Supervisor: Plan threatens water supply

Glenn County supervisors believe a proposed Delta restoration plan would open all the dam gates in the North State and leave them open.

That is the conclusion Supervisor Leigh McDaniel expressed Tuesday as the board approved an opposition letter to the Delta Stewardship Council.

McDaniel said allowing flows of 75 percent or higher out of the Sacramento Valley, as proposed by the council, would essentially eliminate most water storage in this region.

He said Stewardship Council members are seeking natural flows into the San Joaquin Delta, but that is an "extremely narrow vision."

McDaniel also said comments and concerns expressed by North State counties and water interests seem to be ignored for the past year, and the Council seems "hard bent on going forward with the EIR on its (plan)."

Supervisor John Viegas echoed McDaniel's comments by suggesting the council is not taking into consideration the negative impacts here.

"This is not going to work for us," he said.

Viegas added assumptions are being used in the plan's environmental impact report and it is not really known whether raising the flow will actually help the Delta's ecosystem.

The county's letter offered four bullet points, he said, basically reiterating McDaniel's ideas.

First, it said the draft EIR and the flow regimes required do not take into consideration the devastating effect they would have on the overall economy of the Sacramento Valley region.

Secondly, the draft EIR cannot adequately characterize or anticipate the effect of increased groundwater usage in the region the recommended flows would initiate.

The third bullet states the EIR proposal will have a "severe impact on the terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems that make up the Sacramento Valley region, a heaven for recreational activities."

Finally, the letter said flow objectives established during specific periods in dry years "could still be used in subsequent efforts to establish or modify water rights."

It also said flow criteria are to be used to inform, but are not by themselves regulatory in nature. However, while the flow criteria is to address public trust uses in the Delta and Delta watershed, it does not consider balancing flow criteria with other beneficial uses, based on language in the plan, county officials said.

Board members also say the Council does not take into account the recommended flow criteria "are inconsistent with the interests of the public or the policy of co-equal goals for the protection and restoration of the Delta."

They also said the plan does not consider the effect on areas upstream of the Delta and "the role these upstream environments play for a healthy and economically viable California."

The board also said the "aggressive timeline" for implementing the plan by June 20, 2014, and June 2018, can only provide "additional depletion of regional groundwater resources and significantly reduce storage in the Shasta and Oroville reservoirs — in addition to causing negative economic and social impacts to the rural communities of the Northern Sacramento Valley."

Assemblyman Dan Logue, R-Lake Wildwood, also wrote a letter opposing the plan and his field representative Nadine Bailey attended Tuesday's supervisor meeting.

Bailey presented the board with a copy of Logue's letter.

Contact Rick Longley at 934-6800 or rlongley@tcnpress.com.