The new name that the state and federal governments have given to the former Bay Delta Conservation Plan to build Governor Jerry Brown's massive Delta tunnels is the "California Water Fix" - and it appears that "the fix is in" on this plan, judging from the latest developments.
Even though the public comment period for the environmental impact report for the Delta tunnels plan won’t end until October 30, the Department of Water Resources and US Bureau of Reclamation today jointly submitted a permit application to began clearing the path for the controversial water diversion project that imperils the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, the largest estuary on the West Coast of the Americas.
The petition requests the State Water Resources Control Board (SWRCB)'s approval to add three points of diversion and rediversion from the Sacramento River to the existing water right permits and existing diversion authorization held by the State Water Project and Central Valley Project.
"This is an important milestone for the project that brings with it additional opportunities for public participation in important regulatory processes related to the federal Clean Water Act and California water rights, including submission of comment and testimony,” according to the announcement from the “California Water Fix."
The permit application is available here: https://s3.amazonaws.com/...
However, Delta advocates disagreed with the agencies' rosy assessment of this "important milestone," noting that the joint state and federal request to add three additional points of water diversion from the Sacramento River to supply the State Water and Central Valley Projects amounts to “steamrolling ahead” with the project before the EIR process is completed.
Restore the Delta, in a statement, noted that the three intakes would each have a capacity of 3,000 cubic feet per second. “That potential 9,000 cfs is a shocking amount of water exports considering that TODAY, the Sacramento is so dry it occasionally runs backward at Freeport station at high tide,” said Barbarra Barrigan-Parrilla, Executive Director of Restore the Delta.
The group said the exported water would not be allowed to flow through the Delta where it is needed for farming, drinking water, and the protection of endangered species including the Chinook Salmon, the Delta Smelt and the Greater Sandhill Crane. The water would instead be diverted into two 30-mile-long, 40-foot diameter tunnels beneath the Delta directly to the state and federal projects, then conveyed to corporate agribusiness interests irrigating toxic, drainage impaired land on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, and oil companies conducting fracking and extreme extraction methods.
Osha Meserve, a Delta water rights attorney, observed, “This application looks like a rush job, it’s not even filled out completely. The petition just says ‘see EIR’ for much of the basic info. Good luck finding that in the 48,000 pages of cross-referenced material with multiple errata. This application is a real sales pitch and it’s full of holes.”
To show what a badly rushed job the state and federal agencies are doing pushing these permits, even the phone number listed in the Department of Water Resources announcement, "CONTACT US | 866.924.9255," is not working! If you call that number, rather than getting information about the California Water Fix, you will hear an offer for a $100 rebate for purchases at stores such as Walmart and Target!
Every scientific panel, ranging from federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) scientists to the Delta Independent Science Board, has strongly criticized the Bay Delta Conservation Plan because it was based on the fatal and fallacious premise that you can restore an estuary hemorrhaging from a lack of flow by depriving it of another 2.5 million acre-feet of flow. The EPA last August wrote a scathing 43-page comment letter on the BDCP’s draft Environmental Impact Report/Environmental Impact Statement (EIR/EIS). (http://calsport.org/...)
It is extremely unlikely that the federal and state scientific panels would approve the "new" California Water Fix, since it is based on the same fallacious premise as the BDCP.
“It’s astounding these agencies continue to steamroll the tunnels project as if federal permits won’t again be rejected on environmental grounds, or that water district funding won’t dry up when they realize what a boondoggle the tunnels are,” said Barbara Barrigan-Parrilla.
She said this petition seeks to permit the construction of the tunnels before the required consideration of the water quality impacts on the San Francisco Bay-Delta Estuary.
"This permit application, along with the recent documents we revealed showing plans to take hundreds of Delta farms through eminent domain, show these agencies consider the democratic process is just a side show because Governor Jerry Brown and corporate interests in Southern California are demanding action. The process has become profoundly anti-democratic,” concluded Barrigan-Parrilla.
Yes, "the fix is in," the California Water Fix, that is. If the agencies can't even get a phone number right, how can we possibly trust the state and federal governments to build one of the biggest public works project in California history? And how can we trust them to protect Chinook Salmon, Delta Smelt, Greater Sandhill Cranes and a host of other species from extinction?