Bay-Delta Plan Update: Deputizing the fox to protect the chickens

Revised Plan Skirts the Law, Promotes Disastrous “Voluntary Agreements” to Protect Bay-Delta

The State Water Resources Board has released implementation plans for its update to the Bay Delta Water Quality Control Plan – the roadmap that will determine water quality and salinity for the vast Bay-Delta watershed, the source for most of California’s developed water, according to a press statement from the California Impact Network (C-WIN).

“The plan details implementation procedures for the update’s Voluntary Agreements – protocols that would allow the state’s largest corporate agricultural interests to avoid regulations. It also provides information on a possible regulatory pathway, even though it is well understood the Board will approve the Voluntary Agreements in pro forma fashion,” the group wrote.

Max Gomberg, a water policy expert and board member of the California Water Impact Network (C-WIN), panned the update for evading a primary legal obligation: analyzing economic impacts.

“The California water code stipulates that these updates must address economic considerations,” said Gomberg. “This plan explicitly fails to do so, which is further evidence the Board is unwilling to grapple with the economic benefits of leaving more water in our rivers and the economic costs of continuing massive water diversions. Moreover, the lack of economic considerations directly violates the Board’s public trust responsibilities.”

Starting next year, said Gomberg, “We are going to face an assault on the environment and indigenous and other non-white populations from the authoritarian Trump administration. They will claim that the only water values that matter are profits for corporate agriculture. We need the state to reject these lies and demonstrate the economic and social values that Californians hold sacred.”

C-WIN senior water policy analyst Tom Stokely said the Delta Plan update ignores dire impacts to the Trinity River, a Klamath River tributary that supplies water to the Sacramento River and the Delta via three reservoirs and a tunnel. Cold water from the Trinity is essential for maintaining fish populations in the Klamath, where four dams were recently removed to revive its once mighty salmon runs.

“The update acknowledges there will be serious impacts to the Trinity, but proposes no mitigation measures other than annual reports from the Bureau of Reclamation,” said Stokely. “This is particularly frightening, given that the US Bureau of Reclamation will soon be run by people with no regard for the Trinity and the people who depend on it. Without guaranteed releases of cold water from Trinity Reservoir during critical periods, we’re going to keep seeing major fish kills on the lower Klamath, such as the one in 2002, when more than 65,000 adult Chinook and Coho perished – the largest salmon die-off in the history of the western states.”

The implementation plans for the update to the Bay Delta Water Quality Control were issued as the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta is now in its biggest-ever ecological crisis. No Delta smelt, once the most abundant fish in the estuary, have been found in the California Department of Fish and Wildlife’s Fall Midwater Trawl Survey for the past six years.

Four runs of Sacramento River Chinook salmon, Delta and longfin smelt, green sturgeon and other species are at risk of extinction, due to the export of massive amounts of water to corporate agribusiness and other factors. A Big Ag-friendly Trump administration will only make the prospects for recovery of the state’s fish populations even worse.

The return of fall-run Chinook salmon at the Coleman National Fish Hatchery on Battle Creek, a tributary of the Sacramento River, is shockingly low during the second consecutive year of a complete closure of all California ocean and river waters to salmon. While the facility’s normal production is 12 million juvenile fall Chinook salmon, this year hatchery staff have collected only 5.4 million eggs at the hatchery.

“Yesterday one million eggs were transferred from Feather River Hatchery to Coleman NFH,” according to the hatchery’s Facebook page. “As a result of our low run of fall Chinook salmon this year we have partnered with California Department of Fish and Wildlife to transfer eggs to Coleman from state hatcheries in the Central Valley.”

Meanwhile, Governor Gavin Newsom continues to promote the environmentally destructive Big Ag-backed voluntary agreements, Delta Tunnel and Sites Reservoir. These projects will only hasten the extinction of salmon, Delta smelt and other fish species, according to a broad coalition of Tribes, fishing groups, environmental justice advocates, family farmers, boaters, elected officials and Southern California water ratepayers.