The Great Water Deal of 2009

By Peter Schrag, California Progress Report
On the rare occasions when the biggest players in Sacramento blow kisses to one another for a historic achievement, the object of the celebration deserves a hard second look. It happened again last week when Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, legislative leaders and a gaggle of other politicians and lobbyists reached the great water deal of 2009. He wanted to congratulate all concerned, said the governor “for this historic accomplishment.”

Like many other big deals in Sacramento in recent years, this one, too, was composed in large part of black boxes, deferrals, fudges and borrowing — $11.1 billion in general obligation bonds in this case– for large water projects, some as yet unspecified, plus a fair amount of pork having little to do with water.

From 30,000 feet, the agreement, in the form of five bills, touches nearly all the major issues in California’s complex water picture: flood control, protecting the fragile Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta ecosystem, securing more water for the big San Joaquin Valley growers, many of them suffering the effects of a severe drought, reducing water consumption, monitoring and replenishing the state’s overdrawn ground water and addressing the increasingly severe effects of global warming.

We don’t yet know whether the deal will lead to the construction of a peripheral canal to take Sacramento River water around the ecologically overstressed Delta, for delivery to those growers and to Southern California cities. Nor do we know how much of the new storage capacity will be the costly surface dams the growers love and how much will go into the Valley’s depleted underground aquifers.

What we do know is that the deal did little to guarantee effective ground water monitoring by the state or to require more efficient use of water by agriculture, which still consumes roughly 80 percent of the state’s water. It aims to reduce urban water use by 20 percent but requires no similar effort by growers. And it’s still the taxpayers who’ll have to pay off the bonds – with interest a total of as much as $22 billion — not the farmers, developers and flood plain property owners who will be the major beneficiaries.

Water is a fixed – and probably declining – resource. The only way it can be stretched is by conservation, recycling of waste water and by more efficient use. This deal takes the first baby steps in that direction, but only by promising more goodies to agriculture and by taking most of the money to pay for it not from the beneficiaries but from schools, universities, the old and the sick, and from the taxpayers, present and future. Next November, when they get to vote on the bonds, they’ll have the last word on that.

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Source: California Progress Report

National Academy of Sciences to Study California’s Water Woes

By Bettina Boxall, LA Times

In a bow to a summer of angry complaints about water cutbacks to Central Valley farms, the Obama administration said Wednesday it would invite the National Academy of Sciences to examine the environmental measures restricting some water shipments from Northern California.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said he would ask the academy to conduct an independent review of the science underpinning federal pumping limits imposed under the Endangered Species Act to protect smelt and salmon in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

In a letter to U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who had requested the review, Salazar said he was confident that the fish protections were “scientifically sound.” But he said he would like the academy to determine if there were other actions that could be taken that would have less of an effect on water supply.

The announcement came on the same day that Salazar held a public hearing in Washington on California’s water shortages, caused by a three-year drought and mounting environmental problems in the delta, the conduit for water shipments to the San Joaquin Valley and Southern California.

The delivery cutbacks have hit agribusiness on the west side of the valley the hardest because they have junior rights in the huge federal irrigation project that supplies much of the region.

State water officials say most of the delivery cuts from the delta are the result of drought — not the fish protections — but Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Central Valley congressmen have repeatedly denounced the endangered species restrictions as placing fish above people.

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Source: LA Times

Water for Auction in California

By Bettina Boxall, LA Times

Need more water? If you’ve got $30 million or so, you can bid for it at an auction this fall.

In what officials believe is a first for the state, a Southern California water agency is planning to auction off enough water to supply about 70,000 homes for a year.

Water sales are not uncommon in California, especially when supplies are tight, as they are in the current drought.

But putting water up for bid in an auction — which is bound to drive up the price — appears to be unprecedented in the state.

“Water in general has always been a very low-priced commodity, and I think the reality is, it’s going to start catching up with other utilities. It’s going to fluctuate with markets,” said Ken Manning, chief executive of Chino Basin Watermaster, a quasi-public entity that manages the basin. “Whether that’s right or wrong, I don’t know. I just know where it’s going.”

