Water Archives · Jason Peltier interview

Title

eng Jason Peltier interview

Description

eng Former deputy general manager of Westlands Water District, former deputy secretary of the Interior, and current general manager of the Delta Mendota San Luis Joint Powers Authority. Talked about water policy during his years in the Interior Department and the trouble west side farmers are having getting regular water supplies.

Creator

eng Peltier, Jason

eng Holyoke, Thomas

Relation

eng Water Archive Oral Histories

Coverage

eng California State University, Fresno

Date

eng 4/11/2014

Format

eng Microsoft Word 2013 document, 25 pages

Identifier

eng SCMS_waoh_00020

extracted text

>>Thomas Holyoke: Today, we are interviewing Jason Peltier who is
right now general manager--deputy general manager of Westlands Water
District, but you've been involved with California Valley water
issues, most to your professional career I understand.
>>Jason Peltier: Probably you could say my whole professional career.
[Laughter]
>>Thomas Holyoke: Well, let's start early though, I guess you came out
of the farming in Kern County.
>>Jason Peltier: My--Actually, my father and uncle farmed in--near
Buttonwillow starting after World War II, that's where I was born in-near Buttonwillow and eventually, I ended up growing up with my aunt
and uncle and near--over near Lamont--between Lamont and Arvin and
there too I was--I started with water--in fact, I joke that I started
my water career in 1966 when I was a irrigator's assistant, that's not
really a title but it's kind of the function I served, digging ditches
and->>Thomas Holyoke: So, you're the irrigator's assistant, then you're
the one actually went out there with the shovel.
>>Jason Peltier: Yep. And that's why I started. And that's where I
went to college.
>>Thomas Holyoke: Did you end up doing any farming yourself?
>>Jason Peltier: I did a little bit after college. I was-- I went to
Chico and I was involved with student government at Chico and was
student body vice president and president and, you know, I've--really,
that was a great experience. I went home actually in a farm with
another uncle in San Diego County for about a year and I've decided
that I missed the excitement of the public policy arena and so, I went
to work for a couple of ag trade associations in Sacramento, did that
for--again, for only about a year and then Senator Hayakawa needed a
water person or ag and water person and so--and for some reason, they
said we don't need somebody that understands the Capitol and the
Senate and how it works. We need somebody that understands California
agriculture and that was great, that was fantastic opportunity and so
I went and worked for him for about his two and a half years in
office.
>>Thomas Holyoke: What part of California did he represent?
>>Jason Peltier: Senator Hayakawa?
>>Thomas Holyoke: Yeah.
>>Jason Peltier: United States senators generally represent--

>>Thomas Holyoke: Oh!
>>Jason Peltier: --all of the State.
>>Thomas Holyoke: I'm sorry, I though you said California state
senator. Right.
>>Jason Peltier: What department do you see him?
[Laughter]
>>Thomas Holyoke: I grew up in Nebraska, not California. So, were you
then in the California office of his or-[Multiple Speakers]
>>Jason Peltier: No, I was in Washington, DC for--and I went from
working after he left office, I went into the Bureau of Reclamation
briefly and then transferred with the bureau out to a job in
Sacramento. So, I start worked in the regional director's office in
Sacramento.
>>Thomas Holyoke: So, when you went to work for Senator Hayakawa, that
was--what point in time is this? What years?
>>Jason Peltier: About '81 or something, something like that in 1981
>>Thomas Holyoke: Since you were his chief water assistant, what
issues do you remember coming up with political issues [inaudible]?
>>Jason Peltier: Well, yeah, the--on water in California. on the
federal level, it was acres limitation was the big battle that was
going on and it was funny, my wife Jean-Marie worked for Tony Coelho
at the same--we kind of fell in love and she moved back there and went
to work for Tony doing ag and water for Tony and so, we--our paths
crossed a lot professionally but, yeah, it was mostly those acres
limitation and, you know, the older fights about subsidies and things
like that really were--seemed really important at the time today seem
totally innocuous and petty and driven by what we all certainly felt
in those days, petty issues being driven by Congressman George Miller
and the anti--what we felt were like the anti-ag forces that, you
know, they just didn't--they wanted to fight, they made a fight and we
had a fight.
>>Thomas Holyoke: What was--now, a little more specific about--the
fight was over?
>>Jason Peltier: It was over what the 160 acre limitation that was in
the historic--in the 1902 Reclamation Act in that was a reality that
we, you know--that might have worked, been fine in some places, but it
was a largely irrelevant in California and that's whether it was up in
the Sacramento Valley or in the San Joaquin Valley and so the whole

reclamation reform legislation, legislative package was all about
modernizing that and getting us, getting it to a 960-acre limitation
and that happened and you know, people--as big of a battle as it was,
the--it ended up okay, not without a lot of transaction cost so people
coming in to compliance with it and the new members and the new rules
and regulations and all that, but it was a lot--probably a lot bigger
benefit to the legal community to make all of the operational and
business arrangement changes that were needed to comply that it
certainly was to whatever the agenda was of the people that were, you
know, fighting and->>Thomas Holyoke: So, as I understand from that battle, the old law
had said that the Bureau of Reclamation couldn't provide water on more
than 160 acres.
>>Jason Peltier: More or couldn't provide--yeah, I think that's what
it said and the reality was that the people had complied with that by
so structuring their business arrangements so that, you know, they
were able to comply but it was just kind of a nightmare and it was a
battlefield.
>>Thomas Holyoke: And what was Congressman Miller, the champion of
applying this law or is it such a restricted version of this law?
>>Jason Peltier: I cannot explain George Miller's long, long history
of antagonism towards the Central Valley. I cannot explain--understand
it, I can't explain, I can't--I can kind of describe it as, you know,
it's always attack mode particularly against Westlands in particular.
He felt that there was a--it was a great issue for him to--you know,
he felt passionately about it. I'm not saying it was made up or
anything, but it was--you know, it seemed like he felt that, you know,
we had--we--that the Westlands farmers had--got taken in for advantage
of the law or had gotten benefits beyond their--and beyond what they
deserved or something, but it was--it seemed--actually, it's kind of
like, you know, we see traces of it today, that whole anti-ag, antiWestlands kind of a rhetoric pervades even though there's a press
release last week when we're struggling with the drought issues,
environmental community, you know, but their press release about fat
cat corporate barrens that don't care about fish and just want to get
water so that they can sell it to the cities, total nonsense stuff,
but they--I can understand in the case of the environmental
organizations, they can profit off that, they can profit off making
this fight, they can get funding to--but George Miller was some
genetic thing between him and his father but, you know, today, as
opposed to just five or ten years ago, there are very few people in
the environmental community that are engaged with serious policy
discussion on water, trying to make things work. And I think that's a
reflection, maybe, of the fact that their funders fund them to work on
things they want, than to work on like saving Wetlands or fracking or
whatever it is, but whatever it is, it's not much in the way of ag
water policy nowadays because there are where, you know, a few years
ago, you could have found--I could have named right off the top of my

