Stimulus Spending at the Department of the Interior

From email:

Over the last week, Secretary Salazar has announced the first of various Department projects to be funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009:

* $140 million that will fund 308 U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) projects. The funds will be used generally for repair, construction and restoration of facilities, equipment replacement and upgrades, national map activities, and critical deferred maintenance and improvement projects. Specific expenditures include: $15.2 million to modernize equipment in the National Volcano Early Warning System at all USGS volcano observatories; $14.6 million to upgrade to high-data radio technology and upgrade streamgages with new technologies for streamflow measurement; $14.6 million for remediation to remove streamgages, cableways, and ground-water wells that are no longer in use; $29.4 million for projects that address health and safety issues and functional needs, make facilities more energy efficient, and incorporate sustainable design criteria in project implementation; $29.4 million to modernize the Advanced National Seismic System (ANSS) by doubling the number of ANSS-quality stations and upgrading seismic networks nationwide; $17.8 million for construction of wildlife and environmental research facilities in Maryland, Missouri, and Wisconsin; $14.6 million to improve mapping data; and nearly $500,000 to digitize and make publicly available via the Internet bird banding records, which are useful for disease research.

* $260 million for California water projects, including: $40 million for immediate emergency drought relief; $109.8 million to build a screened pumping plant at the Red Bluff Diversion Dam; $22.3 million to address dam safety concerns at the Folsom Dam; $8.5 million to repair water-related infrastructure at Folsom Dam; $20 million for the Contra Costa Canal to protect water supplies and to build fish screens for Chinook salmon and Delta smelt; $4.5 million to restore the Trinity River; $26 million for Battle Creek Salmon/Steelhead Restoration project; $4 million to the Bay Delta Conservation Plan; $4 million to broaden scientific knowledge of Klamath River sedimentation; and $20.7 million in smaller water infrastructure and related projects.

* $50 million for the Central Utah Project, which delivers water from the Colorado River to users in Central Utah. This funding will include: $41 million to construct portions of the Utah Lake System pipelines for use in conveying an additional 60,000 acre-feet of water to Utah and Salt Lake Counties; and $9 million for construction of a Ute Tribal fish hatchery and other fish and wildlife projects.

* $12.5 million for New Mexico water infrastructure projects, including: $7 million to complete portions of the Navajo Nation Municipal Pipeline; and $5.5 million for smaller infrastructure reliability and safety projects along the Rio Grande and power plant improvement efforts at Elephant Butte Dam.

The Department of the Interior will manage $3 billion in investments as part of the stimulus package. About one-third of that total will be invested in water infrastructure projects. That funding will be allocated across several project areas, including those listed above: meeting future water supply needs ($450 million); improving infrastructure reliability and safety ($165 million); environmental and ecosystem restoration ($235 million); water conservation challenge grants ($40 million); green buildings ($14 million); Central Utah Project Completion Act ($50 million); and emergency drought relief in the west ($40 million).

ER2010 - Earth Retention Conference 3

About the Conference

ER2010 is the third in a series of conferences on earth retaining structures organized by the Earth Retaining Structures Committee of ASCE’s Geo-Institute. Held at 20-year intervals ER2010 follows the highly successful ER conferences in Ithaca, New York (1990) and (1970). ER2010 will bring together a broad community of geo-professionals working on retention structures using a wide range of support systems with comprehensive coverage of developments over the past 20 years. The coverage will be diverse, including case histories and practice-oriented papers, recent research findings, innovative technologies, and the emerging arts across many of our disciplines. Professional engineers, researchers, specialty contractors, regulators, educators, and students will interact across a broad range of technical sessions, tutorials, short courses, discussions, and equipment demonstrations.

2009 Annual Symposium, Managing Hydrologic Extremes - Call for Abstracts Extended to April 30th

The 2009 Annual Symposium, "Managing Hydrologic Extremes", will be held at The Westin Kierland Resort & Spa August 30 through September 2, 2009 in Scottsdale, AZ. The event will be a joint symposium with the 2009 national conference of the American Institute of Hydrology (AIH) and AHS' Annual Symposium. AIH and all AHS volunteers, and participating sponsors will put on a fabulous, successful event at a super venue. We will also be organizing a published volume of the proceeding papers. AIH normal produces published proceedings an we are looking to continue this tradition for 2009. So if you or someone you know is interested in seeing their paper in print, here's your chance. Start thinking of those paper ideas now! Look for more details as the 2009 planning continues...

Keith Ross

Arizona Hydrological Society

Co-Chair

Allen Gookin

American Institute of Hydrology

Co-Chair

Arizona Geology On-Line Publication

The AZGS quarterly newsletter, Arizona Geology, has gone digital only due to budget cuts at the state level. The web version is up and looks nice.

