Federal biologists worked frantically this year to meet a deadline to assess the environmental impacts of Trump administration plans to send more water to Central Valley farmers.
But the biologists’ conclusion — that increased deliveries would harm endangered Chinook salmon and other imperiled fish — would foil those plans. Two days after it was submitted, a regional federal official assembled a new review team to improve the documents.
The move is the latest salvo in the decades-long battle over the environmental harm caused by the mammoth government operations that export water supplies from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, the center of California’s vast water system.
During the Obama administration, federal fishery agencies adopted tougher export limits after finding that delta pumping was pushing delta smelt, Chinook salmon and other native fish to the edge of extinction.
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