Delta Flows April 14, 2010
Yes, fish are better off with more water
In March, the National Research Council committee charged with evaluating the biological opinions on Delta fish reported that more scientific analysis was needed to determine what specific environmental triggers would indicate when water diversions should be reduced. But the report also found that “Most of the actions proposed by two federal agencies to reduce water diversions in the California Bay-Delta in order to protect endangered and threatened fish species are ‘scientifically justified’.”
It’s Fuller vs. Stripers Again
You had to get to the Capitol early on April 13 to get a seat in room 437, where the Assembly Water, Parks and Wildlife Committee was again going after striped bass as predators in the Delta. Bass fishermen and their supporters had packed the room. Committee Chair Jared Huffman had put this bill (AB 2336) first on the agenda, undoubtedly to allow the room to clear for other matters later.
Of course, Huffman saw this swell of opposition coming (after all, we went through a similar process last fall). He had persuaded author Assemblywoman Jean Fuller to amend the bill. Instead of focusing on striped bass predation, the Delta Independent Science Board will now be instructed to consider “impact of invasive species and non-native species, water quality impairments, and predation on native species.” In other words, other stressors besides the flow reductions caused by the water projects.
Funny. We thought the National Research Council committee was already doing that. And the State Water Resources Control Board, which is supposed to be looking at flows but would like to look at stressors instead. And the BDCP, which is already committed to blaming anything but flow reductions for the situation of fish in the Delta. Surely the Delta Independent Science Board itself would have gotten around to this anyway, even without AB 2336. So this piece of political theater was pretty much redundant, as Huffman pretty much admitted.
Despite the many people speaking in opposition to the bill, it passed out of committee. But one opponent made a particularly astute observation: ALL those agricultural crops grown in the San Joaquin Valley, like cotton, almonds and pistachios are nonnative species.
Another worrisome bill also passed out of the committee that day. This was Huffman’s own bill, AB 2092, regarding fees for planning and administration for the Delta Stewardship Council. This is where we get right down to the “beneficiary pays” provisions for funding the Stewardship Council. The bill originally required the SWP and CVP contractors to pay for “planning and administrative costs.” This sounded reasonable to the Audubon Society, NRDC, and the Nature Conservancy, but a lot of water districts and growers’ groups balked. So the bill has been amended to say “specified costs.” Whatever that means.
Also amended out of the bill was the part that would have made beneficiaries responsible for paying for the costs of implementing the Plan.
Huber reintroduces her sensible canal proposal
Assemblymember Alyson Huber is reintroducing a bill, AB 1594, that would prohibit construction of a peripheral canal around the Delta without a full fiscal analysis and a vote of the legislature.
Last November’s water package completely omits legislative oversight, merely leaving it to the Delta Stewardship Council to decide whether the BDCP is consistent with the co-equal goals for the Delta.
Huber’s bill prohibits the construction of a peripheral canal (defined to include any facility or structure that conveys water directly from a diversion point in the Sacramento River to SWP or CVP pumping facilities south of the Delta) unless expressly authorized by the Legislature.
It further requires the Legislative Analyst’s Office to complete an economic feasibility analysis prior to the enactment of a statute authorizing the construction of a peripheral canal.
The bill would also require that the construction and operation of a peripheral canal not diminish or negatively affect the water supplies, water rights, or quality of water for water users within the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta watershed.
Rollout of the bill is scheduled for Monday, April 26. The bill is scheduled to be heard by the Water, Parks and Wildlife Committee on April 27.
Riverkeeper gets it wrong
Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is in New York state this week to be honored by the Riverkeeper, a Hudson River environmental organization. (The Hudson River is the watershed that supplies water to New York City.) Riverkeeper will be honoring our Governor at a Fisherman’s Ball for his environmental advocacy. Obviously Riverkeeper didn’t bother to look into the effect of Schwarzenegger’s policies on California’s rivers and fish.
A quick scan of Riverkeeper financial supporters turned up a Resnick—not Stewart, but Jeff. He is Treasurer of the Board for Riverkeeper. He is also a managing director at Goldman Sachs (Global Head of Risk Management and Trading for Goldman’s Commodities and Money Market Businesses), and he used to work for Chevron in San Francisco. One online source reports that Lynda Resnick, Stewart’s wife, has a stepson named Jeff. Probably just a coincidence . . . .
Speaking of predation . . .
If you value private enterprise and free markets, and have any sympathy for small growers and processors, you may appreciate the situation of Ali Amin, a Persian immigrant who owns a pistachio processing plant and is trying to compete with agribusiness billionaires Stewart and Lynda Resnick.
