The word "SPLAT" sounds like an egg falling on the kitchen floor.  In the case of the Stanislaus River system, SPLAT was the acronym for the "Stanislaus Planning Action Team."  That was the name given to a collaborative group made up of state and federal agencies, utility districts, county officials, CSERC, and other organizations that collectively met together 188 times over nearly six years.    The goal of the whole process was to attempt to come to agreement about how the Tri-Dam Project and Pacific Gas and Electric should manage their numerous hydroelectric dams and diversions on the Middle Fork and South Fork of the Stanislaus River.  For more than 50 years, those forks had been managed primarily for power generation.    Up to 95% of the river's flows at certain times of the year were diverted into canals or pipelines to generate electricity.  Many river-related wildlife species have declined in numbers, and in some years, careful control of river flows completely eliminated the heavy early summer flushing surge of snowmelt that naturally would have freshened the entire river system.

  In the many hydro-river meetings and field sessions, CSERC played a lead role for the environmental community.  CSERC staff brought unique knowledge about the Stanislaus River ecosystem that came from staff walking miles of the river canyons over years of fieldwork.  CSERC staff also actually read the thousands of pages of documents -- consistently seeking creative solutions that often weren't immediately popular with the utility districts or agencies.  When the utilities proposed meager improvements related to river flows and river management, CSERC staff spent weeks modeling more environmentally beneficial ways of managing the river. 

  The result was a surprisingly successful consensus.  Tri-Dam and PG&E bent over backwards to find middle ground solutions that didn't focus solely on power generation or profits.  All the collaborative trade-offs resulted in a final agreement that was based on higher minimum flows in the river and guaranteed flushing flows in early summer to mimic what would naturally occur.