The interagency committee charged with implementation of the Delta Plan endorses a list of high priority science actions for the Delta
As implementation of the first Delta Plan enters its third year, the Delta Plan Interagency Implementation Committee held the first of two semi-annual meetings on May 11, 2015.
The Delta Plan Interagency Implementation Committee (DPIIC) is comprised of eighteen heads of the state, federal, and local agencies that are responsible for implementation of the Delta Plan, and serves as a forum for these agencies to increase their coordination and integration in support of shared national, statewide, and local goals for the Delta.
Agenda items for the meeting included a briefing on actionable Delta science, the near-term future of water storage, the interagency crackdown on invasive aquatic weeds, and an update activities on the Yolo Bypass.
But first …
An update on the California Water Fix and California EcoRestore
Prior to the start of the first agenda item, Chair Randy Fiorini referenced Governor Brown’s recent announcement of changes to the twin tunnels project, formerly known as the Bay Delta Conservation Plan, which is now split into two projects: California Water Fix, a way to improve how water is moved across the Delta, and California EcoRestore, which aims to restore the Delta ecosystem. He then invited Deputy Secretary of Natural Resources Karla Nemeth to the podium to brief the Committee members on the recent developments.
“A little over a week ago, Governor Brown confirmed what had started to be reported in the news and that is the Brown administration’s uncoupling of a habitat restoration program from a conveyance fix proposal in the Delta,” began Karla Nemeth. “This was really after very careful review of the public comments received on the Bay Delta Conservation Plan last July and a lot of discussion amongst key members of the Brown Administration, understanding that the state needed to proceed to address the coequal goals in the Delta, but that perhaps the initial framework of the Bay Delta Conservation Plan as originally envisioned was not feasible in terms of looking at the realities of climate change, and their effects on the system over time, on our need to get restoration underway as quickly as possible, and our need for some real success in that arena.”
“That essentially has launched our revised effort, which is the California Water Fix, which will be a part of the supplemental environmental review documents that are due to be released to the public in late June,” she said. “We will continue to proceed with the California EcoRestore, which is an effort over the course of the next three and a half years to essentially move through the permitting process for restoration projects in the Delta.”
Ms. Nemeth noted that a lot of the entities at the table today have been working together to identify where restoration for native fish and wildlife species can work best with local land use in the Delta. “That’s a key feature moving forward, but also our ability with the variety of agencies around the table to permit those projects, and to get through those processes in a faster way than we have been able to so far to date. I would anticipate that the DPIIC would be very much front and center in all those kinds of discussions. It’s going to be a great opportunity to interact with the public on our progress and what we’re learning.”
“The other key piece of course is the science and adaptive management around habitat restoration,” she said. “Our ability to plug in a public setting in a science agenda I think is going to be critical to making sure that the investments we make are as effective as we need them to be.”
Ms. Nemeth then introduced David Okita, the recently retired general manager of Solano County Water Agency who will be the Brown Administration’s point person working to expedite permitting of restoration projects.
David Okita then introduced himself, saying that this is his first foray into state government, having been working in local government for 36 years. “It’s a very challenging task to get all these projects done,” he said. “These are very complex projects. They have a list of all the permits and permissions they have to go through, and my job is to help them get through that process. … In Solano County, we did a lot of restoration in Putah Creek, very successfully; we did it relatively fastly. Your agencies have been very cooperative with our projects and they’ve turned out to be community successes. So while I do have some experience in restoration, but these projects are much different scale and I’m looking forward to the challenges associated with it.”
Maria Rea, Assistant Regional Administrator with the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) then gave some remarks, noting that NMFS is one of the federal agencies that has been working very closely with the Brown Administration and the state agencies to support the evolution of BDCP into the California Water Fix project and the associated Cal Restore project. “As the Water Fix goes into the permitting phase, we’ll be working in an interagency environment as part of our Section 7 ESA consultation. Our final decision on that is due sometime next year, but that process is still very well underway with a lot of resources, looking at current modeling and science and making sure those decisions are based on all the best available science.”
Ms. Rea said she was looking forward to working with Mr. Okita and the Delta Conservancy more closely to move forward on restoration projects. “The restoration projects are critical for salmon and steelhead recovery,” she said. “We have quite a few of those projects in our recovery plan. Restoration, in my view, is really its own expertise with its own set of permitting challenges that need to be worked through so I think peeling that away from large infrastructure project and giving its own focus is definitely the right thing to do and will accelerate the projects.“
Ms. Rea noted that NOAA Fisheries has a separate restoration center which will be hiring someone for the first time to work in the Central Valley on NOAA restoration. “We’re in the process of looking for a candidate to do that right now, so we will hopefully be as prepared as we can be to help meet the challenge of getting those projects on the ground as soon as possible.”
