Delta Flows Newsletter
Tracking
Senator Feinstein wants to help out the Delta by introducing federal legislation that would designate the Delta a National Heritage Area.
This effort by the Senator has come at the request of representatives for the Five Delta Counties: Contra Costa, Sacramento, San Joaquin, Solano, and Yolo. Restore the Delta recognizes that the Five Counties have been working hard to protect Delta Communities in the myriad of Delta processes being led by the state.
Restore the Delta also thinks there may be some positive things about an NHA. But we’re suspicious of anything that comes from the top down rather than being initiated by the people who will be affected.
It is our understanding that the creation of an NHA usually involves many community meetings so that the area involved can articulate what it would like to see happen for itself within the designation. This type of ground level consensus building has not happened.
And of course we’re a bit suspicious of the Senator’s motives given her track record supporting water exporters.
Stay tuned.
They made a wrong turn back there
It has been 15 years since five State Water Project contractors and DWR met behind closed doors in Monterey to renegotiate how water is divided between urban agencies and agricultural users in drought years.
Before the Monterey Plus Amendments, DWR had to allocate water to urban areas first, which could force farmers to fallow their fields – at that time, mostly annual row crops. Under the Amendments, the division of water became 50% to farmers and 50% to cities.
Cities lost their “urban preference.” And a few agribusinesses got the deed to the Kern Water Bank.
Despite a lawsuit by the Planning and Conservation League and others, courts allowed DWR to operate provisionally under the Monterey Plus Amendments. On May 5, 2010, DWR formalized the 1995 agreement giving ownership and operational control of the water bank to the Kern County Water Bank Authority.
Last week, a suit was filed in Sacramento Superior Court by the California Water Impact Network, the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance, the Center for Biological Diversity, the Central Delta Water Agency, and the South Delta Water Agency.
The suit challenges the legality of the following:
- Institutionalizing the concept of “paper water” – water promised by contract that can never realistically be delivered.
- Eliminating the “urban preference,” which prioritized water deliveries to municipal customers during drought. This change resulted in water shortages and higher utility rates for southern California ratepayers.
- Illegally transferring state property known as the Kern Water Bank to private entities and undermining the California Water Code by masking the purpose and place of water use.
- Increasing water exports from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, thus worsening water quality problems and triggering the collapse of the Delta’s ecosystem and fisheries.
The lawsuit seeks to reinstate the urban water preference during drought in State Water Project contracts, reduce the pumping of Delta water that has resulted in the collapse of fisheries, and return the Kern Water Bank to public ownership.
EPA to BDCP: Just what do you want?
In a letter this month to regional administrators for the Bureau of Reclamation, the National Marine Fisheries Service, and the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service, EPA administrators expressed unwillingness to review the BDCP when its most recent Purpose Statement (in the 2/13 Notice of Intent) includes delivering up to full contract amounts of export water.
The EPA points out that the SWP and CVP have never exported more than about 6.3 MAF annually. (And as we know, that’s bad enough.) But the full contract amounts are “at least 1 million acre feet more than has ever been exported historically.”
The EPA notes that you can’t analyze the scope of alternatives when it isn’t clear whether the purpose of the project is to change the method of conveying the historical amount or to deliver the full contract amount. They also point out that increasing exports out of the Delta is inconsistent with recent state legislation.
And the EPA says that “significantly increasing exports out of a stressed Delta is the wrong policy.”
EPA suggests that either the federal action agencies return to the project purpose in the 4/15/08 Notice of Intent or start with the “coequal goals” language in the 2009 Legislation.
Failure to sort it out could slow down the BDCP’s expedited schedule.
A Flood Management Plan inches forward
Can the Central Valley Flood Management Plan (the CVFMP) achieve what the Legislature intended in 2007 when it directed DWR to develop documents to guide integrated flood management for the Central Valley?
Five regional work groups (the Upper and Lower Sacramento regions, the Upper and Lower San Joaquin regions, and the Delta) have produced a Regional Conditions Summary Report, the first step in generating the Central Valley Flood Protection Plan (CVFPP), due in 2012.
