Again, substitute "Delta Plan" for "CalFED" and viola...there you go!
Hold CalFED to Its Word!
By Alex Hildebrand
The CalFED Bay-Delta Program (CalFED), a joint statefederal
program addressing water and ecological problems in
the Bay-Delta region, makes laudable progress on statewide
water use efficiency, water quality, and watershed programs.
CalFED also brings policy focus to levee system integrity for
the 1,100 miles of levees protecting farms, cities, and towns
in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta immediately
west of Stockton.
However, the public has been led to believe that CalFED
will resolve almost all water issues in California’s Central
Valley, but they are being misled.
After its inception in 1995, CalFED adopted goals and
principles that were derived in a public process. Those
principles included commitment that CalFED’s program
would reduce conflicts over water, would be “durable” and
“equitable,” would avoid “redirected impacts” (that is, those
in which solving a problem in one place creates a new
problem somewhere else in the water system), and that
“solutions will solve problems in all problem areas” such
that “improvement for some problems will not be made
without corresponding improvement for other problems.”
Re-authorization and further funding of CalFED by
Congress and the state Legislature should be contingent on
CalFED revising its implementation plan to adhere to its
publicly adopted principles, and to assure that it addresses
groundwater overdraft, electric power, salt pollution, and
more, throughout California. CalFED has not even been
willing to evaluate the magnitude and the long-term consequences
of its plan’s deficiencies. CalFED has ignored the
advice of its own Bay-Delta Advisory Council on these
matters. These are fundamental water issues; CalFED
ignores them at the peril of California’s future.
Inadequacies in CalFED’s Plan
In February 2001, San Joaquin County and Delta area
farmers presented to California Senator Dianne Feinstein and
Congressmember Richard Pombo of San Joaquin County the
following proposals on which CalFED’s continued funding
from Congress should be made contingent.
• California now depends on an unsustainable net longterm
overdraft of groundwater. Pumpers take out more water,
year-in and year-out, than is returned to the ground. Large
overdrafts of groundwater now get California through
droughts, but the underground supply is not fully restored in
other years. CalFED’s plan would increase the rate at which
we destroy the availability of groundwater for overdraft
during droughts.
• CalFED has been unwilling to estimate the water supply
needed in and from the Delta watershed to meet urban,
agricultural, and environmental needs during the life of its
plan. It has also been unwilling to determine and reveal the
effect of its plan on the adequacy of future water supplies,
and it has misled the public regarding the extent to which its
storage proposals could increase water supply.
• California has a serious power shortage, but CalFED
promotes types of water storage (like off-stream pumpedstorage
reservoirs, and conjunctive use schemes) which
would be substantial power consumers instead of power
generators. Increased Delta water exports called for in
CalFED’s August 2000 Record of Decision will also be a net
power consumer.
• CalFED has not disclosed the extent to which its
implementation plan can comply with key state and federal
laws.
• CalFED’s plan would increase the ongoing destructive
accumulation of tens of millions of tons of imported salt in
agricultural soil and groundwater south of the Delta.
• CalFED pledges to reduce conflicts, but has not
resolved the injustices when state flood control agencies
require reclamation districts to do levee maintenance needed
for flood protection and then other agencies (particularly
federal) delay and deny permits, and threaten criminal
actions prohibiting those same measures.
• CalFED’s plan would reduce agricultural production by
converting large amounts of land and water from food
production to other uses (see “Decimating Delta Farming,”
this issue).
In exchange for future funding, the CalFED Bay-Delta
Program must assure Congress it will address fundamental
issues affected by its plan for California water, and will
evaluate the consequences of failing to address any broad
water related issues that it does not address. In what follows,
several specific contingency items need immediate congressional
attention:
Goals and Principles
CalFED’s program must comply with its publicly-adopted
goals and principles, and a public process should be
required to bring its implementation actions into line with its
goals and principles.
Groundwater Overdraft
California will experience a major catastrophe when it
can no longer overdraft millions of acre-feet of water during
its recurring droughts. Furthermore, overdrafting causes aquifer sediments to compact and irreversibly lose water
storage capacity. This lost storage capacity in California’s
Central Valley is already equal to more than 40 percent of all
of the state’s surface storage reservoirs.1
CalFED’s plan proposes groundwater storage in some
unquantified degree that will provide drought year water.
