A balanced and thoughtful analysis, as usual.
Dan Walters: A new jolt on water quandary
By Dan Walters - Bee Columnist
Published 12:00 am PDT Sunday, September 9, 2007
California's precarious water situation has been increasingly evident for decades, so politicians shouldn't need another reminder that action is overdue. A federal judge in Fresno nevertheless provided just such a jolt the other day.
Judge Oliver Wanger ordered state and federal governments to reduce transfers from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta -- the primary source of water for two-thirds of the state's population -- in order to stop killing tiny Delta smelt, which are sucked into huge pumps at the south end of the Delta.
Water managers are scrambling to determine the precise impact of Wanger's verbal order, but it appears that it could curtail roughly a third of the 6 million acre-feet of water that's drawn out of the Delta in a normal year for San Joaquin Valley farms and Southern California users.
In times past, state water officials would have reacted negatively to such an order, but it is, in political terms, something of a godsend. It bolsters their long-languishing plans to build new reservoirs and alter how water is moved either through or around the Delta. Wanger's decision is "proof that the Delta, indeed, is broken," says Mike Chrisman, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's resources secretary.
There is no more complicated, or probably more important, issue in California than water, an almost impenetrable political, legal and financial thicket rooted in decades of conflict over who gets it and who pays for it.
The last time anyone made a major water decision was 1982, when voters rejected a peripheral canal, which would have carried Sacramento River water around the Delta to the pumps near Tracy, both enhancing deliveries and preventing further environmental degradation of the West's largest estuary. That shortsighted decision by voters, egged on by a odd-bedfellows alliance of San Joaquin Valley farmers and environmentalists, has stalled water policy ever since.
