Delta Flows- May 27, 2010
Who’s in whose pocket?
In our last issue, we mentioned that Governor Schwarzenegger has appointed The Nature Conservancy’s Anthony Saracino to the Water Commission. In addition to overseeing Water System Operational Improvements – dams – if the water bond passes, the Water Commission is the governmental body authorized to condemn land for the State Water Project. DWR itself can’t do that.
TNC has a history of doing land deals in the Delta. You could call Saracino’s appointment “working closely with state and federal resources agencies and local partners.”
Or you could call it a conflict of interest.
TNC pragmatism Part 2: Nestlé
Not only is TNC tied up with BP (see our last edition). It has been tied up with Nestlé Waters North America (NWNA) for at least five years.
Back in 2005, Nestlé Waters North America donated $1 million dollars to The Nature Conservancy “to protect important freshwater ecosystems across the United States.” Although that donation focused on two projects in Texas and Virginia, TNC announced that “The funds will also go toward Conservancy projects to find new approaches for storing and using water to serve human needs, including drinking water and electricity, while preserving the health of the nation’s critical rivers and lakes.”
NWNA was already in a battle with Michigan citizens about pumping water from a stressed stream and lake for its Ice Mountain bottled water in Mecosta, Michigan. It was in 2005 that the Michigan Court of Appeals affirmed a 2003 trial court ruling that Nestlé’s pumping violated Michigan water law. That’s how much Nestle cared about preserving the health of rivers and lakes.
This is about the same time that NWNA was trying to persuade the people of McCloud, California to let Nestlé contribute to the local economy by bottling water from a plant near Mt. Shasta. McCloud eventually said “No,” but Sacramento recently said “Yes” to allowing NWNA to bottle and sell municipal water. You see, it creates jobs.
(For a great piece on Nestlé’s shenanigans in Maine, google Jim Wilfong’s “Who Owns Maine’s Water – Nestlé or the People?”)
TNC is proud of its alliance with NWNA. From where we sit, it just looks like trading public resources for land.
We wouldn’t call this pragmatism. We’d call it privatization.
In a nutshell, TNC supports Delta water exports to water contractors who will profit from water sales through new conveyance, with an expanded Delta conservancy not controlled by Delta local landowners. This seems to fit TNC’s pattern of trading public resources for land.
Wanger leads us all in a big, costly circle
Remember when U. S. District Judge Oliver Wanger found the Biological Opinions were inadequate to protect fish in the Delta? He ordered export reductions while fishery agencies went back to redo the BiOps, and exporters had a long, noisy fit.
The new BiOps require nearly the same export restrictions to protect fish. Now Wanger doesn’t find enough science there to support decreased exports.
Last week, Wanger decided that water officials must consider humans along with fish in limiting use of the Delta for irrigation. The arguments of urban and agricultural water users convinced him that the federal government’s science didn’t prove increased pumping from the Delta imperiled salmon.
Wanger followed that decision with another this week that lifted pumping restrictions designed to help endangered salmon. Urban and agricultural water users argued that these restriction could be lifted without harming the fish. The order will be in place until June 15.
As of this writing, pumping restrictions to protect smelt remain in place. According to John Ellis, reporting in the Fresno Bee, users have focused on the salmon restrictions because they are less onerous than those for smelt. But Tom Birmingham, general manager of Westlands Water District, admits that continued smelt restrictions could cancel any water delivery gains resulting from lifting the salmon restrictions.
Writes Ellis, “Wanger also ordered federal officials to monitor the increased pumping. If more endangered spring-run Chinook salmon or Central Valley steelhead are found around the pumps or being killed by them, the federal government or environmental groups can ask Wanger to reverse his ruling.” But at this point, “most of the endangered spring-run Chinook salmon and Central Valley steelhead had already passed through the Delta and out to the Pacific Ocean.”
To some, this looks like the same plan for operation that Wanger invalidated in the previous salmon management plan because it jeopardized the species.
And what will they do with that water?
Wanger’s decisions means that Westlands water users will get about 10% more irrigation water for the next 20 days.
Cropping decisions were made last fall. So some of the water available now will be stored at San Luis Reservoir for future use.
KFSN in Fresno interviewed Kerman almond and cotton grower Paul Betancourt. Said Betancourt, “The immediate change won’t be in acres planted but it will be in groundwater pumped. The quality of surface water is much higher than groundwater so we can use the surface water. Get some of these salts flushed out of the soils.”
Wait! You mean you have salts in your soil?
