JPA Could Save Temperance Flat Dam

Joint Power of Authority Could Save Temperance Flat Dam

By Patrick Cavanaugh, Deputy Editor

A Joint Power of Authority (JPA) is being formed to help preserve money authorized for construction of the Temperance Flat Dam with the passage of California Proposition 1, the Water Bond in 2014. Joel Nelsen, president of California Citrus Mutual, has been engaged in getting the project off the ground.

“It is unfortunate what has happened to the Friant Water Authority leadership and the lack of suitable talent there to run with it. The situation has adversely impacted getting a Temperance Flat water storage program in front of the California Water Commission, whose nine governor-appointed members are responsible for advising the director of California Department of Water Resources, approving rules and regulations, and monitoring and reporting on the construction and operation of the State Water Project. The Water Commission, which elicits preferred priorities from the agricultural industry, will award bond money in early 2017.

The Water Bond approved by voters last fall designates $2.7 billion for water storage. While this amount will help subsidize the construction of the dam, Nelsen noted there needs to be better organization in its planning, “because when we negotiated money for storage planning, we were set on two locations, Temperance Flat, behind Friant dam and east of Fresno, and Sites Reservoir, north of Sacramento. Of course, all along, we have known that farmers were investing a lot of money into it as well, but you have to have a plan,” Nelsen said.

Nelsen explained the JPA consists of city and county leaders as well as farm industry leaders from Merced to Bakersfield, including those from Fresno, Madera, Kings, Kern and Tulare Counties, and will require everyone’s cooperation to get the job done. “The inability to sustain some leadership at the Friant system right now has stalled our ability to make something happen in that regard.

“If we can use the talent within our counties right now to generate some of the proposals until we have the ability to get additional water experts online, I would give those who are working on the JPA all the credit in the world,” Nelsen said.

2016-05-31T19:27:08-07:00October 6th, 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.”

 

 

2016-05-31T19:30:31-07:00February 9th, 2015|

California Drought Puzzle: Store or Conserve More Water?

(Photo: Paul Chinn, The Chronicle)

 

by Peter Fimrite, SF Chronicle

 

There was a time not long ago when much of civilized society considered each drop of river water that reached the ocean a wasted resource.

That was before environmentalists pointed out the benefits of the outflow to fish, wildlife and the ocean ecosystem, setting off an ongoing tug-of-war between fishermen and farmers in California that has reached a critical stage this year as the state struggles through a drought.

One thing that’s become clear amid the fallow cropland and rationing is that there is not enough water storage in California to sustain all the competing interests. The dilemma has again put a spotlight on the precious water that gets away.

In an average year, rain and snowmelt in California generate about 71 million acre-feet of water, some of which is captured in reservoirs or groundwater basins. An acre-foot is the amount needed to cover an acre with a foot of water, enough to supply an average household for a year.

About 32 percent of the 71 million acre-feet are used for agriculture and 10 percent for urban areas, according to the state Department of Water Resources’ chief hydrologist, Maury Roos.

About 35 percent of the total is reserved by law to help river ecosystems, wetlands and fisheries, and to maintain a healthy flow of water in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta.

That leaves about 21 percent of the total to flow out into the ocean without being used for anything, according to Roos’ calculations.California drought puzzle- store or conserve more water

“That is the segment we can capture more of,” Roos said. “If we could store more of that, we would have a larger water supply.”

Trouble is, nobody in California can agree on how, or even whether, to capture it.

Storage, conservation

Everybody agrees that something must be done to quench California’s ever-increasing thirst. The question is whether the state should spend billions of dollars capturing the water behind dams and distributing it through new pipelines or spend a little less money by maximizing usage through conservation.

A laundry list of proposals, including water recycling, groundwater storage and even cloud seeding, are listed in a working draft of the California Water Plan, a comprehensive blueprint for future management of the resource.

It is nevertheless Gov. Jerry Brown‘s proposal to build twin water tunnels to bypass the delta and take water south that is getting all the attention. The project, which is part of the Delta Conservation Plan, would include restoration of marsh habitat in the delta.

