The Bay Delta Conservation Plan ostensibly aims to preserve the Sacramento Delta while funneling most of the water away from it via two huge tunnels for use by Central Valley agriculture and Los Angeles.
Calif. Governor Jerry Brown strongly supports the BDCP since it enriches two key constituencies, the labor unions who will build it and the investment banks who will finance it. However, one of Brown’s appointees, Natural Resources Agency Deputy Director Jerry Meral, forgot to stay on script and badly blundered by saying the “BDCP is not about, and has never been about, saving the Delta. The Delta cannot be saved.” Numerous groups are calling for his resignation but that won’t solve the problem, which is that a cynical governor is trying to ram through a building project to help his cronies. And if the Delta dies in the process, oh well.
“I think there’s some very serious problems with the BDCP, and they’re just becoming worse and worse,” said state Sen. Lois Wolk, D-Davis. “There isn’t a day or a week that goes by when there isn’t a serious concern raised about either the fisheries, the cost, the construction, the process, the exclusion of the Delta counties from participation. These concerns just keep growing and growing. And they’re never responded to.”
“The poorly named Bay Delta Conservation Plan is not really designed to save the Delta, but is primarily focused on exporting more water from the North to the South,” the legislators said.