Plan Designed to Bring Delta Foes Together Inflames Debate Instead

After four years of urging the state’s water rivals to cast aside their differences long enough to save the sickly Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, state and federal officials instead are being barraged with uncompromising rhetoric from all quarters.

At a series of public hearings throughout the state, officials from Calfed, the program aimed at saving California’s major watershed, are on the receiving end of a litany of complaints and dire predictions.

The delta, which supplies water to 22 million people, is the lifeblood of the state’s trillion-dollar economy. The Calfed program is an attempt to improve its conditions by considering measures to clean up tributaries and control flooding and siltation.

But farmers say that the proposed plan tilts too heavily toward birds and fish. It would be ruinous, they say, to agricultural interests in the Central Valley by pushing tens of thousands of acres out of production by taking away water.

Environmentalists counter that the plan would signal a retreat in the fight to save imperiled wildlife and restore natural habitat. It would do nothing, they say, to curb the farmers’ wasteful ways or to prohibit them from planting super-thirsty crops like alfalfa.

And the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which supplies water to six counties, says that the Calfed proposal does virtually nothing to improve the quality or reliability of water that flows south from the delta through the California Aqueduct.

All this is ominous for a program predicated on the optimistic notion that archenemies can be persuaded to reach a compromise rather than let the delta continue to suffer flooding, brackishness, contamination and loss of fish and wildlife.

When the Calfed effort was announced in 1994, it was hailed as the most ambitious watershed restoration program ever attempted in the United States--bringing together a Democratic administration in Washington, a Republican administration in Sacramento, and the usual suspects of California water wars: agribusiness, environmentalists and urban water districts.

The nonpartisan Sacramento-based Water Education Foundation refers to the delta as “probably the single most important aspect of California’s complicated water picture,” an aquatic switching yard for water destined for the San Francisco Bay area, Central Valley and Southern California.

From Silicon Valley to the smallest avocado patch outside Fallbrook, the state’s trillion-dollar economy is inextricably linked to the health of the delta created by the confluence of the state’s two major rivers. The 1,600-square-mile estuary provides a home to 120 species of fish and irrigates 200 different crops, including 45% of the nation’s fruits and vegetables.

The first years of what is envisioned as a 30-year project have been consumed with studying the many issues, trying to bring together suspicious foes, and authorizing only the least controversial of projects.

But now the time is fast approaching to make decisions that could cause considerable anger among one group or another. The Calfed staff, employees of state and federal agencies with a stake in the delta, hope to have a plan of action for big-ticket items by early next year and are midway through 15 public hearings from Redding to San Diego to test the political waters.

Officials Optimistic

The waters are proving quite chilly. The regionalism and tribalism that have blocked previous efforts at restoring the delta are again reasserting themselves.

“What we’re seeing now is people digging in to protect their positions,” said Calfed Executive Director Lester Snow. “It is very distressing because we’ve made so much progress in other areas, but it’s also predictable. The stakeholder-based process is arduous, long and frustrating, but for this kind of program it’s the only way to go.”

Despite all the tough talk of competing interests, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt says that he remains optimistic about Calfed.

“People are repositioning themselves during these hearings and that’s normal,” Babbitt said. “But the bottom line is that they have to realize that if we do nothing in the delta, it gets worse for every single stakeholder.”

Babbitt says that his optimism is buoyed by an August meeting with Gov. Gray Davis, a fellow Democrat. Babbitt said he is convinced that Davis is fully engaged in the process and has the moxie to make Calfed a success. The two share authority to decide which projects Calfed will pursue.

So far, the politically cautious governor has not offended environmentalists or Northern Californians. Yet the future of Calfed may hinge on whether Davis will risk the wrath of groups that are part of his core political constituency.

“Babbitt and Davis have the opportunity to lead in a very positive direction as long as they realize that governing from the middle does not mean governing without controversy,” said Tim Quinn, the MWD’s deputy general manager.

Cautious Approach

Thomas Hannigan, director of the state Department of Water Resources, said the Davis administration sees no need for a peripheral canal around the delta, a project despised by Northern California as a trick by Southern California to drain the Sacramento River. The MWD contends that the canal is needed to ensure that the water sent to the south in the California Aqueduct has not been tainted by the contaminants in the delta.

The $1.97-billion water bond endorsed by Davis last week and set for the March ballot also demonstrates a cautious approach. A demand by Republicans to add money for reservoirs was thwarted by Davis--who acceded only to study whether reservoirs are needed.

The question of reservoirs is a flash point in the Calfed process. Calfed officials are studying a dozen possible sites where water could be stored.

Water districts and farmers say that increased water storage is necessary to prevent flooding and to capture water during rainy years that would otherwise be flushed into the San Francisco Bay and out to sea. Stored water could be used in dry years to prevent cutbacks.

The pro-storage side feels that the issue is going the way of the peripheral canal proposal.

“The political pressure is overriding the engineering and the science,” Charley Wolk, a Fallbrook avocado farmer and chairman of the California Avocado Commission, told a Calfed hearing in San Diego this month. “I beg you not to let that happen.”

To the environmentalists, storage is a code word for a return to the days that California thought it could solve its water problems with dams. There also is the fear that building reservoirs only avoids coming to grips with what they see as a continuing outrage: that 80% of the state’s water is devoted to agriculture.

“The old strategy for water problems was to build massive facilities, ignore the environment and stick taxpayers with the bill,” John McCaull of the California chapter of the Audubon Society said at a Calfed hearing in Huntington Park. “It’s disappointing that Calfed is still considering taxpayer-subsidized, damaging projects.”

Similar philosophic chasms can be found in other key areas: improving water quality, stopping the intrusion of saltwater into the delta from San Francisco Bay, and divvying up acreage and water between wildlife and farms.

“In the water wars, when Californians are forming a firing squad,” Babbitt said, “they form a circle facing inward.”

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Delta Dispute

The vast Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, the state’s largest watershed, provides water for 22 million people and habitat for hundreds of species of wildlife, and undergirds the state’s trillion-dollar economy. Government officials hoped that a plan by the state and federal governments to save the deteriorating delta would persuade environmentalists, farmers and urban water users to set aside their differences. But the old rivalries appear as strong as ever.