Department of Water Resources
California Water News
A daily compilation for DWR personnel of significant news articles and comment
July 6, 2009
1. Top Items–
Water officials fear Calif. Aqueduct could sink
San Jose Mercury News
Despair flows as fields go dry and unemployment rises
L.A. Times
Take a good look at costly water bills - the ones in Sacramento
S.F. Chronicle
Delta gates proposal builds support, but environmental impact remains murky
Sacramento Bee
Divisive Delta canal now on the fast track
Contra Costa Times
Making the case for the human right to water
S.F. Chronicle
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Water officials fear Calif. Aqueduct could sink
San Jose Mercury News-7/5/09
By Tracie Cone (Associated Press)
Fearing the main canal carrying drinking water to millions of Southern Californians is sinking again, water officials are monitoring the effects of incessant agricultural pumping from the aquifer that runs under the aqueduct.
Their concern is that the canal, which has sunk six feet in places during California dry spells, will buckle enough to slow delivery of water to parched points south and force costly repairs.
"We have spotty data saying it's active again," said engineering geologist Al Steele, of the state Department of Water Resources.
On June 1, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California and other users of state water signed a $255,000, two-year contract with the U.S. Geological Survey to monitor by satellite the California Aqueduct along a vulnerable 70-mile stretch west of here, between Los Banos and Kettleman City.
"It doesn't mean that all-of-the sudden you're out of water, but you do have to spend a ton of money to fix it," said Roger Patterson, assistant general manager of the MWD, which delivers 1.7 billion gallons a day to 19 million people.
Farmers on the west side of Fresno County, facing cutbacks in canal deliveries because of drought and environmental concerns, are pumping a half-million acre feet this year from the ground to keep crops watered in the most prolific agriculture region of the country.
That pumping is only half as much as the 1 million acre feet a year that caused the
ground to sink 30 feet in some places in the San Joaquin Valley in the first half of the last century. But the current pumping is approaching levels reached during the big drought of 1977 and beyond, when the canal bowed several feet, slowed the gravity-flow system and forced emergency repairs.
The growing reliance on groundwater, which has a high salt content, means that some permanent crops such as almonds are wilting, but water officials say the real trouble is brewing underground.
"We are not pumping at a sustainable level," said Tom Glover, who oversees resource management for the sprawling Westlands Water District that straddles the canal on the west side of Fresno County.
As a result of drought, environmental problems in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and efforts to protect threatened fish, Westlands will receive 10 percent of its federal water allocation this year.
While some farmers without water fallowed a quarter-million acres in Westlands as a result, others who are better capitalized have sunk new wells and are running old ones full-time.
Shawn Coburn, who farms almonds and grapes in Westlands, fears that if sinking becomes an issue, farmers will be forced to stop pumping.
"They'll say it's a national security issue because this canal delivers water to more than just ag users," he said.
When the canal sinks, the walls and bridges on the upstream segments have to be raised. The cost excluding bridge repair is $1 million a mile, state officials say.
Carl Torgerson, chief of operations for the State Water Project, says that affects water flowing to Southern California.
The collapsed aquifer never regains storage capacity, a problem for towns that draw municipal water from it.
"Everyone in the entire valley should be concerned because it's all connected," said hydrogeologist Ken Schmidt, who has studied San Joaquin Valley groundwater for 40 years.
http://www.mercurynews.com/news/ci_12757946?nclick_check=1
Despair flows as fields go dry and unemployment rises
San Joaquin Valley farms are laying off workers and letting fields lie fallow as their water ration falls
L.A. Times-7/6/09
By Alana Semuels
Reporting from Mendota, Calif. -- Water built the semi-arid San Joaquin Valley into an agricultural powerhouse. Drought and irrigation battles now threaten to turn huge swaths of it into a dust bowl.
Farmers have idled half a million acres of once-productive ground and are laying off legions of farmhands. That's sending joblessness soaring in a region already plagued by chronic poverty.
Water scarcity looms as a major challenge to California's $37-billion agricultural industry, which has long relied on imported water to bloom. The consequences of closing the spigot are already evident here in rural Fresno County, about 230 miles north of Los Angeles.
Lost farm revenue will top $900 million in the San Joaquin Valley this year, said UC Davis economist Richard Howitt, who estimates that water woes will cost the recession-battered region an additional 30,000 jobs in 2009.
