Our young turkeys of the land gobble on

 “They (environmental groups) can emotionally appeal to the general-election voting base a whole lot more effectively than they can in an off-election cycle,” Koehn said.
Jeff Marchini, director of Division 1, said things are different than in 2011. If MID wants to protect its water from the environmental groups in Sacramento, switching the election years is the right thing to do, he said.
“Things have changed dramatically since 2011 – I’ve seen with my very eyes – up in Sacramento,” he said, “and it’s a whole different world right now. It’s going to continue that way.” -- Brianna Calix, Merced Sun-Star, Nov. 3, 2015

 
The Badlands editorial board is familiar with environmentalists and do not find them above reproach. But we got a great laugh on this one from our mollycoddled, government-farming, taxpayer-and-consumer gouging (tried to buy a bag of almonds lately?), environment destroying, hyper labor exploiting, constantly whining, richer and richer and fewer and fewer, corporate agribusiness executives.(1) 
Agriculture's cash will continue to have more influence on government than environmentalists -- those geniuses of emotional manipulation -- have. The evidence? Worst or second-worst air quality in the nation; American Rivers' choice for most endangered river of 2014; critically overdrafted aquifer and soils rapidly salting up. All this is laxly regulated by state and federal government, whose officials are regularly visited by pleasant, knowledgeable, attractive, fully accredited representatives of agriculture who arrive with political contributions in hand.

Since most of the country has awakened to the reality that the family farm began to die in the Dust Bowl, was never the "backbone" of agriculture in California, and has been replaced by family trusts, and is now being replaced by finance, insurance and real estate corporations, domestic and foreign, it is just possible that this news has finally reached Sacramento along with daily updates on environmental disasters that can accurately be blamed on agriculture.
Is the MID board and staff are terrified that the public might remember that the irrigation doesn't own the water? It has only a use right to it, regulated by the state. And behind that restriction lies the Public Trust Doctrine, which came from Rome through English Common Law to the United States and even got to California.
The district and farmers have far better rights to groundwater; (2) and as drought and global warming continue, groundwater will become ever more important to the maintenance and cultivation of ever more acres of permanent orchards, that must be irrigated or they die. (3) The district and its member farmers will continue to drill more, deeper wells until they collapse the entire floor or the valley (4) or until taxpayers get tired of supporting these spoiled little rich "stewards of the land," as they called themselves several agro-propaganda cycles ago. -- blj
 
7-23-13
San Angelo Standard-Times
RYAN ALEXANDER: House farm bill worsens government waste
Ryan Alexander, president of Taxpayers for Common Sense
http://www.gosanangelo.com/news/2013/jul/23/ryan-alexander-house-farm-bill-worsens-waste/
 
SAN ANGELO, Texas — Remember when the House rejected a trillion-dollar version of the farm bill a month ago? I predicted the subsidy apologists would be back. Unfortunately, I was right.
They struck with a stealth attack at about 8 p.m. one week after July Fourth. House Republican leadership announced an “emergency” session of the Rules Committee — to begin at 9 p.m. — to come up with a plan to debate an “agriculture-only” Farm Bill.
Crafting this new and unimproved version of the farm bill simply required jettisoning the longstanding part of the legislation that covers nutrition programs, including the food stamp “SNAP” program. What commenced over the next 20 hours or so was one of the most undemocratic and saddest spectacles from our current kick-the-can-down-the-road Congress.
I don’t oppose separating the nutrition and agriculture programs. Far from it. If lawmakers can debate and reform each of the farm bill’s main components on their own merits, it’s actually the best way to achieve common sense reforms in the nation’s outdated agricultural programs.
But instead of taking two steps forward, House Republicans stepped backward by bringing up the bill under a “closed” rule. That meant no amendments, no real debate, and just a rubber stamp. It also meant no discussion about stopping checks to millionaire farmers, or setting limits on the subsidies any one farm can receive.
There was no chance to stop the newly created business-income entitlement programs included in the latest version of the farm bill. Furthermore, instead of sunsetting the subsidy programs in 2018, as the previous bill allowed, the new legislation surreptitiously made them permanent. The House’s new farm bill represents little more than government waste on auto-pilot.
With only a couple hours to review these sweeping changes, and some staffers not knowing that the subsidies were made permanent, too many lawmakers took the bait. The 600-plus page bill passed less than 24 hours after it appeared, 216-208.
Every Democrat and 12 brave Republicans voted against this farm bill, which calls for spending more on the SNAP-free portion than the Senate’s version. It saves less than half of what Republicans agreed to economize in their House budget, and falls short of the cuts called for in President Barack Obama’s budget request for the coming fiscal year.
What happens next?
House Republicans are promising a vote on a nutrition-only bill, but with such differing opinions on what the right spending level is, it will be an uphill battle.
Even if this does happen before Congress jets out of town for lawmakers’ lengthy August break, it’s hard to imagine how the disparate House and Senate bills can be melded into something the Republican-controlled House, Democrat-controlled Senate, and ultimately Obama would all find acceptable.
A more probable scenario may be a repeat of last year, when the 2008 farm bill got extended for a year. It will be the latest sign that politics and special interests are blocking real reform.
Lawmakers need to do their homework, go back to the whiteboard, and come up with a more cost-effective, accountable, responsive and transparent farm safety net. Taxpayers deserve a fiscally responsible solution that makes long-overdue reforms and begins to reduce our $16.8 trillion national debt.
 
