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Delta groups oppose improvement for Delta’s habitat?
Dan Bacher has an interesting Calitics article on the complicated politics of local Delta constituencies.
The DNP guesses Mr. Bacher had to swallow hard to publish this one, especially with his links to respected journals like The Nation.
SB 565 was co-sponsored by co-equalitionists Fran Pavley (D-Agoura Hills), Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento) and Jared Huffman (D-San Rafael). According to Bacher, SB 565 would “give the State Water Resources Control Board (SWRCB) new penalty and investigative powers dealing with water rights.”
The last thing the Delta’s landowners (who of course in their smallness rely on very senior water rights to wield their disproportionately large stick) want is someone up in their kitchen doing this.
Bacher’s article sheds all kinds of harsh light on the libertarian, property rights are sacrosanct, streak that seems to inspire much of the work of groups like Restore the Delta.
The DNP wonders where the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance comes out on this.
Even without knowing the CSPA’s position, the article makes all too clear the fractured geography of the anti-water-export coalition. Going their separate ways in this situation (at minimum) are certain Delta interests and downstream fresh water users like those concerned with the health of SF Bay and the Pacific fishery.
The DNP wants to ask whether we can finally put to rest the idea that groups like Restore the Delta are willing to see a world (or a state, really) beyond their small, below sea level piece of it.
Nonbinding
Once you find the actual document, the “draft report” link, read it, and decide whether you think it should be made into law.
A careful bit of work. What a job these folks have. We guess is they do it with a cynical and thoughtful grin. We hope so.
Ideals are not policy. Policy is not law. Laws are not plans. Plans, laws, policies and ideals require enforcement, etc.
Is this possibly a plan to just kill the delta? Paranoid types like we are here at the DNP might conclude that it could be nothing else since its conclusions are extremely impractical. It’s sure not a plan to fix, save, restore, preserve, or co-equally manage the Delta.
It may not be a plan, but it is a description of the scale of the predicament. Those charged with producing this analysis were given a thankless task: how much water does the Delta, and its ecosystem, need to survive?
Some are not happy with the conclusions. Others are.
The answer is in dispute, but is probably as accurate, subtle, and complete as any analysis that has been produced to date.
It is also nonbinding. Simply a description of the problem.
That wasn’t so hard, was it?
The State Water Resources Control Board has weighed in with its (narrowly confined to water flow-only factors) assessment of what ails the Delta.
Tidily summed up by Kronick, Moskovitz, Tiedemann & Girard, all that needs to happen is for Californians to allow
75% of unimpaired Delta outflow from January through June
75% of unimpaired Sacramento River inflow from November through June
60% of unimpaired San Joaquin River inflow from February through June
Wow. That was really easy. Let’s make it happen, California! All you have to do is use a lot less water! Start by stop growing, developing real estate, and farming in unsustainable, toxic regions!
Of course, the problem is that the state’s citizens want to have their cake and eat it too. They want water, but they don’t want to pay for it. They want schools, but they don’t want to pay for them. They want to be environmental stewards, like their grandparents are, but they don’t, or should we say won’t, pay for that either.
When push comes to shove, the Delta will be the next endangered species to go extinct. The SWRCB report and this map just makes the point that it’s only a matter of time:
According to KMT&G, the report was produced as a consequence of last fall’s assembly votes, the centerpiece of which, the Water Bond, has now fallen through even the Governor’s big hands.
The Governor wanted his cake and eat it, too. Sorry, Governor—no new taxes, no legacy water projects.
All that is left now are bits and pieces from those heady days. Fragments like this SWRCB report, which will be a nuisance to those wishing to export more, not less, water, from the Delta.
But there were other things agreed to last fall. There was the creation of a Delta Watermaster, kind of an ombudsman of water coursing through the Delta. This position has evaporated with the Water Bond.
A majority agreed that, when it came to sharing responsibility for ensuring water supply and ecosystem health, the idea of “co-equality” meant something.
Also agreed to last fall was all sorts spending that, depending on your view and where you lived, was either wasteful pork or necessary investment. What happens to those projects now?
With its report, the SWRCB has done a useful thing, which is to describe the scale of the problem California faces with its water situation. Unfortunately, that problem is so big and so politically intractable that describing it only reinforces just what a doubtful future faces the Delta. Californians have some difficult choices to make.
Manmade weather
Over the past year or so, the DNP has noted how much man made weather has been making the news in California.
Man made droughts, that is.
Droughts caused by men and women who seek to protect “three-inch bait fish.”
Doesn’t it make sense somehow that in some other part of the world the concern is about man made floods?
Like here:
The DNP believes that this clipping illustrates that floods and droughts, like laws and religions, are made by the commissions and omissions of men and women. The pain caused by these acts is experienced by men and women, and that men and women are able to express the effects of that experience to others.
Little fishes like Delta smelts do not have the ability to express the pain they feel, and that is why a whole other group, we might call them other men and women, must do the expressing for them, often in the form of constraints on the ability of men to do what ever they wish to do with “their” land.
Who pays for “co-equal” goals?
One of the points made by some economists opposed to the now terminally ill Water Bond is that it would be paid for by public, but would largely benefit private, interests.
According to this way of thinking, the principle should be that the beneficiary pays. This principle makes good sense, but the devil is in the details, especially because the region that the Bond focuses on, the geography, is a below sea level landscape inhabited by perhaps 50,000 souls who cannot hope to pay for the scope of work the Bond contemplates that serves their interests.
So, Delta ecosystem improvements will not be paid for by Delta residents. Who should pay for them? Sacramento waste water producers? Westlands Water District and Paramount Farms? The cities of Santa Clarita, Santa Monica, San Francisco, San Rafael (actually, no—not San Rafael) and San Bernardino?
All of the above? Certainly, San Franciscans benefit from the bond, even though their water supply is cut out of the Delta watershed long before it arrives there. So does anyone in Crescent City, Santa Barbara or Redding who believes in environmental conservation.
The DNP is a bit confused by this principle of beneficiary pays. Assuming for a moment that the bond actually benefits anyone (as opposed to, say, the shared benefits of increasing water user fees, conservation enforcements, and groundwater regulation—in other words, seriousness on the water issue), who, ultimately, does NOT benefit from the Water Bond?
How can the private beneficiaries be distinguished from the public ones? How does a suburban developer in Palmdale get separated from the person he sold a house to ten years ago?
Let’s face it, honestly parsing these questions would lead to a twenty-two, not a two-party system.
Another point of received wisdom is that the Water Bond was full of “pork” that wouldn’t actually help resolve the state’s water crisis. Dan Walters makes this point in his SacBee piece:
It’s loaded with unconscionable pork—such as a quarter-billion dollars for Schwarzenegger’s pal, billionaire Warren Buffett, to underwrite removal of dams on the Klamath River that have absolutely no connection to California’s water supply.
The DNP guesses that one person’s pork is another person’s job. But really, the point is that the state could use some pork stimulus-packaging its belly. We’d have preferred it was a quarter-billion dollars worth installing metering devices on groundwater pumps in the San Joaquin Valley, but that’s just us.
Can any one help educate the knowledge-poor DNP team on either of these matters?