Playing the Odds with
Environmental Water
By Tim Stroshane
In July 2003, the bucolic Napa Valley hosted the California
water industry’s current effort to rationalize the water
system it so uneasily controls. The industry’s new technological
consensus is called the Napa Proposition. If implemented,
the 11-page plan would enable the water industry to
export more water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River
Delta.1
But that may be just the beginning. Amid Napa’s
Mediterranean splendor, state and federal water contractors
and bureaucrats of the State Water Project (SWP) and the
federal Central Valley Project (CVP) negotiated toward a
future they probably hope will result in merger of the
projects into one hydraulic regime; risk-free security for their
water deliveries; minimal compliance with the federal
Endangered Species Act; and expansion of their canal and
reservoir facilities as contemplated in the CalFED Record of
Decision (ROD) of August 2000.2
The two projects divert water north and south of the Delta
into export pumps near Tracy (see image, page 7). This water
is delivered via the Delta-Mendota Canal and the California
Aqueduct for agribusiness irrigation and southern California
cities (see map, page 9). Together the projects deliver in
excess of 5 to 7 million acre-feet of water each year to places
in California that normally experience very little rainfall.3
Government estimates put the Proposition’s increased
deliveries between 200,000 and 1 million acre-feet a year.4
Each project has its own set of pumps, each capable of
pumping the equivalent of substantial rivers. Maximum
capacity for the CVP pumps is 4,600 cubic feet per second
(cfs), while the maximum capacity of the SWP pumps is
more than twice that, 10,300 cfs. The total for both sets of
pumps is nearly 15,000 cfs; but under earlier permits from
the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and a 1995 Delta Water
Quality Control Plan, the state’s pumps are regulated to
pump only a maximum of 6,680 cfs at specific times of the
year.
During January 2004, for comparison, average total Delta
exports from both sets of pumps were 11,391 cfs, about one quarter
of average Delta outflow in January 2004. Combining
the controlled flows of all Central Valley rivers to the
Carquinez Straits and the Bay, Delta outflow was 44,487
cfs.5
To avoid impacts on endangered fish and Delta water
quality, the two big water projects must come up with a lot of
extra water to make things work out for everyone. The
increase from the regulated maximum rate of 6,680 cfs to
8,500 cfs at the SWP pumps could occur as early as this fall.
The CalFED ROD calls for export pumping at the SWP
pumps to top out eventually at 10,300 cfs, an increase of
about 66 percent over current pumping rates.6
The success of the Napa Proposition turns on whether the
water it will need actually exists somewhere in California’s
fabulously complex rivers and its water rights and hydraulic
systems. That’s another topic, full of intrigue. Suffice it to
say that environmentalists and Delta water interests believe
the Napa Proposition will be too much water exported from
the Delta too soon, resulting in another ecological crash,
especially for endangered fish species there. For them,
CalFED’s water quality, fisheries, and ecosystem restoration
programs move too slowly and are short of funds, and yet
these programs were key assurances to environmental
interests, bartered as part of the CalFED ROD.7
Is Napa CalFED?
Increased exports from the Delta by the SWP and CVP
were called for in August 2000 in the CalFED ROD, massing
the bureaucratic inertia of the CVP and SWP projects behind
the Napa Proposition. It’s hard to imagine there being a
damned thing anyone can do to stop the revving of the Delta
export pumps.
Environmentalists maintain that CalFED stands for
ecosystem restoration and fisheries protection first, but when
one reads CalFED reports and plans it is difficult to sustain
that view. CalFED’s top priority is to increase California’s
“water supply reliability.” Restoring compromised fisheries
and ecosystems is in CalFED’s plans an important means to
the end of delivering fresh water to the state’s growing
capitalist economy and largely urban population, but not an
end in itself.8
Under CalFED, public trust resource protection evolved
from a legal theory best embodied in the Mono Lake
decision of 1983 (that is, the state is responsible for protecting public trust resources using its police power) to a market
theory (that is, the government should give private water
users financial incentives to protect public resources),
deteriorating into a reality in which water project operators
and fisheries managers assume all risks of gambling public
funds in the water market for the survival of endangered
species, while guaranteeing water contractors risk-free,
reliable water supplies.