Tackling selenium, or not
Today, the Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board is considering a “time extension for compliance” to allow the continued direct discharge of selenium-laced agricultural water into Mud Slough, a tributary to the San Joaquin River and about 50 miles as the crow flies to the Southern California drinking water pumps. This toxic water has caused reproductive failure and death in aquatic life, migratory birds, and salmon.
One source of toxic selenium pollution is Westlands, where irrigating 300,000 acres of toxic lands mobilizes selenium into the waters of the state and thousands of acres outside of the Grasslands area where drainage is discharged or seeps into the federal San Luis Drain and the San Joaquin River.
Recent reports estimate up to a 50% mortality in Chinook Salmon exposed to these high toxic discharges. Meanwhile, export interests focus on urban sewage discharges as the main cause of fish deaths.
The only way to deal with selenium-laced water is to dilute it, in this case with water from the San Joaquin and Merced Rivers. RTD keeps saying that we can’t solve any of these problems without plenty of fresh water flowing through the whole system.
Flushing compromised Westlands soil with Delta water certainly doesn’t help.
The expectation is that the Central Valley RWQCB will continue not to enforce selenium standards
Delta Flows May 25, 2010
Souls for sale?
On the surface, the Nature Conservancy’s “compatible development” seems like a good idea, pragmatically accommodating the needs of both business and environmentalism. But can you really preserve land and resources by partnering with profit-driven corporations?
Maybe not.
On May 23, The Washington Post reported that one of the Nature Conservancy’s business partners is British Petroleum , the oil spill people. TNC says they partner with BP for wind energy, not for oil drilling. But according to The Post, TNC “has given BP a seat on its International Leadership Council and has accepted nearly $10 million in cash and land contributions from BP and affiliated corporations over the years.”
TNC chief executive Mark Tercek is quoted as saying, “The oil industry is a major player in the gulf. It would be naïve to ignore them.” Someone commenting on the article pointed out that this is a false dichotomy. You can recognize BP as a major player without allying your organization with them.
What is naïve is believing that corporations will let any consideration trump their bottom line.
Some Nature Conservancy members are not happy about this level of “pragmatism.” They think TNC has taken “non-confrontational” too far. It’s time to confront.
Here in the Delta, we’ve watched the Nature Conservancy’s “pragmatism” win it a seat as a token environmental organization at the BDCP table, advising on restoration programs from which it will surely profit. We’ve watched it go along with the 2009 Comprehensive Water Package that takes big steps toward dismantling water and property rights in the Delta and small steps toward addressing California’s unsustainable water habits.
Now Governor Schwarzenegger is turning to the TNC yet again for green washing, appointing Michael Eaton to the Delta Conservancy and Anthony Saracino to the Water Commission. (The Water Commission is the resuscitated agency that will oversee the Water System Operational Improvements – dams – that get 27% of the funding that will become available if voters approve the water bond in November.)
Eaton was senior project director for the Nature Conservancy from 1995 to 2007. Saracino has been director of the California Water Program at the Nature Conservancy since 2005.
Following the dotted line of influence, we find that since leaving the Nature Conservancy in 2007, Michael Eaton has been executive director of the Resources Legacy Fund, which is funding the Governor’s Marine Life Protection Act (MLPA) Initiative.
The MLPA called for an evaluation of the current state of California’s coastal waters and the creation and management of a network of marine protected areas along the California coastline. Critics say the MLPA process is effectively privatizing public trust ocean resources to pave the way for offshore oil drilling, wave energy projects and corporate aquaculture.
If Eaton’s work with the MLPA is any guide, we shouldn’t expect much ecosystem restoration or local economic vitality to come out of the Delta Conservancy. We shouldn’t expect much transparency, either. The MLPA has openly violated the Bagley-Keene Open Meetings Act, banning video and photo journalists from its work sessions.
So how does all this apply to the Delta? TNC and the Resources Legacy Foundation, working with the creators of the water legislation package passed last November, the Delta Vision Blue Ribbons task force, the new Delta Conservancy, the Delta Stewardship Council, and the BDCP, have played a major part in the script to push forward its version of ecological restoration for the Delta onto California voters. They are selling it in support of the water bond as the pragmatic approach of the “co-equal goals” of restoring the Delta and managing water supplies for all of California. We cannot help noticing how this pleasant sounding phrase of environmental responsibility, “co-equal goals,” mimic’s TNC’s promotion of “compatible development” in the Gulf.