Standing in a parched field in 104-degree heat, valley farmer Joe Del Bosque pointed to cracked earth where tomatoes should be growing. He didn't bother this year because he can't get enough water to irrigate them. He's cultivating only about half of the cantaloupe and asparagus that he did in 2007. He has slashed his workforce, and his bills are mounting.
"We can't survive at 10% of our water," said Del Bosque, 60, a white cowboy hat, long sleeves and jeans protecting him from the blistering sun.
Desperation is rippling through agricultural communities such as Mendota, 35 miles west of Fresno, where an estimated 39% of the labor force is jobless. It's a stunning figure even for this battered community of about 10,000 people, which has long been accustomed to double-digit unemployment rates.
Sporadic food giveaways by churches and nonprofits draw hundreds of people. Enrollment in area schools has dropped by a quarter this year. Crime is up, so much, in fact, that the cash-strapped town voted in May to form its own police department rather than rely on the county sheriff.
On a recent afternoon, a dozen men in white T-shirts and jeans were leaning against a liquor store wall across from City Hall, hoping someone would hire them. Others, such as Candelario Torres, sat in the shade of Kiki's Pool Hall, playing cards and swatting flies. They, too, waited for the slim chance a farmer would employ them to weed tomato fields or pick cantaloupe.
"There's no water, so there's no work," said Torres, a 56-year-old father of three who doesn't have a car and can't go far to look for jobs. "Everyone in here is looking."
It's much the same in rural towns such as Firebaugh and Huron, whose jobless farm laborers helped pushed the Fresno County unemployment rate to 15.4% in May, above the California rate of 11.5% and up from 9.4% a year earlier.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger last month asked President Obama to declare Fresno County a disaster area to boost federal aid. But that's not what the farmers say they want. At a recent town hall meeting in Fresno, while some women in the audience knitted, men in baseball caps and T-shirts shouted down officials from the Interior Department: "We don't want welfare, we want water."
But climate change is intensifying competition for this resource and may well force changes in the way the valley has been farmed for decades.
This area, once known as part of the great California desert, has always depended on water from somewhere else. In the early part of the century, homesteaders dug wells or hauled water from up north, but in 1952 they banded together to form the Westlands Water District. It later contracted to buy water from the federal government, which built a system of canals and reservoirs that captures water in the northern part of the state and sends it to farmers in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.
Because of its subordinate water rights, the 600,000-acre Westlands Water District is often last on the long list of groups receiving water from this federal project. In the last two years, below-average rainfall and a shrinking snowpack have made the supply even tighter than usual.
Statewide runoff -- the amount of rainfall and snow melt that ends up in rivers and streams -- was 53% of normal in 2007 and 58% of normal in 2008, said Lester Snow, director of the California Department of Water Resources. The federal government-run water supply allotted only half the water that farmers south of the delta had been expecting in 2007, and 40% in 2008.
This year has been even drier after a federal court ordered that pumps moving water through the system be turned down to protect endangered species including delta smelt, salmon and green sturgeon. The pumps can reverse the water flow and trap salmon in the river, pulverize fish or ensnare them on screens, said Maria Rea, supervisor of the Sacramento office of the National Marine Fisheries Service.
Farmers in the Westlands Water District have protested at Fresno City Hall, joined a March for Water that stretched from Mendota to the San Luis Reservoir, and posted signs along Interstate 5 declaring the area a "Congress Created Dust Bowl."
"We taught the entire world how to grow crops," said Tom Stefanopoulos, owner of Stamoules Produce, bitterly. "But this is the first time we've had to compete with fish."
Stefanopoulos, who owns one of the largest farms in the Westlands district, has planted fewer seasonal row crops this year, but hasn't lost any of his precious pistachio trees. But a neighboring farm, lacking water, left its plum orchard to die. Weeds and dead branches now litter the ground next to Stamoules' field of sweet corn.
Valley farmers aren't the only ones suffering. Increasingly, when it come to water, one industry's livelihood is another's loss.
The more water that's pumped from the San Joaquin-Sacramento Delta, which stretches from Yolo County near Sacramento to the lower parts of San Joaquin County, the more that wildlife from the area is harmed, said C. Mark Rockwell, California representative of the Endangered Species Coalition. There hasn't been a commercial or recreational salmon fishing season in California or in certain parts of Oregon in the last two years, he said.
