Category: News

A referendum will be held on February 5th in the City of Santa Clara over the 17-acre BAREC property on 90 North Winchester Road, bordering San Jose. This is a historic agricultural research and University of California agricultural extension project, and one of the small number of surviving parts of prime farmland in North Santa...

Just publishing a note here that I’ve been elected the chair of the Environmental Advisory Committee for the Santa Clara Valley Water District. I’ve been vice-chair for the last two years. A little more work, but it’s an important committee in terms of emphasizing the environmental restoration that the District needs to do. -Brian

I will be off on vacation for a few weeks, so the the CGF Journal blog will be quiet for a bit. The rest of the CGF staff will be around though, continuing to do the good work to protect our local open space. Happy Holidays, everyone! -Brian

San Jose Inside, a prominent political blog, has highlighted and supported the recent Metro investigation of San Jose’s biased environmental review process. We’re very glad to see the issue get picked up some more. Hopefully this attention will translate into action. -Brian

We occasionally get asked about how our work relates to fighting climate change. I’m recopying below a short email response I wrote on this subject: The main thing is that we fight sprawl, the car-use-maximizing, environment-destroying driver of climate change. We’ve written about climate change here: http://search.atomz.com/search/?sp-q=%22global+warming%22+&B1.x=0&B1.y=0&sp-a=sp1002afb3&sp-p=all&sp-f=ISO-8859-1We’ve submitted critical environmental comments on bad projects that...

Well, this time it’s KCBS radio discussing funds held by Santa Clara County Parks, and possible acquistion of the redwood forest owned by San Jose Water Company. We’re very glad to be noticed. -Brian

CGF is a participating member of the Santa Clara County Creeks Coalition, an umbrella group coordinating stream protection in our county. I’ll be mentioning SCCCC activities from time to time. A big event coming up next month is the Creeks and Watershed Conference, an all day conference on November 17th in San Jose to educate...

Here’s an interesting article from a British news source: 400-year old dikes are being breached to restore 1,700 acres of tidal wetlands on what is currently farmland, for a price of 17 million British pounds (about $25 million). That is a restoration cost of $15,000 an acre. Wetland restoration projects in Santa Clara County routinely...

Should be a very useful public education forum on the Santa Clara Valley Habitat Plan, and is co-sponsored by CGF. It will be here at the Peninsula Conservation Center, 3921 East Bayshore Road in Palo Alto, tomorrow at 6:30 p.m. More info here. Hope to see you there!-Brian

We just heard from Assemblyman Ira Ruskin’s office that the proposal to log the redwood trees in the watershed supplying much of Santa Clara County with water has been rejected. San Jose Water Company applied for a special “NTMP” permit that allows logging in perpetuity, but had to meet several conditions that they didn’t meet....