The Fallbrook Public Utility District will use Jennifer Spaletta as FPUD’s special counsel for matters involving Santa Margarita River water rights.
A 5-0 FPUD board vote, Oct. 28, approved the legal services agreement with Spaletta Law. Spaletta replaces Martha Lennihan, who retired.
“We just retained another water rights attorney with a lot of experience and knowledge in the area,” FPUD general manager Jack Bebee said.
The top state agencies that manage water and wildlife resources in California submitted a package of voluntary agreements with water districts to the State Water Resources Control Board on Friday, as an alternative to controversial flow requirements approved in December for the Tuolumne, Stanislaus and Merced rivers. The agreements, hammered out in the waning hours of Gov. Jerry Brown’s administration and favored by Gov. Gavin Newsom, combine increased river flows with a larger set of tools for restoring salmon in rivers that feed into the San Joaquin-Sacramento Delta.
The failing health of Lake Erie, the world’s 11th largest lake, is at the heart of one of the most unusual questions to appear on an American ballot: Should a body of water be given rights normally associated with those granted to a person? Voters in Toledo, Ohio, will be asked this month to decide whether Lake Erie, which supports the economies of four states, one Canadian province and the cities of Toledo, Cleveland and Buffalo, has the legal right “to exist, flourish, and naturally evolve.”
“The judiciary is the safeguard of our liberty and of our property under the Constitution,” said U.S. Supreme Court Justice Charles Evans Hughes in Elimra, New York in 1907. That quote exemplifies the reason that five irrigation districts on tributaries to the San Joaquin River as well as the city of San Francisco filed lawsuits recently against the State Water Resources Control Board. They are defending their water rights. In December, ahead of the Water Board hearing, Governor Brown and Governor-elect Newsom both asked the Water Board to hold off and let the districts, the State, and the federal government finalize the voluntary agreements.
An arbiter has sided with five local tribes in a dispute over what county water officials argued was a request that left them with an unexpected $2.1 million budget deficit after the tribes won back lost water rights. At issue was a one-time loss to the San Diego County Water Authority in 2017. The dispute arose after the federal government restored water rights to the San Luis Rey Indian Water Authority, which represents the tribes, that year. Shortly after winning back water rights, the tribes submitted a request to the county water authorities that would essentially allow them to start collecting money on those water rights.
The State Water Resources Control Board issued updated water rights permits and an updated license which finalizes that part of the Santa Margarita Conjunctive Use Project. The three permits and the license were issued Nov. 20. “It’s a big accomplishment to finally have the underlying permits and water rights for the project,” said Fallbrook Public Utility District general manager Jack Bebee. The Santa Margarita Conjunctive Use Project being pursued by FPUD, Camp Pendleton and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation will enhance groundwater recharge and recovery capability within the lower Santa Margarita River basin and develop a program which will increase available water supplies for FPUD and Camp Pendleton.
For months, the Santa Clara Valley Water District has been preparing for its annual flood awareness campaign. Our multi-language poster full of flood safety tips is hitting mailboxes in areas located in or near flood-prone zones. You may hear or see our new flood awareness ads, with the theme “Climate Changed.” The timing of this message could not be more fitting. The newly released Fourth National Climate Assessment shows that the effects of climate change are already being felt all over the country, including more frequent and intense extreme weather and climate-related events.
Rep. Jeff Denham, one of the nation’s most vulnerable Republicans, is trying desperately to shut down a state water plan that’s widely disliked in his district. But nothing has worked so far. One thing could: Yet another lawsuit between the Department of Justice and the state of California over the issue. Denham first tried to include a provision in a congressional budget bill in July that would prevent a federal reservoir, called New Melones, from using federal dollars to participate in the plan, which would direct greater amounts of water out of his district’s water resources and into the ocean, purportedly to help salmon populations.
They say you can’t get water from a stone, but one man says he can solve California’s water crisis with water from the desert. Scott Slater is the CEO of Cadiz, a California company that owns 45,000 acres in the Mojave, one of the driest places on earth. He says that a few hundred feet beneath the ground surface lies an enormous watershed the size of Rhode Island, about 1300 square miles. He is proposing taking hundreds of trillions of gallons of desert ground water a year and piping it over a hundred miles to the populated suburbs around Los Angeles.
Re “County water move has its costs” (July 1): The San Diego Union-Tribune addressed an important regional question on whether the San Diego County Water Authority’s decades-long strategy to create a reliable portfolio of water supplies is worth the cost. Unfortunately, the story omitted clear-cut evidence that the region’s supply reliability strategy is an unqualified success: Our independent water supplies from the Colorado River are both less expensive and more reliable than supplies from the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which have been cut twice in the past decade by drought.
