California Water News
A daily compilation of significant news articles and comment
July 20, 2009
2. Supply –
Utility reverts to the long ago and not-so-far-away
L.A. Times
Council Steps In on Water After Mayor's Plan Falls Flat
Voice of San Diego
Drought spotlights region's patchwork water supply
S.F. Chronicle
Fresno County, left in the dust
L.A. Times
Growers scrambling to cope with drought
Hanford Sentinel
Drought not as bad in desert, but farmers still feeling it
Desert Dispatch
California may ease gray-water restrictions
L.A. Times
American Canyon eyes pact for Vallejo water
Vallejo Times-Herald
Water district to host forums
Glendale News-Press
Water district can help residents save money
North County Times
Excavation starts work on water main under I-80
Sacramento Bee
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Utility reverts to the long ago and not-so-far-away
L.A. Times-7/20/09
By Bettina Boxall
Thick clouds veiled the peaks of the San Gabriel Mountains. Not far away, just south of East Riverside Drive in Ontario, water gushed into an earthen basin the size of 10 football fields.
It had washed up there from the rain-filled gutters of East Merion Drive, Doral Court and South Grove Avenue. Most parts of Southern California would have shunted the storm runoff to the sea as fast as they could.
But here, on the southwestern edge of San Bernardino County, a local utility hoarded it, letting it sink into the earth and into the future drinking supplies of the Inland Empire.
The simple act defied a century of Southern California tradition.
Ever since cold Sierra meltwater first tumbled into the San Fernando Valley from the Los Angeles Aqueduct, the Southland has been addicted to water from someplace else.
But as the big straws that carry that water hundreds of miles from the Eastern Sierra, Colorado River and Northern California all shrivel under long-term environmental forces, water managers are shifting their gaze homeward, toward sources that Martha Davis calls "overlooked, mistreated or underutilized."
Davis is executive manager of water policy for the Inland Empire Utilities Agency, a district at the forefront of the emerging local-is-good movement. About 70% of the agency's water comes from its own backyard: a patchwork of dairies, industrial parks and planned communities overlying the big Chino Groundwater Basin.
In Los Angeles, local sources make up less than 15% of the city supply. The Southern California region overall gets more than half its water from afar. In a typical year, the L.A. Basin sends the equivalent of three-quarters of Los Angeles' annual water demand into the ocean in the form of runoff and treated wastewater.
"We're going to have to live within our means," says Richard Atwater, chief executive of the Inland Empire agency. "Do you really want to wait until we all go over a cliff?"
Davis, 55, and Atwater, 57, are at first glance an unlikely management team.
Atwater grew up in Long Beach, wears white button-down collar shirts and spent a decade working for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California -- powerful agencies that move water around California and the West as though it were a railroad box car.
As an MWD official in the late 1980s, he helped kill a state water board proposal to cut water shipments from Northern California for environmental reasons, decrying the plan as a recipe for drought "forever" in the Southland.
Davis grew up in Marin County and worked for Greenpeace after college.
For much of the 1980s and '90s, she headed the small but tenacious Mono Lake Committee, which took on L.A.'s mighty water brokers and won, eventually forcing the city to give up much of its water from the ecologically fragile Mono Basin on the edge of the Eastern Sierra.
A state lawmaker once described her as "a baby-faced killer" who possessed the endearing looks of a cocker spaniel and the jaw hold of a pit bull.
When Atwater left the MWD in 1990 to become general manager of two water districts in Los Angeles County, their interests converged. He was developing recycled water -- a.k.a cleansed sewage -- to inject into coastal aquifers as a seawater barrier.
Davis' group, meanwhile, was exploring water recycling as a way for Los Angeles to make up for its Mono losses. The two wound up working together to pursue federal funding and Atwater came out in support of the "Save Mono Lake" campaign.
When Atwater was hired to run the Inland Empire agency in 1999, he called Davis -- though she had never envisioned herself as a water utility executive. "Heavens no!" Davis exclaims.
Since then, she's learned it's easier to tell public agencies what to do than to do it herself from the executive suite.
"Particularly when you're on the outside looking in, you say, 'Why aren't you doing this? Isn't this obvious?' " she says. "But to put together the combination of resources, engineering design, political support -- that's very complicated. Very doable but very complicated."
In early February, days of storms had filled the 25-foot-deep catchment south of East Riverside Drive, where rainwater began to seep into the sand and gravel at a rate of a quarter-foot a day, starting a years-long, subterranean journey to the utility's well fields a few miles south.
By the time it arrives, it will have mingled with natural drainage from the San Gabriel foothills, as well as treated wastewater, other storm runoff and some imported water the district uses to help replenish the aquifer.
