Stockton, CA – For the first time, proponents and opponents of the State’s plans to transform the San Joaquin-Sacramento Delta will discuss the merits and drawbacks of the Delta Plan and the peripheral canal. The forum is scheduled Saturday, March 3, 2012 at the Civic Auditorium, in Stockton, and is open to the general public.

The purpose of this forum is to inform and explain to all residents in the Delta region the scope, and impact of changes that may forever alter the unique features of the Delta by redefining the character and future growth of communities that lie within the region, by eliminating family farms operating within the Delta, and by altering the fabric of life enjoyed by Delta residents.

“A Primer on Water and the Delta” is the first of three forums that are being hosted by the same coalition of environmental advocates, private business and local government that held community forums the past two years on how to employ sustainable practices in everyday life. Members of the coalition are the Sierra Club, Campaign for Common Ground, the A.G. Spanos Companies, the Stockton City Council and the San Joaquin Council of Governments.

“Water is vital to our local economy, our farms, and our cities. As residents of the region and stewards of this unique estuary and habitat to many species, it is important that we stay informed and alert to insure that we retain local control over our water and our future,” said Susan Eggman City Council Member.

Presentations at the forum will be made by Dr. Jerry Meral, Deputy Secretary for the California Natural Resources Agency; Jason Peltier, Chief Deputy General Manager, Westlands Water District; Jim Fiedler, Chief Operating Officer, Santa Clara Valley Water District; Ann Johnston, Mayor of Stockton and Chair for the Delta Coalition; John Herrick, an expert on local water issues; Jeff Michael, Director of the Business Forecasting Center, University of the Pacific; Larry Ruhstaller, San Joaquin County Board of Supervisors; and, Barbara Barrigan-Parrilla, Executive Director of Restore the Delta.

The forum will begin at 8:30 a.m. and conclude at 12:00 noon. Each presentation will be followed by a question and answer period. Moderator for the entire series will be Susan Eggman, a City Council Member of the City of Stockton and Professor of Social Work at the California State University at Sacramento.

Members of the organizing committee are Dale Stocking, Sierra Club; Eric Parfrey, Campaign for Common Ground; Councilwoman Susan Eggman, Stockton City Council; Natalia Orfanos, A.G. Spanos Companies; and Andrew Chesley, Executive Director of the San Joaquin Council of Governments.

Click here for for view flyer.

Last September, 225 environmental organizations signed a detailed critique of the Delta Plan, noting that the Fifth Draft showed little effort to consider the economic value of the public trust and the economic consequences of potential choices or alternatives. “The Council,” they said, “cannot evade having to make difficult decisions regarding the distribution of limited water resources. Sadly, the Fifth Draft of the Delta Plan embraces the status quo and fails to provide the structure and information critically necessary to make intelligent, but painful decisions.”

This month, dozens of other organizations, including Restore the Delta, responded to the Draft Environmental Impact Report (DEIR) of the Delta Plan. Among the complaints: no measurable targets for improving flows for the benefit of either fish or Delta water quality; and no inclusion of an Economic Sustainability Plan for the region, as required by law.

Below are links to comments on the DEIR by a variety of organizations that are critical of it. (Actually, just about everybody on all sides of the issue is critical of the DEIR.)

On February 7, the Delta Watermaster reported to the State Water Resources Control Board (SWRCB) on investigations of water rights in the Delta. Of over 1,000 Delta properties investigated since 2008 for illegal diversions and failure to file reports, formal enforcement action has been taken in only 12 cases.

Twelve. Out of over 1,000 properties.

The Watermaster’s report notes that there are approximately 3,000 diversions taking place in the Delta, but a much smaller number of special district and water companies – about 50 – that either divert water directly or work with individual diverters in their service area. Special districts can legally deliver water in excess of their licensed amounts to owners under the owners’ riparian and pre-1914 rights. The Watermaster’s staff has been able to get information about claims more quickly by working with water districts rather than with individual diverters.

Says the report, “Given the level of effort expended for the relatively small number of cases that resulted in enforcement action, it may be more appropriate to focus some of the future compliance and enforcement activities on special districts in the Delta who divert water under their water rights and/or furnish water to individuals under the latter’s rights.”

Delta Stewardship Council (DSC) chair Phil Isenberg never hesitates to work himself and everybody else through lunch. His plan for last week’s DSC meeting was to work right through to 6:30 on Thursday – two hours beyond the scheduled adjournment – so that no one had to come back on Friday. He got special permission from West Sacramento City Hall.

