Delta Stewardship Council Drought Update: Policy actions and priorities for addressing the ongoing drought

Delta map generic sliderboxKarla Nemeth from the Natural Resources Agency and Ellen Hanak from the PPIC discuss the state’s response to the drought: What is the state doing and what could it do better?

At the April 23rd meeting of the Delta Stewardship Council, council members received an update on the existing and forecasted water supply conditions, and how this is impacting the Delta and its ecosystem.  The update consisted of three panels: the first addressed water policy actions and priorities; the second panel discussed hydrologic conditions and the state’s response to drought impacts; and the third panel focused on how the drought is impacting operations within the Delta.

In the first panel, Karla Nemeth, Deputy Secretary for Water Policy with the California Natural Resources Agency discussed the actions the administration is taking to address the ongoing drought,and Ellen Hanak, Senior Fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California and Director of the PPIC’s Water Policy Center, gave some recommendations for how the state could respond to the possibility of continued drought conditions.

Here’s what they had to say.

KARLA NEMETH, Deputy Secretary for Water Policy for the Natural Resources Agency

Karla Nemeth began by saying that everyone felt a palpable relief at the beginning of December when we had the big rain storm; that was followed by a dry January and more rain at the beginning of February. “We had a lot of rainy season left in front of us at that point, but I think similar to last year, we all sort of watched as that high pressure ridge hung on and hung on and hung on, and we find ourselves in a fourth year of drought with very difficult water supply conditions for the entire state,” she said. “We’re starting to see multiple impacts, both across the environment and water users in urban areas and in rural areas.”

Karla Nemeth 1She acknowledged that the reservoir conditions are in some ways better this year than last in that the two major state and federal reservoirs have more supplies than they did at this point last year, although those south reservoirs south of Delta missed the few storms that did come this year and are in difficult shape. “What’s fundamentally different about this year of course is our lack of snowpack,” she said. “We have about 5% the historical average of water content in our Sierra snowpack. That creates a different set of conditions this year, because it’s essentially we have all the water we’re going to have; we’re not going to rely on that snowmelt through the season and inflows into the reservoirs in any kind of substantial way.”

In January of 2014, the Governor convened a drought task force when he declared the state of emergency and issued the first of what would be four executive orders on the drought. “The task force is combined of state agencies from Health and Humans Services to the Department of Water Resources, the State Board, all the different agencies that are focused on how we manage the drought, and DGS is heavily involved to make sure that our state agencies are doing the things that they need to be doing to conserve water so that we’re really leading the way for California.” She noted that the task force meets weekly to update one another on actions to date, as well as to generate ideas for actions moving forward.

The drought task focuses on assistance to communities, such as housing and food assistance, and trucking water to communities having difficulty with groundwater supplies, she said.

A key focus is funding shovel ready projects through the integrated regional management program at DWR,” she said. “The initial drought package spending bill included more money for that program. DWR has granted $200 million last October across the state to projects that were ready to go and could demonstrate a way in which they were making those communities more resilient to drought and were going to assist in their management of water supplies in the current drought. DWR is ready to award another $200 million by the end of this year under the same rubric.”

The other focus of the drought task force is working with the State Board, DWR, and others to improve our data collection on water use, management, and diversions, she said. “One of the big learning curves of last year is understanding how data poor our systems are for actually managing a drought. I think we’ve made tremendous headway over the course of the last year, and we’re continuing to do that. The latest executive order even made some of those reporting provisions permanent. That’s going to be important for how we strategize over the course of the next several years should the drought be prolonged.”

Another key piece of the administration’s response has been essentially streamlining government response,” she said. “That has generated a lot of interaction between the Department of Water Resources, the Bureau of Reclamation, and the State Water Resources Control Board in terms of how we manage the Delta system.” She noted also includes making sure that permit applications aren’t languishing beyond 90 days.

Aerial view showing recreational boats by the Bidwell Marina at Lake Oroville during low water (drought) conditions on March 2, 2015.
Aerial view showing recreational boats by the Bidwell Marina at Lake Oroville during low water (drought) conditions on March 2, 2015.

