Save the California Delta Alliance (STCDA)

Legislators concerned about the state water issues have just sent a bill (AB 301) to the governor’ desk. If passed, this legislation would force water bottlers to reveal exactly how much of our water they are taking. This is commonsense legislation for a state with huge water problems — after all, how can we begin to properly manage our water resources if we don’t know how much industry is taking?

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.

An interesting article in the L.A. Times last week:

“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.

Please view this video:

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.

“Excess” tap water in Sacramento, Calif., is helping supply a new Nestlé bottling plant.

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.

Even though organizations concerned about the Delta, newspapers, and others were clammoring for the legislature to NOT vote yes on AB-1265 to take the Water Bond off the ballot in November, on Monday, the Legislature voted to postpone the water bond to 2012. Said Food & Water Watch’s Elanor Starmer. “In the interest of all Californians, legislators should take this opportunity to repeal the bond and start anew, not postpone it.” However, since the backers of the water bond knew it was unlikely to pass this year, rather than revise it to provide a reasonable initiative voters could approve, they chose to remove it and hope in two years everyone forgot the issues with the measure.

The Senate backed postponement from the outset, voting 27-7. I’m happy to report that our local Senator DeSaulnier joined the always pro-Delta senator Lois Wolk in voting no. The Assembly took several votes, with Jared Huffman (Chair of the Assembly on Water) arguing to keep the measure on the ballot or pull it altogether and revise it, leaving the ballot date open. It took until 9:35 p.m. for the last Assembly holdouts, Assembly Member Pedro Nava (D-Santa Barbara) and Assembly Member Sandre Swanson (D-Alameda), to respond to pressure from legislative leadership and vote to postpone. Again, happily our own Joan Buchanan voted on the “NO” side.

Supporters to delay the Water Bond to 2012:

Association of California Water Agencies
California Building Industry Association
California Chamber of Commerce
California Farm Bureau Federation
California Municipal Utilities Association
Dublin San Ramon Services District
Eastern Municipal Water District
Friant Water Authority
Helix Water District
Kern County Water Agency
San Diego County Water Authority
WateReuse California
Western Municipal Water District

In our post last week, State Releases Delta Flows Report, the recent report released by the State Water Board had a key central conclusion: Significantly more water must be left to flow through the Delta. Now groups that rely on delta water are beginning to take positions on what this report means.

Those who are concerned about the Delta are pleased to have an official report on delta flow requirements. “This [report] is something that some of us have been awaiting for more than two decades,” said Zeke Grader, executive director of a trade group for commercial salmon fishermen, the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations. The conclusion was unsurprising to many given evidence developed during the 1980s and 1990s during similar proceedings but which were ignored under political pressure. “This doesn’t have the (regulatory force) those other two processes had, but the science has finally been liberated,” Grader said.

The San Jose Mercury News reported that water agencies sought to dismiss the report as “pie in the sky.”

• It was “an interesting theoretical exercise” and “not a useful resource” said the State Water Contractors, an association that represents the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, the Kern County Water Agency and a handful of water agencies in the Bay Area.
• Thomas Birmingham, general manager of the Westlands Water District, the nation’s largest irrigated farm district, called the report “immaterial” and urged board members not to adopt it.

Although water agencies have long been able to define how much water they need, the report marks the first time specific numbers could be put on the environment’s side of the scales, said Gary Bobker, program director at The Bay Institute.

The study found that about 75 percent of the rain and snowmelt in the Delta watershed should be allowed to flow uninterrupted to the bay and ocean. Currently only about half the water flows through to the bay. To meet the report’s recommendations, Delta water use would have to be cut in half.

A great article in the SF Chronicle today

By: Elanor Starmer | August 06 2010 at 03:48 PM

Here’s an excerpt:

“Supporters of the water bond, which would cost California taxpayers $22 billion over 30 years, hope that in two years voters will forget how bad it is. That will also give bond supporters time to gather the millions of dollars needed to push their message out statewide. We shouldn’t be fooled: a vote to postpone this bad bill is a vote to keep it on life support.

