VOLUME XVI, Fall 2014

THE EEL RIVER

REPORTERA Publication of Friends of the Eel River

Regulating By Initiative: A Rush to Disaster

What Effective Cannabis Regulation Might Look Like

Preparing for a Dry Future

STAFFScott GreacenExecutive Director

David KellerBay Area Director

Alicia HamannAdministrative Director

Bobbie ToddBookkeeper

BOARD OF DIRECTORSPete NicholsPresident

Maggy HerbelinVice President

Pam NetzowTreasurer

Nadananda

Samantha Kannry

David Keller

Jim Lamport

Ernie Merrifield

MISSIONWorking for the recovery of our Wild and Scenic Eel River, its fisheries and communities.

FRIENDS OF THE EEL RIVER

Table of Contents

Office at 1385 8th Street, ArcataPO Box 4945

Arcata, CA 95518707-822-3342

foer@eelriver.orgeelriver.org

Regulating By Initiative: A Rush to Disaster ........3

Effective Cannabis Regulation ...............................4

Preparing for a Dry Future ....................................5

Calculate the Impact of your Diversion ...............7

2 2014 • Vol. XVI Fall www.eelriver.org

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Regulating By Initiative: A Rush to DisasterThe following ran in the Eureka Times-Standard on November 30 in response to the newspaper’s editorial in support of the CCVH initiative. We have asked CCVH leaders to withdraw the initiative. To date, they have declined.

We could not agree more with the Times-Standard “Get ready for legalization, or get ready to lose” (Nov. 23) that it is high time for Humboldt to address the impacts of its marijuana industry through locally appropriate regulation. We are heartened by cannabis cultivators speaking out about serious damage to our rivers, forests, fish, and wildlife, and advocating to bring producers out of the shadows. In our view, however, the campaign by California Cannabis Voice - Humboldt (CCVH) to force Humboldt County to accept its preferred version of a cultivation ordinance is counterproductive. If successful, it would lead to harms above and beyond those most North Coast citizens already find unacceptable. Since the 1996 passage of Prop 215 gave growers who claimed a medical purpose a defiance against state cultivation charges, a Green Rush of more and more ever larger pot grows has caused serious harm to our watersheds. In its current form, the CCVH proposal would exacerbate the Green Rush, establishing a right to grow a ton of weed or more a year on every parcel larger than 40 acres across Humboldt County. Far from reining in the Green Rush, this scheme would ignite another wave of impacts to our watersheds and further fragment forestland that has been impacted by decades of irresponsible logging. Iconic, imperiled species like coho salmon, already nearly extinct in the Mattole and in dangerous decline in the South Fork Eel River, desperately need impacts like water diversions and pollution reduced. As well, the CCVH proposal fails to bring the bad actors causing the greatest harms into the sunlight. Instead, it calls only for granting permits to those who comply with existing environmental laws. Given Humboldt’s long experience of law enforcement’s inability to prevent harms from illegal operations, and our recent history of rising harms associated with the Green Rush, it is hardly unreasonable to ask that the industry clean up its messes before we allow exponential growth in marijuana operations and risk even more impacts to our forests and watersheds. Worse, by advancing their proposed ordinance as an initiative, CCVH would make it nearly impossible to fix its flaws. Once CCVH submits a petition bearing the signatures of about 3,000 registered voters, the Board of Supervisors cannot change even a period in the proposal: they must either adopt it as written, or put the question to an expensive special election, where a majority of those voting would decide the question. Only another initiative and election could ever change any detail of the new ordinance. The initiative process would also sidestep the California

Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), one of our best tools for reducing unnecessary environmental harms. If precisely the same proposal were to come from the Board of Supervisors, CEQA would require consideration of impacts, alternatives, and mitigations necessary to reduce harm to protected species, downstream residents, and resources at risk. Under an August 2014 ruling by the California Supreme Court, however, ordinances advanced by initiative are entirely exempt from CEQA review. There are other possible paths to a well-written ordinance. Through a truly open, public process, we can work to develop a regulatory framework that reflects the legitimate concerns not only of growers and environmentalists, but of public health advocates, law enforcement, and the agencies that would be charged with making regulations work on the ground. Above all, such an effort should set reasonable limits on the size and number of operations; clarify the areas suitable for marijuana cultivation; and ensure sustainable funding for necessary enforcement. We believe such an ordinance should support smaller-scale, environmentally-sensitive operations. Just for example, a one-thousand square foot grow can produce something in the neighborhood of a hundred pounds of finished product. If such an operation were to follow current laws and reasonable best management practices, including storing winter water and stopping summer diversions, we believe most Humboldt citizens could support it. If permit holders want to grow more, and can work with their neighbors to eliminate summer water diversions and winter sediment discharges, we believe there’s a good argument for increasing the scale of permitted grows in watersheds where recovery is really underway. No system of regulation will work if a critical mass of current growers aren’t willing to become legitimate businesses. But neither should the cannabis industry be allowed to write its own rules. These questions are far too important to be addressed by anything less than a truly open, democratic and publicly accountable process. Humboldt has an opportunity to create a well-crafted ordinance that protects our critically important natural resources and promotes a local industry that could be ecologically, socially, and economically sustainable. But that opportunity may be squandered by CCVH’s aggressive attempt to legitimize, and to expand, the Green Rush.

Dan Ehresman, Northcoast Environmental CenterNatalynne DeLapp, Environmental Protection Information CenterJennifer Kalt, Humboldt BaykeeperLarry Glass, Safe Alternatives for our Forest EnvironmentScott Greacen, Friends of the Eel River

E E L R I V E R R E P O R T E R 3

4 2013 • Vol. XV Fall www.eelriver.org

What Effective Cannabis Regulation Might Look LikeA sustainable set of policy solutions to the environmental, social, and legal challenges presented by the Green Rush needs to:

• Reflect Community Concerns• Reduce Cumulative Impacts • Be Practicable and Effective

• Work Toward Comprehensive Solutions• Implement Sustainable Practices• Reflect Limits

Reflect Community ConcernsThe spectacular failures of marijuana prohibition are to a large degree unanticipated problems generated by yesterday’s apparently simple solutions to complex problems. Better solutions address all critical concerns and stakeholders. Optimal solutions are most likely to emerge from an open process that seeks out expert and lay perspectives on problems and solutions and looks ahead to future changes.

Reduce Cumulative Impacts Rising environmental impacts associated with the Green Rush threaten our iconic North Coast rivers, fish and wildlife. Summer water diversions must be halted, and sources of excess sediment corrected, to give threatened coho salmon and steelhead their best shot at recovery. Environmental review at the program level to ensure impacts are limited. Effective regulation should: • Halt Green Rush increases in the number and scale of cultivation operations • Reduce watershed impacts of cultivation in general, not just willing permittees

Be Practicable and Effective It is essential that the marijuana industry itself take responsibility for reducing its watershed impacts. Due to the peculiar circumstances of the industry’s long evolution under prohibition, enforcement efforts targetting environmental harms associated with marijuana cultivation have been limited in effectiveness.Enforcement will remain an indispensable element of any comprehensive approach to managing the marijuana industry and its environmental impacts. Better-targeted and better-funded enforcement, coupled with incentives structured to support community-based watershed protection efforts, can drive better outcomes. • Adequate funding and clear direction for enforcement and inspection measures prior to implementation • Growth of permitting program should reflect agency capacity and need for adaptive management • Nuisance abatement to address violations • Disincentives: uncorrected willful violations of permit terms disqualify permittee and parcel

Work Toward Comprehensive SolutionsWhile Cannabis remains federally prohibited, even state legalization can only go part of the way to correcting the unintended consequences of prohibition. County-level regulation should go as far as possible to show state and federal policy-makers where we would like to go. • Regulate all but de minimis individual cultivation • Appropriate limits on personal, medical, and commercial production • Include both willing and unwilling cultivators on the private landscape • Consistent to the extent possible with Department of Justice guidelines for state legalization and regulation

