California’s Central Valley constitutes 1 percent of the agricultural land in the United States yet it harvests nearly a quarter of the nation’s farmed products.
The 50-mile wide, 450-mile-long breadbasket is irrigated by an intricate series of river impoundments and canals that are regulated by federal and state agencies.
California, like much of the West, withered during a multi-decade drought that, over its past three years, featured the region’s driest span on record.
Water was so scarce that Central Valley irrigation was often scaled back with farmers forced to rely on groundwater, where and when available.
But now the valley, like much of California, is flooded after a three-month spasm of “atmospheric rivers” swamped previously parched farmlands, citrus orchards, nut groves, and livestock grazing pastures.
With a record snowpack in the Sierra Madre Mountains looming to the east, a spring and summer of sustained snowmelt flooding await. As this “excess” water seeps into the sea, meanwhile, San Diego is paying $38 per acre foot to desalinize seawater.
Little of winter’s abundant rains and snowpack will be impounded and retained for use in a future where, as California’s hydrologic record confirms, drought is certain.
All this water will flow into the sea over soil that was dust months ago and will be dust again because there is little additional capacity to impound or divert water for storage in Central Valley despite dozens of water retention and flood control projects over the decades being proposed and, in some cases, tentatively approved.
In essence, key regional water storage projects are drowning in paperwork, Central Valley water district managers and farmers told a Congressional panel on April 11 during a two-hour field hearing at World Ag Expo in Tulare, California.
The hearing before the House Natural Resources Committee’s Water, Wildlife, and Fisheries Subcommittee was staged by the chamber’s Republican leadership to kickstart $10 billion in projects stymied in permitting, opposed by Democrats, and entangled in federal regulations being aggressively applied by the Biden administration.
Two Bills To Stem Regulatory Flood
House Republicans are backing two bills they say will help California’s Central Valley and water managers throughout the West advance water infrastructure projects.Central Valley’s three river basins—Sacramento, San Joaquin, and Tulare Lake—comprise the Central Valley Project (CVP), which is managed by federal agencies and under California State Water Project (SWP) regulations.
The CVP includes 20 dams and reservoirs that hold nearly 12 million acre-feet (AF) of water, including about 5 million AF to irrigate about 3 million acres, or roughly one-third of the agricultural land in California.
Central Valley WIIN projects include a $2 billion approved plan to raise Shasta Dam by 18-and-a-half feet to store an additional 634,000 AF, a $4 billion plan to build the preliminarily endorsed 1.5 million AF Sites Reservoir, and $23 million to build the proposed 8,000 AF Seaborne Reservoir.
The proposed water storage reservoirs have all been extensively litigated, especially in reference to the federal Endangered Species Act (ESA).
All CVP waters are subject to “biological opinions” (BiOps) regarding two ESA-listed species—the 3-inch Delta smelt, regulated by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), and salmon, regulated by the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS).
The two BiOps require Shasta Dam to meet flow requirements for smelt and salmon “with some water requirements for each conflicting with the other,” according to Valadao’s bill, which occurred when the USFW demanded Shasta release water when it was at 50 percent capacity for a winter salmon run at the same time that NMFS was ordering a halt to releases to protect delta smelt.
In late 2019 and early 2020, the Natural Resources Defense Council and California filed separate lawsuits challenging the updated BiOps for raising Shasta Dam and enlarging its Sacramento River impoundment claiming the project violated federal and state ESAa.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration issued a new state Incidental Take Permit for the SWP, creating conflict and uncertainty about the Shasta project.
The Biden administration is now insisting on new reviews of the 2019 USFWS and NMFS biological opinions in the CVP, which would require Shasta Reservoir to provide temperature controls downstream, new spring outflow requirements, and changes to water export amounts.
With the Shasta Dam Raise effectively halted, the CVP’s Los Vaqueros expansion and Sites Reservoir project are in the regulatory pipeline limbo because the Biden administration is seeking new BiOps.
The proposed “WATER For California Act” would uphold the 2019 BiOps and essentially greenlight the projects to bypass the red tape.
Bureaucratic Tyranny
The simultaneous contradictory release-don’t-release directives from two federal agencies are the inspiration for the second bill on the field hearing’s agenda, HR 872, the proposed “Federally Integrated Species Health Act,” or FISH Act.Introduced by Rep. Ken Calvert (R-Calif.) and six California co-sponsors, including Democrat Rep. Jim Costa, the FISH Act would consolidate all ESA regulations under the USFWS.
