The 3-hour January 25 Bay Delta Conservation Plan (BDCP) public meeting was devoted to presentations on eight chapters of the BDCP draft by consultants ICF International. Most of the time was spent on appendices to the chapter that analyze biological effects of the plan, and on public comments and questions related to those appendices. With...Read More

If you are having trouble keeping track of what’s going on here, you’re in good company. We have the BDCP going forward with a plan that the 2009 legislation said was supposed to be incorporated into the Delta Plan. But the Delta Stewardship Council plowed on ahead to produce a draft Delta Plan WITHOUT the...Read More

Natural Resources Secretary John Laird has added his voice to those who want to slow down on flow studies and determinations for the Delta. He’s also asking outside groups not to engage in discussions with legislators about water conveyance, Delta levees, or financing, saying that such discussions are premature. It looks like problems with financing...Read More

In his State of the State address, Governor Brown confirmed this week what we all knew anyway: Conveyance in the Delta is a priority for him. He went on to repeat the canard about how the BDCP project “will ensure water for 25 million Californians and for millions of acres of farmland as well as...Read More

In her 2007 book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, journalist Naomi Klein traces a pattern in which economic “shock therapy” is used to gain control for large-scale corporate enterprises when the public is disoriented by wars, terrorist attacks, or natural disasters. Klein’s book reads like a catalog of situations in which corporate...Read More

Oddly enough, the scenario modeled in the new report doesn’t bear much resemblance to the projects central to the Delta Plan and the Bay Delta Conservation Plan (BDCP). For example, it assumes a dual conveyance system averaging 4.9 million acre feet per year, about what exporters got between 1980 and 2000. But exporters have made...Read More

A memo to the South Delta Water Agency Board of Directors by SDWA Counsel and Manager John Herrick highlights some of the problems with science in the PPIC report. The analysis, he says, “appears to be based on a fundamental lack of understanding of the hydrodynamics, hydraulics, diversions, and water quality data of the area.”...Read More

We’ll have more to say later about the quality of research in the new PPIC report. We will note here, though, that for a January 11 article on the PPIC report, KQED’s Climate Watch  blog interviewed PPIC economist and report author Ellen Hanak. “She recounted the story of a  2004 levee break on the Jones...Read More

Reporting on Governor Brown’s proposed 2012-13 Budget, ACWA (the Association of California Water Agencies) says “The budget calls for ‘bold investments’ [Brown’s words] in the state’s future. . . , including habitat and conveyance improvements in the Delta through the Bay-Delta Conservation Plan. It proposes $25 million and 135 positions within the Department of Water...Read More

Assembly member Alyson Huber’s bill to require a fiscal analysis of Delta conveyance, a Legislative vote, and protection of existing Delta uses failed to make it out of committee last week by a narrow 6 to 5 vote. Assembly Water, Parks, and Wildlife chair Jared Huffman supported the bill and complained that the BDCP was...Read More