by Bob Walsh
Yes, I am saddened to report it is true. There appears to be good reason to believe that the State Water Resources Control Board has been meeting for a couple of years on the DL with the Dept. of Water Resources, presumably in order to grease the skids for Jerry's water theft tunnel.
The Water Board does not deny that the meetings have taken place, but does deny that they were illegal. (The formerly great state of California has some very stringent laws regarding private meeting and public business.) They are, however, admitting to violating of the "ex-parte" rules.
Various opponents to the tunnel ripoff project are asserting that this whole process has hopelessly compromised proceedings and therefore believe that they have no confidence in the process.
It would be pretty much impossible to actually build the damn tunnel, or tunnels, without the Water Board's say-so. They need to issue a permit in order to actually build.
These meetings apparently involved staff and not members of the actual board, and (according to the Board's lawyers) involved discussions of the EIR and not the hearings about the construction of the tunnel itself. This may be a distinction without a difference, depending on who you ask.
With any sort of luck this little revelation will end up rolling things back so far that the project will die a natural death before it sucks up any more money, time or energy.
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