 Well, good morning everyone and thank you for joining us, both in person and virtually. And I'd also like to give a particular thanks to the presenters we'll be hearing from today that have given up their time and as you'll see really invested a lot of effort to provide this overview we'll be hearing from. So I'm Peter Goodwin, I serve as the chair of this ad hoc committee of the National Academy of Science, Engineering and Medicine to review the science for the Central Valley project. I am recently retired as the president of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science and also the vice chancellor for environmental sustainability for the university system of Maryland. Before we get started, a few safety announcements. The emergency exits, there's two exits here, the back of the room in the corner by the flowers and in the front here that is not an exit on the left hand side. In the event of an emergency please don't use the elevators, take the stairs and walk across and congregate in an open safe area. Also the restrooms on this floor out of the double doors here or you can take the corridor from the back of the room. We'd like to start with a land acknowledgement, the history of the Sacramento area and the people is rich in heritage, culture and tradition. The area was and still is the tribal land of the Nisenan people, Sacramento was the gathering place for many local tribes who have lived throughout the Central Valley and the foothills for generations and were the original stewards of this land. We would like to acknowledge the southern Maidu people to the north, the valley and plains Maiwok, Maiduuk peoples to the south of the American River and the Patwin Wintown peoples to the west of the Sacramento River. We would also like to honor the Wilton Rancheria, the only federally recognized tribe in Sacramento County. Throughout our work we acknowledge that we are standing on the tribal lands of Sacramento's indigenous people. So why are we here? At the request of the US Bureau of Reclamation, the first cycle of this study committee will look at two things. The first is to look at the science, modeling, monitoring and decision tools for the long-term operations of the Central Valley project and the state water project where relevant. In this first cycle special attention will be paid to three elements of the system, summer fall smelt habitat, shester cold water pool management and the old and middle river flow management for smelt and samanids. And it's important if you look at the detailed outline that we're focusing on the science that informs the decision making, not the merits of one endangered species over another or one interest over another. A very brief overview of the agenda. Today we will start with an overview of the process that the National Academy employs for this type of review. We'll also hear from US Bureau of Reclamation who will give their rationale for undertaking this study. And we'll be getting a very in-depth dive from a variety of speakers that are studying the Central Valley project and the state water project. And we will conclude today with some perspectives from just a few of the interested parties. Tomorrow we'll be learning about the ecology in the delta, the effects of climate change and most importantly the open mic session that I'll talk about more in a moment. I'm going to run through very quickly the various committee members and I apologize to my colleagues ahead of time that I have pulled out only one or two expert themes for each. All these appointed members are very well versed in interdisciplinary complex systems and their expertise goes far beyond the one or two topics that I'm going to highlight. But for those of you attending the meeting in person, I thought you might like to know who to connect with during the various breaks. So the first member is Dr. Jared Bales. He has served as the chief scientist for water for the USGS and most recently he served as the executive director of quasi for those of you are not familiar with that. That's the consortium of research universities working on water issues across the US and internationally I should say now. The expertise of Dr. Bales of course is hydrology, water resource management and in addition it's important to know he was a great champion when he was at the USGS for emerging technologies and new techniques. Dr. Brandt unfortunately is not able to be with us in person today but is joining from a distance. He's with Oregon State University. His background is fish ecology and management, food webs and is well known as an expert for ecosystem forecasting. Pedro Beauty is with Utah State University. She also serves as the co-director of the USGS Utah Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Unit and her background is conservation biology, invasion ecology, fisheries management and food web dynamics. Dr. Bray is a hydrologist and fluvial geomorphologist. And one of the things she's very widely known for is her temperature modeling and the effects of flow releases in regulated systems. Dr. Joseph Fernando, University of Notre Dame. All things fluid dynamics related to the environment, atmospheric oceanographic, riverine processes, climate and he's also done considerable work in alternative energy. Dr. Renee Henry is the science director for California Trout Unlimited. His background is fisheries scientists and the ecology of regulated rivers. Dr. Lund is one of the two members of the National Academy is on this committee. He's an emeritus, but probably working harder than he has in his life. As he agreed to take on the co-directorship of the Center for Watershed Sciences at UC Davis. And of course, he's very active in groups like PPIC. His background is water and environmental systems, engineering and modeling. Dr. Josue Medean Azouara. His expertise is water management and economics. And one of those few interdisciplinary scientists that has a strong background as an economist, but brings it to water systems, both agricultural, environmental and urban. Dr. Myra works with the Rand Corporation and is also on the faculty of the Rand Graduate School. Expertise, of course, is risk management, particularly related to climate resilience and adaptation, disaster resilience and recovery. Mo Amadi is with the University of Michigan, but has had extensive experience working on the water issues in California. And his expertise is in the prediction of climate change, particularly on the consequences to society. Dr. Owen is with the University of California Law. I still struggle over that. I think of it as Hastings Law School, but the University of California Law San Francisco. He's an expert on the Clean Water Act, Endangered Species Act, the Public Trust Doctrine. And also much of his research deals on the negotiation within environmental decision making. Dr. Reed is with the University of New Orleans. She's a coastal geomorphologist and is renowned globally as an expert on mass sustainability and the rate of or the role of human activities in modifying coastal and deltaic systems. Dr. Vidal is with UC Berkeley. His background is freshwater ecology, aquatic food web responses to hydrologic regimes in regulated rivers and the impacts of climate change. Dr. Sadro is with UC Davis. He's an immunologist specializing in aquatic systems ecology, watershed processes, and terrestrial aquatic interactions within ecosystems. David Sen heads the San Francisco Bay Nutrient Management Program and is at the San Francisco Estuary Institute. His background is biogeochemistry, harmful alkyl blooms, and has been a leader in the field of nature-based solutions for nutrient management. Dr. Jerry Stedinger is our second member from the National Academies. He's at Cornell University. Of course, he's well known for the field of hydrology, operation of water resources, optimization, multi-reservoir, and hydropower operations under dynamic market conditions. Dr. Sullivan is also at Cornell University. He's an expert in statistical methods, particularly applied to dynamics of fish, mammals, and other ecosystem characteristics. So with that, I would like to acknowledge the efforts of reclamation staff and Laura Ellis and Stacey Karras, who you'll be hearing from in a moment. The diligence and research in constructing this study is quite a remarkable achievement in the last few months. I would like to emphasize in closing that this is an open on the record meeting. I would remind everyone that this is information gathering session. And particularly, comments made by individuals, including committee members, should not be interpreted as positions of the committee or the National Academies. In addition, committee members often ask probing questions that are not indicative of their personal views. I mentioned on Wednesday afternoon, we have an open mic session. And we would just ask so we can plan that time in the most effective way. If you have not already registered to speak in that session, there's a sign up sheet on the back table. Alternatively, you can email Maya on the email address given here, mfry at nas.edu. And just to emphasize, this study is not going to be successful without the input through these public meetings. And so please, please engage with us over the coming months. So this study can be the most effective and constructive for the ecosystem, the state of California, and the federal government. So thank you. I'll now turn it back to Dr. Ellers to talk about all of Stacey going first. Thank you. Thank you all for joining us this morning. Thank you, Dr. Goodwin, as well for your opening remarks. I just want to welcome everybody to the first open public information gathering session of this committee that's been put together to look at the long-term operations of the Central Valley Project and the State Water Project. This presentation will orient us to the National Academies, a bit about who we are, how we operate, and what we do. It will also introduce the committee's task composition, which thankfully our chair went through in great detail, and also the projected study schedule. I'll be covering the first portion of that, and then I'll turn it over to my colleague, Dr. Ellers, to complete as well. As a side note, this image that you're seeing is a piece of artwork that hangs in our National Academies building in Washington, DC. It depicts the signing of the charter for the National Academies. I'm told that this gathering didn't actually happen this way, but that, in fact, those were some of the leading members in establishing the National Academies back in 1863. All right, so as I said, the National Academies were for the National Academy of Sciences, rather, was formed in 1863 by a congressional charter signed during the Lincoln administration. And three subsequent executive orders have reaffirmed the importance of the National Academies and expanded on our charter as well. The 1916 Executive Order established the National Research Council, which many of you that have been engaged with the academies in the past may recognize as the working arm of the National Academies. That's who we represent. That's now called the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. So I'm going to cover a few of the select sort of functions of the academies. We are a nonprofit 501-3C organization. We are independent from the government, although we do receive most of our funding from federal agencies. We were established to provide independent scientific and technical advice, again, primarily to the government when called upon. But we do also accept funding from and provide feedback to other organization types, including state governments, the private sector, et cetera. We do not lobby or advocate directly to Congress. And we also support, I wanted to mention as well, academic institutions as well. We do this by convening groups of expert scientists on a voluntary basis to serve on committees like this. Primarily, we conduct consensus studies. But we do also, I'm skipping ahead a bit here, we do also conduct other types of convening activities as well. That can include workshops, standing committees that provide ongoing input to agencies and other mechanisms. We produce consensus reports, but other products also. Several of our committee chairs and committee members in the past have provided congressional testimony after reports have been produced. We also produce social media, booklets, colloquial and workshop reports. And some videos, we've provided a link to some of the YouTube videos that you can watch as well. I want to go back quickly, because I did skip over this. This is our organizational chart. At the top, you'll see the three national academies, the honorary societies that we represent. That's the National Academy of Sciences, formed, as I said, in 1863. The National Academy of Engineering, which came next in 1964, established under the original charter. And the National Academy of Medicine, which formerly known as the Institute of Medicine, came in 1970. Below the three honorary societies is the organization of the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, the Working Arm. And there are seven program units within that that cover a variety of topics, ranging from engineering and physical sciences, earth and life studies, health and medicine, et cetera. We fall within the division on earth and life studies. And within that division, there are 11 specific program areas or boards represented. This particular study is being led by the Water Science and Technology Board staff from the WSTB include Laura and also supported by the Ocean Studies Board, which I represent as well. So a few unique strengths of the National Academies that I want to point out. Again, we draw from the membership of those three honorary societies. So the stature of the Academy's memberships is recognized and certainly one of the strengths that we can bring to this is access to those individuals. However, we get the very best to serve both from within the academies and elsewhere. And again, thank you, Peter, for pointing out that we've got a couple of Academy members on this committee as well. But the reputation and objectivity of our committees is both a drawing point for committee members and also one of the assets of what we produce. As I said, our committee members serve on a pro bono volunteer basis, which helps us maintain our objectivity. We do maintain a special relationship to the government in that we have for 160 plus years now been providing reliable, objective, independent advice. And that is respected and called upon continuously. We also have a number of quality control procedures in place, probably most notable is our external peer review process, but others as well within the institution that help maintain a level of quality that is noted by our sponsors and by others that rely on our reports as well. And collectively, these produce independence, scientific objectivity and balance, which again has served in maintaining our reputation. I think with that, I'll turn it over to Laura to talk more about this specific study and some of the related reports that have led up to it. Thanks, Stacy. Okay, so in the last five minutes or so, I'll just pivot to why we're all here today. This is not the first time the academies has stepped into the Bay Delta region to provide scientific advice. Back in the late 90s, we did two reports on flood frequencies on the American River. Jerry Stenger was involved if anybody wants to ask him about that experience of more than 20 years ago. And then around the 2010, 2011, 12-time frame, we wrote a series of three reports that were commissioned by the Department of the Interior on more or less the same system that we're here to talk about. And those three reports were pretty impactful for helping the NASA Stewardship Council at that time set their science plan for many of the other decision-makers in the area. But it's been a decade and things have changed substantially, obviously, as you all know well. And so we're hoping that we will have even greater impact this time around. I wanted to mention that the format of this study, it's an ad hoc consensus study, but the Bureau of Reclamation has been talking to us about having this be an ongoing biennial review in the flavor of our review of the Greater Everglades Restoration. That's the middle report that you see there. We've been advising in the Everglades for about 15 years and committees produce reports about every two years and the membership changes slightly with each iteration. But I think that that is a model that the Bureau of Reclamation is very interested in. This would just obviously be the first cycle. But I just wanted you to be aware that there is the potential for continuing cycles after this cycle is done. We do have experience in large watersheds, although this is the largest geographic area of any WSTB product that I've been involved in in 27 years. Even the New York City watershed is only the quarter of the storage capacity of the Central Valley Project. So we have our work cut out for us. We have a lot of experience working in watersheds and water supplies throughout the country. And also on endangered species issues, the bottom report there you see is one of four that we wrote for the Edwards Aquifer Authority. So this is territory that we're pretty familiar with and comfortable with. Peter's already given you the statement of task. If anybody wants a hard copy, they're on the table in the back. The front side is the statement of task and the back side is the committee membership. Please feel free to take those. It was mentioned that it has this kind of two parts to it. The first part is looking at the state of the science of these three specific issues that the Bureau of Reclamation is interested in at this time. And the second part is really a kind of a broader overview of how monitoring, modeling, and decision-making could be adapted, changed, improved, what have you to better assess the effects of the operations of the state of the Central Valley Project and the state water project on the issues that are in part A. And this is what a statement of task for subsequent cycles would look like as well, except that the specific issues in the first section would change depending on the input of the Bureau of Reclamation and other stakeholders. And that's very much how our Greater Everglades Restoration reviews have been working. Every cycle, there's a discussion of significant progress and then they take on one to three specific issues of interest in that system. That's all I wanted to say about the statement of task. Yes, I'm certainly not gonna talk about the committee membership. You've had a great introduction to our committee members. I invite everyone to get to know people and mingle during breaks. I do just want to point out this is a large committee, 18 people and we just felt like we needed this size of committee to deal with the size of the system and the complexity of the system. I'm gonna spend my last little bit of time here on this study schedule and that's to let you know what we will be doing for the next 18 months or so. So 2023 is already behind us. That was when we negotiated the contract with the Bureau of Reclamation. The contract start date was in August and in the fall, we received hundreds of nominations to the committee. We had dozens and dozens of phone calls, talking to people, vetting committee members. We appointed the committee and it was approved by our oversight board in late November. During that time, we've been having regular meetings with the Bureau of Reclamation to talk about meeting planning, et cetera. Now we're in 2024 and the first item on there is already past us. That was a closed session meeting of the committee members to talk about their potential conflicts of interests and biases. And we left that meeting with confidence that we had the expertise to do the study and that no one had any financial conflicts of interest that would prevent them from participating. And now we're on to the public meetings that you see starting with meeting one through five, which will be in this year. These will all occur somewhere in the Bay Delta region. The second meeting, if you don't have this on your calendar, will be February 28, 29. I love that it's a leap year. And March 1st, and that's going to be in Davis. And if our website hasn't been updated to show the exact location, it will be very soon. Meeting three has also been scheduled. It will be May 6th to 8th up north in the Redding, California area that I know is not on our website yet, but it also will be there very soon. And as meetings get scheduled, we will post them to our website. You can see these are information gathering meetings where we will spend the majority of the time in public session, but there will be some small closed session times and that amount of closed session time will increase slowly until we get to 2025 when the final three meetings, meetings six through eight will be entirely in closed session at one of our facilities either in Irvine, California or in Washington, DC. And then after the report is produced, it will go through a review and then it will be released in the fall of 2025. So I just want to talk a little bit about what we're hoping to get out of our interactions with all of you during that time. The Bureau of Reclamation, our sponsor, is involved kind of from beginning almost to the end. We've, as I said, had weekly meetings with them in the Delta Stewardship Council since the fall. They've been instrumental in helping us think about who would give presentations, helping us plan field trips. They will also be an incredible source of information to us we will be making in formal information requests. I'm showing that here on the right, formal information requests that will occur subsequent to every meeting. So basically after a meeting has occurred about seven to 10 days later, we will send the Bureau of Reclamation and possibly others a list of things that we're hoping to get. It could be reports in the gray literature. It could be peer review literature, other documents. There could be requests for specific data sets that the committee would like to manipulate or analyze. Often now we have Zoom calls just to gather information. Very infrequently do we ask the sponsor to actually do data analysis for the committee. If the committee is going to embark in data analysis, it will usually do that itself. And also very infrequently would we ask the sponsor or others to do model runs for us. But I recognize this is an incredibly busy time for all of you and we will make these information requests with sensitivity to your very busy schedules as you're going through re-consultation. Because we know there's only a limited amount of time for you to respond to our requests and to come to our meetings. Another thing I just wanted to talk about was this external review that Stacey mentioned. So this is an independent external review involving about 12 to 14 scientists whose expertise mirrors the committee members. It does not in any way involve the sponsor or stakeholders. It is overseen by our report review committee which are staff people at the academies along with volunteer experts. One is an academy member and then there's usually one other person. And it's a weeks long process, very rigorous. And once we get sign off from that process then we format the report and it is released to the public. This release will be sometime in fall, end of September approximately of 2025. There is a small grace period prior, just prior to the release where the sponsor will receive an embargoed copy of the report so that they can read it and be prepared for any media that might wanna talk to them about it. It is not an opportunity for the sponsor to in any way change or review the report. The pre-publication draft that gets released is a fully approved national academies report although it is superseded usually weeks later by a final version that has better graphics and a color cover and et cetera. And the day of not printing anything and hard copy anymore, usually it depends but we just don't like to hold contract deliverables to our press which can't necessarily produce things by certain dates. So the pre-publication when it comes out will be a full report of the national academies. And then after that happens there will be lots of dissemination activities, webinars, these are things that you can all find out about. If you go to our website, which is right here, we encourage people who want to follow what the committee is doing to register to receive updates. That way you don't have to keep going to the website to say when is the next meeting? I don't know when it is. You'll get email updates if you register to receive information. Ooh, I'm two minutes over. Does anyone have any questions about process that I could help answer? If not, feel free to catch me during breaks. That's all I had for introduction. No, I don't need slides. I'm just going to be introducing Dr. Summer. Well-known to many people in this room. Apparently Dr. Summer is a research fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California where he's working on the development of tools to help conserve freshwater ecosystems in the face of climate change. His reputation and publication record is on native fishes with studies on salmon biology, native fishes, floodplain ecology with particular note on his work on the yellow bypass. Until 2021, Dr. Summer served as the lead scientist for the Department of Water Resources in California where he guided the department's aquatic science efforts particularly for the Delta and the tributaries. Also he's well known for his work co-leading the pelagic organism decline, the POD study, a remarkable synthesis effort that happened a few years ago and he's been a long-term champion of not, it's not good enough just to collect the data or to run a model. It's how do you pull all of that information together with synthesis. So Dr. Summer, thanks for being with us today. Hi everyone. One of the recurring lessons over the decades is that unless you really understand how the Bay Delta works, unless you understand the geography, nothing is going to be clear. Well, by the way, can I get presenter? Do you want that? So you have a panel loaded with hydrologists and modelers. The irony here is we're starting this presentation with a non-hydrologist, a non-modeler to talk to you about how the hydrology works. But I'm hoping you find this as a unique perspective. Part of the reason I put the energy into trying to come up with this presentation is we don't really have a simple overview that I can point you to to introduce you to the hydrology. What you'll be hearing is a much condensed version of a training class I've given to our agency staff and others before. So we'll be leaving out a lot of stuff but hopefully there'll be a decent amount of time for questions here. So I'm gonna start out with some key points here. And the first couple are based on input we've gotten from new arrivals in the system. First, estuary is not a river. You'll see Sacramento River. You'll see San Joaquin River on the maps. Nope, we're an estuary. But the estuary is actually a pretty weird estuary as well. And then there's a kind of tongue-in-cheek lesson. There's no such thing as a free lunch. This is really about trade-offs in the management doing the system. And then lastly, nothing lasts forever. I'm hoping to kind of illustrate those points in going through this information. And really I want you to understand some of the logic behind the regulatory criteria. That's something you might not have gotten in just a straight hydrology talk. And I'm hoping I'll give you a conceptual model at the end that will, I hope, give you a better sense of how to understand some of the different components of the system. Much of what I'm gonna be discussing is based on the cumulative history of water development in California. A lot of milestones here, coincident with the massive growth we have in the state. So much of what I'll be talking today really has to be put in perspective of things like the historical levee construction, the flood control projects, and the various dams and water projects that we've produced. So before we begin, you kind of need to understand some basic geography. The nomenclature and how to refer to a system is really messy. I've heard it referred to as the San Francisco Bay Delta, the Sacramento Delta, the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Estuary. I'll try and give you what I think is the correct term. The estuary is the whole thing from San Francisco Bay all the way up to Sacramento and down to Stockton. The parts that we're gonna be talking about today, there's two component parts, the freshwater title Delta that's highlighted there. And this is the zone from Sacramento in the north down to Stockton, and then out to Chips Island in the west. And then Sassoon Bay, this is the brackish mixing zone that we'll get a whole lot of attention here. So I'm hoping understanding these geographic components will help give you a little clarity in reviewing the materials. The other thing I wanna convey is that the estuary is really weird, particularly the Delta. When we talk about a Delta globally, you typically have a river, it fans out towards the coast into a bunch of distributary channels. Ours is totally backwards, right? So you have a narrowing and then it spreads out, it fans completely backwards. And this has all kinds of consequences for the way water works, for water management and for biology. I do wanna discuss one of the main drivers, why is the estuary backwards? Yeah, we had rivers coming down depositing sediments, but there was the sea level rise that happened 15,000, 10,000 years ago that drowned a river valley that was in the California coastline. So you had those two kind of opposing forces, sediment deposition versus sea level rise that created this unique configuration. The other thing that should be obvious in a big populist state like California is that the estuary is radically transformed. Historically, we had large areas of tidal wetlands, some riparian zones here, and the lighter color tan stuff you see now, that's the current Delta. It's agricultural dominated, although as you see in Sacramento, we have large cities as well. By the way, this is an excellent source of information from San Francisco Estuary Institute. They have done an eco Atlas, a wealth of information about the historical system. So one of the examples is their reconstruction of some of the regional zones in the estuary. Delta right now is really homogenized. Historically, we had large areas where there were tidal networks of channels, flooded islands, and particularly as I'll talk about in the South Delta, lots of complex distributaries. So I'm gonna now focus on some of the details of the modern estuary. I'll talk about some of