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TOM WHEELER:

Welcome to the EcoNews Report. I'm your host this week -- Tom Wheeler, executive director of EPIC, the Environmental Protection Information Center -- and I'm joined by my co-host Scott Greacen, Friends of the Eel River. Hey, Scott.

SCOTT GREACEN:

Hey Tom, how you doing?

WHEELER:

Good. How you doing, buddy?

GREACEN:

Getting along. Glad to see the days getting a little longer.

WHEELER:

Yeah. Right, Alright. So we are talking about the Central Valley Project. If you are new Californian like me -- I only moved to the state a couple of years ago -- you may know roughly about the Central Valley Project, but you don't really know how it works. We have a couple of expert guests joining the show. Today we have Glen Spain of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations. Hey, Glen.

GLEN SPAIN:

Glad to have you.

WHEELER:

And We have Chris Shutes from the California Sportfishing Protection Association. Hey, Chris.

CHRIS SHUTES:

That's "Sportfishing Protection Alliance Alliance Alliance." You're one of many who misnamed C S P A, as we call ourselves, or the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance. Thanks very much for having me.

WHEELER:

That's my bad. I always forget that "a" last day of any group name has to be "association." All right, "alliance," I got that. All right. So today we are talking about the Central Valley Project, which if you are like me, you may have heard things about it, but don't really fully understand it. So we're talking about the Central Valley Project and a recent decision by Interior Secretary Deb Haaland that will hopefully result in more money going back to fisheries restoration, habitat protection, that sort of stuff. So Chris, can you tell me just kind of broadly about the Central Valley Project and how are we here on the north coast, You know, we're based out of Arcata, California. How are we connected to this thing? That is like elsewhere in the state of California?

SHUTES:

Well, generally speaking, the Central Valley Project moves water from northern California to southern California, although it also moves it around different parts of the San Joaquin Valley and in, in places south of the Delta, it's a series of reservoirs and canals and those reservoirs and canals are connected and allow water to be delivered primarily for agriculture, although it's also used to deliver water to cities and towns up and down the state. It was started in the twenties, conceived in the twenties. It was built out in the forties really, and added to the last major reservoir was added in the sixties. The main reservoirs that you might know about the Shasta on the Sacramento River, Folsom on the American River, Friant Reservoir on the San Joaquin, New Melone's the newest, on the Stanislaus River, and closest to home in Humboldt County is Trinity Reservoir on the Trinity River which controls the flows that, that go down the Trinity River and also that moves water from the Trinity River over the hill down to the Sacramento River just below Shasta Dam, There are also a series of canals that move water north, the south, primarily one called the Delta Mendota Canal that starts in the Delta near Tracy, California and moves water down to a town near a town called Fireball to deliver water to the west side of the San Joaquin valley. Most of the water from the Trinity River ends up is destined and allocated to folks there on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley.

SPAIN:

Let me add one little quick here. When they built out the project, they took water from wherever they could find it. Most of northern California, that's where most of the water is. Where the, the fields are, in central and southern California. There was originally desserts to get that water. They did everything they could to tap whatever water was available in northern California. Ship itself the trinity, roughly half of the total volume of the Trinity River originally has been essentially they confiscated if I could use that word, shipped through a tunnel that was artificially built in to get it over a mountain range and becomes part of the water supply of the California Central Valley Project. So, your water from the Trinity shows up as far south as Los Angeles and San Diego.

WHEELER:

That is wild<./span>

SPAIN:

And, and it is the largest irrigation project in the world serving primarily, you know, several dozen irrigation districts, including Westlands Water District, which is the largest water district in the world. Mostly corporate farmers.

GREACEN:

Right, So that brings us to the Westlands Water District. We're talking here about a water district As Chris laid out on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley roughly 600,000 acres 600 farmers. What has Westlands' role been in the fight over the Central Valley Project and the Central Valley Improvement Act? What's their role been? What are they seeking, and how did Secretary Bernhardt achieve that in the Trump Administration?

SPAIN:

What they're after is water And in California, water is power, water is wealth. There's not a lot of it where they're farming. And remember, the Westlands Water District is an irrigation district, they serve farmers, but the largest farmers down there are big corporations. Richland Oil for instance is the largest farmer in the Westlands Water District. There were decades of consolidation where small family farmers were basically cheated out of their land and cheated out of their water by big corporate interests. So we're not talking mom and pop farmers, we're talking big corporate agriculture of the scale of thousands of acres and what they've been after his water. And they built the project with little or no regard to environmental issues. I think the word environmentalist hadn't even been invented back then. Nobody cared. There were no environmental laws like we have today and they did a great deal of damage but we're still feeling the impacts of that damage. The C. V. P. I. A. was something that the fishing industry was proposing for years to try to reverse that, to try to make fish and wildlife needs at least co equal with irrigation. Under the old Bureau of Reclamation laws, the only purpose of the Bureau of Reclamation was to provide agriculture with water. That was the only purpose. We got that changed and it took 10 years. And I remember, you know, we were talking to some of the Westlands layers on this issue and we said we're going to get this change and they laughed at us, you scrappy little fisherman, what do they know? We're the water parents, we're the big boys. Well, it took us 10 years. And with the help of then-congressman George Miller, we got this thing through George Bush facing a tight election with California in the balance decided to sign it to our delight. And then of course lost the election. In any event, we, what we have is now the C. V. P. I. A -- California Central Valley Improvement Act. We'll just have to use that acronym for for a bit. But the C. V. P. I. A basically reformed the whole system, or tried to It put fish and wildlife needs this coequal purposes of the project for the Bureau of Reclamation. And it also set up a required set of mitigation measures to try to protect from fish and wildlife problems.

GREACEN:

So why was it so important to mitigate the impacts of Westlands in effects on the environment? What what was happening because of Westlands that drew so much attention? This is a very slow pitch.

SHUTES:

There were several things. First of all, Westlands is the last entity. They have the least senior contracts for Central Valley Project water. So they were always scrambling to get water when others got it first. And that meant that they were more eager and aggressive in trying to limit the amount of water that was devoted to the environment because they were the ones who most immediately suffered. The other thing is specific to the Westlands Water District itself. As this formerly desert land was irrigated. It turned out that there was a lot of runoff that was coming off as, as the fields were drained after the irrigation took place and it contained a lot of elements that were very damaging selenium being one of the most damaging. And it created an enormous amount of water quality and drainage problems. So water coming in from the west side of the San Joaquin River was supposed to have been captured and contained and ultimately drained somewhere unknown when, when Westerners first came online and they were putting it in a bunch of drainage ponds and the water as it drained off these these lands is irrigated lands and basically poisoning birds. Birds were dying in massive numbers and, and folks from Fish and Wildlife Service, we're finding deformed and otherwise damaged or dead birds as a result of their nesting or landing in and around these damaged this polluted water part. So it was contributing. In addition, it was also contributing a lot of salts and that salt was draining in the San Joaquin river and eventually into the delta. So it was creating this huge salinity problem for folks downstream model for environment. But for folks who are trying to divert water for agriculture in and near the California Delta. And and that was another problem that was created by this massive water district that didn't really have a plan and never has completed a plan for figuring out what it's going to do with the water and straining. So there were a host of issues.

SPAIN:

Another big issue, of course, for the salmon fishery is the salmon inter link and they spawn and rear. Many of them responded here in this constructed system. Now it's basically an engineered system. Well, we were losing a lot of the salmon runs. We continue to lose the Senate grants the salts that are toxic to people are also toxic to fish. The problems with too much water taken out means elevated water temperatures, which are also killing fish. We have all these problems of an over engineered system in a state where the water system itself is grossly over appropriated. Most people don't understand that there just isn't that much water. There are a lot of paper water contracts out there. One study, a very rigorous study concluded that California's about five times over appropriated. That means there are about five times more so called water rights. Then there is the volume of all the rivers in California on an annual basis. So we're in this situation where the salmon are declining, The birds are, the wildlife refuges are poison traps, the water system is responsible and we needed them to help fix it. The C. V. P. I. A. Set that process up to build them for some of the damages and some of the restoration work that their system creates and that they benefit from.

GREACEN:

I just want to note how deeply cynical it was to establish the so called testers and wildlife refuge on what amounted to a series of toxic drainage ponds. And you know, it was a way to sort of saddle the fish and the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service with responsibility for Westlands toxic waste. But we should probably move on to recent events and the good news which really requires that we explain what Secretary Bernhardt did. You know in those last months of the trump administration

SPAIN:

and have

WHEELER:

we covered yet how how intimately connected Secretary Bernhardt is to all of this. I think that that is an important part of this story.

SPAIN:

Well, his primary client for years was Westlands Water District. So you have the lead attorney for the Water district now the regulator of the whole water system that they're part of. Now that sounds like a conflict of interest. They claimed that they could overcome that and etcetera. But the end result is he did a lot of favors for his former client.

