Dear Friends,
“The more things change, the more they stay the same.” We didn’t anticipate in early October that we would be writing our year-end report by quoting a lyric from rocker Jon Bon Jovi. Yet, 2025 is shaping up to be the year of repeats for Restore the Delta, but with a twist.
While we have worked effectively the last two years to build our Flood and Land Management, Sustainable Agriculture, Outreach and Youth Engagement, Delta Science, and Carbon Management programs, all to work on local Delta restoration efforts, our Delta Policy Program will be front and center in 2025 to stop the Delta Conveyance Project once and for all. $20.1 billion for a tunnel that will finish off California’s salmon runs and fisheries, decimate Delta rural farm communities with construction impacts, and pollute Delta urban communities with toxic algae and dirty waterways will not stand.
We will not let it.
Delta Conveyance is the continuous repeat of corporate interests and outsized government pushing down on the people. From North Delta wine makers to our Delta tribal partners, from pollution burdened urban communities to South Delta family farmers, from commercial salmon fishermen, who have lost two years of income, to Delta marina operators, who have lost over $100 million in revenues since 2012, the threat of the tunnel hangs over all our heads. It limits our ability to improve conditions in the Delta and to advocate for and create the local infrastructure that our people, rural and urban, deserve. It is the cause behind government neglect of our waterways, flood protection, and bad statewide water management, year after year, leading to fishery extinction, saltwater intrusion, and green, dangerous slime choking our waterways.
This time, however, we are better prepared for the fight. We trained for this. Our talented young staff, who have all developed deep expertise in the work described above, represent you, Delta community residents and lovers of healthy rivers and estuaries, in government and public forums, either through panel presentations, steering committees, or through sharp, factual public comments. On any given workday, Restore the Delta is advocating for healthy waterways and healthy communities for the San Francisco Bay-Delta estuary in dozens of meetings and events, and at each and every opportunity, our staff stands up in opposition to the Delta tunnel. The impact of our work is felt in public spaces, and we are moving the needle in ensuring the Delta has a voice in the halls of government and public policy forums.
Our staff also advocates for clean water, flood protection, sustainable agriculture policies and resources, fishery needs, and place-based protections for the Delta’s people and ecosystem with the following agencies: US EPA, State Water Boards, Delta Stewardship Council, Delta Protection Commission, US Geological Survey, Department of Water Resources, Lawrence Livermore National Labs, Lawrence Berkeley National Labs, Metropolitan Water District, and the Office of Emergency Services. We participate and advocate in an alphabet soup of acronyms – multi-agency and academic climate, economic, and environmental planning processes – that will ultimately shape the future of the estuary and result in decisions touching the lives of millions of area residents.
We do the work that our supporters cannot do on the day-to-day through litigation, research, extensive written comments, tabling at dozens of events, teaching youth, media outreach, organizing, canvassing, and through podcasts and social media. Our young staff is the future. They have the energy and the impatience of youth to take the fight where it needs to go, but because we have and will continue to train them for the future through real time work, they understand the past – including how the Department of Water Resources’ expired water rights disallow the construction and operation of Delta Conveyance and how millions of acre-feet of paper water have transformed state water management into a pyramid scheme.
They, like you, are over it.
We are asking for your year-end gift to support our extended advocacy for the health of the estuary and its people, to support our litigation against the Delta tunnel, and to build a much larger regional advocacy effort in 2025, by the thousands, to stop the tunnel boondoggle once and for all. Your contribution will support our efforts to expand our capacity, to be always where needed, and to change the legislative conversation once and for all through a multi-prong approach of policy-based work distilled for voters into usable messages to deliver to their state and federal representatives.
You can donate online here, or send a check with this form to 2616 Pacific Ave #4296, Stockton, CA 95204.
If you visit our website, you will see descriptions of our core team’s work for 2024, which will continue. But we encourage you to see them as your next generation advocates. They not only have defined areas of expertise, but they also work together to promote our regional Delta values and to advance collective work to end the Delta tunnel for good.
Yes, the more things change, the more they stay the same, like decades of Delta Conveyance efforts rejected by voters decades ago. This moment, however, is also different. We are more determined than ever.
The Delta is our home. That makes all the difference. Our collective identity is tied to the largest, and most magnificent, estuary on the West Coast of the Americas. It’s time to beat the odds and to win.
We wish you and your family happy holidays, peace, prosperity, and good health in 2025. We hope that you laugh heartily with family and friends and that you find joy in traditions and new beginnings.
We look forward to doing an abundance of good work with you next year.
With warmest regards and gratitude,
Barbara Barrigan-Parrilla
Executive Director
Restore the Delta
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