OAKLAND, Calif. (CN) - California fishermen and crabbers call the federal decision to divert water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta "a charade devoid of any effective environmental review," in Federal Court.
The Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations and the San Francisco Crab Boat Owners Association sued the U.S. Department of the Interior and the Bureau of Reclamation for violations of the National Environmental Policy Act and the Central Valley Project Improvement Act.
The 1,100-square mile Delta, formed by the confluence of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers, is the largest estuary on the Pacific Coast.
The fishermen object to the Bureau of Reclamation's environmental assessment (EA) and the adoption of its Finding of No Significant Impact (FONSI), a "charade" necessary to deliver eight water service contracts in the next 2 years.
The groups claim the reports violate NEPA because they assume that Reclamation has no discretion to reject the contracts, reduce the quantity of water diverted from the Delta or increase the price of the contracts to force a reduction in water demand.
"Reclamation's environmental review thus conveniently ignores the growing environmental impacts its water exports are having on the Delta's increasingly imperiled salmon, steelhead, sturgeon and other fish and wildlife affected by the signing of the interim contracts. Because Reclamation considers continued water deliver - at present quantities and prices - to be the environmental baseline, the EA and FONSI conclude that water deliveries under the interim contracts will have no effect on the environment. Consequently, the Bureau failed to consider any alternatives or mitigation measures that would reduce the interim contracts' impacts or even seriously to examine those impacts at all," the complaint states.
"To add insult to injury, Reclamation's erroneous premise that it lacked any meaningful discretion regarding the interim contracts was based on an outdated water needs assessment, which is not representative of current conditions. Reclamation's EA process was thus reduced to nothing more than a meaningless charade, devoid of any effective environmental review of the interim contracts' adverse effects, and of alternatives and mitigations that would avoid or reduce those effects."
The groups says that since passage of the Central Valley Project Improvement Act in 1992, the Delta's Chinook salmon, Central Valley steelhead, North American green sturgeon and Delta smelt have been driven to the brink of extinction. The winter-run Chinook salmon, listed as a federally threatened species in 1990, was declared endangered in 2005 because of continuing population declines.
Seventeen species of fish indigenous to the Delta have become extinct and just 12 indigenous species remain, the fishermen say. Excessive water exports, usually to the southern San Joaquin Valley and to Southern California via the California Aqueduct, decrease freshwater flows, which result in increased salinity and the more concentrated runoffs of herbicides, pesticides and toxic agricultural products in the Delta, the fishermen say.
A 2009 biological opinion by the National Marine Fisheries Service informed Reclamation that based on scientific and commercial information, continued excessive water exports from the Delta "are likely to jeopardize the continued existence of federally listed: endangered Sacramento River winter-run Chinook salmon, threatened Central Valley spring-run Chinook salmon, threatened Central Valley steelhead, threatened Southern Distinct Population Segment of North American green sturgeon, and Southern Resident killer whales (who feed on the salmon)," according to the complaint.
