Gov. Newsom outlines a peace agreement on California water. Will the fighting finally end?
Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration unveiled a $2.6 billion environmental peace treaty on the Central Valley’s overtaxed rivers Tuesday. The deal calls for farms and cities to surrender billions of gallons of water while contributing funds to help restore troubled fish habitats.
Newsom’s top aides called the 34-page memorandum of understanding a compromise measure that will leave more water in the rivers — but not as much as many environmentalists believe is needed to prop up ailing populations of salmon, steelhead and other fish. And some key water users, such as the city of San Francisco, haven’t yet signed onto the plan.
“We don’t have to choose between healthy ecosystems or a healthy economy,” Newsom said in a written statement. “We can choose a path that provides for both. This is a meaningful, hard-earned step in the right direction.”
This latest attempt to create a grand bargain among competing factions in California’s water world comes as the state faces a third straight year of drought. Many farmers have already been told to expect minimal water supplies this year, and on Monday Newsom ordered urban water agencies to step up their conservation efforts.
In a separate move Tuesday that underscores the severity of the drought, federal and state officials outlined a plan for releasing minimal amounts of water this year from Shasta Lake — the state’s largest reservoir that’s supposed to feed the Sacramento River with enough cold water to keep endangered winter-run Chinook salmon alive. Less than 3% of the population survived last year, when water releases from Shasta were more generous.
“The system is in incredibly bad shape,” said Jared Blumenfeld, secretary of the state Environmental Protection Agency. “No pretense here that this is a decision that will produce great outcomes.”
Against that dismal backdrop, state officials say a peace plan on the rivers is essential.
“We have to end these water wars,” Blumenfeld said.
The so-called voluntary agreement released Tuesday is signed by some of California’s biggest water users that pull water from the Central Valley’s rivers. They include the agencies supplying water for Sacramento Valley’s rice farmers, the city of Sacramento and its suburbs, most of urban Southern California and Westlands Water District, the largest farm-water agency in the San Joaquin Valley.
“We actually have a critical mass of players — water users, federal agencies, state agencies — that are going to move forward,” said Wade Crowfoot, Newsom’s Natural Resources Secretary. “We’re not waiting any longer.”
Key water users haven’t signed on
That said, several key players that pull water from the San Joaquin River and its tributaries are notably absent from the list of signatories released Tuesday. They include the city of San Francisco and water districts serving Turlock and Modesto and their surrounding farms. These water users have long objected to giving up water under Newsom’s compromise plan, which originated in the final months of the governorship of his predecessor, Jerry Brown.
Last fall, Newsom’s administration sent these holdouts a warning: Without their cooperation, the State Water Resources Control Board would go ahead with a plan that would seize considerably more of their water than what’s called for in the voluntary agreement.
On Tuesday, top administration officials repeated that warning, saying the state water board would crack down on groups that refuse to leave more water in the rivers for fish.
“We anticipate that,” Blumenfeld said. “It’s really important that we have a regime to make them provide (river) flows, because otherwise, if we didn’t, it would put an undue burden, an unfair burden on the folks signing the (voluntary agreements).”
He added that the terms outlined in the proposal “are not seen as negotiable.”
Two of the holdout agencies, the Modesto and Turlock irrigation districts, said they were disappointed that state officials left them out of the negotiations that produced Tuesday’s agreement. Despite Blumenfeld’s statement, they declared themselves open to negotiating.
“We will keep pursuing every avenue to reach an agreement that benefits all — the Tuolumne River, our communities and our customers,” they said in a joint statement.
The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission remains in talks with the state, said spokesman John Coté.
Environmentalists have been objecting to the voluntary program for years, saying Newsom’s compromise doesn’t go nearly far enough to protect the fish. Instead, they’ve been calling on the state water board to simply order farms and cities to leave more water in the state’s rivers.
The added water for the environment “is far less than half of what’s needed,” said Doug Obegi, a lawyer with the Natural Resources Defense Council. He scoffed at the idea that the voluntary plan would solve California’s litigious water climate, saying, “How do you bring peace to a process when you exclude from the room” environmentalists and other key players?
The document that state officials unveiled Tuesday isn’t a legally binding settlement, but officials said it spells out the parameters of an enforceable plan.
Tuesday’s document details how the $2.6 billion would be spent and how much water would be left in the rivers that flow into the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, California’s massive and environmentally troubled estuary south of Sacramento that serves as the hub of the state’s water delivery network.
Under the plan, farmers and cities would leave up to 824,000 acre-feet of additional water in the rivers that flow into the Delta during certain months of the year. For comparison, Folsom Lake east of Sacramento holds 976,000 acre-feet when it’s full. An acre-foot is 326,000 gallons.
The state and federal governments would pay for the bulk of the plan, although farm-irrigation districts and local water agencies would contribute more than $660 million. The funds will go to restore nearly 30,000 acres of habitat. Some of the funds will reimburse Sacramento Valley rice farmers to leave their fields unplanted so more water stays in the Sacramento River.
Some Sacramento Valley rice fields will go idle
The plan would lead to 35,000 acres of Sacramento Valley rice fields being left fallow, said Karla Nemeth, the director of the Department of Water Resources. That’s about 6% of the Sacramento Valley’s 550,000 acres of rice.
Thad Bettner, general manager of Glenn-Colusa Irrigation District, which delivers water to one of the state’s largest rice-farming areas, said the plan balances “beneficial water needs for fish, farms, communities and the environment.” He is among those who signed the memorandum.
State officials said the proposal won’t be implemented for at least another two years as it winds its way through the regulatory process. But they insist it’s still faster than what would happen if the water board had unilaterally acted on its own, a move that would inevitably trigger an avalanche of lawsuits that would take close to a decade to resolve in court.
The talks come at a critical time for the state’s drought-plagued ecosystems, which Californians have dramatically altered for water storage and flood control.
The dams that ring the Central Valley cut migratory fish off from their spawning grounds, more than 90 percent of the state’s wetlands have been plowed or paved over, and at various times of year more than half of the Central Valley rivers’ flow is diverted for human uses. In dry years, so much water is pulled from the Tuolumne River, which supplies San Francisco, that only 11 percent of its flows make it to the Pacific Ocean.
Independent scientists warn that the critically endangered Delta smelt is perilously close to extinction, and other native fish species such as salmon and steelhead aren’t far behind.
Chuck Bonham, the director of the Department of Fish and Wildlife, said Tuesday the settlement proposal is the best way to save what little habitat is left.
“We need to have done this stuff a decade ago,” Bonham said. “California has more imperiled species than any other state in the union. I don’t want to fight about this stuff anymore. It’s going burn out the clock.”
This story was originally published March 29, 2022 at 2:22 PM with the headline "Gov. Newsom outlines a peace agreement on California water. Will the fighting finally end?."