Dear Conservation Voter,

It’s been a long, hot summer. After many months and several rounds of secret negotiations, California has yet another budget revision that purports to carry us through the end of the fiscal year in June 2010. Governor Schwarzenegger and a minority of ideologues in the legislature repeatedly held the budget hostage, and the drawn out negotiations resulted in many upsetting losses for the environment, education, healthcare and more. Poor people and students suffered the most.

The governor and these lawmakers hijacked not only the budget, but the constitutional process by which Californians enact environmental protections. Their outrageous demands will result in the closure of up to 100 (a third) of the state’s parks, devastating cuts in local funding for the California Conservation Corps, delayed clean-up of dirty diesel pollution from off-road equipment, and the exemption of several highway construction projects from the state’s most important environmental quality law (CEQA).

This radical minority even tried to override a decision by the State Lands Commission, in order to overturn a 40-year moratorium on offshore oil drilling near California’s pristine coast. But you helped us fight back by telling your representatives that the dollars promised by Big Oil were not worth the risk to California’s natural heritage.

Rather than causing us to throw up our hands, this ugly process has convinced many environmental voters that we MUST get involved as early as possible in the 2010 gubernatorial and other legislative contests.

CLCV and the entire environmental community must make it clear to all of the candidates in the 2010 elections that we refuse to sacrifice our clean air and water, our forests and our community health, for short-term economic gain. We will tell them (early and often) that we expect a bold vision of how a clean energy economy that encourages innovation can rescue our economy, create good jobs, and protect California’s wilderness, its coastline and all its citizens.

Together we can “Build a Greener Governor” and a greener legislature for California. We’ll fight for important environmental legislation right up until this year’s September 11 deadline. We’re also researching 2010 candidates, finalizing our questionnaires, and setting up candidate interviews. In addition,we’re hard at work creating an exciting online community that will make it easier for each of you to play a key role in these campaigns. And finally, we’re entering into new partnerships like one with the Extraordinaries, an organization that’s introducing new technology to encourage “micro-volunteering” and innovative options for citizen engagement.

These are challenging times, but there’s no better time to be a part of the movement working to elect true environmental champions in California. We hope you enjoy the latest (online) edition of Groundswell.

Warner Chabot
Chief Executive Officer

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