A wrap-up of posts published on Maven’s Notebook this week …
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In California water news this week …
PG&E formalizes plan to eliminate Lake Pillsbury in Mendocino National Forest in landmark move
“In a landmark moment, Pacific Gas & Electric Co. formalized its plans to tear down two more-than-century-old dams on the Eel River — removing the barrier that forms Lake Pillsbury, freeing the waters of the river and restoring the lake footprint to a more natural state. The moves are part of a 94-page draft surrender application submitted to federal regulators and made public Friday as part of the utility’s plan to decommission its Potter Valley powerhouse and all the infrastructure that comes with it — including Scott and Cape Horn dams, sited slightly downstream. PG&E has said work deconstructing the dams could begin as early 2028, depending on regulatory approval and environmental review of the plan. Scott Dam, built in 1921, would come down first, either in phases or all in one season. … ” Read more from the Santa Rosa Press Democrat.
SEE ALSO:
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- PG&E Confirms Plan to Begin Full Removal of Eel River Dams, from Cal Trout
- Draft surrender and decommissioning plan offers two paths to freeing the Eel, press release from Friends of the Eel River
Sites Project Authority certifies Sites Reservoir’s final environmental report
“An important milestone was reached Friday for the construction of another reservoir in California. The Final Environmental Impact Report (EIR) for Sites Reservoir was certified and the Sites Reservoir Project was approved by the Sites Project Authority, the lead agency under the California Environmental Quality Act. Next up for the Sites Project Authority is to move the project through the final planning stages. After getting through the final stages, crews will begin building the reservoir. “Over the last six years, we conducted one of the most comprehensive environmental analyses ever done for a water supply project to design a project that can meet the needs of California’s communities, farms, and environment,” said Fritz Durst, Chair of the Sites Project Authority Board of Directors, in a statement. … ” Read more from CBS Sacramento.
SEE ALSO:
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- PRESS RELEASE: Sites Reservoir Reaches Milestone in Environmental Review Process, press release from the Sites Reservoir JPA
- PRESS RELEASE: Friends of the River, Sierra Club, California Sportfishing Protection Alliance Condemn Today’s Hastened Approval of Sites Reservoir’s Environmental Impact Report, press release from aforementioned entities
Republican lawmaker seeks to undo Central Valley Project environmental protections
“More than 30 years ago, a piece of federal legislation dropped like a bomb on California’s Central Valley farmers. Reverberations from that legislation continue through today. Just last month, a San Joaquin Valley congressman added language to an appropriations bill that would unwind a key portion of the 1992 Central Valley Project Improvement Act (CVPIA). The CVPIA was the first legislative attempt to give the environment and others a seat at the state’s water table. It was a big bill with 10 areas of change to the federal Central Valley Project, a 400-mile system of dams and canals that spans California from Redding to Bakersfield. One of its cornerstones was that 800,000 acre feet of water per year would be carved out of supplies that had been sent to towns and farms and redirect it to the environment instead. Specifically, the legislation hoped to save salmon populations, which had been crashing. … ” Read more from SJV Water.
Fishery disaster determinations announced as main stem Sacramento River sees dismal salmon returns
“The Secretary of Commerce has determined that a commercial fishery failure due to a fishery resource disaster occurred in two California ocean and inland salmon fisheries, the Sacramento River Fall Chinook and Klamath River Fall Chinook, opening the door to disaster assistance from the federal government. The determination is in response to requests from Acting Governor Eleni Kounalakis. “Secretary of Commerce, Gina M. Raimondo, working with NOAA Fisheries, evaluates each fishery resource disaster request based primarily on data submitted by the requesting official,” according to a statement from NOAA Fisheries. … ” Read more from the Daily Kos.
Going to the source: Can meadow restoration beef up California’s water supplies and reduce flooding?
“California’s 280,000 acres of mountain meadows dotting the Sierra Nevada are more than pretty rest stops along arduous alpine trails. They also act like giant water sponges, filtering water and slowing it down as runoff barrels down mountainsides. Yet more than 50,000 acres of meadows are in need of restoration. US Forest Service ecologist Karen Pope said California has some of the best meadows in the world, and likens them to “nature’s speed bumps” for their ability to moderate water flows for downstream users. Their restoration is part of a bigger picture, encapsulated in the Department of Water Resources’ strategic Water Plan, which acknowledges climate change as an “urgent threat” and calls for focusing on the state’s watersheds, water systems and communities. Meadows are part of that. … ” Read more from SJV Water.
El Niño update for California: Meteorologists say this one could be ‘historically strong’
“Past El Niño years won’t help meteorologists determine what this winter will look like, the National Weather Service said in a Tuesday morning update, because conditions this year are not typical. An El Niño was declared in May, meaning sea surface temperatures are warmer than normal in the equatorial eastern Pacific. This region of the ocean typically drives large-scale atmospheric patterns that impact us locally, Courtney Carpenter, warning coordination meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Sacramento, said in the video update. Here’s what El Niño conditions mean for California, and what meteorologists predict winter in the northern parts of the state will be like, as of late November … ” Read more from the Sacramento Bee.