And as we all know in the Delta, these government appointed task forces, and the professional meeting attendees from groups like TNC who are appointed repeatedly to carry forth the official party line of water management in California, ignore existing Delta communities. They have actively worked to exclude Delta stakeholders in the decision making process by consistently saying that ideas brought forth from the Delta are not worthy of consideration. This is what happened with the Delta Vision process, CalFed, and is happening with the Bay Delta Conservation Plan. (Government processes that include stakeholder meetings in which recommendations made for protecting the Delta by Delta people are written down and filed away in a drawer because they aren’t the answers officials want to hear, is not dialogue or true engagement.)
Thus, as seen with the Marine Life Protection Act, local communities have been alienated and local knowledge ignored in order to superimpose the new environmental model for California’s water future onto the people already here.
And this is exactly why the TNC/Delta Vision/Delta Conservancy/Delta Stewardship Council/BDCP model for water management for California fails. It doesn’t acknowledge the relationship between the environment and the people of its commons – the people who are the stewards of the Delta. It doesn’t meet the needs of environmental justice communities that need access to clean drinking water. It doesn’t make more water for the system. It doesn’t protect Delta fisheries. But, through the bond that TNC and friends are promoting, our general obligation debt will increase by $800,000,000 annually for thirty years.
Second, this model for managing the Delta, diverting even more water from the Delta with new engineering, all under the guise of new management standards for flows, letting islands go (which will put Delta urban populations at risk), and promoting a return to predominately Delta wetlands (which will require even more surface water than Delta diverters use presently and very well could increase methyl mercury production for fisheries), has never been implemented successfully anywhere in the world. We have yet to find a river system that has been improved by diverting water from it. But we are supposed to trust the TNC model and vote for an $11.4 billion water bond to fund implementation of the model, even though California is broke.
As we have seen with BP in the Gulf, people running highly engineered systems that take from the environment promise a lot, but can fail in major ways to deliver on those promises. While the Nature Conservancy did some great work a generation ago, and still manages some worthy projects in the present, they and their employees who move into related government appointed positions, are too willing to allow for the sell out of communities to corporations which desire to control natural resources – like in the Gulf of Mexico, on the California Coast, and in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.
This type of corporate environmentalism –heavily engineered systems that are mismanaged by regulatory agencies that fail to respect, engage, and protect local communities — has little to do with protecting the Earth. It’s about protecting corporate profits and giving the corporate status quo a green appearance.
Isenberg: still stealing the show
by Brett Baker
Delta Stewardship Council Chair Phil Isenberg has been the point man moving from appointment to appointment in the evolving Delta planning process, continually using his interpretations of California Water Law and Public Policy to shape and direct the debate over the Delta. From discussions with lawmakers behind closed doors as a lobbyist for the Irvine Ranch Water District to public forums as chair of the Delta Vision to his most recent appointment as Chair of the Delta Stewardship Council, Isenberg has been working hard to muddy the thinking of folks directly involved in the Delta planning process as well as the general public.
In November, he wrote an op-ed to provide political cover for Darrell Steinberg after the passage of the Comprehensive Water Package. He has appeared and testified before countless legislative committees to support and justify bad policy, all the while requesting increased appropriations of taxpayer dollars to fund the process and paying lip service to transparency and the public trust doctrine.
At the April 22nd meeting of the DSC, with DWR and Resources agency staff playing their supporting roles, Isenberg was in his element.
After the usual formalities, introductions and roll call, Keith Coolidge, Interim Chief Deputy Executive Officer DWR, gave a Delta briefing to set the stage. Coolidge gave an overview of Supply and Demand In California’s Water System, citing tree-ring studies. How would this council know that tree-ring studies have actually been shown to have a weak correlation with hydrologic conditions? Many factors may influence tree growth. Also there are statistical weaknesses associated with analyzing an individual organism and extrapolating conditions for an entire region, let alone a state with as much climate variability as California.
With respect to demand, Coolidge claimed that it will inevitably increase as population continues to grow. The discussion regarding supply is continually centered around increasing urban demand, while the vast majority of our state’s water, and more specifically the water exported from the Delta, is used for agricultural irrigation.
Some members of the Council have extremely limited knowledge of California water and especially the Delta, and they will most likely be making decisions based on the poor PowerPoint presentations and consultant analyses that will be continually be paraded in front of them throughout this process.
After the presentation, it was time for questions. Council member Hank Nordoff had some good questions about the willingness of ag users to sell water to urban users. Isenberg seemed to support such sales, saying they were a traditional short term strategy, but he admitted that perhaps that policy needs revisiting.