the seasonal and annual patterns. Obviously the anthropogenic changes, tidal cycles, and then some of the key geographic bottlenecks that are caused by that strange configuration of the Delta. So I'm gonna start first with the hydrograph. And here's a comparison of the hydrograph. Our water year starts in October when the wet year starts and moves off from there. The old Delta, you have the peak in blue. The new Delta is in green. And the hydrograph is of course, quite altered from historical conditions. So one of the likely mechanisms for that shift is the buffering by the historical landscape. If you remember the historical Delta was that whole spongy distributary of little channels and it had floodplain and so forth. So that landscape helped slow down water. And so there's a peak in flow that happened historically at a later point than it does now. The simplified Delta, the water comes down quickly and earlier. The other part of that is reservoir operations. And again, there's those two hydrographs, the historical hydrograph and the current one. And not surprisingly, the network of reservoirs we have in the system store water from those winter and spring storms and release it. So that helps to moderate the hydrograph overall. So those two different mechanisms, the buffering of the landscape and our operations are really what drives the current hydrograph. I also wanna note that the degree to which the hydrograph is altered depends a lot on water year. So here's a cool analysis that is published in our regional online journal, modeling the historical hydrograph versus the current hydrograph in different water year types. So we have five water year types that we commonly recognize from critical to wet years. And the basic message here is that it's really the drier years when there's that big divergence between what happened historically and what we see now. And in wet years, there's less difference. It's just kind of wet. We don't affect the water all that much. So you also really need to understand further the importance of the geometry here as we get into some of the water management. So forth. As I showed you a few slides ago, the historical delta was highly dendritic and it had lots of micro habitat. So this is a cool reconstruction of the historical delta from a former USGS scientist, Brian Atwater. And here's compared to the current delta which is designed to convey floods. We wanna get the water out. Our local communities from flooding is also designed to keep the delta fresh and we'll talk more about that later. And it's also great for navigation. All those little tiny channels we had before really hard for shipping. So lots of the current channels look like this. Big, deep trapezoidal channels, water moves fast. There isn't much habitat along the edges and you will all see a lot of that in your tour that's coming up. But that doesn't mean the river always stays in channels. Here's an example of some of the transformation of the delta during flood periods. And this is because we have a couple very, very large flood overflow basins. And for the estuary, the largest one you'll be hearing about is the Yolo bypass. This is an area I've done a lot of work in. The basic idea is this inhabited part of the historic flood plain at high water, the Sacramento River, which is the darker yellow line spills out into this basin, moving out over the large landscape and then drains further downstream down towards Maria Vista. Just for you hydrologists, it's also a pretty cool system the way it works. There's a lot of structuring in the different water sources. So there are different creeks and water sources. It's a broad shallow basin. Those waters spread out there. It's a natural color photo. You can see this photo for 40 miles and it's basically happens in all the different flood events. This is more though than just a pretty, excuse me, a pretty place. It also has a lot of biological and ecological significance. So one of the key things I showed you a couple of slides ago is how deep and narrow the Sacramento River is. By contrast, yellow bypass is broad and shallow. So here's some simple modeling I did a while ago on a couple of different flood events showing the Sacramento River in green. You see there's basically no habitat over the course of each of those years, shallow lines versus the amount of shallow water habitat created in yellow bypass in a pretty big flood event in 98 and a modest flood event in 2000. So this is a lot of the shallow water habitat that's created when the bypass fully floods, it doubles the wetted area of the Delta. It also is a massive increase in shallow water area. So we're gonna move now from the more riverine part of the system into the tidal part of the estuary. And again, it's important to think about this is a tidal system rather than as a river. And I'm gonna have us look at it in a couple of different ways. The first is to look at salinity variation in different parts of the estuary. So here's a figure showing the salinity range in different regions of the estuary. And you see out towards San Francisco Bay, it's pretty much marine, not a lot of salinity variation there. At the other end in the tidal freshwater part of the Delta, not surprising, not much tidal range, although there are tides for sure. A lot of the action occurs in the central part of the estuary, so soon march. You see quite a lot of salinity variation there. And as we'll talk about more shortly, it is no coincidence. This is a lot of the focus of management. So the other way to look at this is just based on tidal excursion. So here's a snapshot here. The blue line show tidal excursion from drifters. You can see like in the lower line, just how far drifters will move in tidal excursions. Also you can see some of the exact values for the estimated tidal range of these locations. So at the edge of the Delta, it's plus or minus 5,700 cubic meters per second out by carcina straight, where it empties into San Francisco Bay, more like 12,000 cubic meters per second. And by the way, feel free to chime in with questions anytime I'm going through this fast covering a lot of ground here. So that tidal variation has real consequences for organisms that are trying to navigate things. For example, salmon trying to move up systems. Remember that whole backward Delta thing. Well, if you've got a normal Delta, if a fish comes from the ocean, it finds one of the little channels, it will end up in the main river at some point because things converge. Our system backwards, fish come in and there's this whole splay of these crazy channels. And there are all kinds of complicated things that start to happen at channel junctions. So one of the examples here, adult Chinook salmon, and this is true for other migratory fishes as well, moving up, they come up to Sacramento through the Delta and they hit this split between the lower Sacramento River and the Cache-Slew complex, which is the base of where the Ola bypass spills out. You would think from the map that the Sacramento River channel is large. And in fact, the tidal flows in that lower Sacramento River channel are only about one eighth of the tidal flows that are moving through that North Delta complex. So if you're a migratory fish, it's all Sacramento River water at that point, where is most of the Sacramento River going? It's going up into this North Delta complex. And so this is why fish passage and straying and stranding is actually a pretty big deal. It also has interesting implications for fish nursery use in the system as well. So because of that large tidal action, there continues to be a lot of fish habitat in that region. So for example, young fish moving down the Sacramento River, we get salmon spawning upstream, they move downstream. Even at lower flows, there's this massive tidal jet that happens in that North Delta complex. And we end up with very large numbers that end up in those tidal slews at the base of the system. So again, this is a key reason that North Delta area is such a large focus of restoration and management. Okay, we're gonna move deeper and deeper into the tidal system. And one of the things you have probably heard about at some point is about our regional quirky metric, the use of X2 as a management target. I don't know that anywhere else in the US or in the world does anything quite like this. Please correct me if I'm wrong. But the basic concept here is that this is the location of the brackish zone, where it sits on the axis of the estuary. And for various reasons, folks picked two parts per thousand as the magic number that we're gonna try and track. So X2 is just the distance from the Golden Gate Bridge up to where that two parts per thousand zone is. So to help you understand this, here's a graphic of some of the X2 locations. So you see when there's a wet year, when the salt field is way downstream, so example way down at 55, the number for X2 is going to be a small number. Small numbers mean wet years. And the other end of the spectrum, wet years, the number is large. So why do we do this? Well, the first reason is that salinity intrusion is a really big deal. We'll talk about it more. This is the water supply for a lot of people, a lot of different industries. Salinity intrusion is a big deal. We need to know where that salt field is. The second thing is, and this has changed with technology over the years, but it's really hard to measure inflow into the system. You've got those massive tidal excursions. And if you put measurement devices out there, there's a lot, even a tiniest amount of error, you'll get everything wrong. But we're really, really good at measuring salt. So X2 is a very convenient tool to use for regulation. It's also something that probably has some biological basis. So where the salt field is, affects where the amount of habitat for some of the species may be. So here's a modeled exercise showing, depending on where the salt field is, how much area or volume is available to species that may be out there. There are other reasons that flow or the salt field might be related to what happens with these organisms. I do not wanna give you the idea that this is the driver of biology in the system, but just simple fact, if a salt field is down in that Sassoon Bay area, it's a big broad open area. So at this point, we get into the really unique stuff of the water distribution system. And much of the story here, not surprisingly is about water supply. The Bay Delta is the water supply for 25 million people in California. It's about 8% of the population. And it supports a multi-billion dollar ag industry where one of the world's largest economies. This really matters, but there's a really big issue here. Most of the precipitation that drives inflow to the system is in the northern part of the state. Most of the population, including a lot of the ag industries occur in the south. And the challenges don't stop there. There's also a ridiculous amount of precipitation variability. So the colored map of the US shows a cool analysis by Mike Dettinger at USGS, showing variability and precipitation across the country. And we are kind of ground zero as the most hydrologically variable spot in the United States. And that further complicates water management in the system. So we'll start first with some of the sources to the Delta. And this is an analysis based on some of the modeling from Department of Water Resources, but the short story here is much of the water comes from the Sacramento drainage. A lot of it will go through Yolo bypass depending on the year. We also get some from East Side Tributaries, San Joaquin River. It's a decent input, but not nearly as much as the others. And where does all this go? Well, surprisingly, the majority of it actually does make it out to the bay. Depends on water you're tight, but about five million acre feet out of that portion that comes in is exported based on this analysis. What happens to all that water that comes through the system? Here's a breakdown from my current bosses at Public Policy Institute of California. It breaks things down regionally across different parts of the state and also by a couple different water years and a couple of things to see. First, in the northern part of the state, most of the water ends up being what we call environmental water. It flows out to the ocean. And in the coastal and southern parts of the state, the majority of the water is really used more for agriculture and cities. And that varies also with wet and dry years. In wetter years, not surprisingly, there's more water that's considered environmental water. And how we typically move that water is super complicated. We could spend the whole day on the next part of this, where all that water goes. I wanna note that there are a number of upcoming talks by John Lehi, by Levi, who are gonna talk more about the specific operations where the water goes. So I'm not gonna go into this in detail, but needless to say, this is a truly impressive water distribution system. There's not anything like this anywhere else on the planet. It's quite remarkable. So I will talk though about some of the diversions that happen in the system. And first we need to recognize just the ridiculous number of diversions there are in the Bay Delta. So here is a map of just of these smaller diversions based, and this is a little bit outdated probably, but it's from my old employer, Department of Water Resource, and mapping around 2,000 different water diversions in the system. And some of you might be surprised, we actually only have kind of a hazy idea of exactly how much water these siphons are all taking and when, but they are an important part of the hydrology. What we do know a lot about is the big water delivery systems, the state and the federal projects. And that is the focus of what you're going to cover today. So that zone is circled here. And how the water gets to those diversion system are really complicated. And again, you're going to be hearing from John and Levi and some of you hydrologists may cringe wasn't about to describe, but I'm going to give you a simple conceptual model to understand how the water gets to the pumps under different circumstances. And in particular, how different features of the system affect flow patterns. So what I'm going to describe is what I call a tiered approach with the three red arrows. The first tier is the San Joaquin River inflow in the lower corner. And that's the water that's kind of closest if you will to the water diversions. And so the biggest hydrodynamic draw is on that first tier. That's the water that gets taken. And again, this is conceptual, but that gets taken first. The second tier is in this central Delta corridor here coming from the North from the Sacramento River through this central Delta area. Finally, the third tier, when the San Joaquin River flows and the North Delta sources are insufficient to cover the rates of pumping or if they are constrained, which happens a lot, we start pulling water from the West Delta and flows, net flows, if you will, reverse. So the flows there with that whole tiered thing are really complicated. We've actually come up with a way that kind of integrates it. You're gonna be hearing a lot more about old and middle rivers, why? In case it isn't obvious, old and middle river sits right in the middle of all those areas, it's right in the middle, it's a pretty useful integrator of things. So that is why you're gonna hear so much about that flows in that corridor and in particular why flows are kind of negative or southward in terms of net flows. So some implications here First, why is San Joaquin River inflows such a big deal? You will hear more about EI ratios, export to inflow ratios, that focuses on the San Joaquin River because the San Joaquin Rivers are so important, it's such a big driver, we focus on those flows. Second, why we have a Delta Cross channel, that's that second tier, the San Joaquin River often isn't a large enough source to supply the pumping needs for the water projects. So there's this channelized corridor through the central Delta to help draw more Sacramento River into the central area. And finally, why you can have net reverse flows coming from the West Delta? If these other sources are constrained or insufficient, flows will move from where they are needed. So bottom line, the flow effects are really complicated but hoping the conceptual model there gives you some clarity on how things sort of work. And I'm gonna illustrate that with my next slightly tongue-in-cheek thing about trade-offs between different things that we do. So the first example is the Delta Cross channel. Remember I said a few minutes ago, we've channelized this corridor, so that second tier has a decent flow down to the Delta. Well, the challenge is you've got a zillion young salmon migrating down the Sacramento River. That corridor is away from their normal migration corridor. If they end up in this central Delta, there's lots of evidence that survival is poor, habitat conditions are poor. So one of the things that typically is done in winter is the cross channel that you will see tomorrow, yes. Thursday is closed in winter to protect downstream migrating, winter and Chinook salmon and other things. But I hope you'll understand from that conceptual model what happens when you close the door for this corridor, you'll start drawing more water from the other sources. And that in this case is typically from the West Delta, if that makes sense. So you just close the second tier. The other example here is the South Delta barriers. I don't know if you'll see them or go into them in detail, but remember I said the San Joaquin River is the location of the strongest hydrodynamic draw from the export facilities. That has consequences for local channels. There are local farmers down that way. They watch their channels drop in elevation and they have a hard time pumping. What happened several decades ago is the department started installing barriers to try and protect the elevations in those channels. And then a bit later, we found that fish weren't doing well in there. So we added a Hattable River barrier. So there are four South Delta barriers here. Again, there are consequences. There are trade-offs. You have just plugged your first tier. And so what happens in this case is you start creating more pressure on that second tier and you get greater drafting of flows that start to happen from the North and move to the South. I don't have quite enough time to go into it but there are other barriers as well. This is probably the closest thing to a free lunch that we have. Remember I mentioned salinity intrusion is a big deal and that water creeping in during dry years. When you don't have much inflow, salinity creeps in. If the salinity creeps too far in, it gets in the Delta. The Delta becomes brackish. It becomes brackish. We lose the water supply for the state of California until the next big year. It is a disaster if it happens. So one of the things that was done recently and probably will be done again in the future is a barrier in the West Delta to help stop that salty jet coming in. And there's some ecological consequences but not as freaky as some of the other examples that I just mentioned. And finally, I want to mention that everything I mentioned is conditional. We can expect everything I just mentioned to shift with climate change and gradual sea level rise. We know a lot of the places, the low lying areas in San Francisco Bay are highly vulnerable to sea level rise. The Delta is even more vulnerable. You'll be seeing a lot of those islands. They call them islands in the Delta. I just want folks to realize they are exactly opposite to islands. They are levied historical islands that have become society. They are holes in the ground that are just waiting to be flooded. The levies are super fragile, super high risk that those levies will be overrun by floods, by earthquakes and in particular by sea level rise. So this should probably be updated but super high risk that there will be large scale levy failure here. And if that happens, lots of saltwater ends up moving into the system. It's going to change eventually. So I want to tie things back together. Your charge is to think about some of the regulations. I want to make sure folks understand the connections then. So first, some of the regulatory documents and activities really focus on habitat restoration, floodplain, wetlands. I hope based on my presentation, you understand why that is such high value. Second, why we obsess about X2 standards in different things. Third, why Delta crop channel operations are such a high profile part of our operations. Fourth, old middle river flows. I think that's one of your major tasks here. Nice integrator of some of the wildflow patterns. Exports, that should be pretty obvious. It's a huge driver of hydrology. I didn't have a chance to get in to Sassoon Marsh to Lending Control Gates. If folks want, I have extra slides so we can go into that. Lastly, South Delta barriers. Interesting part of the landscape, they have hydrodynamic consequences. You may hear about potential effects of those. So with that, I've given you a lightning fast tour of the Bay Delta. I can take questions. We could talk about a couple of other features I didn't cover, but otherwise you're now experts. Well, thank you, Ted. That was really an excellent opening. So I'll open the floor to the committee members. Were there any pressing questions that came out? Colin, Dr. Summers' talk. Dr. Fernando. Thank you very much for that. Very, very, very good talk. When you look at these whole systems, you said there's no being a system like this. Why is this complexity devoid because of inadequate planning during the process of developing? Oh, boy. Hindsight's great. Hindsight is absolutely great. Yeah, there are definitely some things that when the water projects were planned, people didn't really anticipate. So a couple of examples. First, putting the water diversions down in the middle of a major nursery area and a subsided tidal network was probably not the best location. There are water quality issues with all of the wetlands and so forth down there. It's also kind of a vulnerable area. Similarly, one of the more recent additions to the system, the North Delta Aqueduct didn't have time to go into it. It was put off in the North Delta and that was put there because, well, people were starting to recognize there were problems in the South Delta. We'll move it to the North Delta. Over the past couple of decades, we've realized just how important that North Delta area is. So there are lots of challenges now in trying to manage the North Delta diversions as well. But, you know, hindsight is great. You know, some of this could have been anticipated but we've learned so much of the past few decades that help guide our decision-making. What you tell me, I want if you wanted just to, oh, sorry. Yeah, just a clarification. The X2 standard, is that a tidal lean or a maximum? Oh, boy. Yeah, I will point that to one of the operators you're going to hear from shortly. Yeah, I think it's the tidally averaged value over the course of, yeah, right, right. Sorry, I get biologists here. You're going to hear from a couple of the major experts with specific operational targets like that. Yeah. Why isn't more of the San Joaquin water diverted before it gets to the Delta? So there are, you know, water quality standards within the Delta. You may also get more information about the Central Valley Improvement Act and mandated flows down the San Joaquin system. I don't know how much of the San Joaquin story you're going to get, but, you know, there have been periods when it's been largely diverted and there are not contiguous flows, but now there are some mandated flows to try and provide fish migration. But, you know, bottom line, we can't totally dewater the system without pretty massive consequences. I know. I was wondering if climate change impacts on a snowy partitioning and snow belt is a concern when you talk about, yeah, yeah, I could have easily put some of the projections, but the hydrograph is going to change a lot. It's already skewed as it is, but so much more of it will be coming down in winter and we are going to lose a lot of the snow melt for the later hydrology. So it's a real challenge, of course, for operations. We have this historical baseline, but at the same time it's a moving target with the expected shift in hydrology. So I would assume the shift would be earlier. It would be earlier. And there's the challenge to instoring some of that water, the reservoirs, try and maintain some of it. And then maybe even the more important thing is I showed you the variability in hydrology and precipitation. We are the most variable. Well, guess what? The weather whiplash that we are seeing emerge is going to drive that divergence even more. So there's an even greater divergence now between wet and dry years. I showed you the five water year types and it's pushing further and further towards either end. Either it's kind of very wet or very dry. You showed a slide of the relative importance of the shallow habitat and the yellow bypass to the Sacramento River. Is that relative difference purely an artifact of this highly regulated system or would the yellow bypass area have historically computed a large percentage of the shallow habitat? If I made that clear. Yeah, it's a little bit of both, but we dredged the heck out of those in the river channels. There used to be a lot more small distributary channels in the Delta where fish probably would have found habitat. Also, we rip-wrapped the heck out of everything as well. There would have been some edge habitat as well. But clearly that whole yellow flood basin was historically a big part of the hydrology during the high flow events then and now. Most of the flow ends up going off into that flood plain. So, you know, it would have been historical rearing area for salmon, but also a number of other species as well. David and then Denise. You showed us the historical rainfall, historical flows coming into the system, historical exports coming here, and also the historical landscape, historical habitats. And are you aware of any studies that also explored the historical flow routing through the interior or central southern Delta? Jay may be able to answer that question better than I, but I believe folks have used some of those historical recreations of the Delta geometry in order to estimate some of those modeled flow patterns for historical versus now. But, you know, I don't know how good, like the channel geometry was for some of those modeled runs of the historical Delta, but at least it gives you a better sense of how it probably slowed things down. Jay, did you want to... Most of those historical reconstructions, I think in terms of the channel flows within the Delta are pretty coarse. But the results are what you'd expect in blood here, the whole thing is flooded. And it's dominated more by the second on river flows than south. Can I just remind the committee members, if you ask a question, find the mic that's in front of you and push the button so that that green light turns on so that people on Zoom can hear your question. Thank you. I'll go to Denise, but perhaps we could also check just the CHD grant that's put any questions into the chat. So, Denise. Oh, it's very many. Okay, great, got it. We can hear you better, too. Yeah, gosh, me not being loud. Unless we have it a bad day. So, Ted, could you pass out the North Delta area for us a little bit? I think, you know, in your discussion about habitat, you kind of lumped cash slew with your bypass. Could you talk about the bit that floods when the river's high versus the bit that is there all the time? Giving you whiplash here. So this is a region with multiple personalities. So the simplest one to understand is the flood aspect of it. When the river's overflow and fall out into this seasonal basin and drain southward, floodplain or flood basin straightforward. The more complicated part to understand is the tidal network of it. So cash slew is the lower network of channels down there. And it always receives tidal flow. And it actually floods the lower base of Yolo bypass as well. So there's tidal wetlands there. It's a floodplain, but those are tidal wetland floodplain regions. So the water sloshes strong tidal forces moving through back there. The tidal flows move all the way up past cash flow. So there's always water in this complex. But what happens is seasonally there may not be any net flows coming out of it. During flood periods, sure. But there are a lot of ag uses, other diversions there that tend to pull water. So that is the other region of the estuary that has net negative net flows. And so I don't know if you're going to cover it, but this is one of the reasons why periodically we do tests of managed flow pulses through the system during lower flow periods to try and provide a net downstream pulse of typically plankton and other nutrients here down into the estuary. So it's kind of a gradation of tidal wetlands in the lower half from Sacramento to seasonal floodplain in the northern part of the bypass. Anything else in particular, Denise, you wanted to No, I saw that that was the distinction that you did. I just wonder if it's worth for the folks to look at it. You see that map of the network of channels, but I wonder if you just wanted to comment on the size of the channel and the complexity of some of the flow structure. Just very generally from an ecology point of view, when those junctions come together. Yeah, I don't know if you're going to go visit the junction between the Sacramento river and cash flow, but these are massive deep channels. They are designed to convey a flood function of the system. Yolo bypass is part of the historical floodplain, but it was designed as a partially engineered basin to protect Sacramento and surrounding communities. During high flow events, the Yolo bypass conveys about five times as much flow as the adjacent Sacramento river. So that channel coming down through cash flow, you will see an absolute monster. It's big and deep. It's got big gouged out parts. The Sacramento river, it looks pretty much like that photo. I showed you kind of just a trapezoidal riprap channel. Any more questions from the committee? Ted, I have a question about the tide that you've seen this. The slide you showed with all of the two thousand small diversions. Right. So do you think as a percentage of the total exports that it's negligible and that's why nobody's ever bothered trying to measure any of it or regulated? I'm just curious if you have a kind of a rough estimate of what percentage of the total export you think that that constitutes. It's not trivial. It's at least a tenth of what the water projects are. You know, maybe even 20%. Feel free to ask a couple of the operators. They