Divisive Delta canal now on the fast track
Fears loom that moving water south could devastate, contaminate supply
Mike Taugher
Contra Costa Times
07/03/2009
CLARKSBURG — Chuck Baker grows pears on land his family has worked since 1851 and has a farmer's sensitivity to the plagues of modern agriculture — pesticide regulations, the intrusive hand of federal regulators, the threat to private property posed by wetlands restoration — and, most of all, the need for water.
So, he sympathizes with San Joaquin Valley farmers who are short of water this year, but he also has little patience for the argument being trumpeted by valley politicians: that the problems confronted by valley farmers can be reduced to the simple equation of "fish versus farmers."
"I don't think we'd be in this situation if they paid any attention to their own rules," Baker said. "They're the ones that ruined the fish. Not me, not me who's been irrigating the same piece of land for 150 years."
The "they" Baker was referring to was not so much his kindred farmers, but the state and federal agencies that ship them Delta water. Those agencies, he said, created the ecological crisis by taking more water out of the Delta than they should have.
As Delta pumping increased in recent years, fish populations collapsed and triggered new rules to prevent fish from going extinct. Those rules will affect water deliveries for years, but so far have had a minor impact because shortages this year are mostly due to dry conditions and drawn-down reservoirs.
Now, the solution proposed to keep Delta water flowing south — a peripheral canal — poses a threat to water rights his family has held since statehood, Baker said. It is not something north Delta framers like Baker should have to worry about. They have the law, contracts and water-quality standards on their side.
But given a long record of broken promises and aborted plans, Baker and others say there is no reason to trust the government will protect their rights from the thirst of others, especially the farmers in the San Joaquin Valley.
"They're going to build this canal whether we want it or not," he said. "The best we can do is fight them until we run out of money."
Baker's son, Brett, a 25-year-old UC Davis graduate who represents the sixth generation of his family to live on the same 30-acre orchard, put it this way: "This is being framed as a fish-versus-people issue, when in actuality it's a people-versus-people issue."
Plans to build a peripheral canal, the massive aqueduct rejected by voters 27 years ago to take water from the Sacramento River to pumps near Tracy, have quietly moved in recent weeks to a more intensive phase. Tentative details are emerging, and the environmentalists, regulators and water agencies who are hammering out the plan are coming to broad agreements on how it might be designed and operated.
The version now under consideration would be nearly 50 miles long, 500 feet across at the water's surface and include massive levees that would further widen the path it would cut through the Delta, most likely around its eastern flank.
It would be capable of carrying 15,000 cubic feet of water per second, smaller than the 22,000-cubic-feet-per-second version that was defeated in 1982 but still large enough to do enormous environmental damage if it were run indiscriminately.
The canal is the centerpiece of an ambitious Bay Delta Conservation Plan that is on a record-shattering, and probably unrealistic, schedule to have the studies and permits needed for construction done by the time Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger leaves office after the 2010 election.
Such plans usually take far longer, and the Delta plan is extremely complex. A far simpler habitat plan that focused mostly on housing development in East Contra Costa County, for example, took 10 years to complete.
The Bakers say the canal could divert so much water that it could diminish their water quality by allowing salt to creep into their supplies from the Bay. They are also concerned about plans to recreate marshes on or near their property.
To major water users, some environmentalists and outside experts, however, the conservation plan strategy provides the best chance to halt the downward spirals of water reliability and the environmental health of the West Coast's biggest remaining estuary.
"If we don't resolve this issue it's going to get really ugly," said Jay Lund, director of the Center for Watershed Sciences at UC Davis and an engineer who helped write a pair of influential reports sponsored by the Public Policy Institute of California that recommended a new canal.
Experts at Davis and elsewhere have been eyeing a canal even before the latest environmental and water supply crisis hit the Delta. Those crises have only added urgency.
The problem, as Lund sees it, is that the channels that guide water today through the Delta from Northern California are so vulnerable to their inherent fragility, rising sea levels, floods and earthquakes, that they are certain to fail.
Subsequent flooding could draw seawater into a water-supply system that provides about one-third of the water used in the Bay Area and Southern California.
"Many of those islands are goners. It's just a matter of time," said Lund.
A peripheral canal could secure water supplies for those water agencies in the Bay Area, San Joaquin Valley and Southern California that rely on Delta pumps, and it could reduce or eliminate the damage Delta pumps do to fish populations.
But critical questions remain. Among them: How much water would be left in the Delta to provide fish habitat and dilute runoff and polluted discharges, and how much water would be allowed to flow down the Sacramento River for migrating salmon?
"Until they have an answer to those questions and what the Delta needs they can't possibly develop any of these alternatives," said Russell van Loben Sels, a farmer and the head of a Delta caucus that represents farmers in Contra Costa and other Delta counties.
Still, the plan will have to be approved by regulators, and a handful of environmental groups are helping draft it. Although the parties agreed this week on a range of alternatives to study — a range of options that essentially determine how water will be split between water users and the environment — the results of those studies are unknown, and it is unclear whether they will agree on a plan in the end.
"It will all depend on operating the system very cautiously so that we don't create new environmental impacts, particularly on species like salmon," said Ann Hayden, a senior water resource analyst at the Environmental Defense Fund and a member of the steering committee that is crafting the plan. "This is all a big unknown."
Sixty miles south of the Baker's farm, another Delta farming family is running its own battle near Manteca.
In the south Delta, farmers' adversary is salt. And salt levels, they contend, are made worse by the state and federal pumps.
The problems faced by Alex and Mary Hildebrand provide a cautionary tale for any promises that might accompany a new canal, Delta farmers say.
To protect south Delta agriculture, regulators set a salinity standard in the 1970s and later assigned responsibility for meeting the standard to state and federal government.
Having that responsibility means state and federal water agencies have to adjust their operations or build facilities to limit the flow of salt into the south Delta.
But the Department of Water Resources and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation failed to meet a series of deadlines to do so.
In 2006, state regulators ordered the agencies, yet again, to take steps to prevent those standards from being violated. They even issued a drop-dead deadline, saying they "will not extend the date for removing the threat of noncompliance beyond July 1, 2009."
That date came and went this week with no action. State and federal water agencies blamed recent federal rules to prevent salmon from going extinct for their inability to build salt gates in Delta channels even though it has been clear for several years that they would not be able to meet the deadline.
The state and federal water agencies still have no plan other than to pursue a gate project they have little hope of building, according to testimony during a hearing this week and last week to once again extend the deadline.
It is unclear what, if anything, regulators will do.
"Having protections in place on paper has not served us," said Mary Hildebrand, who farms near Manteca with her father.
