SACRAMENTO – As a closure of salmon fishing on the state’s ocean waters and rivers continues to devastate fishing communities around California, a coalition of Tribal, fishing, and conservation organizations this week submitted official comments on the Department of Water Resources (DWR) on its 2023 Update of the California Water Plan (2023 Plan Update).
The coalition includes the Shingle Springs Band of Miwok Indians, Defenders of Wildlife, Friends of the River, California Sportfishing Protection Alliance, Golden State Salmon Association, Restore the Delta, Institute for Fisheries Resources, Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations, Save California Salmon, Sierra Club California, and Tuolumne River Trust.
“DWR needs to drastically amend the 2023 Plan Update to bring water supplies and demands into balance to truly achieve equity for all, to strengthen watershed resilience, and create a plan for addressing climate urgency,” according to the comments. “The revised Plan Update 2023 must eliminate problematic policy proposals that undermine these goals such as the Delta Conveyance Project, Sites Reservoir, and the Voluntary Agreements and support the long-overdue update process of the Bay-Delta Plan.”
“The Plan Update must also acknowledge the importance of restoring our Chinook salmon populations alongside a commitment to ecosystem health through enforcement of regulatory protections. Finally, DWR must also describe robust plans to act on mitigation of HABs, to rethink backbone system operations to respond to changing climatic conditions in the present such as increased flood risk, and improve other pressing water quality conditions to protect Tribes and frontline Delta communities,” the comments stated.
On a positive note, the Tribes and groups wrote, “It is also encouraging to see that DWR has a chapter on Tribal Resources and acknowledges that since time immemorial, Tribes have stewarded the land and waters of California. However, DWR needs to do a much better job of incorporating Tribal Ecological Knowledge into the decision-making process to help mitigate serious environmental impacts on Tribal Beneficial Uses. This includes recognizing the importance of HABs on Tribal Beneficial Uses of rivers and the Bay-Delta estuary.”
Representatives of three of the groups filing the comments urged the Water Board to “drastically amend” the California Water Plan and discussed some of the multitude of flaws in the plan.
“As a coalition, we strongly urge DWR to drastically amend the 2023 Water Plan Update,” stated Jann Dorman, Executive Director of Friends of the River. “This proposal does not match the urgency of California’s water crisis which has been exacerbated by the very policies previous Water Plans have authorized. We need to accept that small fixes to a broken system are not close to enough.”
“The California Water Plan is an important water management policy document, and while the draft 2023 update had admirable themes, it lacked consistent actions to achieve its goals of increasing watershed resilience and achieving equity,” said Ashley Overhouse, Water Policy Advisor for Defenders of Wildlife. “Defenders was also disappointed to see that the draft Plan declined to prioritize ecosystem health or even mention the state’s declining Chinook salmon populations while promoting scientifically inadequate and inequitable policy schemes such as the Voluntary Agreements and the Delta Conveyance Project.”
“California desperately needs to balance its water budget,” concluded Chris Shutes, Executive Director of California Sportfishing Protection Alliance. “Sheer numbers require a modern California Water Plan to present a comprehensive roadmap to reduce aggregate agricultural water demand. This Draft Plan doesn't come close. Leaving the market to randomly weed out water use without consideration of the social consequences is the avoidance of a plan, and it is also deeply inequitable.”
As the comments were submitted, all recreational and commercial fishing on the ocean in all of California and most of Oregon is closed, due to the collapse of Sacramento River and Klamath/Trinity River fall-run Chinook salmon populations spurred by poor water and fishery management by the state and federal governments, according to salmon advocates.
Recreational salmon fishing on the Sacramento and Klamath rivers is closed and tribal fishing for salmon on the Hoopa Valley Reservation on the Trinity River and the Yurok Reservation on the Klamath River is severely restricted this year. The total tribal allocation for Klamath River fall-run Chinook salmon on the Klamath River system is 1872 adult fish this year, according to NOAA Fisheries: www.fisheries.noaa.gov/..
The Yurok Tribe is allocated 80 percent of the salmon, while the Hoopa Valley Tribe is allocated 20 percent of the fish. That doesn’t make for many fish when you consider that there are 6,357 enrolled members of the Yurok Tribe, the largest Tribe in California, and 3,167 enrolled members of the Hoopa Valley Tribe.
