Central California residents, long hoping for federal water reform, have begun to see some movement from Washington. 

Rep. David Valadao, R-Calif., has rolled out language designed to “build on last year’s legislation that was loved by farmers and loathed by environmentalists,” as McClatchy reported. “The bill scales back an ambitious San Joaquin River restoration program, speeds completion of California dam feasibility studies and locks in certain water deliveries to Sacramento Valley irrigation districts, among other things. Parts of the bill would not have been accepted by the Obama administration, but the Trump team is different.”

After weeks of fearing the worst, relief washed over vulnerable Republicans hoping to remain part of California’s congressional delegation. Despite a dogged effort by Democrats hoping to capitalize on Donald Trump’s unpopularity in the Golden State, their challengers fell short, leaving most — if not all — of the GOP’s few seats in incumbent hands. 

“Trump’s paltry 33 percent of the state’s popular vote didn’t seem to drag down homegrown candidates,” noted Matthew Artz at the San Jose Mercury News. “Although the GOP lost two seats in the state Assembly, they staved off challenges to several sitting congressmen and appear to have prevented the Democrats from winning back a supermajority in the state Senate.”

Amid nationwide elections that shocked California’s dominant party, the news blunted enthusiasm around its other victories up and down the coast. “Democrats weren’t able to win any of the […] districts they targeted,” the Los Angeles Times reported. “Democrats had hoped to make inroads with the Central Valley’s growing Latino population, but Rep. David Valadao (R-Hanford) and Jeff Denham (R-Turlock) each won re-election in their largely agricultural districts. Rep. Steve Knight (R-Palmdale) also slid into another term in the 25th District, a seat Democrats had aimed to flip. Knight is the last Republican representing L.A. County in Congress.”

Down to the wire

The highest-profile House race in Southern California, however, remained in doubt. “Rep. Darrell Issa’s lead over Democratic challenger Doug Applegate continued to shrink after tens of thousands of mail-in votes were counted through Monday,” according to U-T San Diego. 

“The Vista Republican was ahead of Applegate 50.7 percent to 49.3, according to the latest tally. Another vote update is expected to be released late Tuesday by election officials. Issa led Applegate by 2,871 votes, the thinnest margin since early returns were released after polls closed last Tuesday night. It’s one of the three closest House races in California, according to the Secretary of State. Hundreds of thousands of ballots remain to be counted, though it’s unknown how many are from the 49th Congressional District.”

Win or lose, Issa’s photo finish will have underscored the shifting political sands troubling California Republicans, even in areas that once reliably delivered for party. “The longtime Republican Party bastion of Orange County voted for a Democratic candidate for the first time since 1936, when Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected for his second term,” the Times observed. “The historic loss represents a growing uphill climb for Republicans in California; the party saw registered Republicans in California drop to 26 percent from 29.8 percent, ultimately losing Orange County by almost 5 percent.”

“While traditionally Republican strongholds ultimately delivered Orange County to Mitt Romney in 2012, Democratic inroads expanded in 2016, allowing Hillary Clinton to win.”

A new tone

Nevertheless, Republicans’ success in weathering this election cycle amounted to a vote of confidence in the state party leadership, including party chairman Jim Brulte. Seeking to square its president-elect with its would-be constituents, Brulte offered an election post-mortem that nodded to populism and comity while placing blame for California’s continued struggles on established Democrats.

“The California dream fails when people must choose between a roof and basic necessities, when schools can’t hire the best staff to help launch their kids to greatness, when people feel compelled to abandon the life they have built here for what they hope will be a better future outside the Golden State,” he wrote at the Sacramento Bee. “Democrats have controlled both houses of the Legislature for two decades. This total control of policy making has left many of them out of touch and unwilling to truly lead in a time when we are in desperate need of modification.” A growing number of influential Democrats have raised questions about what the party needs to do to speak more convincingly to lingering economic concerns among the sorts of voters who flipped from Barack Obama in 2012 to Trump this year.

California Democrats have centered around a handful of Republican challengers they hope to tar with Donald Trump’s brush. 