However, the plan also exacerbates agricultural water
shortages that will increase the need for groundwater
pumping in most water years. The plan does not assess these
effects on long-term groundwater depletion, nor does it seek
to eliminate them.
Future CalFED funds must be contingent on revising its
plan to avoid exacerbating the net long-term overdraft of
groundwater in the short-term and to make that overdraft
unnecessary in the long-term.
Water Supply
CalFED refuses to estimate the overall water need within
and from California’s Central Valley during the life of the
CalFED plan in order to adequately provide for all water
uses, including urban and environmental needs, and domestic
production of food and other agricultural commodities
needed for a growing population. CalFED ignores its Bay-
Delta Advisory Council’s (BDAC’s) recommendation to do
this, and the Council’s proposed basis for the calculation.2
CalFED is also unwilling to estimate net overall effects
of its proposals on the adequacy of water supplies needed for
use within and from the Central Valley (which is the Delta’s
watershed). CalFED’s plan proposes multiple uses of water
and proposes a few new storage facilities for study. But it also proposes new stream flows, substantial conversion of
farm lands to wetlands (which consume substantially more
water than farmlands), more water consumption by terrestrial
habitat, and reservoir “re-operations.” These actions may
reduce water yields.
CalFED has neither revealed the amount of new water
supply its storage proposals would provide nor acknowledged
that the resulting firm yield in water supply derived
from new storage would be far less than the volume of new
storage capacity.
When cumulated with other governmental actions,
CalFED’s plan will seriously deplete agricultural water
supplies and will be insufficient to avoid a major overall water shortage as the population grows. The public should
know the extent of this potential shortage and the extent to
which CalFED’s plan will exacerbate the shortage.
CalFED funding should be contingent, first, on the
Program estimating and publicly disclosing the total water
supply needed within and from the Central Valley during the
30-year life of CalFED’s plan in order to provide for urban
needs, environmental needs, and the need to produce an
adequate domestic supply of food and other farm products.
CalFED’s funding should also be contingent on the Program
estimating and disclosing the net effect of its proposed
actions on the adequacy of California’s water supply and the
extent to which the resulting supplies will meet estimated
need.
Power
CalFED’s preferred types of new or expanded storage, its
water management proposals, and its emphasis on increased
Delta water exports will all require a lot of power and may
collectively cause a substantial increase in both total and
peak power consumption. Yet California already has a power
shortage, and its crown jewel, the State Water Project, has
long been a net consumer of electrical energy.
CalFED funding should be contingent on the program
disclosing the overall net effect of its plan on power consumption
and on peak power loads and demands.
Compliance with Laws
CalFED must be required to disclose a review of its plan
for compliance with all existing state water quality standards
and with all existing and relevant state and federal laws,
including but not limited to water rights, Area of Origin
Statutes, and the Delta Protection Statutes, as well as
compliance with California Environmental Quality Act and
National Environmental Policy Act requirements that relate
to proposed reallocation of agricultural land and water to
other uses.
Accumulation of Imported Salts
One effect of the California State Water Project (SWP)
and the federal Central Valley Project (CVP) is to import tens
of millions of tons of salt from the Delta into the Central
Valley south of the Delta, since water exports began in the
1940s. Water exports to the south contain salt from tidal
action in the Delta. Most of this salt accumulates in soil and
groundwater of land receiving water imports for San Joaquin
Valley irrigation. Gradually, the productivity of those lands
will be destroyed.
Several hundred thousand tons of salt also drain into the
San Joaquin River each year at high concentrations with
resulting salinity problems for downstream users and river
ecosystems. Furthermore, some of CalFED’s proposals
would improve the quality of urban water deliveries by water
trades (such as one proposed between the Metropolitan
Water District of Southern California and the Friant Water
Users Authority in the east side of the San Joaquin Valley)
that would exacerbate this salt accumulation. CalFED’s funding should be contingent on assurances that the Program’s proposals must not worsen salt accumulation in Central Valley soil and groundwater in the shortterm.
