[Water_news] 1. DWR'S CALIFORNIA WATER NEWS - Top Item for 3/11/09

Department of Water Resources

California Water News

A daily compilation for DWR personnel of significant news articles and comment

 

March 11, 2009

 

Top Items–

 

California must step up to save salmon, experts tell legislators

The Sacramento Bee

 

Westlands Water District files lawsuit on biological opinion

The Western Farm Press

 

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California must step up to save salmon, experts tell legislators

The Sacramento Bee – 3/11/09

By Matt Weiser

California has most of the laws and regulations it needs to protect dwindling salmon populations. What it lacks is money and willpower to do it, a panel of legal and fishery experts told legislators Tuesday.

 

Illegal water diversions, pollution, habitat degradation and a lack of basic data all threaten the state's salmon. The situation is so grave that two-thirds of the state's native salmon and trout species face imminent extinction threats.

 

One is the Central Valley fall-run chinook, which has supported the West Coast's commercial salmon fishing for decades but last year set a historic population low. As a result, all salmon fishing in California is likely to be banned for a second straight year.

 

A stream of legal and environmental experts told the Assembly Water, Parks and Wildlife Committee at a special hearing Tuesday that California's salmon are in peril largely because state government has not had the nerve or resources to help.

"There is, indeed, a salmon crisis in California," said Holly Doremus, a UC Davis expert on state environmental laws. "We think it's important to note that this is not new. It's as if we've waited until we've had a heart attack to seek medical attention rather than take preventive action."

 

The reasons are not sexy and don't make good political theater. Rather, they deal with the nuts and bolts of government neglected amid budget cuts and infighting.

 

Doremus and Richard Frank, a UC Berkeley legal scholar, said a big problem is a starvation diet imposed on the Department of Fish and Game for nearly two decades.

 

The agency has about 200 field-level game wardens to police the entire state – the lowest per-capita wildlife enforcement in America. This means, for example, that hundreds of illegal stream diversions go unnoticed every year, literally depriving salmon of habitat.

 

Fish and Game also does not have enough technical staff to review timber harvest plans and other land-use changes. This means erosion into streams and more habitat loss.

 

"The bottom line is that California wildlife laws are both robust and legally adequate," said Frank, director of UC Berkeley's Center for Environmental Law and Policy. "The single largest problem with respect to fisheries is a lack of adequate fiscal and personnel resources at the Department of Fish and Game."

 

This shortcoming has also crippled the state's ability to gather data on its salmon.

 

Oregon, Washington and Idaho all fund robust data gathering efforts so policymakers know where to spend habitat restoration and enforcement money most effectively. California has no comprehensive salmon monitoring.

 

"To revive this patient, we must know something about them," said Charlotte Ambrose, coastal salmon recovery coordinator at the National Marine Fisheries Service. "We desperately need statewide monitoring in place and, most critically, a statewide database for information management."

 

One area where more regulatory power may be needed is water resource management.

 

Vicky Whitney, deputy director of the state Water Resources Control Board, said officials know little about the amount of water consumed by so-called "riparian" water rights holders.

 

Riparian rights, usually attached to properties that border streams, are the most senior category of water entitlement in California.

 

Riparian rights holders must annually report to the state how much water they divert. But Whitney said only about 10 percent do so, and her agency does not have the power to enforce compliance.

 

The water board also has never had the power to regulate groundwater – a rarity among the 50 states

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These loopholes exist because state leaders have never been willing to fight the political wars needed to end them.

 

"It indicates a general failure of management of fisheries on a large scale," said UC Davis fisheries professor Peter Moyle, who recently finished a study warning that 20 of California's 31 salmon and trout species risk extinction. "Maybe we should be surprised the salmon are here at all." #

 

http://www.sacbee.com/politics/story/1688882.html?mi_rss=State%2520Politics

 

Westlands Water District files lawsuit on biological opinion

The Western Farm Press – 3/10/09

 

The Westlands Water District announced on March 4 that it is joining with other public water agencies in the San Luis Delta-Mendota Water Authority in filing a lawsuit to undo the latest round of cutbacks that federal authorities have ordered in California's water supplies.

 

"We are in the midst of an emergency that Gov. Schwarzenegger has rightly pointed out will impose hardships on all Californians," said Tom Birmingham, general manager of the Westlands Water District.

 

"In the Central Valley, communities are facing catastrophic consequences. The federal government has announced that farmers we serve will receive no water to grow their crops. And another set of federal authorities are demanding that we waste hundreds of thousands of acre feet of freshwater into the ocean on behalf of an endangered minnow that will not benefit in any way from the losses suffered by the people who rely on water supplied by the Central Valley Project," Birmingham said.

 

The lawsuit asks the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California to enjoin the enforcement of a biological opinion by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) that has cut water supplies to two-thirds of California's residents by approximately 30 percent.

 

"We are not trying to upset the Endangered Species Act," said Birmingham. "We are trying to ensure that the Act is implemented in a manner consistent with its requirement that decisions be based on the basis of the best available science."

 

The lawsuit cites numerous instances in which USFWS officials violated their own standards for scientific accuracy, contradicted their own findings, and substituted their own suppositions for hard evidence.

 

"On top of the enormous economic damage this biological opinion has done to millions of people, it has also had sweeping environmental impacts that have even complicated the survival of California's salmon fisheries," Birmingham said. "And yet, they did no environmental impact analysis before issuing their decree."

 

For nearly 20 years, the availability of California's water supplies has been tied to the welfare of the Delta smelt. USFWS first ordered reductions in the pumping of water moved through the Delta in 1992 to protect this threatened minnow. It ordered additional restrictions in 1994, 2000, 2004, and then again in December, 2008, Birmingham says.

 

The latest population surveys conducted by the Department of Fish and Game found that the abundance of the Delta smelt is at its lowest point since records began to be kept.

 

Birmingham said, "At some point, as Fish and Game Director Don Koch recently remarked, we have to ask ourselves whether we have been turning a knob that isn't connected to anything."

 

The reductions in pumping have compounded the impacts of the severe drought that began two years ago. Crop losses due to water shortages totaled $309 million in 2008.

 

And if the drought persists and the federal restrictions remain in force, experts at the University of California estimate that economic losses will approach $2 billion in 2009 and as many as 80,000 people will lose their jobs.

 

Those totals account for the losses to agriculture south of the Delta. The overall losses to the economy as a whole will be much larger, Birmingham said.#

 

http://westernfarmpress.com/environment/california-water-0310/

 

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