River friends:
Here is a letter I wrote recently to sum up the issues. If you haven’t written your letter yet, you can base a letter on this information if you like. Please email your letters to: ESA at estuaryproject@esassoc.com and also Jessica Martini-Lamb at Jessica.Martini.Lamb@scwa.ca.gov Please ask them to respond that they received your comments. The deadline for submission of comments is February 14, 2011, at 5 pm. The project description and DEIR can find on Sonoma County Water Agency’s (SCWA) website at: www.scwa.ca.gov/estuary-eir/
The Biological Opinion (BO) can be accessed at the same website and you can skim pages 241 to 253 in reference to D1610 if you are ambitious. Guerneville’s gauge is at Hacienda. The minimum flow proposed for Hacienda, is from 125 cfs down to 70 cfs. We are only concerned about lower river issue at this time.
Background Summary:
In mid-nineties Coho were listed as endangered by the State and “threatened” by National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) and have since been listed as endangered. Steelhead and Chinook were soon after listed as “threatened”. Russian River used to be the fourth largest run of steelhead in California.
These listings triggered a consultation between ACOE, SCWA, and two other agencies, to address impacts on the fish of SCWA water delivery system and associated diversions. As operators of the system during the summer, SCWA has taken the lead and has overseen the development of the EIR. They first developed a Biological Assessment, which was submitted to NMFS around 2007. In September, 2008, the Biological Opinion (BO) was released and it directed SCWA to fulfill certain tasks including low flow and a closed estuary.
The Estuary project is really an adaptive management project and subject to trial and error. While they are not sure how or if this project is going to work, our main concern is that they not make permanent flow changes until there is some level of certainty about this plan. We don’t think they should separate the Estuary Project EIR from the D1610 flow change EIR. There have already been two scoping processes on the D1610 EIR by both SCWA and the State. RRWPC submitted extensive comments on both.