2-2-14
US News & World Report
Congress' Farm Bill Binge
Political pork reigns supreme in this piece of legislation.
Ryan Alexander

http://www.usnews.com/opinion/economic-intelligence/2014/02/12/taxpayers...
 
For years now, Congress has focused public attention on our nation’s fiscal woes. From passing the Budget Control Act in 2011 to the showdowns over the fiscal year 2014 appropriations (and other things) that lead to the government shutdown last year, Congress has been loudly proclaiming that we need to change the way we do business or risk fiscal disaster.
So, what is the first bill passed in the wake of the recent budget deal? A thrifty, transparent attempt to solve problems in a serious and fiscally responsible way? Nope, it was a trillion dollar farm bill full of corporate subsidies that will increase the deficit. Like shepherds guarding their flock, for nearly three years the chairmen and ranking members of the House and Senate Agriculture Committees opposed nearly every common sense effort to rein in spending on profitable agribusinesses and proved that Congress doesn’t really want to change it ways. Ordinary taxpayers got fleeced while special interests got rewarded.
I’ve written about the farm bill more times than I can count, so you may already know that the Agricultural Act of 2014 is the product of an opaque, byzantine, soap-opera worthy series of efforts by the leaders of the Agriculture Committees to jam a trillion dollar bill into any legislative vehicle they could. First, they tried to shove a backroom-written farm bill into the so-called Super Committee process on deficit reduction, and when the Super Committee failed, they tried to convince us their already-crafted trillion-dollar bill was an “emergency” response to the 2012 drought. Then they tried to sell their paltry (andalmost certainly fake) projected savings as a part of the fiscal cliff deal. And even when the bills did make it to the House and Senate floors, the vast majority of amendments trying to improve the bill were kept off the floor of Congress. Just 15 out of the 259 submitted were even allowed a vote in the Senate, and no amendments were allowed in the final House bill.
While the leaders of the Agriculture Committee keep touting the “savings” achieved by this bill, in fact the bill is a great example of old-fashioned Congressional binging. True, the new law does eliminate direct payments, a wasteful program that sent out checks no matter what, but it replaces it with three new entitlement programs designed to send checks for “shallow” (their words, not ours) dips in income. The program that sounded bad (and was) – the counter-cyclical system of setting minimum prices for crops – is eliminated and replaced with … wait for it … a program of government-set minimum (but much higher than before) prices called “Price Loss Coverage.” And instead of new crop insurance policies being vetted through the U.S. Department of Agriculture, as has historically been required, Congress instead caved to special interests by mandating numerous new policies whether or not they are in taxpayers’ best interest. Among Congress’ new pet projects are crop insurance subsidies for everything from catfish and cotton to peanuts, pennycress, swine and sugarcane.
There are so many examples of bad policy making in the farm bill, I can’t list them all. Floor amendments that added to the cost of the bill — for example, tacking on crop insurance policies for business disruptions in the poultry industry, a market study for U.S. Atlantic Spiny Dogfish and new grants for the promotion of maple syrup — made it into the final legislation. Cost-savings and good government amendments that would put modest caps on the amount of taxpayer subsidies paid to agribusinesses, repeal the Sheep Industry Improvement Center, increase transparency and the public’s understanding of new taxpayer subsidized crop insurance policies, and require a new Government Accountability Office report on crop insurance fraud were all scrapped.
Last but not least, a requirement that lawmakers and cabinet secretaries publicly disclose their crop insurance subsidies was abandoned as well. When given the choice between bowing to special interests or fighting for taxpayers, the Agriculture Committee leaders said “no” to no one except those wanting to increase transparency in arcane subsidy programs or better yet, save taxpayer dollars.
At Taxpayers for Common Sense, we wish President Obama had followed his own fiscal year 2014 budget priorities and vetoed this expensive, status quo piece of legislation. But instead, he took a trip to Michigan to sign it in the backyard of one of the Agriculture Committee chairmen. Taxpayers deserve a more cost-effective, accountable, responsive and transparent farm safety net, not yet another farm bill that spares the sacred cows by shearing taxpayers. Stay tuned for the next farm bill, in five years. Let’s hope sanity is restored between now and then. 
11-11-15
US News & World Report
Planting the Seeds of Real Farm Reform
The current farm bill is terrible, but there's legislation that could fix it.
Ryan Alexander
http://www.usnews.com/opinion/economic-intelligence/2015/11/11/affirm-ac...
 
