Follow the link for an excellent education of the Monterey Agreement and Amendments.
http://www.c-win.org/monterey-amendments-state-water-project-contracts.html
In 1994, four State Water Project contractors (Tulare Lake Basin Storage District, Solano County Water Agency, Coachella Valley Water District and Central Coast Water Authority), including the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (MWD) and the Kern County Water Agency (KCWA) which together control about 75% of the state's water, and representatives from Paramount Farming (a private corporation, owned by Stuart and Lynda Resnick), met secretly in Monterey to resolve their water shortage issues...
Under this secret deal in Monterey in 1994, the State agreed to eliminate drought protections for urban areas (deleting Article 18(a) and 18(b), which encouraged "paper water", the give-away of a State-owned groundwater storage bank asset to local interests.
To appease urban water interests that participated in this negotiation, DWR agreed to change the rules that control how, when, and under what circumstances water could be moved through the SWP (Article 21 'Surplus Water').
These water management changes, promoted by the negotiating parties as mechanisms to enhance water management "flexibility", have contributed to the decline of the Delta by encouraging increased pumping during certain times of the year.
There are four aspects of these amendments that changed the course of California water history (and are the reason we are facing the decimation of the Delta today with current practices and certain elimination with the addition of the jerry-rigging of the BDCP):
1. Elimination of Article 18(a). The "Urban Preference". This removed the "Urban Preference", the safeguard put in the contracts in 1960 to make sure that in times of prolonged dry weather, which occur in over one-third of years in California, agricultural allocations would be cut first.
2. Elimination of Article 18(b). The "Paper Water" safeguard. Article 18(b) was put in the original contracts to make sure that the total amount of what was promised could actually be delivered on a "firm yield" basis. This clause in the contracts required the total amount of the Table A Allocations to conform to the "safe yield" of the SWP.
The true 'safe yield' of the SWP is not the current Table A Allocation total of 4.23 million acre-feet per year (MAFY) because the contracts were premised on full build-out of State Water Project facilities, which has not occurred. In fact, the average actually delivered between 1990 and 2000 was 1.86 MAFY (By 1990 all SWP contractors were requesting their full contract "entitlements".)
The difference between the 4.23 MAFY and the actual delivered average of 1.86 MAFY in "paper water" in the State Water Project. The Third District Court of Appeal (in its 2000 decision invalidating the Department's first environmental report on the Monterey Agreement) called this difference "a wish and a prayer"....
Article 18(b) was eliminated in the Monterey negotiations with virtually no environmental review of its consequences.
3. Kern Water Bank Given Away by the State. As part of the Monterey Agreement, the Department of Water Resources turned over a state asset, the Kern Fan Element (a 20,000-acre alluvial fan), th the Kern County Water Agency in exchange for the retirement of 45,000 acre-feet of "paper water" (water that Kern would never receive). As a state asset, it could have been used by DWR to help firm up all of the contractor's SWP Table A Allocations, especially in times of drought.
Instead, the day after DWR turned over the Kern Water Bank to the Kern County Water Agency, the Agency turned over somewhere between 58 to 68% of the Kern Water Bank to Paramount Farms, a private corporation owned by Stuart and Lynda Resnick, as part of a newly constituted public-private partnership called the Kern Water Bank Authority (a joint powers authority that was allowed under state law to include a private corporation as a partner.
This privatization of the Kern Water Bank allowed the water bank owners to buy cheap so-called "surplus water" (Article 21 water, see below), store it underground in their "bank" and then sell it to the highest bidder for large profits. The various subsidiaries of the Resnick empire have been doing this ever since taking over the water bank and have made many millions of dollars in profits off the tax payers of California.
4. Article 21 So-Called "Surplus Water". The Monterey Agreements enable state water contractors, particularly those in the souther San Joaquin alley and those under the umbrella of MWD, to make much greater use of surplus water in the State Water Project - that is, when surplus water is available.
During the 1990s, SWP deliveries were well below projected entitlements for SWP contractors,and very little surplus water was available. During the 2000s, more surplus water came available after the federal government and the state of California adopted the CalFED Record of Decision, which enabled greater export pumping from the Delta.
