At the May 29th meeting of the Delta Stewardship Council, councilmembers reviewed and approved the comments for the Bay Delta Conservation Plan that will be submitted by the Council as part of their role as a responsible agency as mandated by the Delta Reform Act.
Prior to reviewing the comments, the Council heard a presentations from consultant ARCADIS on how the Bay Delta Conservation Plan addresses the goals and objectives of the Delta Reform Act and the Delta Plan and from the representatives from the Delta Independent Science Board and the independent review panel on their reviews of the science behind the Bay Delta Conservation Plan. With the stage then set for the Council, it was time to review the prepared comments and for councilmembers to take their last opportunity to direct any changes or make any additions.
Deputy Executive Officer Dan Ray began by reminding that the Council’s role as a responsible agency is to actively participate in the EIR process by reviewing the draft and submitting comments that pertain to areas of our jurisdiction. “We’ve tried to focus our comments to reflect the role of the Council as the agency with the long view, recognizing that the general direction of the BDCP and many elements of the conservation strategy can help further the objectives of the Reform Act,” he said. “The Delta Plan calls for its successful completion, but also recognizes the importance of the measures that are proposed to mitigate impacts, so one of the things that we’re supposed to do if we’re dissatisfied with aspects of the EIR is to suggest ways that better mitigation could reduce impacts.”
“The Delta Reform Act has particular requirements for information that is supposed to be in the EIR that is not required normally, and so where that information can be found is summarized in Appendix 3-I of the EIR, and we paid particular attention to that in our remarks,” he said. The other comments identify areas where additional information or analysis would provide a fuller assessment of the environmental impacts of the project or its alternatives, he said, noting that the comments draw on the ARCADIS’ analysis, as well as the reports from the two science reviews.
Many of the comments that the Council submitted on the administrative draft were addressed by the BDCP staff, and the comments being submitted now are those that remain as well as a few additional areas, he said. The comments include a cover letter and the request to incorporate the Independent Science Board’s comments by reference as well as by attachment, and for the BDCP agencies to respond to both the Council’s comments and the Independent Science Board’s comments, he said.
“People shouldn’t misconstrue our suggestions that there are ways to improve the EIR as some broad criticism of the program or the EIR,” said Mr. Ray. “There’s a tremendous amount of work that’s gone into this.”
The BDCP and the Delta Reform Act requirements
“We looked at Appendix 3-I to see whether it provides the road map and the analysis that the Reform Act specifies in terms of the unique requirements of the EIR,” he said, noting that while they did consult with the legal staff, it’s not really a legal question. “It’s really about if we find the information in the analysis, in part that’s because these are unique requirements. We don’t have a lot of guidance from prior judgments about this to act upon.”
“One of the unique requirements of the Reform Act is that the alternatives have to be based on flow criteria, rates of diversions, and operational criteria that in part will identify the water that’s required for the ecosystem and the fish, and the BDCP agencies feel that they’ve done that adequately through the Effects Analysis and the other measures that help them suggest flow criteria and operating provisions for the diversion tunnels,” he said. “The Act states that it quantify the water that remains available for export and other beneficial uses, and so far, what the EIR does, it talks about how much water we need for the fish and the environment, here’s how much will be exported, but the law is very clear that it’s supposed to identify the water that remains available for export and other beneficial uses, and so that additional piece of analysis is something that still needs to be developed. They could do that, we think, through a water balance that examines how water within the Delta and water being exported fits together with water that’s being passed through the Delta for ecosystem purposes.”
We think the analysis of climate change could be improved, he said. “A lot of the information they need to provide an adequate analysis is in Appendix 3-E of the EIR but it’s not properly reflected in Appendix 3-I or elsewhere,” he said.
“One of the unique requirements of the Reform Act in terms of the adequacy of the EIR is that it evaluate and talk about impacts on Sacramento and San Joaquin River flood management, and again that’s another particular area where we think additional attention would help them fulfill requirements of the Reform Act for unique contents of the EIR,” he said.
“We’ve been unable to find a place where they’ve identified the hydraulic impacts associated with construction of the temporary coffer dams that would go into the rivers at the time the diversions are being constructed, or where they have assessed the impacts of highway traffic on those roads where the road is atop the levee, and so you might imagine there could be some potential for damage to the levee itself,” said Mr. Ray. “It’s also important that they acknowledge explicitly the connection between conservation measures and the physical parts of the State Plan of Flood Control for a portion of the work that would be done in the Yolo Bypass and in some other locales, and that needs to be clear.”
