A daily compilation of significant news articles and comment
November 9, 2007
2. Supply
REDWOOD VALLEY WATER SUPPLY:
Water officials nervous in
AG RESTRICTIONS IN
District tightening water tap on growers - Riverside Press Enterprise
Joint water project still on tap; Tehama Colusa Canal possible alternative to Sacramento River - Woodland Daily Democrat
L.A. Bets on the Farm; Faced with unprecedented drought, the West's most powerful water agency is mixing Wall Street tactics and rice farm supplies to hedge against Southern California's risk of going dry - High Country News
REDWOOD VALLEY WATER SUPPLY:
Water officials nervous in
Santa Rosa Press Democrat – 11/9/07
By Glenda Anderson, staff writer
If there is no significant rainfall by January, the water intake pipe that brings water to the valley may be sucking air instead of water.
"We're just praying for rain," said water board Chairman Don Butow.
Redwood Valley County Water District is the only agency drawing water directly from
The lake on Thursday was at 714.5 feet above sea level and losing about 3 inches of water a day, a rate that increases as the lake level drops, according to U.S. Army Corps of Engineers officials.
At the current water-loss rate,
"If we don't get any appreciable rain, we will be having some real problems by December," Butow said.
Other water users theoretically could continue to draw water from the
This year's lake level is among the 10 lowest in the dam's 47-year history, said Army Corps Water Manager Marchia Bond.
The lake's record low was in September 1977, when it dropped to 688.71 feet following two years of drought, she said. It reached lows in the 705 range in 1960, 1961 and 2002.
The district's customers are accustomed to conserving because the district is chronically short of water. It has been under a water-hookup moratorium for almost two decades because it has only a conditional winter water right.
When the Sonoma County Water Agency asked
"Our customers have done a fantastic job," he said.
Butow said the district will be discussing the lake levels at its next meeting.
"We're going to be watching this closely. We're really at the mercy of the weather," he said. #
http://www1.pressdemocrat.com/article/20071109/NEWS/711090438/1033/NEWS01
AG RESTRICTIONS IN
District tightening water tap on growers
Riverside Press
By Jeff Horseman, staff writer
TEMECULA - About 1,700 agricultural customers of the Rancho California Water District will have to learn to live with less after the district Board of Directors voted Thursday morning to reduce their water supplies.
The move, on a 7-0 vote, comes in response to a 30 percent cutback in water used to irrigate crops from the Metropolitan Water District, a major Los Angeles-based supplier serving
MWD warned its client water districts of the cutback as the region grapples with a chronic drought and problems obtaining water from outside
Rancho
The cutback goes into effect Jan. 1. Farmers should get letters informing them of their new water allocations in early December. Those affected include avocado growers and vineyards.
The customers affected by the cutback belong to a special program in which they get water at a reduced rate in exchange for being first in line for supply cuts. The district is no longer accepting new customers for the program.
Rancho
Before voting, the board held a public hearing in which no one spoke. The district has held two meetings with farmers to discuss the cutback.
There was little discussion among board members. But board President Stephen Corona voiced his support.
"It's as fair a plan as we can hope for," he said.
The cutback in water for agriculture is only one strategy Rancho
To conserve drinking water, the district implemented a policy requiring large-scale customers, such as the city of
http://www.pe.com/localnews/rivcounty/stories/PE_News_Local_S_swater09.4025cec.html
Joint water project still on tap; Tehama Colusa Canal possible alternative to Sacramento River
Woodland Daily Democrat – 11/8/07
By Lizeth Cazares, staff writer
As the multi-million Davis-Woodland Water Supply Project is being reviewed by both cities, the Woodland City Council is making sure that all options are open to ensure the city has a reliable water supply.
On Tuesday night's City Council meeting, the councilmen received the project's Final Environmental Impact Report by city staff and voted to continue working on acquiring its water rights.
The $300 million project will help provide
But before council could discuss the project or the report's findings, Jeff Sutton, executive director for the
The canal currently runs to Dunnigan and provides irrigation and drinking water to farmers near the area. Sutton suggested to extend the canal to
"This is a real opportunity to save
Several councilmen were interested in Sutton's suggestion, especially since it would save the city in infrustructure costs. There were also some doubts whether agreeing to the water supply project would prohibit the city from using the canal as an alternative.
Councilman Jeff Monroe was concerned that once the council agreed to the water supply project the city wouldn't be able to use the canal, even if it becomes a better source for surface water.