As fishing closure continues, the Newsom administration continues to push the environmentally destructive Delta Tunnel project, Sites Reservoir and the voluntary agreements. These projects will only hasten the extinction of Sacramento winter-run and spring-run Chinook salmon, Delta and longfin smelt, green sturgeon and other species.
The situation is so dire now that the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) has not found one Delta smelt, once the most abundant fish in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta Estuary, in its fall midwater trawl survey throughout the Delta for the past five years.
I will be reporting monthly on the results of the CDFW’s fall midwater trawl survey as soon as they are posted: wildlife.ca.gov/…
ACTION ALERT - Bay-Delta Plan Staff Report from Restore the Delta:
Sacramento River Flow HEARINGS:
November 17th, December 1st, and December 11th
Restore the Delta and partners have been advocating through petitions filed with the State Water Resources Control Board, and with US EPA, for movement by the State Water Board to finish the Bay-Delta Plan. While we wait for implementation of Phase I (San Joaquin River flows) which was approved December 2018 and delayed due to the “voluntary agreements” process, the Delta has suffered for decades without updated water quality and flow standards that protect communities, culture, fisheries, recreation, and agriculture.
Now is the time for you to help us advocate for an improved Bay-Delta estuary!
WHO: State Water Resources Control Board Public Hearings
WHAT: Public Hearings (Panels and Individual Comments) for Phase II of the Bay-Delta Plan. Staff Report, which focuses on Sacramento River flows. Here is a link to the 5000-plus page report.
WHEN: November 17th, 9:30 am; December 1st, 9:30 am; and December 11th, 4:00 pm.
WHERE: Cal EPA Building, 1001 I Street, Sacramento or attend on Zoom.
HOW: You can organize a panel to make comments or speak individually. Panels are 20 minutes in length; individual comments are 5 minutes (about 450 words when drafting). The State Board, however, is only allowing individuals to speak once, either on a panel or individually over the course of the 3 days.
IMPORTANT!
You MUST REGISTER by November 3, 2023, or you cannot participate in the public hearings. (We know, not an easy process that welcomes the public.) Here is the link to register.
WHY: The Staff Report for the Bay-Delta Plan contains the “voluntary agreements” – a private, incomplete, and discriminatory process – in which most Californians were left out of having a say in water allocations and river and Bay-Delta protections – not to mention the disparate impacts these agreements will cause for tribal and environmental justice communities.
Additionally, the Staff Report doesn’t contain a proposed project, but rather, a recommended alternative with options, through which the Board can put together a Bay-Delta Plan that serves political interests, rather than science-based objectives to restore our fisheries and environmental health.
WHAT WE ARE SEEING:
- As currently drafted, the Plan is incomplete and inadequate for fisheries and the overall health of the Bay-Delta estuary.
- A proposed alternative of 55% unimpaired flows for the Sacramento River with a range of 45-65%, will not save native fisheries, and fisheries will continue to slide into extinction. While there isn’t a stable proposed project because Board members are being offered alternatives with additional a la carte management options, 65% minimum unimpaired flows gets us closer to fish recovery, and 75% is the best based on established science. There is no plan of implementation for the proposed alternative which should have been finished over the last five years.
- There is no harmful algal bloom standard to protect people who come in contact with waterways. There isn’t a real strategy for how harmful algal blooms will be tracked, identified, and mitigated.
- The voluntary agreements, which are offered as an option, do not set water quality objectives -- so the voluntary agreements cannot meet the objectives of the Bay-Delta Plan.
- The voluntary agreements, as included in this draft, do not include an implementation plan, meaning that the public will have to comment on implementation later. This keeps us in a perpetual cycle of reacting to a Bay-Delta that is never finished.
- Beneficial uses are identified in this plan, i.e., agriculture, fisheries, recreation, drinking water, but the Plan does not define Tribal Beneficial Uses, which is a continuation of discriminatory practices.
- The staff report only looked at groundwater and drinking water, not cultural or recreational uses. The Environmental Justice analysis for the Delta is inadequate seeing it doesn't cover 72 small drinking water systems.
- The voluntary agreements do not address cold water pools upstream needed for fisheries and do not contain storage thresholds.
- The Staff Report does identify the beneficial uses of a healthy river and estuary, and healthy fisheries within the cost benefit analysis. Cost benefits are mostly related to water exports.