(NewsReview) - When Gov. Jerry Brown announced two weeks ago that he was changing his Delta conservation plan and radically downsizing a 100,000-acre wetland restoration job, environmentalists and water-policy activists blew the foul whistle.

Initially, Brown’s plan was to build two massive water-diversion tunnels in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and spend money on habitat restoration. The 30-mile-long twin tubes remain the central feature of Brown’s controversial hydro-engineering project, known for years as the Bay Delta Conservation Plan. But now the governor has scaled back the environmental component to just 30,000 acres.

Last week in Sacramento, Brown told critics of his new plan to “shut up.”

Tough love—and yet some environmentalists are hopeful: 30,000 acres is still a lot better than nothing, they say. And, what’s more, there is talk that the work, which could bring declining fish populations back from the brink of vanishing, might begin imminently.

But critics of Brown and his tunnel-touting appointees say government agencies are trying to cheat their way out of not-yet-met environmental-enhancement obligations.

The government, they point out, made promises to revive thousands of acres of wetland and marsh in 2009—work that remains undone. They say Brown’s new habitat-enhancement plan is little more than a ploy to meet a 6-year-old debt without adding anything new to the drawing board.

“Cutting the habitat restoration to 30,000 acres is just winnowing it down to existing requirements,” said Tom Stokely, water-policy analyst with the California Water Impact Network.

In 2009, he explained, state and federal agencies agreed to restore at least 25,000 acres of riverside habitat in the Delta and Sacramento Valley. That project was intended as a way to partially mitigate the effects of the two giant water pumps in the southern Delta, which have allowed farms in the San Joaquin Valley to flourish while playing a lead role in nearly annihilating native salmon and smelt.

The sites slated for improvements in Brown’s newly unveiled habitat plan are similar to those named in 2009, only with several thousand acres of new land added to the drawing board.

“These are the same projects that the state and federal water agencies were already obligated to complete,” said attorney Osha Meserve, who represents environmental and agricultural interests in the Delta.

Language in the 2009 law, called a biological opinion, even states that the required habitat-restoration action “is not intended to conflict with or replace habitat restoration planning in the BDCP process.”

Conservationists say the government instead should be planning to restore at least 55,000 acres of land vital to the life cycles of fish and wildlife.

Taxpayers also may be getting cheated by the new Delta deal.

Meserve explained that federal and state water agencies, which pump Delta water to farmers in the San Joaquin Valley, were supposed to pay for most of the 2009 restoration: 80 percent of the 25,000 acres, the total tab for which could be $300 million.

However, the California Department of Water Resources and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation are being billed, so far, for only $130 million—less than half the cost—meaning taxpayers might be covering the remainder.

“This was just a sleight of hand to … shift part of the cost of the project to taxpayers,” Stokely said.

But to others in the environmental community, these details aren’t worth the argument.

A half-dozen fish species in the Central Valley are teetering on extinction, says Jacob Katz, a salmon and steelhead specialist with the group California Trout. Though not a fan of the two tunnels, he is optimistic about the way Brown has changed the project—specifically detaching the tunnel construction job, now being billed “California WaterFix,” from the wetland and floodplain enhancement work, newly branded as “California EcoRestore.”

This means that the Delta restoration plans might finally get moving after years of talk. “I’d rather have 30,000 acres completed now than a promise for 100,000 acres that is stuck in perpetual planning and never gets done,” said Katz.