Partial Transcription of Interview with Jim Wilcox: Matt Norman: I’ll provide some background about myself. Jim Wilcox: You don’t need to wear a mask unless you feel comfortable with it. I’ll maybe take it off for me because I’m a lip reader. M: The reason I’m interested in this area is because I’m interested in the natural history of California and exhilarated by the remoteness of Quincy and its rich history of mining and such. J: We’re even separated from each other in the county. We have Quincy over here and Greenville over there and Portola over there and we’re separated by mountains and canyons. .... M: I’m curious about the work that Plumas Corp does and the range of different projects going on. Do you have private and government contracts? J: Yep, we serve as a resource for landowners, stakeholders, interested in watershed health and we’ve developed a niche in meadow restoration expertise but we do a lot of other things too. As a non profit we can apply for funds to help people who have the need but they don’t have the funding. M: Where does the funding come from? The Federal government? J: No, actually the bulk of it comes from the state. The state invests in natural resources pretty heavily. It has been for the last 15 years or so – particularly water – and now there’s water and there;s fire. Our niche is that we can bring the money to the table so we’re not a general consulting firm that just contracts someone to do the work with their money. We bring the work and do it for them with our money. M: Even for private landowners? J: Yep, there are agreements in place with the private landowners. We have agreements with them that are tiered with the grant and the state agreements that manage the land that maintain the conservation values that the public invested in while they are general getting an increase in agricultural productivity. There is more and more interest by corporations to offset some of their climate and water footprint. Microsoft, Disney, cocacola. We ave funds from all of those. They will invest in a project and we’ll have appropriate monitoring in place to show that the benefits that they expected to receive with their investment are realized. M: They own land here? J: No they don’t own land, they invest in public land, private land. They are interested in being able to say “We invested in this and it’s helping us offset x amount of our carbon or water footprint in California.” M:What sort of projects would those be that they pay for? J: Meadow restoration mostly at this point. M: What is a meadow? J: Well you’re looking at one right out there. It’s been manipulated obviously but this is a meadow right here. In the sierras we have lots of large meadows and particularly in Plumas county. Our valleys are meadows. M: They were that way? J: Yeah M: because of the floodplains? J: Yeah and most of the waterways in our meadows in the sierras have in one way or another been adversely affected and the principal response of the streams to these impacts has been to downcut, so they they start incising, cutting into the bed, and what that does is allows it to hold more and more water before it can spill out onto the floodplain and get rid of the energy. So once it starts incising and you get more and more erosive power it continues to incise and then start widening until it reaches a new base level equilibrium of slope and energy and around here that’s usually around 8-12 feet of cut. And so what happens is the shallow water table in the valley follows it so it’s draining the valley out and the vegetation changes from sedges and willows to annuals and brush and even trees moving in and on the east side sagebrush and we’ve gotten projects on the east side where when we did the work it was all just sagebrush flats and now they’re knock your eyes out wetlands with all the attributes of beavers and waterfowl and songbirds and cormorants and fish and otters. M: from depending on a stream? J: Yep .... M: What is the status of the creeks here in Plumas County? J: (description of creek map) One of the reasons the state choose the Feather River as its water supply is because it’s one of the wetter basins in the state. When we have floods they are major kick-ass floods. M: Were you around in 97? J: I was here in 97 and 86, I’ve been here 44 years. The lower downstream end of all the valleys here is a natural constriction where it dives into a canyon and what happens is that you have flood water moving down the valley and the only way you can pass that water is for it to back up like a lake and raise in elevation. There are times when that bridge out there is the only thing showing and everything else around it is wall to wall water from hill slope to hill slope for days. M: What does a pre-restoration meadow look like and why is it undesirable J: when the stream channel in a meadow stats to incise then during high water, water that would normally spread out on the meadow and slowed down and deposited sediment and nutrients and basically moved much slower now is accelerating out of the basin and it is eroding all the historically deposited sediments are being rapidly re-recorded and remobilized and moved down the system. When you start stacking up one meadow after another down the system pretty soon you have a significant change in the whole basin hydrograph. So now all the water is coming down faster and it's coming down in the winter when nobody can use it! You know local irrigators can't use it and it's not doing