Unanswered Questions about the Peripheral Canal
January 7, 2009 | Posted by Laura Harnish in Bay Delta
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.
One Response
Comment from davidzet
January 8th, 2009 at 11:01 am
(3) is the killer. You cannot pursue two "co-equal" goals that conflict. I would say more (and even link to a blog post on the idea), but Sheryl Canter told me not to
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