Project staff reassured the council that if the canal becomes a more viable alternative the city will have an opportunity to acquire water rights from it. They also told the council it was important for them to pass the resolution at the meeting.
The council unanimously voted for it and to pursue further action to develop the water supply project.
While the council agreed to pursue the project, there was also a consensus to look at alternative water sources.
"We still have to look at these options," Vice Mayor Skip Davies said. #
http://www.dailydemocrat.com/news/ci_7405239
L.A. Bets on the Farm; Faced with unprecedented drought, the West's most powerful water agency is mixing Wall Street tactics and rice farm supplies to hedge against Southern California 's risk of going dry
High Country News - 11/07
By Matt Jenkins, the author is a contributing editor of High Country News
This article was made possible with support from the William C. Kenney Watershed Protection Foundation and the Jay Kenney Foundation
On the south edge of the Union Station plaza, in the heart of Los Angeles, a 12-story office tower stands swarmed by the constant stream of police helicopters that troop in and out of the L.A.P.D. air base a couple of blocks away. This is the headquarters of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, the most powerful water agency in the West.
On the first floor, in an expansive boardroom that evokes the ambience of the U.N. Security Council chambers, a ring of leather chairs waits for Metropolitan's directors, representatives of the 27 agencies in the Los Angeles and San Diego area that buy water from Met. Eighteen million people - half of
Metropolitan is the apparatus that has enabled
Yet Metropolitan now faces a gathering crisis, and beyond a tightly guarded front desk and a bank of elevators, the view from general manager Jeff Kightlinger's top-floor office is terrifying. This has been the driest year on record in
The
"It's amazing how fast things have moved. It's like being run over by a freight train," says Kightlinger. "We're being outstripped by the events and we can't keep up with them."
That crisis is, in broader form, one that the entire West will soon confront. Bedeviled by climate variability and change, water managers are struggling to provide a rapidly growing population with reliable sources of water. Surprisingly, Metropolitan may, in its moment of crisis, offer promising lessons for the rest of the region. Two decades ago, the agency embarked on a quiet endeavor to break out of the hidebound traditions of Western water, partnering with farmers spread throughout the length and breadth of the state and experimenting with increasingly sophisticated ways of managing risk. That effort - despite some mistakes along the way - is now helping Metropolitan counterbalance the rising uncertainties it faces.
Two hundred miles east of
"The scary thing," Smith says, "is that you can see - this supposedly came from Russian stuff, OK? - and look: You can see friggin' cars and trucks on the freeway."
Looking at the satellite photo, it is hard not to get the sense of the irrigation district in the crosshairs of an evil empire - even more so because several such images made their way into Smith's hands via Metropolitan, which has used the now widely available photos to assess the irrigation district's potential water yield.
Outside, the fields that appear in the satellite photo lie flat and lush, hemmed in by desert mountain ranges, jagged heaps of dusky slag that call to mind Luke Skywalker's home planet of Tatooine. After a five-mile trip over roads whose painted striping has warped beneath the ferocious sun, Smith stops his pickup at a dry field full of gigantic dirt clods. Earlier this year, the field was taken out of production. To keep the dust down from the fallowed field, "they wet it," Smith says, "and then go in there and disc it, it so it makes these big ol' nasty clods."
The cloddy field makes up a couple of the roughly 15,000 acres of ground that farmers scattered throughout the valley have fallowed to provide water to Metropolitan this year. It also represents the latest round in an ongoing and occasionally uneasy alliance between Met and farmers throughout the state.
In 1986, Metropolitan dispatched an emissary, a sometimes-pugnacious Ph.D. economist named Tim Quinn, to the
Finally, however, after years of negotiations, the Palo Verde farmers agreed to test-drive the fallowing concept from 1992 to 1994. Farmers laid out about a fifth of their land - land they otherwise would have planted in alfalfa, cotton and melons - in exchange for $1,240 per acre, an amount calculated to cover what they would have earned had they used the water to grow crops, plus a little extra.
For Western water bosses, the standard denomination for water is an acre-foot: about 326,000 gallons, enough water for two families in the
The agency stored the saved water in Lake Mead, upstream on the Colorado River near
For Met, the deal had not been an auspicious adventure, but it was hardly the end of the agency's pursuit of farm water.
