President Donald Trump lost no time Monday in advancing his agenda for California’s water supply with a “presidential action” intended to send more Delta water south to millions of Southern Californians and San Joaquin Valley farms.
The memo calls on the Secretary of Commerce and the Secretary of the Interior to develop a new plan within 90 days “to route more water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to other parts of the state for use by the people there who desperately need a reliable water supply.”
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Entitled “Putting People Over Fish: Stopping Radical Environmentalism to Provide Water to Southern California,” Trump’s order calls for reinstating 2019 regulations drafted by his first administration.
At stake are the rules that guide operation of the federal Central Valley Project and State Water Project, the two systems that deliver water from Northern California rivers to San Joaquin Valley farmers, Southern California residents and other water users in the southern half of the state.
Because the two systems harm salmon and other protected fish, the regulations have been highly contentious and debated among federal and state officials, environmentalists, farm groups, tribes and scientists for decades.
Trump apparently is asking his agencies to override the latest version, years in the making, that the Biden administration, with the support of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration, announced in December.
Karla Nemeth, director of the state Department of Water Resources, said returning to the earlier Trump rules “has the potential to harm Central Valley farms and Southern California communities that depend upon water delivered from the Delta, and it will do nothing to improve current water supplies in the Los Angeles basin.”
She said the rules from the Biden and Newsom administrations are the product of a three-year, labor-intensive process “to balance the needs of tens of millions of Californians, businesses, and agriculture while protecting the environment.”
Will this order be celebrated when the Delta water is diverted South and the NoCal farmers’ crops die off from hyper-salinity because the balance of fresh and salt water has not been controlled? Trump should consider all of the facts and have his people do a deep-dive on the existing water delivery structure before he just makes an executive order trying to divert it all to L.A. Does he realize that California is a desert state dependent principally on snowmelts for water most of the year? Has he considered that if you take the river and/or reservoir water from NoCal to SoCal to help fight wildfires in SoCal, it leaves NoCal with less ability to fight its wildfires? Has he considered the impact of moving the NoCal water to SoCal on the local agriculture? Is agriculture of California more or less important than the destruction of million dollar homes in SoCal?
What is desperately needed here is a Presidential Declaration that the California Governor, Legislature and Bureaucracy as enemies of the Residents of California and the people of the United States.
Absolutely no one in Sacramento is working on developing new and abundant water resources. They are not approving strategically located new reservoirs for fire fighting or domestic consumption.
Instead, the game is all about making water more scarce and driving up the costs to residents homes and businesses.. Eventually the last cubic foot of available water will sell for half a trillion dollars to the last rich guy left in the state.