By Ryan Mills
Monday, May 16,
2022
Jamie Traynham has spent nearly half a
century in and around the lush Northern California valley, about 70 miles north
of Sacramento, that is home to her family’s ranch.
As a girl, she and her sister rode their
horses through Sites Valley, and helped build the barn stalls where they raised
livestock to show in local 4-H competitions. As an adult, Traynham and her
husband rent the ranch from her mother and use the land — typically a sea of
green in the rainy season — as a key winter-feeding location for their cattle.
“It’s a beautiful, beautiful valley with beautiful
scenery and history,” Traynham said.
And she hopes that within the next eight
years it will all be under water.
Traynham is no catastrophist counting on
California to soon fall into the Pacific Ocean. Rather, the valley where her
family’s ranch is located also is the site of the proposed Sites Reservoir, a
planned 1.5-million-acre-foot off-stream water storage facility that would be
the first reservoir built in the Golden State since the New Melones
Dam was completed in 1980 north of Sonora.
The reservoir is designed to provide
much-needed water to about two dozen water districts and suppliers up and down
the state who’ve invested in the roughly $4 billion project. The state also is
a partner in the project, and the federal government intends to invest in it as
well, according to project leaders. If all goes according to plan, permitting
will be finished in the next two years, and the reservoir will be built by
2030.
There is little doubt that California
could use the water. The state is in a severe, three-year drought, with all 58
counties under an emergency proclamation. This past January, February, and
March were the driest on record for those three months, according to state data.
Farmers are letting their fields go
fallow, with State Water Project allocations slashed from 15 percent to only 5
percent. Last month, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California
announced for the first time that it was limiting outdoor water use to one day
a week for its six million residents, with threats of massive fines for
providers who fail to impose the restrictions. A Los Angeles
Times headline in April declared that
Southern California “cannot afford green lawns.” The water district’s general
manager told the paper, “We’re behind on precipitation. But it’s the changing
climate that we cannot rely on anymore.”
The fight over water in California pits
two distinct ideological visions against one another.
On one side are progressive
environmentalists who view water as an increasingly scarce resource, and who
call for reining in modern lifestyles, prioritizing conservation over new
water-storage projects, limiting greenhouse gas emissions, and protecting
endangered species. A coalition of environmental and tribal groups that
subscribe to that view have gathered more than 50,000 signatures on a petition
to kill the reservoir project, citing the alleged harm that would be done to
certain species of fish in the nearby Sacramento River, among other concerns.
On the other side are water-abundance
advocates who believe that even in years of drought California receives
more than enough precipitation to support both its farmers and urban residents,
if the water is managed well. They champion innovation and an “all of the
above” water strategy, including constructing new water-storage facilities and
desalination plants, in addition to recharging aquifers, recycling wastewater,
and conserving stormwater runoff.
To the water-abundance crowd, California’s
drought — or at least the water shortage leading to fallow fields and a war
against green lawns — is “man-made,” the result of environmentalist lawsuits,
government “green tape,” and weak political leadership.
“It’s a long-term problem caused by
long-term inaction,” said Steven Greenhut, a California-based senior fellow at
the free-market R Street Institute, and the author of the book Winning the
Water Wars.
Rather than focusing on scarcity and
limiting peoples’ water use, water-abundance advocates argue that California
should model for the world how to increase water supply in an environmentally
responsible way.
“California shouldn’t be in this
predicament. We should have so much water abundance in this state that
everybody’s got water fountains in their front yards,” said state assemblyman
Devon Mathis, an inland Republican who has been helping to lead a statewide
effort to establish an ongoing funding stream to pay for new water projects.
But California is nowhere near achieving
water abundance. For the most part, the environmental groups have been winning.
Since California’s last reservoir was built, the state’s population has
skyrocketed from about 24 million to nearly 40 million.
“The environmental justice lobbies are
extremely powerful in the state of California,” Mathis said. “They are loud.
They have a lot of funding. And they are very large in the Democrat-majority
cities.”
But for the first time in more than 40
years, the proposed Sites Reservoir offers Californians an opportunity to
increase their water-storage capacity, and to provide more flexibility in
managing the entire state’s water system.
“This project is probably the largest and
most significant opportunity to improve our statewide water management of any
opportunities that are out there currently,” said Jerry Brown, executive
director of the Sites Project Authority, and of no relation to the state’s
former governor of the same name. “I’m 100 percent confident that the Sites
Reservoir will be built. It must be built. It is absolutely necessary for our
future water management in California.”
