Trump’s environmental rollbacks hit Calif. hard
By Evan Halper, Los Angeles Times
When 50,000 acre-feet of water went gushing out of the Sacramento River last month, it fast became a test of California’s ability to protect its environmental policies from an increasingly hostile Trump administration.
The episode proved humbling.
Heeding the calls of big agriculture interests and area congressional Republicans, the administration pumped federally controlled water to Central Valley farms despite protest from the state that the move imperiled the endangered delta smelt. All California could do was temporarily shut its own pumps, which came at the expense of the state’s mostly urban water customers.
It was perceived by some in California as the kind of big agriculture water grab that the state had not seen in years. And it flouted a longstanding water-management partnership between California and Washington, D.C.