The stories you want. The opinions that matter.
No, thanks
Tag: sacramento
Clash At California Capitol Leaves At Least 10 Injured

Clash At California Capitol Leaves At Least 10 Injured

By Eric M. Johnson and Justin Madden

At least 10 people were injured at a rally outside the California state capitol in Sacramento on Sunday as members of a white supremacist group clashed with counter-protesters, authorities said.

The melee erupted during a rally staged by the Traditionalist Worker Party, described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a white nationalist extremist group.

One of its leaders, Matt Parrott, said the party had called the demonstration in part to protest against violence that has broken out outside recent rallies by Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee.

The incident may fuel concerns about the potential for violent protests outside the major party conventions in Cleveland and Philadelphia this summer and in the run-up to the Nov. 8 presidential election.

“With the eyes of the world’s media on both Philadelphia and Cleveland, no doubt there will be significant protests,” said Democratic strategist Steve Schale. “The extreme rhetoric, combined with the nonstop media attention, does encourage these kinds of events.”

In Sacramento, when the white supremacists arrived at the capitol building at about noon on Sunday, “counter-protesters immediately ran in – hundreds of people – and they engaged in a fight,” said George Granada, a spokesman for the Capitol Protection Service division of the California Highway Patrol.

In announcing the counter-protest, a group called Anti-Fascist Action Sacramento said on its website that it had a “moral duty” to deny a platform for “Nazis from all over the West Coast” to voice their views.

“We have a right to self defense. That is why we have to shut them down,” Yvette Felarca, a counter-protester wearing a white bandage on her head, told reporters after the clash.

The Sacramento Fire Department said 10 patients were treated at area hospitals for multiple stabbing and laceration wounds.

None of the injuries were life-threatening and there were no immediate reports of arrests, Granada said. The building was placed on lockdown.

Matthew Heimbach, chairman of Traditionalist Worker Party, said his group had expected violence even though it planned a peaceful rally and had a permit.

“We were there to support nationalism. We are white nationalists,” Heimbach told Reuters. “We were there to take a stand.”

Representatives of the Sacramento police could not be reached immediately for further comment.

Video footage on social media showed dozens of people, some of them wearing masks and wielding what appeared to be wooden bats, racing across the capitol grounds and attacking others.

Photos on social media showed emergency officials treating a victim on the grass in the area as police officers stood guard.

The melee comes about four months after four people were stabbed during a scuffle between members of the Ku Klux Klan and counter-protesters near a KKK rally in Anaheim, California.

In recent months Trump has blamed “professional agitators” and “thugs” for violence that has broken out at many of the Republican candidate’s rallies.

In Albuquerque, New Mexico, last month, anti-Trump protesters threw rocks and bottles at police officers who responded with pepper spray. A month earlier, some 20 demonstrators were arrested outside a Trump rally in Costa Mesa, California.

 

(Reporting by Eric M. Johnson in Seattle, Fiona Ortiz and Justin Madden in Chicago; Writing by Frank McGurty; Editing by Chris Reese)

Photo: Anti-fascist counter-protestors parade through Sacramento after multiple people were stabbed during a clash between neo-Nazis holding a permitted rally and counter-protestors on Sunday at the state capitol in Sacramento, California, United States, June 26, 2016. REUTERS/Max Whittaker 

Old Sacramento Tours Descend To History Underground

Old Sacramento Tours Descend To History Underground

By Jennifer Crane, The Sacramento Bee (TNS)

SACRAMENTO, California — The sun doesn’t shine here, but it used to.

A path made of old, cracking wood leads into a dark tunnel. The air is dusty, the lighting dim and the brick walls crumbling.

This ancient underground is part of Sacramento’s history and is open for tours.

The Old Sacramento Underground Tours, started six years ago by city historian Marcia Eymann, offer both a family-friendly interactive history tour and an adult tour that also covers gambling, crime and prostitution in Sacramento.

The underground experience educates the Sacramento community and visitors on the rich history of the region, said Shawn Turner, manager of the Old Sacramento Underground Tours.

“People don’t realize the Old Sac they are walking in is not actually the original city. It is actually 25 feet below,” Turner said of the Front Street area.

Most of the buildings were lifted while others were destroyed to make room for newer buildings, Turner said. Some of the buildings, such as a few hotels and the Fat City Bar & Restaurant at the corner of Front and J streets, were left at their original level with a level built on top, out of reach of floodwaters.

The tale of the up-and-coming capital of California is filled with loss and triumph.

Steve Rossi, a tour guide who is working toward a master’s degree in history at Sacramento State, said he enjoys leading visitors and sharing his knowledge about Sacramento’s past.

“It is such a unique story,” Rossi said. “The city was destroyed so many times, but kept coming back.”

As Turner puts it, “The history of Sacramento is a story of birth, death and rebirth.”

John Sutter planned to establish a town named Sutterville outside of Sacramento. Plans changed with the discovery of gold in 1848 and later in the rivers of the Sierra Nevada and the Sacramento River. Sam Brannan, an elder in the Mormon church who became California’s first millionaire, persuaded Sutter to form the city next to the water, which was a port for shipping goods to mining areas. Shortly after, Brannan ushered in a great migration of people to search for gold. Brannan and John Augustus Sutter Jr., Sutter’s son, laid out the city in 1848. Brannan named the city “Sacramento” after the river.

