We are being lied to!

Assembly Member Patterson Accuses NRDC and Governor’s Office of Bias

By Laurie Greene, Editor

“We are being lied to,” declared Jim Patterson, who represents the 23rd Assembly District in the California State Assembly since 2012, at his recent drought forum in Clovis.

“I have come to the conclusion there is a power structure led by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), the governor’s office and in the bureaucracies,” Patterson explained. “They are not telling us the truth. They do not abide by their own agreements, and they have a bias against the very water technology and the water systems that have made California a ‘Golden State’. They are biased against dams, reservoirs and conveyance, and every time I turn around, I find another example.”

Jim Patterson, California Assembly Member

Jim Patterson, California State Assembly Member

“We need to have regulatory relief from the State of California in order to build Temperance Flat (a proposed dam project on the San Joaquin River) and its conveyance systems and to build the improvements at Shasta Dam and Reservoir and at Sites Reservoir,” said Patterson.

“And yet,” he continued, “I know for a fact that we are not going to get that regulatory relief. Nevertheless, the governor and this legislature have given that very same regulatory relief to the Kings’ Basketball Stadium in Sacramento (Golden 1 Center) and to two big NFL football stadiums in the state.”

To build water saving and conveyance systems, Patterson expects to face a gauntlet of litigation from the NRDC. “Though we have tried over and over again, unsuccessfully, to get the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) reformed,” he stated, “the Democrats will do it for basketball and football, but they won’t do it for water. That demonstrates to me they are absolutely disingenuous.”

“Secondly, we were promised money in this budget for the Central California InterConnect,” Patterson said. “Putting an interconnect between the federal Central Valley Project (CVP), best illustrated by the Kings River and San Joaquin River Watersheds in the Central Valley, and the state’s California State Water Project (SWP), exemplified by the San Luis Reservoir system, is critically important. We need to connect those projects so we have water conveyance alternatives to improve water reliability and to save us from the kinds of hard decisions that we’ve had to reach now—to starve a portion of the Valley. Because we can’t get water between the two systems, the situation is real and dire.”

“The governor promised those of us who negotiated the bond the budget would include appropriations for the InterConnect,” Patterson reported. There is no such thing. It doesn’t exist, and it didn’t show up in this budget. The governor didn’t come through on his promises.”

“I have tried repeatedly to talk with the water bureaucracies—appointees of the governor—and ask how I could help them understand the importance of giving us back the water,” Patterson commented. “For example, the water behind Shasta Dam right now has been paid for and banked by our farmers. I’ve asked repeatedly, ‘Why can’t we get the InterConnect funded? You promised us that you would do that.’ I’ve asked, ‘What is it going to take for you to understand the importance of storage in the San Joaquin River Watershed?’ It’s like talking to a wall; I get no answer.”

“So, I have had to come to the conclusion that we’re being misled, and it’s on purpose,” he said. “I just don’t believe this governor anymore. That’s a sad conclusion to have to come to, but I think we are seeing a ‘behind-the-scenes hand of power’ called the NRDC, that runs the governor’s office and the state legislature.

When asked what concerned citizens can do, Patterson answered, “Today we heard a lot of passion. I think we need to turn that passion into significant efforts, politically and organizationally. We have to make a real nuisance of ourselves to the governor and to the legislature until they pay attention to us. I have learned in public life, as mayor and now in the legislature, that those people who stand up and are persistent and persuasive get heard. We have got to continue to step up in ever-increasing numbers and be heard.”

“We also have win some elections,” he emphasized. “We are under a one party-dictatorial rule right now. And I would be saying this even if Republicans were the party in rule. Our founders believed there should be separated powers in government and people in office from all walks of life. These kinds of checks and balances get us to good policy for most people, most of the time.”

“You can’t do that in a dictatorship,” Patterson explained, “and that’s really what we have—one party that has all the levels of power and is using them all against us in Central California. And we’re seeing the result of it.”

Patterson tells other members of the legislature on the committees he serves, “You are literally putting a bait fish that striped bass are eating, ahead of the lives and the wellbeing of people and their property, and you’re blaming us for it. The reality is you’re making a drought that is bad into a drought that is a nightmare.”