Mr. Ray said another area that needs attention is the response to the requirement in the Reform Act that the BDCP address the resilience and recovery of the conveyance facilities in the event of catastrophic loss caused by earthquake, flood, or other disaster. “The analysis they’ve provided in this section of the EIR looks at the risks that the construction could pose to the integrity of those facilities, but doesn’t look as well at what happens in the event of the disaster … These are things I think where the information is available and it is just a question of compiling it and putting it together.”
Finally, the analysis of the effects of the Delta conveyance alternatives on water quality is an area where substantial improvements in terms of analysis and mitigation measures would be helpful, he said.
Delta Plan conflicts
We think the EIR could better assess whether there are any conflicts between the BDCP as proposed and the Delta Plan, he said. “If the BDCP is approved by the state and federal agencies and it meets the other requirements of the Reform Act, it will be incorporated into the Delta Plan, and we’ll be the ones who have to make sense of that,” said Mr. Ray. “That may require some adjustments in the Delta Plan to have the whole package make some kind of sense, so it’s important that in this EIR, if there are those kinds of conflicts, they begin to tease those out and help us understand what kind of adjustments might be necessary, so we can really think how these things work together as a total package.” He noted that the BDCP does consider the Delta Plan as part of the cumulative impact assessment, so much of the work has been done, but a more detailed assessments of perceived conflicts between the BDCP and the Delta Plan is needed.
Uncertainties of the outcomes of habitat restoration measures
A lot has been said about the uncertainties of successful outcomes for the conservation and restoration measures, he said. “In the context of the EIR, these conservation activities are mitigation measures that compensate or reduce some of the adverse effects of constructing the conveyance facilities or operating them. It’s a very complex system and there’s always going to be things we don’t understand, but that as conclusions have been presented, they often take the best outcome as the scenario presented in the EIR for what the outcomes of mitigation measures might be. An analysis that better reflected that uncertainty, and especially the uncertainty of the outcomes of the tidal marsh restoration.”
Mr. Ray recalled how at a recent meeting, Dr. Herbold reported from the seminar on tidal marsh restoration that while tidal marsh restoration can provide a lot of benefits to the ecosystem, the wide diversity of fish, mammals and other life and may provide especially valuable help for animals that are right in the vicinity of the restored site, whether there will be benefits from that restoration to fish that are more distant is more uncertain, he said. “That seems to be one of the ways that the mitigation package that’s proposed now could better reflect the uncertainties that are available.”
Another reasons for the uncertainty over restoration is that the Restoration Opportunity Areas are just conceptual right now, he said. “They tell you we’re going to have restoration that might be between 10,000 to 15,000 acres, about this much tidal marsh, about this much riparian habitat, but exactly where, exactly how, the pace at which it might occur, none of those details are spelled out,” he said.
“As we’ve listened to the reviews of the BDCP, one of the things that I’ve grown to appreciate is the additional understanding folks have about the tunnels and the diversions because they’ve actually gotten to a 10% level of design, and through that process of going those extra steps, they’ve been able to make a number of adjustments that have reduced their environmental impacts, enhanced people’s understanding of how those projects might operate and provide some additional assurance to folks who had questions,” he said. “That kind of additional planning for the restoration would be helpful as it would help us better understand feasibility of restoration in some areas, it would help us better understand what potential conflicts there might be with existing land uses and infrastructure and other activities, and help us better identify mitigation measures within each of those areas.” He noted that one of the recommendations is to build a landscape conceptual model for each of the Restoration Opportunity Areas.
The timelines for restoration may be overly optimistic, he said. “We looked back at the pace at which ecosystem restoration actions have been carried out in the Valley and in San Francisco Bay, and it’s taken much longer in practice to get this work in place than the BDCP is counting on so it’s going to slow the pace at which mitigation measures will be implemented, and so that slower pace ought to be reflected in the analysis,” he said.
Water quality impacts
Another key issue are the impacts to water quality, said Mr. Ray. “One of the things that the science panels pointed out is that often the analysis reflects the ability of the BDCP to meet targets that are established in the state water quality objectives, but those may not always reflect the needs of the species that BDCP is trying to address, so paying a little more attention to those triggers would also be valuable.”
It’s important to analyze the potential effect of the BDCP on San Francisco Bay for many reasons, one of them being that a number of the covered species are found not only in Suisun Bay but in the San Pablo Baylands, for example, where there is a massive restoration program underway, he said. “We want to make sure that as we carry out this program, we’re thinking about the needs of those species across the full ecosystem they use.”
“It’s especially important with sediment supplies because as these areas are opened back up to tidal influence, sediments will wash up into them to help rebuild the elevations and provide the substrate for tidal marsh,” he said. “It’s rebuilding elevations in their tidal marshes in ways that help them keep ahead of rising sea levels and dampen the effects of storm surge and what-not, but we’re also in a system in which sediment supplies are being reduced. If we start also gaining those sediments to recover our tidal marshes, the San Franciscans have reason to worry that there may not be enough available to meet their needs as well, and so a little more analysis of that is especially important.”
