FISH STOCKING PROGRAM WILL CONTINUE FOLLOWING COURT ORDER

From the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance:

November 2008 -- SACRAMENTO – An order today signed by Sacramento Superior Court Judge Patrick Marlette will allow the Department of Fish and Game (DFG) to stock more waters than would have been allowed under his Nov. 6 tentative ruling. The order is a result of weeks of negotiation among DFG, and the Pacific Rivers Council and Center for Biological Diversity, along with their counsel Stanford Legal Clinic.

“DFG fought hard in the negotiations to save its fish stocking programs,” said DFG Director Donald Koch. “We are pleased that the order allows us to continue stocking in a number of areas where the communities depend on fishing.”

The order, with some exceptions, has a broad prohibition against DFG stocking “nonnative” fish in “any California fresh water body” where surveys have demonstrated the presence of 25 specified amphibian or fish species or where a survey for those species has not yet been done. The order does not address the stocking of native fish into native waters.

The order lists exceptions to the prohibition regarding stocking nonnative fish, which include:

Stocking in human-made reservoirs larger than 1000 acres.

Stocking in human-made reservoirs less than 1000 acres that are not connected to a river or stream, or are not within red legged frog critical habitat or where red legged frogs are known to exist.

Stocking as required as state or federal mitigation.

Stocking for the purpose of enhancing salmon and steelhead populations and funded by the Commercial Trollers Salmon Stamp.

Stocking of steelhead from the Mad River Hatchery into the Mad River Basin.

DFG’s Aquarium in the Classroom program.

Stocking actions to support scientific research.

Stocking done pursuant to an existing private stocking permit or to be done under a new permit with terms similar to one that was issued in the last four years.

DFG is preparing a list of waters where stocking will cease based on these parameters. It will be available on the DFG Web site early next week.

In October 2006, Pacific Rivers Council and Center for Biological Diversity, represented by Stanford Law students, sued DFG over fish stocking programs it has engaged in for more than 100 years, claiming that no Environmental Impact Report (EIR) had been completed for the programs. The result of the case was a court order requiring DFG to complete an EIR. DFG is engaged in the years-long and multimillion dollar EIR process, now scheduled to be completed in January 2010.

Due to delays in the EIR process, which involves combining the EIR with a federal Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), on Friday, Nov. 7 Judge Marlette told the department to negotiate with the petitioners to seek an agreement on terms for how and where DFG may continue stocking fish during the time it is preparing the EIR/EIS.
 

Fish and Game Commission votes to reduce water exports
November 14, 2008
California fish and wildlife managers approved major new restrictions on water pumped from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to protect a native fish, triggering protests from farmers and cities reeling already from water shortages.
The Fish and Game Commission voted 3-0 Friday to enact emergency regulations to scale back water pumping for 90 days starting on Dec. 1 to safeguard the longfin smelt, considered a bellwether species for the estuary.
"Clearly as a society we haven't erred on the side of the fish in the past, we've erred on the side of the water supply," said Commissioner Michael Sutton. "We have to come down on the side of the fish. If we don't take care of these ecosystems, they're not going to yield us the services for much longer."
The latest round of pumping cutbacks will slash state and federal water deliveries by up to 1.1 million acre feet, bringing California's total water supply to slightly more than half of what it would be in an average year.
That's in addition to recent water cutbacks imposed by the state Department of Water Resources, which plans to deliver just 15 percent of the amount that local water agencies request every year.
The combination "could create a water supply and delivery crisis the likes of which Californians have not seen in decades," warned Director Lester Snow in a statement.
 

State of Bay-Delta Science Book, Fact or Fiction?
by Dan Bacher

October 23, 1008 -- The CAL-FED "Science" Program yesterday published a book, the "State of Bay-Delta Science, 2008," summarizing the "new knowledge" gleaned from eight years of CAL-FED science research into water supply and water quality, ecosystems and levee fragility in the California Delta. 

For those not familiar with CAL-FED, it is the joint-state federal agency, formed after a "Water Summit" by the state and federal governments in Sacramento in 1994, that has presided over the dramatic decline of Central Valley chinook salmon, Delta smelt, green sturgeon, white sturgeon, striped bass, threadfin shad and other fish in the California Delta-San Francisco Bay Estuary.  

Those of us aware of the numerous examples of political manipulation of science to serve corporate agribusiness and water developers under the Schwarzenegger and Bush administrations have become very wary of "political science" masquerading as "natural science" in reports such as this one. For example, the Delta Vision Blue Ribbon Task Force, a supposedly "independent" body appointed by Arnold Schwarzenegger, released a report last week advocating the construction of a peripheral canal and more dams to "restore" Delta fisheries, even though they would certainly further imperil collapsing populations of Central Valley chinook salmon and Delta fish. 