Desalination facility The groundwater cycle.At the wells, pumps suck the brew into desalting plants that strip out contaminants, including the nitrates and salts left by a century of farming. From there, the purified water goes to the bathrooms and kitchens of Chino, Norco, Ontario and Chino Hills.
The utility's reliance on homegrown supplies is partly an artifact of geography. It overlies one of the biggest groundwater basins in Southern California, nourished by runoff from the mountains that tower in the background.
But Atwater argues that parts of the Southland can do much the same, weaning themselves from an imported water habit that is getting harder to satisfy.
Climate change threatens the Sierra snowpack, while environmental restrictions -- including those Davis fought for -- have slashed the amount of water Los Angeles can suck from the Owens Valley and neighboring Mono Basin. Drought has cut Colorado River flows, while rising demand from up-river is ending the surplus deliveries that helped fill the Colorado River Aqueduct.
Shipments through the 444-mile-long California Aqueduct could be permanently constricted by the ecological collapse of the Sacramento-San Joaquin delta, the heart of the state's waterworks.
When the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp. studied potential water sources for the region last year, it concluded that increasing conservation, capturing storm water and recycling could yield roughly as much water as the Southland is getting from the delta.
"I'm not going to say it would be easy, or could be done overnight or would be cheap," said Gregory Freeman, the corporation's vice president. But "there are all these great opportunities for us to do self-help projects.
"The water solution of the next 100 years will be different from the water solution of the past 100 years," he said.
Last year, the Orange County Water District began operating what it calls the world's largest water reclamation plant, which purifies sewage that then is pumped into a groundwater basin supplying 2.3 million people. In Oxnard, a desalination plant is cleaning up local groundwater. Cities in San Diego County have contracted with a private firm that hopes to break ground this year on a seawater desalination facility in Carlsbad.
Even the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power is getting the message. Last year, the utility drew up a plan that calls for more outdoor water conservation, collecting storm flows and expanding the city's recycled water pipeline system.
H. David Nahai, DWP's general manager, calls the document "revolutionary" in its departure from L.A.'s historic water hunts.
Among the ideas: reviving a proposal to pump treated wastewater into the San Fernando Valley aquifer, a project that died nearly a decade agounder a fusillade of "toilet-to-tap" criticism by Valley residents.
The plan would also require a $1-billion cleanup of the Valley's groundwater basin, heavily contaminated by industrial pollutants.
And Nahai would like to see new developments built with porous parking lots, landscape swales and water-holding cisterns to retain more of the rain that sheets down streets during winter storms.
In the wet winter of 2004-2005, enough water poured from the mouth of the Los Angeles River into the Pacific Ocean to supply the city for more than a year.
When a master planned community called The Preserve was approved in Chino six years ago, developer Randall Lewis recalls, Davis and Atwater asked if he would mind "trying some things."
Lewis installed pipes to carry reclaimed water to common areas, median strips and parks, all of which are irrigated with recycled water supplied by the Inland Empire agency's sewage treatment plants.
Many lots are landscaped with drought-tolerant plants rather than grass. Runoff from streets lined with two-story houses flows into a 20-acre basin.
The area doubles as a burrowing owl sanctuary and a wetland, filtering the drain water before it flows into creeks and percolates back into the aquifer.
When the development is finished, Atwater says, none of its roughly 10,000 homes will need a drop of imported water.#
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-water-local20-2009jul20,0,1032528.story?track=rss
Council Steps In on Water After Mayor's Plan Falls Flat
Voice of San Diego-7/19/09
By Rob Davis
When the first reduction in San Diego's water supplies in two decades loomed earlier this year, a long list of people weighed in on Mayor Jerry Sanders' proposal to reduce citywide use.
Lobbyists lobbied. Economists critiqued. Concerned residents questioned.
One group was notably silent: The City Council.
That changed in early April after voiceofsandiego.org revealed misrepresentations that Water Department staff had made about the benefits of Sanders' proposal, which had based proposed cuts on residents' historic use.
Very quickly, the council got a lot more interested in shaping a policy that had previously been entrusted to the Mayor's Office and Water Department staff to develop and market.
Then San Diego got a reprieve. The 20 percent supply cut the city had prepared for didn't manifest. Instead, the region is coping with an 8 percent reduction. But as the potential for cuts looms again next year, City Council President Ben Hueso is now prodding his colleagues to develop their own water-reduction strategy -- not rely on the mayor.
In a recent memo, he asked them to submit ideas for promoting water conservation and new supplies and has proposed a series of public meetings about water.
A key ingredient in Hueso's proposal: Tiered water rates that encourage water conservation. Under that type of system, a household is budgeted an individualized amount of water depending on how many residents and how much landscaping it has.
