December 15, 2016

The water conversation continues this week as the Ojai Basin Groundwater Management Agency (OBGMA)  has released a revised Alternative Demonstration for groundwater sustainability that can be downloaded from their website here. The OBGMA will hold a second special meeting Friday December 16th at 5pm to review and approve the alternative demonstration for submittal to the California Department of Water Resources. At the Ojai Special City Council Meeting on December 13th the council discussed the draft alternative demonstration and voted unanimously to direct their representative on the OBGMA to deny the alternative demonstration. You can watch the meeting here. We will get an update on Sustainable Groundwater Management activities from both the OBGMA and the Upper Ventura River Groundwater Sustainability Agency at our next Council meeting on Thursday January 5th at 10:30am at the Bell Arts Factory in Ventura.

Instream Flow Request For Qualifications For Modeling Kevin Delano from the State Water Resources Control Board Division of Water Rights Instream Flow Unit has come to several Watershed Council meetings to talk about Governor Brown’s California Water Action Plan directive to establish a flow requirement to protect endangered salmonids while balancing other beneficial uses of water. To view the RFQ, please visit the Cal eProcure website at https://caleprocure.ca.gov/pages/index.aspx.

  1. Click on “Get Public Procurement Information”
  2. Click on “See Current Bids”
  3. In the “Event ID” field, enter event ID 0000003754 and click “search”
  4. Click on the “Sell: RFQ No. 16-031-300: Ventura River Modeling” link

To view the solicitation document:

  1. Click “View Event Package”
  2. Click “View”

Deadline Extended and New Forms For Urban and Community Forestry Program Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF)

The CAL FIRE Urban and Community Forestry Program Concept Proposals now due December 30, 2016 by 3:00 pm. Grant guidelines, concept proposal forms, and the presentation from recent workshops are available on CAL FIRE’s website

URGENT UPDATE: ARB released the draft FY 2016-17 quantification methodology and GHG emission reduction calculator for public comment in October 2016.  The final draft was updated to reflect public input received and was released in November 2016.  As of December 8, 2016, technical errors have been corrected in the UCF GHG Calculator Tool for FY 2016-17; Version 2, dated December 8, 2016 and available at: www.arb.ca.gov/cci-quantification, must be used for concept proposals and full applications submitted to CAL FIRE.  The quantification methodology document has not been updated because the methods and equations remain unchanged.   In addition, CAL FIRE was made aware that there is a formula error in concept proposal forms for all three grant types that results in the budgets not totaling correctly.  Those errors have been fixed, and the updated forms are posted on the Urban and Community Forestry Grants page:  http://www.fire.ca.gov/resource_mgt/resource_mgt_urbanforestry_grants#.   CAL FIRE has extended the deadline for concept proposal submissions until December 30th to accommodate applicants due to these two errors.  Please contact your Regional Urban Forester if you have any questions or concerns.

New Watershed Conservancy Job Opportunity The Santa Clara River Watershed Conservancy is seeking a motivated individual to help develop this organization, which will encompass conservation properties throughout the watershed, particularly those currently managed by The Nature Conservancy. The position would involve assisting in the hiring process of an Executive Director and building a Board of Directors, developing donor relations and assisting in grant preparation, property management documentation, assisting in restoration planning & implementation, building outreach & education capacity, etc.   If interested, please contact Tom Dudley for more details, and feel free to pass along to others who might be interested. This position has a lot of future potential!   Tom Dudley, SCR Watershed Conservancy      Saticoy, CA & UCSB Marine Science Inst. e-mail contact: tdudley@msi.ucsb.edu

Sincerely,

Zoë Carlson Ventura River Watershed Coordinator

VenturaWatershed@gmail.com

C: 530.401.7689

T: 805.308.8512

www.venturawatershed.org