Looking Forward: C-WIN’s Post-Election Mission
Fighting the Water Policies that Subsidize Billionaires and Punish Ratepayers and the Environment
By Carolee Krieger
Executive Director
California Water Impact Network
Since our founding in 2001, the California Water Impact Network (C-WIN) has had a laser focus: amend California’s water policies to benefit working people and the environment rather than the few agribusiness conglomerates that enjoy extravagant – and taxpayer subsidized – water deliveries and windfall profits.
C-WIN and our allies have prevailed in some critical battles, yet we have faced major headwinds from a Newsom administration bent on pursuing antiquated mid-20th century solutions to our pressing 21st Century challenges – including a $20 billion+ tunnel project that would dramatically raise water rates, further erode ecosystems, and deliver less water than promised. Approximately 27 million ratepayers – fully two-thirds of California’s population – will be forced to foot the bill for a project that will provide them with little if any benefit. Now we face an added adversary: a greedy, racist, and authoritarian Trump administration determined to eviscerate our environmental laws, roll back civil rights protections, subsidize wealthy elites, and punish anyone who stands in their way.
“27 million ratepayers – fully two-thirds of California’s population – will be forced to foot the bill for a project that will provide them with little if any benefit.”
Nevertheless, our work goes on, and we will not back down from the good – and necessary – fight. Right now, our focus is on defeating the tunnel and changing the rules that subsidize agribusiness at the expense of ratepayers and the environment. Those rules are set via the State Water Resources Control Board’s Bay Delta Plan update, which establishes water quality standards that determine how much water can be diverted to the sprawling corporate farms of the Central Valley.
The Bay Delta plan pushed by the Newsom administration promotes “voluntary agreements” between large agricultural water contractors and the state and federal agencies that store and deliver water. Rife with loopholes, these agreements would subvert legal requirements to leave more water in our rivers and continue the practice of urban ratepayers paying for water delivered to corporate agriculture.
C-WIN is committed to calling out these illegal and destructive policies and using the legal system to ensure the state upholds its duty to protect people and the environment. And we will also stand up to efforts by the incoming Trump administration to divert even more water to their wealthy agribusiness backers.
It will take all of us to stand against the coming onslaught, and there are many pathways for joining in: donate money and volunteer time to organizations ready to mobilize; demand your state and federal elected representatives oppose harmful policies; tell your local water agencies to invest in local water projects instead of the tunnel boondoggle; talk to family, friends, and coworkers; and do not comply with efforts to strip anyone of their rights and their dignity.
You can help C-WIN fight this fight for you.
Donate here. Thank you.