OPINION: San Francisco’s Turn to Cut Back Water Use To Help Fish

The contentious struggle to restore threatened fisheries in the San Francisco Bay-Delta and the Central Valley has focused mostly on reducing the amount of water exported from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to farms and Southern California cities. That’s now changed. The State Water Resources Control Board has asked San Francisco and other communities that withdraw water from rivers that feed into the delta from the south to be part of the solution. Declaring that “the Bay-Delta is in ecological crisis,” the state water board has proposed leaving 40 percent of the natural flow of these rivers untouched.