Sacramento — A coalition of environmental and fishing groups and one California Indian Tribe on November 27 filed a lawsuit against the California Department of Water Resources (DWR) alleging that the agency’s approvals and Environmental Impact Report (EIR) for the long term operation of the State Water Project will harm the San Francisco Bay-Delta estuary and imperiled fish species.
The parties say the project will cause significant harm to seven endangered or threatened fish species, including Delta Smelt, Longfin Smelt, spring-run Chinook Salmon, winter-run Chinook Salmon, Central Valley Steelhead, White Sturgeon and Green Sturgeon.
Delta Smelt have become functionally extinct in the wild, with no Delta Smelt found in the California Department of Fish and Wildlife’s Fall Midwater Trawl Survey for the past six years.
The Petitioners and Plaintiffs include the San Francisco Baykeeper, Sierra Club California, Center for Biological Diversity, California Water Impact Network, Restore the Delta, Friends of the River, Golden State Salmon Association, Winnemem Wintu Tribe, AquAlliance and Planning and Conservation League. The lawsuit was filed in the Sacramento County Superior Court.
In case you’re not familiar with it. the State Water Project (SWP) is the massive system operated by DWR for diverting, storing, exporting, and delivering California water. The SWP diverts enormous volumes of fresh water from the Sacramento River and San Joaquin River watersheds and the San Francisco Bay-Delta estuary for export to San Joaquin Valley agribusiness and Southern California water agencies.
The SWP includes water, power, and conveyance systems, delivering an annual average of 2.9 million acre-feet of water. (EIR, Ch. 2, Project Description, p. 2-1.) That amount of water roughly translates into three times the 1 million acre feet stored in Folsom Lake on the American River when it is full.
“The operation of the Project significantly degrades environmental conditions in the Sacramento River and San Joaquin River watersheds and San Francisco Bay-Delta estuary, including reduced flows, harm to endangered and threatened fish species and adverse modification of their critical habitat, worsened water quality, increased salinity levels, reduced food supply, and increased harmful algal blooms,” the lawsuit states.
“Despite these extensive, negative, and well-documented impacts, DWR implausibly concluded operations of the SWP will have either no impact or less than significant adverse environmental impacts on anything,” the plaintiffs wrote.
The groups also said the EIR fails to “provide the full environmental disclosure and analysis” required by the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), a landmark California environmental law.
The lawsuit noted that “among the most egregious of the EIR’s inadequacies” as an informational document was its failure to analyze for the benefit of the public information from the State Water Resources Control Board prior to the circulation of the Draft EIR.
The document cites the Water Board’s September 28, 2023 Draft Staff Report/Substitute Environmental Document that “contained extensive information about the crisis, facing native fish species and concluded that it was necessary to increase river flows into and through the Delta—meaning far more water would need to bypass DWR’s diversions and less water would be exported by the SWP.”
“With one hand, DWR commented on the Water Board’s Staff Report/SED by a letter on January 22, 2024, expressing concerns that the proposed requirements to protect endangered and threatened fish species could lead to reductions in freshwater diversions for SWP exports. Yet, DWR failed to analyze for the public any alternative that would have reduced water exports as DWR explained would be necessary under the conditions described in the Staff Report,” the document revealed.
Accordingly, the petitioners seek a writ of mandate and declaratory and injunctive relief directing DWR to vacate its approval of the project, the findings for the project, and the certification of the Project EIR, and to revise its findings to conform with the law.
Robert Wright, counsel for Sierra Club California, explained the reasoning behind the lawsuit.
“The whole purpose of the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA ) is to require public agencies, when they’re considering approval of a project, to provide full environmental disclosure to the public and the readers of the EIR of the environmental impacts of the project,” said Wright. ”DWR in the draft EIR, which is issued for the purpose of public review and comment, claimed long term operations will have no adverse environmental impact on anything.”
“Meanwhile, the Draft EIR was issued in May of 2024, but months earlier in January DWR commented on the State Water Board’s September 2023 proposed Bay-Delta Plan Update,” Wright stated. “DWR indicated that the plan update would have adverse consequences for water exports and that the Water Board’s proposed Bay Delta plan update included extensive information about how the endangered and threatened fish species needed increased flows to avoid extinction.”
“The proposed update called for extensive reductions in water exports to both the San Joaquin Valley and to Southern California. That information should have set forth loud and clear in DWR’s draft EIR. Instead DWR said nothing about it except that the Water Board had prepared a proposed plan update. That constituted concealment from the public and was the opposite of everything that CEQA requires to be in a draft EIR,” Wright concluded.
The lawsuit was filed as Governor Gavin Newsom continues to push forward with the controversial Delta Tunnel, Sites Reservoir and the Big Ag-backed voluntary water agreements. A broad coalition of Tribes, environmental NGOs, fishing groups, Delta water agencies, Delta counties, family farmers, environmental justice communities, elected officials and Southern California ratepayers say the Delta Tunnel would hasten the extinction of Sacramento River winter-run and spring-run Chinook Salmon, Delta Smelt, Longfin Smelt, Central Valley Steelhead, Green Sturgeon and White Sturgeon.
