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<h1>Feinstein's slick maneuver to move water around</h1>
<p class="date">Tuesday, December 27, 2011</p>
<span id="articlebody">
<p>Just two sentences, dropped into a 1,221-page, $915 billion
omnibus spending bill, have streamlined the controversial
practice of selling water from north of the Sacramento-San
Joaquin River Delta to farms and cities south of the delta. This
little provision merited more scrutiny and debate than it
received.</p>
<p>Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., inserted the language into the
bill, a complex document that authorized the spending needed to
keep the government in business through September that President
<a href="http://www.sfgate.com/barack-obama/">Obama</a> signed
into law Dec. 17, to provide more flexibility in moving water
around the Central Valley - something she has sought for several
years.</p>
<p>The first sentence eases water transfers from irrigation
districts served by the federal Central Valley Project,
including the Westlands Water District and the privately owned
Kern Water Bank. The second sentence mandates a study to
streamline water sales, both among south-of-the-delta water
contractors and north-south transfers.</p>
<p>State law has been moving for the past decade toward water
markets as a way to distribute more equitably the state's most
precious resource. The transfers are in keeping with that
policy.</p>
<p>The rules matter because if they could ease the transfer of
"paper water" - water a district has contracts for but doesn't
actually have - it could increase the overall amount of water
exported. That water would have to come from someone else; that
could be bad for fish, farmers or San Francisco Bay.</p>
<p>Those concerned about the state's salmon and trout fisheries
fear more flexibility to transfer water will reduce the
Sacramento River to the same state as the San Joaquin River -
but a trickle of its former flows. They want greater protections
for the fish. The delta ecosystem is already declining as
pumping has increased.</p>
<p>At the same time, Bay Area water districts rely on the ability
to move water to supplement their own supplies. It's too easy to
characterize water conflicts as a north-south or
fish-versus-farmers or greedy-private-water-contractors debates.</p>
<p>An earlier law that allowed water transfers for a year has
expired. How well did that work? What does the federal
government get out of agreeing to deliver another
80,000-acre-feet of subsidized water? </p>
<p>We don't know, because this tiny rider to an omnibus bill
wasn't discussed in public as it should be.</p>
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<p id="url"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/12/27/ED7R1MGG4Q.DTL">http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/12/27/ED7R1MGG4Q.DTL</a></p>
<p id="pageno">This article appeared on page <strong>A - 11</strong>
of the San Francisco Chronicle</p>
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