Delta? Who dat?

About once a year I am reminded that the Stockton Record columnist, Mike Fitzgerald, is really good at what he does. Since most of that involves writing about San Joaquin County, I don't follow too closely until something sends me back and I am reminded yet again. This week it was this column on the Sacramento / San Joaquin Delta.

I am not sure how many times I have posted about the Delta. I know that there are 7 labels for posts that begin with "Delta". A search of this blog for the labal "Delta Vision" will get at least 10 posts. So, I was a bit surprised, as Fitzgerald seemed to be, that some 78% of California don't know who, where or what it is. I wish that I could deal with that as well as Fitzgerald does.

In the latest installment of "Invisible Valley," the saga of a region nobody pays attention to, a survey shows 78 percent of Californians don't know what the Delta is.

Or where it is. Or who it is.

Mind-boggling.

Seventy-eight percent of the lotus-eaters in this state haven't got a clue the Delta even exists.

Even as they drink it, fill their swimming pools with it and live on food that couldn't have grown without it.

"Nothing is easier than self-deceit. For what each man wishes, that he also believes to be true." -Demosthenes

I really wish that every Green reader of this blog were part of the 28% who know a bit about where we get our water, and so, learned reader, I will continue to believe it.

What bothers me most is that it is just so damned difficult to make any progress at all toward a comprehensive negotiated settlement of CA's Water Wars and this lack of public awareness, or knowledge, is allowing that power brokers to continue doing what they have been doign for years, screwing the rest of us for relatively short term economic advantage. Even such an Green sounding organization as the Coalition for a Sustainable Delta is now what it purports but, according to activist Dan Bacher...

Three executives of Stewart Resnick's Paramount Farms in Kern County founded the Coalition for a Sustainable Delta. Resnick is the politically connected Beverly Hills billionaire who has made tens of millions of dollars annually from buying and reselling water back to the public for a big profit.

Then, Kern County isn't exactly part of the Delta either, is it.

It is fast becoming too late to do anything to stop the process currently under way, one that is aimed at giving the current Gov. Brown a legacy of building CA's infrastructure to match that of his Father. Unfortunately for us, if he succeeds, there will be hell to pay, and pay, and pay for years to come. We will be in bonded servitude to debts of a failed project.

In one more reminder of just how far things have gone awry and how little the bureaucrats care, I suggest your taking the time to read this post by Jane Wagner-Tyack at Restore the Delta.

Just to be clear here: Delta levee improvements, including seismically-resistant levees, were found to be less costly than conveyance and to have greater risk reduction benefits. So the risk-reduction benefits were misrepresented in both reports, and the seismically-resistant levees disappeared altogether from the second.

Oh yes. The fix is in and all the Good Dems will continue nodding to Gov. Brown's planned Big Dig.