The shift in the administration’s call for voluntary water conservation to mandatory reductions received a lot of media attention, Ms. Nemeth noted. “It’s still certainly taking up 24 hours a day of several dozen staff at the State Board, who are really working round the clock to get those regulations in place, because we all know that the primary time when we really need to capture that conserved supply is during the warmer summer months, so the objective is to have those regulations finalized by the beginning of May.”

Ms. Nemeth then turned to the dynamics that have emerged around the call for mandatory urban conservation without an analogous call for mandatory reductions to agriculture. “I think we’re now starting to see more of the complexities play out in the press, and I think that’s an important development, but fundamentally as you may have heard the Governor explain, the dynamics in the ag community where many of our farmers have already received reductions in water allocations, and some are getting are no water the second consecutive year,” she said. “The other piece of that is the curtailment process underway at the State Board. … That is happening up and down the system, and this year, I think we may see an increase in curtailments simply because we don’t have that snowpack that we did last year, so those cuts are being felt by the agricultural community. It’s a very different dynamic in terms of how they manage their water supplies.”

I think the biggest signal that the administration is sending to the general public on the 25% reduction is that the use of potable water supplies for ornamental landscapes is probably not part of California’s future,” she said.

She said the feedback from the water agencies is that the 25% target is attainable. “The challenge is how do we do it intelligibly and equitably based on other investments that other agencies have made and their particular local conditions,” she said.

The executive order does include a 50 million square-foot turf replacement program meant to complement local agencies that are already pursuing turf replacement programs, she noted. “We’ve received feedback from the 400+ local water agencies is that it’s not very easy for a member of the general public to understand what rebates are available to them, because sometimes they have a wholesaler rebate layered on to a retailer rebate, so those are some of the issues that we’re teasing out as we’re looking at the turf replacement program and how state dollars can support an overall state effort. The dollars that the state will contribute are designed to address needs in some underserved communities; again DWR is working with some of the local agencies that have implemented these kinds of programs to get them underway. All these programs, they do require budget action and we would expect that they would be underway by July 1st.”

Ms. Nemeth also noted that the Executive Order includes a consumer rebate program to upgrade inefficient appliances, it requires large landscapes to cut irrigation of lawns, and it prohibits new development from irrigating with potable water unless it’s on drip or microspray.

The executive order also directs local water agencies to implement tiered pricing to incentivize water conservation,” she said, noting that the outcome of the San Juan Capistrano case has certainly been on their minds. “Initial feedback that we’re getting is that other water agencies are looking at that case carefully and ways to establish the benefit nexus. I think we need to pay a bit more attention to what worked and what didn’t work in that particular situation, but not all water agencies and all their conservation pricing necessarily has the same legal vulnerabilities that the court recently found.”

Agricultural water management plans for 25,000 acre operations or greater are due at the end of 2015, and the executive order expands that to include operations that are 10,000 acres and higher, she said. “It essentially requires that they do things that are analogous to water shortage contingency plans in the urban world, where they need to demonstrate their water supply sources and what their approach will be to a dry 2016.”

In terms of groundwater management, those critical groundwater basins that have not yet provided data on available groundwater supplies, that data is now required and the Executive Order provided for enforcement action for those entities failing to provide that kind of information, she said.

Ms. Nemeth then turned to the management of the state and federal water projects and the broader system. “In December of last year, the Department of Water Resources together with the Bureau of Reclamation and the state and federal fishery agencies provided a strategic framework for drought management heading into 2015,” she said. “The basic premise was getting out ahead of the curve a little bit as compared to 2014 … The strategic framework that was released in December was designed to identify what we learned last year about how the system operates in this kind of a dry year, what the interplay is, when we have overlapping regulations, and where we’re operating the projects both to meet salinity and water quality needs under D1641 versus biological opinion requirements, either for smelt or salmonids.”

