[Water_news] 5. DWR'S CALIFORNIA WATER NEWS: AGENCIES, PROGRAMS, PEOPLE - 10/15/08

Department of Water Resources

California Water News

A daily compilation of significant news articles and comment

 

October 15, 2008

 

5. Agencies, Programs, People –

 

 

California's whale tail license plate harpooned; new image will replace it following legal standoff

San Jose Mercury News

 

Dorothy Green's Final Fight: Before She Died, Heal the Bay Founder Said California's Drought Is a Fake

"If we managed water differently — better — there would be plenty of water for the state of California."

Los Angeles Weekly

 

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California's whale tail license plate harpooned; new image will replace it following legal standoff

San Jose Mercury News – 10/14/08

By Paul Rogers

 

California's whale-tail license plate, which raised millions of dollars for state environmental programs by merging humpbacks with highways, has been harpooned and will soon be replaced with a new coastal image.

 

The California Coastal Commission is giving artists, schoolchildren and others who think they can draw a distinctive-looking whale tail until Jan. 15 to design a new specialty plate in a contest to replace the current one.

 

The winner will be announced next summer, with the new plate hitting California roads by 2010.

 

The cetacean switch is the result of a dispute between Wyland, the Southern California artist who goes by one name and who created the original whale-tail image, and the commission over whether it should pay him royalties. Rather than fight it out in court, the commission decided to junk the old plate and start fresh with Son of Whale Tail.

 

"Nobody will buy it. What are they going to sell, three of them?" Wyland said on Tuesday. "My tail was lightning in a bottle. It is a powerful image. You can't do an imitation of a powerful image. And my name carries good will."

 

The commission, however, is betting that a kindergartner's crayon drawing could have just as much appeal.

"There are in fact other images out there that depict a whale tail that are much more original and compelling,'' said Peter Douglas, executive director of the coastal commission. "It was not a Picasso."

 

Wyland, a Laguna Beach painter famous for his huge murals of undersea life, designed the original license plate in 1994 depicting the breaching posterior of a humpback whale and allowed the coastal commission to use the image to raise money.

 

In May, his attorney sent a cease-and-desist letter to the coastal commission. It ordered the agency to stop using the image after Wyland asked the state to begin paying his non-profit foundation a 20 percent royalty and the commission refused.

 

"They said they wanted to use one of my images. I said OK," Wyland said. "To say that a guy like me would say they could have my artwork in perpetuity without a contract and with no royalties, does that smell funny? It's an artist's rights issue."

 

Douglas said he was surprised by the request. He acknowledges that the original deal was on a handshake, and in retrospect that has created a whale of a problem.

"There was nothing put in writing, and that was our big mistake. We relied on his word," Douglas said. "It was very clear to us that he made the offer without any strings attached. There were no time limitations; there were no royalty payments. The only thing we were asked to do was give him credit, which we did."

 

Compared with standard-issue California license plates, the whale tail plate costs an additional $50 for the initial purchase, with a $40 annual renewal fee.

 

Since 1997, when the plates first hit the road, their sales have gone swimmingly, with more than 175,000 sold. They have raised $43.1 million for the coastal commission, the state Coastal Conservancy and the Resources Agency, funding programs like Adopt-a-Beach, the annual Coastal Cleanup Day and grants to schools to teach children about marine science.

 

Wyland noted Florida pays his foundation a 10 percent royalty for a specialty plate he created for Sunshine State motorists. He said he first began requesting that California pay a royalty when his foundation asked for a grant from the whale tail license plate program and was turned down. Last year, the Wyland Foundation spent about $650,000 on marine education.

 

Rather than battle him in court, Douglas and the coastal commission, an agency which regulates development along California's 1,100-mile oceanfront, decided to stop using Wyland's image and to hold a contest to create a new plate. The rules (at www.coastforyou.org or 1-800-Coast-4U) say the new plate should depict a whale tail, but also can include other features, like a rocky shoreline, crashing waves or other wildlife.

Ocean advocates are watching the squabble with interest.

 

"I welcome the opportunity for the public to be involved in a really worthwhile coastal resource program," said Mark Massara, director of California coastal programs for the Sierra Club. "I think the existing whale tail kind of looks like an offshore oil derrick anyway."#

http://www.mercurynews.com/localnewsheadlines/ci_10720654

 

 

Dorothy Green's Final Fight: Before She Died, Heal the Bay Founder Said California's Drought Is a Fake

"If we managed water differently — better — there would be plenty of water for the state of California."

