Running Water

You’ve got your charismatic megafauna, like polar bears, losing their Arctic pack ice habitat as the poles warm. Everyone loves polar bears. (Including me.)

Then there are the tiny little creatures, the ones whose listing as endangered raises nothing but ire that such an insignificant mite could hold up human activity. Such as, say, the Delta smelt. But these tiny creatures are so much more vulnerable to habitat degradation, to pollution, to man-made changes in the environment. Their travails are ours; they’re telling us that something is seriously wrong.

So biologists at the UC Davis Fish Conservation and Culture Laboratory are breeding Delta Smelt in captivity, to keep the species alive, since they are almost sure to go extinct in the wild in the next few years.

The lab is creating the refuge population from a parent generation of just 500 smelt gathered from the Delta in December 2006. These are the last wild fish the lab was able to obtain before officials halted scientific collections in the Delta – another drastic step taken to protect the species.
…
There are currently no plans to reintroduce these fish. In fact, almost no one wants that to happen yet. At the moment, they represent only a backup plan.

Is this the ecosystem that we’re “managing for?”

I describe my experience of running in the 2003 recall election as “a performance art piece rather than a campaign.” One thing that I concentrated on was the experience of campaigning itself (such as it was.) I realize that the focus in different in this campaign (I actually want to win) but I still think that the experience is interesting for itself.

So, here are my campaign posters:

Mad props to National Printing Company in J-town, for a great job, and being a pleasure to work with.

It’s raining now, but when it’s dry, I’ll be going up the street to downtown Willow Glen to ask businesses to put them up in their windows. As long as we’re in the mad props department, my excellent gym, the Fitness Group is the first such business to do so!

I have a guest post up at San Jose Inside. Thanks to Jack Van Zandt!

I am running for a fairly obscure elected position. In fact, a common reaction when I tell people that I’m running for the SCVWD Board is, “That’s elected?” What public attention the Board has received has come about from coverage in the Mercury. Which is why I find the situation described by this article from The New Yorker so disturbing. Not that it took reading it to make me aware of the parlous state of our daily print media, but it’s a thorough, if depressing, overview of the subject. However wonderful it is in other ways, the blogosphere doesn’t have the reporting resources of even a mid-size paper like the Merc. OK, you’ve got me covering the Board meetings, but I have an obvious agenda here, don’t I? Contemplating life without daily newspapers, where is the truly disinterested coverage going to come from, not only of the Water District, but of all local politics?

Local government, overwhelmingly, has the biggest effect on our everyday lives, and yet taking an active interest in it tends to evoke the same kinds of reactions as does trainspotting or Civil War reenactments. I’m obviously interested in it; I have to think that you are, too, if you’re here reading this. But we’re in a definite minority, and I have no answers at all about how to involve more people, except that reducing the amount of information available is going the wrong direction.

I also have to say that the other common reaction I get to news of my candidacy is defensiveness that the person I’m telling doesn’t know which district she lives in, so I know full well that haranguing people isn’t the way to go, either.

I’m off to the Monterey Bay Aquarium in a few minutes, for a spring-break visit to the new Splash Zone. But first, a couple of news stories.

The report on the Sierra snowpack just came out, and it’s funny how our two local papers spin the news. The Mercury trumpets: Sierra Report: No 2008 Drought, while the Chronicle is a bit more realistic: Sierra snowpack won’t fill reservoirs. Both articles point out that our share of Sierra water, as conveyed through the Delta, is going to be smaller this year, as pumping is restricted to aid the endangered smelts.

And as I leave for the home of the Seafood Watch card, I will not be eating salmon of any kind, any time soon. We’re already facing a summer without local salmon. And today’s New York Times reports on the unsustainable practices in Chilean salmon farms, whence come much of our supply. Especially disturbing was the image of Marine Harvest’s packing up to move on to unpolluted waters after fouling their current site, incidentally leaving local workers without their jobs.

Back to back SCVWD meetings. This morning’s highlights: a presentation on the Delta, brief discussion on filling vacant unclassified positions, and briefer discussion on the amount of time a Board member or the CEO must wait until coming back to work for the District as an employee. When I say that the Delta presentation was given by Greg Zlotnick, former Director of District 5, and now an unclassified employee who joined the District immediately after resigning from the Board, a thread emerges to link all of these disparate topics.

Mr. Zlotnick gave a very informative presentation on the actions of the Delta Vision Blue Ribbon Task Force and the progress on the Bay Delta Conservation Plan. It is clear why Stan Williams hired him as special counsel; he is obviously highly knowledgeable and experienced in Delta issues. He was also obviously very comfortable presenting to the Board; when Chair Kamei tried to open the discussion, he interrupted her several times to get in a few last comments.

Moving on in a crowded agenda, the Board considered a request by the CEO to approve her filling five vacant unclassified positions. While Director Sanchez reiterated his personal opinion that there are too many such positions at the District (there are 33), and that they should be reduced by attrition, the Board unanimously approved her request. The reason they have a policy of requiring such approval had just finished giving the Delta presentation, and yet there was no explicit mention of this, just vague reference to “the trouble we’ve had,” and expressions of trust in the current CEO.

