under current law. In 2007 DFG began seeking comments from the public on whether suction dredge mining had adverse environmental impacts, if the activity as permitted under DFG regulations was harming fish and whether new information had come up since 1994 that showed there were significantly more severe environmental impacts that the agency previously had considered. DFG's review was supposed to take 18 months and be completed by July 2008, but by the time Wiggins' legislation was passed this summer it still hadn't begun. The EIR never got off the ground because financial and staff resources weren't available, said Traverso. Meanwhile, before the legislation passed with no end date known for DFG's review, the Alameda District court issued a preliminary injunction in the case in which DFG was ordered to immediately cease using general fund money to operate the suction dredge permitting program because it is being operated in violation of the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). Hobbs said Public Lands for the People also has filed an appeal of that injunction. Hobbs took part in the environmental impact report process for DFG's 1994 regulations update, which had a working committee. There's no such committee this time, said Hobbs, who maintained no new evidence has been presented from 1995 forward that shows damage from suction dredge mining. Miners say they can't be in the river during spawning periods, that they care about the fish and don't harm them. Tucker, however, said they've seen evidence of dredges in the river at critical times. There's also evidence, according to mining supporters, that the practice breaks up hardened gravel at the bottom of streams, making for better salmon nesting conditions. The attempt to ban suction dredge mining wasn't new. "This isn't the first time they've tried this," said Siskiyou County Supervisor Marcia Armstrong, who spoke against Wiggins' bill. In October 2007, Schwarzenegger vetoed AB 1032, a bill by then-Assembly member Lois Wolk (D-Davis), which would have authorized DFG to close areas to dredging if it determined the action was necessary to protect fish and wildlife resources, and would have let the agency specify the size and type of equipment to be used, as well as adjusting permit fees. Schwarzenegger's veto message called the message "unnecessary," noting that DFG had "the necessary authority to protect fish and wildlife resources from suction dredge mining." Despite the 2007 veto, Wiggins' bill to institute a moratorium appeared to gain momentum following the closure of the fisheries along the Pacific coast of California and Oregon. In Wiggins' North Coast district, which includes Lake and Mendocino counties, coastal counties were heavily impacted when the fisheries were closed in 2008. Wiggins chairs the Joint Committee on Fisheries and Aquaculture. Other legislators who saw impacts in their districts signed on as SB 670 co-authors:Assemblyman Jared Huffman (D-San Rafael), Sen. Lois Wolk (D-Davis), Assembly members Noreen Evans (D-Santa Rosa) and Dave Jones (D-Sacramento). DFG's previously stalled study is now well under way, and Traverso said $1 million was included for the study in the 2008-09 budget, plus another $500,000 for 2009-10. Teresa Schilling, a legislative aide with Wiggins' office, said Wiggins was looking for a way to get the process back on track "and get the state to do the job it should be doing." Schilling said Wiggins also was looking at ways to bring back salmon runs. Some of the bigger issues around the fisheries collapse is being addressed now as the state looks at the Bay-Delta, "which is really about how do we allocate water in a more fair and modern way" that can benefit salmon runs, she said. In the case of SB 670, Wiggins said the moratorium was needed in order to help address the alarming decline of salmon and steelhead populations, which in turn were affecting the livelihoods of commercial fishermen, fish processors and charter boat operators. She said the practice kills fish eggs, immature eels and churns up long-buried mercury left over from the gold mining era. Schilling said they've received a lot of feedback on the bill. "There are economic impacts on both sides of the issue," she said. She said most of the studies say there is some impact on fish due to suction dredge mining, and the body of science points to the need for overhauling state regulations. But while the legislation may have aimed to help the North Coast fisheries, the ripple effect wasn't good for the gold country. In Armstrong's community, she said she's already seeing businesses hanging on by a thread. In April Armstrong - who has worked on salmon issues since 1992, serving with the Klamath River Fisheries Task Force and the Five Counties Salmonid Conservation Program - testified before the California Senate Natural Resources and Water Committee and urged against SB 670's passage. "It is our opinion that various studies have shown that suction dredge mining has a negligible effect on fisheries and can have a positive rehabilitative effect in the restoration of spawning gravels. We have found no published peer reviewed scientific field studies to the contrary," she told the committee. With a gold mining history heritage, Siskiyou County still sees people make a modest living on gold mining, said Armstrong. It's been a popular draw for tourists and an important micro economy in an area that suffered through the decline of the timber industry in recent decades as concerns about another creature - in that case, the northern spotted owl - ended livelihoods. Tourism has helped the area since. She said an economic study shows Siskiyou county is dead last among the state's counties in terms of economic well-being, and has the lowest median income at $30,356, compared to $56,332 for California as a whole, and 65 percent of Siskiyou County households with children ages 0 to 17 are low income. Siskiyou's September unemployment rate was 13.5 percent, compared to Lake's at 14.7 percent. Armstrong estimated the Happy Camp area's unemployment is 10 percent higher than the rest of Siskiyou County. Armstrong said a mining claim is a property right that should have just compensation if it can't be used. Bill Bird, spokesman for Sen. Sam Aanestad - whose 12-county area includes those most impacted by the suction dredge mining ban - said the senator's district includes Del Norte County, an area where salmon fishing is an important activity. "You basically had two sides pitted against each other" - the suction dredgers and the fishermen, said Bird. In the end, Aanestad looked at the issue from a statewide perspective and chose to argue against hurting an industry, Bird said. "Unfortunately, he was not able to garner the votes to stop the bill." Bird said their office has been told that DFG is halfway completed with its review, but no time frame was given for completion. He said Aanestad's office has talked to people around the state whose livelihoods have been affected by the ban. "We know that the signing of the bill put a lot of them pretty much out of business." Bird said nobody's arguing that the salmon fishing industry hasn't collapsed, but he maintained it's not because of mining. Just like on the Klamath, salmon numbers are down in the Sacramento and American rivers, where there is no suction dredge mining below the dams. In the end, more study needs to be done, Bird added. "Some industries are accepted and loved in California and others are not," he said. Armstrong said the Happy Camp area's chamber of commerce had a series of events this summer to try to boost the economy in the wake of the mining ban. There were cycling and other events passing through, but the money they left behind wasn't close to that gained through the miners. That doesn't bode well for the area's businesses. "I suspect that there's going to be some problems in keeping some of those services in the community," Armstrong said. She said Happy Camp's family resource center is running out of emergency food supplies as winter approaches. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Wed Nov 18 07:47:24 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Wed, 18 Nov 2009 07:47:24 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Delta Issues Message-ID: <005e01ca6866$6cf0be30$46d23a90$@net> Federal judge makes new ruling in Delta water/smelt case Central Valley Business Times 2 new lawsuits to save S.F. Bay-delta smelt S.F. Chronicle The federal Bureau of Reclamation may have to reconsider whether cutbacks in pumping fresh water out of the San Joaquin-Sacramento Delta to protect the Delta smelt are worth the human environmental costs, under a ruling handed down Friday by U.S. District Court Judge Oliver Wanger in Fresno. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said the smelt, a minnow-like fish that lives only in the Delta, had to be protected. The Bureau of Reclamation then cut water deliveries to customers in the Central Valley. Severe restrictions of water deliveries have been blamed for fields lying fallow this year and rising unemployment rates ion the west side of the Valley. But the Bureau of Reclamation failed to prepare a critical Environmental Impact Statement and thus violated the National Environmental Policy Act, the court says. The impact of Friday's decision is expected to become more clear when the court conducts a remedies hearing on Nov. 24.# http://www.centralvalleybusinesstimes.com/stories/001/?ID=13615 2 new lawsuits to save S.F. Bay-delta smelt S.F. Chronicle-11/15/09 Bob Egelko Two environmental groups sued the federal government Friday seeking greater habitat protections for two San Francisco Bay-delta fish species, one of them the delta smelt, a small but important creature in California's water wars. One lawsuit asks a federal judge in Sacramento to require the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to respond to the groups' March 2006 request to change the delta smelt's status from "threatened" to "endangered." That action would somewhat tighten federal standards for development or water-use permits. A second suit, filed in San Francisco, challenges the federal agency's decision in April to deny protected status to the bay-delta population of the longfin smelt. The agency said the local population is not a distinct group entitled to protection because some of the fish migrate up the coast to breed with other longfin, a conclusion the environmental groups called a reversal of the government's longtime position. "Formerly abundant fish at the base of the food chain in the San Francisco estuary are being driven to near extinction," said Jeff Miller of the Center for Biological Diversity, which filed the suits along with the Bay Institute. Fish and Wildlife Service spokesman Steve Martarano said his agency is still reviewing the status of both fish, and cited recent federal surveys showing both populations at historically low levels. The agency issued a biological opinion on the delta smelt in December that triggered a government order of reduced water shipments from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, angering Central Valley farm groups and prompting an unsuccessful protest from Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Martarano also said there's no practical difference between the law's protections for endangered and threatened species, both of which are entitled to government designation of critical habitat and a recovery plan. Miller agreed but said the lawsuits, if successful, would strengthen environmental safeguards that affect other species - Central Valley salmon, sturgeon and steelhead - and counter the state's pressure for water development. He criticized legislation signed by Schwarzenegger this week that puts an $11.1 billion water bond on the November 2010 ballot, including funding for delta protection and restoration, new dams, and potentially a peripheral canal to carry water around the delta. Environmental groups are split on the measure. Biologists say the delta smelt, 2 to 3 inches long, is an indicator of the health of the ecosystem. Court rulings and regulatory decisions since 2007, designed to save the once-abundant fish from extinction, have substantially reduced pumping of water from the delta to Central Valley croplands and Southern California households.# Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Wed Nov 18 12:12:24 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Wed, 18 Nov 2009 12:12:24 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Trinity Journal 11 18 09 Message-ID: <003f01ca688b$73634970$5a29dc50$@net> Proposals may divert additional Trinity water BY AMY GITTELSOHN THE TRINITY JOURNAL Trinity River advocates are on high alert with water proposals pending at both the state and federal levels which they fear will result in more water diverted from the river. On the state front, legislators and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger recently passed a state water package meant to restore the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and provide a more stable water supply to Southern California cities and Central Valley farmers. But Trinity County's representative in the state Assembly, Wesley Chesbro, D-Arcata, voted against the bills, saying that the emphasis should be on water conservation, not making it easier to ship more water south. "This package makes it easier to access North Coast rivers and the Trinity River," Chesbro said. "The water package sets up a streamlined decision-making process for building a peripheral canal. . It locks the voters out of the opportunity to decide as they did in the 1970s." The governor and new Delta Stewardship Council - most of whom will be appointed by the governor - will have the authority to decide whether to build the canal, Chesbro said, and that process is now in place regardless of whether or not voters pass the bond measure also included in the package. Probably next November, voters will be asked to approve the $11.1 billion bond measure to pay for recycling, drought relief, water storage and wastewater treatment programs. The $3 billion in that bond for water projects down south "will increase the pressure on the Trinity and other North Coast rivers for increased water export," Chesbro said. The use of general obligation bonds rather than revenue bonds means, "not only do they want take our water, they want to make us help pay for it," Chesbro said. The water package includes false promises for the environment and guarantees for Southern California farmers, said Tom Stokely, retired senior resource planner for Trinity County and a board member for the California Water Impact Network. The 20 percent reduction in water usage does not apply to agriculture, and there are numerous loopholes for urban water agencies, he said. Furthermore, although the plan calls for groundwater monitoring, this does not include regulation, Stokely said. Assemblyman Chesbro has signed on as a coauthor of a bill that would require legislative approval of any future plans to build a peripheral canal around the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and would also require a full fiscal analysis by the Legislative Analyst's Office before any such project could proceed. In another water issue, the federal Bureau of Reclamation has petitioned the State Water Resources Control Board for an extension to the year 2030 on certain CVP water rights permits, including seven on the Trinity River. Originally granted to Reclamation in 1959, but never developed, the Trinity River permits in question promise allocations amounting to millions of acre-feet of water in addition to what is already diverted to the CVP. The Trinity County Board of Supervisors has filed a protest to the extension request because the permits in question were based on minimum in-stream flows to the Trinity River of just 120,500 acre-feet, far less than the Trinity River Record of Decision signed in 2000 calls for even in a critically dry year. "I certainly will appear in support of Trinity County's efforts before the water board," Chesbro said. >From Reclamation, Deputy Regional Resources Manager Richard Stevenson said at this point the agency is merely seeking more time, until 2030, in which to show how much water it puts to beneficial use under 32 permits, including those for the Trinity. Based on that, the state board will determine licensing conditions. At that stage the state board could consider requests to include the terms and conditions of the Record of Decision, he said. "There are still plenty of opportunities to consider whether or not the ROD terms should be incorporated into our permits," he said, noting "We are operating to what ROD calls for." The state board has received 14 protests pertaining to the Reclamation petition, and the agency is to be given time to respond to protests the board accepts before the matter is placed on the board's hearing calendar. Still another water-related matter is being heard in the U.S. Senate. S. 1759, sponsored by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, would waive two requirements in existing law in order to facilitate water transfers. One requirement which would be waived ensures that water to be transferred would have been used beneficially in the year it's transferred. The other requires that the transfer not exceed the three-year average of water used by the transferring agency. Stokely, from the Water Impact Network, said the effect of waiving those requirements will be a drawdown of reservoirs, including Trinity Lake. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mdowdle at tcrcd.net Wed Nov 18 15:33:01 2009 From: mdowdle at tcrcd.net (Mark Dowdle - TCRCD) Date: Wed, 18 Nov 2009 15:33:01 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] C-WIN Board unanimously opposes pending water bond measure Message-ID: <4B04842D.4070502@tcrcd.net> *Oppose Water Bond, C-WIN Board Says* *Agribusiness and MWD will kill Delta, and bilk California ratepayers* Unanimously opposing the Governor?s $11.14 billion water bond, the California Water Impact Network (C-WIN) Board of Directors urges voters to reject the water bond next November 2010. ?The Governor?s water legislation marks the path to build the Peripheral Canal,? said C-WIN President and Executive Director Carolee Krieger. ?And the water bond he signed will soak all Californians for the impacts from the Peripheral Canal. It will kill the Delta?s present ecosystems. ?And Southern California water ratepayers will foot most of agribusiness?s and the Metropolitan Water District?s construction bill. We urge your ?no? vote on the bond,? she said. Building the Peripheral Canal?which would be bigger than the Panama Canal?could cost $53 billion, over $1 billion per mile. ?With 14 million California taxpayers,? said Jim Edmondson, C-WIN?s Treasurer, and himself a Mono Lake activist in the victory over Los Angeles in the 1980s and 1990s, ?that?s nearly $4,000 per taxpayer in California! It?s bad business and offends common sense.? About 80 percent of the canal?s water would irrigate selenium-poisoned land in the western San Joaquin Valley at the same time it would take water away from productive Delta soils. Instead, retiring those poisoned lands would free water up to serve the equivalent of two million California households. The bond contains $2.25 billion for Delta restoration and $1.785 billion for watershed funding in the rest of California. These pork projects bought support of legislators previously opposing the bond. ?Make no mistake, this is an Astroturf water bond for agribusiness and MWD under the guise of providing environmental restoration,? said Joan Hartmann, C-WIN Board member and a long-time southern California watershed activist, adding, ?Californians want real water solutions for /all/ Californians, not just to benefit the Governor?s political cronies,? said Hartmann. The Governor?s water bond, if passed, would strip Delta water rights under state laws enacted after Los Angeles stole Owens Valley?s water supply a century ago. Without such protections, Delta water will get saltier, making the quest for a Peripheral Canal self-fulfilling. ?The Governor and his friends? Delta water grab would set a terrible, frightening precedent for all parts of California with abundant streams and rivers,? warned Krieger. ?If they can do it to the Delta with all its natural wealth, they?ll come for /your/ water someday. ? *For more information, visit our new website at **http://www.c-win.org* *.* From bwl3 at comcast.net Wed Nov 18 12:17:49 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Wed, 18 Nov 2009 12:17:49 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Trinity Journal 11 18 09 Message-ID: <005701ca688c$33ba06a0$9b2e13e0$@net> Spawning season Hatchery numbers about average TRINITY JOURNAL STAFF http://www.trinityjournal.com/news/2009/1118/front_page/001p1_lg.jpg Hatchery workers Gene Stanfield and Mike O'Brien collect eggs from female fish that had been anesthetized and killed. The Trinity River Hatchery in Lewiston is having a "middle of the road" year for fish returns to the facility, Hatchery Manager Laird Marshall said. "It's not a banner year, but we will make sufficient egg collection," Marshall said early this week. Preliminary counts from the state Department of Fish and Game indicate that 3,092 spring run chinook returned to the hatchery. The other runs are not complete, but as of Nov. 10, there were 4,683 returning fish from the fall chinook run with collection to end around the first week of December. Also on Nov. 10, 2,034 coho had returned to the hatchery, with that run to end around the second week of December. It is very early for steelhead, but on the 10th 123 had made it to the hatchery. The hatchery has eight full-time employees and three seasonal aides. Located immediately downstream from Lewiston Dam, it is intended to mitigate for lost spawning and rearing grounds due to Lewiston and Trinity dams. http://www.trinityjournal.com/news/2009/1118/front_page/001p2_lg.jpg Small steelhead back in April. http://www.trinityjournal.com/news/2009/1118/front_page/001p3_lg.jpg Above, Amy Knabe, a seasonal aide, and Gene Stanfield, a fish and wildlife technician, sort anesthetized fish based on the fish's readiness to spawn. At right, Knabe and Mike O'Brien prepare the fertilized eggs. http://www.trinityjournal.com/news/2009/1118/front_page/001p4_lg.jpg PHOTOS BY PHIL NELSON THE TRINITY JOURNAL http://www.trinityjournal.com/news/2009/1118/front_page/001p5_lg.jpg Sperm is shot from the males. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 15540 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image002.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 14044 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image003.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 16953 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image004.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 19427 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image005.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 9522 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Thu Nov 19 09:55:15 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Thu, 19 Nov 2009 09:55:15 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] AlterNet 11 19 09 Message-ID: <005901ca6941$746a6180$5d3f2480$@net> How Limousine Liberals, Water Oligarchs and Even Sean Hannity Are Hijacking Our Water Supply AlterNet-11/19/09 By Yasha Levine A group of water oligarchs in California have engineered a disastrous deregulation and privatization scheme. And they've pulled in hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars without causing much public outrage. The amount of power and control they wield over California's most precious resource, water, should shock and frighten us -- and it would, if more people were aware of it. But here is the scary thing: They are plotting to gain an even larger share of California's increasingly-scarce, over-tapped water supply, which will surely lead to shortages, higher prices and untold destruction to California's environment. California is in year three of a fairly nasty dry spell. And some very powerful forces are not letting this mini-crisis go to waste, fiercely lobbying Governor Schwarzenegger and Senator Dianne Feinstein, paying off corporate shills like Fox News' Sean Hannity and capitalizing on people's fear of drought to push a massive waterworks project that will pump more water, build more dams and keep sucking the state's rivers dry. The fearmongering schtick goes like this: California is on the brink of a water crisis of cataclysmic proportions, with a life-or-death struggle just around the corner, pitting small farmers who want to save their livelihood against big city elitists who care more about the environment than they do about American jobs. But in reality, this drought hysteria is nothing more than political theatrics, a scare tactic backed by big agribusiness to strong-arm California voters into building a multi-billion dollar system of dams and canals that would not really help small farmers -- of which there are very few anyway -- but would deliver more water to corporations, subsidize their landholdings, fuel real estate development and enable large-scale water privatization. At its core, it is a war waged for water by California's megarich on everyone else. The leader of these recent water privatization efforts in California is a Beverly Hills billionaire named Stewart Resnick. Stewart and his wife, Lynda Resnick, own Roll International Corporation, a private umbrella company that controls the flowers-by-wire company Teleflora, Fiji Water, Pom Wonderful, pesticide manufacturer Suterra and Paramount Agribusiness, the largest farming company in America and the largest pistachio and almond producer in the world. Roll Corp. was ranked #246 on Forbes' list of America's largest private companies in 2008 and had an estimated revenue of $1.98 billion in 2007. They are a limousine liberal power couple. Hyperactive in politics, business and philanthropy, the two raise huge amounts of cash for the Democratic party, donate to the arts, support education and hobnob with influential progressives like Arianna Huffington and the anti-global warming activist and producer of An Inconvenient Truth, Laurie David. Stewart Resnick gave over $350,000 to the Gray Davis campaign and various anti-recall groups between 2000 and 2003, a favor Governor Davis returned by appointing Resnick to co-chair his agriculture-water transition team. A shrewd businesswoman, Lynda is credited with single-handedly creating the pomegranate health fad to sell her Pom Wonderful and catapulted Fiji Water to its recent success, one that environmentalists love to hate as was recently documented in Mother Jones by Anna Lenzer. But there is a gaping hole in most accounts of the jet-set Baby Boomer couple: their company, Roll International, is one of the largest, if not the largest, private water brokers in America. Through a series of subsidiary companies and organizations, Roll International is able to convert California's water from a public, shared resource into a private asset that can be sold on the market to the highest bidder. It all comes down to Stewart Resnick's involvement in the creation of a powerful but little-known entity called the Kern County Water Bank -- an underground water storage facility at the center of a plan to bring deregulation to California's most important public utility: water. According to a 2003 Public Citizen report titled "Water Heist," the Kern County Water Bank is an underground reservoir in the hottest, driest, southernmost edge of the Central Valley with a capacity of 1 million acre-feet, enough to convert the entire state of Rhode Island into a swampland one-foot deep or supply the City of Los Angeles with water for 1.7 years. The water bank was envisioned in the late '80s by the Department of Water Resources as a safeguard against prolonged drought. During wet years, it would serve as a repository for excess water coming in from Northern California and the Sierras, and pumped out in dry years. California spent nearly a hundred million dollars to develop the underground reservoir and connect it to the state's public canals and aqueducts, but in 1995, California's Department of Water Resources suddenly, and without any public debate, transferred it to a handful of corporate interests. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Thu Nov 19 15:53:23 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Thu, 19 Nov 2009 15:53:23 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] FW: Trinity River Science Symposium, Jan 2010, CALL FOR ABSTRACTS Message-ID: <002201ca6973$7ae53e40$70afbac0$@net> List of planned and call for additional abstracts for Trinity River Science Symposium January 12-14, 2010. Byron From: Peterson, Eric B. [mailto:ebpeterson at usbr.gov] Sent: Thursday, November 19, 2009 12:00 PM Subject: Trinity River Science Symposium, Jan 2010, CALL FOR ABSTRACTS We have a good preliminary list of presentations for the Science Symposium (attached). Abstracts for these presentations are due November 30th. Please follow the format of the example abstract below. We are still open to additional presentations. If you wish to contribute, please email Eric Peterson (ebpeterson at usbr.gov) as soon as possible. Email should include authorship, draft title, and preference of oral or poster format. Example abstract (* = presenter): Coho, A. and Chinook, B* Trinity River Swimmers Club, Bucktail Hole, CA. bchinook at trsc.org Swimming in the Trinity River is great fun. [abstract up to 250 words]. Thanks! --- Eric Peterson, Ph.D. Data Steward Trinity River Restoration Program (contracted through SAIC) 530-623-1810 http://www.trrp.net http://www.saic.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: DraftPresentations.doc Type: application/msword Size: 31744 bytes Desc: not available URL: From trinityjosh at gmail.com Thu Nov 19 21:23:13 2009 From: trinityjosh at gmail.com (Joshua Allen) Date: Thu, 19 Nov 2009 21:23:13 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Oil America Group Inc. Doubles Gold Claim Acreage (Push out the little guys in dredgers, and this is what you're gonna get...coming to the Trinity first!) Message-ID: *SOURCE: American Energy Production Inc.* Nov 19, 2009 08:30 ET American Energy Production Inc. Announces Wholly Owned Subsidiary Oil America Group Inc. Doubles Gold Claim Acreage *Highlighted Links * http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/American-Energy-Production-Inc-1079268.htm lMacReport Media Publishing MINERAL WELLS, TX--(Marketwire - November 19, 2009) - American Energy Production Inc. ("AENP") (OTCBB: AENP) announced today that it's wholly owned subsidiary Oil America Group Inc. ("OAG") has signed a letter of intent to acquire an additional 200 acres of Placer Gold Claims in Trinity County, California. 