In the latest event in the battle to stop Governor Jerry Brown’s Delta Tunnels Plan, Delta residents, farmers, fishermen and San Francisco Bay Area conservationists will be asking hard questions at what they described as a “biased Sacramento Bee event” tonight, July 13, at 6:00 pm at The Sacramento Bee, 2100 Q Street, in Sacramento.
The event is entitled “A Conversation About Water” between Dan Morain, the Sacramento Bee's editorial page editor, and Jeffrey Kightlinger, general manager and chief executive officer for The Metropolitan Water District (MWD) of Southern California.
According to an announcement from the Sacramento Bee, the two will “discuss solutions on the use of Northern California water and resources serving Southern California markets. A Q&A session will follow the talk.”
The Metropolitan Water District is the largest municipal water provider in the nation, delivering an average of over 2 billion gallons of water a day to 19 million customers across Southern California. MWD is one of the key promoters of the Delta Tunnels, renamed the “California WaterFix” last year.
You can buy buy tickets here.
Fishermen, farmers, and Delta residents denounced this “pro-tunnels sales pitch” as an “insult to Northern Californians.”
In a statement, Restore the Delta (RTD) said they made repeated requests to Sacramento Bee editor, Dan Morain, to balance the event with an opposing expert to debate the Delta Tunnels proposal.
“Email and phone requests were ignored,” according to RTD executive director Barbara Barrigan-Parrilla. “Restore the Delta proposed a highly credentialed opponent of the Delta Tunnels - Jonas Minton, the former Deputy Director of the California Department of Water Resources – to also be a speaker.”
“A debate with the head of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California would be of enormous public benefit,” said Barrigan-Parrilla. “We offered an expert for such an event. Unfortunately, tonight Sacramento Bee editorial page editor Dan Morian will instead host a sales pitch for the Delta Tunnels.”
Barrigan-Parrilla, referring to one of the darkest chapters in Los Angeles water history, the dewatering of the Owens River and Valley by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP), said SF Bay-Delta estuary residents “will not let their home become the next Owens Valley.”
“Metropolitan Water District of Southern California is orchestrating one of the largest water grabs in California history. Most Northern California newspaper editorial boards have already expressed their opposition to the destructive Delta Tunnels proposal. The Sacramento Bee is the outlier,” she said.
Delta advocates consider the tunnels plan to be the most environmentally destructive public works project in California history. They said the plan would hasten the extinction of Sacramento River winter-run Chinook salmon, Central Valley steelhead, Delta and longfin smelt, green sturgeon and other fish species, as well as imperil the salmon and steelhead populations on the Trinity and Klamath rivers.
Below are Restore the Delta’s questions for MWD’s Jeff Kightlinger and the Sacramento Bee’s Dan Morain:
Questions for MWD’s Jeff Kightlinger:
1. Why does MWD staff continue to tell MWD board members that the Delta Tunnels will provide them more water when it is clear that climate change will lead to less snowpack in the Sierra Nevada and reduce flows to fill the tunnels?
2. Are you confident that your property-tax payers and ratepayers understand the magnitude of potential costs of this risky and expensive project that will take 14 years to build if all goes according to plan? Do your ratepayers understand the project will not bring them any drought relief?
3. Given these high stakes for the public, will you pledge to give ratepayers and property tax- payers a vote on the project? Will you pledge that there will be no cost overruns and the project will be completed on time?
4. Can you provide us with Metropolitan’s cost-benefit analysis that has been used to arrive at the conclusion to support the project? How many billions of dollars will Metropolitan Water District be paying for its share of the project?
5. Official State environmental documents indicate that the tunnels cannot increase water exports out of the Bay-Delta Estuary without unacceptable sacrifices to water quality protections for the Bay-Delta and for endangered species. Will you commit to accepting no additional exports (or even less water) from the Delta if the tunnels are built to protect Bay-Delta water quality and species?
6. Metropolitan is proposing to spend hundreds of millions on the purchase of the Delta Islands with a declaration that “no” decision has been made to use these islands as a means to export more water. Will you pledge today that the islands will not be used as a means to take even more water from this imperiled estuary?
7. Can you promise that the Delta Islands purchase will not be paid for by California taxpayers, such as by applying for Proposition 1 funding, to meet your existing mitigation obligations for present water exports from this imperiled estuary?
Questions for Sac Bee’s Dan Morain:
1. Readers and residents deserve a vibrant debate over the Delta Tunnels and Metropolitan’s purchase of five Delta Islands. Why instead do we get this one-sided PR event?
2. Is the Sacramento Bee Editorial Board biased in favor of the Delta Tunnels?
3. Why does your newspaper refuse to ask hard questions about water availability and costs?
“Delta Advocates had originally planned a public demonstration in front of the Bee and had more than 100 RSVPs but chose to cancel the protest considering recent civil unrest across the nation,” RTD noted.
Media Contacts:
Barbara Barrigan-Parrilla, 209-479-2053 restorethedelta.org
Brian Smith, 415-320-9384 bpspr.com