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On the Hayes meeting
Lester's Stacked Deck: Are we surprised?
by Bill Jennings, Executive Director, CSPA
August 11, 2009 -- California Department of Water Resources Director Lester Snow invited Deputy Secretary of the Interior David Hayes to California for a California Water Issues Forum to discuss the Delta. The Forum will be held this Wednesday, 12 August, at the Capitol Plaza Holiday Inn (California Room) at 300 “J” Street in Sacramento at 1:00 p.m. David Hayes is Interior Secretary Salazar's point person charged with coordinating the Obama Administration's Delta efforts.
Lester being Lester, made sure the Forum is a Bay Delta Conservation Plan (BDCP) and export water agency love fest. No fishermen, Delta farmers, boaters or informed opponents of the peripheral canal are on the agenda to embarrass him or complicate matters.
Dr. Doom (Jeff Mount) will be there to promote his catastrophe theories of impending levee disaster. Representatives from Westlands and Metropolitan Water District will be present to extol the benefits of increased exports. There will be the obligatory token environmentalist who is collaborating in the BDCP process. And of course, no dog and pony show would be complete without a large contingent of the state and federal water and resource agency staff, who chaperoned the collapse of the estuary, to now tell how they're going to save it by rerouting the Sacramento River straight to the export pumps.
However, Brother Snow couldn't figure out a way to eliminate the public comment period. It's important that the fishing, environmental, Delta farming and boating communities turn out to let the hydraulic brotherhood understand that their scheme is not yet “a done deal.” The Delta needs you to let them understand that there is a large and passionate grassroots opposition to a peripheral canal that is committed to, with due deference to Winston Churchill, “ fight with growing strength on the channels, cuts and sloughs of the Delta through its tules and marshes and from the levees and in the orchards and fields - to understand that we shall never surrender our estuary and its fisheries to the corporate greed of water merchants and the barons of industrial agriculture. We shall never surrender!