Although a recent, science-fiction and heavily-slanted piece in Politico on California’s impending water battle is a page waster, there is some truth whether intended or not.
Water allocations in California are one-hundred percent political and the Biden and Newsom administrations are working hard to guarantee more water is dumped into the ocean for the foreseeable the future.
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The difference we realize today versus the decades of back-and-forth on water management in our state is they currently have no hesitation in admitting what their goals are.
The goal for California, in this case, is scarcity.
The Biden and Newsom administrations are in a race to rewrite rules on water management for fish protections regarding the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta before the election in November.
Of course, both administrations – including California’s Director of the Department of Water Resources, Karla Nemeth –and the media describe the 2019 Biological Opinions on Smelt and Salmon as “Trump” rules.
Nemeth is quoted in this story as saying, “We do want it done at the end of this administration, and that’s the commitment we’ve gotten.”
She is referring to the agencies involved in consultation to update those 2019 BiOps into something new. Biological Opinions are supposed to be updated every ten years on a federal level. Meanwhile Sacramento is attempting to change the rules at-will, with a keen eye on the winds of an upcoming election.
And here we have yet another media vignette that fails to state that the formation of the 2019 BiOps backed by ten years of data was initiated by the Obama administration in early 2016, leading you to believe Trump wrote them himself.
We now have every side of the water dilemma in California admitting that the jockeying is 100 percent political.
In 2019, agencies involved in forming new rules all agreed their ten years of data and years of work culminated in an updated, more scientifically sound set of rules.
Then, Newsom sued, and the State of California decided to issue an Incidental Take Permit to operate the State Water Project with disregard to the entire system including the Central Valley Project.
This is a move that could have caused chaos in water delivery from a document that explicitly stated that it “does not seek to increase SWP exports” to water users south of the Delta.
Oddly enough, and yet another testament to the political vulnerability of our water, was that the state’s plan was similar to the hard work produced in the 2019 BiOps that realized real-time management instead of a rigid calendar-based set of rules which produced a decade of declining fish numbers, increasing fallowed farm acres, and degraded water quality.
These were all results of the failed 2008 and 2009 BiOps.
The so-called “scientific brain trust” in Sacramento was not capable of embracing innovation in their own set of rules but was blatantly obvious in making a political move with our water. Citizens and their ‘right’ to water be damned.
We have moved from a massive undertaking of data collection, interpretation of information, formulation of data into updated and sensical modifications, and time consuming and thoughtful scrutiny by experts and stakeholders, to a brazen attempt of shoehorning decade-long rules governing water delivery through with a public review period of a couple of weeks.
The people of California deserve better than a lazy approach to the delivery of our water for the next decade that is explicitly rooted in radical ideology.
To be clear, this is not a case of a continual abundance of water with the 2019 BiOps versus no water with whatever the current effort of political expediency produces.
While the 2019 BiOps surely could have been better, in my opinion, it was a marked improvement over the complete disaster we had before.
That disaster is what Teams Biden and Newsom would rather revert to while disregarding new rules.
Now, we are supposed to believe the current administration spent about two years looking at our water issues and has better answers than the decade long effort exhausted in the 2019 BiOps because the President’s last name at the time finalizing them happened to be Trump.
At least they openly admit it.
Scrutinization and peer review will be more important than ever before knowing motivation to update water rules is purely political.
The reasons you go through a process matter and not one person can honestly say the reason here is fish protection. This process was initiated by people who are completely inept and unarmed in the world of water management and are after nothing more than radical and ideological control of a resource that is abundant in our state.
We have both a federal and state administration that tells us the only path forward is to prepare for scarcity.
Scarcity pays and stacks control with the producers of it and has dangerously brought our country to a standstill.
They openly say the production of a domestic food supply is unnecessary.
It is immoral to do what these people are attempting to do, and the juggling of our water for the next ten years is the latest example.
It is dangerous and should not be allowed to happen.
