A Dan Bacher News Story

Senator Lois Wolk Unveils Delta Legislation At Symposium

by Dan Bacher, editor of the FishSniffer
Senator Lois Wolk (D-Davis) outlined her package of legislation to protect the Delta and spoke about her strong opposition to a peripheral canal in Lodi on Saturday, February 28. 
 
“We must take responsibility for the Delta and recognize that it is a significant region worthy of permanent protection,” said Lois Wolk before a crowd of 250 people at a day long symposium held by Restore the Delta. “Saving the Delta can’t just be about the interests of balancing the interests of Southern California, corporate agriculture and endangered fish. Doing just that is a recipe for ruin.” 
 
Wolk emphasized that there are people, communities, recreation, wildlife, history, transportation and economic infrastructure that must be considered in saving the Delta. 
 
During the event, people on five panels representing diverse communities including farmers, environmentalists, fishermen and Delta residents rallied to detail why the Delta must be saved. They also disclosed their solutions to stopping the decline of Central valley salmon and Delta fish populations, as well as the impacts of the Delta’s decline upon Delta farmers and environmental justice communities. 
 
Headlining Wolk’s legislative package to save the Delta is Senate Bill 457 to establish a Delta Stewardship Council to balance the “the triequal goals of the Delta ecosystem, water supply reliability and the Delta as a place.” She introduced the bill because the Delta currently has no structure that coordinates governance of the Delta. 
 
“The Delta needs a steward, someone entrusted with responsibility for this critical and irreplaceable resource and not just given power over it,” she said. “There are 200 some odd state, federal and local agencies with some responsibilities with some responsibility in the Delta. Too often these agencies are working at cross purposes and with varying interests.” 
 
Wolk’s package also features SB 458, which creates a Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta Conservancy to promote projects that further Delta-based tourism, agriculture, fishing, hunting and other related economic activities. “The Delta isn’t just the state’s plumbing system and it shouldn’t be treated like an aquarium,” she said. “These bills work to protect the Delta as a whole.” 
 
The Senator’s Delta package also includes SB 456, a $9.8 billion bond to increase water supply and fund Delta restoration and sustainability, and a bill to encourage statewide water conservation. 
 
Her water bond contrasts greatly with water bond bills sponsored the same week by Senator Dave Cogdill (R-Fresno) and Senate Majority Leader Dean Florez (D-Shafter) that include funding for a peripheral canal (“conveyance”) and Temperance Flat and Sites dams. Unlike those bills, Wolk contains no peripheral canal nor funding for Temperance Flat and Sites, though her bill does provide $3 billion for regional and local water storage projects, groundwater storage and cleanup projects. 
 
“If all of the energy of the state goes into the building of peripheral canal, the Delta will die,” she noted. “There are too many things to be done on the Delta to put a pipe through it.” 
 
She also disclosed that $1.2 billion of funding for the California Department of Water Resources, the agency that has teamed up with the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation for decades to drive our fisheries into the abysmal state they are now in, is “off the budget.” 
 
“There are no hearings on this issue – there is an absolute lack of transparency. If there’s one thing I do this year in Sacramento, I want to see this changed,” she vowed. 
 
Restore the Delta, a Delta-based coalition including Delta farmers, environmentalists, everyday citizens, fishermen, business leaders, the faith community, and recreation enthusiasts, held the event to “craft a blueprint for the Delta that reflects the needs of Delta communities and fisheries,” according to Campaign Director Barbara Barrigan-Parrilla. 
 
The event featured a morning key note address by Congressman George Miller (D-Martinez) and afternoon key note address by Jerry McNerney (D-Pleasanton). Restore the Delta presented Congressman Miller with their inaugural award - The Delta Advocate Award - for his years of advocacy at the federal level on behalf of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. 
 
The organization also bestowed Delta Advocate Awards to Bill Jennings of the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance, former California State Senator Mike Machado, and Delta farmer Alex Hildebrand. 
 
During his address, Miller condemned the move by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, Feinstein and State Legislators to build a peripheral canal. “The peripheral canal is a setup that requires the taxpayers to pay and the environment to suffer. We’re going to twitter the canal out of business,” he said to applause. 
 
He also said the Bureau of Reclamation’s mission has to be changed to one that is “futuristic and based on science, “compared to the days of the Bush administration when science was frequently manipulated or discarded to support Bush’s political agenda. 
 
“There is an investment to make in saving these species,” he stated in a call to action, noting the economic importance of commercial and recreational fishing to the state’s economy. “I think we’re up to it and we’ll be successful if each one of us engages in political activity to save the Delta. The Delta is as fundamental as any geographical area in the country - it is fundamental to the quality of lives and economy of the people of California.” 
 
Bill Jennings, executive director of the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance, emphasized how the fate of fishermen, environmentalists and Delta farmers is “irrevocably intertwined." 
 
“We understand that a Delta that supports abundant fisheries also supports productive farms and recreational and viable communities,” he stated. “We’ll prosper together or we’ll hang together.” 
 
In contrast to the “collaborative” “win, win” processes that the state and federal governments have often used to drive the agenda of corporate agribusiness, Jennings said the following. 
 
“There is no win, win solution,” he noted. “We live in a water-limited state where there is only an average of 29 million acre feet of runoff in the Central Valley, while the State Water Resources Control Board has allocated 245 million acre feet of water rights.” 
 
He condemned the “solution” of the water contractors to build a peripheral canal – and said that we need to compel our regulatory agencies to enforce the water code and Clean Water Act. 
 
“The canal would transfer pumping impacts to the last viable salmonid river in the Valley (the Sacramento), eliminate critical habitat and send numerous species into oblivion, and increase the concentration and bioaccumulation of pollutants,” he said. “It would increase salinity, severely reducing yields of hundreds of thousands of productive farmland, and eliminate tens of thousands of fishing, recreational and agricultural jobs.” 
 
Mike Jackson, CSPA attorney and board member of the Water Impact Network, quipped that “the Governor should tell his scriptwriter, Susan Kennedy, to rewrite his current script. What he’s doing now is “Terminator Five, the Death of the Delta.” 
 
After receiving his award, South Delta farmer Alex Hildebrand put the current Delta fish and water quality declines and the effort to build a peripheral canal into historical perspective. “Societies rise, flourish and eventually crash because they misuse their water,” said Hildebrand. “As those ancient civilizations fell, they trashed their environment." 
 
For more information about Restore the Delta, go to http://www.restorethedelta.org.