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Rogene Reynolds - Activist in Spite of Herself

To hear Rogene Reynolds tell it, all she wants to do is "raise my kids, play with my grandchildren and watch the world go by," but the world just won't let her. For the past two decades the Delta real estate agent has again and again found herself leading the charge to protect Delta farmland and water from the incursions and insults of urban interests. These days it's the specter of the peripheral canal, summoned from the grave by CALFED, that's driving her towards the battlements.

"She's a lightning rod," says the Delta Protection Commission's Margit Aramburu, who says Reynolds has an extraordinary ability to mobilize people around issues.

Although "raised to pay attention," Reynolds says she was fairly apolitical until she joined the 1970s grassroots effort to persuade Governor Brown to veto the Senate bill authorizing the canal. She helped gather signatures and joined a delegation -"busloads of people" - that went to Sacramento hoping to meet with Brown. When he refused, Reynolds staged a one-woman sit-in in his office that lasted well into the night. When Brown signed the bill, Reynolds helped launch the referendum that ultimately defeated the canal plan.

Reynolds' activism is fueled by a fierce commitment to the agricultural community where she has spent most of her life. Reynolds, 49, was born and raised on Roberts Island, where her great grandparents settled and began farming in the 1880s. She married young and moved away, but returned to the Island 10 years ago with her second husband, Bill. The island, one of the largest of the Delta islands, is still exclusively agricultural, due to zoning provisions designed to discourage subdivisions.

After the PC victory, Reynolds says she backed away from politics for some time. "I got too involved," she says of her first brush with activism. "I sacrificed my family's time and I damn near ruined my marriage. It was worth it in the sense that it had to be done but looking back, I really got too carried away."

But politics kept coming to her. First the city of Lathrop tried to acquire 2,500 acres of Roberts Island for sewage treatment, then the Bay Area Water Recycling Program developed a plan to irrigate the area with treated waste water. "It's always the same issue: because we're open space we're a dumping ground," says Reynolds. She took the lead in fighting both plans, and in both cases her opponents backed off.

Reynolds, a Republican, says she sees only a small conflict between her political beliefs and her real estate career. Although she doesn't care for the growth patterns in the Stockton area, which she expects will eventually cover a lot of farmland, and would hesitate to "do business with a developer," she says she's a realist. "People have to live somewhere, and it's my job to sell it to them. But I do wish they'd build up more, and not put people on the best land."

Between battles, Reynolds has directed some of her prodigious energy to spearheading a drive to restore the historic Roberts Island Farm Center, raising more than $60,000 from local sources. "When a cause appears, she's right there in the forefront," says Farm Center president Mike Robinson, who has known Reynolds since childhood.

Reynolds hadn't paid much attention to CAL FED until the program's draft EIS/EIR was released last spring. "It was a shock," says Reynolds, who went to bed crying after reading the document and it wasn't just the canal that upset her. "The whole thing was such a slam on farming, which is my heritage" she says, citing CALFED's land retirement plans. Although she supports the basic idea behind CALFED - that is, trying to balance competing water needs in the face of a growing population - she has a real problem with plans to move water from one basin to another for the benefit of urban areas. "Ultimately, we're going to need it, either for our own environment, our own farming or our own growth," she says. "Once water is gone to the cities, it isn't going to come back."

For the moment, Reynolds is taking a cautious wait-and-see approach with CALFED. "There are extremely powerful interests pushing for the new canal," she says. "They're not going to go away, not that easy. They may try a different tack, but if they don't get it now they'll be back again in 20 years." But in all likelihood, so will Reynolds. "They'll build this ditch over my dead body," she says.

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