California: Water Is For Fish Not Farmers
California: Water Is For Fish Not Farmers
State regulators are moving to leave more water in two of the biggest rivers in California in an effort to preserve the native ecosystem of the San Francisco Bay and the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta.
While California farmers’ water allocations have been reduced, San Francisco water officials have freely tapped the Tuolumne River. The river was dammed early in the last century near its headwaters in Yosemite National Park.
Now the State Water Resources Control Board wants to leave 40 percent of the Tuolumne water in the river. But scientists have said that number may not cut it to save the bay and delta.
The draft rule would limit human water use during drought years when there is not enough water for humans and bay ecosystems. In short, the State Board says that the ecosystem trumps any human use (farming or domestic).The board hopes to make the rule final next spring.
The measure is a long-overdue effort to “rebalance the allocation of water for the ecosystem and water we use consumptively,” according to Jeffrey Mount, a water policy analyst at the Public Policy Institute of California, a nonprofit think tank.
Mount said the plan would be more effective than Gov. Jerry Brown’s (D) proposal to build twin tunnels to draw water directly from the Sacramento River, bypassing the delta. He called the giant tunnels a “sideshow” when compared to the board’s efforts to block water to favor the environment.
But many oppose the plan. An Oct. 7 op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle by Bay Area water officials called the plan untenable and warned it could mean “we would have to fundamentally rethink where we get our water in drought years and how we consume that water.”
(Carolyn Lochhead, San Francisco Chronicle, Oct. 23).