Hayden Starts Investigation of Lake Program

A key legislator Tuesday launched his own inquiry into a Department of Fish and Game decision to award nearly all the contracts for a lake restoration program to a businessman who has connections to a powerful legislator and a top official in the Wilson Administration.

State Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica), chairman of the Natural Resources Committee, asked the department for immediate explanations for of its actions surrounding the problem-plagued Adopt a Lake program, which is being investigated by the attorney general’s office and audited by the agency.

Citing an article Tuesday in the Los Angeles Times, Hayden said he wanted to know why the department continued to give contracts to a nonprofit company operated by Fresno businessman Byron Kemmer even after state officials had received complaints that it was not completing its work.

“Given the department’s responsibility to administer contracts, how did the department allow only four of 16 contracts awarded to Mr. Kemmer to be completed?” Hayden asked in a letter to Fish and Game Director Boyd Gibbons.

Adopt a Lake had met few of its original goals to restore bass habitat and had been undermined by politics and mismanagement, The Times found.

State Sen. Jim Costa (D-Hanford) and his aides, as well as Craig Schmidt, a special assistant to Resources Secretary Douglas Wheeler, had intervened on numerous occasions to help Kemmer with problems he was having with agency officials, according to records and interviews. Kemmer is a friend of both the senator and Schmidt.