Assemblymen Dante Acosta, R-San Bernardino, David Hadley, R-Torrance and Marc Steinorth, R-Redlands, Assemblywoman Young Kim, R-Fullerton, and state Senate candidate Mike Antonovich have all been hit with the attack, which aims to send them packing by exploiting Trump’s historic unpopularity in-state. “Trump is extraordinarily unpopular in California, even for a Republican in the famously liberal state. Nearly seven in 10 California voters view Trump unfavorably, according to a Field Poll conducted last month. More than half said they hold a ‘very unfavorable’ view of him,” the San Jose Mercury News reported. 

“California Democrats in those races are using a strategy their party has employed in congressional and other contests across the country — spending millions of dollars to link Republican candidates to their party’s nominee for president, even in races where GOP lawmakers have refused to back Trump.”

The Republican nominee has still managed to maintain a hard core of support. But it has been increasingly likely to draw headlines that do little to flatter the candidate. “Supporters of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump staged a protest Tuesday outside the Los Angeles office of attorney Gloria Allred, who represents Summer Zervos — the Huntington Beach woman who claims she was a victim of unwanted sexual advances by Trump,” as the Mercury News noted separately. “Allred and Zervos made headlines Friday when the contestant on Season 5 of ‘The Apprentice’ said during a news conference that Trump kissed and groped her after she approached him about a position in his business empire.”

A state lost

Although the Trump campaign made hay early in the election season by playing up California’s struggles with unlawful immigration, and both the candidate and his team often intimated that they could put the deep-blue state in play with their unconventional approach and populist message, Trump’s stumbles approaching the electoral finish line have put West Coast voters far out of reach. “The controversial GOP candidate’s support has fallen to 30 percent, below the current low-water mark held by George H.W. Bush, who got 33 percent of the popular vote in California in a three-way contest in 1992,” according to ABC 10 News.

“While both presidential front-runners have lost support in the past 17 days, according to a SurveyUSA pre-election tracking poll conducted for KABC-TV in Los Angeles, KPIX-TV San Francisco, KGTV-TV San Diego, and KFSN-TV Fresno, Hillary Clinton’s lead over Trump remains steady at 26 percentage points.” 

But in a reminder that Democrats have not fully addressed voters’ frustrations, Clinton and Trump both dropped three points, while the undecided vote doubled, the station reported.

Team of rivals

Meanwhile, the main target of Trump’s intraparty battles, House Speaker Paul Ryan, has not given up on the Golden State as a critical place to seek and show support. “The Wisconsin representative arrives in California next Thursday and will hold 12 events in seven cities over two days,” the Los Angeles Times noted. “Ryan is expected to campaign with Reps. Jeff Denham, David Valadao and Steve Knight, as well as Scott Jones, who is challenging Rep. Ami Bera. He will also hold events benefiting Team Ryan, a joint fundraising committee.”

“Ryan was already a prodigious fundraiser, raising nearly $50 million this year and transferring more than half to help congressional candidates. But he is barnstorming the nation in the lead-up to the November election. This month alone, Ryan has held more than 65 events in 17 states.”

Despite Ryan’s appeal to sitting Republican representatives in California, the national mood among the GOP has appeared to turn against him amid Trump’s attacks. In a recent Bloomberg poll, for instance, “46 percent of all voters have a negative view of Ryan, and only 37 percent favorable, a drop from earlier surveys this year. More striking, when asked who represents their view of the party, Republicans by 51 percent to 33 percent prefer Trump over Ryan.”

Two months ago, Republican operatives feared that presidential nominee Donald Trump would destroy their chances to

Now things look much brighter for the party after a rough stretch for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. The Senate appears less at risk because the fact that Trump is the GOP nominee doesn’t seem to be held against GOP incumbents. Gerrymandering appears to have left the House Republican majority safe, perhaps until 2022, after the next census.

But in California, at least, the assumption remains the Trump will drag down GOP candidates in congressional races. That’s why the state Democratic Party is seeking in seven swing districts to target Republicans who are “running on the Trump ticket,” according to a party statement last week as it launched the WrongForCA.com website and related social media efforts.

Four of the Republicans are incumbents: Jeff Denham, R-Turlock, Darrell Issa, R-Vista, Steve Knight, R-Lancaster, and David Valadao, R-Hanford.