Pulling water from the delta also lets more seawater in from the San Francisco Bay, sullying farms near Sacramento, said Barbara Barrigan-Parrilla, campaign director of advocacy group Restore the Delta.
"There really isn't enough water to go around, particularly in a drought year," Rockwell said.
Fights will probably escalate in the face of global warming, said Juliet Christian-Smith, a senior research associate at the Pacific Institute.
"We have a new climate reality, and our old structure for allocating water will not work for the future," she said. "Fish are just one sign of an ecosystem that's collapsing."
Officials have discussed a variety of long- and short-term fixes, including transferring water from other areas, installing gates to protect the smelt and increasing the statewide storage of water.
But Del Bosque and other farmers said they couldn't survive even one more year of stingy water allocation. Some are considering quitting the business. Field hands too are looking to other industries. But there aren't many options now that the region's construction boom has gone bust.
Valley farmworker Cecilia Reyes said some of her neighbors drive from Fresno County to places as far as Bakersfield, Hollister and Gilroy to look for work, returning at night to be with their families.
Reyes, a slight woman clad in a baseball cap emblazoned with the word "Angel," a handkerchief and long sleeves, said she felt lucky that she recently had found three days' work weeding tomato fields. "I hope there's more work this year," she said in Spanish. "If there's not, I don't know what I'll do."
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-drought6-2009jul06,0,3172131.story?page=1
Take a good look at costly water bills - the ones in Sacramento
S.F. Chronicle-7/5/09
Traci Sheehan Van Thull,George Biagi
While still not resolving the $26.3 billion budget crisis, the California Legislature is on the verge of considering an extensive and costly restructuring of California's water laws and water infrastructure. Does the right hand know what the left hand is doing?
Several secret bills are set to emerge this week to cover some contentious water issues, including governance of the bay-delta region, water conservation, new dams and an updated proposal for a peripheral canal, which was overwhelmingly rejected by California voters in 1982.
We need to ask some tough questions about the goals and the long-term vision of our state and its water needs.
First, we need to be honest about how much water is available. The state has already given permits for much more water than nature provides - similar to Wall Street and its debt credit swaps. That means water agencies that depend on water from the delta must figure out ways to import less. Any meaningful reform must require that these agencies increase their self-sufficiency through water conservation, recycling and improved groundwater management.
Second, the Legislature needs to take the time to do it right. Even though the public and even most legislators have not seen the bill language, the bills are scheduled for only one substantive policy committee hearing. The public needs time to look carefully at these proposals.
There needs to be a delta plan that is reviewed and approved by the Legislature in consultation with affected local governments, not just new laws that give political appointees the authority to approve even the most controversial projects, without answers about how it would affect water quality, endangered fish and flood control.
The delta is the largest estuary on the West Coast of the Americas - and its ecosystem is collapsing. A comprehensive plan must use independent science to identify how much water it needs to recover. The final package must also include enforceable guarantees that the water will be there.
Delta communities need to have a major voice in the process - more than 500,000 Californians live in the delta. These community members must have a seat at the table as decisions are being made. Changes to the delta could mean increased exposure to pollutants in the waters, increased costs for water and water treatment, reduced farm production, greater loss of commercial fishing and a higher risk of flooding.
Californians have supported water bonds in the past, but the costs of any water project, especially one that encompasses storage, conservation and recovery of the delta would be the largest - with a price tag of $10 billion to $15 billion. Californians cannot be asked to pay for this without understanding the total costs and effects. The problems of the delta and California's water management are critical to all of us. That is why the Legislature cannot take short cuts.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/07/05/INBM18I6SM.DTL
Delta gates proposal builds support, but environmental impact remains murky
Sacramento Bee-7/6/09
By Matt Weiser
A plan to build gates across two Delta channels has strong support from state and federal leaders, though little is known about how the project would affect the environment.
The so-called "two gates" project would build moveable gates across Old River and Connection Slough in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.
The channels bracket Bacon Island in the heart of the estuary. They are key passages for water and aquatic life moving between San Francisco Bay and the south Delta, where powerful state and federal water export pumps divert water to the San Joaquin Valley and Southern California.
Water officials argue that blocking those channels at key times could prevent threatened Delta smelt from being sucked to their deaths in the pumps. This might allow water diversions to continue even when smelt migrate into the central Delta in winter. Pumping is often reduced now to protect fish, contributing to statewide water shortages.