“The current structure of two federal regulatory agencies adopting single-species and uncoordinated BiOps can lead to a contradiction of management operations for water projects,” the bill states, citing as examples the CVP and the Klamath Project in southern Oregon.
The purpose of the bill is to ensure “two agencies don’t conflict with one another,” House Natural Resources Committee Chair Rep. Bruce Westerman (R-Ark.) said, reading from the bill memo.
“I am going to read that again,” he said, “we need to pass a law to ensure two agencies regulating endangered fish species don’t conflict with one another, by consolidating them into one agency.
“We’re in the greatest country in the world,” Westerman continued, “and we’ve got two different agencies trying to manage fish species in two different ways and it creates gridlock and a grinding halt. We can do much better than that.”
San Joaquin River Exchange Contractors Water Authority Executive Director Chris White called HR 872 “long overdue” and said adopting it would be “a win-win for the fish, the environment, the federal government, and stakeholders.”
Rep. Doug LaMalfa (R-Calif.) said the bill may not be necessary if the regulatory reforms in HR 1, an omnibus energy package adopted by the House last week, advance through the Senate.
But regulatory over-reach is endemic across the spectrum of federal affairs, he said.
“Why can’t we have one-stop shopping for permits?” LaMalfa asked. “It’s just a constant spanking line of having to go through all these lettered agencies in order to get anything done.”
Friant Water Authority Chief Executive Officer Jason Phillips blamed Congress for forcing commerce, industry, and consumers to endure “spanking lines” of bureaucratic abuse.
“To reallocate water away from communities and people to comply with old environmental laws, [those] decisions were made by unelected agency staff” in Washington, he said, “delegated the responsibility for the most significant policy area we face in the state of California—how to best manage the state’s limited water resources”—by a Congress that failed to do its job.
Phillips praised both bills because they place “accountability for creating man-made droughts on elected officials.”
“We are dealing with agencies, we have to call it out as it is—these are simply the lords of scarcity,” Rep. John Duarte said. “They gain power over us by keeping us on the edge of privation.
“Yet we’re taking God’s probably greatest agricultural gift, the largest watershed in the world.
Not Acts Of God But Of Man
Chair Rep. Chris Bentz (R-Ore.) said with 40 million people, 15 percent of the nation’s GDP, and 70 percent of its domestically grown fruit and vegetables, “California is obviously terrifically important to America.”Valadao said sustaining the Central Valley’s $22.5 billion agricultural output is not just critical to California’s economy but to feed the nation.
“Food security is national security. Without a reliable water supply, our ability to feed the nation will be in jeopardy,” he said.
“While we cannot control the weather, we can control the laws and regulations that govern our water and ensure we are using it with the most common sense possible.
“If we don’t take time to address some of the misguided policies that prioritize fish over people,” Valadao continued, “the entire country will be in trouble.”
Bentz and Westerman said Department of Interior Secretary Debra Harland was invited to the hearing but declined. Also invited were representatives from the Department of Commerce, the Bureau of Reclamation, USFWS, NMFS, and the California Fish and Game Department.
“That is disappointing and unacceptable,” Westerman said, noting he’ll be sending “a letter to Appropriations [House Appropriation Committee]” regarding the budgets for “those agencies that don’t have time for Congress.”
All but one subcommittee Democrat, Costa, “chose not to come,” he said.
Bentz said federal agencies submitted written statements that they do not support either bill but did not elaborate on why.
Tehama-Colusa Canal Authority General Manager Jeff Sutton called such delay and intransigence irresponsible.
“These crises are predictable. It’s going to stop raining again and we’re going to experience droughts, but they’re preventable if we make the right investments,” he said, stressing the sooner the better.
“The system is broken,” Sutton said. “We got to fix it. Both of these bills are steps in the right direction.”
The water is streaming down the hills and into the sea, across floodplains that will soon be dusty flats, said DG Bar Ranches owner Tony DeGroot of Hanford, California.
“God has given us an open door to act,” he said, citing floods in 1969, 1982, and 1997 and fears he is witnessing “another wasted blessing go by.”
“We’ve done it to ourselves,” McClintock said. “We are not suffering from acts of God. We’re suffering from acts of man.”