140 acres is contiguous with the previously announced 200 acres currently operated by OAG in a joint venture with Dorado Gold LLC. The remaining 60 acres is located close to Helena, California where the Trinity River runs through the property. This is very prolific Gold mining country that shows tremendous commercial promise. Joe Christopher, President of OAG and Gold Project manager, said, "We are very excited with the opportunity of acquiring more Placer Gold Claims in the same vicinity as the Dorado Gold processing operations. With access to water and our existing equipment we can transition into producing this adjoining Gold Claim faster and more efficiently and keep the entire area environmentally friendly." Charles Bitters, President of AENP, stated, "We are adding more Gold Claim acreage in the Trinity area because of two fundamental reasons, number one is competition from other potential mining operations that might enter the area and two, there is significant potential for finding additional large deposits of Gold along the Canyon Creek proven area. Gold is currently making new record highs almost every day (currently over $1100/troy oz.). With the economy in such disarray, an expert economist projects that in two years there could be double digit inflation and the Gold price could rise to $1,500.00 to $2,000.00/oz. AENP will now have a very profitable hedge against the declining dollar and the increasing demand for Gold. The country of India purchased $6.5 billion dollars worth of IMF Gold this past week and we believe many countries will be purchasing Gold to reduce their dollar holdings over the next few months. Gold will become the 'new currency.' These purchases, coupled with increasing private demand, could make Gold and Gold related investments a very exciting investment over the next few years." Gold has been mined in Trinity County, Calif. since the 1880s. A tremendous amount of Gold has been mined in the county, along with related noble metals such as silver and platinum. The largest platinum nugget ever found in the US was found in Trinity County in 1920. In 1917, 25,000 ounces of Gold was produced in Trinity County. This amount of Gold produced at today's prices would represent approximately $27,000,000.00. Mr. Christopher's Gold team has almost completed a magnetic grid map on the Dorado 40 Gold claim. This map will show potential "hot spots" or areas where there are black sand deposits. Where you find black sand you often find commercial quantities of Placer Gold. This should allow much more efficient recovery of the Gold, reducing the amount of earth moving. This type of Gold recovery operation is one that does not require the use of any chemicals and is a totally green operation and thus is environmentally friendly. Statements contained in this release, which are not historical facts, may be considered "forward-looking statements" and are based on current expectations and the current economic environment. We caution the reader that such forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance. Unknown risk, uncertainties, as well as other uncontrollable or unknown factors could cause actual results to materially differ from the result, performance, or expectations expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Contact: American Energy Production Inc. Charles Bitters 940-445-0698 http://www.americanenergyproduction.com or Oil America Group Inc. Joe Christopher 972-386-0601 Jchristopher at oilamericagroup.com Click here to see all recent news from this company -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Sat Nov 21 07:57:17 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Sat, 21 Nov 2009 07:57:17 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Sacramento Bee 11 21 2009 Message-ID: <000f01ca6ac3$4da4e6a0$e8eeb3e0$@net> Westlands Irrigation District wields major clout in California water wars Mark Grossi Fresno Bee Published: Saturday, Nov. 21, 2009 - 12:00 am | Page 4A The most powerful voices in the state's recent $11 billion water talks might have been two water districts - one speaking for half the state's population and the other for just 600 San Joaquin Valley farmers. The negotiations led to legislation with the promise of epic change - restoring dying fisheries, building dams and easing gridlock that has dogged water system improvement for decades. It made sense that Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which serves 19 million people, would wield big political clout in those talks. But who are those 600 farmers? They are customers in Westlands Water District, the country's largest federal irrigation district. With crops worth $1 billion a year, this one district produces more than some whole states. The 600,000-acre Westlands - with a footprint twice the size of Los Angeles - is no hayseed at any bargaining table. For decades, politicos from Sacramento to Washington, D.C., have heard regularly from Westlands. The district's name appears on dozens of lawsuits. Any time there's an important statewide discussion of water supply, Westlands is in the room. "This district is a very influential player," said Assemblyman Jared Huffman, D-San Rafael. Westlands is protecting its farmers, who have been losing water to environmental reform efforts since the 1990s and idling land because of soil contamination since the 1980s. This farming giant is in a slow-motion transition, struggling to turn the next page in a 57-year history. The district's past is filled with powerful families - Giffen, Diener, Harris and Boswell - who carved success with sweat, guile and groundwater in west Fresno and Kings counties. When they tapped into Northern California river water on the federal Central Valley Project in the 1960s, they made enemies. Now those north-state enemies blame Westlands for trashing the ecosystem and ruining the salmon fishing industry. They say the district takes too much water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. They call Westlands a litigious maverick, a greedy agribusiness and an abuser of federal subsidies. Some suggest Westlands should die off and eliminate one of the many water consumers in California. "We should never have allowed farming out there," said Bill Jennings, chairman of the California Sport Fishing Alliance, based in Stockton. "I think we can solve a lot of California's water problems by buying Westlands farmland and taking it out of production." Which Westlands? Farmer Dan Errotabere, a Westlands board member whose family has been on the west side since before the Great Depression, chuckles when he hears critics call him a millionaire with big political muscles. "If that were true, why wouldn't we have more success at getting the water we need?" he asked. But critics say Westlands more often than not gets its way. Westlands quickly goes to federal court when confronted with a roadblock, said Tom Stokely, a member of the nonprofit environmental group California Water Impact Network. And lately, it has been winning more often than not. For instance, Westlands sued over a federal biological study that resulted in a 25 percent loss of the district's federal supply this year, forcing further consideration. "They're a big bully with lots of money to sue people," said Stokely, a former Trinity County planner based in Northern California. Westlands' reputation for hiring the best lawyers and filing many lawsuits comes partly from the 1980s when its well-known irrigation drainage problem worsened. A clay layer beneath the soil prevents irrigation water from sinking far on thousands of Westlands' acres. Minerals build up and eventually poison the land. As a solution in the late 1970s and 1980s, federal officials piped drainage water from Westlands to Kesterson Reservoir in western Merced County. Scientists later discovered the drainage was toxic after it killed or disfigured shorebirds and other animals. Federal officials stopped drainage to Kesterson in 1985. Then, legal actions began as officials sorted out how to deal with the dirty water. The solution has eluded authorities, the dirty water remains and drainage issues are still in court. Benefits for the public Only farmers have reaped the benefits from the investment of public money in Westlands, one environmentalist contends. Fresno lawyer Lloyd Carter, a deputy state attorney general and longtime Westlands critic, wrote in the Golden Gate University Environmental Law Journal this month that over several decades taxpayers have invested more than $1 billion in everything from canal construction to crop subsidies for this district. But residents of Fresno and Kings counties have little to show for it, he concluded. Westlands officials reply that farming has created thousands of jobs on the west side and is the basis for many spinoff businesses, such as food processing. Another prominent critic of Westlands is Rep. George Miller, D-Martinez, who co-wrote a 1992 irrigation reform law that provided more water for the state's ecosystem. Westlands and other federal farm contractors lost 35 percent to 50 percent of their Northern California irrigation water in the process. Miller has said Westlands represents a privileged group of farmers who bought cheap land and got rich by using federally subsidized water to grow subsidized cotton. Rep. Jim Costa, D-Fresno, disagrees, saying much has changed in the last 20 years. Westlands farmers are largely out of the cotton business and now pay full price for federal water. He said Westlands' family farms are a critical part of Fresno County agriculture, which leads the nation in farm production. "It would be a tragedy and a blow to national security if we did not have Westlands," Costa said. On the farm With the passage of state reform legislation, Westlands officials say there is a clear path to building the canals and reservoirs that could bring more water to west side farms. But it will take years, and there are no assurances. Back on the farm, things look grim. The three-year drought, irrigation water cutbacks to protect Delta fish and drainage problems have knocked out of production 260,000 acres - more than 40 percent of Westlands land. Growers aren't giving up. They've spent millions of dollars on drip-irrigation systems. Water-intensive flood irrigation - filling furrows with river water - has largely been abandoned, said farmer and board member Errotabere. "Water is expensive, and we don't have enough of it," he said. "It has always been that way around here." Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From gking at asis.com Sat Nov 21 14:34:13 2009 From: gking at asis.com (Greg King) Date: Sat, 21 Nov 2009 14:34:13 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Oil America Group Inc. Doubles Gold Claim Acreage (Push out the little guys in dredgers, and this is what you're gonna get...coming to the Trinity first!) In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <2BD90D44-5243-406B-B754-8CB551C279D9@asis.com> Joshua, The "little guy" dredgers have no place in a salmonid stream, and neither does American Energy. Why do we need to choose? Both should be opposed. Greg On Nov 19, 2009, at 9:23 PM, Joshua Allen wrote: > SOURCE: American Energy Production Inc. > > Nov 19, 2009 08:30 ET > American Energy Production Inc. Announces Wholly Owned Subsidiary > Oil America Group Inc. Doubles Gold Claim Acreage > > Highlighted Links > > http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/American-Energy-Production- > Inc-1079268.htm > > lMacReport Media Publishing > MINERAL WELLS, TX--(Marketwire - November 19, 2009) - American > Energy Production Inc. ("AENP") (OTCBB: AENP) announced today that > it's wholly owned subsidiary Oil America Group Inc. ("OAG") has > signed a letter of intent to acquire an additional 200 acres of > Placer Gold Claims in Trinity County, California. 140 acres is > contiguous with the previously announced 200 acres currently > operated by OAG in a joint venture with Dorado Gold LLC. The > remaining 60 acres is located close to Helena, California where the > Trinity River runs through the property. This is very prolific Gold > mining country that shows tremendous commercial promise. > > Joe Christopher, President of OAG and Gold Project manager, said, > "We are very excited with the opportunity of acquiring more Placer > Gold Claims in the same vicinity as the Dorado Gold processing > operations. With access to water and our existing equipment we can > transition into producing this adjoining Gold Claim faster and more > efficiently and keep the entire area environmentally friendly." > > Charles Bitters, President of AENP, stated, "We are adding more > Gold Claim acreage in the Trinity area because of two fundamental > reasons, number one is competition from other potential mining > operations that might enter the area and two, there is significant > potential for finding additional large deposits of Gold along the > Canyon Creek proven area. Gold is currently making new record highs > almost every day (currently over $1100/troy oz.). With the economy > in such disarray, an expert economist projects that in two years > there could be double digit inflation and the Gold price could rise > to $1,500.00 to $2,000.00/oz. AENP will now have a very profitable > hedge against the declining dollar and the increasing demand for > Gold. The country of India purchased $6.5 billion dollars worth of > IMF Gold this past week and we believe many countries will be > purchasing Gold to reduce their dollar holdings over the next few > months. Gold will become the 'new currency.' These purchases, > coupled with increasing private demand, could make Gold and Gold > related investments a very exciting investment over the next few > years." > > Gold has been mined in Trinity County, Calif. since the 1880s. A > tremendous amount of Gold has been mined in the county, along with > related noble metals such as silver and platinum. The largest > platinum nugget ever found in the US was found in Trinity County in > 1920. In 1917, 25,000 ounces of Gold was produced in Trinity > County. This amount of Gold produced at today's prices would > represent approximately $27,000,000.00. > > Mr. Christopher's Gold team has almost completed a magnetic grid > map on the Dorado 40 Gold claim. This map will show potential "hot > spots" or areas where there are black sand deposits. Where you find > black sand you often find commercial quantities of Placer Gold. > This should allow much more efficient recovery of the Gold, > reducing the amount of earth moving. This type of Gold recovery > operation is one that does not require the use of any chemicals and > is a totally green operation and thus is environmentally friendly. > > Statements contained in this release, which are not historical > facts, may be considered "forward-looking statements" and are based > on current expectations and the current economic environment. We > caution the reader that such forward-looking statements are not > guarantees of future performance. Unknown risk, uncertainties, as > well as other uncontrollable or unknown factors could cause actual > results to materially differ from the result, performance, or > expectations expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. > > Contact: > > American Energy Production Inc. > Charles Bitters > 940-445-0698 > http://www.americanenergyproduction.com > > or > > Oil America Group Inc. > Joe Christopher > 972-386-0601 > Jchristopher at oilamericagroup.com > Click here to see all recent news from this company > _______________________________________________ > env-trinity mailing list > env-trinity at velocipede.dcn.davis.ca.us > http://www2.dcn.org/mailman/listinfo/env-trinity -- Greg King President/Program Director Siskiyou Land Conservancy P.O. Box 4209 Arcata, CA 95518 707-498-4900 gking at asis.com http://siskiyouland.wordpress.com/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kierassociates at suddenlink.net Sun Nov 22 08:09:25 2009 From: kierassociates at suddenlink.net (Kier Associates) Date: Sun, 22 Nov 2009 08:09:25 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Oil America Group Inc. Doubles Gold Claim Acreage (Push out the little guys in dredgers, and this is what you're gonna get...coming to the Trinity first!) In-Reply-To: <2BD90D44-5243-406B-B754-8CB551C279D9@asis.com> References: <2BD90D44-5243-406B-B754-8CB551C279D9@asis.com> Message-ID: <20091122160936.NHZA20088.omta01.suddenlink.net@kier.suddenlink.net> An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Sun Nov 22 08:32:25 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Sun, 22 Nov 2009 08:32:25 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] NY Times 11 22 09 Message-ID: <000801ca6b91$5ffe1f00$1ffa5d00$@net> New York Times Thomas J. Graff, an Expert on West Coast Water Use, Is Dead at 65 By JESSE McKINLEY Published: November 22, 2009 SAN FRANCISCO - Thomas J. Graff, a leading environmentalist who championed the idea of offering financial incentives for environmentally friendly behavior, an approach that had far-reaching impact on state and federal policies, especially on water use in the drought-prone West, died Nov. 12 in Oakland, Calif., where he lived. He was 65. Skip to next paragraph http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/11/22/us/22graff_CA0/articleInline. jpg Thomas J. Graff The cause was thyroid cancer, his family said. Mr. Graff, who founded the first California office of the Environmental Defense Fund and led it for 37 years, dealt with a host of environmental issues, including AB 32, the first-of-its-kind legislation, adopted in 2006, that sets limits on greenhouse gas emissions in California. But he made his biggest impact in the realm of water use, a constant source of vexation in the West. Mr. Graff's early support for using market forces to encourage environmentally friendly behavior was a somewhat radical idea at the time. But it has since become increasingly common in environmental negotiations nationwide and has echoes in " cap and trade" policies around the world involving things like airborne pollutants and carbon emissions. "If a resource is scarce, we ought to put a price on it that reflects its value," Mr. Graff said in an interview in 2008. "Otherwise there's an incentive to over-consume." Mr. Graff's theory was put to wide use in 1992, when he cajoled federal lawmakers into passing the Central Valley Project Improvement Act, a landmark bill that established a new accounting system to assure that diversions of water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, whose waters help irrigate millions of acres of farmland to the south, would not outstrip the delta's own ecological needs. The bill also established a groundwork for a so-called water market, which allowed agricultural interests to sell excess water to cities and other users for a profit. This process rewarded farmers for conservation and simultaneously helped protect the delta, where salmon and other fish are sometimes endangered by giant pumps and low water levels in tributaries. "On the Central Valley Improvement Act, no person was more important than Tom Graff," Senator Barbara Boxer, Democrat of California, said in a statement after his death. "It wasn't just his knowledge of water. It was his knowledge about the stewardship of the environment and what this state had to consider if it really thought about its future." Mr. Graff also played a major role in Project 88, an influential, privately financed 1988 report to President-elect George Bush, which focused on ways to use market forces to protect the environment and led to the development of market-oriented controls on acid rain. Born in Honduras to Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany and educated in law at Harvard, Mr. Graff learned the art of politics and persuasion in Washington and New York, serving as a clerk for a federal judge in the capital and a legislative assistant to Mayor John V. Lindsay of New York. In 1970, a private law practice drew him to San Francisco, but his love of the environment quickly led him across the bay to Berkeley. In 1971, Mr. Graff established the first California office of the Environmental Defense Fund in Berkeley, near the law library of the University of California campus. He was joining an organization that had staked out a science-based middle ground in the growing and often polarized environmental movement. Mr. Graff's own philosophy combined equal parts pragmatism and personal charm. In Berkeley, he used economists and computer analysts to break down energy and water issues, believing that hard data were a singular tool for winning arguments, whether in boardrooms or courtrooms. (His obsession with statistics was also personal; he kept a running tally of his free-throw percentage during his down-time basketball games.) While corporations and public utilities had long been viewed as the enemy in the environmental movement - an early motto at the defense fund was "Sue the bastards" - Mr. Graff showed a willingness to work with potential combatants. Indeed, last week, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California hailed Mr. Graff's accomplishments even as he signed a new state water reform law, calling him a friend to "even those who would normally be considered adversaries." Mr. Graff is survived by his wife, Sharona Barzilay of Oakland; two daughters, Rebecca Graff of Cambridge, Mass., and Samantha Graff of Oakland; a son, Benjamin Graff of San Jose, Calif.; a sister, Claudia Bial of Fort Lee, N.J.; and two grandchildren. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.gif Type: image/gif Size: 1110 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image002.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 18411 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Sun Nov 22 08:35:59 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Sun, 22 Nov 2009 08:35:59 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Oil America Group Inc. Doubles Gold Claim Acreage (Push out the little guys in dredgers, and this is what you're gonna get...coming to the Trinity first!) In-Reply-To: <20091122160936.NHZA20088.omta01.suddenlink.net@kier.suddenlink.net> References: <2BD90D44-5243-406B-B754-8CB551C279D9@asis.com> <20091122160936.NHZA20088.omta01.suddenlink.net@kier.suddenlink.net> Message-ID: <001b01ca6b91$dffd2660$9ff77320$@net> Like "Water" for sale by irrigator recipients of the federally or state subsidized public trust asset. From: env-trinity-bounces at velocipede.dcn.davis.ca.us [mailto:env-trinity-bounces at velocipede.dcn.davis.ca.us] On Behalf Of Kier Associates Sent: Sunday, November 22, 2009 8:09 AM To: Greg King; Joshua Allen Cc: Trinity List Subject: Re: [env-trinity] Oil America Group Inc. Doubles Gold Claim Acreage (Push out the little guys in dredgers, and this is what you're gonna get...coming to the Trinity first!) did you notice that "gold" is capitalized throughout the release, like "God" ? At 02:34 PM 11/21/2009, Greg King wrote: Joshua, The "little guy" dredgers have no place in a salmonid stream, and neither does American Energy. Why do we need to choose? Both should be opposed. Greg On Nov 19, 2009, at 9:23 PM, Joshua Allen wrote: SOURCE: American Energy Production Inc. Nov 19, 2009 08:30 ET American Energy Production Inc. Announces Wholly Owned Subsidiary Oil America Group Inc. Doubles Gold Claim Acreage Highlighted Links http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/American-Energy-Production-Inc-10792 68.htm l MacReport Media Publishing MINERAL WELLS, TX--(Marketwire - November 19, 2009) - American Energy Production Inc. ("AENP") (OTCBB: AENP ) announced today that it's wholly owned subsidiary Oil America Group Inc. ("OAG") has signed a letter of intent to acquire an additional 200 acres of Placer Gold Claims in Trinity County, California. 140 acres is contiguous with the previously announced 200 acres currently operated by OAG in a joint venture with Dorado Gold LLC. The remaining 60 acres is located close to Helena, California where the Trinity River runs through the property. This is very prolific Gold mining country that shows tremendous commercial promise. Joe Christopher, President of OAG and Gold Project manager, said, "We are very excited with the opportunity of acquiring more Placer Gold Claims in the same vicinity as the Dorado Gold processing operations. With access to water and our existing equipment we can transition into producing this adjoining Gold Claim faster and more efficiently and keep the entire area environmentally friendly." Charles Bitters, President of AENP, stated, "We are adding more Gold Claim acreage in the Trinity area because of two fundamental reasons, number one is competition from other potential mining operations that might enter the area and two, there is significant potential for finding additional large deposits of Gold along the Canyon Creek proven area. Gold is currently making new record highs almost every day (currently over $1100/troy oz.). With the economy in such disarray, an expert economist projects that in two years there could be double digit inflation and the Gold price could rise to $1,500.00 to $2,000.00/oz. AENP will now have a very profitable hedge against the declining dollar and the increasing demand for Gold. The country of India purchased $6.5 billion dollars worth of IMF Gold this past week and we believe many countries will be purchasing Gold to reduce their dollar holdings over the next few months. Gold will become the 'new currency.' These purchases, coupled with increasing private demand, could make Gold and Gold related investments a very exciting investment over the next few years." Gold has been mined in Trinity County, Calif. since the 1880s. A tremendous amount of Gold has been mined in the county, along with related noble metals such as silver and platinum. The largest platinum nugget ever found in the US was found in Trinity County in 1920. In 1917, 25,000 ounces of Gold was produced in Trinity County. This amount of Gold produced at today's prices would represent approximately $27,000,000.00. Mr. Christopher's Gold team has almost completed a magnetic grid map on the Dorado 40 Gold claim. This map will show potential "hot spots" or areas where there are black sand deposits. Where you find black sand you often find commercial quantities of Placer Gold. This should allow much more efficient recovery of the Gold, reducing the amount of earth moving. This type of Gold recovery operation is one that does not require the use of any chemicals and is a totally green operation and thus is environmentally friendly. Statements contained in this release, which are not historical facts, may be considered "forward-looking statements" and are based on current expectations and the current economic environment. We caution the reader that such forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance. Unknown risk, uncertainties, as well as other uncontrollable or unknown factors could cause actual results to materially differ from the result, performance, or expectations expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Contact: American Energy Production Inc. Charles Bitters 940-445-0698 http://www.americanenergyproduction.com or Oil America Group Inc. Joe Christopher 972-386-0601 Jchristopher at oilamericagroup.com Click here to see all recent news from this company _______________________________________________ env-trinity mailing list env-trinity at velocipede.dcn.davis.ca.us http://www2.dcn.org/mailman/listinfo/env-trinity -- Greg King President/Program Director Siskiyou Land Conservancy P.O. Box 4209 Arcata, CA 95518 707-498-4900 gking at asis.com http://siskiyouland.wordpress.com/ _______________________________________________ env-trinity mailing list env-trinity at velocipede.dcn.davis.ca.us http://www2.dcn.org/mailman/listinfo/env-trinity Kier Associates, Fisheries and Watershed Professionals P.O. Box 915 Blue Lake, CA 95525 707.668.1822 mobile: 498.7847 http://www.kierassociates.net GSA Advantage Contractor GS-10F-0124U -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From gking at asis.com Sun Nov 22 09:42:47 2009 From: gking at asis.com (Greg King) Date: Sun, 22 Nov 2009 09:42:47 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Oil America Group Inc. Doubles Gold Claim Acreage (Push out the little guys in dredgers, and this is what you're gonna get...coming to the Trinity first!) In-Reply-To: <20091122160936.NHZA20088.omta01.suddenlink.net@kier.suddenlink.net> References: <2BD90D44-5243-406B-B754-8CB551C279D9@asis.com> <20091122160936.NHZA20088.omta01.suddenlink.net@kier.suddenlink.net> Message-ID: <8E4463BE-88DB-4E3F-A38D-0F0D9AAF0795@asis.com> Ha! I did not notice that. Now that's it's crested the holy $1,000/ ounce price, I guess that would make sense to some people. Gold is one of the best representatives of the greed that has proven the downfall of human civilization. On Nov 22, 2009, at 8:09 AM, Kier Associates wrote: > did you notice that "gold" is capitalized throughout the release, > like "God" ? > > At 02:34 PM 11/21/2009, Greg King wrote: >> Joshua, >> >> The "little guy" dredgers have no place in a salmonid stream, and >> neither does American Energy. Why do we need to choose? Both >> should be opposed. >> >> Greg >> >> On Nov 19, 2009, at 9:23 PM, Joshua Allen wrote: >> >>> SOURCE: American Energy Production Inc. >>> Nov 19, 2009 08:30 ET >>> >>> American Energy Production Inc. Announces Wholly Owned Subsidiary >>> Oil America Group Inc. Doubles Gold Claim Acreage >>> >>> >>> >>> Highlighted Links >>> >>> http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/American-Energy- >>> Production-Inc-1079268.htm >>> >>> l MacReport Media Publishing >>> >>> MINERAL WELLS, TX--(Marketwire - November 19, 2009) - American >>> Energy Production Inc. ("AENP") (OTCBB: AENP) announced today >>> that it's wholly owned subsidiary Oil America Group Inc. ("OAG") >>> has signed a letter of intent to acquire an additional 200 acres >>> of Placer Gold Claims in Trinity County, California. 