Traynham is the authority board’s
treasurer and a strong supporter of the reservoir, which she sees as critical
for the region’s farmers and for the state as a whole. In addition to running
cattle, Traynham and her husband farm rice and walnuts nearby. They’re not
planting most of their rice paddies this year to preserve water for their
walnut trees, she said.
In her mind, sacrificing her childhood
home — where her mom still lives — is necessary to ensure her rural community’s
survival. But building the reservoir would still be bittersweet, she said.
“When it starts to flood, the whole valley
where I spent basically 45 years riding, driving, walking back and forth, every
nook and cranny, bend in the creek, you won’t ever be able to see it again,”
she said. “The scenery of your life is gone. It is changed forever.”
Building Support for the Sites Reservoir
The idea of flooding Sites Valley to
create a new water storage facility is not new. It’s been studied and
considered for over 50 years.
Traynham said earlier efforts by state and
federal authorities to build the reservoir went nowhere, because the plans
essentially called for shipping almost all the collected water to cities in
Southern California. She said the message to the locals was, “We’re going to
come, build this reservoir, kick you off your land, and you’re going to get
nothing out of it. And we’re going to ship it down to L.A.” That proposal
struggled to get broad political support, and “it just kind of sat there,”
Traynham said.
The proposed reservoir got a new breath of
life starting about 15 years ago, when local water districts, struggling with
water shortages even then and looking for new ways to secure water, took
control of the project. In 2014, California voters overwhelmingly approved
Proposition 1, the Water Quality, Supply, and Infrastructure Improvement Act, a
$7.1 billion bond that dedicated $2.7 billion for water storage, dam, and
reservoir projects. Sites is the largest proposed water storage project
eligible for state funding.
Under the current plan, the completed
Sites Reservoir would provide an “annualized yield” of about a quarter-million
acre feet of water each year to a mix of rural and urban water agencies across
the state. That’s down from about a half million acre feet under a previous
plan. For perspective, a single acre foot of water is enough to supply about
two homes for a year.
The Sites Reservoir wouldn’t solve all of
California’s water shortage — there is no silver bullet water project that
would — but proponents say it is an important piece of the puzzle.
Every year, Californians use about 40
million acre feet of water, with farmers using about three-quarters of that to
irrigate their land. The state actually averages about 200 million acre feet in
precipitation every year, but more than half that evaporates, according to a
report in the nonprofit
CalMatters news site. And the rain doesn’t
always fall where the most people and farms are; the less populated northern
half of the state tends to receive more rain than more bustling but drier
southern half. As a result, California relies on a complex network of dams,
reservoirs, canals, and pumping stations to move water where it’s needed.
Sites proponents paint their project as an
environmentally friendly opportunity to create a new, reliable, dry-year water
supply. It will be an off-stream reservoir, meaning it won’t require damming
the nearby Sacramento River. It will instead divert water from the river only
during periods of high flow in the winter. Most of the water will come from
rain runoff.
“It’s in an ideal location,” Traynham
said. “To build this reservoir it only requires one major dam and . . . seven
saddle dams, very little dam construction, because it is already a natural
bowl.”
The reservoir is expected to help with
flood control, and it would likely create a new habitat for local wildlife.
Anywhere from 20 percent to 40 percent of the project would be dedicated to
ecosystem enhancement and environmental benefits, Brown said. But that doesn’t
mean the environmental justice groups are on board.
A coalition of environmental and tribal
groups have gathered more than 50,000 signatures in opposition to the
reservoir. They claim the Sacramento River is already over-tapped, and that
building the reservoir will destroy critical habitat in the Bay-Delta
watershed, diminish traditional tribal resources, and undermine California’s
efforts to combat climate change.
Doug Obegi, director of the National
Resources Defense Council’s California River Restoration and Water Division
program, has argued that the project would cause “unreasonable harm” to the
salmon and Longfin Smelt populations, the Sacramento River, and the Bay-Delta
ecosystem. The water that would come from the reservoir would be expensive,
Obegi wrote in a
blog post in August, and “large scale water
recycling projects are far more cost-effective.” California, he wrote, has an
“excessive and unsustainable demand for water.”
“The proponents of Sites are savvy
myth-sellers,” he wrote, “but it’s clear that this project harms salmon and the
environment, and that it will not meaningfully address future droughts.”
Greenhut agrees that environmental
concerns need to be addressed when building new water projects or expanding
existing facilities. But the era of reckless building is over in California,
and it’s still exceedingly difficult to build even the most sensibly designed
projects, even after years, sometimes decades of studying the environmental
impacts, he said.
