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California Sportfishing Protection Alliance
“Conserving California’s Fisheries"

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CSPA Protests Bureau of Reclamation’s Petitions to Take All the Water That’s Left

 

by Chris Shutes, CSPA FERC Projects Director

October 31, 2009 -- CSPA has protested the Bureau of Reclamation’s petitions to extend the time to use all the water allowed on 32 water rights permits. These permits allow the Bureau, on paper, to use far more water than exists.
 
The 32 petitions filed with the State Water Resources Control Board don’t bother to say how much water the Bureau has used under each permit, or how much it intends to use. They simply asks the Board to allow the Bureau to keep on doing business while the Bureau figures out how much it can divert, store, and deliver. The permits are for water from the Trinity River watershed and from watersheds in diverse parts of the Central Valley.
 
CSPA’s protest reads, in part:
 
The face value of these permits is far greater than the average annual runoff in the Central Valley. Having paper water on file that vastly exceeds the water available is not in the public interest. It effectively leaves no water available for any other water user. It creates permanent, systemic pressure to reduce use of water for environmental purposes. Cloaked behind the plea of complexity is a basic operating principle: the CVP will take as much water as it can whenever and wherever it can, and put it to use wherever it pleases. Lacking specificity, these water rights permits effectively operate as a permanent line of credit, good anywhere in the Central Valley and in the Trinity River watershed upstream of Lewiston Dam, limited only by operational constraints, by whatever regulatory restrictions the Bureau cannot avoid, by diversion and storage facilities, and by what is taken by others. It is, in short, not a right to a certain amount of water. It is a right to all of it that’s left.
 
Read the CSPA protest Here.