Instead, it must stop this accumulation of imported salt
in the long-term either as part of CalFED’s plan or through
a separate plan concurrently administered by CalFED
agencies.
Delta Levees
One of CalFED’s purposes is protection of land and
water in the Delta as part of its system reliability objective
and to reduce conflict among all objectives. CalFED also
strives to increase ecosystem restoration options including
revegetating Delta channel levee banks to increase habitat.
But CalFED fails to provide sufficient assurances for
permanent levee protection through long-term funding
strategies or the leadership needed to resolve conflicting
demands by different agencies regulating levee-related
activities.
State flood control agencies and legal obligations of local
reclamation districts require that levees be managed to
control burrowing rodents (whose normal activities, if
unchecked, undermine levees’ structural integrity), maintain
visibility for inspection of “boils” and seepage flow, armor
banks and levees as needed to prevent erosion, and so forth.
These obligations are critically necessary to protect life,
property, infrastructure, and habitat within the levees as well
as maintain eligibility for state and federal disaster funding.
Other agencies have delayed, opposed, and denied permits
for these activities, and even threatened to bring criminal
charges against Reclamation Districts for carrying out some
of these responsibilities. Similar problems occur with regard
to channel maintenance.
CalFED funding must be contingent on the program
resolving these conflicts so that, first, reclamation districts
and other entities cannot be prevented from doing levee and
channel maintenance necessary for primary flood protection
purposes. In addition, any levee-related requirements for
environmental enhancement or protection of endangered
species must not jeopardize the levees’ primary purposes of
flood protection. Finally, CalFED should help resolve these
conflicts without creating a new layer of administration over
the state’s Delta Flood Protection Program (administered by
the California Department of Water Resources).
Conversion of Land and Water
CalFED proposes converting a substantial acreage of
agricultural land and thousands of acre-feet of agricultural
water to other uses, particularly in the Delta (see “Decimating
Delta Farming,” this issue). This is proposed without
regard to the consequent reduction in domestic food production
and other agricultural products that will be needed as
California’s population grows.
CalFED asserts disingenuously that its implementation
plan will increase agricultural water supplies by 15 percent.
CalFED has only committed to restore part of the water
previously taken from some imported water users by
governmental action, for example under the Central Valley
Project Improvement Act, state and federal endangered
species acts, and from State Water Resources Control Board
decisions. There is no commitment that there will be an
increase in overall agricultural water supply.
The negative socioeconomic impacts of CalFED actions
in the Delta must be addressed and mitigated. CalFED must
not use funds directly or indirectly for the acquisition of land
or property rights in land within the Sacramento-San
Joaquin River Delta as described in California Water Code
Section 12220 if such acquisition diminishes the value of
land for agricultural purposes unless first certified by the
U.S. Secretary of the Interior, the California Secretary of
Resources and in consultation with the California Delta
Protection Commission. These parties must find that no
publicly owned or controlled land is available for the
purpose to be served by such acquisition. CalFED must also
disclose the long-term reduction of domestically produced
food and other agricultural products resulting from all its
proposed land use conversions and water reallocations.
No More Excuses
CalFED will continue to provide benefits for some water
needs, such as those of the Metropolitan Water District of
Southern California, but it appears to have removed itself
from any commitment to address its proposals to all of the
water-related social and ecological needs of our growing
population. The California Legislature and the U.S. Congress
should insist as a minimum condition of future funding that
CalFED at least assess the consequences of failing to address
these issues.
The fact that there are no perfect solutions to complex
and conflict-ridden water-related needs does not excuse a
failure to address and quantify what is and is not feasible.
Quantification of potential unmet needs will focus attention
on what can be done, and will prepare us for whatever
austerity we must endure. If CalFED ignores these issues,
there is no other entity that will address them.
NOTES
1. Worldwatch Institute, State of the World 2001, p. 24
2. Letter from Mike Madigan, Chair, and Sunne Wright
McPeak, Vice Chair, Bay-Delta Advisory Council, to David
Hayes, U.S. Deputy Secretary of Interior, and Mary Nichols,
California Secretary of Resources, May 24, 2000, Specific
Recommendation 12, pp. 8-9.
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