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Question & Answer - CALFED Bay Delta Program

Lester Snow, Executive Director, CALFED Bay-Delta Program

Q: What is the purpose of your program?

A: To devise a long-term solution for the problems plaguing the Bay-Delta Estuary and to balance the need for reliable water supplies with environmental restoration.

Q: What status will the short-term Delta water quality standards set on December 15 have in the CALFED Program's effort to develop a long-term solution?

A: "I look at those standards as a small piece of the whole environmental restoration picture. I think we'll find that we need to be buying land, recreating large areas of habitat, basically doing a lot more than just focusing on standards. This time we need to take an ecosystem approach and start from the habitat perspective, then see what that means to the hydrologic regime. This is probably our last chance to redefine how we, and even how the whole country, should deal with resource management in the 21st century.

Q: Why is it our last chance?

A: "Because pressures have built up so greatly. In the past, most of the fights in the water wars were intellectual or policy oriented. Now they're fights about survival - the environmentalists to keep species from being lost forever, the urban users are fighting to maintain reliable supplies for businesses threatening to leave the state, agriculture to keep their water rights....There's no resilience left in the system. If we fail, all this will get turned over to the lawyers. "It's also our last chance because of the uniqueness of the December 15 accord. That type of cooperative spirit doesn't last forever. We've got a window of opportunity and we've got to go through it. What's also in our favor is the mood of the nation, which I interpret as a mood of people wanting government to stop bickering and get something done. Even if we repeal the Endangered Species Act, we still have to fix the Delta. Even among warring interests there remains genuine recognition we can't just legislate our problems away."

Q: How do the CVPIA, CCMP and your CALFED Program fit together?

A: "There's not 100% overlap, but clearly we need to coordinate a great deal among these activities. We need to make sure we're not reinventing the wheel where information and consensus already exist. That's why right now our whole mode of action revolves around high level coordination."

Q: The rush to complete the Bay-Delta Accord excluded some interested parties from the final negotiations. Will CALFED be the same?

A: "The December 15 agreement was negotiated quickly to get a quick fix and buy us a three-year truce. Now we need to take the time to fix the Delta forever. The CALFED program can't get out ahead of interest groups and the public, otherwise it will fail. My theory about public involvement is that by the time you come up with a solution, the public should be saying 'Yeah, yeah get on with it.' When we finally get to the podium, we must have all the stakeholders behind the curtain or we'll loose credibility."

Q: How is the new BDAC (Bay-Delta Advisory Council) different from the now defunct BDOC (Bay-Delta Oversight Council), and what is its role in the CALFED Program to develop long-term solutions for the Delta?

A: "BDAC will have two basic functions. First, to provide advice on the development of objectives for long-term alternatives and comments on whatever becomes the preferred alternative. Second, to provide a key vehicle for this to remain an open process and to facilitate public input. BDAC will be different from BDOC, not only because the latter group was all governor appointed, but also because BDOC was supposed to be a deliberative group with responsibility for coming up with a long-term fix. BDAC, on the other hand, doesn't have that responsibility except in an advisory capacity to CALFED."

Q: What are the biggest challenges ahead?

A: "History and financing. Replaying history is something we do well in California. The challenge will be to keep ourselves and others from falling back into what many feel most comfortable with - lawsuits and warring. In terms of the financing challenge, any solution we come up with for the Delta is going to cost money. It's a difficult time to be trying to fund anything. I imagine we'll come up with a bunch of different ways to finance the Delta solution, and we'll probably need to do all of them. No single GO bond or water fee can fund this."

Q: Why do you think they hired you for this job?

A: "Because I don't believe in 'decide, announce, defend.' Because I have a history professionally of building consensus, of working with people and trying to develop solutions that meet all their needs."

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