Implement Sustainable Practices • Deter unsustainable practices to the greatest practicable extent: no indoor cultivation, pesticides, water hauling. • Individual parcels: suitability screens, site fixes, BMPs in operation • Watershed and community level: net compliance with water protection measures, including winter diversion rates, no summer diversions, effective sediment abatement • Where effective practices have been demonstrated at the subwatershed level, increases in net and individual parcel cultivation may be considered • Fund and support prevention and remediation of trespass operations, watershed restoration, pollution prevention

Reflect Limits • Limit total number of permits • Limits by parcel size, location, parcel suitability, etc • Permits only to natural persons • Permits limited to one per person and one per parcel • No incentive for parcel division: if a parcel is split, the net limit on the two remaining parcels may not be greater than the original parcel for a period of ten years

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Preparing for a Dry FutureWater availability and supply reliability are becoming less predictable and more problematic. Our watersheds and the organisms that have evolved within them have been put on mandatory rationing through excessive exploitation of our rivers, lakes, tributaries and groundwater. Yet population and development in California continue to grow. In California and the arid West, our water law and policies, technologies, agriculture, development patterns, economy and habits of use are based on a century and a half of relatively abundant rainfall and snow. California was developed as if water was inexhaustible. The carrying capacity of our region, however, is determined by dry times, not wet periods. And while changing climate conditions and weather patterns suggest water is going to be less available to much of California at least some of the time, human demands have increased, both for a growing population, and for water-intensive development. A recent analysis confirms that California’s water rights system has allocated far more water from many of our watersheds than they can actually supply in even average years, much less in drought. And while the Eel appears to be one of the few significant rivers in the state that is not already overappropriated, the experience of the last few summers, in which the South Fork and even the mainstem Eel got so low that the river became a series of disconnected pools, strongly suggests that surface diversions have outstripped summer flows across the Eel River watershed as well. It’s just that very few of those diversions are associated with legal water rights. And we can’t manage what we don’t measure. Existing water users – including all legal water rights and permit holders throughout the watersheds – are more frequently experiencing significant shortages, dropping water tables, increased expenses for pumping and storage, and loss of water quality. The combination of low flows and increased diversions has been devastating for native fisheries.

By David Keller and Scott Greacen

Continued on page 7

Climate researchers have cautioned that California has seen long, severe droughts in past centuries that could overwhelm our current systems. Yet “we continue to run California as if the longest drought we are ever going to encounter is about seven years. We’re living in a dream world. California is a classic case of people building themselves beyond the carrying capacity of the land,” according to Scott Stine, a paleoclimatologist at Cal State East Bay1. There is now solid historical evidence for severe megadroughts from 850 to 1090C.E., and from 1140 to 1320C.E. And indeed, tree-ring researchers have now shown that California’s recent three year drought was the most severe, and 2014 the single most arid year, in the last 1200 years. Further, their analysis2 shows that though these years did see a shortfall in rain and snow, it was record high temperatures that produced record low levels of soil moisture. In fact, high temperatures appeared to account for as much as 36% of 2014’s aridity. With rising temperatures locked in by the past century’s emissions, and a destabilizing climate likely to continue to produce extreme events, it’s a near-certainty that California will face more extreme drought in the years ahead.

Driving policy in the wrong directionPerhaps predictably, industrial agricultural interests with profits at stake have been quick to seize the political opportunity presented by the drought to pursue long-sought rollbacks in protections for California’s rivers and fisheries. The entire Republican delegation from California has lined up behind an attempt to jam a last-minute bill through Congress, the so-called California Emergency Drought Relief Act that would require maximum water deliveries to junior water rights holders like the Westlands Water District. The North Coast’s Congressman, Jared Huffman, has been outspoken in his opposition to the bill. Speaking

against a Republican move to send the bill to the House floor without committee review, Rep. Huffman said it “would harm California fisheries and tribal interests, undermine state law, deprive water managers of the critical flexibility they need in a complicated system like California’s, and micromanage the water system of California in a very unwise way.” The bill is expected to be refused by the Senate. Nonetheless, the White House issued a formal notice that it would veto the bill if passed. The best that can be said for California Senator Dianne Feinstein’s effort to negotiate a version of such a “drought relief ” bill with Republicans, but without her fellow Democrats, is that the senator finally agreed to put the effort on hold until the new Congress – when a Republican majority in the Senate will send to the President’s desk any number of anti-environmental measures that have so far stayed bottled up in the House. Given the enthusiasm both Feinstein and the GOP delegation have shown in pushing these rollbacks, continued deadlock may be the best we can hope for from D.C. for the next few years. In the near term, we need to continue to pursue water resources reform at the state and local level.

