Letter to the Governor

[Aaron&Julie]

Following up with Jeff Krieger's action to the governor, which he mentioned on a post by Paul Lebowitz on FB, I also sent him an email, including the information about the pending lawsuit by Bob Fletcher, which contains many great points. I figure it can't hurt, and inundating the governor with these messages, may wake him up before it's too late.

Here's the link to send similar messages and include the 2 articles copied and sent, plus the subject and position I used:

http://gov.ca.gov/m_contact.php

Subject: Environment – issues/concerns Your position: Con

Dear Governor,
I'm sending this email, because I am against the unnecessary closures of quality fishing grounds trying to be implemented by the MLPA. I've fished Southern California ocean waters for over 40 years, and I know for a fact these closures are not required. The DFG for the last few decades have controlled any decline in fish populations with size and quantity restrictions to the specific species of fish being effected and have done an excellent job. The closures don't address the actual problems of pollution, oil drilling, etc, that impact our coastline. If anything, a fishermen will remove pollution found on the water, not add to it. Below I've listed recent actions taken by fishermen and the corrupt process the MLPA has taken to appease the overly eco-minded citizens, while disregarding the rest.

Anglers Fight Back Against Unlawful Marine Closures
Recreational fishing groups file lawsuit to invalidate regulations that unnecessarily deny access to public waters

January 27, 2011
Sacramento, CA - Member organizations of the Partnership for Sustainable Oceans (PSO), which represents California’s recreational fishing and boating community, have filed a lawsuit in the San Diego County Superior Court seeking to set aside regulations established by the California Fish and Game Commission in connection with the Marine Life Protection Act (MLPA). The commission approved regulations for the North Central and South Coast study regions in August 2009 and December 2010, respectively, establishing marine protected areas – essentially no-fishing zones – in large areas of the state’s coastal waters. The lawsuit, filed by United Anglers of Southern California, Coastside Fishing Club and Robert C. Fletcher, cites a lack of statutory authority for adopting the regulations, and, in the case of the South Coast regulations, numerous violations of the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) in the commission's environmental review of the regulations.
"From the outset, it was clear that the MLPA process was set up to reach a predetermined outcome under the fiction of an allegedly open and transparent process," said Bob Fletcher, former president of the Sportfishing Association of California. "In a rush to establish regulations based on political timelines and a pre-determined agenda, the Fish and Game Commission has ignored the legal requirements it must follow."
Most notably, the petition states that:
• The commission does not have the statutory authority to adopt, modify or delete marine protected areas under the MLPA's main rulemaking provisions until it has approved a final Master Plan for the state. The final Master Plan has yet to be written or approved.
• The other statutory authorities that the commission relies on do not provide the commission with the authority it needs to adopt these MPAs.
• The privately-funded "MLPA Initiative" process has been conducted in a manner inconsistent with the process the state legislature directed in the MLPA, and meetings held by MLPA planning groups that should have been open meetings were closed to the public.
• The South Coast study region regulations were adopted on the basis of an environmental review process that is in violation of CEQA.
"Our concerns were presented to the commission prior to its December 2010 vote to approve regulations for the South Coast," Fletcher further said. "Ignoring the information before them, the commission went forward with approving regulations to close 116 square miles of southern California coastal waters to recreational fishing. Many of the best sportfishing areas are included in the closures. These closures don't just disappoint the fishermen – they take away jobs and income for many California small businesses along the coast and elsewhere. Particularly concerning are the flaws in a regulatory process that has been fueled with private money from special interests. The end result of this process has been a rush by the commission to adopt regulations without the authority it has to have to adopt them, and without a proper review of the environmental consequences of what they're doing. That should be a concern for all Californians, whether they fish for fun or for a living, or whether they've never been fishing at all."
"Much of the best fishing areas are now closed under the MLPA process," noted Dan Wolford, Science Director for the Coastside Fishing Club. "Anglers in the North Central region are now suffering because of excessive, unnecessary closures that we believe were improperly established. We find it extremely concerning that anglers, who are the original conservationists, are being taken off the water through a seriously flawed process, while the real threats to the health of our ocean, such as contaminated stormwater runoff and industrial pollutants, are allowed to continue unabated."
The petition is the second lawsuit involving the MLPA by members of the PSO. In May 2010, Fletcher filed suit against the MLPA Blue Ribbon Task Force and Master Plan Team – also known as the Science Advisory Team – for failing to respond to a Public Records Act request, as state agencies are required to do. These groups claimed that they were not required to make their records available to the public on the ground that they are not "state agencies." Last October, a California Superior Court ruled that the Blue Ribbon Task Force and the Science Advisory Team are indeed state agencies and therefore are compelled by California’s Public Records Act to share information that they were withholding from public view.
"The good intentions of the MLPA have been derailed by private interests and political motivations," said Fletcher. "We urge anglers, outdoors enthusiasts and anyone who supports good government and the public’s right to know what its government is doing, to visit www.oceanaccessprotectionfund.org and donate what they can to help us to continue to fight this flawed process in the courts."