head ten environmentalists that were actively engaged some more
constructive than others, but at least they were engaged in the
conversation and today, there's hardly any.
>>Thomas Holyoke: Does that mean when you were giving the policy
makers in Washington and Sacramento, that there's a lot less pushback
from the environmental community?
>>Jason Peltier: No, well, the problem is I said--you know, I think I
just said something like engaged constructively, they're engaged in a
different way now. They're engaged in a way that is, you know, let's
paint them to be evil, these policies are lopsided, they benefit
people at the expense of the environment. Now that was one--that's one
kind of really big thing that I've watched on in my--in the last
twenty years of water policy conflict and that is this notion, the way
the Central Valley Project Improvement Act, that Miller and Bradley
Bill was passed by Congress was--it was on--filled by rhetoric that
was all about--this project, the CVP and its customers are relics of
the past. They're from the time that we have five-cent candy bars. The
world has changed, the project hasn't. The public values, things
environmental today more than ever and we need to recognize that that
public appreciation and value and in environment. So, let's pass this
Central Valley Project Improvement Act, let's put fish and wildlife as
a top tier of--the top tier priority. And along with that, shortly on
the heels that came the first listings under the Endangered Species
Act and again, we were told and we believe, I still believe today,
that our past to a reliable water supply is through healthy fisheries.
But talk about that--how we failed on that front end, the agency was
failed on that front, but for this purpose of this notion that public
attitudes have changed, I get it, but the old values that drove the
development of the water projects in the generation before us, putting
people to work after the war, giving them a home, building
communities, improvement of the quality of life, et cetera, et cetera,
low price food, those old values were not discarded or, you know, said
we don't care about that stuff anymore. We still care about that, at
least some of us care about that. A lot of people in this valley care
about that, that's what they live and die with, not with I feel good
because we're giving more water to the fish. And they, you know, our
water supply reliability in Westlands has gone from an average of
ninety percent reliability twenty years ago to forty percent today and
it's because of reallocation of water from reprioritizing fish needs
and making sure that the fish agencies who basically run the water
project today, you know, can--making sure that their needs, whatever
they make up, whatever think they are, are mapped and they give us the
dicta on how life exists.
>>Thomas Holyoke: Still kind of keeping back in the 1980s right now,
after Reclamation Reform Act is passed in 1982, were there any other
big contentious water issues back--or was the environmental community
as mobilized back in the 1980s as they are today or were--

>>Jason Peltier: Well, there were some standouts. Tom Graff with
Environmental Defense Fund was particularly--and Zach Willey and David
Yardas, they were engaged in a very constructive and different way in
terms of being early champions of water marketing and as a means of
reallocating water from those that may have too much to those that
don't have enough and all--and take a slice for the environment in the
process, there was some definite constructive engagement. What really
I think got the environmental community jacked up in the '80s was
Kesterson and the selenium problem that we had on the west side, a
problem that I was working at the Bureau of Reclamation at that point
and was lived through the--what was kind of the first of many but, in
hindsight, but the first really big environmental confrontation
between historic irrigation and ag and the environment. The--that had
a searing impact on a lot of people, you know, in the agencies and the
farmers and the communities and it was a jolt into modern-day
environmental law and shook up a lot of people's thinking, but--and it
was really a great stimulant for the environmental community. It was
in a lot of ways, you know, they had this anti-agriculture agenda for-which I can't explain or understand, but it--Kesterson was a gift
that just kept on giving for them because it had birds with
deformities caused by agricultural drainage and the concentration of
selenium in Kasterson and here was proof positive that farming was bad
for the environment, proof positive in their mind and they got a lot
of mileage out of that, you know. Sadly, one thing the environmental
community never realizes is--or I'm sorry for over generalizing about
the environmental community, there are many--that many in the
environmental community don't recognize is the value of agriculture as
part of our environment, some are into what they call the working
environment that's making--helping agriculture stay sustainable, stay
in business, tweaking practices with hedgerows and habitat around
fields and not disking your stubble and doing wildlife friendly things
on the farm, that's a constructive part. The other part is Westlands
should go away because it's natural to be farming in that landscape.
They say that, you know, there's no water there so why should they be
farming there and yet, take those same people out to Westlands this
year or take them out in 2009 when we had the--only had a ten percent
water supply, it will be about the same this year with only zero
surface water, hundreds of thousands of acres out of production. Four
hundred sections will be fallowed in Westlands this year and four
hundred square miles of barren dirt. Now, tell me what kind of habitat
that is as opposed to--and what it does for the environment for air
quality, for--to say nothing of the job situation and the local
socioeconomic fabric, tell me what that success on their part, their
agenda is, they'd like to see that on a pretty constant basis. They
say we should retire that land. Well, is that what they want? You
know, is that environmental improvement to go to waste land basically?
>>Thomas Holyoke: The drainage issue you brought up that's an issue-Kasterson, it's an issue today on the west side; could you just talk a
little bit about what is the problem?

>>Jason Peltier: Sure, well, Westlands is--large parts of Westlands
anyway are underlined by--with a clay lens that--or layer of clay
below the surface, which when you apply irrigation water, it goes down
and hits that clay and it can't penetrate so it begins to back up and
you got a perched water table. And eventually, that perched water
table is saltier and saltier and pretty soon, if it's into the root
zone, you can't grow a crop there. So historically, the approach was
we'll manage this problem, you know, the way a city manages its
sewers, it's always going to be there and it will destroy it if you
don't take care of it, so you manage it. You would--the plan was that
we would put drains under--below the root zone and collect that-drainage pipes underground and collect that extra water, move it, then
collect all those drainage lines and put it into, the old plan was,
let's put it to the San Luis drain and--which was partially built up
to Kasterson, and then that's the drainage water that cause the
problem. That whole plan, the whole idea, it was sort of an old idea,
it was--I mean, it was in the San Luis Act in 1961 or whenever, San
Luis Congress passed the San Luis Act creating San Luis unit and
making Westlands possible was Congress directed the secretary of
interior to provide drainage, actually make sure it's there before
water is delivered 'cause, you know, we can look through the history
of man that different societies have failed to deal with this issue
and it destroyed them. So, it was always known as an imperative. We've
gone along ways not in building the drain, the master drain that was
supposed to take this saltwater to the ocean or to the bay and then to
the ocean, but we've come a long way in deal--in coping with this
issue and in Westlands, we've--part of the--one of the things we've
done over the last twenty years when our water supplies become so
unreliable, one of the biggest things the district did was purchased
hundred thousand acres of farmland back from farmers, took it out of
irrigated agriculture, well, at least the farmers if they want to try
the dry land farm green, but that's not a very--that didn't work too
good. And so that was a big step to deal with the drainage problem. We
still have a drainage problem, we have repeated court decisions
affirming the United States' responsibility, the Department of
Secretary of Interior's responsibility to provide drainage and we
continue to talk with them about how they're going to do it. We've got
some good ideas, we think we have a basis to settle our litigation and
make the drainage--allow us to deal with the drainage problem. We had
great confidence in that I would say up until the last few years when
our water supply has been so devastated, so--becomes so unreliable
that, you know, now I think a lot of people wondered, do we have the-if we don't have the water to grow the crops, we don't have revenue to
run the district the way it should be run and we don't have the
revenue, maybe, to address the drainage problem. We'll see. If we
could stay in this limbo or we could have some breakthrough and find a
way to manage it, but I think we know how to manage it. It's going to
be an in-valley solution, it's--you can go just toward north to the
grasslands drainage basin and see the fantastic work they've done in
collecting drain water, mixing it with freshwater, growing salttolerant crops, increasingly concentrating the drain water to the
point here but [inaudible] that you need treat and then you treat it