Environmental mainstays at the innumerable CalFED
meetings of the 1990s included Environmental Defense,
Natural Resources Defense Council, the Bay Institute of San
Francisco, Save San Francisco Bay Association, Sierra Club,
Natural Heritage Institute, Friends of the River, the League
of Women Voters of California, and the Mono Lake Committee.
These organizations tried to keep pace with CalFED’s
all-out blitz of a planning process between 1995 and 20009.
Their technical and lobbying expertise are vital to grassroots
environmental protection groups, who haven’t the resources
to bird-dog CalFED.
The Napa Proposition’s stated purpose is “to maximize
water supplies for the benefit of both CVP and SWP contracts
that rely on water delivered from the Bay-Delta in a
manner that (1) will not impair in-Delta uses, and (2) will be
consistent with fishery, water quality and other flow and
operational requirements imposed under the federal Clean
Water Act, Endangered Species Act, the Central Valley
Project Improvement Act, and the CalFED Record of
Decision.”
The proposition calls for the two projects to:
• Continue a wholesome-sounding program called the
Environmental Water Account (EWA), including a detailed
plan for financing and operating the EWA. More on this
below.
• Help each other meet wildlife refuge water needs and
Delta water quality requirements.
• Share information, and their reservoirs and pumping
plants, “without impeding existing uses of those facilities” in
order to accommodate increased water market transfers.
• Share “risk-taking” to “minimize exposure of project
contractors to possible loss of water.”
Once undertaken, these “sharing” tenets of Napa would
ease the eventual merger of the SWP and the CVP, probably
under the State of California’s control.10
Environmental activists are nonetheless angry about the
Napa Proposition, publicly expressing a clichéd populist
indignation about CalFED innovations contained in the
document—especially the Environmental Water Account,
which some among them claim as their idea.
“The process [for the Napa Proposition] stunk,” Tom
Graff, regional director of Environmental Defense in
Oakland, fumed to the Bakersfield Californian in August.
“The contractors and the Department of Water Resources and
the Bureau of Reclamation got together and divvied up the delta’s water and decided to jack up exports and didn’t
bother to include any environmental interests.”11 Environmental
Defense has advocated for a water transfer market
since before the defeat of the Peripheral Canal in 1982.
Barry Nelson, a senior policy analyst with Natural
Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and a long-time water
warrior who cut his teeth on environmental water politics
with Save San Francisco Bay Association, issued an NRDC
communiqué charging that the Napa agreement was “a backroom
deal” that will result in poorer water quality in the
Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.
“The big contractors are just cherry-picking the parts of
CalFED that they like,” groused Eric Wesselman of the
Sierra Club. “Napa shows a disregard for the standards and
obligations outlined in the CalFED Record of Decision and
its regulatory underpinnings. This is the biggest, baddest
diversion from CalFED yet.”12
“Their basic premise [of environmental critics] is to
oppose improvement of the water supply for the projects, so
of course they’re going to scream and yell,” retorted Tom
Clark, General Manager of the Kern County Water Agency
(KCWA), the largest state water contractor representing
mostly agricultural water users in the San Joaquin Valley.
Clark told the Bakersfield Californian the parties to the Napa
Proposition were merely working out details of the proposal
for increased pumping in the Delta that had already been
agreed to by environmentalists in the CalFED ROD.13 “It
looks like the environmentalists no longer want to abide by
that agreement,” Clark added. KCWA expects to receive an
average of 50,000 acre-feet more in deliveries should Napa
come to pass.14
“Frankly,” says Tim Quinn, a vice-president for SWP
resources with Metropolitan Water District of Southern
California (MWD), the state’s largest water wholesaler, “it’s
a difficult question to say what’s CalFED and what’s Napa.
From the perspective of those of us who were involved,
Napa is CalFED.”15
Quinn claimed to the Contra Costa Times in September
2003 that the Napa agreement represents an environmentally
sensitive approach to meeting Southern California’s water
needs, with neither a peripheral canal nor new dams. It relies
on water transfers, increased efficiency and operational
flexibility. “That vision [of dams and canals] is completely
gone,” he said. “The environmentalists won.”
