Delta land purchase is a water grab

This editorial is from the San Jose Mercury News:

For the better part of the past century, the primary interest of Southern California's mammoth Metropolitan Water District has been to secure water from whatever source possible to satisfy the region's thirst for growth.

It boggles the mind that Metropolitan Water District General Manager Jeff Kightlinger thinks anyone will believe him when he said last week the agency's interest in purchasing four Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta islands is because it is 'intrigued with the potential environmental benefits.'

It's a $200 million water grab, pure and simple, aimed at jump-starting the controversial Delta tunnels project to send as much water as possible from the Delta to 19 million people in Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino San Diego and Ventura counties.

There's little that can be done to prevent Metropolitan Water from buying the 20,000 acres of land on four islands in San Joaquin and Contra Costa counties from a private company, Delta Wetlands. But Northern Californians should demand a public vote before the state moves forward with the massive $15 billion, 35-mile-long, twin-tunnel project. As crazy as it sounds, water districts across the state, including Metropolitan and the Santa Clara Valley Water District, can approve the funding of the project without asking California voters, or even their ratepayers.

The Contra Costa Water District, East Bay Municipal Utility District and the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission have all decided they want nothing to do with participating in the twin-tunnel funding.

The four islands include Bouldin Island, Bacon Island, Holland Tract and Webb Tract. It's no coincidence that Bouldin and Bacon islands are located on land smack in the middle of Gov. Jerry Brown's proposed tunnel project, which is specifically designed to send water from the Sacramento River to Central Valley farms and Southern California cities.

Kightlinger, Metropolitan Water's general manager, is right when he says that converting the islands to wetlands and wildlife habitat would have environmental benefits. But the only way to improve the health of the Delta is to pour more water, not less, through the largest estuary west of the Mississippi River.

Every serious scientific study of the Delta shows that its health is continuing to deteriorate for the simple reason that too much water is being drawn from the estuary. State biologists acknowledged this spring that the Delta smelt, the canary in the coal mine for the Delta, is almost extinct, and salmon runs were horrific this year because of the lack of sufficient cold water to keep them healthy.

California need to search harder for a more secure water source. Tapping the Delta with the ill-conceived twin-tunnel plan isn't the answer.