The project's main proponent is the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which imports about 30 percent of its water supply from the Delta to serve 18 million people.
"The work we have done shows that by temporarily opening and closing these gates, we could improve the level of smelt protection," said Roger Peterson, Metropolitan Water's assistant general manager. "That will eventually result in us being able to operate water supplies with more reliability."
Other supporters include the San Luis & Delta Mendota Water Authority, the Contra Costa Water District, Kern County Water Agency and Westlands Water District.
The project was supported last year by a broad committee of Delta interests acting as advisers to the Delta Vision Task Force. Appointed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the task force recommended building the two gates by next year as a pilot project.
The $30 million plan calls for building hinged gates on surplus cargo barges. The gates would swivel open and closed like revolving doors on a hotel. The barges would be sunk to the river bottom, with the gates extending to the surface.
Metal sheet piling would be installed between the barges and levees on each side to close off the channel.
The whole apparatus could be removed if the project proved unsuccessful, and moved to another location to try again.
From December through March, Metropolitan Water proposes to close the gates an hour each day. From March through June, the gates could be closed as long as 10 hours a day. They would stay open the rest of the year.
The idea, in short, is to control smelt habitat.
Patterson said smelt prefer to move with pulses of silty water. They follow this cloudy water as it moves deeper into the estuary, and closer to the pumps, in winter and spring.
The gates could limit how far this cloudy water flows, and thus how far smelt move.
It is unknown whether restricting the smelt's movement would harm them. It's also unknown whether other species would be affected.
One side effect is that predators, such as striped bass, could learn to lurk near the closed gates to eat their fill of smelt that might become trapped there.
"We propose it as a five-year test," Patterson said. "But, clearly, if it's not working after the first few months, you can refloat these barges and try it at a different location."
The project is supported by some environmental groups, but not all.
"This might be a project that could provide some incremental improvements," said Jonas Minton of the Planning and Conservation League. "A main reason we are open to this concept is the ability to monitor it and very quickly change or terminate the project."
Water officials want to build the project by December. This would require expedited environmental review.
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar recently told a rally in Fresno he supports it. Plans call for the gates to be operated by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which is overseen by the Interior Department and which operates one of the two Delta water export systems.
Schwarzenegger said on June 19 that he also supports fast review. The state Department of Water Resources operates the other Delta water pump system.
The project is among a package of proposed Delta fixes being drafted by the ongoing Bay Delta Conservation Plan process. Its centerpiece is a massive new water canal that would divert a portion of the Sacramento River's flow out of the Delta and directly to the export pumps.
A canal could take 10 to 15 years to build. The gates are seen as a quick fix that may help in the meantime.
The CalFed Bay-Delta Authority will convene an independent panel of scientists to review the project at an Aug. 6 meeting in Sacramento. It will issue findings a month later.
Minton of the Planning and Conservation League supports expedited review. But Bill Jennings, executive director of the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance, does not. He said it should be subject to a full environmental impact study.
"We will definitely go to court over that, because we don't know what the adverse impacts will be," he said.
Paying for the project also may be controversial. The Metropolitan Water District has spent $5 million on initial studies, Patterson said. It wants the remaining $25 million to come from state bond funding for habitat projects.
Patterson said the project aims to benefit fish and therefore qualifies as a habitat project.
Minton disagreed.
"I would say the project is to mitigate the impact of the pumping that serves those water districts," he said. "They should provide the funding for projects that benefit them."
http://www.sacbee.com/ourregion/story/2002299.html?mi_rss=Our%2520Region
Divisive Delta canal now on the fast track
Fears loom that moving water south could devastate, contaminate supply
Contra Costa Times-7/3/09
By Mike Taugher
Chuck Baker grows pears on land his family has worked since 1851 and has a farmer's sensitivity to the plagues of modern agriculture — pesticide regulations, the intrusive hand of federal regulators, the threat to private property posed by wetlands restoration — and, most of all, the need for water.
So, he sympathizes with San Joaquin Valley farmers who are short of water this year, but he also has little patience for the argument being trumpeted by valley politicians: that the problems confronted by valley farmers can be reduced to the simple equation of "fish versus farmers."
"I don't think we'd be in this situation if they paid any attention to their own rules," Baker said. "They're the ones that ruined the fish. Not me, not me who's been irrigating the same piece of land for 150 years."
