California’s Water Plan Is Worse Than Trump’s: Environmentalist

An environmentalist is criticizing a proposed California water plan as being worse than Donald Trump’s version in terms of how much damage will be done to endangered fish in the area.
The Joe Biden and Governor Gavin Newsom administrations are in the throes of rewriting a plan for water operations in California’s major Delta water conveyance projects—the State Water Project (SWP), managed by the state Department of Water Resources (DWR), and the Central Valley Project, managed by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. The projects deliver water to millions of Californians and millions of acres of farmland.
In 2019, the Trump administration proposed a plan that would pump more water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta for farms—a plan welcomed by growers given California’s long-standing water problems as the state battles for water rights and endures longer droughts. Although biological opinions from the National Marine Fisheries Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said otherwise, environmentalists pushed back against Trump’s plan because of the possible impacts on endangered fish living in the Delta.
Trump’s plan was successfully challenged by California in court. Now, years later, the DWR and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation are finalizing a replacement plan that once again proposes more water for farms and cities.
However, the proposal is facing similar criticism for its environmental impact.
“You’d think it would be at least as good as the one the [state] sued over—but it’s not,” said Jon Rosenfield, science director at San Francisco Baykeeper, according to a report by the website CalMatters. “Not only do the proposed operations make things no better [for fish in the San Francisco Bay-Delta], they actually make things worse.”
In a statement, a DWR spokesperson told Newsweek that the DWR disagrees with Rosenfield’s comments and said there are plans in place to protect the threatened species.
“DWR disagrees with that assessment,” the statement said. “We believe the proposed State Water Project operations will better protect threatened fish species by incorporating new science and addressing climate change impacts through commitments to finalize restoration of tidal marsh and flood-plain projects, improve fish passage in critical migration corridors, and support hatchery production activities for key listed species.”
“The proposed operations also incorporate a robust adaptive management plan that will allow the SWP to incorporate new information or science tools to revise project components in a manner that more efficiently protects species,” the spokesperson added.
Reached for comment, a spokesperson with the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation referred Newsweek to comments made in the CalMatters article. Specifically, David Mooney, manager of the agency’s Bay-Delta Office, said the agency expects conditions for the winter-run Chinook salmon, one of the endangered species, to improve under the new plan.
However, a biological assessment of the preferred plan found in July that the proposal is “likely to adversely affect” the winter-run Chinook salmon as well as other threatened fish, including Delta smelt, spring-run Chinook, Central Valley steelhead, green sturgeon and longfin smelt, CalMatters reported.
The final environmental review of proposed options is expected next month. Federal and state officials could approve a new operation plan for the projects by the end of the year.