Legal & Regulatory Protection
Headwaters Magazine
California’s senior U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein recently passed away after 31 years in the U.S. Senate. To say that she was influential on California water matters would be an understatement. I’ve prepared some personal recollections for Friends of the River.
Senator Feinstein’s introduction to high-stake water and rivers games came when she was still the mayor of San Francisco. In 1987, the year that I joined the FOR staff, President Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of the Interior Don Hodel floated the idea of restoring Hetch-Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park. She soon paid her first visit Yosemite and was calling O’Shaughnessy Dam and Hetch-Hetchy Reservoir “San Francisco’s birthright….”
The California Fish and Wildlife Commission made the Shasta snow wreath species a candidate for endangered species status under the California Endangered Species Act in 2020, and this month it was fully listed.
Friends of the River and its four coalition partners have been in a long-running legal struggle with the licensees of several federally licensed hydropower projects. These licensees have taken to the courts to reduce state authority to protect and manage their waters.
Like Jack Nicholson axing his way through the door to announce that he’s home in “The Shining,” the Delta Conveyance Project – aka the Delta Tunnel, nee the Peripheral Canal – has returned to once again threaten the health of California’s rivers and the San Francisco Bay-Delta estuary…