State’s call for more water for fish turns to northern rivers next

Article from ChicoER.

By Heather Hacking, Chico Enterprise-Record
POSTED: 09/16/16, 7:32 PM PDT

Sacramento >> Watching water regulations unfold for the San Joaquin River has local agricultural water users on edge. The proposed flow objectives call for more water from the San Joaquin’s main waterways to the delta, to improve conditions for dwindling fish populations.

People in Northern California are watching carefully because the Sacramento Valley is next.

Asemblyman Adam Gray, D-Merced, fired off a press release calling the move for increased flows an “economic death sentence,” to the agriculturally-based San Joaquin Valley.

That’s the fear from many in Northern California as well.

The proposed regulations announced by the state Water Resources Control Board call for 30-50 percent of “unimpaired flows” within the San Joaquin River, with a general suggestion of 40 percent.

If that same figure is used in the Sacramento Valley, the question would be “how do we come up with that amount of water,” said Thad Bettner, manager of Glenn-Colusa Irrigation District, which provides water to more than 1,000 farmers who grow crops on about 140,000 acres

He predicted the area would see crops taken out of production. Trees need water every year and would die during years without water, he said. Less water at that scale would see “massive economic losses, massive environmental losses,” and “changing base economics,” Bettner said.

“I think we have a few more options but we need to start working on them now,” he said.

As it sits now, the state Water Resources Control Board is poised to release rules for the Sacramento Valley in 2018, he said.

In Chico, Barbara Vlamis of AquAlliance.net has been watching the process unfold for years.

More water is needed, she said.

“You can’t starve a river of water and expect it to be healthy,” she said. The San Joaquin River is in terrible shape, Vlamis said, as is the area as a whole. Environmental groups have sued for 20 years to force the start of restoration for fish, and groundwater levels continue to drop each year. The problem is that too many people are given the right to draw water from the river, she said.

That’s exactly what she would like to see avoided in the Sacramento Valley.

She said it’s curious to her why people in the Sacramento Valley would discourage increased flows from the San Joaquin system to the lower delta. If the San Joaquin River provides less water, state water leaders would probably ask Sacramento Valley water users to make up the difference, she said.

With the San Joaquin guidelines announced this week, many specifics remain to be clarified.

“Everybody is going to read the worst case scenario form their point of view,” said Bill Jennings, long-time environmental advocate with California Sportfishing Protection Alliance, and a frequent ally of AquAlliance in environmental water issues.

“They said they will target 40 percent flows, but they will decide on what they decide at the spur of the moment,” he said, admitting he is cynical of the process.

Previous research called for 60 percent of the river’s natural flow, but no one is talking about that high of an amount at this point, Jennings said.

“They’ve handed us 3,400 pages (of documents) plus spread sheets and modeling data and essentially said ‘trust us’,” Jennings said.

The bottom line is “we have failed to grapple with the fundamental problem that we live in an age of limits. Water is finite,” Jennings said. People in California need to be creative and “bring our demand for water into a rough approximation” of how much is available.

David Guy, president of Northern California Water Association agreed that “nobody knows exactly what it means.”

It’s clear, of course, that “a whole lot of water has to flow down the river that did not flow before,” Guy said. Yet, there are many specifics that will need to be clarified.

His focus is on Northern California water, and he hopes there will be time to improve strategies before the state Water Board passes similar rules in the Sacramento Valley.

Simply setting a number for flow is “an old 20th Century water management technique that doesn’t work in the 21st Century,” he said. Streams and rivers need water at certain times for certain functions. Also water is needed to flood land at certain times, including for migratory birds.

“We need to be more creative in California to meet all these demands of cities, farms, wildlife, fish.”

Putting a block of water down the river would end up draining Lake Oroville and Lake Shasta, he said, and draining the valley.

“We want to have a different conversation in the Sacramento Valley.”

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