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Valley Crossroads

A move to reorient solutions to the San Joaquin Valley's salt management and selenium-tainted drainage problems - from an in-valley to an out-of-valley approach (such as completion of the controversial San Luis Drain and export of drainage to the Delta) - so disturbed members of an influential public oversight committee that it disbanded.

The Drainage Oversight Committee -created in the early 1990s to provide diverse stakeholder oversight for the San Joaquin Valley Drainage Implementation Program - was already on the rocks. According to acting committee chair Jean Auer, "We had lagging attendance, little money to implement the program, and then this controversy over a proposed new direction." Many members didn't like that new direction, proposed by some program managers in a new draft agreement between responsible agencies and an accompanying draft scope of work. The Environmental Defense Fund's Tom Graff says these summer 1996 documents prematurely abandoned the policy blueprint laid out by the 1990 "Rainbow Report" and encouraged the "let's build the San Luis Drain" approach.

The five-year, multi-million dollar Rainbow Report drew on exhaustive technical research and public and stakeholder input, and found that in-valley drainage management (such as source control, evaporation systems, land retirement etc.) could provide adequate interim solutions to environmental contamination problems for decades. The report also required such actions as the first phase of any out-of-the-valley export system for drainage.

Graff doesn't see how a drain could ever be built without in-valley solutions first being exhausted and without out-of-valley money, support and feedback. "You can't do things on your own in the California water wars anymore," he says, "and with the committee's dissolution they've lost all semblance of any Bay-Delta or environmental input into a solution."

Program coordinator Manacher Alemi says "Where we are today is not really satisfactory to us." Alemi says future directions and goals for the program will be discussed at an interagency management group meeting this November.

Contact: Tom Graff (510)658-8008 or Manucher Alemi (916)327-1630

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