That report was released in December and was provided to the State Board in fulfillment of a change order issued in October of last year; it generally lays out the approach over the springtime months when we tend have the most conflict between moving water through the system for export, water quality in the Delta, and species needs in the Delta,” she said. “That has really been our guidebook for several change orders. The most recent one schedules out operations from April to November of this year, and that’s likely to be our last change order with the exception of the change order that accompanies the emergency drought barriers.”

The Sutter Slough rock barrier that was being installed by the California  Department of Water Resources to control water salinity upstream during the drought of 1976 and 1977. Photo taken August, 1976.
The Sutter Slough rock barrier that was being installed by the California Department of Water Resources to control water salinity upstream during the drought of 1976 and 1977. Photo taken August, 1976.

DWR recently announced its intention to build a rock barrier in West False River. “Originally there had been three potential barriers that DWR was studying, and had studied throughout the course of last year, and they settled on this one as one that had the least impact on fisheries and focused on salinity control in the Delta,” she said. “I think originally there was a lot of expectation that the emergency barriers would fundamentally assist in cold water pool management. After a lot of modeling, that’s turned out to be less the case, and the focus really is on risk management in the Delta to prevent that deep salinity intrusion that would ultimately render those supplies for folks in the Delta and south of the Delta unusable. Construction of the drought barrier is expected to begin in the beginning of May and to be completed within about 3 to 4 weeks, as we definitely wanted to get it in in advance of the warming summer months.”

There was some success and some important lessons learned in the early part of the season, particularly with turbidity in the Delta that allowed the system to be operated early on in a way that was more efficient and more protective of species in the long haul, and that was essentially based on new science and better monitoring, she said. “This year we also were able to add additional monitoring boats in the right places to better understand real time fish presence, kick that data back to the project operators and adjust accordingly, so when we had more water in the system in the beginning part of the year, we had daily if not hourly operations calls between the five agency directors. That kind of coordination is unprecedented, but it is something that I think has brought a lot of needed information into the discussion about how the system performs, some of its limitations, frankly, and that’s all very important data as we continue to plan for next year.”

Generally speaking, as the drought deepens across communities and in CA, it certainly is deepening in terms of the effects on fish and wildlife species,” Ms. Nemeth said. “We continue to try and manage the system, but as the drought continues to deepen, those challenges just deepen right along with it. We are trucking fisheries to help avoid low flows and temperature problems similar to what we did last year.”

She noted that the Fish and Game Commission closed a portion of the Sacramento River to recreational fishing as a way to protect winter-run stock, so there’s this ripple effect on the economy. “It’s just not the ag economy, it’s just not the work that we’re doing through the mandatory restrictions in the urban world, to prevent that deepening economic dislocation but the recreational economy as well, so it’s very much a balancing act across multiple sectors of the economy and across the environment.”

Our fundamental objective is to continue to raise awareness, and continue to call on people to understand this as a new normal and change behavior,” she said. “We’re looking towards what the out of the box ideas might be if we do find ourselves in the middle of a ten year drought, which is the question that is certainly on the administration’s mind. We are beginning some internal discussions about what can we really learn from the Australian experience. Fortunately, we have some incredibly bright minds that have been thinking about this quite a lot, and that will certainly be part of the administrations’ future dialog on drought.”

And so with that …

ELLEN HANAK, Senior Fellow and Center Director at the Public Policy Institute of California Water Center

Ellen Hanak began by saying that she’d be giving an overview of highlights of a report they released in March called Policy Priorities for Managing Drought. The report drew on panel discussions from a conference in January with agency officials and stakeholder groups where the PPIC came up with some proposals, and then used those proposals as a way of teeing off panel discussions.

Item 10 Panel 1 - 2-Ellen Hanak PPIC_Page_02 She started with a chart showing reservoir levels for the past three years. “We are entering a fourth year of drought,” she said. “This is just going to make it harder this year compared to last year.”