In 1984, Carl Boronkay became Met's general manager, and he inherited a pledge the agency had made, 30 years earlier, to provide whatever water was necessary to supply the growing needs of
Boronkay set out to transform Met's thinking, and he soon hired Quinn, who had been working at the RAND Corporation, a Santa Monica-based public policy think tank. One of the first things Quinn did was analyze the reliability of Metropolitan's water supply. He delivered his findings to the board from behind an overhead projector - the first of many times that the
"I compared our reliability to other sectors like electricity and telephones and natural gas, and all those places were virtually 100 percent reliable all the time," he says. "And it turned out that we were about 50 percent reliable.
"It caught the board's attention." But more important, Quinn notes, "it really energized where Boronkay wanted to go."
Spurred by a serious drought in the late '80s, Boronkay set Metropolitan on a path toward diversifying its water-supply portfolio.
No longer would the agency rely solely on massive engineering projects, such as dams, for its water. Met began giving its member agencies incentives to increase water conservation. Those agencies also began to increasingly "recycle" water by treating their wastewater for reuse. And they added a long-neglected asset back to the portfolio by working to clean
But increasingly, the state's farms came to occupy a prominent place in Metropolitan's vision for the future. In one sense, the
"I thought, just 5 percent of that agricultural water would make a hell of a difference to us," Boronkay says. "We could use just a little of the massive amount of water that's devoted to agriculture to save ourselves."
Boronkay, who is now 77, has perfected the habit of delivering radical observations with a disarming grin, but the idea of transferring farm water to the city put him on perilous ground. The notional conflict between cities and farms stands at the center of the West's rip-roaring saga of water wars - thanks largely to William Mulholland and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power's infamous raid on the
Boronkay knew in his bones that simply buying farms to take their water was a political nonstarter. But he saw promise in experimenting with fallowing programs as a way to free up water. "Farmers can pull back: They fallow land if markets aren't good," he says. "So it's nothing strange." He and Quinn set to work puzzling out whether farming communities and urban areas might be able to forge a symbiotic, rather than a parasitic, relationship.
In the late 1990s,
By that point, Palo Verde's farmers had resigned themselves to the inevitability of Met's presence in their lives. "We know there's 18 million people over there, and 2,700 of us here. They're gonna come get some water," Smith says. "And we want to make a deal that's best for us."
In late 2000, one of the irrigation district's board members called Smith and instructed him to drive out to the Blythe airport to pick up a couple of representatives from Metropolitan. The two sides began negotiating an agreement that would take water transfers to a higher order of sophistication. As in the earlier deal, farmers in the irrigation district would generate water for Met by fallowing their lands. Unlike the previous arrangement, however, this one would stand in place for 35 years.
"Both sides spent a lot of time trying to look for bogeymen," Smith says. "If you're going to be in this 35 years, you have to think about a lot of things."
Simply taking land out of production for that length of time would have been tantamount to drying it up permanently. But by crafting a "rotating" fallowing program, in which any given field would be idled for no more than five years in a row, the new deal makes the impacts temporary and distributes them throughout the district.
The negotiations were not without their rough spots. Met, for instance, initially insisted on approving the yearly plan that each participating farmer submits to his bank for loans. "That was an absolute deal-killer," Smith says. "We will guarantee that if you tell us to fallow some ground, we will fallow some ground. The rest of that ground, you have nothing to do with it. It's none of your damn business."
Finally, after nearly three years of negotiations and a set of meticulously written contractual protections, the Palo Verde Irrigation District agreed to be drawn within Met's orbit. Farmers idle between 7 to 29 percent of the land in the district each year. In exchange, they received a sign-up bonus of $3,170 per acre, plus about $630 for each acre they fallow in any given year. (In each subsequent year of the deal, that amount will increase to cover inflation.)
The fallowing program allows Metropolitan to draw a steady "base load" of at least 25,000 acre-feet from the district each year. During dry years, Met can call for a maxed-out "peak load" of 111,000 acre-feet. For the valley's farmers, the deal allows them to continue farming the majority of their acreage during normal years and compensates them for income lost from any fallowed acreage.
When Metropolitan's managers talk about the agency's diversified water-supply portfolio, they tend to emphasize the interplay between Met's water-conservation programs and its massive expansion of storage projects. Per capita water consumption in Metropolitan's service area has been decreasing since 1990, while Met has expanded its water storage capacity by a factor of 10 over the same period. The agency can stash whatever water its efficiency efforts save during wet years.