I have written on these pages and elsewhere about the many ways that the 2014 farm bill has already failed taxpayers. Apologists for big spending on agriculture claimed passing the nearly $1 trillion bill would generate $16.6 billion in savings over 10 years, but this fantasy is crashing down less than two years after the bill was signed into law. 
The reality is the 2014 farm bill increased spending much more than promised. Spending in fiscal year 2014 alone was $5.2 billion more than projected by the farm bill because of payments made to farmers. And the Department of Agriculture has testified that its "cost cutting" shallow loss programs are going to be $3 billion over-budget in just their first year of payments. It's pretty clear those promises of savings are never going to bear fruit.
That's why Reps. Ron Kind, D-Wis., and Jim Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., last week introduced the Assisting Family Farmers through Insurance Reform Measures Act. Longtime observers of the Washington policy landscape, these congressmen know good agriculture policy requires years of cultivation. Before we can plant an agriculture policy that better serves farmers, consumers and taxpayers, we have to begin clearing out special interest brambles and brush that grow up long before most people start paying attention to the once-every-six-years farm bill. And these kernels of good reform must be tended to withstand ferocious attacks from moneyed special interests that benefit from the dysfunctional status quo.
The bill is the latest application of common sense reform. It would help rein in the spiraling cost of the nearly $9 billion a year in federally subsidized crop insurance program, which has quickly become the most expensive taxpayer subsidy for agriculture. It brings crop insurance in line with every other federal subsidy available for agricultural businesses. It caps at $40,000 the amount of subsidy an individual can get to buy their insurance, as opposed to the 26 operations that each received more than $1 million in one year. 
By excluding any company with an adjusted (after your accountant deducts every last dime spent as a business cost) gross income greater than a quarter million dollars, it targets subsidies to smaller, beginning and family farms. It caps at $900 million the subsidy private crop insurance companies receive for selling policies and filing claims (while taxpayers bear most of the risk of losses). It eliminates an egregious provision that automatically adjusts payouts if prices at harvest are higher than anticipated at planting. And it would require USDA to release to taxpayers the names of every individual, including members of Congress, who receives subsidies, just like USDA does for every other agricultural income support program.
It's clear the Agriculture Committees will do everything it can to cut down any attempt to harvest those promised savings. Section 201 of the budget deal passed last month required the Department of Agriculture to renegotiate the Standard Reinsurance Agreement – a contractual agreement between taxpayers and those paper-pushing crop insurance companies – in order to reduce subsidies to companies by $3.5 billion. Even before the ink had dried, Agriculture Committee leaders crowed about how they'd been promised these cuts would be undone in the upcoming omnibus spending deal, shifting those $3.5 billion in cuts to some other part of the budget or even just putting them on the nation's credit card. The bill once again mandates this deal be renegotiated to produce savings.
When offered as an amendment during the 2014 farm bill debate, Kind and Sensenbrenner's bill fell just a few votes shy of passing. In that debate the seed was planted. In just two years, it's become clear the 2014 farm bill gives taxpayers nothing but a bitter harvest. The Assisting Family Farmers through Insurance Reform Measures Act will help change that.
Any farmer worth their salt will tell you the steps to getting a good yield come long before the harvest. A good farmer knows the limits and potential of his land. He or she will spend years building fertility into the soil. And after the seeds are in the ground, the plants must be tended, flexibly adjusting to changing circumstances as needed. I am so happy to see that some in Congress know the same diligence is required when what you're looking to reap is savings for taxpayers.
 
