Department of Water Resources
A daily compilation of significant news articles and comment
September 12, 2008
5. Agencies, Programs, People -
Yucaipa-Calimesa plan would recharge underground water basins
The Press-Enterprise- 9/11/08
Sacramento issues dead lawn fine, then backs off
The
A Strategy for Coping with Climate Change: Amid rising seas, a California modeling effort recommends abandoning land tracts in the Sacramento
MIT Technology Review- 9/11/08
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Yucaipa-Calimesa plan would recharge underground water basins
The Press-Enterprise- 9/11/08
Homeowners in Yucaipa and Calimesa will pay about $2.50 more per month beginning Nov. 1 as part of a new water-banking strategy being implemented by the Yucaipa Valley Water District.
The long-term conservation strategy aims to protect residents and businesses from continuing drought and uncertainties about water availability from the Sacramento Delta, said Joe Zoba, general manager of the water district, which serves about 50,000 customers in a 50-square-mile area.
The district will tack on a 15 percent surcharge to be paid by residents and businesses.
The money will be used to purchase more water from the California State Water Project, which can be stored underground as reserves.
"It will not only help us protect our customers from future water shortages but give us the ability to replenish our local groundwater basins," Zoba said.
In recent years, the district has had to pump more water than can be naturally recharged, drawing down area groundwater basins, Zoba said.
The district's water-banking plan also will require developers and others wanting to build new homes or businesses to deposit enough money to purchase 7 acre-feet of water per proposed home or business.
One acre-foot of water equals 325,851 gallons.
Developers opting to buy 15.7 acre-feet of water for each proposed house can earn Crystal Status, allowing them to build when the district must restrict water use by at least 20 percent.
When mandatory water cutbacks reach 35 percent or more, however, Crystal Status property owners could face restrictions, district officials said.
Earlier this year, the state Department of Water Resources instituted further pumping restrictions of State Project Water to comply with an order by federal Judge Oliver Wanger to protect an endangered fish, the Delta smelt.
State water exports had to be scaled back at a time when the Department of Water Resources would normally have been supplying farmers with irrigation water and replenishing local water supplies, said Lester Snow, the department's director.
Water Resources projected its water deliveries would be reduced up to 30 percent this year as a result of the court order.
Along with a water-banking strategy that took the district's board, developers and ratepayers about 10 months to develop, a new recycled-water delivery system will help the district recycle and reuse water for outdoor landscaping at new commercial and residential developments.
Historically, the Yucaipa Valley Water District has relied on groundwater to supply customers, but area growth prompted the district to tap surface water supplies as local groundwater supplies dwindled.
The district recently unveiled a $44 million, 30-acre water filtration complex that uses microfiltration and nanofiltration treatments to match existing groundwater quality with a variable surface water supply.
Ensuring water districts can meet rising demand is likely to get costlier in
An association study found much of the nation's drinking water and wastewater infrastructure was built 80 to 100 years ago.
Replacing and repairing aging pipes is expected to top$250 billion over the next 20 years.
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http://www.pe.com/localnews/rivcounty/stories/PE_News_Local_E_waterbank12.225559e.html
Sacramento issues dead lawn fine, then backs off
The
By Sam Stanton
You can imagine Shela Barker's frustration when she received a notice from the city this week that her home is a public nuisance because of the dead lawn out front, and that she was being assessed $931 in fees as a result.
Standing in the yard of her home directly behind the Arden Fair mall Thursday morning, Barker could point down the street to another home with a dead lawn. Two doors down in the other direction is another. A few doors farther down is yet another.
None of those, however, is listed on the city's Web site as being in violation of
"Isn't that hilarious?" Barker asked. "That just drives me nuts."
Barker has been dealing with the issue since May, when someone complained to the city that her lawn was dead and in violation of city codes. The 33-year-old attorney let the lawn die intentionally, planning to replace it with drought-resistant landscaping.
She had read a July story in The Bee about an east
Barker figured her plan to install new landscaping that requires much less water would pass muster, too.
But it took a series of phone calls and e-mails to the city before Barker received assurances that she will not have to pay the fines outlined in a Sept. 5 letter from the city.
