Delta advocates blast flaws in tainted PPIC report

Delta advocates blast flaws in tainted PPIC report

by Dan Bacher

Restore the Delta is challenging the accuracy and value of the Public Policy Institute’s controversial "report" on the Delta, "Transitions for the Delta Economy," funded by the Stephen Bechtel Foundation, Resources Legacy Fund and David and Lucile Packard Foundation.

In the report's summary, the Public Policy Institute (PPIC) proclaimed, "Enormous changes—from natural forces to management decisions—are coming to California’s fragile Delta region and will have broad effects on its residents. This report finds that in the first half of this century, the Delta as a whole is likely to experience a loss of 1 percent of economic activity as a result of these changes. It also identifies planning priorities for managing the Delta’s future."

The full report is available at http://www.ppic.org/content/pubs/report/R_112EHR.pdf

After reviewing the report, Barbara Barrigan-Parrilla, executive director of Restore the Delta (http://restorethedelta.org), commented, "It is disheartening that the report fails to fully and properly analyze Delta water quality, current project proposals, and the real Delta economy."

Barrigan-Parrilla emphasized that the PPIC report assumes that the new "dual conveyance" system, more commonly known to Californians as the peripheral canal/tunnel, will only divert 4.9 million acre feet of Delta water, despite the reality that water contractors will have difficulty justifying the sale of billions of dollars in new revenue bonds to finance the project if they are going to receive a significant smaller share of Delta water.

Conner Everts with the Southern California Watershed Alliance noted, “Southern California rate payers cannot afford to pay more and more to Metropolitan Water District for an unsustainable water supply. Regional self sufficiency, which can be achieved through conservation, storm water and reuse projects, is a much more affordable way to make more water for Southern California water users.”

Restore the Delta policy analyst Jane Wagner-Tyack quipped, “The report is so out of touch with reality that it actually places the new Stockton water supply project under water because the authors have decided that the way to fix the Delta is to permanently flood it. By depriving Stockton of a water supply, it seems that someone has made a decision to relocate the Delta’s largest urban population of 300,000 residents somewhere else.”

Barrigan-Parrilla said that despite multiple attempts by Delta water agency representatives, Delta engineers, levee experts trained at other renowned universities, economists, and Delta advocates, the authors of the PPIC reports on the Delta have rebuffed attempts to incorporate local input into their research. The report's writers are Josué Medellín-Azuara, Ellen Hanak, Richard Howitt, and Jay Lund, with research support from Molly Ferrell, Katherine Kramer, Michelle Lent, Davin Reed, and Elizabeth Stryjewski.

“The PPIC models regarding salinity changes in the Delta and how such changes would alter our economy are flawed," Barrigan-Parrilla concluded. "If people in California want to know the real value of the Delta economy presently and how exporting water could destroy it, they should read the Economic Sustainability Plan recently published by the Delta Protection Commission – a rigorously reviewed document produced by experts who know the Delta best.”

PPIC tries to hide funding by Bechtel, Packard and Resources Legacy

Barrigan-Parrilla noted that while the cover states the report was funded by The Watershed Science Center at UC Davis, page 62 of the report explains that the study was paid for by the Delta Solutions program funders, that once again includes the Stephen Bechtel Foundation, Resources Legacy Fund and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.

"So it seems this time rather than checks going directly to PPIC from these pro peripheral canal foundations, checks floated through the University and then to UC Davis," said Barrigan-Parrilla. "Restore the Delta believes this is a worsening scenario because the average person will simply believe that the study was financed by an unbiased educational institution without a hidden agenda. And if there is nothing to hide, then why aren’t the funders on the cover?

According to the Bechtel Foundation's website (http://www.sdbjrfoundation.org), "Stephen D. Bechtel, Jr. created the S. D. Bechtel, Jr. Foundation in 1957 to improve the quality of life for Californians by addressing selected issues that challenge the health and prosperity of the state. In addition to his leadership of the S. D. Bechtel, Jr. Foundation and the Stephen Bechtel Fund, Mr. Bechtel is Chairman Retired and a Director of Bechtel Group, Inc."

The Brown and Obama administrations are currently fast-tracking Arnold Schwarzenegger's Bay Delta Conservation Plan (BDCP) to build a peripheral canal in order to export more Delta water to southern California and corporate agribusiness on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley. Delta advocates believe the construction of peripheral canal or tunnel would result in the extinction of Central Valley steelhead, Sacramento River chinook salmon, Delta smelt, longfin smelt, green sturgeon and other imperiled fish species.

