At last week’s Assembly Water Parks and Wildlife oversight hearing, Natural Resources Secretary Lester Snow announced the release of two Bay Delta Conservation Plan (BDCP) reports in the upcoming weeks. The BDCP Steering Committee has spent four years and $140 million to study and develop a proposal with the goal of protecting the fragile Sacramento- San Joaquin Delta ecosystem, while improving the reliability of the state’s water supplies that flow though the Delta.

The BDCP Steering Committee finalized its working draft at their meeting last week, and the report is yet to be made public. The draft report allegedly will be released today, and already is in the midst much controversy.

The San Francisco Chronicle recently reported, “Forty-three cities, counties and water agencies – including those serving more than 4 million residents in San Francisco, the Peninsula and parts of the East Bay – say the plan is a blatant Southern California water grab that could further harm the delta, constrict water supplies and raise water rates in much of Northern California.”

Knowing that the BDCP controversial draft report can not be finalized by the end of this administration, a separate “status report and issues summary” on the process will be released the week of December 6, 2010.