Spreck Rosekrans is an Economic Analyst at EDF.

As discussed at Wednesday’s CALFED “Ops” group meeting, state and federal officials are planning to deliver an urgency request to the State Water Resources Control Board to reduce required Delta outflows in February and perhaps beyond. The request will be officially made by the Water Operations Management Team (WOMT), comprised of representatives of fishery and water project agencies. They are expected to cite the extremely low storage volumes in principal State Water Project and Central Valley Project reservoirs, and explain that it is essential to conserve cold water in those reservoirs to protect endangered salmon later in the year.

Salmon require cold water. Fall run chinook spawn in the fall and outmigrate to the ocean in the spring, and are not present in our river system during our warm summer months. Winter run and spring run chinook, on the other hand, are in our rivers in the summer and require cold water. Under pre-dam conditions, they would often spawn at elevations above the large reservoirs. That upstream habitat is no longer available. Since water temperature in the reservoirs increases when storage volumes are low, conserving reservoir storage until later in the year will help these endangered fish.

Increased spring outflow, the best known operational feature of the 1994 Bay-Delta Accord, is correlated with higher abundance of a plethora of Delta fish and other ecological factors. So the WOMT is making the difficult choice to protect salmon at the expense of Delta fish species.

Of course, reducing outflow requirements will allow increased exports to cities and farms that rely on the CVP and SWP for some of their supplies. Unless we get some substantial storms in February and March, water supply for our cities, farms and environment will all suffer this year.

Spreck Rosekrans is an Economic Analyst at EDF.

Yesterday’s Orange County Register asserted that southern California gets about half its water from the northern Sierra. That is an overstatement. Imports from the Bay-Delta and the Owens River & Mono Lake account for slightly over one quarter of the total water supply in the urban southland.

It might surprise some people to hear that the Bay Area is slightly more dependent than southern California on diversions from the Bay-Delta. Read more »

Ann Hayden is a Senior Water Resource Analyst at EDF.

Check out the Contra Costa Time's latest piece on the proposed peripheral canal.

Taugher raises a lot of the right questions, such as: What level of water diversions can the Delta sustain to help recover the ecosystem? How will the canal be governed and operated to ensure the conservation of the Delta? What is the right size of the canal?

These are the sort of fundamental issues that must be addressed before a canal can be approved—recalling Spreck's recent blog post: The Delta Smelt Export Reductions in Context.

While it's a long road ahead, I'm working with others to try to tackle some of these difficult questions through the Bay-Delta Conservation Plan process.

Ann Hayden is a Senior Water Resource Analyst at EDF.
Payments by federal water and power users into the Central Valley Project Improvement Act (CVPIA) Restoration Fund for such projects as doubling salmon populations must continue for many years to come. This is the key conclusion of a recently released draft report (PDF)by the Bureau of Reclamation and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Back in 2005, the Central Valley Project Water Agency requested a reduction in payments to the Restoration Fund based on their claim that all reasonable efforts had been made to achieve the environmental goals of the Act. Had their request been granted, funding for programs such as restoration of the Trinity River and recovery of Central Valley salmon would have been diminished.

Read more »

Spreck Rosekrans is an Economic Analyst at EDF.

It was disappointing for several reasons to read Craig Manson’s opinion editorial in yesterday’s San Francisco Chronicle that criticizes the management of the Delta export pumps to protect Delta smelt.

First, the column is titled “Shutting off the pumps…”. The pumps are not being shut off. The new regulations will limit how much can be exported, but will still allow as much as was exported until recent the pattern of increases that began in 2000. A study by Professor David Sunding et al. of Berkeley Economic Consulting, funded by the water exporters, shows that deliveries to the State Water Project as a result of the federal court ruling to protect Delta smelt would actually be in excess of amounts delivered through 1999. Read more »

Spreck Rosekrans is an Economic Analyst at EDF.

It is good to see that Congressman George Miller, sixteen years after working with Senator Bill Bradley to pass the Central Valley Project Improvement Act, hasn’t missed a step. His editorial opinion on the future of the Bureau of Reclamation in today’s San Francisco Chronicle is a slam dunk. Read more »

Laura Harnish is the California Regional Director.
You may have heard that TNC came out and "endorsed" a peripheral canal yesterday. Many agree that a peripheral canal that provides both environmental and water supply reliability should be given full consideration, especially given climate change and the condition of levees in the Delta.

The trouble of course is that there remain a number of extremely critical unanswered questions about how we can accomplish this, as TNC admits in their press release and as we pointed out in our report "Finding the Balance".

Chief among these questions are:
1. Who is going to pay for this multi-billion dollar facility?

2. How will we assure that the co-equal goals of environmental integrity/ ecosystem health and water supply reliability are met consistently now and in the future and in the face of numerous conflicts and challenges such as climate change, recurring drought, species on the brink, etc?

3. How are we going to ensure that water operations provide the flows required to assure ecosystem health?

4. What is the governance structure and set of assurances that will best assure conflicts will be addressed fairly in the future?

We will continue to work tirelessly in the BDCP process and other forums to address these questions.