The CAL-FED publication was released on the eve of the  5th Biennial CALFED Science Conference, initiating the gathering of 1,200 San Francisco  Bay/Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta scientists, managers and policy makers at the Sacramento Convention Center, according to a CAL-FED news release.

“This is a landmark publication summarizing our current understanding of the Delta by the most  knowledgeable experts on the estuary,” claimed Cliff Dahm, CALFED Lead Scientist.  “I envision this as a go-to book for managers and policy makers, as well as interested members of the public that are working to gain a better understanding through science of forces at work in  the Delta."

The effort was led by Michael Healey, a former CALFED Lead Scientist and Science Advisor to the  Governor’s Delta Vision Blue Ribbon Task Force. 

One of the key findings, in an apparent attempt by "political biologists" to exonerate the Bush and Schwarzenegger administrations from their role in engineering the Pelagic Organism Decline, as well as the collapse of Central Valley salmon populations, appears to dismiss water exports as a primary cause for the unprecedented fishery collapse.

" Since 2001, both public and scientific attention has focused on the unexpected decline of several open-water fishes (delta smelt, longfin smelt, juvenile striped bass, and threadfin shad)," the report claims. "It is clear that export pumping is only one of several factors contributing to the decline. Other factors include changes in food supply, loss of habitat and toxic chemicals. (Chapter 4).

Other "key findings" include:
• The Delta of tomorrow will be very different than it is today. Intensifying forces of change, such as land subsidence, rising sea level, species invasions, earthquakes and regional population growth, virtually guarantee that current land and water use in the Delta cannot be sustained. (Chapter 1).

• The largest estuary in western North America, the Bay-Delta is a system of extremes. Discharge from tributary rivers varies more from year to year than other large western rivers, such as the Columbia or Colorado. (Chapter 2) 
• Many toxic chemicals are a concern in the Delta. Organisms can often be affected by very low concentrations of contaminants. Effects can be magnified though concentration up the food chain or synergistic effects of mixtures. (Chapter 3)

• With climate change, California will become warmer, more precipitation will fall as rain and less as snow, the snowpack will be much reduced, and there will be less groundwater recharge. These changes will challenge the capacity of California’s water management system to provide reliable, high-quality water to satisfy human and environmental needs. (Chapter 6) 

Other areas of the book deal with Delta history, science, geophysics, water quality and supply, aquatic ecosystems, levees, climate change, policy development and some themes that are crosscutting across areas and issues. 

In addition to Healey, other editors of the publication are Michael D. Dettinger, Research Hydrologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography; and Robert B. Norgaard, Professor of Energy and Resources at the University of California, Berkeley. Darcy Jones and Jana Machula of the CALFED Science Program were managing editors.  

The conference features seminars on the Pelagic Organism Decline - the dramatic decline of Delta smelt, longfin smelt, threadfin shad and juvenile striped bass in recent years. The event will also offer sessions about salmon management and ecology. 

Ironically, as these presentations are being made, our public trust fisheries continue to collapse. CAL-FED, a joint federal-state agency, has spent millions and millions of dollars on scientific studies, conferences and "restoration" programs, but has been a dismal failure to date. 

The reason for its failure is that the state and federal governments have constantly resisted taking the drastic measures needed to restore salmon and other fish populations, including dramatically reducing water exports from the California Delta and taking drainage impaired land on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley out of production. The CAL-FED Process to date has produced nothing but the collapse of Central Valley salmon fisheries and the Bay-Delta ecosystem. 

The CAL-FED process has been an elitist process where the people most impacted by fishery declines - recreational anglers, commercial fishermen and California Indian Tribes - have been excluded from the decision making process. Meanwhile, those who have presided over the destruction of public trust fish populations - the Bureau of Reclamation and the California Department of Resources - have completely bent over to serve the needs of corporate agribusiness and the state water contractors. 

Although I think there is some good information available at conferences like this, the problem is that there are lot of agency people and consultants making good salaries incessantly "studying the issue," often with apparently pre-determined conclusions, while failing to stop the decline. The state and federal governments have set up a de-facto "restoration industry," in cooperation with some corporate funded NGO's, that extracts millions of dollars from the taxpayers with fishery collapses the only concrete result!  

Patrick Porgans, independent natural resources consultant in Sacramento, often refers to CAL-FED as "CAL FED UP." This is an appropriate term to describe his and my view of the agency that has squandered millions of the taxpayers money, with only unprecedented fishery collapses to show for all of the money spent!

Copies of the The State of Bay-Delta Science, 2008, will be available to attendees of the CALFED Science Conference October 22-24, at the Sacramento Convention Center, or beginning October 22 on the CALFED website. Hard copies are available by contacting Rhonda Hoover-Flores at rhondah [at] calwater.ca.gov. http://www.science.calwater.ca.gov/pdf/publications/sbds/sbds_2008_final_report_101508.pdf