Amin has filed a lawsuit in Fresno County Superior Court claiming the Resnicks violated California public utilities laws by profiting from selling water to farmers who weren’t members of their Bakersfield-based water company, Westside Mutual Water Co. The Resnicks’ plant processes almost two-thirds of the nation’s pistachios. Amin’s suit alleges that growers were lured by water supplies to sell their nuts to the Resnicks’ plant, costing Amin $5.5 million in revenue.
An AP story dated April 11 quotes Lynda Resnick as saying, “”We’ve done more for the pistachio than anyone ever since it was planted in the Garden of Eden . . . . My husband should be canonized for all the work he’s done.”
OK, but let’s have a refresher here on where that water came from.
In the 1980s, the Resnicks bought Central Valley farmland as a hedge against inflation and gained access to water contracts attached to that farmland. In the mid-1990s, Resnick and other Kern County agricultural users gained control of the Kern Water Bank—the largest underground water storage facility in the nation—after negotiations with DWR.
Although the Kern Water Bank had been developed with public money—$74 million from DWR and $23 million in taxpayer-approved bonds—the state eventually ceded ownership to a local water agency. Ownership of the bank ultimately was transferred to a joint powers authority including the local water agency, the Resnicks’ Westside Mutual Water Co. and four water districts.
(The same kind of joint powers authority—with taxpayer subsidized costs and private profit—was written into the language for surface storage facilities developed with money from the water bond coming up on the November ballot.)
The Resnicks ended up with a 48 percent stake in the Kern Water Bank. At one point, their water holdings were more than twice the size of the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir.
This provided them with the water to grow the pomegranates (as in POM Wonderful), pistachios, and “Cutie” sweet orange/Chinese mandarin hybrids that Lynda Resnick has marketed so successfully. We won’t get into the issue of growing permanent crops like this with water that has to be transferred and stored. What we will point out is that between 2000 and 2007, records show the state paid the Resnicks $30.6 million for water previously stored in the Kern Water Bank as part of a program to protect Delta fish – that didn’t protect Delta fish.
But back to Mr. Amin and the pistachios. The California Public Utilities Commission requires most mutual water companies to register as public utilities and subject their rates to state regulation if they sell water to nonmembers for profit. This is supposed to prevent price gouging. Westside didn’t register with the PUC.
Amin’s suit alleges that Westside evaded the law by selling water to nonmembers at a profit.
According to the AP article, “Assemblyman Huffman and Sen. Dean Florez, D-Shafter, said those allegations in the Amin lawsuit touch on a broader debate about whether companies should be able to profit from taxpayer-funded waterworks amid a drought.”
Restore the Delta doesn’t think taxpayers would see anything here to debate.
Says Amin, “You feel like David fighting Goliath. . . . If they’re allowed to keep doing this, the rest of the independents and small growers won’t be able to compete.”
The Resnicks typically win in court. They sued to kill the California Pistachio Commission, a board farmers paid to do generic marketing for pistachios. After spending more than $2 million in legal fees, farmers gave up and voted to disband the commission three years ago.
The Resnick’s corporate control over a part of the state’s public trust — water, with its delivery and environmental use being financed for the Resnicks by California’s middle class, is a perfect example of why Americans’ are developing collective outrage. But, we need to stop and ask ourselves is where our outrage should be directed? Yes, elected official need to be held accountable. That’s why we vote. But, the real problem is corporate control (by big dollar players like Resnick) of our political leaders and our government agencies – all at the expense of California’s citizens. Corporate control of government leads to environmental programs that don’t produce results (and we want good environmental results), and an economy that works against the free market. To solve this problem, we must work for political reform.
The lions share, but only if they have to …
by Brett Baker
At the March 25th BDCP steering committee meeting, Resources staff Jerry Johns raised the issue of permitting for the Barker Slough pumping plant, which feeds the North Bay aqueduct (part of the State Water Project that serves Napa and Solano Counties) and for the intakes to supply the once-through cooling facility at Mirant Power plant. Johns suggested that this permitting be rolled into the BDCP process. A possible connection from new diversion facilities in the Northern Delta could be sought to meet the needs of contracts with users in Napa and Solano County. Johns pointed out that this wouldn’t divert any more water from the Sacramento River; it would just give it a different destination.