Manning anticipates that the water will fetch $800 to $1,000 an acre-foot, or roughly $30 million. Underground storage in the basin will cost another $30 million.

“We think we’re offering a reliable product. It’s in the ground. So it will demand a higher price,” he said.

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Source: LA Times

Union Pacific to Pay for Water Act Violations

By John Boyd, Journal of Commerce Online

Union Pacific Railroad will pay civil penalties of $800,000 and is restoring some Nevada stream areas at an estimated cost of $31 million, the Department of Justice said, to settle alleged Clean Water Act violations in 2005.

In January 2005, the government said, UP’s tracks in the Clover Creek and Meadow Valley Wash areas “sustained significant damage following a flood in southern Nevada” and the railroad “made time-critical actions to repair damage.”

But Justice said “UP also conducted extensive non-emergency construction and stream alteration work without obtaining the required Clean Water Act permits, which could have minimized and compensated for the damage to the streams.”

That work included building “massive structures to control stream flows, such as dikes, berms, levees and diversions within the stream systems,” some up to 15 feet high and as much as thousands of feet in length.

The proposed decree said “Union Pacific has already performed substantial removal, restoration, and re-vegetation work at many sites.” It also said “nothing in this consent decree shall constitute or be construed as an admission of liability or wrongdoing by Union Pacific.”

John C. Cruden, acting assistant attorney general for the department’s Environment and Natural Resources Division, said work the railroad agreed to undertake in the settlement “will restore Clover Creek and Meadow Valley Wash.”

Kush said “most of the requested work is complete.” Justice said UP agreed to restore 122 acres of mountain-desert streams and wetlands, in 21 sections in Clark and Lincoln Counties, Nev.

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Source: The Journal of Commerce Online

California Adds Delta Tunnel to List of Possible Water Solutions

By Collin Sullivan of Greenwire

SAN FRANCISCO — California officials are studying whether a 35-mile tunnel under the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta might help solve some of the state’s water supply problems.

Teresa Engstrom, chief of the delta engineering branch at the California Department of Water Resources, confirmed that the agency is conducting feasibility studies on an “all tunnel” option that would route water under the Bay Delta from rivers and reservoirs to the north of Sacramento to farms in the south.

The idea to build a tunnel sprang from a handful of public workshops the department held recently on how to approach California’s long-running fight over water rights in the northern part of the state. A tunnel, she said, could theoretically offer a way out of the vexing maze of water supply, endangered species and farming issues facing the state.

“We had a lot of comments that said, ‘Why don’t you go under?’” Engstrom said. “So we thought we would take a look.”

Engstrom stressed that the all-tunnel option has no more weight at this point than competing ideas to build a canal around the delta or new levees along the water’s current route through the middle of the delta region. All are under consideration.

DWR engineers conducting environmental and geotechnical studies expect to have a draft environmental report completed by the end of the year on all three proposals, Engstrom said. A final public draft would then be ready next year.

The new wrinkle comes as lawmakers, farmers, commercial fishers and environmentalists continue to bicker over whether to build major new infrastructure to both protect endangered fish and improve water deliveries to farms in the Central Valley. Pumping through the region is currently restricted to protect endangered delta smelt and salmon, much to the ire of struggling farmers.

Jonas Minton, water policy adviser for the Planning and Conservation League, called the tunnel proposal and the council bad ideas. He estimated that such a tunnel would likely stretch beyond 50 miles, making it “longer than the Chunnel connecting England with France.”

“The Department of Water Resources says it has no idea how much the tunnel would cost,” added Minton, guessing it would easily surpass the $13 billion spent 15 years ago to build the tunnel connecting France and England.

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Source: New York Times

Study: West Faces Water Catastrophe

by Bruce Finley, The Denver Post

Denver » A new study projects that all reservoirs along the Colorado River — which provide water for 27 million people in seven Western states, including Utah — could dry up by 2057 because of climate change and overuse.

If warming led to a 10 percent reduction in the river’s flow, it would create a 25 percent chance of depletion, according to the University of Colorado research released this week. Warming resulting in a 20 percent reduction would raise the chance of depletion to 50 percent, the study found.

