Trump is taking steps to reform the way Delta water is delivered to California farms and cities

Read this story at English

President Donald Trump wasted no time Monday in moving his California water agenda forward with a presidential action” designed to send more water from the Delta south, to millions of Southern Californians and farms in the San Joaquin Valley.

The memo calls on the Secretary of Commerce and Secretary of the Interior to develop a new plan within 90 days “to send more water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to other parts of the state for use by the people who need it there.” are in desperate need of a reliable water supply.

Titled “Putting People Before Fish: Stopping Radical Environmentalism to Secure Water for Southern California,” Trump’s order calls for establishing the 2019 regulations drawn up by his first administration.

The rules are in place to guide the operation of the federal Central Valley Project and the State Water Project, the two systems that deliver water from Northern California rivers to San Joaquin Valley farmers, Southern Californians and other water users in the southern half of the state.

Because both systems harm salmon and other protected fish, the regulations have been highly controversial and debated among federal and state officials, conservationists, agricultural groups, tribes and scientists for decades.

Trump is apparently asking his agencies to back off the latest version, which was in the making, that the Biden administration, with the support of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration, announced in Decembere.

Carla Nemeth, director of the state Department of Water Resources, said Trump’s return to previous rules “has the potential to harm Central Valley farms and Southern California communities that rely on water delivered from the Delta, and will do nothing to improve current water supplies in the Los Angeles Basin.

He said the rules by the Biden and Newsom administrations are the product of a painstaking three-year process “to balance the needs of tens of millions of Californians, businesses and agriculture while protecting the environment.”

The Biden-Newsom plan has support from city water districts and many Central Valley agricultural groups, including the Southern California Metropolitan Water District, state water contractors and Sacramento River Village Contractors, which represent farmers.

However, Westlands Water Districtwhich represents the large agricultural region of the San Joaquin Valley in parts of Kings and Fresno counties, welcomed the president’s message.

“We are grateful to see that the water supply issues facing California are a priority for the Trump administration,” Allison Febbo, the district’s general manager, said in a statement. “We look forward to working with the state and the incoming federal administrations to find a way forward that benefits everyone.”

In his memo, Trump recounted how the Newsom administration, in an effort to protect endangered fish, “filed a lawsuit to prevent my administration from enacting improvements to California’s water infrastructure.” He wrote that his plan “would allow vast amounts of water to flow from snowmelt and stormwater into Northern California rivers for beneficial use in the Central Valley and Southern California… Today, this vast amount of water flows losing water to the Pacific Ocean. ”

But the rules that Biden and Newsom agreed on in December they would actually send more water to southern California that Trump’s rules have been superseded, according to a Environmental analysis on the plan.

“I hereby direct the Secretary of Commerce and the Secretary of the Interior … to immediately resume the work of my first administration … to send more water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to other parts of the state so that the people there can use desperately as they need a reliable water supply.”

The President of the United States, Donald Trump

Trump’s suggestion that his plan offers more water to Southern California than Biden’s is one of several inaccuracies that John Rosenfield says make the Jan. 20 memo difficult to interpret.

“It’s not precisely worded and it contains a lot of false premises,” said Rosenfield, science director of the environmental group San Francisco Baykeeper. “It shows an incredible lack of understanding of how water works in California.”

Restore the Delta, a Stockton-based environmental group, disputed Trump’s claim that river water ending its journey to the sea is a wasted resource. Instead, the group said it “supports the West Coast’s largest estuary, a vital resource for California’s economy, commercial and recreational fishing industries, Delta farmers, local businesses and millions of residents who depend on clean and safe water.”

The group Save California Salmon, which represents tribal communities and the fishing industry, said Trump is “implying a water shortage that doesn’t exist.” The group blamed the collapse of the state’s Chinook salmon fishery, which has been closed since 2023, on water regulations put in place by the Trump administration five years ago.

Trump’s memo “is not precisely worded and contains many false premises. “It shows an incredible lack of understanding of how water works in California.”

John Rosenfield, San Francisco Baykeeper

Trump’s memo also cited the wildfires in Southern California as a reason why his “plan should be re-implemented immediately,” saying his rules would “provide desperately needed water there.”

But Southern California water officials recently said they have a record amount of water in storage. The largest reservoir in the region, Diamond Valley, is almost fullas well as several smaller ones.

Pacific Palisades City Reservoir is empty for repair during the about a year, but did not dry up because of the lack of water from the delta. Los Angeles gets most of its water from the Owens Valley, the Colorado River, and groundwater.

While Trump claimed in a Jan. 8 social media post that Delta’s regulations affected firefighters’ ability to battle the devastating Palisades Fire, local authorities They rejected the idea. instead Officials of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power They said a sudden surge in demand for fire hoses exceeded the system’s ability to supply them, causing hydrants to run dry.

“California’s reservoirs are at or above average levels, even in Southern California, where facilities have enough water to meet needs, including firefighting efforts,” said Nemeth of the California Department of Water Resources.

Trump has repeatedly expressed hostility toward the delta, an endangered small fish, and recently derided it as “useless.” But conservationists say the nearly extinct smelt is just one casualty of an entire collapsing ecosystem, from its mountain springs to San Francisco Bay. Several populations of king salmon, rainbow trout and two species of sturgeon are also in sharp decline.

Some farmers say they want a fair distribution that provides water for them and the environment.

“There’s no question there has to be a balance on both sides,” said Sarah Wolff, a farmer in Fresno and Madera counties, where farmers have long expressed dissatisfaction with rules limiting water supplies. “We continue to have a real supply bottleneck in the Delta that doesn’t benefit the species or the water users and only causes a blockage of the water supply.”

Rosenfield said he believes Trump’s 2019 rules. are in violation of the Endangered Species Act by causing massive winter mortality of Chinook salmon below Shasta Dam for three years in a row, plus large losses of protected steelhead in the Delta pumps.

Jennifer Pierre, general manager of State Water Contractors (which supplies Delta water to 27 million Californians and 750,000 acres of farmland), noted that the longfin is federally listed as an endangered species in 2024. That, he said, would complicate any potential effort to restore Trump’s 2019 water management rules, known as biological opinions.

“Can they go back to the 2019 rules?” he said. “I’m not sure. “We have a new species on the list.”

This article was originally published by CalMatters.