GREACEN:

And he'd been in kind of a revolving door situation. Bernhardt had been the solicitor of the Department of the interior in the early 2000s and then went back to his Colorado law firm to be a lobbyist for oil and gas and Westlands. But with the trump administration, he actually helped set up the Department of the Interior without devin Nunez, just a very, very extreme voice in terms of the overall politics of these issues. But then when Ryan Zinke was forced to resign as secretary of the Interior, Bernhardt sort of appointed himself Secretary and and just started making major moves. So

SHUTES:

GREACEN:

shocked even me, I think at the time that Bernhardt would go so far as to sort of give his clients what they wanted. But the layout, what he did, it's pretty amazing

SHUTES:

in the case we're talking about right now. What he did was he basically said, well at the beginning of the Central Valley Project, when we first started out, we knew they were going to create some problems and we set up some ways to mitigate those in the Central Valley Project Improvement Act set up specific requirements that for each acre foot of water, large amount of water that was delivered for water supply. There had to be a certain amount of money placed in a fund to help create construct mitigation mitigation places, things, things that mitigate the the the effects on fish and wildlife of the Central Valley Project. And there's a schedule that you can look up online and it's anywhere from 6 to $24 an acre foot that the different entities have to pay into a fund. And then each year a series of resource agencies get together and decide how best to use it. Now, it doesn't provide more water, which is one of the main things that that is needed, but it does provide the opportunity to create wetlands, wildlife refuges off Channel or or in channel rearing habitat for fish, those kinds of things. And it's tied to the idea that there are ongoing effects that are created by the Central Valley Project. In this operation, Secretary Bernhardt said, well actually, we're done mitigating for this, the responsibility that the folks who who actually get the water have for this is now is now come to an end. It was just sort of like declaring once and for all by fiat that the war was over and victory was declared and these folks no longer had to contribute anything.

WHEELER:

The EcoNews Report. We're talking about the Central Valley Project

SHUTES:

And so that's the stage that was set for the memo that we're about to speak of. At the same time, the Secretary Bernhardt issued a series of permanent contracts to all these folks which had been contingent on, first of all, paying off all the money that they had borrowed in order to construct the Central Valley Project in the first place, but also on mitigating the different harms that the Central Valley Project causes that requirement for reissuing contracts and making them permanent basically went away because Secretary Bernhardt decided include

GREACEN:

So in very brief, Chris, it sounds like Secretary Bernhardt canceled a lot of corporate debt just with the stroke of his pen and then issued them the permanent water supply they had long been seeking.

SHUTES:

That's a good way of putting it in a nutshell, permanent debt and other obligations.

SPAIN:

And the interesting thing of course is the timing. It was done all in the last few days of the trump administration and in some cases the last few hours where he actually signed things and made them regulatory and of course a day later the biden administration came in and one of the things that biden did is signed an executive order saying, look at all of these things that the trump administration did make a decision as to whether to keep them or cancel them. And that got us to where we are today because this was one of the things that a lot of people thought should be revised re rethought and just basically nullified, including members of Congress Jared Huffman was a leader in that I just wanna do kudos there, thank him for his hard work. He and others have been working the administration on this issue for a while and that brings us to the recent decision.

WHEELER:

Yeah. So let's go into that decision. So let's go to the recent decision by Secretary Hale And what has the biden administration done? Have we, have we fully reversed this? This trump order?

SHUTES:

The short answer is no, we've reversed part of it. We've once again reinstated the requirement that contractors folks who get water from the Central Valley Project have to pay into a fund to help restore efficient wildlife affected by the Central Valley Project.

SPAIN:

What we

SHUTES:

haven't done is reverse the contracts that were made permanent. My organization and Glen's organization, California, Sportfishing Protection Alliance, pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Association are currently in court to try to do that a different way. What we'd like to have happens. We'd like Secretary Halen to end the need to litigate the issue and cancel the contracts and and go back to where they were before before Secretary Bernhardt made his last minute changes. Let me

SPAIN:

talk about the contracts of it. The concept of them is appalling to me. The way it's set up originally is there were several year contracts. They were reviewed from time to time to see if they were effective, see what the environmental impacts were. They could be mitigated in the next renewal. The idea of giving a major district or a whole bunch of districts a permanent contract regardless of later science, regardless of later discoveries of environmental impacts without any kind of environmental review. Just basically we are going to give this water away forever regardless of whether it's a drought or not. That's appalling. It's in terms of policy, it is a terrible policy. That's one of the reasons we're attacking it. And we're not opposed to long term contracts, but they have to be reviewed and they have to be corrected if we're doing the wrong thing over and over, we've got to have some way of correcting that problem.

SHUTES:

The contracts are between the Bureau of Reclamation and the folks who actually get the water. The Bureau of Reclamation holds the water rights. They and the water rights are held under the Central Valley Project. Folks who get the water don't hold water rights themselves. They get contracts with the Bureau of Reclamation in order to get the water from the Bureau.

GREACEN:

That's the U. S. Bureau of Reclamation. So, we're talking about federal government with the contract then to the Western Water District.

WHEELER:

So what's next in your advocacy here? So, we're we're asking to to cancel these permanent contracts and move to a different system. Is their litigation or another strategy to to force Interior to do this?

