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The California Sportfishing Protection Alliance (CSPA) is a longstanding nonprofit organization working for the conservation of California’s fisheries and their aquatic habitat. In so doing, we seek administrative remedies to restore degraded fisheries and their riverine habitat and we guard against further threats to these extremely valuable public resources. California has many laws protecting
fisheries and their habitat but a poor track record of enforcing them.
CSPA continuously monitors the water rights process to protect
the public’s aquatic environment upon which our fisheries are so
dependent.
Over the past twenty years we have filed
several hundred protests with the State Water Resources Control Board
against detrimental water quality conditions as well as
deleterious water rights applications and decisions, to assure that
adequate amounts of good quality water stay in our rivers, streams,
and estuaries. These efforts have directly benefited more than a hundred
rivers, streams, and watersheds in California and have resulted in
substantial improvements in flow and better in-stream habitat for fish
and wildlife. The organization continuously monitors the
activities of the federal and state resource agencies, including
the California Department of Fish and Game, Department of Water
Resources, the California Fish and Game Commission, the State of
California Resources Agency, the California Environmental Protection
Agency, the federal National Marine Fisheries Service, the U.S. Fish and
Wildlife Service, the U.S. EPA, and the Bureau of Reclamation. No other
sport fishing group maintains such a steady presence with these
important agencies that have management responsibility for the
public’s fishery resources. We participate in the re-licensing of hydroelectric projects and, when necessary, file comments, complaints and petitions of intervention with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to ensure that hydroelectric project licenses are amended to provide sufficient flows for fish. We actively participate in the California Hydropower Reform Coalition as a steering committee member, and work with our coalition allies to improve the environmental condition of watersheds, rivers and fisheries that are dramatically impacted by the way that hydroelectric projects are licensed and operated. We have filed, often in conjunction with other groups, legal actions against a number of state and federal agencies, in order to enforce the laws established to protect fish and their habitat. When necessary, we have also filed legal actions to compel those that violate their waste discharge permits, issued under the Clean Water Act, to comply with the laws intended to restore the integrity of California’s waterways. These legal actions seek compliance with environmental laws and with fishery management regulations to encourage our government to be a proper steward of the public’s natural resources. The organization is currently participating
in the Governor’s Delta Vision Process. Our Conservation Director was
appointed to this effort to help reestablish the sustainability of the
Delta ecosystem and its fishery resources including salmon, steelhead,
striped bass and sturgeon. We developed and presented the Fishery
Recovery and Restoration Plan to the Governor’s Blue Ribbon Task
Force. Some forty members of the Allied Fishing Groups, an entity that
we helped to establish to make a stand for saving the Bay-Delta estuary,
endorsed this plan. We work with state and federal fishery
agency leadership to formulate CALFED estuarine and fishery restoration
policies and programs. To this end, CSPA, along with several other
conservation and environmental groups, participated in a series of
meetings with Secretary of Interior Bruce Babbitt during the Clinton
Administration. These meetings developed critical policy vital to the
establishment of equitable fishery restoration programs in California. CSPA works closely with the Environmental
Water Caucus and the Allied Fishing Groups to secure a responsible water
future for California’s public and its fishery resources. We play
important leadership role in these critical undertakings.
All
materials and images on this site, unless otherwise indicated, are the
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