A lecture hall full of people spent four hours on February 22 hearing about the legislative, economic, research, and legal situation in which we find ourselves in the wake of the 2009 Legislative Water Package.  Hosted by UOP at its McGeorge School of Law in Sacramento, the water forum was subtitled "Where Are We, and Where Do We Go From Here?"
 
The goal, said the moderator, a McGeorge adjunct professor, was to provide a neutral place for people with differing views to discuss the subject.
 
Panelists generally agreed that the water bond is laden with pork added to the soup at the last minute, in the dead of night, to make it palatable to more legislators.  Even Assemblyman Bill Berryhill, who signed on to the original package for the new storage, said that pork in the water bond outweighs storage and delivery projects three to one and that legislators didn't understand what they were voting on.
 
Senator Lois Wolk recapped the water package's flaws: no significant representation for Delta counties, no enforceable flow criteria, no realistic revenue source, no water rights protections, and no provision for the new Stewardship Council to require contractors to do anything differently in the future than they have in the past.
 
Kathy Cole, legislative representative for the Metropolitan Water District, said MWD thinks the water package "does what it needs to do" in terms of conservation and respecting co-equal goals.  Tim Quinn, Executive Director of the Association of California Water Agencies (ACWA), was more enthusiastic in his praise of the "truly historic" water package. 
 
Quinn pointed out that the "magnificent system we rely on" was built in a time of extraction-based policies that didn't assign value to the ecosystem.  The water package is part of the difficult transition to sustainability-based policies.  Quinn said that the projected cost of fixing transfer and storage infrastructure isn't high compared to what our parents paid to build the system in the first place.  He said it is reasonable to ask ratepayers to pay for it. 
 
Economists and scientists alike said that we don't have the information we need to make good decisions about water in general and the Delta in particular.
 
Dr. David Sunding, a professor of economics and water policy from UC Berkeley, said that discussions about the Delta, formerly dominated by engineering and biology, now see economics coming to the forefront, but data about costs is lacking.  This involves not just the actual cost of whatever we do but the cost of doing nothing, the cost of catastrophic failure, the value of a more reliable water supply, and the value of biodiversity.  If we assume a 5-year construction period and costs financed at 5% for 40 years, we get a cost per acre foot of water that is considerably higher than the present cost.  Would the benefits justify that increased cost?  No one has calculated the benefits. 
 
Water markets, he said, are not a silver bullet; their performance has been disappointing, with urban agencies having trouble arranging transfers.  He said we need to get to the bottom of transfers, a view with which Restore the Delta agrees.  There may be a lot of transfers going on that economists and the rest of us don't know about.
 
Dr. Jeffrey Michael from UOP's Business Forecasting Center addressed the issue of water and jobs.  He pointed out that facts are things you know only when all the data is in, so some recent figures on farm employment that have been presented as "facts" are very preliminary.  Restore the Delta readers are familiar with Dr. Michael's analysis of the history of employment in the San Joaquin Valley and the factors affecting recent increases in unemployment: construction job losses, not farm job losses.  Last summer's biggest losses were sustained by farmers, not farm laborers.  He pointed out that, "We don't know what farm jobs would have been with full water."  (Dr. Michael didn't say it, but Restore the Delta has to wonder: If there had been more water, how much of it would have been used for farming?)
 
Ryan Broddrick, former Director of the Department of Fish and Game, said that DFG has plenty of experience with "command science" responding to events but little with activities such as data collection and monitoring, which aren't "sexy." Rich Breuer from the Department of Water Resources echoed Broddrick, referring to "crisis-driven science."  Broddrick said that Delta science is young, and research is not keeping up with demand.  Therefore, statistics rather than science has driven many decisions.  Broderick also commented on the trend to "out-sourcing" science to universities and consultants in connection with natural resources and water bonds passed in the 1990s.  People with regulatory authority are not doing much of the research.
 
Jonas Minton of the Planning and Conservation League unveiled PCL's alternative to the five-intake, two tunnel BDCP conveyance proposal now on the table.  PCL is calling for one tunnel with one Sacramento River intake.  Capacity for each: 3,000 cfs, or 2 ½ million acre feet maximum.  Some advantages: less surface disruption, lower cost, reduced South Delta diversions when fish are in the estuary, and less opposition.  Part of PCL's message: show us how you manage a small tunnel before we talk about more changes in diversions. 
 