“In the short term, the risk is relatively low,” said Balaji Rajagopalan, associate professor of civil environmental and architectural engineering at the university and lead author on the study, which was accepted for publication by the American Geophysical Union.

“But after that, the risk escalates enormously. If you do nothing, and you have no policies in place, even drastic measures such as cutting people off will not help from staving off catastrophe.”

Researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Bureau of Reclamation participated in the study. Rajagopalan said the study was done in response to a 2008 University of California study that found a one-in-two chance that overuse and warming could deplete reservoirs much sooner — by 2021.

A 10-year drought along the Colorado River, which runs 1,450 miles from the Rocky Mountains to the Gulf of Mexico, has created anxiety. Lawyers are looking into how down-river users such as Californians might assert water rights if reservoirs dried up.

Dozens of dams along the Colorado River trap 60 million acre-feet of water in reservoirs — four times the annual flow of the river. (An acre-foot is the volume of water needed to cover an acre to a depth of one foot, or 325,851 gallons, enough to sustain a family or two for a year.)

The reservoirs along the river supply cities including Phoenix and Las Vegas. Drought in recent years has dropped water levels in those reservoirs to less than half full. Currently, the reservoirs are about 59 percent full.

Study authors advocated “adaptive management” of supplies, with basin-wide discussion of how best to reduce down-river use and ramp up efficiency.

“Use the time to put together policies that can be sustainable,” Rajagopalan said. “There’s lots of room for creative policy. We need to start right now — not wait.”

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Source: Salt Lake Tribune

Waste Not: A Solution for California’s Water Woes

By Noah Buyaher, WSJ Blogs

The knives came during California’s budget battle — literally. But there’s still at least one big tussle in the Golden State left this year: solving the state’s water crisis.

As the Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month, Gov. Schwarzenegger and legislative leaders are planning a big push to address water shortages in the state, which has suffered a three-year drought. Everything from new reservoirs to urban conservation efforts is being considered.

But a big lever, according to a new study out of the Oakland-based Pacific Institute, is getting farmers to use H2O more efficiently.

The finding is no great surprise. The Institute’s co-founder Dr. Peter Gleick has long advocated a “soft path” for water (freeing up new supply by curbing waste). And he’s been a critic of what he calls misinformation about the plight of Central Valley farmers. He says that they’re getting more water than they claim, and that the causes for astronomical unemployment rates in some farm communities owes more to the recession and poverty than the drought.

What’s interesting about the analysis is just how much the authors think a combination of irrigation technologies and management practices can save: 5.6 million acre-feet in an average year. That’s 17% of all water used by California farmers, and more than twice the total the state’s millions of city-dwellers could save if they wised up about their water use. It’s also a whole lot more than the enormous desalination plant in Carlsbad, Calif. will produce when it comes online.

The report reiterates what demand-siders in both the water and energy debates have been saying for a long time: Spending money on capital-intensive projects (like desalination plants and huge solar arrays) makes little sense when there are cheaper and bigger opportunities in improving efficiency.

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Source: Wall Street Journal

“Water Hog” Label Haunts Dallas

By ANA CAMPOY, Wall Street Journal

DALLAS — A reputation as a wasteful “water hog” is complicating Dallas’s efforts to siphon water from nearby communities.

Local officials, who say they need to nearly double their water supply in coming decades to keep up with a fast-growing population, want to build new reservoirs and buy water from nearby Oklahoma. But these efforts are entangled in federal lawsuits as Dallas’s neighbors see the city’s love for emerald-green lawns and lush golf courses as rampant waste.

“It’s not that they need the water to survive,” said Michael Banks, an East Texas dentist who lives near a river Dallas wants to dam. “What they want is to destroy our wildlife so they’ll have enough water for their grass.”

City officials recognize they have an image problem. “We’ve been called water hogs,” said Ramon Miguez, Dallas assistant city manager. But he said the city has made significant efforts to conserve water in recent years, including educating residents not to drench their lawns.

Spats between communities that sip and those that gulp are becoming increasingly common in the South and the West. Sprawling cities packed with houses featuring big lawns and many bathrooms typically don’t use water very efficiently, experts and environmentalists say.