and you ended up with fresh water. So, I think we can deal with it.
But I'll tell you, it's kind of hard to think about it right now in
the context of a problem to be solved when--if we don't, you know,
when you're setting at a zero supply or a very limited supply you're-it's kind of a luxury to even think about. Another great new modern
development has been that drip irrigation. One of the name coping
methods that our farmers have come up with over the last twenty years
is to put a lot of drip in the Westlands silt point where probably
eighty percent of the district is drip or microsprinkler, that means
we've always had a policy no runoff from your field, that's--farmers
had to collect their runoff and it back in their system and reuse it.
We hardly need any return systems anymore because we only put exactly
the amount of water that the plant needs and so there's--and that
translates to no runoff, but it also translates into less water and
less pressure on the drainage problem because we're not doing what we
did in the '60s which was flood irrigated in the fall to pre-irrigate
for cotton and those kind of things, those are--that's--those days are
long gone.
>>Thomas Holyoke: Actually, why was the drainage system never
completed? You said that the original idea was to complete the
drainage system before they put water, you know, out there anyway.
Maybe just a little before the time that you were involved with it.
>>Jason Peltier: Yeah, it was. My sense is it was--there was always
higher priorities. In the United States was, you know, the priority
was get the water supply and get these lands productive, create the
jobs and we'll get to the drainage next and we'll get to the drainage
next and they never got to the drainage.
>>Thomas Holyoke: After you left the Senate I guess you went to work
for the Bureau of Reclamation. Actually it was one of two times you
worked at the Bureau of Reclamation, right?
>>Jason Peltier: Well no, it was actually the only time I worked for
the Bureau of Reclamation, and that was in Sacramento as a kind of an
assistant to the regional director and then public affairs person. I
did--subsequent to that, I was the first full-time manager of the
Central Valley Project Water Association and that was at a time--let
me just go on that for a bit because it was an interesting--it's an
interesting reality piece of history is that, the CVP water users had
a--throughout, you know, their existence, they relied on the Bureau of
Reclamation. The bureau operated the project, they protected the
interest of the project, they fought for it in regulatory settings,
they--you know, the water users could, you know, their contract meant
a whole lot to them because it was more than just the terms and
conditions of delivery. It was a relationship with the United States
that the bureau was responsible for holding up one end of and they did
a great job. We saw in the late '70s, early '80s, you know, all of
that changed very quickly starting in the '70s, with all of a sudden,
the bureau had a whole bunch of new masters. We had EPA on the scene,
we had the Clean Water Act, we had the Endangered Species Act, we had-

-you know, the landscape changed incredibly and the water users began
to realize more and more that we've got to invest in protecting
ourselves. We've got to have our own organizations, our own lawyers
that are worried about things beyond what does the contract say about
public policy issues and I arrived at the CVP Water Association at a
great time, perfect time, because that was just when all that was
unfolding and the farmers were realizing that they couldn't rely on
the bureau to protect the project anymore. It was going to fall to us,
and so I spent 12 years running the CVP Association, built the small
staff of a biologist, accountant and hired lawyers and lobbyists and
we were in the business of protecting the project. After 12 years
there, I went to work in the Bush Administration. And then I wasn't
really working for the bureau, I was working more for the secretary of
the interior as a deputy assistant secretary for water and science. By
that time, the CVP Association kind of went in decline after I left
because I think something, a really important natural evolution had
occurred and that is that the farmers and the water districts on the
different canals had organized themselves to take over the operations
of the project conveyance facilities-- that's what created the San
Luis and Delta-Mendota Water Authority, the Friant Water Authority and
Tehama-Colusa Canal Authority. They--and so they began building their
own not only operational through joint powers authority, their own
operational capabilities and hiring staff to take over the
responsibilities of things that had been in those of the bureau like
operating and maintaining the Delta-Mendota Canal and the Jones
Pumping Plan, et cetera. But it also put them more in the arena of
their own activism advocacy defense on the public policy issues. And
so, that was a--that is a really--poorly understood--not understood, I
mean, when we tell people that, yeah, we, Westlands and twenty-five
other districts that make up the San Luis and Delta-Mendota Water
Authority operate and have operated the Delta-Mendota Canal, the
pumping plant and other related facilities since the early '90s and we
feel certain that we are doing a better job, a cheaper job, a more
efficient better product, you know, it's--local control is really-made a difference and it's a great model of transferring from the
federal government function which can be operated at the local level.
That's a--it's a silent but very significant development that
occurred.
>>Thomas Holyoke: You have the pumps but you don't have the authority
to turn them on when->>Jason Peltier: Exactly. Exactly. We follow the orders that come from
Central Valley operations and we just got a great order today, it was
go to maximum capacity. We've been sitting at about fifteen hundred
CFS except for a few little rises with storms through this, you know,
the worst drought in the modern times or maybe since men arrived or
white men--or excuse me, white men arrived in California. And just-there was just kind of a breakthrough yesterday, small but it was a
change in some endangered species regulations that allowed them to
say, okay, take the federal pumping plant up to maximum capacity. The
state is staying low so the combined exports are about six thousand--

five to six thousand cubic feet per second. And will straighten out
the books, the water will be shared fifty-fifty between the two
projects, but for fish management purposes, we take less fish at the
federal pumping plant, so we're the one that are going to max on them.
We got that order from Central Valley Operations. Usually the order
is, drop one large pump and you'll result in a single pump operation
of eight hundred CFS. That's the one I've been seeing most of this
year.
>>Thomas Holyoke: Is there--anybody talk about transferring the entire
CVP over to private management and getting the government out of the
job?
>>Jason Peltier: There have been multiple, multiple times that
conversation has happened. Starting in--and we've got box probably on
every one of those efforts starting, you know, in the '60s I believe
was the first conversation about why do we have a state water project
and a CVP that are doing basically the same thing? Why don't we
operate them as one and if we're going to operate them as one, why
don't we transfer the federal project to the state. There was a very
serious effort probably fifteen years ago, where, you know--where the
United States was fully engaged. Secretary Babbitt thought it was a
good idea. We were pursuing it and maybe it will happen someday.
Because the United States--I mean, certainly the United States is
incapable of--I mean, what we've seen with--just to take over the
conveyance facilities, we can fund them better and make priority
investments as we know is needed and as the bureau knows was needed
when they had it, but they couldn't. The morass and the competition of
dealing with the reclamation projects in the seventeen western states
just wouldn't let them do the right thing. So, you know, that--those
efficiencies that we saw in the--that we see in conveyance could be
expanded to the whole project. And I'm sure the conversations will
come up again and again. The problem is--one of the major problems is- when we start having that conversation, there's a lot of people with
grievances against the project, like George Miller who is now retiring
from Congress but there were plenty of people to fill the issues that
are critics of the project, like, John Garamendi or Hoffman out of the
Bay Area that will pick up the slack, pick up the ball and run with
it, and they're going to say, "Oh no , you can't transfer the project
and tell, this issue is fixed this way and that issue is fixed that
way and that issue is fixed that way and pretty soon, you've got a
project that is so burdened with fixes that it's not worth having.
>>Thomas Holyoke: When you were at Central Valley Project Water
Association, I understand you went there around '88 or so?
>>Jason Peltier: Mm-hm, sounds about right.
>>Thomas Holyoke: OK. So you were starting there sort of that lead up
to I guess what became the 1992 Central Valley Project Improvement
Act, which was, you know, for better or worse, a major milestone in

Californian water. Could you talk a little bit about what that is and
how it came about?
>>Jason Peltier: Well, the reform agenda that we need to change the
way water is managed in California led by George Miller and then Bill
Bradley, a senator from New Jersey, was for some reason that nobody
has ever understood or explained had this great fascination with
wanting to reform the CVP. And they--that was about modernizing the
project, really it was about re-prioritizing fish and wild life and
extracting about fifty million dollars a year to fund habitat
restoration projects. And it was a hard slog, it was a very hard slog
in terms of holding the west side, the east side, and Sac Valley all
together and presenting a united front and engaging in this process
and developing testimonies and so forth. You know, an interesting
aspect of that battle is really stuck with me. It was this notion of
should we just try to fight it or should we engage and try to come up
with a bill that works. And Roger Robb from Lower Tule Irrigation
District on the east side was--I remember was just a great leader and
also a very forceful voice in the--if we engage, we're holding the gun
to our head and that is not a posture, you know, that we--but
eventually we engage and we try to come up and make a bill work. Let's
say in hindsight--and I-- I did an oral history for this for the UC
archives on CVP and I--that oral history was--it was so focused on the
CVPIA, the person that did that was very lucky because she got me like
less than six months since their pass. That book is about this big of
me relegating a bunch of the fights that we had, but--and part of
that, another person that did an oral history was Dan Beard, who was
on Miller's staff at the time and subsequently became commissioner of
the Bureau of Reclamation in the Clinton Administration. But I read
something in Dan's oral history that really, really rocked me, it
really, really, really hurt because I was an advocate of we ought to
engage because there's some--maybe we can do some good things, maybe
we can have less bad happen to us if we engage and right there in Dan
Beard's oral history is as soon as the water users decided to engage
in the process, we won. And it was like, what a kick in the teeth, you
know. The message was--wow, okay. Anyway, that's a pretty strong
memory also of fax machines spitting out fifty-page Thermo-Fax paper
that was all curled up and trying to communicate like that. Or
conference calls late into the night. Legal and lobbying bills that
I've never seen since, well I guess that now we're kind of seeing
those a little, but nobody had ever seen--spend that kind of money to
get the talent we need to represent us and advocate for us, and do
legal work and stuff. It was--we rose to the challenge of the conflict
and we lost. My takeaway now looking in--twenty years back, you know,
the thing--one thing I saw happened right away was the enviroes that
had--this was a national cause for them. It was just awesome that they
won in their minds. But what really was infuriating was--okay, it
passes and David Yardas was in Environmental Defense Fund and Tom
Graff said, "We've got an idea. Since we're going to have this new
restoration fund and since none of us trust the Bureau of Reclamation
and the Fish and Wildlife Service to invest this money wisely, to
spend it on projects that will make a difference, et cetera, we should

