Article from Central Valley Business Times.
http://www.centralvalleybusinesstimes.com/stories/001/?ID=26502
STOCKTON
August 14, 2014 5:12am
- Say governor rejects 21st Century solutions to water problems
- Water bond not “tunnels neutral”
The water bond that will be on the November ballot in California is a “poster-child of pork barrel politics, a rejection of 21st Century solutions and a return to the failures of the dam building era,” says a critique of the bond’s fine print by the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance.
The $7.5 billion bond pushed by the governor represents “an enormous underground subsidy” for the governor’s massive water tunnels that would suck fresh water out of the Sacramento River before it could flow into the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, the group says.
The $2.7 billion in the bond for new dams – at Temperance Flat on the San Joaquin River and at Sites north of Sacramento – would benefit special interests and provide little “new” water, the alliance says, and “would not be economically viable except for lavish public subsidies.”
Recycling projects provide far more “new” water at less cost while providing more jobs than surface storage projects, the alliance asserts.
“And recycling projects would help alleviate present shortages by creating “new” water within a few years in contrast to the decades required to design and build new dams,” says the Sportfishing Protection Alliance. “This bond does little to address near-term needs.”
“Legislative sausage-making is always messy but last minute sausage making ends up making baloney and this bond is a subsidized truck load of pork baloney,” says CSPA Executive Director Bill Jennings. “The governor inexplicably turned his back on 21st Century demand side strategies to embrace 19th Century supply side approaches that have brought us to the present crisis. California deserves better.”
Proponents of the governor’s $67 billion tunnels scheme have been insisting upon public funds to purchase water to supplement exports because their studies demonstrate that the tunnels are not economically feasible if not supplemented by huge public water purchases, Mr. Jennings adds.
“The bond undermines public trust doctrine by providing hundreds of millions of dollars to purchase water for fish and water quality, ignoring existing requirements that public trust beneficial uses of water quality and fisheries must be protected as a precondition for diversion of water for consumptive purposes,” the alliance says.
“Habitat restoration to restore fisheries to pre-project conditions is a legally mandated mitigation requirement of the export projects,” it says. “Habitat restoration should not be dependent on vast public subsidies.”
It says that any publically funded habitat projects in the Delta would relieve the tunnel project from its responsibility of mitigating impacts. “Consequently, publically funded habitat projects, like publically funded water purchases, are not ‘tunnel neutral,’” says the alliance.