#proposition 68

[montereybayaquarium]

Are you registered to vote? Next month California voters can embrace a healthy future for our state’s ocean and coast! Proposition 68 invests in the protection of beaches, bays, wetlands, lagoons, and coastal watersheds and wildlife areas. We’re otterly for it, and hope you’ll vote YES on June 5! 

Learn more 

(Photos courtesy Christopher Michel)

[rjzimmerman]

California's Prop 68 pledges to revitalize and create urban parks

Measure dedicates $725 million to underserved neighborhoods.

Excerpt:

A $4.1 billion investment is no small potatoes when it comes to protecting natural resources and improving public parkland.

But Proposition 68, a general obligation bond that will appear before California voters on June 5, is one incredibly small-minded measure. And that’s nothing but a good thing.

Authored by Kevin de León, a state senator representing Los Angeles' markedly dense and ethnically and economically diverse 24th District, Prop 68 is a measure that goes out of its way to eschew big marquee projects that tend to garner headlines and drum up controversy and excitement.

As the San Francisco Chronicle explains, in lieu of building dams and expanding the scope of already sizable state parks located in often hard-to-access corners of the state, Prop 68 — also known as the Parks, Environment and Water Bond — strives to make the great outdoors more accessible to California’s rapidly growing — and frequently underserved — urban population. As envisioned by de León, small, local parks will be upgraded in cash-strapped cities where funding for outdoor recreation is often an afterthought. The state's urban greenways will be protected and pollution-plagued bodies of water located smack-dab in the middle of cities and suburban areas will be subject to extensive cleanup efforts.

In total, roughly a third of funding — $1.3 billion — will go toward improving California’s local and state parks if the measure is approved. A third ($1.2 billion) will be used to help conserve and protect the state’s vast natural areas, with a decent share of it reserved for climate change-related resiliency projects. Another third ($1.6 billion) of the bounty is dedicated to anti-flood measures, waterway cleanup efforts and ensuring that all Californians have access to safe, reliable drinking water. Even the tragically degraded Salton Sea, the largest lake in California, will receive a dedicated $200 million for remediation efforts.

[ahouseisahome]

California Conservation Corps workers planting trees and shrubs California, and especially the Central Valley, is no stranger to floods. The biggest one in modern times occurred in 1861-62, when 40 days of rain turned the valley into a 250-mile-long lake and Leland Stanford, the state’s new governor, took a rowboat to his inauguration in Sacramento.

That flood occurred before most of the state’s dams, levees and other flood-control works were built (and when the population was one-hundredth of what it is today). While not as big, some more recent floods have been severe, including one in 1997 that killed nine people and caused nearly $2 billion in damage. River Partners plants many species — trees like cottonwood and black willow, shrubs like golden currant and valley elderberry and a variety of grasses — all of which can recover after being underwater for months.

– New York Times