A daily compilation of significant news articles and comment
December 12, 2007
2. Supply
URBAN SUPPLY ISSUES:
Perris-based water district first to postpone delivery deals to major new developments - Riverside Press
IID joins landmark agreement - Imperial Valley Press
WATER RESTRICTIONS:
Villaraigosa weighs curbs on water usage; The mayor says he will decide early next year whether to impose mandatory restrictions on L.A. residents - Los Angeles Times
CLIMATE ISSUES:
Climate change linked to declining snowpack, scientists say - San Jose Mercury News
AG WATER ISSUES:
State experts discuss long-term water solutions - California Farm Bureau
LOCAL CONSERVATION EFFORTS:
District asks customers asked to save water - Ventura County Star
County agency helps consumers conserve water; New program designed to save about 30M gallons of water a year -
URBAN SUPPLY ISSUES:
Perris-based water district first to postpone delivery deals to major new developments
Riverside Press
By Jennifer Bowles and Dan Lee, staff writers
Tight water supplies in
The delay by the Perris-based Eastern Municipal Water District includes a 2.4-million square-foot distribution center proposed by Highland Fairview Properties for eastern
Skechers USA Inc. signed an 11-year lease for the facility worth an estimated $100 million that some commercial real estate brokers say may be the largest ever signed for a distribution center in the Inland area and, possibly, the
Highland Fairview President Iddo Benzeevi said he thinks the water issue will be resolved. He also said water agencies need the time to develop a plan to address the water supply concerns.
"We're not sure yet how it may affect the project but we are working closely with the EMWD and the city," he said
Details on the other six developments weren't immediately available Tuesday. Under state law, large developments must get "will-serve" letters from water districts, promising they can supply water for 20 years, before construction proceeds.
Randy Record, an Eastern Municipal board member, said the district will re-evaluate issuing those letters to the developments in March, when agency officials have a better sense of the statewide water supply situation, including winter rain and snow counts.
Record said he wants to make sure the water supply of people who are here is not compromised because of new development.
"When we approve development going forward, it's going to be under our terms, which is, is the development state-of-the-art and does it take into consideration the value of all resources, especially water?" Record said.
The state's water woes are the result of an eight-year drought on the
On Tuesday, a judge ordered federal wildlife officials to develop a new plan to protect the Delta smelt by September. He also said water managers must scale back pumping water out of the Delta during the winter and in the spring to protect the fish.
If the drought continues on the
Borre Winckel, executive officer of the Building Industry Association's
"It adds to the uncertainty in an already uncertain market," Winckel said.
The building industry is working hard to prevent the slumping market and inadequate water supplies from halting construction, he said.
"You can't open a project unless you have water service," Winckel said.
Home builders and commercial/industrial developers are all going to have to deal with the new world of substantially smaller water supplies, he said.
Next Steps
Elsewhere in the Inland region, water agencies haven't considered mandatory rationing but are planning more aggressive steps to urge residents to conserve, especially in their yards, where 60 percent to 80 percent of a home's water goes.
The Coachella Valley Water District, for instance, will pay homeowners associations to change their landscaping from water-thirsty plants to more drought-tolerant ones, said Steve Robbins, the district's general manager.
And if things get worse, Western Municipal Water District, which serves western
"We'd have to look at installing a lock on the meter," district General Manager John Rossi said.
Meanwhile, many farmers in western
About 510 of the 1,703 farmers served by the Rancho California Water District in Temecula are being substantially affected, with avocado farmers taking the brunt or the reduction and wineries escaping much of the cutbacks, said Tim Barr, the district's resource planner. The average reduction for those 510 farmers is 28.4 percent, he said.
New Agreement
The Colorado River agreement, to be signed Thursday by Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne in Las Vegas, includes first-ever guidelines developed over the past few years to determine how water will be shared among
The lake is currently 50 percent full.
Roger Patterson, assistant general manager of the Metropolitan Water District, said it's highly unlikely -- a 2 percent chance over the next 20 years -- that the district would be affected by shortages.
The district, which serves 18 million Southern Californians, will be able to store water in
Also under the new agreement, Southern Nevada Water Authority will help pay for a new $172 million reservoir in Imperial County, north of the Mexican border, in exchange for getting credit for the water the reservoir would conserve.