140 acres is >>> contiguous with the previously announced 200 acres currently >>> operated by OAG in a joint venture with Dorado Gold LLC. The >>> remaining 60 acres is located close to Helena, California where >>> the Trinity River runs through the property. This is very >>> prolific Gold mining country that shows tremendous commercial >>> promise. >>> >>> Joe Christopher, President of OAG and Gold Project manager, said, >>> "We are very excited with the opportunity of acquiring more >>> Placer Gold Claims in the same vicinity as the Dorado Gold >>> processing operations. With access to water and our existing >>> equipment we can transition into producing this adjoining Gold >>> Claim faster and more efficiently and keep the entire area >>> environmentally friendly." >>> >>> Charles Bitters, President of AENP, stated, "We are adding more >>> Gold Claim acreage in the Trinity area because of two fundamental >>> reasons, number one is competition from other potential mining >>> operations that might enter the area and two, there is >>> significant potential for finding additional large deposits of >>> Gold along the Canyon Creek proven area. Gold is currently making >>> new record highs almost every day (currently over $1100/troy >>> oz.). With the economy in such disarray, an expert economist >>> projects that in two years there could be double digit inflation >>> and the Gold price could rise to $1,500.00 to $2,000.00/oz. AENP >>> will now have a very profitable hedge against the declining >>> dollar and the increasing demand for Gold. The country of India >>> purchased $6.5 billion dollars worth of IMF Gold this past week >>> and we believe many countries will be purchasing Gold to reduce >>> their dollar holdings over the next few months. Gold will become >>> the 'new currency.' These purchases, coupled with increasing >>> private demand, could make Gold and Gold related investments a >>> very exciting investment over the next few years." >>> >>> Gold has been mined in Trinity County, Calif. since the 1880s. A >>> tremendous amount of Gold has been mined in the county, along >>> with related noble metals such as silver and platinum. The >>> largest platinum nugget ever found in the US was found in Trinity >>> County in 1920. In 1917, 25,000 ounces of Gold was produced in >>> Trinity County. This amount of Gold produced at today's prices >>> would represent approximately $27,000,000.00. >>> >>> Mr. Christopher's Gold team has almost completed a magnetic grid >>> map on the Dorado 40 Gold claim. This map will show potential >>> "hot spots" or areas where there are black sand deposits. Where >>> you find black sand you often find commercial quantities of >>> Placer Gold. This should allow much more efficient recovery of >>> the Gold, reducing the amount of earth moving. This type of Gold >>> recovery operation is one that does not require the use of any >>> chemicals and is a totally green operation and thus is >>> environmentally friendly. >>> >>> Statements contained in this release, which are not historical >>> facts, may be considered "forward-looking statements" and are >>> based on current expectations and the current economic >>> environment. We caution the reader that such forward-looking >>> statements are not guarantees of future performance. Unknown >>> risk, uncertainties, as well as other uncontrollable or unknown >>> factors could cause actual results to materially differ from the >>> result, performance, or expectations expressed or implied by such >>> forward-looking statements. >>> Contact: >>> >>> American Energy Production Inc. >>> Charles Bitters >>> 940-445-0698 >>> http://www.americanenergyproduction.com >>> >>> or >>> >>> Oil America Group Inc. >>> Joe Christopher >>> 972-386-0601 >>> Jchristopher at oilamericagroup.com >>> Click here to see all recent news from this company >>> _______________________________________________ >>> env-trinity mailing list >>> env-trinity at velocipede.dcn.davis.ca.us >>> http://www2.dcn.org/mailman/listinfo/env-trinity >> >> -- >> Greg King >> President/Program Director >> Siskiyou Land Conservancy >> P.O. Box 4209 >> Arcata, CA 95518 >> 707-498-4900 >> gking at asis.com >> http://siskiyouland.wordpress.com/ >> >> >> >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> env-trinity mailing list >> env-trinity at velocipede.dcn.davis.ca.us >> http://www2.dcn.org/mailman/listinfo/env-trinity > Kier Associates, Fisheries and Watershed Professionals > P.O. Box 915 > Blue Lake, CA 95525 > 707.668.1822 > mobile: 498.7847 > http://www.kierassociates.net > GSA Advantage Contractor GS-10F-0124U > -- Greg King President/Program Director Siskiyou Land Conservancy P.O. Box 4209 Arcata, CA 95518 707-498-4900 gking at asis.com http://siskiyouland.wordpress.com/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From truman at jeffnet.org Sun Nov 22 10:03:06 2009 From: truman at jeffnet.org (Patrick Truman) Date: Sun, 22 Nov 2009 10:03:06 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Oil America Group Inc. Doubles Gold Claim Acreage(Push out the little guys in dredgers, and this is what you're gonna get...coming to the Trinity first!) References: <2BD90D44-5243-406B-B754-8CB551C279D9@asis.com><20091122160936.NHZA20088.omta01.suddenlink.net@kier.suddenlink.net> <8E4463BE-88DB-4E3F-A38D-0F0D9AAF0795@asis.com> Message-ID: <0041B399CB9D4627A72E0ADBB6A65146@HAL> Gold only has value because people have been brainwashed into believing it, good Gawd. I mean, can you eat the stuff and live? ----- Original Message ----- From: Greg King To: Kier Associates Cc: Trinity List Sent: Sunday, November 22, 2009 9:42 AM Subject: Re: [env-trinity] Oil America Group Inc. Doubles Gold Claim Acreage(Push out the little guys in dredgers,and this is what you're gonna get...coming to the Trinity first!) Ha! I did not notice that. Now that's it's crested the holy $1,000/ounce price, I guess that would make sense to some people. Gold is one of the best representatives of the greed that has proven the downfall of human civilization. On Nov 22, 2009, at 8:09 AM, Kier Associates wrote: did you notice that "gold" is capitalized throughout the release, like "God" ? At 02:34 PM 11/21/2009, Greg King wrote: Joshua, The "little guy" dredgers have no place in a salmonid stream, and neither does American Energy. Why do we need to choose? Both should be opposed. Greg On Nov 19, 2009, at 9:23 PM, Joshua Allen wrote: SOURCE: American Energy Production Inc. Nov 19, 2009 08:30 ET American Energy Production Inc. Announces Wholly Owned Subsidiary Oil America Group Inc. Doubles Gold Claim Acreage Highlighted Links http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/American-Energy-Production-Inc-1079268.htm l MacReport Media Publishing MINERAL WELLS, TX--(Marketwire - November 19, 2009) - American Energy Production Inc. ("AENP") (OTCBB: AENP) announced today that it's wholly owned subsidiary Oil America Group Inc. ("OAG") has signed a letter of intent to acquire an additional 200 acres of Placer Gold Claims in Trinity County, California. 140 acres is contiguous with the previously announced 200 acres currently operated by OAG in a joint venture with Dorado Gold LLC. The remaining 60 acres is located close to Helena, California where the Trinity River runs through the property. This is very prolific Gold mining country that shows tremendous commercial promise. Joe Christopher, President of OAG and Gold Project manager, said, "We are very excited with the opportunity of acquiring more Placer Gold Claims in the same vicinity as the Dorado Gold processing operations. With access to water and our existing equipment we can transition into producing this adjoining Gold Claim faster and more efficiently and keep the entire area environmentally friendly." Charles Bitters, President of AENP, stated, "We are adding more Gold Claim acreage in the Trinity area because of two fundamental reasons, number one is competition from other potential mining operations that might enter the area and two, there is significant potential for finding additional large deposits of Gold along the Canyon Creek proven area. Gold is currently making new record highs almost every day (currently over $1100/troy oz.). With the economy in such disarray, an expert economist projects that in two years there could be double digit inflation and the Gold price could rise to $1,500.00 to $2,000.00/oz. AENP will now have a very profitable hedge against the declining dollar and the increasing demand for Gold. The country of India purchased $6.5 billion dollars worth of IMF Gold this past week and we believe many countries will be purchasing Gold to reduce their dollar holdings over the next few months. Gold will become the 'new currency.' These purchases, coupled with increasing private demand, could make Gold and Gold related investments a very exciting investment over the next few years." Gold has been mined in Trinity County, Calif. since the 1880s. A tremendous amount of Gold has been mined in the county, along with related noble metals such as silver and platinum. The largest platinum nugget ever found in the US was found in Trinity County in 1920. In 1917, 25,000 ounces of Gold was produced in Trinity County. This amount of Gold produced at today's prices would represent approximately $27,000,000.00. Mr. Christopher's Gold team has almost completed a magnetic grid map on the Dorado 40 Gold claim. This map will show potential "hot spots" or areas where there are black sand deposits. Where you find black sand you often find commercial quantities of Placer Gold. This should allow much more efficient recovery of the Gold, reducing the amount of earth moving. This type of Gold recovery operation is one that does not require the use of any chemicals and is a totally green operation and thus is environmentally friendly. Statements contained in this release, which are not historical facts, may be considered "forward-looking statements" and are based on current expectations and the current economic environment. We caution the reader that such forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance. Unknown risk, uncertainties, as well as other uncontrollable or unknown factors could cause actual results to materially differ from the result, performance, or expectations expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Contact: American Energy Production Inc. Charles Bitters 940-445-0698 http://www.americanenergyproduction.com or Oil America Group Inc. Joe Christopher 972-386-0601 Jchristopher at oilamericagroup.com Click here to see all recent news from this company _______________________________________________ env-trinity mailing list env-trinity at velocipede.dcn.davis.ca.us http://www2.dcn.org/mailman/listinfo/env-trinity -- Greg King President/Program Director Siskiyou Land Conservancy P.O. Box 4209 Arcata, CA 95518 707-498-4900 gking at asis.com http://siskiyouland.wordpress.com/ _______________________________________________ env-trinity mailing list env-trinity at velocipede.dcn.davis.ca.us http://www2.dcn.org/mailman/listinfo/env-trinity Kier Associates, Fisheries and Watershed Professionals P.O. Box 915 Blue Lake, CA 95525 707.668.1822 mobile: 498.7847 http://www.kierassociates.net GSA Advantage Contractor GS-10F-0124U -- Greg King President/Program Director Siskiyou Land Conservancy P.O. Box 4209 Arcata, CA 95518 707-498-4900 gking at asis.com http://siskiyouland.wordpress.com/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ env-trinity mailing list env-trinity at velocipede.dcn.davis.ca.us http://www2.dcn.org/mailman/listinfo/env-trinity -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From danielbacher at fishsniffer.com Sun Nov 22 10:26:14 2009 From: danielbacher at fishsniffer.com (Dan Bacher) Date: Sun, 22 Nov 2009 10:26:14 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Oil America Group Inc. Doubles Gold Claim Acreage (Push out the little guys in dredgers, and this is what you're gonna get...coming to the Trinity first!) In-Reply-To: <20091122160936.NHZA20088.omta01.suddenlink.net@kier.suddenlink.net> References: <2BD90D44-5243-406B-B754-8CB551C279D9@asis.com> <20091122160936.NHZA20088.omta01.suddenlink.net@kier.suddenlink.net> Message-ID: As corporations seize control of Trinity County gold, the oil industry has seized control of marine "protection" in California. Life in California has become living political theatre under Schwarzenegger and the California Legislature. This is a story - a huge environmental issue with many implications - that the corporate media refuses to investigate! Dan Big Oil Takes Control of Marine Protection in California MLPA Task Force Chair Appointed President of Western States Petroleum Association by Dan Bacher Corporate greenwashing in California under Arnold Schwarzenegger, the "green governor," has become so bizarre and egregious that no political satirist, comedian or novelist could concoct fictional schemes that rival the reality of current politics in the state. Only in Schwarzenegger's California would a governor appoint an oil industry lobbyist to a key administration position supposedly promoting "marine protection" at a time when oil companies are seeking to expand drilling operations off the California coast. On August 14, Secretary of Resources Mike Chrisman announced the Governor's appointment of Cathy Reheis-Boyd, the Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of the Western States Petroleum Association, as chair of the Marine Life Protection Act (MLPA) Blue Ribbon Task Force for the remainder of the MLPA South Project. After having served on the MLPA Task Force for the North Coast, Chrisman and Schwarzenegger apparently thought she had done such a good job of promoting the fast-track MLPA process that he appointed her to the new position. Under the guise of "marine protection," Reheis Boyd and other task force members chose a "marine protected area" plan for the North Central Coast that banned the Kashia Pomo Tribe and other American Indian Nations from harvesting seaweed, mussels and abalone as they had done for centuries from their traditional areas off Stewarts Point and Point Arena. In spite of overwhelming opposition to the plan by North Coast environmentalists, seaweed harvesters, fishermen and Indian Tribes, the Fish and Game Commission voted for the "Integrated Preferred Alternative" (IPA) adopted by the task force on August 5. More recently, in yet another installment in this living political satire, the Board of Directors of the Western States Petroleum Association (WSPA) on October 16 announced that Reheis-Boyd will assume the role of President of the oil and natural gas industry trade association January 1, 2010. ?No one is more capable, experienced and deserving of leading our Association into the future than Cathy Reheis-Boyd,? said Gary Yesavage, President of Global Manufacturing for Chevron Corporation and Chairman of WSPA?s Board of Directors. ?Cathy is a great leader and the Board is 100 percent confident she will continue to be a forceful and successful advocate for our industry.? The Western States Petroleum Association is the leading petroleum industry trade association in six western states ? California, Arizona, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon and Washington. Its twenty-seven members include major integrated oil and natural gas companies as well as independent refiners and marketers, and independent producers. Formed in 1906, it is the oldest petroleum industry trade association in the United States. Reheis-Boyd, 52, has become the Association?s "primary expert and spokesperson on climate change issues" and has played a key role regionally, nationally and internationally in public policy discussions on these issues, the news release noted. ?Providing our region?s future energy supplies and meeting our climate change objectives are going to be major challenges for all of us, not just the petroleum industry,? said Reheis-Boyd. ?WSPA members will be integral to solving those challenges and I am looking forward to helping craft those solutions.? Ironically, the contact for the association listed at the top of the release was Tupper Hull, the former spokesman for the Westlands Water District. The district, considered by many to the "Darth Vader of California water politics, has continually fought every move by fishermen, tribes and environmentalists to restore salmon, steelhead and other fish populations of the Trinity, Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers. John Lewallen, longtime North Coast environmentalist and seaweed harvester, believes that Reheis-Boyd's position as an "oil industry superstar" is a conflict of interest with her position as chair of a task force charged with developing marine protected areas (MPAs). "Reheis Boyd is moving right on up, really advancing the cause of the oil industry," commented Lewallen. "By setting up these no-take marine reserves and kicking fishermen, Indians, seaweed harvesters and other ocean food providers off traditional areas of the ocean, the Schwarzenegger administration is paving the way for offshore oil drilling. Twenty-three percent of the nation's offshore oil reserves are off the coast of California. The Point Arena Basin off Mendocino is on track now to be leased for drilling by the Mineral Management Services." Lewallen noted that under Reheis-Boyd's "leadership," the Southern California community plan for new Marine Protected Areas, developed over 14 months by 64 stakeholders and many community groups, was "thrown in the trash can" on Nov. 10 by the Blue Ribbon Task Force of the Marine Life Protection Act Initiative. "The Southern California Blue Ribbon Task Force 'Integrated Preferred Alternative' is devastating to fishing communities, but good for offshore oil drilling interests," said Lewallen, the co-founder of the "Seaweed Rebellion" movement and longtime opponent of offshore oil drilling, the clearcutting of forests and corporate greenwashing. Reheis-Boyd's ascendance on the MLPA Blue Ribbon Task Force and in the oil industry are no coincidence, since the MLPA task force's decisions provide a "green" veneer to plans by the oil industry, wave energy companies and corporate aquaculture to privative public trust ocean resources. "The people of the state of the California are being denied access to sustainable ocean food by the MLPA process," said Barbara Stephens Lewallen, John's wife, who will be banned from sustainably harvesting seaweed off Point Arena starting next year, the result of the August vote by Schwarzenegger's hand picked Fish and Game Commission. The North Coast Blue Ribbon Task Force is about to be chosen by Governor Schwarzenegger - and Lewallen suggested that the environmental, fishing, tribal and seaweed harvesting communities of the North Coast demand that Catherine Reheis-Boyd should not be appointed as a member, due to her obvious conflicts of interest. John and Barbara are outraged that a private corporation, the Resources Legacy Fund Foundation, a group with dark ties to some of the worst corporate greenwashers on the planet, is funding the MLPA Initiative. "A shadowy group called the Resources Legacy Fund Foundation has taken over the process of setting up Marine Protected Areas, and is moving to finance and control fisheries law enforcement and the making of all fisheries regulations," added Lewallen. "The sooner Californians unite to stop the private takeover of California?s fisheries management, the better." All of those concerned about the privatization of public trust resources and the corruption of the democratic process should join John and Barbara in challenging Schwarzenegger's appointment of an oil industry "superstar" to chair a process supposedly designed to "protect" the ocean. Has the MLPA initiative under Schwarzenegger, the worst Governor for fish and the environment in California history, become in reality the Marine Life Privatization Act process? On Nov 22, 2009, at 8:09 AM, Kier Associates wrote: > did you notice that "gold" is capitalized throughout the release, > like "God" ? > > At 02:34 PM 11/21/2009, Greg King wrote: >> Joshua, >> >> The "little guy" dredgers have no place in a salmonid stream, and >> neither does American Energy. Why do we need to choose? Both >> should be opposed. >> >> Greg >> >> On Nov 19, 2009, at 9:23 PM, Joshua Allen wrote: >> >>> SOURCE: American Energy Production Inc. >>> Nov 19, 2009 08:30 ET >>> >>> American Energy Production Inc. Announces Wholly Owned Subsidiary >>> Oil America Group Inc. Doubles Gold Claim Acreage >>> >>> >>> >>> Highlighted Links >>> >>> http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/American-Energy- >>> Production-Inc-1079268.htm >>> >>> l MacReport Media Publishing >>> >>> MINERAL WELLS, TX--(Marketwire - November 19, 2009) - American >>> Energy Production Inc. ("AENP") (OTCBB: AENP) announced today >>> that it's wholly owned subsidiary Oil America Group Inc. ("OAG") >>> has signed a letter of intent to acquire an additional 200 acres >>> of Placer Gold Claims in Trinity County, California. 140 acres is >>> contiguous with the previously announced 200 acres currently >>> operated by OAG in a joint venture with Dorado Gold LLC. The >>> remaining 60 acres is located close to Helena, California where >>> the Trinity River runs through the property. This is very >>> prolific Gold mining country that shows tremendous commercial >>> promise. >>> >>> Joe Christopher, President of OAG and Gold Project manager, said, >>> "We are very excited with the opportunity of acquiring more >>> Placer Gold Claims in the same vicinity as the Dorado Gold >>> processing operations. With access to water and our existing >>> equipment we can transition into producing this adjoining Gold >>> Claim faster and more efficiently and keep the entire area >>> environmentally friendly." >>> >>> Charles Bitters, President of AENP, stated, "We are adding more >>> Gold Claim acreage in the Trinity area because of two fundamental >>> reasons, number one is competition from other potential mining >>> operations that might enter the area and two, there is >>> significant potential for finding additional large deposits of >>> Gold along the Canyon Creek proven area. Gold is currently making >>> new record highs almost every day (currently over $1100/troy >>> oz.). With the economy in such disarray, an expert economist >>> projects that in two years there could be double digit inflation >>> and the Gold price could rise to $1,500.00 to $2,000.00/oz. AENP >>> will now have a very profitable hedge against the declining >>> dollar and the increasing demand for Gold. The country of India >>> purchased $6.5 billion dollars worth of IMF Gold this past week >>> and we believe many countries will be purchasing Gold to reduce >>> their dollar holdings over the next few months. Gold will become >>> the 'new currency.' These purchases, coupled with increasing >>> private demand, could make Gold and Gold related investments a >>> very exciting investment over the next few years." >>> >>> Gold has been mined in Trinity County, Calif. since the 1880s. A >>> tremendous amount of Gold has been mined in the county, along >>> with related noble metals such as silver and platinum. The >>> largest platinum nugget ever found in the US was found in Trinity >>> County in 1920. In 1917, 25,000 ounces of Gold was produced in >>> Trinity County. This amount of Gold produced at today's prices >>> would represent approximately $27,000,000.00. >>> >>> Mr. Christopher's Gold team has almost completed a magnetic grid >>> map on the Dorado 40 Gold claim. This map will show potential >>> "hot spots" or areas where there are black sand deposits. Where >>> you find black sand you often find commercial quantities of >>> Placer Gold. This should allow much more efficient recovery of >>> the Gold, reducing the amount of earth moving. This type of Gold >>> recovery operation is one that does not require the use of any >>> chemicals and is a totally green operation and thus is >>> environmentally friendly. >>> >>> Statements contained in this release, which are not historical >>> facts, may be considered "forward-looking statements" and are >>> based on current expectations and the current economic >>> environment. We caution the reader that such forward-looking >>> statements are not guarantees of future performance. Unknown >>> risk, uncertainties, as well as other uncontrollable or unknown >>> factors could cause actual results to materially differ from the >>> result, performance, or expectations expressed or implied by such >>> forward-looking statements. >>> Contact: >>> >>> American Energy Production Inc. >>> Charles Bitters >>> 940-445-0698 >>> http://www.americanenergyproduction.com >>> >>> or >>> >>> Oil America Group Inc. >>> Joe Christopher >>> 972-386-0601 >>> Jchristopher at oilamericagroup.com >>> Click here to see all recent news from this company >>> _______________________________________________ >>> env-trinity mailing list >>> env-trinity at velocipede.dcn.davis.ca.us >>> http://www2.dcn.org/mailman/listinfo/env-trinity >> >> -- >> Greg King >> President/Program Director >> Siskiyou Land Conservancy >> P.O. Box 4209 >> Arcata, CA 95518 >> 707-498-4900 >> gking at asis.com >> http://siskiyouland.wordpress.com/ >> >> >> >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> env-trinity mailing list >> env-trinity at velocipede.dcn.davis.ca.us >> http://www2.dcn.org/mailman/listinfo/env-trinity > Kier Associates, Fisheries and Watershed Professionals > P.O. Box 915 > Blue Lake, CA 95525 > 707.668.1822 > mobile: 498.7847 > http://www.kierassociates.net > GSA Advantage Contractor GS-10F-0124U > > _______________________________________________ > env-trinity mailing list > env-trinity at velocipede.dcn.davis.ca.us > http://www2.dcn.org/mailman/listinfo/env-trinity -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From ema.berol at yahoo.com Sun Nov 22 19:58:31 2009 From: ema.berol at yahoo.com (Emelia Berol) Date: Sun, 22 Nov 2009 19:58:31 -0800 (PST) Subject: [env-trinity] Oil America Group Inc. Doubles Gold Claim Acreage(Push out the little guys in dredgers, and this is what you're gonna get...coming to the Trinity first!) In-Reply-To: <0041B399CB9D4627A72E0ADBB6A65146@HAL> References: <2BD90D44-5243-406B-B754-8CB551C279D9@asis.com><20091122160936.NHZA20088.omta01.suddenlink.net@kier.suddenlink.net> <8E4463BE-88DB-4E3F-A38D-0F0D9AAF0795@asis.com> <0041B399CB9D4627A72E0ADBB6A65146@HAL> Message-ID: <409400.95032.qm@web46207.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> So, it sounds like they are talking about Canyon Creek ... and poor old Trinity County gets nothing, as usual? It's too bad the county can't seize the property for its own benefit, at least ... and this part makes me want to get my violin out ... "With access to water and our existing equipment we can transition into producing this adjoining Gold Claim faster and more efficiently and keep the entire area environmentally friendly." >> >>> >>That is soooooooo reassuring ... > "He Who has the Gold, Rules... " Charles Hurwitz ________________________________ From: Patrick Truman To: Greg King ; Kier Associates Cc: Trinity List Sent: Sun, November 22, 2009 10:03:06 AM Subject: Re: [env-trinity] Oil America Group Inc. Doubles Gold Claim Acreage(Push out the little guys in dredgers, and this is what you're gonna get...coming to the Trinity first!) Gold only has value because people have been brainwashed into believing it, good Gawd. I mean, can you eat the stuff and live? ----- Original Message ----- >From: Greg King >To: Kier Associates >Cc: Trinity List >Sent: Sunday, November 22, 2009 9:42 > AM >Subject: Re: [env-trinity] Oil America > Group Inc. Doubles Gold Claim Acreage(Push out the little guys in dredgers,and > this is what you're gonna get...coming to the Trinity first!) > >Ha! I did not notice that. Now that's it's crested the holy > $1,000/ounce price, I guess that would make sense to some people. Gold is one > of the best representatives of the greed that has proven the downfall of human > civilization. > > > >On Nov 22, 2009, at 8:09 AM, Kier Associates wrote: > >did you >> notice that "gold" is capitalized throughout the release, like "God" >> ? >> >>At 02:34 PM 11/21/2009, Greg King wrote: >> >>Joshua, >>> >>>The "little guy" >>> dredgers have no place in a salmonid stream, and neither does American >>> Energy. Why do we need to choose? Both should be >>> opposed. >>> >>>Greg >>> >>>On Nov 19, 2009, at 9:23 PM, Joshua Allen >>> wrote: >>> >>> >>>SOURCE: American Energy >>>> Production Inc. >>>>Nov 19, 2009 08:30 ET >>>> >>>> >>>>American Energy Production Inc. Announces Wholly Owned Subsidiary >>>> Oil America Group Inc. Doubles Gold Claim >>>> Acreage >>>> >>>>Highlighted Links >>>> >>>>http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/American-Energy-Production-Inc-1079268.htm >>>> >>>>l>>>> MacReport Media Publishing >>>> >>>>MINERAL WELLS, TX--(Marketwire - >>>> November 19, 2009) - American Energy Production Inc. ("AENP") (OTCBB: AENP) >>>> announced today that it's wholly owned subsidiary Oil America Group Inc. >>>> ("OAG") has signed a letter of intent to acquire an additional 200 acres >>>> of Placer Gold Claims in Trinity County, California. 140 acres is >>>> contiguous with the previously announced 200 acres currently operated by >>>> OAG in a joint venture with Dorado Gold LLC. The remaining 60 acres is >>>> located close to Helena, California where the Trinity River runs through >>>> the property. This is very prolific Gold mining country that shows >>>> tremendous commercial promise. >>>> >>>>Joe Christopher, President of OAG >>>> and Gold Project manager, said, "We are very excited with the >>>> opportunity of acquiring more Placer Gold Claims in the same vicinity as >>>> the Dorado Gold processing operations. With access to water and our >>>> existing equipment we can transition into producing this adjoining Gold >>>> Claim faster and more efficiently and keep the entire area >>>> environmentally friendly." >>>> >>>>Charles Bitters, President of AENP, >>>> stated, "We are adding more Gold Claim acreage in the Trinity area >>>> because of two fundamental reasons, number one is competition from other >>>> potential mining operations that might enter the area and two, there is >>>> significant potential for finding additional large deposits of Gold >>>> along the Canyon Creek proven area. Gold is currently making new record >>>> highs almost every day (currently over $1100/troy oz.). With the economy >>>> in such disarray, an expert economist projects that in two years there >>>> could be double digit inflation and the Gold price could rise to >>>> $1,500.00 to $2,000.00/oz. AENP will now have a very profitable hedge >>>> against the declining dollar and the increasing demand for Gold. The >>>> country of India purchased $6.5 billion dollars worth of IMF Gold this >>>> past week and we believe many countries will be purchasing Gold to >>>> reduce their dollar holdings over the next few months. Gold will become >>>> the 'new currency.' These purchases, coupled with increasing private >>>> demand, could make Gold and Gold related investments a very exciting >>>> investment over the next few years." >>>> >>>>Gold has been mined in >>>> Trinity County, Calif. since the 1880s. A tremendous amount of Gold has >>>> been mined in the county, along with related noble metals such as silver >>>> and platinum. The largest platinum nugget ever found in the US was found >>>> in Trinity County in 1920. In 1917, 25,000 ounces of Gold was produced >>>> in Trinity County. This amount of Gold produced at today's prices would >>>> represent approximately $27,000,000.00. >>>> >>>>Mr. Christopher's Gold >>>> team has almost completed a magnetic grid map on the Dorado 40 Gold >>>> claim. This map will show potential "hot spots" or areas where there are >>>> black sand deposits. Where you find black sand you often find commercial >>>> quantities of Placer Gold. This should allow much more efficient >>>> recovery of the Gold, reducing the amount of earth moving. This type of >>>> Gold recovery operation is one that does not require the use of any >>>> chemicals and is a totally green operation and thus is environmentally >>>> friendly. >>>> >>>>Statements contained in this release, which are not >>>> historical facts, may be considered "forward-looking statements" and are >>>> based on current expectations and the current economic environment. We >>>> caution the reader that such forward-looking statements are not >>>> guarantees of future performance. Unknown risk, uncertainties, as well >>>> as other uncontrollable or unknown factors could cause actual results to >>>> materially differ from the result, performance, or expectations >>>> expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. >>>> >>>>Contact: >>>> >>>>American Energy Production Inc. >>>>Charles >>>> Bitters >>>>940-445-0698 >>>>http://www.americanenergyproduction.com/ >>>> >>>>or >>>> >>>>Oil >>>> America Group Inc. >>>>Joe Christopher >>>>972-386-0601 >>>>Jchristopher at oilamericagroup.com >>>>Click >>>> here to see all recent news from this company >>>> >>>>_______________________________________________ >>>>env-trinity >>>> mailing list >>>>env-trinity at velocipede.dcn.davis.ca.us >>>>http://www2.dcn.org/mailman/listinfo/env-trinity >>>-- >>>Greg >>> King >>>President/Program Director >>>Siskiyou Land Conservancy >>>P.O. >>> Box 4209 >>>Arcata, CA 95518 >>>707-498-4900 >>>gking at asis.com >>>http://siskiyouland.wordpress.com/ >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> >>>_______________________________________________ >>>env-trinity >>> mailing list >>>env-trinity at velocipede.dcn.davis.ca.us >>>http://www2.dcn.org/mailman/listinfo/env-trinity >>Kier Associates, Fisheries and Watershed Professionals >>P.O. Box >> 915 >>Blue Lake, CA 95525 >>707.668.1822 >>mobile: 498.7847 >>http://www.kierassociates.net// > > > > > > ________________________________ _______________________________________________ env-trinity mailing list env-trinity at velocipede.dcn.davis.ca.us http://www2.dcn.org/mailman/listinfo/env-trinity -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From Charles_Chamberlain at fws.gov Mon Nov 23 16:07:24 2009 From: Charles_Chamberlain at fws.gov (Charles_Chamberlain at fws.gov) Date: Mon, 23 Nov 2009 16:07:24 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Mainstem Trinity River redd survey update 11/23/2009 Message-ID: Me again! Spawning info for the Trinity River redd survey has been updated to include last week's data at the link below. Have a great Thanksgiving! Charlie Charles Chamberlain/AFWO/ R1/FWS/DOI To env trinity 09/28/2009 01:21 cc PM Subject Mainstem Trinity River redd survey update 09/28/2009 Hi all, Fall 2009 salmon spawning surveys of the mainstem Trinity River are underway. These are conducted collaboratively by the Arcata Fish and Wildlife Office, California Department of Fish and Game, Yurok Tribal Fisheries Program, Hoopa Valley Tribal Fisheries Department, and the Shasta-Trinity National Forest. Our first within-season update for the 2009 redd survey is available from the Arcata Fish and Wildlife Office Website at the link below. Click on "Trinity River 2009 Redd Survey Update" near the bottom of the page. http://www.fws.gov/arcata/fisheries/projectUpdates.html Cheers! Charlie Charlie Chamberlain Fish Biologist - U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Arcata Fish & Wildlife Office 1655 Heindon Road Arcata, CA 95521 Charles_Chamberlain at fws.gov Phone: (707) 825-5110 Fax: (707) 822-8411 www.fws.gov/arcata/fisheries -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: graycol.gif Type: image/gif Size: 105 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: ecblank.gif Type: image/gif Size: 45 bytes Desc: not available URL: From Vina_Frye at fws.gov Tue Nov 24 11:18:27 2009 From: Vina_Frye at fws.gov (Vina_Frye at fws.gov) Date: Tue, 24 Nov 2009 11:18:27 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Trinity Adaptive Management Working Group Meeting Message-ID: Hi Folks, The Trinity Adaptive Management Working Group (TAMWG) meeting notice for December 14-15, 2009 was published in the Federal Register yesterday. Best regards, Vina [Federal Register: November 23, 2009 (Volume 74, Number 224)] [Notices] [Page 61171] >From the Federal Register Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov] [DOCID:fr23no09-84] ----------------------------------------------------------------------- DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR Fish and Wildlife Service [FWS-R8-FHC-2009-N248; 81331-1334-8TWG-W4] Trinity Adaptive Management Working Group AGENCY: Fish and Wildlife Service, Interior. ACTION: Notice of meeting. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- SUMMARY: The Trinity Adaptive Management Working Group (TAMWG) affords stakeholders the opportunity to give policy, management, and technical input concerning Trinity River (California) restoration efforts to the Trinity Management Council (TMC). The TMC interprets and recommends policy, coordinates and reviews management actions, and provides organizational budget oversight. This notice announces a TAMWG meeting, which is open to the public. DATES: TAMWG will meet from 1 to 5 p.m. on Monday, December 14, 2009, and from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Tuesday, December 15, 2009. ADDRESSES: The meeting will be held at the Weaverville Victorian Inn, 1709 Main St., 299 West Weaverville, CA 96093. FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT: Meeting information: Randy A. Brown, TAMWG Designated Federal Officer, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, 1655 Heindon Road, Arcata, CA 95521; telephone: (707) 822-7201. Trinity River Restoration Program (TRRP) information: Mike Hamman, Executive Director, Trinity River Restoration Program, P.O. Box 1300, 1313 South Main Street, Weaverville, CA 96093; telephone: (530) 623-1800; e-mail: mhamman at mp.usbr.gov. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Under section 10(a)(2) of the Federal Advisory Committee Act (5 U.S.C. App.), this notice announces a meeting of the TAMWG. The meeting will include discussion of the following topics: TAMWG role and effectiveness in Trinity River Restoration Program; TRRP staff organization; TRRP science program; TRRP budget process and budget update; Trinity River channel rehabilitation projects; Trinity reservoir operations; Proposed Klamath River dam removal; and Tribal harvest management and allocation. Completion of the agenda is dependent on the amount of time each item takes. The meeting could end early if the agenda has been completed. Dated: November 17, 2009. Randy A. Brown, Designated Federal Officer, Arcata Fish and Wildlife Office, Arcata, CA. [FR Doc. E9-28070 Filed 11-20-09; 8:45 am] BILLING CODE 4310-55-P Vina Frye U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Arcata FWO 1655 Heindon Road Arcata, CA 95521 Telephone: (707) 822-7201 Fax: (707) 822-8411 vina_frye at fws.gov -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mdowdle at tcrcd.net Tue Nov 24 16:06:04 2009 From: mdowdle at tcrcd.net (Mark Dowdle - TCRCD) Date: Tue, 24 Nov 2009 16:06:04 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Draft Order Modifying State Water Board Cease and Desist Order WR 2006-0006 Against DWR & USBR in Connection with the State Water Project and Central Valley Project Message-ID: <4B0C74EC.4000905@tcrcd.net> The attached file contains a draft order modifying the Cease and Desist Order WR 2006-0006 issued against the Department of Water Resources (DWR) and United States Bureau of Reclamation (USBR) in response to the threatened violation of DWR's water right permits for the State Water Project and USBR's water right license and permits for the Central Valley Project. This order is tentatively scheduled for consideration by the State Water Resources Control Board (State Water Board or Board) at its Board meeting on Tuesday, January 5, 2010. All written comments or changes to the draft order must be received by the Board by 12 Noon on Monday, December 14, 2009. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: Delta CDO Mod Draft Order cover letter_mailing list_draft CDO-1.pdf Type: application/pdf Size: 256961 bytes Desc: not available URL: From mdowdle at tcrcd.net Tue Nov 24 16:06:04 2009 From: mdowdle at tcrcd.net (Mark Dowdle - TCRCD) Date: Tue, 24 Nov 2009 16:06:04 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Draft Order Modifying State Water Board Cease and Desist Order WR 2006-0006 Against DWR & USBR in Connection with the State Water Project and Central Valley Project Message-ID: <4B0C74EC.4000905@tcrcd.net> The attached file contains a draft order modifying the Cease and Desist Order WR 2006-0006 issued against the Department of Water Resources (DWR) and United States Bureau of Reclamation (USBR) in response to the threatened violation of DWR's water right permits for the State Water Project and USBR's water right license and permits for the Central Valley Project. This order is tentatively scheduled for consideration by the State Water Resources Control Board (State Water Board or Board) at its Board meeting on Tuesday, January 5, 2010. All written comments or changes to the draft order must be received by the Board by 12 Noon on Monday, December 14, 2009. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: Delta CDO Mod Draft Order cover letter_mailing list_draft CDO-1.pdf Type: application/pdf Size: 256961 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Wed Nov 25 07:54:50 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Wed, 25 Nov 2009 07:54:50 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Channel Manipulation Site Designs Message-ID: <000601ca6de7$9fedb870$dfc92950$@net> Upcoming channel manipulation project site partial designs available: All - The Trinity House Gulch and Lower Reading Creek project site - 90% drawings and design reports are on our FTP site and available for download. We encourage you to review the design information and provide your feedback by December 18th, 2009. Download the files from the following link: http://ftp.trrp.net/TRRPoutgoing/IDT/October_2009/ If you have difficulty accessing the data please let me know. Thanks, David J. Bandrowski DBANDROWSKI at usbr.gov Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From tstokely at att.net Wed Nov 25 09:24:54 2009 From: tstokely at att.net (Tom Stokely) Date: Wed, 25 Nov 2009 09:24:54 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Times Standard- Water bond's lure for the North Coast Message-ID: <2BA6E13D731D405B87E82296A9A19A15@homeuserPC> Water bond's lure for the North Coast John Driscoll/The Times-Standard Posted: 11/25/2009 01:30:21 AM PST The North Coast would get $315 million and be eligible for a share of $3.38 billion as part of a state water bond being proposed for 2010 -- a bond that many are questioning as unaffordable and that regional interests say threaten salmon rivers. The Department of Water Resources this week roughly outlined how the $11.1 billion in the water bond would be dispersed by region. The North Coast would be eligible for hundreds of millions for watershed projects, wetland restoration, salmon habitat improvement, waterfowl habitat projects, and vegetation management. In the bond measure is also $250 million for removal of the Klamath River's four main dams. While the bond, and the legislative package passed earlier this month, has been touted by supporters as a big stride toward improving the state's weak water policies, conservationists in the north point out that most of the money would go to new dams, water projects and a canal to pump water around the Sacramento River Delta to cities and farms to the south. That could threaten water available for fish in the Trinity River, which is connected to the Central Valley Project, they say. "I'm pretty sure that it's a long-term commitment of Central Valley water and nobody is sure how the Trinity River plays into that," said Humboldt County Supervisor Jimmy Smith, "but I think it's going to be significant." The Legislative Analyst's Office points out that the state is currently operating at a $6.3 billion shortfall, with deficits projected to reach $14 billion next fiscal year and $20 billion a year for another five years. The bond would create debt service of $600 million a year. Smith said the proposed bond is far too expensive and complex, and that the Klamath money should be carved off and put forward in its own package, or a simpler one. If the money for the North Coast -- Humboldt, Del Norte, Trinity and parts of Glenn, Lake, Marin, Modoc, Siskiyou and Sonoma counties -- is meant to draw support from the region, it's not certain that it would be delivered. Proposition 84, a water bond passed in 2006, was $5.4 billion. Tom Stokely with the California Water Impact Network pointed out that some $40 million for the California Department of Fish and Game's fisheries restoration program hasn't yet come through. Billions from previous water bonds also haven't been spent, according to the State Treasurer's Office. Stokely cautioned that the efforts most likely to be funded are the building of dams, reservoirs and canals, while fish and wildlife provisions are likely to get bound up due to state budget woes. "I liken it to Charlie Brown and Lucy where she holds the football for him and then at the last minute pulls it away," Stokely said. Assemblyman Wesley Chesbro called the water package and the bond to be "a wolf in sheep's clothing." The Trinity River may be particularly vulnerable to excess diversion due to existing infrastructure tying it to the Central Valley Project, he said. Chesbro also said that water projects have always been paid with revenue bonds, but that's different with the latest water bond. "This would be a general obligation bond, which means they want to take our water and then make us pay for it," the Arcata Democrat said. John Driscoll covers natural resources/industry. He can be reached at 441-0504 or jdriscoll at times-standard.com. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kierassociates at suddenlink.net Wed Nov 25 09:50:19 2009 From: kierassociates at suddenlink.net (Kier Associates) Date: Wed, 25 Nov 2009 09:50:19 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Times Standard- Water bond's lure for the North Coast In-Reply-To: <2BA6E13D731D405B87E82296A9A19A15@homeuserPC> References: <2BA6E13D731D405B87E82296A9A19A15@homeuserPC> Message-ID: <20091125175020.CBKT20778.omta02.suddenlink.net@kier.suddenlink.net> An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sari at sisqtel.net Wed Nov 25 10:42:37 2009 From: sari at sisqtel.net (Sari Sommarstrom) Date: Wed, 25 Nov 2009 10:42:37 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] CBB: Study Looks At Sustainable Salmon Production, Says Salmon Fisheries Low Global Scale Impact Message-ID: <20091125184740.DDCEE1318F0C@mx.dcn.davis.ca.us> THE COLUMBIA BASIN BULLETIN: Weekly Fish and Wildlife News www.cbbulletin.com November 25, 2009 Issue No. 510 * Study Looks At Sustainable Salmon Production, Says Salmon Fisheries Low Global Scale Impact Popular thinking about how to improve food systems for the better often misses the point, according to the results of a three-year global study of salmon production systems. Rather than pushing for organic or land-based production, or worrying about simple metrics such as "food miles," the study finds that the world can achieve greater environmental benefits by focusing on improvements to key aspects of production and distribution. For example, what farmed salmon are fed, how wild salmon are caught and the choice to buy frozen over fresh matters more than organic vs. conventional or wild vs. farmed when considering global scale environmental impacts such as climate change, ozone depletion, loss of critical habitat, and ocean acidification. The study is the world's first comprehensive global-scale look at a major food commodity from a full life cycle perspective, and the researchers examined everything ? how salmon are caught in the wild, what they're fed when farmed, how they're transported, how they're consumed, and how all of this contributes to both environmental degradation and socioeconomic benefits. The researchers behind the study sought to understand how the world can develop truly sustainable food systems through the lens of understanding the complexities associated with wild and farmed salmon production, processing and distribution. They found that decision-making for food must learn to fully account for the life cycle socioeconomic and environmental costs of food production. How we weight the importance of such impacts is ultimately subjective and in the realm of policy and culture, but using a comprehensive approach provides a more nuanced process for informed decision-making. Even food has a lifecycle, and the world must learn to comprehend the full costs of it in order to design reliable, resilient food systems to feed a world population that's forecast to grow to 9 billion in less than 40 years. The researchers chose salmon as their focus as it exemplifies important characteristics of modern food systems, yet offers unique opportunities for comparison. It is available around the world at any time and in any location, regardless of season or local ecosystem, it is available in numerous product forms, and it is distributed using a variety of transport modes. Unlike many other food systems, however, it is available from both wild sources and a range of farmed production systems. While it isn't easy to balance people, profit and planet, the world must do much better. Food production, in aggregate, is the single largest source of environmental degradation globally. Impacts vary dramatically depending on what, where and how food is produced. For example, early results of the study found that growing salmon in land-based farms can increase total greenhouse gas emissions ten-fold over conventional farming depending on how and where the farming is conducted. Similarly, while organic farming of many crops offers benefits over conventional production, organic salmon production gives rise to impacts very similar to conventional farming due to the use of resource intensive fish meals and oils. Beyond the farm, it's important to also consider the total impact of food preparation. Driving to the store alone and then cooking alone at home has a big environmental impact. Going out to dinner more, or just eating more frequently with friends and family at home, has huge benefit. For concerned consumers, it's important to think about how food was produced and transported ? not just where it was produced ? when making food choices. Initial Findings from the study: --- Fish should swim, not fly. Air-freighting salmon, and any food, results in substantial increases in environmental impacts. If more frozen food were consumed, more container ships would be used to ship food. Container ships are by far the most efficient and carbon-friendly way to transport food. Globally, the majority of salmon fillets are currently consumed fresh and never frozen. In fish-loving Japan, which gets much of its fish by air, switching to 75 percent frozen salmon would have more benefit than all of Europe eating locally farmed salmon. --- The choice to buy frozen matters more than organic vs. conventional or wild vs. farmed. --- A full life cycle assessment approach to research provides a more nuanced process for informed decision-making. Even food has a lifecycle, and we must comprehend the full impact to make meaningful improvements to food systems. Tradeoffs may be inevitable. --- Contrary to what is widely perceived, the vast majority of broad-scale resource use and environmental impacts (energy inputs, GHG emissions, etc) from conventional salmon farming result from the feeds used to produce them. What happens at or around a farm site may be important for local ecological reasons but contributes very little to global scale concerns such as global warming. --- Across the globe, what is used to feed salmon and the amounts of feeds used vary widely. As a result, impacts are very different. Norwegian salmon farming resulted in generally lower overall impacts while farmed salmon production in the UK resulted in the greatest impacts. --- Reducing the amount of animal-derived inputs to feeds (e.g. fish meals and oils along with livestock derived meals) in favor of plant-based feed inputs can markedly reduce environmental impacts. --- Growing organic salmon using fish meals and oils from very resource intensive fisheries results in impacts very similar to conventional farmed salmon production. If not planned carefully, technological fixes aimed at addressing local environmental challenges associated with conventional salmon farming can result in substantial increases in global-scale environmental impacts. In general, salmon fisheries result in relatively low global-scale environmental impacts. However, substantial differences exist between how salmon are caught. Catching salmon in large nets as they school together has one tenth the impact of catching them in small numbers using baited hooks and lures. Across salmon production systems ? and all food systems ? the world is often swimming against the tide. Instead of working with nature, people work against it, chasing fish in the open ocean with big diesel engines or substituting energy demanding pumping and water treatment for free ecosystem services in salmon farming. We can and must do better than this and start to swim with the tide. The most recent published paper from the study can be seen in the journal Environmental Science & Technology: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es9010114 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From frankemerson at redshift.com Wed Nov 25 11:00:37 2009 From: frankemerson at redshift.com (frankemerson at redshift.com) Date: Wed, 25 Nov 2009 11:00:37 -0800 (PST) Subject: [env-trinity] CBB: Study Looks At Sustainable Salmon Production, Says Salmon Fisheries Low Global Scale Impact In-Reply-To: <20091125184740.DDCEE1318F0C@mx.dcn.davis.ca.us> References: <20091125184740.DDCEE1318F0C@mx.dcn.davis.ca.us> Message-ID: <1223.216.228.19.205.1259175637.squirrel@webmail.redshift.com> Sounds like a salmon farming lobbyist wrote this....defending the idea that open net salmon farming is less impact (carbon impact) than "chasing salmon in the open ocean" with "big diesel engines" without even mentioning the enormous impacts, even catastrophic collapse, to wild salmon due to open net pen salmon farm pollution is misleading, at best. Frank Emerson Alliance of Communities for Sustainable Fisheries Carmel River Steelhead Association > > THE COLUMBIA BASIN BULLETIN: > Weekly Fish and Wildlife News > www.cbbulletin.com > November 25, 2009 > Issue No. 510 > > > * Study Looks At Sustainable Salmon Production, > Says Salmon Fisheries Low Global Scale Impact > > Popular thinking about how to improve food > systems for the better often misses the point, > according to the results of a three-year global > study of salmon production systems. > > Rather than pushing for organic or land-based > production, or worrying about simple metrics such > as "food miles," the study finds that the world > can achieve greater environmental benefits by > focusing on improvements to key aspects of production and distribution. > > For example, what farmed salmon are fed, how wild > salmon are caught and the choice to buy frozen > over fresh matters more than organic vs. > conventional or wild vs. farmed when considering > global scale environmental impacts such as > climate change, ozone depletion, loss of critical > habitat, and ocean acidification. > > The study is the world's first comprehensive > global-scale look at a major food commodity from > a full life cycle perspective, and the > researchers examined everything ? how salmon are > caught in the wild, what they're fed when farmed, > how they're transported, how they're consumed, > and how all of this contributes to both > environmental degradation and socioeconomic benefits. > > The researchers behind the study sought to > understand how the world can develop truly > sustainable food systems through the lens of > understanding the complexities associated with > wild and farmed salmon production, processing and > distribution. They found that decision-making for > food must learn to fully account for the life > cycle socioeconomic and environmental costs of > food production. How we weight the importance of > such impacts is ultimately subjective and in the > realm of policy and culture, but using a > comprehensive approach provides a more nuanced > process for informed decision-making. Even food > has a lifecycle, and the world must learn to > comprehend the full costs of it in order to > design reliable, resilient food systems to feed a > world population that's forecast to grow to 9 billion in less than 40 > years. > > The researchers chose salmon as their focus as it > exemplifies important characteristics of modern > food systems, yet offers unique opportunities for > comparison. It is available around the world at > any time and in any location, regardless of > season or local ecosystem, it is available in > numerous product forms, and it is distributed > using a variety of transport modes. Unlike many > other food systems, however, it is available from > both wild sources and a range of farmed production systems. > > While it isn't easy to balance people, profit and > planet, the world must do much better. Food > production, in aggregate, is the single largest > source of environmental degradation globally. > Impacts vary dramatically depending on what, where and how food is > produced. > > For example, early results of the study found > that growing salmon in land-based farms can > increase total greenhouse gas emissions ten-fold > over conventional farming depending on how and where the farming is > conducted. > > Similarly, while organic farming of many crops > offers benefits over conventional production, > organic salmon production gives rise to impacts > very similar to conventional farming due to the > use of resource intensive fish meals and oils. > Beyond the farm, it's important to also consider > the total impact of food preparation. Driving to > the store alone and then cooking alone at home > has a big environmental impact. Going out to > dinner more, or just eating more frequently with > friends and family at home, has huge benefit. > > For concerned consumers, it's important to think > about how food was produced and transported ? not > just where it was produced ? when making food choices. > > Initial Findings from the study: > > --- Fish should swim, not fly. Air-freighting > salmon, and any food, results in substantial > increases in environmental impacts. If more > frozen food were consumed, more container ships > would be used to ship food. Container ships are > by far the most efficient and carbon-friendly way > to transport food. Globally, the majority of > salmon fillets are currently consumed fresh and > never frozen. In fish-loving Japan, which gets > much of its fish by air, switching to 75 percent > frozen salmon would have more benefit than all of > Europe eating locally farmed salmon. > --- The choice to buy frozen matters more than > organic vs. conventional or wild vs. farmed. > --- A full life cycle assessment approach to > research provides a more nuanced process for > informed decision-making. Even food has a > lifecycle, and we must comprehend the full impact > to make meaningful improvements to food systems. Tradeoffs may be > inevitable. > --- Contrary to what is widely perceived, the > vast majority of broad-scale resource use and > environmental impacts (energy inputs, GHG > emissions, etc) from conventional salmon farming > result from the feeds used to produce them. What > happens at or around a farm site may be important > for local ecological reasons but contributes very > little to global scale concerns such as global warming. > --- Across the globe, what is used to feed salmon > and the amounts of feeds used vary widely. As a > result, impacts are very different. Norwegian > salmon farming resulted in generally lower > overall impacts while farmed salmon production in > the UK resulted in the greatest impacts. > --- Reducing the amount of animal-derived inputs > to feeds (e.g. fish meals and oils along with > livestock derived meals) in favor of plant-based > feed inputs can markedly reduce environmental impacts. > --- Growing organic salmon using fish meals and > oils from very resource intensive fisheries > results in impacts very similar to conventional farmed salmon production. > > If not planned carefully, technological fixes > aimed at addressing local environmental > challenges associated with conventional salmon > farming can result in substantial increases in > global-scale environmental impacts. > > In general, salmon fisheries result in relatively > low global-scale environmental impacts. > > However, substantial differences exist between > how salmon are caught. Catching salmon in large > nets as they school together has one tenth the > impact of catching them in small numbers using baited hooks and lures. > > Across salmon production systems ? and all food > systems ? the world is often swimming against the > tide. Instead of working with nature, people work > against it, chasing fish in the open ocean with > big diesel engines or substituting energy > demanding pumping and water treatment for free > ecosystem services in salmon farming. We can and > must do better than this and start to swim with the tide. > > The most recent published paper from the study > can be seen in the journal Environmental Science > & Technology: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es9010114 > _______________________________________________ > env-trinity mailing list > env-trinity at velocipede.dcn.davis.ca.us > http://www2.dcn.org/mailman/listinfo/env-trinity > From bwl3 at comcast.net Wed Nov 25 14:37:05 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Wed, 25 Nov 2009 14:37:05 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] CALL FOR ABSTRACTS Message-ID: <001b01ca6e1f$d0ae8420$720b8c60$@net> From: Peterson, Eric B. [mailto:ebpeterson at usbr.gov] Sent: Wednesday, November 25, 2009 11:26 AM Subject: CALL FOR ABSTRACTS Just a quick reminder that abstracts for the Trinity River Science Symposium are due at the end of the month, aka November 30th, aka Monday. And have a great holiday! --- Eric Peterson, Ph.D. Data Steward Trinity River Restoration Program (contracted through SAIC) 530-623-1810 http://www.trrp.net http://www.saic.com Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kierassociates at suddenlink.net Wed Nov 25 14:40:24 2009 From: kierassociates at suddenlink.net (Kier Associates) Date: Wed, 25 Nov 2009 14:40:24 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] CBB: Study Looks At Sustainable Salmon Production, Says Salmon Fisheries Low Global Scale Impact In-Reply-To: <20091125184740.DDCEE1318F0C@mx.dcn.davis.ca.us> References: <20091125184740.DDCEE1318F0C@mx.dcn.davis.ca.us> Message-ID: <20091125224025.DXZX20088.omta01.suddenlink.net@kier.suddenlink.net> An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From frankemerson at redshift.com Wed Nov 25 15:35:39 2009 From: frankemerson at redshift.com (frankemerson at redshift.com) Date: Wed, 25 Nov 2009 15:35:39 -0800 (PST) Subject: [env-trinity] CBB: Study Looks At Sustainable Salmon Production, Says Salmon Fisheries Low Global Scale Impact In-Reply-To: <20091125224025.DXZX20088.omta01.suddenlink.net@kier.suddenlink.net> References: <20091125184740.DDCEE1318F0C@mx.dcn.davis.ca.us> <20091125224025.DXZX20088.omta01.suddenlink.net@kier.suddenlink.net> Message-ID: <1403.71.198.157.113.1259192139.squirrel@webmail.redshift.com> Hello Tom, In what way are Canadians and Europeans ahead of "us" regarding open net pen salmon rearing and salmon life cycles? What was the result the assessments? The list of researchers on this "study: should be enough to tell you it was supported by the salmon farming industry. "School for Resource and Environmental Studies, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Sustainable Food Production, SIK - Swedish Institute for Food and Biotechnology, Gothenburg, Sweden, Knowledge Systems, Ecotrust, Portland, Oregon, and School of Food Engineering, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Valparaiso, Valparaiso, Chile" Other than ecotrust they are all "food institutes" and "food engineering schools" in the heart of salmon farming regions of the world. The reference to land based production is the giveaway. Many scientists in BC are demanding that provincial govts require salmon pens to be closed contained pens, with effluent treatment to prevent the contamination of out migrating smolts with sea lice, as well as the pollution that is changing fjords near the pens. I sincerely urge you to go to this scientists blog and read about what is happening in BC. http://howbadtherecord.blogspot.com/2009/08/new-blog-by-alexandra-morton.html There are many "youtube" vids on Alexandras work in BS and the Broughton Archipelago also. http://www.youtube.com/user/cradel3 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-e7Ma-mD7h0&feature=fvw Thank you, Frank Emerson ACSF > > > Two years ago I served, together with scientists from Canada and Europe, on a National Environmental > Trust-hosted expert panel to conduct a life cycle assessment of Pacific salmon fisheries and of Pacific pen-rearing operations.

