Schwarzenegger regime plans to start drilling for peripheral canal
Posted by Dan Bacher
The state Department of Water Resources is planning to begin drilling into river bottoms of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta next month to obtain information for proposed intake structures and tunnels for the peripheral canal.
Although state officials claim the drilling is necessary for the state to evaluate different conveyance options under the controversial Bay Delta Conservation Plan, or BDCP, fishermen, farmers and environmentalists see the plan to drill as laying the groundwork for the peripheral canal, even though the project hasn't been authorized or funded yet.
"We're not building a canal intake now," said Matt Notley, spokesman for the Department of Water Resources. "This is part of a survey process we've done for several months on land as part of the environmental review under the BDCP."
Notley said the department would be studying in-water soil samples at 16 proposed intake locations under consideration on the Sacramento, San Joaquin and Mokelumne rivers. A lot of the drilling will occur on the Sacramento between Freeport and Walnut Grove, the approximate area where the canal would begin.
"None of the impact analysis itself has begun," he stated. "All of this preliminary data- gathering will be used to do the impact analysis when it begins."
He claimed that to conduct an appropriate impact analysis for the series of conveyance options proposed under the BDCP, they need to obtain the correct and updated geotechnical data.
However, Bill Jennings, chairman of the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance, said it was "subterfuge" for DWR to start the drilling process for proposed intakes before it has been decided whether or not the canal will be built. …
The growing coalition of Delta farmers, commercial fishing groups, recreational angling organizations, Indian tribes and environmentalists sees the canal as a water grab by corporate agribusiness in the San Joaquin to increase water exports from the Delta to corporate agribusiness in the San Joaquin Valley and Southern California. They fear that the canal will only worsen the collapse of Central Valley chinook salmon, Delta smelt, longfin smelt, green sturgeon, striped bass and other species. …
Oil companies and the budget deal
Posted by Robert Cruickshank
We've been focusing a lot here on Calitics in the last day or so on the losers in the recent budget deal. But who are the winners? Pretty high on that list would have to be Big Oil. They were able to persuade Democrats to drop their demands for an oil severance tax and were able to persuade Democrats to agree to allow the first offshore oil drilling in 40 years to begin off the unspoiled coast of Santa Barbara County near Point Conception.
Every other oil-producing state in the union taxes the extraction of oil from its lands – including Texas and Wyoming. Even Sarah Palin raised the oil severance tax in Alaska to 25 percent in 2007. Instead, as Paul Hogarth pointed out, California is defining itself to the right of Sarah Palin by refusing to embrace such a tax.
The California Budget Project estimated that a 9.9 percent oil severance tax would bring at least $1 billion into state coffers. If oil prices rose again above $100 a barrel, we could see $2 billion in revenue per year. Given the high likelihood of such increases, an oil severance tax would be a significant long-term boon to the state's coffers, since oil companies can't exactly shift production out of state, and oil is only going to become more valuable over time.
And that money could help prevent the most egregious human services cuts that were agreed to in the budget deal – the cuts to Healthy Families that will cost 500,000 children their health care coverage, the cuts to In Home Supportive Services that people ... need to survive. …
Californians are being asked to make a choice: Give the oil companies a sweetheart deal unprecedented in the United States or demand that oil companies pay their fair share and help prevent a humanitarian catastrophe that budget cuts will cause. …
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