California Water Governance: Some Questions

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I’ve a chance to get out to California later this year and do some reporting on water issues, so I’ve been doing some reading, trying to get a better feel for where to focus my attention. This is in part driven by my belief that the West’s water issues have become inextricably linked, and to understand problems here in New Mexico I have to better understand the bigger picture.

With that in mind, I’ve a question for the California water wonks in the audience.

I’m currently making my way through the February PPIC report, which makes this point:

Most of the state’s (California’s) water management is highly decentralized, with many hundreds of local and regional agencies responsible for water supply, wastewater treatment, flood control, and related land use decisions. This system has many advantages but has often resulted in uncoordinated, fragmented water and land use decisions that contribute to chronic groundwater overdraft, impairment of watersheds by a wide range of pollutants, ineffective ecosystem management, and rapid development in poorly protected floodplains. Similar coordination failures among state and federal agencies have led to inefficiencies in reservoir operations, ecosystem management, and water marketing, among others.

It is easy to read through the coverage and literature and find a host of specific suggestions for dealing with California’s water problems:

  • more dams
  • ag conservation
  • markets
  • rip out all those damn LA lawns
  • peripheral canal
  • peripheral tunnel thingie
  • throw Westlands under the bus
  • throw the Imperial Irrigation District under the bus
  • throw those stupid bait fish under the bus
  • etc. (this list is in no way exhaustive)

What I’m baffled by is the institutional framework by which California will succeed or fail in sorting out the various choices. Where, in an institutional sense, does the conversation go on by which stakeholders come together to work these issues out?

In Arizona, for example, the Central Arizona Water Conservation District (which runs the Central Arizona Project) provides a framework by which most of the major players in the state’s water world sit down and talk about stuff. This doesn’t mean Arizona’s water problems are all unicorns and cheap beer, but it does provide a broad institutional framework. On a broader regional scale, the institutional structures around the Colorado River Compact provide such a framework. Again, no guarantee of success, but as a journalist it at least gives me a place to start.

What is California’s framework, if such a thing exists?

(Note that one potential answer may be “there is no institutional framework”, which is close to the conclusion I’ve come to regarding the similar set of questions here in New Mexico – sub/ad req. for that link.)

Water in the desert – low flows on the Rio Grande

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NM Drought Monitor

NM Drought Monitor

I’ve been spending a lot of my work days of late in a blow-by-blow rundown of the growing drought conditions in New Mexico:

An already dismal forecast for spring runoff in New Mexico’s rivers has gotten worse, after a dry, windy March sapped the state’s snowpack.

Spring and summer flow on the Rio Grande into Elephant Butte, the river’s largest water storage reservoir, is forecast to be just 33 percent of normal this year, federal forecasters said Wednesday afternoon. That is down from a forecast of 52 percent one month ago.

The steep decline came after a March that combined a near complete lack of precipitation with warm, dry winds that blew away some of the snow before it had a chance to melt, said Ed Polasko at the National Weather Service’s Albuquerque office.

They’re working hard down south to dig a pilot channel simply to make sure the Rio Grande can reach Elephant Butte Reservoir – it has a tendency to plug itself up down there. We’ll get a better idea of the detailed flow forecast next week when the Bureau of Reclamation releases its Rio Grande operating plan, but it’s looking like the river through Albuquerque may only get up to 2,000 cubic feet per second during this year’s runoff peak.

Bosque overbanking, June 2005

Bosque overbanking, June 2005

That’s not much water.

I was reminded of that this morning, going through some old photos of the river in 2005. Our “bosque”, the ribbon of riparian woodlands that flanks the middle Rio Grande through north-central New Mexico, is a lovely place, but it’s an ecosystem on the edge. In its more natural state, before we built dams to store water for human use and to prevent flooding, along with levees and other engineered structures to channelize the water and move it efficiently toward downstream rivers, the Rio Grande would hop its banks in a good spring runoff and wander the valley floor. The result would have been a rich, meandering riparian ecosystem, with clumps of trees and grassy meadows and meandering patches of wetlands.

Most of the cottonwoods you see there now, I’m told, date to the last big flood, back in 1941, which seeded a big cohort of cottonwoods.

This picture was taken during 2005, when a big snowpack gave us a runoff peak north of 6,000 cfs in June. The 6,000-7,000 cfs level is pretty much the limit because of the built environment, especially a railroad bridge south of Socorro at San Marcial. (The Army Corps of Engineers uses the big flood control dam at Cochiti to cut manage the flow peak.) It takes more than that to get water up out of the river channel and back into the woods along much of the river, but there are places where the channel is shallow enough that you get scenes like this, and it’s delightful.