Where in early SWP contract amendments from the 1970's, Article 21 (g)(1) prohibited commitment of surplus water - which may not be available from one year to the next - the Monterey Agreement and its amendments called for elimination of this provision. State Water Project contract Article 21 provides for sale of surplus water available in the SWP system during periods of heavy flow and could be sold for just the cost of transporting it to the buyer. This is part of the sell game used to manipulate the price of water for the Kern Water Banks as journalist Mike Taugher (recently deceased) demonstrated in his 2009 series on water sales in May 2009 for Contra Costa Times. It is a gamble made by the state water contractors that the State Water Project would be able to increase its supplies, when dry times hit, the project still cannot be counted on.
Exporting Article 21 water from the Delta also has devastating fishery impacts, particularly on migratory steelhead...
The Monterey Agreement's Article 21 water surplus program emerged in 1995 to allow contractors to take delivery of water over and above approved and scheduled contract deliveries on a short-term, interruptible basis. Contractors are not supposed to count on these supplies year-to-year, but when available, they're cheap to get. And DWR and the contractors try very hard to prevent interruptions in this cheap source of water, regardless of whether California is in a drought or a wet year, and at the expense of steelhead habitat.
Article 21 water is pumped from the Delta in coordination with reservoir releases at the rim dams of the Central Valley and delivered to contractors between November and April - the same time of year when adult steelhead return from the ocean to spawn in cold Ventral Valley streams. Their larvae hatch and rear in the floodplains and wetlands of the Central Valley and Suisun Marsh before the trout that will migrate to sea undergo key physiological changes and exit the Delta, provided these young steelhead avoid getting killed at the export pumps near Tracy.
Unfortunately, in this decade, heavy pumping through 2007 of this Article 21 water helped cause the Delta's open water ecosystem decline (which was first identified in 2005), as well as closure of the commercial salmon fisheries in 2008 and 2009. This is the water that federal judge Oliver Wanger and the Biological Opinions covering Delta smelt and the salmon fisheries restricted sharply under the Endangered Species Act.
With low precipitation and runoff since 2006, hydrologic restrictions have reduced Delta exports, but the dry conditions have also hindered recovery of the Delta's open water ecosystem and the Central Valley salmon resources that depend upon Delta through-flows and water quality during their life cycle.
The SWP contracts lay out the contractors' and the state's obligations concerning delivery of water under both surplus and drought conditions. In each contract, there is a "Table A" schedule that details how much water the contractor is "entitled" to each year. These "entitlements" quantified the maximum delivery of SWP water that each contractor could expect - and the share of SWP costs for which each contractor would be responsible.
The original SWP contracts contained provisions that discouraged contractors from requesting large volumes of water during the winter and spring months; instead, they would usually request water when it was most needed, in the summer and fall. The proposed SWP Amendments encourage contractors to request the maximum amount of water, from a variety of sources, at all times of the year. This is a likely cause of over-pumping from the Delta in the winter and spring months, which has arguable contributed to the massive decline of the Delta smelt and other Bay-Delta fish populations.
The Monterey Amendments Must be Overturned
C-WIN believes that one of the best ways to solve MWD's (California's water problems) water problems would be to overturn the Monterey Amendments. This would mean returning the taxpayer-created Kern Water bank to the State's control to be used in dry times, as it was originally intended, to meet Urban Preference requirements. This would increase the real wet water MWD (California/Junior Water Rights holders) could count on from their Table A Allocation.
Reinstating Article 18(b) would mean that the Department of Water Resources could reduce the overall "entitlements" of "Table A" in each of the project contracts to water that the Department can actually deliver. This would ultimately lead to more reliable water service by the State Water Project to its contractors.
The Monterey Amendments must be overturned to stop the privatization of the SWP. This is the best way to ensure that the Kern Water Bank benefits all Californians without soaking them further in increased water system costs and increased rates in the process...Please spend time at California Water Impact Network's website, it is a wealth of information, historical AND current! There are many links within this article on their site that helps make sense of how the past is repeating today...get informed...help define a NEW, correct history for California's Water!!
http://www.c-win.org/monterey-amendments-state-water-project-contracts.html
