California’s top water official told a key gathering of south state water representatives that “hard-earned progress” is being made on the Brown administration’s controversial plan to build twin tunnels through the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta.
The comments by Mark Cowin, director of the state Department of Water Resources, were aimed in part at dispelling rumors that the project, known as the Bay Delta Conservation Plan, or BDCP, had run aground, perhaps permanently. He made the comments last week to a committee of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, the huge wholesaler that serves much of the south state’s water agencies.
Tunnel opponents were bolstered when the federal agency in charge of enforcing water quality standards harshly criticized the plan, leading some to predict the controversial project was dead.
Not so, Cowin said, adding that the Brown administration is preparing to recirculate an updated environmental analysis that will reflect physical changes to the proposed facilities and the tunnel alignment, as well as address the EPA’s comments.
Cowin said he had been ‘surprised’ by the content and tone of the letter from the EPA as the EPA and DWR have worked together on a staff level for years now. Among the many comments in the 43-page letter, the EPA had said its research determined that the project would be likely to increase salinity and other contaminants within the estuary, worsening water quality for those within the Delta while improving it for those who receive the exported water, a violation of federal water quality standards.
The suggestion that the department would operate the project in violation of water quality law is what concerned Cowin the most.
He called the comment a misunderstanding that arose from the analysis. “It’s based upon a monthly time-step model which doesn’t account for the daily types of decisions that we make when we operate the project,” he explained. “While we have committed that we would not violate the standards that EPA is concerned about, the modeling would suggest that we would. Our response to that is that we’ll deal with those challenges on a day to day basis, but essentially it’s up to us to describe that in a much more clear way.”