Article from Chico Enterprise-Record.
By Heather Hacking, Chico Enterprise-Record
POSTED: 06/04/15, 5:28 PM PDT
Chico >> Environmental groups, including Chico-based AquAlliance, filed a lawsuit Thursday to press for delivery of better water quality for imperiled fish.
Barbara Vlamis, director of AquAlliance.netsaid the amount of water remaining in reservoirs is not enough for both farms and fish.
Crops can be grown another year, the groups say, but extinction of fish is forever, Vlamis said.
The same thing happened last, where laws to protect fish were relaxed to provide more water for fish. The result was devastation to fish populations, Vlamis said.
If the lawsuit prevails (read the details here, https://goo.gl/6uDaeP) less water would be released to farms through the Central Valley and State Water projects and more for water quality in rivers. Vlamis said this would probably mean water that is planned for water transfers in July would not be transferred.
The lawsuit cites several laws, which the plaintiffs say are not being followed, including the Bay-Delta Plan, Clean Water Act, Central Valley Project Improvement Act, Delta Protection Act and others.
Vlamis said the lawsuit comes after a long process. The group monitored water use last year, but did not file suit when water quality rules were not followed, Vlamis said.
“We kept asking for an evidentiary hearing,” which is similar to a court hearing where people are sworn in under oath and asked to give evidence. Yet this did not take place.
Then in February 2015, the State Water Board again relaxed water quality rules, which allowed more water to be released to farms and some cities, she said.
The group might have acted with legal action at that time, but was delayed through procedural rules.
Technically, board staff relaxed the rules, not the board itself. This meant the environmental groups needed to first make an appeal to the State Water Board, asking the board to reconsider. After waiting 90 days, the State Water Board chose not to take up the topic, the group said in a press release, https://goo.gl/UYe9ec
Now with the lawsuit filed, the next step in the legal process is that the defendants will respond.
The press release points out that fisheries are at historic lows.
“Relaxation of temperature standards in the Sacramento River and unnecessary depletion of Shasta cold-water storage last year caused chinook salmon losses of 95 percent of winter-run, 98 percent of fall-run and virtually all of the spring-run,” the press release states.
Meanwhile, Reclamation “has again scheduled to deliver almost 1.6 million acre-feet of water to Sacramento Valley water contractors,” the statement continues.
The lawsuit was filed in federal Eastern District Court for California in Sacramento against the U.S. Department of Interior, Bureau of Reclamation, State Water Resources Control Board and members of the California Department of Water Resources.
Joining AquAlliance are the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance, http://calsport.org; California Water Impact Network, http://www.c-win.org; and Restore the Delta, http://restorethedelta.org.