Press Release from Restore the Delta

Senator Feinstein's willingness to suspend Endangered Species Act protections for Chinook salmon

Announced first by Westlands Water District on the radio yesterday and confirmed in this morning's San Francisco Chronicle-has stunned her constituents in the Delta, Northern California, and much of the rest of the state.

Unemployment is indeed high in some valley towns, but it has been consistently high for years, due to the seasonal nature of large-scale irrigated agriculture. How many times do we have to point out to our senior Senator that the subprime mortgage crisis and housing implosion are responsible for most of the recent job losses in the San Joaquin Valley? UOP studies estimate that 47,000 construction jobs were lost in the San Joaquin Valley, as opposed to 8,500 jobs in agriculture, 6,500 of those due to the drought and likely to return this year.

The reservoirs are filling. Agricultural contractors with senior water rights got 100% of their water allocations in 2009. Some contractors even had enough left over to sell for development in other parts of the state, and the Kern Water Bank continues to be healthy. The situation on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley is not typical of the entire Valley. This is the region with junior water rights and impaired soils whose growing thirst and unwise crop choices have driven the decline of the Delta ecosystem, the loss of water quality for farmers in the Delta, and two years of closure of the salmon fishing industry at an annual cost of $1.4 billion and the loss of 23,000 jobs.

Does the Senator really want to sacrifice those 23,000 jobs permanently for the sake of the estimated 2,000 agricultural jobs tied to ESA-related cutbacks?

Senator Feinstein has an admirable record of insisting that we face facts with regard to climate change and energy. Last September, she delivered comments on the Senate floor with respect to efforts to prohibit the EPA from using any funds to enforce the Clean Air Act to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from stationary sources. The Senator said,
"The Flat Earth Society cannot prevail. [. . .] What we do here to protect our planet Earth for the next generations is so key and critical." She needs to apply this same clear-sighted concern for the future to water resources in the state she represents.

The days when California can sustain high levels of irrigated agriculture, especially on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley, are over, and lifting environmental restrictions now will simply prolong the pain for agribusiness and for individual workers as the economy adjusts to depending less on water transfers. It is vital that this area recalibrate itself to work with the water that it can reasonably expect to receive given the state's variable precipitation and given its junior water rights under the water project contracts.