CALFED’s plans will alter the Delta and its Central
Valley watershed by:
• Construction of tidal barriers and fish screens at the
export pumps to protect local water quality and water levels
in Delta channels for agriculture there. Stabilization and
enlargement of existing Delta channels will also help
accommodate more water deliveries to the south by making
it easier for CVP and SWP export pumps to increase their
pumping rates.
• Recharge of groundwater basins in wet years for use as storage reservoirs so that water may be pumped for later use,
especially in dry years (called “water banking” or “conjunctive
use” water management);
• Raising existing dams and building new reservoirs to
increase water storage in the foothills of the east slope of the
Coast Range and the west slope of the Sierra Nevada;
• Establishment of water quality, supply, and ecosystem
health criteria by which a final decision on a “isolated
conveyance facility” (that is, a newer, smaller peripheral
canal) for the Delta would be reached by 2007; and
• Creation of a water transfer market, which will allow
cities, farmers, and fish and game regulatory agencies to buy
and trade water more easily—including, CalFED officials
and Napa Proposition adherents hope, for protection of
endangered Delta fishery species via the EWA.
Most flows in water transfers are routed through the Delta
to the state’s export pumps; increasing their pumping rate is
likely to increase the overall size of California’s emerging
water market.
A Truly New Idea
The EWA represents the institutional and technological
breakthrough the water industry needed out of the CalFED
planning process to break the impasse over Delta exports and
the pumps’ impacts on endangered fishes, the one truly new
idea that the water industry seized on in five years of
meetings to keep CalFED afloat and working for its interests.
The EWA, in CalFED’s description of it, is a “cooperative
management program, the purpose of which is to provide
protection to at-risk native fish species of the Bay-Delta
estuary through environmentally beneficial changes in SWP/
CVP operations at no uncompensated water cost to the
Projects’ water users. This approach to fish protection
involves changing Project operations to benefit fish and the
acquisition of alternative sources of project water supply,
called the ‘EWA assets,’ which the EWA agencies use to
replace the regular project water supply lost by pumping
reductions.”16
EWA comes into play during project operations when, for
example, real-time monitoring of the export pumps reveals
large schools of, say, endangered Delta smelt congregating
around the pumps and which would be killed (the water
projects’ quasi-Christian euphemism for their mass destruction
is “salvaged”; the Endangered Species Act’s [ESA] term
of art is “take” or “taking”). EWA fisheries managers would
swing into action, perhaps ordering the pumps slowed or
shut down immediately until the problem fish disperse.
Meanwhile, project operators would keep track of how
much water was not exported and the EWA would “pay” that
amount of water, either out of its own water sources stored
underground in a San Joaquin Valley water bank, or from
EWA water stored at the San Luis Reservoir near Los Banos
northwest of Fresno. In other circumstances, EWA “assets”
might be used to provide additional flows to attract migrating
fish upstream or to flush juvenile salmon into and out of the
Delta beyond the reach of the fish-killing export pumps near
Tracy.
“Reclamation, DWR, and their respective contractors
support continuation of the Environmental Water Account,”
states the Napa Proposition, “for the purposes described in
the CalFED [Record of Decision]…and DWR, Reclamation,
and their respective contractors propose to develop in
cooperation with the management agencies a plan for the
continuation of the EWA.” The Napa plan for the EWA is to
include “commitments regarding specific assets”—that is,
both water and money—for use by the EWA agencies (i.e.,
state and federal fisheries agencies); and stable financing for
EWA. The mainstay groups have long recommended user
fees for all Delta exports to fund ecosystem restoration and
environmental water purchases (including EWA), but DWR
and USBR have been too faint of heart to adopt such fees;
their contractors adamantly oppose Delta export user fees.17
Counting EWA’s Cards
But the EWA raises numerous issues that today remain
unresolved three years into its four-year experimental period.
The Bay Institute of San Francisco studied the EWA’s first
two years, finding that:
• EWA is “under-endowed” with funds and water, and
constrained in its functions.
• The mainstays did not intend their spawn, EWA, to
mitigate impacts of additional new export, storage, or
conveyance. But that is how it is turning out with the
CalFED ROD and Napa.
• The EWA needs “better coordination” with other
environmental and non-environmental water initiatives.