The "they" Baker was referring to was not so much his kindred farmers, but the state and federal agencies that ship them Delta water. Those agencies, he said, created the ecological crisis by taking more water out of the Delta than they should have.
As Delta pumping increased in recent years, fish populations collapsed and triggered new rules to prevent fish from going extinct. Those rules will affect water deliveries for years, but so far have had a minor impact because shortages this year are mostly due to dry conditions and drawn-down reservoirs.
Now, the solution proposed to keep Delta water flowing south — a peripheral canal — poses a threat to water rights his family has held since statehood, Baker said. It is not something north Delta framers like Baker should have to worry about. They have the law, contracts and water-quality standards on their side.
But given a long record of broken promises and aborted plans, Baker and others say there is no reason to trust the government will protect their rights from the thirst of others, especially the farmers in the San Joaquin Valley.
"They're going to build this canal whether we want it or not," he said. "The best we can do is fight them until we run out of money."
Baker's son, Brett, a 25-year-old UC Davis graduate who represents the sixth generation of his family to live on the same 30-acre orchard, put it this way: "This is being framed as a fish-versus-people issue, when in actuality it's a people-versus-people issue."
Plans to build a peripheral canal, the massive aqueduct rejected by voters 27 years ago to take water from the Sacramento River to pumps near Tracy, have quietly moved in recent weeks to a more intensive phase. Tentative details are emerging, and the environmentalists, regulators and water agencies who are hammering out the plan are coming to broad agreements on how it might be designed and operated.
The version now under consideration would be nearly 50 miles long, 500 feet across at the water's surface and include massive levees that would further widen the path it would cut through the Delta, most likely around its eastern flank.
It would be capable of carrying 15,000 cubic feet of water per second, smaller than the 22,000-cubic-feet-per-second version that was defeated in 1982 but still large enough to do enormous environmental damage if it were run indiscriminately.
The canal is the centerpiece of an ambitious Bay Delta Conservation Plan that is on a record-shattering, and probably unrealistic, schedule to have the studies and permits needed for construction done by the time Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger leaves office after the 2010 election.
Such plans usually take far longer, and the Delta plan is extremely complex. A far simpler habitat plan that focused mostly on housing development in East Contra Costa County, for example, took 10 years to complete.
The Bakers say the canal could divert so much water that it could diminish their water quality by allowing salt to creep into their supplies from the Bay. They are also concerned about plans to recreate marshes on or near their property.
To major water users, some environmentalists and outside experts, however, the conservation plan strategy provides the best chance to halt the downward spirals of water reliability and the environmental health of the West Coast's biggest remaining estuary.
"If we don't resolve this issue it's going to get really ugly," said Jay Lund, director of the Center for Watershed Sciences at UC Davis and an engineer who helped write a pair of influential reports sponsored by the Public Policy Institute of California that recommended a new canal.
Experts at Davis and elsewhere have been eyeing a canal even before the latest environmental and water supply crisis hit the Delta. Those crises have only added urgency.
The problem, as Lund sees it, is that the channels that guide water today through the Delta from Northern California are so vulnerable to their inherent fragility, rising sea levels, floods and earthquakes, that they are certain to fail.
Subsequent flooding could draw seawater into a water-supply system that provides about one-third of the water used in the Bay Area and Southern California.
"Many of those islands are goners. It's just a matter of time," said Lund.
A peripheral canal could secure water supplies for those water agencies in the Bay Area, San Joaquin Valley and Southern California that rely on Delta pumps, and it could reduce or eliminate the damage Delta pumps do to fish populations.
But critical questions remain. Among them: How much water would be left in the Delta to provide fish habitat and dilute runoff and polluted discharges, and how much water would be allowed to flow down the Sacramento River for migrating salmon?
"Until they have an answer to those questions and what the Delta needs they can't possibly develop any of these alternatives," said Russell van Loben Sels, a farmer and the head of a Delta caucus that represents farmers in Contra Costa and other Delta counties.
Still, the plan will have to be approved by regulators, and a handful of environmental groups are helping draft it. Although the parties agreed this week on a range of alternatives to study — a range of options that essentially determine how water will be split between water users and the environment — the results of those studies are unknown, and it is unclear whether they will agree on a plan in the end.
"It will all depend on operating the system very cautiously so that we don't create new environmental impacts, particularly on species like salmon," said Ann Hayden, a senior water resource analyst at the Environmental Defense Fund and a member of the steering committee that is crafting the plan. "This is all a big unknown."