 
11-3-15
Merced Sun-Star
MID board changes election cycle to odd years

Board was approached by coalition of growers

Action taken in hopes of keeping elections nonpartisan
Brianna Calix
http://www.mercedsunstar.com/news/article42857124.html
The Merced Irrigation District board has decided to move voting for its membership to odd years, reasoning that separating it from the even-year general elections would boost local control and protect farm interests from environmentalist-led campaigning.
The board voted 4-1 Tuesday to move election of its members to odd years, despite the likelihood of higher costs. Atwater farmer Billy Pimentel, a former MID board president and current representative for District 5, cast the lone “no” vote.
Pimentel expressed concern that some growers who signed a letter supporting the odd-year cycle were misinformed about what they were signing. He also said he didn’t understand the need to change the even-year cycle the board adopted in 2011.
“I don’t understand where this is coming from,” he said.
Scott Koehn, the board’s vice president, said having elections in odd years could provide more local control to farmers.
“They (environmental groups) can emotionally appeal to the general-election voting base a whole lot more effectively than they can in an off-election cycle,” Koehn said.
Jeff Marchini, director of Division 1, said things are different than in 2011. If MID wants to protect its water from the environmental groups in Sacramento, switching the election years is the right thing to do, he said.
“Things have changed dramatically since 2011 – I’ve seen with my very eyes – up in Sacramento,” he said, “and it’s a whole different world right now. It’s going to continue that way.”
At the board’s Oct. 20 meeting, growers presented letters requesting that the board switch to the odd-year cycle in order to have voters focus on the MID race, rather than consider it as an afterthought during a general election. During Tuesday’s meeting, farmers also said switching to the odd-year cycle would avoid partisan election rhetoric they said works against the election of candidates who support farming interests.
Local farmers said they increasingly are concerned by environmental groups that are pushing the State Water Resources Control Board to release more water to flow through regional waterways in order to protect native fish. The “unimpaired flow” plan could limit the amount of water available to farmers through MID. Local water agencies have asked the state board to pursue other “more practical” approaches for protecting fish. Last week, dozens of environmental groups signed a letter urging the state board to reject the request.
The five-member MID board, whose members are all tied to agriculture, oversees the Merced Irrigation District, which owns, operates and maintains water storage facilities on the Merced River, including the New Exchequer and McSwain dams. The district’s boundaries include 138,000 acres of irrigable lands, according to its website. Members serve four-year terms, with either two seats or three seats up for a vote each election.
Before 2011, elections for MID board members took place in odd years, similar to other irrigation districts in the region. The board voted to switch to even years to align with school districts in the county who did so and split the cost of elections.
According to MID documents, the county election office has said it costs roughly $5 per registered voter to hold a vote, putting the total cost of an election on an average annual basis at more than $60,000 if MID is the only agency participating. Current average annual election costs are about $11,000 per year.
By switching to an odd-year cycle, current board members’ terms will be extended by one year. The election that was scheduled for November 2016 for the directors in Divisions 2, 4 and 5 will be extended to November 2017. Elections for the directors in Divisions 1 and 3 will be extended to November 2019.
 