the wildlife any good they have to get out of the way and they have no place to go to get out of the high velocity whereas when you have the meadow the fish and beavers just go out on the flood plain and hang out there and wait for the water and hang out there. M: So you are trying to retain water and avoid making this tube. J: We want to get rid of the tubes that have been made from our impact. Road Building and sometimes it’s mining. And people want to point at cows but cows are not the major player, they can interrupt recovery but they didn’t really cause the issue- we physically manipulated these channels to make them more convenient for us. For either draining because it was too wet for too long in the season. They’ll turn around and have a whole other system for irrigation. I always characterize it as command and control agriculture. Rather than just harvesting with the system the dividend. With command and control we were consuming our principal if you look at it from an economic standpoint – rather than just living off the dividend. This is of significant interest to the state because the meadows in the sierras are our natural reservoirs for the summer for the landscape. Those meadows would retain water in the soil even after the spring and winter floods are over and your base flow is happening then water that’s in the soil of the meadow starts to move back toward the channel. So you're changing the timing of flow for a portion of that water out of the basin from a time when its arguably of now use to anybody and they can’t even stop it at Oroville because they have to maintain flood reservation space all winter and so they have to dump it in the ocean. If we keep it up here and it doesn’t have to move out until April 1st then their flood reservation i s lifted at Oroville then they can keep it and use it. It’s not making more water, it’s changing useability of the water we have. M: Have you been a part of the reconstruction effort since 2017? J: No M: But it’s in their interest anyway. J: Yeah and DWR has been a strong player with us over the years because they operate Oroville on behalf of the 13 contractors in the state – the big water agencies all the way to san diego that rely on that water and so a lot of the funding we’ve been getting has been from water interest bonds that speak to water supply reliability things like that because they realize that there is a benefit they're and there is a benefit when you bring the base level back up the surface then the water table in the meadow has to come back up to match it and the vegetation that did change begins to change back and then all the species that actually inhabited it – and they are some of the ones that are of the most concern, riparian dependent species – they can come back. They have habitat. We’ve also found out that meadows are huge carbon sinks. When they are in a degraded state they are leaking historically stored carbon back into the atmosphere so they are a net emitter just like a power plant. M: Methane? J: Methane, carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide are the three respiratory gasses in most landscapes. In a functional meadow the carbon gets deposited in an anaerobic setting in other words it is saturated and therefore it can’t oxidize. If you dewater that profile then the previously secured carbon is exposed to oxygen and begins to oxidize and bleed out. The publications that are on the shelves now consistently report that degraded meadows are net emitters, restored meadows are net sinks. M: In general vegetation is good for carbon retention. J: Yeah, and the thing about the meadows is that all the benefits are in the soil. You can graze it, you can burn it. As long as you don;t change the hydrology you don;t lose that. When you invest in a forest for carbon, it’s prone to burn, so it’s considered more secure. There’s as much carbon going on in an acre of meadow as there is in 12 acres of forest believe it or not. M: Why is that? J: The professor at UNR who discerned that – he’s a soil chemist and he had done all his work in rain forests and had done all his work in forest soils. When he got roped into our research I think he was a little skeptical and then after looking at the data he said “wow that’s insane – it’s real!” That’s why meadows are considered a high priority. The bird people say that the meadows are the single most important habitat for birds in the sierras. And that they represent the habitat that is at the most risk of degradation and loss. Another ancillary piece is that because of the reservoir effect we all know and after 40 years here I can attest our snowpack is getting thinner and higher up. Because we are low elevation sierras here our percent of the land with a good snow pack now is reducing so as opposed to having an impenetrable snow pack at 5000 ft now it is 6000 ft (from valley floor). So here that’s a lot of land now that is in the rain snow zone rather than the all snow zone. And so we can;t even count it as a reliable snow reservoir so we have to offset that by getting back the meadow reservoirs. So climate change adaptation with direct carbon benefits and direct water benefits and direct habitat benefits. Its a win win. M: Sounds like it. And is this what it should look like? J: No this is what a degraded meadow looks like because milk creek over here is incised. So this is lots of annual plants – mustard, annual grasses, this is not good. M: If it’s okay to talk about, what is the