A day after President Trump visited the Central Valley to celebrate a boost in water for California farms, state officials sued to block the additional water deliveries.
Attorney General Xavier Becerra, in a lawsuit filed Thursday, maintains that new federal rules designed to increase pumping from the Sacramento San Joaquin River Delta fail to protect salmon and other endangered fish in the delta estuary.
Gov. Gavin Newsom has put forward aframework for managing water and habitat in the Delta and its watershed. As far as we can tell, no one is very happy with the framework—and that may be a good sign.
The framework is the product of years of effort to negotiate an agreement among water users, other stakeholders, and regulatory agencies. Details are yet to be worked out, including firm commitments for water and funding, along with critical negotiations with the federal government on how to cooperatively manage upstream dams and the Delta pumps. Ultimately, the package has to be acceptable to state and federal regulators.
The Newsom administration Tuesday floated a proposal to avert a protracted legal battle over new state standards that would make some of California’s biggest water users cut their river diversions to help struggling fish populations.
State officials see a settlement as the linchpin of administration water policies that have been bogged down in the perennial conflicts over the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, a source of water for much of California and home to some of its most threatened native fish.
California is moving forward with its biggest water project in decades, a single tunnel beneath the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta that will help move Northern California water south to cities and farms, state water officials said Wednesday. The proposal piggybacks on plans by former Gov. Jerry Brown, who wanted to build a pair of 30-mile-long tunnels through the delta but was stymied by funding shortfalls and controversy. The project shares the same vision as Brown’s: to halt deterioration of the delta’s fragile ecosystem — the pinch point of the state’s water delivery network — while ensuring adequate water shipments to the rest of the state.
SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — California’s governor has restarted a project to build a giant, underground tunnel that would pump billions of gallons of water from the San Joaquin Delta to the southern part of the state.
Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration on Wednesday issued a Notice of Preparation for the project, which is the first step in the state’s lengthy environmental review process.
Last year, Newsom halted a similar project that would have built two tunnels for the same purpose. The new project will have only one tunnel, and it will carry less water. State officials don’t know how much it will cost.
A fight over the management of a diked island in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta is shining a light on a growing conundrum for California water managers, farmers and environmentalists over the best way to restore natural habitat on cropland created more than a century ago by draining marshes.
The courtroom battle over 9,000-acre Staten Island is the latest conflict in the delta over farming, wetlands and the aging levees that, besides preventing flooding, preserve a way of life on the man-made islands.
The war over California’s water between Governor Gavin Newsom and the Trump administration is at a crossroads, with new federal guidelines loosening the restrictions on water pumping set to take effect soon. The new guidelines call for diverting more water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta to agribusiness and urban areas further south. Barbara Barrigan-Parilla with the group Restore the Delta, says despite Newsom indicating he was going to sue over the new federal guidelines, that hasn’t happened yet.
The heavy management of river systems in California is causing a compression in the migration timing of Chinook salmon to the point that they crowd their habitats. As a result, they might miss the best window for entering the ocean to grow into adults. Currently, less than 3% of wetland habitat remains in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.
The governor was for the water grab before he was against it.
Last week, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced his intention to launch the latest of dozens of legal battles between California and the Trump administration over a plan to boost water deliveries to Central Valley farmers, promising a lawsuit challenging further depletion of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta and the vulnerable wildlife that depends on it.