Court of Appeal upholds County of Monterey’s management of groundwater in landmark SGMA case
“On November 13, 2023, the Sixth District Court of Appeal issued the first published decision interpreting California’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (“SGMA”) in City of Marina et al., v. County of Monterey et al., Case No. H049575. The case arose after the County of Monterey elected to form a groundwater sustainability agency (“GSA”) to resolve overlapping claims to manage groundwater in a small area of the Salinas Valley Groundwater Basin known as the CEMEX Area, a seaside parcel on which CEMEX previously operated a sand-mining facility and is now proposed to house a desalination plant to provide fresh water to residents of Monterey County. The Court upheld the trial court’s determination that the County of Monterey Groundwater Sustainability Agency, rather than the City of Marina, has the authority to manage groundwater in the CEMEX Area. The Court’s decision signals judicial support for the California legislature’s preference for local management of groundwater under SGMA. Downey Brand successfully represented Monterey County before both the trial and appellate courts. … ” Read more from Downey Brand.
Living with earthquakes: How DWR maintains vigilance and resources to respond to the next jolt
“When a magnitude 4.2 earthquake struck near Isleton in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta on October 18, it was a reminder of the threat posed to critical State Water Project (SWP) infrastructure by seismic activity. That infrastructure includes more than 1,100 miles of Delta levees which, if they were to fail during an earthquake, could cause a possible outage in water supply delivery to 27 million Californians and 750,000 acres of farmland. The temblor was followed by a 2.8 magnitude aftershock and, five days later, a 2.9 magnitude aftershock rumbled below Twitchell Island, less than a mile south of the first quake. All three quakes occurred on the Midland fault, one of several active fault lines that traverse the Delta. The initial jolt was strong enough to trigger a ShakeAlert, the Earthquake Early Warning System managed by the U.S. Geological Survey. … ” Read more from DWR News.
Bay Area congressmen seek to expand Delta heritage area
“Federal lawmakers are seeking to expand the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta National Heritage Area — the first in the state to receive such a designation — by annexing dozens of acres of public lands, including a decommissioned army base. U.S. Rep. Mike Thompson, D-St. Helena, and Rep. John Garamendi, D-Walnut Grove, on Friday introduced legislation to expand the boundary of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta National Heritage Area to include approximately 62 acres of publicly owned land in Solano County. According to Thompson’s office, he and Garamendi introduced the legislation at the request of the city of Rio Vista to expand the National Heritage Area’s boundary to include the decommissioned United States Army Reserve Center, U.S. Coast Guard Station Rio Vista, Beach Wastewater Treatment Plant and Sandy Beach Park in Solano County. … ” Read more from CBS San Francisco.
SEE ALSO: Local Lawmakers Seek To Expand Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta National Heritage Area, from SF Gate
In commentary this week …
Without a statewide water supply target, California’s future is at risk
“If you don’t already know, it will surprise you to learn that for all the attention that our state’s water supply receives in California – for all the worry and effort it takes to make sure there’s enough for our 40 million residents, 24 million acres of farmland, countless acres of natural environment, and status as the world’s fifth-largest economy (of which its agriculture and environment are huge parts) – no statewide goal exists to ensure a sustainable water supply for California’s future. What big, bold vision has ever been achieved without first setting a goal? Without such a goal, we have no clear path forward, and we don’t know which direction and how far we need to go to achieve a reliable water supply. In a state always preoccupied with fears of drought and the impacts of climate change, we have not determined how much water will be needed in the short- and long-term to address these existential threats. … ” Continue reading at Capitol Weekly.
Column: This water project is expensive, wasteful and ecologically damaging. Why is it being fast-tracked?
Columnist Michael Hiltzik writes, “Noah Cross, the sinister plutocrat of the movie “Chinatown,” remarked that “politicians, ugly buildings and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.” He might have added public works projects to that list: If they get talked about long enough, sometimes they acquire the image of inevitability. That seems to be the case with the Sites Reservoir, a water project in the western Sacramento Valley that originated during the Eisenhower administration. The project’s long sojourn on the drawing board should have been taken as a signal of its manifest flaws, which include its immense cost and its uncertain ability to contribute to the state’s water supplies — a contribution that has only become more dubious with the intensification of global warming. … ” Read more from the LA Times.