“If this were to be compared, for example, to a forest fire,” Patterson conjectured, “and the firefighters were told by the governor, ‘Stop trying to save lives and stop trying to save property; go make sure you save that tree over there because there’s a spotted owl in it,’ people would very quickly tell the governor where to go and what to do.”

California Ag Today2016-05-31T19:28:09-07:00July 21st, 2015|

California Water Usage

Joel Nelsen, President of California Citrus Mutual on Water Usage

By Courtney Steward with California Ag Today

Joel Nelsen, president of California Citrus Mutual (CCM), commented on the recent upsurge in negative public opinion on the state’s agricultural water usage, “They don’t want the attention focused on their cherished agenda item, which is environmentalism.”

“There are good reasons to protect the environment,” Nelsen explained, “we don’t want salt-water intrusion in the Delta and we don’t want fish to become extinct. However, we do want a realistic approach to solving environmental problems starting with science-based assessments, partial limits and sustainable solutions.”

Nelsen said “’sustainability’ varies depending on who you talk to. “Ask a farmer and they will tell you that sustainability is about producing a legacy, ensuring that future generations too will be able to cultivate a viable crop on the same land. Sustainability is about learning from the past to prepare for the future and fulfilling an inherent responsibility to the environment and to society, working with the land in order to feed the world today and in the future. The California citrus industry has not only sustained, but thrived for over 125 years.”

“So, how do we solve this complex issue of a limited water supply for competing needs with solutions that deliver sustainable results with accountability from all parties involved? Nelsen stated, “You want a thorough assessment of the current situation; are our current solutions solving our water problems?”

“When you talk about restoring the San Joaquin River,” Nelsen explained, “our current solution is not biologically viable. The smelt population is not recovering; it continues to decline. Let’s honestly ask ourselves ‘is this solution effective or is it time to quit wasting money, quit wasting water and try another science-based solution?”

Patrick Cavanaugh2016-05-31T19:30:25-07:00May 8th, 2015|

Temperance Flat Reservoir Offers Solution for Flood Years

And Yes, Flood Years Have Always Followed Drought Years

By Patrick Cavanaugh, Editor

Temperance Flat Reservoir offers a big solution for flood years, said Ron Jacobsma, General Manager of Friant Water Authority, who spoke at a special California State Board of Food and Agriculture meeting in Sacramento recently regarding solutions to California’s water situation as we may be entering a fourth year of drought.

“The bottom line: We are not in a position to waste any more flood water. We have groundwater overdrafts all over the Valley, and if we don’t start balancing our water supplies from a regulatory perspective, but also managing when we have these generous years, we are going to end up with tens of thousands of prime agricultural land taken out of production,” said Jacobsma.

Jacobsma was focused on the proposed Temperance Flat Dam that would provide an additional 1.25 million acre feet of storage behind Millerton Lake and Friant Dam which holds only 400,000 acre feet.

“We have spilled over Friant Dam more than one million acre feet of water over the years, which ends up going to the ocean, and Temperance Flat would stop this,” said Jacobsma.

“What Temperance Flat will do is enable California to use the water twice. How do you use it in a non-consumptive way for the environment? We can create cold water pools and augment flows on the San Joaquin River. But then we can pick the water back up and move it to where it needs to go, either as irrigation supplies that year, or to recharge groundwater basins. And we have to get in the other side of the aisle–if you will–and start thinking about this,” noted Jacobsma.

“We’re not talking about grabbing as much water as we can even if we really can’t define why we need it,” said Jacobsma. “We need to say, “Let’s find a way to make the consumptive part go to traditional uses like urban and agriculture, but let’s see how we can manipulate the system with more infrastructure so that we can better manage our existing supplies and get ecosystem benefits as well.”

“That’s really the whole fundamental basis of Chapter 8, which refers to the public benefits of the Water Bond that was passed overwhelmingly by voters last November. We have to find that balance because the public is going to pay only for the public benefits.”

“It would be nice if the public paid for Temperance Flat for us, but they’re not going to. And if we can provide public benefits, we can build a broader base of support. So our objective on Temperance Flat is to take the flood water, put it in the Friant system, send it within the San Joaquin Valley with partners because we are going to have to move some water around, have some flood control, and get some recreational benefits out of it.”

“But if we are going to spend a billion dollars plus trying to get a fishery on the San Joaquin River that has not been there for 60 years–a fishery that is dependent on cold water–why wouldn’t you invest in Temperance Flat and get multiple uses out of it?”

