And the only positive benefit is to the big agribusiness special interests – Westlands millionaire farmers who should have “junior” farmer water rights who farm the arid farmlands west of Hwy 5. This isn’t about the family farmers or drinking water in LA.

There have been reports on this bill in SF Gates and Contra Costa Times. A good summary is from the “Water for Fish” newsletter article:

Fatal Salmon Provisions Pass the House of Representatives

2010 Fall Run Salmon Returns Improve. A 2011 Fishing Season Looks Promising
The seven year steady declines in fall run salmon counts turned around in 2010. Preliminary Fish and Game data shows that 133,014 fall run adults and 30,181 two year old jacks returned to the Sacramento San Joaquin system. These figures are over three times the returns of 2009. This may provide enough fish for a 2011 season but the crisis is not over. “

Call to Action

Sen Feinstein
Sen Boxer

———————————————
Sample:
Send to Barbara Boxer and Diane Feinstein

SUBJECT: House Continuing Resolution language to withdraw California funding for the implementation of the Salmon biological opinion in the San Francisco Bay and Delta and to withdraw funding for the San Joaquin River restoration project.

I am deeply concerned with the House Resolution which would destroy our Central Valley salmon runs.

The salmon biological opinion of 2009 is the only thing left standing in the way of a complete loss of the Central Valley salmon. All of the runs have declined more than 50% in the last few years and fall run and the ESA listed winter run have each declined more than 90%. In the interest of our jobs and the economic viability of our local businesses, I urge you to oppose and reject the language which would destroy the salmon and our livelihoods.

The State of California is now taking positive steps to solve its water and salmon problems. There is a good new law on the books and diverse parties are now starting to work together. Leaders of our industry and other stakeholders are now at the table. I don’t believe that federal legislation is needed at this time. We should give the state processes time to work. Solutions are needed, but sending wildlife to extinction to benefit a few agricultural interests is not a solution.

• North Delta – Monday Jan 24 (6:30 PM – 9:30 PM)
  Clarksburg Middle School Auditorium
  52870 Netherlands Road, Clarksburg, CA 95612
  




• South Delta – Tuesday Jan 25 (6:00 PM – 8:30 PM)
  San Joaquin County Robert J. Cabral Agricultural Center
  Assembly Rooms 2 & 3
  2101 East Earhart Ave
  Stockton, CA 95206

A meetings will also be held in Chico Wednesday evening. Links to information on these scoping meetings are available at:

http://deltacouncil.ca.gov/calendar.html

PLEASE DOUBLE-CHECK MEETING PLACES AND TIMES AT ABOVE LINK.

There was very little Delta representation at the Concord meeting last week we hear from a couple of folks who did attend. At the meeting the council representatives re-stated their “coequal goals” – providing a more reliable water supply for California and protecting, restoring and enhancing the Delta ecosystem. The coequal goals shall be achieved in a manner that protects and enhances the unique cultural, recreational, natural resource and agricultural values of the Delta as an evolving place.

Isenberg stressed that by establishing the goals as coequal, no priority may be given to one over another, hence the water supply can not be underscored below the health of the Delta.

The local attendee who emailed STCDA expressed strong concern for how this will affect us locally here in the Delta. But felt if we have any chance in this matter, it will be with them on our side. They will be establishing the laws that will govern us. Please do not hesitate to submit comment and urge others to do so.

We have until January 28th for public comment to be submitted to their website www.deltacouncil.ca.gov or via email at deltaplanscoping@deltacouncil.ca.gov.

We think this could be a good thing. The BDCP process has been flawed from the start and its plans are a serious threat to Delta Communities and the Delta itself.

In their Press Release, Thomas W. Birmingham, General Manager of Westlands states “Through this action we are trying to get BDCP back on track,” or in other words, Westland wants any restrictions on the amount of water exported removed in order to continue to fund the BDCP.

The Sacramento Bee reported this morning that Westlands recently realized that Obama’s Interior Department is likely to demand reduced water diversions as part of a completed Bay Delta Conservation Plan. When this issue was raised at a meeting with a top Interior official in Washington two weeks ago, Westlands officials stormed out of the room.

