Voluntary Agreements

If big water districts and the Newsom Administration have their way, so-called “Voluntary Agreements” (or VAs) will be adopted that let water users get away with aquatic ecosystem murder – that is,  degraded water quality, the extinction of native species, the collapse of commercial fisheries and the loss of a broad array of environmental services provided by healthy river flows to the Bay-Delta estuary. Friends of the River is fighting back. 

 Under both state and federal law, the California State Water Resources Control Board and the five Regional Water Quality Control Boards are responsible for setting, implementing and enforcing water quality regulations to ensure that California’s waters are fishable, swimmable, and drinkable. The Voluntary Agreements would sideline those responsibilities, and would substitute ineffective non-flow actions in place of increased freshwater flows. 

 The State Water Board sets and enforces the requirements for California’s largest and most complex water system: the Bay-Delta estuary and its vast Central Valley watershed. The last complete update of the standards in the Bay-Delta Water Quality Control Plan was in 1995.

The estuary’s fish and wildlife resources have been declining since the 1970s, but the collapse of many species starting around 2000 prompted the Board to initiate a major update in 2009. A 2010 study mandated by the state legislature found that 75% of the freshwater flow from Central Valley rivers (including 75% of the Sacramento River’s flow and 60% from the San Joaquin) would be needed to reach San Francisco Bay in order to fully protect the estuary ecosystem. Currently, only half of the average annual flow actually reaches the Bay—and far less in dry years, or months when fish and wildlife need it most. These reduced flow regimes make fish spawning, rearing and migration more difficult, raise temperatures, promote harmful algal blooms, lower food web productivity, and limit habitat creation and extent. 

 Since 2009, the only significant action the Board has taken was in 2018. It set standards requiring 40% of the flow from San Joaquin River tributaries (the Merced, Stanislaus and Tuolumne) to reach the Delta. But those regulations are not yet being enforced . The rest of the estuary is still waiting for protective regulations – Sacramento River flow to and through the Delta, limits on water export in the Delta by the giant federal and state pumps, Delta outflow to the Bay, and others. 

Instead, final decisions to update the regulations have been repeatedly delayed to allow state agencies and water districts to pursue the VAs (officially and misleadingly rebranded as the “Healthy Rivers and Landscapes” initiative). These VAs would upend the standard setting process by: 

• Requiring little or no additional fresh water to be released, even though the best available science shows that additional flow is essential to improve  water quality, maintain viable fish and wildlife populations, and guarantee ecosystem services. Implementing habitat restoration instead won’t address the fact that fish declines and water quality degradation are primarily caused by starving the estuary of fresh water, and that habitat projects won’t succeed anyway without adequate freshwater flows in order to be effective! And  many of these actions would have occurred anyway—giving the VA proponents double credit for projects that were already completed or planned. 
• Relying on taxpayers to cover the cost of implementing the VA habitat projects  
• Postponing the legally-mandated goal to double salmon populations—which was set thirty years ago and still has not been met—until 2050 
• Being in place for only 8 years, with the prospect of returning to square one at the end or if (when) the VAs fail. 

Not only are the VA proponents asking that the VAs be adopted instead of new protective regulations, but they are also fighting the small step forward from the 2018 San Joaquin River regulations  

The VAs aren’t just driven by the desire to escape the regulations that make it more difficult for agribusinesses and developers to continue degrading our rivers. The VAs are a tool that would permit more water to be used for major new proposed water projects (like Sites Reservoir and the Delta Tunnel). The VAs would weaken the rules controlling how much water can be taken from rivers in order to make these projects pencil out. Together, the VAs, Sites, and the Tunnel constitute a “Triple Threat” to the health of the Bay-Delta estuary and the rivers that feed it.