Patricia McBroom’s most recent posting on her blog, California Spigot, looks at efforts to get a National Heritage Area designation for the Delta and to get a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to recapture the history and enduring narratives of the area, hopefully to raise public awareness and perhaps to gain leverage...Read More

By:  Jane Wagner-Tyack The Delta Risk Management Strategy (DRMS) is a study done by the Department of Water Resources (DWR) and a team of consultants in response to AB 1200 (legislation authored by John Laird, now the California Natural Resources Secretary).  Phase 1 of DRMS has come in for criticism in the past for painting...Read More

This bit of “truthiness” was exposed at the Delta Protection Commission (DPC) meeting on January 26.  That was also the meeting at which Resources Deputy Secretary Jerry Meral addressed the DPC. Meral, who is trying to midwife the BDCP, told the DPC that every concern of Delta counties and Delta people will be considered and...Read More

The big news this week with the Delta Stewardship Council (DSC) is that everyone who wants to comment on the 2,000-and-some page Draft Environmental Impact Report (DEIR) for the Draft Delta Plan has until February 2 to do it. Restore the Delta has commented in detail on some portions of the DEIR as part of...Read More

The Planning and Conservation League’s annual legislative symposium in Sacramento on January 28 brought together several hundred people for break out sessions on a variety of topics.  Bruce Reznik, the new Executive Director, said in the morning keynote that the influence of environmentalism is very low in “the building” (the State Capitol); environmentalists need to...Read More

The 3-hour January 25 Bay Delta Conservation Plan (BDCP) public meeting was devoted to presentations on eight chapters of the BDCP draft by consultants ICF International. Most of the time was spent on appendices to the chapter that analyze biological effects of the plan, and on public comments and questions related to those appendices. With...Read More

If you are having trouble keeping track of what’s going on here, you’re in good company. We have the BDCP going forward with a plan that the 2009 legislation said was supposed to be incorporated into the Delta Plan. But the Delta Stewardship Council plowed on ahead to produce a draft Delta Plan WITHOUT the...Read More

Natural Resources Secretary John Laird has added his voice to those who want to slow down on flow studies and determinations for the Delta. He’s also asking outside groups not to engage in discussions with legislators about water conveyance, Delta levees, or financing, saying that such discussions are premature. It looks like problems with financing...Read More

In his State of the State address, Governor Brown confirmed this week what we all knew anyway: Conveyance in the Delta is a priority for him. He went on to repeat the canard about how the BDCP project “will ensure water for 25 million Californians and for millions of acres of farmland as well as...Read More

In her 2007 book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, journalist Naomi Klein traces a pattern in which economic “shock therapy” is used to gain control for large-scale corporate enterprises when the public is disoriented by wars, terrorist attacks, or natural disasters. Klein’s book reads like a catalog of situations in which corporate...Read More