Item 10 Panel 1 - 2-Ellen Hanak PPIC_Page_03She next presented a map by Mike Dettinger showing the variation in annual precipitation, noting that pink represents the end of the scale with little variation, with variability increasing as the colors change from yellow to green to blue. “The western US in general has more variability, but we are just off the charts in California,” she said. “What that means is we are used to having droughts and also used to having floods. This is truly a zinger in terms of droughts, but it’s not the first time, and it’s not the first time we’ve had a big thing to deal with in recent history.”

From a management perspective, the drought from the late 80s through the early 90s has helped us get through this drought because it caused urban water managers to improve their drought management, and that’s very lucky in terms of the impacts we’ve seen so far, she said. “This leads to a message, a mantra almost, which is when you have a drought like this, learn from it,” she said. “It gives you a chance to see how we are doing compared to last time we went through a drought.  There’s some good news here which is that given the kind of shortages that we’ve had in precipitation, our urban agencies are very good shape. This is why they haven’t been necessarily making as much effort as maybe the Governor would have liked to see when he made the call for 20% voluntary conservation last year.”

Metropolitan Water District has increased their storage by a factor of 14 since the last drought, Ms. Hanak noted. “A lot of money has gone into above ground storage,” she said. “People say we haven’t been building storage but urban agencies have. It’s true in the Bay Area too, including interconnections, which is key because our system is more fragmented. Agencies that used to spend their time suing each other are building interconnections and ties and that’s been really valuable when you have different sources of water and some of them are in better shape than others.”

Item 10 Panel 1 - 2-Ellen Hanak PPIC_Page_04The state also played a nudging role after the drought by requiring water agencies to develop drought contingency plans in order to receive grant funding. “Those have gotten pretty good in a lot of places,” she said. “They can still get better, but it’s meant that the economy of California is not in terrible shape with this drought.”

The bad news is that some sectors, such as agriculture, are more vulnerable, she said. “We have a large agricultural sector, the biggest in the country,” she said. “It’s a system built on irrigation and when you have a sector that big and a drought this bad, you’re going to take some hits. The ag sector is able to adapt to shortages by deciding if they do have a shortage of surface water to pump groundwater, but that’s becoming more expensive. That’s a problem in some places where the groundwater has not been managed for that purpose, so that’s where you’re starting to see the big costs in digging new wells and so on.”

Water markets are an important tool for the agricultural sector, and even more so in a drought year, she said. “It’s especially important because there are some folks just based on our seniority system that have more water than others and the markets allow the water to flow,” she said.

Ellen Hanak 2Ms. Hanak said the government should not be telling farmers what they should farm. “Let them make that decision, that’s a business decision,” she said. “What they are going to do is they are going to cut back the things that are going to be the least costly. It doesn’t mean it’s not painful, but it’s least costly, so you’re going to see revenue reductions that are smaller than the water supply reductions because just the ability to make those adjustments.”

Supply emergencies in small communities continue to be a problem, and often means trucking water or connecting with other systems. “There is still work to do there and discovering there are institutional challenges to dealing with the really small communities especially,” she said.

With the environmental water crisis, people have been working like crazy to not have disasters happen, and so there have been fewer disasters so far then there might have been,” she said. “But some of the numbers are really troubling. The winter run, we lost the entire cohort of winter run salmon because it was too hot. We have the lowest Delta smelt numbers, ever. That is a concern … I know Chuck Bonham says he has the best job in the world, but I think he has the hardest job in the world.”

Item 10 Panel 1 - 2-Ellen Hanak PPIC_Page_05The PPIC event in January featured Dr. Jane Doolan, an ecologist and water manager from Australia who gave insights into how their country dealt with the drought. “We’ve often heard about Australia and their water markets and their water rights systems, but what Jane brought in addition to that was knowledge about some of the ways they handled their ecosystem challenges. Australia has a lot of similarities with us: climate, variable hot Mediterranean-style climate, economy, big ag water use, irrigated agriculture, a lot of infrastructure. They have plumbed their system a lot, as we have, maybe not quite as much as we have, but a lot.”

