Department of Water Resources
A daily compilation of significant news articles and comment
March 10, 2009
5. Agencies, Programs, People –
EDITORIAL: Water limits, cutbacks need careful review
OUR VIEW: Lot size, fairness ought to be limits' factors
Editorial: Can city stop the water waste?
Thomas D. Elias: Now it's definitely a man-made drought
Marysville Appeal Democrat
California
Indian Country Today
Coso investing $12 million-plus on merits of pump proposal
Inyo Register
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EDITORIAL: Water limits, cutbacks need careful review
OUR VIEW: Lot size, fairness ought to be limits' factors
By
Water officials have been talking up the ongoing drought and urging us to "conserve" for so long that as surprising as it may seem, some
Now, however, officials are talking about rationing or setting water-use limits but ignoring the basic issue: Cut back from, or ration based on what? There is no obviously reasonable benchmark.
Telling residential households they will now have to use "20 percent less" than same-time-last-year sounds easy enough, sure. But it has problems. Chief among those is the fact that it is among the least fair options (if fairness matters, and it should).
Rationing may be in the cards, but again, based on what water usage as determined by what calibrator? Some suggest rationing water by price, but again, there is that fairness issue.
A reduction from past or ongoing water use penalizes those who have been good citizens, doing their part and instituting sound water habits. And it rewards water hogs for their past excesses (for example, who among us would be able to do just fine with "only" 80 percent of the federal government's bailout of AIG?).
Government ---- this includes water agencies ---- must acknowledge those residents who have been voluntarily reducing water consumption. Some residents stayed in the habit of being smarter about water since the drought of the 1990s, remembering then-Gov. Pete
Rationing by price would only work with a reasonable baseline allotment, which government could set by using lot size (square footage of lot). Those with bigger yards would get higher baselines at the minimum water use rate; consumption above that point would be charged a higher price. Those with smaller yards receive smaller baseline allocations. This seems to be the most fair to us.
But these allotments would need to be workable as government still needs to be mindful of those who are the most price-sensitive: Young military families with a spouse overseas at war, as well as seniors or the disabled living on their meager savings and whatever other private or governmental financial assistance they obtain.
For ourselves, we believe the factors mentioned above, plus many others, all must be taken into account, hashed out and limits set soon: The day when water cutoffs or rations become a part of life in Southern California is rapidly approaching.#
http://www.nctimes.com/articles/2009/03/10/opinion/editorials/z9b035b42ebb1c8cb882575660082a2b1.txt
Editorial: Can city stop the water waste?
Sacramento
After years of acting like the Jabba the Hutt of the water world,
At a workshop last week, the City Council heard proposals from staff members on beefing up landscaping rules and enforcing water-waste rules.
Utilities director Marty Hanneman also wants the council to consider requiring homes up for resale to be retrofitted with water-efficient fixtures, an ordinance enacted by other
While actions are more important than words, these proposals – and the council's response to them – represent a marked departure from business as usual.
Before Hanneman became utilities chief,
Under the previous regime, the city seemed to be operating under the mistaken presumption that the best way to protect the city's water rights was to consume as much as possible. Now there's a recognition that, if the city is seen as a water glutton, it eventually will be subject to increasing adjudication and punitive legislation. As Councilman Steve Cohn put it, "If we are reactive, it's going to be bad news."
Consider the basic facts: California is facing its third dry winter, yet people in Sacramento continue to consume about 280 gallons of water daily, compared with a state average of 192 gallons.
Most homes in
Even if the city doubled its current rate of meter installations, it would reach 2025 with nearly 50,000 homes left to meter.
To put its new water-wise words into action,
• Adopt immediate, cost-effective ways to reduce water consumption citywide, starting with city parks and facilities. Some of these are unmetered. All need to be metered. Once they are, the mayor should consider tapping his network of volunteers to help in retrofitting parks with irrigation, water sensors and drought-tolerant plants.
• Document how much energy the city uses to treat and pump water around the city. This figure is essential as a baseline for determining the potential cost savings of increased water conservation.
• Set up a funding stream for accelerated installation of water meters, as well as an enhanced water education and enforcement program.
• Lastly, we'd urge the Sacramento Association of Realtors not to react in a knee-jerk fashion against a city plan to require plumbing retrofits whenever a home is resold. When the housing market recovers, home buyers moving here from the Bay Area and elsewhere will want homes with efficient plumbing, especially as the city moves from a flat rate to a metered rate for water.
A better approach is for Realtors to examine funding options that would help home sellers cover part of the cost of retrofits.
Other communities finance such programs.
http://www.sacbee.com/opinion/story/1685332.html
Thomas D. Elias: Now it's definitely a man-made drought
Marysville Appeal Democrat – 3/10/09
Thomas D. Elias writes on California
One question hung in the air for many months after a landmark ruling by a federal judge in Fresno severely limited amounts of water the huge pumps in the Delta of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers can send to much of the San Francisco Bay Area, Southern California and farms in the Central Valley:
Why didn't anyone even try to overturn the ruling?
