Please join a coalition of environmental, Tribal, fishing and environmental justice groups on Tuesday, February 2 to urge the State Water Resources Control Board to adopt and implement new flow standards.
More flow is needed to protect the fish and wildlife in the Bay-Delta ecosystem and the rivers that flow into it – including the salmon runs that support salmon fishing jobs from Morro Bay to Fisherman’s Wharf and into Oregon. The State Board has been paralyzed for years. We need strong public support to get them to do their job.
Meeting Time: The meeting will be held on: Tuesday, February 2, 9:00 AM.
How to Join: You can join the meeting by video conference call at this link: https://www.youtube.com/user/BoardWebSupport/ or https://video.calepa.ca.gov/
Instructions about how to testify can be found here: https://www.waterboards.ca.gov/board_info/remote_meeting/
Talking Points: Here are some suggested talking points for your testimony from John McManus, President of the Golden State Salmon Association:
• I urge you to restart the State Board process to set and implement Bay-Delta flow standards. It is time for you to do your job.
• The salmon fishing industry was shut down entirely in 2008-2009 because of collapsing Bay-Delta salmon runs. Salmon jobs and salmon runs have still not fully recovered from that disaster. Improved flows are needed to restore healthy salmon runs and salmon fishing jobs.
• Science shows – as your work has confirmed – that inadequate flow standards are the driver of the collapse of Bay-Delta fish species.
• The State Board is the only agency with the authority and legal responsibility to provide enough water flow in our rivers to keep the fall run and our salmon fishing industry healthy.
• The current flow standards are 25 years old. Those standards have failed.
• It has been more than 2 years since the Board adopted new flow standards for the San Joaquin River. Since that date, the ecosystem has continued to decline. Delta smelt are on the brink of extinction. Yet your process has remained stalled.
• Talks to produce a voluntary agreement – as an alternative to State Board action – have failed. This is not a serious effort to develop a solution. It’s simply a strategy to encourage you to continue to delay.
• Today is Groundhog Day. And it feels like it. We have heard water users promise voluntary agreements for years. And yet an adequate VA never arrives. And the Board keeps delaying. And that pattern goes on and on.
Feel free to tell a story about your personal experience on these issues.
Background: The State Board is the only agency with the authority to require adequate flows to protect all Bay-Delta Species, including commercially important salmon runs. The current flow standards were adopted in 1995 – more than a quarter century ago. Since then, the Bay-Delta ecosystem and the salmon fishing industry have suffered one crisis after another.
Six species are now protected under the state and federal Endangered Species Acts, including winter run Chinook salmon, spring run Chinook salmon and Central Valley steelhead. Toxic algae blooms are a growing public health threat in the Delta.
For the third year in a row, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife found zero Delta Smelt (Hypomesus transpacificus) in its 2020 Fall Midwater Trawl Survey throughout the Delta. Not only did the survey catch zero Delta Smelt, but it also found zero Sacramento Splittail, a native minnow that was removed from the Endangered Species list by the Bush administration.
“All signs point to the Delta smelt as disappearing from the wild this year, or, perhaps, 2022,” according to a California Water Blog post by Peter Moyle, Karrigan Börk, John Durand, T-C Hung and Andrew L. Rypel. “In case you had forgotten, the Delta smelt is an attractive, translucent little fish that eats plankton, has a one-year life cycle, and smells like cucumbers.”
The zero Delta Smelt and Sacramento Splittail found in the survey reflect an ongoing collapse of pelagic (open water) fish species in the Delta that also includes Longfin Smelt, Striped Bass, Threadfin Shad and American Shad.
An overwhelming amount of scientific work demonstrates that the Bay-Delta’s environmental problems are driven primarily by a lack of freshwater flow. On rivers like the Tuolumne River, in dry years, more than 90% of natural flow is diverted. And two of the largest water projects on the planet divert millions of acre feet of water from the Delta annually.
In December of 2018, the State Board set new standards to require a significant increase in flows on the San Joaquin River and its tributary rivers. However, the Board has not yet implemented those standards. The Newsom Administration has urged the State Board to delay the process to allow time for negotiations to reach a “voluntary agreement” in which water users would agree to provide water flows and habitat improvements. However, the VA process has collapsed. Draft VAs have been dramatically inadequate.
Today, many of the largest water users in the state and the federal government are no longer participating in negotiations. Indeed, the original deadline for a final VA proposal was 4 years ago. Yet the State Board has still not restarted its Bay-Delta standards process. The VA process is now simply a strategy to continue the State Board’s long delay.