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After we came out with the report, as we were pulling briefing slides together, I said, let’s call them ‘new world ecosystems’ in the sense that Australia and California are really different from Spain or Israel,” she said. “People have been living and working those lands and that water in Spain and Israel a long time, so there’s not really natural or semi-natural ecosystems anymore. Those are completely managed. Here and in Australia, we have remnants of the natural ecosystem and still native species, issues that are different, and where we still have a chance to kind of keep those somewhat intact. The Australians have that same objective with a somewhat different legal system, but still the lessons of what they are doing, if they succeed at it, can be really useful for us.”

Based on this, Ms. Hanak said they developed four priorities for policy reform in California. “It doesn’t mean they are the only ones, but the ones that we could start doing now to get through this drought better and also it will set us on a better path for future droughts,” she noted.

Item 10 Panel 1 - 2-Ellen Hanak PPIC_Page_071-Manage water more tightly with better information

This is the ‘you can’t manage what you don’t measure’ idea,” she said. “It’s not that we don’t have information about water use; it’s just that the state does not have a very good system for knowing what’s used and being able to manage it.” She noted that there have been some tremendous strides, with the new reporting requirements for surface water users and the data on groundwater levels that was enacted with the 2009 legislation, and since the emergency declaration last year, there have been further advances. “I was excited to see in the executive order the move towards making this permanent, also getting more information from the ag sector on groundwater.”

Ms. Hanak said she thought it was important to think about not just water use, but also discharges. “We know not every drop that is put on a field or that goes into a home is consumed; a lot of it goes back into the river or it goes into the groundwater basin,” she said. “Especially when it goes back into the river, that’s a major part on some rivers of the water that’s available. On some of the San Joaquin tributaries, it can be 40 to 50% of the flows. We actually do report discharges; it’s a different data system. Urban agencies report that already; we think it’s not a huge stretch for large ag users to report that, those are off of typically discrete points, and there’s ways to think about that. We have bond money now, let’s use some of that to help pay for the measurement system.”

The other important thing is that if the state is going to ask for information, it needs to make the best use of it, she noted. “It can be onerous to report it, so let’s make sure we’re using it and thinking about a transparent system that really makes the best use of this. We are the hub of the information economy, we ought to be able to draw on some of those resources in California to be able to help look at that.”

Item 10 Panel 1 - 2-Ellen Hanak PPIC_Page_082-Set clear priorities, objectives, and expectations

This is the idea that when you do have to curtail, how you think about aligning that with not just the water rights system but also other constitutional requirements and other aspects of law in California requiring us to think about the environment and to think about public health and safety,” she said.

Last year was the first time for curtailments since 1977, she noted. “It was tough because there wasn’t really a memory of having done it by most people that were there, but given that, it worked pretty well,” she said. “In some informal ways, public health and safety and the environment have been considered in that process, but not formally. It’s been to sort of strictly follow seniority but make sure to worry about this stuff, but we think probably there’s room for having a policy on that as we go forward.”

We think it’s also important to do dry runs to practice, or in some of our blogs we called it wet runs, since you do it maybe when it’s not dry,” she said. “We do this for floods, we do this for fires, we do it for earthquakes, we need to do it for droughts. Some agencies do this for droughts, but the state needs to do this, too, and think about some different scenarios for that … if this is year four or five in a ten year drought, some what if’s just to have a sense of what the options are and how we would respond.”

3-Promote reasonable use and robust supplies

A lot of the action has to happen at the local level by urban and ag users in terms of actually making the decisions on water use, but we are calling on the state to do things like set standards for landscape water use and conservation oriented pricing,” Ms. Hanak said. She referenced the recent court decision regarding tiered rates and Prop 218. “The judge certainly said he thought tiered rates can be consistent with 218 if you’re transparent and clear in your record and you can show how it relates to increasing water use. The concern I would offer is that rate setting is partly art; it’s not a precise science, so yes be transparent in your record and demonstrate and argue, but if the courts get the mistaken impression that you can go to multiple decimal points in accuracy on that, both on the cost side and on the demand projection side, that’s not true. So I’m anticipating that some reforms on the legal side could be helpful there.”

