Sacramento Bee Criticized, Called 'Outlier' by 'Restore the Delta' Over Tonight's Water Forum

By Dan Bacher | July 13, 2016 |

In the latest event in the battle to stop Governor Jerry Brown’s Delta Tunnels Plan, Delta residents, farmers, fishermen and San Francisco Bay Area conservationists will be asking hard questions at what they described as a “biased Sacramento Bee event” tonight, July 13, at 6 p.m. at the Sacramento Bee, 2100 Q Street, in Sacramento.

The event is entitled “a conversation about water” between Dan Morain, the Sacramento Bee's editorial page editor, and Jeffrey Kightlinger, general manager and chief executive officer for The Metropolitan Water District (MWD) of Southern California.
Jeffrey Kightlinger, general
manager and chief executive
officer for The Metropolitan
 Water District (MWD)
of Southern California.

According to an announcement from the Sacramento Bee, the two will “discuss solutions on the use of Northern California water and resources serving Southern California markets. A Q&A session will follow the talk.”

The Metropolitan Water District is the largest municipal water provider in the nation, delivering an average of over 2 billion gallons of water a day to 19 million customers across Southern California, and is one of key promoters of the Delta Tunnels, renamed the California WaterFix last year.

You can buy buy tickets here.

Fishermen, farmers, and Delta residents denounced this “pro-tunnels sales pitch” as an “insult to Northern Californians.”

Restore the Delta (RTD) said they made repeated requests to Sacramento Bee editor, Dan Morain, to balance the event with an opposing expert to debate the Delta Tunnels proposal.

“Email and phone requests were ignored,” according to RTD executive director Barbara Barrigan-Parrilla. “Restore the Delta proposed a highly credentialed opponent of the Delta Tunnels - Jonas Minton, the former Deputy Director of the California Department of Water Resources – to also be a speaker.”

“A debate with the head of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California would be of enormous public benefit,” said Barrigan-Parrilla. “We offered an expert for such an event. Unfortunately, tonight Sacramento Bee editorial page editor Dan Morian will instead host a sales pitch for the Delta Tunnels.”

Barrigan-Parrilla, referring to one of the darkest chapters in Los Angeles water history, the dewatering of the Owens Valley by the LA Department of Power and Water, said SF Bay-Delta estuary residents “will not let their home become the next Owens Valley.”

“Metropolitan Water District of Southern California is orchestrating one of the largest water grabs in California history. Most Northern California newspaper editorial boards have already expressed their opposition to the destructive Delta Tunnels proposal. The Sacramento Bee is the outlier,” she said.







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