• Until the end of 2004, the EWA is an experiment, but
one whose results are only poorly studied by the state and
federal agencies who intend to make it a permanent part of
California’s hydraulic regimes. “It is imperative,” wrote Bay
Institute scientist Christina Swanson in 2001, “that the
results of its actions be more accurately measured and
evaluated.”18
• The Bay Institute and other mainstays take CalFED’s
commitments beyond those actually made to the EWA,
called “Tier 3” water, as a “promise.” However, CalFED
clearly states in its ROD that the Tier 3 commitment depends
on its ability to make water available should CalFED’s
minimum regulatory requirements and the EWA prove
inadequate for fish protection at the export pumps. “It is
unlikely,” states the ROD, “that assets beyond those…will be
needed to meet [Endangered Species Act] requirements.”19
Complaints about EWA spread beyond the environmentalists’
camp, however. Average water prices per acre-foot paid
by the EWA range from $179 in Fiscal Year 2001 to $144 in
2003.20 Steve Ottemoeller, general manager of the Madera
Irrigation District north of Fresno, testified on EWA’s
environmental reports last August that EWA managers
consistently outbid smaller agricultural water districts for
scarce, transferable blocs of water on the Central Valley
water market. Growers in his district are concerned that EWA
will price them out of the water market since it is backed by
taxpayer funds.21 The market’s knack for creative destruction
appears to be at work in the world of California water.22
When to Hold ‘Em...
It also appears that water and environmental policy are
increasingly created and implemented independent of
appropriate political channels (the Legislature, the Governor,
or the Courts). CalFED has free rein to initiate water policy,
conduct scientific and program experiments on natural river
systems, and generally enjoy a freedom from public accountability
available only to anointed “stakeholders.” Elevated to
a new status as the CalFED Bay-Delta Authority by the
Legislature last year, the agency at last faces greater fiscal
scrutiny.
“The EWA guarantees that water deliveries to state and
federal contractors will not be affected as a result of modifications
in water project operations to reduce harmful impacts
on endangered fishes,” wrote Christina Swanson in a 2002
review of the EWA. “Risks to contractors of reduced or
interrupted water deliveries have been eliminated.”23
While endangered fish species in the Delta face reduced
risks of mass destruction with a robustly-funded and endowed
EWA in operation, their risks have hardly been
eliminated. Funding for the program shrunk steadily, from
$69 million in Fiscal Year 2001 to $38.2 million in Fiscal
Year 2003.24 Future funding is unlikely to be robust.
Swanson fears that since the EWA’s experimental years
were “under-endowed,” fishery managers handling EWA
duties face a dilemma of whether to spend water and money
for water early in the October-to-September water year to
protect winter-run chinook salmon in December and January,
or whether to harbor their scarce assets for protecting Delta
smelt in March and April.
This dilemma is compounded by economics and the vagaries of California’s hydrology: prices for available water
in wet years may be cheaper, but EWA’s water buyers will
pay with public funds dearly for water in dry years. And
when its budget is set each autumn no one knows how much
rain and snow will fall in the months ahead. “In effect,”
wrote Swanson, “[EWA’s managers] are forced to gamble
with their fish protection tools and, to date, their strategy has
been to withhold protection or provide minimal levels of
protection, less than would be preferred, in order to husband
their finite resources.”25
...And When to Fold ‘Em
Believing the Delta’s Central Valley watershed held
surplus waters sufficient for California’s post-World War II
booming economy and population, state and federal water
managers dreamt of vast water exports at the pumping plants
adjacent to Clifton Court Forebay at the birth of the great
hydraulic regimes in the 1960s and 1970s.26 Drought
postponed these dreams in the early 1990s, as did near extinctions
of winter-run Chinook salmon, delta smelt, and,
until recently, Sacramento splittail fishes, and because the
pumps caused havoc for Delta farmers’ water supplies and
quality.
