Save the California Delta Alliance (STCDA)

STCDA Board member and attorney Michael Brodsky filed a petition to the state Water Resources Control Board protesting the placement of the Delta Conveyance Project intake tunnels in the town of Hood. Brodsky cited the Department of Water Resources (DWR)’s unlawful discrimination and violation of environmental justice principals.

The Hood Community Council and Hood community members had objected repeatedly to DWR’s placement of the intakes at Hood during DWR’s planning process. Yet DWR refused to meet with Hood representatives and refused to discuss Hood’s grievances about intake site selection.

Frustrated and appalled, Hood Community Council Chairman Mario Moreno organized a door-to-door campaign in September 2021 gathering signatures on the Hood Declaration of Protest Against the Delta Conveyance Project by the People of Hood. Long-time Hood resident Eddie Magana helped with the signature gathering. The Declaration bears signatures representing virtually the entire community. The Declaration was addressed to Governor Newsom and was sent to the Governor, the Delta Conveyance Design and Construction Authority (“DCA”), California Resources Secretary Wade Crowfoot, and DWR. The Declaration begins:

[W]e object, condemn, and oppose the environmental racism being visited upon our community, the majority Latino town of Hood, by your engineers, lawyers, and consultants in the planning of the Delta Conveyance Project.

The Hood community, in cooperation with local elected officials, organized a community meeting in Hood on December 6, 2022, to air concerns over the Project; including the disparate impacts on Hood. DWR was invited to attend. DWR refused to attend the meeting. The meeting was well attended, with over one hundred people participating.

The September 2021, Hood Declaration of Protest, endorsed by the 104 households of Hood, aptly sums up what DWR perpetrated on Hood, hiding behind a mask of environmental justice:

Your engineers ignore the plight of our community and insist on locating two gigantic intakes a few hundred yards from the heart of our tiny town. Our pleas to your engineers to move the intakes to anywhere else among hundreds of miles of riverbank fall on deaf ears; they insist we must suffer the impacts of six or more years of heavy construction activity, the daily invasion of thousands of construction workers, that we must breathe the pollution of tons of diesel exhaust from thousands of trucks, the noise, the dust, the blockage of our roads—we cannot survive this onslaught and our town will become a ghost town.

We inform you that your “environmental justice” consultants are but a tool to perpetuate environmental racism. “We have reached out far and wide to minority communities and conducted oh so many meetings and surveys, yes we have” your consultants refrain. But we cannot discuss with you moving the intakes that destroy your town, “they must be here,” say your engineers. Then “all is well,” say your consultants because we have done so much outreach and held so many meetings.

And on it goes, the charade of justice. We demand real justice: do not obliterate our poor brown community: move the intakes.

DWR’s discriminatory conduct and the unfair obliteration of Hood are not in the public interest.

The Project significantly harms public trust values. The Project degrades the Delta Environment and contributes to salt water intrusion into the Delta. Public trust values negatively impacted include water quality in the Delta, air quality in the area of Hood, including within the 1,000 foot impact zone surrounding the intakes and at the Hood Franklin Road Highway 5 interchange. The Project exacerbates climate change and harms the atmosphere; a public trust value. Intake construction negatively impacts navigation in the Sacramento River adjacent to Hood. The long-term health of the Delta ecology, including fish, plants, and other species cannot survive the continued exports embodied in approval of the DCP. The Project will exacerbate Microcystis, Egeria Densa, and other invasive floating and submerged aquatic vegetation.

Take action!

Make your voice heard by writing a letter or email to Governor Newsom demanding they end the Delta Conveyance Project and work toward REAL solutions to provide water for Californians!

Send in Comments

• Email the Governor online at: www.gov.ca.gov/contact/
• Mail:
  • Governor Gavin Newsom
    1021 O Street, Suite 9000
    Sacramento, CA 95814