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Tuesday, Mar 19, 2024

Drought May be Over, But Water Crisis Still Very Real

Thom Senzee Contributor Business leaders, government officials and water management executives gathered in downtown Los Angeles late last month to tackle decades of inertia in the search for a compromise solution to California’s broiling water crisis. The state’s water problem is threefold: Changing climate patterns and a growing population mean less water is available, while demand is growing; aging conveyance and storage systems are increasingly insufficient to meet the expected needs of water agencies’ residential, farming, business and government customers; and water-management methods, as they stand today, are environmentally unsustainable. A case in point is December’s final decision by federal judge Oliver Wanger limiting pumping from California’s largest freshwater estuary,the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. The result of the order is a 25- to 30-percent cut in water drawn from the Delta, where state trawling surveys have shown huge declines in the populations of native species of fish, including the California smelt. Also as a result of the order, an already precarious mix of pumping, storage and conveyance is now incapable of delivering adequate fresh water for proposed new land developments to go forward. Developers are being told they cannot build because there is no water for their projects. “This is a real crisis that is going to require a solution, or else real economic consequences that effect everything from housing to small business could devastate California’s economy,” said one attendee, speaking on condition of anonymity, who represents a major developer. But, say government officials, there are reasons to be worried other than not having enough water for new communities to be built in California. “We’ll be going year to year based on whether we’re going to ration or not,” said Jeffrey Kightlinger, general manager of Metropolitan Water District. ” And that is not something that is going to be a reliable water supply for our economy. We need to have something we can plan around.” What is new is that drought will not necessarily be the central issue as water districts take up the annual question of whether or not to ration. Since the early 1990s, in a tenuous truce among diverse regional water-resource competitors, agencies have cooperated to maximize the flow of water from the Delta into Central Valley irrigation ditches and into taps in Southern California as well as the San Francisco Bay area. “We can’t do that right now,” Kightlinger said. “We can’t manage our infrastructure the way we had intended to manage it.” The panel discussion, sponsored by Valley Industry and Commerce Association, about businesses’ role in water resource management and reform was titled “Water and Our Economy.” VICA president and CEO, Brendan Huffman, says his organization’s position is simple and nonpartisan: “We support a real solution.” For now, it seems, VICA is letting the water agencies and environmentalists lobby for a solution. For its part, the MWD, Southern California’s heavyweight water agency, is calling for leadership from the top levels of state government. “We also need the governor and the state administration to start taking steps now because we can’t live with this 25- to 30-percent cutback [in water pumped from the Delta] for the seven to 10 years it takes to build the infrastructure,” said Kightlinger. The centerpiece of the panel discussion was a set of highlights presented by Public Policy Institute of California senior fellow, Ellen Hanak, from a report compiled by a University of California, Davis multidisciplinary group. That group included economists, scientists, engineers and public policy experts, and their report is called “Envisioning Futures for the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.” “There is a crisis of confidence in governance in the management in the Delta,” Hanak said. According to her, that fragile alliance of competing water interests, known as CALFED, is inclined now to stop cooperating and start litigating against one another, as they had in past decades. But her group has come up with alternatives that recognize several threats, while, she says, addressing the need to keep CALFED unified. “Let’s look at long-term solutions for the Delta recognizing that the Delta is not going to stay the way it is right now no matter what we do,” Hanak said. “It’s not in a stable situation now.” Her group outlined nine proposals, most of which were ultimately discarded as being unrealistic, prohibitively expensive, or ineffectual. In each of the nine proposals, Hanak said, the group ” Asked how well would they be able to deal with the water supply needs [and] how well would they be likely to resolve any ecosystem crises we’d be likely to be facing.” “Can’t we make the current system keep working?” was the question Hanak said the group asked and found the answer was a resounding “No.” Rising sea levels have put many of the islands that populate the Delta below sea level. If the levees ever fail, those islands will be inundated. Salt water already penetrates into the Delta at a growing rate of volume every year. Southern California relies on the Delta for 30 percent of its drinking water, as do the other major metropolitan areas in the state. Some places even get 100 percent of their water from the Delta, and numerous findings say the Delta is on a fast track to collapsing as an ecosystem. Judge Wanger’s decision to protect the smelt from extinction by curtailing water exports is a harbinger of things to come. The process of moving water through the Delta is an unlikely one that pumps water through hundreds of miles of marshy inlets and waterways north and south contrary to the estuary’s natural east-west flow. That is why any solution will be complex. “Public health and safety is at stake, and so is our economy,” said Sunne Wright-McPeak, a long-time California water-issues guru and member of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Delta Vision Blue Ribbon Task Force. “The Delta ecosystem and a reliable water supply are co-equal goals, and the environment in the Delta is too important to leave to the environmentalists.” Wright-McPeak said by that she means business must be at the forefront of solving the problem while working with environmentalists. Of course, any solution will be expensive. The cost to build the minimally necessary infrastructure to meet the environmental and supply needs is estimated to be between $4 and $7 billion. Most experts agree the solution will include new dams (three are currently proposed) and possibly a major new canal, which would run parallel to the Delta. “But Southern California cannot be expected to pay for everything,” said former assemblyman Richard Katz, who also is a former State Water Resources Control Board member. “We can’t be looked on as the checkbook to pay for new infrastructure. The beneficiaries have to contribute something as well.” A follow-up report to the Public Policy Institute of California’s “Envisioning Futures ” report is expected in June. According to Ellen Hanak, it will outline the most viable water supply alternatives in greater detail than the first report.

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