Amid the water shortage, Gov. Gavin Newsom is putting almond, pistachio and alfalfa growers ahead of California's salmon industry in allocating water.
Gov. Gavin Newsom bills himself as a protector of wildlife, so you wouldn’t think he’d take water from baby salmon and give it to almonds.Especially when California was just drenched with the wettest three-week series of storms on record and was headed into another powerful soaking of snow and rain.
But a water shortage doesn’t necessarily mean drought. It means we’re not recycling, conserving and recharging aquifers enough — and not judiciously allocating what we’ve got. The Sacramento River is the second-biggest producer of salmon on the West Coast, behind only the Columbia.on the Sacramento in recent decades, largely because of dams that block historic spawning areas and the diversion of water to farms and cities.
“Salmon numbers have fallen significantly every Newsom year — one-third since he became governor,” says Barry Nelson, a longtime water consultant and environmentalist.“Absolutely,” Nelson says. “Without a doubt the governor is responsible. He’s been waiving standards designed to protect salmon. The failure of the state to protect salmon has turned bad news into a disaster.”
The state Water Resources Control Board, which the governor appoints, dutifully obliged and suspended a requirement for flows through the delta estuary that salmon need this time of year to push them out into the ocean. “It’s not even a drought. If we can’t provide good conditions for fish in a year like this, then we are totally bankrupt as resource managers,” says Gary Bobker, program director at the Bay Institute, an environmental organization that focuses on San Francisco Bay.
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