California Gov. Jerry Brown wants to build to ginormous twin tunnels to shunt water around the Sacramento Delta to San Joaquin Valley agriculture and southern California. Their Board of Supervisors has released a scathing report opposing the plan, which appears to be backed by few now except for Brown’s most favored constituencies, big money and big labor, who will profit mightily from it.
“The problem we have is that it doesn’t make any additional water available during times of shortage,” said Bob Elliott, chair of the Board of Supervisors. “It just takes water from one part of the state and transfers it to another. It doesn’t solve our state’s water problem.”
Elliott called the plan “unworkable and counterproductive and detrimental for the Delta.”
“Despite the Orwellian doublespeak employed by its proponents, the BDCP is not really about conserving anything,” County Counsel David Wooten told supervisors. “Conserving something means to keep or protect it from injury. Yet despite all the attempts to politically green-wash this project, the BDCP is really only about one thing: Building the largest and most expensive public-works water project in U.S. history through the heart of the Delta, primarily in San Joaquin County.”
Further, Delta counties would be excluded from any meaningful input into the system, plan documents are twice as long as Keystone pipeline documents and are “totally unreadable”, conservation plans are vague and rely on phantom water that doesn’t actually exist.