The Press Release sounds like a Westlands scare tactic. Birmingham states “And without a project to fix the water supply problem, California won’t have the means to restore the Delta either.”

“Jonas Minton, a senior project manager at the Planning and Conservation League who monitors California water issues, noted the water agencies involved have never offered to pay for Delta habitat projects – only for new water diversion plumbing. So Westlands’ move may not jeopardize any environmental improvements associated with the waterworks.”

For the full Sacramento Bee article click here.

Delta: A lake in the making

By Mike Taugher
Contra Costa Times
Posted: 09/12/2010 12:00:00 AM PDT

The toxic blue-green algae floating in the scientist’s jar is a symptom of a disturbing shift in the West Coast’s biggest estuary.

Common in lakes and reservoirs around the world, this kind of algae is less likely to be found in estuaries where rivers and ocean tides tangle in a restless ebb and flow.

But the slime has spread in an increasingly stagnant Delta.

After five years of studies, scientists are coalescing around the idea that diverting fresh water to farms and cities has led to a fundamental change in the Delta by slowing flows for most of the year.

Other factors are also at play, especially the dramatic conversion of a once vast tidal marsh into a network of deep channels and “islands” first built for farming.

In short, the Delta is becoming more like a lake or a lagoon, researchers say.

As a result, transplanted species — such as largemouth bass — that thrive in more stable, lake-like environments are outpacing native species, including salmon and smelt.

“You have this really important ecosystem and California is about ready to lose it if we’re not careful,” said Zeke Grader, a lawyer and head of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations, a commercial salmon trade group. “We’ll lose the estuary and end up with an inland sea.”

Consider this: As California’s salmon fishers braced last spring for a third straight dismal year — a plight many of them blamed on water diversions — professional largemouth bass fishermen came to the Delta for 2010′s first Bassmaster Elite fishing tournament, during which 93 anglers caught more than 1 ton of bass over four days.

The tour then moved on to Clear Lake in Lake County and to other lakes across the nation, mostly in the South.

The new Delta “resembles a weedy lake,” said Anke Mueller-Solger, lead scientist for the Interagency Ecological Program, a 40-year-old state and federal research project in the Bay and Delta.

Changes?

On a recent trip aboard the research vessel Questuary, researcher Lindsey Sullivan was looking for tiny jellyfish, not the toxic algae she collected.

The postdoctoral researcher from Rhode Island and her team lowered over the stern a high-tech device that transmits to an onboard computer measurements of salinity, temperature and the depth of the water.

A plankton net, similar to the butterfly net that cartoon character SpongeBob SquarePants uses to go “jellyfishing,” trailed behind the boat, collecting samples.

The estuary, which includes the Bay, the Delta and adjacent waterways, is reputed to be the world’s most biologically invaded.
So it was not much of a surprise when Sullivan held up a jar with hundreds of zooplankton native to China’s Yangtze River and a few tiny jellyfish from the Black Sea.

Or toxic algae, for that matter.

The algae, Microcystis, was first found here in 1999 and has spread aggressively in recent years. Its presence in the Delta, a significant source of drinking water, is a concern because it produces a powerful liver toxin.

Though increased ammonium discharges from Sacramento’s sewer treatment plant may have boosted it, Microcystis probably was able to take hold because of the central Delta’s unnaturally slow-moving water, according to a 2008 report.

But Sullivan, a jellyfish expert, was here for the jellies.
She wants to know whether they are undermining the food web by eating organisms that estuary fish such as Delta smelt need to thrive.

One of the theories about the decline of smelt, the Delta fish most in danger of extinction, is that the plankton it eats are no longer available, possibly because clams, jellyfish or something else is eating them.

Sullivan wants to examine whether the jellyfish invaders are eating enough plankton to affect the smelt.

When biologists discovered in 2005 that the Delta’s fish were in sharp decline, they began focusing on three areas: pollution, changes in water management and invasive species.