EWA holds out the prospect for water contractors of
getting around federal ESA take problems at the Delta export
pumps if enough “assets” can be found.27 And intensive,
deity-like surveillance and coordination of real-time fisheries
management in water operations, on which EWA is premised, creates bureaucratic momentum in the hydraulic regimes for merger of the two hydraulic regimes (the SWP and CVP), as well as the building of additional surface
storage sites, including:
• Construction of the SWP’s Sites reservoir (off stream) in
Glenn County;
• Raising of CVP’s Shasta Dam north of Redding;
• Construction of the off-stream Sites Reservoir west of
Colusa;
• Expansion of Los Vaqueros Reservoir in eastern Contra
Costa County; and
• Either raising of CVP’s Friant Dam on the San Joaquin
River east of Fresno, or construction of a new dam and
reservoir at Temperance Flat, just upstream of Friant Dam.
At its core, the CalFED planning process strived to create a reliable water supply for California agribusiness and urban development interests; the environmental investments are a means to this end.
It was always so with CalFED, which signaled its desire to increase export pumping repeatedly in its deluge of reports and publications. A public debate about whether California as a whole is on the right path of water,
urban, rural and agricultural development recedes further
from the public’s attention.
The Napa Proposition reveals the waning utility of the
mainstay environmentalists’ “win-win” strategy for real
fisheries protection. “Win-win” works best when power
differentials among competing interests are balanced, not out
of balance as they are now. The water industry appears to
have stolen environmentalists’ thunder.
The Environmental Water Account weakens enforcement
of the federal Endangered Species Act at the Delta pumping
plants without legitimate political action by the U.S. Congress.
In the EWA’s first experimental operations three years
ago, about 20,000 Delta smelt were killed at the state’s
Banks pumping plant.28 According to the Bay Institute, this
carnage was 300 percent over the “take limits” set for the
pumps by federal fisheries biologists under the ESA.
Given scientific uncertainties of knowing where fish may
suddenly turn up, EWA managers must adopt a gambler’s
mindset. Biologists and hydrologists and engineers study
“gaming” scenarios to learn how to work the system given
the interests of the house (i.e., the projects’ water contractors,
and California’s mercurial climate). They must learn to, in
effect, count cards they and others hold (their “assets and
tools”) and must learn when to hold ‘em, and when to fold
‘em.
Kinda puts the “western” back into “western water.”
Prudent Buyers and Sellers
Who benefits from the export pumping and, more
generally, from the EWA’s shouldering of the contractor’s
hydrologic and hydraulic risks? New underground “water
banks” will benefit grandly from this risk-free facet of the
“market” for water. Water banks are vast tracts of agricultural
land converted to shallow lakes percolating water into
porous geological “deposits” pin-pricked with extraction
wells and holding huge amounts of groundwater for later
“withdrawal” for sale to thirsty farmers or new towns of the
Tulare Lake Basin in Kings and Kern counties, state water
contractors generally, and corporate agribusiness and urban
sprawl developers.29
A recent report by Public Citizen’s California office in
Oakland disclosed that Paramount Farming, a privately held
agricultural corporation headquartered in Beverly Hills,
owns a mutual water company possessing a 48 percent share
in the Kern Water Bank Authority. Publicly-owned water is
already controlled by private interests there, though how
much and by whom is costly and difficult to determine.30
Other major landowner-speculators like Tejon Ranch and
Newhall Land and Farming Company have stakes in other
Tulare Lake Basin water banks formed at the hydraulic
interchange of the SWP’s California Aqueduct, and the CVP’s Friant-Kern and Cross-Valley Canals west of Bakersfield.
It’s a lot like having Enron, Mirant, Reliant, Duke and
Calpine owning your state’s power plants on the eve of
energy deregulation.
“[DWR deputy director Tom] Glover said the emphasis
on building a 10-year EWA,” writes Gary Pitzer in the water
industry’s Western Water, “gives fishery agencies the
opportunity to look at longer-term investments so they can
become ‘more prudent buyers’ of water assets.”31
And water agencies (especially those that are veneer for
private, usually corporate interests) up and down the state
will certainly look to longer-term water sales strategies so
they can be come more sophisticated sellers of water.
“Market power,” the power industry’s euphemism for
manipulation of supply and price under deregulation, may
gain currency in the water industry someday soon: remember
Get Shorty, Dark Star.
