The funds come from California’s $7.5 billion Proposition 1 Water Bond, approved by the voters last year.

Although it is unlikely that all of the $287.5 million will be used for water purchases to benefit the environment, the Wildlife Conservation Board and the Department of Fish and Wildlife still have yet to determine what they will do with their respective $200 million and $87.5 million bond funding allocations.

The last time California tried a pilot program of purchases of environmental water, it didn’t work out so well.

Interest adds up

Starting in 2000, state and federal water agencies purchased farm water for fish and wildlife using bond funds under a now-defunct state-federal program called CALFED. The Environmental Water Account project was aimed at improving water supply reliability and protecting the Delta ecosystem.

The project followed a major allocation by Congress in 1991: a one-time allotment of 800,000 acre-feet for salmon runs plus another 400,000 acre-feet annually for wildlife refuges without payment for the water. (See page 15). An acre-foot of water – enough to cover one acre of land to a depth of one foot – can supply two to four urban households per year, depending on whether it is a normal or drought year. That same amount can support about one-third an acre of cropland per year.

The use of general obligation bonds to buy water for the environment is controversial because actual financing costs would typically be double the principal amount once interest is included.

Calwatchdog.com spoke with Wes Strickland, a water rights attorney in California and Austin, Texas, about the results of the EWA project. Strickland said EWA was a lose-lose-lose-lose deal for every group involved:

• For environmentalists it did not allocate enough water to alleviate ecosystem stress.
• For farmers it drove up spot market water prices because of reduced supply.
• Southern California cities were thwarted from buying water to bank for dry years.
• State and federal water agencies didn’t accomplish their environmental goals even as the state ran up its budget deficit and exhausted water reserves going into a 2007-2010 court-ordered limit on water pumping.

From this failed experiment, Strickland said California should have learned to make small, incremental water purchases during rainy years to support the environment during years of drought.

$193.4 million

The state and federal taxpayer bill came to $193.4 million for the EWA project, which lasted from 2000 to 2007. More than 2 million acre-feet of water were purchased for environmental uses. (See table below.) According to the California Department of Water Resources:

• $16.8 million came from Proposition 204, a 1996-voter approved state water bond.
• $101.2 million was from Proposition 50 voter-approved state water bond.
• $50.1 million was from the state general fund in 2001.
• $25.3 million came from federal coffers.

Under the program, the government came to dominate the spot market for water.

On average, water purchases under the program made up 43 percent of all spot-market purchases of water each year. By the final year of the program, the government’s purchases comprised 87 percent of all water bought on the spot market.

The average price of water purchased over the seven years was $96 per acre-foot, without bond interest, compared with the current going price of $700 per acre-foot for water transfers from farmers.

At the lower price, the $287.5 million under Prop. 1 would be enough to purchase about 3 million acre-feet of water. As the table below shows, in 2007 California bought 477,000 acre-feet of water for fish runs, and that was deemed insufficient to help migrating fish get to the ocean.

Will there be any water to buy?

Because Lake Oroville has been drawn down below 50 percent of its storage capacity, water cannot be sold by the farmers along the Feather River, which flows into the lake.

The EWA project ended just before the Natural Resources Defense Council filed suit to protect the Delta smelt, prompting court-ordered limits on the amount of water drawn from the fish’s habitat.

Environmental Water Account Purchases, 2001 to 2007

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By Katy Grimes

First there was the bullet train to nowhere. Now there are the tunnels to nowhere.

Gov. Jerry Brown is hell-bent on creating a legacy. Unfortunately, it also appears that most of California’s legislators make decisions based on legacy as well.

But lawmaking by legacy rarely bodes well.

Water wars

Brown announced Wednesday that the state intends to build two large tunnels to move water under the very fragile Delta, from Northern California to Southern California.

Where is Jake Gittes when you need him?

Gittes was the hard-boiled private investigator in “Chinatown,” the 1974 movie about the historical California battle over water. Set in Los Angeles in 1937, “Chinatown” was inspired by the California Water Wars, the historical disputes over land and water rights that raged in southern California during the 1910s and 1920s.

Gittes, played by Jack Nicholson, discovers that water is illegally being diverted, and that that agents of the water department have been demolishing farmers’ water tanks and poisoning their wells.

“Either you bring the water to L.A. or you bring L.A. to the water,” Noah Cross says, played by John Houston. Cross was the movie’s villain, and tried to gain control of all the water in Los Angeles.

It appears that like a character out of the movie, Gov. Jerry Brown has reignited California’s North-vs.-South battle over fresh water.

Water water everywhere, but not a drop to drink

Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar  and Brown held a Sacramento news conference at the California Natural Resources Agency to announce a massive, multibillion-dollar water diversion plan, which many are saying is only another version of the peripheral canal plan that voters rejected in 1982, 30 years ago, during Brown’s last run as governor.

Brown is acting like a woman scorned. “Analysis paralysis is not why I came back 30 years later to handle some of the same issues,” Brown said. “At this stage, as I see many of my friends dying… I want to get s— done.”

How eloquent.

Brown called the plan “a big idea for a big state.” But the plan to funnel water from the Sacramento River to pumps that supply water to parts of Southern California, the Central Valley and the Bay Area, has many worried that Northern California will be faced with shortages.

Farmers, fishermen, and environmentalists, oppose the plan, and rallied at the Capitol. They say diverting Northern California water would be the final death blow to the fragile Delta.

Water Politics

Devastating environmental litigation resulted in cutbacks on one third of all water deliveries to California’s Central Valley, causing agricultural production losses, thousands of jobs, and hundreds of millions of dollars in crops.

Three years ago, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service ordered major pumping cutbacks into the California Aqueduct that delivers water to the state’s farms, based on arbitrary concerns that the giant water pumps killed the Delta Smelt, a tiny fish not even indigenous to the Delta. The Fish and Wildlife Service ordered 81 billion gallons of water, enough to put 85,000 acres of farmland back into production, to flow out to the ocean each year, instead of feeding California’s Central Valley farms.

Instead of fighting to feed California’s crops and farm families, and to repair the state’s agricultural lifeblood, Brown has created another public works project to feed unions and high-cost union jobs.

This is the second giant public works project deal this month that Brown has sealed.  Just two weeks ago, he signed bills to authorize spending to begin on the phony high-speed rail project, which will tear up valuable Central Valley farmland.

Brown’s political vanity is taking precedence over reforms; his need for a legacy is apparently more important than the 37 million residents of the state. Brown should have done the right thing instead.  Because as Chinatown’s Noah Cross is also famous for saying,”Course I’m respectable. I’m old. Politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.”