At an oversight hearing in Sacramento last week, Assemblymember Jared Huffman (D-San Rafael),chairman of the Assembly Water, Parks and Wildlife Committee voiced concern that water exporters will have unprecedented control over the content and focus of a plan that would steer the state’s water policies for the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta over next fifty years.
The hearing on the Bay-Delta Conservation Plan (BDCP) was the fifth held by Huffman, whose district is stretched from the Delta, the largest wetlands estuary west of the Mississippi, west to coastal communities north of the Golden Gate - many of which are dependent on commercial fishing of the endangered Delta Salmon.
Water exporters, including the monolithic Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which today represents 26 communities in Southern California from Los Angeles to San Diego, will pay up to $240 million dollars for the study of options on how to restore the amount of water previously taken from the Delta - then increase it by as much as 7 million square cubic feet annually - while still preserving the endangered species of California's great but fragile Bay-Delta estuary.
But under the same agreement, these water exporters will also write the policy, giving those who will benefit from the pumping of more water unprecedented control over the content and focus of the state's plan how to do it, while concealing and controlling public knowledge of its content according to a Memorandum of Agreement with the Department of Water Resources.
History
What worries most environmentalists is that it has been from the beginning of California's water wars over a century of water rights and environmental wrongs, that water contractors like the City of Los Angeles historically have cast sad nets over underpopulated, ecologically fragile regions of the golden state, like Owens Valley and Mono Lake - and since Proposition 1 and the Burns-Porter Act of 1960 - the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, harvesting water and life from these regions and leaving in their place destroyed habitat and a litany of extinct or endangered species.
Environmentalists argue these water wanters have repeatedly shown a preference for environmental atrocities and species extinction rather than commit a populace to politically unpopular conservation and regional sustainability measures - artificial import that uses a full 5 % of all energy consumed in the golden state every day - rather than regional sustainability, recycling, reuse and rainfall capture.
And while Mono Lake is slowly being restored, it was not by Angelenos' epipheny according to environmentalists, but rather court order that forced the municipality to stop draining and destroying the Owens Valley of the Eastern Sierra.
Now Los Angeles and MWD face reductions from historic regional sources, poisoned groundwater of the San Fernando Valley and court-mandated reductions in water from the Colorado river and Eastern Sierra, that has these water exporters are turning to the last viable source from which to import water, the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.
Environmentalists wonder how logical it is to have MWD control the feasibility study of exporting more water from the Delta when it so desperately wants the resource?
Water exporters lobbied hard for this new state conveyance infrastructure after a 2007 endangered species-court ruling restricted Southern California's ever-increasing amount of water pumped from the Delta by the State Water Projects south Delta pumping stations that are known infamously as "Death Pumps" because of the tens of thousands of Delta Salmon and Smelt killed by their operation.
Environmentalists and taxpayer rights groups note California's taxpayers are still obligated for a third of the bond for the first water conveyance. They also complain that while developers and farmers tout the successful irrigation of three quarters of a million acres of central valley farmland, the congestion, smog, overcrowded freeways and dense housing that has diminished the quality of life for Southern Californians also are the results of California's aqueduct and the conveyance of a resource that once mitigated growth. With the abundance of water came an unfettered population explosion that in just five decades exhausted a water conveyance described as 'the permanent solution' to California's water woes when it was proposed to voters fifty years ago.
Environmentalists argue 'conveyance without controls' has been the de facto policy of a state lacking growth management plans or strategies, greenbelts or water-efficient crop restrictions - all rejected by the various water interests that now seek to write the plan that will call for more water from the Delta.
The BDCP
At the hearing held at the Capitol Tuesday, a spokesperson for the Legislative Analyst told committee members his office supports the $100 million dollar funding agreement even though it gives water exporters unprecedented leverage over future protections of the endangered estuary.
Under the MOA, water exporters interested in increasing the amount of water pumped from the endangered Bay-Delta estuary, like the Central Valley Farm Growers Association and the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, will control development of the state’s plan to drain up to 7 million acre feet more from the endangered Bay-Delta estuary, agreed to by legislators in 2009.
“We think the contractor funding of BDCP is appropriate,” Anton Favorini-Csorba, spokesperson for the Legislative Analyst Office told committee members,” admitting the agreement does give "significant leverage” to the water exporters over environmentalists, legislators and state agencies also participating in the development of the BDCP.
“One final issue with funding… it’s off budget because it’s part of the [State Water Project], said Favorini-Csorba. “So the funds being off-budget means the legislature is limited in its ability to control or have oversight over expenditures.”
“We do have the ability to have some legislative oversight, in fact this is our fifth hearing on it,” Huffman told California Progress Report.
“ I think certainly that special editorial access and the possibility [water exporters] have to essentially kill it in the crib and walk away if they choose, is worthy of concern,” Huffman said in a phone interview on Friday. “That’s on top of the fact that they are sort of paying the bill.”