This year, not so much.

 

 

River Beat: Equalization

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From the US Bureau of Reclamation’s April 24-month Colorado River operations plan (pdf):

The April 24-Month Study with an annual release volume from Glen Canyon Dam of 8.23 maf projects a Lake Powell end of water year elevation of 3,662.63 feet. Based on this projected condition and consistent with the provision in Section 6.B.3 of the Interim Guidelines, a shift in Glen Canyon Dam operations to being governed by the Equalization Tier will occur for the remainder of water year 2011. The April 24-Month Study projects a Lake Powell annual release volume of 11.56 maf; however, the projected annual release will be updated each month throughout the remainder of the water year to reflect changing hydrology in order to achieve the operation specified by the Equalization Tier.

Translated: extra water transferred from the Colorado River’s Upper Basin to the Lower Basin this year, a result of a good snowpack in the Rockies. The current forecast calls for Lake Mead to finish the year 21 feet above last year’s elevation.

Rainwater Harvesting, Arizona Style

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Chris Brooks has a post on proposed legislation in Arizona that would have created incentives for large-scale rainwater harvesting and groundwater recharge. The idea was to give people water rights to the resulting water stored in the aquifer.

As Chris notes, there are a couple of problems. First, some of the rainwater you harvest and store underground would have otherwise drained to a river. Where downstream users have water rights. This the classic conundrum that dogs our discussions of the issue here in New Mexico. It’s not free water, and just because it runs off of your city doesn’t mean it’s being “wasted”.

Chris raises a second, much more nuanced and interesting issue:

Looking at the original legislation, it seemed pretty silly to me that you would go to the expense of harvesting rainwater just to put it in the ground, then pump water back out of the ground to provide to customers. Seems a lot simpler to just spend that money buying rain barrels for people they could use to harvest their own water to then use in place of potable water. In theory, that would permit water providers in the area to reduce their pumpage, thereby cutting into the amount of the overdraft. But it doesn’t really work out that way. Having decisions made by thousands of individual homeowners is not how water providers like to manage their water supplies (although to some extent it is kind of like that now). And having current customers reduce usage doesn’t mean that water will stay in the ground, it will just be used somewhere else or at some other time. This also doesn’t create more renewable water that satisfies the requirements of state law, so it can’t help areas that need renewable water to keep growing.

In the end, the legislation went nowhere. Instead, they formed a commission to study the issue!

Talking about adaptation

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Digging through some old files, I ran across this fascinating discussion of climate adaptation in a 2009 Las Vegas Sun interview with Pat Mulroy, head of the Southern Nevada Water Authority:

[W]here we have finally begun to look at how to mitigate climate change and what we have to do in terms of changing our energy habits and where we get our energy from and what kind of cars we drive and the overall carbon emissions, we’ve not had a substantive discussions on how we’re going to adapt.

This is a long-term problem. It’s not going to go away overnight and there are fundamental changes that are going to have to happen in this country. They affect land-use planning, they affect water-resource planning, they affect a lot of things that we just almost are … we can’t get our head around them, and we’re not having that conversation.

While the situation regarding mitigation seems to have changed a bit in the two years since she said that, has the situation changed with respect to adaptation?

One of America’s Great Ballfields

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Oscar Huber Ballpark, Madrid, NM, March 2011

Oscar Huber Ballpark, Madrid, NM, March 2011

Many years ago, as a young pup of a reporter, I was sent to Madrid, NM, on a quiet Saturday to chronicle an old-timers day in the old mining town-turned art colony.

Madrid’s community center sits next to the Oscar Huber Ballpark which, legend has it, was the first lighted baseball field west of the Mississippi. The legend has enough different versions – first in New Mexico? first in the entire US? – that I remain, in professional terms, a skeptic. As in, I’d never put it in the newspaper without a bit more investigation.

But whatever the roots of the story, it is a wonderful ballfield, carved into a hillside at the north end of town. The ballpark dates to the 1920s, and the Madrid Miners were apparently quite the home nine in their day. When I visited for old-timers day, I rounded up a couple of the guys who had played on the Miners and dragged them out to the infield to tell stories. The field was just dirt flecked with little bits of hard black coal – they hadn’t played ball there for years. But the old grandstands were still there, home to Madrid’s annual blues festival.

Lissa and I stopped by last weekend on our way up to Santa Fe to see the new grandstand they’ve just completed – a replica of the old.

Still lovely.