But wet years are increasingly rare, and farm-water transfers play a critical role in the total mix; during droughts, they're the one reliable way Met can "backfill" shortfalls and make good on its pledge of 100 percent reliability. To ensure access to that water, Quinn - who was rising through Met's ranks on his way to becoming deputy general manager - began working to establish relationships with irrigation districts in other parts of the state.
"It wasn't like there was a long line of people wanting to talk to us," he concedes. "My nose got broken 86 times with agricultural district doors slamming shut on it, saying, 'What part of "no" don't you understand?' "
But Quinn learned. Eventually, he began touting the ways that Met could use its considerable financial resources to help farmers hedge their own risk, by providing them a supplemental source of income that was more dependable than variable crop prices.
Quinn also got better at sniffing out people like Van Tenney, who ran the Glenn-Colusa Irrigation District, more than 400 miles north of
In 2001, Glenn-Colusa banded with other local irrigation districts to sell water to the Westlands Water District, an agricultural powerhouse in the
Still, in the years after Boronkay left Metropolitan in 1993, Met's top brass did little to help Quinn's cause. In the late '90s, Boronkay's successor, John "Woody" Wodraska - who, not long afterward, would go on to work for Enron's water subsidiary - delivered an incendiary speech to the area's rice farmers. "He basically came up and told the audience, 'If you guys don't cooperate with Metropolitan, we're gonna take your water,' " says Tenney. "It was the most in-your-face thing I've ever seen."
Wodraska's departure from Met, and a series of conversations with Quinn, finally convinced Tenney that the agency was, as he puts it, "going through a fairly significant attitudinal change." He agreed to talk.
Quinn, meanwhile, had been thinking about how to move beyond the simple first-order strategy of portfolio diversification as a way to manage risk. He set out to hedge two of Metropolitan's biggest risks - running short of water, and spending heavily on backup supplies that it might not need.
"The really bad years don't happen that often," Quinn says. "We had enough water most of the time." Metropolitan might only need to backfill its supplies one year in five. "I wanted to find some sort of mechanism that would solve that one-in-five-year problem," Quinn says - a way that Met could ensure itself access to backup water, but only in the worst drought years.
As a graduate student at UCLA, Quinn was interested in stock-options trading. Electrical utilities had adapted that tool to put together portfolios that supplemented their "firm" supplies - such as power plants that they themselves owned and operated - with options to buy power from other producers on an as-needed basis. Quinn borrowed that idea and tailored it to the rusticated world of Western water.
In the winter of 2002, Quinn arranged a series of meetings with farmers in Glenn-Colusa and 10 other
Under the terms of the contract, Met paid the irrigation districts $10 an acre-foot for the option to buy sometime before the following March. If Met called the option, it would pay an additional $90 per acre-foot to buy the water. The irrigation districts would then "float" it down the Sacramento River and into the Delta; State Water Project pumps at the Delta's southern edge would transfer the water into the California Aqueduct, which would then carry it to
If Metropolitan didn't need the water, it wouldn't exercise the option. Farmers would pocket the option fee and then use the water on their farms. For Met, the arrangement was attractive because the agency could keep extra water on-call, but pay just a fraction of what it would have cost to buy the water outright and run the risk of not actually needing it.
It was an elegant idea - on paper. All told, Met signed options for more than 146,000 acre-feet of water. The winter was dry, and that spring, Met called the options. Almost immediately afterward, the heavens opened, and it rained like hell. "April was off the charts," says Quinn. "April and May combined were one of the biggest flows in history."
Because so much water had fallen on
And, in a sort of dejavu, $8.3 million worth of water floated down the
Undaunted, Quinn tried again the next year. He began negotiating another round of options contracts, with a call date on April 1. But he added a new provision. "I learned in 2003 to put your call date really late," Quinn says, so he sweetened the new round of contracts: If farmers would hold on until May before Metropolitan decided whether to exercise its options, the agency would pay an additional $20 per acre-foot premium. "We offered them more money if they kept the call going longer," Quinn says. "That's valuable to you as the buyer, because it reduces the probability of your making a mistake."
With such adjustments, Quinn slowly stacked the odds in Met's favor. At the beginning of every "water year," which starts on Oct. 1, there is a 50-50 chance that Metropolitan will have enough water to meet its demands. The potential spread at the start of the year is huge: Met may need to store as much as a million acre-feet of excess water each year, or it may need to scare up a million acre-feet to cover shortfalls. It all depends on how much precipitation falls over the course of the winter. Only as summer approaches do water managers finally have a solid idea of how much water will really be available.
