This week a Courtland landowner caught a couple of trespassers in a pick-up full of BDCP maps. After the landowner pressed for identification, one of the trespassers provided a card listing AECOM as his employer. According to its website, AECOM “is a global provider of professional technical and management support services to a broad range...Read More

Ongoing efforts to tie Delta water quality problems to urban discharges continued at the NAS committee briefings last week. Fortunately, there were public comments to supplement the scheduled briefings. Deirdre Des Jardins (see brief bio at the end of this newsletter) gave the committee a bibliography of major studies on the effect of other stressors...Read More

This week, the California Water Resources Control Board released a draft report identifying increased water flows needed to protect fisheries and water quality in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta Estuary. According to Mike Taugher of the Bay Area News Group, “The key finding is that of all the snowmelt and rain that falls into the Delta’s...Read More

Will the Water Board get it right this time? Mike Taugher quotes Roger Patterson, assistant general manager for the Metropolitan Water District. Meeting the 75 percent target “would obviously devastate water supplies,” Patterson said. He speculates that if pollution, invasive species, and other issues in the Delta are addressed, more water could be taken out....Read More

Deirdre Des Jardins is currently a policy analyst for environmental and fishing groups. She specializes in finding and synthesizing information from diverse and often highly technical government reports, research, and technical documents into a coherent, understandable framework for policy decisions. She has a background in complex systems theory and computational modeling, and has worked at...Read More