Over the next several years, they looked at culprits within those categories — Delta pumps, invasive clams, ammonium pollution, pesticides and others — but found no single suspect to blame for the ecological free fall.

Now, scientists have given up searching for a single cause and have turned to a more complex examination of how a dynamic environment has stagnated.

“It’s more of an ecosystem approach. Before it was more of a fish-centric approach,” said Mueller-Solger, the ecological group’s lead scientist.

A bit of history

The intense biological productivity typical of estuaries and the Delta’s immense size — 738,000 acres, or about the size of Yosemite National Park — make it one of state’s the most valuable ecosystems.

Its watershed covers 40 percent of the state, and the estuary is an important stop on migratory birds’ Pacific Flyway and a critical nursery and migration route for California’s king salmon runs. It is home to about 50 species of fish and 300 mammals, birds and reptiles.

About 500,000 people live in the Delta — a triangle with corners roughly at Antioch, Sacramento and Tracy — and more than 23 million people around the state get at least some of their drinking water from it.

In an estuary, salinity levels naturally vary as the run of rivers and the tides push back and forth.

However, the sprawling network of dams and pumps that water managers use to supply farms and cities through the Delta are run to optimize water delivery without violating salinity standards meant to protect drinking water and habitat.

The result is that the Delta’s salinity today is both higher and less variable than it was historically, researchers say.

For 800 years, the water in Suisun Marsh and Suisun Bay — between Benicia and Pittsburg — was mostly fresh, according to the Contra Costa Water District, which supplies Delta drinking water to 550,000 people.

Beginning in about 1915, when rice farmers moved into the Sacramento Valley, the drain on the Delta’s fresh water allowed salt water to pour in from San Francisco Bay.

Salinity increased dramatically as water development continued in the 1920s.

“The other thing we found was that the nature of salinity intrusion changed,” said Greg Gartrell, assistant general manager at the Concord-based district.

Before the levees were built and the waterways were channelized, the Delta remained full of fresher water even in long droughts, when Suisun Bay was salty.

“That means it (salinity) is exacerbated not just by the diversions but also the draining of the marshes and channelization of the Delta that allowed the tides to accelerate intrusion,” Gartrell said.
As California’s thirst grew, draining more fresh water from the Delta, salty water pushed farther into it.

By the end of the 1990s, new reservoirs such as a complex of underground water banks in Kern County and Diamond Valley Lake in Southern California were in place.

Then, even in wet months and wet years, when the demand for Delta water was low, water managers could store excess Delta water that otherwise would have flowed out to sea, further interfering with the natural variations of healthy estuaries.

In recent years, the state and federal water projects supplying millions of acres of farmland and two of every three Californians have taken record amounts of water — as much as 6 million acre-feet. That is enough to irrigate about 3 million acres or supply nearly 50 million people — more than California’s population.

And it is about 1 million acre-feet more than the Bay and the Delta together can hold at any one time, said Bruce Herbold, a biologist at the Environmental Protection Agency.
So, in other words, if the impossible happened and no water flowed in from rivers or the ocean, the amount of pumping from the Delta in recent years has been more than enough to run the estuary dry.

Raising the alarm

In early 2005, annual surveys showed an alarming three-year drop in several populations of fish that could not be explained by weather patterns.

It was a mystery with lots at stake — namely, the health of an important estuary and the availability of water from the state’s most important water source.

Mueller-Solger, the ecology program’s lead scientist, in 2008 began prodding a team of researchers to consider whether the Delta’s changes showed it becoming more like a lake, according to Herbold.

About the same time, two leading experts at UC Davis were coming to similar conclusions about the Delta’s plight. In August 2008, Peter Moyle and Bill Bennett published their thoughts in a little noticed appendix to a report on Delta water policy.

“This shift presumably occurred as a result of the long-term (slow) process of steadily increasing pumping rates over time, which required the maintenance of freshwater conditions in the Delta during summer, as well as the relatively rapid invasion by Brazilian waterweed and other factors that favored (lake fish),” they wrote.

