Groups sue to halt changes pitched for Delta water plan

By Mike Taugher, Contra Costa Times
Wednesday, August 10, 2005

Environmentalists, fishing groups and an Indian tribe sued Tuesday to block the biggest changes to California's water storage and delivery system in a decade.

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Oakland, is the latest in a series of developments signaling a slow disintegration of a 10-year calm in the state water picture. It challenges a federal report that concluded changes to the state's plumbing system will not drive salmon and steelhead to extinction.

That biologists' report is already in question after a federal inspector general's investigation last month found fault with the process used by agency managers to overturn the work of government scientists. The biologists at first concluded the changes would jeopardize the continued existence of some salmon and steelhead runs, but their findings were later reversed in what critics claim was a political move.

At the heart of Tuesday's court challenge is an obscure and massive federal document called the Operations, Criteria and Plan, which spells out how California's two largest water projects, including reservoirs at Shasta, Oroville and elsewhere plus the Delta's huge pumping plants, will store and distribute water.

Among other things, the document clears the way for state and federal water agencies to ramp up the pumps that carry water out of the Delta for the San Joaquin Valley and Southern California, and it allows the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation to renew more than 200 25-year water contracts for users from Contra Costa to Kern County.

"The future of the Delta as we know it arrives in large measure on the outcome" of the lawsuit filed Tuesday and a companion lawsuit filed in February, said Bill Jennings of DeltaKeeper.

Spokesmen for the two federal agencies named in the lawsuit, the Bureau of Reclamation and the National Marine Fisheries Service, said they had not seen the lawsuit and had no comment on it.

Alarmed by recent findings that the Delta's open-water ecosystem is in an unexplained decline and that the CalFed water program set up to address the Delta's problems is beginning to run out of money, environmentalists and fishing groups recently intensified their opposition to plans to increase water supplies south of the Delta.

In particular, they have objected to the OCAP document, the broad outlines of which were crafted in the summer of 2003 during private meetings in Napa. Those meetings, which were first reported in the Times, sparked outrage among environmental groups who were not invited to participate.

Delta farmers, also excluded, were also angered, and state legislators responded by forcing changes to the Napa agreement to better protect the quality of water to those farms.

Zeke Grader, executive director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations, said the billions of dollars available to CalFed for the past five years allowed the state to pursue a number of projects, many of which were good but also diverted attention from the limitations of the state's water supply.

"These fish don't swim in money," Grader said. "Sooner or later we had to confront this issue. We're going to have to get more water into the system, and begin looking at other alternatives (to boost water supplies.)"

The OCAP blueprint eliminates the requirement that 1.9 million acre-feet of water be stored behind Shasta Dam to ensure cold water is available for spawning salmon in dry years.

It also shortens by 42 percent the length of the Sacramento River that must be kept cold, according to the lawsuit.

Contra Costa Water District assistant general manager Greg Gartrell said doing away with the 1.9 million acre-foot carryover requirement made sense because in back-to-back drought years, the task was impossible and would create water quality problems in the Delta.

"All the modeling shows it can't be done," he said.

The lawsuit also accuses the Bureau of Reclamation of failing to conduct proper environmental analyses before issuing the OCAP.

In addition to the Pacific Coast fishermen's federation and DeltaKeeper, other parties to the lawsuit include the Bay Institute, California Trout, Friends of the River, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Northern California Council of the Federation of Fly Fishers, the Sacramento River Preservation Trust and the Winnemem Wintu Tribe.

Mike Taugher covers the environment and energy. Reach him at 925-943-8257 or mtaugher@cctimes.com.

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