Newsom declares war on S.F. Bay
In response to the 9/11 attacks of 2001, then-President George W. Bush created an enemy that could not be defeated — the very concept of terrorism. He used this framing to help justify launching unjustified wars of aggression in Iraq and infringing on traditional civil liberties at home. His actions — propelled by the cynical exploitation of a real emergency — ultimately backfired, fueling terrorist ideology instead of hindering it.
While obviously not so dramatic, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s executive order this week declaring war on California’s water scarcity takes a note from the Bush playbook. The decision to extend his drought emergency declaration — despite the recent record rains and flooding — gives carte blanche to state agencies to eviscerate essential water quality and environmental protections in perpetuity. Meanwhile, his administration continues to press for the same kinds of projects and management strategies that helped create the state’s water problems in the first place.
The results will be catastrophic for the health of San Francisco Bay.
The bay and the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta form one of the planet’s great estuaries, where salt water and fresh mix, and the estuarine ecosystem is highly dependent on the amount of fresh water that flows into it from the watershed. In recent decades, on average less than half of the watershed’s runoff reaches the bay, with the majority stored or diverted upstream. The results have been a disaster for the estuary’s fish and wildlife, whose population levels closely track freshwater inflow to the bay. The lack of bay inflow has been a major factor in the current or pending listing of numerous fish species in the estuary as endangered and at risk of extinction.
But apparently, the governor has bought into the old falsehood that the water that sustains a healthy San Francisco Bay is just “water wasting to the sea.”
Managing California’s water resources has always required planning for highly variable natural weather patterns of alternating droughts and floods. Throughout our history, however, California’s leaders have misunderstood the problem as a lack of water rather than the state’s wasteful and unsustainable water use.
Like terrorism, water scarcity is real. But what is needed to meet this challenge is a clear plan and strong actions to diversify the sources of our water supplies, to adopt and promote water policies and projects based on their contribution to long-term water supply sustainability, and to ensure that the needs of disadvantaged communities and the environment are provided for before water is delivered to powerful constituencies for private gain.
A generic war against the realities of California’s hydrology cannot be won. Such rhetoric misrepresents the nature of the problem and justifies using the variability of California’s weather as a pretext to discard essential protections for water quality and the environment.
Here in the Bay Area, we’ve already seen the result of the emergency approach to managing water scarcity. Over the past few years of actual drought, water quality standards were waived, ostensibly to save cold water stored in upstream reservoirs for salmon. Instead, water that would have provided some measure of protection to the bay-delta estuary in the winter and spring was released later in the year to senior water rights holders who get water whether it’s dry or wet. Endangered salmon populations were devastated several years in a row (leading to the likely closure of California’s salmon fishery this summer), other native fish species at risk of extinction continued to decline or were nearly extirpated and toxic algal blooms proliferated around the state.
Now that winter rains are once again filling reservoirs, the rules in the state’s water quality control plan for the bay and delta, and Water Rights Decision 1641 which implements the plan, require that we share some of that bounty to protect water quality and fish and wildlife. State regulators explicitly acknowledge those rules to be insufficient to reverse the decline of our rivers and San Francisco Bay caused by years of drought and mismanagement. Now, instead of complying with even these minimal protections, California’s Department of Water Resources and the federal Bureau of Reclamation are ignoring the rules — and Gov. Newsom’s drought emergency extension was issued specifically to encourage regulators to allow them to get away with it.
In reality, his war on water scarcity has become a war on San Francisco Bay. The bay’s future — the continued existence of its fish and wildlife, and the health of communities dependent on a healthy bay ecosystem — is at stake.
The challenges of balancing real human needs with effective environmental protections are real — but so is the rule of law. Suspending the rules because they are inconvenient is not a solution. Instead of abusing the drought emergency declaration process, even as reservoirs across the state are filling fast, Gov. Newsom should accept that his administration has an obligation to come up with and enforce science-based rules in an open and credible process to protect people, the environment and the economy. That’s the kind of decision-making process Californians expect and deserve.