It was an eye-opening experience for me - the Europeans (and for that matter, people all over the planet) are way ahead of us in this kind of analysis and in applying life cycle assessment results to all kinds of consumer choices and government rule-making - 'way ahead

It will be a delight to see this kind of thinking arrive, even slowly, in > the U.S

> Bill Kier

>  At 10:42 AM 11/25/2009, Sari Sommarstrom wrote:

THE COLUMBIA BASIN > BULLETIN:
> Weekly Fish and Wildlife News
> > www.cbbulletin.com
> November 25, 2009
> Issue No. 510

>
> * Study Looks At Sustainable Salmon Production, Says Salmon Fisheries Low Global Scale Impact

> Popular thinking about how to improve food systems for the better often misses the point, according to the results of a three-year global study of salmon production systems.

> Rather than pushing for organic or land-based production, or worrying about simple metrics such as "food miles," the study finds that > the world can achieve greater environmental benefits by focusing on improvements to key aspects of production and distribution.

For example, what farmed salmon are fed, how wild salmon are caught and the choice to buy frozen over fresh matters more than organic vs. conventional or wild vs. farmed when considering global scale > environmental impacts such as climate change, ozone depletion, loss of critical habitat, and ocean acidification.

> The study is the world's first comprehensive global-scale look at a major > food commodity from a full life cycle perspective, and the researchers examined everything ? how salmon are caught in the wild, what they're fed > when farmed, how they're transported, how they're consumed, and how all of this contributes to both environmental degradation and socioeconomic benefits.

> The researchers behind the study sought to understand how the world can develop truly sustainable food systems through the lens of understanding the complexities associated with wild and farmed salmon production, processing and distribution. They found that decision-making for food must learn to fully account for the life cycle socioeconomic and environmental costs of food production. How we weight the importance of such impacts is ultimately subjective and in the realm of policy and culture, but using a comprehensive approach provides a more nuanced process for informed decision-making. Even food has a lifecycle, and the world must learn to comprehend the full costs of it in order to design reliable, resilient food systems to feed a world population that's forecast to grow to 9 billion in less than 40 years.

> The researchers chose salmon as their focus as it exemplifies important characteristics of modern food systems, yet offers unique opportunities for comparison. It is available around the world at any time and in any location, regardless of season or local ecosystem, it is available in numerous product forms, and it is distributed using a variety of transport modes. Unlike many other food systems, however, it is available > from both wild sources and a range of farmed production systems.

> While it isn't easy to balance people, profit and planet, the world must do much better. Food production, in aggregate, is the single largest source of environmental degradation globally. Impacts vary dramatically depending on what, where and how food is produced.

> For example, early results of the study found that growing salmon in land-based farms can increase total greenhouse gas emissions ten-fold over conventional farming depending on how and where the farming is conducted.

> Similarly, while organic farming of many crops offers benefits over conventional production, organic salmon production gives rise to impacts very similar to conventional farming due to the use of resource intensive > fish meals and oils. Beyond the farm, it's important to also consider the > total impact of food preparation. Driving to the store alone and then cooking alone at home has a big environmental impact. Going out to dinner > more, or just eating more frequently with friends and family at home, has > huge benefit.

> For concerned consumers, it's important to think about how food was produced and transported ? not just where it was produced ? when making food choices.

> Initial Findings from the study:

> --- Fish should swim, not fly. Air-freighting salmon, and any food, results in substantial increases in environmental impacts. If more frozen > food were consumed, more container ships would be used to ship food. Container ships are by far the most efficient and carbon-friendly way to transport food. Globally, the majority of salmon fillets are currently consumed fresh and never frozen. In fish-loving Japan, which gets much of > its fish by air, switching to 75 percent frozen salmon would have more benefit than all of Europe eating locally farmed salmon.
> --- The choice to buy frozen matters more than organic vs. conventional or wild vs. farmed.
> --- A full life cycle assessment approach to research provides a more nuanced process for informed decision-making. Even food has a lifecycle, and we must comprehend the full impact to make meaningful improvements to > food systems. Tradeoffs may be inevitable.
> --- Contrary to what is widely perceived, the vast majority of > broad-scale resource use and environmental impacts (energy inputs, GHG emissions, etc) from conventional salmon farming result from the feeds used to produce them. What happens at or around a farm site may be important for local ecological reasons but contributes very little to global scale concerns such as global warming.
> --- Across the globe, what is used to feed salmon and the amounts of feeds used vary widely. As a result, impacts are very different. Norwegian salmon farming resulted in generally lower overall impacts while farmed salmon production in the UK resulted in the greatest impacts.
> --- Reducing the amount of animal-derived inputs to feeds (e.g. fish meals and oils along with livestock derived meals) in favor of > plant-based feed inputs can markedly reduce environmental impacts.
--- Growing organic salmon using fish meals and oils from very resource intensive fisheries results in impacts very similar to conventional farmed salmon production.

> If not planned carefully, technological fixes aimed at addressing local environmental challenges associated with conventional salmon farming can result in substantial increases in global-scale environmental > impacts.

> In general, salmon fisheries result in relatively low global-scale environmental impacts.

> However, substantial differences exist between how salmon are caught. Catching salmon in large nets as they school together has one tenth the impact of catching them in small numbers using baited hooks and lures.

> Across salmon production systems ? and all food systems ? the world is often swimming against the tide. Instead of working with nature, people work against it, chasing fish in the open ocean with big diesel engines or substituting energy demanding pumping and water treatment for free ecosystem services in salmon farming. We can and must do better than this > and start to swim with the tide.

> The most recent published paper from the study can be seen in the journal > Environmental Science & Technology: > > http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es9010114
> _______________________________________________
> env-trinity mailing list
> env-trinity at velocipede.dcn.davis.ca.us
> eudora="autourl"> > http://www2.dcn.org/mailman/listinfo/env-trinity

> Kier Associates, Fisheries and Watershed Professionals
> P.O. Box 915
> Blue Lake, CA 95525
> 707.668.1822
> mobile: 498.7847
> http://www.kierassociates.net
> GSA Advantage Contractor GS-10F-0124U > > > _______________________________________________ > env-trinity mailing list > env-trinity at velocipede.dcn.davis.ca.us > http://www2.dcn.org/mailman/listinfo/env-trinity > From frankemerson at redshift.com Wed Nov 25 16:57:55 2009 From: frankemerson at redshift.com (frankemerson at redshift.com) Date: Wed, 25 Nov 2009 16:57:55 -0800 (PST) Subject: [env-trinity] CBB: Study Looks At Sustainable Salmon Production, Says Salmon Fisheries Low Global Scale Impact In-Reply-To: <1403.71.198.157.113.1259192139.squirrel@webmail.redshift.com> References: <20091125184740.DDCEE1318F0C@mx.dcn.davis.ca.us> <20091125224025.DXZX20088.omta01.suddenlink.net@kier.suddenlink.net> <1403.71.198.157.113.1259192139.squirrel@webmail.redshift.com> Message-ID: <1474.71.198.157.113.1259197075.squirrel@webmail.redshift.com> Bill, My apologies for addressing you as Tom, not sure why I did that sorry. Here is a better link to Alexandras' blog concerning BC salmon and open net pens. http://www.google.com/gwt/n?u=http%3A%2F%2Falexandramorton.typepad.com%2F Frank Emerson > Hello Tom, > > In what way are Canadians and Europeans ahead of "us" regarding open net > pen salmon rearing and salmon life cycles? What was the result the > assessments? > > The list of researchers on this "study: should be enough to tell you it > was supported by the salmon farming industry. > > "School for Resource and Environmental Studies, Dalhousie University, > Halifax, Nova Scotia, Sustainable Food Production, SIK - Swedish Institute > for Food and Biotechnology, Gothenburg, Sweden, Knowledge Systems, > Ecotrust, Portland, Oregon, and School of Food Engineering, Pontificia > Universidad Catolica de Valparaiso, Valparaiso, Chile" > > Other than ecotrust they are all "food institutes" and "food engineering > schools" in the heart of salmon farming regions of the world. The > reference to land based production is the giveaway. Many scientists in BC > are demanding that provincial govts require salmon pens to be closed > contained pens, with effluent treatment to prevent the contamination of > out migrating smolts with sea lice, as well as the pollution that is > changing fjords near the pens. > > I sincerely urge you to go to this scientists blog and read about what is > happening in BC. > > http://howbadtherecord.blogspot.com/2009/08/new-blog-by-alexandra-morton.html > > There are many "youtube" vids on Alexandras work in BS and the Broughton > Archipelago also. > > http://www.youtube.com/user/cradel3 > > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-e7Ma-mD7h0&feature=fvw > > Thank you, > > Frank Emerson > ACSF > > > > >> >> >> Two years ago I served, together with > scientists from Canada and Europe, on a National Environmental >> Trust-hosted expert panel to conduct a life cycle assessment of Pacific > salmon fisheries and of Pacific pen-rearing operations.

It was an > eye-opening experience for me - the Europeans (and for that matter, people > all over the planet) are way ahead of us in this kind of analysis and in > applying life cycle assessment results to all kinds of consumer choices > and government rule-making - 'way ahead

It will be a > delight to see this kind of thinking arrive, even slowly, > in >> the U.S

>> Bill Kier

>>  At 10:42 AM 11/25/2009, Sari Sommarstrom wrote:

>

THE COLUMBIA BASIN >> BULLETIN:
>> Weekly Fish and Wildlife News
>> >> www.cbbulletin.com
>> November 25, 2009
>> Issue No. 510

>>
>> * Study Looks At Sustainable Salmon Production, Says > Salmon Fisheries Low Global Scale Impact

>> Popular thinking about how to improve food systems for the > better often misses the point, according to the results of a three-year > global study of salmon production systems.

>> Rather than pushing for organic or land-based production, or worrying > about simple metrics such as "food miles," the study finds that >> the world can achieve greater environmental benefits by focusing on > improvements to key aspects of production and distribution.

For > example, what farmed salmon are fed, how wild salmon are caught and the > choice to buy frozen over fresh matters more than organic vs. > conventional or wild vs. farmed when considering global scale >> environmental impacts such as climate change, ozone depletion, loss of > critical habitat, and ocean acidification.

>> The study is the world's first comprehensive global-scale look at a > major >> food commodity from a full life cycle perspective, and the researchers > examined everything ? how salmon are caught in the wild, what they're fed >> when farmed, how they're transported, how they're consumed, and how all > of this contributes to both environmental degradation and socioeconomic > benefits.

>> The researchers behind the study sought to understand how the world can > develop truly sustainable food systems through the lens of understanding > the complexities associated with wild and farmed salmon production, > processing and distribution. They found that decision-making for food must > learn to fully account for the life cycle socioeconomic and > environmental costs of food production. How we weight the importance of > such impacts is ultimately subjective and in the realm of policy and > culture, but using a comprehensive approach provides a more nuanced > process for informed decision-making. Even food has a lifecycle, and the > world must learn to comprehend the full costs of it in order to design > reliable, resilient food systems to feed a world population that's > forecast to grow to 9 billion in less than 40 years.

>> The researchers chose salmon as their focus as it exemplifies important > characteristics of modern food systems, yet offers unique opportunities > for comparison. It is available around the world at any time and in any > location, regardless of season or local ecosystem, it is available in > numerous product forms, and it is distributed using a variety of > transport modes. Unlike many other food systems, however, it is > available >> from both wild sources and a range of farmed production systems. >

>> While it isn't easy to balance people, profit and planet, the world must > do much better. Food production, in aggregate, is the single largest > source of environmental degradation globally. Impacts vary dramatically > depending on what, where and how food is produced.

>> For example, early results of the study found that growing salmon in > land-based farms can increase total greenhouse gas emissions ten-fold over > conventional farming depending on how and where the farming is > conducted.

>> Similarly, while organic farming of many crops offers benefits over > conventional production, organic salmon production gives rise to impacts > very similar to conventional farming due to the use of resource > intensive >> fish meals and oils. Beyond the farm, it's important to also consider > the >> total impact of food preparation. Driving to the store alone and then > cooking alone at home has a big environmental impact. Going out to dinner >> more, or just eating more frequently with friends and family at home, > has >> huge benefit.

>> For concerned consumers, it's important to think about how food was > produced and transported ? not just where it was produced ? when making > food choices.

>> Initial Findings from the study:

>> --- Fish should swim, not fly. Air-freighting salmon, and any food, > results in substantial increases in environmental impacts. If more frozen >> food were consumed, more container ships would be used to ship food. > Container ships are by far the most efficient and carbon-friendly way to > transport food. Globally, the majority of salmon fillets are currently > consumed fresh and never frozen. In fish-loving Japan, which gets much of >> its fish by air, switching to 75 percent frozen salmon would have more > benefit than all of Europe eating locally farmed salmon.
>> --- The choice to buy frozen matters more than organic vs. conventional > or wild vs. farmed.
>> --- A full life cycle assessment approach to research provides a more > nuanced process for informed decision-making. Even food has a lifecycle, > and we must comprehend the full impact to make meaningful improvements to >> food systems. Tradeoffs may be inevitable.
>> --- Contrary to what is widely perceived, the vast majority of >> broad-scale resource use and environmental impacts (energy inputs, GHG > emissions, etc) from conventional salmon farming result from the feeds > used to produce them. What happens at or around a farm site may be > important for local ecological reasons but contributes very little to > global scale concerns such as global warming.
>> --- Across the globe, what is used to feed salmon and the amounts of > feeds used vary widely. As a result, impacts are very different. > Norwegian salmon farming resulted in generally lower overall impacts while > farmed salmon production in the UK resulted in the greatest > impacts.
>> --- Reducing the amount of animal-derived inputs to feeds (e.g. fish > meals and oils along with livestock derived meals) in favor of >> plant-based feed inputs can markedly reduce environmental impacts.
> --- Growing organic salmon using fish meals and oils from very resource > intensive fisheries results in impacts very similar to conventional farmed > salmon production.

>> If not planned carefully, technological fixes aimed at addressing local > environmental challenges associated with conventional salmon farming can > result in substantial increases in global-scale environmental >> impacts.

>> In general, salmon fisheries result in relatively low global-scale > environmental impacts.

>> However, substantial differences exist between how salmon are caught. > Catching salmon in large nets as they school together has one tenth the > impact of catching them in small numbers using baited hooks and lures. >

>> Across salmon production systems ? and all food systems ? the world is > often swimming against the tide. Instead of working with nature, people > work against it, chasing fish in the open ocean with big diesel engines or > substituting energy demanding pumping and water treatment for free > ecosystem services in salmon farming. We can and must do better than this >> and start to swim with the tide.

>> The most recent published paper from the study can be seen in the > journal >> Environmental Science & Technology: >> eudora="autourl"> >> http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es9010114
>> _______________________________________________
>> env-trinity mailing list
>> env-trinity at velocipede.dcn.davis.ca.us
>> > eudora="autourl"> >> http://www2.dcn.org/mailman/listinfo/env-trinity
>