Those who use more than they're budgeted get charged steeper rates than those who use what they're supposed to. The approach penalizes inefficient use and rewards conservation.
The Irvine Ranch Water District in Orange County is commonly held up as a model for the approach. It adopted water budgets with tiered rates in the early 1990s, helping to drive down per-capita consumption.
"Some individuals use more than their fair share," Hueso said. "A tiered program will ensure that if those people don’t want to change their habits that we'll have a policy that will help them change their habits."
Earlier this year, water officials exaggerated the challenges of instituting tiered rates with water budgets, while acknowledging it was a fairer way to reduce use. Water officials and Sanders instead offered a plan that would've allowed the largest users to have still remained the largest users, regardless of whether they were using water efficiently.
But that idea has been shelved, and support is growing for a tiered-rate system like Irvine Ranch's among council members. Councilman Carl DeMaio said the council should have a tiered-rate system in place by the winter. Councilmen Todd Gloria and Kevin Faulconer and Councilwoman Marti Emerald want to explore the concept. Councilwoman Donna Frye said she likes it too, and believes it could be adopted by next summer.
"If a commodity costs nothing, that becomes the value of it," Frye said. "And people are not going to conserve what has little or no value to them."
Water is growing more expensive. San Diego's water rates, which cost the average resident about $76 monthly, are scheduled to increase this year and next. The Los Angeles-based Metropolitan Water District, the major supplier of San Diego's water, is boosting rates 20 percent in the next two years. That will be passed on to all residents and businesses throughout San Diego County.
"The more water efficient we are, the lower our cost of operating and cost of living," DeMaio said. "This is a no-brainer, common-sense way to transition our households and economy to more sustainable living and operating."
Cities and water districts that use tiered rates and water budgets do so to dissuade inefficient use and give customers a financial incentive to conserve. Like the Hummer owner in the era of $4-a-gallon gasoline, residents who want to irrigate inefficiently still can, as long as they're willing to pay more for it.
Price becomes the motivator -- not the threat of their neighbor tattling to the water cops if they irrigate on the wrong day.
San Diego has tiered rates currently, though they are not as steep as Irvine Ranch's and are not tied to efficient use. Customers in Irvine Ranch pay 940 percent more for their wasteful use than the lowest users pay. San Diegans pay 22 percent more for water in the highest tier compared to the lowest.
The council members all said a change should be evaluated regardless of how San Diego's water supply picture develops during the next year. Water managers have optimistically pointed to the development of an El Niño, a weather pattern that often brings wet winters, as a sign that next year may be wetter and potentially loosen water restrictions.
"If we don't have a cut next year, that's great news -- but we occupy an arid region with a growing population and competing demands from other communities," Gloria said. "If we get lucky with an El Niño, fantastic. But we have to make some tectonic shifts in the way we use water. And I think folks expect us to do that."
Such a move wouldn't be without challenges. The city's Water Department would have to increase staffing to handle requests for exemptions, while boosting public education. And tailoring the approach to businesses and industry would be more difficult than single-family homes.
Water-use footprints can vary from business to business. A restaurant will use more water than an accounting firm occupying the same space. Business groups will push for a method that accounts for what they call "process water" -- the water that surgeons use to disinfect their hands, that biotechs use to keep equipment cool, that bottling companies use to create Coca-Cola.
Frye said she believes the council will encounter resistance. "I think it's going to be a tough sell," she said. "Those who are going to be affected by it will push back mightily."
But some business groups say they support a tiered-rate structure, if done fairly.
"If the allocation is set the right way, the tiered-rate structure makes sense," said Craig Benedetto, a lobbyist for the San Diego Building Owners and Managers Association. "You have to accurately gauge usage by business -- by the individual type of building and the type of tenants you have."#
http://www.voiceofsandiego.org/articles/2009/07/19/environment/843councilwater071909.txt
Drought spotlights region's patchwork water supply
S.F. Chronicle-7/20/09
By Kelly Zito
Ana Sarver jogs 5 miles along the Contra Costa Canal every day. But water from the 10-foot-wide channel, just a few steps from Sarver's front door in Pleasant Hill, doesn't flow through her taps.
Her water comes from the Mokelumne River basin - 100 miles away in the Sierra Nevada.
Confused?
Unlike Southern California, where one giant agency - the Metropolitan Water District - oversees the distribution of water from a few sources across 26 cities from San Diego to Santa Monica, the nine-county Bay Area landscape is a broad patchwork of local, state and federal water systems - with various jurisdictions controlling each.
Most times the hodgepodge works. But, as California moves into a third year of drought, disparities among the region's complex water systems are becoming more apparent.
