Call for new Delta Tunnels EIR

Article from Central Valley Business Times.

http://www.centralvalleybusinesstimes.com/stories/001/?ID=31094

SACRAMENTO
August 18, 2016 11:29am

  • Environmental groups say current draft violates federal and state laws
  • “We are supposed to have a government of laws not of rulers”

The draft environmental impact report for the governor’s tunnels fails to disclose and analyze adverse environmental impacts, says a coalition of ten environmental groups.The draft also fails to develop or even consider a reasonable range of alternatives to increase water flows in the California Delta, the groups say in a letter.

The governor’s tunnels project as it stands violates both the National Environmental Policy Act and the California Environmental Quality Act, say the groups in a letter Thursday to Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell; Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker; U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Gina McCarhy; Council on Environmental Quality Managing Director Christina Goldfuss; California Natural Resources Agency Secretary John Laird and U.S. Bureau of Reclamation Regional Director David Murillo.

Tunnel advocates want to build multi-story water intakes along a five-mile stretch of the Sacramento River to drain fresh water out of the river before it could flow into the California Delta, as it has for thousands of years. Instead, the water would be sent in twin underground tunnels to supply customers of the State Water Project and the federal Central Valley Project.

“Due to the new points of diversion north of the Delta, freshwater that presently contributes to water quality, water quantity, fish, fish habitat, Delta agriculture and public health by flowing through the already impaired Delta would instead flow through massive Tunnels no longer providing benefits within the lower river, sloughs, and the Delta,” the letter says. “This undeniable truth is obvious. And this undeniable truth has been ignored for years by the federal and California agencies trying to take the water away from the Delta.”

The tunnels, touted by Gov. Edmund Brown Jr., would be an underground version of Mr. Brown’s Peripheral Canal.

Unlike the canal, which was rejected by California voters in 1982, the tunnels scheme avoids a public vote.

“We are supposed to have a government of laws not of rulers,” says the letter. It says the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and the state’s Department of Water Resources “apparently plan on ignoring our laws such as NEPA and CEQA by issuing a patently insufficient Final EIR/EIS [Environmental Impact Report/Environmental Impact Statement] for this controversial project. They must instead proceed in the manner required by law by issuing a new Draft EIR/EIS for public review and comment.”

The signers of the letter are: AquAlliance; California Sportfishing Protection Alliance; California Water Impact Network; Center for Biological Diversity; Environmental Justice Coalition for Water; Environmental Water Caucus; Friends of the River; Planning and Conservation League; Restore the Delta, and Sierra Club California.

Drilldown

Download a copy of the letter here (tunnels letter.pdf, 754 KB)

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