 

 

 
10-28-15
Sacramento Bee
Feds: Winter salmon run nearly extinguished in California drought

Effort to save endangered Chinook may have failed
Plan kept water behind Shasta Dam, angering farmers

More uncertainty looms for farmers, fishing industry
Ryan Sabalow,Dale Kasler and Phillip Reese
 

 

 

http://www.sacbee.com/news/state/california/water-and-drought/article416...
 

 

 

For the second straight year, huge numbers of juvenile winter-run Chinook salmon appear to have baked to death in the Sacramento River because of California’s drought-stretched water supplies, bringing the endangered species a step closer to extinction.
The grim statistics released by federal officials Wednesday raise the specter of more water cuts for agriculture next summer and restrictions on next year’s commercial and recreational salmon fishing seasons. Even a strong El Niño winter might not be enough to prevent those outcomes.
The disclosure by the National Marine Fisheries Service suggests a complicated and controversial effort to save this year’s run of salmon may have ended largely in failure, although officials said they wouldn’t have definitive numbers until late November or early December.
“We try to be hopeful, but this is not good news,” said Maria Rea, the agency’s assistant regional manager, in a conference call with reporters.
Federal officials sharply curtailed flows of water coming out of Lake Shasta this spring, delaying deliveries of irrigation water to hundreds of Central Valley farmers. Some who already had planted crops had to scrounge for water; others fallowed fields or saw smaller yields.
It now appears to have been a futile effort to keep enough cold water in the system to keep as many of the fish alive as possible.
If the preliminary figures are confirmed, it would be the second year running that nearly all of the juvenile winter-run Chinook succumbed because the water in the Sacramento River got too warm. Officials estimate that last year, only 5 percent survived long enough to migrate out to sea.
Preliminary counts indicate this year’s situation is worse, Rea said. What’s particularly troubling is that a higher number of adult fish actually swam up the river to spawn compared to last year, raising hope that the population of offspring heading downstream toward the Pacific would be greater.
Instead, Rea said, fish traps that biologists use to count young Chinook near Red Bluff have seen a nearly 22 percent drop from the same time last year.
“Chinook salmon are among the hardiest, most robust fish that we know of,” said Jon Rosenfield, a biologist with the nonprofit Bay Institute. “Even if you don’t care about fish, the fact that Chinook salmon can’t survive in the Sacramento River is a testament to how poorly we treat our rivers.”
Because the fish have a three-year spawning cycle, environmentalists and others fear the salmon could be on the brink of extinction as a species in the wild. The winter-run Chinook have been listed as endangered since 1994 by the federal government.
A government-run hatchery below Shasta Dam breeds winter-run Chinook in captivity. Rea said the hatchery likely will play a critical role in preventing the outright extinction of the winter-run Chinook. With dams now blocking their access to cold-water tributaries, the only place for the wild fish to hatch in the heat of the blistering summer is along a short stretch of the Sacramento River near Redding.
Rea said that the likelihood of another die-off adds urgency to plans to truck hatchery-born winter-run juveniles to the icy cold McCloud River above Shasta Dam. Those plans won’t be implemented until at least 2017.
In the immediate term, the announcement adds to the uncertainty of how the state’s surface water supplies will get allocated next year. Rea was skeptical that a rainy winter would be enough to help the fish. The El Niño conditions are expected to bring warm storms and heavier rains across the state, particularly in Southern California. Most officials say a deep snow in the northern Sierra would be the best remedy for the drought.
Rea said officials likely will “have to be very conservative with Shasta reservoir next spring.”
The drought cost farmers nearly 9 million acre-feet of water from the state and federal water projects this year, or nearly half the usual supply. Although they made up for much of the loss by pumping additional groundwater, they still fallowed some 540,000 acres of land, resulting in economic losses of $2.7 billion, according to a UC Davis study.