The other three are businessman Justin Fareed, seeking the seat of retiring Democratic Rep. Lois Capps in the Santa Barbara area; businesswoman Denise Gitsham, who’s going against Rep. Scott Peters, D-San Diego, and Sacramento County Sheriff Scott Jones, who is targeting Rep. Ami Bera, D-Elk Grove

Michael Soller, communications director for the California Democratic Party, likened Trump’s candidacy to a “sick joke.”

The best hope of sinking a GOP incumbent may be in Issa’s district, which straddles north San Diego County and south Orange County and appears to be moving leftward from its traditional Republicanism. Issa only got 51 percent of the vote in the June primary and has a higher-profile opponent than in past elections, former Marine Lt. Col. Doug Applegate. Running against a poorly funded, little-known Democrat in November 2014, Issa took 60 percent of the vote. The former chairman of the House oversight committee has endorsed Trump, while also making clear his lack of enthusiasm for the New York billionaire.

In November 2014, Denham won with 56 percent of the vote. Knight won with 53 percent and Valadao with 58 percent.

GOP could take first CA Democratic House seat since 1998

Of the other three races, the most surprising is the battle for the seat of the retiring Capps. The Cook Political Report moved the race between Fareed and Santa Barbara County Supervisor Salud Carbajal from “solid Democrat” to “leaning Democrat” last week after Carbajal’s campaign released a seemingly credible Tarrance Group poll showing Fareed up 46 percent to 43 percent.

But as the Cook analysis noted, California Republicans have not won a congressional district represented by a Democrat since 1998. That was when then-Assemblyman Steven T. Kuykendall, R-Rancho Palos Verdes, defeated Janice Hahn of the dynastic Los Angeles political family for a seat that had previously been held by Jane Harman, who ran for governor in 1998. Harman defeated Kuykendall in 2000, making him the only House incumbent to lose that year.

Hanh succeeded Harman in 2011.

Despite substantial labors on both sides of the aisle, legislators in the House and the Senate alike have failed to agree on a drought relief package for California, deepening a dispute over where water should flow that seems to have no end in sight.

Dueling bills

In Washington, D.C., Golden State lawmakers have struggled to push a bill through Congress. Last month, Rep. John Garamendi, “whose district abuts 200 miles of the Sacramento River,” had introduced legislation “that would specifically align with Proposition 1, the water bond recently passed by California voters,” the Woodland Daily Democrat reported. “This would allow federal, state and local agencies to coordinate on the implementation of the projects funded and authorized by the bill.” 

Previously, the paper noted, Sen. Dianne Feinstein had “proposed legislation to provide drought relief, but faced so much opposition that she pulled her support.” But Garamendi’s bill in the House, which was identical to Feinstein’s latest effort, drew immediate fire from within his own party; “eight Bay Area Democrats, along with members from Oregon and Washington, released a statement saying they have major concerns with the bills,” the Los Angeles Times reported. House Republicans had passed a bill written by GOP Rep. David Valadao, but, as Feinstein suggested, that piece of legislation would fare poorly in the Senate. Unfortunately for Feinstein, however, the Members attacking the Garamendi bill also announced their opposition to reconciling the House Valadao bill with Feinstein’s in the Senate: “any legislation that emerges from a conference would not be acceptable to many of the diverse stakeholders in our home states,” they concluded, according to the Times. 

Different approaches

The Valadao bill would not go down to defeat for lack of trying. Republicans “successfully put key pieces of Valadao’s bill into an energy bill, to get it into conference negotiations with the Senate — over the objections of nearly all of the state’s Democrats,” as The Hill observed. Valadao’s bill would set “minimum pumping volumes and new standards for when endangered species concerns can override pumping — something the Democrats say amounts to gutting the law.” By contrast, “Feinstein’s bill doesn’t dictate volumes, but gives federal officials more flexibility in how they make water and species decisions.”

Nevertheless, Feinstein did fill the legislation with big budget items. “It authorizes $1.3 billion for desalination, water recycling, storage and grants,” as McClatchy noted. “The money provided includes $600 million for projects that could include constructing Temperance Flat or Sites Reservoir, in the Sacramento Valley, and raising Shasta Dam.”

But the first hearing her bill encountered largely served only to spotlight the intractable differences between water’s opposing camps. “The Senate subcommittee hearing itself, while laying the procedural foundation for legislation to advance, did nothing to resolve any of the conflicts,” McClatchy went on. “No more than one or two senators on the 13-member committee were generally present during the hearing, and of some 18 questions asked of the witnesses, only two touched on California.”

