Article from Merced Sun Star.
http://www.mercedsunstar.com/news/article43921938.html
BY BRIANNA CALIX
bvaccari@mercedsunstar.com
Environmental groups and San Joaquin Valley water agencies are still unable to agree on how to protect native fish populations in rivers and are pressuring the State Water Resources Control Board to take a stance through the Bay-Delta Plan that is already behind schedule.
Last month, a coalition of more than 80 environmental groups signed a letter asking the board to reject a request from local water agencies to abandon a provision of the plan that would set a minimum level of “unimpaired flow” on area rivers in order to help native fish.
The state water board’s proposed Bay-Delta Plan would require 35 percent of snow runoff to be released into the Merced, Stanislaus and Tuolumne rivers, meaning that amount could not be stored in reservoirs.
When the Bay-Delta Plan was proposed in 2012, the state water board hoped to adopt and implement the plan by June 2014. The timeline repeatedly has been pushed back as the plan is further analyzed. Water board staff members currently are reviewing impacts across the entire environmental document, including gathering information from irrigation districts, said Larry Lindsay, the Bay-Delta unit chief of the board’s Division of Water Rights. He predicts the revisions will be ready later this year or in early 2016.
The water agencies – including the Merced, Modesto and Turlock irrigation districts, the San Luis & Delta Mendota Water Authority, San Joaquin River Tributaries Authority and others – argue that in times of drought, the unimpaired flow approach would drain reservoirs and further intensify the impact on farming. The water agencies say the state board should take other steps, including doing more to curtail the presence of invasive species that prey on native salmon, which the agencies say is the largest factor hurting local fish populations.
The environmental groups contend the water agencies have mismanaged water during California’s drought and dismissed the argument as “nonsense.” It said the agencies “exacerbated” the severity of the drought by making normal water deliveries in the first years of the water shortage. The environmental groups urged the state water board to move forward with the unimpaired flows approach, saying low reservoirs and groundwater levels have “nothing to do with unimpaired flow.”
“It has everything to do with an over-appropriated system and the failure of water agencies to embrace realistic delivery schedules with a margin of safety to protect against inevitable dry years,” the letter reads.
Michael Martin, who signed the letter on behalf of the Merced River Conservation Committee, did not respond Monday to a phone message and email from the Sun-Star.
The Merced Irrigation District contends it has not released the usual amount of water during the drought. “The inflammatory, incorrect information about drought-year allocations in (the) letter is misleading and simply not helpful to the conversation,” said Mike Jensen, a spokesman for MID.
MID typically delivers 300,000 acre-feet of irrigation water to farmers through its canal system, Jensen said. Since 2011, a wet year, inflow to Lake McClure has dropped dramatically. MID has delivered considerably less water than the typical deliveries since 2012 following the wet year. This year, MID allocated 7,500 acre-feet to farmers.