Tag: california

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Shakers

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Thanks to a couple of people I met through some of my salmon reporting on KQED, I got to go out fishing today on a boat that put out from Moss Landing, on Monterey Bay about 100 miles south of Berkeley. I’ve considered it a little odd that I’ve developed a passionate interest in California salmon without once having fished for one. But on balance, only a little odd.

Today, I only kind of fished. I went out with Marc Gorelnik, a board member of the Coastside Fishing Club, whose boat is currently berthed at Moss Landing. His crew were a couple of guys named Chris from Marin County. All three knew their way around the boat and all the gear. They rigged the gear and set the lines while I mostly spectated (though I guess I worked in my own fashion: I had my recorder and camera with me, so I came back with sound and pictures).

Since I was a salmon rookie, the first time a fish hit one of the lines, the rod was handed to me and I reeled in whatever was on the end of the line. It turned out to be a salmon, though not a huge one. The minimum size anglers are allowed to keep this year is 24 inches; under that length, and you have to release them. The fish on I was pulling in was borderline. One of the Chrises landed the fish and then measured it against a guide on the stern. Twenty-two inches. Using a device that looked a little like a screwdriver with a blunt end–the idea is to minimize handling of fish that will be released, because the whole point is that they’ll survive to grow into mature adults–Marc “shook” the fish off the line, and back into the water it went. (The term for undersize fish, which I never heard before last week: “shakers”).

And that was the big fishing excitement of the day. Marc had his radio on, and we heard lots of boats saying they had zero luck and a handful reporting they were catching fish, some up to 22 pounds. To an inquiry from a friend’s boat, one voice on the radio said he was about to make his limit but added something to the effect that “the last fish is always the hardest to catch.” Marc responded, “I hate that guy.” (He was also out last Saturday, the season opener, and had just four shakers and several hours of weathering rough water to show for it.)

Two other fish would up on our lines, though–both shakers. The last one hit one of the rigs on our way in, immediately after one of the Chrises said, “One fish. One fish can easily be divided four ways. The fish in question is pictured (click on the images for larger versions). It was a little thing, maybe a foot long. It would have been hatched out the fall before last (2009), and then either made its way to the ocean (if it was naturally spawned) or was released on the upper reaches of San Francisco Bay (the recent practice for most hatchery-generated fish) about a year ago. Given its size, it’s got nearly a year and a half more to survive at the mininum before it will begin its run back to fresh water somewhere in the Sacramento River system.

So there it is–a shaker. I caught only a brief, brief glimpse of it. It was small, but it was a beauty.

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All-Salmon Weekend

A summary of my weekend-plus at the meeting of the Pacific Fishery Management Council (what I'll describe as akin to an advanced seminar on chinook salmon from a world-class faculty) in Vancouver, Washington:

Day 1: I left home for the Oakland airport at 7:20 a.m. or so. My plane departed at 9 a.m. and landed in Portland at 10:40 or so. I was behind the wheel of a rented car by 11 a.m. and at the Hilton in downtown Vancouver by 11:30. In a hallway, I recognized a voice I'd only heard on the phone before–Barbara Emley, a San Francisco salmon troller who's been fishing salmon since the 1980s. I introduced myself and she invited me to lunch with her and two fishermen, Dave Bitts of Eureka and Joel Kawahara, from Washington's Olympic Peninsula. They filled me in on the morning's proceedings and what was to come in the afternoon, including a discussion of limitations that may be posed on this year's chinook salmon catch to accommodate threatened populations of killer whales, which like to snack on them. I spent the afternoon in a variety of meetings and talking to a variety of people, including Chuck Tracy, the PFMC officer who works on salmon issues. At about 5:45, I headed over to my friend Pete's house in Portland to hang out with him and his boy Niko. 

Day 2: Sunday morning I was at the hotel by 10:30 or so for another day of meetings both on the status of the Sacramento River salmon fishery and on initial suggestions for the 2011 fishing season. I interviewed about half a dozen people, pulled a couple soundbites, wrote up a short story to air on KQED's local news on Monday morning, did a read-through with my editor in the Bay Area. I got out of the hotel about 7:45, went to Pete and Niko's, had a late dinner, then voiced and uploaded my story. Pete and I stayed up talking until about midnight, then he went to bed. Since I had promised a second story, I stayed up and wrote that, pulled another soundbite, and sent it off to one of the editors in San Francisco. 