The state can help expedite implementation of water transfers, recycled water, and stormwater capture, she said. “This is the idea of helping with the permitting process, as well as with funding,” she said.

I would say on water transfers we are not there yet,” Ms. Hanak said. “One of the things we have pointed out is that there’s an inherent conflict for DWR of being both the owner of the infrastructure that the through-Delta transfers go through, so they have to approve it from that perspective; but also being the junior water right holder in the Sacramento Valley means that sometimes they are not inclined to think a transfer is valid even when most other people would look at it. … many folks are doing their job from the perspective of what they are perceiving as their job, and in that case, it’s the difficulty of two things that are happening there, so I feel like we could get better at making the process more transparent. What are the rules of the game? What is the water credit you get for fallowing? Let’s just be willing to recognize that we can’t get to multi-decimal point precision on that and get the system moving. We’re going to need transfers this year. That will reduce costs overall for the state and for the ag sector.”

There are issues with recycled water and stormwater capture where the state and the regional boards can be really valuable in making those things happen at a permitting level, Ms. Hanak said. “The sooner we get the mechanisms in place for implementing that, the better, because at a certain point, farmers are going to want to be able to be trading groundwater within a basin in order to make do with the limited reserves that are there, and you need to have a management system in place for that.”

Exercise state authority to prevent waste and unreasonable use, she said. “We are suggesting a couple of things, and it’s not telling farmers what crops to grow, and it’s not telling them what irrigation technology to use, because those are problematic both from a net water savings perspective and from an economic second guessing perspective of business decisions,” she said. “We do think the state should make it clear that local irrigation districts that are relatively water rich and that don’t like the idea of water leaving their district through the water market, it’s probably not reasonable to have that position during the drought. In the same way that we’re willing to say it’s not reasonable to water your lawn with potable water, maybe we should really be thinking about not having those market barriers. So yes, water rights should be acknowledged; we’re not suggesting taking water away from those agencies, but if there are willing transactions, not to block them at the local level.”

Item 10 Panel 1 - 2-Ellen Hanak PPIC_Page_10She then presented a graph of residential water conservation showing the overall average by region for the period of June through February, and noted that the Governor got about half of the 20% he was asking for. “The areas that locally had bigger problems and bigger water shortages did more. The Sacramento area did more because there were some real concerns about vulnerability; the Central Coast did more, even though they are very low water users already, because they had local vulnerabilities, so this suggests I think that mandate is going to in some ways make it easier for some local agencies who would like to do more and face political pressure from their constituents to do that – if they can blame Felicia Marcus and Governor Brown, that would make it easier to implement.”

Item 10 Panel 1 - 2-Ellen Hanak PPIC_Page_11She said she was glad to see the focus on outdoor water use. “It’s not fixed in time forever that we have to think that having big lawns as ornamental landscape is something that we need in order to have quality of life,” she pointed out. “We used to think it was fine to smoke in restaurants, we used to think it was fine to drive without seatbelts; now we don’t. You can see in different communities in the Southwest as some places that are ahead of us on this as people have come to realize that not having lawns does not mean having nothing; it can mean actually having beautiful landscapes that just use less water, actually give you flowers of different kinds all during the year, that can reduce your labor costs outdoors in addition to your water bills, you start to see land values start to go up in homes that have that kind of landscaping.”

Prices and rebates can help get the turf conversions going. “Half of our urban water use is used outdoors. Half. And that’s averaging across the state. In San Francisco, it’s tiny, in Palm Desert, it’s big, and it varies with how much outdoor landscaping there is, it varies with the climate, all of those things,” she said. “We can get it down and still have beautiful communities, so that’s where the focus of the executive order probably makes some sense.”

