Closed Door BDCP Meetings Exclude Delta Residents

Closed Door BDCP Meetings Exclude Delta Residents

by Dan Bacher

As Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger road a high-speed rail train with high ranking Japanese officials on September 14 during his whirlwind tour of Asia, Schwarzenegger administration officials continued to railroad Delta advocates by excluding them from secret meetings planning the fate of the California Delta.

Closed-door meetings now taking place among top water agency officials, regulatory agencies and three corporate environmental groups threaten every bit of progress made in the past year to curtail pumping from the California Delta and give imperiled fish populations a chance to recover.

State Resources Secretary Lester Snow is co-leading these secret sessions to negotiate an agreement regarding the Bay Delta Conservation Plan (BDCP) before Governor Schwarzenegger leaves office, as disclosed in Mike Taugher’s article in the Contra Costa Times on September 7 (http://www.contracostatimes.com/top-stories/ci_16014714).

“Supporters say the closed-door talks, which began in late August without notice to committee members, are needed to try to break a logjam,” according to Taugher. “Critics see another example of a long practice of secretly settling high-stakes California water issues in ways that end up favoring powerful water contractors while harming the Delta.”

Delta advocates view the BDCP as a thinly veiled plan to build a peripheral canal and new dams to facilitate water exports from the Delta to corporate agribusiness giants including Stewart Resnick, the owner of the 120,000-acre Paramount Farms in Kern County, and southern California water agencies. They fear that the canal would likely lead to the extinction of collapsing populations of Delta smelt, longfin smelt, Central Valley salmon, Sacramento splittail, young striped bass and other species devastated by massive water exports in recent years.

“The Governor really wants that canal, and he prefers to do water policy closeted with a few of his best friends,” explained Barbara Barrigan-Parrilla, campaign director of Restore the Delta.

Of course, Snow, Schwarzenegger and their collaborators have made sure that recreational anglers, commercial fishermen, Tribal members, conservationists, environmental justice communities, Delta farmers and Delta residents, the people most impacted by Delta water decisions, are completely excluded from these back door sessions.

“No one from the Delta is part of these meetings,” Barbara Barrigan-Parrilla said. “Restore the Delta has learned that Snow is now taking a ‘non-public’ proposal to the group. It includes a proposal for Delta operations and governance that allows flexibility but requires only a ‘best effort’ from agencies to avoid additional water impacts.”

Barrigan-Parilla also said the proposal also allows the California Department of Water Resources (DWR) and the Bureau of Reclamation to veto any changes to the range of operations.

“This could effectively prevent adaptive management intended to protect fish,” Barrigan-Parrilla said. “In fact, it appears that the proposal would allow the feds to gut the biological opinions.”

Schwarzenegger has continually attacked the federal biological opinions designed to stop the extinction of Delta smelt, Central Valley steelhead, Sacramento River winter run and spring run chinook salmon, green sturgeon and the southern resident population of killer whales (orcas) while the Governor’s Office continually issues press releases touting Schwarzenegger as the “Green Governor.”

The proposal would require only token funding from water users for habitat restoration. It also would exclude an analysis of the Water Board’s new flow criteria.

This penchant for secrecy by the Governor at the same time that he hypocritically calls for greater “transparency” in government is the hallmark of the Schwarzenegger administration, the worst in California history for fish and the environment. This is the same Governor that gave the keynote address on an “undisclosed topic” before global oligarchs at the highly secretive Bohemian Grove near Monte Rio on July 30 of this year.

Have you had enough of the secrecy by the Schwarzenegger administration and its collaborators? Call the Resources Agency at (916) 653-5656 today and tell Lester Snow to stop this closed-door negotiating process and bring to the table all affected parties.

Or email Snow directly at secretary [at] resources.ca.gov and let him know what you think of him presiding over this destruction of the state’s public trust resources!