Sixty miles south of the Baker's farm, another Delta farming family is running its own battle near Manteca.
In the south Delta, farmers' adversary is salt. And salt levels, they contend, are made worse by the state and federal pumps.
The problems faced by Alex and Mary Hildebrand provide a cautionary tale for any promises that might accompany a new canal, Delta farmers say.
To protect south Delta agriculture, regulators set a salinity standard in the 1970s and later assigned responsibility for meeting the standard to state and federal government.
Having that responsibility means state and federal water agencies have to adjust their operations or build facilities to limit the flow of salt into the south Delta.
But the Department of Water Resources and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation failed to meet a series of deadlines to do so.
In 2006, state regulators ordered the agencies, yet again, to take steps to prevent those standards from being violated. They even issued a drop-dead deadline, saying they "will not extend the date for removing the threat of noncompliance beyond July 1, 2009."
That date came and went this week with no action. State and federal water agencies blamed recent federal rules to prevent salmon from going extinct for their inability to build salt gates in Delta channels even though it has been clear for several years that they would not be able to meet the deadline.
The state and federal water agencies still have no plan other than to pursue a gate project they have little hope of building, according to testimony during a hearing this week and last week to once again extend the deadline.
It is unclear what, if anything, regulators will do.
"Having protections in place on paper has not served us," said Mary Hildebrand, who farms near Manteca with her father.
It is not just water-quality standards that have been ignored. State water managers also operated for years without a permit required under the state's endangered species law, and they delivered more water under a discount water program than they told regulators. Both of those indiscretions allowed the Department of Water Resources to move more water out of the Delta.
That track record is convincing evidence that the government cannot be trusted with infrastructure that can do harm, no matter what laws or regulations are in place, Hildebrand said.
"Our only option, as we see it, is to prevent them from having the physical ability to harm us," Hildebrand said.
Making the case for the human right to water
S.F. Chronicle-7/6/09
Editorial
Most of us assume we'll have the water we need to survive, especially in California. Think again.
Access to safe, affordable and clean water is hardly a given in the Central Valley and parts of the Central Coast. In these communities, more than 90 percent of drinking water is from contaminated groundwater.
In Delano (Kern County), the water is undrinkable, yet poor residents pay between $20 and $45 per month for it. All told, more than 150,000 California residents lack safe water for drinking, bathing and washing dishes; even more have water service disconnected because they cannot afford to pay their bill.
The concept of a human right to water is a hot topic at the United Nations and in international circles. But what does a human right to water really mean?
Interestingly enough, the prime opponent of guaranteeing a human right to water has been the United States. It is this political dynamic of our federal government opposing human rights to not only water, but food and housing as well, that makes AB1242 by Assemblyman Ira Ruskin, D-Redwood City, so interesting. The key vote on this bill is today.
The prime opponents of the bill - public water agencies and municipal utilities - worry that they will come up short on the revenue side if this law requires them to provide water for free.
But the right to free speech does not require the publishers of this newspaper to give it away for free. Nor does a right to water mean water services must be free. Indeed, subsidized water can sometimes drive shortages, by encouraging waste.
Many environmental activists, support the notion of charging market prices for water in order to provide incentives for conservation. But the dilemma is this: The more water that is conserved, the less revenue for public water providers.
On top of that, California does not have a universal statewide lifeline water rate or allocation - similar to our lifeline rates for energy and phone service - so when costs become excessive, families cannot pay their bills and, thereby, risk losing water service.
While the arid West has always suffered from more severe water challenges than the rest of the United States, experts claim 36 states will experience local or regional water shortages over the next five years.
Californians will probably face escalating water bills to pay for facilities to treat contamination and to upgrade aging infrastructure. Many supporters of AB1242 are concerned about the cost implications for disenfranchised citizens, particularly low-income Central Valley residents.
AB1242 does not delve into any of these water pricing issues. Most public water systems do provide safe, clean and affordable water. The issues facing the Central Valley are much more common in the developing world and China, where, oddly enough, multinational companies are often better at cleaning up their acts than local governments.
AB1242's general affirmation of the human right to water is intended to address a specific challenge regarding groundwater contamination and access to affordable water in Central California. But it is also part of a much larger conversation.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/07/06/EDGV18H122.DTL
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