Board fires away at canal supporter; San Joaquin supervisors also oppose bill they say would hurt farming

From Stockton’s Record:

County policy-makers stepped into the ever-changing maelstrom of water-related bills Tuesday long enough to debate a peripheral canal proponent before voting officially to oppose one piece of developing legislation in Sacramento.

County officials have never been shy about voicing opposition to any plan to build a canal to divert water bound for the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to pumps sending water to points across the state, but at their meeting Tuesday, members of the San Joaquin County Board of Supervisors were able to deliver their disapproval directly to a representative of a group promoting such a canal.

They listened to Karla Nemeth, a spokeswoman for the Bay-Delta Conservation Plan, lay out her presentation, including her take that the fragile estuary would sustain less damage if exported water were diverted around the Delta instead of being sucked out at pumps along with nutrients and fish. The Bay-Delta Conservation Plan proposes to balance ecological needs of the Delta with the needs of the 25million Californians who use the estuary as a source of water.

“It’s a major challenge to restore an ecosystem in an environment like the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta,” she said. Rough estimates say the plan could restore at least 55,000 acres of wetlands, she said.

But county supervisors noted any canal would do nothing to create new sources of water for an increasingly thirsty state, and they were concerned a peripheral canal would harm the county’s water quality and the livelihoods of farmers who use that water.

I definitely do not want Karla Nemeth’s job! You can read more from The Record by clicking here.

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