So when city officials scout for more water beyond their boundaries, they don’t get much sympathy from their neighbors.

“It’s an environmental equity issue,” said David Feldman, chairman of the Department of Planning, Policy and Design at University of California, Irvine. “Before they give up their water, they want to make sure that the city isn’t being wasteful.”

In recent years, cities such as Los Angeles and Las Vegas have been forced to conserve water aggressively to meet their needs and persuade other communities to let them tap their supplies.

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Source: The Wall Street Journal

It’s Now Legal to Catch Rain in Colorado

By Kirk Johnson, The New York Times

DURANGO, Colo. — For the first time since territorial days, rain will be free for the catching here, as more and more thirsty states part ways with one of the most entrenched codes of the West.

Precipitation, every last drop or flake, was assigned ownership from the moment it fell in many Western states, making scofflaws of people who scooped rainfall from their own gutters. In some instances, the rights to that water were assigned a century or more ago.

Now two new laws in Colorado will allow many people to collect rainwater legally. The laws are the latest crack in the rainwater edifice, as other states, driven by population growth, drought, or declining groundwater in their aquifers, have already opened the skies or begun actively encouraging people to collect.

“I was so willing to go to jail for catching water on my roof and watering my garden,” said Tom Bartels, a video producer here in southwestern Colorado, who has been illegally watering his vegetables and fruit trees from tanks attached to his gutters. “But now I’m not a criminal.”

Who owns the sky, anyway? In most of the country, that is a question for philosophy class or bad poetry. In the West, lawyers parse it with straight faces and serious intent. The result, especially stark here in the Four Corners area of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah, is a crazy quilt of rules and regulations — and an entire subculture of people like Mr. Bartels who have been using the rain nature provided but laws forbade.

The two Colorado laws allow perhaps a quarter-million residents with private wells to begin rainwater harvesting, as well as the setting up of a pilot program for larger scale rain-catching.

Just 75 miles west of here, in Utah, collecting rainwater from the roof is still illegal unless the roof owner also owns water rights on the ground; the same rigid rules, with a few local exceptions, also apply in Washington State. Meanwhile, 20 miles south of here, in New Mexico, rainwater catchment, as the collecting is called, is mandatory for new dwellings in some places like Santa Fe.

And in Arizona, cities like Tucson are pioneering the practices of big-city rain capture. “All you need for a water harvesting system is rain, and a place to put it,” Tucson Water says on its Web site.

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Source: The New York Times

Oil-Shale Projects in Utah to Slurp Up Agricultural Water Rights

By Arthur Raymond, Deseret News

The virtual non-existence of available water rights in the bone-dry southern reaches of Utah will not hobble possible oil shale mining and nuclear power development projects, according to testimony delivered by industry insiders and state officials to a legislative interim committee Wednesday.

Utah state engineer Kent Jones told the committee that the state’s allocation of water rights in the Uintah Basin is essentially maxed out, and either effort would require obtaining water rights in control of someone else.

“Any use of water in the Colorado River Basin will have to be done based on existing rights,” Jones said.

Utah Division of Water Resources director Dennis Strong said that issue would not place a constraint on potential large-volume water uses, like oil shale processing or nuclear power generation, since they could obtain the rights from current holders in the agriculture business.

“We make those choices all the time,” Strong said. “We’ve made them on the Wasatch Front a lot. Instead of growing crops … we grow houses.”

But University of Utah student Tim DeChristopher, awaiting trial for disrupting a Bureau of Land Management oil and gas lease auction last winter, countered in his testimony that the fight over existing rights will wreak havoc on rural communities and small agri-business owners who will be outgunned by deep-pocketed energy developers.

The shift in water control from agriculture to industry is a move, DeChristopher said, that would abandon the interests of rural communities.

“What we’re looking at doing is sacrificing our local agriculture here in Utah,” DeChristopher said. “I would challenge anyone on this committee to make that statement … that Utah should be taking away water rights from our farmers and giving them to oil companies.”

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Source:  Deseret News

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