And then the Board approved the policy language that they had discussed in the special meeting devoted to governance on 11 March. Director Santos had moved to reduce from 1 year to 6 months the time required before a Board member could be employed by the District, and had also included the CEO in that requirement. Director Judge was not present at that meeting, and today, he wondered what the rationale was for the change. At the time, Director Santos had expressed the feeling that having to wait a full year might cause possible financial hardship to a candidate. Judge wondered why it was necessary to have a waiting period at all, and Santos replied, “If you want to change it again, go ahead and make a motion.” Director Sanchez replied that “Politically, you’re never going to make that happen.”

I don’t believe that the Board feels there was anything wrong with Zlotnick’s hiring. With the bitterness that Directors Estremera and Santos have publicly expressed about the negative attention that it generated, there is no sense of remorse or responsibility to the voters. Even the policy changes that the Board passed in its immediate aftermath come up again and are questioned and called unnecessary.

I tried to think of something to add to this heartbreaking article last night, but I couldn’t, so I’m just posting the link here. Bats are dying off, and no one knows why, leading biologists to talk of their possible extinction.

This article is closer to home, and another example of, if not unintended, then unexpected consequences of the foreclosure crisis. Landlords facing foreclosure are not paying their water bills, hoping thereby to force out their tenants (and make for an easier sale of the property, I would guess.) So the East Bay Municipal Utility District is changing its policy to putting liens on defaulting landlords’ property, rather than shutting off the water to tenants.

And, in another unexpected consequence, the Mercury reports that researchers were themselves surprised to find that extensive computer modeling of water circulation in Lake Tahoe predicts that, due to climate change, by 2019, it may stop altogether, leaving the deeper layers devoid of oxygen, and driving cold water species into shallower water, where they will get eaten by introduced species.

This morning’s special Board meeting dealt with the District’s Capital Improvement Program, which is the District’s rolling five-year plan for large capital projects. Today’s meeting dealt with adding projects to the plan, but with the understanding that the budget process, which is about to begin, will be the final word on what actually gets built.

The Board approved the addition of three flood control projects: two bridges on Lower Silver Creek (at Capitol Expressway and Jackson Avenue) and restoring capacity on lower Llagas Creek. This latter project was the subject of some comment among the Board members. Director Sanchez wondered why clearing thickets of willow was so expensive, and Chair Kamei predicted that the options available to the District were very narrow, that buying adjacent property and expanding the channel by moving back levees would be the result. It sounded as though this was a maintenance problem that grew until it turned into a capital project.

There was an environmental enhancement project also included under the watersheds category, the Pond A8 project, which is part of the restoration of the former Cargill salt ponds. This project will open pond A8 to tidal action, restoring a salt-marsh habitat, scouring sediment from the slough and providing more flood-control capacity for Alviso.

Moving to the water utility side, by far the largest project added to the CIP was the upgrades to the Rinconada Water Treatment Plant. This is a multi-year, $264 million project to move from chlorination to advanced treatment techniques and improve the quality of our Delta water, as well as increase the capacity of the plant and perform ongoing maintenance.

And, pursuant to Board requests, the Stevens Creek Fish Passage Enhancement was moved up by several years. This is part of the Fisheries and Aquatic Habitat Collaborative Effort (FAHCE). This was again the subject of some Board comment. Chair Kamei wondered why it had taken so long to get to this, and staff replied that this particular project was never due to be started until a few years from now, anyway. However, the fact that the best overview on FAHCE that I could find to link to is from 1998 still implies that the whole effort is not moving along as quickly as many people would like.

All worthy projects, to be sure. Trish Mulvey, in a public comment, however, pointed out that there was no discussion of how any of these projects fit into the District’s “No Regrets” portfolio. (And it is another measure of obscurity that the best discussion of this initiative is in a water supply planning study from 2003.)

Today, I took my family on a farm tour at TLC Ranch. Jim Dunlop and his wife Rebecca Thistlethwaite, raise pigs




and laying hens



in Watsonville. The animals are raised on pasture, fed organic feed, and, as ethicurians would put it it, have only one bad day in their lives.

Jim now has 3,500 chickens. That is a lot of chickens, but it is only a drop in the bucket compared to the current demand for pasture-raised eggs. Because of the consolidation of the meat industry, Jim either has to slaughter his animals himself, or drive them hours away to have them slaughtered at USDA-inspected slaughterhouses. The slaughterhouse infrastructure is designed around the huge CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations) in the Central Valley,

not for the convenience of small producers who treat their animals humanely and feed them the way the animals evolved to eat.

This is a subject that I am passionate about, but I will turn this back to water by mentioning two things. One is that these enormous CAFOs dump untreated sewage laced with antibiotics into the environment. Jim rotates his pigs and chickens throughout his acres of pasture, where their manure enriches the soil, instead of turning into toxic waste.

The other is that the Water District sets its water rates lower in South County to encourage the preservation of farmland as open space. I think that there is much greater potential for farming in the Santa Clara Valley, that the huge and growing market just a few miles to the north is a wonderful opportunity to embrace local production of sustainable food.

ETA: Here is an excellent discussion of CAFO pollution, and the EPA’s attempts to weaken further their reporting requirements.

March 22 is World Water Day, declared as such by the United Nations, and focusing this year on sanitation.