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Show Panel outlives its usefulness The California Debris Commission is a federal agency that was created 92 years ago to regulate the hydraulic gold mining industry. . But hydraulic gold mining is a practice of the past, a technique that began to fall into disrepute around the turn of the century and hasn't been used at all for more than three decades. Then why does the California Debris Commission still exist? Your guess is as good as anyone's. Scientists can explain why the horseshoe crab and the Galapagos tortoise have survived for tens of millions of years, but no one knows why the California Debris Commission Commis-sion has been around since the days of Grover Cleveland. Here's the story: In the mid-19th century, California miners discarded their picks, pans and shovels and began unearthing veins of gold by washing down hillsides with streams of water. Debris poured into streams and rivers, inundated farms and turned California's central valleys into oceans of mud and gravel. Farmers and shippers who wanted to preserve the navigability of the state's rivers lobbied for 30 years before they finally won a court battle banning hydraulic mining. But within a few years, the nation's gold reserves dipped into the danger zone and the "Panic of 1893" ensued. Railroads declared bankruptcy; hundreds hun-dreds of banks folded; and thousands thou-sands of commercial houses went broke. Congress leaped to the rescue and created the California Debris Commission Com-mission to revive the gold mining industry and regulate it. The commission was attached to the Army Corps of Engineers and the three commissioners, all high-ranking corps officers, began issuing permits and requiring the construction construc-tion of dams and stone walls to contain the debris. The commissioners have never re ceived salaries (other than their Army pay),, have no staff, office, or stationery. Their expenditures have totaled only $3 million or about $80 million, depending on how the figures are interpreted. " But the fact remains that the California Debris Commission has had very little to regulate for a long time. Its powers were substantially reduced by the Flood Control Act of 1917 and the Clean Water Act of 1977. During the 1970s, it had only one permit on file. The wording of its annual report has not changed significantly since 1962. It hasn't spent a dime in two decades. "It's kind of unique," said Mike Helm, chief of operations for the Sacramento district of the Army Corps of Engineers Corps, "that you've got a commission that is no burden on the taxpayers whatever." When Gen. Paul Kavanaugh became chief engineer for the Sacramento district in 1979, he automatically became a commissioner. commis-sioner. "Somebody informed me I was a member of the California Debris Commission and I thought I was going to be a glorified junk man," he told our reporter, Kenneth Reid. In one of his first acts as a commissioner, Kavanaugh convened the group and recommended that it vote to dissolve itself. The motion carried and the recommendation began to work its way up the Army chain of command. In February 1985, the Defense Department finally asked Congress to write the commission off the books. The requisite language was inserted into a massive water bill that was approved by the House Public Works and Transportation Committee. But it has to be considered by four other committees before it gets to the House floor this fall. Like the snakes down South, the California Debris Commission probably pro-bably isn't going to expire until somebody cuts off its head and beats it with a stick. Even then, it won't die until the sun goes down. DIPLOMATIC DIGEST: Has the legendary James Bond defected t6 the Russians? 'Among . the . new,) diplomatic" license plates issued to'" the Soviet Embassy in Washington is one marked "SX 007." The car is parked frequently on 16th Street outside the embassy, but whether it belongs to a SMERSH agent, the FBI won't say. There has been a flurry of contradictory reports on the possibility possibi-lity of a softening of relations between the Soviet Union and Israel. But there will be no improvement until a serious problem is addressed: The plight of Soviet Jews who want to emigrate but who have been refused visas. From a 14-year high of more than 15,000 exit permits granted in 1979, the number plummeted steadily to 1,000 last year and only 499 in the first half of 1985. In the Soviet Union, workers in vodka factories are assigned to "escort" shipments of their products. pro-ducts. The official Soviet newpaper Pravda recently reported that sometimes some-times "an escort gets so drunk that not only the car's contents but also he himself has to be carried out." EDITORIAL: How nice to learn recently that the minds of college-age college-age kids will now be protected from progressive thought by a new group of intellectual vigilantes that calls itself "Accuracy in Academia." The new organization will post spies in the classrooms in search of the "10,000 known Marxists" supposedly supposed-ly teaching there. This prompts an observation: We are up to our keisters with ideologies and doctrinaire people. We are tired of left-wing and right-wing fanatics and their 25-word formulas for solving the world's problems. We wish they would cease their public bleatings, caucus among themselves, and leave us radical middle-of-the-roaders alone. |