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California’s Mud Season

Sam Schuchat

For a California state bureaucrat, August is the cruelest month. No state budget means no ability to purchase anything, not even office supplies. Vendors and contractors don’t get paid, and become cranky. Staff can’t be reimbursed for travel, so we stick to the office or effectively loan the state travel money. If you happen to work in Sacramento, the weather is abysmal. And this year, as has happened occasionally in years past, there have been layoffs and the threat of a massive pay decrease.

I know I shouldn’t complain. We still have jobs (most of us), and when the budget is finally passed, as it must inevitably be, whatever pay was taken away will be restored. Still and all, it is more than a little demoralizing to work within a system that seems to break down every year, only to be patched up with debt and duct tape and sent sputtering off again like an ancient, barely maintained car.

It isn’t as if the public doesn’t value what we do, and I don’t just mean the Coastal Conservancy. Time after time, even during recessions, the public has voted overwhelmingly for resource bonds. The mere threat of closing 48 relatively underused state parks generated thousands of letters to the governor’s office and was quickly dropped as a way of balancing the budget. Releasing tens of thousands of prison inmates hasn’t fared very well either! I doubt that many Californians would be happy if thousands of police officers, game wardens, park rangers, lifeguards, nurses, prison guards, teachers, and so on suddenly disappeared, taking with them all the Caltrans road crews. (They may be the butt of innumerable jokes, but new roads get built and old ones get fixed, don’t they?)

Nevertheless, every year in June and July I find myself warning my staff not to get too much debt on their credit cards, because they may need it come August. It is our fifth season: fall, winter, spring, summer, and budget season. I suppose there is some comfort in this analogy, since it suggests that there will inevitably be a budget, and we will be able to refocus on the important work we are here to do: conserving land and water, providing public access to the coast and recreational opportunities, restoring damaged natural communities, and helping our regulatory brethren with their important work.

There is certainly plenty of work to do. The South Bay Salt Pond Project, the largest ecosystem restoration west of the Mississippi, is almost through five years of paperwork and is ready to begin construction. We are tantalizingly close to taking down two large dams, one on the Carmel River in Monterey, the other on the Ventura River. At the Coastal Conservancy meeting scheduled for this September we have miles of Coastal Trail planning and construction to present to the board. As I write this, two million cubic yards of sediment are being moved from the Port of Oakland to Hamilton Army Airfield in a unique wetland re-creation project. Later this year I expect to bring to our board a 2,000-acre land acquisition in San Luis Obispo County, which will complete a 20-mile route from Montaña De Oro State Park to Port San Luis.

Many of our project partners consider the Coastal Conservancy to be the easiest government agency to work with. There are many reasons for this: our staff enjoys its work, we have an entrepreneurial attitude toward our jobs, we are flexible and able to move quickly. We are also, I think, a very user-friendly “front end” for government bureaucracy. It’s kind of like the Macintosh operating system; it looks clean and simple, but it hides an awful lot of complexity. I have often thought that we actually shield our public agency partners from many of the inanities of life and work in a giant bureaucracy. Friends and colleagues are usually surprised to learn that I personally approve not just every vacation for our 70-plus employees, but also every single trip they make out of the office. It is pretty much a full-time job for one person on my staff to fill out and file all 30-plus annual reports that are required of us by the rest of the government.

In this light, the annual budget train wreck becomes just another fact of life to be endured. It is like the “mud season” in New England: you have to get through it if you want to experience the glories of summer and fall. So we will hunker down and get through this year’s budget crisis, and do our best to make sure that it does not inflict any damage on our partners, and keep our work moving forward as best we can. After all, if the going gets too rough, we can always go to the beach!

Sam Schuchat is the executive officer of the Coastal Conservancy.

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