No date mentioned in the TS article. The water flow is an issue. Younger forests and changing weather patterns are an issue. The writer, perhaps wisely, avoided too much discussion of residential and underground commercial draws from the river, probably because that might be interpreted as blaming people who don’t want to be blamed. So I hope when the meeting time and place are announced, all of the stakeholders will show up and be ready to listen as well as talk.
Already the comments thread attached to the article is heating up.
The image comes from the US Fish and Wildlife Service.
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June 21, 2010 at 12:57 pm
Anonymous
I don’t like fish.
June 21, 2010 at 4:18 pm
Eric Kirk
Are you killing all of them?
June 22, 2010 at 7:32 am
Fred Mangels
I like fish.
June 22, 2010 at 8:37 am
Anonymous
Where are the HumCPR trolls now? Usually they are here beating their drums when anything pertaining to the GPU comes up. But when you actually get at the meat of the issue? Crickets.
June 22, 2010 at 10:17 am
Rockfish Rule
I like fish, but not salmon so much.
June 22, 2010 at 11:52 am
longwind
8:37, could it be because this has nothing whatsoever to do with the GPU?
The meat of the issue you’re confused about has been discussed for months: the county has blocked rather than assisted private efforts to help the Mattole’s last salmonids. This is finally enough of an issue, thanks to the beating of drums, that county closed minds are creaking open–just as with the GPU, as you would have noticed if you noticed anythng.
So who are you calling a troll?
June 22, 2010 at 1:27 pm
Fred Mangels
I like salmon, but it’s best fresh caught. Otherwise, rockfish are fine for me.
June 22, 2010 at 7:39 pm
Eric Kirk
longwind – I believe the poster is referring to the excessive number of draws from the river, which doesn’t help the fish. Whether the GPU will address the draws adequately even with the Measure A options is another topic really, as I don’t think most of the commercial marijuana grows are concerned about permits and whatnot.
However, the proliferation of residences in the hills over the past couple of decades is a legitimate water issue and legitimately related to the fish issue.
I don’t understand the troll comment however. People come to blogs for debate. A troll by definition tries to hijack a thread to another topic of his/her own agenda.
June 22, 2010 at 7:41 pm
Eric Kirk
And I actually prefer Lingcod to salmon. Unfortunately, the cods and rockfish are all endangered, so I’m refraining of late.
June 22, 2010 at 8:55 pm
the reasonable anonymous
Ironically, the commenter complaining about “HumCPR trolls” was themselves engaging in “trolling” by trying to change the subject to their own dislike of HumCPR. Gotta love it!
By the way, I agree that the GPU probably isn’t going to make much difference with the big commercial growers, who, as you point out, probably aren’t too worried about permits.
I must say, I don’t have a lot of sympathy for the really big, rather (in my opinion) greedy commercial growers who suck millions of gallons of water and reap millions in profits every year, but can’t be bothered to spend some fraction of their profits putting in winter water storage tanks.
Meanwhile, I do know folks who are homesteaders / small-time growers of very limited means who ARE spending the money and doing the work to store a large quantity of water. By itself, these individual efforts aren’t enough, but they’re a start and can help provide an example for others. I look forward to the day when a lot people compete over who has the biggest winter water storage system, rather than who has the biggest gas-guzzling truck!
The county’s recent (apparent) change of policy, where they say they’ll grant permits for water storage tanks without necessarily requiring you to first get everything else on the property “up to code” and permitted, is a (small) step in the right direction. However, it will take quite some time before many people are ready to trust the Planning Department enough to take them up on the offer, without worrying that drawing attention to their property by applying for the water tank permit might result in their name getting onto Planning’s Shit List for further scrutiny somewhere down the line.
In general, its going to take some time and continued confidence-building measures to convince rura residents that Planning is really interested in helping to solve the water-use issues, as opposed to just USING the water scarcity issue as a handy argument to oppose rural residency.
A good next step would be for the County to streamline their permit process for composting toilets (perhaps eliminating the “bowel movement tax” element as well) and start allowing people to apply for a permit for a composting toilet without first installing a conventional, water-wasting septic system. The County ought to look at giving a kind of blanket approval to a few of the well-proven designs for composting privies, so that residents who use one of those boilerplate designs would not have to go through all the repeated inspections, etc. The result of that current policy is that it hasn’t stopped anyone from building a composting privy, but it HAS convinced them not to consider trying to get a permit for it.