Presidential posturing

While Donald Trump flatly declared “there is no drought” at a recent Fresno rally, the Democrats’ own presidential contenders have failed to do much better on the California campaign trail. “Bernie Sanders’ campaign did not respond to repeated requests for the candidate’s position on California water issues,” as the San Francisco Chronicle reported, while Hillary Clinton’s camp merely referred to a prior response she had “made to a Southern California television reporter asking whether she thinks more water should be sent from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta to farms and cities in the south.”

Neither Democrat, however, has shied away from making broad promises. “Both Sanders and Clinton have proposed hundreds of billions of dollars in new infrastructure spending that could update the West’s water systems, as well as aggressive plans to battle climate change, which intensifies Western droughts,” the paper added. 

Reps. Jeff Denham, R-Turlock, and David Valadao, R-Hanford, expressed confidence that they can secure a vote on the so-called ENLIST Act, which has been stalled in committee for months. The Act, as the Los Angeles Times reported, “would allow people brought to the United States illegally as children before 2011 to become lawful alien residents if they complete a term of military service.”

Although Denham and Valadao, the Times added, rank “among the most outspoken members of their party pushing for comprehensive immigration overhaul,” their focus on ENLIST reflected a broader unwillingness among House Republicans to tackle the issue this election season — whether in pieces or as a whole.

Running out the clock

The hands-off position was freshly cemented by newly elected House Speaker Paul Ryan. To help secure the backing of the House Freedom Caucus, which has depicted comprehensive immigration reform as a concoction of big business and big government, “Ryan pledged he would not move an immigration reform overhaul to the floor unless it was backed by a majority of House Republicans,” as The Hill recalled.

Ryan, The Hill noted, “was loosely involved with talks about immigration reform in the House in 2013. At the time, a bipartisan group of House lawmakers was working to put together a comprehensive immigration overhaul. Ryan wasn’t part of the core group, but did have conversations with its members.” Leading Republicans have sometimes been burned by their support for that effort. Sen. Marco Rubio, for instance, has had to pivot away in order to shore up his right flank and seize an advantage against main primary season rival Gov. Jeb Bush.

Balance and blame

Ryan, for his part, did not disavow outright his preference for a so-called “pathway” to citizenship for many unlawful and undocumented immigrants. But in recent remarks on the CBS program Meet the Press, he tried to indicate that he actually preferred a path to “legal status” instead of outright citizenship, as the Associated Press noted:

“Legal status versus citizenship is an important distinction, partly because only citizenship confers the right to vote. His office said Ryan supports ‘earned legal status,’ noting that this could eventually lead to citizenship through existing channels.”

At the same time, Ryan blamed president Obama for his reluctance to proceed with immigration legislation. “Look, I think it would be a ridiculous notion to try and work on an issue like this with a president we simply cannot trust on this issue,” he said. “He tried to go it alone, circumventing the legislative process with his executive orders, so that is not in the cards.”

The response from the White House was swift. Press Secretary Josh Earnest “accused new House Speaker Paul Ryan of ‘pandering to the extreme right wing’ of his party on immigration,” the Associated Press reported, labeling his comments “preposterous.”

Bicoastal politics

Although the testy rhetoric suggested little room for lawmakers to maneuver, California Republicans like Denham and Valadao have taken advantage of unusual personal circumstances to pursue their agenda. Hispanics make up a significant percentage of voters in both representatives’ districts, as the Hill observed, while both currently lean Republican, the Cook Political Report determined.

In other words, although their districts remained competitive heading into 2016, both lawmakers boasted enough support at home to seek to expand their vote by sticking their neck out politically in Washington. Of late, California has racked up numerous and generous programs for unlawful immigrants. Measures passed this year, the AP noted, “to help immigrants in the U.S. illegally by improving their access to health care, opposing discrimination and enabling more people to apply for legal status. One measure aims to help immigrant crime victims apply for federal government visas.”

