Rivers & Delta Program

The Bay Institute’s Rivers and Delta Program employs scientific and policy expertise to promote reforms in the way California manages its water supplies and protects the ecological values of the San Francisco Bay-Delta estuary and its watershed. It is a continuation and broadening of TBI’s original, core mission of using research and advocacy to secure increased freshwater flows to the Bay. The Program’s main objectives include:

• Adoption and enforcement of regulatory requirements to protect endangered ecosystems, water quality and public health.

• Development and use of tools to measure ecological conditions in the estuary.

• Design and evaluation of specific ecosystem restoration programs and projects, particularly those intended to improve instream flow and Delta outflow conditions, rehabilitate and expand wetland and floodplain habitats, and restore connectivity between habitat types and ecological zones.

• Monitoring and oversight of federal, state and local water project impacts on endangered species and habitat quality.

• Analysis and promotion of alternatives to traditional water management, including conservation, recycling, conjunctive use of surface and groundwater supplies, source water quality control and retirement of drainage-impaired irrigated lands.

The Rivers and Delta Program staff pursue initiatives in four broad policy areas:

• Healthy Ecosystems: TBI dedicates considerable resources to ensure that state and federal environmental protection efforts are effective in a variety of ways. Program staff advocate for more adequate statutory protections, better informed rulemaking activity, more sufficient and reliable environmental funding, and more rigorous enforcement of existing regulatory requirements for endangered species and habitats, water quality and public health, before legislators, regulatory boards, agency directors, and other decision-makers; work collaboratively with government agencies, independent experts, water users and land owners to design and implement large-scale ecological restoration programs through the CALFED Bay-Delta Program, the CVPIA Anadromous Fish Restoration Program, and other initiatives; monitor water project operations, report on endangered species and water quality problems to the public, and advocate for necessary operational or other changes to avoid adverse environmental impacts; and provide expert technical and policy support to numerous litigation efforts to compel compliance with regulatory requirements of the Clean Water, Endangered Species, National Environmental Policy, California Environmental Quality and Central Valley Project Improvement Acts, and other statutes. 2003 priorities include helping state and federal agencies to design and implement a program to acquire instream flows to improve habitat conditions on high-priority Central Valley streams; working to secure enforcement by the State Water Resources Control Board of the requirement to double wild chinook salmon populations; and tracking endangered species impacts and operations management at the huge state and federal water project pumps in the south Delta.

• Bay-Delta Ecological Scorecard: TBI has launched the first serious attempt to develop a comprehensive annual assessment of the estuary’s health. Based on state-of-the-art theory and applications and reviewed by the nation’s leading indicators experts and estuarine scientists, the Scorecard combines a wide range of multi-metric indicators into eight indexes that evaluate fish, bird and invertebrate communities; measure flow, habitat and water quality conditions; and rate human uses of and impacts on the Bay-Delta environment. The first Scorecard, covering the Bay region, was issued in fall 2003; scorecards for the Delta, San Joaquin, and Sacramento regions will follow.

• San Joaquin River Restoration: TBI provides leadership, working with the Natural Resources Defense Council, to the environmental community’s campaign to restore flows to the Central Valley’s second largest river, dewatered for half a century until our legal and political efforts secured the first environmental water releases and paved the way for long-term recovery of river function and extirpated salmonid populations. Rivers and Delta Program staff serve as principal consultants on river restoration, water management, and pilot projects, including the first releases of water to the river for environmental purposes beginning in 1999. In May 2003, a federal mediator’s proposal to settle the long-standing litigation against the Bureau of Reclamation and Friant water users, brokered by a small team of negotiators including TBI’s Program Director, was accepted by TBI and other environmental groups but rejected by San Joaquin water districts, and the case went back to court (see Summer 2003 Bayletter for more information).

• Agricultural Water Management: TBI’s activities to reform traditional water policy proceed along two separate tracks. Program staff analyzes and opposes environmentally destructive and economically inefficient water supply projects, works with government agencies and local water districts to identify best management practices for conservation and recycling alternatives, and seeks funding for projects and programs that use water more efficiently (go to our Publications section to download a Blueprint for an environmentally and economically rational approach to managing water supplies, prepared by TBI and other members of the Environmental Water Caucus, for more detail). The Program is also actively engaged in legal and political efforts to halt completion of the San Luis Drain, which would convey polluted drainwater to the estuary, and in scientific and policy efforts to identify and implement innovative solutions to the westside San Joaquin Valley drainage problem. (See Drainage without a Drain, a new report from TBI and others concerned about agricultural water pollution, in our Publications section).