Badlands Journal

For immediate release:
30 July 2008

Contact:
Bill Jennings, CSPA Executive Director, 209-464-5067, 209-938-9053 (cell)
Mike Jackson, CSPA Attorney, 530-283-0712, 530-927-7387 (cell)

CSPA Protests State Board’s Elimination of Key Delta Protection

Stockton, CA. Today, the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance (CSPA) submitted a formal petition to the State Water Resources Control Board (State Board) asking it to reconsider its issuance of a “secret” Order allowing export pumping to be increased despite violation of Delta water quality standards. The Order was issued in response to a petition from the California Department of Water Resources (DWR) and U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (USBR). South Delta Water Agency has also asked the State Board to reconsider the decision.

Although Badlands began its Sunshine Week (now stretching into Sunshine Month) with Merced County government issues, members of the editorial board have been attending Merced Area Groundwater Pool Interests (MAGPI) meetings since the inception of MAGPI several years ago. We have found these meetings extremely valuable for the amount of information about the Merced area water resources, but have continually been mystified by what, if any, public-process rules, regulations or laws MAGPI follows at any given point. Below, readers will find several months of correspondence concerning MAGPI’s latest product, a groundwater management plan update. In addition to letter subjects, we have bolded certain passages we found particularly interesting.

Badlands Journal editorial board

And he is too humble to take the responsibility for thinking. The whole structure of his world would be endangered if he permitted himself to think. The pieces must stick within their pattern or the whole thing collapses and the design is gone. We wonder whether in the present pattern the pieces are not straining to fall out of line; whether the paradoxes of our times are not finally mounting to a conclusion of ridiculousness that will make the whole structure collapse. For the paradoxes are becoming so great that leaders of people must be less and less intelligent to stand their own leadership. John Steinbeck, The Log from the Sea of Cortez (1941), p. 46.

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From: MCCORRYM
To: pkhiek@co.merced.ca.us, rgabriele@co.merced.ca.us
CC: rlewis@co.merced.ca.us, jfincher@co.merced.ca.us, CALFMAN1, MCCORRYM
Sent: 3/31/2008 10:55:31 A.M. Pacific Daylight Time
Subj: Request to view active files pertaining to Felix Torres

Mr. Khiek and Mr. Gabriele,

On March 28, 2008, we received an email from Mr. Gabriele. In the body of the email was a reference to our potential request to view all files associated with the Felix Torres Child Development Center. We are confirming in this email our right to view these files.

In a previously scheduled meeting, we had incorrectly anticipated the timing of a Hearing Officer hearing. Typically, they have lasted between 30 minutes to one hour — this particular hearing ran nearly 2 hours - in which we were actively participating (February 25, 2008). As a result, Mr. Khiek, seems to have interpreted our actions as disrespectful to staff as we were late for our appointment (we met him after the meeting was over). Unfortunately, despite our good faith attempts, we have been unable to accurately predict the duration of County hearings — no disrespect to staff time, it is/was beyond our control.

Badlands is declaring the coming days a Sunshine Week to post a number of documents submitted to Merced County government in the last few months. Some of these documents have been included in the official packets of information for Board of Supervisors and Planning Commission meetings. Others have been suppressed.
This material is best understood by reference to the audio or video archives of supervisors’ and planning commission meetings and we encourage readers seriously interested in understanding their local government to go to the Merced County webpage, http://www.co.merced.ca.us/CountyWeb/, to seek out these hearings, particularly the two board of supervisors meetings on July 1 and July 8.

Badlands is declaring the coming days a Sunshine Week to post a number of documents submitted to Merced County government in the last few months. Some of these documents have been included in the official packets of information for Board of Supervisors and Planning Commission meetings. Others have been suppressed.
This material is best understood by reference to the audio or video archives of supervisors’ and planning commission meetings and we encourage readers seriously interested in understanding their local government to go to the Merced County webpage, http://www.co.merced.ca.us/CountyWeb/, to seek out these hearings, particularly the two board of supervisors meetings on July 1 and July 8.
The following correspondence and public comment letters concern the approval of a Merced County Housing Authority project.

Badlands is declaring the coming days a Sunshine Week to post a number of documents submitted to Merced County government in the last few months. Some of these documents have been included in the official packets of information for Board of Supervisors and Planning Commission meetings. Others have been suppressed.

Badlands is declaring the coming days a Sunshine Week to post a number of documents submitted to Merced County government in the last few months. Some of these documents have been included in the official packets of information for Board of Supervisors and Planning Commission meetings. Others have been suppressed.

Badlands is declaring the coming days a Sunshine Week to post a number of documents submitted to Merced County government in the last few months. Some of these documents have been included in the official packets of information for Board of Supervisors and Planning Commission meetings. Others have been suppressed.

Badlands is declaring the coming days a Sunshine Week to post a number of documents submitted to Merced County government in the last few months. Some of these documents have been included in the official packets of information for Board of Supervisors and Planning Commission meetings. Others have been suppressed.

Badlands is declaring the coming days a Sunshine Week to post a number of documents submitted to Merced County government in the last few months. Some of these documents have been included in the official packets of information for Board of Supervisors and Planning Commission meetings. Others have been suppressed.

Badlands is declaring the coming days a Sunshine Week to post a number of documents submitted to Merced County government in the last few months. Some of these documents have been included in the official packets of information for Board of Supervisors and Planning Commission meetings. Others have been suppressed.

At the end of Joseph Kanon's The Good German (Picador, 2001), there is an interview with the author. The interviewer asks Kanon, whose novel superbly depicts the labyrith of bureaucracies among Allied Armed Forces in the first weeks of the occupation of Berlin at the end of WWII:

As a writer whose work often centers on shrouded governmental activity, do you consider yourself prone to conspiracy theories?

Kanon. No. Conspiracies exist largely in the world of melodrama. In the real world of government, we're more likely to find the less exciting mix of incompetence, special interests, political expediency, and plain, dumb carelessness.

The California Department of Water Resources announced on June 27, after the largest fire in Northern California history had been raging for a week:

Members of the public who make comments on projects before the Merced County Board of Supervisors are routinely chastised by supervisors for sending in their written comments late. This letter by attorney Marsh Burch explains the problem. Because the County could not produce a coherent packet of information for the July 1 board meeting, three items had to be continued.

To Supervisor Jerry O'Banion, who at the June 10 board meeting, accused the public of using late submissions (at the perfectly legal time of a public hearing) as a "ploy" and a "tactic," we suggest again that the ploy and tactic is the County government's, not the public's.

Since every ploy and tactic imply a strategy, citizens of Merced County must assume that the strategy of County government is the strategy of finance, insurance and real estate special interests which has produced our present national shame, our mortgage foreclosure rate. Nowhere is that clearer than when the public tries to obtain documentary background to special interest projects in Merced County.

However, today, July 1, 2008, the supervisors sullenly blinked.

Badlands Journal editorial board
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