We attended and presented (on your behalf) at every one of the public hearings with the CAWB when the permitting was being discussed and we produced a pretty compelling video of the Department of Fish and Game (DFG) actively suction dredging in other states to “create fish habitat”. Their Board of Directors voted unanimously it is deminimus (no harm). What they concluded was dredging was deminimus, meaning it doesn’t harm fish or fish habitat. What happened is the folks at the CAWB who are scientists and engineers pulled the raw data of all the studies over the past 20 years which were provided to them by WMA (Western Mining Alliance) and decided to see if dredging was in fact harming fish or fish habitat. So the CAWB didn’t toe the political line as some expected. Therefore, since that was really all they left us with, we made that argument, which was quite compelling that this is a ban and an illegal prohibition on small scale mining. It is a final process, but not a mining method. As we pointed out in testimony at the Senate hearing on SB1222, panning is not, nor has it ever been a mining method. Kind of hard to say an airplane is a wheelbarrow just because both have wheels and that is precisely what the vague language in SB637 did.
We pointed out that this morphing of language was illegal, immoral and adversely affected 10’s of thousands of people. People were cited, their equipment confiscated and fines were paid.
High bankers, water pumps, track wheel chairs, trucks and even sluice boxes. SB637 morphed into a defacto prohibition on mining as it then labeled all things as suction dredges. We believe the sponsors of SB637, Izzy Martin and the enviro group The Sierra Fund, along with their Senator who brought the bill forward, Ben Allen, a Democrat from Hollywood believed the CAWB would toe the political line and just slow walk, or deny permits all along. As a part of SB637 (The Suction Dredge Bill) signed into law in January of 2016, it was mandated that the California Water Board (CAWB) study and evaluate whether permitting should be allowed in the state, and if so, the CAWB was tasked with creating a permitting structure.
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