Fed judge halts further ag water cuts
Wanger rejects environmentalists' suit to scrap contracts.
John Ellis
The Fresno Bee
04/27/2009
A federal judge on Monday rejected a request to cancel or renegotiate more than three dozen Sacramento River water contracts that environmentalists claimed were drawn up using flawed information.
The ruling by U.S. District Judge Oliver W. Wanger appears to keep in place the Central Valley's intricately woven water system -- and to spare agricultural users north and south of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta from potentially losing even more water.
Trent Orr, an attorney for environmental group Earthjustice, said it appears that water amounts outlined in the Sacramento River users contracts will be "there in perpetuity. We just don't think that's right."
Westlands Water District spokeswoman Sarah Woolf said it was "nice to see [environmentalists] simply didn't win one."
Wanger's ruling involves one of the last outstanding issues in a federal lawsuit involving the endangered delta smelt. Earlier, Wanger had thrown out a set of rules governing the smelt's management and ordered the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to rewrite them.
The new smelt rules involved the effect of delta pumping on the tiny fish. But environmentalists said the new rules also should govern water delivery contracts reached with Sacramento River water users.
At issue were decades-old contracts reached with Sacramento River Settlement Contractors. Those contractors hold water rights that predate the federal Central Valley Project, which delivers water to Westlands and other Valley users.
The settlement contractors argued in court filings that if their contracts were canceled, they would revert to using water under their pre-existing water rights. In turn, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation's "ability to operate the [Central Valley Project] would be severely compromised."
Wanger's 86-page ruling makes clear that the federal government and the Sacramento River Settlement Contractors agreed in the early 1960s "on long-term water contracts to continue for a 40-year term and renewals thereafter, for fixed, contractually defined quantities [of water]..." Those contracts predate the federal Endangered Species Act, which governs management of the delta smelt...