have this restoration plan roundtable where we get the water users and
the environmental community and the power users to all come together
and engage--invite the bureau and the Fish and Wildlife Service and to
have conversations about how they're going to spend this fifty million
dollars a year they've got and so we can make sure it's the right-that was a great idea. We got going the restoration fund roundtable,
did a lot of really good work in terms of--and the agency itself,
sometimes they probably thought we were a pain in the ass. But a lot
of times, things we were asking for were just good common sense kind
of management things that, you know, like where's the plan and where's
the spreadsheet that shows me how much money you've spent on different
things. It was--I think we helped the program a lot, but it was really
upsetting because after a couple of years of really good
participation, the environmental community was down to one person
engaged. And I would still have a dozen water guys and power guys come
into the meetings and, you know, there would be one environmentalist.
And it was just--they weren't interested in making sure that law
actually worked, that it was--that the promise of it was fulfilled.
They just kind of said, "Well, we'll go on another battle, we won
that." Well, that is really a lesson for the ages about, you know,
winning battles. If you really want to make change, if you win the
battle, you got to make sure the change happens 'cause it--you know,
we can look back and I was--I've been talking to some salmon guys now
and we have the identical concerns that we had fifteen years ago about
money, the way they are investing money, the way empire building is
going on, the way ground money is not going into the ground to
meaningful projects, et cetera et cetera. But there aren't many
environmentalists around that will engage. So that was one thing that
was really a disappointing experience. And I guess the other thing
with the CVPIA has been, you know, we've adjusted I guess all right.
We pay more for her water and our water is astronomically high now,
and it was relatively cheap then and some one hundred fifty bucks to
the farmer now plus, plus. But we also got the clue after the act
passed, that this notion of our water supply reliability runs through
a healthy ecosystem and healthy fishery. We got that, and now we're
getting to a point of real anger at the fishery agencies because
they're--they control, they just dictate how the project is going to
operate, what reality is for us. But after reallocating the two and a
quarter million acre feet of water historically use for human purposes
to the environment every year, after spending a billion dollars of our
money on ecosystem projects, the fish populations have not responded.
In fact, this deltas smelt is the basement and salmon go up and down
like this, but you would have thought with all the claims of
destruction, that once we put a temperature control device in Shasta
or screened eighty percent of the diversions in the Sacramento Valley,
that based on the claims of the damage, if that damage wasn't
occurring, we'd have huge populations. Well that salmon haven't
responded that way, so, we're getting to the point of some real anger
at the--that the fish agencies dictates on what needs to be done, you
know, they can't--they not only--you know, and it comes up now in the
delta planning process in BDCP. They're--You know, they say we can't
permit that. We don't think it's permittable what you're proposing to

do with all these habitat changes and reducing stressors and building
new conveyance in the delta. We don't think we could permit that. So
on one hand they're saying, we've had all these tools to use to
recover the fish, and we failed at that but they don't say that, but
it's obvious to everybody. I never get pushback from them. They have a
chagrin about the fact that they've had all these tools for twenty
years and haven't--many will show a benefit. And then on the other
hand, we're trying to plan for a better future and address the fish
issues and they can't tell us what it takes, all they can say is that
rock is a wrong rock, bring me another rock. And so, they're--nobody
disputes, everybody wants to see the fish populations better,
everybody sees the data that they're not better. And it's struggling
with what to do, but I can't--the anger that the fish agencies are
pulling out of the water community and power community about with
their dicta and no results is--it's a shame.
>>Thomas Holyoke: I gather some of this conflict is over, you know,
not being clear at what's happening to the fish anyway, and I
understand agriculture has been blamed because the pumping supposedly
kills fish and that saltwater intrusion from taking out too much
freshwater also kills fish. But I kind of get the impression that no
one's exactly quite sure what is happening->>Jason Peltier: That is true. No one is sure--no one is sure. We
spend--between primarily the Bureau of Reclamation and DWR and the
water users, we spend about thirty-five million dollars a year
monitoring the delta, gathering data, surveys, special studies, when
we had the extraordinary decline of delta smelt in the mid-2000s, you
know, that ramped up another whole body of work and study that went on
for ten years and it's kind of come to a conclusion now. With the
conclusion being: why did the smelt decline? The answer to that
question is it's kind of based on all the study and going to the Bren
School in Santa Barbara and getting national--experts from around the
nation that sit on independent panels and do all this review, look at
all this data. The answer comes back, the reason for the decline is,
it's a number of things. No one of which is the significant driver,
but it's kind of everything. And an answer like that is kind of
everything is it's nothing. We don't know what it is. So, we're shadow
boxing and the fish agencies have this false sense of confidence in
their biological opinions under the Endangered Species Act that this
flow reversed flow level and this channel cannot go above that number
or it's going to jeopardize the continued existence of the fish. They
have this--it's totally made up false confidence that they know what's
going on. If they were so confident, they knew what was--and they were
prescribing the right thing, we wouldn't have a fish problem today
'cause all of our water would have done some good. Well, it hasn't.
And that's why--and you know, it fits with the whole mantra that we
run into that's the pumps, the pumps, the pumps are the answer. And I
agree sometimes we do get a lot of fish at the pumps, mostly they are
irrelevant fish or invasive since ninety-five percent of the aquatic
biota in the delta is invasive anyway, but sometimes, we get big
numbers and usually, those were very wet years where there's been big