Day 3: Monday, which at one point in this adventure was penciled in as a day off, I was up at 7:30, drank Pete's excellent coffeed, stayed at the house while Pete took Niko to school, then voiced the second piece I had written the night before, wrote a third piece (these are all very short, like a minute, max), voiced that, then uploaded everything to KQED. I made an attempt to talk the editor of our statewide show to put off a Tuesday morning story I had promised her, because I was hoping to have a pressure-free day before flying back to Oakland in the evening. But my gambit didn't work, and a promise is a promise, so I said I'd have a script to her late in the afternoon. In the meantime, Pete had returned home and we had talked about going to Powell's, the landmark bookstore in Portland, which I had never visited. So we walked to the Lloyd Center "Max" station–about three and a half miles from Pete's, as it turned out–and rode free to the heart of downtown, then walked the rest of the way to Powell's. We hung out there and both bought something–I got a cookbook, which I never do, and a novel by Peter Carey that's supposed to be something of a gloss on Tocqueville's visit to America. Then I bought Pete lunch at Little Big Burger, which was awesome (we each consumed 1.5 cheeseburgers and split an order of fries). Then Pete said, "Well, you feel like walking back?" I did. So we set off across the Pearl District, Old Town/Chinatown, the Burnside Bridge, and up Burnside Avenue to Laurelhurst; we detoured through Laurelhurst Park, with Pete filling me in on details of the neighborhoods we passed through. At 3 o'clock, when we got back to Pete's, in the general vicinity of Mount Tabor, we had walked another four and a half miles or so. The total for the outing came to about nine miles. Back at Pete's I packed up, loaded up the car, took my leave, filled up with gas, and made the short, easy drive to the Portland airport for my 6 p.m. flight. There, I schlepped my stuff to one of the cool little work carrels they have in the terminal buildings and, at about 4:20, began writing my story for Tuesday morning. At about 5:30, I had something that was, if not profoundly insightful, most likely would not provoke shrieks of outrage from editor or listeners. I did a quick read-through with said editor, then packed up my stuff and walked to the gate for my flight, which was due to be boarding. It was a little late, but not by much, and the flight was uneventful. We got to Oakland about 7:30 or so. Kate picked me up. We went home, had dinner, walked the dog, and then I recorded my voice tracks and isolated my soundbites and uploaded all the sound. Lest that all sound real quick, I was done with all that at 12:30 this morning. 

Day 4: This morning, while I was asleep, an engineer mixed the sound, and the piece aired at 5:50 a.m. I caught it during a 6:50 repeat and at some point realized I had made a factual error in the piece. So I wrote a correction for that, too.

Later, I vacuumed the house. 

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California Salmon: Oroville Hatchery

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I read a press release from the state Department of Fish and Game last week that the hatchery up in Oroville, on the Feather River just below the big State Water Project dam, was about to open its gates to fall run chinook salmon and steelhead. Saturday we drove up there, 142 miles from Berkeley, to see what the show looked like. After several years of disappearing fall salmon runs, it was a thrill to see the fish coming up the ladder toward the hatchery. In the river at the bottom of the fishway–a low dam blocks the fish from going any further upstream–it seemed there were hundreds of salmon, maybe more, churning the water and leaping into the air. The ladder includes a below-grade viewing area so you can see the fish on their way up. We were there for two or three hours, and we saw a steady stream of people, including lots of families with kids, coming to check on the run. Very cool.

Still reporting the story, but watching the fish, one is seized with the feeling where there’s life, there’s hope for the salmon. (And yes, that feeling persists even knowing to what a huge degree humans are intervening in the process we’re watching. A hatchery is really a kind of fish factory after all, though that’s not entirely visible when you’re watching the salmon progressing up the ladder. I’ve had a couple people ask me, “After they come up to the hatchery, what happens?” Well, technicians step in and harvest the roe and sperm from the fish and kill them in the process. For salmon, that’s the same end result as the wild run–though vastly different in the details and perhaps the quality of fish that result. For now, in this place, the hatchery is all we have left to keep the run going. So a celebration is in order despite our heavy-handed intervention.)

