Gavin Newsom Announces Voluntary Water Conservation Framework with Rural Districts

California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Tuesday that the state had reached broad agreement with rural water districts on a voluntary framework for conserving water in the Central Valley, potentially bringing years of disputes to a conclusion.

As Breitbart News reported in 2018, the California’s State Water Resources Control Board (SWRCB) had approved the controversial Bay-Delta Plan to allocate more water to environmental uses in an attempt to stabilize fish populations.

That plan short-circuited ongoing negotiations between the state and rural water districts that supply farms and communities in the Central Valley, leading to more lawsuits that have become the costly battleground on which water disputes are fought.

But the “memorandum of understanding” released by the governor’s office could move those disputes out of court, based on a commitment by the water districts to give up a limited amount of water and invest in the restoration of local fish habitats.

The Sacramento Bee reported:

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration unveiled a $2.6 billion environmental peace treaty on the Central Valley’s overtaxed rivers Tuesday. The deal calls for farms and cities to surrender billions of gallons of water while contributing funds to help restore troubled fish habitats.

…

The so-called voluntary agreement released Tuesday is signed by some of California’s biggest water users that pull water from the Central Valley’s rivers. They include the agencies supplying water for Sacramento Valley’s rice farmers, the city of Sacramento and its suburbs, most of urban Southern California and Westlands Water District, the largest farm-water agency in the San Joaquin Valley.

The Associated Press added that under the agreement, farmers with more senior water rights would be paid by the local water agencies not to grow some portion of their most water-intensive crops. That “would result in about 35,000 acres of rice fields left unused — or about 6% of the state’s normal crop each year” and would yield “an extra 824,000 acre feet (1 billion cubic meters) of water each year flowing through the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta.”

Some water agencies have not yet joined the agreement, and environmentalists claim that they have been excluded from it.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.

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