12.9.13: Opposition is Strong, Financing Weak – AquAlliance and colleagues around California oppose Governor Jerry Brown’s attempts to construct two Peripheral Tunnels, which are housed in the long-awaited draft Environmental Impact Statement/Environmental Impact Report (EIS/EIR) released today for the Bay Delta Conservation Plan. The proposed Bay Delta Conservation Plan (BDCP) is intended to serve as the basis for a 50-year permit under the federal Endangered Species Act and California’s Natural Communities Conservation Planning Act for water export pumping projects. The EIS/EIR comment period runs into April 2014.

The centerpiece of BDCP and the analysis in the EIS/EIR is the new water conveyance system: two, 35-mile long, 40 feet in diameter tunnels buried deep underground. The purpose of the tunnels is to circumvent the Sacramento/San Joaquin Delta by exporting water directly from the Sacramento River to urban centers (20 percent) and agricultural users (80 percent). Both Governors Schwarzenegger and Brown made the tunnels a priority. “To understand this bipartisan support for BDCP, AquAlliance can show you what drives this project and what it could do to California’s largest watershed (see video), There is little doubt that the massive tunnels will drain the Sacramento River and North State aquifers, diminish vital flows into the already devastated Delta, further stress native salmon runs, and destroy 150-year-old family farms to benefit unsustainable corporate agribusiness in the southern San Joaquin Valley,” stated Barbara Vlamis, executive director of AquAlliance. “In addition to the economic and environmental threats to the Sacramento River Watershed, is the state’s empty promise that it will locate the source water and funding for the Peripheral Tunnels later,” she concluded.

View the BDCP web site here.