Residents of one city, for instance, are forbidden from washing their cars or watering gardens, while in the neighboring community, swimming pools and emerald lawns sparkle in the sun. Rates go up for some, not for others.
"It's funny - I pay a lot more attention to water now with the drought," said Sarver, 44.
Sarver's water originates in the Mokelumne basin on the Amador-Calaveras county border. >From there, it cascades through a series of reservoirs, dams and canals operated by the East Bay Municipal Utility District to 1.3 million customers in Alameda and Contra Costa counties.
The Contra Costa Canal sends water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta to 550,000 customers in Antioch, Martinez and parts of Walnut Creek.
That's just the start.
Bay Area residents wash, irrigate and swim in water from varied, sometimes far-flung sources - from the mighty Sacramento River to tiny Vasona Reservoir in Los Gatos - with very different hydrological conditions and regulatory controls.
While that autonomy allowed many parts of the region to grow at their own speeds and create their own identities, it also limits how water can be used in times of need.
In the Bay Area, for example, when parched Marin County needed water in 1977, a temporary pipeline had to be built over the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge to supply water from the East Bay.
In Southern California, by comparison, "you can move a molecule of water from any corner of Southern California to any other corner - it's very integrated physically," said Tim Quinn, executive director of the Association of California Water Agencies. "The Bay Area evolved much more independently. Although they are realizing that they have many common concerns right now."
After three critically dry years and increasing alarm about the ecological impacts of pumping so much water out of rivers and underground aquifers, California water managers have one major worry: supply.
While Southern California relies mainly on two sources of water - the Colorado River and the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta - the Bay Area draws from the delta, Russian River, Tuolumne River and Mokelumne River, as well as various reservoirs and wells.
Each watershed, in turn, has its own set of characteristics.
San Francisco's vaunted, yet controversial, Hetch Hetchy water system, for instance, pulls from the Tuolumne River watershed, which originates inside Yosemite National Park. In recent years, that area has benefited from a decent amount of rain, translating into just 10 percent voluntary water reductions in the city.
Because the 167-mile-long system isn't physically tied to the delta, San Francisco has also escaped the water cutbacks forced by federal rulings designed to protect the endangered delta smelt and other species.
The same can't be said of Contra Costa Water District, Zone 7 Water Agency in Alameda County, or the Santa Clara Valley Water District, where 15 percent mandatory conservation is in place.
Contra Costa Water District is the largest municipal customer of the Central Valley Project, the huge network of federal pumps and canals built in the 1930s to deliver water from the delta to millions of acres within California's fertile interior. To cope with the federally mandated cuts, Contra Costa customers face penalty pricing for exceeding allotments.
"Water is taken for granted by everybody, until everyone is parched," says Jeff Weir, spokesman for the Contra Costa Water District.
In recent years, planners have begun knitting the physical systems more closely together. In 2002, for instance, the East Bay Municipal Utility District and the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission created a 1.5-mile-long link between their pipelines in Hayward. Five years later, EBMUD completed a similar project with the Contra Costa Water District.
Experts say these are steps in the right direction for a state where urban, agricultural and environmental interests must begin to cooperate in order to stretch existing - or develop new - supplies.
"People don't pay a lot of attention because they turn on their taps and water comes out," said Jeff Kightlinger, general manager of Metropolitan. "But we can't dam more rivers, and we've picked a lot of the low-hanging fruit when it comes to conservation - low-flush toilets and short showers.
Now comes the hard, expensive stuff like desalination, recycling and building something to fix the delta. People are going to see their prices going up - they're going to start paying a lot more attention."#
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/07/19/MN0S17MKN8.DTL&feed=rss.news
Fresno County, left in the dust
L.A. Times-7/19/09
By Rick Wartzman
Opinion
A couple of years ago, were you to have swung by Westside Grocery in the town of Mendota on a Thursday or a Friday, you probably would have had to linger for a while in the sizzling Central Valley heat.
The little store was so busy that the line of customers waiting to cash paychecks and make purchases would often spill out the door and halfway down 7th Street.
But now the paychecks have dried up, along with the farmland in these parts, thanks to a cruel confluence of drought, environmental regulation and years of political neglect.
On a recent end-of-week visit to the market, I found the place empty, save for two jobless men loitering inside and the owner, Joseph Riofrio, and his teenage son, who stood behind the front counter hoping for customers.
Over the next hour, half a dozen or so folks trickled in. A couple bought snacks. Most, though, had stopped by to take care of their utility bills -- many of them delinquent. Westside Grocery doubles as a Pacific Gas & Electric payment center.
