California Water News

A daily compilation of significant news articles and comment

April 21, 2008

2. Supply -

Initiative divides farmers

Groups split over effects that eminent domain would have. -

Fresno Bee

A water fight in court

Smaller cities take on the big players to get a better break on drought rates. -

Long Beach Press Telegram

Farmers fallow their land to cope with water cutbacks -

The Associated Press

'North end' is golden -

Inland Valley Daily Bulletin

Warming could push Colorado to historic low -

Deseret News

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Initiative divides farmers

Groups split over effects that eminent domain would have.

Fresno Bee – 4/20/08

By E.J. Schultz, staff writer

SACRAMENTO -- When it comes to water, thirsty California farm groups normally fight as one. But it is water that is behind a growing split in the agriculture community over an eminent domain measure on the June ballot.

Proposition 98, backed by the California Farm Bureau Federation and an anti-tax group, would prohibit governments from seizing property, including farmland, for private use.

But some farm groups -- including the Fresno-based Nisei Farmers League and Western Growers Association -- fear the measure would block use of eminent domain for construction of long-sought pipelines, canals and reservoirs, including one targeted for east of Fresno.

"We're headed down a very bad situation here," said Manuel Cunha Jr., president of the Nisei league. "I look at this and I have great concern for our farmers."

The anti-98 campaign picked up more steam last week when Rep. George Radanovich, R-Mariposa, came out against the measure.

The congressman is normally aligned with the farm bureau and the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, the measure's other backer. But in a letter last week, he said "serious questions have been raised regarding the impact this constitutional initiative will have on our ability to guarantee a plentiful and safe water supply in the future."

The letter was sent to the no-on-Prop. 98 campaign, which plans to use it in campaign materials.

The farm bureau -- which has spent more than $298,000 on the "yes" campaign so far -- is standing by the measure and has support from multiple farm groups, including the California Grain and Feed Association and Fresno Cooperative Raisin Growers Inc.

The bureau "is a strong supporter of creating new reservoirs, and we're a strong supporter of property rights protection," said spokesman Dave Kranz. "Those two interests are both well represented in Prop. 98."

At issue is a single paragraph that would prohibit government from taking private land for the "consumption of natural resources." The language is meant to keep cities from taking water rights.

But Western Growers and other groups said the measure could block acquisition of land for pumps, pipes, canals and water-storage projects.

In the Fresno area, this would add roadblocks to the proposed Temperance Flat reservoir upstream of Millerton Lake, Prop. 98 opponents said. The majority of the targeted land is held by the U.S. government, but portions are under private control, said Mario Santoyo, assistant general manager of the Friant Water Users Authority, which represents east Valley growers.

"There's no question that [Prop. 98] would have some effect on this project," he said.

The farm bureau says its farm brethren are misinterpreting the measure. Prop. 98 still allows land to be taken for public use, including for "public facilities" such as water-storage projects, according to legal advice obtained by the bureau.

"The suggestion that [Prop. 98] would preclude the taking of property for the purpose of constructing a water storage or water conveyance facility because the water stored or conveyed is eventually 'consumed' is unpersuasive," the opinion states.

While eminent domain has rarely been used to take over farm land, the farm bureau fears that cities, eager to expand their boundaries, might use it more, said Kiran Black, the bureau's manager of political affairs.

"Our members expect us to protect family farms and ranches and we believe eminent domain is a real threat," she said.

Eminent domain became a hot issue in the wake of a 2005 Supreme Court ruling that governments could seize private property for the sake of economic development. In 2006, California voters narrowly defeated a measure that would have put sweeping restrictions on eminent domain. Cities strongly opposed it.

This year, Prop. 98 is joined on the ballot by Prop. 99, a more narrowly crafted measure backed by the League of California Cities that would bar governments from seizing owner-occupied residences. No farm groups have signed up to endorse Prop. 99.

Radanovich fears that if Prop. 98 passes, the water question would ultimately be decided by a judge, and "we haven't done very well in front of judges lately," he said in an interview.

Just last week, U.S. District Judge Oliver W. Wanger in Fresno ruled that a federal water plan did not adequately protect salmon -- a decision that will likely lead to further reductions in water deliveries from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

Farm groups have cited such rulings in their drive to get state money to build more canals and dams to shore up the state's water supplies.

But Prop. 98 has divided the normally tight-knit coalition.

Cunha blamed the farm bureau for "rushing to meet a deadline" on the initiative and failing to get the opinion of other farm groups.

"In most cases the farm bureau is pretty open to communicating with all the groups ... but on this one they slipped up," he said.

The bureau shows no signs of backing off.

"We're very confident in the work that we have done to put this initiative together," Black said.

"It is carefully crafted."#

http://www.fresnobee.com/263/story/539714.html

A water fight in court

Smaller cities take on the big players to get a better break on drought rates.

Long Beach Press Telegram – 4/20/08

An agency serving Lakewood, Cerritos, Norwalk and other smaller cities have gone to court to take on the mammoth Metropolitan Water District on the issue of fair pricing. We're on their side.

Central Basin Municipal Water District is suing because, it says, the MWD's new drought plan robs from the poor to pay the cost of new development in affluent areas.

