Thomas J. Graff is Senior Counsel at EDF.

They say cats have nine lives.  

How many does the proposed Auburn Dam have? 

The answer: one less than it did last week.  

On Tuesday, the State Water Board revoked the Bureau of Reclamation's decades-old permit to divert water from the American River at Auburn, holding that it had not pursued completion of the dam in a timely fashion. 

Many heroes can be credited with helping to bring about this result. Ron Stork, Steve Evans, and colleagues at Friends of the River, including the since-departed Charlie Casey, stand out among them. 

I recall two episodes from this long battle. Read more »

Spreck Rosekrans is an Economic Analyst at EDF.

The Public Policy Institute of California has released its long-awaited report on the Delta in which they endorse a highly controversial peripheral canal. PPIC's timing is excellent, coinciding with today's lead Opinion Editorial in the San Francisco Chronicle written by my EDF colleagues Laura Harnish and Cynthia Koehler which makes a compelling case for the link between environmental reliability and water supply reliability.

As the PPIC authors acknowledge, the best thing for our embattled fisheries would be to take the pumps out of the Delta entirely. Considering that option isn’t too popular, it may well be that a canal of some kind would provide useful water supply benefits to south of Delta water users including improving water supply reliability, even with the explicit understanding that it might not increase the overall volume of supply. And, operated correctly and conservatively, it has the potential of causing less damage to fish than the existing pumps.

But we know enough about the system today to understand that protecting fisheries, including our salmon industry, will require substantially more than pouring concrete, and that safeguards, as we describe in the newspaper today, must be put in place prior to authorizing or constructing a canal. More on the PPIC report to follow in the coming days.