August 6th, 2012
The Delta Dialogues took a hard turn into a big, newsy controversy in July, with a day-long gathering devoted to discussion of the Bay Delta Conservation Plan (BDCP) and how its recent announcement should affect the future of the Dialogues.
The turn came at the fourth monthly session of the dialogues, at the Westlands Water District offices on the Capitol Mall in Sacramento that came two days after the BDCP press conference hosted by the state and federal governments. The turn was intentional, with facilitators of the Dialogues framing the session around the BDCP as a way of pushing the Dialogues more deeply into specifics. “We want to go into the fire,” Kristin Cobble, one of the facilitators with Groupaya, told the group early in the day. “We want to go where the lightning rod is provoking us.”
And so they did, for more than five hours, a session that produced some of the most difficult and enlightening conversations of the Dialogues. The tone remained civil, but the exchanges were frank and the differences seemed stark for the first time in a process that has emphasized what the participants have in common.
Participants from the environmental community and water users acknowledged that they supported the BDCP process, while others were more critical, with some questioning whether it was designed to arrive at a predetermined conclusion: The building of a conveyance to bring water from north to south via tunnels. Mary Piepho, a Contra Costa County supervisor, said the BDCP was “not a balanced, thorough proposal. Not comprehensive enough. It doesn’t include local government at the table or water storage components. It lacks a thorough cost benefit analysis and only one project alternative is being analyzed.”
State agency officials are part of the Dialogues, but none attended this meeting. Some participants raised questions about that absence, but no explanation for their absence was discussed.
Despite different opinions about the BDCP, some key points of agreement emerged. Participants agreed that there were deep fears about the BDCP process, and that those fears remained a huge obstacle to making progress in the Delta. (The room was divided on whether those fears were based on real risks or were more a byproduct of mistrust based on previous broken promises about Delta policies.) Participants agreed that the status quo was unacceptable, and that they were willing to make concessions in the name of progress.
One strong criticism of the BDCP also emerged, both from those sympathetic to the plan and those critical of it — that the BDCP process had not been sufficiently inclusive of “in-Delta” constituencies, particularly local governments and farmers. As a result, the recommendations were not as complete as participants would have liked.
Jim Fiedler of the Santa Clara Water District said the problem stemmed from the BDCP’s focus on its “co-equal goals” — ecosystem restoration and water supply — to the exclusion of the people in the Delta. Leo Winternitz of The Nature Conservancy said he had felt “elation” from the BDCP’s commitment to restoring the Delta environment, but “disappointment” because “there was no strong similar commitment to protecting the Delta quality of life.”
The conversation felt disjointed at times. During the middle of the day, facilitators attempted to use the BDCP conversation to leap into a more difficult, specific conversation that would look at the details involved in creating a new method of governance for the Delta. This push occasioned puzzled looks from participants, and facilitators retreated.
The conversation also seemed to miss North Delta farmer Russell van Loben Sels, who was ill. He sent along an email that was critical of BDCP and that was discussed for nearly half an hour. His name was mentioned more times than that any other participant, despite his absence.
In the afternoon, the conversation turned to determining how the Dialogues should go forward in light of BDCP. Should the Dialogues focus on misinformation and areas of disagreement about the facts of the Delta? Or should the focus be on how in-Delta interests don’t have trust in BDCP and other processes, and what would make them trust?
Through the discussion, it became clear that the questions were related. And, in a curious way, one area of agreement emerged: A shared feeling of mistrust. Multiple participants recalled broken promises related to the Delta. Given that history, participants said, as the meeting concluded, that they valued the opportunity the Dialogues provide for open conversation, even over controversial subjects.
In an email chain that followed up the meeting, participants said they would like to keep the momentum and have more follow-up conversations before the next regularly scheduled Dialogue gathering (August 24).
June 26th, 2012
The first two Delta Dialogues meetings, in April and in May, set the table for a detailed conversation about the Delta’s future.
At the third meeting, on June 15, the steak was finally served. Literally.
Over three intense hours on the wood-paneled second floor of Peter’s Steak House in Isleton, participants chewed over a host of complicated issues, with a particular focus on levees and habitat restoration.
This launch into specifics felt like the end of the beginning for the dialogues. And the session ended with the group outlining a plan for detailed, follow-up work on key issues — alleviating misinformation, levee protection, complications of habitat restoration, trust building, and governance — at an extended, day-long Dialogue meeting on July 27.