E E L R I V E R R E P O R T E R 5

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A Road Map to A Better Water SystemFortunately, a coalition of environmental groups has rallied behind a strong report on California’s water system, prepared by the Pacific Institute and Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). The report identifies a series of specific, discrete programs that can, together, set the stage for “a more reliable long-term water supply, a more resilient economy, and a healthier environment.” The report builds on previous studies showing that there is neither a single cause of the system’s weakness, nor a single ‘silver bullet’ solution that would fix all its flaws. Instead, it suggests, for example, that the combination of three strategies – urban and agricultural efficiency, reuse, and stormwater capture – could reduce demands on surface and groundwater by producing as much as 14 million acre-feet of new supply – far more than could be produced by taking more water from the Sacramento Bay Delta. The report outlines a series of actions to increase the efficiency of water use, reuse, and stormwater; to increase the capacity of critical systems, including groundwater management, floodplain restoration, and smart water storage; in planning for continuing and future drought; and in financing sustainable water supply investments3. In addition to these efforts, we need to continue to reduce human water demands. This is a critical component for achieving an essential balance of limited supplies and increasing demands while protecting water quality and natural resources for the long term. How can we achieve sustainable water supplies and restored fisheries for the Russian River while eliminating diversions of water from the Eel River to mask the overdrafting of the Russian River?

Original Sources Here1 http://bit.ly/2megadroughts 2 http://bit.ly/CAdendrochronology 3 http://bit.ly/CAwatersupply

6 2013 • Vol. XV Fall

Critically low flows on the mainstem Eel River near Fernbridge Photo by Scott Greacen, Sept. 2014

E E L R I V E R R E P O R T E R 7

You can calculate the rate of your diversion without a flow meter. Find a one-gallon container, and measure the amount of time it takes to fill that one gallon. For example, if the gallon container is filled after 1 minute, your rate is 1 gallon per minute (gpm). If the container fills in 30 seconds, then your rate is 2 gpm.

To protect fish and wildlife habitat, individual pumping rates should never exceed 5% of streamflow at the point of diversion1. With a diversion rate of 2 gpm, the diverted source should be flowing at 40 gpm in the least.

Streamflow data is available at waterdata.usgs.gov and is usually presented in cubic feet per second (cfs). To convert gpm to cfs simply divide by 448.8. For example, a diversion rate of 2 gpm is the same as .0045 cfs.

1Resilience in a Time of Drought: A Transferable Model for Collective Action in North Coast Watersheds is a practical ‘how-to’ guide for community members, restoration practitioners, non-profits, and other stakeholders wishing to establish a voluntary water conservation program in their watershed. This guide was developed based on the methods and findings of a collaborative technology transfer project that was initiated in Humboldt County, California in 2013 by Sanctuary Forest and Salmonid Restoration Federation in collaboration with Sara Schremmer, then-graduate student in the sociology program at Humboldt State University. Access at http://bit.ly/schremmer.

Water Measurement Conversions

1 CF = 7.48 GAL

1 CFS = 448.8 GPM

1 AF = 325,851 GAL

1 AF = 43,560 CF

Calculate the Impact of your Diversion

Thank you to all who volunteered with us in 2014!

Fran Bikel ~ Mike Buettner ~ Stevie Luther ~ Gabe Richards ~ Sara Schremmer ~

Annalee Veach ~ Randy Weaver ~ Wonderful Board of Directors

You helped us make a memorable impact at events, fundraise, get a little more tech-savy, organize newspaper archives, and maintain effective programs to

protect the Eel River and its fisheries. Way to go!

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