The meaning: An assortment of species more at home in stable environments — largemouth bass and the Brazilian waterweed they like to hide in, jellyfish, overbite clams and even a zooplankton called Limnoithona — are driving out and replacing the Delta smelt, longfin smelt, striped bass and the plankton on which they prey.

The new way of looking at the Delta does not lead to easy answers.

For example, if Microcystis is blooming more now because of the ammonium from the Sacramento sewage treatment plant, is the solution to reduce the pollution or to increase flows to dilute it and wash the toxic algae downstream? Or are both necessary?

The answer, in this and many other cases, probably is both.
“In an aquatic system, it does come down to water to some degree,” Mueller-Solger said. “On the other hand, all the other threats are real, too.”

Last month, a powerful state agency adopted a report that found California’s farms and cities are using far more Delta water than is good for the estuary — roughly twice as much.

That report has no regulatory teeth and officials of some water agencies have said the report should be effectively ignored while the separate Bay Delta Conservation Plan being pushed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is written.

But the call for more water to flow through the Delta may challenge that plan’s direction: Its authors risk damaging the conservation plan’s credibility if they do not acknowledge new limits on water supplies.

Options limited

There is no way to restore the estuary to pre-Gold Rush conditions; the shallow marsh spreading through the Central Valley is gone forever.

The invaders feel quite at home. Voracious filter feeding clams carpet parts of the Delta bottom. Bass tournaments produce better fishing than native salmon runs.

Increasing the flow of water, while controversial and costly, may be one of the most effective ways to improve conditions, if only because other threats are irreversible.

One researcher considers the loss of flow a distant third on the list of estuary threats — behind the Delta’s channelization and the introduced species.

But restoring the landscape or eradicating invaders are next to impossible.

That leaves increasing water flows as the next best option, said Wim Kimmerer, director of San Francisco State’s Romberg Tiburon Center for Environmental Studies and Sullivan’s faculty adviser. And he is not convinced that will help.

“There are a whole bunch of problems and they are linked together somehow, and there are only some we can work on,” said Kimmerer, who described himself as being more skeptical than many of his colleagues studying the Delta. “I’m skeptical flow (increases) will do what we’re hoping.”

Others are more confident, though.

“We can make it better habitat,” Herbold said. “Right now, we’re making it just ideal for the introduced species. It would behoove us to do what we can.”

Though many of the changes in the estuary are permanent, researchers say that adding water might help, at least a little.

Mike Taugher covers the environment. Contact him at 925-943-8257.

Some water bottlers are are taking their water directly from our municipal water supply and others are drawing from springs on private land that can also impact local water sources and wells.

Click here to go to the Food and Water Watch form to encourage the governor to weigh in on the side of water and not bottlers.

On August 18, the Assembly reviewed the Senate revision. Assembly comments:

1) Acknowledged that from 2007 to 2009 California experienced water
management challenges due to a severe drought and, to a lesser
extent, the need to prevent the extinction of Delta fish
populations protected by FESA, CESA, or both and that drought,
recession and other hardships contributed to the economic
dislocation of rural farming communities on the west side of the
San Joaquin Valley.

2) Recognized the Two-Gates Project as an experiment that proposes
to install barriers and gates across two Delta rivers with a
hypothesis that this would reduce the loss of Delta smelt at the
SWP/CVP pumps and an inference that such a reduction would allow
greater SWP/CVP export water deliveries.

3) Requested USDOI to complete the Two-Gates Project study.

Isn’t something missing here?
The assembly recognized that the main water issues were “due to a severe drought” and only “to a lesser extent, the need to prevent the extinction of Delta fish.” They also recognized that it’s a combination of “drought, recession and other hardships”, not Delta fish that impacted farming communities (and as we now know, most of the hardships were in the construction business). This is an “experiment”. Yet this resolution moves forward to complete the study of the 2-Gates.

The recent State Water Board Delta Flows report stated the crisis in the Delta is too much water being extracted and the legislators are saying they want “greater SWP/CVP export water deliveries.” We say reliable exports, yes. More water exported, no.

