Water Supply and Water Rights

February 22, 2010 in Water | by evonchambers

The state’s editorial boards have voiced near unanimous opposition to Senator Dianne Feinstein’s plans to eviscerate protections for California’s endangered chinook salmon.

Feinstein announced last week that she is preparing a rider to a federal jobs bill to suspend rules protecting the iconic fish.

dBusinessNews-1/20/10

The public agency responsible for supplying water to more than a million acres of the Central Valley as well as 1.8 million people in the Bay Area today called on California's senior Senator Diane Feinstein and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to proceed immediately with legislation to lift some of the constraints on California's water system that have been imposed under the federal Endangered Species Act.

The action comes amidst growing concerns that those constraints will prevent California from capturing and storing the water that is currently pouring into

Sacramento Bee-1/21/10
By Matt Weiser

An elite science panel's work to clarify California's water problems has become, instead, the latest front in a battle over the Delta's endangered species.

Experts on the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta say political meddling prompted the review by the National Academy of Sciences.

Feature story - From the January 11, 2010 issue of High Country News by Matt Jenkins

On Sept. 17 of last year, the famously hypertensive right-wing Fox News commentator Sean Hannity rolled into the West Side of the San Joaquin Valley, satellite truck in tow. Months earlier, when it became clear that a 2-year-old drought would grind on for another year, the federal government announced plans to slash water deliveries to local farmers. Hannity smelled blood.

BY LANCE WILLIAMS   |   CALIFORNIA WATCH   |   DECEMBER 6, 2009

Wealthy corporate farmer Stewart Resnick has written check after check to U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s political campaigns.

By Mike Taugher
Staff Writer
Posted: 05/23/2009 09:32:01 PM PDT
Updated: 09/03/2009 11:22:49 AM PDT

Kern County water users who sold millions of dollars worth of water to a program meant to help the environment said the arrangement made sense because the water was rightfully theirs.
Few would dispute that water that was purchased and stored in Kern County could be sold to the environmental water account.

But the sales were made easier by the fact that the state Department of Water Resources was cranking up water deliveries to unprecedented heights at the same

By Mike Taugher
Staff Writer
Posted: 05/23/2009 09:34:58 PM PDT
Updated: 09/03/2009 11:22:14 AM PDT

As the West Coast's largest estuary plunged to the brink of collapse from 2000 to 2007, state water officials pumped unprecedented amounts of water out of the Delta only to effectively buy some of it back at taxpayer expense for a failed environmental protection plan, a MediaNews investigation has found.

The "environmental water account" set up in 2000 to improve the Delta ecosystem spent nearly $200 million mostly to benefit water users while also creating a cash str

By Mike Taugher
Staff Writer
Posted: 05/23/2009 09:36:41 PM PDT
Updated: 09/03/2009 11:22:25 AM PDT

It must have seemed like easy money.

The state was delivering more water than ever to its customers, and in Kern County some of those customers sold some of it back, through a simple trade, at a higher price.

Tens of millions of dollars in sales to the "environmental water account" were little more than paper shuffles.

By Mike Taugher
Staff Writer
Posted: 05/23/2009 09:39:21 PM PDT
Updated: 09/03/2009 11:22:41 AM PDT

Stewart Resnick is not your typical dirt-under-the-fingernails farmer.
The Beverly Hills billionaire's companies, according to tax records, appear to own more than 115,000 acres in Kern County, about the size of four San Franciscos and more than all of the East Bay Regional Park District's parks combined.

The operation is the largest pistachio and almond growing and processing operation in the world, according to the company's Web site, and part of a business e

Wyatt Buchanan, Chronicle Sacramento Bureau
Sunday, December 27, 2009
(12-27) 04:00 PST Sacramento - --

Private companies could own, operate and profit from reservoirs and other water-storage projects built with billions in taxpayer dollars under a little-noticed provision of the $11.1 billion water bond that was approved by the Legislature and goes before California voters next year.

Lawmakers barely discussed the provision while considering the bond, and water experts who were asked about it by The Chronicle said they knew little about it or why it was a necessary pa