“Check out the video No on AB-1265 and share it with your neighbors. ”

Read the entire SF Chronical article here: click here

The article below expresses the feelings of many who have observed the Delta’s decline over the last ten years. Mr. Fitzgerald is referring to the California Water Resources Control Board draft report released last week which states that the amount exported is MUCH higher than what can be exported and still have enough water for the Delta to be healthy for fish and wildlife.

No more watered down excuses

By Michael Fitzgerald Record columnist July 23, 2010 12:00 AM

State water officials are the San Joaquin Delta’s most destructive invasive species. Amazingly, at long last, they have concluded Delta fish need more water.

A lot more. Water users are taking twice as much from the Delta as they should, the state has been forced to admit. In so concluding, they indict themselves.

This is big. This is not some environmental group saying Delta fish need more water. This is not a scientific panel easy to ignore. This is the state of California itself.

The very state that brutally exploited the Delta, from its dam-it-up mentality of the 20th Century to the send-it-south policy persisting to this day.

But now, lo, the same 2009 water package that may enable a peripheral canal, or tunnel, required the State Water Control Resources Board to rise above the special interest politics that have long compromised state water policy to the point of ecological insanity and to scientifically answer the question: How much water do Delta fish need?

How much water is necessary to keep the Delta alive?

Big Ag and south-state urban users long ago figured out how much they want to take; remarkably, though, nobody in state water agencies ever figured out how much they ought to leave.

How much more have they been exporting than is biologically sound? How bad is their betrayal of the public trust, the deliberate neglect of their duty to steward the Delta’s natural resources for all, including future generations?

Any attempt to quantify the volume of wrongly exported water will be rough. Flows and exports vary with wet years and dry, and other factors. So most reports use percentages.

But I want to go with numbers. Even rough numbers paint a picture.

So. The 100-year average amount of water moving through the Delta is about 29 million acre feet a year. The takers take about 15 million acre feet a year.
To restore the Delta, they have to cut their take by half, the report says, and let 75 percent of rivers flow during certain times.

If they did, the amount returned to the rivers would be (again, roughly, as the reductions are seasonal) 7.5 million acre feet a year.

Meaning, over the last 20 years alone, the amount of water they have wrongly taken – the amount the state allowed them to hog – is, at the high end of estimates, enough to fill 22-mile-wide Lake Tahoe to its capacity of 39 trillion gallons, with enough water left over to fill giant New Melones Reservoir at its current level almost five times over.

A staggering sea of water.

You can quibble with the math. But not the minimum flow requirements.

With this minimum number, we now have a metric for the greed, a yardstick for the cynical indifference, a scale on which to weigh the state’s betrayal of the public trust.

And this time the science compiled by the state is not something Sean Hannity can spin away. It agrees with data an army of experts has provided the state again and again over decades at hearings.

But Republican governors, instead of acting responsibly, quashed scientifically sound and crucial recommendations to benefit Big Ag and Southern California cities.

Big Ag, which helped corrupt the state water regime, predictably has come out swinging.

“The draft Delta Flow Criteria Report is a purely theoretical exercise with no application in the real world,” bellowed the San Luis & Delta Mendota Water Authority. “Any attempt to apply these findings would be devastating.”

Correction, sirs: The devastation is already well under way in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. Which is more than just a sponge to wring.

While this report is a welcome injection of reality, its conclusions are not binding. The restoration of Delta flows, though right and necessary, is inconceivable. If the Sacramento River runs at 75 percent, where’s the water for the Peripheral Canal?

Expect politics to distort the outcome. State officials call it “balancing.” I call it a kinder, gentler betrayal of the public trust.

Only now none can deceive. They can’t pretend fulfilling excessive water contracts – promising to deliver more water than exists – and restoring the Delta both are feasible goals. They can’t say we’ll all get better together.
The facts are out. They’ve taken up to 7.5 million acre feet too much, three New Meloneses of water, every year for decades at the Delta’s expense.
The truth may not be a game-changer. But now, at least, the game is better illuminated.

“Now we can say, ‘If you want to kill the Delta, at least be honest about it,’ ” said Bill Jennings, head of the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance.

Contact columnist Michael Fitzgerald at (209) 546-8270 or michaelf@recordnet.com. Visit his blog at recordnet.com/fitzgeraldblog.