overflow and flooding, mobilizing a lot of food into the system that
gives you really healthy fish populations. We can't replicate that by
releases from reservoir, but that's the mantra. You need to release
more water and there needs to be more flow, less diversion. And so
this narrow-minded focus on the pumps, and yeah, there is a big debate
even though--so we got this thirty-five million dollars’ worth of
monitoring data where we got a huge very data rich environment to work
in. But different conclusions by well-meaning people and wellqualified people on both sides. There's a lot of people and they're
all, virtually all the people in the regulatory community thinks that
if we could just figure out the right way to manage the pumps, that we
solve the problem. Other biostatisticians can look at that same
mountain of data and say, "I can't find a correlation--population
level effect correlation here. I can't see--sure, you'd take some
fish, but is it significant? No, I can't--we can't tell if there's a
population level effect." So--but, you know, I guess that--if there's
a good thing that's come from all of this conflict over the pumps and
project operations is a realization that we need to take a
comprehensive look at the delta and we need to go take a look at all
the stressors and maybe that will translate into something that works,
but I kind of doubt it, though, because I don't think the fish guys,
they're just stuck. While on one hand they're very certain that they
know and they'll defend their biological opinions and the actions that
they dictate take place. On the other hand, there's so much
uncertainty, they're frozen and they can't make a decision and so--and
it's this fear of the unknown that the biologists, government
biologists see that is going to cause us probably not to have new
conveyance in the delta or you know, the project that they would say
is acceptable is totally not a project that is realistic or feasible
to be built. One that produces so little water and costs so much money
that you'd be insane to pay more for less, right? That's where they
seem to lead us.
>>Thomas Holyoke: Although sometimes it sounds like the solution
people are talking about is to have more freshwater in the delta down
by the pumps. I mean, peripheral canal is supposed to have done that,
part of CVPIA was withholding water to keep it in the delta, even some
of the justifications I've heard for the BDCP and twin tunnel system
or fresh water down there helps fish.
>>Jason Peltier: Well, the big--the tunnels--unlike the peripheral
canal, the tunnels we were talking about-- the clear benefit--well, I
guess I shouldn't say that 'cause I don't know what is clear really-the delta. But the big benefit, the big change and it's a change for
the better is the existing pumps are in a sump end of the delta.
There's no bypass flow. All the water that comes in there is drawn in
there and so their screens or fish catching devices we catch the fish,
we put them in a truck, we haul them over to some other place in the
delta where we dump them all the time and the predators are there
waiting, writhing in a big ball of feeding frenzy when we dump the
fish in. Now, they got that figured out. What we could do on the
conveyance off the Sacramento River is we have a river flowing by and

we could build these flat plate screens that are stainless steel,
little tiny holes. We'd fill enough of that so a fish could swim right
up next to it and swim right away, not even know that the--they would
not be impinged because there's so much screened area. So we could
very effectively separate the water from the fish. That is a thing-that's caused cow, fish and game, now cow, fish and wildlife to have a
position since the early '60s that we ought to build conveyance like
that so we cannot affect the central part of the delta so much.
>>Thomas Holyoke: It's interesting one of the--somebody was supposed
to come out of CVPIA and I think it you can start touching on it was
of, you know, more--working together in coordination with the farmers
and environmentalists, the agencies, which was supposed to have led I
guess to bay delta accords, CALFED, were you involved in those
things?
>>Jason Peltier: I didn't know that there were so much that they were-that came out of CVPIA as much as maybe the realization came that at
least in the case of the CVP, you know, the division of some, towards
Miller, Bill Bradley, and all their supporters was that we bring these
changes, we modernize the CVP and that will solve a lot of problems.
Well, it didn't solve for water problems and the in fact, it's only
our billion that's been spent, but over another billion and a half has
been spent by the other state in federal money on habitat projects and
that hasn't worked. We've kind of got to the point where the rallying
cry for CALFED was, you know, the delta is broken, we got to address
it and fix it. CALFED was--it's a whole other story, but it was a
great collaboration effort. Some good stuff came out of it, but in the
end when you start--there were two problems in my mind. One was it
ignored the delta. It basically said, if we take on trying to fix the
delta question, everything else we're trying to do in terms of
environmental improvements, that's all--that's really what CALFED has-we have to show for CALFED. There's a lot of environmental investment
and that's--now, I don't take issue with that. I just wish were
smarter about it. But we would jeopardize that, we'd jeopardize our
work in the watersheds, we would jeopardize the good things that we've
seen out of CALFED if we take on the delta so they ignored it. That's
problem number one. Problem number two is after the record-head
decision was signed, it was time to start making some decisions, not
just planning. And the planning, especially when you have a consensus
by addition, like just to add money and more money and we give more
people shaking their head up and down saying CALFED is a good thing.
But then when you start making decisions, you have to make choices,
you have to make prioritization, you have to do things where there's
winners and losers, that's when CALFED started to fall apart is, when
in my view, that's my theory. Plus the agency people had been ridden
really hard by Secretary Babbitt, at least on the federal side and
they had a lot of other problems that they put on the back burner and
when they had the record-head decision done, they were sprinting off
to deal with whether it was Klamath or wherever else it was and they-you know, people kind of took a break and never came back.

>>Thomas Holyoke: What was CALFED supposed to have been?
>>Jason Peltier: We're all going to get better together. Every--we'll
fix this system. It's broken and it's not acceptable and everybody is
suffering, not a much different starting point than the Bay Delta
Conservation Plan which is our--the current induration of trying to
solve the delta problems and by extension, other problems. But I think
the BDCP has some unique attributes to it that are--make it more
likely to succeed. One is that, it's by design focused on the delta,
stay--let's stay very narrow. Let's not try to be all things to all
people and let's not try to address the storage in watersheds and you
know, and all these things that need to be addressed, but we're going
to stay focused on the delta and that was a great attribute. But--all
right, back to how it started. It started with this-- and I still-everybody still uses this phrase is that the status quo can't stand
and it's broadly recognized that that's a reality, that you know, for
us, the farmers that are depending on the project to work, it's not
working. We've got twenty years of forty, sixty, ninety, now one
hundred percent shortages, only three years that we had one hundred
percent supply in the last twenty, so that status quo is no good. For
the fishery agencies, we're sure the status quo is no good because the
listed fish are staying depressed and they're not coming back even
though we're doing huge things in their name. For people in the delta,
the status quo can't stand in the sense that there's got to be a-well, we haven't had a levee failure since 2004. There's got to be a
permanent--and we've--since then, we've invested more and you know,
probably two-hundred fifty million dollars over the last fifteen years
in delta levee work. But for people in delta, unless there's a
sustainable funding extreme, you know, their--the integrity of the
delta is at risk. So we have--we start with kind of the same mantra as
we started CALFED with which is the system is broken, we got to fix
it. This notion that the status quo is no good for anybody driving
BDCP I think is true and yet the further we've gotten down the road,
the less--well, the environmentalists that we used to meet with
weekly, the dozen or so that we're engaged and wanted--could see the
habitat value associated with sixty thousand acres of intertidal land
and more shaded marine habitat and more preserved farm ground that is
not going to be turned into vineyards, they've gone somewhere, I don't
know where they've gone. They're not around and the agencies are
saying it's not permittable. So I don't know unless there is a huge
kind of come to Jesus moment where we have, you know, typical with the
big deal, you're going along, you're trying--you know, I got to say,
the drought is totally preoccupied everybody from policy makers to
technical people and kind to push BDCP out of the way somewhat, but
part of me says that there's going to have to be a meltdown and some
kind of come to Jesus moment about are we going to fix these problems
that we all know exist and leave a legacy that the next generation of
we've improved on what we received from the generation before us and
we've made it better, we made it stronger and more durable. Or are we
going to take the alternative path which is we just can't get anything
done, we're just going to fight until we're at--where stand still and
we leave a legacy of conflict and poor investment in the