David Murillo, Regional Director of the Bureau of Reclamation, said that it’s challenging enough to get water from north of Delta to south of Delta in normal years, let alone dry years, especially when there are multiple dry years in a row. “We’ve had several of the districts get zero allocation the last three years, so we’re very interested in being able to improve the water supply and I think this working close with the Governor’s office on the California Water Fix is going to get us there. This conveyance is going to be a key part of meeting the coequal goals, so we’re in line with the Governor’s office trying to get this project permitted.”
AGENDA ITEM 2: Actionable Delta Science
Randy Fiorini reminded that at the November meeting, the Delta Science Program presented the Interim Science Action Agenda, a list of 320 science actions compiled from a lengthy survey of more than 20 agencies to determine the top priority science actions. “That was in many ways a historic list,” he said. “This effort to inventory what agencies felt was a high priority action items had never been done before. You received that, and thanked the Delta Science Program for its input, but told them it wasn’t good enough; to take it back and to hone that down to a few select high impact science action items. The science program staff has followed through on your recommendation.”
“In the past two years, you have fostered a very different environment for undertaking science, and its moved us from the era of combat science towards collaborative science,” Dr. Goodwin said. “In November of 2014, you asked us to develop a short list of high impact science actions that could be implemented in 2015-16, and we’re bringing that back to you today.”
Dr. Goodwin then discussed the workgroup effort to develop the short list. “This has been pretty much a unique effort within the Delta,” he said. “It’s brought together the various Delta agencies represented here to collaboratively identify high priority science actions. Many of the participants said this was really a valuable exercise because we’re very good at bringing together folks on the science side to look at a specific problem or a particular management action, but to actually allow some of the top scientists and managers in the system to get together and to look at how everything fits together from a long-term systems approach was somewhat of a unique opportunity.”
“It was not our intent to come up with a short list from the 320 science priority actions which were identified across all of your agencies, so we had to develop a technique for winnowing that down,” he said. “And it’s not the intent to cover what has already been recovered adequately by agencies or programs. What we were targeting the gaps in the glue – what’s missing right now to understand how this immensely complex and dynamic system is evolving over time. The National Research Council, when they produced their review, pointed out that there’s world class science going on around specific issues, but what was really missing was how does that all fit together. They referred to it as synthesis.”
Dr. Goodwin said they used the Delta Science Plan as a guide. “The concept of One Delta, One Science intends to do four things,” he said. “First of all, we’re looking for multi-agency relevancy of the science. Secondly, we’re looking for credibility – is the scientific method being followed, has it been peer-reviewed and will it stand up to scientific scrutiny? The science must also be legitimate, and by that we mean that all the experts from whatever side or perspective you come from was part of the development of the science, so it’s not excluding part of the information or part of the experts. And of course, all of this has to lead to informed decision making and efficiencies in being able to make decisions.”
Dr. Goodwin briefly reviewed the Delta Science Plan, noting that was was developed with over one thousand comments and inputs from various scientists from academia, local government, and agencies. “The science plan itself is a three part strategy: The plan describes the process by which we do things, it describes the infrastructure which we need to do science more collaboratively and more efficiently, and also to generate actionable knowledge much faster,” he said. “The two other elements of that are the State of Bay Delta Science, and the Science Action Agenda, which is the workplan that describes priority science activities and how these science activities fit together across agencies and programs to give that system perspective.”
Dr. Goodwin then turned the floor over to Taryn Ravazzini to discuss the process. “In November, the committee did accept the Interim Science Action Agenda; however, at that time, you also did ask that we look at pursuing a slightly more pared down list than 320 actions, so upon acceptance, the committee members expressed their collective interest to take the next step towards prioritizing and implementing the science actions within that action agenda,” said Taryn Ravazzini. “The Committee members agreed to commit a group of science and policy managers to secure cross-agency understanding to priority science needs in the Delta, and to identify that short list of high-impact, multi-benefit science actions for implementation within 2015-2016.”
“The Delta agency science workgroup is a compilation of science and policy managers, many of which were identified and hand selected by the Committee members themselves to represent their individual agencies,” she said. “We asked them to come into the room with not only their agency hat on, but also their Delta experience hat and if they could speak to the issues that they had noticed over the years that needed to get addressed from a science perspective, so we were really challenging their loyalty. But it was more about the Delta, so we had a nice comfortable environment which we could ask the people around the table to look at the Delta as a whole, comprehensively, and what are the needs and could we decide on some important actions to take.”
