Just got back from the Sacramento Meeting

[Bluebeard]

It doesn't look like anyone else has made a report, so I guess I will do so.

Mojave Joe and a few others organized to work on specific issues to deal with at the Sacramento meeting. Before I go on, I want all you guys (and gals) to go out of your way to thank all those who have literally put their lives on hold for this whole process. I am sure there are a bunch of people who were not a part of the group I was working with, but there are a lot of dedicated miners who put together a valiant effort. My group consisted of Mojave Joe, Craig L. from the North Fork Dredger's Association, Eric M. (a dredger from Tampa Fl), Robin L. (a dredger from Auburn), and on occasion Jim H. (GPAA President of Sac GPAA)- there were others, but these guys were the main hitters- and they put together a tremendous amount of research and have literally been flooding Mark Stopher's email account with letters about just about every aspect of the review of the DSEIR. And in all honesty, I feel I am of average intelligence, but these guys were so bright, I felt like a mental midget around these guys. I was the resident joe-sixpack guy of their group.

We planned on getting to the meeting really early to get low numbers so we could guarantee that Eric and Craig could talk with their power point presentations. We expected a huge showing, considering it was the last opportunity to present- but we were quite surprised that the meeting room probably held seats for 200, and maybe 50-75 people showed up.

Lee Adams (Supervisor) from Sierra County gave a 3 minute talk about the financial impacts of the lack of Suction dredging on his county. Others who spoke for 3 minutes were assorted miners with well thought out presentations, a disgruntled property owner who felt the dredgers were trashing her property, several representatives of environmental organizations, Izzy Martin from the Sierra Fund, A Tribal spokesperson from a tribe near Nevada City and Craig Tucker from the Karuk Tribe.

The presentations then moved on to the prepared speeches. Eric M (who by the way flew out from Tampa FL for the day) was first- and his presentation on a review of the Humphfries and Fleck Mercury studies hit the ball out of the park. If you guys ever run across Eric (or Craig & Mojave Joe for that matter) you owe him (them) a beer or a steak dinner. Apparently he is a retired intelligence analyst and it is apparent that he is very good at what he does. For over 25 minutes he spoke clearly and concisely about how the calculations of Mercury impacts within the two studies were mis-interpreted by Horizon Environmental and were construed to appear to be very negative - while when he reviewed the actual numbers, he found that many of the conclusions of the calculations of Horizon Environmental were orders of magnitude off- and patently wrong. His review of their conclusions showed that Horizon's numbers were so far off that if there wasn't a ulterior motive, then perhaps Horizon may be incompetent (my observation, not his). It was an amazing presentation.

Next up was Craig L. of the North Fork Dredgers Assoc- his powerpoint presentation showed that the distribution of the Yellow Legged Frog was only suggested by the software program the DFG uses and the software was designed to be very generous as to determination of distribution. His presentation was also spot on.

There were several other prepared speeches, and the final presentation was done by Ken M about the issues with his patented claim in the Trinity Wilderness.

All said and done, I am glad I went to this event. This time I brought my dictation tape recorder and I recorded the whole thing. As I am typing this I am transferring the recording into mp3 format to give to Mojave Joe to put on his CSP site.

It will be interesting to see where this whole process goes from here. If I were Mark Stopher, the first phone call I would make would be to Horizon to ask them "What the F___?". Their data compilation skills were definitely shown to be extremely flawed or perhaps they didn't read the conclusions their sub contractors provided back to them.

Before I finish, I need to take my hat off to Mojave Joe. I thought I was pretty good at finding the points of contention in documents. Joe is amazing at doing just this-and I learned a lot from his style of reviewing documents- not to mention he is a great organizer and kept us busy with all the research he was doing day and night. Oftentimes at 11pm an email would come in to my email box with a comment from Joe. This guy never sleeps!!

So for a "rag-tag group of miners" we have some amazing people on our side. For everyone who put the time and energy to send letters, and to offer a presentation, thank you for your time - no matter what happens, slap yourself on the back- you guys (and gals) did a great job!

[russau]

very good report! thanks for posting it!

[tommyknocker]

Bluebeard,
Thank you for the report. Many thanks go to you and those you mentioned and probably others I am not aware of. Thanks for representing us! I wanted to go for no other reason but to donate my minutes to one of "our" presenters but couldn't get away from work.

In one of my letters during the comment period I told Stofer that I thought it was a waste of 1.9 million (correct?) taxpayers dollars that he paid Horizon...But I firmly believe they did exactly what they were told to do!

[russau]

yep! no doubt about it!