Is a state plan to update Delta water rules double counting restoration of water and habitat?
By Alastair Bland
A historic effort to pump some life back into the San Joaquin River’s devastated salmon runs began more than 15 years ago as water users began releasing more water each year from Friant Dam for restoration purposes. Under the rules of the San Joaquin River Restoration Program, Friant water users are permitted to recapture that water downstream of the 153-mile project area, but only if doing so has no adverse impact on the environment downstream of the recapture point.
Now, as part of a state-backed plan known as the Voluntary Agreements that would rewrite Bay-Delta water and ecosystem management rules, the Friant water users have offered up to 50,000 acre-feet of annual Delta outflow to improve conditions for fish. To achieve this, they propose to forego recapturing the San Joaquin River restoration flows.
But environmental watchdog groups are crying foul. For one thing, Friant water users recapture very little water in the first place, so foregoing recapture would not produce much flow for the Delta. Opponents to Friant’s plan also assert that San Joaquin River Restoration flows that benefit the Delta ecosystem cannot be credited to the Voluntary Agreements. To do so, they say, would amount to double counting—using one block of water to meet the rules of two programs.
“They’re looking for credit for something they’re already required to do,” said Greg Reis, a hydrologist with the group Friends of the River.
The issue Reis points out, and which is contested by the Friant Water Authority, highlights the contentious and complex nature of the Voluntary Agreements, a draft regulatory plan involving proposed contributions from Central Valley water right holders now years in the making that would effectively update the San Francisco Bay and Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta Water Quality Control Plan. This keystone ruleset governs water use and ecosystem management in the estuary and its tributaries, and it has not been fully updated for 30 years.
Now, the process is finally nearing its end. A public hearing takes place this week, Jan. 28-30, to allow members of the public to weigh in on the latest draft of the plan, released in December by the State Water Resources Control Board.
The 3,000-plus-page docket includes highly technical river-by-river actions, or agreements, proposed by numerous water right holders aimed at restoring large areas wetlands and floodplains and providing modest increases in river flows.
Officials, including Gov. Gavin Newsom, and many Central Valley irrigation districts hope to put the plan into effect late this year or in early 2027.
If adopted by the water board, the proposed agreements—formally known as the Healthy Rivers and Landscapes program—would run for a term of at least eight years and are intended to not just stabilize the estuary’s declining fish populations but, no later than the year 2050, help achieve a longstanding state mandate of doubling Chinook salmon populations from levels seen between 1967 and 1991.
In an emailed statement, the State Water Contractors—representing the water agencies that serve 750,000 acres of farmland and 27 million people—said Healthy Rivers and Landscapes “provides the balance necessary to protect all beneficial uses of water and the best possible outcome for people, farms, fish and wildlife.”
State Water Board officials were unable to reply before publication.
Squishy Baselines
Despite promising language in the state’s plan, environmental watchdog organizations, tribal groups, and salmon fishery advocates say the Voluntary Agreements offer dubious ecosystem benefits and will hasten the extinction of salmon and other native fishes.
Their main sticking point comes down to water. While the agreements propose to increase flows through the Delta and into the Bay from existing levels, they barely move the needle. In critically dry years, the Sacramento River—the backbone salmon producer in the valley—will receive zero additional water, while wetter years will see 100,000 acre-feet of new flows, less than half a percent of the river basin’s 21 million acre-feet of average annual total runoff. Basin-wide water provisions of 600,000 to 700,000 acre-feet will come in dry to above normal water year types—a slightly more generous 2.5-percent bump over the total average annual runoff of 28.5 million acre-feet.
Critics allege that the agreements could even produce a loss of water in the ecosystem in the future, since the state’s plan lacks airtight language protecting baseline flows from such anticipated water projects as Sites Reservoir and the Delta tunnel. For this reason, environmental groups have pushed for an alternative pathway to updating the Bay-Delta Plan. Though it has largely fallen to the wayside, it would have set strict minimum river flows of between 55 and 65 percent of the total water available in the watershed, a measurement known as unimpaired flow, across 7-day averages.
“It’s like a speed limit,” said Barry Nelson, senior policy advisor to the Golden State Salmon Association. “It’s numerical, it applies to everybody, it’s easy to understand, it’s enforceable.”
The percent-of-unimpaired flow pathway was meant to align with data and research showing that higher flows in Central Valley rivers help produce larger populations of native fishes, both by maintaining cooler water temperatures and assisting fish on seaward migrations. However, it would also impose heavy cuts to existing agricultural and urban supplies—why many farmers and water agencies have pushed back on it.
“The amount of water that’s talked about with unimpaired flows will be devastating to the state, frankly to a level that they didn’t evaluate sufficiently in their environmental document,” said Ian Buck-Macleod, the Friant Water Authority’s water resources manager.
Though the State Water Board endorsed the unimpaired flow approach until about 2019, when Gov. Gavin Newsom switched up the board’s leadership, that plan has since fallen out of favor. It remains viable only as a potential plan B for water right holders not covered by the Voluntary Agreements.
But the complexity of the state’s preferred alternative continues to be problematic. There is lingering uncertainty, for instance, over how the State Water Board will ensure that flows provided by Voluntary Agreement signatories will add to the existing baseline, versus getting lost in a squishy range of average annual flow.