Underground water storage is needed in California
The Southern California News Group writes, “Despite an unusually wet season last year and predictions for a boisterous rainy season this year, California continues to struggle to store enough water to meet the needs of its population and farms. We’ve experienced two particularly grueling droughts in the last decade, with state officials repeatedly blaming climate change for the challenges. We don’t doubt that climate change is stressing our water systems. But state policy ought to prioritize resilience by building the storage we need to adapt to whatever climate conditions we will face. Fortunately, Southern California water officials are getting the message. News reports point to a $211-million underground storage facility in the Mojave Desert that the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California is currently building. The district this month completed the first phase of the High Desert Water Bank. … ” Read more from the Riverside Press-Enterprise.
Spring run salmon collapse 2023
“The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), in an August 2023 Assessment, provided a status review of spring-run Chinook salmon in California’s Central Valley. The Assessment found that salmon are declining, but primarily as part of a short-term trend, under the burden of climate change. The conclusions of the August Assessment stand in stark contrast to October’s condor-like effort to preserve remaining wild spring-run salmon in a conservation hatchery at UC Davis. This contrast demonstrates the limitations of the federal and state resource agencies’ focus on climate change and the ocean as the cause of the salmon declines and the reason to shut down fisheries.1 The resource agencies need to direct more attention to controllable elements: water operations. On that level, they must take immediate action, before another one of California’s most important public trust resources is lost. … ” Read more from California Fisheries.
California Legislature destroys incentive to achieve water resiliency
Edward Ring, a contributing editor and senior fellow with the California Policy Center, writes, “The California State Water Board is currently drafting the regulations needed to implement Senate Bill 1157, which is possibly the most misguided, unnecessary, intrusive, expensive disaster of a law ever passed by the state legislature. Passed and signed by Governor Newsom in 2022, SB 1147 requires California’s water agencies to limit residential indoor water use to 47 gallons per person per day starting in 2025 and 42 gallons in 2030. The theme promoted by the State Water Board as they conduct hearings and solicit public comments is “Making Water Conservation a Way of Life.” Rationing would be a more apt description of what’s coming for California’s households. It isn’t as if conservation hasn’t been a way of life in California for decades. … ” Read more from the California Globe.
Yay for bad government! Unless…
Thomas Buckley, former Mayor of Lake Elsinore California and contributing author to The Point, writes, “Populated by slothful, uncaring time servers who literally have no motivation to do much more than physically (and now not even that) show up, sit down, and look plausible (if that is at all possible,) the rather dour reputation of any bureaucracy is well deserved. But sometimes – just sometimes – that can actually be a good thing. Take, for example, California’s State Water Resources Control Board. In January, the board unanimously approved a Racial Equity Action Plan . The plan called for a number of actions – hey, that’s in the name! – to be taken by the Board and its staff to make absolutely sure that the water that is piped to your farm, business, or home is not bringing California’s systemic racism along with it. … ” Continue reading at Water Wrights.
Column: Solving climate change will have side effects. Get over it
Sammy Roth writes, “When I wrote a column two weeks ago urging the Biden administration to approve a lot more solar and wind farms on Western public lands, I knew I would get flak from critics of large-scale renewable energy — and indeed I did. On social media, conservationists blasted me for what they described as my failure to understand that sprawling solar projects and towering wind turbines tear up wildlife habitat and destroy treasured landscapes. They called me a shill for money-grubbing utility companies and suggested it’s obvious that we should rebuild our energy systems around solar panels on rooftops. In an ideal universe, I’d support building renewable energy exclusively within cities and on previously disturbed lands such as farm fields and irrigation canals. In an ideal universe, I’d support only climate solutions that don’t cause other problems. But we don’t live in an ideal universe. … ” Read more from the LA Times.
California’s greenhouse gas emissions are rising — and we’re not even counting them all
“California has committed to substantially reducing its greenhouse gas emissions, aiming for carbon neutrality by 2045. The pledge is key to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s claims of climate leadership, which featured prominently in his recent visits to China and the United Nations. But the California Air Resources Board recently released a preliminary greenhouse gas inventory suggesting the state’s emissions increased slightly last year compared with the previous year. This is of course bad news, since addressing climate change requires deep and swift emissions reductions. What I’m even more concerned about, however, is that the state’s greenhouse gas inventory undercounts emissions in the first place. Although the issue seldom gets attention, California’s inventory excludes emissions from a variety of sources, including wildfires and industrial sectors such as shipping, aviation and biofuels. … ” Read more from the LA Times.
In regional water news this week …
Watering up a major piece of the Pacific Flyway
“In the shadow of the Sutter Buttes in the northern Sacramento Valley, the Gray Lodge Wildlife Area is an oasis of more than 9,000 acres of habitat that is a haven for millions of migrating waterfowl. When they flock to Gray Lodge for the winter, the cacophony of the collective honking and squawking is hard to ignore. Neither is the sheer number of birds present. Gray Lodge is special because it represents a remnant of what used to be in the valley. Long before the Sacramento and Feather rivers were developed for flood control and water supply, the valley would regularly be turned into a vast inland sea as the rivers spilled their banks and dumped floodwater into the low-lying floodplain. … ” Read more from the Bureau of Reclamation.