We wouldn't call Lakewood, Cerritos and Norwalk poor communities, but semantics aside, Central Basin is right. Instead of respecting water rights that have been in place for years, the MWD's plan would give affluent growth areas a better break on excess-usage fees.

MWD denies that the plan is unfair, since Beverly Hills and Compton have the same rates. But what that point misses is that L.A., San Diego, Orange County and Inland Valley areas would get lower rates than Compton and other low-growth areas.

In Long Beach, for example, which isn't served by Central Basin but is among the lower-growth areas, rates could go up 22 percent, on top of regular increases.

MWD sells water imported from the Colorado River and Northern California to 28 cities and water agencies in Southern California. Its board members voted heavily in favor of the drought plan, but remember: L.A., Orange County and San Diego alone control more than half of the votes.

Central Basin and Long Beach argue that the drought plan is contrary to state law, an argument that may or may not survive a court test. It clearly flunks the fairness test.

What's especially frustrating is that if the big guys (and smaller ones as well) would practice conservation as faithfully as Long Beach, most of the drought worries would dry up. While others have done little, Long Beach has enacted an aggressive program that has reduced water usage 8 percent.

Within 10 years, the Long Beach Water Department intends to increase water recycling, implement a desalination system and increase conservation to the point it no longer needs imported water.

That's the right longer-term solution to these water fights. And the best part is that it would work just as well in L.A., Orange County and San Diego as in Long Beach.#

http://www.presstelegram.com/opinions/ci_8995566

Farmers fallow their land to cope with water cutbacks

The Associated Press – 4/21/08

FRESNO, Calif. --

A new report says California farmers are planting more crops that offer higher returns and require less irrigation to cope with water shortages this year.

Officials with the Westlands Water District, a coalition of giant farms in the San Joaquin Valley, say their members have let one-third of their land go fallow this year because of the water cutbacks.

The report by the federal government says farmers are planting almost 50 percent fewer acres of Upland cotton, while winter wheat acreage is up 20 percent and barley is up 53 percent.#

http://www.sanluisobispo.com/348/story/338600.html

'North end' is golden

Inland Valley Daily Bulletin – 4/20/08

Matt Wrye, Staff Writer

The dry, sun-baked front yards at Arrowhead Suburban Farms in San Bernardino are sitting on a gold mine, but there's no getting to it anytime soon.

These 364 acres just north of Little Mountain lie on county land, surrounded by the city.

Beginnings

Guy Zebbs, 38-year resident, began researching the Newmark Reservoir in 2000 after stumbling across the last neighbor who pulled water from a nearby well.

He found that a miniature agricultural suburbia was destined for this area ever since Roy Newmark and his brother, owners of Newmark Grain Co., originally subdivided 105 acres of land and incorporated Arrowhead Valley Mutual Water Company in 1920.

If you own property here, you're a stakeholder in the company and the 1,400-plus acre-feet of H20 down below.

Getting that precious fluid out of the ground is another story.

In 1925, the water company made a deal with the city. San Bernardino took over reservoir rights, but it agreed to let 98 inches of property owners' water flow into the neighborhood every year.

Over time, the city constructed a nearby pump plant to increase the reservoir's capacity, which holds more than 20 million gallons.

But no one maintained the network of underground pipes, and by 1952 that network was mostly obsolete.

The water company was reincorporated in 2002, but no water is being pumped out of the ground to this day.

Drawing card

Some old-time residents never moved away after buying their first home here.

It was Wilson Franklin's U.S. Air Force post at George Air Force Base near Victorville that got him acquainted with the area in 1960.

"I didn't have to shovel snow half the year," the New York native said.

Quite a different story than Vincent Ponce, who's almost a newcomer compared to Wilson.

Ponce grew up in the city's Westside, an area marred by violence.

"It's a lot safer up here," the five-year resident said.

"It's a big change not hearing gun shots and police helicopters."

He had no idea why his neighborhood is called Arrowhead Suburban Farms.

"I always called it the north end," Ponce said.

Insider's view

Danny Contreras hurried back to his house on 41st Street with determination on Wednesday.

An informal gardener for his neighbors, Contreras pushed a trash-can full of shovels back to his garage.

"When you dig to plant your plants, all of a sudden you hear, `clunk'," he said while digging a small hole adjacent to the driveway.

"I'm finding 12- and 14-inch pipes."

It's not unusual for residents to discover the old water company's irrigation footprint. There was 10,000 feet of cement pipe at one time.

Through 5th District Supervisor Josie Gonzales, and other funding sources, grants worth $300,000 are being put to work on the neighborhood's first sidewalk, curb and gutter along Mountain Drive.

Good news, bad news

Homeowners live on spacious lots of land, where green landscaping borders withering trees and shrubs.

Yards could be a lot greener, though, Zebbs says.

"If you could restore that thing with a magic snap of your fingers ... you still couldn't get the physical work out of people (living here) to make it happen," he said about the old water-pumping network. "People don't have the time."

He estimates residents could cut their outside water bill by 90 percent if they tapped into their underground water.

