Our View: A look at the issues surrounding water in California

As we prepare for the Community Conversation: Our Water on July 15 at the Gallo Center at 7 p.m., here are some of issues concerning the Tuolumne, Stanislaus and Merced rivers, groundwater, the Delta and more.

A Terrible Drought

Whether it’s part of a natural cycle or due to climate change, we’re suffering devastating water shortages. Without rain, Don Pedro Reservoir, on the Tuolumne River, would be able to provide only a few inches to growers next season. New Melones, on the Stanislaus, has only enough for this year’s crop. Exchequer, on the Merced, is already empty. Deliveries to West Side growers from both the Central Valley Project and State Water Project were cut sharply, then cut even deeper in June due to an operating error at Lake Shasta. The state has “curtailed” the rights of thousands who draw directly from rivers, threatening heavy fines for scofflaws.

As we struggle to find solutions, many cite Australia’s 12-year drought (ending in 2010). There, the government revoked all water rights, then started from scratch with new rules, rights and priorities. It also invested heavily in desalination and updated irrigation methods. Such solutions here would have serious, perhaps devastating impacts. Without water, there are no good options.

Nuts to lawns

The state’s demand for 35 percent urban cutbacks means the lawns of homeowners are dying, representing significant costs. Some, however, appear immune, including governments, golf courses and farmers. The resulting outrage is often misplaced. Most governments have cut back, but some have concentrated their water on baseball and soccer fields while letting other areas die.

Farmers also face anger from non-farming neighbors. It’s usually misplaced. Most lost half their water supplies this year. Many couldn’t plant crops, forgoing a year’s income; others let old orchards die to protect new trees; others paid $50,000 or even $150,000 for new wells to keep trees alive. Some farmers, though, have ignored the deep concerns and planted new orchards, a business decision made possible only by long delays in implementing new state groundwater regulations. If nothing else, it was a poor PR move.

Fish vs. farmers

A healthy river has fish in it, namely salmon and trout. The difficulty is keeping those fish healthy. Many activists believe the only way is to send more water down the rivers. But for the past 120 years, our region’s rivers have been controlled by dams and water has been diverted into fields, orchards and even into our taps. After decades of ever-increasing diversions, the trend began to reverse in the 1990s. Still, many in the environmental movement believe far too much is still diverted, and they’re using political muscle to get more of it.

Few farmers would ever want our rivers to become fetid ditches. But they believe, with justification, that striped bass – a species brought to our rivers in the 1900s by misguided sportsmen – have decimated the salmon and trout. This predation, they insist, kills more salmon than river conditions. Further, the San Joaquin and its tributaries provide less than a tenth of 1 percent of the statewide salmon run.

To save our rivers and save our farmers, we must find a way to accommodate both and that might entail a different criteria for determining success. Regardless, control of river flows from the dams built by farmers during the last century is an utterly crucial aspect of any solution.

Dam dilemma

The licenses allowing the Turlock, Modesto and Merced irrigation districts to operate their dams on the Tuolumne and Merced rivers are being reviewed for renewal by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission – a years-long process.

FERC can’t renew the licenses unless the State Water Resources Control Board certifies the quality of the rivers’ water; part of that certification is having viable fish populations. The state board is suggesting that twice as much water flow down each river before it will certify the quality. Area agriculture leaders say that will fallow tens of thousands of acres, cost communities hundreds of millions of dollars, thousands of jobs and tens of millions in taxes.

San Francisco shares the Tuolumne with Turlock and Modesto, and says its losses alone will be $2 billion. Absurdly, the state originally put the losses at $124 million; it’s now re-evaluating such a laughable guess.

Congress, meanwhile, is considering a law that would require economic impacts to be taken into consideration in the relicensing process.

Bureaucratic Bungling?

It’s hard to maintain faith in state and federal planning when they are so frequently ineffective. Consider the release of 35,000 acre-feet of water from New Melones ordered in April by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. It was to help push Chinook salmon down the river to the ocean. But FishBio, a scientific firm that tracks fish populations, reported that no salmon actually migrated during either surge. Three fish exited in the short interval between the surges, but none during. All that water – enough to nourish 12,000 acres of almonds or supply 70,000 households for a year – could have been held for other uses. Perhaps the salmon knew something the scientists did not, that conditions weren’t right for migration.

There are other examples. A broken gauge at Shasta Dam is being blamed for catastrophic water mismanagement, perhaps costing West Side growers their entire crop this year. On Redwood Creek in Marin County, biologists reconfigured the stream to save a salmon run of roughly 200 fish. After restoration, no salmon returned. There have also been great environmental successes; but most were achieved with the help of local people, not in spite of them.

Peripheral Tunnels

The most contentious issue in Northern California involves the West Coast’s largest estuary. Gov. Jerry Brown insists two 40-foot-wide tunnels should siphon the Sacramento River beneath the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to the pumps near Tracy for shipment south. Even the federal government questions how removing so much water – the Sacramento provides 80 percent of the Delta’s flow – can improve the estuary’s health. To keep saltwater from entering the Delta, it will need more water. And the only other source is the San Joaquin River and its three major tributaries – the Tuolumne, Stanislaus and Merced. Some believe this explains the state’s insistence that more water is needed to save salmon.

Voters emphatically rejected a similar plan in 1982. This time, Brown isn’t taking that chance, asking those who would benefit – mainly South Valley and Southern California water districts – to finance it.

Well, well, well

The Legislature passed the state’s first groundwater regulations in 2014, requiring basins (there are at least seven in our region) to reach sustainability by 2025. That’s a long horizon considering that nearly 400 well-drilling permits were issued in Stanislaus County last year and thousands of acres of almonds have been planted even as residential wells have dried up. Every city in the Valley depends in part or entirely on groundwater. If the state claims more water from the rivers, farmers will have to pump more groundwater to stay in business. Our region has always had ample supplies, but increased demands could lead to a “tragedy of the commons” with not enough left for anyone.

This story was originally published July 10, 2015 at 3:04 PM with the headline "Our View: A look at the issues surrounding water in California."