It’s tree planting time. The rains have come, and our habitat team is in high gear: augering holes, sowing native grass seed, and getting young plants in the ground. We at Audubon California plants trees and shrubs to support the birds that need them for food, cover, and nest sites. Valley oak, coyote brush, redbud, coffeeberry, wild rose, toyon. When there is sufficient room next to a waterways , these plantings mimic the riverside forests that used to run ribbons across the Valley, providing one of the richest habitats for wildlife in North America.

As a public agency, Browns Valley Irrigation District, a northern California water purveyor, hires an outside accountant (CPA) to do an annual audit of the financial records. This process is one of the ways that we insure that public funds are being expended appropriately. As is the norm, there are always transactions that need to be clarified as the CPA works through the previous year’s records.
This year, I was hit with one question that made me take pause. The CPA saw that one of the budget line items was for “Delta Issues.” He posed “why on earth is an irrigation district that is located some 60 river miles upstream of the Delta, spending money on issues in the Delta?” Good question. This was not going to be one of those one or two sentence answers that simply tied the expense to a District project. I asked the CPA to sit down and I will try to explain.