infrastructure and fisheries and continued decline. I mean, that's the
question we're going to face at some point.
>>Thomas Holyoke: Is there really an answer to the question? I mean,
BDCP and these big plans all sort of predicate these twin goals of
water reliability and you know, ecosystem restoration, but is it
doable?
>>Jason Peltier: Yeah, I totally believe it's doable. But I don't know
if we're capable of it. I didn't know if--you know, with the problems
we face or not unlike the problems that you would see in any high
profile mega project or big social issue or you know, there get to be
so many people involved with so much individual power as entities that
making a decision to go forward can be stymied by the--by a minority,
very easy, and not that we want to run over minorities, but if we
allow, you know, the fishery biologists to say, "You got to operate it
this way and you're only going to get half of what you're currently
getting out of, there's people with an agenda like that, that truly
believe that we--you know, you should take half of what you
historically taken and that's just fine. If they control, we don't
make a decision 'cause we're not going to go for that project and then
we're not going to invest in habitat improvement. We're not going to
invest in better systems and so I--I mean, it's--the challenge of
decision making, and look at how dysfunctional our government is, you
know, it's sad and makes everybody angry and members of Congress are
quitting and saying, "This place is dysfunctional," and we're getting
polarized even more politically and policy makers no matter how well
intention, you know, the regional director of the bureau has one
hundred masters out here and how we can devote time and energy to
solve the problem of this magnitude is just kind of beyond him, I
can't see it. He's got Klamath to deal with, he's got Nevada to deal
with, he's got a river restoration program here in the San Joaquin
that's kind of in the crapper, he's got the Trinity River restoration
where, you know, they reallocated a bunch of water and said, "We need
to do all this work in the mainstem and fix the Trinity River." Now,
the locals that had supported that are saying, "Stop doing in-river
work. You need to go up in the watersheds. Well, there's no authority
to do that. I mean, he's got ugly, ugly problems everywhere he turns,
so you know--but he's a kind of by the microcosm of all of the pieces
of government that need to go like this to work together to go forward
and I think you can look across a political landscape and see this
kind of gridlock in a lot of places.
>>Thomas Holyoke: Well, when you were in the interior department as
deputy assistant secretary, how did you cope with these things?
>>Jason Peltier: Well, everything was pretty good then.
[Laughter]
>>Thomas Holyoke: That's when the judiciary was forcing more and more
cutbacks on water for Westside agriculture.

>>Jason Peltier: Yeah, you know, that was a fantastic experience, that
six years in the administration. It was a fantastic experience in that
problems--the issues you're dealing with, some of them were
specifically 'cause there was a statutory reason that the assistant
secretary or the commission of the assistant secretary or the
secretary had to be involved in it, so you had to deal with those. But
most of the problems, really tough problems were issues that couldn't
be solved. You know, we want all--you know, the regional office setup
in reclamation works good in the context of the regional director
solving problems, many of which nobody in Washington will ever hear a
thing about because he or she is doing their job and they're getting-they're finding ways to work around problems and come to resolutions
that people find acceptable. Issues that they can't work around.
They'd get high profile political or controversial because
stakeholders are divided or water users are divided. Those are the
kind of issues that end up going to Washington. And so what I found
was really an interesting realization that what goes on--the conflicts
that I had been involved with in California water, it's just a
microcosm of what goes on everywhere else in the west in a lot of
ways. You know, if you look at the water user environment conflict rub
in the CVP, you can see the same thing in Klamath, on the Columbia, on
the Rio Grande, on the Colorado. It's kind of everywhere and they're
the same kind of problems in a sense. There are different labels hung
on them, but it's all because where there's not enough water to go--to
meet everybody's needs and so--and we're--and it's all about what's
the right thing from a policy perspective, what's the right thing from
equity perspective, what's--you know, how do you solve problems with
those goals in mind of equity and sticking with the statutory
framework that you're stuck with. So I--but, did--you know, I was
horribly frustrating when--'cause, you know, there was--our ability to
do things--I mean, I was in the same place I was describing with the
regional director from the bureau I was in. You got all these masters,
you got all these objectives that are sometimes conflicting and rarely
coming together in the synergistic way that says we got the solution
here. So that was a great experience. To see that from the inside and
yeah, it didn't go well. But you know, I was--actually, one part of it
did go well. I could not remember--somebody asked me about this when I
shortly--when I returned to California. They said looking back, what
was the biggest surprise and--that you see and in your reflection and
my--and the biggest surprise in my reflection and I don't know--'cause
I came up with this notion and I thought about a lot of--and I don't
know if it's hubris or the self-important feeling or something like
that or--but I think it was really true is that I cannot--I can
remember one, one meeting where the topic of the meeting was what went
wrong. You know, we knew we were heading for choppy waters all the
time. That things are going to be controversial, but you know, did we
communicate with the right people with the right messages, did we have
our advance work done, do we know where the opposition is going to
come from, are we ready to deal with it, are we ready to deal with the
politics of both big P partisan politics and small p people politics,

were we prepared to deal with all those things that went with making a
decision and so that was a pretty--I mean and--I got to--yeah, so.
>>Thomas Holyoke: Any pivotal moments that you're proud of or that you
felt you actually solved something?
>>Jason Peltier: Well, we did some really good stuff on the Colorado
River. We made some milestone progress and it wasn't Jason doing it,
but being part of the team that did that. I think that was--there was
some good progress there and I took some small delight in the fact
that it was obvious that for the Bush Administration, California was
not that relevant, not like President Clinton who seemed to come out
every week or other week and spend a lot of time and did a lot stuff
out here. President Bush, you know, it wasn't part of his--the world
that he really seemed to care about. So I felt good 'cause I was the
secretary's representative to CALFED and I was coming out a lot and
going to meetings and engaging, and I feel good that I was able to
keep, you know, that relationship functioning and keep the--keep
interior engaged in a way that was constructive and yet, I didn't get,
you know--there was never an editorial that said, "Where's the Bush
Administration?" They are not engaged. When--and it was a--that was a
good thing. That was a little accomplishment, but it represented to me
something important which was in the face of all the other issues, all
the competition of--for issues across the county and across the
agencies and given with a high profile issue CALFED had been in the
Clinton Administration that I was able to engage in a way that was
constructive and visible enough that we didn't get attacked, that was
good."
>>Thomas Holyoke: In the years following, CVPIA and across the mark of
the 21st century, there is--was this seemingly a big explosion on the
amount of litigation over, you know, how much water had to be held
back for, you know, fish populations, Judge Wanger ordering the pumps
to stop moving, at the same time he's also throwing on biological
opinions. Was this a highly unusual level of litigation or is this
just another phase->>Jason Peltier: Yes. It was unusual and it remains--and yes, it's
been extraordinary and the amount of money that we've had to invest,
the--you know, the--sometimes you go to a board meeting, the San Luis
and Delta-Mendota Water Authority on the Westlands board and you look
at the agenda and here's the top part of the agenda and then here's
the closed session discussion of litigation. It takes up the rest of
the first page and a whole another page of all the losses, not
everyone's discussed and active and you know, or even updated. But
there's a long list of litigation and yeah, it's unusual. It's a
reflection I think--clearly, in my mind, it's a reflection of why do
you litigate. You litigate because you think government didn't do the
right thing or they affirmatively did the wrong thing and that you've-we use the third branch of government to try to reconcile the
differences of opinion about what the law is or what the policy is and
what the right thing to do is and so it's just a reflection of the

amount of conflict between the different stakeholder groups 'cause
certainly we get sued all the time too by environmentalists and
fortunately, they don't prevail very often. We don't prevail against
the United States very often. We have this weird circumstance where I
understand why courts give deference to the federal agencies, but it
just means that the federal agency needs to past the test. So, Dan
Nelson had a great phrase for this--coined a great term for it.
Actually I think maybe you give somebody else credit for, but you
know, I heard of--from Dan first, which is, "This is our life in a D
minus world," where D minus is a passing grade, that's all the
agencies have to do, to justify their actions and whether they're
right or wrong, it doesn't matter. If the court is going to give them
that kind of deference, then they get to--so we have a huge burden to
overcome and we have on occasion and some of the Wanger ruling where
he found the biological opinions to be arbitrary, capricious and
unlawful. That was good. We're still under those biological opinions
and now the appeals court is kind of--knocked him off his pedestal.
So, but that will continue. We will continue to use the courts because
there's--and you know, the good news about this drought is, you know,
while we all have a great, great history of conflict and fighting in
the water community, the drought has really pulled us together a lot
and there's a lot less fighting and a lot more mutual aid conversation
going on. I imagine there'll be litigation down the road, but here we
are--that would be after the fact when people say, we've had a claim
and we better make it and we better search something, so precedent
isn't set. But, you know, so far so good. You know, there's not--we're
not been spending money on lawyers. That could change this week with
the decision that was just made yesterday about the agencies. The
environmentalists might seek a temporary restraining order to--because
the decision amounts in a tiny increment of additional water going
down the San Joaquin Valley and they will fight that on principle.
>>Thomas Holyoke: And farmers become more effective at using the
courts as a venue for pursuing some of their goals or at least
fighting back against environmentalists? I simply asked that because
for a number of years, like farmers tend to do--be frequently on the
losing end of these issues.
>>Jason Peltier: Yeah. Well, we lose more than we win, that's for
sure. I don't know, if you look at the case of--at the Wanger decision
relative to the smelt and salmon opinions, and why it was thrown out,
my understanding of it is that it was more--it was almost the
technicality in the procedure you use by bringing in outside experts
and witnesses that were maybe beyond the record. But as he was trying
to understand the record, you know, he's--'cause the record was
unintelligible and there's, you know, the--it's this phenomenon that-this way of doing business that the fishery agencies have, it's the
technical term for the scope. They use a lot of made up shit. They
say, "Well, let's just say this is what it is." And they hang on to it
and they--pretty soon, they believe it and we were able to show I
think in the proceeding that it was arbitrary and capricious decision
making going on. So, in--the--so, he got knocked off the pedestal

