BOOOOO!! Booo! BOOO! Boooo! BOOOO!!! A bureaucrat got hold of this plan! BOOOO! If I wanted to read bureaucratic weaseling, I could read my own professional work. BOOOOO! Fire someone! (Not me.) What the hell?! Booooo!
The first plan was so swashbuckling. It was awesome. It asserted things clearly, and announced that it was boss of the whole world. Now it says bullshit things like, ‘there are two types of action, and some local governments should heavily consider our advice if they take one kind and strongly consider our advice if they do the other kind although we make no mention of enforcement and our appeal process is complicated the end.’ BOOOO! They lost their courage. It was way better before. Now it is another boring bureaucratic plan detailing an overly ornate process that will need infinite additional bureaucratic interpretation. I have been in so many rooms where we parsed out bureaucratic interpretations of complicated bifurcated processes, and I always know that this is why the public hates us.
Bring back the old plan! ACTION! Smackdown! LAW! Clarity!
OK, now I’m on to reading more of the content. I’ll give you something substantive in a bit.
NO I WON’T: Here! On page 27, where the DSC is ‘supporting creation,’ ‘urging consideration,’ and ‘supporting extension’ of mild things. Are you serious? Urging consideration by whom? Christmas elves? This is so very sad. First draft, the DSC was saying stuff like, “These are our badass regs and if you’ve ever so much as sipped water that could have flowed through or come from the Delta, they apply to you.” Now they’re urging other mysterious people to consider possible forms of districts? How did this happen?
What happened to you, DSC? Did they find your kryptonite? Are they holding your children hostage? I would personally lead the rescue operation if it meant we’d get the old DSC back.
On the public record 
Thank goodness, I thought it was just me! Bureaucratic regurgitation of the same tripe always raises my blood pressure and just think, we have 3 more revisions, a final draft and then the actual document to stomach. Hopefully, DSC will take your suggestions to heart.
Thank you so much for the first good belly laughs I’ve had in over a week. For awhile now it has seemed very much as if the entire world had lost its sense of humor.
Did you click on the link under the first BOOOO!? Totally worth it.
The Boooo link is terrific! But I don’t inderstand why you thought the first draft was better. It had findings but no policies. Maybe it talked tougher in the introduction but in the working chapters there were only laundry lists of possible actions, no policies. Now, because the findings have been ridiculed by the Independent Science Board, they have been taken out for rewriting and we have pallid policy recommendations based on it is not clear what. The policies were supposed to flow from the findings, so I would not be too hard on the staff or the consultants who wrote language that is essentially a placeholder until the process comes back together again. The big question is: will it come together at any point? The draft policy recommendations are of course very curious. They are basically lists of things that other people should do. The only one that caught my eye as something that the DSC might actually implement is RR R6, which talks about the creation of Delta Flood Control Assessment District. Well, even that they pass off to someone-else. As an expert witness for the plaintiffs in the Paterno Case, RR R2 and RR R3 also caught my eye. RR3 calls for a constitutional amendment to exempt flood control projects from inverse condemnation liability. Good luck on that. There is a easy-to-implement protection from inverse condemnation liability – State agencies simply have to be competent and even-handed. Oh no, I hear those muppets laughing again!
It doesn’t inspire much confidence does it.
Hopefully the DSC is listening and regains the use of their spine before the next version is released.