The report is over an inch thick. It turned out to be so long and detailed that DWR produced a second document, “Interim Progress Summary No. 1” for elected officials, the general public, and others who need something more user-friendly.
In producing these documents, DWR used an outreach effort it describes as “robust.” The work groups included 192 members across the five regions, and they met eight times. A team of engineering and collaborative policy consultants ran interference between DWR and often-skeptical Delta work group members.
So did that robust outreach produce accurate documents? In early drafts, “fragile hub of California’s water supply” descriptions dominated discussions of the Delta. Much of that framing is gone. Not every levee failure is described as “catastrophic.” Delta work group participants succeeded in giving the Delta a face as a region worth protecting for its own sake.
On June 3, work group representatives from all five regions met for a CVFMP Valleywide Forum in West Sacramento. Two panels gave their views on what needs to happen to make this process effective.
A sample of concerns expressed:
- Can this plan actually be implemented? Is this just the latest in a long series of time-consuming processes that end when they reach a difficult place?
- How will it be paid for? How can we avoid unfunded mandates?
- How will the process be integrated with local land use planning? The state pays for flood damage, but local agencies have authorized development, usually with no real understanding of flood risk.
- The feds are more interested in urban projects; do we want the same level of protection in a rural area if it would encourage development?
- How do we get back to a system that can at least handle design flows?
- Why wasn’t the Corps of Engineers at the table during the Phase 1 process?
DWR Director Mark Cowin told the audience that the norm will no longer be single purpose projects regulated by just one agency. The Department will integrate all flood management process and focus not on risk management but on sustainable flood protection.
Participants agreed that without a unified vision and a systemwide plan, permitting takes too long and agencies give conflicting advice.
There is plenty of disagreement among work group members. For example, participants disagreed on the subject of dams, with one asking how you get to 200-year protection without dams upstream and another arguing that dam removal in some places has increased flood safety. Another said that slowing flood flows rather than moving them through is “a recipe for disaster.”
One of those representing the Delta was Marci Coglianese, who noted that floods are more costly disasters than earthquakes. And after all of this, there is still no emergency response plan in the Delta.
DWR and the consultants got a lot of initial pushback from Delta work group members about assuming that conveyance was a given and that we would just have to do flood management around it. The BDCP and associated conveyance do not appear in the Summary Report under “Pending Projects and Programs.” Included are projects under construction, approved for construction, or in final planning stages and due to be completed before the CVFPP update in 2017.
The Delta workgroup fought to have flood planning and public safety considered before the BDCP went forward. Last year, Secretary Chrisman sent a memo to the work group promising coordination between the CVFPP and the BDCP. DWR staff insist that all the Department’s “top people” support Chrisman’s promises, and a meeting of consultants and the public is tentatively scheduled for July or August. It looks like that will be just in time for the BDCP’s EIR/EIS Scoping Report.
Phase 2 of the CVFPP process will be looking at “solution sets.”
By invitation only?
Joe Del Bosque, a Fresno farmer and a member of the California Latino Water Coalition (CLWC), was sworn in last Friday as a member of the California Water Commission, the agency resuscitated by November legislation to hand out money for dams if voters approve the water bond in November.
Also appointed to the Water Commission by Schwarzenegger is Daniel Curtin, Director of the California Conference of Carpenters. According to the California Farm Water Coalition, Curtin is also a member of the CLWC.
Restore the Delta wonders who else will be appointed to this Commission?
Thus far, as reported last week, we have a representative from The Nature Conservancy – the group that wants to convert Delta farming communities into an inland sea with some land for habitat that TNC’s friends can manage; a representative from the community that wants to continue farming unsustainable crops and selling water to developers; and a representative from the trade groups that wants to build new Delta Conveyance. (Members of the building trades should be put to work improving levees throughout the state using existing bond money.)
Perhaps, the Governor will add an expert on privatizing water for profit to the Commission? That way the cabal to destroy the Delta will be complete.