Of course, everyone still seems to be assuming that the Sacramento River provides an inexhaustible supply of water.
 
There was general agreement that we need a better way of communicating good science to policymakers, and a general sense that science is reacting to policy decisions rather than informing them.  And everyone agreed that we need more data.  Asked about research criteria, Minton said that we need to find out what we need to have a healthy Delta.  USGS hydrologist Steven Phillips said there are major gaps in data regarding water availability in California; we have no water use data from private irrigators. 
 
In response to a question about Senator Feinstein's proposed rider to the jobs bill, Minton said Feinstein's information on jobs is not good.  He also said that if there are no fundamental assurances on the Endangered Species Act, environmentalists will abandon the BDCP.
 
On legal issues, attorneys were asked whether the recent package of bills represents a step forward regarding water rights.  Attorney Stuart Somach represents clients in the North Delta and the Sacramento Valley and serves as an outside counsel for Sacramento and Yolo counties.  He said the package is too Delta-centric to be helpful in developing water policy.  Somach echoed earlier speakers in noting that creating more layers of governance was not a good idea.  He commented that the Delta Stewardship Council abrogated decision-making from elected officials to appointed officials.
 
Attorney Scott Slater, who represents people north and south of the Delta, talked about the importance of "managing misery" so that people rise and fall together and have equal incentive to find a solution.  He called for everyone to "put down their swords."
 
Dante Nomellini, counsel and general manager for the Central Delta Water Agency, didn't mince words in declaring that there was nothing good about the Delta package.  He criticized the Delta Risk Management Study (DRMS) as a study undertaken to provide a scientific basis to support the unsustainability of the Delta.  He noted that DRMS predicted 3.8 levee breaks a year (a situation never seen so far) and led to a Blue Ribbon Task Force that was committed at the outset to an isolated conveyance facility.  The Delta Stewardship Council has been designed to ensure that interests now in control will remain in control well beyond the present administration.  Why, he asked, don't we have a Westlands Stewardship Council or a Desert Development Stewardship Council?
 
Asked about water rights, Nomellini noted that the Water Board is not impartial.  Requiring diverters to measure their diversions will put the politicized Water Board in charge of allocating water (actually water shortages).  Slater called for a recognition that water rights are a form of property rights, although they have a social duty associated with them.  But Somach noted that destabilizing the present water rights system is in no one's best interest.
 
UOP will be issuing summaries of the McGeorge presentations along with answers to audience questions not addressed at the forum.

 
Last week's BDCP meeting discussed several big areas of uncertainty:
 
1.  The reach of the project.  There seems to be a lot of uncertainty about how the BDCP effort will affect existing Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and Endangered Species Act (ESA) requirements for upstream reservoir operations.  Could the plan alter existing agreements? 
 
2.  Collaboration with local governments.  No one understands how county and community plans will work with the BDCP.  Even now, local governments like Yolo County don't have a good idea of the timeline for BDCP to address their concerns.
 
3.  Accounting for effects of planned projects (City of Woodland) and completed projects (EBMUD and City of Stockton) to avoid incomplete incremental analysis. 
 
4.  Lack of data.  Environmental organizations criticized the lack of justification for terrestrial mitigation acreage targets, and also the lack of biological response numbers or goals.  The Westlands representative wanted others to be responsible for that kind of data.  There was also dissatisfaction with numbers used in land acquisition for an eastern alignment.
 
RTD staff continue to be surprised at the ease with which BDCP steering committee members say that they have no idea about a topic when questions are asked that they either do not have an answer to or just don't feel like they have a publicly digestible answer for.  Either an issue isn't their responsibility or they haven't thought about it yet.   They behave as if they are acting in a vacuum when they insist that they will come up with necessary flows and continue to protect water quality; it is unclear that they will be able to alter upstream releases required to meet these obligations.
 
They might as well plan on getting an additional 10 MAF of precipitation in California every year.
 
BDCP staff announced that local interest groups are in queue and that agendas will be out in mid-April.