MID expects full 42-inch allotments this year for growers

Modesto-area growers could get 42 inches of water this year – an average allotment, at long last – and probably won’t have to worry about higher prices, they learned Monday at a Modesto Irrigation District landowner meeting.

Both points are expected to go before the MID board on March 14, when leaders also could affirm a March 22 start date for this year’s water season.

Staff members will recommend that the district continue allowing individuals to move their share of water among parcels that each owns, leases or rents. Other drought-time programs, such as selling portions of one’s water share on the open market to other MID customers, apparently won’t be renewed.

The mood among about 50 people attending Monday’s landowners meeting was positive compared with the past few years, when farmers faced extended drought and paid drought surcharges that won’t be levied this year.

“It’s all on how much water there is,” board member Nick Blom said after the meeting. “When you’ve got plenty of water, guys know they will get plenty.”

The 42-inch proposal is less than the 48-inch allotment approved for Turlock-area farmers by the Turlock Irrigation District, MID’s partner on the Tuolumne River. Most MID crops don’t need more than 42 vertical inches, Blom said, but those that do will likely get a chance to buy more water. Some may want to flood property just to recharge groundwater, helping their wells.

“We’ve had an incredible amount of rain and snowpack,” said the district’s Gordon Enas. Some parts of California have received twice the normal amount, he said.

Two years ago marked MID’s all-time low, with a mere 16-inch allotment, although last year saw a rebound to 36 inches.

MID growers pay only a fraction of the district’s true cost for delivering water, but likely won’t face an increase this year after several years of rate hikes.

MID electricity customers – more than 100,000 homes and businesses – for decades have subsidized farmers’ water prices. Last year, the subsidy came to $17 million, and the district faces a class-action lawsuit seeking to correct the imbalance.

Some growers seemed concerned about the tightrope that TID and MID are walking with their jointly owned Don Pedro Reservoir in the foothills to the east. It’s nearly brimming after record highs this year in mountain rain and snow, and huge releases in recent weeks have brought some flooding to low-lying homes and farmland near Modesto, but nothing like the disaster of 1997.

Fearing that a warm storm could melt snow and overwhelm Don Pedro, resulting in massive flooding, the districts would like now to release even more than already is flowing down the swollen Tuolumne. But federal officials have prevented that because levees downstream toward the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta are strained.

“You’ve probably noticed a big slug of water coming down the Tuolumne River,” Enas said. But because of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ order, Don Pedro is “still a very full reservoir,” he said.

“It doesn’t help us in this room,” assistant general manager John Davids said, “but they have to make tough decisions for the whole system.”

MID’s staff expects melting snow to provide Don Pedro with about 2 million acre-feet of runoff this year. The near-full reservoir holds about that same amount, so the swollen river’s current level is expected to remain that high for about 4  1/2 months, Davids said – bad news for growers with low-lying farmland, some of which is underwater and will be for a long time.

“We should have a lot of fish a year from now,” a man said, with sarcasm, drawing laughter from the audience. It was a reference to the ongoing fight against a state proposal that would send more water down the Tuolumne, Stanislaus and Merced rivers to benefit fish at the expense of farms and cities.

Davids noted stories from times before people dammed the rivers, when they would slow to a trickle in summer and fall – far less than current amounts that time of year – yet fish somehow survived.

This story was originally published March 6, 2017 at 9:14 PM with the headline "MID expects full 42-inch allotments this year for growers."