Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and California legislators have been relentlessly campaigning for over the past two years for the stealth package of water bills proceeding through the California Legislature comprise a virtual road map to the peripheral canal. But a broad coalition of recreational fishing groups, commercial fishing organizations, Delta farmers, American Indian tribes and environmentalists are strongly opposing the canal, a bad idea that was voted down overwhelmingly by California voters in 1982.
Bill Jennings, executive director of the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance, told that the five bills that were gutted and passed out of Policy Committees have now been reformatted and released. He added that they will be headed to a joint conference committee and then moved to the floor of the respective houses for a vote.
The five bills are: AB 39, the Delta Plan (Huffman), AB 49, Water Conservation (Feuer), SB 12, Delta Governance (Simitian), SB 229, Water Use Reporting (Pavley) and SB 458, Delta Conservancy (Wolk). According to Jennings collectively, the bills are a legislative shell game that raises bureaucratic mumbo jumbo to an art form. He compares the poorly-conceived, fast-tracked peripheral canal legislation to the energy deregulation fiasco that was pushed by legislators and corporate-funded “environmental” groups under the Pete Wilson administration, resulting in power black outs and dramatic power rate hikes through unscrupulous gaming of the market by energy companies including Exxon and Reliant Energy.
It is informed that the peripheral canal would be approximately the size and length of the Panama Canal. The canal would have the capacity to transport 15,000 cubic feet of water per second (cfs) from the Sacramento River around the Delta. The length of the conveyance would be between 47 and 48 miles.