have models and in the models, they put numbers for different times of the year, but it's kind of an assumed number, but these are all, you know, private facilities. Folks don't have the authority to go in and collect measurements. A few of them have been studied. One of the things I will say is they are not, you know, unregulated during the extreme drought conditions we had, they were severely limited just because there was too much risk of salinity intrusion. There just wasn't water coming down from the rivers to supply them, let alone the water projects. Thank you. I'm sure we'll see this on the field trip on Thursday. I grew up in Bakersfield, and so these, and then Los Angeles, so these hardened channels that, you know, you can drive in, which people do for recreation in Bakersfield. This is very familiar to me, but now I live on the east coast where there are no channels that look like that, so I'm just trying to think in my mind is everything south of the city of Sacramento, on the Sacramento, is that how the river looks? There's no riparian zone anywhere south of the city of Sacramento? There's some, if I remember right, someone can correct me, but like 70% of the banks are rip-wrapped. And there are some shallow areas like with toolies down by the water, but it's pretty trapezoidal. That's why when I showed you that modeled estimate of shallow water habitat in the Sacramento River versus like the flood plain there, it just doesn't even register. I'm going to be blunt, there's nowhere to hide the fish in the Sacramento, which is part of the reason one of the quirks of fish migration to the system. The models tend to show well, higher flows are what you need to move the fish out. And that is because there's so little habitat, it's better for those fish to move fast through those channels than to try and stay, even if they're not quite ready. And then the San Joaquin River, does it look similar or is it more natural along the bank? Could I say worse? Of course. Yeah. And the channelized network that you showed, which is simplified from the historical condition. Are those channels similarly rip-wrapped and hardened? Absolutely. And the degree of change is even more extreme in the South Toba. Because based on the historical analysis that I showed you from San Francisco History Institute, historically that was the part of the Delta that had the greatest density of all these little channels. They're just gone. You can see them in some of the land use photos. You can kind of follow where they used to be, but yeah, it's radically altered. Okay. Great. Maya, anything from Steve? No questions. That's great. Thank you. And so, Ted, just to wrap up this session, we'll right up the start with listening. Do you have any thoughts for the committee within that scope that Laura mentioned before that you think could be particularly constructive? No, I make, I guess I'll just sympathize with you. It's such a messy, complicated system. It takes a while to come to grips and understand it. I hope this has helped, but even with some guidance up front, I realize it's a headache to try and understand all the different scenarios, water moving, all the different features and so forth. So be patient with yourself. If you start to get a headache at some point on Thursday. Thursday. And by the way, do ask lots of questions on your tour. I think you're going to have a bunch of great tour guides that know a lot about the fine details that I really haven't had a chance to cover. Okay, so perhaps we could thank Dr. Summer. That was a great summary. So we're going to take a break now and we'll be back at 1045. And, you know, thanks again. And anything else, Laura? Okay, so we'll be back in 15 minutes. I hate to break up great conversations. Okay, this next session we're going to have an overview of the Central Valley project and the state water project. The first part is going to focus on water supply and hydropower delivery. And our two speakers, which I'll introduce both of them at the same time. Levi Johnson from the US Bureau of Reclamation. He's currently serving as the acting operations manager for the Central Valley operations office that oversees water and power operations for the Bureau of Reclamation's Central Valley project. Prior to joining the CVO, he served as the water resource branch chief for the Central California Area Office in Folsom, supporting the management of the American River Stennis Laos River and Nimbus Fish Hatchery. Before joining Reclamation, Johnson worked for the East Columbia Basin East Irrigation District in the Columbia Basin. And John Lehigh is known to many, many people in the room. He's with the California Department of Water Resources, where he serves as the lead water manager for the state water project within the California Department of Water Resources. He's got more than 30 years of experience with the department and over 25 years of those has been of leading the state water project operations. So welcome, Levi and John. I'm not sure who's going to go first. Good morning. Thank you so much. Good morning. Thank you. Good morning. Thank you so much. Levi Johnson, Central Valley project operations acting operations manager. I'll admit I did not know the committee makeup until the role introduced this morning. So incredible brain trust here. Fantastic. I just wanted to provide a very brief overview of CVP Central Valley project from an operations perspective. Very brief. I'll introduce CVP operations and then hand it over to John Lehigh to describe state water project operations. So reclamation. Many folks don't know of our organization. Just a brief overview. We are under the Department of Interior, US Bureau of Reclamation. Our region is the California Great Basin region. You can see we cover pretty wide geographic area here. Good portion of California. Our La Hutton Basin office extends into Nevada. And then of course we sneak into Oregon a little bit with the Klamath Basin as well. Our mission is very clear. We look to manage water resources and environmentally and economically sound manner for the public good. Thanks Dr. Summer describing the disparities in precipitation and demands in California. This is really one of the foundational challenges of California water. I won't go into too much detail. I like to use a rule of thumb of about 80% of the available precip that hits the state is in northern California. Whereas conversely 80% of that demand is really in the southern part of California. That's a big variation in that precip as we all know. Added complexity to operations. So from the federal facilities of the Central Valley Project. Let me just walk us through some of these and I don't have a pointer available. But starting up north in the 1940s we had authorization and construction of Shasta Dam. Shasta 4.5 million acre foot of storage. This is the largest reservoir in California and really a cornerstone of water management in the state. That's on the Sacramento side, northern part of Sacramento, Sacramento Valley. And then in that same time frame we have a friant division on the San Joaquin and then the Jones pumping plant. This is the export facility in the southern Delta on the federal side. 1950s we have Folsom Dam not far from where we're located right now. Critical piece of infrastructure for flood control on the American River protecting Sacramento. 1960s let's head back up north. The Trinity River Division is constructed. This is a very unique set of facilities. Trinity Division has the ability to divert water from that basin into the Sacramento basin with major implications for hydro power, water supply and species on both systems. Also in the 1960s the San Luis unit construction. So this is the San Luis reservoir, the large off-storage facility. This is a joint use facility that's operated jointly with our state water project partners. Simfully pay unit coming off of that. And then kind of the latest major facility, the Pneumolognes Dam on the Stanislaus River. One thing to remember are that these federal facilities are authorized by congressional authorizations to finance and these describe the authorized purposes for these facilities. And often there's numerous authorities and often those are multi-benefit purposes with the primary on most of these facilities being flood control. Levi, can I ask you to just define the word division because you have it there for Trinity and this seems to be all over the literature. Is there a specific definition of what a division means in this context? I use that term loosely. So when we think of, for example, the Trinity River division, we're not thinking of just one dam, there's going to be numerous facilities that are typically covered under those authorizations and to get the specifics we'd have to go to those authorizations. So the idea is that it's not just a single dam but it's a single dam. What is the significance of the Central Valley project in California? So the federal facilities that are authorized by Congress and operated are underpinned by water rights that are issued by the state of California. We then in turn use hundreds of contracts and agreements to make deliveries of this federally developed water in hydropower. You can see our delivery of water goes to Wideswas in California. Water supply, 7 million acre foot. We should probably put a range in there. This is highly dependent on the water year as you can all imagine. I will point out we are more focused on delivering ag water but we do have several important M&I water service contracts as well. That'll be a bit converse to what you'll see on the state water project side. I'll highlight as well that we deliver vital water supplies to wildlife refuges throughout the Central Valley to support the Pacific Flyway. As we're operating our federal facilities, making releases for demands, requirements, et cetera, most of our facilities are generating hydropower. So this low carbon power source is very important. 2.8 billion kilowatt hours. We were at 3.6 billion last year. Again, this is highly dependent on what the water year looks like and how much water we're able to release. And of course, we have to coordinate our operations not just with the state water project but with numerous local systems that were here before the CVP and came after the CVP. This will be a reoccurring theme. Water management, natural resource management in California is complex. CVP is no exception. A few unique characteristics of the CVP I think worth highlighting is we have to coordinate our operations with the state water project. We hold joint water rate permits and conditions on those permits that require us and compel us to coordinate on how we operate our systems together. And we're operating in a milieu with other local water districts whose operational decisions will impact us and the system as a whole. Another unique feature that I think is worth highlighting is that the CVP, as you saw, we have numerous facilities that are controlling flows on numerous basins in the state. We look at tributary and basin specific requirements on releases from a facility, but we operate the CVP as a whole. An example, a great presentation on delta water quality requirements. When we have to operate our systems to meet those delta water quality requirements we're not looking at Shasta, we're not looking at Folsom, we're looking at all of these reservoirs as a whole and how can we best meet these demands and requirements looking at the conditions of all these reservoirs. That integration is across the CVP not just from an operational standpoint, but also from a financial standpoint. In this pie graph you can see the outsized role in terms of storage, the CVP plays. These highlighted blue reservoirs. Our state water project partners have Oroville. So major role in storage, but we're not the only players. We have a lot of challenges in California. A lot of you are on the front lines of researching those. I'll just highlight a few here. PhymaChange came up and I think this is going to be a reoccurring theme. There was a question and response concerning the type of precipitation, the changing dynamic and there's some compelling research on the American river basin specifically on climate change scenarios not impacting the total amount of precipitation in that basin, but how and when it falls. And so as we rely on the biggest reservoir in California, Snowpack and that diminishes or runs off into our reservoirs earlier in the season. So that's a major implications on how we operate our facilities and our ability to meet water quality requirements in the delta. I like this slide because I believe the charge of this committee will be looking at and hopefully helping us chart a path on addressing some of these challenges that we're dealing with in California water. More of a CVP California water 101. I like showing what these historic fish habitats look like on the tributary prior to the construction of these large rim dams. Why I wanted to highlight this when we talk about and Dr. Simmer did a great job in presenting operations and how that can affect delta water quality and delta dynamics. As we're operating CVP reservoirs and all these rim dams, there are tributary specific operational considerations that we look to namely temperature for species and also flows for species. Those operational changes will ultimately make their way into the delta. So as we're thinking of the delta, we have to think also of how that interplay with tributary management is affecting delta. Floodplain habitat, how we make releases out of fulsome could easily trigger when a floodplain is activated. For example, we are flowed during flood management and then of course our delta export operation, which I'm sure will be a focus of this committee, affects and is affected by that complex hydrodynamics of the delta. I wanted to put this delta slide in there just to highlight some of the facilities in there. Really appreciated the focus on the delta cross channel. This is a key feature to how we operate the system in terms of bringing that fresh or Sacramento river water into the central south delta for water quality and export. So soon marsh, Selenic control gates, another key feature, Old and Middle River, and then of course I'll just highlight the the most well known delta facilities. These are the export facilities, Banks and Jones pumping plant. This is the hub of California water where there's a lot of controversy and a lot of room for improved information science and hopefully tools to help guide operational decisions in the delta. And I think John Lehi will describe a little bit more on the differences and similarities of our export operation, hopefully. Okay, so operations. We have goals, we have requirements, we have demands and what does that look like? Well, it really depends and one of the most interesting aspects of operating the CVP and I'll speak for a state water project is every year is different and every tributary is different. But we do have these overarching goals we can point to and we can look at them from a seasonal perspective. So in the winter, if you have kind of a wetter winter, wetter year, you will be making releases from your upstream reservoirs to ensure you're within a flood curve. Right now at a Shasta, for example, we have a huge atmospheric river coming in this week and so and we're close to encroachment. So we're increasing releases out of Shasta. So that's to protect that flood storage space and protect the facility. What about a dry year? You could be in winter. You could have had, you could have been on the heels of two dry years. You could have very low storage and say Shasta and you might be releasing minimum release requirements to try and build up storage to get through the year. We're increasing releases out of Shasta right now for flood control and at the same time, we're limited at what we can export right now through the facilities because of an old and middle river fish trigger, so a protection measure. So you can have those two dichotomies going at once. Moving into spring, again, it depends on what that season looks like. If you had a really wet spring, like we did last year, you could be operating to flood rules through summer. We had a historic snowpack down in the summer in Sierra last year. You're dealing with flood control management late into the season. If it's a dry year, you might be trying to make minimum releases to meet minimum requirements in the delta. Again, because your storage is so low and you're worried that you're not going to be able to get through that year in meeting minimum needs for fisheries in those tributaries. Summer rolls around a typical operation. If it's been a good year, a wet year, you probably have good storage. If it's a dry year, it's pretty cold. You're going to have a stratified reservoir and you're going to know what kind of cold water pool resource you have available to meet temperatures in the river and also hopefully protect some of that cold water pool resource for temperature management in fall. If it's a dry year, you're making releases for minimum demands on the system. You're trying to recognize that you have limited cold water pool resource. Temperature management may be a struggle. Meeting minimum delta requirements might be a struggle and you might even need to request relief from some of those requirements. And then in fall, maybe one of the more challenging times this is when you are trying to maximize the remaining cold water pool of your reservoir to meet in-stream temperatures. You might have some opportunities to export depending on what the conditions look like in the delta or you might be constrained. These are just broad brush kind of operational goals of what we're looking at. Conceptually, the tributary temp operations, some thinking Shasta and Folsom specifically on this, you have this really cold full reservoir and winter. You'll notice that the reservoir level doesn't change here. That's probably not too accurate. You've got spring inflows come in, things start warming up. You've got some warm tributary inflows coming in and then by May you're hoping to have this nice stratified lake and you're hoping that we have a really good abundant source of cold water pool here. This is critical. And then we will use on depending on the facility selective withdrawals from these different strata to mix and blend to get the ideal temperatures again to meet, say, rearing habitat temperature goals on the American first steelhead during the summer and then trying to ensure we have enough cold water pool to get to the fall run spawning season. Here's Folsom. So what does that look like in the real world? So this is water year 2023 huge year, Folsom's full. Here's the dam. We have an M&I intake here that's pulling water to meet local water supply demands for our water service contractors. We're spilling out of the main spillway here. Ideally, we would be pulling water through our power generation units. So we'll probably max those out. We have temperature shutters here so we can close those shutters to try and preserve that cold water pool for later in the year. And then we have this relatively new auxiliary auxiliary flow way as well providing flood control protection. So just just what these facilities kind of look like in the real world. And huge variability Another thing I hope this committee will take away from this presentation two examples extreme examples of Shasta during kind of a wet wetter and a drier year. So I think this is 2022 in this kind of lighter orange beige and you can just see what Shasta storage looks like. So during our wetter months, we are not doing well at recovering in terms of our storage correspondingly. You can see I think these are flows at Bend Bridge on the Sacramento River. This corresponds to really minimum releases out of Shasta. But also these flows are influenced by tributary flow downstream of Shasta as well. So just very, very low trying to get the storage to recover. Why? Because you need that higher storage and cold water pool to get through your temperature management season. Conversely, this is 2017 I believe and you can just see huge increases to storage, huge increases to flow in the Sacramento River flood control releases and really a nice recovery of flood storage. So just two examples depending on how the water year plays out Main takeaways I'd like you to consider as you're doing your work is this is an incredibly integrated system not just from the CVP and state water project side but also within other local systems within California water landscape. We're managing in an environment of high uncertainty even without climate change or in a Mediterranean climate you don't know what year, what each year is going to give you and you don't know what next week or next month is going to give you. And so there's a lot of uncertainty in a lot of variables we're having to manage. I'll give you one example I think the Fall X2 question came up on how we use that we use a monthly average for Fall X2 this last year we we actually had an exceedance and we're not able to make meet that Fall X2 because of a huge title anomaly that we cannot foresee and so when you look at like a daily or you know five day average in a title system like the Delta it just does not work from a practical standpoint we have uncertainty as well in terms of how the regulatory landscape will play out our facilities are old often they don't perform like we think they're going to perform so there's a lot of uncertainty there as well given these two truths coordination is key just to give an example what that looks like in the real world we coordinate daily with the state water project on how we're making releases to meet all of these different requirements and goals of the system when you're in flood operations you're meeting even more with the flood operations center to manage releases from all of these dams to protect human life and structures so coordination is key I'll say one more one more pitch on coordination we work incredibly close with our Bay Delta office and our science arm to make the most informed operational decisions and I think we have a in place a very collaborative process with all of the state agencies to help inform and express why we're making certain operational decisions and the reason I say that not to pat ourselves on the back but I think the work this committee can undertake to help improve inform and find some of those gaps in those tools will have real world consequences to help inform our operational decisions so thank you in advance for your work on that and with that I'm happy to hand it over to John Lehi I actually take question oh yes yeah yeah so all right thank you good morning everyone again my name is John Lehi the lead water manager for the state water project with the California department of water resources so the state water project is the state project that runs parallel and close coordination with the federal project that Levi just presented we have responsibility in meeting a lot of the requirements in the delta so just an outline of what I'm going to cover here I'm going to go over the background again some of what you'll see is maybe somewhat repetitive from the last two speakers but I think it's really important to understand the foundational information that the reason why the projects exist as far as I will also go into more detail on who our customers are the water supply contractors the project facilities of the state water project how water is developed by the project and a little bit on the delta hydraulics so again back to these these graphics it's all about when and where the supply occurs as opposed to when and where the demand is so you've seen various other slides similar here of course most of the rain and snow melt occurs in the north part of the state and predominant population centers in the south and also majority of the ag demand is also south of the delta and of course the mismatch seasonally the Mediterranean type climate we have here all of the precipitation occurs in the winter months and virtually nothing for several months during the summer period so there is that great mismatch between the supply and the demand both geographically and temporarily and then others have touched on this as well just as the intra-annual disparity exists there is an inter-annual disparity that also exists and you can see the chart there on the left is the various year types and the volume of runoff in the Sacramento Valley Dr. Summer went over the five different year types that we have in the state so the greener colors there are the above average wet the warmer colors are below normal dry, critically dry and what you might also be able to tease out there is those extremes are only getting more variable over time we saw our wettest year 2017 just a few years ago followed by one of the driest droughts that we've seen on record as well and that's only expected to get even worse with changing climate and there is the Dettinger plot showing that our standard deviation for the precipitation up to, you know, 50-60% in California of the average versus only a 10% deviation from the average in most of the rest of the country so the canals on this really applies to both projects that's to rectify this geographic disparity what's shown here is as an example is banks pumping plant so that's state water projects primary export pump out of the delta there's a long approach channel there you can see the delta in the background and then the reservoirs remedy the temporal imbalance and so the example here is Lake Oroville up in Northern California which is the state water projects principle reservoir so a little bit more on the state water project it is the largest state built multi-purpose water project in the United States we have over 29 water supply contractors up and down the state one of the big differences as Levi pointed out is state water project primarily uses urban uses 70% but we do have a fairly large agricultural constituent as well 30% 750,000 acres of cropland in the Central Valley and we do now supply water to 27 million people at least two thirds of the state's population it gets at least part of their water supply from the state water project and here here are the various service areas for the state water project of those 29 contractors you can see that we have some up north near Lake Oroville itself we do service off the the North Bay Aqueduct the Napa region Solano after water is pumped at banks in the south part of the delta we have a south Bay Aqueduct services Alameda County and Silicon Valley and then the majority of the flow continues down south through the Central Valley and you see in green there that's our largest agricultural contractor Kern County Water Agency and then you can see the various other blue areas there in southern California that the Central Coast we have the cities of San Luis Obispo Santa Barbara and further south is the LA Basin Metropolitan Water District of southern California is the largest contractor and that includes the service area of the city of San Diego so quite an extent extensive geographically there and so here's the breakdown for the originally contracted for a little over four million acre feet in the 1960s by these contractors that's not how much we deliver by any means on a year to year basis the kind of the average is just referred to as table A as you can see there only about 56% on average is the estimate and dropping the you can see that Metropolitan Water District contracts for a little under half of that total and Kern County Water Agency is about a quarter and then the other 27 contractors make up the remainder if you were to take a look at that service area served by the state water project you look at the economy for that area and you rank it it's gross domestic product against the rest of the world's it would be the eighth largest economy so you often see California as a state the fifth would rank fifth amongst the world's countries but just the state water project service area alone would be up there as well state water project facilities we do have 33 storage facilities 20 pumping and generating plants 700 miles of canals and pipelines the fourth largest power consumer in the California and the fourth largest power generator in the state so our project is very impactful to the state's energy grid both in terms of the power, the load that's put on the grid and the generation the flexibilities that we can provide really help stabilize the overall power grid in the state just going over a few of the major state water project facilities starting up north again Lake Orville so about 60 miles north of where we are now where the north end of the Sierra Nevada meets the southern end of the cascade range on the Feather watershed that's the principal reservoir for capturing those winter rains and snowmelt water is then conveyed down the Feather River confluence then to the Sacramento into the Delta estuary pumping from banks pumping plant south the other major reservoir shown there in kind of a purplish color that's San Luis Reservoir and that's a joint use facility that's the second largest reservoir for the state water project and it is shared with Central Valley project close to 50-50 so there are not only are both projects responsible for meeting a lot of the flow requirements in the north we also share many of the facilities in the south including San Luis Reservoir here's a profile or elevation view of the state water project turning the state on its side there gives you an idea of the elevation changes involved starting on the left you see Lake Oroville between a little less than a thousand feet elevation where most of the generation occurs down in the Feather River and then down to sea level at the Delta banks pumping plants then lifts the water into the Central Valley a number of other pumping plants along the way and then these larger you see these big lifts those are the pumping plants that lift a lot of the supply over various mountain ranges so we've got the coastal aqueduct that are the coastal branch that we lift water over the coastal range over to San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara and then the biggest lift is a series of pumping plants culminating with Edmondston power plant sorry pumping plant over the DeHatchby range into the LA basin and then we have a couple of recovery generating plants to recoup some of that power it took to pump the water up to the crest of those ranges so because of the vast expanse of the project we many of the operations and maintenance activities are performed in five different field divisions throughout the state we also have centralized control of the system in Sacramento and that's where the power scheduling occurs in this facility is called the joint operation center and for reason it's called that is because that is where the operation staff for