To Sacramento’s dismay, the early 1850s was an era of fires and flooding. Then, from late December 1861 through February 1862 a disastrous flood swept over the city. During this period, Sacramento experienced snow and 45 days of heavy rainfall. Thirty inches of rain fell in two months. The filled American River broke through the levee around the city.

In 1864 Sacramento residents came together, laced up their boots and started to uniformly lift the city. The city was lifted an average of 9{ feet above the flooding. The buildings were lifted with screw jacks by the muscle of community members.

“The city was rather proud and full of itself,” Turner said. “These buildings and businesses were built fancy and were imposing. They weren’t going to move somewhere else.”

The underground tour guides come from different backgrounds but were selected because they share a passion for the history. Some dress in costume and act out figures from the time. Each tour guide uses his or her own knowledge, so no two tours are alike, Turner said.

“I think it is important to know where we come from and to have fun while learning about it,” said Julie Ivanovich, Sacramento native and the educational and interpretive programs assistant at the Sacramento History Museum.

“This city (has) survived all these catastrophes and will need to again,” Turner said.

———

UNDERGROUND TOURS

Where: Sacramento History Museum, 101 I St., Old Sacramento

When: Weekends April-December. Weekday tours vary by month; check tour calendar.

Cost: $10-$15, children 5 and under free, although the tour is not recommended for young children

Information: sachistorymuseum.org, 916-808-7973

Photo: Old saloon bottles found in the ground are displayed in a case as visitors learn about Sacramento, Calif., history while on The Old Sacramento Underground Tour on June 22, 2015. (Lezlie Sterling/Sacramento Bee/TNS)

California Gov. Brown Orders Cities To Cut Water Use By 25 Percent Due To Long Drought

California Gov. Brown Orders Cities To Cut Water Use By 25 Percent Due To Long Drought

By Bettina Boxall, Chris Megerian, and Matt Stevens, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

PHILLIPS, Calif. — Standing in a brown field that would normally be smothered in several feet of snow, California Gov. Jerry Brown on Wednesday ordered cities and towns across the state to cut water use by 25 percent as part of a sweeping set of mandatory drought restrictions, the first in state history.

The directive comes more than a year after Brown asked for a 20 percent voluntary cut in water use that most parts of the state have failed to attain, even as one of the most severe modern droughts drags into a fourth year. It also came on the day that water officials measured the lowest April 1 snowpack in more than 60 years of record-keeping in the Sierra Nevada.

Wearing hiking shoes and a windbreaker in an area that normally requires cross-country skis this time of year, Brown announced the executive order in a Sierra Nevada meadow that provided a dramatic illustration of the state’s parched conditions.

“We’re standing on dry grass,” Brown said. “We should be standing on five feet of snow.”

Emphasizing that the drought could persist, Brown said Californians must change their water habits. “It’s a different world,” he said. “We have to act differently.”

The order touched virtually every aspect of urban life. Cities have to stop watering the median strips that run down the middle of roads. The state will partner with local agencies to remove 50 million square feet of grass — the equivalent of about 1,150 football fields — and replace it with drought-tolerant landscaping.

State agencies will create a temporary rebate program to encourage homeowners to replace water-guzzling appliances with high efficiency ones. Golf courses, campuses and cemeteries must cut their water use. New developments will have to install drip or microspray systems if they irrigate with drinking water. Water agencies will discourage water waste with higher rates and fees.

The order aims to reduce the amount of water used statewide in urban areas in 2013 by 25 percent. Local agencies that have been slow to conserve since then will feel the order’s effects most dramatically.

Felicia Marcus, chairwoman of the State Water Resources Control Board, said local agencies will receive targets for cutting water use based on how well they’ve done so far.

“You’re rewarding the early adopters … and you’re saying to the laggers, ‘You have to make a change,'” she said.

The water board will release draft regulations in mid-April to implement the order. It plans to approve the regulations in early May.

Most of the burden of enforcement will fall on local agencies. If they don’t follow the governor’s order, the state can fine them as much as $10,000 a day.

Many Southern California agencies are already taking steps called for in Brown’s order. For instance, under a turf rebate program administered by the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, spokesman Bob Muir said homeowners are planning to remove almost 89 million square feet of turf, the equivalent of more than 59,000 front yards. It’s unclear whether Brown’s mandate for 50 million square feet of lawn replacement includes work already done by local agencies.

Similarly, Los Angeles already has a tiered water-rate structure to encourage conservation.

Although Southern California water managers said it might be tough for some cities to meet the 25 percent target, they welcomed Brown’s action.

“It’s the right time. It’s a proper directive,” said Rob Hunter, general manager of the Municipal Water District of Orange County.

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti praised the executive order, noting that last year he called for a 20 percent cut in the city’s water use by 2017.

In Long Beach, Water Department General Manager Kevin Wattier said the order would have the biggest effect on water districts that use much more water per capita than Long Beach and Los Angeles.