Los Angeles Weekly – 10/16/08

By Judith Lewis

 

I didn’t go to talk to Dorothy Green because she was dying. I wasn’t looking to do a tribute. I went because I was working up a story about water, about how we use it and abuse it, mismanage it and waste it, and about how the bipartisan water bond being pushed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and Senator Dianne Feinstein — with its provisions for new dams and “water conveyance” projects — is a really bad idea. In August, I had gone to a protest rally against the water bond at which Green had spoken, and in the brief interview we had that day, I realized how much of my thinking about water — about Southern California’s wasted storm water, the Central Valley’s reckless and polluting agricultural irrigation, the rage that simmers up in me when people call storm drains “sewers” and dump crap into them —traced back to Green. I had never sat down and talked to her. She gave me her card and told me to call.

 

A few weeks after the rally, I did. I told her I wanted to follow up on some of the ideas she’d brought up, specifically her claim that California wasn’t really suffering an epic drought. “It’s a manufactured drought,” she’d told me. “It’s being staged so that Big Ag can take control of the water supply and sell it back to consumers at a profit.” I asked if we could set up an interview.

 

“Sure,” she said, “but you’d better hurry. Because, you know, I’m dying.”

 

Two days later, we sat down on the couch in the living room of the Westwood home where she’d lived for 40 years and raised three sons. She spoke haltingly, frequently stopping to scold herself for losing her train of thought. The melanoma she’d fought back for 30 years had resurfaced in 2003 as a brain tumor, “the first of a half-dozen metastases,” she explained, and left her struggling to keep her body balanced and her mind from stubbornly wandering. “Oh, brain!” she’d say as she paused, and then continue on in a perfectly articulated explanation of the Reclamation Act of 1902, which stipulated that water subsidized by the state, harnessed and husbanded for agricultural irrigation, should go only to family farms.

 

Her pauses were mitigated by the urgency of her message, by the sense she had that this was her last chance to save the declining species of the California Delta, including the smelt and salmon, and to put right more than a century of corruption that had robbed California’s citizens of their right to clean, safe water — to drink, to water their gardens, to swim in.

 

“If water were managed differently — better — there would be plenty of water for the state of California, even with all the people in it now,” she insisted. “What we need is for the state to do its job.” She was calling for a restructuring of the State Water Resources Control Board, “so that appointees to the board could never be fired for political reasons.” She was still working hard to make it happen.

 

And she was still trying to persuade California’s lawmakers and citizens that “Big Ag,” as she called it, had spent the past century pulling a fast one on the public. At the time of the Reclamation Act, “a family farm was 160 acres,” Green explained. “The Central Valley clearly does not have family farms. And yet they exist on water subsidized by the state. It’s a huge scandal.” As she explains in her 2007 book, Managing Water: Avoiding Crisis in California,the limit was later raised to 960 acres. “But before that, they played a lot of interesting games, setting up farms to make them look like family farms, when they were actually corporations.

“What we want to find out now is who really owns the farms in the Westlands Water District, which is the largest water district in the nation. Nobody has really taken a look at this business of Big Ag, of all these corporations. Who are the real owners? How many owners are there, really, of this subsidized water?”

And then the phone rang, as it would many times while we talked. She took every call. “I’ve got many, many good friends,” she said, smiling. “Really good friends. I’ve been lucky.”

 

Dorothy Green died on October 13, at the age of 79. She’d been an activist since 1972, and over her lifetime worked on campaign finance reform, lobbied for laws to protect the environment and fought the irresponsible siting of nuclear power plants. But nothing mattered to her as much as water. In 1985, she founded Heal the Bay to address the problem of sewage and other pollution pouring into local coastal waters; 11 years later, she brought together disparate water agencies, politicians and environmentalists to form the Los Angeles and San Gabriel Rivers Watershed Council. She was outspoken, but, unlike her mentor, coastal-protection activist Ellen Stern Harris — who once openly wished a tsunami would wipe away coastal development — Green kept her head. Managing Water, published last year by University of California Press, is a straightforward and sober analysis of where California’s water comes from, who gets it and how. There are many things to learn from it, including how to tackle a topic you’re passionate about without alienating the people who most need to hear you. #

http://www.laweekly.com/2008-10-16/news/dorothy-green-39-s-final-fight-before-she-died-heal-the-bay-founder-said-california-39-s-drought-is-a-fake/

 

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