Huge Coalition Presents Historic Recommendations to Delta Council
Water exports from the Delta must be decreased and current federal and state water contract levels must be reduced in keeping with a safe, healthy, and reliable supply.
Dan Bacher
Indy Bay
10/03/2011
More than 200 organizations, representing an astonishing cross-section of the environmental, fishing, tribal and environmental justice communities, have taken aim at the Delta Stewardship Council's draft Delta Plan, according to Bill Jennings, Chairman/Executive Director of the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance (CSPA). You can find the letter by the groups on CSPA’s website at http://www.calsport.org.
"In order to recover the health of the Bay-Delta ecosystems and its fisheries, scientifically developed criteria that would allow increased flows through the Delta must be established," according to the groups. "Water exports from the Delta must be decreased and current federal and state water contract levels must be reduced in keeping with a safe, healthy, and reliable supply."
"It's become clear that the Delta Plan is little more than CalFed in another costume and CalFed’s ‘getting better together’ has been reconstituted as the ‘co-equal goals,'" said Jennings. "The Council simply can’t bring itself to define the ‘co-equal goals’ or acknowledge that, in an over-appropriated watershed where protection of public trust resources requires more water, someone will have to make do with less water. Consequently, the state is addressing its water crisis and the collapse of the Bay/Delta ecosystem in the same manner it addresses its budget crisis; though smoke and mirrors."
The letter was issued as the Brown and Obama administrations are fast-tracking the Bay Delta Conservation Plan (BDCP) to build a peripheral canal to export more Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta water to corporate agribusiness and southern California water agencies. The canal's construction would lead to the extinction of Central Valley steelhead, Sacramento River chinook salmon, Delta smelt, longfin smelt, green sturgeon, Sacramento splittail and other imperiled species.
The letter's release is also underscored by the setting of two disturbing "records" on the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta as the water year ended on September 30.
First, 9 million Sacramento splittail were "salvaged" at the state and federal Delta pumps near Tracy in 2011. The previous record salvage number for the splittail, a native minnow found only in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River system, was 5.5 million in 2006 (http://blogs.alternet.org/danbacher/2011/09/09/over-11-million-fish-salvaged-in-delta-death-pumps-since-january-1).
Second, the water projects pumped a record 6.5 million acre-feet of water from the Delta in 2011, according to government data compiled by Spreck Rosecrans at Environmental Defense. The previous record was 6.3 million acre-feet in 2005.
I applaud the 200-plus conservation, environmental justice, tribal, and commercial and recreational fishing organizations for coming together to challenge the plan!
"It is seriously deficient; it does little more than maintain the status quo; it will not achieve the “co-equal” goals of the enabling legislation; and it will cost the state billions of dollars more than we need to spend; and it does nothing to balance public trust values – one of the foundations of state water management policy," the groups summed up.