>> Kier Associates, Fisheries and Watershed Professionals
>> P.O. Box 915
>> Blue Lake, CA 95525
>> 707.668.1822
>> mobile: 498.7847
>> href="http://www.kierassociates.net/">http://www.kierassociates.net
>> GSA Advantage Contractor GS-10F-0124U >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> env-trinity mailing list >> env-trinity at velocipede.dcn.davis.ca.us >> http://www2.dcn.org/mailman/listinfo/env-trinity >> > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > env-trinity mailing list > env-trinity at velocipede.dcn.davis.ca.us > http://www2.dcn.org/mailman/listinfo/env-trinity > From ema.berol at yahoo.com Fri Nov 27 12:45:09 2009 From: ema.berol at yahoo.com (Emelia Berol) Date: Fri, 27 Nov 2009 12:45:09 -0800 (PST) Subject: [env-trinity] Times Standard- Water bond's lure for the North Coast In-Reply-To: <20091125175020.CBKT20778.omta02.suddenlink.net@kier.suddenlink.net> References: <2BA6E13D731D405B87E82296A9A19A15@homeuserPC> <20091125175020.CBKT20778.omta02.suddenlink.net@kier.suddenlink.net> Message-ID: <77925.43874.qm@web46206.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> I think the Mexicans have an expression for it, too (false promises - sounds good, but the part that sounds good they have no intention of delivering) : arroz con pollo, sin pollo (rice with chicken, without chicken) ________________________________ From: Kier Associates To: Tom Stokely ; Trinity List Sent: Wed, November 25, 2009 9:50:19 AM Subject: Re: [env-trinity] Times Standard- Water bond's lure for the North Coast Tom That's what Zeke and I used to call "getting van Pelted" (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_van_Pelt ) Bill At 09:24 AM 11/25/2009, Tom Stokely wrote: Water bond's lure for the >North Coast > >>John Driscoll/The Times-Standard >>Posted: 11/25/2009 01:30:21 AM PST > >>The North Coast would get $315 million and be eligible for a share of >$3.38 billion as part of a state water bond being proposed for 2010 -- a >bond that many are questioning as unaffordable and that regional >interests say threaten salmon rivers. > >>The Department of Water Resources this week roughly outlined how the >$11.1 billion in the water bond would be dispersed by region. The North >Coast would be eligible for hundreds of millions for watershed projects, >wetland restoration, salmon habitat improvement, waterfowl habitat >projects, and vegetation management. In the bond measure is also $250 >million for removal of the Klamath River's four main dams. > >>While the bond, and the legislative package passed earlier this month, >has been touted by supporters as a big stride toward improving the >state's weak water policies, conservationists in the north point out that >most of the money would go to new dams, water projects and a canal to >pump water around the Sacramento River Delta to cities and farms to the >south. That could threaten water available for fish in the Trinity River, >which is connected to the Central Valley Project, they say. > >>?I'm pretty sure that it's a long-term commitment of Central Valley water >and nobody is sure how the Trinity River plays into that,? said Humboldt >County Supervisor Jimmy Smith, ?but I think it's going to be >significant.? > >>The Legislative Analyst's Office points out that the state is currently >operating at >>a $6.3 billion shortfall, with deficits projected to reach $14 billion >next fiscal year and $20 billion a year for another five years. The bond >would create debt service of $600 million a year. > >>Smith said the proposed bond is far too expensive and complex, and that >the Klamath money should be carved off and put forward in its own >package, or a simpler one. > >>If the money for the North Coast -- Humboldt, Del Norte, Trinity and >parts of Glenn, Lake, Marin, Modoc, Siskiyou and Sonoma counties -- is >meant to draw support from the region, it's not certain that it would be >delivered. Proposition 84, a water bond passed in 2006, was $5.4 billion. >Tom Stokely with the California Water Impact Network pointed out that >some $40 million for the California Department of Fish and Game's >fisheries restoration program hasn't yet come through. > >>Billions from previous water bonds also haven't been spent, according to >the State Treasurer's Office. > >>Stokely cautioned that the efforts most likely to be funded are the >building of dams, reservoirs and canals, while fish and wildlife >provisions are likely to get bound up due to state budget woes. > >>?I liken it to Charlie Brown and Lucy where she holds the football for >him and then at the last minute pulls it away,? Stokely said. > >>Assemblyman Wesley Chesbro called the water package and the bond to be ?a >wolf in sheep's clothing.? The Trinity River may be particularly >vulnerable to excess diversion due to existing infrastructure tying it to >the Central Valley Project, he said. Chesbro also said that water >projects have always been paid with revenue bonds, but that's different >with the latest water bond. > >>?This would be a general obligation bond, which means they want to take >our water and then make us pay for it,? the Arcata Democrat said. > > >>John Driscoll covers natural resources/industry. He can be reached at >441-0504 or jdriscoll at times-standard.com. > > >> >>_______________________________________________ >>env-trinity mailing list >>env-trinity at velocipede.dcn.davis.ca.us >http://www2.dcn.org/mailman/listinfo/env-trinity Kier Associates, Fisheries and Watershed Professionals P.O. Box 915 Blue Lake, CA 95525 707.668.1822 mobile: 498.7847 http://www.kierassociates.net GSA Advantage Contractor GS-10F-0124U -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From danielbacher at fishsniffer.com Fri Nov 27 14:04:11 2009 From: danielbacher at fishsniffer.com (Dan Bacher) Date: Fri, 27 Nov 2009 14:04:11 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] =?windows-1252?q?Standing_Up_to_Big_Water=92s_Astro?= =?windows-1252?q?turf_Groups?= In-Reply-To: <031a01ca6e67$f479a4a0$c8255142@omnio1yiei2jxc> Message-ID: <06248EE2-0F6E-4E93-BE08-80101583249C@fishsniffer.com> ? 1125delta1.jpg Standing Up to Big Water?s Astroturf Groups By Dan Bacher The ruthlessness that corporate agribusiness and southern California water interests employed, through political bribery and thug-like tactics, to seize public trust water over the past century is well- documented in Marc Reisner?s Cadillac Desert and other books. However, ?big water? in California has refined and added an increasing sophistication to its strong arm tactics in the computer age by creating fake ?Astroturf? organizations to deceive the public and promote its goals. The past few years have seen the creation of four ?Astroturf? organizations ? Friends of the Delta, Families Protecting the Valley, the Latino Water Coalition and Coalition for a Sustainable Delta. For those not aquainted with the term, ?Astroturfing? is ?an English-language euphemism referring to political, advertising, or public relations campaigns that are formally planned by an organization, but designed to mask its origins to create the impression of being spontaneous, popular 'grassroots' behavior. The term refers to AstroTurf, a brand of synthetic carpeting designed to look like natural grass,? according to Wikipedia. Although their names are different, these four organizations represent the same San Joaquin Valley corporate agribusiness and southern California water agency interests that are trying to grab more Delta and northern California water. Their ultimate goals are to increase water exports from the imperiled Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to corporate agribusiness and southern California by building a peripheral canal and more dams and to strip protections for Sacramento River chinook salmon, Central Valley steelhead Delta smelt, longfin smelt, green sturgeon and other species under the Endangered Species Act. Although there is a strong right wing Republican presence in these ?organizations,? they also share their goals with leading Democratic politicians including Senator Dianne Feinstein, Representative Jim Costa and Representative Dennis Cardoza on the federal level and Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg and Assembly Speaker Karen Bass on the state level. The bi-partisan support of the goals of ?Big Water? is mostly graphically illustrated by how Steinberg and Bass collaborated with Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger this fall to ram a package through the legislature that creates a clear path to the construction of the peripheral canal and more dams. The corporate media, with a few notable exceptions, has for the most part quoted representatives of these ?Astroturf? groups as if they are legitimate grassroots organizations with real grassroots members. Delta Group Asks Astroturf Group to Cease and Desist Only a brave few have stood up to counter the lies of the ?Astroturf? organizations. Foremost in the battle to expose the Astroturf organizations for the shams that they are is Barbara Barrigan-Parrilla, campaign director of Restore the Delta (RTD). Barrigan-Parrilla on Tuesday, November 24, called on the "Friends of the Delta," an "Astroturf" group, to stop using RTD materials in information packets it distributes as part of a campaign to drum up support for the peripheral canal. Unlike the incongruously named Friends of the Delta, Restore the Delta is an actual grassroots organization with a board, advisors and thousands of members. It is a broad coalition of Delta farmers, fishermen, environmentalists, the faith communitiy and environmental justice advocates fighting for the restoration of the West Coast?s largest estuary and to stop the peripheral canal. On its website, the Friends of the Delta is described as "a non- profit organization focused on educating the public on the need for a comprehensive Delta restoration and an enhanced conveyance system with the long-term vision of supporting efforts to provide a sustainable water supply for California." Barrigan-Parrilla said the group, rather than being an organization concerned about the restoration of the Delta, is instead a "disingenuous 'Astroturf' group based out of a public relations firm in Newport Beach." "Residents and advocates of the Delta region have a right to know when they're being hoodwinked," said Barrigan-Parrilla. "The use of our material to further a cause that is completely counter to our mission is repugnant and must stop now. With 'Friends of the Delta' like these, who needs enemies?" Barrigan Parrilla blasted the so-called Friends of the Delta for inserting materials from Restore the Delta in a briefing packet it is distributing http://www.friendsofthedelta.org/images/Complete% 20Briefing%20Packet.pdf in "what may be an effort to deceive readers into believing they share a common goal with Restore the Delta and other Delta advocates." My examination of the briefing packet confirms Barrigan-Parrilla's accusation that "Friends of the Delta" may be trying to portray themselves as being allied with Restore the Delta, even though the Astroturf group has been formed to support the Governor's plan to build the peripheral canal, a government boondoggle that Restore the Delta is strongly opposing. The RTD materials are deceptively sandwiched between an August 17 letter by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to Senate President Tem Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg and Assembly Speaker Karen Bass urging them to support his peripheral canal/dams water package and a Friends of the Delta draft resolution "in support of government action to restore the Delta and provide a reliable water supply." The site displays a Restore the Delta action alert, including photos of the July 7 rally the group held at the state capitol to oppose the peripheral canal and to demand the inclusion of Delta communities in the water legislation process, and a flyer announcing the "Million Boat Float" against the canal held on August 16-17. "Based on initial investigation, the phony 'Friends of the Delta' appears to be headquartered in the offices of the Sheldon Group, a public relations firm representing Southern California water interests and developers interested in seeing a peripheral canal built to divert water from Northern to Southern and Central California," according to Barrigan-Parrilla. The contact address and phone number listed on the website are: Friends of the Delta, 901 Dove Street, Suite 140, Newport Beach, CA 92660, 949-777-9400. That is the address of the Sheldon Group, a group that describes itself as "a unique and public affairs company that connects our clients with decision makers and communities." "With over 30 years of combined experience in the fields of politics, community relations, coalition building, city planning, community outreach, and media, our industry experts have the strategies and the tactics necessary to develop winning solutions and effective public outreach campaigns," the Sheldon Group website proclaims. The Sheldon Group's website lists its "team" as Stephen Sheldon, President, David Graham, Director of Public Affairs; and Greg McCafferty, Director of Planning. Steve Sheldon is an Orange County lawyer who is the son of Reverend Lou Sheldon, head of the Traditional Values Coalition. He?s also President of the Orange County Water District. Sheldon is a second generation player in right wing Orange County politics who has built a very successful and lucrative lobbying practice. Restore the Delta is calling on the counterfeit "Friends of the Delta to ?cease and desist? using RTD material in its propaganda. In addition, RTD calls upon this front-group to reveal their "true patrons" in the "About Us" section of their website and all collateral material. In the "About Us" section, the Astroturf group says, "We are taxpayers, farmers, business owners, agency experts, and elected officials dedicated to educating the public and encouraging statewide participation in creating a sustainable water supply for California." However, the shadowy group provides no names of its founders, board members or supporters. "Your support is essential in finding a solution to California's water supply," Friends of the Delta proclaims on its website. "Please contact us at FriendsoftheDelta@ gmail.com to discuss ways you can participate." Astroturf Group Runs Ad to Deceive Delta Residents Restore the Delta's call for the Astroturf group to stop using its materials was issued the day after a four page ad headlined, "The Great Delta Toilet Bowl," appeared in the Stockton Record. The ad clearly states it is paid for by Friends of the Delta. The ad attemptsto enlist Delta residents in a false campaign against water pollution by local cities and communities in an attempt to divert attention away from the catastrophic impact of increased water exports from the Delta on Central Valley salmon and Delta fish populations. "Friends of the Delta paid for the ad so that in-Delta residents could become members of Families Protecting the Valley," said Barrigan Parrilla. "The board of directors for Families Protecting the Valley includes members like Bob Smittcamp, who is a grower in the Westlands Water District, lives in Fresno's posh zip code 93711, many miles away from his industrial farm that exports crops like almonds to Asia and Europe." Barrigan-Parrilla said Smittcamp has held fundraisers for Governor Schwarzenegger, who declared in a recent visit to Stockton that he is building the peripheral canal around the Delta (regardless of what the residents want!). Mrs. Smittcamp was also Chief Executive Officer of JoinArnold.com. A survey of the website of Families Protecting the Valley reveals that it is an organization funded by corporate agribusiness, based out of Madera, linked with a right wing group, "the Tea Party Patriots." The donor's list features hundreds of agribusiness corporations and related businesses on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley: http://www.familiesprotectingthevalley.com/ Donor'sList-i-14-14.html The ad quotes "science" provided by the Coalition for a Sustainable Delta, yet one more in a growing list of Astroturf organizations campaigning to build the peripheral canal and strip Endangered Species Act protections for Delta smelt, Sacramento River chinook salmon and other fish species. "This Coalition for a Sustainable Delta is housed in Stewart Resnick's headquarters for Paramount Farms in Kern County," said Barrigan-Parrilla. "Stewart Resnick is the Beverly Hills Billionaire who has made tens of millions of dollars annually from buying and reselling water back to the state for a tidy profit (http:// www.alternet.org/water/144020/ how_limousine_liberals,_water_oligarchs_and_even_sean_hannity_are_hijack ing_our_water_supply? utm_source=feedblitz&utm_medium=FeedBlitzRss&utm_campaign=alternet). "The coalition poses as a science-based organization concerned about pollution in the Delta, when they are actually a propaganda group spinning facts to promote the Bay Delta Conservation Plan," said Barrigan-Parrilla." As expected, they never consider the possibility that water exports from the Delta have an impact on the ecosystem." Resnick, a "limousine liberal" who supports the Coalition for a Sustainable Delta, is also a frequent political campaign contributor to Governor Schwarzenegger's "Dream Team," Senator Diane Feinstein, and earlier this summer to Senate President pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, she noted. "In fact, the Resnick's contributions to Senate President Steinberg were made shortly before the beginning of the Conference Committee Process, which left Delta legislators out of the water deal making process," Barrigan-Parrilla stated. (Click here to see contributions made recently to Darrell Steinberg: http://www.electiontrack.com/ lookup.php?committee=1292824). "So, in summary, what we are beginning to see is an ad campaign financed by Southern California water interests and San Joaquin Valley agribusiness to bring residents and supporters of the Delta into their coalition: a twenty-first-century- twist on what happened in Owens Valley," she said. Regarding the content of the ad, Barrigan-Parrilla said, "it is highly ironic? that the agribusiness industry, which has successfully lobbied the Schwarzenegger administration and shows up regularly at state and regional water board hearings to protest any strengthening of water quality standards for dischargers, is expressing concern about water pollution in the Delta. ?In fact, water boards and water agencies under the Schwarzenegger administration have been weaker on enforcing water quality standards for the Delta than regulatory agencies have any other time in recent history,? she stated. ?They certainly have been lax in enforcing standards on municipal dischargers." "Is discharge into the Delta a problem?" she added. "Of course it is. But it is also a problem that is exacerbated many times over by excessive exports and reduced inflows into the Delta. Plus, when one considers that growers on the Westside of the San Joaquin Valley are farming on drainage impaired lands that dump tons of boron, salts and selenium into the San Joaquin River that flows back into the Delta - and that these same growers want Northern California's water delivered to them through new conveyance - well, we couldn't make up fiction with more ironic twists and turns." The water boards have faced increasing criticism from environmental and fishing groups over their refusal to enforce water quality standards, as well as over conflicts of interests by board members. The California Sportfishing Protection Alliance (CSPA) on November 12 filed a precedent-setting complaint with the California Fair Political Practices Commission and the California Attorney General's Bureau of State Audits charging Katherine Hart Johns, Vice Chair of the Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board, with many violations of state laws. The 51 page complaint alleges that Hart Johns has violated numerous sections of the Political Reform Act, the Porter-Cologne Water Quality Control Act and the California Government Code. "These violations include failures to disclose economic interests, improper eligibility to serve on the Regional Board, failure to disclose conflicts of interest, improper recusal from Board proceedings and failure to disclose ex parte communications," said Bill Jennings, CSPA executive director. "For example, Katherine Hart Johns failed to disclose, as mandated by the Political Reform Act, that her spouse was a registered lobbyist receiving substantial income from entities regulated under the Porter-Cologne and the federal Clean Water Act." The Latino Water Coalition: Schwarzenegger?s Personal Astroturf Lobby. The disinformation campaigns by big water Astroturf groups are amping up just after California Legislature's recent passage of a water policy and water bond package that "clears the path" to the construction of a peripheral canal and Sites and Temperance Flat reservoirs. The Legislature completely excluded Delta legislators, fishermen, family farmers, California Indian Tribes, environmental justice communities and the vast majority of environmental organizations from the fast-track process that led to the package's passage and signing by the Governor. Key in organizing support for the canal/dams package was the Latino Water Coalition, whose spokesman Paul Rodriguez, a comedian and San Joaquin Valley grower, has appeared at numerous rallies and press conference with Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and corporate agribusiness interests. Earlier this year, independent investigative journalist Lloyd Carter and John Howard of the Capitol Weekly exposed the Latino Water Coalition as an "Astroturf" group formed as a nonprofit and registered by influential Sacramento lobbyist George Soares, whose A- list of about three dozen agricultural clients include the California Rice Commission, the California Cotton Growers and Ginners Associations, the Friant Water Authority, the Nisei Farmers League and The Grape and Tree Fruit League, among others. The group has cynically portrayed itself as the "protector" of the jobs of Latino farm workers, although Dolores Huerta, co founder of Cesar Chavez's United Farmworkers Union (UFW), and Arturo Rodriguez, president of the UFW, have denounced it as a front group for corporate agribusiness. The coalition, whose formation was suggested by Governor Schwarzenegger in a meeting he held with agribusiness interests in Fresno, in April organized a "March for Water" through the San Joaquin Valley in which farmworkers were paid to march to give a "human face" to corporate agribusiness. "In reality, this is not a farm worker march,'' Arturo Rodriguez told the New York Times on April 17. ''This is a farmer march orchestrated and financed by growers.'' Barrigan-Parrilla warned that ads like the one taken out in Delta region newspapers by Friends of the Delta and the deceptive campaign by the Latino Water Coalition are just the beginning of a well-funded disinformation campaign by big water interests to achieve the goal of robbing the Delta of more water. ?Take the time to let local media outlets know that you disapprove of their willingness to accept these advertising dollars,? she stated. ?In addition, we expect these astroturfing groups to charge forward with an assault on the Endangered Species Aact as a ploy to increase the amount of water exported from the Delta." She emphasized that political affiliation has nothing to do with protecting the Delta. ?A number of our state and federal leaders from both sides of the aisle have been corrupted by the California water-money trail. Watch how your State and Federal Representatives vote on Delta legislation and vote accordingly in return at election time,? she concluded. To learn more about Westland Water District?s growers and the link between their practices and institutionalized Central Valley poverty, click here to read Lloyd Carter?s article's recent law review article: http://www.lloydgcarter.com/content/091101321_san-joaquin- poverty-and-industrial-agribusiness-law-review-article-lloyd-carter. For more information about Restore the Delta, contact Barbara Barrigan-Parrilla, (209) 479-2053, Barbara [at] restorethedelta.org, http://www.restorethedelta.org. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: 1125delta1.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 127794 bytes Desc: not available URL: From kierassociates at suddenlink.net Sat Nov 28 13:55:43 2009 From: kierassociates at suddenlink.net (Kier Associates) Date: Sat, 28 Nov 2009 13:55:43 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] CBB: Study Looks At Sustainable Salmon Production, Says Salmon Fisheries Low Global Scale Impact In-Reply-To: <1474.71.198.157.113.1259197075.squirrel@webmail.redshift.c om> References: <20091125184740.DDCEE1318F0C@mx.dcn.davis.ca.us> <20091125224025.DXZX20088.omta01.suddenlink.net@kier.suddenlink.net> <1403.71.198.157.113.1259192139.squirrel@webmail.redshift.com> <1474.71.198.157.113.1259197075.squirrel@webmail.redshift.com> Message-ID: <20091128215547.XULD20088.omta01.suddenlink.net@kier.suddenlink.net> An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From Guillen at uhcl.edu Sat Nov 28 19:56:34 2009 From: Guillen at uhcl.edu (Guillen, George J.) Date: Sat, 28 Nov 2009 21:56:34 -0600 Subject: [env-trinity] CBB: Study Looks At Sustainable Salmon Production, Says Salmon Fisheries Low Global Scale Impact References: <20091125184740.DDCEE1318F0C@mx.dcn.davis.ca.us><20091125224025.DXZX20088.omta01.suddenlink.net@kier.suddenlink.net><1403.71.198.157.113.1259192139.squirrel@webmail.redshift.com><1474.71.198.157.113.1259197075.squirrel@webmail.redshift.com> <20091128215547.XULD20088.omta01.suddenlink.net@kier.suddenlink.net> Message-ID: I think what this illustrates best is the urgent need for a true ecosystems management approach that incorporates life cycle assessment of all major components of the ecosystem effected (organisms, water and air quality, hydrology etc). Good examples of where this approach would have come in handy recently is the push for organic (i.e. corn) fuel vs. petroleum and electric cars vs. petroleum. In the first case the actual costs of crop production (land, fertilizer, water and land quality degradation) were not factored in. I recall the sad photos of rain forest being burned for sugar can production to fuel this industry. In the second case, the focus was on automobile emissions reduction, but failed to consider emissions from coal fired power plants that generate electricity, much less the additional heavy metals (e.g. lead etc) that need to be mined to build the batteries used in vehicles. I believe many of our national and state laws, and not just environmental legislation, need to be revised and amended to force them to consider these alternatives (both costs, benefits and drawbacks) from a holistic ecosystem when making recommendations. It makes economic sense and green sense too. George Guillen ________________________________ From: env-trinity-bounces+guillen=uhcl.edu at velocipede.dcn.davis.ca.us on behalf of Kier Associates Sent: Sat 11/28/2009 3:55 PM To: frankemerson at redshift.com; frankemerson at redshift.com Cc: env-trinity at mailman.dcn.org Subject: Re: [env-trinity] CBB: Study Looks At Sustainable Salmon Production, Says Salmon Fisheries Low Global Scale Impact where I left that salmon fisheries vs. pen rearing life cycle expert panel assessment in D.C two years ago, Frank, the ocean fisheries were clearly shaping up, on a life cycle/ greenhouse gas, etc level better than pen rearing I'll see if I can't scare up the final rpt, which I now realize I've not seen, with Google Bill At 04:57 PM 11/25/2009, frankemerson at redshift.com wrote: Bill, My apologies for addressing you as Tom, not sure why I did that sorry. Here is a better link to Alexandras' blog concerning BC salmon and open net pens. http://www.google.com/gwt/n?u=http%3A%2F%2Falexandramorton.typepad.com%2F Frank Emerson > Hello Tom, > > In what way are Canadians and Europeans ahead of "us" regarding open net > pen salmon rearing and salmon life cycles? What was the result the > assessments? > > The list of researchers on this "study: should be enough to tell you it > was supported by the salmon farming industry. > > "School for Resource and Environmental Studies, Dalhousie University, > Halifax, Nova Scotia, Sustainable Food Production, SIK - Swedish Institute > for Food and Biotechnology, Gothenburg, Sweden, Knowledge Systems, > Ecotrust, Portland, Oregon, and School of Food Engineering, Pontificia > Universidad Catolica de Valparaiso, Valparaiso, Chile" > > Other than ecotrust they are all "food institutes" and "food engineering > schools" in the heart of salmon farming regions of the world. The > reference to land based production is the giveaway. Many scientists in BC > are demanding that provincial govts require salmon pens to be closed > contained pens, with effluent treatment to prevent the contamination of > out migrating smolts with sea lice, as well as the pollution that is > changing fjords near the pens. > > I sincerely urge you to go to this scientists blog and read about what is > happening in BC. > > http://howbadtherecord.blogspot.com/2009/08/new-blog-by-alexandra-morton.html > > There are many "youtube" vids on Alexandras work in BS and the Broughton > Archipelago also. > > http://www.youtube.com/user/cradel3 > > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-e7Ma-mD7h0&feature=fvw > > Thank you, > > Frank Emerson > ACSF > > > > >> >> >> Two years ago I served, together with > scientists from Canada and Europe, on a National Environmental >> Trust-hosted expert panel to conduct a life cycle assessment of Pacific > salmon fisheries and of Pacific pen-rearing operations.

It was an > eye-opening experience for me - the Europeans (and for that matter, people > all over the planet) are way ahead of us in this kind of analysis and in > applying life cycle assessment results to all kinds of consumer choices > and government rule-making - 'way ahead

It will be a > delight to see this kind of thinking arrive, even slowly, > in >> the U.S

>> Bill Kier

>>  At 10:42 AM 11/25/2009, Sari Sommarstrom wrote:

>

THE COLUMBIA BASIN >> BULLETIN:
>> Weekly Fish and Wildlife News
>> >> www.cbbulletin.com
>> November 25, 2009
>> Issue No. 510

>>
>> * Study Looks At Sustainable Salmon Production, Says > Salmon Fisheries Low Global Scale Impact

>> Popular thinking about how to improve food systems for the > better often misses the point, according to the results of a three-year > global study of salmon production systems.

>> Rather than pushing for organic or land-based production, or worrying > about simple metrics such as "food miles," the study finds that >> the world can achieve greater environmental benefits by focusing on > improvements to key aspects of production and distribution.

For > example, what farmed salmon are fed, how wild salmon are caught and the > choice to buy frozen over fresh matters more than organic vs. > conventional or wild vs. farmed when considering global scale >> environmental impacts such as climate change, ozone depletion, loss of > critical habitat, and ocean acidification.

>> The study is the world's first comprehensive global-scale look at a > major >> food commodity from a full life cycle perspective, and the researchers > examined everything ? how salmon are caught in the wild, what they're fed >> when farmed, how they're transported, how they're consumed, and how all > of this contributes to both environmental degradation and socioeconomic > benefits.

>> The researchers behind the study sought to understand how the world can > develop truly sustainable food systems through the lens of understanding > the complexities associated with wild and farmed salmon production, > processing and distribution. They found that decision-making for food must > learn to fully account for the life cycle socioeconomic and > environmental costs of food production. How we weight the importance of > such impacts is ultimately subjective and in the realm of policy and > culture, but using a comprehensive approach provides a more nuanced > process for informed decision-making. Even food has a lifecycle, and the > world must learn to comprehend the full costs of it in order to design > reliable, resilient food systems to feed a world population that's > forecast to grow to 9 billion in less than 40 years.

>> The researchers chose salmon as their focus as it exemplifies important > characteristics of modern food systems, yet offers unique opportunities > for comparison. It is available around the world at any time and in any > location, regardless of season or local ecosystem, it is available in > numerous product forms, and it is distributed using a variety of > transport modes. Unlike many other food systems, however, it is > available >> from both wild sources and a range of farmed production systems. >

>> While it isn't easy to balance people, profit and planet, the world must > do much better. Food production, in aggregate, is the single largest > source of environmental degradation globally. Impacts vary dramatically > depending on what, where and how food is produced.

>> For example, early results of the study found that growing salmon in > land-based farms can increase total greenhouse gas emissions ten-fold over > conventional farming depending on how and where the farming is > conducted.

>> Similarly, while organic farming of many crops offers benefits over > conventional production, organic salmon production gives rise to impacts > very similar to conventional farming due to the use of resource > intensive >> fish meals and oils. Beyond the farm, it's important to also consider > the >> total impact of food preparation. Driving to the store alone and then > cooking alone at home has a big environmental impact. Going out to dinner >> more, or just eating more frequently with friends and family at home, > has >> huge benefit.

>> For concerned consumers, it's important to think about how food was > produced and transported ? not just where it was produced ? when making > food choices.