both the state water project and the Federal Central Valley project are headquartered and we also share the same building with the meteorology and flood forecasting arms of federal and state government so National Weather Service is located in that building as well as California Department of Flood Management so a little bit of deeper dive into the Orville complex it's the second largest reservoir after Shasta in the state 3.5 million acre feet it is the tallest dam in the entire United States so this is even taller than Hoover Dam it's Earthfield Dam 770 feet high has the gated emergency spillway can pass up to 150,000 CFS may have heard about that spillway a few years back that's another story for another time the latest and it is the largest SWP hydropower asset for the state water project 900 megawatts on the flip side of the power coin we have Edmondson pumping plant that I referred to earlier that lifts rivers worth of water over the Tehachapies 4,480 CFS max and the power load from that facility can max out to approximately the same amount that are just under the amount that the Orville complex can generate so takes 800 up to 840 megawatts of the power load again these are key components to the power grid to the extent that we can have flexibility in those operations so now I'm going to talk a little bit about so how does the state water project in what way does it develop the water supply so it's a seasonal operation in the winter spring period is where we're filling the reservoirs both up in Orville we're picking up feather watershed flows that are in excess to the needs downstream and also at banks pumping plant we're picking up excess flows to the extent that we're able or authorized to fill into San Luis reservoir the joint use facility I was talking about earlier in the summer fall period then we are taking that previously stored water from Orville releasing it downstream and conveying it through the delta and re-diverting it at banks for water supply and then we're also releasing the previously stored water from San Luis reservoir to supplement that total delivery for the high demands in the summer and the fall we talked about so the delta comes into play in all aspects of our operations whether it be the direct capture of excess flows or the conveyance of previously stored water for re-diversion in the summer and the fall so it is the hub of the water management system of the state it's let me go to the next slide here so Dr. Summer did a great job of talking about the internal hydrodynamics within the delta itself I'm not going to harp on it too much here but of course we have the freshwater primarily from the Sacramento river but we can get substantial contributions from the San Joaquin and what we call the east side streams of the delta and of course that's the mixing that occurs because of the salt being brought in from the Pacific Ocean that propagate through the San Francisco Bay into the delta the collective effects there was a question about the in delta agricultural diversions those can be significant so we estimate those at peak during the growing season would be up to 4000 CFS and so in comparison to you know Jones pumping plan is right about 4000 CFS at a point source where that pumping is occurring state water project in kind of average to wet years we would typically be 6 to 7000 CFS but in drier years especially critically dry years those internal delta diversions will be much greater than the projects because we will be at combined maybe 1500 CFS or so just a little bit more on the tidal interaction to get a feel for the hydrodynamics that's occurring there there's twice a day flood and abtides that are occurring 6 hours of flood flow coming into the delta channels followed by 6 hours of heavy rain so that's a continuous cycle and then over laying that daily cycle there's a monthly spring neeptidal cycle there's a gradual 7 days of filling of the average of the delta followed by 7 days of average draining of the delta so we've got a very dynamic system of Delta regulatory requirements. Some are has been in place since about the 1990s, largely unchanged since then through the state water board. And these would be our flow and salinity requirements that are jointly currently jointly responsible for both projects. These are some of these are for municipal and industrial beneficial uses agricultural and some are for fish and wildlife. So actually on the on the and these are called D 1641 standards from the board. These these actually the fish and wildlife beneficial uses that includes a spring x to think there was a question on the x to in in the spring that's actually us. It's a shorter time frame and duration in terms of the compliance. So that's either a day to 14 day average x to location requirement. It's a very complicated way to meet this. There's you can meet it through flow or you can meet it with the with the salinity. But that's just to give a sense that was a question on that earlier. I think Levi then talked about the fall x to which came on in effect as part of the biological opinions back in. This would been the US Fish and Wildlife Service in 08. And that is the monthly that's more of a monthly time step for compliance. The and then the other Endangered Species Act actions of all the old and middle river requirements. Those came about as part of these 0809 biops. And then we also have to meet the requirements under the California Endangered Species Act through our incidental take permit. We also have requirements for the state water project through that. So how do we meet these all of these standards. Monitoring is a key for the salinity requirements. So we do have a network of flow and water quality monitoring stations throughout the Delta channels. You know, the most important constituents there is flow itself. Salinity and turbidity has become very important in terms of predicting presence of various fish species in the Delta. So that's that interacts with a lot of the the biop and ITP requirements. So the kind of the take home here for me again that word complex. It is a complex system. It is supporting much of the economic needs of the state. The developed water supply and the fishery are dependent on the same Bay Delta estuary. And that inherent conflict requires a high degree of coordination between the resource agencies. And Levi did a good job of talking about especially in the winter spring period, the high sensitive sensitive period for the fishery, you know, weekly coordination between what we call five agencies, actually six agencies, resource agencies in determining the best balancing of those of those two purposes. So it's very important that we get the science right. Very important competing interests for society here. So I believe that's all I have. Thank you. I'd like to thank both John and Levi for those summaries. It's not easy. Perhaps I'm not quite sure the order that Patrick would just go along the line and then Jared and then Jay and then there we are printed on. So thanks for the presentations. I was valued seeing the the storage relative to rainfall figure. I'm curious, this is my question to what extent is groundwater included the equation? So groundwater is a statewide groundwater is a really important source of supply for the project itself. It is not a source for project supplies. It's all surface water. But many of our customers will manage or bank water in their local groundwater basins. And I think there's there's certainly a strong emphasis here lately on to what extent can others divert flood flows and recharge those groundwater basins. That's that's been a concerted effort over the last couple of years is trying to figure out mechanisms to to make that make that more efficient make that happen without unduly impacting the other water users that exist. If I can do a follow up. So to what extent is is the groundwater regulated anyway? Yes, well, there is a there's it's act called Sigma, which was passed. Gosh, it was I'd say 14. Thank you. There's a they're going through the process now of many of the the groundwater basins have submitted their their plans and how they're going to manage sustainably for each groundwater basin. There's about a 20 year implementation phase for this. So it's a quite a long drawn out drawn out process that is is underway now in terms of of getting regulation. You know, California was one of the I think one of the few states that did not have groundwater regulation until that act was passed several years ago. Maybe I did you have. I'll just add on the ground groundwater management impacts on the federal side. So we've seen and continue to see subsidence affecting a lot of federal and non federal facilities that in turn impacts how efficient those facilities can be managed to meet their initial purposes and also conversely on looking at maximizing excess flows for recharge and groundwater. So we're actively involved in that as well. Yeah, so this is for Levi. Will the Klamath River restoration dam removal project have any impact on the CVP water delivery? The Klamath basin office is managing the current dam removal effort up there. They're managing and figuring out how that's going to impact or how they're going to operate that system now that they're taking over those facilities and removing some of those facilities. In terms of the Trinity River Division, that Trinity River makes its way into Klamath. There's no no changes in how that Trinity River Division would be operated because of that. Good question. The benefit of your committee, can you describe it maybe a minute or two? The day in the life of an operator for their CVP and state water project during that interesting time of the year. I'll take a first cut at it. Sure. All right. I've been removed from that for a few years now, but it's pretty well ingrained in my brain. Yeah, yeah. So really starting really in the winter starting January through June is really that period of intense coordination with the resource agencies. And that's when we have most of the requirements both under the state water board standards that are probably the more challenging to meet, but certainly the biological opinions and the ITP requirements are most in effect in that period. So a lot of the standards for the state water board are more prescript, more prescriptive in terms of, you know, linked to water year type, you know, we need to meet a certain amount of, you know, a certain level of water quality at a certain location in the Delta, certain flows on a monthly average. The challenge with the ESA and CESA related actions, they're much more dependent on location of the fishery, which is a lot more difficult thing to monitor for. We do have, by the nature of the export operations itself, we do have salvage facilities before both Jones and Banks. So that's kind of a natural sampling location for what sorts of species are in the vicinity of the pumps. So there are some actions that are triggered based on the amount of salvage that we see on a day to day basis. The, I talked about the importance of turbidity. There are, this is relatively new, well, since 04, sorry, 0809 biops, but this is a constituent will, is very important to track during the string period because it's thought that that is, that is an indicator of the smelt species on where they might reside in the Delta. So number of the monitoring, we have a good, we have a really good monitoring network. We will, you know, that gives us a good indication of when those species are most at risk to the project pumping, and that will dictate the old and middle river flow that is required to meet. And the knob for that is the exports. And so we have to make rather quick changes to those operations. They have to be very nimble on and off during the spring period. Anything you want to add there, Levi? They're really good. Maybe one difference to remark on on the export and that knob, super important, coordinated between the agencies. State has a bit more flexibility. Jones is on or off and impacted by title influence. Banks can take gulps of water in more ideal time. So there's a little bit of a difference in nuance there. You know, a day in the life is, you know, every week, something's thrown at you. We had a recent, what we call a first flush event that was triggered. This is triggered by certain flows on the Sacramento River and turbidity. And you're trying to forecast, oh, looks like this might happen. Oh, on a Sunday. Great. So what does that mean? We have power schedules that we need to respect. We have reliability standards that we need to meet with our hydropower facilities. And so having that water operations, power operations, coordination is key. A lot of our new operations are based off of feedback or informed from these technical teams. And so are they going to then be able to put together an ad hoc meeting on a Monday morning, looking at the conditions and make a recommendation on an OMR trigger based on what they're seeing and what that data is showing. These are some of the real world things that we're dealing with on a day to day basis, trying to make the most informed operational decision. Thank you, Leigha, both John and Levi for those presentations. What we're going to have to do is cut it off. There's a lot of questions here. If you are around, I'll put a little wide. I know we have a lot of questions. Right. And perhaps, you know, catch them during the break and make sure we capture those answers. So the second part of this overview of the Central Valley project and the state water project, we have two speakers again, one on behalf of the state and one on behalf of the federal government. Josh Israel is the science division manager in Reclamation Bay Delta office. Prior to this position, Josh worked as a fish biologist for more than 10 years, studying salmon survival in the San Joaquin River and Delta, built impacts on winter run salmon and the yellow bypass fish habitat and fish passage modeling. More recently, he's focused on leading staff to incorporate decision analysis tools into Central Valley project real-time and long-term planning exercises. Lenny Gromaldo is with the California Department of Water Resources. He serves as the state water project environmental director for the California Department of Water Resources. He oversees environmental planning, permitting, compliance activities associated with the long-term operations of the state water project. He's currently leading DWRs in dangerous species consultation on the state water project and the Central Valley project operations. Lenny spent more than 25 years as a researcher in the estuary, so we really appreciate both Lenny and Josh being with us today and we'll turn it to Josh first of all. All right, this is the presentation. It's going to keep you from lunch and then Lenny's going to have to extract more slides from his presentation. Thank you, Laura. Thanks NAS staff very much for coming out here and thanks to all the panel for participating. We're really looking forward to your work on our wicked problem. Great, great. Thanks Sabina. All right, so I was asked to talk a bit about the ecology of the Central Valley project and what I'd like to try to do here is explain our approach to understanding the actions of the Central Valley project and its potential impacts on species. I'm going to discuss the varied approaches we have taken over time to manage various stressors and the tools that we use for assessing and understanding impacts of our actions. And finally, I'm going to take a bit of time to describe our interests and goals on each of the specific topics that we'd like for you to cover related to summerfall habitat, Old and Middle River, and Shasta cold water pool management. So to start with, we have a number of foundational documents. We have a number of conceptual models that have been developed by interagency teams that can help us identify stressors, threats and limiting factors, some of which are influenced by our project operations. This example is one we frequently use from the interagency ecological program. It's almost 10 years old at this point, but it's a useful conceptual model for understanding the stressors and limiting factors on the species. Similarly, a few years later, agencies assigned more technical experts to get together to take on a similar assignment for winter lunch nook salmon in Green Sturgeon. And we've continued to use these models to develop conceptual models for central valley steelhead and spring lunch nook salmon, which we do our consultations on and have to understand the potential action effects on. So this presentation is really going to walk through the approach we're using to consider each stressor, how it's being influenced by operations of the central valley project and state water project, and also quickly describe the tools we have for evaluating these stressors and actions, knowing that we're going to get into that over the next couple workshops. And you're going to make a lot of information requests for more information about that to us. So this is not really our assessment framework. It's something that we've taken from Nimps's strategy for evaluating our actions as part of their biological opinions. We think they're places where we got it right, based on the literature and observations and models that we have, but they're also places where it's possible we didn't get it right. And we're always open to that feedback and the adaptation and evolution of these tools. Overall, though, we think that this is a strong approach because it guides an assessment that science based can help us with re making it reproducible and transparent. And it leverages a lot of tools that have been developed in partnerships with the other agencies and interested parties. But before I get into sort of walking into that approach, I want to talk a little bit about how we describe the operations of the central valley project and the state water project. And there's fundamentally five things that the central valley project does. It stores and releases water, which reduces flows downstream. When it releases water, we increase flows downstream. We also blend water, excuse me. We also blend water, as you've heard, at our selective control devices on a couple of our dams. We divert water in the delta. You'll go to those pumping plants on Thursday. And there's places like the delta cross channel gates in the upper right hand side. You'll also be going to where we can route water through different channels of the delta. So we know that this operation causes hydrologic alteration. But it's important to sort of understand like what is that hydrologic alteration? And so we've done some exploratory modeling that I want to share with you over the next five or 10 minutes. We've looked at three scenarios, one that we call run of the river. We think this is important for understanding how the ecology of species is being influenced by CVP operations. Because it's just the impaired inflow into CVP reservoirs that are then passed downstream subject to channel capacity of the Army Corps of Engineers flood control curbs. It also allows us to then look at when there's no delta diversions, how much water might be taken out by other water rights holders when their feasible diversions can occur. Another scenario I'll share with you is called D1641, which we know is being reviewed right now as part of the water quality control plan revisions happening with the state board. But it's important one because it's the current operations of the CVP and SWP under the assignment of responsibilities from the 1995 Bay Delta water quality control plan and our contracts for water delivery. And finally, excuse the NEPA terminology here with no action, but our current operating scenario, which is basically the operating rules for the Central Valley project and state water project under our 2020 record of decision and the operating rules for the state water project under the 2020 incidental take permit. I will sometimes talk about water year types. Those are related to the D1641 definition of water year types. So as you've heard from other folks, here's some modeling to sort of show what's happening. This is two figures of flows on the Sacramento River. X axis time on the Y's flow. We'll look at a couple of these. On the left is releases from Keswick Dam. And you can see that compared to run of the river. We're storing water in the fall and in the winter. And then at some point in the springtime, typically around May, we start to make those releases. And we're releasing quite a bit more water than would be there otherwise under the run of river conditions. Now Wilkins slew is a point downstream of the senior water rights holders diversions. What you see there is a very similar pattern is that under run of the river, you have more water in the fall and winter. And in the summer and fall, you see that we continue to through operations under the D1641 and the current operating scenarios. We actually are maintaining flows. And part of this is because as part of those actions, we're required to meet flows that are sufficient for other non-project diversions along the river. And so we tend to always be providing in the summertime at least three to five thousand CFS depending on water year type at this downstream location. So we can also look at some modeled water temperatures coming out of Keswick Dam into the Sacramento River. On the right hand side, we have sort of three scenarios for temperature management. The first one, again, is run of the river. And you'll notice what you'd expect, which is that it's following the sinusoidal pattern in which temperatures are low in the winter and high in the summer. When we can target 56 degrees, which is the red line using selective withdrawal, we see that across water year types, we're able to reduce temperatures considerably from what they would be under run of the river conditions. And when we use a tiered approach, that'll touch a pound later. It results in slightly warmer temperatures through the early summer, but lower temperatures late in the summer. Now, if you break this down and you look at water temperatures during the different water year types, you can see we do a reasonable job during all water year types except for critical years where we really lose control of temperature and can't meet those temperatures during the summer and fall. So looking at some modeling results down in the delta. So this is inflow. This is when we're releasing water. We're looking at inflows at Freeport, which is the location that I'd say water is entering the delta. You see that same pattern that we saw earlier where you have less flows entering in the fall and winter because of storing and then more flows in the summer and fall due to releasing entering the delta. So building a little bit on Ted's presentation and also what John talked about, I wanted to talk about what really the delta looks like to fish. We're going to talk a lot about old and middle river flows and we're tending to talk about them in generalities like we'll say old and middle river flows no more negative than minus 5,000 or no more negative than or old and middle river flows of minus 3500. But those conditions are seldom actually observed in the system because the delta is tightly driven as we've heard about and flow is just being summarized to you over various averaging periods. This is actually a location in the middle river corridor and this is what flows look like during this two month period in 2016. You can see that although the averaging comes out to about minus 3500 to minus 2000, the daily flows varied over 20,000 CFS at this location and that's what the fish are feeling. The velocities are changing as those flows are occurring and that's part of the ecology of our delta in the central valley project. That helps us understand a bit about suitable habitat. Schnook, salmon, sturgeon and delta smelter all using this delta for migration and rearing in the springtime and in the winter. As we talked about delta's tidal system, if you go out towards the confluence further west than the location I just showed you, sometimes flows can span 150,000 CFS near the confluence. So what we do know though is that the closer to the export facilities you are, the greater the influence of the export operations can be on this from the CVP and SWP. And so here is some modeling of old and middle river conditions with and without exports and it helps us start to identify a zone of influence for regions where habitat is affected by exports. This figure is looking at the daily velocities at each of the nodes in our DSM-2 hydrodynamic model. Each one of those little circles is a different location in the model. This is looking at all the data from the month of March. This model is being run with and without exports in the distribution of the 15 minute velocities compared in that proportion of overlap calculated. And what you can see is that some of these red areas down in the south delta start to pretty much stay there throughout the different values of OMR flows, but there are areas in the south delta like close to the head of old river, which is in the circle here, where you're seeing the proportion of overlap between the velocities changing with the old and middle river flows becoming less negative. Regardless, whether you're at minus 5,000 or minus 1,000, we typically don't see the zone of influence moving into the north delta. And those are the three circles on the top there that you see. So I'm going to talk a little bit more about salinity and X2. As you heard, the location of X2 indicates the extent of our low salinity zone habitat, which we'll talk a little bit about. And it's typically used as a surrogate for delta smelt habitat. This is a modeled information from those three scenarios that looks at the location under X2. You can see there's a couple thin lines here, one around Chips Island, which is excuse me, one around Chips Island, and one, so Chips Island, which is the downstreaming descent is located at 74 kilometers, excuse me here. Upriver, which is a higher number, is more indicative of where Sherman Island is. It's closer to 85 kilometers. During fall and winter, X2 is further west in the run of the river scenario than the other scenarios that we have where we're operating. And this changes, though, a bit during the summertime here, where actually our run of the river operations is slightly greater salinity than when we're operating under these other regulatory conditions. So there are many biological population environmental attributes that we're tracking in real-time and seasonally and annually. And I think we're going to cover a lot of that in workshop two. But we're collecting this information to really understand how the operations is affecting species ecology and habitats. We collect data to evaluate both direct and indirect effects. And these are just a list of the metrics that we're working on to understand Shasta Cold Water Pool Management, Old and Middle River Flow Management, and the Delta summerfall habitat actions that we use as approaches for managing stressors. So next, coming back to our conceptual models, when we look at our conceptual models, we see that there's many habitat attributes that are potentially limited by operations. This is a list of all the habitat attributes that are potentially influenced in the upper Sacramento River. So considering our hydraulic alteration framework, we're identifying stressors also that are not anticipated to change. I haven't included those. Some of those are things like in river fisheries and poaching, competition, introgression and brood stock removal. We can also identify plausible habitat attributes that are affected with all life stages, such as pathogens and disease, toxicity and contaminants. But the one I want to focus on in this next few slides and in the series after that, will be the ones related to the stressors of interest to us in those three topical areas. And this is the stressor of water temperature and how it's related to cold water pool management. So again, going back to our conceptual model, you can see that Shasta Intronity Storage Hydrology and Influenced is our releases in the summertime that influences water temperature, which in the end influences the transition of eggs to fry in the upper Sacramento River. And so what influence do we have? Well, when we store water, we reduce downstream flows, but this is in fact building storage of cold water. When we release water, it depletes cold water storage, but it may be adding some kind of thermal mass that may actually help us maintain temperatures further downstream. When we divert water, this typically happens in the Delta where we're reducing outflows, so it's probably not applicable in the upper Sacramento River. Routing water also tends to happen in the Delta, so it's probably not applicable for things relating to water temperature. Finding blending water, this is really important, this is our temperature control devices where it preserves cold water for release at a later time. So we've taken a lot of different approaches to actions for addressing temperature since the Central Valley Project was started. We did nothing for a time. Then we decided to start managing to target locations for 56 degrees. In the slide on the right, you can just probably make out some little yellow triangles that represent locations where we tried to target locations for 56 degrees. We've also taken approaches where we've tried to manage to end of September storage objectives to meet 56 degrees during that season. We've also used approaches to manage for tiers where cold water that's less than 53.5 degrees is limited. That's this figure that's on the bottom right here. This is our current action approach. What you see here is when we have sufficient cold water stored, we target 53.5 degrees releases, but when we don't have sufficient cold water stored, we attempt to shape releases and blend cold water to the period of time that's most beneficial for spawning winter lunch and oaks salmon and incubating eggs. If these conditions cannot be achieved, we then shape releases and blending for alternative temperature targets that are not 53 degrees to meet the optimal time periods for winter-run Chinook eggs. Then finally, there are periods when we can't even meet 56 degrees. This would be considered a tier four year. That means we have to take other actions to make sure we're protecting eggs, including things like Livingstone National Fish Actory, which I'm not going to touch upon today. Then there are other approaches we're trying to take for managing cold water pool to address temperature management, like managing multiple actions that are guided by storage objective bins that can include things like reducing diversions to contractors. We have a lot of tools for evaluating these different actions and for thinking about what's going