Case Studies

Imperial Irrigation District. Educational Multimedia and Community Outreach. 2016 to 2017.

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The setting

By 2016, California's Salton Sea had endured fifteen years of state inaction. The Quantification Settlement Agreement (QSA) had assigned California responsibility in 2003, but no major restoration or management projects had been implemented. Local frustration was high while people were suffering from decreasing air quality and millions of animals were losing their.. habitats. Imperial Irrigation District had already petitioned the State Water Resources Control Board to force the state to act. The region needed Sacramento to move. But the region itself had not yet been fully equipped to tell its own story at the scale the moment required.

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The problem I saw

The obvious problem was Sacramento's silence. The deeper problem was that efforts aimed at legislators were treating the symptom, not the cause. What was missing was funding; and a regional constituency that understood the science, the stakes, and the solutions well enough to speak for itself. Until the region could speak from a place of shared understanding, restoration would keep being something being done to the Salton Sea communities rather than by them. Institutions respond to public will. Public will begins with organization, and a concerted voice.

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What we did

Imperial Irrigation District appointed The EcoMedia Compass as their educational multimedia and community outreach partner. The scope was regional education first: multimedia management, production, community events, and outreach in service of a multidisciplinary, science-based approach to restoration.

Over the course of the engagement, we developed STEM-aligned curriculum on the Salton Sea for classrooms, shared with schools across the region, hosted community events and forums, produced multimedia on current and proposed restoration projects, and worked with community members, artists, scientists, and shoreline residents to help them tell their own stories in their own voices. We spent a month in Sacramento convening a well-attended forum near the State Capital in the Secretary of State's office, called "California's Salton Sea." We visited every state senator and assembly member's office.

We also brought our existing network of press relationships from local, national and international publications, into contact with the deeper story of the Sea. Throughout the engagement, I remained an independent voice, connecting reporters with authentic sources across the region including community members, scientists, and advocates whose perspectives didn't always align with any single institution's messaging. That independence was the point. Trust with the press came from telling the truth, not from carrying anyone's brief.

The theory of change was regional first: educate the constituency, and the political conditions for state action follow.

 

What shifted

In November 2017, during the final months of the engagement, the State Water Resources Control Board (SWRCB) voted unanimously to approve a stipulated order requiring California to implement a ten-year Salton Sea Management Plan (SSMP). It was the state's first written commitment after fifteen years of inaction. I testified at the November 7 meeting as EMC's executive director, on the record for the residents whose homes ring the Sea. My testimony was a critique as much as a witness: the order named the most emissive playa in the state's plan but did not extend concrete projects to Salton City, Desert Shores, or Bombay Beach where communities actually live. I urged the board to add an accountability provision requiring that if the state fell short of its annual milestones, water transfers from the region be paused until the state caught up. Though not all of my recommendations were adopted the board did approve modifications to address a number of concerns raised during the meeting.

Weeks later, the California Legislature passed SB 615, formally naming the state's comprehensive Salton Sea Restoration Plan and codifying the Water Board's role in restoration. By 2018, the Salton Sea Management Plan  was released, the Legislature held formal hearings on the Sea, and the state moved from planning mode into implementation.

In the years since, over $583 million in state funding has been committed to Salton Sea projects, and a $250 million federal commitment from the Inflation Reduction Act began flowing in December 2023, with additional landmark agreements between the federal government, the California Natural Resources Agency, IID, and the Coachella Valley Water District announced in 2025 to accelerate implementation of the state's plan.

The EcoMedia Compass has been recognized as one of the region's key nonprofit voices, listed on the official California State Water Resources Control Board's Salton Sea resources page alongside universities, research institutes, and long-standing advocacy organizations.

Our engagement was one thread in a much larger effort. But it was the thread that helped the region become audible to itself, and to Sacramento. When the state finally moved, it moved because the region had become impossible to ignore. And when the vote was cast, at least one voice at the microphone insisted that the residents themselves not be left out of the plan that was supposedly for them.