“You’re always going to find some impact
of any construction project,” Greenhut said. “But at a certain point you weigh
the costs and the benefits. And I think as we’re facing a harsh drought that
the benefits of storing more water should be on everyone’s mind.”
Water Scarcity or Water Abundance?
Despite environmentalist pushback and the
power of the eco-justice lobby in California, recent polling has found that
increasing the water supply and drought relief are popular among voters.
A statewide survey last fall conducted by
the group More Water Now found that 82 percent of respondents believe that California’s
water supply and drought relief are either absolutely or very important, in
line with concerns about jobs and the economy, the cost of living, and
homelessness. The survey found little partisan divide on the issue.
Ed Ring, co-founder of the conservative
California Policy Center and a leader with More Water Now, a coalition that
supports investing in modern water infrastructure, said opponents of a
water-abundance strategy feel a “moral imperative” to lower the middle-class
lifestyle.
“The ideological battle is between people
who want scarcity and the people that believe that there is such a thing as
sustainable abundance, that a middle-class lifestyle can be sustainable,” Ring
said. “And in a society as wealthy and innovative as California, we ought to be
setting an example to the world of how to build and maintain a sustainable
abundance, not how to cram our lives down with rationing and scarcity.”
An “all of the above” water strategy would
include building more reservoirs like Sites, but also would include
conservation and recycling efforts generally favored by environmental groups.
Orange County, for example, already has an innovative wastewater recycling
facility, and expects to be recycling 100 percent of the community’s wastewater
by early next year.
“You can drink it. I drink it. When we
have tours we drink the water,” said Steve Sheldon, president of the Orange
County Water District. He said they built the recycling plant because of
“entrepreneurship and ingenuity,” and to make the district less reliant on
imported water. He said recycled wastewater should be a bigger part of the
state’s water mix, but it’s not enough.
“You can’t get out of a drought doing
that,” he said. “That is just having a water-scarcity perspective, which
actually is control. It’s not about water, it’s about control.”
Ring also is a proponent of capturing and
conserving stormwater, but he’s skeptical of recent claims by the Pacific
Institute that the state could collect and sequester up to 3 million acre-feet
of storm water in a wet year.
Water abundance advocates also are
proponents of building more plants to desalinate ocean water, like the massive
Poseidon Water plant that’s been operating in Carlsbad since 2015, producing 50
million gallons of drinking water daily and meeting 10 percent of San Diego
County’s water demand. Although desal represents a small percentage of the
state’s water mix, Ring said it’s important because it offers a dependable and
perpetual source of supply. The vice president of Poseidon Water has called the
Pacific Ocean “the largest reservoir in the world.”
But environmental groups oppose
desalination plants, too, arguing that they are too expensive to operate,
consume too much energy, can suck in sea life through their water intake pipes,
and discharge salty brine back into the ocean. Proponents of the plants say
those concerns are overblown; the energy required for the plant is a fraction
of California’s overall energy use, and the threats to the ocean and ocean life
at the discharge sites are minimal. And desalination plants can be approved and
built much faster than a large reservoir, like Sites.
A new Poseidon desalination plant proposed
for Huntington Beach is backed by Governor Gavin Newsom. But last month the environmental
staff of the California Coastal Commission recommended denying approval for the
plant, which would produce enough water for 16 percent of the homes in the
Orange County Water District. They deemed the project susceptible to sea-level
rise, and harmful to fish and bird habitats. The Coastal Commission officially
rejected the plan on Thursday, possibly ending Poseidon’s efforts there.
While radical environmentalists deserve
much of the blame for California’s water shortage, Ring said he’s learned
through his More Water Now advocacy that the coalition opposed to a water
abundance strategy is broader than that. He said it also includes: hedge funds
that hold water rights that increase in value when water is scarce, large
agrobusinesses that can absorb high water costs to drive out smaller
competitors, water-enforcement professionals, and even manufacturers that
profit by selling low-flow appliances to consumers.
“We knew there were other sources of
opposition, but we didn’t realize how powerful they were,” Ring said. “There’s
a lot of bureaucratic momentum, there’s a lot of corporate momentum, there’s a
lot of financialization, people that want to trade water futures. None of these
people want water abundance.”
More Water Now was trying to get a citizens’
initiative on the ballot this year that would dedicate 2 percent of the state’s
general fund — or about $3.5 billion per year — to projects to increase
California’s water supply. The group has since shifted its campaign to 2024.
Supporters of the initiative say the key is going around the Democratic
legislature.
“The polling data is there,” Mathis said.
“If we can get this on the ballot, it will pass.”
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