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Sunday’s top of the scroll: California water banking plan backfires; increased storage more promising, says editorial

Posted by: Maven on May 31, 2009 at 7:47 am

From Inside Bay Area, this Media News editorial:

There appear to be two fundamental problems that undermine almost any attempt to deliver adequate supplies to users and still protect the Delta: unrealistic water rights and a lack of storage near the Delta pumps.

Former state legislator Phil Isenberg, who chairs the Delta Vision task force, said that the average natural flow of the Delta watershed is 29 million acre-feet. Yet landowners have water rights to 245 million acre-feet. Thus there is always on overabundance of demand for water, many times the supply, complicating the legal obligations to water users.

The second, and arguably most severe, problem confronting California water policy is inadequate storage near the Delta and elsewhere. If there were a large reservoir near the Delta pumps, water could be stored in wet periods for use in dry times, mostly for environmental purposes. Pumping could be temporarily slowed or even stopped to protect fish, and there would not have to be any special water accounts or dysfunctional trading.

Unfortunately, California’s lawmakers do not recognize the severity of the problem and have not approved a major new reservoir for decades, while the state’s population has doubled.

In the meantime, long-term water contracts were signed with the expectation that dams would be built in Northern California. They never were.

As a result, California now faces the prospect of losing much of its agriculture or starving urban users. Perhaps a few dry years might alter our state leaders’ reluctance to invest in water storage, but we remain pessimistic.

Read the full text of this Media News editorial by clicking here.

May 31, 2009 · Filed Under Storage and supply

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