[Water_news] 1. DWR'S CALIFORNIA WATER NEWS - Top Items for 5/12/09

Department of Water Resources

California Water News

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

 

May 12, 2009

 

1.   Top Item–

 

Badly needed California water transfers blocked by economic, environmental hurdles

The Sacramento Bee

 

The Provocative Predictions of One Scripps Water Researcher

The Voice of San Diego

 

State official: Local residents will have say in new Bay-Delta plan

The Lodi News-Sentinel

 

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

 

Badly needed California water transfers blocked by economic, environmental hurdles

The Sacramento Bee – 5/12/09

By Jim Downing

As another summer of drought approaches, hundreds of thousands of acres of San Joaquin Valley farmland are expected to be fallowed, and much of urban California faces 20 percent water cutbacks.

 

But in the Sacramento Valley, rice farmers have been busy for weeks spreading water 6 inches deep over a half-million acres. Many experts expect a larger crop than last year's.

 

It's not that no one saw it coming. The state of California devised a program to move some of that water to thirsty cities and fields south of the Delta. The plan made sense on paper, perhaps, but so far it has been hobbled by everything from high rice prices to environmental concerns.

 

"The state of California did not do its homework with the stakeholders to find out what the impacts of moving a lot of water would be," said Jonas Minton, water policy adviser for the Planning and Conservation League.

 

Moving water around California is never simple. And the troubles with the state's "water bank" show why.

 

Fish-related pumping restrictions in the Delta narrowed the window for moving water from north to south, limiting the amount some farmers could sell and scaring off potential buyers.

 

A collection of environmental groups sued the state for what they claim is a failure to properly assess the impacts of the water sale on everything from local aquifers to the habitat of the threatened giant garter snake. One provision of the bank would allow farmers to sell their river-water allocation but pump ground water for irrigation. That sort of arrangement depleted some rural drinking-water wells during the last state water transfer program in 1994, said Barbara Vlamis, executive director of the Chico-based Butte Environmental Council.

 

Many farmers were leery of entering into a complex water deal with the state, fearing they might be liable for unexpected environmental damages, become ineligible for federal subsidy programs or simply lose money if the sale fell through. The diesel engines some would have to use to pump water are considered air polluters, subject to a complicated permit process.

 

What's more, rice prices are at their highest levels in nearly 30 years, thanks in part to a prolonged drought in Australia that has knocked out the California rice industry's biggest international competitor.

 

"The economics make it a lot better to farm rice than to sell the water," said Brad Mattson, general manager of the Richvale Irrigation District and a Butte County rice grower.

 

Mattson, like many other Sacramento Valley farmers in districts with strong, historic rights to river water, pays less than $10 an acre-foot for his irrigation supply.

 

The state water bank offered farmers $275 an acre-foot, a price meant to roughly compete with this year's rice returns. Teresa Geimer, who is coordinating the program for the Department of Water Resources, said it is likely to transfer about 82,000 acre-feet. The target was as high as 600,000.

 

Even though the irrigation season is well under way, some farmers and water districts are still trying to figure out whether they'll sell.

 

"If everything can be ironed out, we will participate," said Walt Trevethan, who farms about 500 acres of rice near Pleasant Grove in south Sutter County.

 

Manuel Massa, who farms about 700 acres of rice with his son near the Colusa County town of Princeton, is one farmer who's selling. Massa, 66, is recovering from quadruple-bypass surgery and decided not to irrigate 100 acres. The farm will likely forgo some profits, Massa said, but he could use the time off.

 

An acre-foot is 325,851 gallons, enough to serve about two average California households for a year. The roughly 520,000 acres of rice planted in the Sacramento Valley this year will consume about 1.8 million acre-feet of water.

 

Buyers from the water bank will pay for the state's administrative expenses as well as the cost of transporting the water, on top of the $275 base price.

 

It can get pricey, but it's in line with other supplies available to Southern California cities this year. In recent years, emergency irrigation supplies for orchards in the San Joaquin Valley have traded for well over $500 an acre-foot.

 

Economists, many water users and some environmental groups have maintained for years that freer trade in water would lead to better allocation of the resource. In theory, it has the potential to drive improvements in water efficiency, reduce the acreage of low-value crops and enhance the state's ability to cope with drought.

 

That's one argument in favor of major modifications to the Delta, such as a new aqueduct that would bypass sensitive areas.

 

"Until you get the plumbing fixed, I think you're going to have a market that can't respond," said Jeff Kightlinger, general manager of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California.

 

But environmental groups caution that a market can't cure every ill. Barry Nelson, a senior policy analyst with the Natural Resources Defense Council, said it's more important for the state to focus on maximizing water conservation and efficiency than on removing barriers to water deals. #

 

http://www.sacbee.com/ourregion/story/1853186.html

 

The Provocative Predictions of One Scripps Water Researcher

The Voice of San Diego – 5/11/09

By Rob Davis

 

FACEBOOK

REDDIT

NEWSVINE

DIGG

DEL.ICIO.US

BLINKLIST

Back in 2006, Tim Barnett sketched a grim future when asked about the impact climate change would have on San Diego's water supply.