The figures eclipsed earlier embarrassments faced by water districts where consumption actually spiked, sometimes for unknown reasons. “California’s urban water districts cut consumption by 27.3% in June,” the Wall Street Journal observed, “exceeding a tough new state mandate to reduce their combined use by 25% amid a prolonged drought. The savings compared with the same month in 2013 came despite June being the hottest month on record in the Golden State, officials from the State Water Resources Control Board reported Thursday.”

Partisan jockeying

In a statement, Feinstein tried to tempter expectations behind her renewed push for relief. Some analysts expect Republican opposition over its high cost and environmental protections. “I’ve introduced a lot of bills over the years, and this one may be the most difficult, and a warming climate will only make things worse,” she said. “I’m hopeful the bill we’re introducing today will serve as a template for the kinds of short-term and long-term solutions California needs to address this devastating drought.”

But some Democrats have become concerned that Feinstein’s effort cedes excessive ground on environmental regulations, hewing too closely to previous relief plans that wound up losing Boxer’s support. Feinstein had determined that the drought crisis was severe enough to justify negotiating with House Republicans — a maneuver that undermined her support within her own party, causing her to abandon the push.

This time around, revealing Boxer’s support for the rejiggered bill “surprised some stakeholders who saw the negotiations fall apart late last year over proposed changes to endangered species protections,” according to E&E Daily. Although Boxer said she was “pleased to be sponsoring” Feinstein’s new bill “because of the enormity of this crisis,” other Democrats, such as Rep. Jerry McNerney, D-Calif., warned they were “very concerned about some provisions included in the bill that are similar to the House Republican water legislation” that drove Boxer away to begin with.

A long road

That legislation was H.R. 2898, introduced by Rep. David Valadao, R-Calif. As the Sacramento Bee recounted, the bill would have supplied farmers south of the Delta with more water and sped up the federal approvals process, where stringent environmental rules can sometimes grind water and infrastructure plans to a virtual halt. Hurried along late last year during the lame-duck session of Congress, it sailed through the House with staunch Republican support, but provoked president Obama to threaten a veto, and drew strong criticism from California’s delegation of Democrats in both houses of Congress.

Feinstein herself finally caved. “There are several other provisions that would waive environmental protections that need to be changed before I could support them,” she explained, according to the Bee. “I have said all along that I will not support a bill that would waive these protections, and that remains true today.”

Last year, hopes were raised after Dianne Feinstein, the Democrat who is California’s senior senator, and House Republicans reached agreement on a drought-amelioration package that included pushing for more water storage projects and increasing water exports south of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. A bill introduced by freshman Rep. David Valadao, R-Hanford, passed the House in December, but some of its details relating to the relaxing of environmental regulations led Feinstein to oppose the measure, and it failed in the Senate.

Six months later, the California drought has gotten far more attention because of Gov. Jerry Brown’s April order of massive cutbacks in use by residents and most businesses. But as McClatchy is reporting, the House-Senate split over what to do remains intact:

WASHINGTON — Five months into a new Congress, and deep into a lasting drought, California water legislation still stymies and splits the state’s lawmakers.

 

Draft copies are tightly held, as if stamped Top Secret. Myriad details are in flux. The legislative timing, though a June 2 Senate hearing could yet happen, remains unsettled. Democrats are divided; some are distinctly unhappy.

 

It all sounds so familiar, and yet there’s still no telling how this movie ends.

 

“Right now, I don’t know,” a gloomy sounding California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein said Thursday, when asked about the prospects for a bill. “It’s very difficult to put something together. Obviously change is controversial, so to propose something and then not to be able to do it makes no sense.”

Fellow Dems accuse Feinstein of ‘secret jam job’

A bloc of Northern California House Democrats, meanwhile, has pressured the senator to be given a role in negotiations over a compromise.

That led to unusual on-the-record criticism directly from Feinstein: “It doesn’t do any good to say, ‘Let us see your language so we can rip it apart.’”

On water, she appears to have more agreements with Republicans than Democrats on some key issues — and they’ve noticed, as McClatchy has reported:

“We certainly hear about it, involving a sub-group of stakeholders working on drafts that we haven’t been allowed to see,” Rep. Jared Huffman, D-San Rafael, said in an interview. “Far from a transparent regular order, it feels like we’re right back to secrecy and exclusion, and that’s very disappointing.”

 

Complaints about secrecy and exclusion helped undermine legislation last year. Huffman and six other Northern California Democrats subsequently met with Feinstein in January.

