[env-trinity] Breaking: Governor Brown Appoints Grant Davis as Department of Water Resources Director

[Dan Bacher]

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/7/19/1682084/-Breaking-Governor-Brown-Appoints-Grant-Davis-As-Department-of-Water-Resources-Director



Breaking: Governor Brown Appoints Grant Davis as Department of Water  
Resources Director

by Dan Bacher

Governor Jerry Brown today appointed Grant Davis, 54, of Petaluma, as  
director of the embattled California Department of Water Resources  
(DWR).
The appointment comes at a critical time for the Department, as the  
agency reels from intense international and national media scrutiny of  
its mishandling of the Oroville Dam spillway crisis. DWR is also the  
lead state agency in the collaborative effort with the Donald Trump  
administration to build Jerry Brown’s controversial “legacy project,"  
the Delta Tunnels.

Davis has been general manager of the Sonoma County Water Agency since  
February 2011. Before that he was the interim general manager from  
2009 to 2011 and the assistant general manager from 2007 to 2009.

“The agency provides wholesale water, wastewater treatment and flood  
control. It is the largest energy user in the county and became carbon- 
free in 2015 by providing its water through 100 percent renewable  
energy,” according to the Governor’s Office.

Davis was executive director of the Bay Institute from 1997 to 2007,  
senior district representative in the Office of Congresswoman Lynn  
Woolsey from 1993 to 1997 and principal of Impact Consulting from 1990  
to 1993.

Davis currently serves on the University of California President’s  
Advisory Commission, for the Division of Agriculture and Natural  
Resources. In addition, Davis is the president of WateReuse  
California, a member of the Bay Planning Coalition, and a member of  
the San Francisco Bay Restoration Authority Advisory Committee. Mr.  
Davis received his BA in political science from the University of  
California at Berkeley.

This position requires Senate confirmation and the compensation is  
$194,600. Davis is a Democrat.

Public trust advocates are expecting little to change at DWR as Davis  
assumes the helm. The appointment comes at a time when increasing  
numbers of Californians are challenging Governor Jerry Brown’s  
“environmental” and “climate” credentials as he teams up with the  
Trump administration to build the environmentally devastating Delta  
Tunnels and to exempt three major California oilfields from protection  
under the federal Safe Water Drinking Act.

On June 26, the Trump administration released a no-jeopardy finding on  
the biological assessment to build the tunnels, claiming that the  
California WaterFix will not jeopardize threatened or endangered  
species or adversely modify their critical habitat. The biological  
opinion is available here: https://www.fws.gov/sfbaydelta/HabitatConservation/CalWaterFix/Index.htm

The Brown administration praised the deeply flawed biological opinion,  
a document that may have been politically manipulated, in spite of the  
vow Jerry Brown made in January to “resist” Trump administration  
attacks on science.

Over 50 environmental justice and consumer organizations are also  
outraged by the California Legislature’s passage Monday night of the  
Big Oil-written cap-and-trade bill, Assembly Bill 398. The bill was  
rammed through the legislature under intense pressure from Governor  
Jerry Brown, who has received over $9.8 million in contributions for  
oil and energy companies.

Liza Tucker, Consumer Advocate for Consumer Watchdog, described AB 398  
as a “pollute and profit” bill. She said Brown’s plan “ensures that  
Californians keep paying the state’s biggest polluters to pollute by  
banning regulators from ordering refineries and power plants to  
upgrade pollution controls, and by  pillaging cap-and-trade revenue to  
pay for tax breaks.”

More information: www.dailykos.com/...
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www2.dcn.org/pipermail/env-trinity/attachments/20170719/ac8fdc72/attachment.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: Grant-web.jpg
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 7726 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://www2.dcn.org/pipermail/env-trinity/attachments/20170719/ac8fdc72/attachment.jpg>