 

The warming climate, Barnett said then, would bring water cops, limits on lawn watering and trouble for salmon in the Sacramento River, one of San Diego's major water sources.

 

"I believe the environment will eat it first," said Barnett, a marine physicist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. "Do you want to go thirsty or kill off the last salmon in the Sacramento River?"

 

Three years later, San Diego has adopted specific lawn-watering days, which start June 1. The city will spend $756,000 to hire 10 water cops. The salmon population on the Sacramento River plummeted to historic lows last year, prompting an unprecedented closure of commercial salmon fishing from the U.S.-Mexico border to Oregon.

The drier future that Barnett predicted is becoming reality. And today, Barnett is warning of worse things to come. As the climate continues to warm, the Southwest, from San Diego and Los Angeles to Las Vegas and Phoenix, will have to cope with less water, he said.

Barnett projects that in 40 years, the warming climate will reduce runoff into the Colorado River so much that shortages will be more common than surpluses. The seven states that rely on the Colorado, a major source of San Diego's water, will have to handle shortages in as much as nine out of every 10 years. Shortages could hit in four out of every 10 years by 2025.

 

"Our water future is fraught with peril," Barnett said.

The Colorado River is the lifeblood of the Southwest. It supplies 27 million people in the United States and Mexico. It irrigates 3 million acres of crops. Its water has been warred over and litigated for decades. And while the seven states that rely on the Colorado have entered a time of relative peace and cooperation, Barnett's projections signal that a potentially litigious future lies ahead.

The Colorado's annual flows were divvied up among California, Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming in 1922. Those average flows were based on one of the wettest centuries in the last millennium. Without changes in how much water each state is allowed to pull out of the river each year, shortfalls "could become systematic," Barnett and his colleague, David Pierce, wrote in their most recent report.

Lake Mead, a measure of the Colorado's robustness, today sits at 1,099 feet of elevation behind the Hoover Dam. That's the lowest it's been since 1965. More water is pulled out of the vital reservoir each year than goes in.

 

The seven states that rely on the Colorado signed an agreement in 2007 that dictates how they'll divide shortages. For now, Arizona and Nevada will bear the brunt of initial cutbacks, which begin when Lake Mead drops to 1,075 feet. (It's projected to drop to 1,091 feet by the end of summer.) If the reservoir drops to 1,025 feet, the states are scheduled to renegotiate. That could be contentious.

Barnett takes a sour view of the future negotiations about the river, which he said will be inevitable.

"There will be a lot of scrambling and meeting and discussions -- and then the lawsuits will hit," Barnett said. "There we'll sit for a couple of decades. The river may decide the lawsuits before any judge does."

Barnett's work has attracted a flood of media attention in the last two years. He is to Western water supplies what Nouriel Rubini, the New York University professor dubbed "Dr. Doom", is to the financial markets. One Arizona newspaper anointed Barnett the Southwest's Cassandra, the cursed Greek prophetess who had the ability to see the future but was ignored.

Barnett is nothing if not blunt, describing a bleak future in matter-of-fact terms.

 

"These things all seem to have a break point around 2030," he said. "It's going to be interesting. We're not going to turn around and solve the global warming problem between now and 2030. Changing the industrial base of the country in 20 years? I don't think there's any way that's going to happen. You're in deep shit."

He paused.

 

"Deep trouble would be a better quote."

The 70-year-old Long Beach native has seven grandchildren. Though he technically retired in 1998, he said they've been his motivation to continue researching part-time. "I do not like the kind of world they're going to live in," he said.

Brad Udall, director of the Western Water Assessment at the University of Colorado, said Barnett's work has been part of an important body of scientific research that's altered the way water managers view the impact of climate change on water supplies. As the West warms, the amount of water going into the Colorado is projected to drop because more water will evaporate, plants will demand more and the climate will grow more arid.

 

In 2004, Udall gave a presentation to a group of water managers about climate change -- "to absolute dirty looks," he said. By 2007, he said, water managers were convening seminars on climate change and water. "What's happened in the next five years is miraculous," Udall said. "They get it."

Water managers have criticized some of Barnett's work, particularly a 2008 report entitled "When will Lake Mead go dry?" that said the massive reservoir near Las Vegas had a 10 percent chance of running dry by 2014 and a 50 percent chance by 2021.

Terry Fulp, deputy regional director of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which manages the Colorado, said the paper had a catchy title, but had ignored important inputs, such as the 8 percent of flows that enter the river below Lake Powell, the other key reservoir on the Colorado. It similarly didn't acknowledge that water managers would not allow current consumption to continue if Lake Mead kept dropping.

