Cynthia Koehler is Senior Consulting Attorney for EDF.

The demise of a package of five water policy bills in the state legislature late Friday night, while predictable given end-of-session deadlines, had this sliver of surprise buried in it: the 5 policy bills taken together were pretty good. By “pretty good,” I mean good in the sense of “an important and meaningful advance over the water policy status quo for the environment” as opposed to “guaranteeing the water policy outcomes that would be ideal” from an environmental perspective.

How can the policy package possibly be construed as good, when it was linked to a water bond that included billions for construction of new dams under a poorly-defined assumption that they would provide public benefits?

Let’s stipulate that the longstanding practice in California of holding solid water policy reform hostage to a massive public spending commitment is of questionable wisdom at best. (I’ll let you come up with your own descriptions of the “at worst” side of this equation.) Let’s further stipulate that water bond proposals in play could lead to the construction of controversial dams and other water projects that could cause substantial environmental harm.

Nevertheless, it is still extremely important to talk about the water policy piece in the light of day and determine whether – on its own merits – that policy is pretty good or not. The fact is whether the state builds dams or not, California’s water policy is broken and it needs to be addressed if we are to move past the hand-wringing stage and into the fixing things stage.

The tug of war between our highly degraded ecosystem with its barely surviving salmon on the one hand, and the two massive water projects that provide 15% of the state’s water supply to farms and cities on the other, has dragged for decades. The Bay Delta Conservation Planning process (BDCP) is the place where much of the current action to find a solution is taking place. However, there are serious concerns about whether this will just be another in a litany of failed efforts and broken promises leaving the estuary, our salmon, and our state in even worse shape than before. It is of particular concern that a potential peripheral canal lies at the center of the BDCP’s work. The Governor’s Delta Vision Task Force has proposed a set of policy course corrections. The Environmental Defense Fund does not concur with every one of the Task Force’s recommendations, but believes that its Strategic Plan has real merit. In particular, its recommendations that the legislature must act to correct certain out-dated water policies and give guidance to the BDCP process.

So why is the water policy package that emerged just before Friday’s deadline pretty good? Here’s my top ten:

1. It establishes a state policy of reducing reliance on the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta by increasing water recycling, cost-effective efficiency, and regional self-sufficiency.

2. It substantially increases the State Board’s power to enforce water rights and stop illegal diversions of water.

3. It substantially expands groundwater management and monitoring efforts.

4. It requires the State Water Board to do a public trust analysis of the flow needs for the Delta ecosystem within nine months – well in time for the analysis to be of real value to the BDCP process. Granted, the bill does not require the BDCP to use this analysis (let me spare you the long, dull, lawyerly reasons for this), but the State Board is the public trustee for the state’s fish and wildlife and – if the legislature provides it with the resources it requires to do the job – is the right place to get this done.

5. It precludes the start of construction of any canal until the State Water Board issues certain permits. This addresses concerns that a canal could be built first, or construction begun, prior to a Board determination of flow needs. Moreover, those permits would be required to include flows for fish and wildlife protection.

6. It requires that an Independent Science Council must be involved with the BDCP. This Council would be charged with ensuring that the BDCP passes scientific muster. The last thing we need is another plan that fails to keep its ecosystem restoration promises.

7. It requires that the BDCP must meet the recovery standard, and all of the other requirements, of the Natural Communities Conservation Planning Act and be certified by the fisheries agencies to be a Natural Communities Conservation Plan (NCCP) before that plan can be eligible for any public funding or other important benefits.

8. It requires fishery agencies to establish new performance measures critical to achieving a healthy and resilient ecosystem in the Delta and its watershed, and includes a host of additional ecosystem health considerations that must be included in the BDCP and broader planning for the Delta estuary.

9. It requires Delta agencies to respond to climate change and the threats it presents to the Delta communities.

10. It contains a substantial new water conservation program, which, while watered down from earlier versions — and less likely to reach its lofty objectives — still represents an important advance from today’s more anemic conservation efforts.

Is this nirvana? If this bill were enacted today, would we be assured that the conflicts discussed above will be finally resolved, that the salmon fishery restored to health, and that threats to our ecosystem will be banished? It’s probably safe to say that this is unlikely. But would these measures together represent real improvement over the status quo, do they provide important levers for moving decisions and processes in a more productive direction; do they provide greater hope for the future? I believe so. Taken together they give the Delta a fighting chance, while still recognizing the need for a reliable water supply for cities and farms, a threshold test any viable legislation will have to meet.

But what of the linkage between the water bond and the policy bills? At the end of the day, who cares if you have a pretty good water policy bill if you only get it by agreeing to a water bond that could fund new infrastructure that threatens new harm to the ecosystem we are working so hard to restore?

This is a fair and reasonable question, and it is the reason that EDF is taking different positions on these two pieces of legislation. But we need to be able to talk seriously and clearly about policy on its own, first, and then work to de-couple discussions about water bonds from discussions about policies to address water supply reliability and ecological devastation that have been the scourge of this state for decades.

To do otherwise is simply giving in and allowing the hostage taking to continue, to be party to the unending ideological standoff. At that point, California’s only hope is the one we have relied on to date – pray for rain.

We’ll post again soon on the legislative process and continue to explain why policy reform is necessary – not just for the environment but for California’s cities and farms as well.