Nordoff also asked about the price per acre foot of San Diego urban water vs. ag water. This question was thrown around like a hot potato from council member to staff and back again before Executive Director Joe Grindstaff finally said there is basically no difference between what Kern County Water agency users and MWD users pay for their “raw water,” but you see, urban users have to pay all those administrative, distribution, and treatment costs. Glad we cleared that up.
Isenberg asked for any final questions and right on cue, Gloria Gray asked about water rights. Isenberg just happened to have a PowerPoint presentation of his own all ready to go on the overhead projector, and he proceeded to give a run down of California’s water rights system. He started with Pueblo Rights handed out by the Spanish Government, went on to riparian rights, and followed up with appropriative rights and a brief overview of the Public Trust Doctrine and Area of Origin assurances. Don Nottoli, Sacramento County Supervisor and Chair of the Delta Protection Commission asked Isenberg about his views on whether or not water rights should be considered property rights. Isenberg asserted that water right were “akin” to property rights and therefore might not warrant the same assurances as property in a court of law.
Such is Isenberg’s position that his opinion regarding water rights carries a disproportionate amount of weight.
There was a great deal of other discussion about technicalities and logistical issues facing the Council. They have to define the scope of their work; establish policy objectives; decide whether it is appropriate for them to take positions on bills in the state legislature; and coordinate with State agencies (DFG, DWR, and State Lands Commission-SLC) as well as federal agencies (DOI, NMFS, USFWS).
At the April meeting, the DSC also discussed acquiring an independent contract consultant to analyze the BDCP. First they had to define “independent.” There was a good deal of discussion as to excluding folks that had worked on BDCP, Delta Vision and CALFED. But excluding them would leave very few “competent” consultant agencies to choose from. Also, considering the tight timeframe for producing a Delta Plan, it would be next to impossible to crest the steep learning curve required to gain a coherent understanding of the Delta’s hydrological and ecological system.
It’s no surprise that the DSC ended up selecting CH2M Hill, even though that consultant had worked on the BDCP.
Delta interests remain under-represented and under the microscope, with in-Delta water users fighting off claims that their lands lack rights to water. Salmon fisherman continue to be demonized as environmental extremists for wanting to protect and preserve their way of life, and Delta and north state taxpayers are being forced to fund the means to their demise. Meanwhile, the pumps in Tracy keep humming along, and exporters continue to cry about allocations, throwing out percentages of water that doesn’t exist.
You can catch the DSC show this week, May 27th and May 28th at the Secretary of State Auditorium, 1500 11th Street in Sacramento. Tell Chair Isenberg and his supporting cast what you think of his Delta illusions.
3rd Annual Waldo Music Fest
The Waldo Holt San Joaquin Wildlife Conservancy will have its 3rd annual music festival Saturday June 5, 2010, from noon to 6 p.m. at 3536 Rainier Avenue.
Enjoy your favorite musicians, meet your friends, bid in the auction, have some great food, and help save our wildlife!
Musicians Dirk Hamilton; Dave Halford; Water Bros.; and Snap Jackson & The Knock on Wood Players will perform!
Salmon protections eased at request of water agencies
Contra Costa Times-5/26/10
By Mike Taugher
To read about this important ruling that could jeopordize Delta fisheries
Link:
http://www.contracostatimes.com/news/ci_15161932?source=rss&nclick_check=1
Delta Flows May 17, 2010
Prodding Interior about Two-Gates
On Tuesday, May 11, the Assembly Committee on Water, Parks and Wildlife got together for a second “Oversight Hearing: Delta Stewardship Council and Bay Delta Conservation Plan Progress and Update.” (The first oversight hearing was in early March.)
Before tackling the DSC and the BDCP, the committee considered an Assembly Joint Resolution, AJR 38, proposed by Assemblymember Caballero. This resolution would request the U.S. Department of the Interior to complete its study of the Two-Gates Fish Protection Demonstration Project.
Caballero said she originally thought the Two-Gates proposal was a simple short-term way to deal with the turbidity that attracts smelt to the export pumps. And last September, Interior seemed interested, too. In fact, $28 million for the project was included in the November Comprehensive Water Package. But then Interior put the project on hold, calling for more study of the underlying science.
This makes Assemblymembers like Caballero, Arambula, and Fuller impatient. It makes ACWA, the San Luis and Delta Mendota Water Agency, and the Metropolitan Water District impatient. It makes Westlands Water District very impatient.
In fact, Westlands’ General Manager/General Counsel Tom Birmingham himself was there to explain why, technically, Westlands doesn’t actually have junior water rights. The issue of water rights arose because two WHEREAS’s in the Resolution referred to junior water rights and to percentages of allocations and deliveries last year.