In early 2005, Met signed options for 125,000 acre-feet of water. But by February, after a relatively wet winter, there was only about a 10 percent chance Met would need it. "And then when April hit" - in a repeat of what had happened in 2003 - "the (supply) curve shifted up," Quinn says. "All of a sudden we had no (water) problem."
This time, Met let the options expire without exercising them. Although the agency lost the $1.25 million it paid for the options, that was just a fraction of the nearly $16 million it would have lost had it bought the water but not ultimately needed it.
"Some people say, 'Well, you wasted money - you paid the 10 bucks (per acre-foot),' " Quinn says, shrugging. "But it's like paying health insurance: Even if you don't get sick, you don't feel like you wasted the premiums you paid."
This summer, Quinn left Metropolitan for a new job just as the biggest crisis in years hit the agency. In June, the state shut down its Delta pumps for nine days to protect endangered Delta smelt, whose populations have plummeted in recent years.
Then, in September, U.S. District Judge Oliver Wanger ordered the state to protect the smelt by throttling down the pumps from late December until June, when the fish spawn in the Delta. The restriction could reduce by up to a quarter the amount of water pumped out of the Delta.
Metropolitan kicked into crisis mode. The agency maintains an office on the ninth floor of The Senator Hotel, across the street from the state Capitol in
Exactly what form that project will take is, for the moment, unclear. But it could turn out to be a scaled-down version of the
That has left Met scrambling to assess how vulnerable its water supplies will be next year. Metropolitan has significant quantities of water stashed around the state in its various storage projects. But as that water is drawn down, farm-water transfers will become critical. Deep within the agency's L.A. headquarters, its Water Surplus and Drought Management group - known in Metspeak by the pronunciation of its acronym, WSDM, as "the Wisdom group" - has been assessing whether Met needs to begin doing drought-rationing triage and lining up options contracts.
When the state shut down its Delta pumps in May, the WSDM group began calling in Met's chits. The agency immediately asked the Palo Verde farmers to fallow the maximum amount of land allowed under their contract. "We put them on notice," says Kightlinger, Met's general manager, "and we'll be going full-bore next year."
Meanwhile, in an office just past the reception area in the ninth-floor
Judge Wanger's ruling is forcing Hirsch into unexplored territory. In the past, when Metropolitan negotiated dry-year options with farmers, Hirsch says, "it's always been smarter to go north of Delta," in the
Because of the pumping limits, Hirsch will have to thread his water transfers through needle's-eye windows of opportunity that may open at the pumps from next July through September. Only if next year is extremely dry will Met have any chance of getting water transfers across the Delta, through the State Water Project pumps and into the California Aqueduct.
That has left Hirsch pursuing a two-pronged strategy. In addition to buying options north of the Delta, he is making contacts with an entirely new set of irrigation districts, south of the Delta in the
Met is not the only agency seeking emergency water. Several San Francisco Bay Area urban water agencies will also see their supplies cut by Judge Wanger's ruling and are scouting out their own water-transfer deals. They will likely work cooperatively to find water. But at the end of September, the directors of the San Diego County Water Authority - a member of Met that has been increasingly insistent on lining up its own dedicated supplies - voted to seek a deal for 30,000 acre-feet from the Butte Water District in the Sacramento Valley.
The increased competition for water could drive prices up significantly. "If the prices get too high, we have the ability to say we'll sit out a year," Hirsch says. Metropolitan has enough water in storage that it could draw that down further to make up any shortfalls. "That's what we'll do if things get too crazy," Hirsch says, although he points out that such a tactic would result in less water in storage to cover shortfalls in future years.
In addition to the logistical challenges Met faces in the coming year, it will have to overcome some substantial lingering perceptual issues. "They've done a very good job of changing their approach and seeking cooperation," says Van Tenney, who retired from the Glenn-Colusa Irrigation District last year. But, he says, to many irrigation districts, "they're still suspect, even today. A lot of people in the north wouldn't give them the time of day."
In October, Hirsch did not seem particularly overwhelmed by the complex juggling act he'll be facing this winter. Still, he allowed, "this year's tough, because we're entering into a lot of new scenarios."
As evidence continues to mount that climate change will further reduce water supplies in
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http://www.hcn.org/servlets/hcn.Article?article_id=17328
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