Every time someone complains to the Delta Stewardship Council that the Plan is all wrong, Mr. Isenberg smiles politely and asks the complainer to submit a better plan. He always strikes me as completely serious; he would love to see a better plan. I presume ACWA got the same treatment, and to their credit they took him up on it. They did not write a better plan. They didn’t write a plan that ensures the co-equal goals will be met at all. Unfortunately, their cover letter purports that their alternate Delta Plan has a plan in it, one that should be considered as a project alternative in the EIR. That’s an interesting way to give a hollow set of defensive positioning a little credibility while moving the fight down the road.
The cover letter is interesting aside from the “pretend our Delta Plan has a plan in it” aspect. One nice thing is that while it has biases I don’t share, the questions and larger assertions are recognizable to me. Unlike Nunes who thinks that environmentalists are Wiccans, McClintock who thinks that people arbitrarily stopped liking abundance in the 70’s and that’s why we can’t have new dams, or Birmingham who thinks water deliveries don’t depend on hydrology, they are talking about the world I perceive.
They pose some of the same questions I’ve wondered at, about how the DSC will proceed. They do it in a funny leading way: Will the DSC promote harmony and justice while doing this thing we like, or will they continue kicking puppies and small children? But that’s fine. If the DSC can withstand being scolded on the blogs, I figure they can give the answers they intend even if the questions were meant to be leading.
Mostly, though, the policy/cover letter is fine. It is ACWA’s “Alternate Delta Plan” where the exercise falls apart.
On the public record 