Jennifer Pierre, the general manager of the State Water Contractors and one of the leading collaborators in designing the Voluntary Agreements, said the challenge in defining a fixed flow baseline in a naturally fluctuating river system makes it reasonable to have “some level of flexibility in implementing” any new flow rules.
She said, also, that unauthorized pumping by unknown parties within the Delta is removing hundreds of thousands of acre-feet of water per year that would otherwise appear as Delta outflow.
In such an unruly environment, Pierre said, “the idea that [the flow baseline] is so precisely stable that there could never be any adjustment or hydrological variation in the system is just not rational.”
She added that an unreasonable expectation is placed on upstream reservoir operators and water right holders, who have to both produce Delta inflow “and make sure that outflow is actually outflow.”
Friant Example
Downstream of Friant Dam, defining baseline flow conditions has proven contentious, with environmentalists arguing that a small layer of water proposed by Friant Water Authority as a contribution to the Voluntary Agreements is already a part of the baseline, thanks to rules in place for 20 years. The disagreement stems from the language in paragraph 16(a)(1) of the San Joaquin River Restoration Settlement. It states that “any recirculation, recapture, reuse, exchange or transfer of the Interim Flows and Restoration Flows shall have no adverse impact on the Restoration Goal, downstream water quality or fisheries.”
Opponents to the Voluntary Agreements argue that if foregoing recapture of water and allowing it to flow into San Francisco Bay provides an environmental benefit—as implied in Friant’s proposal—recapturing would have an adverse effect by eliminating those benefits. Thus, under the Settlement’s terms, recapture is impermissible. And if water cannot be recaptured, recapture cannot be foregone.
Ultimately, the environmental camp argues that any environmental benefit to the Delta from the San Joaquin River Restoration flows must be attributed only to that program, and that to contribute to Delta ecosystem recovery under the Voluntary Agreements, the Friant water users would have to release still more water.
“It’s a catch-22,” said Gary Bobker, program director with Friends of the River.
But Buck-Macleod says it’s not entirely circular. He reasons it’s possible to both remove water from the ecosystem without causing harm, which would make recapture permissible, and leave it in the ecosystem—that is forego recapture—to provide a benefit.
“Something can definitely be a betterment but not necessarily be an impact” if it is removed, he said.
Is it Double Counting or New Water?
A related disagreement has emerged with the Yuba Water Agency’s voluntary agreement. As one component of its flow commitments, the agency has proposed that a varying small sum of water—3,600 acre-feet on average, according to their general manager—that is already released in certain water-type years from New Bullards Bar Reservoir under the 2008 Yuba River Accord be chalked up as a Voluntary Agreements contribution. This proposal comes with the added caveat that the water must not be recaptured downstream or backed up in other storage facilities, as it currently may be. Though Yuba Water will not be releasing extra flows to generate this portion of water, and though many miles of river below the reservoir would see no change in flow from this action, Delta outflow would see a material increase.
Chris Shutes, executive director of the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance, is peeved that the Yuba Water Agency “doesn’t even have to break a sweat to do this. In fact, they’ll be making money.”
According to Willie Whittlesey, Yuba Water’s general manager, the California Department of Water Resources has agreed to a payment program that will provide Yuba Water with almost $50 million in state funding to support the water district’s Healthy Rivers and Landscapes actions, which include payments to support habitat construction work.
But Whittlesey objected to Shutes’ contention that the water is merely rebranded Yuba Accord water. He emphasized that the key mechanism making it a net addition to baseline flow conditions is the requirement that the water or any corresponding volume in storage upstream cannot be consumptively used, and that the releases must be allowed to reach saltwater.
“This will be a new, dedicated and protected source of water for Delta outflow,” he said.
The Voluntary Agreements’ non-flow measures have also drawn criticism for proposing to count habitat projects completed under past programs as achievements of the new one. Of 47,000 proposed acres of floodplains, spawning gravel beds, and in-stream rearing habitat, 14,506 acres are either in progress already or have been completed.
The Lower Elkhorn Basin Levee Setback project, for instance, consists of more than 2,000 acres of floodplain and food production acres that were reconnected to the flow cycles of the Sacramento River more than two years ago. The project emerged from the 2012 Central Valley Flood Protection Plan but is set to be scored as a Voluntary Agreements achievement.
As far as flow-based provisions go, Pierre said quibbles over minute variations are almost moot in a watershed like the Central Valley’s, where annual natural flow fluctuations often exceed the range of impact that new flows will have. She described a “floating baseline” on which adding water will have variable results.
Buck-Macleod also said that benefits or impacts associated with variations in the flow volumes being argued over in the San Joaquin River are close to negligible, anyway.
“You just don’t have enough of an effect at these flows to really show a difference,” he said. “If you look at the 50,000 acre-feet [from the Friant VA] in isolation, we are probably decimal dust in the Delta.”
For environmentalists who argue that diminished flows are the master variable driving the decline of the estuary, such reasoning does not assuage concerns over the relatively small volumes being offered by the Voluntary Agreements.
Bobker, at Friends of the River, worries that difficulties in ensuring that the Voluntary Agreements create material gains will only accelerate the decline of species like Delta smelt, longfin smelt, and winter-run Chinook salmon, all nearing extinction.
He feels the double counting issues associated with the Friant and Yuba proposals are “emblematic of the problem with the VAs … where you get credit for not doing much, for not really changing the status quo.”
Stay tuned for Part 2 of the Bay-Delta Plan update saga. This story was produced by Estuary News Group.
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