Fishing, environmental, farming groups will sue to halt Delta Plan
June 14, 2014 | By Dan Bacher | In the latest escalation of the California water wars, a statewide coalition of fishing, environmen...
https://www.elkgrovenews.net/2013/06/fishing-environmental-farming-groups.html
June 14, 2014 | By Dan Bacher |
In
the latest escalation of the California water wars, a statewide
coalition of fishing, environmental and farming groups on Monday, June
17 will announce the filing of a lawsuit to stop the Delta Plan, a
document that lays the groundwork for the Delta water export tunnels.
The
details of the lawsuit will be released to the media in a conference
call and press release. The groups filing the litigation include the
California Water Impact Network (C-WIN), California Sportfishing
Protection Alliance, AquAlliance, Restore the Delta, Friends of the
River and Center for Biological Diversity.
"The
Delta Reform Act gave the Delta Stewardship Council a historic
opportunity to remedy 40 years of water policy failures,” said Santa
Barbara resident Carolee Krieger, executive director of the California
Water Impact Network (C-WIN), a statewide water advocacy organization.
"The
council instead failed to use the best available science – biological
or economic - and adopted a status quo program that fails to fix the
Delta or the water supply problem. The Council failed to honor its own
mandate: the adoption of an effective strategy for the distribution of
water and the preservation of the Delta,” Krieger stated.
The
conference call will feature Carolee Krieger, representing C-WIN; Bill
Jennings, California Sportfishing Protection Alliance; Barbara Vlamis,
AquAlliance; Barbara Barrigan-Parrilla, Restore the Delta; Michael
Jackson, Attorney for several groups; Bob Wright, Attorney for Friends
of the River; Adam Lazar, Center for Biological Diversity.
Attorney
Mike Jackson said the lawsuit’s purpose is to rectify the Delta
Stewardship Council’s ignoring of the requirements placed on them by the
Delta Reform Act.
Jackson
explained, “As an example, the Delta Reform Act told the State Water
Resources Control Board to do a water flow investigation to find out
what it would take to protect the estuary. The state board turned in a
flow recommendation and the Council didn't use the flows in the plan.”
“The
Delta Reform Act also instructed the California Department of Fish and
Wildlife to report to the Council what the biological objectives should
be for species in the Delta. The CDFW wrote hundreds of pages in a
report and turned it in to the Council. The Council not only did not use
it, but didn't even mention the goals and objectives in the plan,” he
said.
“Finally,
the Delta Reform Act instructed the Delta Protection Commission to
write a report about economic sustainability. The Commission wrote the
report and turned it in to the Council - and again, they didn't use it,”
said Jackson.
The common thread?
“In all three cases, the documents were inconvenient to the approval of the tunnels," Jackson emphasized.
Jackson said the Delta Plan also violated the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) in ten different ways.
For more information, contact: Steve Hopcraft 916/457-5546; steve [at] hopcraft.com Twitter: @shopcraft.
The
litigation by Delta advocates follows the lawsuit filed by the
Westlands Water District and San Luis and Delta-Mendota Water Authority
on May 24 to require the Delta Stewardship Council to revise the Delta Plan "to be consistent with the 2009 Delta Reform Act, which created the
Council."
"In
particular, the action asserts that the Delta Plan fails to achieve the
co-equal goals of Delta ecosystem restoration and water supply
reliability established by the Act," the district said.
“The
Delta Plan may be the most incomplete environmental document I’ve ever
seen and, in that regard, I do agree with Westlands,” said Jackson.
In
other Delta news, a group of over 30 organizations from across the
political spectrum have formed Californians for a Fair Water Policy.
This statewide coalition is working to defeat the $54.1 billion tunnels
project that will “unfairly and unnecessarily burden California’s
taxpayers, ratepayers, and the environment.”
Besides
being enormously expensive, the construction of the tunnels is likely
to hasten the extinction of Central Valley Chinook salmon, Delta and
longfin smelt and other fish species and would take vast areas of Delta
farmland, among the most fertile on the planet, out of production in
order to provide massive amounts of water to irrigate drainage impaired
land on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley. The Delta Plan lays the
groundwork for the construction of the salmon-killing tunnels.
To my knowledge, no river system or estuary has ever been restored by taking more water out of it.
More information about the battle to fight the tunnels is available at http://www.restorethedelta.org.
1 comment
Thank you Mr. Bacher for keeping us informed.
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