[env-trinity] Fwd: Fw: Court supports order to divert water into to support salmon

[Tom Stokely]

Yay!

http://www.sfchronicle.com/news/article/Court-supports-
order-to-divert-water-into-to-10949050.php#comments

Court supports order to divert water into to support salmon
By Bob Egelko <http://www.sfchronicle.com/author/bob-egelko/>, San
Francisco Chronicle
February 21, 2017 Updated: February 21, 2017 3:21pm

The federal government can redirect water from a Northern California dam to
prevent mass die-offs of salmon in drought years, water that otherwise
would be shipped to Central Valley farmers, a federal appeals court ruled
Tuesday
The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation had authority under a 1955 federal law to
release Trinity River water from the Lewiston Dam in 2013 into the Klamath
River, where salmon were migrating to their spawning grounds, said the
Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.
That law allowed the government to take “appropriate measures” to preserve
fish and wildlife, said the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San
Francisco. And it gave the Bureau of Reclamation “substantial discretion to
determine what constitutes ‘appropriate measures’ in the face of unforeseen
or changing circumstances,” Judge N. Randy Smith said in the 3-0 ruling. He
said the law specified maintaining Trinity River water flow as one of the
“appropriate measures” the bureau could take.
In addition, Smith said, under California law, dam owners, including the
federal government, are required, not merely permitted, to release enough
water “to keep in good condition any fish that may be planted or exist
below the dam.”
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Smith, generally one of the court’s more conservative judges, was appointed
by President George W Bush.
A lawyer for fishing groups that supported the increased water flows said
the state law would be a safeguard if the Trump administration refused to
order releases in future drought years.
“The court has said you have a duty under state law to protect these fish,”
said Trent Orr, an attorney with Earthjustice in San Francisco.
At a campaign rally in Fresno in May, candidate Donald Trump said
California’s drought, then in its fifth year, was a fiction and that the
state had “plenty of water” but chose to ”shove it out to sea ... to
protect a certain kind of three-inch fish.”
That fish, the Delta smelt, is a threatened species that California
protects by limiting releases of water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin
Delta. Trump promised his supporters that, once elected, “we’re going to
start opening up the water, so that you can have your farmers survive.”
The Justice Department, which represented the Bureau of Reclamation, did
not respond to a request for comment on the ruling. There was no immediate
comment from lawyers for the Westlands Water District and the San Luis &
Delta-Mendota Water Authority, which challenged the bureau’s actions.
For most of the last half-century, water from the Trinity River, a Klamath
tributary, has been largely diverted to the federal-state Central Valley
project for agricultural use, but the deaths of about 34,000 Klamath River
salmon prompted a federal judge in 2002 to authorize increased flows to the
river. As water supplies dwindled in 2013, the Bureau of Reclamation
ordered renewed flows from Lewiston Dam to protect the salmon, and did so
again the following two years.
In upholding the bureau’s actions, the court cited both the 1955
wildlife-protection law and other measures intended to protect the fishery
resources of the Hoopa Valley tribe, in the Trinity River basin, and the
Yurok tribe in the lower Klamath basin.
*Bob Egelko is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer.
Email: begelko at sfchronicle.com <begelko at sfchronicle.com> Twitter: Bob
Egelko (@egelko) | Twitter <http://twitter.com/egelko>*

Bob Egelko (@egelko) | Twitter
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