[Water_news] 1. DWR'S CALIFORNIA WATER NEWS - Top Item for 7/23/07

Department of Water Resources

California Water News

A daily compilation for DWR personnel of significant news articles and comment

 

July 23 2007

 

1.  Top Item

 

Delta water exports could be trimmed

Stockton Record – 7/23/07

By Alex Breitler, staff writer

 

Water exports from the Delta could be cut anywhere from 6 percent to 37 percent next year under a temporary state and federal proposal to protect threatened smelt.

 

Environmentalists and water contractors are expected today to file responses in federal court in Fresno. A judge will make the ultimate decision.

 

In May, District Court Judge Oliver Wanger ordered the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to rewrite rules that decide how the pumps near Tracy can be operated.

 

The new rules may not be finished until August 2008. So the question is how to handle water exports next year - especially if rain and snow are scarce in California.

 

"Fortunately we've developed a lot of storage programs over the past 15 years," said Roger Patterson, assistant general manager with the Metropolitan Water District in Southern California. "But if you take a 40 percent reduction in your paycheck, eventually your savings account is going to go dry."

 

Such a reduction would, at least temporarily, disrupt a trend of increasing exports from the state and federal pumps, which provide water for 25 million Californians and millions of acres of farmland.

 

In the early 1950s, the pumps exported fewer than 1 million acre-feet each year. By the 1980s, the numbers had swelled to 4 million to 5 million acre-feet.

 

In 2000, for the first time, exports topped 6 million acre-feet.

 

Environmentalists have said there is a clear pattern of increasing exports and decreasing fish populations. Smelt this year plummeted to record lows.

 

In court documents filed earlier this month, Steve Thompson, a regional manager for Fish and Wildlife, acknowledged those trends but said there's not enough evidence to say the numbers are more than "circumstantial."

 

The role that the pumps play in the fish decline is poorly understood, he said. Officials have pointed to other factors, such as invasive species gobbling up the food that smelt need and toxins that spill into Delta waters.

 

Thompson did say that returning to export levels seen in the late 1990s would be appropriate until the new reports are done.

 

The government's proposal would reduce, but not eliminate, reverse flows in Old and Middle rivers at certain times of year.

 

Those rivers flow backward when the pumps are operating, sucking in fish from the south Delta.

 

Environmentalists have said they want reverse flows eliminated. "You've got to move water from Northern California to Southern California," said Jerry Johns, deputy director of the state Department of Water Resources. "Those rivers have got to run that way."

 

He said the proposal uses the "best available science that we have."

 

State Water Contractors, an association of agencies that distribute state water, reported some areas might not face an immediate water crunch next year because they receive water from other sources.

 

But the Zone 7 Water Agency, which serves the Livermore, Dublin and Pleasanton areas, is heavily reliant on the Delta and could lose 30 percent of its water supplies next year under the proposal, a spokeswoman said. #

http://www.recordnet.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070723/A_NEWS/707230321

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