It will specifically capture water that would otherwise flow into
It would contain two cells, each holding 4,000 acre-feet of water, Walsh said. One acre-foot is 326,000 gallons, or enough to serve a family of four for two years.
Perhaps more importantly, some said, the agreement prevents the three states from battling in court.
"Now there's an order on the river and relative peace and we know what we're doing and not getting caught up in the all the cross-fighting. That's the whole point," Robbins said. #
http://www.pe.com/localnews/inland/stories/PE_News_Local_D_water12.3327dbc.html
IID joins landmark agreement
By Brianna Lusk, staff writer
The lifeblood of the Imperial Valley depends on the water supplied from the
As the nearly decade-long drought continues along with a historic low water flow, a landmark agreement has been reached on what to do if the situation worsens.
The Imperial Irrigation District has joined water rights holders including the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California and entities from six other states in what is being called the most important water pact since 1922.
This week the secretary of the Interior is expected to sign the Record of Decision on the Water 2025 Initiative in
The initiative puts into place measures to prevent states from warring over water in the event of a crisis.
The agreement is being touted as the most important move in water history since the signing of the Colorado River Compact.
“It gives us the opportunity to store the water and take it when we need it,” said IID board President Stella Mendoza.
If the IID had voted against it, it would have served effectively as a veto against the decision being heralded as a solution to the growing water shortage problem.
The Water 2025 Initiative allows the district to bank water, up to 50,000 acre-feet per year, behind Hoover Dam in
The ability to store water that has been conserved by the district has been more than 20 years coming, officials said.
The Bureau of Reclamation estimates that by 2025, the region along the
Metropolitan Water District, covering portions of Orange, San Diego and Los Angeles County along with Coachella Valley are estimated to face likely water shortages by 2025.
Through various methods of intentional conservation, water saved by IID will be kept at
The lake, acting as a reservoir, will allow IID to draw on any surpluses created in the event of a shortage locally.
The agreement also establishes criteria on how the Interior Department could declare a shortage on the river and how the water would be delivered to entities that rely on the
Director Mike Abatti said he took issue with the agreement because the Metropolitan Water District has joined the Southern Nevada Water Authority on a reservoir to be built near Drop 2 on the
“It smells like a transfer to me,” Abatti said. “I think we’re giving up too much.”
MWD has the right to store more water than IID, according to the Water 2025 Initiative. After two years of negotiating, the MWD has allowed others to join in storing water at
The reservoir along the
Director James Hanks said he was concerned that participation in the program should not interfere with IID’s priority in water coming from the river.
Despite ongoing water controversies and the unanswered question of how the Water 2025 Initiative will affect
“We don’t have a cause for concern because our water is our water and MWD has their own. That is our own supply for us to use when we need it,”
http://www.ivpressonline.com/articles/2007/12/12/local_news/news04.txt
WATER RESTRICTIONS:
Villaraigosa weighs curbs on water usage; The mayor says he will decide early next year whether to impose mandatory restrictions on
By Deborah Schoch, staff writer
Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said Tuesday that he will decide early next year whether to impose mandatory curbs on water usage in
"I will reassess that at the beginning of the year," Villaraigosa said. "We're going to have to do substantially better in conserving and reducing our water use."
In the past, city Department of Water and Power officials have said that they would not make that decision until February or March, after reviewing weather conditions.
In early June, the mayor issued a plea for residents to rein in their water use by 10%, pointing to a record dry year and a small snowpack in the eastern
Despite Villaraigosa's request, overall water use in the city stayed virtually unchanged from June through October, The Times reported Monday.
City officials say they anticipate a small decrease once November statistics are compiled and reviewed. By contrast,
Although a storm passed through
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-water12dec12,1,7573382.story?coll=la-headlines-california
CLIMATE ISSUES:
Climate change linked to declining snowpack, scientists say
By Betsy Mason, Bay Area News Group
Dwindling snowpack, earlier stream flow and rising temperatures in the Western U.S. can be attributed directly to human activity and will seriously affect
For the first time, scientists have linked several specific trends in a regional water cycle to global climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions. Since 1950, the Sierra snowpack has decreased by about 20 percent, the temperature in the Rocky Mountains has gone up 3 degrees and spring water flow in the
"These signals are the same no matter where you go in the West," marine physicist Tim Barnett of Scripps Institution of Oceanography said Tuesday at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. "We've got a real serious problem."