because of the way he went about the case supposedly. We'll see how
that gets result. To your question, will we--are we getting better? I
don't know. I don't know, I mean, the issues are now getting more
complicated, certainly. One thing that we're doing today that we never
did before was invest in the kind of technical scientific expertise
and have our own science program. We've got through the organization,
the State and Federal Contractors Water Agencies, which is both
federal and state contractors have come together and our program there
is not a science programming aimed at litigation, but it's a science
program that aimed at saying, "It's in our interest that we figure out
these questions of science. It's in our--the interest of our customers
that we do, that we constructively engage in the scientific
conversation. So, we got a lot going on there. You know, probably, I
don't know, we're spending three or four million dollars a year on
funding studies and collaborating with others and building internet
tools to help people get access to the mountains of data. So, that's
all very constructive. But we're also in the context of litigation
spending more on experts.
>>Thomas Holyoke: When you say we, are you just referring to Westlands
or?
>>Jason Peltier: I would say--well, both. It's Westlands is and
Westlands is as a part of the San Luis and Delta-Mendota Water
Authority, and Westlands is as a part the whole State and Federal
Contractors Water Agency, you know. It's a--so, it's kind of expanding
circles of who we are.
>>Thomas Holyoke: Well, coming more to the present time now, there's
been a lot of attention the last few years on the Bay Delta
Conservation Plan, a big feature of that are a couple of tunnels to
deliver water from the Sacramento River down to the pumping plants.
The west side farming has been very much in favor of this. Why is this
proposal seen as something so helpful for west side farmers?
>>Jason Peltier: Well, the--because in--it's not a--let me just
clarify, it's not a proposal yet, there's not a plan yet. And until we
have a plan that works, there won't be a plan. And what works is
something that's affordable and meets our water supply objectives.
And, you know, as I said earlier, we've gotten from ninety percent to
forty percent in terms of average reliability on--for the federal
contractors and we need to find a way to get that reliability back up,
not back up to ninety percent where we were. But let's get--let's
start moving in that direction and give people some predictability and
reliability and because most of the water losses have been as a result
of the attention--the focus on the pumps, let's regulate the pumps.
There's--Here's a little contradiction where I'm saying, right? I said
earlier that we don't have any--we can't--there are biostatisticians
who can't find the population level effect of the pumps. But on the
other hand, we're saying, "Let's build this conveyance so we can ease-more easily separate the water from the fish." Well, if you're not
having an effect, if you really believe that the pumps are not having

an effect on the fish, why are you going to spend your share of twelve
billion dollars to build two tunnels to take water from the Sacramento
River to the--to Tracy? I guess a weird answer to that, but I think,
it's kind of true is that we're just kind of giving up. We've giving
up--We know it's unsustainable in the regulatory environment we're in,
the forty percent average reliability, and probably dropping. We know
that's unsustainable. So, we've got to find the solution and that
conveyance project is the solution in terms of giving us some more
reliable supply. We can also continue to pump out of the delta in the
summer when all we're getting in are invasive fish and that will be,
you know, sort of the dual setup. But the isolated conveyance of
tunnels are seen as a way out of the regulatory morass-ran and that's
just about all it is. I mean, there are other reasons. There's water
quality, twenty percent improvement, less salt, earthquake resistance,
resilience. If the--I guess it's not if it's when, an earthquake of
the right magnitude and the right location comes and knocks some delta
levees down and seawater rushes in. Today, we're vulnerable as can be.
We just got to shut the pumps off. And we're seeing the suicidal
consequences today of saying, "You have no surface water." And go-we're only being saved by some carry over water we had and some
groundwater over drafting we're doing. But that is not sustainable on
any kind of a multi-year basis. So, if we have a big earthquake in the
delta, the tunnels will also help mitigate that problem, but->>Thomas Holyoke: Actually, how bad is the overdraft problem on the
west side right now?
>>Jason Peltier: Let's say, it's bad. Probably our safe yield is
probably, two to three hundred thousand acre feet and probably this
year where farmers are leaning on it really heavy, they'll probably
extract five to six hundred thousand acre feet. Don't ask me out of
what 'cause I don't know how much is down there and how significant
that is. But you can certainly see, you know, the groundwater
overdraft was the basis of--a lot of basis for the construction of the
CVP on the surface supply. It was we could see the groundwater levels
were just going down, down, down. But you could also see a correlation
when surface water came in, they stabilized and then started going up.
And then, we hit the twenty year--the twenty years of regulatory
interruption on decline in the water supply, then you see the
groundwater going back down, down, down because farmers turn to it.
So, there's a huge environmental problem overdraft and it can have
permanent impacts on the surface features and it's not a sustainable
practice. This is a survival practice, though. And it's just one of
those--it's a kind of out of sight, out of mind, unless you're dealing
with it directly, you're not worried about it. And certainly, if the
fishery agencies are not worried about the consequences--the human
consequences of their reactions--of their actions, of their policy
choices, which I've demonstrated over and over that they're--well,
they don't have to worry about it under the Endangered Species Act.
So, they don't worry about what they do unemployment or communities or
any of those old values, so to speak. And I have to say that their-they probably feel the same way about overdraft until you know it's a

huge environmental issue. They should be very concerned about it. Just
like they should be concerned about all the dust and air quality
problems associated with four hundred square miles of ground left
barren in the summer and what that's going to do to the air quality.
But they're--you know, that's not their agenda. So, they're not
worried about it.
>>Thomas Holyoke: This idea from building new underground conveyance
under the delta, it's been said at times that west side farmers would
pay for a lot of that or pay for the whole construction. Is that--at
least, at this point in time, was that still->>Jason Peltier: Yeah.
>>Thomas Holyoke: --a proposal?
>>Jason Peltier: That's our position that we will pay. We said two
things, we will pay for conveyance and we're going to operate under
the beneficiary pays reality. That cuts out a whole bunch of debate
that just says, that part is resolved. We know that. That's certain.
But as the fishery agencies and others continue to tinker with and
reshape the big delta conservation plan and impose limits on it and
drive up cost, it's--it could well get to the point where we can
afford to pay for it. We could well--we could easily arrive there, if
we haven't already arrived there now, and don't--just don't recognize
it. The--in that case, we will go--I assume we will shift to more back
to the basic foundational policy framework approach, which is, we will
pay for the benefits we receive. If we get one hundred fifty dollars’
worth of benefit, we'll pay one hundred fifty dollars. We're not going
to pay for the benefits received by the Wetlands. We're not going to
pay for the benefits received by others. You know, we--that may be the
reality. We're not going to pay for the benefits, the perceived that-you know, the--one of the fish issues is all of a sudden, you got
structures in the river and predators love structures and the rivers
are loaded with predators, in fact, some studies shown ninety-five
percent of the downstream migrating salmon are eaten by predators. And
salmon-- National Marine Fisheries Service, which has salmon
responsibility say relocating the intakes up there is actually worse
for salmon because there'll more predation. Well, I'm pretty sure our
engineers can figure out a way to have no dead spots, which is
something they found on some of the screens they built up in the
Sacramento Valley over the eddy, a little back eddy by the lower edge
where the predators can relax and not expend much energy and they can
go out and get the food when it's there. We--I think we can design
around that but, you know, if there are--the fishery agencies can't-have and can and probably will continue to drive up the cost by design
modifications and drive down the benefits by limitations they place on
a project. That could lead us to a place where there is no project.
>>Thomas Holyoke: That would be a situation though where maybe the
state could pick up some of the cost through this proposed water bond
people keep talking about?