Item 10 Panel 1 - 2-Ellen Hanak PPIC_Page_124-Modernize environmental drought management

This is where a page from the book of Australia is useful, Ms. Hanak said. “This is the idea of environmental drought management,” she said. “Something that the Australians did was rethink about when you are in really dry conditions, what are your priorities. Where are you going to get the best bang for your buck, watershed by watershed, so that you’re going to be able to justify to everybody concerned why you are putting that environmental water where you are, and where you need money to complement that so that you can do some sort of infrastructure in order to stretch that supply.”

They went through an explicit process,” she said. “Initially, it was pretty qualitative … In a one year period, they were able to figure out how to do strategic environmental watering in Victoria. The map shows you the what the plan was, what they did, they got buy in across a wide range of stakeholders.”

They also had to be able to bring some environmental water to it,” she said. “So where California should move is in addition to some base regulatory flows, really think about acquiring water rights for the environment, and there’s a small amount of money in the bond for that – a couple hundred million. I think that would reduce a lot of the friction that we would see. It’s not like it would be painless, but a good way to use some public funds.”

She noted that the Australians also authorized carryover, so environmental water managers could decide if they needed to store it instead of use it.

Item 10 Panel 1 - 2-Ellen Hanak PPIC_Page_13The new water bond can really go toward a lot of the priorities outlined here and that includes improving water monitoring networks, diversifying supplies, and managing groundwater she said. “We think there are a lot of environmental dollars there and it can be used for planning and investing in these kinds of environmental drought strategies that we’re talking about,” she said. “Does the spending improve drought resilience should be a question that gets asked for every bond dollar that goes out, because we know we have to be ready for droughts in the future, too.”

Item 10 Panel 1 - 2-Ellen Hanak PPIC_Page_14We need a reliable long-term funding mechanism that outlives the bond, and we’ve looked at other work at options for that,” she said. “We need an additional annual $2-3B for our water system, which is not a lot per household on average. Constitutional constraints right now make it very hard for local agencies to raise funding.”

Item 10 Panel 1 - 2-Ellen Hanak PPIC_Page_15Crises are opportunities for reform,” she said, presenting a slide of PPIC polling data. “It’s asking the open ended question, what do you as the top issue for the state, and it’s almost always jobs, but you can just see as this drought has unfolded, how that has changed. It’s true the economy’s doing okay, but water is in a dead heat now with the economy and that just suggests there’s a lot of public attention to this, and so there are possibilities for doing more.”

Item 10 Panel 1 - 2-Ellen Hanak PPIC_Page_16Everybody’s come up with creative solutions, so I just wanted to end by showing you a creative solution from my neighborhood in San Francisco; one local establishment is suggesting people should drink more whiskey and less water,” Ms. Hanak concluded.

During the discussion period, Council member Judge Damrell asked about desalination.

That’s a tough one, in terms of looking at the Australian experience,” Ms. Hanak replied. “All the major cities along the coast, and all of them built desal during the drought, Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Perth. The only ones in operation right now after the drought are the ones in Perth, as Perth climate conditions have just shifted and it’s just drier there now. The others are not in operation and that’s because the operating costs alone are higher than the cost of alternative water sources when you’re in non-drought conditions, and so it’s been politically tough for them.”

“Australia’s water market is almost entirely within ag and ag environment; the cities operate very little on the water market,” Ms. Hanak said. “Our cities do more purchasing that they do, and I have economist friends there who say it’s just a crazy expense relative to more flexible management of the available water supplies. The ‘91 drought experience is why the folks in San Diego are building that Carlsbad plant. Because they are at the end of the line and they are very scared about reliability, and the residents are willing to pay for that. It’s going to be 7% of county’s supply, so it’s high cost, but their water is high cost in general because they are at the end of the line, and they are going to blend that in, and they feel good about it, at least so far. I don’t know when all the bills come due, people will get cranky there too.”

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Coming tomorrow …

The drought update continues with DWR’s Deputy Drought Manager Jeanine Jones gave an update on current hydrologic conditions and how the Department is responding to the dry conditions Lead Scientist Ted Sommer gave an update on the Delta’s fish species, and Delta Watermaster Michael George discussed the actions the State Water Resources Control Board is taking.

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