Effort Falters on San Francisco Bay Delta

[phantom power]

SAN FRANCISCO — A high-stakes effort to remake the San Francisco Bay Delta, the West Coast’s largest estuary, is looking as fragile as the degraded delta itself these days.

Four years into the effort, the distance between competing water constituencies has only been widening as self-imposed deadlines come and go.

Farmers and cities in Southern California are pressing for a return to the abundant supply of water delivered through the 1,000-square-mile delta before a drought and legal rulings to protect endangered fish led to constraints two years ago. Environmentalists want ironclad guarantees that threatened fish like the minnow-size delta smelt will not be wiped out for want of water.

...

The goals of the plan are to keep vegetables and fruit trees growing in the Central Valley, taps running in Southern California and native fish swimming in the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers and in the briny western reaches of the delta, which the rivers feed and give it its formal name.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/15/science/earth/15delta.html?_r=1

[tularetom]

1. Only benefits a handful of ginormous corporate farms on the west side of the valley

At the expense of family farms in the delta and north valley where irrigation water is supplied by Sierra streams.