At least one environmental mainstay member worried
openly about being out of touch with the times. “We’re going
to go right back to where we were in the late 1980s, with
sudden fishery collapses,” ED’s Tom Graff groaned to the
Contra Costa Times in August 2003. “Do people care about that more than swimming pools in Orange County? I don’t
know. If this were all about 100,000 acre-feet for Westlands
(Water District, an irrigation district and traditional foe of
environmentalists), we’d all be in our traditional trenches
fighting subsidized agriculture,” he added. “This is Met [and
the 22 million people who rely on the Metropolitan Water
District of Southern California]. This is different. It’s a lot
more water, and it’s for people.”32
It wasn’t like that in 1992 and 1993 when ESA listings of
salmon, smelt, and splittail fishes in the Delta, coupled with
a grinding drought and a major financial crisis within the
State Water Project had the California water industry facing
its worst crisis since the defeat of the Peripheral Canal in 1982.
At that time, environmentalists held stronger cards in
their hands: their threats of litigation to enforce adequate
Delta outflows to protect the region’s decimated fisheries
struck terror into the hearts of drought-battered water
agencies. Rather than be accused of obstructionism, and risk
the environmental damage of perhaps-decades-long Delta
litigation, they anted up with the CalFED process, providing
it with a political-ecological legitimacy the water industry
then so desperately craved.
And California has added a few million people over the
last 10 years.
“Assets” for the Environmental Water Account may exist
or may not. We must think not only of assets from
California’s rivers, streams and aquifers, but of taxpayer
funds allocated from state and federal budgets to the EWA,
which are as under-endowed and over-appropriated as our
grandest rivers. In that light, the strategy of paying for the
public trust with taxpayer funds may be neither fiscally
realistic nor sustainable. All Californians should be asked to
vote on this, but we won’t be.
To insulate the EWA from the troubled public fisc,
agribusiness and urban water contractors would have to
agree to Delta user fees to fund the EWA. As self-interested
political and economic actors, will they step out of character
long enough to achieve this? If it’s important enough, they
will.
But governmental responsibility for enforcing the public
trust in water resources will continue to erode the longer that
a water market takes hold. And it will have happened without
the consent of the governed: the people of California who are
the original, perpetual owners of water here.
“We believe a long-term EWA is necessary,” enthuses
Brent Walthall, who oversees the Kern County Water
Agency’s Bay-Delta Resources Division. “It helps mitigate
for take at the pumps [and] can also be used to recover
species beyond the ESA’s jeopardy level. Paying for it has
not scared us away from the table yet.”33
MWD’s Tim Quinn told Western Water that his agency
would continue the practice of investing in environmental
mitigation and restoration for the Delta; it benefits MWD in
both overall water quality as well as supply. “Exporters are
wedded to the proposition that protection has to precede
operations,” he said. “We do recognize that firm funding for
EWA is important.”34
Mainstay environmental groups weren’t invited to Napa’s
wine country last July probably because water industry
officials felt no need for the mainstays to continue
greenwashing the SWP and CVP; they may believe they can
handle it themselves now that EWA is in their grasp.
ENDNOTES
1 Anonymous, Draft Proposition Concerning CVP/SWP
Integrated Operations (no date), 11 pages, issued on the
Bureau of Reclamation’s web site 30 July 2003; it is no longer
posted there, however, as of this writing. The Napa Proposition
may be viewed at http://www.spillwaynews.net/Napa/
Proposition.
2 CalFED Bay-Delta Program, Programmatic Record of
Decision, August 28, 2000. See especially sections 2.2.6,
Conveyance, and 2.2.7, Environmental Water Account, pp.
48 through 57. Hereafter cited as “CalFED ROD.” These two
sections lay out the physical improvements CalFED Agencies
(which include the California Department of Water Resources
and the United State Bureau of Reclamation) intended to
pursue to increase pumping at the SWP pumps from currently
allowed 6,680 cubic feet per second (cfs) to 8,500 cfs. This
increment of increase is referred to as “Banks 8500” in the
Napa Proposition. Export increases to the full capacity of both
CVP (4,600 cfs) and SWP pumping plants (10,300 cfs) were
factored into the CalFED Final Programmatic Environmental
Impact Statement/Report, July 2000, Attachment A, p. A-15. A
timeline for this export increase presented to state water
contractors in November 2003 indicates that endangered
species compliance reviews and south Delta improvements
for Banks 8500 will be completed by the end of June 2004.
