ed 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.  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.  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 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.  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.  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.  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.  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.  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 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.  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.