As written, on the surface it appears to be limited to a direct kill shot on dredging, but don't kid yourself for one minute and think that is where it stops. This bill is a foundation and has legs, it will grow and spread. The saddest part of it all is how conditioned and compliant weve become to it all. You can already see the "It's not so bad, could be worse- your paranoid!" acceptance attitude coming out, and it's been less than a month. Give it another month and folks will be like- "SB637, oh yeah what a bummer that was. Hey well at least we can still pan in the local blm rec area, right? " No I'm not directing any of this towards any one person, It's all across the community, the internet and general population as a whole. "They" have the formula down pat - little bites, not big chunks, go slow and we will give it away, "cuz it could always be worse."
This is total deja vu for me. When "they" put up the first gate going down to the river. It started out with: "It's only for winter errosion control, we will open it in the spring don't worry".
Some of us said BS they are gonna shut us out of the forest. Others said we were paranoid, "they told us why and said they'd reopen it, it makes sense".
Next year gates started popping up on the side roads. "Those are old roads and we don't want people getting lost or hurt or dumping drug labs." The communities response was "Oh ok that makes sense, at least we still have the main road and the road to the river in the summer". Again we said we are losing our access as well as our exit points should we have a major fire. Again- "YOUR PARANOID" , well long story short a few years later - We have ZERO access, one road in one road out. To their credit they didn't lie to us about opening the road to the river in the summer. Yep they swing the gate open sometime in June. However they stopped maintaining the road. So now it's little better than a goat trail, it's a miserable drive even on a long travel atv. Too bad there is no gold in it, I'd set up shop cuz "they" won't even drive down in there now.