[Water_news] 1. DWR'S CALIFORNIA WATER NEWS - Top Item for 3/12/08

Department of Water Resources

California Water News

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

 

March 12, 2008

 

1.  Top Item

 

State to study if additional dams worth trouble; water quality, ecosystem improvements

Stockton Record – 3/12/08

By Hank Shaw, Capitol Bureau Chief

 

SACRAMENTO - Can additional dams help save the Delta?

 

Two local state senators working to strike a deal on building new reservoirs in the Central Valley might explore that concept further. Sens. Dave Cogdill, R-Modesto, and Michael Machado, D-Linden, want to see how much the public would benefit from building a dam on the San Joaquin River near Fresno and another along the Sacramento River in Colusa.

 

The proposals themselves are not new: A reservoir at Temperance Flat near Fresno and the proposed Sites Reservoir near Maxwell have been kicked around by lawmakers for the better part of five years.

 

What is relatively new is the idea that the water these new reservoirs would hold could improve the water quality and the ecosystem in the West's largest estuary.

 

Feasibility studies need to be completed on both proposals, and completing them with the environment in mind - as opposed to strictly water storage for farms and urban users - could show that the state does indeed have a stake in their construction. Or not.

 

"The concept has been a chunk of money that buys an asset for the environment," state Department of Water Resources Director Lester Snow said during a hearing of the Senate Natural Resources Committee on Tuesday.

Added Cogdill: "That's been a key criteria in terms of what this proposal has to be."

 

Machado and Cogdill hope to break a two-year impasse over a new bond that would ask voters to spend billions on water supply projects. Broad agreement already exists for projects to clean up polluted groundwater, store water underground and promote conservation. Whether public money would be well spent with a new dam is the issue.

 

Most of the good places for dams already are taken, so any water stored behind new sites would be expensive.

 

Supporters argue that global climate change is expected to cause more of California's precipitation to fall as rain instead of snow - and rain needs to be captured in a reservoir, they say.

 

Thus far, that argument has not held water, so to speak. But late last year, Cogdill and a few of his Republican colleagues said building dams at Colusa and Temperance Flat could be run specifically to keep existing Delta flows clean and secure.

 

Machado has generally supported this notion for years, as has his Assembly counterpart, Lois Wolk of Davis. The problem always has been how much the public benefits from all this, if at all. And how much the public benefits would determine how much of the bill the state would pay. Each dam would cost more than $1 billion. Historically, however, the state has spent only a tiny percentage on dams. Local money provided the bulk of the funding.

 

"It has not been the way we've gone about it" in the past, Snow said.

 

The state has spent more than $62 million studying the various dam proposals in recent years. The Water Resources Department estimates it will cost another $16 million to finish them. #

http://www.recordnet.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080312/A_NEWS/803120327/-1/A_NEWS14

####