methodology? J: Well what we started out with 26 years ago was an odd tool that I heard about from one of my mentors called pond and plug where you basically – because it’s expensive to haul material around and these cuts have taken out hundreds of thousands of yards of material per mile or more – and so to do it cost effectively to take a portion of the exiting cut and excavate the sides out and use that material to fill both directions back up the grade and then we go down to the next area and do the same thing and we do that all the way down the meadow and it was such an appropriate nickname. When we go out to projects all the people focus on is the pond and we say “no, the ponds are just the residue of borrowing the material. There’s a great channel over here!” That’s what we’re really trying to do is get a channel that’s connected to its floodplain and in balance. .... We’re not universally loved. There’s always going to be a detractor. Particularly if you are doing something M: Skeptical of any impact...even if it’s good. J: Yeah. Some people think nature should take its course and that ponds create habitats for invasive species. So we have some projects where we have complete fill now. But it’s usually only if we have to and it costs a lot more. M: Where does that material come from? J: Well, sometimes we can get the material from a hillslope nearby. M: We have a project and other stakeholders insisted that we not excavate because of native american sensitivity not that there’s any known bodies out there but it’s a public valley and it's a really special spot for the Midue and they were adamant that they didn’t want us excavating out there anywhere. We’re doing the project for the forest service on their land so the forest service said “We will pitch in extra funds if you can find material to come in from off site. There’s a quarry in Chester that has overburdened itself from their operation that's pretty good material actually – it's alluvium. So we’re going to haul that in. M: What is that? J: It’s alluvium topsoil m so they take it off to get down to the old gravel. And so it’s just sitting there as a by-product. M: and they truck that in for 90,000 dollars. J: Cost of the material and trucking and it's mostly trucking. And I’m sitting there thinking “Well what about the climate thing here?” But anyway that’s an example. What we’re trying to do is connect a stream to its natural floodplain. ..... M: Do you work at all on waterways that aren’t meadows? J: Yeah we do work on some. For one reason or another maybe we can’t bring it back to the surface. People are interested in dealing with raspy erosion issues. We have techniques to stabilize stream banks in aesthetic and effective ways rather than just rip out. That’s about 10% of our work. We work up and down the Sierras now. We incubated here and got most of our expertise here initially but we’ve been working the length of the sierras for about the last ten years in a lot of national forests all the way from Kern county to McCloud. M: Has the work been affected by forest fires? J: The projects are actually resilient to forest fires because they’re actually green and one of the things that the fire folk like is that if we do pond and plug they can dip in the pond with their helicopter. One fire over by antelope a few years ago, they set up their pump line in one of our ponds and ran lines for a mile each direction. There’s lots of benefits. Obviously fires that behave like they did last year and have a potential to delay this year a 30 40 50 acres meadow is a fly spec but it doesn’t bother them. The fires don’t adversely affect the meadow. Currently nothing we have done has been subject to a debris torrent from a burn or something like that yet. Might happen one of these days but even so a lot of the meadows we work on in the sierras you can see evidence of old debris torrents from fires maybe 3000 years ago followed by a flood and it’s all part of the meadow building process. It would be better for that meadow to catch that material than for that meadow to be a channel for that material to move right on through and down the system. M: And wind up in the ocean? J: Or the state’s reservoir, yeah. So that's where we’re at. Plumas corp was actually formed as an economic development agency by the county and the business community as a non governmental entity to help attract business and attract funds to help attract business, that kind of thing and so the nascent watershed restoration effort in the Feather began just about the same time Plumas corp started and the first executive director basically did a survey and asked people who moved their businesses here why they moved here and they said “Well we moved here to ski or motorcycle or snowmobile or fish. And he said well anything that’s going on that affects the environmental quality of life is an economic development activity and we need to be involved in that. M: That’s why people are here J: and so when that program got the point where it actually had legs and some funding and a project to build and they needed a place for a coordinator to be and that’s when they asked Plumas Corp if they would allow the coordinator to work and run their funds through Plumas Corporation because at that time we had the county and fish and wildlife and the forest service and PG&E and caltrans – all these entities were trying to work together and they’re all in court with one another all the time and so none of them wanted their