Elected Officials Urge Closed-Door Delta Meetings Be Opened to Public

Elected Officials Urge Closed-Door Delta Meetings Be Opened to Public

by Dan Bacher

In response to news of closed-door meetings to discuss the future of the imperiled California Delta, Members of Congress and the California legislature on September 16 sent a letter urging California Resources Secretary Lester Snow and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to open the talks to the public and include Delta representation.

State Senator Lois Wolk (D-Davis), who represents four of the five counties in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, pressed for transparency and openness in the meetings on the Bay Delta Conservation Plan (BDCP) being convened by the offices of the California Natural Resources Agency and the Department of the Interior.

Many Delta advocates view the BDCP as a thinly veiled plan by the Schwarzenegger administration to build a peripheral canal or tunnel and new dams to facilitate water exports from the Delta to southern corporate agribusness and southern California. They fear that the canal would likely lead to the extinction of collapsing populations of Delta smelt, longfin smelt, Central Valley salmon, Sacramento splittail, young striped bass and other species devastated by massive water exports in recent years.

Wolk, Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, and Congressional Representatives John Garamendi, Doris Matsui, Jerry McNerney, George Miller and Mike Thompson officially requested that the meetings be more inclusive and transparent. State Senator Mark DeSaulnier and State Assembly Members Bill Berryhill, Joan Buchanan, Alyson Huber, Tom Torlakson and Mariko Yamada also signed the letter.

"This most recent exclusion only serves to further frustrate and anger those within the Delta community who are genuinely interested in working constructively with the state and federal agencies and the newly formed Delta Stewardship Council," the letter states. "In short, this new Delta Principals Group process represents a return to the closed-door deal-making that has historically resulted in further degradation of the Delta."

"The meetings show a lack of commitment to achieving the coequal goals established by the 2009 legislative package on water," commented Wolk. "As defined by that package, the state's goals are to provide a more reliable water supply for California and protect, restore, and enhance the Delta ecosystem 'in a manner that protects and enhances the unique cultural, recreational, natural resource, and agricultural values of the Delta as an evolving place.' Without Delta representatives at the table, this group cannot credibly ensure that negotiations live up to these goals."

The letter includes a series of questions of Snow and Salazar, including:
• What is the role and objectives of the Delta Principals Group? Is this a new group or a separate new process?
• Who are the principals?
• How were the principals identified and what criteria used in determining which groups/representatives would be allowed to participate?
• Are the proposals being discussed based on the best available science?

Mike Wade of the California Farm Water Coalition supports these closed-door meetings, claiming that that they "may lead to significant understandings between various groups that might move California closer to a reliable water future and an environmentally restored Delta."

"The result would be a benefit to all Californians," he stated. "Yet, those who continue to hold fast to a 'me-first' attitude at the expense of others throw temper tantrums because they are not included. It is this type of (re)action that prevents California from moving forward."

However, Barbara Barrigan-Parrilla, campaign director of Restore the Delta, said that the closed-door meetings now taking place among top water agency officials, regulatory agencies and three environmental groups "threaten every bit of progress made in the past year to curtail pumping from the California Delta and give imperiled fish populations a chance to recover."

Lester Snow is now taking a 'non-public' proposal to the group, according to Barrigan-Parrilla. It includes a proposal for Delta operations and governance that allows flexibility but requires only a 'best effort' from agencies to avoid additional water impacts.

Barrigan-Parrilla also said the proposal also allows DWR and the Bureau of Reclamation to veto any changes to the range of operations.

"This could effectively prevent adaptive management intended to protect fish," said Barrigan-Parrilla. "In fact, it appears that the proposal would allow the feds to gut the biological opinions."

The proposal would also require only token funding from water users for habitat restoration, as well as exclude an analysis of the Water Board's new flow criteria.

Mark Franco, headman of the Winnemem Wintu Tribe, emphasized that these latest meetings take place in the context of how the state of California has made its decisions regarding natural resources since the 1800s.

"As tribal people, we have seen the results of these closed door meetings," said Franco, "and what has happened has never been good for the state or its people. As tribal people, we stand together to demand a just and open process so that the bad decisions over water and natural resources made in the past don't continue on into the future."

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has gone out of his way since assuming office in 2003 to exclude California Indian Tribes, Delta residents, recreational anglers, commercial fishermen, environmental justice communities and grassroots conservation groups from all of the talks and meetings deciding the fate of the Delta and the California's water plans. These latest closed door meetings are only in one in a series of secret sessions that Schwarzenegger has used, such as the back room negotiations last year to craft the water policy-water bond package in the Legislature, to push through his plans to build a peripheral canal and new dams.

Ironically, at the same time that these secret sessions were being held, Schwarzenegger had the gall to spout off about the need for "transparent" government in his weekly radio address on September 4. "Ever since I became Governor, I have pushed to make California government more transparent," Schwarzenegger claimed.

This is coming from the guy who has demonstrated more of a penchant for secrecy than any other Governor in California history, a corporate-controlled political hack who was a keynote speaker on July 30, 2010 at the highly secretive Bohemian Grove near Monte Rio on the Russian River (http://blogs.alternet.org/danbacher/2010/09/06/arnold-bohemian-grove-schwarzenegger-calls-for-transparent-government).

It is appalling that the Obama administration, in the foot steps of the Bush administration, is collaborating with Schwarzenegger's plans to build his "Big Ditch" to benefit big corporate agribusiness magnates like Stewart Resnick, owner of the 120,000 acre Paramount Farms in Kern County, so these water privateers can sell water back to the public at an enormous profit. What type of "Change" is this?