California Republicans in the U.S. House proposed “an ambitious new, but familiar,” drought relief bill “that once again includes hot-button items like scaling back a San Joaquin River restoration program,” reports the Fresno Bee. A similar bill passed the Republican-led House last year but died in the Senate, which was then controlled by Democrats. The water bill would speed up studies for new storage projects, raise Shasta Dam, authorize increased pumping of water to farms in the San Joaquin Valley and replace “a San Joaquin River salmon-and-habitat restoration plan with a less-ambitious plan for warm-water fish,” says the Bee.
House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy took a leading role in drafting the bill, which is expected to pass the House next month, said the Bee. California Sen. Dianne Feinstein said the new bill has useful provisions but also “would violate environmental law, which I’ve said many times I cannot support.”
The 720,000-acre Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta “has become a central battle zone” in the struggle for water, “pitting north against south, farmers against environmental groups, farmers against one another and many local residents against California’s governor, Jerry Brown, whose plan to fix the delta’s problems upsets them almost as much as the drought itself,” says the New York Times. The delta provides water for more than three million acres of farm land, much of it in the San Joaquin Valley, but also for cities and farms in the Central Valley and Southern California.
In other drought-related news: Drier and sunnier winters, says the Los Angeles Times, “have conspired to reduce the diversity of wildflower species in a Northern California research meadow by 15% over 15 years, according to a study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences …. In particular, the species that were disappearing fastest were those with broad leaves, which are most susceptible to drought.”