Monthly Archives: March 2011

I was startled at Dr. Gleick’s editorial in the Sac Bee saying that the PPIC report lets ag off the hook for solving California’s water scarcity. I get that Dr. Gleick’s complaint is that the PPIC report doesn’t emphasize agricultural water conservation enough. But my consistent, recurring thought as I read the PPIC report was “Oh man, ag is NOT gonna like that.” My read was that extracting water from ag was a consistent theme throughout the report, starting in the first paragraph of the Executive Summary.

The third sentence of the Executive Summary, right after ‘things are bad’ and ‘everyone wants more’ is:

At the same time, the state’s economy no longer depends as directly on water to generate wealth: agriculture, which still consumes the lion’s share of water, represents a small fraction of overall employment and economic output, and manufacturing accounts for only a small fraction of total water use.

This is not pro-ag sentiment; it goes straight to one of ag’s favorite myths, that they’re an economic powerhouse in the state. And if ag isn’t a big part of the economy, perhaps it isn’t a bad thing if the water they’re using now goes to other things. Other parts of the report echo that.

In chapter 7 (p 317-322), the report recommends putting both the reasonable use clause and the public trust doctrine to work. Under the heading “Reallocating Water for the Environment” they talk for ages about the two doctrines, and end up saying they are necessary “for responsive adaptation to changing conditions.” The writing is still a little soft, but the truth of the world isn’t. If we “reallocate water for the environment” it will come from ag, because it surely won’t come from urban. Five pages about how legal it is to do that is not pro-ag. (Page 328, on bringing pre-1914 rights and riparian rights into alignment with the rest of our rights system, is a direct challenge to one of ag’s sweeter deals.)

The PPIC report recommends a public goods charge. Right there on page 344, they write define it as “a volumetric charge on all surface and groundwater used in the state”. This is another measure that lands heavily on ag, because they use a great deal of water. Imagine a fee of $10/af-year. Urban households now use somewhat less than an acre-foot a year; that’ll go down in the next decade, but a public goods charge will cost a household $10 or less per year. Farmers use a great deal of water. If Stuart Woolf irrigates his entire 20,000 acre farm in Westlands, he’d buy 60,000 af/year, roughly. He would pay $600,000/year into the public goods fund for water. Recommending a volumetric public goods charge puts ag squarely on the hook for the water they use.

Several aspects of their governance recommendations are about extracting water from ag. Frankly, I think that’s the primary motivation behind a water market they talk about at length. They suggest directly compensating people (like farm laborers) who suffer third-party impacts from water leaving ag. I thought their recommendation to re-examine the lengths of ag water contracts from the projects (currently 40 years) was one of their most dramatic recommendations (page 372). I haven’t heard much chatter along those lines, so it is a pretty bold thought.

I understand Dr. Gleick’s complaint (more on that in the next post), but this is not a document that lets ag off the hook. The entire report is based on the premise that much less water will be used for ag. It discusses legal mechanisms to loosen the water rights of ag users. It provides governance mechanisms for arranging the flow of water out of ag. It proposes that ag pay big dollars to the public goods fund, in proportion to their big water use. The text of the report isn’t quite as direct as this post, but for all of these recommendations, all that is required to see the implications for ag is one more obvious interpretive step. I can’t imagine that ag likes the report any.

If you guys have specific questions about my read on the PPIC report, I’d give them some thought (with a caution that my expertise is not on the ecosystem side of things, so my thought there would likely be: “Huh. Dunno.”)

Otherwise, I’m planning three posts. One responding to Dr. Gleick’s critique in the Bee. One on my take on the proposed governance structure. One on the potential to implement a public goods fee. If you want more than those three posts, you should ask.

A judge invalidated the incidental take permit for the Scott and Shasta Rivers? Good. That was always a horrible idea. The Department of Fish and Game was bending over for the ranchers in the Scott and Shasta Valleys, saying that if they signed on to the valley-wide take permits for endangered coho salmon, they didn’t have to get separate take permits for each of their own diversions. But the ranchers might still see restrictions on their operations, even under the more lenient valley-wide permit, (because they damn near de-water whole stream reaches) so they hated it anyway. If everyone is going to hate a compromise, then you might as well scrap it and have winners and losers. That way at least someone will be getting what they want.

By the way, this quote comes at the end of the article.

Park declined to say whether the groups would begin targeting individual landowners. Etna, Calif., rancher Jeff Fowle acknowledged there’s a risk of such suits, but he said landowners have taken many measures to protect fish and have only diverted water in accordance with their adjudicated rights.

…

Ranchers have put in Fish and Game-designed fish screens and permanent rock weir structures so they don’t have to use push-up dams, Fowle said.

You might not know what a push-up dam is. I didn’t. We didn’t learn about push-up dams in my engineering classes. Turns out they aren’t real technical. A push-up dam is when a cowboy gets his tractor out in the spring, and pushes the gravels in the streambed up to form a hump across the stream. Water stacks up behind the loose hump of gravels so the rancher can divert it to flood his pastures. Those gravels maybe had salmon eggs or hatchlings in them, but fuck ’em. The tractor probably crushed them, and they wouldn’t have lived anyway, since the push-up dam completely dewaters the downstream reach until the water reaches high enough to start coming over the gravel hump.

A push-up dam is such an outrageous violation that a local guy should know better than to mention it to the press. That’s the kind of thing that makes me wish for very strict, very personal application of the ESA in the Scott and Shasta river valleys. The valley-wide incidental take permits were too good for the ranchers up there. I’m glad a court invalidated the concept. Now I’d like to see some real enforcement up there, keeping tractors out of rivers.