on in our system. This is where we really like your help thinking about these things. We have a lot of planning tools around temperature models. We've got a brand new temperature model that I believe is coming online next year called the Water Temperature Modeling Platform. Hopefully you'll hear about that in Workshop 2. We have a number of different survival models that all work with slightly different functions and relationship between temperature and other environmental covariates. The number, a number of mortality models as well to help us understand how temperature is influencing different life stages of winter-run Chinook salmon. Then in real time, our biologists meet as interagency teams and look at red and carcass surveys, rubbery screw trap, information about juvenile production, the condition of fish, and then there's continuous temperature monitoring at many locations in the river and reservoir temperature monitoring as well. Some of the things we like to get out of temperature stressor modification and trying to improve and reduce temperature stressors is trying to find what the right environmental conditions are to support multi-species survival and recruitment. We'd also really like to make sure that we get to defensible criteria for protecting winter-run Chinook salmon. There's things, there's obviously approaches and actions that we take for water temperature through cold water pool management that affect water delivery and power generation. So some of the things we'd like to do there is try to minimize uncertainty that impacts delivering water and power. So if there's things that we can do to reduce delaying allocations because of cold water pool and meteorological forecasts, we'd really like to know what kinds of tools and approaches we should be thinking about and also ways that we can avoid carryover storage spill when it could be delivered. And of course, California liked to find ways to maximize power generation during the summer and fall when our communities needed the most. So moving on to entrainment risk, this is a list of all of the stressors potentially linked to operations in our IEP conceptual model. I'm going to focus on entrainment risk. Again, you can go back to the conceptual model and see that the proximity of water diversion sites is impact the amount of water diversion and the amount of water diversions that occur affects the entrainment risk of adults that then need to spawn to produce eggs and juvenile delta smelt. This is also an issue for juvenile salmonids. So this is a figure from the NIMPS conceptual model and the title estuary. And you can see the proximity of these fish to the water diversions affects their entrainment risk and their survival to be coming out migrating juveniles. So some of the things we do is we reduce delta inflows. We release water. Now this typically doesn't occur in the winter and spring, so it's probably not applicable, but we'd be interested in your feedback. Blending water typically occurs in the river, so it's probably not applicable in the delta. We divert water, which reduces outflow from the delta, which probably does influence out migration cues and entrainment risks. And we route water, which also can move flows into different locations. Now Ted talked about the Delta Cross Channel Gates. This is actually a figure from our seasonal report last year that shows when the Delta Cross Channel Gates operations are. And the gray lines there are when the Delta Cross Channel Gates are open during this season. And you can see that the little boxes there in the triangles represent when we see fish in our fish monitoring surveys. And so what this suggests is that the Delta Cross Channel Gate was closed. It's clear in that area where we are seeing fish entering the delta, which suggests that our closure of the Delta Cross Channel Gate helped to reduce entrainment of fish into the interior delta, likely reducing these fishes entrainment risk. Now I think John talked a bit about this as well. There's been a lot of different approaches taken for addressing entrainment risk. We change routing like through that example I just gave through the Delta Cross Channel Gates. And I think Lenny is going to talk a bit about another approach that's being used at Georgiana Slough. And I think we're going to drive by there on Thursday. We've done a number of other things. We've reduced diversions based on inflow. This is the inflow export concept. We've reduced diversions based on old and middle river flows. We've reduced diversions based on salvage of fish, whether it be daily or weekly or annually. We've reduced diversions based on environmental conditions such as temperature and turbidity and even sometimes reduced diversions based on modeled risk. So on the right hand side are two figures from our seasonal report as well, just showing 2023 flow and temperatures. You can see as flow on the upper portion went above that hyphenated line there, we ended up taking a first flush protection action. It's the same time that we saw high turbidity, which are indicative of fish moving in to the Delta and Delta Smelt migrating up into this potentially into the South Delta. So we have lots of tools. Would you like me to move on? Be honest. Perfect. They're all going to get the presentation, right? Okay, great. So I think you can see we have lots and lots of tools for managing entrainment risk and evaluating and understanding entrainment risk. Here, really, we have very similar entrainment risk goals. Help us understand how to support broad environmental conditions to promote Delta fish recruitment. Help us figure out what tools and information we need to create defensible criteria to avoid ESA listed species population effects. The presentation goes on, talks a lot about the summerfall habitat action. You can see these. We'll get to talk about these on the bus, perhaps. And what I'd like to do is just summarize that, you know, we're really proud of the extensive contributions that agencies, academia, and private scientists have made to our understanding. We're trying to leverage that into what we do. Conceptual models are just the beginning. We have much more sophisticated tools, as you can see, that we use both in real time on a daily and weekly basis, as well as for our long term planning. We think that many of these tools can be improved. And your input on helping for us to improve the conceptual models or understanding of stressors and what information would be valuable there. And the tools can help us develop and evaluate actions better. There we go. Thank you. Thank you. So let me please take you for 15 minutes. And of course, we'll be hearing from just later in the week and also in meeting too. So there's an awful lot of information there on the tools. And I'm sure there'll be a lot of questions. So and don't worry, panel. I could probably do this in eight minutes. I'm hungry. You're hungry. It's hot. We need to get some fresh air. So let's let's get to it. So one of the charges was for you to look at some of the science underlying the actions that we have in our ESA and CISA permits. So I'm going to give a quick overview of that and just the teaser of some of the big items that we're going to download later either through information or on the field trips with our staff that are participating in those field trips. So more more detailed to come. This is just going to be a quick overview. And I would be remiss if I didn't talk about the consultation that's occurring at the moment. So I think some panel members are aware that we're undergoing consultation both for new state and federal permits. On the state side it was mentioned earlier that for our CISA coverage, we're getting an incidental take permit from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. And then on the federal side, the state water project needs ESA coverage through federal biological opinions. Just a quick recap on that. The application and the BAs were submitted this past fall, so this is we're in the thick of it right now for the consultation. And then John mentioned there's some other operational considerations that we have for D1641, another story, another time. So we'll skip that for now because the actions and the scope that you're looking at are related to our state and federal permits. And then one key note here is that I've been doing this for a long time with different folks on these consultations. We're all trying to lean in together. DWR's interest is actually to work with the fish agencies to develop a proposed action that maximizes fish protection, but also maximizes water supply, you know, on the other hand. So we're leaning in. It's been a really good effort to date on the proposed action and working with the fish agencies to get to where we got last fall and submit into application. So real fast, everyone's talked about Old and Middle River management, and I'd be remiss if I didn't give you a PTM run. Dr. Fernando, excuse the fluid dynamics, if I missed this up, but I'm going to do it with myself. So if that's the, if those are the projects, and that's the Delta, that wall over there, and I'm a neutrally buoyant particle, the way that the Old and Middle River flow is, right? We have tides on the flood side. I go closer to the ponds on the edtide. I go back, but when it's more negative, I'm going to keep going more towards the projects, right? So I'm doing this, I'm doing this, and eventually I can get in a train. So I think that's important to think about the mechanisms that are underlying, once you're in that footprint, right? It's probably not a good place to be because you're unlikely to escape that hydrodynamic effect. So what, as a general matter, we're trying to develop rules that try to keep fish out of that interior Delta altogether, or do actions that keep fish out of the interior Delta altogether. So real fast for Delta Smelt, there's so few wild Delta Smelt collected anymore, we have to rely on surrogate measures for protections, and there was a lot of work that was done to get us to this point where we feel confident in relying on those rules. And by the way, if I have something bold and italicized, that means DWR is going to provide additional information reports or citations for those items. And there's different ways to describe uncertainty. We all think about it in different ways. For me, for this panel, I'm going to contextualize it in the questions that we may want to generate for the panel, but these are questions that we're exploring as an agency group, as a collective agency group together. So I'm not going to go over these questions, you have them in the presentation, but these are some things that are going to be important for DWR in working with the agencies to identify the uncertainty in our different rules. For Longfin Smelt, both the smelts, they reside either in the lower estuary or the bay, and they have this weird thing where they move up towards the pumps when it starts to rain. So I'm thinking about Longfin Smelt, and thinking about all the presentations before us. When there's more outflow, more Longfin Smelt gets shifted to the west. When there's less outflow and drier conditions, Longfin move into the delta, and then that creates entrainment risk. So we have rules that are designed to minimize or that are triggered to minimize that entrainment risk during those drier conditions. They actually work under wetter conditions, but we have very low entrainment risk during those wet conditions. Winter run salmon, as a general matter, for all the species, we're trying to think about how our projects impact the population levels of all these species. So we manage winter run currently on some percentage of the juvenile protection estimate. These are the number of fish that survive from below Shasta and make it to the delta. So there's some percent that we have that triggers a threshold depending on risk. One thing that I'm really excited about is the new genetic approaches. So it wasn't until recently where we had this advancement in genetic technology where we can actually identify these species in near real time. So we're actually going to make that decision to reduce exports on confirmed races that are covered under the ESA and the CISA permits. For spring run, we really like the winter run JPE approach. So for spring run, the state is moving forward through its 2020 ITP with the development of a spring run juvenile production estimate. We've now brought in the federal agencies to help with that, but eventually we wanted to frame up a pretty significant and robust monitoring plan to estimate the juvenile production abundance of spring run in the Central Valley and then that could help guide operations in the future, hopefully. And I just want to note we are going under independent peer review for the monitoring activities for the JPE. Spring outflow, this is another component where we operate by reducing exports to increase spring outflow during April May and this is intended to increase a couple of things, mainly improved conditions for longfin smelt. Through this process, you might hear about the longfin smelt spring outflow abundance relationship. It's been well documented that longfin have this really strong relationship to spring outflow. So part of this action is intended to preserve that abundance relationship, but it's also intended to help with other listed species. This spring outflow could help with winter run survival and spring run survival for the fish that are emigrating through the system. And then finally, I think we've heard a lot about Fall X-2 and this is Soon Marsh Selenium Control Gates. And a nutshell, Fall X-2 is designed to improve habitat conditions during the fall by pushing outflow during the months of September, October. So we have a criteria that we meet for that and that is hypothesized to improve conditions for Delta Smelt that improve their survival to the next year. And it's not just hypothesized, we actually have modeled output and modeling done, not we service a collective of folks that have done a lot of this modeling that indicates the benefits of the Fall X-2 action. We actually have the gate action, which is intended to do the same thing, but just in a smaller area of the estuary and it's hypothesized to improve food subsidies and turbidity and habitat in that location where Delta Smelt have historically reared in the summer and fall. And we have a full monitoring and science plan that we're doing right now, which I think you might be interested in seeing all our monitoring and science plans for all these different actions that we're doing for these actions. Stop laughing, Denise. A couple other non-operational measures. I'm just giving key highlights here of some of the things that we're doing. We are restoring title marsh in the Delta. These are acres that are required under the permits, but keep in mind this is not the only habitat that restoration that we're doing. We're doing other restoration that's outside the authorization of the permits. And the good news is we're about three quarters done with the restoration and we have a robust monitoring program as we speak and we can provide those monitoring plans on this restoration work. Another item and you'll visit this on the field trip and Ryan Reeves from our shop will be on the field trip to help talk about it more was the installation of this non-physical barrier dubbed the disco barrier. It looks really fun. It's that yellow light is the actual barrier in work. It's not anything that I did to doctor up that photo. And as salmon go downstream we want to keep them in the main stem of the Sacramento River and not have them go into the interior Delta. So that's the purpose of that barrier and Ryan Reeves can give you a lot more information during your field trip. A couple other key items that we're all in on is Delta Smelt supplementation. As you heard earlier, Delta Smelt are rare to find the wild Delta Smelt. So we're all on board with the supplementation effort and we're now going to transition from the experimental phase to the full-on supplementation phase of this program. More to come from that. Brian Schreyer from our shop will be on the field trip. Feel free to grab him. He's right there. But he can talk more about the supplementation program. We also have a pilot culture program started for Longfin Smelt. I think one thing we recognize is conditions, you know, are not looking great under climate change. So we need to prepare now. We need to be thinking where we're going to be in 20, 30 years with these species. So we want to start initiating these efforts now so that we can be prepared for worst case scenario. And also we have a Longfin Smelt science plan that has a lot of different information on different activities that we're doing to try to understand the mechanisms, understand, underline spring outflow relationships and treatment risk, etc. And then finally, as I said, I've been around this world a long time. I don't really want to talk too much about our proposed action, but there is one piece that we want to share with you. It's our adaptive management program and our proposed action that we worked on collectively. This is the gold standard for what I've seen in adaptive management plans. It integrates SDM and different time frames for when we would look at these different items under the consultation. As you know, these are wicked problems, right? Sometimes you don't get to implement an action because the conditions don't exist. For example, our summer fall habitat or summer gate action, it's only implemented during those in-between years. And guess what? We had the last four years, wet and critical years. So we haven't had a chance to actually implement that action. So yeah, we're learning from the non-action periods, but we would really want a good in-between year so we could start learning these things. So anyways, just bigger point here is we think we came up with a really good framework for how we could approach these different items that we'll be operating to over the next 10 years. Love your feedback on our adaptive management plan. Hope we can provide that sooner than later. And I think that with that, I'm done. So I did that in less than eight minutes, I think. I think what we're going to do, we're going to be interacting with Lenny's team and with Josh not only this week, but at the next meeting as well. So just to say on time, we're going to take it great for lunch now. Please be backed by 1.15. And let's just give both Josh and Lenny a round of applause for some comprehensive. Yeah, committee members. Lunch is available for committee members on the back table. Everybody else, thank you for coming and we'll see you after lunch. Yeah, you're a committee member. So that we can get started promptly again. Thank you so much. We've got this afternoon is from the US Bureau of Reclamation. Mario Manso will be speaking. Since 2018, he has served as a deputy manager for the Bureau of Reclamation by Delta office. He's got more than 18 years of experience with reclamation serving as a project manager in the planning division, supervisor of the water management goal for the San Joaquin River Restoration Program and chief of the contracts and water rights branched. So Mario, thanks for being with us today and explaining what you would like to see out of this. Perfect. Thank you. So appreciate the opportunity to speak to you all today. Dave Mooney, the area manager for the Bay Delta office had a conflict, but don't feel bad about him. That conflict is toes in the sand in Puerto Vallarta. So when you see him, just ask him how it went. All right. So this is something that the Bureau of Reclamation has been thinking about for a long time. The last National Academy's review of the CVP was nearly a decade ago and was focused on the 08 and 09 opinions. So since then, we've been thinking a lot about the science enterprise and how we advance it. Historically, reclamation has played a more passive role in the science enterprise. And lately, we've been taking a more active role and getting into the tools and details of how our operations are impacted. In 2019, we began developing with the National Marine Fishery Services on how we might use the National Academies to help out on some of our more contentious issues. We've shifted a little bit from that. So our thinking now is hoping more, looking forward to advice on the fundamentals and where to invest in better tools. So I just want to reiterate that. What we're really looking for here is that advice on the fundamentals and where to invest in better tools. We have lots of regulators out there, so don't need more regulators adding on to that. Levi covered this a little bit, but just since it's been since lunch that we last covered this, I'll cover it again. Reclamation was enacted in 1902 to sell the Western 17 States. We have five regions with our headquarters in Denver and our commissioner in the District of Columbia. We're here in the Central California Great Basin. Folks have been around, may remember we were the mid-Pacific region. I do, I have a hard time remembering whether we're CGV or MP, but we're now the Central California Great Basin. There's three area offices that oversee the Central Valley Project in our Redding area. You have the Northern California Area Office. They oversee Shasta in Folsom. You have the Central California Area Office. They oversee the American River and Numelones along with the Solano Project. And then in Fresno, we have the Central California Area Office that deals with the Friant and a lot of the San Luis operations. We also have two special project operations. You heard from Levi earlier today, they're doing our operations. And then there's the Bay Delta Office, which is right downtown, the only way out. You go by the old post office right next to City Hall. That's where we're located. And we oversee the many of the Fish and Wildlife obligations that the Central Valley Project has. So one of the things, why we're here, our reclamation mission has changed and continues to change. So as I mentioned, we started in 1902 as the Land Settlement Act. And as you're fighting through traffic later tonight, and you fought through the lines at lunch, I think we can mark that as success. We've settled the West. So if that's a success, why are we here? And so that's because our values have changed since we started in 1902. Most of our focus was on flood control, river regulation, irrigation, and domestic uses. In the 40s, 50s, and 60s, that changed into more of an environmental focus. So the values that we have now, we're putting on the decisions that were made before in that context. And so it's not impossible to bring those past decisions to our current values. It just takes modifying facilities and agreements. And that's not impossible again, just expensive and takes time. So here you go, getting into more of the project purposes of the Central Valley Project. Reclamation is one of those unique agencies, federal agencies, and that we don't have just one core mission, like looking at flood controls or looking at Nadrum's fish. We get all these amazing project benefits that we have to try to balance and achieve. And as Levi talked about with that, we have 270 contracts and agreements that we're working on in the Central Valley Project. We have water deliveries to 29 of the 58 counties in California. And I won't continue to repeat it because Levi did a great job, but we deliver a lot of water, a lot of power, and a lot of critical needs to the state of California. And so just looking on the screen there, you can see the various project purposes that we're looking to accomplish. I like to remind my boss who started the CVPIA program manager, who says it was Fish and Wildlife, or the Central Valley Project Improvement Act in 1992 that established Fish and Wildlife as the priority or a purpose. It's actually not. So in the 40s and 50s, it was identified to have propagation of Fish and Wildlife as a project purpose, but that's a value of more of commercial fishing and making sure hatcheries versus what the 1992 CVPIA accomplished of putting the ecosystem and refuges on a same level playing field as the needs of the other project purposes. Again, identifying the change in value since 1937 to 1992. So here's our problem statement. Species aren't doing well, water supply is declining, and our power generation, well, we'll see in a couple slides, that's doing okay, but there's room for improvement. We always want to do better. The CVP is important to California and the nation. We're not asking the panel to help us with what specific actions or whether we should go from kilometers to miles on the X2. We're looking for those big foundational issues and those tools that we should be thinking about investing in. And as you can see, and Levi showed earlier, it's just generally it's hard to be a critter in the Central Valley project. You can see all in, not just the project, but the Central Valley. A lot of the areas that they used to access are now cut off by rim dams. And so we're trying to recreate that habitat that's in that gray area in those bottom river systems that weren't necessarily created to accomplish that. And Ted did a great job showing the pictures of how they've also, we've also modified the river systems down below to not have a whole lot of habitat. All right. So now some graphics. So this is talking about project performance. So the upper plot is the allocation for our South of Delta contractors. You can see that there's a couple phases there, the pre-water quality control plan. So that's the state board's water right permit requirements on us. There's a post plan and pre-biot period and a post-biot period. You can see that over time, we're starting to see that decline. Somewhat, we can see the additional laying of regulations. That's not entirely fair. You can also see that climate change has been a big driver on the ups and downs between the various years that we're talking about, given the recent drought experiences. The lower plot is North of Delta. Specifically, our folks are from Shasta. You can see in the early 2000s, they got a little bump up. This is because we had constraints in pumping through the Delta. So if you think of it as a hose, the end of it was squeezed. And so they had a diversion before that squeeze and took a little more. Now that with regulations on Shasta, that bump up is no longer there. And not necessarily covered here, but something to think about is reliability. Variability in water supply is tough for all the project purposes that you're talking about. And it's really hard to make huge financial investments when you have that significant variability. So if we think about when water supply gets known, it's generally in your April and May time period. And whether you're a Fish and Wildlife or an Ag customer, you're wanting to have certainty on that information in January, February period. So you can see the drastic mismatch of knowing what the water supply is actually going to be versus when you need to know it. About two or three months mismatch there. All right. Moving on to power. As I mentioned, powers of all the ones we're looking at, not doing the worst, if that can be a standard. So at the edge of the plot on the left, you can see CVP power was cheap, relatively cheap and expensive alternatives. As you can see over time, that's now evened out. Our goal is always to stay cheaper than the market. So we can support a lot of the not for profit communities and organizations, many which are rural and economic and that rely upon this project power. What's missing in these plots is the value that we create through our power peaking operations and time of day pricing. You think about solar power is great in the daytime, not so great in the nighttime. Water supply doesn't care about day or night or sorry, storage projects don't care about day or night. And this helps add a couple bucks to the market. Moving on to ecosystems. So the top graph is winter run and the bottom graph is delta smelt. The winter run at the edge is truncated. Otherwise, it was extremely hard to see because you can see in the later years the numbers go significantly down, but the populations in the 1970s were into the low 20s and 30,000. We've most tightly linked to juveniles before they get to the ocean. Our benefits are swamped by ocean conditions, but we need juveniles to have juveniles in order to be swamped. Supplemental hatchery at the base of Shasta Dam, Livingston Stone supports the population, particularly in drought years. So that's what winter run have become heavily relying upon to sustain that population. And delta smelt, that's a bit different. We were using various programs prior to 2018 to monitor delta smelt and try to collect them. Those stopped actually finding any delta smelt. We got to zero. So we actually went to Fish and Wildlife Service. They created a new enhanced delta smelt monitoring program and have been able to pick up those fish that are out there. And when I say those fish that are out there, it's largely the three-year experimental releases that we've been doing for delta smelt. It started around 40,000 and we're in our third year. And I think we're somewhere around 80,000 release as of now. Could be up to 100. We'll see if Brittany gives me a reaction. 