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In a nutshell, Westlands relapses
The DNP preferred Westlands’ lateral thinking from a couple months back.
Back then, WWD’s perhaps hundreds of people were exploring alternative development options for its toxic but productive real estate.
But we should have known that like any intelligent strategic thinker, Westlands understands the value of a multi-pronged strategy for making money or winning battles over geography and scarce resources.
As the Fresno Bee’s E.J. Schultz reports, Westlands has hired Craig Manson, University of the Pacific law professor and former assistant secretary of the Interior for Fish, Wildlife and Parks under George W. Bush.
Quoting Schultz:
Manson worked in the Bush Interior Department from 2002-05 and pushed some policies that were harshly criticized by environmentalists. In 2003, for instance, the administration shrank plans to protect Central Valley vernal pools, citing economic reasons.
One of Manson’s underlings, Julie MacDonald, faced accusations from environmentalists that she bullied career scientists.
She was reprimanded by the Interior Department’s inspector general for leaking information to private groups, such as the California Farm Bureau Federation, and resigned in 2007.
The DNP agrees with Michael Campana about the implications of Manson’s hire.
Campana sits on the National Academy of Sciences’ Bay-Delta panel charged with producing independent, sound scientific analysis on the dynamic interplay of the Bay-Delta ecosystem and human impacts, including pollution and water export, on that ecosystem.
Clearly, Westlands is gearing up for their next round of litigation. Why wouldn’t they be? It is in their interest to do so, these perhaps hundreds of people who have no water rights but do have a great deal of political power.
Ironies abound here. The reason why Campana sits on the Delta NAS panel in the first place is because Sen. Feinstein agreed to help out friends and contributors the Resnicks, who didn’t like what the Endangered Species Act was likely to do to their pistachio and pomegranate profit margins.
And if the Resnicks have a moderate Democratic U.S. Senator in their corner, Westlands knows it doesn’t hurt to have the not-so-moderate right wing megaphone at your disposal:
Along with friends in high places and Fox News, litigating is a big part of the tool kit. How do they fund it, these perhaps hundreds of people who control an empire with huge unemployment rates in the small towns that dot their domain?
It helps of course to minimize the expense of putting local people to work. Despite all of the claims of hardship by folks like the Resnicks and the perhaps hundreds of Westlands litigants, keep in mind that they still have the money to pay lawyers millions of dollars a year to advocate their interests.
Manson’s annual salary will be $185,000. That number suggests he might be taking less than market rate for the pleasure of the task.
Despite Fox News’s coverage of an embattled farmer destroying his almond orchard because, he claimed, he had no water to irrigate the trees because of a little fish, California almond production was up 8.5% last year, to 1.53 billion pounds.
From the Agriculture Statistics Service:
The DNP has no idea whether Fox’s (almond) farmer, the Resnicks or Westlands came along for the state’s almond farming 8.5% growth joyride. We suspect they did. From the splash page of the Resnick’s Paramount Farms website:
For the powerful, enough is never enough. As water becomes ever scarcer in California, we hope civility will not.
$9.5M would be a bargain
News out that the Delta Stewardship Council has hired CH2MHill to develop the required comprehensive long-term management plan for California’s Delta.
On its website, the DSC also invites people to comment on the interim management plan that must be implemented until CH2MHill’s work is done and approved.
Restore the Delta has already expressed skepticism about the hire. RTD points out that the firm is already involved in the Bay-Delta Conservation Plan.
The DNP has not seen the short list of firms that CH2MHill beat out, but would be interested to know what they were. And of course, whether any of them would have been more acceptable to RTD. Kind of doubt it.
CH2MHill is getting $9.5M to do the work, charged with coming up with a plan to meet those “co-equal goals”:
State law calls for the Delta Plan to guide state and local actions in the Delta so that they further the coequal goals. According to the California Water Code, Section 85054: “Coequal goals” means the two goals of providing a more reliable water supply for California and protecting, restoring, and enhancing the Delta ecosystem. The coequal goals shall be achieved in a manner that protects and enhances the unique cultural, recreational, natural resource, and agricultural values of the Delta as an evolving place.
While that seems like a clear enough purpose, the devil is in the details. It is entirely unclear whether it is possible to meet these goals. If Hill is able to achieve these goals, then the state is getting a real bargain.
Keep in mind that “co-equal” goals are primarily of political utility.
Just today, as the Sacramento Bee’s Matt Weiser reports, the Corps of Engineers is considering imposing its national policy of tree-stripped levees for the Delta.
A treeless Delta landscape. So much for co-equal goals. The Delta is destined to become nothing more than a piece of plumbing if the risk-averse get their way.
An inverted marina for the Delta
As a coda to the recently-completed Peak Water studio, the DNP will be blogging on some of the work of the students.