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Flicka and Friend

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Today we drove through the Panoche Valley and environs, a beautiful stretch of grasslands, range, and hills between the central San Joaquin Valley and the northern Salinas Valley. Took lots of pictures, including this one of a horse we spotted. She (I think it was a mare) was friendly and curious and maybe a little disappointed I didn’t have some choice provender secreted about my person. Beautiful horse. Beautiful place.

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Election Hangover: Consequences, Intended and Otherwise

To catch up with something I started to write about just after the California primary on June 8: Our state ballot included an initiative to change the way primary elections are conducted. Up through this election, California primaries worked the way they do in most states: Each party put up candidates for elective offices, and each party’s registered voters went to the polls to decide which of their candidates will go on to the general election.

Under Proposition 14, which passed with a healthy majority among the one-third of registered voters who cast ballots, the exercise changes. Primary voters can now vote for any candidate in any party; and instead of the winner in each party advancing to the general election, now the top two vote-getters, regardless of party, will appear on the general election ballot.

The theory behind this “reform” is the same as the thinking behind an open-primary scheme the state enacted (as Proposition 198) in 1996. First, voters get a more meaningful choice. Second, the top-two system is supposed to empower independent voters (the fastest-growing bloc in the state) and thus moderate the positions taken by party candidates (one article of California’s current conventional wisdom is that extreme partisanship by both parties has crippled the Legislature’s ability or even inclination to govern).

By the way–what happened to Proposition 198, which set up open primaries? Predictably, the major parties didn’t like it. The Democrats sued the state on the grounds the system violated their First Amendment right of freedom of association. In essence, they argued that as groups organized around certain principles and beliefs, they ought to be able to say who represented them in elections and in office; open primaries crippled their ability to express themselves in that manner. The Supreme Court agreed in a 7-2 majority decision written by Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, and the open primary system was thrown out.

Proponents of Proposition 14 say it’s different somehow. Thanks to a similar “top-two” system approved by voters in Washington state, that issue has already been to the Supreme Court once (see Washington State Grange v. Washington State Republican Party) and is likely to begin wending its way through the federal courts again this fall. The Washington Republicans argue that the top-two system also interferes with freedom of association. In California, the chief complaint levied against the system is that it virtually guarantees that the host of small parties that have won the right to appear on statewide ballots–Green, Peace and Freedom, Libertarian, and American Independent, among others–will never place candidates on the general election ballots. Again, that’s something that will likely be fought out in court.

It’s significant that voters keep trying to enact these schemes, though. They seem to be saying they want some sort of change. But do they really want the kind of change the top-two primary will bring? We’ll see, I guess. But for now, it’s possible to get a glimpse of how Prop. 14 would affect some elections in the state. If the initiative had been in effect on June 8, the general election slate for eight races would have changed. In two congressional districts–the 19th and 42nd–the top two vote-getters were Republicans, meaning they, and no one else, would appear on the November ballot; in a third district, the 36th, two Democrats ranked one-two. Five Assembly results would also have ben affected: the 9th, 20th, 28th, 47th, and 50th; in all five instances, the top two vote-getters were Democrats, and they’d be the only ones listed on the November ballot if Prop. 14 were already the law of the land. (Here’s a spreadsheet with the details.)

Now, people will be looking at those results and trying to figure out what they mean in terms of party strategy and voter impact. For instance, maybe parties will discourage large fields that could split votes and thus deny all participants from getting on the November ballot. Less choice in a field of primary candidates doesn’t seem like an enhancement of the democratic experience. Seeing your party simply eliminated from the general election doesn’t seem like a magnet for more voter participation, either.

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Arnold’s Choice

We had a little bit of a debate the last few days at work (a public radio newsroom) about how much importance in our newscasts we should give Governor Schwarzenegger’s “May revise” — the adjustments to the state budget he first released in February. I took the position that since we all know that the situation is bad, that the revision would include some new, but predictable, cuts, and that the revision release itself amounts to little more than a political ritual, we shouldn’t waste a lot of time on the event. On the other hand, if we wanted to devote some resources to talking about the real impacts the state’s budget calamity have already had–effects on people and institutions, effects that might tell us something about where the state’s headed with the next round of cuts–that might be worth something to our listeners. My view didn’t sway anyone, and in the event, we wound up doing a smart and well-informed take on the story, though one that focuses almost entirely on the political chess game behind the budget.

