[Water_news] 2. DWR'S CALIFORNIA WATER NEWS: SUPPLY - 5/2/07

Department of Water Resources

California Water News

A daily compilation of significant news articles and comment 

 

May 2, 2007

 

2. Supply

 

WATER USE:

Urban creep siphons water; Forum mulls land use issues - Red Bluff Daily News

 

SACRAMENTO RIVER:

Keswick flows boosted to help water district - Redding Record Searchlight

 

WATER CONSERVATION:

Guest Column: Conserving water is the key to our future - Ventura County Star

 

LOCAL WATER SUPPLY ISSUES:

Editorial: Looming water fight; El Dorado prepares to challenge Sacramento - Sacramento Bee

 

 

WATER USE:

Urban creep siphons water; Forum mulls land use issues

Red Bluff Daily News – 5/1/07

By Rebecca Wolf, Assistant News Editor

 

RED BLUFF - In 2000, the residents of the upper Sacramento Valley consumed 4.2 million acre feet of water per year. To put that in perspective, Shasta Lake holds about 4.5 million acre feet.

 

Most of that was used for agricultural lands with only about 160,000-acre feet used by urban areas, according to Todd Hillaire of the Department of Water Resources. However, with the recent population growth and projected future growth, that number will more than double by 2020.

 

How to plan for that and create sustainable water use strategies was the focus of an all-day forum at the Red Bluff Community and Senior Center Monday. About 70 people from around the Sacramento Valley met to discuss water quality and land use issues.

 

The group heard from a panel made up of Hillaire, a representative from the Sacramento River Watershed Program and a Chico developer about ideas on creating sustainable water use strategies and policy solutions and how to put them into code.

 

Kathy Russick with the Sacramento River Watershed Program said that the Sacramento Valley is going through a time of transition with a "slow creep of urban areas."

 

She said the popular "ranchettes" have been making land traditionally used for agriculture, no longer viable commercially.

 

Her group looked at general plans of counties in the Sacramento Watershed to determine what land uses have been approved in the area.

 

"Our board was shocked to see what had been approved," Russick said. "... I don't know what supervisors see when projects come before them. Maybe it doesn't seem like a huge deal to change from a 200-acre lot to five 40-acre lots, but again it's a slow creep."

 

Something that conservation groups hope to control with growth principles incorporated into county's planning and land use codes.

 

"This is a major transition and the implications of that, we don't know," she said.

 

Hillaire said that most urban areas are dependent on ground water for their water supplies and that as the prices increase for water from the Tehama Colusa Canal, more agriculture is starting to use wells tapping into ground water supplies.

 

Much of the discussion centered around the 25 resource strategies outlined in the 2005 California Water Plan.

 

Hillaire said the strategies need to be used to ensure a healthy ecosystem and a high standard of living.

 

John Anderson of New Urban Builders in Chico shared what he said were the common views of developers and tried to give a reality check to the resource strategies.

 

"We're asking permission on the scale of planning staff and planning commissions and people sitting in traffic," he said of developers. "We don't typically get involved in issues as big as watersheds."

 

He added that it is hard to come up with economic incentives to come up with new and innovative water systems in projects.

 

"Right now, it's a lot cheaper to pay into municipal water than to come up with innovative approaches," he said. #

http://www.redbluffdailynews.com/news/ci_5792307

 

 

SACRAMENTO RIVER:

Keswick flows boosted to help water district

Redding Record Searchlight – 5/2/07

By Dylan Darling, staff writer

 

A slug of Lake Shasta water is set to flow down the Sacramento River through Redding starting today to fill Lake Red Bluff temporarily.

 

The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation plans to ratchet up flows from Keswick Dam, which regulates releases from Lake Shasta, starting at 3 p.m. today. The flows will increase from 8,500 cubic feet per second to 13,000 cfs by 7 p.m. Thursday and then be eased back down to 9,000 cfs by 9 p.m. Friday, said Larry Ball, operations chief for the bureau’s Northern California area office.

 

“This is to fill Lake Red Bluff,” he said.

 

The bureau is filling the lake early this year to supply water to the 18 water districts that rely on the Tehama Colusa Canal. The seasonal lake forms when the bureau drops gates at the Red Bluff diversion dam.

 

A dry winter and light spring rainfall caused the canal’s water managers to ask the bureau for an early closing of the dam.

 

Not all the dam’s gates will be completely closed so some water still will head down the Sacramento. Even with some of the gates only partially lowered, the dam blocks salmon and green sturgeon — both of which are federally protected species — from migrating upstream.

 

For the sake of the fish, the bureau will open the gates again and allow for fish passage for five days before dropping them to form the lake for its normal four-month stand, said Paul Freeman, the dam’s division chief for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation.