“There are a number of impacts to in-Delta water quality that I think if I were an in-Delta water user, especially an agricultural or municipal user in the western Delta, it could trouble me,” he said. “Mitigation measures for those activities are not yet well described, and in some cases, the BDCP acknowledges that the decisions are yet to be made about how that should happen. Partly they need to spend the time with the folks that are affected to maybe reach agreement on what those issues should be, but it’s important that proper mitigation for those impacts be identified in the final EIR rather than have it be deferred. Another approach could be to set a specific standard that they will meet, and recognize that they have to make some adjustments over time to do that. Right now, those approaches are left too open.”
Impacts to the Delta as a place
The final set of concerns address the impacts to Delta as a place, said Mr. Ray. “We recognized when the Delta Plan was adopted that the Delta has really important values for agriculture and for recreation, it has unique communities, it’s a very scenic area, it’s filled with cultural resources, and our job is to help protect, preserve and enhance those as a changing place,” he said. “We recognize that change is probably going to have to occur in the Delta, in part to meet the coequal goals of ecosystem restoration and water supply reliability. But the pace of that change has to be measured enough that the folks that live in the Delta and the economy they depend on can actually adapt to those changes successfully. And that is in large part about the nature of the mitigation measures that are offered.”
“The programmatic nature of the conservation measures inhibits full assessment of what those impacts would be,” he said. “The BDCP has a less than detailed analysis of the impacts of the restoration actions in the Restoration Opportunity Areas on agriculture in those areas, and that’s in part because they are uncertain about how much areas and which locales would be affected. In the Effects Analysis, they actually forecast the benefits to fish and wildlife of that restoration based on scenarios of conversion and so we think we could use those same scenarios to at least get a ballpark for what the agricultural impacts might be in each area. That would be so important in identifying the nature and the magnitude of programmatic conservation measures.”
“If we’re going to have a program, for example, to acquire easements to compensate for farmlands, let’s start to identify early on what the size of that program is going to be, how many tens of millions, set it up as a program that can operate in combination with other funds to protect farmland in our state, rather than try to do it on a parcel by parcel basis,” he said. “Same thing, if there’s going to be measures to mitigate the economic effects within the region of agriculture’s change and the potential environmentally-related changes that might spin off of those economic effects, we could begin to put together programs that are more effective than what’s outlined in the EIR to address those issues if we had a better sense of the scale of those impacts.”
The impacts of boat inspections on recreational boating are not very well assessed in the EIR, he said. “I think we’re all thinking that’s a good thing because nobody wants to have the Delta infested with some new mussel, but it’s important that we right-size that,” he said. “Right now the BDCP suggests five inspection stations for the Delta, but we compared it with the size of a similar program at Lake Tahoe, and tried to adjust for the number of boats that use the two waterways and the number of entries to the Delta, and we think they’ve probably undersized that, and that would be damaging to recreation and it would also create real problems for the Delta’s tourism economy which is so dependent on boating.”
“With respect to the construction zone impacts of the project, if you live near this construction, it’s going to be a pretty unpleasant period, and they could do a better job of conveying what those effects are going to be, and how the mitigation measures proposed work together to reduce those impacts,” he said. “More creative approaches may be in order to compensate for harm to these communities that can’t otherwise be adequately reduced.”
The assessment of impacts to scenic resources could also be improved, he said. “If we looked at how to assess the effects of a large project on the coast or some sensitive area in one of our communities, often there would be some depiction of what it would look like if you saw it from the street, and I think with this project along a scenic highway and a heavily used recreation river, a similar analysis would be helpful.”
In many cases the BDCP can do a better job in the EIR of what the mitigation for these adverse effects might be. “In some cases, for example on agricultural mitigation, they have a menu of choices that might be applied,” he said. “It might be helpful to say at a minimum we’re going to do this, and we might use the other ones as they might apply.”
The construction of the BDCP will interfere with recreation in some places, he said. “The document includes reference to State Parks proposal and suggests they might make a contribution to help implement some portion of that, listing all six options that were the Parks suggestions of things that might get done. An analysis of those suggestions leads you to realize that three of them can’t get done during the period of construction so they don’t provide that mitigation and a couple of them are really so far away in terms of their location, they wouldn’t replace the recreational access that’s being lost in the construction area, so that’s another place where let’s figure out what you’re going to do and do it.”
