The farmers know we need it.
Jean Sagouspe: Rains only help if water can be delivered to farms
By Jean P. Sagouspe - Special to The Bee
Published 12:00 am PDT Thursday, March 20, 2008
The winter snow and rain hasn't put an end to our water shortages. Indeed, California's water crisis cannot be solved if we permit the legal and regulatory roadblocks to prevent us from moving the water from this year's snowpack south to the cities and farms where it is needed.
This crisis, like many others, is the result of a failure of leadership, a failure to act and surrender to the gridlock assured by a host of environmental laws.
Farmers on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley have known for some time that we're facing a looming disaster. But now, because of restrictions to protect the Delta smelt that the federal court has placed on pumping by the Central Valley Project and State Water Project, the effects of the crisis are extending beyond the San Joaquin Valley to have an impact on major urban areas in San Francisco and Southern California.
Some Southern California cities are already informing builders they may not be able to meet water demands created by new construction. And supplies could be cut back even further as a result of an order by the state Fish and Game Commission imposing more restrictions on pumping.
If uninformed people read the news about fishing declines in the Delta, they would get the impression that, prior to these recent legal and regulatory decisions, nothing had been done. Of course, this is not the case.
More than $1 billion has been spent on habitat improvements. Hundreds of millions more have been spent on scientific research. For decades, multiple restrictions have been imposed on pumping, and in the last 10 years, we have seen more than a million acre-feet of water a year relocated from human uses to environmental purposes.
…The planning efforts focused on the Delta today are very important to the future of California's water supply. The Bay-Delta Blue Ribbon Task Force has concluded that isolating and building a conveyance system apart from fish habitat offers our best hope of recovering the fisheries, restoring the Delta and securing the water supply California needs. It's time to have a serious conversation about how to fix the problem instead of continuing to point fingers.