"People don't know where they're going to get the money," said Riofrio, shuffling through a stack of orange PG&E past-due notices. "Some are paying with pennies and dimes."
Riofrio's own business has fallen off 60% in the last six months.
Mendota (population 9,870) has gotten a lot of attention of late, what with its unemployment rate now topping 40%. The state secretary of Food and Agriculture showed up here last month. So did Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has called on President Obama to issue a federal disaster declaration for Fresno County.
But what Riofrio and others will tell you is that, despite the surge of interest in this region, the crisis did not materialize suddenly. Rather, the people of Mendota and their neighbors -- in Kerman, Firebaugh, San Joaquin and a handful of smaller burgs -- are the victims of a long and painful slide. This is California's Detroit.
The 47-year-old Riofrio, whose grandfather settled in Mendota in the early 1940s and started the grocery, has watched the area mature from a temporary outpost for migratory labor to a permanent home for tens of thousands of farmhands and others. Along with this transformation has come a rise in Latino political power. (Riofrio himself serves on the City Council.) And though unemployment has always been high and poverty severe, for a time a vibrant rural culture was being forged out of the fields.
"You saw the establishment of a real working-class community," said Don Villarejo, an agricultural policy consultant and a longtime observer of Mendota and nearby towns.
But the realities of water shortages -- and water politics -- have taken a huge toll. Riofrio says that things began to slip away about five or six years ago. That's when he began noticing the effects of farmers in the 600,000-acre Westlands Water District fallowing and permanently retiring more and more cropland as a way to cope with too little irrigation and major drainage problems that have led to salty soil.
About a year and a half ago, well before Mendota started making headlines, things had gotten bad enough that Riofrio stopped selling fresh milk at his store. Too few could afford it anymore. In the last few months, the downward spiral has greatly accelerated.
Farmers in Westlands, who've yanked about 100,000 acres out of production since 2000, say they may now be forced to idle as many as 150,000 more for lack of water.
The issues at play are complicated. They're also fraught with bad blood. Farmers are set to receive only 3.7 million acre-feet of water this year from federal and state plumbing systems--about 2 million acre-feet less than in a normal year. Some environmentalists, however, have been quick to accuse the growers of overstating the problem.
They say farmers have extra water stored both above and below ground and have gotten supplies transferred from other locations.
The environmentalists' instinct to dig in on this point is understandable. Many of the giant growers in Westlands have been less than honorable over the decades, gaming the system to claim more than their fair share of cheap, federally subsidized water. And there is something rather unseemly about the way the growers are using the plight of poor farmworkers to help aid their own cause.
The truth is, though, not every farm has access to multiple sources of water, resulting in a crazy patchwork of dusty and well-irrigated dirt that's hard to miss these days as you drive across California's interior.
And if environmentalists tend to distort the problem, so do many farmers, blaming what's happening mainly on a series of court decisions and federal agency actions that have reduced pumping and diverted river flows in order to protect fish. State officials say that the environmental rulings are responsible for about 25% of the current mess, while the rest is due to drought.
What's critical for policymakers to keep in mind is that, in the end, none of this squabbling matters. It's simply a distraction from the one thing they should be focused on: The people of Mendota are suffering terribly -- and steps need to be taken right away to bring them relief.
First, U.S. officials have to resist pressure from environmental groups and others and allow, at least temporarily, for the partial lifting of the fish protections. It won't completely solve things, but it will help. It will also send a crucial signal of support to Riofrio and his customers, who are fast becoming a more endangered species than Chinook salmon or delta smelt.
Second, and most important, federal, state and local officials need to coordinate on a long-term economic development strategy -- and put some serious dollars behind it. This must go way beyond the $260 million in federal stimulus money that's been promised by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to patch up ailing irrigation infrastructure across the state.
The real question is what emerges after the almonds, tomatoes and cantaloupes disappear. What happens as ever more Central Valley farmland is retired, as is inevitable? What does the future look like for the northwest corner of Fresno County? Will the usual solution -- building a new prison -- be all that's conceived? Or can the sun-baked San Joaquin Valley become a hub of solar power and alternative energy, as some have suggested? If so, who will prepare workers for this new field?
"The people ... of Mendota will require the assistance of knowledgeable and culturally sensitive rural economic development specialists," Villarejo concluded in a report for the California Institute for Rural Studies. "On-the-ground demonstration strategies will be needed," along with "the development of human capital at the community level." The trouble is, Villarejo wrote those words way back in 1996, in the aftermath of an earlier drought, and little, if anything, has been done to realize that vision.
"We are part of a multibillion-dollar agricultural juggernaut that feeds the nation," Riofrio said. "But we've gotten chewed up and spit out."
