Environmentalists hit Interior's new Central Valley water plan

Tuesday December 17, 2002

By MARK SHERMAN
Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) The Bush administration's new plan for managing water in California's Central Valley would in some years cut by more than half the amount set aside for the environment, according to environmentalists who are fighting the plan.

The Interior Department says it is merely implementing a February court ruling that Interior's Bureau of Reclamation errs in how it measures water used to boost salmon runs and improve the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

The new policy could be made public as early as Wednesday.

The ruling by U.S. District Judge Oliver Wanger of Fresno, if put into practice, would reduce water for the environment by up to a third, said Tina Swanson, a biologist with the Bay Institute of San Francisco.

A draft of the new policy obtained by The Associated Press goes beyond the court ruling in one important respect. It would more easily allow Interior to reduce the amount of water set aside for fish by up to an additional 25 percent.

Spreck Rosekrans, an Environmental Defense analyst, said the draft policy would allow the administration to declare drought conditions an average of once every three years, instead of the once-a-decade average under the existing rules.

Environmental groups say a combination of court rulings and administration action signals a retreat from a commitment to restore the delta and boost the number of fish by dedicating 800,000 acre feet of water a year for environmental purposes. An acre-foot of water roughly covers a football field a foot deep.

The groups are appealing Wanger's ruling to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, which has said it will quickly consider the appeal.

The Interior Department initially appealed Wanger's ruling, then withdrew the appeal in August.

``I think it is par for the course for the Norton Interior Department,'' said Tom Graff of Environmental Defense, the lead organization in the appeal. ``They are looking for ways to capitulate.''

Gale Norton is the Interior secretary.

Jeff McCracken, spokesman for Interior's Bureau of Reclamation in Sacramento, said the new policy is needed to comply with the ruling.

The purpose of setting aside water is to comply with a 10-year-old law that called for doubling the number of salmon in Central Valley streams by 2002. In the draft policy, the government concedes that the doubling and other goals ``have yet to be realized.''

The lawsuit was filed by the Westlands Water District, a large irrigation district on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley. The judge agreed with Westlands that the government was being too generous to fish at the expense of farmers.

``It's protective of the environment and it's fairer to the water users,'' Westlands spokesman Tupper Hull said of the court ruling.

Westlands representatives met last week with Interior officials to discuss the new policy, said Michael Thabault of Interior's Fish and Wildlife Service. Hull would not comment on the meeting.

But the environmental groups say it is more evidence that the Bush administration is now working with farmers to undermine their legal appeal.

With Interior's new policy circulating in draft form, Westlands already has asked the appeals court to delay its review. The practical effect of that move would be to allow the new policy to govern the allocation of water in the spring, when young salmon are swimming downstream to the Pacific.

Then, environmentalists fear, Westlands and the government will try to persuade the court that the appeal is no longer relevant because a new policy is in place.

The Central Valley Project supplies water to more than 3.5 million urban customers and 20,000 farmers from Redding to Bakersfield.

(Copyright 2002 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)