Export increases are expected to start when the South Delta
Improvements Program is completed.
3 An acre-foot is approximately 326,000 gallons of water, an
amount used by a typical California household in a year.
Millions of acre-feet represents trillions of gallons.
4 Gary Pitzer, “The CalFED Plan: Making it Happen,” Western
Water January/February 2004.
5 Flow and export data from Delta Outflow Computation table
available from U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s Central Valley
Project Operations Office web site for water accounting
reports, www.usbr.gov/mp/cvo/html/pmdoc. Data obtained 12
February 2004.
6 CalFED ROD, op. cit.
7 Pitzer, op. cit., p. 11.
8 CalFED Bay-Delta Program, Ecosystem Restoration
Program Plan: Strategic Plan for Ecosystem Restoration,
Final Programmatic EIS/EIR Technical Appendix, July 2000,
p. 5, which states: “…[C]onfusion and contention still surround
the concept of ecosystem restoration....[T]hat is, the
term itself seems to imply that the ecosystem will be restored
to its pristine, pre-disturbance condition or some structural
and functional configuration defined by a particular historic
baseline….Ecosystem restoration does not entail recreating
any particular historical configuration of the Bay-Delta
environment; rather, it means re-establishing a balance in
ecosystem structure and function to meet the needs of plant,
animal, and human communities while maintaining or
stimulating the region’s diverse and vibrant economy.” A
similar passage is found in the July 1999 draft of this same
report. This is not deep ecology, but it functions as a public
secret.
9 CalFED’s planning process was a meeting marathon for
many years. Having created numerous advisory councils,
working groups, roundtables, and subcommittees, the state
and federal government together have literally hundreds of
expert engineers, consultants, biologists, hydrologists, and
lawyers who can fan out to meetings with impunity. The same
is also true for the Metropolitan Water District of Southern
California and other urban water agencies (including the
Santa Clara Valley Water District). Agribusiness water
districts send high-priced lawyers and engineers on retainer
to CalFED meetings. It is obvious that environmentalists, even the best-paid, most professional, and most foundation grant-
endowed ones, are outgunned and the CalFED process
was no exception. The difference, as will become clear,
seems that the environmental mainstays somehow cling to
the belief that their access to the CalFED process bridged
this inequality; with benefit of four years’ hindsight and now
the Napa Proposition, it probably didn’t.
10 Tom Phiilp of the Sacramento Bee’s editorial board, wrote in
his web log on 8 October 2003, “Schwarzenegger’s campaign
web site had something intriguing to say about water, and the
message of course is a little different [than that of the Davis
Administration]. Translation: We’re adrift because of a lack of
leadership, and part of the solution is for the state to own all
the key plumbing in the Delta. That means somehow buying
the Central Valley Project from the Bush administration. This
idea hasn’t been on the front burner for years. Maybe its
origins trace to a Wilson-era advisor dusting off an old idea.
But was this a plant from the Bush administration, perhaps
Interior’s Bennett Raley [currently Deputy Secretary of the
Interior under Gale Norton]? I don’t know, but California under
Governor Arnold would be the perfect place for the Bush
team to launch an agenda to downsize federal ownership of
its aging western water projects. Even in a budget crisis, the
state could float this purchase if Bush and Congress were
willing to sell the Central Valley Project on favorable terms
(reasonable price, paid over decades). That way the budget
doesn’t take a hit, and all the project water users easily
absorb the cost through a modest hike in the rates.” Posted
to the Salmon Coalition listserv on 9 October 2003. If the
State owns the CVP eventually it would probably also mean
the end of all pretense of acreage limitations on CVP
agribusiness beneficiaries.
11 Quoted in Vic Pollard, “Valley boost on tap: plan between
state projects to increase water for Kern as much as 50,000
acre-feet,” Bakersfield Californian 20 August 2003, p. 1.
12 Quoted in Cariad Hayes Thronson, “Napa Deal
Demystified,” Estuary, December 2003, p. 1.
13 Quoted in Vic Pollard, “Water deal could increase supplies,”
Bakersfield Californian 11 December 2003.