Many farmers have complained that too much water has been devoted to fish, and have made repeated calls for an overhaul of the federal law that affords special protections for endangered species. Chris Scheuring, a water lawyer for the California Farm Bureau Federation, said the die-off is a clear indication that federal officials need to be more flexible in their approaches to managing fish and water supply.
“There are multiple goals on the river right now, and we don’t seem to be meeting any of them,” he said. “The Endangered Species Act has been administrated in a way that doesn’t appear to prevent fish die-offs ... All of that has come at the expense of ... water supply.”
His sentiments were echoed by U.S. Rep. Doug LaMalfa, a Republican whose family farms rice near Richvale. “This development confirms that simply cutting water supplies to humans, which is the first and only step these agencies take, doesn’t solve the problem,” LaMalfa said in a prepared statement.
Federal scientists thought they had a plan this spring to avoid a repeat of last year’s mass die-off. Generally speaking, they tried to keep temperatures at key points on the Sacramento River at 56 degrees or less to give the juveniles a chance to survive. But officials at the federal Bureau of Reclamation at one point realized their temperature-monitoring equipment was faulty, and the water coming out of Shasta was warming up more quickly than expected. They held water back in Lake Shasta to keep it cool.
To compensate for reduced flows from Shasta, officials ramped up releases from Folsom Lake to help maintain water quality in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, the estuary through which water is pumped to cities and farms in the San Joaquin Valley and Southern California. That has brought Folsom to record-low levels, raising anxiety among the suburban Sacramento water agencies that rely heavily on the lake for their primary supplies.
Meanwhile, river temperatures frequently exceeded 56 degrees despite the cool-down plan. An official gauge on the Sacramento River upstream from Highway 44 in Redding – a key point for spawning this year – logs temperature readings every hour. From June 10 through Oct. 10, the gauge measured water temperatures above 56 degrees about 1,600 times.
“By design, the Bureau of Reclamation, with State (Water Resources Control) Board approval, allowed temperatures to be much higher than they should be,” said Rosenfield, the Bay Institute biologist. “They were trying to go with the cook the egg slowly approach. ... As I expected, as others expected, this year’s hatching success is even lower than last year’s.”
The shrinking winter-run population signals troubles for the state’s $1.4 billion salmon-fishing industry. Although commercial fishermen mostly harvest hatchery raised fall-run salmon, the die-off could lead next year to more stringent regulation of commercial and recreational fishing to ward against accidental catches of winter-run fish. Salmon fishing could be restricted along much of California’s central coast and in the Sacramento River system. Rea said those decisions wouldn’t be made until next spring.
John McManus, executive director of the Golden Gate Salmon Association, said commercial and sport fishermen are bracing for more restrictions. As it is, the waters were closed to commercial fishing earlier this year at two key points along the coastline.
In 2008 and 2009, fisheries officials shut down the salmon fishing seasons altogether because of poor returns of the fall-run Chinook. State officials estimate the closures those years led to a nearly $549 million hit to California’s economy.
Bill Jennings, executive director of the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance, said the law is clear: Dam managers, water regulators and fisheries officials are required to manage the dams to ensure the fish don’t die. Instead, he said they kowtowed to powerful agricultural interests and allowed more water to be released than they should have.
“The bottom line is they ignored the law,” Jennings said. “We’ve over-appropriated and over-promised, and this is the result.”
Ellen Komp
At a July 1 hearing in the California Joint Committee on Fisheries and Aquaculture, all the water and fishery experts talked about the Shasta reservoir, with officials raising the target water temperature to 57degrees rather than 56, because that more desirable number just isn’t possible.The reservoir feeds the Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys for rice farms and nut orchards there. Dropping in and out of the hearing to look out for water rights holders in his district was veteran state Senator Jim Nielsen, who took over his Assembly seat from now-Congressman Doug Le Malfa, a USDA-subsidized rice farmer.

