Save the California Delta Alliance (STCDA)

Bill Wells, Executive Director of the Delta Chamber of Commerce and author of the regular “Bay and Delta Yachtsman” magazine’s “Delta Rat” articles, has requested that anyone who is available this Friday to attend a meeting in Sacramento about the Invasive Week problem in the Delta and voice your opinion. Also please forward this to other interested persons. Here’s the meeting info and agenda – Click Here.

Bill’s email said:

Our governor Jerry Brown and resource secretary John Laird have totally dropped the ball on this rolling disaster. As near as we can tell area boaters are picking up the full tab for the Division of Boating & Waterways effort to “control” invasive plants. Local marina owners and business people are spending their own funds to try to stop this scourge. It looks like about $15 million is funded for the effort and about $50 million is needed. It is time for all “stakeholders” to start paying their fair share. The water districts that export water from the Delta should pick up the lions share of the expense and the Corps of Engineers charged with keeping navigable waterways open needs to provide adequate funding too.

We have gotten to this point because of inept management of our water resources in the past and we need to put a stop to it now before it totally destroys the Delta. We need a complete audit of the Natural Resources Agency and in the future we need far better oversight of the agencies charged with keeping our waterways clear.

For more background and why the weed clean-up should be paid for by the water contractors who are exporting too much water causing the issue and not just the boaters here in the Delta stuck with the issue, see Gene Beley’s film of Gary Rogers interviewing DBW Director Chris Conlin regarding invasive plants in the Delta.

The editorials are coming out of the woodwork now. Wonder if someone is paying for them to do these or they are getting the “bright idea” on their own.

Today’s was an opinion piece in the Sacramento Bee called “Brown’s new Delta fix makes all sorts of economic sense,” by Betty Jo Toccoli, President of the California Small Business Association.

She says that the California Small Business Association supports the plan because the availability of a reliable water supply is of great importance to all of our members.

What she obviously doesn’t understand is that her Small Business Association members are getting nothing, nada, squat out of the “California Water Fix.”

She goes so far as to say the opponents of the plan’s economics “don’t pan out,” referring to Dr. Jeffrey Michaels, an independent economist at the University of the Pacific. Instead she quotes as truth/fact economist David Sunding, who is paid by the DWR and has been slanting the economic reports in the tunnels’ favor for years.

I love this part (it is often repeated) – that we must consider the “economics of a catastrophic failure. According to an analysis by leading UC Davis professors, the old dirt levees that protect water supplies have a 64 percent probability of collapse or catastrophic failure in the next 50 years. The Department of Water Resources analyzed the economic consequences of multiple levees failing should a large earthquake occur. Water exports would be cut off for months, if not years. The total cost of disruption to our water system would cost the economy $30 billion to $40 billion over five years – more than twice the total construction costs of the pipelines.”

OK – now, really. So she bought into the faulty (no pun intended) Earthquake Bogey and reports of failing levees. I actually love that one. Because if the levees are so precarious and the state is not doing anything to fix them, then the state is risking hundreds of thousands of lives of people living in the Delta. And, even if true, the water exports would NOT be cut off for years, according to true scientists. Bogus. Stupid. Wrong.

I wish these people wouldn’t write about what they know nothing about. People like Betty Jo Toccoli, President of the California Small Business Association, should stick to what they know instead of buying the hype being put out by the the DWR and Gov. Brown in support of the Corporate Farmers (not small businesses) and Big L.A. Developers (again not small businesses) about why they want the “wonderful” California Water Fix. Instead, she should consider that the Delta Tunnels will destroy acres and acres of fertile, family-owned (small business) Delta farmland, impact Delta communities, ruin Delta recreation (and related small businesses), not to mention the most important, destroy the salmon runs off the entire coast of California and Oregon (commercial fishermen). Why? For big business profits. Profits from more almonds. Profits from re-selling water.

There’s nothing there to help small businesses. It’s only to make the very, very rich richer.

Published here.

State contractors have readied plans to acquire as many as 300 farms in the California delta by eminent domain to make room for a pair of massive, still-unapproved water tunnels proposed by Gov. Jerry Brown, according to documents obtained by opponents of the tunnels.

Farmers whose parcels were listed and mapped in the 160-page property-acquisition plan expressed dismay at the advanced planning for the project, which would build 30-mile-long tunnels in the delta formed by the San Joaquin and Sacramento rivers.

“What really shocks is we’re fighting this and we’re hoping to win,” said Richard Elliot, who grows cherries, pears and other crops on delta land farmed by his family since the 1860s. “To find out they’re sitting in a room figuring out this eminent domain makes it sound like they’re going to bully us … and take what they want.”

Read more here.

So much for Carly Fiorina as a potential President (and I’d LOVE to see a female president). She said it “may well be true” that climate change has worsened effects of the drought. Like many Republicans, however, she blamed environmentalists and their Democratic allies for blocking the construction of dams in the state.
“California has had droughts for millennia,” Fiorina told The Sacramento Bee. “And so knowing that, you would think that you would prepare for droughts by building reservoirs and water conveyance systems so that you could save the rainwater during years when there’s a lot of rain.”

Oh, Man … Reservoirs and the Delta Tunnels aren’t the answer. We have empty reservoirs (which would have been empty even if there was more capacity before the drought) because the paper water system uses more water each year than exists. We need to refurbish our water distribution laws, encourage desal and recycling and conservation, and plant according to available water. It’s not the environmentalists that are the issue – they are the last barrier to the total destruction of the salmon runs!

Cruz and Walker were right there with Fiorina.

http://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article31237517.html