BDCP Workshop UPDATE:

[Flutterby]

Tomorrow at 3PM! Hope you can be there with all your boating friends.....

"Delta activist groups will gather at the Martin Luther King Park in Stockton on Tuesday, September 22, 2009 at 3 pm to protest the Bay-Delta Conservation Plan (BDCP) water meeting, taking place across the street at the Civic Auditorium later that afternoon.

WHO:Barbara Barrigan-Parrilla, Restore the Delta

WHERE:Martin Luther King Park (across from the Civic Auditorium) Stockton, CA

WHEN:Tuesday, September 22, 2009, 3:00 p.m.

After opposing a package of water bills that neglected to provide the people of the Delta communities with a voice and would have allowed for the construction of a peripheral canal, Delta groups will protest the BDCP water meeting. The BDCP meetings have a preordained outcome - the construction of a peripheral canal and the members of the Delta community will have their voice heard in this fight."

http://www.restorethedelta.org

 

[Flutterby]

from Restore The Delta:

" About 600 concerned Delta advocates, including farmers, fisherman, boaters, landowners, environmentalists, and business leaders turned out for the four Bay Delta Conservation meetings hosted by the California Resources Agency. As we expected, the meetings were a controlled process and were designed to minimize comments from attendees. However, to the credit of Delta community members, numerous concerns and critiques were raised regarding the Bay Delta Conservation Plan serving as a mere tool for implementing the Governor's peripheral canal strategy.

In short, the BDCP presentations made by SAIC, the company contracted to create the BDCP plan, sounded much like King Julian's scheme (in Madagascar II) to use animal sacrifice as a way to acquire water from the volcano gods. According to an SAIC representative, by building a large pipe to divert a large amount of Sacramento River water, Delta fisheries will be made healthier because it will be easier for fish to escape the pumps in an upstream current. As with King Julian's presentation of the facts to the huddled masses, the SAIC science presentation "seemed" sound on the surface, but the premise - diverting large quantities of fresh water from a collapsing estuary in order to fix it - is fiction. Unfortunately, the consequences for the Delta, complete destruction of its fisheries and communities, would not be as harmless as an into- the-volcano prank in a kid's movie.

While the Bay Delta Conservation Plan Steering Committee, water exporters, and Resource Agency Directors should have been present at these meetings, Delta advocates succeeded in sending a clear message back to the staff present: that neither the Delta can be fixed, nor California's water problems solved by building a pipe or canal through the heart of the Delta in order to export water at the rate of 15,000 cubic-feet-per-second to agribusiness in the San Joaquin Valley."