By scaling down global climate models to bring greater detail of the region, a team of scientists led by Barnett and atmospheric scientist Ben Santer of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory projected these trends into the future and found a grim picture for the West. By about 2040, the Colorado Rockies will be nearly barren of snow as early as April 1 each year. And a similar story will play out in the Sierra.
As temperature rises, snowpack will disappear earlier leading to a shift in peak stream flows to earlier in the year. That could be a significant problem for
"Mother Nature is acting like a tremendous reservoir for us," Barnett said.
Reservoirs will be at a greater risk of flooding, though, as meltwater arrives before reservoir levels have gone down enough to accommodate it.
"It's the timing that's the problem," he said.
The team tested the accuracy of their climate models against past trends, and were able to closely match actual changes in snowpack, stream flow and temperature.
They then used the models to find the cause of the changes, and found a distinct human fingerprint.
Without adding past human greenhouse gas emissions into the equation, they could not get the models to reflect reality.
"No matter how we cut the cake, no matter how hard we tried to look at the uncertainties and quantify them, we could not get a 'no' result, no detection of a fingerprint," Santer said.
Santer worries that much of
"It's not stable any more," he said.
Barnett is frustrated by the lack of preparation for the changes that are coming, and inaction by the federal government.
Adapting will be important because the greenhouse gasses already in the atmosphere will continue to heat up the globe for several decades, and global emissions continue to rise.
"For someone who's got seven grandkids, that scares the hell out of me," Barnett said. "I've had a look at the future and I don't like it." #
http://www.mercurynews.com/breakingnews/ci_7695286?nclick_check=1
AG WATER ISSUES:
State experts discuss long-term water solutions
By Dave Kranz, CFBF Communications/News Division
With many
Water leaders who participated in the discussion predicted years of difficulty, particularly for agricultural water users, as
"There's a rough patch ahead for
A federal judge's decision committing more water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to benefit protected fish leaves water agencies south of the delta scouting for alternative supplies, Quinn said.
"With what's happening in the delta, the Metropolitan Water District and big ag districts in the
A representative of one of those agricultural water users, Jason Peltier of the Fresno-based Westlands Water District, said the court ruling could lead to a 70-percent reduction in water supplies in Westlands and in "a bunch of other districts."
"Hopefully, it won't be that bad but certainly, that's what some of the modeling is showing," he said.
And that's just for one year in what could be a lengthy wait for a long-term solution for moving water through or around the delta.
"How do we deal with the eight, 10 or 15 years it takes to get a canal built so we can effectively separate our water from the fish?" Peltier asked. "It's a frightening prospect looking at that gap."
The prospect of a canal to carry water around the delta worries landowners and water users there. Tom Zuckerman, former co-counsel of the Central Delta Water Agency, said construction of a water conveyance in the delta "doesn't solve problems, it just moves them."
"Until we begin to address the severe imbalance between supplies of water and demands for water, building a conveyance that enables us to transfer the deficit from one area of the state to another doesn't really address our problems," Zuckerman said.
But Quinn said water conveyance lies at the heart of the state's water problems and that ACWA will seek solutions to solve "that controversial, difficult conveyance problem and still make sure all the boats are rising with the tide around the state of
Northern California Water Association Executive Director Ryan Broddrick said he worries that discussions about water supply reliability have not focused on what's needed to sustain long-term food and fiber production in the
"There's been a lot of discussion about what is needed for urban supplies and a lot of discussion about opportunities for conservation," he said. "But there has not been a discussion about the future of agriculture in the
Westlands' Peltier said agricultural representatives in water negotiations must constantly deal with the myths that farmers use water inefficiently and that agriculture represents a low-value use of water. At one recent meeting, he said, he tried to change people's perceptions.
"I asked people to think about an acre," Peltier said. "You can play a football game on an acre of grass and it's pretty to look at, but what can a farmer do with an acre? A farmer can grow 12,000 heads of lettuce. That's 48,000 servings. A farmer can grow 100,000 pounds of tomatoes. A farmer can grow 2,000 pounds of almonds and if you're good and eat a can a week, that one acre can feed you for 150 years."