>> Initial Findings from the study:

>> --- Fish should swim, not fly. Air-freighting salmon, and any food, > results in substantial increases in environmental impacts. If more frozen >> food were consumed, more container ships would be used to ship food. > Container ships are by far the most efficient and carbon-friendly way to > transport food. Globally, the majority of salmon fillets are currently > consumed fresh and never frozen. In fish-loving Japan, which gets much of >> its fish by air, switching to 75 percent frozen salmon would have more > benefit than all of Europe eating locally farmed salmon.
>> --- The choice to buy frozen matters more than organic vs. conventional > or wild vs. farmed.
>> --- A full life cycle assessment approach to research provides a more > nuanced process for informed decision-making. Even food has a lifecycle, > and we must comprehend the full impact to make meaningful improvements to >> food systems. Tradeoffs may be inevitable.
>> --- Contrary to what is widely perceived, the vast majority of >> broad-scale resource use and environmental impacts (energy inputs, GHG > emissions, etc) from conventional salmon farming result from the feeds > used to produce them. What happens at or around a farm site may be > important for local ecological reasons but contributes very little to > global scale concerns such as global warming.
>> --- Across the globe, what is used to feed salmon and the amounts of > feeds used vary widely. As a result, impacts are very different. > Norwegian salmon farming resulted in generally lower overall impacts while > farmed salmon production in the UK resulted in the greatest > impacts.
>> --- Reducing the amount of animal-derived inputs to feeds (e.g. fish > meals and oils along with livestock derived meals) in favor of >> plant-based feed inputs can markedly reduce environmental impacts.
> --- Growing organic salmon using fish meals and oils from very resource > intensive fisheries results in impacts very similar to conventional farmed > salmon production.

>> If not planned carefully, technological fixes aimed at addressing local > environmental challenges associated with conventional salmon farming can > result in substantial increases in global-scale environmental >> impacts.

>> In general, salmon fisheries result in relatively low global-scale > environmental impacts.

>> However, substantial differences exist between how salmon are caught. > Catching salmon in large nets as they school together has one tenth the > impact of catching them in small numbers using baited hooks and lures. >

>> Across salmon production systems ? and all food systems ? the world is > often swimming against the tide. Instead of working with nature, people > work against it, chasing fish in the open ocean with big diesel engines or > substituting energy demanding pumping and water treatment for free > ecosystem services in salmon farming. We can and must do better than this >> and start to swim with the tide.

>> The most recent published paper from the study can be seen in the > journal >> Environmental Science & Technology: >> eudora="autourl"> >> http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es9010114
>> _______________________________________________
>> env-trinity mailing list
>> env-trinity at velocipede.dcn.davis.ca.us
>> > eudora="autourl"> >> http://www2.dcn.org/mailman/listinfo/env-trinity
>