“In terms of the cultural resources and the historic resources, I think we can look at other large projects that actually help not only just collect the information from archaeological or historic sites that are disturbed, but go the extra step of working together with local universities and museums and other places to help people understand what they’ve learned through those processes and build people’s recognition of the history and culture in which they live,” he said.
“So those are our summary recommendations … “
Discussing the resolution …
Mr. Ray then reviewed the resolution that staff has prepared for the Council’s consideration acknowledging the work of the Delta Independent Science Board, directing staff to incorporate the ISB’s letter into the Council’s comments, and acknowledging that while CEQA may not always require the use of best available science, addressing those details will also help them prepare for fish and wildlife’s charge of using best available science to approve the NCCP, if they get to that stage. The resolution then asks the Council to authorize the Executive Officer to send the comments to DWR.
Councilman Larry Ruhstaller expressed his concern that invasive weeds have not received enough attention in the plan. “As I understand it, out of 40,000 pages, there’s a page and a half, maybe two pages, on invasives, but almost nothing on invasive weeds,” he said. “And when you think about it, everything about the BDCP will require some attention to the fact that we have the aquatic weed problem in the Delta, whether it’s at the export pumps, whether it’s at the marinas, whether it’s the ag pumps, and this is just been ignored … something has to be done on this particular issue.”
Lucas Paz from ARCADIS agreed with Mr. Ruhstaller, saying they had expressed concerns about the programmatic nature of some of the conservation measures, including Conservation Measure 13, Invasive Aquatic Vegetation Control. “Those are only generally described, and the specifics of how that program would be implemented are left to a future detailed plan that would be developed in association with the specific restoration plans for a specific area,” he said. “The amount of challenge that’s involved in addressing non-native species when restoration projects are implemented are considerable. I know from my own experience in the San Francisco Bay that it becomes an ongoing annual operation and maintenance issue over many years that requires repeated applications of either appropriate herbicides or mechanical removal and in many cases, can take a lot of additional concerted effort and resources and planning to do so in a successful manner, so again, similar to some of the concerns with respect to the adaptive management program, the management of invasive species specifically vegetation needs to be an integral part and be a more proactive approach and recognize the resources that would be necessary to actually implement that on a large scale.”
Vice-Chair Phil Isenberg discusses the cover letter, attachment 4. He suggests an additional bullet point, ‘a much stronger involvement of science’. “Thematically in everything we’ve heard today and throughout the Delta Plan, and everything we’re doing on the science plan is to make that point, and in many ways, this bullet summary and the cover letter from the Chair becomes the most public document … it’s that distillation of the overarching principles, goals, whatever they are, that seems to me to be important.” Mr. Isenberg also suggested other changes to captions and reorganization of the portions of the letter.
“I want to provide some general comments about the BDCP process and what is has meant over the last eight years,” said Councilmember Gloria Gray. “I think it has been a very transparent process. DWR and certainly the Natural Resources Agency has come before the Council from time to time to bring us updates about the status of the process and to brief us on it and so I think it’s been a good deal for the Council because BDCP is important to us. It’s been in process for over 8 years and it’s been developed with input from state and federal agencies as well as the science community and it’s held hundreds of public hearings from stakeholders, and so I think it has been a very long and transparent process. I believe in being thorough; I believe in being comprehensive, I believe in getting information, but I think at some point, a decision has to be made about BDCP, but again, I believe a process has to happen, and so I think once there is a decision made, hopefully – well first of all, nothing is perfect. The Delta Plan has not been perfect, and certainly once the project is approved, there will be some questions about it, but hopefully through adaptive management later on, some of those things can be addressed. I just really wanted to speak to the fact that I think it’s been a lengthy process, more so than probably some people would have thought should’ve taken that long … at some point, I believe, some decision has to be made with BDCP. This Council has made a decision about the Delta Plan moving forward, I do want to go on record by encouraging that.”
Dan reads the motion. Councilmembers and Dan discuss clarifications of the language. Dan Ray suggests the including further analysis flood fighting and evacuation plans for residents as per Melinda Terry’s suggestion during the public comment period. There is consensus among Councilmembers on the addition of Mr. Isenberg’s suggestion about adding best available science, and reorganization of parts of the letter. Councilmembers concur with the addition of suggestion about further analysis on invasive weeds. Councilmembers unanimously agree to the changes and approve the comments.
For more information …
- Click here for the agenda for the May 29th meeting of the Delta Stewardship Council.
- Click here for the staff report for this item, Agenda Item 9.
- Click here for the draft letter and comments from the Delta Stewardship Council. (Note that the Council approved some changes.)
- Click here for part one, How the Bay Delta Conservation Plan addresses the goals and objectives of the Delta Reform Act and the Delta Plan
- Click here for part two, reviewing the science behind the Bay Delta Conservation Plan