What’s also missing is legislative recognition of the impact the 2-Gates will cause to Delta communities. Besides 1) above, there should be a 1B:

1B) Acknowledged that the installation of these 2 Gates would cause
economic and other hardships to the Delta Communities and to all
those that use the South Delta waterways, cause safety issues,
and are likely to negatively impact Delta fish and wildlife.

And then, if they would acknowledge these facts, wouldn’t the resolution logically be killed and the study stopped?

Only 4 Assembly members voted no in May 2010 when the resolution was first voted on. The Assembly vote was 63-4 with Nay votes from the Discovery Bay Assemblymember representative Joan Buchanan plus Gaines, Niello, Yamada. Only one Senator voted no last week. Mark DeSaulnier the senator that represents Discovery Bay and other Delta communities was the lone “NO” vote.

Today the Delta Stewardship Council released the Final version of their Interim Plan. It lists as the first responsibility under the DWR:

• “Efforts to cooperate in the construction and implementation of the Two-Gates Fish Protection 21 Demonstration Project by December 1, 2010″.

The study hasn’t been completed, the DWR and many others know it is not a good idea. Why is there still an aggressive implementation date?

Sometimes it seems people are starting to listen to reason and rational thought concerning the Delta. The DWR understood the issues and concerns when they wrote their Dec. 22, 2009 letter putting 2-Gates on hold for more scientific analysis. The Obama Adminsistration and EPA called for additional environmental analysis. Newspapers are now reporting more about water issues and exposing private special interests. Then the senate passes AJR-38. We’ll have to see what happens next.

“A lawsuit by water agencies and environmental groups contends the Kern Water Bank transaction was essentially a gift of public property to private interests and therefore violates the state constitution.”

“That’s the theme of a lawsuit filed a few weeks ago alleging there’s something smelly about how a group of private interests — notably a huge agribusiness owned by the wealthy Southern California couple Stewart and Lynda Resnick — got control of an underground water storage project the state had already spent $75 million to develop.”

It will be interesting to see how this lawsuit progresses. Their goal is to return the Kerns Water Bank “into the state’s water management plan, so a precious and dwindling natural resource can serve everyone in the state, not just a few powerful farm companies and real estate developers.”

To read the entire L.A. Times article, click here.

Nestle Steals Water; excerpt from FLOW, an excerpt from the 2008 Sundance Film Festival documentary “For the Love of Water”. The message is pertinant because, as we reported in the post Sacramento has Excess Water? earlier today, Nestlé just signed a 10-year agreement with Sacrmento to open a new bottling plant which will use Delta water to bottle. This film shows what happened when Nestlé opened a bottling plant in Massachusetts (very scary) and raises the question of who owns water and who gets to make decisions about water.

It’s not just in Massachusetts – there is a YouTube video from Ontario, Canada about Nestle collapsing the groundwater aquivers

“We have fundamental problems with profiting from water, which is a public resource,” said Emily Wurth, water-program director at Food and Water Watch, a Washington, D.C., research and advocacy group that opposes privatizing water utilities and bottling water.

We need to make it illegal for water rights to be privatized.

To view the FLOW video, click here.

The new bottling plant initially will bottle up to 150 acre-feet of water annually, purchased from the city of Sacramento and from nearby private springs.

The bottler signed a 10-year lease with options to extend. That’s another water contract state agencies have signed continuing the process of over-committing water we don’t have.

This may have been a wet year, but has everyone forgotten the past four years of drought or the July 20th State Water Report that says the Delta needs more water flowing through it than is currently allowed due to excess water exports?

If Sacramento has excess water, why do they need four new pumps? The four new Freeport pumps near Sacramento are anticipated to go on-line in 2011. The pumps are a joint project by the Sacramento County Water Agency (SCWA) and the East Bay Municipal Utility District (EBMUD) of Oakland to supply 85 million gallons of water per day from the Sacramento River to customers in central Sacramento County and the East Bay area of California.

We’re in a state water crisis! We need to be importing bottled water into California from water-rich states. There is no “excess” water here.