 

That was their high-water mark. Since then, the lawmakers who represent the Delta say they’ve effectively been shut out even though they’ve been asked what they want.

 

“It’s a terrible way to do a bill,” Huffman said. “Instead of trying to do this right, which is inclusive, deliberate and transparent, this is a secret jam job.”

Brown administration not in the mix

None of recent coverage of water legislation maneuvering indicates the administration of Gov. Jerry Brown is trying to shape the congressional legislation.

In December, however, one of his Cabinet members issued a statement objecting to House Republicans’ approach and its focus on changing federal environmental policies in the Delta. “Our collective energies should be devoted to a long-term solution for California’s water needs in a way that rewards working together, as opposed to dividing interests,” said John Laird, secretary of the California Department of Natural Resources.

In California, not all rainwater is equal.

“Two different water years may have identical precipitation and runoff amounts, yet result in significantly different export amounts,” Eric Alvarez told CalWatchdog.com; he’s the Public Information Officer for the Delta Stewardship Council, the state body that provides water to much of California.

For example, autumn rainfall brings greater water exports from the Delta than spring showers.  This understanding of how seasonal water flows affect man-made water shortages is crucial in evaluating a newly proposed Republican drought relief bill introduced last week in the U.S. House of Representatives. It’s H.R. 5781, the California Emergency Drought Relief Act, by Rep.  David Valadao, R-Central Valley.

It includes a key provision for increasing pumping from the Delta during early storms of the water year, which starts on Oct. 1. This measure would bring drought relief to farmers in the next 18 months. That’s different from the 10 years or more timeframe of the $7.5 billion water bond Proposition 1 voters approved on Nov. 4.

Democratic pushback

Some Democrats have been accusing Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and House Republicans of holding secret negotiations for a compromise drought relief bill.  However, now with the new GOP drought relief bill being printed, the public can see what was tentatively agreed to by both parties.

On Dec. 3, KPCC reported:

“Both the House and Senate have already passed individual drought measures, but there are rivers of differences between them. It appeared that an agreement had been reached on a compromise bill before Thanksgiving, but the deal dried up. [Riverside Republican Rep. Ken] Calvert says this new bill includes ‘negotiated text from those sessions between House members and Senator Dianne Feinstein.”  

That was a reference to the drought bill Feinstein introduced earlier this year with the state’s junior senator, Barbara Boxer, the California Emergency Drought Relief Act of 2014. It would keep the Delta Cross Channel open between the State Water Project and the Federal Central Valley Project (shown in above photo).

Although the two Democrats will go into minority status in January when Republicans take over the Senate, they will remain powerful players in California’s water game.

So it was puzzling when Boxer said of the new GOP bill, “This measure could reignite the water wars overriding critical state and federal protections for California.”

The Republican bill also received quick pushback from Democrats in the House of Representatives. Charged Rep. John Garamendi, D-Calif., “The bill makes it more difficult for state and federal agencies to make real-time water decisions, undermines state water rights priorities, misstates current law, and explicitly overrides the Endangered Species Act.”

Rep. Doris Matsui branded the bill “nothing more than a water grab.”

Rep. Jim Costa, D-Central Valley, was the only member of his party to support the GOP bill.

SoCal would get 100 percent of the water they pay for

Another provision of the bill is that the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California would get 100 percent of the drought water it purchases to make up for any curtailments of its allocation from the State Water Project.  MWD often buys supplemental water from Northern California rice farmers, but only ends up with 25 percent or less of that water for environmental and legal reasons. The new GOP drought relief bill would put an end to the policy of paying for water MWD doesn’t get.

Nonetheless, Rep. Grace Napolitano, D-Los Angeles, said of the GOP bill, “There’s nothing there for Southern California.”

Likewise, Patricia Schifferie, an environmental activist, said the GOP bill “clearly alters how environmental protection statutes are implemented and enforced.”

However, the bill also contains provision for reducing the flow of water through the California Aqueduct to Southern California in order to balance water deliveries to Central Valley farmers with environmental protections.

One potential glitch in the GOP bill is the uncertainty of whether the State Water Project would have to backfill federal water diverted to farmers in the fall through the Delta Cross Channel with state water.

