Governor Newsom has signed and vetoed his last batch of bills. In January, a new governor takes the oath. For California’s rivers, salmon, and the Tribes who have depended on both since long before there was a California, that transition cannot come soon enough. Because one of the final things this Governor did with his veto pen was kill Assembly Bill 2218, the Indigenous Water Rights Bill.
What AB 2218 did
AB 2218, authored by Assemblymember Ash Kalra and sponsored by the Karuk Tribe and the Shingle Springs Band of Miwok Indians, was a modest bill. It would have declared it state policy to recognize the inequities in Tribal access to and control over water caused by state-sanctioned termination, removal, and assimilation, and to begin addressing them through financial assistance, protection of Tribal beneficial uses, consultation on water projects and policies, and incorporation of Indigenous knowledge into ecosystem protection and restoration.
It directed the State Water Board, the regional water boards, and the Natural Resources Agency to apply that policy when they write regulations, permits, and grant criteria. It worked within existing authority and existing funding programs. It asked the State to acknowledge a history it has already acknowledged, and to let that history inform decisions going forward.
The Assembly passed it without a single no vote. The Senate passed it on August 25. Roughly 70 organizations supported it. One person said no.
An apology without follow-through
In 2019, Governor Newsom stood before Tribal leaders and formally apologized on behalf of the State of California for its history of violence, mistreatment, and neglect of California Native Americans. It was the right thing to say – but an apology the Governor won’t put into law is just a press release. AB 2218 was the chance to make it mean something in regards to who controls water and who gets left out.
Tribes were written out of California’s water rights system in 1913, and the State has been cashing in on that exclusion ever since. The water users who built their fortunes on it lined up against the bill. The Governor sided with them over the Karuk, the Shingle Springs Miwok, and every Tribal community that has watched salmon runs collapse and rivers run dry while decisions about their ancestral waters were made in rooms they were never invited into.
A familiar pattern
If this veto felt familiar, it should. Governor Newsom has spent much of his tenure talking like an environmental champion while governing the opposite. He pushed the Delta Conveyance Project forward over the objections of Delta communities and Tribes, and championed so-called voluntary agreements as a substitute for the Bay-Delta flow standards the science says our fish need. He threw his weight behind Poseidon’s Huntington Beach desalination plant, a project the Coastal Commission unanimously rejected over its harm to marine life and ratepayers. In 2019, as the Trump administration was dismantling federal environmental protections, he vetoed SB 1, the bill that would have locked those protections into California law, siding with the big water districts that opposed it. And this year he did it again, helping kill SB 601, the Right to Clean Water Act, which would have restored the federal clean water protections the Trump Administration is stripping away, because Newsom preferred permit streamlining over protecting California’s waters. Too often, the calculation has been about his national profile, not the Californians and the rivers he was elected to protect.
Every time the choice has been between the rivers and large water users, the large water users have had a reliable friend in the Governor’s office. AB 2218 was not even a hard choice. It cost the State nothing it hadn’t already promised. And still the answer was no.
What comes next
Vetoes don’t make problems go away. They just hand them to the next person. California Coastkeeper Alliance will stand with Tribal Nations to bring this policy back in the next session, in front of a new governor who we hope understands that environmental leadership is measured in what you sign, not what you say at press conferences.
In the meantime, nothing in AB 2218 required a statute for the State Water Board to act. The Board already has the authority to protect Tribal beneficial uses, to consult meaningfully with Tribes, and to build Tribal equity into its permits, plans, and grant programs. We will be pressing the Board to do exactly that, veto or no veto.
Governor Newsom’s time in office is nearly over, and with it, we hope, his destructive water policies. Tribes should never again hear a California governor tell them their water justice can wait another year. Our next governor should care more about governing California than running for President.
Executive Director Sean Bothwell leads CCKA’s initiatives to fight for swimmable, fishable, and drinkable waters for all Californians.