As It happened, I was off work yesterday when the governor made his announcement. I caught just a snippet of it–but it was a provocative snippet. The governor appeared before the media, while outside the state Capitol protesters decried more cuts to programs to the poor and sick and to the state’s public schools. Solemnly, Schwarzenegger detaied his bad news and talked about how those around him had failed to heed his cals for budget reform. But one phrase stood out from the rest: “no choice.”

“I now have no choice,” the governor said, “but to stand here today and to call for the elimination of some very important programs.” In fact, Schwarzenegger called his decisions about cuts a “Sophie’s Choice.” He sounds tormented. How tormented? Here’s a glimpse, courtesy of The New York Times Magazine, from last year’s budget crisis (a.k.a., “Sophie’s Choice 2009”): “Schwarzenegger reclined deeply in his chair, lighted an eight-inch cigar and declared himself ‘perfectly fine,’ despite the fiscal debacle and personal heartsickness all around him. ‘Someone else might walk out of here every day depressed, but I don’t walk out of here depressed,’ Schwarzenegger said. Whatever happens, ‘I will sit down in my Jacuzzi tonight,’ he said. ‘I’m going to lay back with a stogie.’ ”

“No choice”? Well, one of the governor’s fellow citizens begs to disagree.

You could step up, governor, and show a little moral leadership and talk about how to raise money while we’re in the crisis. Yes, I mean taxes, which many Californians pay without flinching as part of the cost of living here. Of course, you’ve never been one to tell the voters they might need to pay a little for some of the privileges they enjoy. When the last governor and Legislature reinstated a motor vehicle tax during a crisis, you chose to pander to the anti-taxers who threw a tantrum. That tax alone–which had been suspended during boom times with an explicit provision it could be reimposed if the state’s finances unraveled–would have prevented much of the budget crisis we’re facing today.

So, there are choices, governor. Pretending there are none simply avoids responsibility for finding a way through the mess we’re in.

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California Water: Salmon Summit Menu

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Someone at the Environmental Defense Fund sent this to me at KQED after chatting me up about the Salmon Summit in San Francisco tomorrow (what’s the Salmon Summit? See below). I don’t know whether it’s on the level–is all that fish really going to be served? If so–cool! But obviously the real point is about water and fisheries in California.  

And as far as the summit goes: It’s a meeting organized by fishing and environmental groups to highlight the impact of both the drought and California’s water policy on salmon and other fish, and to counter the message from agriculture and water interests that 1) California is in the midst of a “regulatory” drought and 2) that California agriculture is being sacrificed to the interests of a minnow (the delta smelt).

The fishing/environmental folks (some style themselves “the salmon community”) really began this campaign last month. That’s when one of our senators, Dianne Feinstein, began pushing for a bill to guarantee water deliveries to the drought-stricken western side of the San Joaquin Valley. Her legislation would have set aside restrictions on water shipments from Northern to Southern California imposed to protect salmon and smelt.

The salmon community and allies pointed out that salmon fishing has been shut down for two years in a row because of a crash in chinook populations. They produced an economic analysis (from a Florida outfit called Southwick Associates) that calculated the cost of the salmon fishing shutdown: 23,000 jobs and perhaps billions of dollars in “lost economic opportunity” (I haven’t seen the analysis myself). Eleven members of Congress wrote Feinstein that her effort was ignoring the impact of our water problems on the salmon community and asked her to back off. (Ultimately, the Department of the Interior, parent of the Bureau of Reclamation, which delivers water to the west side through the facilities of the Central Valley Project, stepped in and is trying to broker increased water deliveries.)

So far, then, the summit sounds like a recap of what we’ve heard already. The question is what new actions the salmon community might want their legislators to take to help bring their fish back. I’m hoping to hear an answer to that tomorrow.

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Coast Highway

highwayone032810.jpgQuick trip: Saturday afternoon from Berkeley up to Mendocino, by way of U.S. 101 and state Highways 128 and 1. We met East Coast friends up there, spent the night, hung out a little this morning in Fort Bragg, then drove home by continuing north, crossing the Coast Range to Leggett, then coming home on 101. There was some weather coming in when we reached this point, about 10 or 15 miles north of Fort Bragg. It rained as we crossed the range, but by the time we were back in the Bay Area, about an hour before sunset, it was mostly clear again. Too fast a trip, but then again I honestly can’t remember an occasion where we had much time just to sit and take in the coast. Sometime. Sometime soon.  