That letter informed Barker that the city had, in essence, placed a lien on the home she has owned for the past 10 years: a $746 fine for the lawn, another $100 title fee and an $85 "termination fee" to clear the matter from the county recorder's records.
The city added helpfully that if she wanted to appeal the matter she would have to pay a $400 fee to get a hearing.
All this because she wanted to save water and look out on a yard like the ones in her desert hometown of
Thursday morning, when The Bee called city code enforcement director Max Fernandez about Barker's case, Fernandez said she was in the clear.
"I talked to her (Wednesday) and she sent me her plans, so we're just going to let her go ahead and do it," Fernandez said. "There's no money owed now."
A few minutes after Fernandez spoke, Barker received an e-mail from him telling her the case was closed.
Part of Barker's difficulty may stem from the fact that her landscaping change has taken longer than she expected.
After receiving notice of the complaint in May, Barker started her dealings with City Hall, calling and writing and calling again until it was agreed that she would start work on the landscaping by August.
But she was placed on disability Aug. 6, she said, "so a lot of the work I can't physically do right now."
Barker hopes to be off disability by the end of this month and to start the transformation of her brown yard.
Fernandez said his department does not want to stand in the way of people putting in drought-resistant yards, but that his department has to respond to complaints from neighbors about dead lawns. Many of those complaints stem from foreclosures.
"You've got to look at the other side," Fernandez said. "The neighbors are probably frustrated that nothing's happening. We're in the squeeze on this.
"But we're working with our people to look at ways to get through this drought and have the right mindset. We can train our code enforcement people to look at it differently.
"It's the people we have to educate that, hey, rock gardens and cactus gardens are OK."#
http://www.sacbee.com/101/story/1230292.html
A Strategy for Coping with Climate Change: Amid rising seas, a California modeling effort recommends abandoning land tracts in the Sacramento
MIT Technology Review- 9/11/08
By David Talbot
A new multidisciplinary modeling effort concludes that certain tracts of land in
"It's always difficult and controversial to look at these kinds of things," says Jay Lund, a professor of environmental engineering at the
The Sacramento Delta is where the
But a combination of settling land, rising sea levels, and the prospect of levee destruction from earthquakes have long threatened the area.
In 2004, when a delta levee unexpectedly collapsed, the state and federal governments rushed in to repair it, spending more than $75 million. However, the effort protected land worth only $22 million. "Throwing a lot of money at a low-value private asset is not something you want to do with taxpayer money very often," says Richard Howitt, an economist at UC Davis who participated in the study. "We wanted to put a lot of work into what really amounts to a triage list--and say which islands, if they collapse, we say, 'Sorry about that,' but you don't repair them or pump them. You adjust to a new ecology." (By "islands," Howitt means low-lying tracts protected from surrounding water by levees.)
The study--which spanned disciplines including civil engineering, climate science, economics, hydrology, and biology--specifies a precise boundary between areas that should and shouldn't be saved. It also recommends that long-considered plans to build a canal to divert water supplies from points upstream on the two rivers should be carried out now; the present inlet points cannot be protected from salt-water incursion in the long term. The canal proposal was defeated in a 1982 referendum, but ultimately,
"Unless we get some serious modeling,"
The study even looked in detail at the effects of various topographical changes on fish and the resulting economic costs. "Fish biology is a very complex business, but we sat down with 37 fish biologists, bought them a nice lunch and quizzed them and got a proper statistical distribution of their beliefs of certain species' surviving under certain scenarios, and came up with economic decision models," Howitt says. "We are not the only ones doing this, but we are probably one of the more comprehensive. What we've done is quantitatively link the different disciplines."
The analysis would seem to have sobering implications. In terms of sea-level rise, expensive infrastructure investments will have to be made--or willfully not made--in parts of New Orleans, the Everglades, Bangladesh, and the Netherlands, to name just a few obvious spots.
On a more subtle level, climate change will profoundly affect water supplies everywhere, because it will bring deeper droughts, changes in rainfall timing and intensity, and reduced mountain snowpack. "The critical issue is that it will change our planning paradigms, and it will change the information we use to make decisions," says Richard Palmer, a civil engineer and water-resources expert at the
http://www.technologyreview.com/Energy/21363/
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