Farmers in the Westlands Water District heard yesterday how little water they will be receiving under a rationing plan that will run until the end of August.  Because of diminished storage at San Luis Reservoir, those farmers will receive only .47 acre-feet of water per acre until around August 31.  That’s less than half an acre foot which is hardly enough water for most crops to make it through the summer.  The result is that hundreds of thousands of acres will go unplanted, such as fall vegetable crops like broccoli and lettuce, or existing crops will be abandoned so that the scant water supply will be used on much less acreage. 

 A combination of factors led to the water short year.  Those factors include last year’s drier than normal conditions, court-ordered pumping restrictions in the Delta, and essentially zero precipitation this year in March, April and May.

We can’t do anything about the rain.  It’s the environmental regulations that are so maddening.  Between the State Water Project and federal Central Valley Project, a total of 670,000 acre-feet of water that could have been pumped and put to use this year was lost to the ocean.  The timing was such that it had little or no environmental benefit in the Delta either.  All that was accomplished by that huge release of drinking water was to move a small school of Delta Smelt a few miles further away from the pumps that science has shown to have an insignificant effect on the smelt's population levels.

 Why then are we going through this exercise?  Because the Endangered Species Act is inflexible and it is being applied in a manner that harms an economy that’s under strain already it’s putting people out of work, plain and simple.

Is that what the ESA’s authors intended?