GeoFlorida 2010

An interesting sounding conference:

GeoFlorida 2010, the annual geo-congress of the Geo-Institute of ASCE, will present a broad perspective on new developments in geotechnical engineering analysis, modeling and design. Technical topics will crosscut all areas of the profession, including constitutive modeling of soil and rock, site assessment and characterization, computational modeling, stability analysis, geoenvironmental engineering, mitigation of geohazards, earthquake engineering, LRFD methods, alternative contracting for geotechnical projects, and case histories. GeoFlorida 2010 will provide practitioners, consultants, researchers, educators, and students with opportunities to share new knowledge and to learn about innovative advances and emerging technologies that are at the leading edge of current geotechnical analysis, modeling and design. GeoFlorida 2010 will offer technical sessions, plenary lectures, panel discussions, short courses, workshops and the annual student competition. The conference will also include an extensive Exhibit Hall and post-conference field trips.

Call For:

Abstracts
Sessions
Short Courses & Workshops
Panel Discussions
Submission Deadline: April 24, 2009
Click Here to submit your abstract

Key Dates:

• Technical Session Proposals, Various Other Proposals and Abstracts Due: April 24, 2009 (Deadline Extended)
• Notification of Acceptance of Proposals and Abstracts: May 8, 2009
• Draft Papers Due: July 15, 2009
• Review Decision on Draft Papers: September 23, 2009
• Final Papers Due: October 28, 2009

AEG Still Accepting Abstracts for the 2009 Annual Meeting in Lake Tahoe

We have received 190 Abstracts to date for AEG’s 2009 Annual Meeting in Lake Tahoe. We still need 40 Abstracts to complete our Technical Program. We will continue to accept Abstracts on a first-come-first-serve basis until our program is complete. Please email all abstracts to Heather Skladanowski at meetings@aeg-web.org. If you have submitted an Abstract and have not received a confirmation email, please contact Heather to be sure it was received. Please visit www.aegweb.oeg for submission guidelines and details on the 2009 Meeting. We look forward to seeing you in beautiful Lake Tahoe!

Do you Twitter?

AEG Arizona is now on Twitter. No, it's not me telling you a bunch of boring things you could care less about, it's basically another RSS for this blog. All the blog posts are mentioned through Twitter.

On days when I'm extremely bored there may be more, but for now it's just another portal for this blog.

Arizona Department of Water Resources' Mission is Threatened

I just got this bit of depressing news over email. I encourage AEG members and concerned professionals and citizens to contact their state representation and let them know of the importance of ADWR to the needs and safety of the residents of Arizona.

You can find the contact info for your representatives at the following website: http://www.azleg.gov/alisStaticPages/HowToContactMember.asp

Friends,

I appreciate the great interest in the Department that you’ve expressed in your calls and emails over the last several weeks as we embark into this new territory of revenue shortfalls and budget cuts. It is becoming apparent that the importance of DWR’s mission is becoming lost in the budget discussions down at the Capitol. The leaked Republican budget worksheets from last week, the released budget proposal from House Democrats yesterday, and the House Republican budget would each give DWR a $10 million budget. To give you some perspective, our total appropriated FY 08 budget was $24.1 million including special line items (SLIs), $23 million from General Fund and $1.1 million from our Assured and Adequate Water Supply Fund.

A $10 million budget would require the Department to layoff approximately 140 of our 185 employees. You can probably imagine that the impact of such a reduction in force would be severe, and you would be correct – here are just a few examples of impacts: no more adjudications work, no assured or adequate water supply permitting, no hydrologic monitoring, no dam inspections, no long-term water planning for the state, no water conservation or drought planning. In order to function, an $18.4 million budget would allow us to continue our core work, but albeit at a significantly reduced level. It would still require us to close office(s), eliminate contracts, and make other difficult sacrifices.

Any help you can provide to support the Department’s mission is greatly appreciated.

Sincerely,
Fred Breedlove
Legislative Liaison Arizona Department of Water Resources
Office: (602) 771-8429
Mobile: (602) 679-4281

A Few Things of Interest

Over the past week, a few items of potential interest to readers of this blog have come up. They all come from the wonderful blog Arizona Geology that is maintained by the State Geologist of Arizona and head of the Arizona Geological Survey, Lee Allison.

• Mining and dust - Sierrita mine fined

• ADOT's Victor Mendez is nominated to head up FHWA

• Science Foundation Arizona rallys against budget cuts

• Rockfalls in Colorado - an informative publication

• AZGS is forced to cut their involvement in the newly opened Explore Arizona store

JTFAP Draft Document Review Period Extended

The controversial JTFAP Draft Document review period has been extended (see announcment below). And on a related note, in case you missed it, a few members of the Arizona Section met and wrote this memo in response to the draft document.

Dear Members,

We sincerely appreciate all of the comments we have received thus far on the draft JTFAP document. Our members of the JTFAP have recently been informed that Geo-Institute has released the document to their membership for review and comment, much as AEG has done. This will allow us to extend the comment period to June 15, 2009, coincident with Geo-Institute 's deadline. This is great news since it allows all of us more time to discuss, interact, and provide review comments over a more reasonable timeframe. We will provide the AEG Board with copies of the responses received to date in advance of our April 18-19 Board of Directors Meeting in Seattle and will have discussion during the meeting. The BOD will be asked to provide feedback and direction on how AEG members of the JTFAP should proceed but no action is now required until after all comments are received and reviewed in July. Again, we thank you for your attention to this very important document to our profession and please let us know if you have any difficulties downloading the document or uploading your comments.

Regards,
Mark Molinari, AEG President