14 Ibid.
15 Quoted in Mike Taugher, “Most wanted: Delta water,”
Contra Costa Times 30 September 2003.
16 The five “EWA agencies” are the Bureau of Reclamation,
Fish and Wildlife Service, and National Marine Fisheries
Service of the federal government; and the State of
California’s departments of Water Resources and Fish and
Game. Hereafter cited as “EWA Agencies.” EWA Agencies,
Environmental Water Account Draft Environmental Impact
Statement/Report, July 2003, Volume III, Appendix J, “Action
Specific Implementation Plan,” Section 2.2, “EWA Program
Overview,” p. 2-3. Emphasis added.
17 Writes Gary Pitzer in Western Water, op. cit., p. 9:
“Using the EWA can be a complicated, expensive process,
given the scientific uncertainty that exists with protecting fish
and the cost of acquiring water on the open market. The EWA
has provided 900,000 acre-feet of additional water [over three
years] above the regulatory baseline to protect the environment
at a cost of $120 million, [Chief of DWR Water Transfers
Office Jerry] Johns said, adding, ‘This is by no means an
inexpensive program.”’
18 Christina Swanson, Ph.D., The First Annual State of the
Environmental Water Acccount Report, San Rafael, CA: The
Bay Institute of San Francisco, September 2001, p. 5.
Available from http://www.bay.org/news.htm.
19 CalFED ROD, p. 58.
20 Jerry Johns, Chief Officer of the Water Transfers Office,
California Department of Water Resources, “EWA,
Development of Operational Criteria and Plan Proposal:
Where to From Here,” see slide entitled “EWA Budget.”
Public presentation given to state and federal water
contractors, November 25, 2003. Posted on the Internet at
http://www.usbr.gov/mp/cvo/HTML/present.html.
21 Testimony of Stephen Ottemoeller, General Manager of
Madera Irrigation District, Fresno public hearing August
28, 2003, on the Draft Environmental Water Account
Environmental Impact Statement/Report, contained in the
Final Environmental Water Account Environmental Impact
Statement/Report, Volume 4, Chapter 4, January 1994.
22 On the market’s penchant for “creative destruction,” see
Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy,
2nd ed., New York, NY: Harper & Brothers, 1947.
23 Swanson, op. cit., p. 14.
24 Johns, op. cit.
25 Swanson, op. cit., p. 14.
26 Tim Stroshane, “Water and Technological Politics in
California,” Capitalism Nature Socialism 14(2): 34-76,
June 2003. Copies available from the author on request
via email at editor@spillwaynews.net, or in writing at P.O.
Box 8362, Berkeley, CA 94707-8362.
27 Sources for EWA assets may include water purchases
subsidized with taxpayer funds (rather than Delta user
fees); borrowing of water from SWP and CVP reservoirs;
and perhaps water freed up from the Sacramento Valley
Water Agreement, executed in November 2001.
28 See Steve Burke, “Diablo Grande: A Signature Experience,”
and Lynne A. Plambeck, “Water Newhall Ranch on
a wish and a prayer,” SPILLWAY v1n3&4 Spring and
Summer 2001. Available at http://www.spillwaynews.net/
backissues.html.
29 The Kern Water Bank Authority was created immediately
after Kern County Water Agency obtained the Kern
Water Bank as part of the Monterey Agreement. See John
Gibler, Water Heist: How Corporations Are Cashing In On
California’s Water, Oakland, CA: Public Citizen, December
2003, 30 pages. This free report is available from the
Public Citizen web site at http://www.citizen.org/california/
water/heist/ or by contacting Public Citizen at their
California Office, 1615 Broadway, Ninth Floor, Oakland
California 94612, 510.663.0888, or via email at
california@citizen.org.
30 This unpleasant fact about the EWA’s experimental
phase goes unacknowledged in Western Water by both
Jerry Johns of DWR and writer Gary Pitzer.
31 Pitzer, op. cit., p. 9.
32 Quoted in Mike Taugher, “Tapping of Delta waters
opposed,” Contra Costa Times, 19 August 2003.
33 Quoted in Pitzer, op. cit.
34 Ibid.
