Among many other things you will find in the fifth staff draft of the Delta Plan, issued last week, is the subsidence/earthquake/sea level rise mantra repeated over and over and over and OVER. Roger Patterson of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (MWD), among others, is going around chanting the same mantra. Facts hardly...Read More

The ability of wealthy interests to get what they want with respect to water extends all the way to using bonds to get California taxpayers to cover their projects, according to a two-part article by Lloyd Carter and Patrick Porgans. In Part 1, Carter and Porgans show how A few of California’s land rich billionaires...Read More

To see this “you pay, we benefit” strategy up close, we only need to look at the July 29 meeting of the Delta Stewardship Council (DSC), as reported by Restore the Delta’s Brett Baker. One action the DSC took was to unanimously adopt an amended Delta Science Program contract, allowing the program to net an...Read More

Perhaps the most substantive undertaking of the Council thus far in its existence was agenda item 7: the East Bay Municipal Utilities District Aqueduct Protection Projects, which would entail levee improvement projects on Lower Roberts Island, Upper and Lower Jones Tract, as well as Palm and Orwood Tracts.   In a decision that will have...Read More

A graduate student named Aracely Campa at Sac State has done a thesis in Public Policy and Administration called “The Bay Delta Conservation Plan: a mid-course evaluation measuring best practices in collaboration.” According to the abstract, The main findings of the study demonstrated that key stakeholders are missing in the decision-making process. The data also...Read More

In his August 9 blog post, water economist David Zetland fielded a question about investing in “productive agricultural land with water on site”-apparently almond farms. Zetland calls this a high risk strategy, for a variety of reasons.  But we don’t want to forget that for all the talk about feeding the world, some agricultural landowners...Read More