Great column and great prioity list from the highest elected official (Siskayou County Supervisor) in the government closest to the people!!! You make me proud!!!
Your analogy of a "freight train" is headed toward a "train wreck!" The two, or three Governors, will be posing and fighting for control of the locomotive and will hit the curve way too fast, crashing the whole shebang over the cliff and into the river, poisoning everything. (reminds me of the Shasta river train-spill-poisoning incident about a decade ago and Barbara Boxer screaming that the Shasta was "dead forever!")
Why don't you fax a copy of that column to Mr. Philp, chief editor of the Sacramento BEE? He needs to assign a reporter to this with his/her first contact being you to "show him/her around" this issue!!!
You are in a position that will be overlooked and overridden if you don't become the "squeaky wheel" that must be greased!!!
I wish I could say that you could count on at least "spiritual," or "virtual" support from this website, but lately I'm getting very discouraged with the response I'm seeing toward "resourse" or "rural" issues compared to what we saw between Y2K and 9-11.
The "Sage Brush Rebellion has lost three champions, Nye County Commissioner Dick Carver, NV Rancher Wayne Hage and both his wives, (the second being former Representative Helen Chenoweth-Hage) and the Jarbidge and the Klamath Bucket Brigade with it's follow-up Klamath Tea Party to keep the water flowing to the potato farmers was all up-staged by 9-11...
The "Rural Cleansing" started by the Clinton maladministration is now going to be resumed by our new GANG-GREEN Governator/Terminator and his two Liberal buddies to the north! The hand writing is ten-foot tall on the Sacramento Crapitol WALL!!!
CalTrans is funding ('scuse me; tax payers are funding) a culvert removal project on Hwy 96 near Hamburg. They're replacing two pipes with a bridge. ($1.5 million, but it'll go higher as the contractor found some rocks that were not in the original survey). The creek is to steep for Coho and probably too much for steelhead. The construction of the bridge has gone like this:
1) build temp. bypass including traffic control signals
2) install temp. culverts
3) excavate down about 20 feet
4) pour concrete scour protection, footings, etc
5) backfill excavation with boulders, progressively smaller rock ending with 'spawning' rock
6) remove temp. culverts
(here's the best part)
7) install black poly 'slip n slide' to contain the water as it disappeared into all that drain rock within a few feet
The only way the new stretch of creek will carry water is if all the voids in the placed rock are filled with fines. The only way that will happen is if the creek 'blows' outlike it did in '97 and moves tons of fines down the stream bed. In the meantime, the fish will have to settle for black plastic. At least it's not a blue tarp!