Jason Peltier, the deputy general manager for the Westlands Water District, said farmers generally support the tunnels because the project would free up more water for agriculture.

“Most years there is plenty of water in the system that we can’t get to because of operating restrictions,” Peltier said. “We’ve seen over the last 20 years layer upon layer of regulatory restrictions that have taken away water for humans and allocated it for the environment.”

Problem is, the tunnels could cost anywhere from $25 billion to $67 billion, according to recent estimates.

California’s reservoirs

In a typical wet year, California captures about 10 million acre-feet of water in its reservoirs, about 80 percent of which is held in the state water department’s two biggest reservoirs behind Shasta and Oroville dams.

That’s well below the 43 million acre-feet capacity of the 1,200 reservoirs under the jurisdiction of the state water department. The reason, said Roos, is that the department is required to release water for fish and wetlands management and must also leave space during winters to avoid flood-causing overflows.

More unallocated water would be captured from waterways like the American River in one proposal in a draft water plan. Photo: Michael Short, The Chronicle

Yet, agricultural interests support expanding California’s reservoir capacity by adding 18.5 feet to Shasta Dam and building Sites Dam, near the town of Maxwell (Colusa County), and Temperance Flat Dam, near Millerton (Madera County) on the San Joaquin River.

These proposals, like the tunnels plan, are expensive. The Shasta dam and Sites proposals together would cost about $3.5 billion and add about 2.6 million acre-feet of water to the system, just enough to “take you through one dry year,” Roos said.

Meanwhile, environmental groups mostly oppose the tunnels and water storage projects. The existing dams and conveyance system, they say, cut off the historic salmon and steelhead trout runs and have imperiled other fish populations, like the delta smelt. Instead, they are pushing for water conservation, treatment and recycling plants.

Jon Rosenfield, a conservation biologist for the Bay Institute, said water bond money would be better spent replacing thousands of old leaking water mains around the state, implementing tiered water rates and building storm-water capture and water recycling systems.

“It simply doesn’t make sense for us to be flushing toilets with pristine water transported miles from the Sierra Nevada,” Rosenfield said. “The notion that it just gets used once and then it is gone is crazy.”

Recycling success

Conservationists point to the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California as the model for a successful recycling program. The district has built over the past two decades a wastewater treatment and reclamation system that cleans dirty household water and then filters it into the groundwater for reuse later on.

Tom Stokely, the water policy analyst for the California Water Impact Network, said Los Angeles County now uses less water than it did 30 years ago despite having at least a million more residents.

“It’s really up to the Legislature and the individual water districts to take this up, but if they use up all their borrowing on the twin tunnels there won’t be money left over for these things,” said Stokely, adding that statewide recycling and conservation programs could save 2 million acre-feet of water a year. “We see it as an either-or scenario. Do we have a sustainable water future or do we spend all our resources on costly tunnels and water storage projects?”

None of the various ideas would solve California’s water shortage problems, which are more severe than most people realize, according to regulators.

Capturing more water

California would need six times more water storage than it now has to make it through a worst-case-scenario drought, Roos said. That amounts to an additional 18 million acre-feet of storage. Water analysts at UC Davis estimate that all of the dam proposals together would only add 4 million or 5 million acre-feet, at a cost of $6 billion to $8 billion.

Meanwhile, demand just keeps growing as more people move into the state. It is a situation that can only get more dire as the world warms up, snow in the mountains decreases and droughts become more common.

Ultimately, Californians will have to come to grips with the fact that, no matter what gets done, the state will never be drought proof, said Jay Lund, the director of the Center for Watershed Sciences at UC Davis.

“I think there will be some ability to improve, mostly in terms of giving incentives to store groundwater in wet years and to move water from north to south – efficiencies like that – but you can’t make it rain,” Lund said. “In the end, we will still be living in a semi-arid climate, and we will still have droughts. Most of what we can do is make it easier to prepare for the next drought.”

California’s drought

Find additional coverage at www.sfgate.com/drought.

Peter Fimrite is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: pfimrite@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @pfimrite

2016-05-31T19:38:04-07:00April 8th, 2014|
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