"You wouldn't see any dead trees and dying lawns," Zebbs said. "It'd look like Indian Wells." #

http://www.dailybulletin.com/search/ci_8994634?IADID=Search-www.dailybulletin.com-www.dailybulletin.com

Warming could push Colorado to historic low

Deseret News – 4/20/08

By Jim Efstathiou Jr. Bloomberg News
and Stephen Speckman Deseret News

The Colorado River may shrink in this century to its lowest level in at least 500 years because of global warming, threatening water supplies to Utah, California and five other states, researchers at the U.S. Geological Survey say.

But Utah Division of Water Resources director Dennis Strong isn't jumping to any conclusions just yet.

"Right now we're projecting over 120 percent inflow" this year into Lake Powell, one of the river's primary reservoirs, Strong says.

However, a "modest" 0.86 degree Celsius (1.5 degree Fahrenheit) increase in the 21st century could trim the average flow of the river — the primary water supply for residents in much of the U.S. Southwest — to the low end of a range marked between 1490 and 1998, USGS scientist Gregory McCabe said.

The Earth is likely to warm by more than twice that amount in the period, Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said last month. McCabe will brief Congress on the findings in June, when legislators expect to debate plans for the world's largest producer of greenhouse gases to begin capping its emissions.

"A 2-degree Celsius warming pushes the risk so high that it's beyond anything that has happened in the last 500 years," McCabe said on a conference call. "The average flow in the Colorado drops to lower than anything we've seen."

While the long-term prognosis may be dire according to the USGS study, Strong said the Colorado's flow will be ample this year. The lake is expected to rise by 50 feet from above-average upstream runoff, mostly from snowfall in Colorado.

The river is fed by the nation's seventh-largest drainage area. Less precipitation from periodic droughts or climate change leaves reduced snow to feed the 1,450-mile waterway.

In a report presented this past week in Boston and co-written by USGS research hydrologist David Wolock, McCabe used data from an earlier study that reconstructed annual stream flows from measurements of tree rings. The technique provides a way to show how temperatures will affect flows in the future, Wolock said.

"It allows us to place the 20th century conditions that were used in developing plans for managing water resources in the basin in the context of a much longer record of flow," Wolock said in an interview. "We can estimate flow during periods when we were never able to measure."

About 40 percent of Southern California's water supply is likely to be vulnerable within the next two decades as rising temperatures lead to reductions in snow pack in the Sierra Nevada and the Colorado River basin.

Global temperatures are likely to warm by at least 1.8 degrees Celsius this century, the U.N.'s Pachauri said. That would add to the existing gain of 0.76 degree since industrialization began and overshoot the threshold beyond which European leaders have said climate change will become dangerous.

Such a temperature increase would trigger a 38 percent chance of shortages in states such as California and Arizona, said McCabe, whose study was completed late last year.

"It turns out in the Colorado, just modest warming can have significant impacts," McCabe said. "I'm just trying to make people aware that there's possibilities, both from the natural variables as well as from this continued warming, of having some big problems."

Strong is more optimistic.

"We're fairly confident the water supply is not going to crash," he said. "It's not going to stop flowing immediately. ... We feel like we're doing a good job managing water supplies.

"I don't see where the information is consistent with the actual facts," he said about some opinions people are forming in recent months about climate change and its impact on the river.

However, Strong said global warming is "real," and he is concerned about its potential impact on the Colorado, but he wants more science coming in the areas of modeling temperature change and anticipated precipitation for the future.

The Colorado River is a primary water supply for residents in Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada and California. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which manages the two main reservoirs on the river at Lake Powell and Lake Mead, last year developed guidelines on how to cut supplies to users in the event of a shortage.

The Colorado River is allotted to users under terms of the 1922 Colorado River Pact. Allocations were set during an "unusually wet" period compared with the rest of the 20th century, according to the report by Reston, Virginia-based USGS.

Demand for Colorado River water has "increased substantially," the USGS said. As a result, even without global warming, allotments that were set "at high levels that may be difficult to maintain," according to the report.

While developing supply guidelines last year, the bureau projected a 5 percent or less chance of a water shortage by 2010, Terry Fulp, a bureau regional director, said in a March interview. That jumps to a 25 to 30 percent chance by 2020.

Until recently, "the concept of a shortage was contemplated but there were no rules in place on how to deal with it," Fulp said. Climate change "could potentially decrease the mean average flow. We don't know by how much."

Carbon dioxide, the main pollutant blamed for global warming, is produced primarily from burning fossil fuels such as oil and coal. Rising global temperatures driven by human emissions of CO2 and other heat-trapping gases is causing Arctic ice to melt and sea levels to rise, a U.N. panel of climate scientists said in 2007.

European countries and most other developed nations have agreed to limit emissions under the Kyoto treaty.#

http://deseretnews.com/article/1,5143,695272100,00.html

California Water News (DWR)

[Water_news] 2. DWR'S CALIFORNIA WATER NEWS: SUPPLY - 4/21/08

Farmers fallow their land to cope with water cutbacks -

Farmers fallow their land to cope with water cutbacks

The Associated Press – 4/21/08

FRESNO, Calif. --

No comments:

Blog Archive