There are alternatives to Sites

No, we don’t want Sites. For anyone who’s forgotten, it is part of a water plan that includes raising Shasta Dam several feet and trying to bring Lake Oroville back up, while feeding more Sacramento River water than now into one or two massive tunnels to move it south. Oh, and with a little added water from Sites carrying mercury that someone fishing there happened to miss.

We have the added genius of putting all this engineering in place without any climate models we can trust just now; and with no data from the state, and no commitment, to hold flows to the delta and Bay high enough to keep them from eventually degrading unrecoverably.

Something like 85% of the state’s water goes to agriculture now, with the new flows from here basically helping south state growers cope with new restrictions on their groundwater use. There’s a better way. We can let the Midwest get back to growing fruits and vegetables instead of dumping more billions of our tax dollars into keeping California deserts feeding people who will do fine on their own crops. Even in permanent drought we could protect the delta and still feed ourselves and a host of them. Seems fair.

If we want to be dumb, after we drop the dam projects and the water tunnels we can always dump more cash and debt into high speed rail. It’s been a few years since it last doubled in cost. Like those won’t.

— David Smith, Chico