CV-SALTS: Salt and nitrate programs continue to benefit permittees and communities
“Thanks to the continued work of CV-SALTS stakeholders, 2023 has been another year of tremendous progress, with free well testing and safe drinking water being delivered to thousands of households across the Central Valley. Meanwhile, even more drinking water efforts are poised to launch and important progress is being made in developing a salt management blueprint for the Central Valley. … Regulators, permittees, and community members work together to develop and implement the Central Valley Salinity Alternatives for Long-Term Sustainability (CV-SALTS) through a unique process involving permittees, agency representatives, dedicated staff, and community members. This collaborative process ensures that all involved parties have not only had a role in building the program from the ground up but also work together to ensure that the program benefits everyone involved. … ” Continue reading from CV-SALTS.
Lois Henry: Kern River battles continue as ag districts accuse Bakersfield of pulling off an historic “water heist”
“If anyone thought a recent court order mandating 40% of the Kern River’s flow remain in the river for fish was the end of the story, think again. Agricultural water districts are striking back. Not at the fish. But at what they say is an historic water heist by the City of Bakersfield. On Tuesday, a coalition of ag districts filed a motion to stay and motion for reconsideration of Kern County Superior Court Judge Gregory Pulskamp’s injunction and implementation order requiring water in the river. The group, including Kern Delta Water District, Kern County Water Agency and the North Kern, Buena Vista and Rosedale-Rio Bravo water storage districts contend, among other things, that the implementation order was rushed by them not affording them due process. … ” Read more from SJV Water.
Big year of rain means big budget hole at Metropolitan
“California’s biggest water supplier is hurting for cash this year as the recent record-breaking rainy winter means its customers need to buy less water. The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California is facing a more than $300 million budget shortfall – about a quarter of its normal revenue from selling water. The agency, which provides drinking water for 19 million people including San Diego, is drawing money out of its cash reserves and taking out a $100 million loan to make up the shortfall. But long term, its leaders are talking about changing the way they charge for water, realizing that decades of conservation policies in California and diversification of water supplies with desalination and wastewater recycling means water sales will continue to drop. Except, selling water is the main way Met, and other water agencies like the San Diego County Water Authority, make money. “Water goes up, revenues are down. It’s critical to remind ourselves that this is the relationship and how we manage our funds,” said Katano Kasaine, assistant general manager at Metropolitan. … ” Read more from the Voice of San Diego.
Metropolitan Water District forges partnerships to secure Colorado River water in Lake Mead
“In a pivotal move addressing California’s water conservation goals and reinforcing partnerships in the face of the ongoing Colorado River drought, the Metropolitan Water District is seeking authorization for its General Manager to establish agreements with the Coachella Valley Water District, Imperial Irrigation District, and San Diego County Water Authority. These agreements aim to facilitate the addition of water to Lake Mead under the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s Lower Colorado River Basin System Conservation and Efficiency Program for the year 2023. The proposal comes as a response to the Colorado River Board of California’s letter from October 5, 2022, outlining ambitious objectives for California agencies to conserve 400,000 acre-feet (AF) per year in Lake Mead between 2023 and 2026. It also underscores the financial benefits for both Metropolitan and the San Diego County Water Authority, exemplifying the potential advantages of collaborative multi-agency efforts aimed at bolstering the Colorado River. The sought-after authorizations revolve around specific agreement … ” Read more from the Desert Review.
The future of the Colorado River hinges on one young negotiator
“John Brooks Hamby was 9 years old the last time a group of Western states renegotiated how they share the dwindling Colorado River. When the high-stakes talks concluded two years later, in 2007, with a round of painful cuts, he hadn’t reached high school. Yet this June an audience of water policy experts listened with rapt attention as Hamby, now 27, recited lessons from those deliberations. Hamby, California’s boyish-looking representative on issues concerning the river, sat shoulder-to-shoulder with the other states’ powerful water managers, many of whom have decades of experience, an almost uncomfortable sight given their latest brawl over the beleaguered Colorado River. The group had gathered in a mock courtroom at the University of Colorado Law School to discuss water law and to field questions about their negotiations over shortages that have prompted some cities to restrict growth and farmers to fallow fields. … ” Read more from Pro Publica.
Announcements, notices, and funding opportunities …
REGISTER NOW: Army Corps Regulatory Program Workshop: Section 401 Water Quality Certification Process, 2023 Amended Waters of the U.S.
NOTICE of opportunity to comment on changes to proposed regulations regarding hexavalent chromium maximum contaminant level
NOTICE of availability of a draft technical support document for proposed health-protective concentration for noncancer effects of hexavalent chromium in drinking water
NOTICE: Reformatted Order WR 2023-0042: Cease and desist order to BlueTriton Brands, Inc
