Brown Regime Gets Ugly Over State Water Project Contract Extension

Coalition says contract extension used as "stalking horse" for Twin Tunnels

by Dan Bacher

As if Governor Jerry Brown's plan to build the TwinTunnels and his many other attacks on salmon, water and the public trust in recent years weren't bad enough, the Brown administration has opened yet another toxic route in the race to the environmental bottom.

According to a coalition of water policy reform advocates, a proposed Environmental Impact Report on a long-term extension of State Water Project contracts threatens regional and local water agencies with delivery cutbacks if they don’t sign on to the deal.

The coalition is opposing the proposed EIR, characterizing it as an "aggressive attempt by the Brown administration to circumvent public input and due process over the disposition of the state’s water."

"If the contract extension goes through, the current inequitable distribution of State Water Project supplies will stand until 2085, with urban ratepayers shouldering most of the financial burden," according to a coalition statement.

Coalition members observe that any contract extension is premature, given that existing contacts will not expire until 2035.

“The administration is presenting local water agencies with a Hobson’s choice,” stated Carolee Krieger, the executive director of the California Water Impact Network (C-WIN). “They must either get behind this ‘deal’ or face the loss of their State Water Project allocations, conveyance capacity and water transfer rights. It is blatant political intimidation, aimed at quashing dissent and consolidating the near monopoly that corporate contractors hold over ‘public’ water.”

Krieger said the contract extension “is the equivalent of being told in the 20th year of your 30 year mortgage that you have to add another 30 years to pay for undisclosed costs, or else you will lose your home.”

Further, Krieger said the contract extension is being used as a "stalking horse" for the Bay Delta "Conservation" Plan (BDCP), the Brown administration scheme that would construct two massive water conveyance tunnels through the heart of the Sacramento/San Joaquin River Delta, the largest estuary on the West Coast of the Americas. The Twin Tunnels would cost ratepayers $67 billion or more, degrade the biggest and richest estuary on the West Coast, threaten the solvency of hundreds of Delta family farmers, and do nothing to augment state water supplies.

The construction of the tunnels would hasten the extinction of Sacramento River Chinook salmon, Central Valley steelhead, Delta and longfin smelt, green sturgeon and other species, as well as imperil the salmon and steelhead populations on the Trinity and Klamath rivers. The project would take vast tracts of some of the most fertile agricultural land on the planet out of production in order to irrigate toxic, drainage-impaired land owned by corporate agribusiness interests on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley.

“Even though the administration refuses to evaluate the BDCP in the EIR, it’s all about the Twin Tunnels,” says Adam Keats, Senior Counsel for the Center for Biological Diversity. “This environmental review process essentially constitutes an open line of credit for billions of dollars, with the money coming from ratepayers and taxpayers. Average citizens – who are already economically stressed and overtaxed – will be forced to pay for an undefined list of capital projects with a massive potential for cost overruns.”

The coalition letter may be found at: http://www.c-win.org/webfm_send/452

If anybody still believes that Jerry Brown is a "green" governor after he has relentlessly campaigned for the tunnels, presided over record water exports and fish kills at the Delta pumps, signed a bill to expand fracking in California, promoted carbon trading policies that threaten Indigenous Peoples across the globe, and now is engaging in an aggressive attempt to circumvent public input and due process over the disposition of the state’s water, they are simply in an abject state of denial!

The "Brown Water Plan," as Caleen Sisk, Chief and Spiritual Leader of the Winnemem Wintu Tribe calls it, is a wasteful, costly and toxic transfer of California resources into corporate coffers. We must stop the Shasta Dam raise, ban fracking, halt the Peripheral Tunnels, vote NO on Proposition 1, and oppose this latest attack by the Brown administration against the taxpayers and the public trust.