Farmers should Get More Water in California (MercuryNews)

Apr.01, 2009 in Drought, Public Works, Water Crisis

(March 31, 2009, The Mercury News)

Displaying a bowl of minnows and pictures of unemployed farm workers and their families, California congressmen pleaded with their colleagues Tuesday to make an emergency exception to the federal Endangered Species Act.The lawmakers said efforts to protect a 3-inch-long fish, the delta smelt, have led to court-ordered reductions in the amount of water pumped to some farmers in the San Joaquin Valley, leading to fallowed fields and skyrocketing unemployment.

They said even as a drought enters its third year, there is enough water in California to share with the valley’s thousands of farms. Their proposal would increase the diversion of water for those farms.

In 2007, a federal judge ordered federal and state water authorities to reduce the amount of water they pump through the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta in a bid to protect the delta smelt. The finger-length fish is considered a bellwether for the health of the delta, the heart of California’s water-delivery system.

Speaking before the House Natural Resources Committee, several of the state’s lawmakers discounted the drought as the reason for the San Joaquin Valley’s lack of water.

Rather, they said it was a matter of priorities, with the government valuing fish over families.

Rep. Dennis Cardoza, D-Atwater, said thousands of families were moving out of his district. He called the exodus the “Dust Bowl migration in reverse.”

Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Visalia, said the unemployment rate in his district is nearly 20 percent and is nearing 50 percent in some communities.”We’re not asking for a billion-dollar bailout. We’re aren’t even asking for one single dollar,” Nunes said. “All we need is for this committee to move emergency legislation which would allow the delta pumps to return to historic export levels.”

Without such action, the economic devastation will only grow worse, he said.

Experts say the water shortage in California’s Central Valley, the most productive agricultural region in the country, results from myriad factors: the order to reducing delta pumping, several years of below-average precipitation and California’s inability to upgrade its water system to meet the demands of a population nearing 38 million people.

The state has said it will deliver only 20 percent of the water typically allocated for cities and farms this year. The federal Bureau of Reclamation, which operates a separate system to deliver water to farmers, has said it will not deliver any water this spring to farms south of the delta. Farmers north of the delta can expect to get just 5 percent of their contracted amount.

The shortage could force farmers to idle more than 300,000 acres, leading to a loss of about 37,000 jobs. The delta also feeds drinking water to some 25 million Californians, stretching from the San Francisco Bay area to San Diego. Dozens of cities that expect to get less water from the delta this year are considering conservation measures.

Nunes, in pointed comments to the House committee, described the plight of his constituents in the most dire terms. He said the committee has been silent on the issue for two years.

“Failure to act, and it’s over,” he said. “You will witness the collapse of modern civilization in the San Joaquin Valley.”

With that, he offered to submit a fishbowl filled with nine minnows for the Congressional Record. The fish were rainbow smelt, not the endangered delta smelt, which are illegal to possess without a permit.

Rep. Grace Napolitano, D-Norwalk, responded by asking him to take the plastic wrap off the bowl so the fish could get some air, which Nunes did. Napolitano served as chairwoman for Tuesday’s hearing.

The hearing was designed to address the various steps the federal and state governments were taking to address California’s water shortage.

Rep. George Miller, D-Martinez, said some of the lawmakers were “cherry picking history” and ignoring that water has been pumped into the valley at rates that exceeded what was appropriate.

That’s one of the reasons the judge ordered state and federal wildlife agencies to revise how much water should be pumped out of the delta. Most of the pumping occurs from late spring through summer.

“The judge had no choice because the system was run right down to the margins where in fact he did kick in the protections of the Endangered Species Act,” Miller said.

Doug Obegi, staff attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, agreed the water shortage is in some respects man-made, but he said it’s because California has failed to make sufficient investments in alternate water supplies.

He said his organization opposes making exceptions to the Endangered Species Act.

“There are solutions that comply with existing law that protect endangered species and people,” Obegi said. “We can do this without eviscerating protections for salmon, delta smelt and killer whales, all of which depend on a healthy delta.”

(Original Article Here)