80,000 seemed right. All right. So that's how we're currently managing delta smelt absent that. I think we could argue that they went functionally extinct several years ago. Talking about money, my favorite thing is an economist. So here you see on the graph here is kind of the aspects we fund in the various state and federal agencies that we fund to do our work. You can see in the graph that it's somewhere around 40 million dollars. The state water project matches that generally the same amount. In my head, I think about this is focused on expenditures. In my head, I think we get about 50 million dollars in funding from our various appropriation sources with about 10 to 20 million plus up for supplemental. So about 50 to 70 million dollars on science monitoring that we're doing each year. So if you look at the graphs, you can see in them to talk about the numbers, our expenditures are something different than obligations. So that's one of those inefficiencies. I think about if we think we need more investments in monitoring, how do we spend more time to make sure that we're fully utilizing what we already have in addition to getting, we're going out to new funding. Now you're wondering where is that 20, 30 million dollars just sitting and how do I get the hold of where that truck's moving along so I can just get a little bit of that. Well, it's not sitting there. Any of those inefficiencies we're using for our habitat projects. And that's how we've been able to fund anywhere from 40 to 60 million dollars where the habitat projects in any year. So this slide and Levi had it earlier is just really showing that we have a piece of the puzzle. We're not the only game town. So all the blue is reclamation. But what you can see is we are a pretty big portion of the game of storage, roughly half. And so this is our ability to buffer climate change and move water from one season to the next or between years. Derivators is another pie chart that's even more complicated. And I don't envy anybody that has to try to explain that one. But our overall toolkit includes habitat facilities and hatcheries under specific authorizing legislation. And again, as I started, we're asking our panel today focus on operations, specific aspects of those operations and the foundational foundations and tools to analyze them. And up here, I'm just quickly going over the various bullets. So what's driving reclamation and Levi talked about is so our initial legislation was in 1937, it was a reauthorization from the Department of War. Now, I think it's Department Army reclamation took on that initial project. And then we've had subsequent divisions that have come down since then that have established the San Luis unit, or I think it's the West Side Division, there's the Trinity Division and various division and specific authorizations that establish the rules and requirements for those various sections. The next part that we have requirements for is our water quality control plans. So this is the state's water rights under sections eight of the Reclamation Act. Reclamation is required to comply with state water law. I'm not going to go into Endangered Species Act in NEPA. We spend a lot of time with that and I hope at least this panel is fairly familiar with that. I talked about briefly about the Central Valley Project Improvement Act, again, that established Fish and Wildlife on equal playing field, identified supplies for refugees, various construction activities, and it's what we use a lot for our authority to build habitat projects. It also has a funding component that's paid for by the contractors and various reimbursable and non-reimbursable components that help achieve our various objectives. Cal FED at this point is largely a funding mechanism at about $33 million a year and we use again some portion of that for our monitoring and a portion of that for our habitat. And then we get into our watershed specific acts like the San Joaquin program and Trinity River Restoration Program and some of those specific things that Congress adds on and asks us to do, again, chasing the newer values that we're trying to achieve. And then the most recent significant act that we had was the WIN Act and so that did multitude of things, but as it relates to kind of what we're talking about here today, gave us authority for the smelt supplementation activities, a lot of the monitoring and when I mentioned that $10 to $20 million additional supplemental, that's coming from our WIN Act. All right, moving forward to the Central Valley Science Enterprise. So if you add up all the letters on the side, you'll see that it comes out to party with the I and not a Y, but close enough for government work. And so these are the what we call our party principles. It's all about trying to get folks engaged, having that meaningful learning opportunities and working together through that collaborative process to try to adapt and move forward. And so the panel plays a key role in these principles. You guys are going to support the participation and innovation and our presentations are intended to help with relevancy. Our commitment to at least two panels intends to help with accountability and better tools support more innovation. So this is something that is relatively new to us in framing it out as party principles, but it's pretty consistent with I think how mostly folks manage any complex issue. And so we're looking forward to kind of moving through these issues and this kind of party aspect. Okay, so you can tell it's serious when you don't have any pictures to distract you. So this is how we think about it. We want to be organized and how we evaluate effects to species. We have gear reviewed conceptual models that identify stressors. We've tried to be systematic about evaluating our operation against each potential stressor. And so that's where we're really focused on those life cycle models and the stressors and trying to understand it. The next piece we get to is metrics. So in our view we get what we can measure. So metrics help us evaluate and communicate. They help us make predictions and they help us understand our ability to validate our tools. Next we go to knowledge based papers. So this is something we worked with the agencies as part of the LTO process and this is how we get to the range of what we think we might know. We think of knowledge based papers as foundational. If we don't look at what we already know we're doomed to repeat the same mistakes that we've done before. So we have a lot of folks with detailed knowledge on specifics. Sorry, we have a lot of folks with detailed knowledge on specific but generally our ability to share this information probably hasn't been as strong. We categorize by literature, datasets and models but this is primarily to help folks understand what knowledge based means. Again cleaning this up a little bit. So we just really think that there's a lot of individual knowledge. There's a lot of new knowledge that's coming out. There's a lot of innovation that is coming out. There's a lot of paths that we need to appreciate. All the items Ted brought up that we need to have as a foundation to move forward from and all that needs to be readily shared, readily understood and have those kind of conversations which hasn't always necessarily happened. So knowledge changes over time. We apply a filter to knowledge based for what we think is most contemporaneous however different people have different perspectives and this has a lot of value. Analyzing something in more than one way builds confidence and potential outcomes. Conceptual models help with communication. Mechanistic proposals support innovation. And then last we apply these tools to alternatives to help understand potential benefits and trade-offs. When we implement something we test how well we match the predicted outcomes and which tools work better in different situations. So again this is kind of our framework here as we think about how do we get into those repeatability, predictability and making sure we're not just getting to the answer that we necessarily want but using multiple lines of evidence to understand that. Okay so now diving into the three charge questions. So this is to show that there is a lot going in the Delta. Dave wanted me to go over each one of these. I think in the morning I think they proved their point that there's a lot going under the Delta. So I won't get farther into that but you can see here on the left the various ways that we're thinking about in training and ecosystem habitat and the other metrics and stressors that are influencing the decisions that we're trying to make. Okay here we go. So Old and Middle River reverse flow management. So our first specific operation to ask for help on is the Old and Middle River reverse flow management. This has been a focus of the agencies for over a decade and a half. We think we have a lot of tools and we'd like to get help on how we pull them together. Our strategy has been to get some on as past Chips Island and keep them out of the interior Delta and away from the pumps. For fish coming down the Sacramento River there are various ways that they can turn left and end up in poor survival conditions. This is true of the San Joaquin and so again looking at what are the ways that we can keep them out from that interior Delta past Chips Island. For Delta Smelt it's all about supporting adult migration into areas where their progeny are less susceptible to entrainment. We additionally limit the entrainment of larval smelt by keeping them out of the interior Delta while they're pregnant. Metrics. So what we're thinking here as for the metrics is recruitment for Delta Smelt. For Salmanas we're thinking about how many are actually passing through Delta and how many are surviving. And then the other metrics that we've had and we've have a long historical data set for is detections and salvage. So these are our current metrics that we think about. As it relates to mechanisms so there's various lines of thinking here and hypothesis. The four that we thought about look forward to if y'all can come up with more or better ones is the first one is kind of mysterious. So if you don't you know fish just kind of do whatever they want in a mysterious way then you analyze based on a statistical relationship and manage based on export reduction. If you think fish are evenly mixed with flows then you would analyze volumetrically and manage exports proportionally inflow. If you think fish move in streamlines then we'd analyze based on particle tracking models and our zone of influence and manage based on hydrodynamic influence. And then if you think fish are moved by environmental cues then we'd analyze based on eco-ptm and manage based on survival. So what we do know is that it's probably some combination of all four. That's probably a different combination at the different time of the year that we're talking about and different hydrologic conditions too. So we're looking for the different perspectives and objectives. And we know the reality of what I just discussed is much more complicated than what I talked about. So maybe gearing up some questions that the group can think about. So and that we're thinking about is do our models incorporate survivorship bias where we only detect the ones that survive and that gives us a skewed picture of what's happening. Do we think a relationship between delta smelt and turbidity because those are the only fish that survive to be detected? And when will the salmon and then the interior delta that is headed for the pumps turn around and swim out the golden gate? So you don't necessarily need to focus on these questions. These are the questions we're thinking about. It could be terrible. And one thing that we always talk about is one way to get a good reaction is give a terrible response and then have people just weigh in on how wrong that is and give us all sorts of good advice on how it could be right. So if they're wrong, perfect. Love to hear them back. All right. The next charge is on the summer and fall delta smelt habitat. One of the challenges that we've been working through is we know smelt aren't having a great time getting over the summer becoming the next adults for the fall. We have pretty strong statistical tools on this. We're lighter on mechanisms. And one of the other challenges we have where I talked about we're doing delta smelt supplementation, we have a very small population at this point. So part of our ability to see that influence and see those changes and what may happen with the full population is going to be challenged by the fact that it's so small. On metrics, you can see we've talked about X2. Another metric that we look at is suitable habitat. And then that's kind of the key that's driving delta smelt survival at this point is supplementation. On mechanisms, connectivity is about fish being able to move from the confluence into Sassoon Bay. And overlapping habitat needs is about survival. So as I mentioned, with the additional complexity of temperature, we think this is probably an important driver. And generally, we have little control over this in the Delta. You're several hundred miles away from the Shasta at that point and the ability for that cold water to get that way. It's just not going to happen. Some questions that we have, although I may be stealing from Denise a little bit and I'll haul the great work she did on delta smelt. But how do we get past the Ali effect? There are likely competition and predation effects. There seems to be something going on with food and its availability. And are the X2 relationships still valid? The last charge question here, Upper Sacramento River Actions. Again, Levi did a great job talking about the various operations that we have there. So I'm going to skip over this, but you can see that there's an incredible amount of work that's going on there. Again, we're asking the panel for advice on the tools for flow and temperature management here. And then when we talk about Shasta, our operations and habitat are highly integrated. And the intervention is led by our Fish and Wildlife, NIMS, and CDFW partners. So going to Shasta temperature operations and the charge question. So the metrics we have are the age of rise survival. Let me back up one thing. So in the Delta, when we we've largely argued about science, I said for the last decade and a half, we've been focused on a lot of the science and the tools that have been developed. That's not necessarily been the same for the Upper Sacramento. The focus has largely been based on contract litigation. So we don't have as many tools necessarily as we focus on in the Delta. We do have stronger partnerships now. We have a lot of hope towards the science. But again, we think the tools are incomplete, and we're missing some of the physical processes. We also think we're missing some of the biological processes and have been doing our best to fill in the gaps with professional opinion. As Levi talked about earlier, so again, using the same graphic as his so the reservoir doesn't go down. But we're doing the blending to try to make as much as that cold water pool available as possible. The metrics again, going back to that, egg to fry is pretty straightforward. The other metric that we currently have is temperature dependent mortality. And it's a statistical construct that is helpful for scheduling operation of the TCD, but difficult for science. Since it can be, it can't necessarily be measured in the field, or we haven't got all the measurements that necessarily have are capable of doing in the field. When we get to mechanisms, we believe temperature is the most limiting factor. And no appreciable mortality occurs at temperatures of 53 and a half degrees or lower. Warmer temperatures work when dissolved oxygen is sufficient, and other conditions drive production. To achieve temperatures, we lower flows. And then at some point, other mechanisms to drive production. There's a really cool graphic that hopefully at a future presentation we'll be able to show China show that where we see temperature dependent mortality kind of prevailing, and then other factors. And so depending on what year you're looking at those other factors, in drier years, you can clearly see that temperature is the driver. But in other years, you can see that other factors becomes pretty significant. So hopefully we can show that in the future. And back to the questions we're thinking about for this area. How do we explain and incorporate the difference between laboratory and statistical critical temperatures? At what point does low flows impact matter more than cooler temperatures? The idea of you can have it really cool, but you don't have a lot of flow. So how was that trade off looking like now? And then how do we address the high mortality and non drought years? So next to the last slide. So our big ask here, because there's a lot of interest from a lot of folks in this. And our policy folks are always a little bit scared of a change in new things and things they don't have control on. So our big ask is, please don't scare the policy folks. They get they get very nervous. But so and don't worry about the proposed action and the alternatives that comes after the fundamentals. And when we have a solid range of tools to objectively compare between alternatives. Again, we're asking for that foundational input and what tools we should be investing in. We're looking ahead, learning off the past. The regulatory processes and standards are a different issue and unique to those agencies that we want the panel to help with their questions to. Our lessons learned on these types of panels is not to approach this as a one and done, but multiple panels that encourages accountability both ways. We have two panels scoped. Hopefully we get more as we go forward. And we're looking forward to learning how we can best work with you and how we can help this panel help us. And so last slide is our contact information. And maybe before we go to questions, I just want to thank Cindy Meyer, who helped orchestrate a lot of this until she abandoned us to the Water Authority. And then Kristy Ren picked up that flag and got all this moving forward. And then to Laura and the National Academy team to set all this up. This is an incredible amount of work. And so really appreciate everybody's time and energy to the commitment to do something, see something, and move forward. So really appreciate that. That's it. So we do have time for questions from the committee. And I'd also just like to emphasize that last point you made. I think that just requesting the National Academy is to come in. It shows transparency and the commitment to the federal defying best available science. So not an easy decision for an agency to make. And I think we all appreciate that. So looking around, let's start at this end, Jerry. I want to clarify for us a little confusion in my mind from what you said. Initially it sounded like you were de-emphasizing power and water for the Bureau. And then later on you said that the species was now on the same basis. So it sounds like there's sort of three co-equal objectives now. Right. Oh, I forgot to push the button. And then later to that, you sort of, I did some modeling through the Bureau at one point. And at that time it seemed to me that when they emphasized the water deliveries, which were very important, contractual, the power sorting went along with that for the most part, except sometimes there was some dependable capacity. And then you mentioned that now with renewable energy, it makes peaking much more critical. But Shasta, Folsom, Trinity, all have afterbays that I believe are enough more than sufficient capacity to smooth out the peaking of the large reservoirs with a big audience. We have a power operator that would love to have a discussion with you about that. Yeah, so that's one of the challenges that they're having now is with the solar power coming on during the day, they're looking at more of the peaking operations at night. And then they get into a lot of the complications that I don't fully appreciate that I've gotten in five minute briefings. But Levi and his crew have done a phenomenal job shifting in that thinking in the last couple of years of how to maximize the storage ability and the peak power transfers in a lot of the San Luis unit, where you have the ability to pump in the O'Neill and then back in the G&L at night. That's somewhat reversed because now we're trying to do it with the solar power during the and so a lot of that has been changing as we've been moving forward. Yeah, they'd love to have a conversation with. There's training reserve too. I'm getting ahead, not a yes. That's great. So we go to Patrick and then to the other end of the table. Great. Thank you. Thanks for the talk. Really appreciated it. I would just be curious to explore a little bit further your party principle stuff. I mean, really happy about that. The context is I work a lot in federal marine fisheries systems where there's a lot of controversy. And one of the things that we typically have not been good at is communication. And part of the communication thing is not a website. Let's say it's like dialogue. And I know that even with the best science, you can't get things done unless you have a good dialogue with all of those involved. And one of the reasons I raise that is I don't know that's part of our purview to talk about here, but it is a tool in a sense. So I'd be curious to hear more from you on that. Yeah. So there's been various existing forums. A lot of that communication historically has been through the interagency ecological program for kind of how to do the surveys and do a lot of monitoring. You had Cal FED start up and try to do a lot of that communication, broad communication that for the feds continues, but for the state has moved into the Delta Stewardship Program. And they've been doing a lot of communication. And I'll reach through the Delta through those efforts. For the reclamation, one of the requirements of the Winn Act was to have quarterly meetings. So we've been having quarterly meetings, largely focused on where we're at with the re-initiation and consultation been open to anybody who's interested in hearing us speak, whether that be the PWA or public water agencies or the non-governmental organizations or whoever else may have an interest. We've also, as part of the consultation, we're doing monthly interested parties meetings. We've been pretty broad allowing participation from, again, the same host of folks. CVPIA also has a science integration team, the SIT team that's been broadly had folks participate. And so I say all that to say that I can keep going. We've tried to map out all the various collaboration parties that are out there. It gets super complicated and super unwieldy very quickly. And I think, you know, as we have various conversations and think about, you know, there's probably not just one place to have these conversations. And as I'm thinking about, we have our CCAMP and CAMP process. But there are a lot of communication realms. And so how do we make sure that the information that folks are relying upon to make decisions, they're actually getting it, they're having the feedback and are getting that communication. And I'm probably not one period of time that that gets established, but a continual process where we continue to develop those collaborations. And it comes with a lot of trust. Folks have to be willing to trust that they're in the forums that are going to have those communications. And that's one of the reasons we have so many, because there might be specific interests that sneak up in each one of those periods. Great. And we're trying to squeeze in a couple more quick questions. David, I think you were next. Thanks, Mario. In your presentation, especially your slides at the end, we had a few questions that you had about each one, about things that you are interested in, one that you might be able to share with some of those questions. Sounds good. That's great. And Joe, you were next. Just a quick question. So the WinAct was supposed to be that you get extra funds to improve the water supply to the users. But there's a conception, I don't know, a misconception that funds are being used for projects, but not to increase the water supply to the user. Is that a misconception or is that they're kind of rerouting funds? Yeah, so I conveniently ignored that portion of the WinAct when it talks about new storage projects and extraordinary maintenance activities. So that was one of the outcomes of the WinAct to establish a fund to be able to do new storage projects for reclamation. For the Bay Delta office, that's not the portion that we focus on. We're mostly 4,004 and 4,010, which is really focused on the biological long-term operations of the Central Valley Project and the State Water Project and then funding specific to improving our monitoring and improving the science enterprise. I don't want to discount that side. We have a new Deputy Regional Director, Adam Nichols, who's amazing. He has all those facts, but that stays in that side of the house for us. Jay, one quick question for the session now. Yeah, thank you very much for the talk. I look forward to seeing those questions. You have a really nice slide on the monitoring and science expenditures. I'm just wondering how does this, because a lot of people, a lot of agencies have an interest in this. How does that coordinate? Is there an overall science plan for this system for cross-agency? Two questions there. Actually, as part of the Delta Stewardship Program through their DPEC process, we do an annual accounting of all the agencies in the Delta led by the Bay Delta office with the mandible. When it relates to finances, we've been coordinated on that aspect. We've been trying to use a science tracker tool to do a better job of communication and make sure folks can go access it online and see where it's at and actually see what activities are happening. The biggest coordination of the actual monitoring resources and folks going out in the field has been through the interagency ecological program to date. We're working with DWR Official Wildlife. I'm missing somebody and I'm going to CDFW. Let's go with that. Thank you, Brooke. I knew it was four. I'm just going to, and Brooke Jake is with CDFW to address the 2024 monitoring program as it relates to, but that's largely focused on just the Bay Delta. The rest of it, when we talk about Sacramento River, where we talk about Stanislaus and American River, it's a combination of reclamation or local interest. Great. Well, thank you for building those questions and for a great presentation. Thank you. And the next session this afternoon is looking at the regulatory framework in which the Central Valley Project and the State Water Project have to operate. And we're delighted to have Bergen Borg with us from UC Davis. He's a professor of law and his publications run the full spectrum of the definitive text on the history and application of California minimum mainstream flow to hatchery and genetic management plan for the reintroduction of spring run Chinook Salmon in the San Joaquin River. He works on legal and ethical issues in ecological restoration, including local governance issues in ecosystem management. And currently his work is focusing on Western Water Law. So Professor Borg, great to have you here with us this afternoon. Thank you so much. Pleasure to be here. Thank you. Thank you for that introduction. I should say it's Burke like Borg, not Borg like Dork. Just what my mom taught me really early on. I found that helpful. My students seem lovely. Thank you. Yeah, so we're going to talk a little bit about the law of the Delta today. This is my, it is not. There we go. Awesome. Thank you so much. Really appreciate the help with us. So we'll talk about the law of the Delta today. And this is a tremendously complex area of law. It covers a huge portion of the state, has a really long history of water law and water rights and permits and environmental law that kind of layers over itself again and again through history. No rational person would put together a system like this. It's kind of an accident of time and the way we just did it for a very long time. And so we end up with really kind of a mess of law that we're doing our best. On a good day, I look at this and I see a whole lot of levers we can pull. And that's pretty exciting. On a bad day, I think how can we ever change anything in this system without changing everything else? So I think we should lean into that good day approach and see a lot of levers here that we can look at. So we'll start by going through water rights 101. I'll probably move fairly quickly through that, but feel free to ask questions as we go. And then we'll move into some restrictions on water use. So both state and federal law that affect how much of those water rights can be exercised. We'll talk a little bit about reclamation, the CVP, although a lot of that's been covered now by Mario and by Levi and some of those folks. So we won't spend too much time there. And then we'll finish up by trying to integrate this and talking about some of the water rights in the Delta and some of the ongoing disputes. This is an introduction, right? This is your introductory panel. So I'm trying to keep this at a fairly high level so that when you see these regulatory documents or you hear about different fights that are going on in the Delta, you'll understand the statutory background for those pieces, but I'm not going to be diving into particular water rights really deeply or particular lawsuits that are going on. There's a lot more to look at there. And I just say, as Dave, when you get curious about those or need more input on those. Okay, so we'll start with the water rights part of this. Water rights law is generally thought of as state law. State law is where we go to define property rights most of the time. And that's where we create water rights. And so different states have very different approaches to water rights. What we have in California is pretty unique and it's not something you're going to find in any other state in the country. Parts of what other states use you will see here. But it's kind of our own unique blend, as I said, based on our history. This is maybe a relatively full list of the kinds of water rights that we have in the state. The ones that are most important for us are those first five. So riparian rights, appropriate of rights, contractual water entitlements, which are not water rights. I want to be clear, that's a contract entitlement to use water. The underlying right is held by whoever's supplying the water. And that's seen a little bit differently in some states, depending on where you look and which court decision you look at. Area of origin protection and groundwater rights. I'm not going to go in depth into Sigma. There's a lot of stuff we just can't squeeze into our 45 minutes to an hour here. So we're not going to talk about Sigma very much. We're not going to talk about flood management. We're not going to talk about our fisheries conservation acts. All of that stuff we're going to kind of leave to the side for now, because there's just not enough space to squeeze it in. I do want to flag the groundwater piece, because even though we're not talking about it, it really has significant impacts on flow through the Delta. The estimates I've seen say that we're short about 900,000 acre feet of water in the Sacramento River on average due to groundwater extraction upstream. And the other piece of this that's the significant about groundwater rights that they've historically been the steam release valve for California water. So when there's fights over California water, when water deliveries from these big projects drop down because of drought, people pump more water out of the ground. With Sigma, that steam pressure release valve is going to go away. And so the fights that we've seen over water have moved from who should I sue or what should I do to find the cheapest source of water more towards an existential fight to survive. That's what we're talking about following in the Central Valley. And so that changes the calculus for a lot of folks who are involved. It's why I tell so many of my students they should go into water law. This is not going away. And I think the fights that we'll see in the next 50 years are going to be a lot worse than what we've seen in