WATER
While flow is still without doubt the
key issue, it is no longer the only one.
When the Water Board voted to regu-
late and restrict water use by farms and
cities, it also directed staff to continue
the voluntary agreements discussion,
which brings other considerations to
the table. This includes $2.8 billion
for habitat restoration, science and
adaptive management, and another
$2.2 billion for further environmental
improvements, according to the volun-
tary agreements framework.
Kevin O’Brien, a partner at the
Sacramento law firm Downey Brand
who has litigated water cases and rep-
resented water users before the board
for 35 years, says expanding the scope
of the argument to include factors
other than unimpeded f low is the key
to its resolution. He applauds Newsom
for his “willingness to find a middle
path based on sound science.”
“We can’t solve the fish problem
by throwing water at it,” he says. “Flow
is important, but not as important as
habitat restoration and getting these
fish ready for the ocean.”
Kim Delfino, the California pro-
gram director of Defenders of Wildlife,
who has worked on Delta issues from
Biologists Miranda Tilcock and
Veronica Corbett study chinook
salmon raised in pens for the
Nigiri Project, a collaboration
of the UC Davis Center for
Watershed Sciences, the
California Department of Water
Resources and California Trout.
PHOTO BY JACOB KATZ
50
comstocksmag.com | May 2020
the other side of the bargaining table
from O’Brien for 15 years, does not dis-
agree. “It’s not as simple as, ‘Let’s just
cut agriculture off and retire a bunch
of farmland,’” she says. “There may be
points in time when it’s appropriate to
take large amounts of water and move
it south. But there are also times where
it’s not appropriate. Mother Nature is
more complicated than we knew.”
The framework of voluntary agree-
ments — the version the Brown admin-
istration oversaw as well as the version
released in February by Newsom’s team
— addresses habitat restoration as well
as science and adaptive management.
It proposes to restore 60,000-plus acres
of new habitat, including large-scale
restoration in the Sacramento Valley,
and creates a “collaborative science
hub” to study restoration of the fishery
and climate change adaptation.
The wetlands, riparian forests
and free-f lowing streams that once
supported the fishery that included
millions of salmon are now mostly
farms. Conservation groups, includ-
ing California Trout and the Audubon
California, are working with farmers
to create or re-create some of the hab-
itat that has been lost.
Meghan Hertel, director of land
and water conservation at Audubon
California, oversees that organi-
zation’s Working Lands Program.
She says rice farms throughout the
Sacramento Valley and northern San
Joaquin County have become “surro-
gate habitat” for the millions of birds
that migrate along the Pacific Flyway.
She and others are hoping to replicate
that success story for fish.
The story begins with a happy tale
of unintended consequences. In the
1990s, the California Air Resources
Board forced rice farmers throughout
the state to cease burning their fields
at the end of the growing season — a
practice that got rid of unwanted
straw but clogged Central Valley skies
with pollution. The farmers began
f looding their fields instead, and they
started noticing birds returning by the
thousands, and then by the millions.
“W hen those rice growers started
to f lood their fields,” Hertel says, “it
mimicked and replicated much of the
wetlands that had been lost. It creat-
ed surrogate habitat. And the water-
fowl responded very, very quickly.”
Audubon members had also no-
ticed the rebirth of the migratory bird