By Warren Lutz
Friday, April 21, 2006
STOCKTON - Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger proposes to wield more influence over a coalition criticized for coming up short of nearly everyone's expectations in its mission to balance the Delta's health with the state's water needs.
Under a 10-year plan announced Thursday, the group of state and federal agencies known as CALFED will be placed under state Secretary of Resources Michael Chrisman, while its advisory board will be replaced by a group of appointees handpicked by the governor.
The plan largely reflects Schwarzenegger's vision for CALFED, which was created a decade ago in an attempt to end the water wars among farmers, urban users, fishermen and environmental groups.
Yet since CALFED's birth, the quality of Delta water that's delivered to 23 million Californians each year has gotten worse, while the populations of several fish species plummeted to historic lows.
Meanwhile, the Delta's 1,600-mile patchwork of public and private levees continues to erode and occasionally break, triggering fears of a Hurricane Katrina-size disaster in the Central Valley - or even worse.
"If there was a program element that was not funded very well, it was the levee program," CALFED director Joe Grindstaff said Thursday.
CALFED also was expected to receive $8 billion in state, local and federal money, but most of it never came. Critics also said the effort lacked direction because too many agencies were involved with very little oversight.
Recent reviews by the state Department of Finance and the Little Hoover Commission suggested CALFED should be streamlined and its efforts made accountable. Grindstaff said placing CALFED under the Resources Department should shore up those concerns.
Some remain skeptical.
Sen. Michael Machado, a Linden Democrat who chairs a Senate subcommittee on Delta resources, was "quite disappointed" with the restructuring plan, his spokeswoman said.
"Today's announcement was just a reintroduction of old ideas using old data that are not accepted and probably will not be accepted by the Legislature," Jody Fuji said.
Dante Nomellini, an attorney for the Central Delta Water Agency, said he didn't like the idea of getting rid of CALFED's public authority, which included legislative appointees representing members of the public and environmental groups.
"It sounds to me like they're going to throw it back to the back room, out of the public eye," Nomellini said.
One of authority's 24 board members, Marc Holmes, also criticized the move. With the new structure, "we get a single perspective, the state's perspective," he said.
But Holmes, who is also a restoration manager for the San Francisco Bay Institute, an environmental group concerned about the Delta, agreed that accountability should improve under the governor's plans.
Holmes was also optimistic that the legislation for restructuring CALFED would be carried by Assemblywoman Lois Wolk, D-Davis, who is generally supported by environmental groups.
"I'm hopeful she will institute ... some meaningful reforms that will actually improve it rather than consolidate power under the governor's office," he said.
Wolk could not be reached for comment Thursday.
Grindstaff on Thursday acknowledged many of CALFED shortcomings, saying it also never tackled important issues such as rail transportation, land use and gas deliveries involving the Delta.
"There are a number of things that really need to be considered," he said.
But CALFED also did a lot of things right, Grindstaff said. Populations of salmon that migrate through the Delta reached a 40-year high, and water supplies increased by half a million acre-feet annually, he said.
An acre-foot represents enough water for one family a year.
"We made real progress," he said.
Contact reporter Warren Lutz at (209) 546-8295 or wlutz@recordnet.com
Article at http://www.recordnet.com