If you didn’t know anything about BDCP, you wouldn’t get the real story from the plan’s website.  The page “About the BDCP” will tell you that “The Bay Delta Conservation Plan (BDCP) is being prepared by a group of local water agencies, environmental and conservation organizations, state and federal agencies, and other interest groups.” What do...Read More

Friends of the River (FOR) has sent a comment letter to officers and staff of federal agencies – the Bureau of Reclamation, the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) – alerting them to “foundational violations of law and fundamental analytical deficiencies in the Bay Delta Conservation Plan (BDCP)...Read More

Restore the Delta has been saying since last summer that the total cost of the Peripheral Tunnels/BDCP would be close to $55 billion, not the $14 billion BDCP kept talking about. Here, from the BDCP’s own documents, are supporting details of projected costs for the 50 years of the permit period: Construction – $14.5 billion...Read More

DWR has been holding Contract Extension Negotiation Sessions with the State Water Project Contractors.  Meeting summaries are posted for May 1 and May 15, but by May 29 things seem to have been breaking down.  Now the session scheduled for June 12 has been cancelled.  Another is tentatively scheduled for June 26. DWR and the...Read More

As we’ve seen lately with collapsing bridges, it’s one thing to build “visionary” infrastructure. It’s another thing to operate and maintain it for all the decades of its planned life. Compromised SWP operations could be a really BIG elephant in a room already full of pachyderms. In January of 2011, the California Water Commission (CWC)...Read More

While researching the January 2011 CWC meeting, we turned up this juicy tidbit from Jerry Meral, who never misses a chance to tell a listener what the listener wants to hear. (This can make it hard to know what Meral himself actually thinks.) During a presentation that day on the BDCP, then-commissioner Dave Cogdill asked...Read More

By contrast, we ALWAYS know what Jason Peltier of Westlands Water District really thinks.  Here’s a link to a YouTube clip of him telling Senator Fran Pavley. And here is Westlands doing something we approve of: proposing to generate power with solar facilities on San Joaquin Valley land that has salty soil and poor drainage. ...Read More

Melinda Terry of the North Delta Water Agency, our source for the arresting numbers on pile driving and tunnel muck in our recent newsletter,  reports that she had the wrong number for consecutive days of pile driving. If there are about 1,000 piles total to be installed according to Appendix 3C in the BDCP Plan...Read More

In case you missed it… Valley Economy New BDCP Economic Studies Use Outdated Growth Forecasts to Project an Artificial Water Shortage By Dr. Jeffrey Michael Originally Published Tuesday, June 4, 2013 There are so many problems in the cost and economic reports released last week by the BDCP, it is hard to know where to...Read More