“This is the most positive conversation I get to enjoy,” said Jason Peltier of the Westlands Water District. “So much of what we communicate about relative to the Delta is conflict-based, but here we are so constructive, so common in our interests. Sure we disagree, but no one is disagreeable.”
The conversation was framed by a two-hour tour of Bouldin Island levees led by Gilbert Cosio of MBK Engineers. Cosio showed the group four different spots on a levee that is in the process of being strengthened.
The tour, on a windy day, illustrated the complicated nature of levee design, the variety of conditions of the levees, and the delicacy of levee repair. Cosio made two points that seemed to resonate with those on the tour and that were referred to several times during the subsequent afternoon meeting.
First, he noted how slow, careful, and deliberate one must be in rebuilding a levee. Levees move (in one Stockton project, the peat in a levee moved three feet overnight and 13 feet in the course of the project, he said), and changes in levees, even improvements, can be dangerous in the short-term to the levee. In the Delta, everything has ripple effects.
Second, he recounted the history of levees and, in particular, promises that were made 50 years ago that the State Water Project would include the rebuilding of the Delta’s levees. It didn’t happen.
“The way the Delta people see it, they never got what they were promised,” said Cosio.
Russell van Loben Sels, a Dialogues participant and North Delta Farmer who was on the tour, nodded and added: “There are a lot of things in the Delta that have not happened the way they were supposed to.”
Those two, related ideas — that the Delta is more complicated and interrelated than generally thought, and that today’s Delta efforts are undermined by the broken promises of the past — served to propel the Dialogue discussion that afternoon.
That session started with follow-up discussion about the tour and levee issues. Cosio said that many recent reports on levee failure were based on old knowledge and failed to account for hundreds of millions of dollars of levee work since 2005. The conversation soon pivoted from levees to habitat restoration, as participants noted that, as in levees, habitat restoration must be done with the recognition that a small change in one part of the Delta can affect people elsewhere. This part of the conversation brought the sharpest exchange of the dialogues so far — between Brett Baker, a fish biologist and farmer whose family has lived in the Delta for six generations, and Carl Wilcox of the California Department of Fish and Game.
Wilcox made the point that levees are crucial for protecting habitat, as well as agriculture. He mentioned the habitat restoration at Liberty Island as a potential model for how to do this in the Delta.
Baker objected, arguing that the example of one island shouldn’t be extrapolated to the rest of the system. After some back and forth, Leo Winternitz of The Nature Conservancy broke in to say there was common ground between them: that the habitat questions were complex, that there’s been very little habitat restoration, and that there needed to be more dialogue before any progress could be made on the issue. Van Loben Sels then made a similar point. The exchange served to propel the conversation forward, as participants talked about specific areas and questions that were misunderstood and needed more dialogue.
At one point, the participants gathered around a Dialogue Map, blown up and posted on the wall, that listed all the visions of the Delta’s future — specifically in 2040 — that participants had offered at the previous May meeting. Participants were given small green and red stickers, in the shape of dots. They were asked to put their green dots near visions they agreed with and red dots near those with which they had trouble.
Several said they found it hard to place the red dots. Participants ended up putting red dots mostly near visions that they thought were less than pragmatic. (“No net loss of agricultural land” drew a red dot because the idea that there could be “no net loss of anything” seemed unrealistic. Notions that the Delta should be able to manage itself also drew red dots, because of a consensus that the Delta’s complex systems require management). Green dots were placed by several participants near calls for better infrastructure, more integrated planning in the Delta, strong agricultural presence, and the idea of a X-prize style competition for ideas that improve the Delta.
The latter part of the discussion exposed a potential tension between big and small visions of Delta change that could surface in future discussions.
The participants tended to agree that doing even a small thing in the Delta has impact on many other parts of the Delta, forcing discussions and planning to be broader and bigger. But the participants also agreed that attempting to do many things at once creates logjams and runs up against the lack of trust that is the product of historic broken promises in the Delta.
How will the participants reconcile the need to be broad and inclusive, while also being small and targeted?
Stay tuned.
The Delta Dialogues took a hard turn into a big, newsy controversy in July, with a day-long gathering devoted to discussion of the Bay Delta Conservation Plan (BDCP) and how its recent announcement should affect the future of the Dialogues.
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