There was no appeal, it turns out, because that 2007 decision was somewhat temporary, applying only until the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service could issue new rules to protect the endangered, silvery, minnow-like Delta smelt.
Few court rulings have been as consequential in the short run as that one by Judge Oliver Wanger, and the new rules, just out, figure to have even more impact. Simply put, this is causing a major drought.
Wanger's decision was one reason many
Now a series of February and March storms has restored the snowpack in the
But the new Fish and Wildlife regulations will stop the pumps even longer times than did Wanger's order. The idea is to idle them during the entire smelt spawning season, essentially from January to June.
So supplies will be low for farms and cities this spring and summer. Perhaps not as low as indicated by the federal Bureau of Reclamation before the late-winter storms, when it warned many farmers to expect no water at all from the CVP. But still far lower than if the pumps were operating normally.
This time, though, there's an attempt to keep the pumps running. It takes the form of a lawsuit by the Westlands Water District and the San Luis & Delta-Mendota Water Authority, which help irrigate vast swaths of the western
This lawsuit comes in the wake of a batch of news stories detailing what the no-water notice from the CVP could mean, if carried out. Essentially, no water means no survival for places like Firebaugh and Huron and Mendota, which could become ghost towns if their farming economies dry up.
Drying up is a real possibility just now. Some large farms have already begun fallowing fields and other strategies to cope with drought, hoping to survive on whatever ground water their wells can pump.
"Yes, the initial cause of the lack of water was a long drought," said Sarah Woolf, spokeswoman for the Fresno-based Westlands district. "That's now changed, but there still won't be much water. Our reservoirs are at record low levels now because we depleted all of them to meet the needs of salmon in the
But there's substantial doubt that stopping the pumps actually did much for the smelt. It turns out getting sucked into the pumps is only one hazard of smelt life in the Delta. There are also problems like low food supply, hungry predator fish and an often-toxic (from industrial pollution) water habitat. No one has ever known the precise role pumps play in the smelt shortage, and no one knows today if shutting them down has helped. That's because there's no specific information on smelt numbers.
What is known is that a hatchery (estimated cost: $5 million, a paltry figure by
That's cockeyed thinking, and there's a possibility the Westlands-San Luis lawsuit might change things a bit. The districts do not suggest ignoring either smelt or salmon, only that the interests of humans be considered, too.
The rules, they argue, "will result in significant harm to Californians who depend on (that) water supply" and offer no real promise of help for the smelt. The regulations should be revised again, with more pumping allowed in the interim, the water districts claim. It's possible this lawsuit will get some traction, as it may be heard by a judge other than Wanger.
One thing for sure: With snowpack levels and river flows at normal levels or above after the late-winter snow and rains, when California experiences water rationing or a drought this summer and fall, it will not be the fault of nature. This one will be strictly man-made.#
http://www.appeal-democrat.com/articles/water_75156___article.html/wanger_one.html
California
Indian Country Today – 3/9/09
By Victor Morales, Today correspondent
SACRAMENTO – California’s water agency is for the first time including tribal input in the development of its water policy plan, a vital set of guiding principles and course of actions for the thirsty state.
The state’s Department of Water Resources is organizing at least six scoping meetings with tribes across the state to let them have their say in local water issues and to report their usage rate, supply and environmental impacts. The meetings will lead up to one tribal water summit later this year with the information to be included in the California Water Plan, which has been updated every five years since 1957.
“It’s a really big deal that we are talking to tribes,” said Barbara Cross, the tribal liaison for the department’s Tribal Communication Committee, a body in place for just 16 months.
The outreach has been well received.
“We are pleased that, at long last, the state finally recognizes the priority water rights of Indian Tribal Governments,” said Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians Chairman Richard M. Milanovich in an e-mail.
Cross said that to improve the state’s readiness input from tribes is needed and historically there had been a dearth of reservation input.
“We assumed that federal agencies were taking care of tribes and we found that is not always true,” Cross said, adding that tribes unrecognized by the BIA often fall through the gaps and that other government entities typically don’t consider neighboring reservations in their water plans. “They drew a line around the Indian communities as though they didn’t exist.”
She said the committee sent invitations to all of
The first meeting was scheduled for March 4 in
http://www.indiancountrytoday.com/national/40960027.html
Coso investing $12 million-plus on merits of pump proposal
Inyo Register – 3/7/09
By Mike Bodine
There is a company that owns land in
Coso Operating Company (COC), operators of the Coso Geothermal Plant, has requested a permit from the county to pump that water from its fallowed Hay Ranch property to replenish a depleting geothermal reservoir. COC is reporting that the depletion equals a 3.6 percent reduction in power generation, the equivalent of enough energy to power 10,000 homes.
The geothermal reservoir is the hot fluid, thousands of feet below the surface, that travels up wells at the power plant, then flashes into steam at the surface. The steam then pushes and drives turbines that, in turn, drives the electrical power generators. Through time, the reservoir becomes depleted due to evaporation and must be augmented to maintain reservoir pressure.