Richard Roos-Collins, director of legal services for the Natural Heritage Institute, said that sort of understanding among all the different interests involved in negotiating about
"The water-supply system we have today was built at a time when Californians could do business together," he said. "We need to go back to that, or go forward to it, and find a way to do business together that protects our respective interests but nonetheless allows us to put aside differences that can be put aside, so we can get on with the business of the state." #
http://www.cfbf.com/agalert/AgAlertStory.cfm?ID=951&ck=1C1D4DF596D01DA60385F0BB17A4A9E0
LOCAL CONSERVATION EFFORTS:
District asks customers asked to save water
By Joanne Cunha, staff writer
The Las Virgenes Municipal Water District is asking residential and commercial customers to cut water usage by 10 percent, while requiring the area's 25 agricultural customers to reduce usage by 30 percent beginning Jan. 1, officials said Tuesday.
The requested residential cutback would save about 717 million gallons over a year's time. The required agricultural reduction will save 14 million gallons per year, officials said.
"We are entering the second year of a severe drought in
The district serves 65,000 people in a region that includes the cities of
"The population has grown, but water usage has remained level due to water-saving appliances and other general public conservation methods. That's the good news," Mundy said.
The call for water conservation pertains only to potable water. For customers with access to recycled water for irrigation, consumption may remain at normal levels, officials said.
In addition to the drought, the district's water supply has been reduced because of a judge's ruling. The district receives water through the State Water Project from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. A court ordered a 30 percent reduction in pumping of water from the delta to reduce adverse environmental effects.
"Last year was the lowest statewide precipitation in the state since the beginning of statewide record-keeping," said Jeff Reinhardt, a district spokesman. "We only had 29 percent of normal precipitation."
The district is offering customers free on-premises water-use surveys to help them conserve. Rebate programs on water-saving appliances and fixtures are available, officials said. Information can be found on the district's Web site, www.LVMWD.com.
"Achieving a 10 percent reduction is not difficult for most households, but those small savings can make a significant difference," said Mundy.
About 70 percent of water delivered in the district's service area is used outdoors.
"Compared to the drought of 1991, this drought is impacted by not only less precipitation, but legal and federal restrictions on water sources that we haven't had before," Mundy said.
"Unless conditions improve significantly, these steps may be the first in a series of escalating water conservation measures. I want to emphasize that it's time for everyone to get serious about saving water." #
http://www.venturacountystar.com/news/2007/dec/12/district-asks-customers-asked-to-save-water/
County agency helps consumers conserve water; New program designed to save about 30M gallons of water a year
By Rachel Raskin-Zrihen, staff writer
The Solano County Water Agency has taken steps to help the county's largest water users conserve.
The agency will subsidize up to 80 percent of the cost of its new WeatherTRACK Smart Water Management network for some local firms in a program designed to save about 30 million gallons of water and 45,000 kWh of power annually, a WeatherTRACK spokesman said Monday.
The Smart Water Management network is to landscaping what the low-flow toilet is to restrooms, said Tom Ash, director of conservation for Petaluma-based HydroPoint Data Systems, inc.. which developed WeatherTRACK.
"It takes the guesswork out of water use," Ash said. "Based on weather data, it adjusts automatically," thereby eliminating, for instance, the automatic sprinklers going off in the rain.
"If it's hot, it waters a little more, and if it's cooler, a little less," he added.
The program concentrates on Solano and part of Yolo county's largest landscape water users including Lowe's Home Improvement, Phillips Edison, Weingargten Realty Investors and Westfield Solano, according to the announcement. This type of large landscape water user gives the agency "the biggest bang for public funds," said its general manager David Okita. "They use the lion's share of urban water, and this offers a solution problem to conserve four times more water than any other technology."
The technology at work is a decade old and is growing in popularity, Ash said. It will be the only kind of automatic irrigation available in
"Water waste affects everybody's water bills," Ash said. "Saving water keeps bills low and is tremendous for the environment, keeping water in lakes, streams and reservoirs."
The hope, Okita said, is that as others see these big, high-profile firms saving water, they will be inspired to do the same.
"We hope word will spread and others will start using the smart controllers," he said. #
http://www.timesheraldonline.com/todaysnews/ci_7701012
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