A State Appeals Court has blocked a Trump administration federal contract with the Westlands Water District for a million acre feet of Trinity River water, according to a statement from the Hoopa Valley Tribe.
Westlands, nicknamed as the “Darth Vader of California water politics” by Tribes, environmentalists and anglers, is the largest agricultural water district in the U.S. The district is located on the arid west side of the San Joaquin Valley in Fresno and Kings counties.
The case is Westlands Water District v. All Persons Interested, No. F083632 & F084202, Court of Appeals of the State of California, Fifth Appellate District (August 7, 2023).
The Tribe said the door is now wide open for the Biden Administration to revise the contract and “make Westlands pay their longstanding debt to restore decimated salmon fisheries.”
“The court’s ruling at last exposes how the Trump Administration was complicit in signing a water contract that failed to collect Westlands debt for past and future environmental restoration costs,” said Hoopa Valley Tribal Chairman Joe Davis.
“The Westlands Water District would not exist but for the pure and life-giving water that the Bureau of Reclamation exported from the Trinity River into the Central Valley Project for decades,” noted Hoopa Fisheries Director Michael Orcutt.
“The transfer of wealth to industrial agriculture devastated our Trinity River fishery, impoverished our people, and poisoned vast areas of Central Valley wildlife habitat and agricultural land”, said Vice Chairman Everett Colegrove.
“Environmental justice and protection of tribal rights are twin policy pillars of the Biden administration. Today, we believe that the Biden Administration’s ongoing defense of Trump’s actions to gut the CVPIA betrays those policies,” added Vice Chairman Colegrove.
“Congress enacted the Central Valley Project Improvement Act (CVPIA) in 1992 to make sure that those who profited by damaging the environment would pay to restore it,” said Hoopa Tribal Council Member Daniel Jordan.
He added, “Not only that, Congress recognized that the Bureau of Reclamation’s history managing dams on the Trinity River showed it could not be trusted to act alone. Therefore, the CVPIA empowered our Tribe to set and enforce the terms for Trinity River fishery restoration. The contract rejected by the Court failed to ensure that outcome.”
“With rights come responsibility, and we took seriously our responsibility under the CVPIA to lead Trinity River fishery restoration,” said Fisheries Director Orcutt.
“On December 19, 2000, my brother, then tribal Chairman Duane Sherman, signed the Trinity restoration agreement on Hoopa’s most sacred grounds with Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt. We consider that agreement to be a modern-day treaty,” said Council Member Jill Sherman-Warne.
“Enough is enough,” stated Chairman Davis. “As Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black said of the duty owed to Indian rights, `Great nations, like great men, should keep their word.’”
“It is time for the Department of the Interior to revoke the Westlands contract, allocate and collect restoration costs from CVP contractors, and write new contracts that fully protect and enforce reclamation law and federal trust duties to our Tribe,” Davis concluded.
The Trinity River is the largest tributary of the Klamath River. This year all recreational and commercial fishing on the ocean in all of California and most of Oregon is closed, due to the collapse of Sacramento River and Klamath/Trinity River fall-run Chinook salmon populations spurred by poor water and fishery management by the state and federal governments. Recreational salmon fishing on the Sacramento and Klamath rivers is closed and tribal fishing for salmon is severely restricted this year.
On Monday, August 7, the California Court of Appeal issued a landmark ruling affirming a Fresno County Superior Court Judgment refusing to validate a proposed “repayment” contract between Westlands Water District and the United States Bureau of Reclamation, according to a press release from a coalition of groups and attorney Stephan Volker.
This contract was for the purchase and delivery of up to 1.15 million acre-feet per year, in perpetuity and for a highly discounted price, from the Central Valley Project (“CVP”).
The Court’s 44-page ruling holds that Westlands’ draft contract was “materially deficient in its failure to specify Westlands’ financial obligations under the anticipated contract.”
In rejecting Westlands’ requested validation, the Court agreed with arguments advanced by three groups of public interest opponents, including the North Coast Rivers Alliance, Winnemem Wintu Tribe, California Sportfishing Protection Alliance and Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations, Institute for Fisheries Resources, and the San Francisco Crab Boat Owners Association.
They contended that Westlands had “failed to comply with both procedural and substantive laws in approving an incomplete draft contract that sidestepped required public notice, informed agency review and careful environmental analysis.”
Winter-run Chinook salmon, spring-run Chinook salmon, Central Valley steelhead, green sturgeon, Delta smelt, longfin smelt and other iconic California fish species have been pushed to the edge of extinction by decades of massive water diversions from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta by the Central Valley Project and the State Water Project.