Do PPIC's authors live in a parallel universe?

The PPIC report's assumption that the new peripheral canal/tunnel will only divert 4.9 million acre feet of Delta water is mind boggling, considering that exports from the Delta have reached record levels well over 4.9 million acre feet annually over the past 10 years. The Brown and Obama administrations exported a record amount of water from the Delta in 2011.

The annual export total, including water diverted by the Contra Costa Canal and North Bay Aqueduct, was 6,633,000 acre-feet in 2011 – 163,000 acre-feet more than the previous record of 6,470,000 acre-feet set in 2005, according to DWR data. The annual export total, excluding water diverted by the Contra Costa Canal and North Bay Aqueduct, was 6,520,000 acre-feet in 2011 - 217,000 acre-feet more than the previous record of 6,303,000 acre-feet set in 2005.

Are we to believe that the state water contractors are going to agree to the building of an enormously expensive peripheral canal that would actually divert less water from the Delta than the record levels that were delivered to southern California and San Joaquin Valley agribusiness in 2011? The PPIC report authors apparently live in a parallel universe devoid of science, logic and facts.

The record pumping from the Delta in 2011 - used to fill billionaire Stewart Resnick's Kern Water Bank and southern California reservoirs - resulted in a huge, unprecedented fish kill at the Delta pumps. Agency staff “salvaged” a total of 11,158,025 fish in the Delta water pumping facilities between January 1 and September 7, 2011 alone. Scientists estimate that the actual amount of fish lost in the pumps is 5 to 10 times the "salvage" numbers.

A horrific 8,985,009 Sacramento splittail, the largest number ever recorded, were "salvaged" during this period. The previous record salvage number for the splittail, a native minnow found only in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River system, was 5.5 million in 2006.

There is no doubt that the Brown administration has eclipsed the Schwarzenegger administration's abysmal environmental legacy by exporting a record amount of water from the Delta and killing record numbers of fish in the Delta pumps in 2011.

The MLPA/peripheral canal connection

Meanwhile, Governor Jerry Brown and Natural Resources Secretary John Laird are not only continuing Schwarzenegger's mad drive to build a peripheral canal, but they have forged ahead with Schwarzenegger's privately funded Marine Life Protection Act" (MLPA) Initiative. The initiative is a corrupt process, overseen by a big oil lobbyist, marina developer, coastal real estate executive, agribusiness hack and other corporate operatives with many conflicts of interest, that creates so-called "marine protected areas" on the California coast.

And guess who is funding the MLPA fiasco? The Resources Legacy Fund and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, two of the three funders of the recent PPIC report promoting the construction of the peripheral canal, are also funding the MLPA Initiative! The initiative creates "marine protected areas" that fail to protect the ocean from oil spills and drilling, pollution, military testing, corporate aquaculture, wave and wind energy projects and all other human impacts on the ocean than fishing and gathering.

In one of the most overt conflicts of interest in California history, Catherine Reheis-Boyd, the president of the Western States Petroleum Association, chaired the "august body" that designed the "marine protected areas" that went into effect on the Southern California Coast on January 1. Reheis-Boyd, a big oil industry lobbyist advocating for new offshore drilling off the California coast, the Keystone XL pipeline and the gutting of environmental laws, chaired the MLPA Blue Ribbon Task Force for the South Coast, as well as "serving" on the North Central Coast and North Coast Task Forces.

The Packard Foundation and four other "non-profits" donated a total of $20 million to fund the MLPA Initiative. The Resources Legacy Fund Foundation, a shadowy organization that North Coast environmental leader John Lewallen describes as a “money laundering operation” for corporate money, received the funds from these foundations to implement the unpopular MLPA process.

The David and Lucile Packard Foundation contributed $8.2 million to fund the MLPA process. Julie E. Packard, the executive director and founder of the Monterey Bay Aquarium, serves as Vice Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the foundation.

The Laguna Beach-based Marisla Foundation, founded by Getty Oil heiress Anne Getty Earhart, gave $3 million over several years. The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation donated $7.4 million, the Keith Campbell Foundation contributed $1.2 million and the Annenberg Foundation contributed $200,000.

All of this money was dumped into the Resources Legacy Foundation to kick recreational anglers, commercial fishermen and seaweed gatherers, the most vocal advocates of fishery restoration and true environmental protection and the most fervent opponents of the peripheral canal, off the water in a disgusting case of corporate greenwashing. (http://blogs.alternet.org/danbacher/2011/02/18/the-corporate-money-behind-the-mlpa-initiative)