She explained that for the first workgroup session and recognizing everyone’s limited time capacity, the Delta Science Program took the 320+ actions of the Interim Science Action Agenda along with the IEP 2015 workplan recommendations and drafted an interim list of 16 potential high impact science topics. The 16 topics were identified by applying three criteria based on staff interpretation of the implementation committee request: The actions had to be actionable, they had to answer a specific question or a management need that could be addressed through a project or a program; the action had to have cross-agency relevance and it also needed to be an action that could be initiated or implemented in the near-term, meaning feasible to at least initiate within 2015-16.
The remaining science actions were then organized into 16 topic areas based on a similar scope or issue and were presented to the workgroup members at that first meeting, she said. “At that meeting, they all agreed that the 16 were a very good beginning reference point and through facilitated discussion, they whittled that down to identify four high priority areas. These four priority Delta issue areas directly support the California Water Action Plan, the Delta Plan and the Delta Science Plan.”
Ms. Ravazzini then the listed the priority areas, noting they were in no particular order:
- Assessing drought related effects on the Delta: “There is a regional consensus regarding the urgency of understanding the full range of drought effects on the Delta system,” she said.
- The effectiveness and implications of habitat restoration actions. “In light of ongoing and proposed landscape scale restoration projects to begin in the near term, there is a need for pre-restoration data and synthesis of the efficacy of past projects to guide current restoration,” she said.
- Science support for management of estuarine and migratory species. “This issue encompasses several elements identified as priority topics, including native fish distribution, food web dynamics, and flow effects on native species,” she said. “Projects addressing this issue will identify key informational needs for endangered and estuarine species management.”
- Science supporting flood risk reduction and the economies of Delta communities: “This issue incorporates many aspects of Delta as a place, including flood protection, invasive aquatic vegetation, and the Delta economy,” said Ms. Ravazzini. “Increasing our understanding of these topics is the critical step in protecting the unique cultural, natural, recreational resource and agricultural values of the Delta.”
Dr. Rainer Hoenicke then gave a quick presentation on the content of Tables 1 and 2, and the intended next steps. “I was impressed how engaging the workgroup members were right from the first meeting,” he said. “While we’re discussing these potential action items, it became apparent that our list fell into two unique categories. One category could be characterized as something that could be addressed fairly rapidly and feasible to implement in the upcoming year, providing results in two or three year time frame; these actions are more narrow in scope and can be quickly implemented through directed actions or a request for proposals that are described in Table 1. These fulfilled the committee’s request of providing near-term, high impact actions.”
An example would be Topic 1A, which is a near-term science action that we started to implement, he said. “The Delta Science Program has a SeaGrant fellow that is prime to move forward with gathering information for a comprehensive drought assessment as well as organizing a lessons learned workshop,” he said. “Another example is topic 2G in Table 1. The workgroup discussions really highlighted the importance of the salmon life cycle model and the urgent need for its peer review; and NMFS is really poised to move forward with this process already and anticipating the committee’s endorsement of the plan.”
“The second big category is longer term science that can be initiated in the upcoming year but provide results farther down the line where it takes a little longer to get proposals framed and reviewed and implemented,” said Dr. Hoenicke. “The committee’s request initiated an opportunity for workgroup members to focus attention on those longer term research needs that are critical to start now, and these actions have a broader scope and are more appropriate for the form of proposal solicitations or SeaGrant science fellows. The proposal solicitations would engage a wide variety of science organizations and stakeholders in developing more detailed research plans to address each of the four priority issues, and similarly the Delta Science Fellows program provides an opportunity to contribute to this effort and is ready to move forward upon your endorsement.”
The result of the first meeting was a suite of science actions with a range of starting points that could be addressed by multiple implementation mechanisms, Mr. Hoenicke said. “The second workgroup meeting involved further developing, refining, and reorganizing these suites of science actions. During this meeting, workgroup members also acknowledged funding challenges and opportunities, and began to discuss how to manage multi-agency funding and joint implementation. It’s really easy to put a wish list down on paper, but then how do you operationalize it and how do you make it actually workable? So that is one of the items that definitely will be part of the next steps.”
