January 13, 2015 — The U.S. Supreme Court refused Monday to consider appeals by Central Valley farmers and California water districts that want to pump more water from a delta that serves as the only home of a tiny, threatened fish.
The decision lets stand a 2008 U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service plan to safeguard the 3-inch-long Delta smelt, a species listed as threatened in 1993 under the federal Endangered Species Act.
The plan restricts the amount of water that can be pumped out of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and sent south to Central Valley farmers and water districts.
The smelt only lives in the delta — the largest estuary on the West Coast that supplies much of California with drinking water and irrigates millions of acres of farmland.
Farmers contend that under the smelt regulations, vast amounts of water from the Sierra Nevada snow pack are sent through the delta and into the ocean, exacerbating hardships endured by the growers in the three-year drought.
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