Before a very raucous crowd on Friday at the Saranac Building, Spokane’s Julian Powers was presented the state’s top environmental award.

Julian receiving congratulations from Ecology’s Grant Pfeifer

A prolific public speaker and public letter writer, Powers, 85, has been well known and well-respected in the region’s environmental community for many years. He and his wife, Jane Cunningham, are fixtures in progressive and green causes in and around Spokane and both were on hand this evening for the award presentation from the Washington Department of Ecology’s Eastern Regional Director, Grant Pfeifer.

“As I think about the quality of character that we want to recognize here tonight with this award, I think about the characteristics and attributes of perseverance, of action, and words,” Pfeifer said. “And Julian is the model for us. You walk the talk, or ride the talk, is a better way to say it, on behalf of what we all hold dear.”

Pfeifer’s “ride the talk” line got an appreciative chuckle from the packed hall of well-wishers. Powers has been a tireless advocate for reducing the carbon dioxide emissions that cause global warming, and up until a stroke hobbled him two years ago, he rode his bicycle religiously.

“Julian said it so well earlier this evening,” Pfeifer added. “Apathy never got anything done.”

“Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking,” Powers joked as he accepted the award, “I will make this very short. I’m surprised and astonished. I really do appreciate this and I’ll remember this evening for a very long, long time, assuming I live that long. I really, really appreciate it.”

The event Friday evening coincided with a Lands Council “First Friday” event on the Saranac’s second floor, where the Lands Council has its offices.

Julian was featured Saturday morning in a front page story by Spokesman-Review staff writer Becky Kramer, which can read here.

—Tim Connor

Spokane Riverkeeper Bart Mihailovich and former Center for Justice executive director Breean Beggs are among those scheduled to appear this afternoon at a City Hall event marking the second anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United. Citizens United, of course, was the January 21, 2010 ruling that now bars government from placing limits on independent spending for political purposes by corporations and unions. It was immediately denounced in a New York Times editorial as a “disastrous decision” that “strikes at the heart of democracy.

Mihailovich and Beggs will join former Spokane Mayor Mary Verner, Envision Spokane’s Brad Read, small business owner and political activist John Waite, Peace & Justice Action League of Spokane director Liz Moore, United Food and Commercial Workers union leader Larry Hall, Walter Kloefkorn from Spokane Moves to Amend, and Kirk Smith, a local political consultant.

The City Hall forum, entitled “Occupy City Hall,” will begin at 3 p.m. and be introduced by veteran local activist and former Congressional candidate Bart Haggin. The session is being billed as an opportunity for community members to have an open floor to express themselves about the local “Occupy” and/or weigh in on a proposed motion “to reject the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United, and move to amend our Constitution to firmly establish that money is not speech, and that human beings, not corporations, are persons entitled to constitutional rights.”

The panel will respond to citizen comments.

The session is hosted by Occupy Spokane and Spokane Moves to Amend and is co-Sponsored by the Peace and Justice Action League of Spokane. It will be preceded by a reception in the Chase Gallery, just outside the council chambers.

This morning  there will be a peaceful, public demonstration slated for the Federal Courthouse on 916 W. Riverside.  This “Occupy the Court”event is open to all who want to participate and will begin at 11:30 a.m.  For more information you can visit the Facebook event page at http://www.facebook.com/events/268626706529705/

Bart Mihailovich & Tim Connor, for the Center for Justice

For the past several weeks, several users trying to access the websites for the Community Building have, instead, received ominous notices about the site being infected by a virus, or as being listed as a “malicious website.”

We’ve had our web site specialists working on this for several weeks. They recently determined that the Community Building website and the Center for Justice website  have been infected with the so-called “Pharma hack” virus.

Aside from being a big headache to diagnose and purge, the most important thing for our readers to know is that the virus will not infect your computers or networks. What the virus does is redirect you to sites where you can buy certain medications that (cough) are widely advertised to enhance male sexual performance. This is obviously not our intention!

Seriously, though, the Pharma hack virus is elusive and is capable of being dormant for periods of time before awakening and causing the redirection. So far was we know, the virus only effects the site when the user is coming to our site through an external link, such as a Google search or a Facebook posting.

We have been working on a new look/theme for the Community Building website, and trust that the conversion to the new site will alleviate the problem, hopefully by the end of the month.

We appreciate your patience and regret any inconvenience.

— Tim Connor and Rebecca Mack ]]> http://community-building.org/talk-of-the-block/pardon-the-mischief/feed/ 0 http://community-building.org/news/governor-gregoire-backs-gay-marriage/ http://community-building.org/news/governor-gregoire-backs-gay-marriage/#comments Thu, 05 Jan 2012 17:12:59 +0000 rmack http://community-building.org/?p=3777 Governor Gregoire will offer bill to legalize same-sex marriage in Washington.

In a high stakes water use case involving a Franklin County feedlot, the Washington Supreme Court says even mega-feedlots can have unrestricted access to state groundwater.

This story was revised and updated on December 23rd.

In a bitter defeat for state environmental and small ranchers and growers, the Washington Supreme Court today formally interpreted a 65-year-old statute to say that livestock operations, of any size, can make unlimited draws on state groundwater.

The ruling stems from a lawsuit that Five Corner Family Farmers (an organization of Franklin County dry land wheat growers), the Sierra Club and the Spokane-based Center for Environmental Law & Policy (CELP) filed against the state in 2009. Although the state was the nominal target of the suit, the court action was unmistakably instigated by the plans of an industrial feedlot, doing business as Easterday Ranches, Inc.

In one of the state’s driest counties, Easterday wants to operate a feedlot that would regularly tend to 30,000 cattle, and plans to provide most of the drinking water for the vast herds from a well it has drilled into the Grande Ronde aquifer. The drinking water requirements alone would come to between 450,000 and 600,000 gallons per day.

As the New York Times reported in April 2009, the Easterday proposal was met with great alarm by neighboring Franklin County farmers.

“I have one well that my great grandfather dug in 1900,” farmer and lawsuit co-plaintiff Scott Collins told the newspaper. “If I lose it, I’m done.”

Under the 1945 law at issue, were it not for the stock-watering exemptions, Easterday would have been required to get a permit for a withdrawals of water exceeding 5,000 gallons per day. Again, according its own plans, the stock water used by Easterday would be nearly ten times that amount.

Yet because Easterday planned to provide the water to thirsty cattle, a permit for the groundwater it plans to withdraw from the Grande Ronde aquifer wasn’t required.

Or was it?

That was the question that Collins and his co-plaintiffs were raising. They argued that the intent of the 1945 law (though poorly expressed) was to exempt stock watering and a few other specified uses from the requirement of having to get a permit, so long as their ground water use was for less than 5,000 gallons per day. For more than 5,000 gallons per day, user would be required to get a state permit.

But was that intent reflected in the letter of the law?

Collins et al., argued that it was.

Today, however, the Supreme Court, by a 6-3 margin agreed with the state and Easterday. In her prevailing opinion for the majority, Justice Susan Owens parsed the statute pretty much key word, by key word. Ultimately, she and the other five justices in the majority agreed with Washington Attorney General Rob McKenna and an earlier ruling by a Franklin County Superior Court Judge.

“{U}nder a plain reading” of the statute, Justice Owens wrote, “groundwater withdrawn without a permit for stock-watering purposes is not limited to 5,000 gallons per day.”

{The full text of the 1945 statute appears at the end of this story.}

Joining Justice Owen in the majority were Justices Charles Johnson, Gerry Alexander, Tom Chambers, Mary Fairhurst, and James Johnson.

Critics like attorney Rachael Paschal Osborn with CELP say the court’s ruling produces an absurd result, one in which senior water rights users of the same groundwater source are subject to use restrictions under their permits, whereas a stock watering operation–even a massive operation like Easterday–can have unrestricted groundwater use.

“When you have one type of water user who’s already being told they have to shut off their water use during a drought year, how could you possibly have a stock water operation come in and begin to use water in that system?” Paschal Osborn told Spokane Public Radio after the court’s ruling was announced. “All the water is allocated, it’s all accounted for.”

Paschal Osborn added that it is now up to the state legislature to revisit the state’s groundwater law and close the loophole that Easterday seeks to take advantage. You can read more about CELP’s critique of the Easterday plan and the story of the groundwater use loophole here.