“The governor understands we don’t have time to allow any voluntary measures to work,” said Mark Gold of the University of California, Los Angeles’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. “This is such a growing crisis that mandatory conservation was absolutely necessary.”

Lester Snow, executive director of the California Water Foundation and former state secretary of natural resources, said even more restrictions may be necessary in the future, such as banning all outdoor water use.

“We’re probably going to need more action before we’re through the summer,” he said.

Brown issued his order at Phillips Station, about 90 miles east of Sacramento, where state workers conducted a manual snow survey as part of statewide readings that revealed that the water content of the Sierra Nevada snowpack was only about 5 percent of the average for April 1. That is the lowest for the date in records going back to 1950.

The Sierra snowpack accounts for about 30 percent of the state’s water supply, and although major reservoir storage is better than it was last year, there will be little snowmelt to replenish reservoirs this spring.

Nurit Katz, UCLA’s Chief Sustainability Officer and co-chair of a UC system-wide water task force, said every campus has created a water action plan focused on reducing consumption. UCLA is installing artificial turf on its intramural field, retrofitting fixtures such as toilets and developing a smart water filtration system. Combined with other efforts, the campus expects to save millions of gallons of water each year, she said.

Some critics of Brown’s order said it didn’t do enough to address agricultural uses, which account for the majority of California’s water use. Adam Scow, director of Food & Water Watch California, called the order disappointing.

“The governor must save our groundwater from depletion by directing the state water board to protect groundwater as a public resource,” Scow said in a statement.

Brown’s order requires agricultural districts in depleted groundwater basins to share data on groundwater use with the state, and Marcus said the measure isn’t about “finger-pointing.”

“It’s about everybody having to step up in these tough times,” she said. “The agricultural community is already being hit very hard.”

For the second year in a row, Central Valley growers without senior water rights are likely to get no supplies from the valley’s big federal irrigation project. Last year farmers idled about 500,000 acres for lack of water, and this year they may be forced to leave even more cropland unplanted.

“Some people want to say, ‘What about the farmers?’ And farmers want to say, ‘What about those people watering their lawns?'” Brown said. “We all have something to do, and we can all do a little better.”

(c)2015 Los Angeles Times, Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC

Photo: Uvas Reservoir, Santa Clara, Calif. February 1, 2014. (Ian Abbott/Flickr)

California’s San Joaquin River Is Most Endangered In U.S., Group Says

California’s San Joaquin River Is Most Endangered In U.S., Group Says

By Mark Grossi, The Fresno Bee

FRESNO, California — The San Joaquin River in California is America’s most endangered waterway this year, says the national advocacy group American Rivers, known for annually picking the country’s 10 most troubled rivers.

The San Joaquin’s water is spread too thin among farmers, hydroelectric projects and other uses on the main stem and three tributaries, the Merced, Stanislaus and Tuolumne rivers, the group announced Wednesday in Washington, D.C.

For decades, the San Joaquin has been periodically dry for more than 60 miles northwest of Fresno, destroying salmon runs and parts of the river channel. A restoration project began nearly five years ago to reconnect the river with the Pacific Ocean and rebuild salmon runs.

But authorities must continue the fight to get past this dry year, said John Cain of American Rivers.

“The San Joaquin is at a tipping point,” he said. “We need to maintain water releases from the tributaries for fish and water quality and continue the restoration project.”

He added that it is the first time the section near Fresno has been the most endangered on the list. The section was among the 10 most endangered rivers named in 1997. The lower section at the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta has twice been on the list with the Sacramento River.

The American Rivers list has no official clout, but it has been widely followed for more than 25 years. Last year, the Colorado River was the most endangered.

Cain noted the San Joaquin River restoration is getting no water in this epic drought year, the same as many area farmers. He said American Rivers supports help for farmers in this natural disaster, but the group does not want environmental laws set aside.

East San Joaquin Valley farmers, who use the river for irrigation, fought the restoration for 18 years before agreeing to give up some water for the project, which remains a sore spot for them.

People and agriculture in central California continue to need the river as much as nature, said Merced County farmer Kole Upton.

“What about all the communities that are supported by the river?” he asked. “What about all the people who work at providing food for the country?”

More than 60 miles of the river dried up and salmon runs died after the Friant Dam was built in the 1940s. For decades, the river’s water nurtured farming and communities, such as Orange Cove.

Legal watchdog Natural Resources Defense Council filed the 1988 lawsuit that led to the restoration project. Senior NRDC scientist Monty Schmitt said the most endangered ranking highlights changes coming for San Joaquin restoration.

“We’re moving from planning to implementation phases now,” he said. “We’ve been able to adapt to this dry year by studying juvenile salmon in the river. I hope we never face another year like this, but we will know how the river reacts next time.”

In Fresno, a leader of the San Joaquin River Parkway and Conservation Trust said he saw the endangered river ranking as a wake-up call. The parkway trust is helping to preserve land along the river for a 22-mile greenbelt from Friant Dam to Highway 99.

“This ranking is not something you want,” said parkway trust executive director Dave Koehler. “But we need to build ecological health back into the river. Ecological health is as important to people as it is to fish.”

Photo: eutrophication&hypoxia via Flickr