By many accounts, California’s efforts to manage the strains placed on its water supplies by the recent and unprecedented five-year drought can be considered an unqualified success. Urban water agencies stepped up to meet the challenge posed by a bold state order: Reduce use by 25 percent. Their creative approaches and sustained efforts helped avoid significant damage to local economies and community well-being throughout the state.
Some of California’s decisions about how to use its water would be relegated to the federal government under a bill passed by the House on Wednesday. Republicans say the bill will bring more water to the parched Central Valley. California’s Democratic senators have promised to fight the bill in the Senate because it weakens California’s ability to manage its own resources. The Gaining Responsibility on Water Act, sponsored by Central Valley Rep. David Valadao (R-Hanford), was approved in the House by a 230-190 vote largely along party lines.
So who had the original sin in California water development — Los Angeles or the San Joaquin Valley?
While LA’s campaign — devious or otherwise — of snapping up almost all of the Owens Valley groundwater rights and diverting eastern Sierra streams to the point that it dried up Owens Lake that covered 17.5 miles long and 10 miles wide with a depth up to 3 feet until 1913, is still part of California’s water war narrative today, Tulare Lake doesn’t even rate a whisper.
The California drought has been declared over for several months, but some may be surprised to learn there are still watering restrictions in effect in Sacramento. “Conservation in Sacramento remains a way of life,” the city’s website read. The city of Sacramento is continuing a policy of holding residents to watering only two days per week this summer, despite the state lifting its emergency drought order. “Yards can survive on two days per week of watering,” the city’s website said.
It could be California’s biggest water infrastructure project in two generations – a plan to build two massive, 35 mile-long tunnels deep beneath the Sacramento San Joaquin River Delta. Dubbed California WaterFix, it would send water from Northern California to farms and cities in the south, bypassing the fragile delta ecosystem. After years of study and fierce debate, the plan could be headed for a turning point in the coming months.
Residents in unincorporated urban areas such as Lincoln Village and parts of Colonial Heights can finally water their lawns a bit more liberally after county supervisors on Tuesday eased water conservation rules that date back to the drought. Most notably, residents can now water three days a week rather than just two. “I can tell you there are several people in my district who were very happy with this decision,” Supervisor Chuck Winn told county staff on Tuesday.
By the end of 2017, toilet water and other wastewater will be used to irrigate a large swath of Central Valley farmland near Interstate 5, an area that is known as California’s agricultural hub because it produces more than 360 products. “As long as we keep taking showers and flushing toilets, we can guarantee you water,” Modesto Mayor Garrad Marsh said at a news event last August to farmers. Treatment facilities in the two inland cities, Modesto and Turlock, will collect the water from sinks, showers, washing machines and toilets, and process it into what’s commonly referred to as “gray water.”
California officials are trying to speed up repairs on Oroville Dam’s battered flood-control spillway. The Department of Water Resources have asked federal regulators to let it demolish and replace an additional 240 feet of the spillway’s 3,000-foot concrete chute before the rains comes this fall, leaving less work for next year. That 240-foot section originally was going to be replaced next summer as part of the two-year plan for repairing the spillway, whose massive structural problems in February sparked the emergency evacuation of 188,000 downstream residents.
The House will consider a controversial bill this week to adjust water policies in California and the West. The “Gaining Responsibility on Water Act,” H.R. 23, from Rep. David Valadao and 11 other California Republicans, would reduce the cost of water delivery contracts and amend the 1992 Central Valley Project Improvement Act to give users more authority over how restoration funds are spent. Amendments to the legislation are due to the Rules Committee today, and the panel will meet on the bill tomorrow evening before sending it to the House floor for a vote.
Cindy Messer has been named acting director of the California Department of Water Resources following William R. Croyle’s retirement effective July 1. Messer formerly was chief deputy director of DWR and will serve as acting director until a new director is appointed. Previously, she was assistant chief deputy director. Before joining DWR in early 2017, Messer was deputy director of the planning, performance and technology division at the Delta Stewardship Council. She has a bachelor’s degree in environmental policy analysis and planning for the University of California, Davis and a master’s degree in conservation biology from California State University in Sacramento.