>> Kier Associates, Fisheries and Watershed Professionals
>> P.O. Box 915
>> Blue Lake, CA 95525
>> 707.668.1822
>> mobile: 498.7847
>> href=" http://www.kierassociates.net/ "> http://www.kierassociates.net
>> GSA Advantage Contractor GS-10F-0124U >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> env-trinity mailing list >> env-trinity at velocipede.dcn.davis.ca.us >> http://www2.dcn.org/mailman/listinfo/env-trinity >> > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > env-trinity mailing list > env-trinity at velocipede.dcn.davis.ca.us > http://www2.dcn.org/mailman/listinfo/env-trinity > Kier Associates, Fisheries and Watershed Professionals P.O. Box 915 Blue Lake, CA 95525 707.668.1822 mobile: 498.7847 http://www.kierassociates.net GSA Advantage Contractor GS-10F-0124U -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Mon Nov 30 14:24:34 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Mon, 30 Nov 2009 14:24:34 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] $11.1 Billion Water Bond Message-ID: <000f01ca720b$e8d2db60$ba789220$@net> Water bond's lure for the North Coast John Driscoll/The Times-Standard Posted: 11/25/2009 01:30:21 AM PST The North Coast would get $315 million and be eligible for a share of $3.38 billion as part of a state water bond being proposed for 2010 -- a bond that many are questioning as unaffordable and that regional interests say threaten salmon rivers. The Department of Water Resources this week roughly outlined how the $11.1 billion in the water bond would be dispersed by region. The North Coast would be eligible for hundreds of millions for watershed projects, wetland restoration, salmon habitat improvement, waterfowl habitat projects, and vegetation management. In the bond measure is also $250 million for removal of the Klamath River's four main dams. While the bond, and the legislative package passed earlier this month, has been touted by supporters as a big stride toward improving the state's weak water policies, conservationists in the north point out that most of the money would go to new dams, water projects and a canal to pump water around the Sacramento River Delta to cities and farms to the south. That could threaten water available for fish in the Trinity River, which is connected to the Central Valley Project, they say. "I'm pretty sure that it's a long-term commitment of Central Valley water and nobody is sure how the Trinity River plays into that," said Humboldt County Supervisor Jimmy Smith, "but I think it's going to be significant." The Legislative Analyst's Office points out that the state is currently operating at a $6.3 billion shortfall, with deficits projected to reach $14 billion next fiscal year and $20 billion a year for another five years. The bond would create debt service of $600 million a year. Smith said the proposed bond is far too expensive and complex, and that the Klamath money should be carved off and put forward in its own package, or a simpler one. If the money for the North Coast -- Humboldt, Del Norte, Trinity and parts of Glenn, Lake, Marin, Modoc, Siskiyou and Sonoma counties -- is meant to draw support from the region, it's not certain that it would be delivered. Proposition 84, a water bond passed in 2006, was $5.4 billion. Tom Stokely with the California Water Impact Network pointed out that some $40 million for the California Department of Fish and Game's fisheries restoration program hasn't yet come through. Billions from previous water bonds also haven't been spent, according to the State Treasurer's Office. Stokely cautioned that the efforts most likely to be funded are the building of dams, reservoirs and canals, while fish and wildlife provisions are likely to get bound up due to state budget woes. "I liken it to Charlie Brown and Lucy where she holds the football for him and then at the last minute pulls it away," Stokely said. Assemblyman Wesley Chesbro called the water package and the bond to be "a wolf in sheep's clothing." The Trinity River may be particularly vulnerable to excess diversion due to existing infrastructure tying it to the Central Valley Project, he said. Chesbro also said that water projects have always been paid with revenue bonds, but that's different with the latest water bond. "This would be a general obligation bond, which means they want to take our water and then make us pay for it," the Arcata Democrat said. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From Charles_Chamberlain at fws.gov Mon Nov 30 18:10:38 2009 From: Charles_Chamberlain at fws.gov (Charles_Chamberlain at fws.gov) Date: Mon, 30 Nov 2009 18:10:38 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Mainstem Trinity River redd survey update 11/30/2009 Message-ID: Once again, the redd survey project update on our website has been refreshed to include last week's data. See link in the message below. Enjoy! Charlie Charles Chamberlain/AFWO/ R1/FWS/DOI To env trinity 09/28/2009 01:21 cc PM Subject Mainstem Trinity River redd survey update 09/28/2009 Hi all, Fall 2009 salmon spawning surveys of the mainstem Trinity River are underway. These are conducted collaboratively by the Arcata Fish and Wildlife Office, California Department of Fish and Game, Yurok Tribal Fisheries Program, Hoopa Valley Tribal Fisheries Department, and the Shasta-Trinity National Forest. Our first within-season update for the 2009 redd survey is available from the Arcata Fish and Wildlife Office Website at the link below. Click on "Trinity River 2009 Redd Survey Update" near the bottom of the page. http://www.fws.gov/arcata/fisheries/projectUpdates.html Cheers! Charlie Charlie Chamberlain Fish Biologist - U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Arcata Fish & Wildlife Office 1655 Heindon Road Arcata, CA 95521 Charles_Chamberlain at fws.gov Phone: (707) 825-5110 Fax: (707) 822-8411 www.fws.gov/arcata/fisheries -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: graycol.gif Type: image/gif Size: 105 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: ecblank.gif Type: image/gif Size: 45 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bhill at igc.org Tue Dec 8 01:51:37 2009 From: bhill at igc.org (Brian Hill) Date: Tue, 8 Dec 2009 01:51:37 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Meet Stewart Resnick, Corporate Farming Billionaire and One-Man Environmental Wrecking Crew | | AlterNet Message-ID: <0a0601ca77ec$0ca900b0$25fb0210$@org> http://www.alternet.org/story/144427/meet_stewart_resnick%2C_corporate_farmi ng_billionaire_and_one-man_environmental_wrecking_crew -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From Charles_Chamberlain at fws.gov Tue Dec 8 10:37:08 2009 From: Charles_Chamberlain at fws.gov (Charles_Chamberlain at fws.gov) Date: Tue, 8 Dec 2009 10:37:08 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Mainstem Trinity River redd survey update 12/07/2009 Message-ID: Hi all, The report liked below has again been updated. Things are slowing down in the upper river, and still going strong downstream. Conditions have remained good for surveying in the lower river (low and clear), but I sure hope we start getting some weather and snowpack in those hills! Enjoy! Charlie Charles Chamberlain/AFWO/ R1/FWS/DOI To env trinity 09/28/2009 01:21 cc PM Subject Mainstem Trinity River redd survey update 09/28/2009 Hi all, Fall 2009 salmon spawning surveys of the mainstem Trinity River are underway. These are conducted collaboratively by the Arcata Fish and Wildlife Office, California Department of Fish and Game, Yurok Tribal Fisheries Program, Hoopa Valley Tribal Fisheries Department, and the Shasta-Trinity National Forest. Our first within-season update for the 2009 redd survey is available from the Arcata Fish and Wildlife Office Website at the link below. Click on "Trinity River 2009 Redd Survey Update" near the bottom of the page. http://www.fws.gov/arcata/fisheries/projectUpdates.html Cheers! Charlie Charlie Chamberlain Fish Biologist - U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Arcata Fish & Wildlife Office 1655 Heindon Road Arcata, CA 95521 Charles_Chamberlain at fws.gov Phone: (707) 825-5110 Fax: (707) 822-8411 www.fws.gov/arcata/fisheries -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: graycol.gif Type: image/gif Size: 105 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: ecblank.gif Type: image/gif Size: 45 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Wed Dec 9 19:39:14 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Wed, 9 Dec 2009 19:39:14 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] S 1759 HR 3750 Message-ID: <008801ca794a$5f4727c0$1dd57740$@net> This is a most interesting and worthwhile, especially from a Trinity River Restoration point of view, message from Zeke Grader, Executive Director, Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations, to the environmental staff persons for Senators Boxer and Feinstein. It follows a conference call last week in which certain language was changed in proposed water transfer legislation. Friends of Trinity River opposes this clearly unnecessary legislation that achieves nothing beyond opening the gates wider for shipment of more Northern California water south, further fishery and Delta destruction, and financial benefit to a handful of taxpayer subsidized mega-irrigators. Tom Birmingham's remarks to Zeke are most interesting. > From: Zeke Grader [mailto:zgrader at ifrfish.org] > Sent: Wednesday, December 09, 2009 6:45 AM > To: 'Lynn_Abramson at boxer.senate.gov'; 'leah_russin at feinstein.senate.gov' > Subject: S.1759 > > Lynn and Leah > > I want to thank both of you for your efforts to try to bring everyone together S. 1759 and come up with language to facilitate transfers in the San Joaquin Valley from between those who have water to spare and those who are short. What began troubling me after the call, however, was whether the limited transfers that would be provided for under the revised bill language would cause additional diversions from the Delta by east side folks to transfer to the west side. Westlands, as you know, covets Trinity River water and I do not want to agree to any scheme that would assist in their efforts to undo the Trinity ROD. > > Moreover, as I thought about it, while we're attempting to help growers who are short on water this year and maybe next by changing the law, what about trying to help the fishing fleet along coast by seeing to it existing law is enforced, specifically the CVPIA (I've enclosed my 3 November letter to you that refers to those sections)? > > I sat down yesterday and re-read the note that Bill Kier sent you last Friday afternoon and e-mails from Byron Leydecker (about the only two "elders" I have left in all of the water wrangling) and realized that I should have been more concerned, during last week's call on the "proposed red-line for mark-up" S. 1759 language, with the very real prospect of water moving from the east to west sides of the San Joaquin Valley only to be replaced with increased water deliveries from the Delta > > I guess I was hoping during the conference call that someone just might be playing it straight with publicly funded water this time. I certainly believe both of you are, but I'm not so trusting of some of the interests pushing for these transfers. > > Monday afternoon I drove to Fresno to participate in a Fox affiliate 90-minute televised discussion of San Joaquin Valley water issues with a large panel (sans Sean Hannity) that included Devin Nunes and Tom Birmingham (with Jim Costa, George Radanovich, and Dennis Cardoza wired in from DC) - all of whom carped and moaned about the Valley's "loss" of water to the long-overdue compliance with the law forced by things like the San Joaquin River settlement agreement. > > I tried to be civil until Nunes accused my members of being "supposed" fishermen (he, of course, has no interest in going to Fort Bragg or Eureka to meet with supposed fishermen) and complained of the millions provided in disaster relief they finally received in 2008 (he doesn't talk about the billions in subsidies growers are receiving) when I finally called him demagogue that he is. In the backroom following the program, I talked with some of the growers and offered to work with them on the water problem to ensure we protect and expand our food production by both farmers and fishermen. We really are committed to that, since food, along with energy and water, will be the contentious issues of this century. Following that short exchange I had a few words with Tom Birmingham that ended when he blurted that if fishermen thought they were getting screwed before in these water deals, "they haven't seen nothing yet," which got me thinking once again about the language in S.1759. > > > Frankly I've had it with trying to make nice with some of these water hustlers. As my former president, the late Nat Bingham, told a group of water districts and contractors about 20 years ago, "we'll bend over backward to work with you, but we're not going to bend over forward." Sorry to be so crude, but it's about the only language these folks seem to understand. > > As far as I can see, the S. 1759 proponents are pushing back from the language that we proposed because they really do intend to drain the Trinity River and, with BOR's help, game every drop of that 800,000 acre-feet a year the salmon and estuary were supposed to get from CVP yield in the CVPIA. With California plumbed the way it is - and with these water hustlers running the show these days - there isn't any way we can go with a bill in which the BOR says "trust us to do the right thing". They have been nothing but treacherous for decades > > We would really appreciate it if you would use the language we offered you in our 3 November letter. Otherwise, we just see S. 1759 as another plum for the water hustlers. As Birmingham says, the screwing of the fish and the fishermen may have only just begun > > Thanks, Zeke > Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From gking at asis.com Wed Dec 9 22:29:58 2009 From: gking at asis.com (Greg King) Date: Wed, 9 Dec 2009 22:29:58 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] S 1759 HR 3750 In-Reply-To: <008801ca794a$5f4727c0$1dd57740$@net> References: <008801ca794a$5f4727c0$1dd57740$@net> Message-ID: > while we?re attempting to help growers who are short on water this > year Perhaps the Central Valley Project farmer who this year made $77 million ( $5,500/af) selling public water to the Mojave Water Agency will next year help his neighbors in the same fashion. Thanks to Zeke, and all, for maintaining the energy to attempt plugging this geyser of malfeasance. On Dec 9, 2009, at 7:39 PM, Byron Leydecker wrote: > -- Greg King President/Program Director Siskiyou Land Conservancy P.O. Box 4209 Arcata, CA 95518 707-498-4900 gking at asis.com http://siskiyouland.wordpress.com/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From awhitridge at snowcrest.net Thu Dec 10 10:59:13 2009 From: awhitridge at snowcrest.net (Arnold Whitridge) Date: Thu, 10 Dec 2009 10:59:13 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] agenda for TAMWG meeting Dec 14-15 Message-ID: <3FB10C8DCA444987A5A5666C83A58B8A@arnPC> Here's the proposed agenda for next week's meeting of the Trinity Adaptive Management Working Group. It's still true: all TAMWG meetings are open to the public. Arnold Whitridge, TAMWG chair 530 623-6688 Proposed Agenda TRINITY ADAPTIVE MANAGEMENT WORKING GROUP Weaverville Victorian Inn large conference room, 1709 Main Street, Weaverville, CA Monday, December 14 and Tuesday, December 15, 2009 Time Presentation, Discussion, and/or Action on: Presenter Monday, December 14 1. 1:00 p.m. Adopt agenda; approve September minutes 2. 1:10 Open forum; public comment 3. 1:20 Designated Federal Officer topics Randy Brown 4. 1:30 TMC Chair topics/Executive Director's Report Brian Person, Mike Hamman 5. 2:45 Channel rehabilitation program update Jennifer Faler 6. 3:45 Watershed rehabilitation program Bill Brock 7. 4:45 TRRP annual report development Mike Hamman 5:00 Adjourn for the day Tuesday, December 15 8. 8:30 a.m. 2009 Water Year Update/ 2010 Water Year Planning Mike Hamman reservoir operations, river temperatures, flow scheduling 9. 9:15 2011-2015 Budget Plan- principles, policies, numbers Mike Hamman 10. 10:00 Hatchery evaluation update Wade Sinnen, Tom Weseloh 11. 10:30 Preliminary 2009 run size indications Wade Sinnen 12. 11:00 Harvest allocation process; tribal harvest management George Kautsky, HVT, and Dave Hillemeier, Yurok Tribe Noon Lunch 13. 1:00 p.m. Klamath Dam Removal Troy Fletcher, Yurok Tribe 14. 2:00 State of TRRP, TAMWG role, TAMWG recommendations Group 15. 4:45 Tentative date and agenda topics for next meeting 5:00 Adjourn -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From danielbacher at fishsniffer.com Thu Dec 10 09:27:54 2009 From: danielbacher at fishsniffer.com (Dan Bacher) Date: Thu, 10 Dec 2009 09:27:54 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Organic Capital Event Will Honor 2009 Environmental Heroes In-Reply-To: References: <008801ca794a$5f4727c0$1dd57740$@net> Message-ID: <3E71B930-0612-4509-AD1C-90DCDEA329D9@fishsniffer.com> News Advisory: For Immediate Release, December 10, 2009 Contacts: Kim Glazzard at (916) 455-8415 or (916) 761-4726 William Brooks at (916)201-2162 Organic Capital Event Will Honor 2009 Environmental Heroes Organic Sacramento is co-sponsoring the Organic Capital Celebration of Sustainability with Friends of the River on Thursday, December 10, 2009 from 6-10 p.m. at the Beatnik Studio at 2421 17th Street (near the Tower Theater) in Sacramento. The theme for this year's event is "Water, Water Everywhere. . .? The fundraiser for Restore the Delta, Delta farmers, and ongoing water education and advocacy programs will feature wonderful food, great guest speakers, live music, a silent auction, and other surprises. ?This is shaping up to be a very wonderful event and will be an important opportunity to learn more about Delta water issues, the Marine Life Protection Act on the California coast and Nestle?s efforts to build a water bottling plant in Sacramento,? said Kim Glazzard of Organic Sacramento. ?The event is designed not only to thank the numerous individuals for their hard work over this past year, but to also bring the water communities throughout Northern California together in support of the greater values of protection of California?s water.? The program, starting at 7 p.m., will include special guest speakers as well as recognition and acknowledgement for individuals and groups that have made exceptional efforts in addressing these complex and challenging water issues. Mark Franco, headman of the Winnemem Wintu Tribe, will be the keynote speaker and talk about the battle to stop the raising of Shasta Dam, the peripheral canal, and efforts to restore the Delta and salmon fisheries. Vern Goehring of the California Fisheries Coalition and Edwin Nieves of the Mendocino Seaweed Stewardship Alliance will be honored for the work they have done to fight for the rights of sustainable fishermen and seaweed harvesters under threat by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger?s Marine Life Protection Act process. For their efforts to stop Nestle?s from opening a water bottling plant in Sacramento, Evan Tucker, on behalf of Save Our Water, and Sacramento City Council Member Kevin McCarty, will be honored. A number of people and organizations will be recognized for their determination to save the Delta and stop the water policy/water legislation that will clear the path to the construction of the peripheral canal. Public officials to be honored include California State Senator Lois Wolk, City of Sacramento Vice Mayor Lauren Hammond and City of Sacramento Council Member Rob Fong. Representatives of organizations that will receive awards include Bill Jennings, the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance; Barbara Barrigan-Parrilla, Restore the Delta; Mark Pruner, North Delta CARES; Barbara Daly, Save the Delta; and Nancy Price, Women?s International League for Peace and Freedom. For his efforts to bring tribal human rights to the state of California, Randy Yonemura of the California Indian Heritage Council will be honored. The event will feature Gregory Kondos, a well-known Delta artist, live music by David Harpe and the Caribbean Jazz Q-tet. The suggested donation will be $10 - $25, but no one will be turned away. The evening schedule is as follows: What: Organic Capital Community Celebration of Sustainability Date: Thursday, December 10, 2009 When: 6:00 p.m. - 10:00 p.m. 6:00 p.m. - Social Hour 7:00 p.m. - Program and Recognition 8:30 p.m. - Music and Dancing Where: Beatnik Studios, 2421 17th Street, Sacramento (between Broadway and X St., a block up from the Tower Theater) For additional information, contact William Brooks at (916) 201-2162 or Kim Glazzard at (916) 455-8415 or (916) 761-4726. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mhamman at usbr.gov Thu Dec 10 11:05:52 2009 From: mhamman at usbr.gov (Hamman, Mike A) Date: Thu, 10 Dec 2009 12:05:52 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Trinity Management Council meeting agenda for Dec 16-17 In-Reply-To: <3FB10C8DCA444987A5A5666C83A58B8A@arnPC> References: <3FB10C8DCA444987A5A5666C83A58B8A@arnPC> Message-ID: <469C3D002DBB944BBEAEC89CBE8D1DF703DFDAE2F8@IBR5DENMXCMX01.bor.doi.net> Attached is the agenda for the December meeting of the Trinity Management Council. The meeting is at the USFS Office in Redding at 3644 Avtech Parkway off Airport Road south of Hwy 44. For more information please contact the Trinity River Restoration Porgram office at 530-623-1800. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: TMC Agenda_final_Dec 16,17_09.doc Type: application/msword Size: 57856 bytes Desc: TMC Agenda_final_Dec 16,17_09.doc URL: From mhamman at usbr.gov Thu Dec 10 11:37:55 2009 From: mhamman at usbr.gov (Hamman, Mike A) Date: Thu, 10 Dec 2009 12:37:55 -0700 Subject: [env-trinity] Trinity Management Council December 16-17 Meeting Agenda Message-ID: <469C3D002DBB944BBEAEC89CBE8D1DF703DFDAE374@IBR5DENMXCMX01.bor.doi.net> Attached is the agenda for the Trinity Management Council meeing being held on December 16-17 at the USFS Office in Redding at 3644 Avtech Parkway off Airport Road south of Hwy. 44. Please contact the Trinity River Restoration Office at 530-623-1800 if you need further information. ----------------------- Mike A. Hamman, PE Executive Director Trinity River Restoration Program (530)623-1800 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: TMC Agenda_final_Dec 16,17_09.doc Type: application/msword Size: 57856 bytes Desc: TMC Agenda_final_Dec 16,17_09.doc URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Fri Dec 11 11:00:52 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Fri, 11 Dec 2009 11:00:52 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] New York Times December 11, 2009 Message-ID: <000c01ca7a94$434934a0$c9db9de0$@net> In Birthplace of Local Food, Fish Imports Take Over the Menu http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/12/11/us/11sffish_CA0_337-span/arti cleLarge.jpg Josh Haner/The New York Times Paul Johnson has worked at the Monterey Fish Market in San Francisco for 30 years and has witnessed a dramatic downward shift in the local supply of seafood. Top of Form By KATHERINE ELLISON Published: December 11, 2009 Tadich Grill, San Francisco?s oldest seafood restaurant, now serves farmed salmon flown in from Scotland. Sam?s Grill & Seafood, which also dates to the Gold Rush, features shrimp from the Gulf of Mexico and Alaskan halibut.Skip to next paragraph http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/12/11/us/11sffish_graphic/articleIn line.jpg The San Francisco region is where the locavore movement got its name. And decades before restaurants like Chez Panisse in Berkeley were recommending their local leeks, the establishments near San Francisco?s wharves took pride in their fresh, local sand dabs and petrale. These days, fish flown in from around the world is more likely to be on offer. The change began gradually, but has recently sped up. Data from the Pacific States Marine Fisheries Commission, a federal advisory group, reveal the cumulative effect: a 71 percent drop in commercial fishing revenue along the north-central California coast since 1990. The effects are everywhere, seen in the number of idle fishermen or those who have left the profession altogether ? membership in the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen?s Associations is down by two-thirds in 15 years ? and the fish markets filled with Vietnamese catfish and Mexican spiny lobster. Fish from local bays has been ?one of the last local foods to go,? said Jessica Prentice, a Berkeley chef known for coining the word ?locavore.? She added: ?Seafood was one of the few things, well into the industrial age, that people associated with place. If you?re on a particular coast, or bay, or lake, you typically want to eat the seafood that?s fresh and local.? These days in the Bay Area, that means Dungeness crab in the winter and precious little else. With beloved local petrale scarce for the past three months, Andrew Carvalho, the head chef at Sam?s, has had to make do with sea bream from Greece. Not long ago, said Larry Collins, a San Francisco hook-and-line fisherman, ?we fished salmon in the summertime, crab in the wintertime and rock cod whenever we needed to make the mortgage. Now we fish crab in the wintertime and scramble in the summertime.? San Francisco?s situation is part of a national phenomenon. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported last year that more than three-fourths of the fish Americans eat comes from other countries, mostly China. Yet the trend has special resonance around San Francisco. Robert E. Ross, executive director of the California Fisheries and Seafood Institute, a trade group, estimated that Bay Area residents eat, on average, about double the amount of fish consumed annually by most other Americans. Many diners recall when local seafood ? salmon, red snapper, abalone ? was abundant. ?I think about it all the time,? said Paul Johnson, the chief executive of the Monterey Fish Market, which supplies up to five million pounds of fish a year to 150 regional restaurants, including Chez Panisse and the Googleplex in Mountain View. ?In the fall when crab season comes around, and the boilers are steaming and all the guys are coming around with the fresh crabs, it just makes you sad to realize that this is the last major fishery we have left,? he said. The decline and fall of California?s fisheries is an intricate tale. Eighteenth-century Pacific Coast explorers described a paradise teeming with life. ?No country is more abundant in fish and game of every description,? said the French naval officer Jean-Fran?ois de Galaup, who mapped the Pacific Coast in 1786. Two centuries of robust harvests followed, with occasional off-years. Now off-years are the norm. Still, the drop in local harvests doesn?t precisely reflect the decline of fish in the sea. The confluence of expanding global markets and more assertive local controls has produced dramatic change. One fishery after another petered out in the wild, and regulators curtailed fishing to preserve species. As with other environmental problems, every person with a stake in the Bay Area?s seafood decline has a villain of choice. Salmon fishermen tend to blame the decline on inland water users, like farms and developers, who, they say, diverted water needed for spawning new generations of fish. Scientists suggest that a warming ocean has put the fishes? food supply in the wrong place at the wrong time. Others blame mismanagement. Similar finger-pointing is evident around other wounded fisheries. Wild abalone was one of the first local seafoods to vanish, after state officials closed depleted fisheries in 1996. In 2002, trawling for rockfish ? the bottom-dweller often called ?red snapper? and used in the spicy stew cioppino ? was barred on much of the Pacific Coast. In the past two years, fishing bans multiplied as salmon and herring grew scarce. In all cases, the regulators responded to evidence of sharp declines in local species. But many local fishermen, who have sustained staggering economic losses, feel the actions of state and federal officials have been excessive. ?In California, we have the least exploited fisheries in the world, but the toughest regulations,? complained Zeke Grader, executive director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen?s Associations. At the Monterey Fish Market, Mr. Johnson?s 30-year career has spanned the most dramatic downward shift in local supply. When he began, he said, he was importing only about 30 percent of his fish from outside of California. Now, he said, the figure is closer to 80 percent. While industry insiders are all too aware of the change in Bay Area menus, diners may have been slow to grasp it. ?People still don?t get it,? said George Leonard, a marine biologist at the Santa Cruz office of the Ocean Conservancy, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit organization. ?Restaurants will go to great lengths to make it seem like the fish is local,? he said. ?They?ll advertise the ?fresh catch of the day,? and half the time, it?s farmed fish from halfway around the world.? The illusion of fresh local fish became harder to maintain after a 2005 law obliged vendors to label wares by country of origin. This has combined with the trend to advertise the pedigree of foods, like the ?Bolinas black cod? at Chez Panisse. CleanFish, a San Francisco-based supplier of ?sustainable seafood,? boasts its wild and ?sustainably farmed? fish, like the ?Carolina Mahi-Mahi? and the Loch Duarte salmon featured at Tadich Grill. Yet its use of air-shipped and farmed fish rankles some environmentalists. ?When you put fresh fish in an airplane,? Mr. Leonard said, ?all bets are off,? The Monterey Bay Aquarium includes all farmed fish on its ?red list? of fish to be avoided, citing concerns like the discharge of waste and parasites from farms. The founder of CleanFish, Tim O?Shea, said this ignored differences among the farmers. A few chefs, including Alice Waters of Chez Panisse, vigorously advocate serving local seafood whenever possible ? ?We collected our own mussels from a legal zone recently. Divine!? Ms. Waters recounted in an e-mail message. Still, she occasionally resorts to ?sustainable? shrimp from New Orleans. While the globalization of fish may seem unstoppable, some dream of San Francisco seafood?s resurgence. Mr. Johnson of the Monterey Fish Market foresaw encouraging trends over the next few years, if federal strictures help rebuild rockfish populations. Recently, environmental advocates took heart in the state?s decision in August to protect 155 square miles of ocean, permanently banning professional fishing in reserves covering 11 percent of California coastal waters. The decision, to take effect early next year, has prompted complaints from struggling fishermen, yet it is meant to preserve habitat crucial in rebuilding species like rockfish and abalone. ?We can no longer treat the ocean and its fish and wildlife as an all-you-can eat buffet,? said Kaitilin Gaffney, the Pacific ecosystem program director for the Ocean Conservancy. ?But the ocean is pretty resilient. If we allow nature to restore herself, she will.? Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land 415 519 4810 cell bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 90692 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image005.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 20428 bytes Desc: not available URL: From truman at jeffnet.org Mon Dec 14 09:15:56 2009 From: truman at jeffnet.org (Patrick Truman) Date: Mon, 14 Dec 2009 09:15:56 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Sac Bee Ed on Feinstein Message-ID: <6F25D883DD584747A7DE42A3312BFEB0@HAL> http://www.sacbee.com/opinion/index.html This story is taken from Sacbee / Opinion Editorial: Senator needs to balance interests Published Monday, Dec. 14, 2009 Dianne Feinstein was quick to respond in September when a big corporate farmer sought her help in challenging limits on the export of water out of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. Unfortunately, she's rarely shown that level of interest in representing the concerns of commercial salmon fishermen. They are arguably far more vulnerable to how those flows are regulated. An article by the investigative group California Watch, which appeared in last Monday's Bee, revealed some of Feinstein's priorities. The article reports that Beverly Hills entrepreneur Stewart Resnick sought Feinstein's help in getting more water for Paramount Farms, the immense Central Valley agricultural operation he owns. Resnick wrote a letter to Feinstein that contends that federal efforts to restore the Delta's endangered salmon and shad fisheries were "exacerbating the state's severe drought" because they reduced the water that could be used for crops. Feinstein forwarded the letter to two U.S. Cabinet secretaries, calling on the administration to spend $750,000 on a reappraisal of Delta environmental policy. Shortly afterward, the Obama administration OK'd the review. According to the California Watch article, Resnick's letter had more behind it than the power of its arguments. As with many politicians, Feinstein's approach on some policies is heavily influenced by relationships. Her relationship with Resnick is both political and personal. Financially, Resnick has been a major player in state politics for nearly two decades. He, his wife and executives of his firms have made nearly $4 million in political contributions since 1993. Feinstein was one of the manypoliticians in both parties to benefit from that largesse - receiving $29,000 for her own campaigns, with $246,000 more given to Democratic political committees in years she has sought re-election. Beyond that, the two are friends. Resnick held a party in Feinstein's honor at his Beverly Hills home, and he and his wife hosted Feinstein in Aspen over New Year's. None of this is unusual or necessarily unethical. But it would behoove Feinstein, and the state she represents, if she spent as much personal time with dry-docked salmon fishermenas corporate farmers who have a fairly limited view on the subject of water. The salmon fishermen's claim on the water flows that course though the Delta is just as compelling as agriculture's. It might be more so. The Central Valley and the Trinity River were once prolific producers of salmon. But diversions of water - including those that helped the San Joaquin Valley bloom - have harmed salmon and the fishing families that depend on those fish. No doubt, ocean conditions and other mysterious factors have hurt salmon stocks on the West Coast. But the loss of salmon has been steady over decades, coinciding with increased diversions from waterways such as the Sacramento River. Feinstein, who has long been an environmental advocate on many fronts, is key in helping the state balance these interests. She has done this many times in the past. Environmentalists credit her with playing a valuable role, for instance, in a pact that is returning water to the San Joaquin River. To take that same constructive approach in the Delta, she must forge ties with all the players, including the beleaguered fishermen and Indian tribes of the North Coast. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: sacramento-bee-logo.png Type: image/png Size: 8578 bytes Desc: not available URL: From Charles_Chamberlain at fws.gov Wed Dec 16 11:01:05 2009 From: Charles_Chamberlain at fws.gov (Charles_Chamberlain at fws.gov) Date: Wed, 16 Dec 2009 11:01:05 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Fw: Mainstem Trinity River redd survey update 12/07/2009 Message-ID: The Trinity Redd survey update linked below has again been refreshed to reflect last week's data. We are nearing the end of our season. Chinook salmon spawning in the upper reaches is about done, and the weather/turbidity is starting to keep us off the lower river where we would expect continued spawning activity. Charlie Charles Chamberlain/AFWO/ R1/FWS/DOI To env trinity 09/28/2009 01:21 cc PM Subject Mainstem Trinity River redd survey update 09/28/2009 Hi all, Fall 2009 salmon spawning surveys of the mainstem Trinity River are underway. These are conducted collaboratively by the Arcata Fish and Wildlife Office, California Department of Fish and Game, Yurok Tribal Fisheries Program, Hoopa Valley Tribal Fisheries Department, and the Shasta-Trinity National Forest. Our first within-season update for the 2009 redd survey is available from the Arcata Fish and Wildlife Office Website at the link below. Click on "Trinity River 2009 Redd Survey Update" near the bottom of the page. http://www.fws.gov/arcata/fisheries/projectUpdates.html Cheers! Charlie Charlie Chamberlain Fish Biologist - U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Arcata Fish & Wildlife Office 1655 Heindon Road Arcata, CA 95521 Charles_Chamberlain at fws.gov Phone: (707) 825-5110 Fax: (707) 822-8411 www.fws.gov/arcata/fisheries -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: graycol.gif Type: image/gif Size: 105 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: ecblank.gif Type: image/gif Size: 45 bytes Desc: not available URL: From danielbacher at fishsniffer.com Tue Dec 15 08:35:49 2009 From: danielbacher at fishsniffer.com (Dan Bacher) Date: Tue, 15 Dec 2009 08:35:49 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Salmon Water Now Video Exposes Corruption in California Water Politics In-Reply-To: <5D8A1E3BAB1847AB99DA303EC88927C2@YOUR2540FFFB43> References: <20091209114046.ASR39035@ms4.mc.surewest.net> <5D8A1E3BAB1847AB99DA303EC88927C2@YOUR2540FFFB43> Message-ID: I encourage everybody concerned about the destruction of California's salmon, steelhead, sturgeon, striped bass and other fisheries by corporate agribusiness and southern California water interests to watch and share this superb new video, "Science, Politics and Salmon." You can watch the video on: YouTube: http:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gc5LC3HGWgE&fmt=18 or Vimeo: http://vimeo.com/ 8163239 ? sunset.jpg Salmon Water Now Video Exposes Corruption in California Water Politics by Dan Bacher SalmonWaterNow.org has just released a superb new video: "Science, Politics, and Salmon," the best documentary I've seen yet on the real reason for the collapse of Central Valley salmon runs - massive water exports from the California Delta to subsidized corporate agribusiness. I encourage everybody concerned about the destruction of California's salmon, steelhead, sturgeon, striped bass and other fisheries by agribusiness and southern California water interests to watch and share this video. "What does it take to get to the truth?" asks the video's producer, Bruce Tokars. "How hard is it to come up with a scientifically sound explanation for the disastrous decline of Pacific salmon?" "The San Francisco Bay and the Sacramento Delta have been studied over and over again," emphasizes Tokars. "The science seems pretty clear. Salmon and other species that depend on a healthy mix of salt and fresh water have been seriously hurt by excessive water diversions. Put simply, not enough fresh water is flowing through The Delta and San Francisco Bay because it is being sent to big growers in the Central Valley." Tokar notes that inadequate fresh water flows because of natural drought are made worse by big agriculture?s never-ending demands for more and more water. Water for crops is planted on selenium-filled, drainage-impaired land on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley that never should have been irrigated. "Add politics to the mix and you have a clear path to the decline of salmon and plenty of other species," he says. "This video shows how big money, big agriculture, and political contributions have prostituted the work of government scientists." The information disclosed in the video offers a good counterpoint to the recent report, "California Water Myths," by the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC), funded by Stephen P. Bechtel, Jr., the Gap's Fisher Family and other corporate interests, that tries to dismiss the key role that sufficient flows of water play must play in the restoration of salmon and other fish populations. The Bechtel-funded report claims that it is a "myth" that "more water will lead to healthy fish populations." "In reality, more water alone is rarely sufficient to restore a fish population," the Bechtel-funded report claims. "Water that has the wrong temperature, nutrients, or sediment may harm fish, and so can water without sufficient habitat. Supporting native fish will require strategies that account for the complexities of aquatic ecosystems." Of course, fish restoration requires a variety of "strategies," including dam removal, habitat restoration, the reduction of pollution and other actions. However, the foundation of any restoration program, before anything else can happen, is the restoration of water flows in a system. The Bechtel-funded scientists that wrote the report seem to forget that "Fish don't swim in promises - they swim in water," as Zeke Grader, executive director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fisherman's Associations (PCFFA) says. The Bechtel-funded scientists include many of the same U.C. Davis folks who last July recommended the construction of the peripheral canal, an enormously expensive boondoggle that will inevitably lead to increased water exports from northern California and the Delta, as the "solution" to solving the Delta's ecological problems. Ellen Hanak, director of "research" at PPIC and the recent report's co-author, states, "It?s essential to move beyond myth as population growth and climate change put even more pressure on our resources.? However, by dismissing the key role sufficient water flows play in fish restoration, Hanak and the other Bechtel-funded scientists appear to be embracing the myth spread by corporate agribusiness- funded astroturf groups that everything other than water exports is responsible for fish declines. The video features the latest information on "Resnickgate," the huge scandal developing over the corruption of California politics through huge contributions of agribusiness billionaire Stewart Resnick, owner of Paramount Farms in Kern County, to Senator Dianne Feinstein, Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg and other corporate Democrats. The video documents how the "limousine liberal" Resnick, who made millions and millions of dollars selling subsidized water back to the public at enormous profit to himself, has successfully pressured Feinstein to attack protections under the Endangered Species Act for imperiled Sacramento River chinook salmon, Central Valley steelhead, green sturgeon, the southern resident population of killer whales and Delta smelt. Feinstein, Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who collectively have received hundreds of thousands of dollars from Resnick for their political campaigns, are also pushing for a peripheral canal and the destruction of the Bay- Delta Estuary in order to benefit Resnick and other rich corporate agribusiness tycoons at the expense of fish, fishermen, coastal communities, California Indian Tribes, Delta family farmers and environmental justice communities. You can watch the new video on: YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=Gc5LC3HGWgE&fmt=18 or Vimeo: http://vimeo.com/8163239 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: sunset.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 826254 bytes Desc: not available URL: From danielbacher at fishsniffer.com Wed Dec 16 12:43:30 2009 From: danielbacher at fishsniffer.com (Dan Bacher) Date: Wed, 16 Dec 2009 12:43:30 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Klamath Justice Coalition Halts Logging on Karuk Sacred Sites In-Reply-To: <931344.79043.qm@web56001.mail.re3.yahoo.com> References: <008401ca7e7b$ee171dd0$ca455970$@net> <931344.79043.qm@web56001.mail.re3.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <4A737CB8-9C8C-47DA-9B2D-1EC0A4ADC1A1@fishsniffer.com> This morning the Klamath Justice Coalition used a human blockade of 15 people to defend Karuk sacred sites from logging activities. The action took place near Orleans, CA within the Six Rivers National Forest and halted work on the Orleans Community Fuels Reduction Plan. ?The OCFR is actually the Orleans Culture and Forest Reduction plan,? said Leaf Hillman, a Karuk Ceremonial Leader in Orleans. Below are the press releases from the Klamath Justice Coalition and the Karuk Tribe. Dan PRESS RELEASE - Klamath Justice Coalition For Immediate Release: December 16, 2009 For more information: Leaf Hillman, Karuk Indian 530-627-3710 ORLEANS RESIDENTS MOVE TO HALT FOREST SERVICE PLANS TO DESTROY SACRED SITES Forest Supervisor Tyrone Kelly Breaks Promises and Federal Law Orleans, CA ? This morning the Klamath Justice Coalition used a human blockade to defend Karuk sacred sites from logging activities. The action took place near Orleans, CA within the Six Rivers National Forest and halted work on the Orleans Community Fuels Reduction Plan. Forest Service contractors were greeted by activists before day break at Orleans Mountain Lookout Road which leads to one of the units in dispute. Crews turned back without involving law enforcement. ?This morning?s small but important victory marks the beginning of our campaign to defend Karuk sacred sites and protect the health of our forests,? said Orleans local Chook- Chook Hillman. This logging operation was intended to be part of a larger fuels reduction program developed by the US Forest Service with community buy-in. However, in the end the Forest Service betrayed the local community once again. According to the Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS) for the project, the stated Purpose and Need for the Orleans Community Fuel Reduction and Forest Health Project (OCFR) is to manage forest stands to reduce fuels accumulations and improve forest health around the community of Orleans, while enhancing cultural values associated with the Panamnik World Renewal Ceremonial District. ?The OCFR is actually the Orleans Culture and Forest Reduction plan,? said Hillman. Originally, Forest Supervisor Tryone Kelly engaged with community members on a collaborative process to develop a fuels reduction plan that would protect sacred areas, reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfire, and protect sensitive stands of hardwoods. However, in practice it looks like another timber harvest that disregards the concerns of the community. ?We are shocked that the Forest Service thinks that it can get away with lying to our community. We want fuels reduction, but we will not accept the destruction of Karuk sacred sites or a timber sale disguised as a fuels reduction plan,? added Annelia Hillman. This is not the first time that Kelly has shown a particular insensitivity to Tribal cultural issues. Last year he oversaw the bull dozing of a Tribal member?s that was on land disputed to be Indian Trust Land. The act not only destroyed a home, but destroyed a nearby archeological site and a contemporary dance ground. Again during last years? wildfires, Kelly directed the construction of firebreaks and use of heavy equipment that destroyed sections of ?medicine man trails? and high country alters used during annual World Renewal Ceremonies. Representatives from the Karuk Tribe urged Kelley to build the breaks in areas that were less sensitive but the concerns with ignored. ?Its like Kelly is hell bent to destroy our sacred areas one step at a time.? Said Hillman. The Klamath Justice Coalition is not new to direct action as a tactic to force change. The group has staged direct actions in Scotland, Omaha, NE, Portland, OR, and Sacramento, CA, and Salt Lake City, Utah focused on the removal of Klamath Dams. Who we are: The Klamath Justice Coalition is an ad hoc group of Klamath Basin Residents from all walks of life. We are Indians, non-natives, mothers, fathers, workers, hippies, youth, and elders. Our goal is to ensure that the cultures and ecosystems of Klamath Communities are protected and enhanced. # # # Karuk Tribe P R E S S R E L E A S E For Immediate Release: December 16, 2009 For more information: Craig Tucker, Spokesman, Karuk Tribe, cell 916-207-8294 US FOREST SERVICE LOGGING PROJECT THREATENS SACRED SITES Forest Supervisor Tyrone Kelley Ignores Local Community, Tribal Leaders, and his own Proposed Plan Orleans, CA ? Six Rivers National Forest Supervisor Tyrone Kelley has directed his crews to begin logging with heavy equipment in areas sacred to the Karuk Tribe in violation of his own proposed fuels reduction plan. ?We participated in good faith in the Forest Service?s collaborative process. Although we were assured that our sacred areas would be protected and our values respected and enhanced, it?s clear now that these were hollow promises. Furthermore, the actions directed by Kelly are in violation of federal law,? said Bill Tripp, Eco-cultural Resources Specialist for the Karuk Tribe. Over the past three years, the Orleans Ranger District in the Six Rivers National Forest has held a series of stakeholder meetings allegedly designed to work with the Orleans community to develop a fuels reduction plan that both Native and non-native community members could accept. After dozens of meetings and an appeal of Kelley?s original plan, tribal members, as well as non-native local residents, thought that a consensus had been reached. However, when logging began, community members realized immediately that Kelley had reneged on his promises and violated the law by implementing a plan inconsistent with his own Environmental Impact Statement. At issue is the insufficient analysis related to use of heavy logging equipment in areas deemed sacred by the Karuk Tribe, divergence from measures designed to protect, promote, enhance and restore stands of ecological sensitive hardwoods, failure to protect large diameter trees[c1] , and a failure to make good on a commitment for multi- party monitoring during the fuels reduction operations. According to the Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS) for the project, the stated Purpose and Need for the Orleans Community Fuel Reduction and Forest Health Project (OCFR) is to manage forest stands to reduce fuels accumulations and improve forest health around the community of Orleans, while enhancing cultural values associated with the Panamnik World Renewal Ceremonial District. Current logging operations are inconsistent with the FEIS and therefore violates the National Environmental Policy act. The Forest Service also proceeded without required consultations with the State Historic Preservation Officer (SHPO). ?The actual work on the ground will do the opposite of the stated goals. OCFR in all actuality has begun to compromise the integrity of spiritual values associated with the Panamnik World Renewal District,? said Tripp. The areas being debated represent 914 acres to be mechanically harvested. The USFS awarded the contract to Timber Products for nearly $1 million dollars. The Tribe is demanding that the Forest Service halt all logging operations until these issues can be resolved and sacred sites protected. Leaf Hillman is a Karuk Ceremonial Leader in Orleans who contends that this represents the latest in a series of bad decisions by Kelley that have served to denigrate Karuk Cultural areas. According to Hillman, ?Tyrone Kelley has no respect for this community or native cultures. The Tribe and local community members worked hard to develop a fuels reduction plan that meets the needs of both the community and the Forest Service. Kelley?s actions are not only an act of bad faith, they are an act of cultural genocide. We will not sit idly by while he destroys the ecological integrity of these forests and the Karuk Tribe?s sacred areas, we will defend our homeland.? # # # -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bwl3 at comcast.net Wed Dec 16 18:46:26 2009 From: bwl3 at comcast.net (Byron Leydecker) Date: Wed, 16 Dec 2009 18:46:26 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Letter on S 1759 Message-ID: <034501ca7ec3$217f16e0$647d44a0$@net> Attached is letter on S 1759. Byron Leydecker, JcT Chair, Friends of Trinity River PO Box 2327 Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327 415 383 4810 land/fax (call first to fax) 415 519 4810 mobile bwl3 at comcast.net bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary) http://www.fotr.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: S 1759 Joint Ltr final version.pdf Type: application/pdf Size: 95404 bytes Desc: not available URL: From Charles_Chamberlain at fws.gov Mon Dec 28 08:13:33 2009 From: Charles_Chamberlain at fws.gov (Charles_Chamberlain at fws.gov) Date: Mon, 28 Dec 2009 08:13:33 -0800 Subject: [env-trinity] Mainstem Trinity River redd survey - last 2009 update 12/28/2009 Message-ID: Hi all, Thanks for tuning in this season! A special thanks to our partners and staff for collecting an outstanding dataset! Our last update for this 2009 spawning season is available at the link below. I hope you all enjoy a great 2010! Charlie Charles Chamberlain/AFWO/ R1/FWS/DOI To env trinity 09/28/2009 01:21 cc PM Subject Mainstem Trinity River redd survey update 09/28/2009 Hi all, Fall 2009 salmon spawning surveys of the mainstem Trinity River are underway. These are conducted collaboratively by the Arcata Fish and Wildlife Office, California Department of Fish and Game, Yurok Tribal Fisheries Program, Hoopa Valley Tribal Fisheries Department, and the Shasta-Trinity National Forest. Our first within-season update for the 2009 redd survey is available from the Arcata Fish and Wildlife Office Website at the link below. Click on "Trinity River 2009 Redd Survey Update" near the bottom of the page. http://www.fws.gov/arcata/fisheries/projectUpdates.html Cheers! Charlie Charlie Chamberlain Fish Biologist - U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Arcata Fish & Wildlife Office 1655 Heindon Road Arcata, CA 95521 Charles_Chamberlain at fws.gov Phone: (707) 825-5110 Fax: (707) 822-8411 www.fws.gov/arcata/fisheries -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: graycol.gif Type: image/gif Size: 105 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: ecblank.gif Type: image/gif Size: 45 bytes Desc: not available URL: