Due to my commitment to lecturing at San Jose State University for the past 10 months, this blog has been reduced, for the time being, to a semi-annual salute to Earth's position in its annual cycle around the sun - the midway points of extreme posture toward our life-giving sun, days we call the Solstice. On this Solstice, in the northern hemisphere of the planet, the days are the longest, in the southern half of the Earth, the nights are the longest. On these days, Earthlings everywhere gather, as we complement each other with the same honoring ceremonies across the planet. It's a good time to remember and honor our Mother planet, who holds all our ancestors before us. We also celebrate the commonality of all peoples and all life on the planet.
These ceremonies predate what we call civilization, as people studied the stars for at least a millennium before science ever began to evolve in human consciousness and give us understanding of planetary physics and celestial movement. Today we can enjoy visualizing the entire universe through YouTube or any medium available for watching spectacular graphics and knowledge packaged by the best videographers available.
That wouldn't be me, with my 10-year old Olympus digital camera, but I will share some of the Summer Solstice ceremony in which I had the honor to attend, hosted and produced by Sergio Martinez and Angelica delGato this past Sunday. They live along Coyote Creek also, about 300 feet upstream, on the bank next to the William St. bridge. Their home is the farmhouse where the Ferrari family lived and tended the orchard, which was here before becoming 8 duplexes. I'm in great awe and appreciate the great deal of work to organize and prepare their yard and the food for all the celebrants lucky enough to join them in this celebration of life at this significant place on our planet's journey around the sun.
The shaman for part of the ceremony spoke of the Aztec calendar and counting system based on 2o instead of 10, as most of the modern world uses for metrics of time and space, except for astrophysicists, who use light-years. My reading of Mayan and Aztec culture's had informed me that these cultures used 20 instead of 10 for the simple reason that we have 20 fingers AND toes, and they're what we first used to count with. And coincidentally, this year in the world's business calendar, it happens to be the year we call 2010. Sounds like a perfect year to bring together the old mezzo-American calendar and the modern world we are living in today.
For a great ride through time and space. I recommend viewing a segment of the Universe series from the History Channel called Beyond the Big Bang. We are truly star dust in awe of stardust. Blessed Be!
I have been so absent from blogger land these past four months because I can only do so much key board time until repetitive motion cripples my upper right side. All I need is a good voice command typing program under my solstice bush.
But I have been on my keyboard a great deal during the last four months in order to create 27 seventy-five minute multimedia presentations for the class I taught last semester at San Jose State University. The course was titled Water Policy in The Western United States and was taught in the Environmental Studies Department and known through the SJSU catalog as EnvS 129. All the lecture notes, course syllabus (called greensheets, even though they're not when they are printed on paper), quizzes & the final exam are published in this google-powered web site for the world to use as it will: http://sites.google.com/site/envs129/
I have received much encouragement from friends, colleagues and the students themselves in regard to my teaching this past semester. I am also honored and challenged to teach a second course in the Spring 2010 semester on the more numeric side of water resources called MANAGEMENT. This course is listed as EnvS 128 and requires prerequisites of Statistics and basic Chemistry. I consider that the students will arrive with brains exposed to the type of discipline required in those courses.The web site for EnvS 128 is now "under construction" with as minimal of a footprint that I can MANAGE
But I am not there to teach students to be engineers. There is another college a few feet (and clicks) away which trains minds to conduct water engineering work. Most of the students come to the these courses in the College of Social Science to learn how they can help in building a sustainable future, but they certainly won't be ALL part of an engineering team to physically build parts of a water system.
Every student does, however, participate in using and paying for the water infrastructure components that are proposed and built by engineers and marketed and funded with the great influence of business and government. What they need to know is the language of the engineers, so they can engage in critical thinking and PARTICIPATE competently during the public review process, where many powerful self-interests are often poised and ready to override the public good and public trust of the environment and build some public (WATER) work that is going to have serious negative impacts and , in the long run, threaten our species and the sustainability of the ecosystem, which weaves together all our species.
My deepest ethics about water resources are succinctly expressed in this seven-minute student video, titled Rain Dance The film maker is named Amanda Levensohn and she certainly would have received an A+ if she were doing this work in one of my classes.
The Santa Clara Valley Water District Board was successful in bulldozing its way through the legislature and managed a nearly unanimous vote on AB 466(Cot0), with Senator Simitian of Palo Alto being the only No vote.
Lobbying against the bottomless bank accounts of the Golden Spigot (as Scott Herhold of the SJ Mercury likes to call it) would have been a wasted effort to appear at the hearings in Sacramento to try to stop this effort. But I continued to post a better alternative in my blog and posted a link to Senator Simitian web site to send him comments. At least one of the County's Sacramento delegation is awake and understands bad politics when he sees it.
For the record, the following is the Legislative Analyst's description of the impact of the new bill and the record of votes in the Assembly and the Senate:
THIRD READING
Bill No: AB 466 Author: Coto (D) Amended: 6/30/09 in Senate Vote: 21
SENATE LOCAL GOVERNMENT COMMITTEE : 5-0, 6/17/09 AYES: Wiggins, Cox, Aanestad, Kehoe, Wolk
ASSEMBLY FLOOR : 73-0, 5/14/09 - See last page for vote
SUBJECT : Santa Clara Valley Water District
SOURCE : Santa Clara Valley Water District
DIGEST : This bill changes the composition and representation of the Santa Clara Valley Water District Board effective December 3, 2010, expands a district exemption from special fees, and makes other governance changes.
Senate Floor Amendments of 6/30/09 clarify when District directors' terms start.
ANALYSIS :
I. Board of Directors . A seven-member board of directors governs the Santa Clara Valley Water District (District), reflecting a compromise that combined the former Santa Clara Valley Water Conservation District, the former Santa Clara County Flood Control and Water Conservation District, and two other water districts. The former Santa Clara Valley Water Conservation District had an elected five-member board. The Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors was the ex officio board of the former Santa Clara County Flood Control and Water Conservation district. The two other water districts had their own elected boards. The District's current seven-member board has five elected members; one from each supervisorial district. The county supervisors appoint the two other directors who must be voters within the two former water districts. When the District wants to reduce the board to five elected members, the Legislature eliminated the appointed members of the District's board of directors effective on January 1, 2010, by enacting AB 2435 (Coto), Chapter 279, Statutes of 2006.
This bill repeals the statutes which will reduce the size of the District's existing seven-member board of directors to five elected directors on January 1, 2010.
This bill enacts a new governance scheme:
1. Until December 3, 2020, the board consists of:
A. The two appointed directors who served on the board on December 31, 2008.
B. The five elected directors. The two directors who were elected in 2006 serve until December 5, 2010. The three directors who were elected in 2008 serve until December 7, 2012.
2. Starting December 3, 2010, the board of directors consists of seven elected directors.
This bill requires the board of directors to adopt by June 30, 2010, a resolution that creates the seven electoral districts. Voters elect directors by these electoral divisions to four-year terms for four designated seats in November 2010 and the three other seats in November 2012. The District's elections and the directors' terms must follow the Uniform District Elections Law. The board must reapportion the electoral districts by November 1 of the year following each decennial census. The bill renumbers the current provisions for filling board vacancies and recalling directors.
II. Compensation . The District's directors receive $100 for each day's service, but not more than $600 a month, plus actual and necessary expenses. State law requires local governments to adopt reimbursement policies and disclose payments (AB 1234 [Salinas], Chapter 700, Statutes of 2005). This bill requires the District to place quarterly expense reimbursement reports on the board's agenda and to determine if the reimbursements comply with the board's policies. This bill prohibits a member of the District's board of directors from seeking or accepting compensated employment with the District while a director, and for one year after the director's term of office.
III. Governance . This bill requires the District's board by July 1, 2010, to adopt lobbying regulations that include registration, reporting, and disclosure requirements. This bill prohibits directors from contacting the District's staff on behalf of contract bidders. This bill prohibits the District's board from authorizing severance pay when an appointed employee leaves voluntarily. This bill requires the District board's minutes to include a public report of actions taken in closed sessions under the Brown Act.
IV. Reports. The Ralph M. Brown Act requires local governments to post their agendas, including brief general descriptions of each item, at least 72 hours before their regular meeting. The Brown Act provides that writings which are distributed to a majority of the legislative body are public records and must be made available upon request without delay. With five specific exceptions, this bill requires that reports prepared by the District's staff that recommended action by the board at a regular public meeting or public hearing must be available to the public at least six days before the meeting or hearing. This bill declares that this requirement does not require public release of documents that the California Public Records Act exempts from disclosure. If a staff report's recommendation changes because of direction from a director, the report must disclose that revision.
V. Special Taxes . When the District levies special taxes that are subject to a 2/3-voter approval, it may charge minimum uniform rates based on land use category and size. When levying these special taxes, the District can exempt residential parcels that are owned and occupied by taxpayers who are 65 years or older (AB 88 [Alquist], Chapter 63, Statutes of 2001). This bill also allows the District to exempt residential parcels that are owned and occupied by taxpayers who qualify as totally disabled under the federal Social Security Act.
VI. District Budgets . By June 15, the District's board must meet to consider its proposed budget and hear public comments. At the same meeting, this bill requires the board to review its financial reserves and its reserve management policy. Comments
More than 40 years after the district took over the County's flood control duties, local officials continue to discuss how the District should operate. Since the enactment of AB 2435 (Coto), local officials have continued to debate the District's governance. This bill is the result of the latest round of discussions about how to improve the District's accountability, transparency, and responsiveness.
Santa Clara Valley Water District (source) Association of California Water Agencies California Special Districts Association Palo Alto Chamber of Commerce San Jose/Silicon Valley Branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
ASSEMBLY FLOOR : AYES: Adams, Anderson, Arambula, Beall, Bill Berryhill, Tom Berryhill, Blakeslee, Block, Blumenfield, Brownley, Buchanan, Caballero, Charles Calderon, Carter, Chesbro, Conway, Cook, Coto, Davis, De La Torre, De Leon, DeVore, Duvall, Emmerson, Eng, Evans, Feuer, Fletcher, Fong, Fuller, Furutani, Galgiani, Gilmore, Hagman, Hall, Harkey, Hayashi, Hernandez, Hill, Huber, Huffman, Jeffries, Jones, Knight, Krekorian, Lieu, Logue, Bonnie Lowenthal, Ma, Mendoza, Miller, Monning, Nava, Nestande, Niello, Nielsen, John A. Perez, V. Manuel Perez, Portantino, Price, Ruskin, Salas, Silva, Skinner, Solorio, Audra Strickland, Swanson, Torlakson, Torres, Torrico, Tran, Villines, Yamada NO VOTE RECORDED: Ammiano, Fuentes, Gaines, Garrick, Saldana, Smyth, Bass
AGB:cm 7/1/09 Senate Floor Analyses
SUPPORT/OPPOSITION: SEE ABOVE UNOFFICIAL BALLOT MEASURE: AB 466 AUTHOR: Coto TOPIC: Santa Clara Valley Water District. DATE: 08/27/2009 LOCATION: SEN. FLOOR MOTION: Assembly 3rd Reading AB466 Coto By Maldonado (AYES 32. NOES 1.) (PASS)
The State's favorite water fight is brewing up again as a package of legislation moves through the Legislature. The sole intention of this package is to fix the Delta watering hole, with its six million acre feet of straws sucking on it's life giving sustenance.
My response is one familiar to those who have read other posts on this blog:
In addittion to defending the veracity of Dr. Meral's op-ed piece, I commented:
It is the Delta farmers and boaters that are trying to mislead us again. If you really want to end agriculture in the San Joaquin Valley, stop this vital piece of plumbing from being built.
If the canal was built 25 years ago, as the State Legislature and Governor Jerry Brown agreed, 50 million LESS tons of salt would have been deposited on the farmlands as millions of acres were irrigated with salty water from the aqueducts.
With sea level rising, this rate of salinization will increase and the Central Valley farmlands will become permanently destroyed even sooner without the east Delta bypass channel in place. This may serve farmer/speculators well as salted lands are converted to cheap housing and strip malls.
It's shameful to watch and even encourage the loss of such a huge agricultural resource, after billions of federal and state dollars were invested in dams, pumps and canals to grow enough food and fiber to feed much of the US and several other countries. Farming uses 80% of the State's developed water.
The Canal is really about saving farming not about SoCal vs NoCal. Please educate yourselves and save us from making the same mistake twice. There won't be a third chance!
For the third year in a row, those humans with drips on their hats, have brought in harassing canines to attack us while our nesting process is in high mode. While we carry out our genetic mandate to PRO-create, these humans continue to show no regard for our place in the universe, here and now.
Our ancestors flew these paths for thousands of generations. We have always found these wetlands on the way to and from the salty water between the mountains. Each return, we find more habitat is gone and hot black sticky pebbles cover many former water areas. This valley has a bad case of humans.
The humans also must have water to live. Water goes where they want it, and they seem to use water much more often than there are days of rain. The valley is wet everywhere, all the many days between rains. What wetlands we find, we must use. We must create our next generation, as we share the prime directive of all species that contain the spirit of life.
The humans say they want to prevent our unused nutrients from entering the water. But this water has already flowed off the upland streams and through their encampments. The water is then collecting human unused nutrients and shiny floating colors on the top. We have tolerated this unfresh water because there is just not any better alternatives. The people encampments are everywhere there is water flowing into the lowlands.
The editors of Goose News wants to believe that these humans can learn, if we actually are able to get their attention. At the next inter-species congregation, Goose News proposes that a coalition of bird species begin forming word spelling formation groups. Goose News will go from being just another blog, to the spelling of words for humans, and in the actual airways of our home here in this valley.
Father Goose, The Head of Goose News and
Mother Goose, the Neck that turns the Head, and Chief Avian Letter-form Designer
On Monday, June 1, the Santa Clara Valley Water District held a "Open House" in the Olinder School Cafeteria to discuss their flood control options with the surrounding neighborhoods. About 100 people showed up over a four-hour period to be given docent-guided explanations of the dozens of wall maps, charts and graphs depicting the 10 or so options that had so far been considered by the engineering staff of the Water District.
Many folks showed up to voice their protest about any plans that included removing homes from the creek banks or putting levees around the park to enhance its function as a flood detention basin. In a separate post, I describe why William Street Park and much of the Coyote Creek park chain was developed for the dual purposes of flood detention and recreation.
Purely by coincidence, the next day, the Water District conducted what may have appeared as a demonstration of what it would look like to remove a house along the creek. The pics and video below was taken by me on Tuesday. What you see is the pile of sticks which used to be the Jaffe home on the 300 block of South 17th Street in downtown San Jose on the west bank of Coyote Creek.
The story of why this home was demolished began a few weeks after the January 25, 1997 flood on the Coyote Creek. After the flood stage had passed, the Water District began releasing water from Andersen Reservoir, located 20 miles upstream, for the next six weeks or so. Once they reached the elevation of their "rule curve" someone ordered the valve closed at the dam and the water level in the creek downtown dropped 2-3 feet almost instantaneously. Without the water column as a buttress, the saturated banks did what gravity demands and began flowing out into the river and everything above it collapsed.
Another home next to and south of the Jaffe's completely tipped dangerously toward the river, and was soon red tagged and eventually demolished also. There was also some bank failure in the back yard of the home north of the Jaffe home as well. The slippage of the bank unfortunately occurred in the middle of the Jaffe home, so part of the house remained habitable for the time being.
Law suits were, of course, filed against both the District and the City. The District used the immediate defense that the sewer in front of these homes was damaged and leaking and was therefore the cause of the bank failure, not the operation of the reservoir. After I was deposed by the attorney for the home owners, the water District's attorney was not too happy that I supported the theory that the bank slipped due to "draw down failure." In response, they shopped around for someone to write them a report refuting this theory and found a Stanford professor that would back them up, for a considerable fee, of course.
The District won the case but never felt too good about it, apparently, for in about 2006, the District offered to buy the Jaffe's home and remove it, as they have now done. This bring the total to five lots on the west bank of Coyote Creek now restored by the Water District to undeveloped parcels between the William Street bridge and the San Antonio Street bridge. The term used by the District (and others) for homes that back up to the creeks is called "encroachment."
Prior to 1950, before the construction of Andersen Dam, large setbacks from the creek banks were the rule, and streets such as Arroyo Way and Brookwood Drive did not exist, in respect for the need for such setbacks. The City General Plan today includes a 100 ft. setback for new subdivisions, but is seldom enforced, especially if the developer claims they will lose many buildable lots that the City should buy in order to "create" the setback.
The District, for years, has been encouraging Cities and the County to not create subdivisions that allowed homes to back up against the creek banks. Streets were encouraged or at least tolerated, even when floodable, as the District could use these paved surfaces for maintenance, while building homes that backed up to the creeks blocked access and created a continuous source of complaints and often litigation.
In 2000, the voters approved a parcel tax by over a two-thirds margin to fund the "Clean,Safe Creeks and Natural Flood Protection Program." This would generate funds for a period of 15 years to begin several flood control projects throughout the County. One of these projects is the Mid-Coyote Creek planning study, which began near the end of 2007 and has progressed to the state which was on display at the Olinder Cafeteria on Monday.
Yesterday, our District 3 Council member, Sam Liccardo, notified the neighborhoods that a task force would be appointed from all the neighborhoods surrounding the mid-Coyote Creek, between East Hedding St. upstream to Hwy. 280. Over the course of the next year, alternatives will be evaluated and recommended for consideration by the District. Congress member Zoe Lofgren also sent a letter to the neighbors that stated that no project would move forward without her endorsement and that of the neighborhood.
Tomorrow, the Water District will conduct a bus tour for those that signed up on the Monday or Wednesday "open house." The tour will start at Andersen Dam and move downstream, following the virtual flood wave through the reservoir and the creek channel below, heading eventually to South San Francisco Bay. This will hopefully help some of the neighbors visualize the daunting task upon the Water District staff to route a flood wave up to 17,000 cubic feet per second through this highly developed metropolis. It will also be a great opportunity to compare the benefits of flood detention to the less popular and more expensive alternatives of channelization.
But even if most of the flooding can be prevented using the existing reservoirs and other detention facilities like LagunaSeca in Coyote Valley and Lake Cunningham next to Eastridge, the meandering of the river bed through downtown neighborhoods will continue to claim homes built adjacent to Coyote Creek and, in time, we will see a repeat of yesterday's demolition and the demonstration of the forces of the earth, constantly at work in this naturally meandering stream bed.
While Henry Waxman takes on climate change from the federal helm, his home state of California is slowly but surely losing its primary resource: Agriculture
The San Joaquin Valley is the California poster child for desertification through salinization of its soils as a result of using water from the Federal Central Valley Project. This water contains 2 million tons of salt, applied through out each successive irrigation season.
The oceans are the planetary depository for salt. The continents have been contributing salt to the oceans since rain began to fall from the atmosphere. Humans add their piece to the salt flow with their activities, greatly accelerating the salt flow from certain watersheds.
Industrial agriculture adds enormous salt loads to the receiving waters upstream of the ocean and re-distributes salt downstream through irrigation projects, mainly financed by the federal government.
Twenty five years ago, the State was prepared to build a canal around the eastern edge of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta and thereby reduce this salt load by half and further restrict pumping if salt levels were too high to deliver water during droughts. That essential piece of plumbing was then called the Peripheral Canal and these have become the most dreaded two words in Sacramento.
In response to the State, certain large agricultural interests financed a campaign to stop the Peripheral Canal with a referendum to reverse the state legislative actions which authorized the Department of Water Resources to build the final link in this massive water system. Most support to kill the canal came from the Delta farmers and cotton empires of the Salyer and JG Boswell, built mostly in Tulare Lake and surrounding wetlands. Read excerpts from The King of California here.
With the success of this one ballot measure, San Joaquin Valley farmers fired the poison dart that would steal this 100 year effort by the US Bureau of Reclamation to reclaim these arid lands for production of food and fiber to supply our nation and much of the world. Over the past twenty-five years, the farm lands have been laced with 50 million tons of salt delivered with the irrigation water, twice as salty as it would have been if the Peripheral Can had been built.
It is while these lands are still a viable agricultural resource that we need to act.
I'd like to see California push toward more sustainable agriculture by lowering the salt content of the irrigation water in the San Joaquin Valley rather than watch the land owners salt it in and then develop the salt flats with urbanscape. This means we build the peripheral canal and design it for considerable sea level rise.
Congress should act soon to simply halt all water rights if land use conversion removes it from its agricultural purposes, even if it is due to loss of productivity due to soil pollution. This will create a major shift in protecting our national agricultural resources by making all farmers perpetual stewardsof the land, in exchange for a government-developed supply of water.
This proposal would bring the ag lobby to arms like you've never seen it, but it will be good to force them to show their hand (and strong arm behind it!)
George Miller is one of the few members of Congress who could kick off something like this. Congressman Henry Waxman in Southern California could be his strong ally. Senate allies will probably have to come from outside California, as our incumbent Senators Feinstein and Boxer are already owned by the ag lobby.
When the Peripheral Canal was stopped 25 years ago, I started calling the San Joaquin Valley the new Metropolis ofSacroBake, home to 30 million future California residents, unable to grow even a backyard garden in this newly created desert, wondering where their next water will come from: the sky or the good graces of the water managers who control any water coming from the ground or aqueducts and still able to pass the health standards set for salinity? Listen to NPR audio track on California Delta Faces Salty Future.
The world may yet mark us down as one more society that crumbled because of mismanaged irrigated agriculture and a self-imposed victim of too much Salt of The Earth.
That wouldn't be me, with my 10-year old Olympus digital camera, but I will share some of the Summer Solstice ceremony in which I had the honor to attend, hosted and produced by Sergio Martinez and Angelica del Gato this past Sunday. They live along Coyote Creek also, about 300 feet upstream, on the bank next to the William St. bridge. Their home is the farmhouse where the Ferrari family lived and tended the orchard, which was here before becoming 8 duplexes. I'm in great awe and appreciate the great deal of work to organize and prepare their yard and the food for all the celebrants lucky enough to join them in this celebration of life at this significant place on our planet's journey around the sun.
The shaman for part of the ceremony spoke of the Aztec calendar and counting system based on 2o instead of 10, as most of the modern world uses for metrics of time and space, except for astrophysicists, who use light-years. My reading of Mayan and Aztec culture's had informed me that these cultures used 20 instead of 10 for the simple reason that we have 20 fingers AND toes, and they're what we first used to count with. And coincidentally, this year in the world's business calendar, it happens to be the year we call 2010. Sounds like a perfect year to bring together the old mezzo-American calendar and the modern world we are living in today.
