On July 24, 2025, State Water Board staff released an “updated” version of a proposed Bay-Delta Plan. The updated Plan is very clear: it is going to give the water users and the Newsom administration every single thing they have asked for in terms of managing water that goes into the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and through San Francisco Bay.
They are offering a pittance of water in order to say they are making it better. They are trying to substitute money, and work with bulldozers, for the water needed to restore the ecosystem. The existing system of water diversions, storage, and overallocated use will be mildly stretched but systemically will not change. Over time, it will all get worse: the water quality, the usability of the estuary for recreation and enjoyment, and above all the fish.
In 2010, under a mandate from the legislature, the State Water Board published the Delta Flow Criteria Report. It found that the “Delta is in ecological crisis” and that certain percentages of unimpaired flow must enter the Delta and pass through it “in order to preserve the attributes of a natural variable system.” The water users have been beating furiously on that Report ever since it came out. Fundamentally, that vision died on July 24, with a whimper.
In September 2023, State Water Board staff published the Draft Staff Report for the update of the Bay-Delta Water Quality Control Plan. It included two separate and fundamentally conflicting “paths.”
One path was a “regulatory path,” whose organizing principle was a requirement for a percent of the unimpaired flow to enter and pass through the Delta. 55% of the water in the rivers in the Bay-Delta watershed would stay in the rivers and flow to the bay. This included the Central Valley and the mountains whose rivers flow into it.
The other path was a preemptive “voluntary path,” in which water users in the watershed would contribute “new” flow to the Delta. Basically, they got to choose the amount of water they could let go without breaking a sweat. They combined this preemptive offer with promises of “habitat” that would purportedly offset the lack of water.
Well, like so many federal employees, we’ve come to a fork in the road. And the winning side of the fork is all voluntary.
The regulatory path will stick around as a “backstop” to the voluntary landscape, with the empty promise that it’s Plan B if the voluntary approach somehow doesn’t work. We’ll have that argument in eight years. The regulatory path will also apply to the chumps who can’t figure out how to climb onto the voluntary bandwagon.
What’s left of the regulatory path is itself watered down. From an initial proposal of 55% of the unimpaired flow, the updated plan would require 55% of the unimpaired flow in the wettest third of years, 45% in the middle third, and 35% in the driest years. And there are exceptions to those as well.
The September 2023 Draft Staff Report recognized that voluntarily “adding” water to the Delta could easily be negated by new diversions of water. This is not a difficult concept. The 2023 Report proposed subjecting all new diversions to a regulatory requirement to let 55% percent of the unimpaired flow flow past them.
Keeping the existing “floor” of flow ain’t gonna happen. The “updated” version of the proposed the Bay-Delta Plan will deal with each proposed new diversion on a “case-by-case” basis. In other words, it’ll be business as usual.
I personally calculated that in “Above Normal” water years, the proposed new Sites Reservoir would divert about 2/3 of the “new” water that the voluntary update of the Bay-Delta Plan would “add” to the system. And that’s just one proposed new project.
If, as set up, the voluntary path is extended for a second term and lasts 15 years, there’s a very good chance that by the time it’s done there will be less required inflow to the Delta and outflow to the Bay than there is today.
Such a deal.
There is nothing remotely scientific about any of this. It is straight up smash-mouth politics. The monitoring plan is a plan to monitor the decline of the ecosystem. The water accounting plan is a plan to settle who exactly pays what small amount of water. The science plan is a plan to evaluate the implementation of a plan that as a whole is not scientifically supportable.
There is only one way the new Plan can work: if every water year is a Wet year. Perhaps the administration can legislate that.