“It is going to take some time to build those coalitions. First you have to build local support, then regional support, then broader state-wide support. That is the kind of effort that we are going to have to go through,” Jacobsma noted.

Protecting Investment

“The other consideration with regard to Temperance Flat is how we would protect the water it stores. If we get into an operational plan, how do we protect ourselves? If our water users spend more than a billion dollars on surface storage, just to have some regulation or law passed demanding half of the yield, but we’re stuck with that price tag, that’s a huge risk for our guys,” noted Jacobsma.

“So we also need the certainty that whatever we develop will be available for us for a definitive amount of time–you know 40, 50, 100 years,” Jacobsma said. “We have to know that the money is going to be well spent in paying dividends down the road. And we will commit under the operations plan to provide the ecosystem benefits that we agreed to.”

Patrick Cavanaugh2016-05-31T19:30:31-07:00February 9th, 2015|

California has given away rights to far more water than it has

Source: UC Davis News and Information

California has allocated five times more surface water than the state actually has, making it hard for regulators to tell whose supplies should be cut during a drought, University of California researchers reported.

The scientists said California’s water-rights regulator, the State Water Resources Control Board, needs a systematic overhaul of policies and procedures to bridge the gaping disparity, but lacks the legislative authority and funding to do so.

Ted Grantham, who explored the state’s water-rights database as a postdoctoral researcher with the UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences, said the time is ripe for tightening the water-use accounting.

“Given the public’s current attention on drought and California water, we now have an unprecedented opportunity for strengthening the water-rights system,” said Grantham, who conducted the analysis with UC Merced Professor Joshua Viers.

Better information might enable state regulators to better target water cutbacks in times of drought, Grantham said.

Grantham and Viers verified that water-rights allocations exceed the state’s actual surface water supply by about 300 million acre-feet, enough to fill Lake Tahoe about 2.5 times.

The state has allocated a total maximum allowable use of 370 million acre-feet of surface water — more than five times the 70 million acre-feet available in a year of good precipitation, according to the researchers’ review of active water rights on record. The analysis was published today (Aug. 19) in the journal Environmental Research Letters.

The scientists said the California’s water-rights allocation system is complicated and backlogged, which contributes to the mismatched accounting. For example, people sometimes take water, apply retroactively for the right to use the water and continue taking it — sometimes for up to a decade — while their applications are pending.

Inaccurate reporting by water-rights holders worsens the problem. Some may even deliberately overestimate so they do not lose as much if cutbacks occur. The result is that in most water basins and in most years, far more people hold water rights than there is water. In the San Joaquin River basin, for example, water-rights allocations exceed the river’s average annual flow by eightfold.

“All those allocations mean that in times of drought, it’s hard to tell who should have to reduce water use, causing delays in issuing curtailments,“ said Viers, director of the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society at UC Merced.

During the current drought, the state water board has for some watersheds ordered curtailments for all water users, to protect fish.

Viers and Grantham, now with the U.S. Geological Survey, are working to iron out issues with its database and make the information available to policymakers.

Patrick Cavanaugh2016-05-31T19:33:30-07:00August 20th, 2014|

Friant Farmers Insist Lawmakers Hammer Out Water Solution

The passage and letter below from the Lower Tule and Pixley Irrigation Districts was released yesterday by Families Protecting the Valley. These districts are Friant contractors and key members of the Friant Water Authority. They are recommending a revision of the San Joaquin River Restoration program to accomplish a ‘live river’ but not decimate the farms and communities of the East Side that have relied on this surface water for decades.

This is a well written and courageous letter, and the directors listed on the correspondence and General Manager, Mr. Dan Vink, deserve praise. We implore the other Friant Water Authority contractors to quickly send a similar letter reflecting the same views, and vote to have the Friant Water Authority to do the same. This issue will be decided in two weeks after the federal legislators return from their recess.

It is rare when we in the Central Valley have an opportunity to be a part of the discussion especially when something positive is being discussed concerning our water use.

In addition to Friant contactors, other organizations (e.g., farm bureaus) that are involved in agriculture or are dependent on this water (e.g., cities, counties, chamber of commerce, etc.) need to also send in letters of support.

Several of our directors have been involved in this effort, and it is a long standing recommendation of FPV to do exactly what is recommended.