Besides Isenberg, Council members Nottoli, Johnston, and Gray were present. Council members Fiorini, Nordhoff, and Marcus were absent.

On the agenda were reports on the Draft Central Valley Flood Protection Plan, the Levees Program, and the Delta Protection Commission’s Economic Sustainability Plan (ESP). It was mid-afternoon before the Council got to the ESP and presentations by Delta Protection Commission Executive Director Mike Machado and ESP authors, economist Dr. Jeffrey Michael and engineer Robert Pyke.

The ESP includes 38 Recommended Strategies and Actions for Economic Sustainability, and DSC staff took issue with some of them. There was discussion; there were public comments. Time marched on.

Council members Johnston and Nottoli (both representing the Delta region) advised against hurrying through. Anyone who had made other plans for Thursday evening missed part of the discussion, and everyone was back Friday morning, as originally planned.

Among recommendations staff thinks are inconsistent with the Delta Plan:

• Economic impacts of habitat creation and development of facilities for export water supply should be fully mitigated. Isenberg appears to think this will set a bad precedent for other projects elsewhere.

• Maintain and enhance the value of Delta agriculture. Staff thinks this is inconsistent with preservation of the Delta as an evolving place.

Staff identified several Recommendations for Habitat and Ecosystem Improvement as either inconsistent with the Delta Plan or premature, since they relate to something the BDCP might do. Council member Johnston told a community group in Stockton last week that he is just as glad that the BDCP wasn’t completed in time to be part of the Delta Plan. He wants to talk about land use, and he doesn’t think that economic sustainability trumps the coequal goals. Other council members also seem inclined to pretend that BDCP’s massive conveyance proposal isn’t there.

Central Delta attorney Tom Zuckerman was impatient with quibbles about protecting the economic sustainability of Delta agriculture. In public comments, he noted that the whole point of the BDCP is to protect agriculture in Westlands. “If we’re going to spend billions figuring out how to move all that water,” he said, “why not protect Delta agriculture?”

Staff requested that Delta Protection Commission representatives meet with them to discuss the ESP – something that should have happened before staff wrote their initial report. There was no time because of the rule that things have to be noticed 10 days in advance of a DSC meeting.

The North Delta’s Peter Stone is participating in the BDCP Public Finance Work Group. He notes that attendees are a who’s who of California State Water Contractors, plus various federal and state agencies and non-governmental organizations.

At last week’s meeting, reports Stone:

A very interesting discussion and persuasive argument came from a representative of Friant [Water Users Authority] (representing 29 Water Contractors near Fresno). (As an aside, he indicated that Friant has had a hard time getting access to BDCP planning meetings.)   Friant has 1.2 million acre feet of water delivered successfully to their clients and particularly the Cross Valley contractors for the last 60 years. He was indicating to the other water contractors and the group that Friant doesn’t believe that they should be paying for what they already get and get very reliably. Santa Clara Valley Water District didn’t agree with Friant’s very logical position saying anyone who gets water form the new system should pay for it. This just goes to show the very different views on this very pivotal issue of who pays and how much.

Next month, Stone will propose an agenda idea requesting that BDCP Chapter 8, which deals with financing, consider the cost of taking homes and other structures rather than just row crops, vineyards, and orchards. Without that, estimates for the total cost of the project will be unrealistically low.

Stone also believes that there needs to be another mechanism besides or in addition to eminent domain to ensure fair compensation for property taken. The BDCP process has already put 500,000+ acres of the Delta under a cloud, making it impossible for landowners to sell the property for what it would be worth without the threat of conveyance. So in that sense, the taking has already happened.

Patricia McBroom’s most recent posting on her blog, California Spigot, looks at efforts to get a National Heritage Area designation for the Delta and to get a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to recapture the history and enduring narratives

of the area, hopefully to raise public awareness and perhaps to gain leverage in the on-going fight to preserve the Delta’s way of life.

You can find the posting here:

californiaspigot.blogspot.com

By:  Jane Wagner-Tyack

The Delta Risk Management Strategy (DRMS) is a study done by the Department of Water Resources (DWR) and a team of consultants in response to AB 1200 (legislation authored by John Laird, now the California Natural Resources Secretary).  Phase 1 of DRMS has come in for criticism in the past for painting an unnecessarily pessimistic picture of the Delta levee system.  Phase 2 of DRMS evaluated benefits and costs of risk reduction strategies but was never released until recently.  Now the authors of the Delta Protection Commission’s Economic Sustainability Plan (ESP) have uncovered a new problem with the way the DRMS was used in the past.