The students, the DNP hopes and encourages, might blog too. We shall see.
Ariel Mieling’s project most directly addressed the issue of public and private space in the Delta.
Mieling’s site was the southeastern tip of Mandeville Island, once owned by Steve Wynn of MGM Grand and Bellagio fame, and now (or at least the last the DNP knew) by something called the Tuscany Research Institute, coincidentally (or not) also of Las Vegas.
Her proposal for an “inverted marina” is a critique of the private nature of the space of the Delta which, despite its key public role in the state’s water system, remains a subsidized libertarian landscape of tax shelters, cheap water, and private hunting clubs. As Mieling puts it
The dichotomy of public waterways and private levees is reflected in the differences between land and water fishing in the Delta ... A marina extends pleasure onto the water. An inverted marina captures the pleasure of water for use from the land.
Ms. Mieling envisions creating a new cut off island from her peninsular site, then flooding the subsided island’s interior to make it navigable and constructing ring piers accessible from the levee with different fishing habitats within the rings.
Mieling also proposes the construction of a water education destination facility with four aquariums that show the Delta’s ecosystem in 1850, 1900, 1950 and 2000. Classrooms and a lecture hall, a swimming pool, bait shop. washrooms and bioremediating water treatment landscape would all be powered by photovoltaics.
The DNP, like Ms. Mieling, supports a more democratically conceived and occupied Delta future—one that is not entirely controlled by risk-averse technocrats, far-flung power centers and slippery legislators who think that their responsibilities can be more effectively adjudicated by the reptilian rules of the state’s proposition system.
We like a Delta future where lots of little girls can spend Saturdays fishing with their dads without threat of trespassing, and do not believe that such a future creates a risk for water security or supply.
Peak Water studio book
The DNP is proud to announce the completion of the self-published Peak Water studio book.
From the back cover:
At any scale that it operates, design synthesizes the claims of competing interests. This premise is examined in the contested, fragile, technological, and below sea level Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta region of California. The contents of this book are the results of a two-and-a-half week analysis exercise done by graduate architectural students at the University of British Columbia.
If anyone is interested, the book is available for purchasing at Lulu.com. It costs $41.50 USD (shipping is extra), which is the production cost - neither the DNP nor anyone else makes any money from this. Rather, the book is thought of as a public resource and reference.
It is 185 pages total, in full-color and organized as follows:
Intro
Geography (extents & limits, urbanism, infrastructure, buildings, ecosystems)
Energy (biofuels, water & waste water treatment, wind, sun)
Images (full color, 22 total)
The graphic design of the book was a labor of love for Carey van der Zalm, a member of the studio with a background in graphic design. She did a fantastic job!
Tragedy or irony?
(updated 10:15 PM 4/14/10)
Today’s vote on Jean Fuller’s (R-Bakersfield) AB 2336, otherwise known as the striped bass eradication bill, is yet another expression of the ironies at play in the Delta.
Defending the striper is the Delta’s sportfishing community, which believes the fish should be granted status as a naturalized indigenous Delta species.
The bill turns the tables on sportfishing advocates, putting them on the defensive, shifting their legal expenditures to the defense of their beloved game fish and from threatened ones. Clever, those SJ/Antelope Valley folks. And now the Met is beginning to weigh in, too.
This drawing below, done by Peak Water studio student Angela Enman, is called “the tragedy,” but the story it tells is more an irony. Like the irony of a snipe and a clam.
The protagonist of the drawing, the Delta smelt, is a threatened fish indigenous to the Delta. The antagonist, the striper, who preys on the smelt fry as they try and make it out to the Bay.
Unfortunately, the out-migrating smelt are fooled by the immense pull of the State and Federal pumps at Tracy into thinking that downstream is in the direction of the redirected Delta water flow.
Since the fish are protected by environmental laws, the pumps are forced to work at reduced capacity so that the little creatures can make it out to the Bay. Needless to say, downstate water users are not very happy about this.
But the DNP has covered this particular narrative elsewhere, and instead wishes to redirect attention to the ironies of the relationship between smelt and striper.
For this we need to describe another way that the fish are protected, this time by environmental infrastructure, not policy.
Angela’s drawing describes the how the wayward smelt are captured by fish screens before they are ground into fertilizer by colossal pumps, measured by biologists, and put in a tank on the back of a truck.
They are then driven to a dock at Emmaton on Sherman Island, where they are dumped back into the Sacramento River at a place where the direction of downstream is not influenced by pumps or the Delta Cross Channel.
Stripers await this easy snack. Ask the fisherman who also await the stripers there.
Like the Delta itself, it’s difficult to imagine a scenario that doesn’t lead the smelt to extinction. The striper, whose Delta population has also declined in recent years, suggesting deep ecosystem problems given its hardiness, win!
Death of a species, then of a landscape.