Can California salmon survive Trump water plan backed by House Republicans in spending bill?

A Trump administration plan for delivering more water to Central Valley farmers — bottled up in court by opponents for almost four years — could be returned from legal limbo this summer by House Republicans.

Environmentalists say the measure could push closer to extinction the salmon, trout and Delta smelt who live in waterways that sustain the state’s agricultural heart. They also contend that the underlying science has advanced since regulators published their plan in 2019. Congressional approval would lock it in for the next seven years.

In 2019, federal officials determined that increased water deliveries to farms and municipalities through the Central Valley Project and the State Water Project would not threaten the endangered fish. The analyses conducted by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Marine Fisheries Service, called “biological opinions,” approved a plan by the Bureau of Reclamation, the federal agency responsible for water.

Litigation brought by the state of California and environmental groups blocked its implementation.

But the measure is embedded in one of the dozen spending bills that Congress needs to pass to fund the government next year. The Working to Advance Tangible and Effective Reforms for California Act (WATER) is backed by all California Republicans, including House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Bakersfield. Lawmakers will need to consider it when they return from their six-week summer recess in September.

The Central Valley Project, the nation’s largest federal water system, is a network of 20 dams, reservoirs and other infrastructure that store and convey water along a 400-mile path from Redding to Bakersfield. It draws from the Sacramento and San Joaquin River watersheds to feed farms and families in the Central Valley, which grows a third of the nation’s produce. A major source of water deliveries is where the rivers converge with the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

The State Water Project draws from many of the same sources and coordinates operations with the Central Valley Project under certain agreements.

The Central Valley Project delivers on-average 5 million acre-feet of water annually for farms and 600,000 for municipal and industrial use, according to the Bureau of Reclamation. It also maintains wildlife refuges and water quality in the Delta. (An acre-foot is the annual consumption for two average households.)

But drought the last several years has meant water deliveries fell short, if they came at all. As recently as 2022, the agency was not able to send most Central Valley Project recipients any water. Reclamation had to cut supplies for some senior water rights holders during dry years too.

Rep. David Valadao, R-Hanford, said the biological opinions would bring some water security to farmers who desperately need it. Valadao, who sponsored the legislation that now resides in the funding bill, said relying on the opinions is “making sure that we manage water moves to the Delta in the best way we possibly can with the most up-to-date science available.”

Lawsuits blocked Trump’s water plan

The 2019 plan isn’t in place now because immediately after it was signed, California and environmental groups sued. They argued that pumping more water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to farms would further endanger Delta smelt, Chinook salmon and steelhead trout — fish protected by the Endangered Species Act. Many fish native to Northern California have faced difficulties in natural habitats with the creation of dams and reservoirs.

A judge agreed to block the implementation until the end of 2023. An interim plan now dictates how the water delivery systems cooperate. The Biden administration agreed to conduct another review, with results expected in 2024.

Then-California Attorney General Xavier Becerra said the opinion failed to analyze the potential for extinction of the fish and ignored that federal law requires helping the recovery of threatened species, not just ensuring continued survival. The lawsuit contended the opinions neglected the decline in smelt, relied on uncertain harm reduction and failed to account for the impact of climate change.

“Those biological opinions were issued as the result of political interference,” two dozen environmental groups wrote in a letter to members of Congress involved with funding guidelines this year. “They dramatically weakened protections for salmon and other listed species in the previous biological opinions.”

There is also concern about how the plan would work with federal and state conservation rules. The Central Valley Improvement Act and other measures have incorporated wildlife restoration as one of the project’s purposes, which decreased water availability, raised costs on contractors and allocated new water and funding resources for restoration.

And locking in the 2019 opinions’ plan would dictate state operations of its water system.

“That would ordinarily be considered an incredible interference in states’ rights,” said Ron Stork, senior policy advisor at Friends of the River, which signed the letter. “The irony abounds.”

How 2019 plans landed in 2024 legislation

Previous biological opinions about salmon and Delta smelt in the Central Valley and State Water Projects were challenged and revised several times. The agencies released opinions in 2008 and 2009 that developed restrictions on water exports through the Delta pumps and the release of stored water.

Years of drought and species’ decline led Reclamation and California’s Department of Water Resources to ask the Obama administration for a review of long-term Central Valley Project and State Water Project operations in August 2016.

Reclamation proposed changes in operations and protection practices for threatened species in January 2019. These included pumping on real-time monitoring rather than calendar-based targets and cold water management at Shasta Dam to benefit young salmon. Habitat restoration, scientific review and reintroduction of hatchery-bred Delta smelt were also part of the blueprint.

Experts had to consider state rules for water quality and salinity as well as the Endangered Species Act in their review. The Fish and Wildlife and National Marine Fisheries Services concluded in 2019 that Reclamation’s plans did not jeopardize fish or habitats. This was a shift from previous opinions that recommended more stringent environmental protections.

At the same time, the Trump administration had wanted to weaken the Endangered Species Act — including for Delta smelt, the inches long fish that has come to symbolize California’s water wars which might already be extinct in the wild.

Before the 2019 opinion was released, The Los Angeles Times reported that the National Marine Fisheries Service buried findings that increased water deliveries would likely jeopardize salmon, steelhead and Southern Resident killer whales that eat the salmon.

After the opinions were released, Reclamation conducted an environmental review and changes were finalized in February 2020.

Wide-ranging water measures — including one to raise the Shasta dam — were folded into the 2024 energy and water spending bill. Another rule included in the allocations that would affect the Central Valley Project was renewal of the expired Water Infrastructure Improvements for the Nation Act to increase water supplies for agricultural and municipal contractors. It also had offered more funding for water storage projects.

“We should be building infrastructure and looking for ways to work together so that our communities can thrive and so that our farmers can grow food,” Valadao said in describing various water measures, “but also use the best available science to make sure we’re protecting the species.”