According to Birmingham, Westlands doesn’t have junior water rights because they’re just CVP contractors, and the Bureau of Reclamation is governed by different rules. He undertook to explain them. Chair Jared Huffman cut him off with “You’ve made the point that this is complicated.” But Birmingham was on a roll. He got as far as different categories of Bureau contracts, and deliveries in periods of shortage to Level 4 Refuges. “Except,” Huffman interrupted, “refuges didn’t get their Level 3 and 4 water. I know too much about this. Let’s not go there.”
Speaking in opposition to the Resolution were a Contra Costa County supervisor on behalf of the five Delta Counties, who said the State should not take a stand in favor of a particular solution; and a representative of the Recreational Boaters of California, who are worried about public use restrictions of the Two-Gates project.
Huffman didn’t want language in the resolution that would accept either side’s characterization of the situation in the Delta. So the committee agreed to amend the sections referring to water rights and allocations. AJR 38 was adopted with amendments. Only Assemblymember Yamada opposed it.
When is more better?
Already behind schedule, the Committee then proceeded to hear from four panels on the subjects of the DSC and the BDCP. Leading off with “Agency Perspectives” were Natural Resources Agency Secretary Lester Snow and DSC Chair Phil Isenberg.
Snow bragged about the BDCP’s “aggressive public outreach” – 450 to 475 meetings if you count all the public meetings, scoping meetings, workshops, etc. (Lots of outreach, little real input.) He described the BDCP as an “arduous effort” to meet the high standards of an HCP/NCCP. Now they want to produce, by November, a complete draft that people can see (and, presumably, appreciate).
Huffman and Senator Wolk thought that last year’s legislation called for reduced reliance on Delta exports, not for delivering up to the full contract amounts. But Snow doesn’t think there needs to be any change in the BDCP’s Purpose and Needs Statement. A refresher: “The purpose of the Bay Delta Conservation Plan (BDCP) is to promote the recovery of endangered, threatened and sensitive species and their habitats in the Delta in a way that also will protect and restore water supplies.” (Emphasis added.)
We should all be relieved to know that Snow thinks, “The Delta is a solvable problem.” (Not a place. A problem.)
Next, Isenberg gave his testimony, accompanied by DSC Vice Chair Randy Fiorini, former ACWA president and Tulare farmer. (Chuckled Isenberg, “He’s here to protect me.”)
Isenberg said that the enabling statute for the DSC called for one meeting per month, but they’ll be doing two. There’s a lot to be done, and the legislation didn’t allow much time to do it. This was a recurring theme of the day.
The short time frame justified the transfer of about 50 staff from CALFED to run the DSC. It justified staff advertising for consultants to develop the Delta Plan and the EIR, and doing it before the council itself was even seated. Isenberg suggested that to meet the January 1, 2012 deadline, they need an interim plan by August of this year and a first draft of the Delta Plan by this November. That leaves time for three turnaround drafts during the comment period. Good thing they were able to get a consultant hired right away.
(Question: Fifty contractors responded to the RFQ. But DWR received only four bids. Why did forty-six potential bidders decline to be considered?)
The DSC looked into the conflict of interest situation and decided that everything is OK, since Executive Director Joe Grindstaff and DSC council member Richard Roos-Collins have both withdrawn from the BDCP Steering Committee. As for the decision to hire CH2M Hill, the principal BDCP consultant, as the consultant to develop the Delta Plan, well, ALL the consultants who applied had had interactions with the BDCP. Hey, CH2M Hill a big company. The DSC will just ask for consultants who haven’t worked on the BDCP. They will need dozens.
Isenberg said the DSC has a “responsible agency role” with respect to the BDCP and also, maybe, an “appellate role” (quasi judicial). Does this remind you of the Water Board?
Huffman told Isenberg he was glad that Isenberg had been chosen to chair the DSC, but “We hoped this council would be independent.” If the schedule interfered with the DSC being independent, Huffman said he would like to have been informed. Huffman wanted a “firewall.” So RTD wonders, how did that make Isenberg a good choice to chair the DSC?
In response to a question, Isenberg told Senator Wolk that the DSC is not required by statute to require the BDCP to consider alternatives to conveyance. In fact, since there is no concurrent, comparable, funded alternative, alternatives automatically won’t get equal consideration. With the BDCP and the DSC on parallel courses to produce documents in November, and with CH2M Hill working on both, is there any chance that the result would be two different conclusions? No one offered a good answer to that question.