coordinators to be housed in one of the big players with a natural resource agenda. And Plumas corp wasn’t perceived to have a natural resource agenda so that’s why everybody was comfortable with our first coordinator being here and so we;ve been here ever since – that was in 87 when we started, I started in 90. When it was time to build the first project and put it on the ground and that’s what I was hired to do – build projects and do it in a different way – being on the project every minute of every day and directing the work rather than doing the typical engineer building a bunch of blue prints and somebody comes by once a week. They didn’t want to do that because they said that’s not how you do it and they’re right. M: So you’re out there in the tractor digging the ponds? J: Yep we actually operate some pieces. And the contractor is operating the other pieces. I grew up on equipment so I knew how to do that and I trained my colleagues to do it too. M: Who is the contractor? J: Well we have a number of contractors mostly here in Plumas county who do it because they like to do it, you know, it’s their backyard and they have the necessary equipment and they have a lot of the skills of working in the wild lands which is different than building a highway in a valley and so Wilburn construction down the road here, Folken Logging in Portola, All american construction is in yuba city but they grew up in greenville and then digit construction in Chester is another one and so those are the main ones we work with right now. They Are interested in doing it a lot of the other firms – because it is a kind of a direct work thing – we don’t hand them a bunch of blueprints - we say we want x y z pieces of equipment with an operator and how much an hour is it going to be? And we’re going to tell them what to do. And so the contractors will go and bid on these big jobs and want to generate lots and lots of change orders and find errors in the plans and then charge for change amendments and stuff. They don’t like our kind of work so they don't even bid because that’s how they make their money. M: What would be an example of that approach? J: About 20 years ago we did our first cooperative project with the county – with public works. And it was a small project over in Greenville. We wanted to work on some banks and so the director of public works said “ This is the first time we’ve worked together. “ He absolutely insisted that it had to be stamped plans, it had to go out as a public works contract – no negotiation so one of his staff and I sat down and jammed this up as best we could and CalTrans was actually building a passing lane north of Greenville and it was impacting a wetland and so we actually asked caltrans if they would take that mature wetland vegetation and transport it down to stage it at our project area. They said sure. So they did that and then we had some rock left over from another project so we had a contractor come in and bid on it and I had actually estimated that the amount of tie it would take was about five grand . So he said about that – 6 grandma something like that. Close. And as soon as his excavator hit the ground he said “Se these plans you made? That bush is not there, it’s over here and I want 500 dollars to move it over there.” And we had to give it to him. And he did that for two and a half days to me. So at the end of the 2 and half days it was 20,000 dollars. He got 20,000 out of the county and I tracked all of this. And I went in and the public works director then was a local character. He grew up here. He was kind of a crusty guy but he also had a brain and I went in there and I said Tom, this is what happened when we did it this way. Here’s what it should have cost: 5,500 dollars for the days of work for one dump truck and one excavator and because we did it this way it cost us 20 grand. Now we have this grant together you and I or the county and Plumas Corp and we have all this work we’ve got to do and we aren’t going to be able to do it if we have to pay him four times as much as we budgeted. And he said Jim your right we’ll do it your way next time. M: So who’d you call then? J: Well, we finished the project for 20 grand. When you hear about – whether its light rail or highway project - and you hear about all these cost overruns that is exactly what they’re talking about. It’s the same process only on a huge scale. M: So your work around has been? J: We have a design on paper but it's our design, we don’t just give it to the contractor and say build it. M: Your onsite J: we’re onsite and we’ve flagged everything and said we’re placing the fill here and this is how we want you to place it. And it’s easy for the contractors if they’re interested in it because they don't have to sit there and price out bolts and nuts and all this stuff to try to get a competitive bid. They still have to price out their iron and the people you know how hungry they are. M: So was that a major expansion point for Plumas corp. Did you have to hire a lot at that point? J: We’ll in 90 we were running one project a year, by 95 we were running two or three. And now we’ve got at least a dozen that are going at different stages all the time so obviously there are a lot more of us. Then it was just me. And so we're going to build five projects this time between Westwood and Guerneville. Last year we built a project outside of Guerneville, we had a project in Jackson. I think Leslie had a project out of Sonora. But this year...