Governor Gavin Newsom appeases Trump on rollback of environmental protections
The Trump administration is the greatest threat to the environment in modern history. Yet California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, is trying to broker Voluntary Settlement Agreements with the Trump administration that would substitute for Clean Water Act and Endangered Species Act (ESA) protections for the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. Senate Bill 1, a watered-down attempt by the state’s democratically controlled Legislature to nullify Trump’s attacks on the environment, was passed on Friday. However, Governor Newsom has announced he intends to veto the bill.
Governor Newsom has claimed that the Voluntary Settlement Agreements are a "new way forward." The admonitions that the agreements will end California's water wars are reminiscent of Chamberlain's rhetoric about the Munich Agreement, "Peace for our time." Chamberlain’s appeasement of the German expansionist empire was doomed. The Voluntary Settlement Agreements, negotiated with the Trump administration behind closed doors, are similarly doomed. They will result in mass extinction of ESA listed aquatic species in the Delta, and the carte blanche exploitation, degradation and demise of the publicly owned waters of the state. The agreements are a recipe for catastrophe and foster an ongoing crisis of water over-allocation, driven by water export contractors.
Let us be clear. The Delta’s crisis is not about “fish versus farmers.” The state and federal water export contractors are resource extractors, just like California's oil and gas industry. They have relentlessly pumped tens-of-millions of dollars into lobbying and PR campaigns to gut restrictions on Delta export pumping, just as the oil and gas industry aim to gut restrictions on oil and gas extraction.
We’ve also been here before. Voluntary Settlement Agreements in California water are not new. They have a disastrous track record. The 1994 Bay-Delta Accord, signed 25 years ago, espoused the same hoopla that collaboration and habitat restoration and voluntary efforts to increase flows in the Delta would restore fisheries and increase reliability of water supplies.
Over $8.4 billion in taxpayer borrowed money ($13.5 billion with interest) was spent under the CalFed program, while fish populations in the Delta crashed. Adaptive management under CalFed also failed. Joe Grindstaff, former director of CalFed acknowledged: "Fundamentally, the system we devised didn't work." Felicia Marcus, former chair, State Water Resources Control Board stated in 2018 that “Some native fish species have been pushed to the edge of extinction in an ecosystem on the verge of collapse.”
Recommendations by independent and agency biologists to increase flows to restore fish populations have been blocked for decades by the water export contractors’ opposition, effectively delaying the Water Board actions. On the eve of the Water Board’s finally taking long needed regulatory actions, the Voluntary Settlement Agreements were championed by the Brown administration and supported by the Newsom administration.
Instead of being based on the Water Board's independent 2017 Scientific and Technical Basis report, the Voluntary Settlement Agreements are based on studies paid for by the water export contractors. Such studies are not new. The water contractors have been producing them for decades. The studies all have one thing in common: they find that restrictions on Delta export pumping to protect fish are not needed. The studies are also contrary to decades of scientific consensus by fish agency and independent biologists that water exports are a major contributing factor to the decline of pelagic and anadromous fish populations in the Delta.
Meanwhile, the commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation has stated that Reclamation will not recognize the Water Board’s authority to require increased outflows to protect fisheries. The Trump administration has also fired the team of federal biologists who were reviewing proposed changes to operations of the federal and state water projects.
Unfortunately protection of public’s trust resources has been “Trumped” by half-truths and Orwellian rhetoric.