After I left Westside Grocery, I headed over to San Joaquin. The food bank was handing out 1,250 boxes of rice, beans and macaroni. Also available were chicken and bags of peaches, plums and cucumbers -- farm products for needy farmworkers, who queued up down the block, just as they once did outside Riofrio's shop.#
Rick Wartzman is the executive director of the Drucker Institute at Claremont Graduate University. He is the author, most recently, of "Obscene in the Extreme: The Burning and Banning of John Steinbeck's 'The Grapes of Wrath."
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-wartzman19-2009jul19,0,4411825.story
Growers scrambling to cope with drought
Hanford Sentinel-7/19/09
By Seth Nidever
A drive from Hanford to Selma on Highway 43 used to mean rolling vistas of corn and cotton. Now, likely as not, the view is tomato plants and other crops that give more bang for the water buck.
Call it a sign of the times. Or more precisely, a sign of the dry times.
Three years of drought have affected the Kings County landscape, bringing crops to parts of the county they weren’t in before, creating more planting of what used to be rotational crops and generally leaving farmers scrambling to live with less and less water.
“The situation is progressively getting worse,” said Westside farmer Jeremy Freitas.
The numbers reveal the tightening squeeze of dwindling water supplies.
In 2005, Kings County had about 220,000 acres of cotton, a crop that sucks up a lot of water. This year? Barely 70,000 acres.
Some of that has been driven by weak prices, but lack of water, and the higher cost of water, have been big factors.
In 2005, there were less than 1,000 acres of safflower, a vegetable oil crop that requires only one irrigation. This year? Nearly 30,000 acres have been planted despite low profit margins.
More winter wheat has been planted, even though prices for it have declined. The reason? Winter wheat sucks from wells that in the summer must be devoted to other crops.
In the end, much Westside farmland may simply revert to alkali flats and sagebrush fit only for livestock grazing, said Steve Schweizer, Kings County deputy agricultural commissioner.
But farmers aren’t throwing in the towel just yet.
They’re using all their ingenuity to stay one step ahead of failure.
A key part of their arsenal is drip irrigation, a revolutionary system that delivers water through above or underground lines that have tiny nozzles that squirt water at the root of each plant.
The advantage is no wasted water and, in some cases, higher yields.
But drip irrigation works better for some crops, soil types and water supplies than others. It’s been tried on cotton, for instance, with limited success.
Luckily for farmers, it works well for processed tomatoes, which is one of the crops holding a consistently high value during the recession.
That’s meant an explosion in tomato production in Kings County — the acreage has doubled over the last five years, according to Schweizer.
“Basically, our tomatoes are going to carry us through,” Freitas said.
But for how long is anybody’s guess.
One question revolves around how well tomato prices will hold next year amid the huge acreage increases. The other question is more elemental.
Every available drop of the precious surface water Westside growers are getting this year from the Sacramento delta — about 36 percent of average because of the drought — is going largely to tomatoes, which don’t do well on brackish well water.
More and more salt-tolerant crops that can be grown on well water are springing up — wheat being one of the main examples.
Fresno County farmer Scott Schmidt said he’s all but abandoned cotton and, like Freitas, concentrated on tomatoes.
But Schmidt is worried about increasing the saltiness of the soil as more and more well water from deeper and deeper layers is pumped out of the ground.
“We’re running out of options here,” he said.
For many growers, the shift to drought-tolerant crops may be necessary, but does little to earn money.
The prices of safflower, wheat and garbanzo beans — traditional rotational crops that can get by on less water — isn’t particularly good.
Many Westside farmers say they are growing such crops just to pay rent on the land — and to free up water for higher-value commodities like tomatoes and pistachios.
Trying to live just on drought tolerant crops like safflower, sorghum and garbanzo beans probably wouldn’t work, according to Eric Barlow, a grower west of Lemoore Naval Air Station.
Barlow said he’s shifted away from water-intensive crops as much as he can.
Drip lines are helping conserve water applied to the tomatoes, he said.
But he’s already seeing negative effects from pumping salty water through the drip lines to the tomato plants.
And for next year? Barlow, like all the other growers on the parched Westside, is wondering what’s coming down the pipe.
If anything.
“I don’t have an answer,” he said.#
http://hanfordsentinel.com/articles/2009/07/19/news/doc4a62afd5b123a211949100.txt
Drought not as bad in desert, but farmers still feeling it
Desert Dispatch-7/19/09
By Jessica Cejnar
The current drought that has gripped the rest of California hasn’t had as big an impact on the Mojave Desert, but some local farmers are still feeling its effects.