The Honorable Senator Dianne Feinstein

United States Senate

331 Hart Senate Office Building

Washington, D.C. 20515

The Honorable Congressman David Valadao

Washington, D.C. Office

1004 Longworth House Office Building

Washington, D.C. 20515

Re: Support for S. 2198 and HR 3964

Dear Senator Feinstein and Congressman Valadao,

The Boards of Directors of the Lower Tule River and Pixley Irrigation District wholeheardedly support S.2198(California Emergency Drought Relief Act of 2014) and HR3964(Sacramento-San Joaquin Valley Emergency Water Delivery Act). Specific to S.2198, we urge passage by the Senate immediately so these bills can be discussed in a joint process with Senate and House representatives.

More important than any of the words in these bills, we support, and insist you and your colleagues begin the process of rolling up your sleeves and working together to hammer out a balanced solution on California water issues. We are in a serious crisis and the partisan bickering, finger pointing blame game back home is doing nothing to solve the problems. It is nonsense and serves no purpose other than to divide the good people of the Valley. We urge you to rise above the petty noise and hammer out a solution. The water supply reductions we are facing this year are having devastating consequences made worse daily by the inaction of the agencies and Congress to find a balanced approach to distributing water throughout California.

We must have a reasonable set of export rules for the Delta. Our districts know the importance of this now more than ever. It is the failure to capture flows in the Delta that is directly causing a zero projected allocation for the Friant Division, on which we rely. The fish agencies and the courts have not been able to establish viable rules in the Delta, and the result is unmitigated disaster for agriculture in California. We expect the eventual drought bill to address this crucial issue in a real way in order to get water to California farms and stop the damage caused by wasteful use of water on fish programs that do not actually serve fish.

HR 2964 calls for a repeal of the San Joaquin River Settlement Act. We cannot unwind the clock and “do away with the Settlement” and anyone who advocates that position never completely understood the settlement issues in the first place. We agree with both of you when you have publicly said that Restoration has been difficult and expensive to implement and that it is time to reassess the plan(See, for example,Fresno Bee, March 8, 2014). The idea of restoring salmon to the San Joaquin in the timeline envisioned at the outset, and with the money it was projected to cost, was always a long shot. We all knew that Restoration was going to be an evolving plan – it is time for it to evolve.

We want to see a viable San Joaquin River for fish, farming and families. If we are going to get there, it is going to take all the parties coming to the table and dealing rationally with the facts on the ground. We welcome that opportunity and insist it is needed to protect the investment in time and money we have all made to date. Repeal is not an option, but reassessment is a requirement. If we are going to have a sustainable fishery program on the San Joaquin River and a vibrant farming economy in the Valley, we must begin the process.

Both of you have shown a willingness in the past to lead on this issue, and that is why we want to support both of your bills, despite having differences with some of their individual terms. We are confident the two of you working together will become a dynamic combination for us to follow once again. The pending release of Reclamation’s revised implementation plan for San Joaquin River Restoration should provide the framework for the discussion.

The impacts facing our collective constituents require we all work together to get legislation passed and changes made. Failure is not an option. Our Districts look forward to working with you and your colleagues to find common sense solutions to serve the interests of all Californians.

Thank You,

Gary Fernandes,  President, Lower Tule River Irrigation District

Frank Junio,  President,  Pixley Irrigation District

cc: Senator Barbara Boxer,  Congressman Devin Nunes , Congressman Jim Costa,  Congressman Tom McClintock,  Congressman Doug LaMalfa , Congressman Jared Huffman,  Friant Water Authority,  Westlands Water District , San Luis and Delta Mendota Water Users Authority , Exchange Contractors

Lower Tule Board : Gary Fernandes, President;  John Roeloffs, Vice President ; Jim Costa, Director ; Tom Barcellos, Director ; Alex Garcia, Director

Pixley Board : Frank Junio, President;  Russell Schott, Vice President;  Bill DeGroot, Director ; Randall Parreira, Director; Neal Westbrook, Director; Daniel G. Vink, General Manager;  Eric Limas, Business Manager ; Beth Grote-Lewis, Assessor;  Alex Peltzer, Legal Counsel

Patrick Cavanaugh2016-05-31T19:38:02-07:00April 15th, 2014|