Leaving the table hungry
Panel 2 provided an opportunity for BDCP Steering Committee stakeholders to offer their perspectives on the process. North Delta Water Agency’s Melinda Terry, who also represents the Central Valley Flood Control Association, told the committee that public safety was “barely a blip on the BDCP radar.” There’s no good coordination at DWR between conveyance work and flood protection. Levees protect the co-equal goals, and levee subvention program investments have been effective in dealing with the regular occurrence of high water events. But having written off levees as vulnerable to earthquakes, despite evidence to the contrary, the BDCP is ignoring the role of levees in flood protection.
All the public outreach mentioned by Lester Snow has not, according to Terry, resulted in local support for the BDCP because there has been no “loop around”; the BDCP is still not addressing third-party impacts. In fact, looking at burdens versus benefits, there are no Delta benefits, only burdens. The Habitat Conservation Plan will need willing seller landowners, but Terry predicts that there won’t be enough willing sellers because they have been effectively shut out of the process. “If we don’t get it right,” she noted, “it [the BDCP] will be challenged.”
Terry raised the issued of reliable financing for conveyance, including for maintenance. Metropolitan Water District can’t promise to pay for facilities because their users have not yet agreed to that.
Anne Hayden of the Environmental Defense Fund expressed concern about the BDCP’s trajectory and its tight timeline. There are still no quantifiable biological objectives. The BDCP’s water supply objective still biases the plan toward increased exports, contrary to legislative direction. The current schedule doesn’t allow time to evaluate matters like flow criteria or alternative capacities.
Hayden argued for governance that would not just avoid jeopardy but would actually allow for fishery agencies to manage the system flexibly. She said no changes in operations should occur until the biological objectives have been achieved.
Speaking on behalf of the State Water Contractors, Laura King Moon said that size of conveyance, routing, operation, and amount of diversion are all still under discussion. A wide range of options are under review, but the tunnel option needs more focus. She said that the BDCP needs to coordinate with existing land uses and HCPs, including Fremont Weir. Echoing Hayden, Moon noted that fisheries agencies have suggested substantial changes in governance. And like Terry, she mentioned funding as an issue that needs to be addressed.
Panel 3 was supposed to focus on how the BDCP is being integrated with Delta Counties’ HCP/NCCPs. According to Jim Provenza, a Yolo County Supervisor, there are nine local HCP/NCCPs that could provide corridors for habitat. But Kim Delfino of Defenders of Wildlife reported that the BDCP hasn’t provided a meaningful forum for coordinating the BDCP with county efforts, and that the plan won’t be able to be permitted if coordination isn’t worked out.
Don Nottoli, a Sacramento County Supervisor, Delta Protection Commission Chair, and member of the DSC, shifted the discussion from habitat plan coordination to other matters requiring integration between different planning efforts. He said that there is no funding to meet the deadline for the Delta Protection Commission to review the primary zone as required under the recent legislation. The Delta Protection Commission is also supposed to do an economic sustainability study, but that won’t be ready in time to inform the DSC by its November deadline. Nottoli called the schedule “very ambitious.”
Assemblymember Yamada commented that it was nice to see the counties on panels for a change instead of just making statements during the public comment period.
By the time Panel 4 was called up, the hearing was running overtime and the speakers were able to make only abbreviated remarks. Barry Nelson of NRDC criticized the BDCP for focusing on a single alternative and for considering capacity but not operation. He said that he thinks the Purpose and Needs statement is a problem, described the biological objectives as “foundational,” and called for a more realistic timeline. He also called for a robust conversation about short- and mid-term actions, given that conveyance will take 20 to 25 years to implement. And he called for integrating flood management, saying that doing so would build support for the Delta Plan.
The final panelist to speak was Osha Meserve, representing Reclamation District 999 and Stone Lakes National Wildlife Refuge Association. Like earlier speakers, she said affected communities must be included in and see some benefit from the BDCP. She said the BDCP should be addressing all major stressors instead of focusing myopically on a few. She mentioned specifically the problem of selenium from San Joaquin run-off, which is not being addressed by the BDCP as a stressor.
Meserve said that oversight of the BDCP is desperately needed. She called for legislative approval authority over any conveyance over 3000 cfs or above ground; for land acquisition on a willing seller basis only; for in-lieu taxes to counties; and for specific conflict-of-interest provisions.
Huffman and Yamada were still present for the few public comments, but most of the twelve members of the oversight committee apparently had more important things to do.
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