Ruth and Jim Harmsen, who have owned Harmsen Family Dairy in Hinkley for 29 years, said they’re doing everything they can to be more efficient with their water. In addition to owning 1,200 cows, the Harmsens farm 300 acres of alfalfa.
They use groundwater to irrigate their fields, but have had to cut their alfalfa production by 30 to 40 acres because the fees the water master charges has been continually increasing.
“There’s not much we can do,” Ruth Harmsen said. “The only thing (is to) cut back on acreage and put different types of irrigation that uses less water.”
Agriculture has been suffering statewide because of a drought California has been going through since 2007, but the situation in the Mojave Desert isn’t as bad as other areas of the state. Norman Caouette, assistant general manager for the Mojave Water Agency, said the Mojave Desert has extensive groundwater basins that are able to be replenished by water purchased from the State Water Project and stored ahead of time.
But because of the drought and pumping restrictions in the Sacramento Delta, where the water comes from, the amount of water the agency was allotted this year has decreased by 40 percent.
The Mojave Water Agency usually receives 75,800 acre feet of water annually from the project. This year the agency is only alotted 30,320 acre-feet. The amount of groundwater in the desert varies depending on location, Caouette said.
In some areas along the river the ground water is between 30 and 50 feet below the ground. In other areas further away from the river the water table is 100 to 150 feet below ground. According to United States Geological Survey, groundwater levels for Barstow are currently between 50 and 60.
In the Mojave Desert, farmers are able to pump a certain amount of water out of the ground, Couette said. But when there are drought conditions, farmers continue to pump groundwater faster than it can be replenished.
Sandra Cleland, San Bernardino County agricultural officer, said the drought has been a concern of farmers that she’s talked to for a number of years. Many people are planting pomegranates, and one farmer is planting watermelons instead of hay because they take less water, she said.
“(We’ve) got a population that’s drawing faster than we can replenish,” she said. “This is a desert. We can’t keep planting 5,000 square-foot Kentucky bluegrass lawns and not pay the price.”#
http://www.desertdispatch.com/news/drought-6516-farmers-bad.html
California may ease gray-water restrictions
Rules making it easier to install systems that recycle water for garden use could take effect Aug. 4
L.A. Times-7/18/09
By Susan Carpenter
California may soon adopt more lenient rules allowing residents to recycle water from their clothes washers, showers and other household sources for use in their gardens.
If the state's Building Standards Commission approves the new code, as expected, certain types of residential gray-water systems could be installed or altered without a construction permit starting Aug. 4.
That's a reversal of present requirements, which stipulate that homeowners who install systems recycling sink, shower, bathtub and laundry wastewater not only get permits from the appropriate administrative authority but also install the systems underground with extensive filtering apparatus.
Last summer, Senate Bill 1258 passed requiring the state's Department of Housing and Community Development to revise the code "to conserve water by facilitating greater reuse of gray water in California."
The code's revision was scheduled to take effect Jan. 1, 2011, but because of the state's continuing drought, the new code was submitted for emergency adoption.
Complex systems that discharge more than 250 gallons per day may still require construction permits. But the new gray-water standards do apply to lower-volume residential systems, including ones that recycle water from a single washing machine in a one- or two-family dwelling, and ones that recycle water from a single plumbing fixture or drain, also in a one- or two-family home.
Homeowners must follow 12 guidelines but do not need permits. Among the guidelines:
The installation cannot affect other plumbing, electrical or mechanical components including structural features, sanitation or potable water supply.
The gray water must be contained on the site where it is generated.
If gray water is released above ground, there must be at least 2 inches of mulch, rock, or soil (or a solid shield) covering the release point.
Systems must minimize contact with humans and pets.
Water used to wash diapers or similarly soiled or infectious garments cannot be used.
Water cannot contain hazardous chemicals derived from cleaning car parts, washing greasy rags, disposing solutions from home photo labs or similar activities.
For more information on the revised code and to read all 12 guidelines, go to hcd.ca.gov and type in "gray water standards" in the search field.#
http://www.latimes.com/features/home/la-hm-graywater18-2009jul18,0,6940061.story
American Canyon eyes pact for Vallejo water
Vallejo Times-Herald-7/18/09
By Rachel Raskin-Zrihen
Water is again front and center in American Canyon officials' consciousness, as several related items will be addressed at Tuesday's regular City Council meeting.
Council members will consider water storage and similar issues during the public meeting at 6:30 p.m. at City Hall, 4381 Broadway St., Suite 201.
Council members will consider adopting an agreement with the city of Vallejo to provide drinking and firefighting water service to the new American Canyon High School.