This proposal was met with firm opposition by both Roger Patterson of Metropolitan Water District and Jason Peltier of Westlands. They asked for an additional document and explicit language regarding inclusion of auxiliary diversions, including information on the quantity and capacity of intakes for which permits were being sought. This included the new EBMUD facility at Freeport. MWD and Westlands clearly don’t want other water agencies piggybacking without having shared in the financial commitment shouldered by the agencies pushing BDCP.
Kim Delfino, of Defenders of Wildlife, pointed out that regardless of how permitting was to take place, the effects of the diversions should be included and analyzed in flow models and the impact accounted for in the BDCP. Carl Wilcox, CDFG, cautioned that exclusion of additional projects not go too far, referencing North Delta Levee projects.
Next, Delta Science Program member Dr. Cliff Dahm made an hour-long presentation on the “Logic Chain,” an analytical approach supposedly being applied to the current BDCP process. Dr. Dahm highlighted the importance of accounting for a comprehensive set of factors contributing to a species decline and the importance of arranging and analyzing such factors in a hierarchical fashion. He reasoned that formulating a top-down approach to the overall conservation strategy should result in fewer surprises in the end, and also urged the group to attempt to identify and estimate a measurable desired benefit to associate with each conservation measure.
Resources staff and Potentially Regulated Entities (PREs) seemed uneasy with the idea of assigning any numerics to their conservation strategies, perhaps because of the liability/accountability that would accompany promising such outcomes.
From the perspective of RTD staff, one of the most glaring flaws in the current logic chain is real lack of an integrated analysis of water quality impacts on the Delta at large. Currently water quality issues seem to have been cherry picked, violating Dahm’s suggested top-down approach. An inordinate amount of focus has been given to the anoxic or dead zones in the Stockton Deep Water Ship channel, while factors which contribute to the lack of dissolved oxygen in the channel and degrade water quality in the San Joaquin River at large (i.e. selenium-laden and salty drainage water) remain off the table. When these “stressors” are brought up, the steering committee dismisses them as being outside the identified project area and being “the responsibilities of agencies outside of this room.”
Which agencies might those be? Why can’t we get them in the room?
Will fishermen need “take” permits next?
By Brett Baker
The April 8th BDCP steering committee meeting was kicked off with an announcement by Karen Scarborough that State and federal agencies have agreed upon a timeline for the completion of the Draft BDCP in November of this year. However, the draft EIR/EIS will not be out until sometime in 2011, which is later than originally planned by the Resources Agency and it’s fast-fading administration.
Some hope this will allow for consideration of the work of the National Research Council on “how to most effectively incorporate science and adaptive management” into future management efforts in the Delta. But some of the PREs are annoyed by the delay. Roger Patterson of MWD expressed his concerns with holding up BDCP’s progress for another “crackerjack report.”
Next, Jason Peltier passed around a picture of four men who had caught their limits of salmon (4×2 = 8 adult fish) and complained about the injustice of forcing farmers to fallow fields while recreational anglers are being allowed to “take” these endangered fish for sport. As the picture circulated, Peltier went through some fuzzy math (dividing salvage numbers from the Tracy Fish Collection Facility by the total number of hatchery reared salmon fry released by DFG) to support his claim that these four men limiting out in one day of fishing had an equivalent impact to one day of operating the pumps.
The National Marine Fisheries Services representative rebutted the figures Mr. Peltier had just thrown out, but was outnumbered at the table by contractors. Ara Azhderian, Water Policy Administrator for the San Luis and Delta-Mendota Water Authority, piled on, ranting over the social injustice of putting people out of work for others to take advantage of a public resource. Talk about the Pot calling the kettle black! Not looking for a fight, the NMFS rep conceded the argument and a few closing comments were made, Peltier got off his grandstand, and the meeting continued.
A presentation was the given by a member of the National Research Council (NRC) on their report: A Scientific Assessment of Alternatives for Reducing Water Management Effects on Threatened and Endangered Fishes in California’s Bay Delta available at: http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=12881. The presentation was pretty general and lacked any real findings, much like the report. The NRC members also requested input from Steering Committee members, kind of a “help us help you” sort of offering.
The USF&WS representative took the opportunity to thank the NRC for their hard work and support of the biological opinions for which F&WS had taken so much heat.
This RTD staffer looks out the window and rejoices to see more beautiful black storm clouds rolling in from the Pacific. Rain, baby, rain! As our Delta levees are holding strong through yet another wet winter, I take comfort in the fact the every drop of precipitation that hits the ground in California this year helps to dilute the arguments that feed this beast that is the BDCP. We just need to be sure that it doesn’t get a new source of nourishment with passage of the water bond in November.