the last 50, which is sad and terrifying. I think that's on the morass side of the lovers versus morass equation. So I want to start with repairing on water rights. If you're coming from the east, this is the kind of water right you see in your state. These come from English common law. And this is the kind of maybe common law historic approach folks took to water. And this is a water right that comes from your land use. So if you own land that is riparian, you have a riparian right, and it's a right to use the water that abuts your land or flows by your land. And it's not gained by use. It's not lost by not using it. If I have riparian land and I've never used water, I can decide tomorrow to start using that water. And I have the right to go ahead and do that. So that's that that riparian right. This is not permitted by the State Water Resources Control Board. Riparian users are supposed to submit a statement of diversion and use prior to about 2015. Very few of them did that law change in 2015. Reporting has been much better since then. If you talk to the folks who are well depends who you talk to some of the folks in the Delta say we're getting pretty good close to 90% reporting in the Delta now. There's some issues around that accuracy is pretty good. Again, depending on who you talk to, some of those folks hold multiple kinds of rights and we'll talk about that a little bit and they report use under both their riparian right and other rights, which makes it harder to figure out how much water total they're taking out of the system. But that's kind of the main historically the main regulatory hook for these riparian rights is that reporting requirement. And the amount of these rights is not set, right? It's tied to what you can reasonably use on your land. And you have to share that use with other riparians on the system. It's kind of a apply that's divided up into slices in a good year. There's bigger slices for everybody in a bad year, those slices shrink. And so there's no set amount of water that you're given or that you hold under that right. Okay, any questions on our riparian rights here? So these came into California when our legislature imported English common law in 1815. So there's a lot of limitations on these kinds of rights. There's land limits, you have to own the land in order to have riparian rights. So the miners who are out in California mining gold didn't have riparian rights because they were generally mining on public land. The water has to be used on riparian lands. And it has to be used in a place where it will drain back to the place you took that water from. So you can't use it outside of your watershed. That means you can't transport this water long distances under a riparian right. These rights are generally not transferable. There's some kind of tricky stuff you can do to kind of make it like you transfer the right. LA did that with some of the riparian rights around Montalake in order to enable their transfer of water from Montalake down to LA. You also can't store water under these rights for more than 30 days. So you've got a 30 day storage limitation on riparian rights. And then one piece that's going to be key as you're thinking about the Delta is that these rights are limited to the natural flow of the river. So riparian right holders don't have a right to imported water. So the water that comes from the Trinity River through a whiskey town reservoir into the Sacramento River and then flows down to the Delta, that water is imported water and that's not water that riparians can use. Riparians also can't use water that's stored upstream and then released during a different time of year or that's used by upstream people and then released back into the system. So those right those waters are not susceptible to use by riparians. The way we define this generally is that riparians can use the unimpaired flow which is what we would have if there was no storage projects, no diversion projects upstream. I think one of the big questions for the future is what happens with climate change when our natural flow regimes are shifting. So what that means for riparians who are using water in the Delta, if we have much lower flows during the summer and longer periods of low flow into the fall and earlier kind of termination of your spring high flow of snowmelt flows, that's going to mean there's less water available for the riparians in the Delta to use and that's something that people tend to do on their own, right? Folks don't, in places the states that are already dealing with this issue, the research suggests that people kind of overlook the change in the natural flow that's resulting from climate change unless they're forced to confront it. So riparians shift their water use, capture the water that's in the system, even if technically they don't have a riparian right to that water anymore because it's not actually a natural flow of the river. Okay, we're going to shift over to appropriative rights. Any questions on the riparian? I guess I should take questions at the end, but I'll just stop now. Any questions on riparian rights before we move forward? Yeah, Renee. Could we let riparian users know when and how much they can take? Yeah, that's, I'm going to save that one, this is all I do at the end. I'll save that until after we go through some of the limitations. And part of it, like for the natural flow pieces, is it may be lawsuits and that's the only way to convince people to stop. I suspect that's where we'll start at least. Okay, great. Yeah, good question. And I should tell you that I'm trying to give you my unbiased take on these issues, but literally every single piece of this has been litigated and many of them are under ongoing litigation. So when I give you what I think is my best interpretation of the law, there are other people who would argue very strongly that there's a different take that's equally valid, but I'm trying to pull from our decisions and give you that view that I think is right and will stand up, I guess, which is what any attorney would do. One hopes, yeah. What's the idea of helping the excuses? So there's some statistics like statewide about how much this is. The PPIC has some estimates. What I can tell you is that I'm going to go back to the end delta use part of it that we've talked about. The estimates I've seen now say that there's about 3,000 diversions, which is 1,000 more than we heard earlier. So about 3,000 diversions total in the delta. A lot of those are riparian rights because if you have land that butts up against water and you're putting water on that land, courts generally treat that as a riparian right. Some of those are older, appropriate of rights. Some of those are newer, appropriate of rights. And that's just the end delta use portion of it. The numbers on how much use that is, there's real-time monitoring now from the increased effort since 2015. And that's the estimates we heard earlier about total water use. And I think it varies quite a bit. So I think 4,000 cubic feet per second at the high point. I've heard up to 2 million acre feet from some South of Delta people. I've heard a million acre feet from people who are using water in the delta. So the estimates vary pretty widely on that. We should be getting better data in the next couple of years. Yeah. When you say the water is not transferable, does this include virtual water as well? What do you mean? Invented in agricultural products. You can always sell your agricultural products. Yeah, you can sell your rice that you've grown with riparian water rights wherever. That's fine. It's the actual physical water itself that we're not, we don't allow transfers generally. Okay. So, yeah. Riparian rights went out of our appropriate of rights. Good question. Okay. So this is the other kind of water rights. We talked about all those limits on riparian rights. You can't store it. You can't transfer it. You have to use it on riparian property. So we said that's a terrible fit for the miners who are using huge amounts of water and we're fighting over water really early in California's history because they weren't on land they owned. They needed to store water to build up that big head of pressure to blast it through your water cannon to get the gold out of the hillsides. And they were moving and transferring water all over the place. So they came up with a new approach, these appropriate of water rights, which is not a right that's based on land ownership. It's based on use of the water. By appropriating the water, you create a right for yourself. And this really mimics a lot of the white, the mining logs. You get there first, you start using it first, you get the right to use it. Somebody else comes in and tries to take it from you because you were there first, you have that water right. So first in time, first in right, kind of that famous maximum of Western water law. So pre-1914 to get this right, you just had to start using it. You didn't need permission from anybody. You didn't need to get a permit. You could provide notice. There were some statutory things in the 1870s that provided a way to get notice and kind of get an earlier priority date, a date that you could claim. You started using this water, but there's no requirement for permitting pre-1914. After 1914, that was when the kind of predecessor of the State Water Resources Control Board was created. And after that 1914 law, you have to apply for a water right permit, and then you get a license. And that's how you would get an appropriate of right. The early view on that process of the state authority was ministerial, meaning the state didn't have a lot of discussion. If there was water in the system that you could take and use, they had to grant the water right. And that was it. And that's changed. You kind of pigged up that mark at different points. I think it's easiest to say it's about 1983, which is when public trust really became a big thing in California. And it's clear that the water board since that time, and probably since about a decade before that, had a very different role that wasn't ministerial. They're really weighing different competing uses, considering the public interest when they were granting those rights. And these water rights, these appropriate of water rights pre-1914 as to what you were using when you started using that water. If you increased the amount you were using later, that would give you a different right to that increased amount. So you cannot just increase your use the way you could with a riparian right. It's tied to what you originally used. Post 1914, you're granted the right that's in your permit that you pull from the water board. So the water board tells you what you're entitled to. Just because it says on your permit, how much you have doesn't mean you're going to get that amount every year. It's subject to other water users on the system. It's subject to appropriators who are more senior than you are. So you might have a water right that you only get to use one year and every four years, or one year is in every five years, or a flood waters water right that you only use once every 20 years. So these water rights were granted, but there wasn't always water in the system to support those rights. That 1914 act also tried to get rid of unexercised riparian rights, kind of transform California into an appropriate of right only system. And that effort failed. The California Supreme Court struck that down. So after 1914, we continue to have these riparian rights, which part of your question earlier went out over appropriate of rights. And we have these permitted appropriate of rights from the post 1914, and these unpermitted appropriate of rights from pre 1914, the pre 1914 era. If that sounds like a mess already, it is. If you're using your rights and you've had water in the system for a long time, and now your neighbor decides, I think I'm actually going to use my riparian right that's going to change the amount of water available in the system to everyone else. It's going to change what other appearance can use. It's going to change what appropriators downstream can use. So it ends up building a very litigious and kind of conflict laden system to allocate these water rights. Again, not a system you design, but the system that we ended up with. I think California and Oklahoma are the only two places that still have both riparian and appropriate of Dave's nodding. So that's a good sign. They still have these appropriate of and riparian rights. The strength of these rights though, is that you don't need to have land ownership. You are allowed to store these rights over the longer term. They can be used outside of the watershed. Their quantities are more known, still subject to what riparians are doing and what happens with the hydrology in a given year. And transfers are allowed, although you have to get the board's permission to transfer that water right. And generally you're subject to a no injury rule. So you have to show that you're not injuring other water users in your watershed by transferring that water out. So if you have a water right to 10 CFS from the stream, you're probably not going to be able to sell all 10 CFS or transfer all 10 CFS because you're only using some, you're only consuming a small portion of that right. And so you'd be limited transferring out what you're actually consuming, not what goes back to the stream after you use that water right. And then our limitations on these appropriate of rights. They lose out to riparian rights in times of shortage. Your right is tied to a place, a time and a purpose of use. So there's a season to these. It may be that you can start using on April 1st and you have to finish at the end of September. That's tied into the right. And the purpose of use is established by the right. Some of these things can be changed easily. Some really can't. The time of use or season of use is actually really difficult to change, which is another big kind of climate change problem that we'll see for some of these rights. Also, you can lose these rights for non-use. If you don't use a water right for five years, you lose that right. Historically, that's just been it. You lose it if you haven't used it for five years. Now there seems to be a requirement that some courts in California have added saying that someone else has to be trying to use that right. The water board is trying to work around that by saying the public is always trying to use the right. Not clear where the law is going to go there. This is a pretty rare thing to see these water rights forfeited, but it did happen on the Kern River within the last decade or so, which was a pretty big development. Okay, we're going to move then from appropriate rights into these contract rights. I'm not sure there's anything new to add here that you haven't already seen. The contracts for the state water project rights were established in the 60s. Recently amended, there's a lawsuit that upheld the, I said everything is getting sued over. I don't need to say it every time, but this one just got decided within the last month or so. The newest contracts re-upped those contracts to 2085. As you can see at the bottom, these numbers here are how much of the contract allocation folks are getting every year. They have a contract right to this water that the state water project is producing, but the amount of water that they get under that contract varies really remarkably every year, and the current estimate for 2024 is about 10% of their water right, or their contract right. Yeah, right. So contracts aren't rights. Sorry, I misstated it. So these are not rights, but these are entitlements to water that they have from these projects, and they do sue over them all the time. Some other states treat them as something more similar to a right, but for our purposes, thank you. I appreciate the correction. Okay, so this is between the CVP and the state water project showing the agricultural deliveries dating back to 1975, and you again can see the huge variation in how much they deliver every year for a whole bunch of different reasons. Part of that is climate, and part of that is all the other limitations on water rights that we'll talk about. So these are the Central Valley project contractors, and I think we've heard earlier 7 million acre feet on average. There's different categories of these contractors that's probably significant for you all. There's some folks who are just contracting for water delivery, just like anybody else would, but there are also contractors who have rights because they gave up rights to provide rights to the Central Valley project. So the federal government was coming in getting this water right to the water, and folks had water downstream or were a perian downstream and could have objected to the project or did and filed lawsuits, and ultimately many of those were settled. And so we have the Sacramento River settlement contractors who gave up their water rights and got in exchange these contracts in the San Joaquin River exchange contractors who did the same thing on the San Joaquin side. And if we look at, this is a lot of little numbers, but if we look at the water allocations by year on the percentile basis, even in the bad years, our exchange contractors and settlement contractors have pretty strong claims, pretty strong contract claims to this water. So they tend to get that water even in bad periods when other people are cut off almost entirely. And that's because of that historical decision they made to give up their water rights in support of these big projects. Last water rights piece I want to lay in is this area of origin protection, which is a kind of big mess of laws that try and establish protection for the areas that water is coming from for big federal projects. So if you're living in an area that's going to have a dam downstream or going to have a dam upstream, you're really worried about whether you're going to have water after this big federal or big state project goes in. And these were efforts to reassure those folks. So they give some priority and some protection for say a city downstream of a big federal water project that that city can go in and claim water later. And this has happened a couple times. So we have a couple decisions on this. There's a really good letter from a former professor, Jenny Cahill, kind of addressing this. And Laura, I'll send that to you if you want to share it with folks. The one that's most relevant for us is the Delta Protection Act, which protects folks in the Delta who are using water and that limits water available for export under state water project and Central Valley project to protect in Delta use and to reduce salinity to make that water usable in the Delta. Courts have reviewed these area of origin protections and the Delta Protection Act in particular and have said that the water board has a lot of discretion in how it administers this and the courts are not going to be second guessing those decisions about how much in Delta use to protect and what those salinity levels need to be. So this gives the board a lot of power, but doesn't give people power to kind of hold the board's feet to the fire, at least in my view. So for thinking about the water rights in the Delta for the state water project and the Central Valley project, there's about 34 of those rights that are appropriate of rights that are granted to those projects starting in the 20s probably and running through the 70s that give them the right to store that water, divert that water and then sell that water under those contracts we've talked about. Okay, so that's our Water Rights 101 piece, kind of how we establish water rights. Folks, good so far? Okay, cool. Okay, good. I'll try and leave some time at the end and if not, we'll follow up and do it. So now we're going to look at restrictions on water use. So these are state laws, state doctrines and federal laws that keep people from being able to use their full water right. So we'll start with the California Constitution and the reasonable use doctrine that's in our Constitution. We'll talk about the public trust doctrine. We'll talk a little bit about state statutory law and then we'll bring in federal law. So starting with our constitutional limitation here, we have this embedded in the Constitution, Article 10, Section 2, like most of Western states, we put water in our Constitution because it's just that important to us. So the part we want to focus on here is the bolded right, which is this right does not and shall not extend to the waste or unreasonable use or unreasonable method of use or unreasonable method of diversion of water. This restriction on unreasonable use is something you see in every state throughout the West. So we see it phrased in different ways, but every state has this kind of unreasonableness element to its water rights and this applies to all kinds of water rights. It applies to riparian rights. It applies to those pre-1914 rights and applies to rights granted by the Water Board after 1914. The legislature can enact laws to put this into effect. The Water Board is also empowered to write regulations, take actions to enforce this and courts have concurrent jurisdiction to enforce this on their own, which means you can go to court and allege that there's an unreasonable use of water that should be addressed. So what is unreasonable? Lawyers have spent a lot of time and earned a lot of money trying to parse this out. We know that it changes over time. So what was once reasonable may no longer be reasonable because there's so many more people using water or because our priorities as a state have changed. So this first line is from the Tulare irrigation district. What's a beneficial use at one time may because of changed conditions become a waste of use later on. This needs to be thought about. This is a quote from another case. I think it's the forney decision. You have to think about it based on statewide considerations of transcendent importance, which is great language but doesn't give you a lot of guidance. It means you have to think about this water use in the context of what the state as a whole is facing. The Gophers in here because that first case Tulare irrigation district established that drowning Gophers with the full flow of a river is not a reasonable use of water. I feel obligated to mention that. So we go from that to how much water on an ag field is reasonable and it's not clear how much the board is willing to engage in that part of the debate. The board uses this power a lot but it tends to be hard for litigants to force the board to do things using this unreasonable element. Okay. I'll move then into the public trust doctrine. The public trust doctrine is a kind of weird area of law. Something folks have often heard about. This is an ancient doctrine going back depending on which historian you ask to about the Magna Carta. It requires the government to hold certain natural resources in trust for the benefit of us, the benefit of the public. In California it covers tidelands, navigable lakes and streams, non-navigable lakes and streams and ground waters as needed to protect the navigable lakes and streams. So isolated groundwater not covered, groundwater that affects your navigable lakes and streams definitely covered in those cases. And it protects commerce, protects navigation, fisheries, recreational, ecological values in California. It's as I said very amorphous. And this emerged from a lawsuit Marks v. Whitney and then kind of culminated in California Supreme Court decision, the National Audubon or Mono Lake decision that many folks have probably heard about in 1983. And the Supreme Court was weighing like what do we do with these water rights that we've built the whole like state around and this public trust doctrine that says we need to protect the environment. And they said, well, the state has to have the power to grant water rights, like we have to build a grant water rights that people can use even if it negatively impacts the public trust. And that's our first quote up there. But then they said, before anybody approves of these things though, we should make sure that we're protecting these public trust interests so far as feasible to avoid an attempt so far as feasible to avoid or minimize any harm to those interests. So that's our standard so far as feasible, which is not a whole lot easier to understand than unreasonable mess. So definitely ambiguous, but it's clear that decisions made that don't consider the public trust are decisions that are open to attack in court and to reconsideration by the water board. And like reasonableness, the protections and the scope of the public trust change over time. And so they can change previous water allocations. You can kind of think about maybe to try and pin this down a little bit the way that water rights and public trust work with each other. It can be an independent source of authority for the state for state agencies for the legislature to accomplish stuff. One of the places we see that is the state regulating those pre-1914 water rights that it didn't originally permit. And the state has been able to regulate those rights using both reasonableness and the public trust doctrine. And the state's been able to regulate riparian rights using the public trust doctrine. So the public trust doctrine can clearly serve as an independent source of authority for the state to do things in a regulatory setting. It can also be an independent limit on what the state or what other people can do with water. And this is the basis for people suing the state on these public trust litigations that we see. So this is kind of what happened in National Audubon. It's hard to win these when you go to court and say the public trust says the state has to do some particular thing. Because the state has to do this as far as feasible, has to consider the public trust. So people coming in and trying to force the state to do something, that can be really hard to do. Saying the state never considered the public trust, those cases tend to be much easier if people tend to win those lawsuits. And so the state now considers the public trust in all kinds of situations where pre-1983 they didn't. Sometimes there is a hard limit on this. So we'll talk about a section of fishing game code later on, 5937. And that's been interpreted to be a legislative expression of the public trust. And when the legislature says the public trust requires something, then the public can use that public trust standing, that ability to sue the state or sue water users to force compliance with that legislative expression of the public trust. Yeah. Question. What is the function of youth of ruptury in that context? What is the inclusion of that word? I was so hopeful I would get through this whole presentation without saying you should use a ruptuary or however you want to say it. So this says that it's a right to use, not a right to own the corpus of the water. And I don't know, the more I drill down into what a user ruptuary right is, the less clear it is to me what it means. And in the end, I think saying the state has the ability to regulate these rights through these powers that it has over the rights is probably the more important part. And it's less important to me at least to figure out what work use a ruptuary does it does there, aside from taking up like a whole class of intro water law. So yeah. And Dave, if you want to clear that up for me, that would be. No, I think it means whatever you want it to mean, but it won't mean that to anybody else. Much like public trust, then that's yeah. And then the third piece of this, to the public trust and the unreasonable use doctrine do is to give the state protection against takings claims. And we'll talk about that here in a little bit. So I'm going to push that off for now. Okay, so moving away from unreasonable use and from the public trust into state laws, statutory laws in California, there's actually a lot of law in the books about what the water board is supposed to do when it's issuing water rights, the interest that it's supposed to consider. These laws are kind of a representative representative sample of those. These laws are on the books since the 40s or the 50s. But if you go back and look literally every decade since my research says like 1850, 1860, the legislatures try to take action to balance water and other interests, particularly environmental interests. They didn't call it environmental interests in the 60s and 70s, but there were fish passage laws in the books in the 1860s and 70s to be clear. So this is something that's been a priority for the state for a long time. Most of these laws were not enforced and not really considered by the water board when issuing these rights until the advent of the modern environmental era starting in the 70s to the early 80s like we were talking about earlier. So when the water board saw itself as a ministerial agency that was required to issue water rights, if there's water in the stream, again and again, the kind of predecessor CDFW went in front of the board and said, Hey, you got to leave water in the system. We're stocking fish here. Don't take the water out in the water board. So there's water. We don't have the power to not take that water out. So that's in water right decisions from the 1930s, 1940s. So there's a lot of these laws around permitting, but most of the older permits don't really do more than kind of a brief head nod towards paying attention to this very different starting in the 70s and 80s and entirely kind of different water board in a different way of approaching this different kinds of water rights that resulted from that approach. And now most of our newer water rights and some of those older rights, a lot of the water rights that are held by the, for the Central Valley project and the state water project have terms in them or conditions that keep those water rights open so that those water rights can be directly adjusted without having to rely on just reasonable use or the public trust to change the amount of water based on originally with salinity there are most concerned about, but also environmental concerns. There's a host. This is kind of my my litany here of other requirements, other state laws. Some of these are broader. So something like 1602, which is about stream bed modification can also address address diversions. Some people have filed lawsuits around 1602 in order to try and restore in stream flows. This is the one I promised to talk about earlier 5937. This is one that the legislature passed in 1914. So it's a really old law and it went unenforced until I guess late 80s is when we really saw it start to be enforced and it became it began to be enforced when environmental groups started suing using this statute and the water board said, you know what that statute looks like a legislative expression of the public