Water District Board Rejects Citizen Advisory Committee Recommendations on Stream Ecology

Article by Richard McMurtry

The Santa Clara Valley Water District Board held a regular meeting on July 28th, and discussed efforts to restore the salmon and trout fisheries on Santa Clara County streams (see agenda packet, p 72). The end result was a step backwards from its commitments towards the salmonid restoration.

In a move with a short public notice (only 72 hours notice), Water District CEO Beau Goldie proposed to remove Chinook salmon from the fishery restoration strategy and replace it with native fish. Debate has raged in past years as to whether the Chinook salmon are native or not. So, in effect, the change replaced the previous strategy to “Restore the trout and salmon population” with an ambiguous “we won’t restore the salmon because we don’t know if they are native” or an even more ambiguous “maybe we will, maybe we won’t restore the salmon”. All the Board achieved is reigniting a controversy that had been thought settled in 2003.

A member of the Santa Clara Creeks Coalition implored them to not take the salmon out of the policy framework without first convening a science panel to consider the scientific data on whether the salmon were native or not. Despite this recommendation, the Board refused to reject the change proposed by the CEO and instead allowed the change to pass. However, the Board did express an interest in convening a science panel, but no member proposed a motion to do so. What is bizarre about this is that the Water Supply division has already agreed to develop a plan to restore the Chinook salmon population. The result is that the Board now has contradictory policies shaping its approach to salmon restoration – a contradiction that will generate ambivalence towards salmon restoration rather than the enthusiasm needed to develop innovative conservation measures for the salmon. Things at the Water District don’t bode well for the salmon.

Water District staff opposed all the recommendations of the Environmental and Water Resources Committee (EWRC) with respect to the Board recommitting to restoring the salmonid fishery within 15 years and preserving the fishery during drought. The Board mostly went along with staff recommendations. The only positive outcome was a watered-down version of the recommitment to the 15 year goal. In the Board-adopted version, staff would develop a strategy at some unknown point in the future. We will have to wait years for the CEO’s Master Planning process to reach completion with no independently facilitated technical input process. The best ideas will never even be presented to the Board.

The EWRC’s recommended drought policies sought to distinguish between “water needs” and “water preferences” – “needs” like health and safety and “preferences” like lawn watering.    Staff opposed making this distinction, and the Board agreed. The EWRC recommended inserting an objective “Adequate quantity and quality of water will be delivered to the streams” to protect the fish and stream ecology. The Board refused to adopt this objective, instead referring it to the cities and water purveyors to see what those groups thought about the policy.