It seemed what the Environmental Defense Fund’s Cynthia Koehler was concerned about was not water exporters walking away from the plan, but their influence over the focus of the studies, the editorial control over the plan and what she says EDF’s chief concern is, a rushed timeline being pushed by the exporters to complete the study by next year.
“Edf is solidly committed to sound farming practices in California,” Koehler emphasized before the committee, reminding committee members her agency was a key player in the 2009 legislation. “And the estuary is a highly altered system … no one, I believe, is trying to return it to a natural and pristine state, but this timeline is a great concern to us,” said Koehler of the Water Exporter’s contracted schedule that environmentalists say doesn’t allow for adequate scientific study of any of the potential water conveyance options.
“The schedule may be constraining science,” Koehler told legislators. “It’s certainly true we can’t study things forever but not doing the sciences over the last five years ….” Koehler said, noting this is time that was effectively wasted by water exporters who have wanted the new conveyance since the 2007 court ruling against their south Delta pumps that kill tens of thousands of fish each year. “The problem with a project like this is there’s never enough time to do it right the first time but plenty of time to do it over and over again because of litigation,” Koehler warned.
EDF has been out on a limb with other environmentalists because of their participation in the negotiations for more Delta water to be pumped south.
While groups like PCL seek regional sustainability and note the eventual exhaustion of even additional water conveyance to regions that prefer artificial water import over conservation, recycling and gray water rainfall capture, EDF put its environmental credibility on the line by breaking with its environmental colleagues and giving SBx7 1 'green cover.' One insider explained that EDF chose to take water exporters at their word, that they genuinely wanted to reduce reliance on imported water and integrate conservation, recycle and reuse programs in their communities.
The timeline constraints on science, however, is ominous. It may be an indicator the water exporters simply seek conveyance, not true restoration of the Delta or regional self-reliance.
Jason Peltier of the Westlands Water District, one of the districts seeking the additional water conveyance, defended the water contractors control over the plan’s timeline, content and even whether or not it can be released to the public.
“I understand the concerns about editorial control,” said Peltier, but likened the ability of all interested parties to participate in the plan’s development to an editor “writing the title than passing it around and asking ‘what do you think?’ If people are not engaged and say ‘no, I don’t want to do it,” they could effectively delay the plan indefinitely, Peltier claimed.
Peltier does not mention that California farmers are unrestricted in crop choices, growing thirsty crops like Alfalfa remain a practice in a region that, without water conveyance, would be arid desert not productive farmland. In certain instances, Central Valley farming practices with long and honored tradition, have been slow to recognize water as a finite, not infinite resource.
“Our work must contribute to recovery,” said Jerry Meral Deputy Undersecretary of the California Natural Resources Agency. “Contributing to recovery is a high standard … and one of great expense,” Meral told the committee.
“And great importance,” responded Assemblymember Roger Dickinson (D-Sacramento)
“Earlier this year Meral pledged to open planning to more members of the public,” according to Mike Taugher of the
Contra Costa Times. Taugher wrote that, “despite criticism that decisions continue to be made out of the public eye, he repeated his commitment to doing things in the open on Wednesday.”
The coalition of water exporters argued two points, that it's unreasonable to ask them to pay $240 million dollars to study the possibilities of water conveyance without their control of the plan and that there are 25 million people who need this water in Southern California. The environmentalist's answer to the first is that they are the ones wanting additional conveyance so taxpayers statewide should not be asked to foot the bill for what are a conglomerate of special interest groups and second, the additional water is not for the 25 million residents who already receive water and who are 25 million strong because of existing water conveyance, it is for developers to increase the population by another 25 million by the year 2030, a decade before the water bond of $11.14 billion dollars at an annual rate of $800 million dollars for forty years, is paid off.
Delta representative, State Senator Lois Wolk (D-Stockton), speaking for the endangered species and wetlands environmentalists, Delta farmers, residents and other economic interests, stated, “In the MOA it says that basically you’re looking to release an administrative draft fairly quickly. We need another permit from the corps of engineers and we will need 60% of the design completed,” said Wolk, who noted the Delta’s congressional representatives are threatening to remove their signatures from the moa, asking for it to be released to the public.
“I think that the federal government needs to pay very close attention to the feelings and needs of the delta reps in Congress,” stated Wolk. “When will negotiations commence on assurances for the Delta,” asked the Delta representative, whose legislation to reduce reliance on the Delta, SB834, was vetoed last month by Governor Edmund G. Brown, Jr.
“[The BDCP] has to be science-based or it’s not going to meet the legal requirements,” said Huffman. “Every fish that survives passing those pumps, either going out to the ocean or coming back to spawn, pass through the 6th Assembly District,” Huffman told CPR, explaining why protecting the Bay-Delta wetlands and the endangered Salmon and other species is so important to his job. “The restoration of the Delta is extremely important to a majority of my constituents.
Huffman told CPR he is concerned about the level of public oversight of the process. "Most Californians don't appreciate how high the stakes are at this point. Is it good enough? It still has a way to go."
(This article first appeared in the California Progress Report, an online daily update on political issues facing California, from a progressive point of view.)
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