Gone with the flow
Guest commentary by David Pritchett

The fish ladder conundrum that Casitas Municipal Water District finds itself in is hardly as simple or benign as its general manager, John J. Johnson, makes it out to be in his Dec. 11 guest commentary. As a result of continual stalling overseen by Mr. Johnson during the past year, with Casitas calling meeting after meeting but never providing any substantive hydrologic analysis as promised, the water district already has lost a $750,000 state grant because it cannot possibly build the fish ladder on Robles Diversion Dam before its state contract expires next March. The ratepayers of Casitas water district no doubt will be stuck with the bill instead. Another $1.5 million grant, a bird in the hand, expires in March 2004.
A further disaster may ensue if Casitas continues not to cooperate with National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) about the minimal flow requirements for the fish ladder to work properly. Unless the endangered steelhead trout grow lungs and legs, to reach their upstream spawning streams, the fish will need the minimum 6 inches of water depth specified under the analysis by NMFS for adequate flow in Ventura River downstream of Robles Dam. Casitas still has not offered any other analysis to refute this, except for a doom-and-gloom scenario with no evidence to back up their claims that water for fish comes at the expense of ratepayers.
Of course, the real tragedy for the water district and its ratepayers is the loss of local control of their own water. By not cooperating with NMFS, Casitas is forcing that federal agency to impose the flow requirements onto U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, the actual legal owner of Robles Dam, the diversion canal, and the land around Lake Casitas reservoir. The feds could release even more flow for fish and possibly repossess the whole water delivery and storage infrastructure to make sure it is operated in compliance with the Endangered Species Act. Casitas then would be left in quite a conundrum indeed as a local water district with plenty of water but no way to store it.
Water district ratepayers and/or steelhead trout conservationists have a tremendous stake in the next move by Casitas.
The board of directors definitely needs to hear all views during the public meeting tonight at 7 p.m. at Sunset School in Oak View. Especially critical are more than $2 million in grants lost and in jeopardy, and how the water district continues to spend hundreds of thousands of ratepayer dollars on expensive consultants and a distracting public relations campaign that only postpone the inevitable.

David Pritchett is program director for Southern California Steelhead Coalition carexpritch@netscape.net

Fault lines
Bret Bradigan, OVN publisher

We get a lot of criticism here at the Ojai Valley News, and every great once in awhile, some of it is even deserved. But the one criticism to which I give no quarter is that we run "too much negative news."
My response is usually muted, though this is the one statement people make that really gets under my usually thick skin. News isn't negative, or positive. It just is. It is people making their own judgments, coloring it with their own perceptions, that gives it that subjective cast.
If you look through any issue of the paper, you'll see those quotidian occasions that give small-town life its sense of fulfillment are given plenty of space; by any judgment, we run vastly more so-called positive news than we do negative. As we should, given that an important part of our role is to shine a light on all the wonderful things going on around here.
Yet we serve no one by turning a blind eye to the bad. Whether it is rampant drug use among our teens, tragic accidents, misadventures among our public officials, or even the carping of letter writers, we cannot call ourselves a newspaper and not present as much information as possible and let people make up their own minds about its merit.
As Ralph Emerson McGill wrote, "Who loves his town more? He who rights those things in it which are ugly and wrong and unjust, or he who says, 'Let us dwell on our lovely sunsets and our beautiful fields and not advertise our faults.'"
The Ojai Valley News doesn't go looking for trouble, but neither do we ignore the significant occasions or events of our community. And our pledge to you is that we always work hard to be fair as humanly possible, to get the other side of the story, to be balanced in our approach. Sometimes it doesn't appear that way, but I assure you, whether you realize it or not, the people of the Ojai Valley are well-served by their newspaper staff. They are truly a dedicated group of people who love Ojai, and it shows.
By tackling the good as well as the bad, the beautiful as well as the ugly, they incrementally, without notice, pave the way for awareness and dialogue and solutions. And from that, the bad and the ugly are diminished as the realm of beauty and goodness expand. Sometimes, the truest love is the toughest love.

© 2002 The Ojai Valley News

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