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Fresh off the Oroville Dam crisis, California lawmakers on Thursday voted to make dam-safety plans secret through language that was quietly inserted into a budget-related bill. The legislation, which requires Gov. Jerry Brown’s signature before becoming law, says emergency action plans at dams would be kept confidential to “protect public safety.” Assemblyman James Gallagher, R-Yuba City, said slipping the language into a budget-related bill, Senate Bill 92, without debate was “kind of insulting, really” to the 188,000 evacuees such as him who were forced to flee their homes for two days after the near-failure of Oroville’s emergency spillway.

From hundreds of fish annually to nearly 9,000 per year, Butte Creek salmon are thriving, thanks to a project begun 20 years ago. That project was celebrated Thursday at Gorrill Ranch on the Midway. At the spot where Ralph Gorrill first pulled water from Butte Creek to grow his crops 100 years ago, 101 people stood or sat on hay bales as eight of the project’s leaders talked about getting water districts to work with government agencies, farmers, conservationists and public utilities to save the largest population of wild naturally-spawned spring-run chinook salmon in California.

 

In 2007, then-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger revived a plan that big agriculture loved – to build a peripheral canal or tunnels around or under the Sacramento Delta. Since then, a coalition of fishermen, Tribal leaders, conservationists, environmental justice advocates and Delta residents have been fighting to stop this Delta tunnels plan pushed by corporate agribusiness interests and Southern California water agencies. Now, 10 years later, we may be coming to the climate of that struggle.

In the middle of a severe drought in November 2014, California voters approved Proposition 1, a $7.5 billion water bond that set aside $2.7 billion for the public benefits of new water storage projects.Now, project proponents have less than two months to finalize applications for bond funds, which can be used for attributes such as ecosystem improvements, water quality improvements, flood control, emergency response and recreation. Among the projects competing for bond funding is the proposed Sites Reservoir, an offstream storage project that has been studied for close to 40 years.

A state of the art scientific field station planned for the California Delta is getting closer to reality with the finalizing of the project’s environmental documents by the California Department of Water Resources. The proposed field station in Rio Vista would be home to scientists from nine state and federal agencies who are now scattered in offices across the region. All are involved in the decades-long effort to monitor conditions in the California Delta, the largest estuary on the west coast of the western hemisphere.