Sacramento San Joaquin Delta

Standard & Poor's, the nation's largest financial rating service, is not normally in the business of issuing environmental alarms. But this year it did, with a jolting message that is helping to change the way California--and its business community--looks at the environment.

In an historic accord that marks at least a temporary end to the bitter struggle over California's most precious water resource, Gov. Pete Wilson and senior members of the Clinton Administration signed an agreement Thursday to protect the Sacramento Delta estuary and provide reliable water supplies to farms and cities across the state. Flanked by Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt and U.S.

Freeing more than 1 million acre-feet of contested water, a federal appeals court Wednesday removed a significant legal barrier to the historic accord recently reached to protect the Sacramento Delta estuary. The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals vacated a lower judge's injunction that had halted release of water earmarked for the delta and for wildlife refuges in the Sacramento and San Joaquin River valleys.

In a move that could mean more restrictions on water exports to Southern California, federal environmental officials on Wednesday rejected key portions of a state plan for protecting endangered fish and wildlife in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. Officials with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said the state plan fell short of assuring that sufficient water is retained in the delta so that "habitat conditions . . . will be protected."

A shiny finger-size fish that smells like a cucumber and usually lives only a year was declared a threatened species Thursday by the federal government, heightening concerns about the vitality of the state's most important estuary and raising the prospect of vast restrictions on drinking water supplies. The listing of the delta smelt under the federal Endangered Species Act was announced in Portland, Ore., by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.

State water regulators put off a decision Tuesday on a sharply contested proposal to protect fish and wildlife in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, voting instead to retreat behind closed doors to search for a compromise in private. The delay appeared to reflect a lack of consensus among the top water officials about the sweeping delta protections, which would require deep reductions in water shipments to farms and cities in Southern and Central California and impose new fees.

Gov. Pete Wilson is expected today to end weeks of speculation about the direction of his year-old water policy by backing away from support for temporary environmental protections in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. The specifics of the governor's announcement, to be made at a news conference in Washington, were a closely guarded secret Wednesday.

The delta smelt is a tiny, shy fish. But it may have a monstrous impact on the water supply for two out of three Californians. Although only finger-size, the smelt has become a club for environmentalists to bludgeon water regulators--and the entire state--into making amends for a quarter-century of head-in-the-sand avoidance of severe fish depletion in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. For San Joaquin Valley farmers terrified of endangered-species acts, the smelt is a symbol of silliness.

Gov. Pete Wilson's decision last week to drop his proposed temporary protections for the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta provides a startling reminder of how politically volatile--and perhaps insoluble--California's complex water problems remain. Wilson is the fourth consecutive governor to talk, in varying degrees, about addressing the state's water quandary--and the fourth in 25 years to throw up his arms in despair. Not since former Gov. Edmund G.

Two members of a committee seeking long-term solutions to environmental problems in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta have announced that they will withdraw from the group unless Gov. Pete Wilson reverses his decision to drop interim protections for the estuary. "I think (most) of the environmentalists will be withdrawing from the process," said David Fullerton of the Natural Heritage Institute, one of seven environmentalists on the 23-member Bay Delta Oversight Council.