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What we can learn from the MLPA Initiative by Dan Bacher
Jan 29, 2011
In 28 years of covering fish, water and environmental politics in the West, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's Marine Life Protection Act (MLPA) Initiative is the most corrupt public process I've ever reported on.
The Marine Life Protection Act (MLPA), a landmark law signed by Governor Gray Davis in 1999 to create a network of marine protected areas in state waters along the California coast, was designed to provide comprehensive protection to the marine ecosystem. However, the law was eviscerated under Schwarzenegger's privately-funded MLPA Initiative.
The initiative, overseen by oil industry, real estate, marina development and other corporate representatives, took water pollution, oil drilling and spills, wave energy development, corporate aquaculture, military testing, habitat destruction and all other human impacts on the ocean other than fishing and gathering off the table in its perverse concept of marine "protection."
There are six major lessons to be learned from the MLPA fiasco so that the inherent flaws of the initiative are never repeated in any process anywhere.
1. Never fund a public conservation process with private, unaccountable money, especially in a case where you are in effect removing stakeholders from public access. The roots of the MLPA's problems largely derive from the privatization of conservation through the Resources Legacy Fund Foundation, a private corporation.
2. Always consult with Indian Tribes on closures of areas and other regulations that may impact their ceremonial and gathering rights and sacred sites, as protected by state, federal and international laws, including the American Indian Religious Freedom Act and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. This was NOT done in the Central Coast process, in a bad case of institutional racism. It was very poorly and minimally done in the North Central Coast and South Coast. It was not until the process came to the North Coast that language respecting the fishing and gathering rights of Tribes was included in a proposal for marine protected areas.
3. When designing MPAs, you must include other human uses other than fishing and gathering. Otherwise the "marine protected areas" become "marine privatization areas" that aren't protected from water pollution, oil spills and drilling, wave energy projects, military testing and other human impacts on the ocean.
4. Never appoint corporate hacks like oil industry lobbyists, real estate executives and developers to panels designed to "protect" the ocean. Having Catherine Reheis-Boyd, the president of the Western States Petroleum Association, chair the South Coast MLPA Blue Ribbon Task Force was about as crazy a conflict of interest that you could ever come up with!
5. Make sure that you have a funding mechanism for enforcement in place BEFORE you even think about instituting a process like the MLPA Initiative. The wardens call MPAs "Marine Poaching Areas" because California, with the lowest per capita ratio of wardens to the population of any state in the nation, doesn't have enough wardens to patrol new marine reserves, let alone the existing marine protected areas.
6. We need to eliminate "Blue Ribbon Panels" and create "Blue Collar Panels" where grassroots people, rather than political hacks and corrupt big business interests, make decisions about public policy in an atmosphere of real democracy. To start off the MLPA process with a chair like Phil Isenberg, a well connected political lobbyist, is the absolute wrong way to do things. He then went on to chair the Delta Vision plan to build a peripheral canal, showing the direct link between the peripheral canal greenwashing and MLPA greenwashing.
In spite of the claims by MLPA officials and proponents that the process is "open, transparent and inclusive," it is anything but. Californians must pressure their Legislators and the Brown administration to suspend or cancel the corrupt MLPA Initiative - and to learn from its inherent flaws to avoid making the same mistakes in any future public conservation processes.