The draft list was vetted during a public meeting where they received comments as well as a sense of how stakeholders who were not part of the workgroup composition would react to it, he said. “The stakeholders really felt that they wanted to have a role in the implementation of the science agenda, and wanted to participate and ready to participate in the development of the implementation mechanisms, so we have a commitment from other stakeholders to join and help us with implementation.”
Taryn Ravazini then presented the staff recommendations to the committee. “Overall, the committee tasked us with quite a charge, and it resulted not only in a one of a kind, multi-agency proposal, but it also fostered valuable exchanges among key Delta science managers and policy makers who have openly expressed interest in continuing to work together on behalf of the Committee,” she said. “We haven’t wanted to move too far forward without having an opportunity to run this past the committee, but there are a few key actions that are really poised to move forward.”
“There are challenges, absolutely, but until everything is proven impossible to do, I think we should forge ahead,” she said. “Staff therefore is returning with the recommendation to endorse this list. Endorsement for the committee’s purposes would be a consensus based actions consistent with the guiding principles which you did approve last November. Endorsement in this case is intended to empower staff to work together to identify joint funding opportunities and promptly, where feasible, initiate implementation efforts.”
The workgroup would also be empowered to form subgroups for each of the actions where those agencies that have identified a particular science action to be relevant to their agency could get more involved and take more of a leadership role there, she said. “So every agency around this table would not be looking to fund every single action or be the lead agency for every action, this is about moving forward together, being behind one effort of collaborative, filling in the gaps, and providing the glue for important science needs in the Delta.”
Planned next steps include continuing workgroup participation to identify where we can move forward on each action, she said. The science program and staff will initiate scoping documents to provide to the workgroup to help develop the actions, she said. “The list is very concise, so we’ll expand on that, have the workgroup look at that, and they can make more determinations. At that point, we’ll be wanting to move forward with involving more stakeholders. They proved to be extremely valuable, and along with that, we have to broaden our scope as well because we want to ensure that other collaborative efforts are being incorporated and included in this.”
“The workgroup members that we had around the table had already been involved with the collaborative adaptive management team, with the IEP, and their MAST efforts, so we have collaborative efforts that this particular effort is intended to support, so this is about enhancing those, not overlapping with them, and not pulling funding away from those important things. This is about where can we enhance and fill in spaces of science knowledge that do need to get addressed.”
Mark Sogge, Regional Director with the USGS, noted that he has seen similar attempts, sometimes successful, sometimes not, and sometimes it takes years. “So I really want to commend the group for coming back in just six months with something that synthesizes so well. It struck me as I read it that it provides a pretty compelling story of what we really need to know, and even though you haven’t got everything worked out and there are still challenges, I really can’t help but believe that it’s going to be a very useful framework for us to do even more collaborative science.”
“DWR strongly supports the recommendations and looks forward to engaging on the more detailed implementation plan,” said Director of Department of Water Resources Mark Cowin. “Beyond that, I want to commend your efforts for fostering interagency cooperation in the form of the dialog that took place. I believe that making that a way of doing business in the future is going to be essential for success on so many fronts, and as we move forward, trying to better describe the mosaic of different collaborative efforts underway right now … I think it would benefit the person at large to better understand all the different efforts underway … “
Campbell Ingram, Executive Officer of the Delta Conservancy said the Conservancy is supportive of moving forward. “I just wanted to highlight one item. It’s number 2E, development of landscape vision decision support framework for the northeast Delta,” he said. “I just want to highlight that that is now really synonymous with the subregional ecosystem restoration plan that we need to do; it’s recognized in the Delta Plan, it’s now recognized here as a high impact action item, and also recognized in the Governor’s announcement for EcoRestore. … I think what it does come down to is in the near term, we’re going to need agency staff to be actively participating in those restoration planning efforts so that we’re ensuring that we’re in real time working with subject matter experts, agencies, and local stakeholders to ensure we get the best restoration outcomes moving forward.”
“This list is highly relevant to management,” said Maria Rea. “It raises a lot of really good scientific lines of inquiry where we definitely need additional support, and yet it looks concise and feasible, so congratulations on getting to that. We look forward to continue to engage through the workgroup and at this level, to track those.”
Chair Fiorini noted that they are not a voting body, so he asked if any Committee member was dissenting. “Seeing none, I will rule that you have received endorsement.”
For more information …
- For the agenda and meeting materials for the May 11, 2015 meeting, click here.
- To watch the webcast, click here.
Coming tomorrow …
- Chair of the California Water Commission Joe Byrne talks about the specifics of the $2.7 billion in funds allocated for water storage in the water bond.
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