Public should stay involved with flood plan

COMMENTARY
From Justin Fredrickson, environmental policy analyst for the California Farm Bureau Federation:

For much of this year, Farm Bureau has been urging the state to change its Draft Central Valley Flood Protection Plan, to minimize its impact on farmland and other agricultural resources. We've made progress with state officials and still have hope that the plan will be amended further.

But we've also made surprising discoveries about the plan that indicate its impact on farmland could be even greater than we first thought.

Here's an update:

In reviewing the draft plan, we discovered that its major thrust was to increase flood protection in urban areas and increase opportunities for habitat restoration by creating large levee setbacks and additional flood bypass areas on a total of about 40,000 acres, mostly agricultural land, from Butte and Colusa counties in the north, to southern San Joaquin County in the south.

In other words, 40,000 acres of land now on the landward side of levees would instead be on the water side.

Read more in Ag Alert. (The photo of the Sacramento River is from the CFBF.)