What does public and private mean in the Delta?

The Peak Water studio has just returned from a four-day field research trip to the Delta.

Among the most significant findings of the trip was that conventional definitions of public and private do not apply there.

Thankfully.

Here is the No Trespassing sign at the Macdonald Island Bridge, an entirely clear indication of private rights.

Similar signs can be found on most of the islands of the Large Owner Axis, the site of the Peak Water studio’s exploration.

But the actual enforcement of the private property right to keep people off of private land is not consistently employed.

Our research trip experienced the Delta’s ambiguous public/private space regulations firsthand. Despite the DNP’s decade-plus experience with
Bacon Island’s previous reasonable access policy, we were forced to leave the island by a security guard wearing a sidearm.

Bacon Island is one of four islands comprising the Delta Wetlands Project, a private water development project that for almost twenty years has been seeking approval to develop roughly 40,000 acres into equal parts managed habitat and water reservoir.

Only recently the DWP’s policy of allowing people to fish from their levee banks must have changed. Despite the common and generous practice of other private landowners who allow people to fish from their levee banks, Bacon’s owners have become less generous. That is, of course, their right.

Here are a few images of people we saw fishing from Lower Jones Tract, just to the east of Bacon Island:

That image, of a dad and his daughter is beautiful, and so is the thought that here, in the Delta, four lawn chairs occupied by four kids with fishing poles, can be welcome.

Bonus points: Here are a couple of teenagers biking on the Jones Tract levee. The Delta’s future, right there.

Can we agree that none of the above are a threat to anyone or anything?

The DNP wonders why the generous policy of access to Bacon Island has been scrapped. Further, the DNP wonders if it is fair that the owners of islands that receive public funding subsidies and rivers of essentially free water to maintain their levees can then in turn deny the public access to those same levees.

Hoping to get folks in the Westlands Water District salivating between apoplectic fits of rage, here’s a river of water flowing onto an island of the Large Owner Axis:

The people one sees on the banks of the Delta’s levees fishing and enjoying each others’ company seem to be average working class people. They arrive in a variety of social groupings, from families to buddies to dads with daughters.

The generic and open system of levee infrastructure is a perfect mechanism for simple pleasures like fishing with friends and family. We experienced how, on an atypically sunny and warm Saturday in January, the Delta fills with working class people enjoying themselves.

Such an experience only reinforces a larger belief that the value of the Delta cannot be reduced to fish, or water, or risk, or any number of other abstract policy talking points. The Delta’s open and generous landscape transcends these policies, and returns to the simple question of its future human potential.

The DNP proposes:

1. That the land of the Delta remain almost entirely privately owned. Make the levees the responsibility of government to upgrade, but their development rights are retained by the property owners. Radically reinforce the levees, as they are doing on Jones Tract. Reduce significantly the threat of flooding and seismic event.

2. Open up the entire Delta’s levee system to the movement and enjoyment of people. Build light ferry systems to help them get around, and develop commercial, agricultural and public facilities to augment the experience and help pay for the cost of upgrading the levees.