"When it appeared, it gave a lot of folks the feeling that no one in the basin knew there was this water supply imbalance," Fulp said. "The assumption was that everyone was asleep at the wheel. That wasn't at all the case. Water managers are not asleep at the wheel."

Barnett admitted the title may have been too provocative. "Everybody jumped on our ass about that," he said. He tried to address the other concerns in a follow-up report published in April that examined whether current deliveries from the Colorado would be sustainable in the future given climate change. The answer: No. The warmer it gets, the less reliable the river becomes.

But Barnett doesn't shy away from provocation. He said the Southwest's troubled water future is a political problem that no one wants to touch.

 

"The thing that bothers me most is the development going on," he said. "Phoenix is the fourth-largest city in the country and it's in the goddamn desert. The politicians so far have not wanted any of this. The congress people say it's a local problem. The mayors say we can't tell people not to live here. Once you get above my level, it's politics, politics and more politics."

Barnett plans to officially retire from Scripps this fall. He said scientific research is a young man's quest, that he's done what he can.

"I think I've made the point," he said. "We've called out a serious problem. The probability that it will happen is very high. The solution is outside academia."#

 

http://www.voiceofsandiego.org/articles/2009/05/12/environment/846barnett051109.txt

 

State official: Local residents will have say in new Bay-Delta plan

The Lodi News-Sentinel – 5/12/09

By Ross Farrow

 

Karla Nemeth made no bones about it when she addressed the Walnut Grove Rotary Club on Monday.

She works for the Schwarzenegger administration, which wants to ship more Delta water to the southern San Joaquin Valley and to Southern California.

"A lot of people really hate this," Nemeth told what she envisioned to be a hostile audience full of residents of the Highway 160 corridor. "I get this."

Rotarian Larry Emery, pastor of Walnut Grove Presbyterian Church, complained about Northern Californians, and especially Delta residents, not having sufficient representation in deciding the Delta's future.

"We don't have any representation except at these kinds of meetings (like Rotary)," Emery said. "When it comes to decision making, we're not at the table."

Nemeth, communications director for the California Natural Resources Agency, the lead agency in developing the Bay-Delta plan, said the plan will involve input from local jurisdictions.

Daniel Wilson, a sixth-generation Delta farmer, said he has trouble understanding how Delta and other regional interests can be represented on committees related to the peripheral canal proposal, considering that the only way to get the canal built will be to get rid of Delta-area interests.

 

Bay-Delta Conservation Plan timetable

 

Late summer-early fall: Public workshops on draft plan.
December or early 2010: Public review and hearings throughout the state on draft environmental impact report/environmental impact statement (EIR follows state regulations; EIS is a federal document).
June 2010: Hearings on final EIR/EIS.
December 2010: Final decision on plan by California Department of Fish & Game, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Marine Fisheries Service. Other agencies will be involved in the permitting process.

Source: Karla Nemeth, California Natural Resources Agency

 

Nemeth focused her presentation at Wimpy's Marina on the controversial Bay-Delta Conservation Plan, which is centered on preserving fish and land animals and their habitats while delivering water to 25 million Californians to the south.

Nemeth acknowledged the conflict between water flows and protecting endangered species over the years.

"We haven't done a very good job at it," she said.

Delta waters, especially the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers, have nine endangered fish species and 37 land species, Nemeth said.

"If this was just a water project, it would look a lot different," she added.

Salmon, near and dear to the hearts of many in the Lodi area, is getting the most attention, especially when it comes to fighting off predators.

Wildlife biologist Chuck Hanson, a consultant for the Bay-Delta Conservation Plan, said after the meeting that to goal is to keep juvenile salmon going through the Delta and out the Golden Gate. Instead, many of them go south in Old and Middle rivers to Clifton Court Forebay northwest of Tracy, where some of them are eaten by predator fish like small-mouth, large-mouth and striped bass, white catfish and Sacramento Pike Minnow.

The goal is to protect native fish that are state or federally listed as endangered or threatened, especially salmon, Hanson said.

The Bay-Delta plan will also focus on helping salmon as they head downstream from the confluence of the Mokelumne and Cosumnes rivers east of Thornton, Hanson said. This part of the plan helps juveniles migrating to the Golden Gate and adult steelhead salmon heading upstream to Lake Camanche by trying to control parts of the Mokelumne River subject to tidal influences, he said.#

 

http://www.lodinews.com/articles/2009/05/12/news/7_delta_090512.txt

 

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

DWR’s California Water News is distributed to California Department of Water Resources management and staff,  for information purposes, by the DWR Public Affairs Office. For reader’s services, including new subscriptions, temporary cancellations and address changes, please use the online page: http://listhost2.water.ca.gov/mailman/listinfo/water_news . DWR operates and maintains the State Water Project, provides dam safety and flood control and inspection services, assists local water districts in water management and water conservation planning, and plans for future statewide water needs. Inclusion of materials is not to be construed as an endorsement of any programs, projects, or viewpoints by the Department or the State of California.