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Blueprint Needs Green

After six years, and countless hours of negotiation among dozens of stakeholder groups, this summer saw the release of the CALFED Bay-Delta Program's Framework for Action to improve the supply and quality of California's water while restoring the ecological health of the Estuary (see Now in Print). But while acknowledging that the Framework represents an impressive achievement, some observers say the monumental effort will be dwarfed by what lies ahead.

"The biggest challenges for CALFED are still to come," says the Nature Conservancy's Leslie Friedman Johnson. "It's going to take tremendous political leadership to move forward from this point."

The biggest obstacle to implementing the plan is likely to be money. The Framework calls for spending at least $8 billion in federal, state and local funds over 30 years on dozens of initiatives. Among the plans provisions are roughly a million acre-feet of new water storage, an environmental water account of approximately 380,000 acre feet, dam removal and wetland restoration, new rules for water transfers, new efforts to reduce pollution from farms, cities and abandoned mines, and a variety of new water conservation and efficiency measures. According to the program's implementation plan, the state and federal governments are each to provide about one third of the necessary funding, with the final third coming from a combination of local funds and users fees.

Although some funding has already been provided by measures such as 1999's Proposition 13, the overwhelming majority of it still requires state and federal legislation, and is therefore vulnerable to shifting political winds. Indeed, at press time there was no money at all for CALFED in the 2001 federal budget, although members of California's congressional delegation were working on an authorization package for the program.

Johnson worries that the release of the plan itself may jeopardize the momentum needed to keep it going. "By definition the package is a compromise, which means that many interest groups are less than enthusiastic, which could translate into a lack of motivation," she says. "We've got to remember that we've all invested in this and it's up to us to make it work."

Contact: http://calfed.ca.gov.

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