Control the flows of water in California, and you control the state, the people, the resources, the businesses and the politics.
The fact that Davis had this board handle his power crisis was very scary to me.
So who are these people, where do they come from, and are they all card carrying Rats and enviralists?
The first guy that came up here was from the Red Bluff office. He told a room full of landowners that the preliminary opinion from Sacramento was that if the coho salmon was listed under the State ESA, then the fish would get the water first, and what was left over would go to the water rights holders. Keep in mind, water rights on both the Shasta and Scott rivers are fully adjudicated by the County Superior Court. He explained that the California Department of Fish and Game would set "minumum flow standards" for the fish, and that the DWR would enforce those standards.
The next guy came up a month later and wanted to put a flow gauge in the river...above the ag diversions. Come to find out, there is already a gauge below the ag lands, thus the bureaucrats could do simple math and say, "well, there's more coming into the valley then going out so the farmers and ranchers must be to blame for the river going dry." Many were opposed to this, and I led the resistance. The problem that the State had was that the enire stretch of river thru the valley is in private ownership. Without a willing landowner, they could not put in the gauge. One day I happened to walk into a meeting between the landowner, the DWR and the USGS. I explained to the landowner the simple math concept, and that this would open the valley up to political manipulation of the data. The landowner began resisting the DWR employee's arguements, to which the regulator stated: "It doesn't matter if you give us permission or not, we will use the County highway bridge site right-of-way if you don't give us permission." This bridge was on the landowner's property, and what the regulator didn't know was that the County only had a right-of-way at the bridge...they did not actually own the land under the bridge. I then told the regulator that what he was doing was essentially extortion. At this point, the Fed (USGS) guy walked out and told me privately that "this is not how the USGS operates, we will back out of the project if the State over-rides landowner objections."
In subsequent meetings, I told the public that the State was in essence threatening people with emminent domain if they did not give in to the State's demands. This prompted several heated calls from the Red Bluff office accusing me of spreading mis-information. I held my ground and stated that government employees have no right to threaten people when they don't get their way. The official stated that "You people better get used to the idea of gauges because they are going in whether you like it or not; Sacramento has determined that this will happen."
To date, the gauges have still not been installed, and the DWR has been warned that there is a high likelyhood of vandalism to the gauges if they are installed over the objections of the landowners.
BTW, the young regulator who threatened the landowner was extremely biased against republicans, accusing the "Reagan administration" of removing the old USGS flow gauges. Fortunately, the USGS guy stated that the gauges were blown out by the 1964 and 1973 floods, not removed by the Reagan administration.