A member of an influential California commission overseeing $2.7 billion in water spending stepped down this week after pressure from environmentalists over his position on building a dam.
Anthony Saracino, a longtime California water resources consultant, resigned from the California Water Commission on Monday after environmental groups raised a furor over his advocacy for considering the expansion of Shasta Dam, one of several major water storage proposals in the running to receive funds from the 2014 ballot-passed water bond. State officials have identified expanding water storage as one of the long-term methods of improving the state’s ability to weather droughts by increasing the ability to capture floodwaters and other excess runoff.
Saracino, 56, sent his resignation letter to Gov. Jerry Brown (D) on Friday, citing pressure from “special interests,” as well as potential future conflicts of interest stemming from his work as an industry consultant. He had been nominated for a second term in 2014 and was scheduled to have a confirmation hearing in the state Senate today.
“It was clear to me, talking to folks, that it was going to become a circus and a distraction from important commission activity, so I decided to step down now rather than waiting till January to avoid the circus,” Saracino said in an interview. “It’s unfortunate that irrational special interests can influence water policy by essentially stifling public discourse and rational discussion.”
“It’s unfortunate that irrational special interests can influence water policy by essentially stifling public discourse and rational discussion.”
Water policy and every other policy.
Does anyone think that the millions of water guzzling illegal aliens will go home?
Nope, they’ll keep coming, the Third World overflow simply jumps to new states to burden the economy and ecosystems.
To bad Liberal Californians didn’t share anything of value.
In economics they have Gresham’s Law: Bad money chases out good. In politics I could christen it Iggy’s Law, “Bad people chase out good”. People that are productive, moral, and have a sense of duty have something else as well, namely better ways to spend their time than fighting with their opposite numbers that have nowhere else to go and nothing else to do. So they leave the field to the scumbags. It takes a very special kind of person to fight these weasels. The weasels never sleep. They never give up. And they lie, lie, lie. All the time.
I could not keep up the fight against those morons. Not with so many other ways to make my way in the world beckoning, with better pay and colleagues.
California is suffering a drought while Canada has one-fifth of the world’s fresh-water. Someone see a business opportunity there.
Moreover, Canadian bulk water for CA would bring down the price of agricultural produce that we import from them — win, win, win.
Dumb, really dumb.
Some of my former firends from CA asked me why I moved away from loony land.
This is one of many reasons why.
Yes, western democracies have their own home-grown groups trying to take us back to the 7th century.
whatever you do, do not try and save the water that has fallen from the sky and is flowing through. stupid, yep, they are ALL stupid.
Rizwan, remember that America can pump the great lakes faster than Canada, treaties or no treaties. America owns a big chunk of that one fifth.
Export water – you are getting to get the Bolsheviks hyperventilating.
I am sure it would be determined to be environmentally unsound to capture fresh water 10 feet from where it flows into salt water. It would bring on an ice age or something.
All functional systems attract parasites. The parasites are strident and aggressive because being a parasite is a full time occupation and the strident aggression is the life blood of their fund raising — no conflict, no money. Someone who is actually trying to do something useful and productive is at a severe disadvantage because the parasites’ primary focus is a distraction to the producer. Saracino evidently simply became so fed up with the whole tedious mess that he decided he had far better uses for his time and talents. Given the mass insanity that seems to have infected California, he’s probably right.
These back to nature hippy freaks need to be stranded in the wilderness these granola munching tree hugers are stupid and dumber then sticks
These “special interests” need to start receiving pressure upside the head from ordinary Californians.
In fact that’s a remedy that needs to be applied pretty much across the board in Western society.
Why are they being allowed to dictate the terms of how everyone else lives? Because nobody opposes them.
As a lifelong resident of this crap-hole state, let me chip in my 2 cents. The normal weather
pattern in Southern California is 5-7 years of dry, followed by 1 or 2 years of wet (Mostly
Winter rains.) The SoCal area is just a tad less arid than a desert. The development of the
Los Angeles basin included spending billions of dollars on dams, reservoirs and Whyaducks
under the supervision of William Mulholland, who headed the Los Angeles Department Of Water
and Power.
Since all we had where the trickles of water from the Los Angeles, San Gabriel and Santa Ana
rivers, we started building the infrastructure to get water from the Colorado River and Northern
California. Even though Southern California is almost always in drought, we have never had a
shortage of water in the 59 years of my life.
This crisis, like most droughts and famines has political rather than natural causes. All through
the Irish potato famine, Ireland was exporting craploads of corn. In the case of California,
a political decision by a liberal judge caused the water supply to be drastically reduced so
the Central Valley and Southern California got severely boned! Thousands of acres of the
nations most productive agricultural region are now looking like an Oklahoma dust bowl.
Meanwhile, Thousands of acre/feet of water and now being flushed into the ocean in order to
allow Salmon to swim upstream. It should be noted that the Northern part of the state
which includes huge elitist liberal enclaves like San Franfreakshow and Sacramento have
all the water they need (And then some.)
Someone should ask our homosexual governor if he intends to bone us, we should at least get
a kiss afterwards!
Spurwing, as a former Cub Scout, Webelow and Boy Scout, I can assure you these tree hugging
assholes would be shitting peach-pits at the prospects of spending the night in the wilderness.
Sure, there may be a lot of liberal campers and backpackers, but they are more like the
Teddy Roosevelt conservationist types.
Most of the wild eyed radical environmentalist types probably never went camping in their
lives. The parents of red diaper babies are usually self styled pseudo intellectuals and
most likely too elitist to engage in activities with the Proles. In 1965 I learned that
if you pack it in, you pack it out, a lesson these hypocrites never learned judging by
the 22 dump truck piles of crap they leave at their rallies.
Robert Redford eco-hypotcrie appeared ona stupd TV ad a few years ago about so called dissapearing wilderness then sells some wild looking areas to developers to build condos and appeared by putrid movies like THE ELECTRIC HORSEMAN and THE HORSE WHIPERER he needs to GO AWAY