Enviromentalists suing over Delta
MediaNews Group
Times-Herald
09/08/2010
In the latest salvo in a raging legal war over the Delta environment and its water, environmentalists have sued to force state regulators to use the same ancient laws that prevented Los Angeles from drying up Mono Lake in the 1980s.
The lawsuit sidesteps the legal and scientific battles over the region's endangered species and instead demands regulators consider "public trust" values under a
doctrine with roots in the laws of ancient Rome.
Those values can include a variety of things, including the future viability of commercial salmon runs, aesthetic beauty and recreational attributes of the coast's biggest estuary.
While a number of planning processes are moving forward that promise to better protect the Delta, the shocking collapse of the backbone of California's king salmon runs in recent years was one reasons the lawsuit was filed, said a coalition lawyer.
"I don't think we can wait for all of these processes," said lawyer Michael Jackson. "They could be too late, we think."
Citing a July report by state regulators and earlier reports that later were shelved, Jackson said if environmentalists win the case, Delta water users might have to cut by half how much water they got during most of the 2000s.
He said better conservation, desalination and water recycling would offset those cuts.
"The economy will not suffer from reduced pumping out of the Delta," Jackson said. "We believe all of the evidence for a solution to the problem in the Bay-Delta already exists. We will try to get that evidence in front of a judge."
A spokesman for the Department of Water Resources, which pumps Delta water to the Bay Area, Kern County and Southern California, declined to comment, saying the department's lawyers had not reviewed the lawsuit.
But William Rukeyser, a spokesman for the State Water Resources Control Board, which regulates the state's water project and administers water rights, said that while he could not comment on the lawsuit, his agency is moving forward with plans to better protect the Delta.
In July, the board adopted an advisory report suggesting that water users in the Delta watershed would have to use far less water to support a healthy estuary.