 
Billionaire Stewart Resnick of Fiji bottled water and Pom pomegranate juice owns nearly 120,000 acres of farmland in the San Joaquin Valley, where he grows pomegranates, pistachios, almonds and citrus crops. In 2009, after the federal government announced a plan to divert water from irrigation to rescue the Delta’s endangered salmon and smelt fisheries, Resnick put in a call to Senator Dianne Feinstein’s office, and she engineered a $750 million review of the science behind the plan.  
 
Strong prices have led orchard farmers to put in even more trees, and because they can afford to dig deeper wells than the people who live in the area, it’s leaving folks without drinking water. Rice farmers planned to seed only 6% fewer acres in 2015 vs. 2014. 

Source: http://edition.pagesuite-professional.co.uk//launch.aspx?eid=2da280e5-ee...

 
 
Chris Yeager
When the water is managed within the constraints that existed for decades prior to the past few years... Salmon have a chance. But when too many cubic feet per second is expelled during low precipitation months as did not happen during the 1980's. The result is obvious. 
There are a few biologists that have made the same conclusions. I am not alone..... I have spent my whole life just yards from the American River.
I see the problem. Management Vs. Nature. Now go build those tunnels under the delta in a earthquake ridden State. It won't help much.
Richard Lavallee
Of course, without these dams that allow millions of liberals to live in the desert, the Sacramento River used to be much lower and much warmer during drought periods that happen naturally.  So how did salmon thrive for millions of years before Climate Fraud took over the brains of AlGorian faith worshippers? 
 
Russell McMeans
amen brother!.... wondering the same damn thing. What did 'mother nature' do before God created the 'federal scientist' ?   Folks: look at this!... it's madness! [and now they will double down on their methodology to fix the problem.] The problem here-like the global warming crowd, is people have a god complex. Fools! This WILL destroy the farming business in Calitopia. The fish WILL survive. Duh!
Patrick Crain
Before the day of the rim dam that blocked access to the upper portions of the McCloud and Upper Sacramento rivers,  winter-run and spring-run Chinook salmon withstood drought conditions by living in the cold glacier fed (Mnt Shasta) pools of these rivers.  Fish ladders were not built around Shasta dam because it is too high to do so, so we are stuck with the bandaid approach of trying to control the temperatures in the upper Sacramento by maintaining the cold water pool in Shasta Reservoir. Don't blame federal scientists for the short sightedness of the federal water project in California, most were not even born when Shasta dam was built, or the ESA was enacted.  The maddness is that the population is exploding and there is not enough water for the population, agriculture and the preservation of our natural resources.  As for the fish surviving, it is unlikely that winter-run and spring-run Chinook salmon will survive changes in climate in the future without access to cooler waters at higher elevations above California's major dams.  The proposal to move winter-run Chinook salmon over Shasta Dam is on the board for 2017, but unfortunately it may be "too little too late" for winter-run Chinook, I hope not as California has lost too much of its natural heritage already.  I am not a federal fish biologist by the way, but wanted to add some perspective to your "the fish will survive, duh" statement.

NOTES:
(1) MID Board of Directors
http://www.mercedid.com/index.cfm/about/board-of-directors/
Jeff Marchini - Director (Division 1)
Director Jeff Marchini is the Chief Executive Officer of J. Marchini Farms. Mr. Marchini’s involvement with agriculture began at an early age, working for his father and uncle in the farming business on weekends and in summers. He began working full time in the family business in 1985 after attending Fresno State and studying Ag Business. Mr. Marchini is a past president of the Merced County Farm Bureau, as well as having served on the Board of Directors for Le Grand Union High School and the Minturn Nut Company. He was elected to the MID Board in November 2014 and his current term expires in 2018.(The former Crown Prince of Radicchio has become the new King of Yuppie Greens.)
Contact: Ph: (559) 665-2944 E: jeff@jmarchinifarms.com
 
Scott Koehn- Vice President (Division 2)
After graduating Magna Cum Laude with a Bachelor’s Degree in Agribusiness Management from Cal Poly - San Luis Obispo, Mr. Koehn has held various sales and leadership roles for both large multinational Agribusiness interests as well as local production agriculture operations.  He is currently the Western Regional Sales Manager for QualiTech Corporation, a global manufacturer of plant nutrition, animal nutrition, and food ingredient products.  He also serves as a Trustee on the Board of McSwain Union Elementary School District.   Mr. Koehn is the owner and operator of K bar K Cattle Co., a club calf producing cow calf operation. (This cowboy raises calves for 4H -- git along little dogies!!-blj))  He was elected to the MID Board in 2012 and his term expires in 2016.
Contact: Ph: (209) 631-1536 E: k2swk@yahoo.com
 
(2) Water: A Multiple Use Resource Forever, by Felix Smith, Badlands Journal, Nov. 7, 2015
 
(3) Water lawsuits scream overhead, Badlands Journal. June 28, 2015
 
(4) Some questions about land subsidence, Badlands Journal, Aug. 19, 2015