trust. So you all the public have the power to sue to enforce the public trust, which means you also have the power to sue to enforce 5937. I mentioned in this context, both because I wrote about it and I really like it. But more importantly, this is what restored the or is in the process of restoring the spring run Chinook salmon to the San Joaquin River and forced re-operation of Bryant Nam. So that's a big change that river was dry over 60 miles for 50, 60, almost 70 still dry, right? Sometimes depending on on what the levees and releases are doing. But this lawsuit forced rewatering of that river. Currently it's being used on a number of other rivers in the state to try and get water below those. And for a lot of these things and a lot of these these kind of older state laws, there's dams everywhere that don't comply with them and have never complied with them, but probably could be forced to comply with them. So as I said, there's a lot of levers that that can be pulled. And I think it's one of the things that would make it so hard to operate these projects is you have a lot of legal liability hanging out there. And you can make a whole bunch of people really happy. And if you still have a couple of people who are angry with you, they can find a lever to pull that's going to upset the apple cart. I think I've mixed like three metaphors there. But there's easy ways to throw things off in pretty significant ways. So there's the California Endangered Species Act, which historically was not a really big part of kind of the what was going on in the Delta. Generally in the past, folks who were working with that and who needed permits, for example, for these projects under the California Endangered Species Act, got around that by mostly by complying with the Federal Endangered Species Act, and then getting a statement saying that their compliance with the Federal Endangered Species Act met the requirements of the State Endangered Species Act. That fell apart recently. And we'll talk about that when we get there. There's also CEQA, which is the state version of NEPA. And then I'll go into some of these others in a little more detail. So we have the, it's a little bit out of order, sorry. So we have the 1969 Porter Cologne Water Quality Control Act, which at this point is mostly how the state is implementing the Clean Water Act, the Federal Clean Water Act. The act requires the language here, the board to obtain the highest water quality, which is reasonable. Again, that word considering the total values involved, beneficial and detrimental, economic and social, tangible and intangible. And the way these plans are created is that the state goes out and looks at a piece of water and it can be a stretch of a river. It could be a single lake. It could be an entire river. It could be the whole Bay Delta thing itself. And then the state establishes beneficial uses for that area. This is what the state thinks that this waterway should support. And there are certain federal minimums that it has to support, right? In fishable and swimmable, we're kind of the minimums that the federal government wanted states to establish. But she established these uses. The state gets to pick those uses. And then after the state picks those uses, the state develops water quality objectives. And those water quality objectives are what you would think of as the standards. It might be a temperature the water has to be. It might be a level of dissolved oxygen. The water has to be a nutrient level. And that water quality objective is based on the beneficial use that you're trying to support. So you have a use, you have an objective, which is like a standard that's going to support that use. And then the state writes a program implementation, which is how the state is going to get those objectives achieved in order to support the beneficial uses. Does that make sense to folks? Cool. So one example that we've kind of been playing around a little bit is the water rights order 95. And so this came out in 1990. And this is one of the regulatory pieces that addresses water temperatures below Shasta. So in that section of the Sacramento River, where our winter run Chinook are trying to spawn, the state designated for that waterway beneficial uses of cold freshwater habitat, cold migration of aquatic organisms, spawning reproduction and or early development, both of those on the cold water side things, not the warm water side of things. And then based on those beneficial developments, the state developed these water quality objectives, these location based temperature requirements that they needed the river to hit in order for it to be good cold freshwater habitat, in order for it to support migration of aquatic organisms that need cold water. And then use this water rights order to enforce that. And that is where we get the temperature control device, the downstream temperature controls that's been supplemented since then by our biops under the Federal Endangered Species Act. But this is the core piece. And it's still, if you look up like the reporting and what's going on, this is what they're reporting to is this 90-5 order from the board. So the water board implements this Porter Cologne Act. This is the same water board that does water quantity that does the water rights permitting. So California is fairly unique in that we give one board the power to do both water rights and water quality. And that's, I think, at least in part, because they're so intimately tied to each other in a state like this, where we struggle with drought for six months out of the year and years at a time. And then the last one I wanted to mention is its Delta Reform Act 2009, which establishes our Delta Stewardship Council. And there's a couple of different things that this Delta Reform Act did, provides for coordination and prioritization of funding across the Delta for money coming in from a lot of different plots. They lobby the state, and I don't know if that's the term they use, but they talk to the state and educate state legislature and federal folks about where money might be most useful. They also have a significant regulatory role. So for state and local public agency actions, you have to certify, if I'm a county that has land in the Delta, I have to certify that whatever I'm doing on that land, my land use plan, my other actions, are consistent with the Delta Stewardship Council has established in their Delta plan. And then people can say, no, you're wrong. And then they can appeal that to the Delta Stewardship Council, which then gets to decide if that's consistent or not. And if it's not consistent, they actually have the regulatory power to block it. So you've got the Water Board overseeing a lot of things, and also the Delta Stewardship Council overseeing a lot of things in the Delta. And you'll have this afternoon, the Executive Director is going to be here talking to you all a little bit. So if you have questions about this, I'd refer to her because she's definitely the expert. Okay, any questions so far? Yeah, Renee. How does water, actually doesn't fill with the refrigeration filter, how does water will use in response to the United States and the Delta Stewardship Council? So 5937 says the owners of dams have to keep fish downstream in good condition. And so that's a legislative expression of the public. I don't think that there's a clear answer to this question yet. But if you're releasing water under 5937, and that's in support of these public trust uses, those public trust rights can went out over the riparian rights, so riparians can't just pull that water you're releasing out. But it's complicated. So I'm sure if you ask a riparian right holder, they'd have a different view and you'd get some litigation there. Okay, so that takes us through our state level pieces. So we've talked about public trust and reasonable use as kind of an overarching principle and a background element that's kind of floating there. We've talked about the permitting requirements for new rights. We've talked about the way that the board can regulate those existing rights using public trust, unreasonable use, and those water quality requirements. And then we've talked about the special laws that apply. In some cases, California Wild and Scenic Rivers Act says there's certain rivers that are wild and scenic and we're going to protect them from new developments, from big diversion, from loss of certain special characteristics, again, I thought I was going to skip this and I thought no, the McLeod, the Shasta Dam raise, this can't really be skipped. All of these things tie in because of the scope of the projects that that drain to the Delta. So this is what stopped the Shasta Dam raise because it would impact the McLeod River, reduce its free flowing character, which is a wild and scenic river protected under the California Wild and Scenic Rivers Act. Okay, so let's move then into federal law here. And again, I'm just hitting the highlights. So water laws, I said, is generally state law, but there are federal laws that will, when they conflict with state laws, will preempt state law. And so we're going to talk a little bit about these federal laws. The Endangered Species Act is the biggest one, kind of the big piece in the Delta. And it's going to affect use of waters that have listed species in them. We have NEPA, we have the FERC for Non-Federal Hydropower, and we also have Tribal Fishing Rights. Again, I thought I'll just skip Tribal Fishing Rights. Those are really important, but they're not at play in the Delta, but they're at play on the Trinity River. And we have Trinity River that comes through Whiskey Town again into the Delta Project. So these are still relevant when you're thinking about that piece of it. Okay, so let's jump into our Endangered Species Act protections. Folks generally familiar with Endangered Species Act, worked with it a bit, yeah. So, okay, cool. So section three, we'll do this pretty quickly then. Section three provides definitions. Maybe the biggest one to think about for us is when it says the Endangered Species Act, it doesn't mean species. It means species, subspecies, and distinct population segments, which is why we're able to list all of our salmon populations in different populations. Why we have the winter run listed and the fall runs not listed, right? We have our Central Valley steelhead listed, other steelhead aren't listed. So you're listing something below the species level because you're trying to protect the intra species variation that's essential to protecting the species as a whole. Section four governs the listing decisions and there's all kinds of regulatory deadlines for how those decisions happen, critical habitat designations, and recovery plans. I should point out recovery plans, you're supposed to develop them, but they're not legally binding under our current interpretations. So you spend all this time developing those, but you don't actually have to comply with those recovery plans. So if you've worked on those in the past, that's a piece that often isn't stressed, but they're not a binding document. And for us, it's important to note there are two different agencies that oversee listing and oversee management. So we have Nymphs for our National Marine Fisheries Service for our Anadromous Species and our Saltwater Species, and we have the Fish and Wildlife Service for the Freshwater Species. And sometimes they fight about jurisdiction like with the steelhead versus the rainbow trout. We don't have time to go into that, but kind of an interesting escapade, I don't know. So section seven is the big one that we're going to dive into. Section nine is our general take prohibition. It says you can't take endangered species. It does not say you can't take threatened species. Protection for threatened species is actually determined by regulation. Historically threatened species were given the same protections almost always as endangered species with some exceptions. The Trump administration passed a regulation or promulgated a regulation that changed that. That's being changed back. I'm not sure if they finalized that regulation, but it's in the process of switching back so that threatened species get the same protections as endangered species. And this take is a really broad technical term that covers direct harm. Like I can't go out and hook a fish and take it home and cook it, but also indirect harm. I can't drain the water that that fish needs to survive. I also can't block that fish's ability to migrate upstream to complete its reproductive cycle. So it's take that covers both direct harm and indirect harm that happens via habitat modification when it actually kills or injures the species. Section 10 provides authorizations for take. So exceptions to section nine. And then section 11 is the citizen suit provision, which is why we have all these groups that are suing over the biops suing to enforce the endangered species act. There's a very broad grant that says you can sue if someone's violating the endangered species act or someone's not doing what they have to do or the government's not taking an action that it has to take under the endangered species act. So we've got a bunch of listed species. This are just some examples, right? We've got the Central Valley spring run Chinook, which is threatened endangered winter run threatened steelhead, the threatened sturgeon, we've got the threatened Delta smelt. We have the Longfin smelt, which is listed at the state level only, but which is it looks like going to be or at least potentially going to be listed at the federal level very soon. So those state listed species in the past, they've had an emergency regulation from Fish and Wildlife Commission, I believe that allowed take of those without a particular permit for some of the projects. But that may change if those are looped under the federal endangered species act as well. Okay. It is actually. So when you're considering these impacts, they discuss the impact on the killer whales because the killer whales eat the salmon that are impacted by the project. Yeah. It's like I set this up for you to ask that question. It's great. I appreciate it. Every time I see that, I'm surprised again and like, oh yeah, they do belong. Hopefully not in the river, but eating the fish at least. So section seven is the prohibition and its language aims at federal agencies says any federal agency considering an action must consult with the Fish and Wildlife Service or Nymphs to ensure that their proposed activity will not jeopardize or is not likely to. That's a technical term jeopardize a continued existence of any listed species and will not result in destruction or adverse modification of its critical habitat. So that's the broad requirement that gives rise to that consultation process that ends in the biops that we keep talking about. Okay. We're good. This is aimed at federal agencies, but federal agencies do things for private people all the time. So they issue permits. Issuing that permit is a federal action, but it might be done for someone who wants to drain a wetland or someone who wants to build a dock that's going to go into a river area. So for those actions, even though they're private actions because you need federal authorization, that brings in the Federal Endangered Species Act. So any action that's funded, authorized, or carried out by a federal agency falls under the seven section umbrella. So the agency to do this consultation considers whether the listed species is likely to be affected by a federal action and they do this through a biological assessment. You see what species are in the area. If there's species there, you figure out if they're likely to be affected. Do that through your biological assessment. If, yes, if you determine that they are likely to be affected, then NIFS or the Fish and Wildlife Service does that biological opinion. That's a formal consultation process and that culminates in the issuance of a biological opinion. If not, if it's not likely to affect the species in an area, the expert agency confirms that with a not likely to adversely impact finding via a letter often kind of an informal process then the project can go on. So that biological opinion, in that opinion, the expert agency has to decide whether this is going to put the species in jeopardy or harm their critical habitat. In jeopardy is defined as an action that would reasonably be expected directly or indirectly to reduce appreciably the likelihood of both the survival and recovery of a listed species in the wild. I want to flag here this is not about recovering the species. This is whether the project will push the species to extinction. And there's some fights I think ongoing about what happens when you have a species like the smelt that's already in decline. And if you're making it any worse, does that mean that you're putting them in jeopardy? And there's some regulatory efforts that have gone back and forth and some court decisions that I'll just flag it as an issue. And we'll move past that. Your biological opinion can come out with a no jeopardy or not likely to jeopardize statement. In those cases, you get an ITS and incidental take statement that lets a federal agency proceed. And that also serves as the take exemption that keeps whoever's doing the action from getting in trouble with the rest of the section nine prohibitions. If it's a jeopardy finding, then the expert agency will suggest RPAs, reasonable and prudent alternatives that will let them avoid jeopardy. The agency can apply those alternatives change the project and cancel the project or can go to the God Squad. This is the Endangered Species Committee that can exempt projects from the consideration of the Endangered Species Act. I think, I don't know if it's apocryphal, but it was some hippie who was like, man, only God can decide if these species go extinct. And they're like, well, I guess that's our job that makes us the God Squad because we're making that call. If it's not true, it should be. And it helps me remember God Squad. So next is section 10. These are the permits that are outside of the federal agency permitting process. So if you're a federal agency, you go through section seven. The rest of us go through section 10. You can get 10 A1A permits, which are scientific permits for scientific purposes to take fin clips and study the fish that way, or for enhancement, to run a hatchery, right, to run the Delta Smelt hatchery, for example. Section 10 A1B is for incidental take permits. This is kind of similar to the incidental take statements, but it's for private citizens. You have to develop a big plan to show how you're going to minimize impact of the species. And then if you do that and the administrator approves your plan, then you can get a permit that permits the incidental take, not purposeful take. You can also designate populations that are outside the geographic range of a species as experimental. And I mentioned this one because this is how the reintroduction of those spring-run Chinook on the San Joaquin happened. People were really upset about getting an endangered fish in a river that they used for recreation and used to pull water out of. They were worried about the endangered species act liability associated with that. And so those fish were designated an experimental population, an experimental population, and their reduction, their protection level was reduced. So those fish could be reintroduced and otherwise lawful activities that kill those individuals in that experimental population are no longer considered take under the act. So this is kind of an exemption for a whole group of individuals of a species. All right, NEPA, I'm going to skip over. FERC is a big deal because it's the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and it licenses all of the non-federal hydropower projects. So for non-federal hydropower projects on dams, they have to have a FERC license. And that gives FERC the authority to establish flows below those dams, other conditions on the use of the water in those dams. And that, like a lot of these sayings, can interfere with water rights. State law loses out to FERC requirements. So 5937, for example, probably can't be applied to those FERC dams. But Clean Water Act 401 says that for federal projects that are going to impact state water quality, the state gets to weigh in on and decide whether those projects can go forward or not. So FERC projects need a 401 certification. So there is a place for the state to weigh in. It's a terrible Supreme Court decision that leads to this kind of weird impasse, but it gives the state continuing power over federal projects, including these non-federal hydropower projects. And there's been some fighting around 401 and the scope of that recently also. And then I mentioned the tribal fishing rights. A lot of tribes have treaty rights. The Yurok River and the Hupa tribe and the Klamath is a great example. And the federal government is a trustee for those rights. And so they'll make sure, in some cases, that there's enough water or more water, at least, to support those tribal fisheries. Okay. So we're getting close on time. I know. We've done all of our restrictions on water rights, California Constitution, public trust, state statutory, and federal law. I can skip over most of the reclamation pieces because we've talked about that. One other piece I thought it was worth flagging was that because we knew that these projects were going to have negative impacts on fisheries and on ecosystems, the federal government agreed to do mitigation. And one of the big mitigation efforts they made was the establishment of hatcheries below dams. So a lot of the dams that we see have big hatcheries. And those hatcheries were originally designed to make up for the loss of upstream habitat. A core piece, though, of the Reclamation Act, the piece that's really important for us to think about is this Section 8 Savings Clause. The Savings Clause is called a Savings Clause because it saves state law from preemption by federal law. Remember, if there's a conflict between state law and federal law, federal law wins out. But back in 1902, when they were writing the Reclamation Act, there was a concern about what this would do to all the water rights that were already established in the West. And so they added the Savings Clause in that would protect what the states were already doing, protect those laws for preemption. So this is the actual language. There's nothing in this act should be construed as affecting or intended to affect or to in any way interfere with the laws of any state or territory relating to the control, appropriation, use or distribution of water used in irrigation, secretary of the interior and carrying out the revisions of this act shall proceed in conformity with such laws. That means when you want to build a federal project, you have to go pull a state water right to do that. So you have to comply with state law. You can't just preempt that, preempt that state law. This is why on the Friant Dam, the Friant, the Reclamation has to comply with Section 5937 because 5937 was one of these state laws that's saved by the Savings Clause here. So things like the water quality control plan, all of the salinity things are going on the delta. A lot of that is protected by this Section 8 Savings Clause from preemption by the Federal Reclamation Act or any of the authorizing acts that create a lot of their projects. And this went to the Supreme Court 1978. The Supreme Court noted, quote, the consistent threat of purposeful and continued deference to state water law by Congress. And they announced the standard that a state may impose any condition on the control, appropriation, use or distribution of water through a Federal Reclamation Project that is not inconsistent with clear congressional directives respecting the project. And that means then when we say that the CVP project is authorized for all of these things, that becomes really important because that means that CVP water can be applied to all of those purposes, right? So this gives us a lot of flexibility as a state for what we require through state law and under that Savings Clause. We have the Central Valley Project Improvement Act, another Federal law added on to this in 1992. It set some ambitious goals, doubling the fish population by 2002, allocated some water, 600,000 to 800,000 acre feet of water to fish and wildlife purposes, although water required to comply with 95, that water right order about temperatures in the Sacramento or water required to comply with the biological opinions counts as that water. So it's not just new water necessarily. It's total fish and wildlife water, allocates water for refuges and does some create some funds for restoration work, including gravel restoration on the American River, which is the super cool picture there. We haven't hit those restoration targets. I wanted to flag that only because the reading I sent to you said that we had hit them. I don't know where they came up with that. We talked about the WIN Act. A lot of the stuff in the WIN Act finished in 2021. It was flexible operations designed to address the drought. And so a lot of it actually never was able to be used because of the flow conditions changing in the drought. That drought at least ending right after passage of the WIN Act. Some of the lasting things for that from that act, though, are the funds for the storage projects and the Delta smell supplementation we were hearing about earlier. There's a whole bunch of other efforts. It just keeps going down and down. So kind of big picture, when you're thinking about this, one of the ways to think about it is to think about these water rights. And you can think about these water rights as having maybe three different categories. You've got water rights that were issued pre-1914 with no regulation, no consideration of the public impact, no consideration of the environment. A second set that were issued between 1914 and 1983-ish where the Water Board saw its role as ministerial and really still didn't do a whole lot of consideration of the broader public trust or environmental interests. Again, maybe a decade of wiggle room around that. And then these more modern rights where there's a really explicit consideration. You see a lot more modeling. You see discussion of fisheries impacts of those rights. And a lot of the struggle that we've gone through since 1983 is taking those old water rights and updating them to reflect the new rights. There's a PPIC report says pre-1914 and riparian rights and it's a pretty big chunk of your municipal, industrial and ag. Do you remember that stuff, dude? I don't remember, but the first two tranches are where almost all the action is in terms of just following the water rights. Yeah, it's a huge majority because people came out and were able to claim a lot of water. And so they did. And so most of the newer stuff is fighting about some flood flows and some drips and drags. A lot of the rivers are closed to new appropriations. So as we're doing this, and I've been struggling with this over the last 40 years now, one of the areas that's had some developments, and I only have a little bit because you've got one of the national experts on takings here, is this question of Fifth Amendment takings. So the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution says the government cannot physically take private property or go too far in its regulation without compensating people for taking their property. One of the big decisions though that addresses this says the carve out or an exception to that is where the government is doing something that it already had the power to do and it's just formalizing it through a rule or a regulation. So when the water board takes action to enforce the public trust or to enforce the reasonable use doctrine, it may be taking water away from someone, but the California Supreme Court has made clear it's not taking a property right that they had because that reasonable use and that public trust limit already inherent in their water right. The Supreme Court of California is very clear about this, a national Audubon, and we see a lot of appellate court decisions that kind of echo these same lines, Stanford, Vinca, the light decision. So there's a host of decisions in that area. So when we're thinking about this, we have this property, a private property right, this private property protection, but we have a bunch of background principles that essentially carve out, give the government a carve out a regulatory path to address water rights without tripping up that taking. Okay, I'm going to skip forward to kind of try and just hit where we are right now. There's a lot. Okay, so there's... I spent so much, I started with 180 slides and I got down to like... You didn't share your slides. So there's a lot of layers. There's a lot of water right decisions that you can see, 990, 1275, 12... And yeah, they just kind of keep going, keep going. The ones that we should focus on probably are the ones that are still in place. So water right decision 1641 comes out of the Bay Delta Water Quality Control Plan of 1995. So this is a water quality control plan. This is the water board using its powers under Porter Cologne to regulate water quality in the Delta and then adjusting water rights in order to protect that water quality that it's trying to achieve in the Delta. So that's what water right decision 1641 does and it addresses the flow, the salinity, that X2 zone we've been talking about. That's where that kind of comes in. The pumping amounts that are allowed and operational protections. But as that's happening, a whole bunch of other things kind of start exploding. All of the in federal environmental laws that have been passed suddenly start coming into play. Fish species start getting listed. We get our very first biops. I think the first biop was in, yeah, 1993. We get some other adaptive management plans trying to help fish. We get that Delta reform act passed in 2009. And so we have these water right decisions, but we have a whole bunch of other things that are at play here. So if we're kind of looking at everything that's listed under the law of the Delta, we have those underlying water rights. We have those water rights restricted by water right decisions. Some of those water right decisions are implementing water quality control plans. Some of them are reflecting these other federal or state laws. We have these federal laws that themselves restrict water operations through the biological opinions. We have court orders related to all of the lawsuits associated with these different pieces. And then you add on the politics and the, oh, I misspelled constraints. That's great. I was editing this at lunch. Infrastructure constraints come in and our flood constraints, right? A lot of what determines where the water goes.