COC is asking for a 30-year Conditional Use Permit, or CUP, to pump the water, build necessary infrastructure and pipe the water nine miles from the ranch to the plant. If approved by the Planning Commission, the CUP will include mitigation and monitoring measures, enforceable by law, to ensure that the amount of water pumped will not “unreasonably affect the environment or overall economy of
The amount of water requested to be withdrawn is 3,000 gallons per minute, or 4,839 acre-feet per year. According to data from the Bureau of Land Management and county Water Department, when Hay Ranch was producing alfalfa on 500 acres, it used as much as 3,900 acre-feet per year with no adverse effects to Little Lake or other ground water users at that time.
According to the Final Environmental Impact Review (FEIR), the project demonstrates “no significant impacts with monitoring and mitigation.”
The monitoring consists of more than 20 wells spread over 13 miles between Haiwee Reservoir and Little Lake. These monitoring wells include trigger points of water levels that, if reached, will require COC to reduce or stop pumping.
“We believe the project stands on its merits,” said Joe Greco, senior vice president of Terra-Gen Power, one of COC’s parent companies.
To prove it, COC is investing more than $12 million on the project that could potentially be shut down after as little as a year if trigger points are reached.
Greco also explained that COC and Terra-Gen are in the renewable energy business and harming the environment would go against its philosophy and culture of being environmentally friendly.
According to data from COC, since the geothermal plant’s inception it has “reduced carbon emissions in the region by approximately 27 million tons as compared to fossil-fired generation.”
However, opposition to the project varies from allegations of an inadequate environmental review of the project, to assumptions that COC has so much invested in the plant already, it will proceed with or without the Hay Ranch water.
Rex Allen, chairman of the County Water Commission, opposes the project on these grounds. Allen explained his position in a letter he wrote to the
Allen’s argument is based on bond rating reports that he interprets as COC telling the bond raters, “We think we will get the Hay Ranch water and it will probably help cut our costs, but we will do just fine anyhow.”
Allen wrote that COC will make the geothermal plant work with or without the Hay Ranch water and that, “
Another important piece of this puzzle is that COC is one of the largest property taxpayers in
COC Site Manager Chris Ellis said that the plant would continue operating without the Hay Ranch water, but the energy output would drop. If the energy output drops so does the value of the plant, which equals less property tax revenue for the county.
One alternative solution to the Hay Ranch water would be for COC to upgrade the existing facility with a dry-cooling system to try and reduce evaporative water loss.
Ellis explained that not only is this alternative expensive (the estimate cost is between $110 million and $250 million), but it would also not be an efficient project for COC.
Ellis described the dry cooling system as a giant vehicle radiator and fan that would require an enormous geographic space to construct and maintain. He added that the dry-cooling works well in cooler climates, such as the geothermal plant near Mammoth, but in hot climates, like the Coso location, the system actually runs less efficient in the hotter months when energy demand is highest.
“We want to remain profitable,” said Greco, “but we will not do it at any cost.”
Ellis and Greco said they also wanted to clear up any misconceptions the public may have about the Hay Ranch project.
To begin with, they said that the CUP is for the Hay Ranch project only; the geothermal plant was approved by the county in 1987. And, the CUP will allow the plant to generate at levels already previously approved – not to allow the plant to generate more power than currently permitted.
They explained that the environmental impact reports were done by a private, unbiased agency, unaffiliated with COC, and that the report is “very conservative.”
“What we’ve requested is what is sustainable,” Ellis explained.
Some of these conservative estimates in the FEIR include that inflow of water to the basin are based on average precipitation levels above 4,500 feet elevation, so water that falls on the valley floor has not been included in the basin re-charge rate.
Another outspoken opponent of the project is the Little Lake Ranch and private hunting club that has argued that the pumping will have devastating, permanent affects to the lake and surrounding environment. It claims that the FEIR does not adequately address these effects.
However, it is stated in the FEIR that the trigger points established in the CUP will prevent a decrease of greater than 10 percent in flows to Little Lake from ever occurring. There are also requirements that “drawdown levels over time be kept below defined trigger levels” and will act as an early warning system that would allow the project to change, reduce or even stop pumping before acceptable drawdown levels ever occur at Little Lake.
The project has been supported by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger,State Senator Roy Ashburn, Inyo County Superintendent of Schools Terry McAteer and the county’s Water Department.
The Inyo County Planning Commission is holding a public hearing on the project at 9 a.m. Wednesday, March 11 at the Board of Supervisors Room in
According to Sharon Birmingham, Planning Commission secretary, at this meeting the commission will review and vote on a resolution of the plan.
The
The Planning Commission will have the final say on the matter, pursuant to Section 15022 of the California Environmental Quality Act guidelines. The Board of Supervisors will hear the matter if the CUP is appealed.
For more information, call the Planning Commission at 878-0263 or 872-2706.#
http://www.inyoregister.com/content/view/120731/1/
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