In January 2008, DWR reported to the Legislature on DRMS as required by AB 1200.  That report included three scenarios from Phase 2: Levee improvement (including seismically improved levees), an armored pathway, and isolated conveyance through the Delta..

DWR and the Department of Fish and Game ranked the scenarios based on DRMS Phase 2 analysis.  According to the January 2008 report to the Legislature “Scenario 1 (Improved Levees) ranks moderate for reducing risk and is the least expensive of the three.  Scenario 2 (Armored Pathway) and Scenario 3 (Isolated Conveyance Facility) rank high and very high respectively for reducing risk but also cost more than Scenario 1.” (Emphasis added)

Because the report to the Legislature contained qualitative rankings but no quantitative results, ESP author Dr. Jeffrey Michael requested from DWR the numbers that supported the rankings in the 2008 report to the Legislature.  The data in the report showed that improved levees had risk reduction benefits of $7.9 billion, nearly 40% higher than the $5.7 billion risk reduction benefits of Scenario 2 or 3.  Notes the ESP, “While the AB 1200 progress report states that adjustments were made based on the BDCP analysis, the quantitative results show that the adjustment was to reverse the risk reduction rankings of the alternatives to match the proposed isolated conveyance strategy in the BDCP.”

Responding to criticism of DRMS Phase 1 delayed DWR’s planned release of Phase 2 in 2008.  The Phase 2 study was not released until June 2011, and the cover letter received by Dr. Michael from DWR says that the Phase 2 was actually completed in 2009.  So it uses costs for isolated conveyance that are less than half the current estimates and does not consider a tunnel.

But here is the other interesting thing about DRMS Phase 2: Seismically-resistant levees in the south and central Delta disappeared from that report, replaced by levees at PL 84-99 standard.  Like the 2008 report to the Legislature, the 2011 DRMS Phase 2 report says isolated conveyance ranks highest even though the numbers in Table 1 of the report show improved levees had a higher benefit-cost ratio.

Just to be clear here:  Delta levee improvements, including seismically-resistant levees, were found to be less costly than conveyance and to have greater risk reduction benefits.  So the risk-reduction benefits were misrepresented in both reports, and the seismically-resistant levees disappeared altogether from the second.

That’s the level of commitment that the Department of Water Resources has to backing the BDCP’s isolated conveyance.

This bit of “truthiness” was exposed at the Delta Protection Commission (DPC) meeting on January 26.  That was also the meeting at which Resources Deputy Secretary Jerry Meral addressed the DPC.

Meral, who is trying to midwife the BDCP, told the DPC that every concern of Delta counties and Delta people will be considered and addressed.  One observer notes that if someone had said “We want you to paint the intake purple,” he would have said that they would consider that. He described the phase that they are now in as a “document producing process”.  Nothing was said about improved analyses or analyses of alternatives.  Just producing documents. 

Meral said that the people who fear conversion of agricultural land to habitat should remember two things: (1) conversion might just mean easements which allow continued farming; and (2) maybe there should be more emphasis on lands in the Western Delta that are already State owned.  Interesting, but the State owned lands on Sherman and Twitchell are heavily subsided, so it is not possible to easily convert them into tidal or even sub-tidal wetlands. 

In response to a question, Meral told the Commission that BDCP is not required to do a cost-benefit analysis, although he conceded that it might be a good idea.  He said that Chapter 8 of the BDCP will include the cost but that they would have to evaluate the benefits. 

There was also a question about Governor Brown’s suggestion that ecosystem restoration, for which some money is included in the water bond, could be delayed while conveyance moved ahead.  (In other words, they could take the water bond off the 2012 ballot and still go ahead with plans to start digging.)  Meral said that it isn’t necessary to have all the ecosystem restoration money right away, but there are early implementation actions, and there does have to be guaranteed financing for restoration.  He was vague about how that might be done.

It becomes more and more ridiculous to refer to BDCP as a habitat conservation plan as habitat conservation is increasingly revealed to be window dressing for the real plan to build conveyance. 

The big news this week with the Delta Stewardship Council (DSC) is that everyone who wants to comment on the 2,000-and-some page Draft Environmental Impact Report (DEIR) for the Draft Delta Plan has until February 2 to do it.