SHUTES:

Well, there is the ongoing litigation that was initiated in 2020, I believe at the end of the 20 by October and that's ongoing. And we'll see if that gives us what we need in terms of reversing the permanent contracts, were hopeful that perhaps other legislators or folks who have influence within this in the Department of Interior will persuade Secretary Halen to take it one step further and cancel those contracts as I said.

WHEELER:

And so we have funding hopefully now restored so payments into the C. V. P. A. Program to do fish and wildlife habitat improvements. What are you hoping to see in in funding by the federal government?

SPAIN:

That's a big issue. How do you fix an over engineered system? We can patch it here, patch it there. There need to be some major changes. We need also to as a whole state, we need to learn to live within the water that nature actually provides Right now. The biggest single problem we have in California is over appropriation. They supplement the lack of rain by drilling down and draining the aquifers. Some aquifers have been so drained that there is more than 30 ft difference between the height of the ground now and 100 years ago. It's creating chaos back and forth. There's efforts in the state level to try to come up with sustainable groundwater management plans. That's more planned plan at this point, but we really need to come to grips as a state and as a society with the fact that there's only so much water and we live in a dry climate where that will go that's a multipronged approach. But in the meantime, we need to deal with the drainage problems. We need to deal with major water pollution problems that result from poor drainage and use using marginal lands which probably should be retired lands because they generate so much salt. We need to downsize rethink re plumb and really manage it for once and for all for fish and wildlife needs as co equal as the C. V. P. I. A. Requires bureaus never taken that seriously. The water districts have done everything they could to work around it, destroy that process or undercut it. And so far it's a draw. But I think we have to work with the farming industry, the Ag industry and try to come up with some solutions.

SHUTES:

The amount of money that's going to come out of the Central Valley Project Improvement Act is not going to make a huge difference. Let's be clear in the overall condition of fish and wildlife in the Central Valley. Birds generally have done fairly well in the Sacramento Valley due to some of the programs that the Central Valley Project Improvement Act has put into place. Fish haven't done as well. One of the things that's going to happen in the next couple of years is that the biological opinions, the documents that are issued under the endangered Species Act to protect Salmon and fish in the Delta smelt primarily that are listed as endangered or threatened. Those are getting rewritten. One of the things that the biden administration did when it came into office was it said it was going to redo the biological opinion, the stat the trump administration put into place. So there's a big opportunity there. It's not going to change the fundamental nature of the system, but it can provide more water and and will definitely provide more water than the trump administration provided when it rewrote the biological opinions and basically said the priority we're going to have here is water deliveries, maximizing water deliveries was the purpose and need of of the biological opinions of the trump administration put in place. So there's many prawns of advocacy that are taking place regarding the central value project. Another one is the need to put more water through the Delta and that's something that's taking place at the state level through the water quality control plans for the Sacramento Valley in the delta. And and hopefully that's really going to change the thinking about how water is allocated for agriculture for cities and towns and and for environmental purposes going forward.

SPAIN:

And none of this is easy and none of it was passive. We're not waiting for solutions here. We're doing what we can to craft them. Organization. P C. F. F. A. Is the lead plaintiff in challenging this trump administration biological opinion. We are in court now on interim plans while we all work together with the various agencies to try to come up with a longer term solution, a new biological opinion, but it's a couple years down the road

SHUTES:

and meanwhile, organization California Sportfishing Protection alliance is literally getting the way they're managing water temperature and the way that every time there's a drought, the state water board weakens the requirements that protect fish and wildlife in the delta and throughout different parts of the Central Valley. So for

WHEELER:

for folks who are looking to find out more information about your organizations and about how we can improve salmon habitat here in California, where would you direct people to go?

SPAIN:

I direct people to our website www dot p c f f a dot org and remind people were not an environmental group were a major industry. We represent thousands of jobs that are dependent on these river systems and dependent on there being water enough water in the river not taken out of the river.

SHUTES:

And you can get in touch with California Sportfishing Protection Alliance at H T T P S cal sport dot org slash news or just google us in your search and you'll find our website there. We have a lot of information about many of our activities campaigns and initiatives. So I hope that folks will join. We also have a great fishing blog that has about 50 posts a year regarding the state of fisheries in the Central Valley.

WHEELER:

Well, Glen and Chris, thank you so much for joining the EcoNews. I really like it, how the sport fishermen, the commercial fishermen, the environmentalists can team up to create better conditions in our watersheds. So thank you so much for this show and for all that you do. Thank you.

SPAIN:

We're all in this watershed together.

SHUTES:

We are, and we all have to stand up for the fish because they can't stand up for themselves.

WHEELER:

Very true. They lack legs. All right, well, thank you all. Have a good day. This has been another episode of the EcoNews -- join us again next week on this time and channel for more environmental news from the North Coast of California.