This is a change to a 1996 agreement in which Vallejo sells American Canyon potable water, treats its excess raw water, and provides facilities to transmit American Canyon water to certain areas within the city's water service area. Vallejo would temporarily also sell American Canyon nonexclusive rights to Vallejo's elevated water storage facilities to serve the new American Canyon High School for a maximum of five years.
American Canyon officials expect eventually to serve water to the high school from the planned 2.5 million gallon potable water tank. That project is expected to be completed in five years.
The Vallejo City Council approved the plan on June 30, according to a staff report.
There is no alternative to this plan, staff members say, because no other source of potable water at adequate pressure is available to the high school site.
Council members also will be asked to raise the city's water capacity fees. The current fees, by which the city recovers the costs of providing new water system connections or increased water capacity, has not changed since 2007, a staff report notes.
If the Water Capacity Fee fails to keep up with inflation, there may not be enough money to make needed improvements, according to the report.
The Public Works Department recommends the fees rise by 7.12 percent, which is about how much construction costs have increased in the region.
How much of a fiscal impact the increase would make would depend on the number of requests for new water service and for additional water capacity for existing connections, the report notes.#
Water district to host forums
Glendale News-Press-7/17/09
The Foothill Municipal Water District, the major intermediary for imported water to the Crescenta Valley and foothill areas, on Thursday announced a pair of community forums to be held through the end of the month.
The Crescenta Valley Water District imports a major portion of its water from Foothill, which in turn is supplied by the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California.
The public forums were scheduled to provide residents and property owners with updated information on the ongoing water supply challenges, plans for the development of new local water supplies, conservation methods and the current mandatory controls that proliferate the area.
District officials also plan to discuss an aging water supply infrastructure and the need to finance ongoing upgrades and repairs to ensure adequate delivery ability.
The public is encouraged to attend the forums to provide input and ask questions of local water officials.
The first forum is scheduled for 6 p.m. Wednesday at Charles W. Eliot Middle School, 2184 N. Lake Ave. in Altadena.
The second forum is planned for 6 p.m. July 30 at Verdugo Hills Hospital, 1812 Verdugo Blvd.#
http://www.glendalenewspress.com/articles/2009/07/18/news/gnp-briefs18.txt
Water district can help residents save money
North County Times-7/19/09
By Phil Williams
Opinion
California is in the midst of a severe water shortage brought on by ongoing drought conditions, depleted reservoirs and court-ordered delivery reductions.
Metropolitan Water District of Southern California has slashed water deliveries, and major state reservoirs now are at a fraction of their full capacity. Meanwhile, energy costs for water districts are rising, and the threat of state penalties for excessive water use looms large.
Clearly, the need for conservation is now.
The Elsinore Valley Municipal Water District, is implementing a new rate structure to encourage greater water efficiency. The board recently approved a "water budget" structure that will reward customers who already are efficient and encourage others to conserve, while helping protect our precious water supply.
The new rate structure gives customers enough water to meet their needs indoors and out. The structure even increases customers' water budgets in the five hottest months of the year. Customers who stay within their water budget should see only modest increases in their bills.
Customers who refuse to conserve, however, will pay a steep price for their wasteful water ways. Rates will double, triple and eventually quadruple as customers use increasing amounts of water.
Thankfully, there's no need for customers to pay those higher rates if they manage their water budgets wisely. The district has fairly determined the appropriate amounts of water customers need, based on property and family size along with weather conditions.
Additionally, the district also has a host of water-conservation measures to help customers reduce their water waste. Landscaping workshops are available to teach customers how to curb their outdoor water use, which typically accounts for at least half of most residential water use.
Rebates may be available for water-saving devices, such as rotating sprinkler heads and high-efficiency toilets. And the district's dedicated full-time conservation specialist is ready to help customers by providing free water conservation audits, water-saving tips on landscaping and much more.
It's time for everyone in California to be cautious about their water use, and the Elsinore Valley water district is helping its customers do that. By working together to conserve water, the district and its customers can conserve and ensure a safe, reliable water supply today and far into the future.#
Phil Williams is the Elsinore Valley Municipal Water District's board president.
Excavation starts work on water main under I-80
Sacramento Bee-7/19/09
By Cathy Locke
Excavation for a tunnel to extend a water main under Interstate 80 has begun near Antelope Road in the Citrus Heights area.
The work is part of the final stage of a $4.6 million project by California American Water to replace aging water mains in its Lincoln Oaks water system and improve the system's reliability, according to a company news release.
Contractors are excavating and tunneling down 19 feet under the freeway to install a 24-inch casing containing at 12-inch water main.
The main will run for 520 feet under Interstate 80 and tie into existing mains in neighborhoods on each side of the highway.#
http://www.sacbee.com/ourregion/story/2037736.html
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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.
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