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
Senator Feinstein’s aides were in the Delta last week getting feedback on the Senator’s bill for a Delta National Heritage Area and a Delta Conservancy. We were glad to have the opportunity to share our concerns, but it all came very late in the process. The Senator plans to introduce the bill this week. There...Read More
It looks like the Delta Stewardship Council is getting ready to try balancing on that two-legged stool. The issue is risk reduction, and the problem is that as soon as you start prioritizing risks, you discover how much of the Delta is neither ecosystem nor export water supply. Last week the DSC invited the public...Read More
In Sacramento on July 13, the NAS Committee on Sustainable Water and Environmental Management in the California Bay-Delta got a briefing on the BDCP and on water quality. The Committee was asked to review the November 2010 draft of the BDCP and provide a review by mid-2011 to allow permitting by 2012. Their own report...Read More
In the afternoon, Dr. Michael Johnson, recently retired Director of the Aquatic Ecosystems Analysis Laboratory at UC Davis, gave a presentation on “Contaminants in the Delta and their Potential Role in Shaping Biological Communities.” He said that there was insufficient data to conclude that contaminants were partially or wholly responsible for the pelagic organism decline...Read More
Bruce Tokars of Salmon Water Now has been prolific in producing informative videos about water politics and posting them online where they can reach a lot of viewers. His most recent effort is “Paper Water: and Other Sordid Tales.” This is a great overview of Stewart Resnick, the Kern Water Bank, The Monterey Amendments, and...Read More
The Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations (PCFFA) and the Environmental Law Foundation (ELF) have filed a lawsuit against the State Water Resources Control Board and Siskiyou County based on the idea of using the public trust doctrine to regulate groundwater. Since 1980, the State Board has regulated pumping of groundwater within 500 feet...Read More
Have you noticed that certain words and phrases are used over and over again to describe the Delta, while other conditions never get described at all? Discussions about the Delta have been “framed” by people invested in seeing it in a particular way, whether or not that way is accurate. Think about how often you...Read More
