Cynthia Koehler and Spreck Rosekrans
Our late EDF colleague John Krautkraemer was a staunch and passionate advocate of ecological protection and restoration of San Francisco’s Bay-Delta estuary. To paraphrase a famous vice presidential debate, we knew John Krautkraemer. John was a friend of ours – and it is preposterous for Congressman Nunes to invoke his memory in support of legislation that John would have found appalling and certainly would have worked hard to defeat.
H.R. 1837 is a broad attempt, among other things, to exempt state and federal water contractors from environmental protections for the Bay-Delta estuary, native fish and ecosystems beyond those established by the Bay-Delta Accord of 1994. The central conceit – that those 17-year-old protections should limit ecological liabilities for water projects using water from the Bay Delta – is disingenuous in the extreme. Rep. Nunes’ assertions that water supplies derived from the Delta since the time of the Accord have decreased are simply untrue. Total export volumes for the state and federal projects combined have averaged 5.4 million acre-feet over the 17-year-period since the Accord was signed, compared to 4.8 million acre-feet during the 16-year-period preceding the Accord. Annual export volumes since the Central Valley Project first began pumping in the Delta are shown below in Figure 1.
In other words, in the years since the Accord was signed, south of Delta contractors have been exporting substantially more water out of the Bay-Delta than they did prior to 1994. Exports at or above 6 million acre-feet did not typically occur prior to 1994, but became a feature of project operations over the last decade.
Not surprisingly, the Bay-Delta estuary has suffered for it. Populations of pelagic fisheries have declined precipitously, efforts to attain mandates to double salmon populations under state and federal law have been unsuccessful, and additional native fishes have been listed for protection under Endangered Species Acts. There is a growing scientific consensus about the collapse of the Bay-Delta’s ecological health – part of which is that restoration will be possible only if the volume of water extracted from the ecosystem is reasonably limited.
Of course, if the state and federal projects are willing to limit their exports to pre-1994 levels, the flow and operational parameters of the 1994 Bay Delta Accord could be worth revisiting. That’s a concept that John Krautkraemer probably would have been happy to support. John was quoted as saying that the Bay Delta Accord was "not an end, but a beginning."
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