For more than a decade, the State Water Board has repeatedly concluded that the existing Bay-Delta Water Quality Control Plan, which establishes minimum water quality and flow objectives to protect farms, cities and the environment and is implemented through Decision 1641, is inadequate to protect the health of the Delta. Yet instead of strengthening the existing 1995 water quality control plan and implementing stronger environmental flows consistent with the best available science, the State Water Board has repeatedly weakened and waived the environmental rules the Board has acknowledged are inadequate.
In fact, despite publicly claiming that the State Water Project has and will comply with Decision 1641, the State Water Project and federal Central Valley Project have repeatedly violated their obligations under D-1641, filing temporary urgency change petitions to violate the Bay-Delta water quality objectives in 2014, 2015, 2021, 2022, and now 2023. Under pressure from the Governor, the State Water Board has legalized these violations. In addition to these legalized thefts of environmental water in the Delta, the water projects have routinely violated additional Bay-Delta water quality objectives over the past decade, which the State Water Board described in 2021 as the result of "operational decisions... that appear to have discounted the need to maintain regulatory compliance." Each of these violations effectively steals water from the environment, and the cumulative effect is the ecological crisis we see in the Delta: numerous species heading towards extinction, proliferating harmful algal blooms, and the ongoing decline of the State’s salmon fishery….
With his Executive Order, Governor Newsom has chosen to put his thumb on the scale in favor of extinction in the Delta. But his legacy of environmental devastation in the Delta is far from complete, as his Administration pushes to divert even more water from the estuary with new dams, an environmentally destructive proposal for the Delta tunnel project, and hollow promises of a voluntary agreement for the Delta, all of which will worsen the ecological devastation in the Bay-Delta.
It is clear that the State of California is unable and unwilling to protect the Bay-Delta ecosystem, and the thousands of jobs and communities that depend on its health. It’s time for the federal government to once again intervene to protect the Bay-Delta, before it’s too late.
https://www.nrdc.org/experts/doug-obegi ... ltas-water
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