Restore the Delta has commented in detail on some portions of the DEIR as part of comprehensive comments by the Environmental Water Caucus, and we have also associated ourselves with comments by South Delta Water Agency, the Central Delta Water Agency, San Joaquin County, California Sportfishing Protection Alliance, California Water Impact Network, law firms representing commercial fishing and environmental interests, Local Agencies of the North Delta (LAND), and the City of Stockton.

The comments we are submitting independently highlight these points:

• The Delta Plan and the DEIR do not include measurable or otherwise quantifiable targets for flows into and through the Delta, for increased fish populations, or for improved Delta water quality.
• The DEIR does not examine and elucidate how incorporation of the BDCP into the Delta Plan will impact the scope and the effects of the Delta Plan on the Delta ecosystem and Delta communities; moreover, the DEIR fails the CEQA requirement for examination of inconsistencies between the Delta Plan and the BDCP.
• The Delta Plan and DEIR do not reconcile statutory duplications and conflicts between BDCP operations and implementation of the Delta Plan.
• The Delta Plan and the DEIR are incomplete because the legislative mandate to evaluate and incorporate the Economic Sustainability Plan into the Delta Plan has not been completed.

The Plan, consequently, does not meet the needs of Delta communities, the Delta ecosystem, or California citizens, who are clamoring for government agencies to fulfill their missions efficiently and in a cost effective manner.  Without analysis of the BDCP, and incorporation of the Economic Sustainability Plan, the Delta Plan and the DEIR are premature and incomplete, and fail to serve the public interest.

The 5th draft of the Delta Plan itself (on which the DEIR is based) came in for scrutiny at the DSC meeting last week from John Kirlin and Bob Twiss, who are in charge of writing the 6^th draft. They highlighted and identified central themes and listed the stakeholder groups associated with those themes. While retaining their own credibility and objectivity, Kirlin and Twiss were quite critical of the draft.  They stated several times that they had not begun work on the 6^th draft.

The Planning and Conservation League’s annual legislative symposium in Sacramento on January 28 brought together several hundred people for break out sessions on a variety of topics.  Bruce Reznik, the new Executive Director, said in the morning keynote that the influence of environmentalism is very low in “the building” (the State Capitol); environmentalists need to be able to make the case that what is good for the environment doesn’t have to be bad for the economy.  Luncheon keynote speaker State Controller John Chiang raised the issue of how we pay for environmental initiatives in the current economy (without, however, offering any memorable solutions).

In accepting a Legislator of the Year award, Senator Kevin de León, who represents East LA, the most diverse district in the state, said that environmentalists need to reach out to disadvantaged communities and focus more on common interests.  And at a workshop on “The Role of Food in California’s Environmental Future,” David Runsten of the Community Alliance of Family Farmers explored some of the reasons for farmers’ distrust of environmentalists.  Environmentalists, he said, don’t always understand farming.

Of particular interest to Restore the Delta was a session on the Water Bond.  Panelist Joe Caves of the Conservation Strategy Group, who was heavily involved in writing the bond, doesn’t think the bond will survive this year.  He suggested taking it off the ballot and making it smaller, but panelists agreed that there’s no agreement on what the pork is, so it is hard to know what to take out.

Panelist Jim Earp of the California Alliance for Jobs thinks the water bond is not in such bad shape and wants to find a way to make it better, so people can go to work building infrastructure.  But Caves suggested that it might be possible to remove the $3 billion in surface storage (dams) from the bond because most of those who fought for it are no longer in the legislature.  Restore the Delta notes that there are jobs to be created by local infrastructure and conservation projects as well, and they last longer than jobs building dams or a canal.

Panelist Jonas Minton of the Planning and Conservation League called the bond “very confusing,” with a lot of good things in it but with elements that PCL ultimately couldn’t support.  Changing the bond would require a two-thirds vote of the Legislature; moving it to 2014 might be done with a simple majority.  Minton noted that $1.5 billion in the bond was intended for Delta ecosystem restoration, for which money must be in place before BDCP exporters can get the 50-year incidental take permits they need (a point also made by Meral, above).  If upfront money doesn’t come from the bond, it will probably have to come from the exporters.

Moderating the panel discussion was Assembly member Jared Huffman, who has followed the progress of the water bond and the 2009 water legislation from his position as chair of the Assembly Water, Parks, and Wildlife Committee.  Huffman predicted that

the Governor will not allow a large water bond to interfere with his tax initiative.  The legislative route for fixing the bond may not be possible, in which case there will need to be an initiative.

Someone is probably gearing up for that alternative right now.