 

“By noon on the fifteenth we should have a lake again,” Freeman said.  #

http://www.redding.com/news/2007/may/02/keswick-flows-boosted-help-water-district/

 

 

WATER CONSERVATION:

Guest Column: Conserving water is the key to our future

Ventura County Star – 5/2/07

By Richard Handley, of Ojai, is a director of the Casitas Municipal Water District and the co-founder of the Ojai Valley Land Conservancy in 1987

 

In the early 1980s, the environmental advocacy group American Rivers coined the slogan, "Wear a sweater, save a river." They were attempting to simply convey the concept of resource conservation. By dressing warmly in winter and using less electric heat, we could save our last free-flowing rivers from being dammed for hydroelectricity.

 

This slogan may seem quaint in 2007, but the message it conveys is as pertinent today as ever. In fact, the American Rivers slogan should be updated with the advent of global warming to read: Wear a sweater, save a planet. Resource conservation is a common-sense approach not only to global warming, but also to our local water supply.

 

Back in 1992, Ventura County was entering the sixth year of a severe drought. The two options being promoted to solve the water crisis back then were importing water from the State Water Project or building a desalination plant. Another option that did not get much attention was water-use efficiency, even though it was by far the most cost-effective remedy.

 

With the possibility of a drought just another dry winter season away, we should be considering our options now. The Casitas Municipal Water District has initiated a program to offer rebates on low-flow toilets and energy-efficient washing machines. The city of Ventura is handing out low-flow showerheads and sink aerators.

 

Although these are certainly steps in the right direction, they are not enough to save us from the next scorching drought. I believe that we need to think about water conservation in a much broader way. In fact, we need to revolutionize the way we think about water use and the methods for conserving our most precious resource.

 

The best place to store water is underground. This method is being used by the United Water Conservation District with its Freeman Diversion Project that recharges the groundwater basin beneath the Santa Clara River. The Ojai Valley Land Conservancy is creating a three-acre fresh water marsh that will recharge the Ojai groundwater basin by capturing storm-water runoff from Highway 33 and allowing it to be filtered by wetlands plants before it percolates back into the earth.

 

The Casitas Water District is participating in a project to recharge the groundwater basin at the headwaters of San Antonio Creek and capturing up to 500 acre-feet of water per year. If we are willing to carry this concept one step further, we might envision commercial buildings and residences capturing rainwater in a similar same way that we are now capturing sunlight to produce electricity.

 

The roofs of buildings could be fitted with rain gutters that would carry water into underground cisterns to be used for irrigation.

 

Parking lots could be paved with a permeable surface so that water could sink back into the ground instead of picking up pollutants on the way to the nearest creek or the ocean.

 

But, the most realistic method of water conservation is to use our existing supplies in a more efficient way. This means keeping our municipal water delivery systems constantly upgraded to minimize leaks, planting drought-tolerant landscaping and being wiser water users in our homes and businesses.

 

As global climate change and an ever-expanding population put even more pressure on our available water supply, we must invest our time, energy and money on conservation if we expect to survive and thrive in the 21st century. #

http://www.venturacountystar.com/news/2007/may/02/conserving-water-is-the-key-to-our-future/

 

 

LOCAL WATER SUPPLY ISSUES:

Editorial: Looming water fight; El Dorado prepares to challenge Sacramento

Sacramento Bee – 5/2/07

 

El Dorado County officials are looking downhill to Sacramento for water to shore up a local supply needed to sustain the subdivisions, ranchettes, vineyards and apple orchards. Why Sacramento? The capital city and the Sacramento Municipal Utility District have long been using a supply of American River water that originates in El Dorado County. SMUD captures the water in a series of dams to produce electricity. Then once downstream, Sacramentans pump it and drink it (or their lawns do). The arrangement is all down on paper in water rights claims. But El Dorado governments are beginning to set aside hundreds of thousands of dollars to challenge these water rights. This could be the region's biggest water fight in the years ahead unless the two sides can find that elusive compromise -- or the water from somebody else.

 

El Dorado's water strategy is to test a body of law that will be increasingly important for counties in the Sierra Nevada that have more water than water rights and need more water than they have rights to. Various statutes dating back to the 1930s have given "areas of origin" the opening to apply to use water that had been going to downstream users. The laws were a political response to the construction of the mammoth water projects in California, the Central Valley Project and the State Water Project, that constructed dams in the Sierra and Cascade ranges and then moved the water hundreds of miles to farms and cities via rivers, pumps and aqueducts. But is this a slam-dunk case for El Dorado? Hardly. As one legal analysis put it, there is uncertainty "due to the lack of clarity to the statutes themselves and the lack of judicial decisions interpreting them."

 

This region, through efforts on the American River known as the Water Forum, has had a recent tradition of finding workable solutions to complex problems. On matters such as this, the first impulse should be to find a pragmatic way to solve a problem. El Dorado, where water issues take center stage in public life, feels as if it has tried the peaceful route. Sacramento, where water is taken for granted, should take note that this challenge is looming and decide whether to simply wait and see its water rights challenged or try one last round of diplomacy.

http://www.sacbee.com/110/story/164394.html

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