>>Jason Peltier: There's a lot of workarounds. But the fundamental is-I think, this would come out of a decision that this isn't going to
happen. And because of what the fishery agencies--that value, that's
pretty predictable what that'll bring. That will bring, "Oh my God.
You mean, we're not going to solve the problem? And we're going to
live with the status quo like it is?" And that will sink in to the
electives and that'll--then the reaction will be, that's unacceptable.
You get, you know, I could see--I can imagine Governor Brown and
Senator Feinstein saying, "You five water district managers, you five
agency heads, you five environmentalists, you go into that hotel room-conference room and you come out when you got an agreement." And it's
got--we had an--we want an agreement that's two pages long that it's
going to be the delta compact and this is the deal. You know, that's
probably the way we get it done.
>>Thomas Holyoke: And Brown and Feinstein, Brown in particular, seems
like he would like to leave a legacy of having solved some of these
problems.
>>Jason Peltier: Yeah, yeah. And he's awesome. He's got exit power and
he's really using his life's experience in government and public
policy very effectively.
>>Thomas Holyoke: It's April of 2014, as you said earlier, one of the
worst droughts in recorded memory, recorded history. Has this changed
the way that farmers in the west side or farmers on the east side or
south side of the Central Valley are approaching a lot of these
issues? Or actually, to put it in a different way, is the drought
unified farmers->>Jason Peltier: Yeah.
>>Thomas Holyoke: --around the valley.
>>Jason Peltier: That for sure--that is one of the few I can--I could
see three silver linings associated with the drought and that is
number one. It's--I was on a conference call this morning where we had
representatives. It was all bunch of water managers from Kern County,
from Friant, from the exchange contractors, from water service
contractors on the west side of the valley, of the state water
contractors were on, were all, yeah, it's brought us together, which
was great. That's definitely a silver lining. You know, for us, a zero
supply is not a whole lot different than the ten percent supply that
we had in 2009. So, we've been in this territory before. And one of
the interesting things was one of the Friant lawyers was saying the
other day, she said "God, this is just crazy. This is crazy--" 'cause
we're dealing with what the agencies were doing on what information
they had or didn't have and what--where they were going and how they
were going to make their decision and what the possible consequences
were and you know, she just goes, "Wow, I see what you guys have been
dealing with all along. This is crazy." And it's really, you know,

welcome to the pool. The water is really ugly and that's the world
we've been in. So yeah, there's broader understanding. There's--And-You know, the guys that are the two hundred fifty thousand acres of
exchange contractor lands that have forty percent supply, only once
that they have a cutback and that was seventy--just seventy-five
percent. Their--I was just talking to the manager, as I got here,
about what they're going through. And they're having to do things and
manager--system and ways that it was never designed and never been
operated. So, you can imagine what they're going through. The other
silver lining--one other silver lining is the incredible amount of
attention this drought is getting. You know, it's--the national-statewide--it's on the front page of the paper. You know, this will
probably all settle out as things settle out 'cause maybe, you know,
the last storm it's coming, it'll be eighty degrees in Sacramento on
next Monday. Maybe we're kind of at the end of the rain and things
will settle out, we'll have in storage what we have in the storage.
But--And so it'll get quiet. But the media attention, the public
attention in--across the state and nation and international media has
been fantastic. And one thing that is just awesome about that is, this
is a story about--mostly, it's about--because that's pretty good, Bay
Area is fine, pretty much. They got challenges but nothing like we
had. The--their story is about food and we are constantly frustrated
about agriculture as a whole, as frustrated that the public doesn't
understand where their food comes from, what it takes to put it on a
plate, what it takes to make it healthy, and what the consequences of
anti-ag policies are of what--whether it's in labor or pesticides or
air quality management or water that--they're frustrated that the
public doesn't understand how those systems have got to work in a way
that allows farmer to be profitable or he's not going to exist anymore
and the food's going to come from Mexico or someplace else. So, this
is a teachable moment as they say where we get to see the public
exposed to water plus land equals food. And that--that's a rare
opportunity. The other--the third silver lining is kind of a cynical
silver lining. But it's allowing us to shine light on how the fishery
agencies make decisions or don't make decisions and how their--you
know, what we've had since February tenth, we've had about a million
and a half acre feet of water go out to the ocean from a series of
moderate storm. Three--Actually, we now had three storms, three
moderate storms. We haven't named them but we number them. And with
each one, we pushed the agencies to say, we need--the existing rules
aren't working, we need to change the rules a little bit so we get
more water south 'cause a million and a half gone out, about four
hundred thousand acre feet have gone south to put into storage down
there. And the fishery agencies are, you know--but for this last
decision that they just made--announced last night, that they've been
very, very slow in doing anything that's of meaningfulness to us. But
at the same time, we've had zero smelt taken at the export pumps. And
I think one hundred twenty-eight winter-run sized fish of which
historic generic testing shows us--tells us about half of those were
actually winter-run. And our incidental take level is like 23,000 of
them. So, virtually no fish are being taken at the pumps. And it's-the--but their ability to operate on their gut instinct and say, "We

think the fish are in trouble." Well, we know. Now everything's
stressed in this kind of environment. But, you know, there's no
evidence that they can point to, no bodies they could point to. It's
them--shining light on that reality is really a rare opportunity.
>>Thomas Holyoke: Well, I'm out of questions. So, anything you'd like
to add? Any thoughts about the future?
>>Jason Peltier: Thoughts about the future. I know I speak for many of
my generation of water managers who've worked for years trying to
solve problems. And we will most likely, I referred earlier to the
notion of leaving this wonderful system that we inherited better,
probably a lot of us are going to feel like we spent our careers
working to make it better and only to be engaged in conflicts that the
best we could do is not lose as much as we could have lost and our
ability to say, you know, good things happen, right things happen,
positive things happen. It's going to be pretty limited and I really
fear for, you know, the next generation that our--not only in the
physical infrastructure sense, but in the institutional sense. And the
ways the decisions are not made, but so becomes such a dominant
reality for my thirty years of doing it and I can't imagine. I don't
know what it's going to take--no--it's kind of like the delta. I
always thought, we're never going to fix the delta, you know, for--you
know, ever since the peripheral canal debate, in the early '80s. You
know, when that was lost, I was like, "We're never going to fix the
delta until there's a crisis." And then when there's a crisis, then
there will be no choice but to do something about the delta. Well, you
know, today I see a crisis on many levels in the delta. Fish, water
supply, flooding threats and we're not going to seize this moment plus
a fantastic political environment where you've got a governor and a
senator, very seasoned democrats too, who want to solve the problems.
And we're not able to capitalize on it. I guess that I hate to leave
on the negative note with that notion. But that's the burden I think
that we're carrying on into the future and I think that it's too bad
it will take a fear, a crisis because, you know, getting by and making
change based on common sense and your ability to convince people that
this is the right thing to do just doesn't seem to hold much hope.
>>Thomas Holyoke: Okay, thank you.
>>Jason Peltier: Thank you.

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