A minority of the state Supreme Court justices agreed with Paschal Osborn’s critique. Writing for himself and fellow dissenters Barbara Madsen and Debra Stephens, Justice Charles Wiggins wrote that the 1945 statute is—as Collins et al. had argued—“ambiguous” and that the result of today’s ruling is contrary to the legislature’s intent.

“I conclude that the legislature never intended that RCW 90.44.050 would allow Easterday to use between 450,000 and 600,000 galloons of water per day with no inquiry whatsoever into whether existing rights may be impaired or the public welfare harmed,” he wrote. “Rather, I believe the legislature enacted an ambiguous statute that is now being read to produce a result contrary to legislative intent.”

The full text of RCW 90.44.050 is as follows:

After June 6, 1945, no withdrawal of public groundwaters of the state shall be begun, nor shall any well or other works for such withdrawal be constructed, unless an application to appropriate such waters has been made to the department and a permit has been granted by it as herein provided:  EXCEPT, HOWEVER, That any withdrawal of public groundwaters for stock-watering purposes, or for the watering of a lawn or of a noncommercial garden not exceeding one-half acre in area, or for single or group domestic uses in an amount not exceeding five thousand gallons a day, or as provided in RCW 90.44.052, or for an industrialpurpose in an amount not exceeding five thousand gallons a day, is and shall be exempt from the provisions of this section, but, to the extent that it is regularly used beneficially, shall be entitled to a right equal to that established by a permit issued under the provisions of this chapter:

PROVIDED, HOWEVER, That the department from time to time may
require the person or agency making any such small withdrawal to
furnish information as to the means for and the quantity of that withdrawal:

PROVIDED, FURTHER, That at the option of the party making withdrawals of groundwaters of the state not exceeding five thousand gallons per day, applications under this section or declarations under RCW 90.44.090 may be filed and permits and certificates obtained in the same manner and under the same requirements as is in this chapter provided in the case of withdrawals in excess of five thousand gallons a day.

—Tim Connor of Spokane’s Center for Justice

Big Red Barn lays an egg. Left to right; Patrick Klausen, Kevin Brown, Charley Gurche and Ken Glaster The bird is a fighting game cock that Charley found in a pile of discarded birds under a bridge in Missouri many years ago. He is stuffed. Photo by Rick Singer

Big Red Barn will be playing music with special guest Andrew Wilson on the fiddle, til about 10 pm. During the second set, the band will invite local musicians to come and jam with them.

Charley and his wife Sara travel extensively to photograph natural landscapes. He has produced over 15,000 images and his work has appeared in a wide range of books, magazines and calendars including National Geographic Society, Sierra Club, Wilderness Society and the National Parks Publications. He has solely completed numerous books including Mt. Rainier National Park, Oregon, Washington, Virginia, Missouri, and Thoughts from Walden Pond.

We asked Charley to tell us how photography is like playing the banjo.

Charley: One thing that’s similar is that both processes build on themselves. You figure out something to do, and it goes through this evolution, so in both there is a lot of uncharted territory that I like to get into, and it keeps building on itself. In photography,  I keep having new ideas about composition, and like to find new ways to apply compositional ideas. That’s true in music, too. I figure out a cool thing to do and try and figure out when and where to use it.

Another way they’re similar is you can push yourself out of your comfort zone. You can stay in your safety zone where you’ve done the same thing a zillion times before and know exactly how to do it, or you can push into a new place. It’s more inspirational and rewarding to push out, but it’s also more challenging. It’s challenging in a way that’s not always very fun. You know you want to get someplace new, and there’s more to get to, but you can’t find your way there.  So, in that sense, if you’re set on your goal of doing something new, it’s really a struggle because sometimes it’s just not happening. That’s part of the process – you stick to it, or take a break and come back and something eventually does happen.

That’s the internal process, and it doesn’t always result in producing something external – like a new release with the music, or a new book project with the photography. But sometimes it does.

CB: Like now?

Charley: Yes. This our first new CD release since 2005.

CB: The title, Barn Again – did you have some sort of religious conversion?

Charley: (Laughs) No, that’s meant to be sort of a playful thing. There are no Christian songs on Barn Again. Mostly vocals, a few instrumentals, a real gumbo of stuff – swingy and strongly rhythmic. I think you’ll like it.

Rebecca Mack for the Community Building