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‘Crazy Totalitarian Tactics’

I’ve only recently become acquainted with Representative Devin Nunes, who hails from California’s 21st Congressional District, in the southeastern corner of the Central Valley–big pieces of Fresno and Tulare counties. Nunes came to my attention for his authorship of a bill that would ban cutbacks in federal water shipments from Northern California to his part of the state. The cutbacks he targeted are designed to save endangered fish species, and Nunes’s proposal would allow limits to preserve the fish only if the amount of water shipped south equaled or exceeded the historical maximum. A nice Orwellian touch.

Nunes showed up on our television screen today when we started flipping channels between the NCAA basketball tournament and the C-SPAN coverage of the House health-care vote. During one such channel-changing excursion, Nunes was featured talking about the issue of the day. I just went back and played the online video version of the interview he did, and I guess it’s good to know in a way that his on-the-fringe tactics on water are matched by extremist views on other issues.

During the course of the 29-minute interview, he matter-of-factly declared four times that Democrats were using “totalitarian tactics” (or “crazy totalitarian tactics”) to not just enact health-care legislation but to “usher in a new era of socialism.” Early on, the rather milquetoast-y interviewer asked Nunes about incidents Saturday in which demonstrators opposed to the legislation hurled anti-gay and racist epithets at Democratic congressmen.

Nunes’s response? As the Chicago Tribune’s Eric Zorn, among others, noted:

Q. Can you give us a sense of the flavor of the debate on the floor and what you’re hearing? A lot of angry comments yesterday aimed at a couple of your colleagues including Barney Frank and Congressman John Lewis using the N-word as some of the protesters jeered at him as he walked through the halls of the Capitol.

A. Well, I think that when you, when you use totalitarian tactics people begin to act crazy. I think there’s people that have every right to say what they want. If they want to smear someone, they can do it–it’s not appropriate–and I think I’d stop short of characterizing the 20,000 people who were protesting that all of them were doing that. … I think the left loves to play up a couple incidents here or there, anything to draw attention away from what they are really doing.

Nunes got off a couple of other beauties during the interview. To one veteran who said he loved having government-run health care to cope with his health issues, Nunes essentially said care for veterans is too expensive and the guy shouldn’t expect to be taken care of. He also hews to the ultra-right GOP rhetoric that suggests if big government would just get out of the way, state and local governments could take care of people the way God and the Founding Fathers intended (note to the congressman: Be careful what you wish for. Where do you think all those water projects your folks depend on came from? Also: Have you checked on the condition of the state and local governments recently? They’re begging Washington for help.)

It all made me wonder who this guy represents and what in the world they’re thinking when they send someone like this to Washington. How is it that he feels so safe to so complacently utter such on-the-edge beliefs?

A little quick research on the 21st District:

–For the years 2006-08, the Census Bureau estimates that 19.1 percent of the district’s residents have income that places them below the federal poverty level. (California as a whole:  12.9 percent.)

–In January, California had a statewide unemployment rate of 12.5 percent. That’s low compared to Nunes’s district. Fresno County had an 18.2 percent rate for the month; Tulare County was at 18.3 percent. Here’s the jobless rate percentage for some of the bigger towns in the 21st District:
Clovis: 10.0
Dinuba: 26.4
Lindsay: 22.1
Porterville: 16.9
Reedley: 33.6
Tulare: 15.8
Visalia: 11.6

–The district is 71 percent white, 2.4 percent black. Maybe that’s why it’s no big deal for people to blow off steam using the “N-word.” Here’s a stat that puts the “white” number in perspective, though: 48.5 percent of the residents identify themselves as Hispanic or Latino, and more than 90 percent of that group is of Mexican ancestry. Just 40.6 percent identify themselves as “white only.”

–20 percent of the district’s population is foreign-born, and one-third of that group are naturalized U.S. citizens.

–About 57 percent of the 18-and-over population is registered–though because of the high number of foreign-born in the district, that’s not necessarily a reflection of eligible registrations. Voter registration is 46.6 percent Republican, 34.8 percent Democrat.

None of these numbers explain this guy. More reading into the Nunes files later.