Time to gut and change California's fraudulent water agencies – California Globe

In California today, we have given unelected state bureaucrats the power to make decisions that affect millions of people and cost billions of dollars, with almost no recourse.

There is hardly any public criticism of the decisions of these authorities. That's because the people most familiar with the extraordinary power of these agencies are also the ones who have to turn to them for approvals and often critical funding. Despite the lack of serious public criticism, the primary narratives that state agencies use to decide water policy in California are highly controversial.

Let's start with the big climate boogeyman who urges us to accept literally anything. The counterargument is simple and convincing. While climate change has occurred – bringing more volatile weather patterns and hotter, longer summers – this only increases the urgency for regulatory flexibility, new approaches to protecting endangered species and new water supply infrastructure.

The narrative that more flow in rivers is required to protect endangered species is overused and increasingly disconnected from observational data that points to a host of other critical variables, including habitat, food sources, fishing rules that impact rivers and oceans, predators and hatchery management.

The narrative that too much energy is used to pipe water into aqueducts, pump groundwater, treat wastewater or desalinate seawater is unfounded for two reasons. First, because the energy required represents only a tiny fraction of California's total energy consumption. Second, as the renewable energy lobby continues to proclaim, once solar power and battery storage are fully realized in California (assuming conventional energy sources are not abruptly shut down), electricity will be plentiful and cheap. Our energy shortage, like our water shortage, is not fate. It is a political decision.

After all, it is a ridiculous but widely accepted narrative that disadvantaged communities and members of California's indigenous tribes are somehow trapped in a system that dismantles practical infrastructure while making it nearly impossible to obtain permits and funding to build much-needed new infrastructure are better off.

Most people, including most experts, know this, but they fear retaliation for good reason. They must protect the interests of their water authority and their customers. They remain silent and the problems get worse every year.

What is at stake affects much more than just California farmers, who face the imminent closure of about 1 million acres of productive land. Food and everything else that requires water is becoming more expensive. Without access to water, new homes cannot be built, prolonging California's housing shortage. Overall, by shaping scarcity through ever-escalating restrictions, Californians are being denied the surpluses that could make the difference between successfully managing a civil or climate-related disaster or making it a reality.

When you ask people in the industry what needs to change, the first answer everyone says is that we need to invest in more water supply infrastructure. But when you go deeper, an even deeper frustration emerges. California state bureaucrats don't care about farmers, and their policies don't even help our fish stocks. When confronted with facts and evidence that contradict their approach, they are inflexible, biased and behave with an attitude that is often perceived as hostility towards private companies in general and farmers in particular.

If this criticism were made by an individual or a cohort of people who share, for example, a conservative ideology, it could diminish the credibility of their frustration. But it is heard with equal force by everyone, everywhere, regardless of their party affiliation, regardless of the crops they grow or the size of their farms. And the overwhelming consensus is that the California Department of Fish & Wildlife (CDFW) is the worst of the worst.

It is difficult to succinctly summarize the variety of ways in which this agency has been accused of being rogue, but in attempting to do so, a few categories of abuse stand out. For several years now, they have largely ignored scientific studies that clearly show that merely increasing flow through the delta to restore fish populations is pointless. Every year, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of acres of water are dumped through the delta into the sea instead of being stored and sent to our farms and cities.

At the same time, CDFW is not taking decisive steps to address other options for recovering endangered fish. They are not changing breeding practices or accelerating experiments with special wetlands where salmon or smelt can grow larger in a natural environment before being released. They are not trying to curb predators by easing restrictions on bass fishing or killing the swarms of seals that congregate in estuaries during the salmon hunt. They do not effectively address the damage caused by the discharge of municipal wastewater into the Delta and San Francisco Bay. They have not adopted the latest and much more accurate techniques for monitoring salmon populations in the ocean.

When it comes to the CDFW, there are many questions on the answers to which the fate of entire industries and entire species depends. Why, one might ask, does CDFW work to maintain flow in California's rivers year-round during dry years when flow in many of these rivers was naturally a trickle before the creation of the reservoirs?

Critics of the CDFW claim that its employees, indoctrinated by the schools where they were trained and inspired by current leadership, are hampering virtually every project in the state that involves drawing water from a river. That's a problem because water projects generally have to go through the CDFW to be approved. This not only affects farmers, but also communities. When CDFW and other agencies began reducing the amount of water that could be pumped into the aqueducts about 20 years ago, farmers began pumping more groundwater. Now these wells are depleted, and the only way to refill them to get agricultural, municipal and domestic wells functioning again is to divert winter floodwaters from Sierra tributaries into seepage basins and rutted fields during winter floods. This requires means of transport. Try to get a permit for one of these modes of transportation through CDFW. By the time the necessary studies are completed and, with luck, approval is granted, the funding has expired.

If Gov. Gavin Newsom is serious about saving California's agricultural economy and saving California cities (including some of its most disadvantaged communities) from water rationing or even no water at all – and if, ironically, he cares about endangered fish stocks and wants this state His people must develop the resilience they need when disaster strikes – then he must go to CDFW and clean house. Tomorrow wouldn't be too early.

The California Department of Fish and Wildlife must be reborn as an organization dedicated to scientific debate about green dogma, prioritizing results over process, and respecting the balance between the needs of fish and the needs of people.