Environment

But water allocated to the environment already takes first claim to State Water Project flows anyway under the Public Trust Doctrine of the California Constitution.  Environmental water takes 64 percent of all system water in wet years when it is critical to store up water for future dry years.

Alvarez explained:

“In wet years, less water is normally exported because of less demand by the water contractors (people who use the exported water) even though there is enough water to export. In average years, the maximum amount of water can be diverted because of higher demand is coupled with available water. In dry years, demand is high, but available water is not.

“However the relationship between water year type and amount of water exported is not necessarily that straight forward. The amount of water exported is also dependent on timing of the available flows. Greater amounts of the Delta inflow can be exported if the inflow occurs in the fall than if the same amount of Delta inflow occurs in the spring. This has to do with how the State Water Project and the Central Valley Project are operated to protect fish and meet salinity standards set by the State Water Resources Control Board.”

“The operation of the California federal water projects referred to above involves the closure of the Delta Cross Channel on the Sacramento River from Oct. 1 to November 30 to protect fish. This policy, not just drought, affects whether farmers will have sufficient water deliveries in the summer.”

Driven by the haunting reality of lack of California farm water, the Democratic and Republican drought relief bills in the U.S. Congress tentatively are starting to merge into one.

Back in 2009, U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., got her San Joaquin River Settlement Act through Congress. But it has come back to haunt her because it created a foreseeable but unaddressed farm-water shortage in dry years, such as now. Feinstein has recently criticized the environmentalists who helped her design the bill as “never having been helpful to me in producing good water policy.”

Passed when Democrats controlled both the Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives, the bill appropriated $88 million in planning funding for a proposed $2.2 billion restoration project. In 2010, Republicans took back the U.S. House of Representatives and subsequently have blocked any additional funding to implement the project.

Feinstein is now backtracking and has revised and successfully pushed her S. 2198, the Emergency Drought Relief Act of 2014, through the Senate on May 23.  It now will be considered in the House for merger with a Republican drought bill, H.R. 3964, by Rep. David Valadao, R-Hanford (formerly named H.R. 1937 by Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Tulare).

Valadao released a statement that Feinstein’s bill “is a positive step in the right direction.”

Neutered drought bill

To get her drought bill passed over stiff opposition from a large number of environmental organizations and Northern California lawmakers, Feinstein neutered the bill of any provisions that would impede passage by either political party.  The new revised version of the bill has dropped from her original bill provisions to:

• Reauthorize the Delta restoration program provided under the CALFED compact of 2002 (sought by Republicans).
• Authorize several hundred million dollars for drought relief (sought by Democrats).
• Soften the authorization of funding for expanding the capacity of Nevada’s Lake Mead to appease Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

As presently worded, the bill would not authorize anything new that is not already being undertaken to relieve drought impacts on farms and rural areas before the onset of summer. But that made the bill palatable enough for senators in both parties unanimously to pass it.

River restoration goal: 500 fish at cost of $4.4 million per fish

The 2009 San Joaquin River Settlement Act authorized 10 physical restoration projects in the river to be completed by Dec. 31, 2013.  None of the projects even has started. And the projected cost now is $800 million. What planning money has been available has been used physically to transport salmon across the dry reach of the river in tanker trucks.

This hasn’t stopped the NRDC from forcing the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation to release 180 thousand acre-feet of water from March 2013 to Feb. 2014 — with nothing completed that was called “necessary” by the NRDC for the success of the project. Success is defined as the return of 500 fish in the dry reach of the river by 2019.

The water storage situation in California would be much different if the NRDC had not released flushed water to the ocean for fish during drought. Recently, Rep. Tom McClintock, R-Auburn, has criticized such releases of water as waste that could have been avoided if the Republican-backed drought bill, H.R. 3964, had been passed.

First ever water shipped from eastside to westside farmers

To relieve the drought, on May 15 for the first time ever, federal water managers conveyed 529,000 acre-feet of water from the Eastside of the San Joaquin River Valley (from Millerton Lake) to Westside farmers in Patterson and Mendota. That increased the water allocation to Westside farmers, but also increased water to wildlife refuges in the South Delta from 40 percent to 65 percent.

In response, the Friant Water Authority has filed suit in the U.S. District Court in Fresno to challenge the unprecedented release of federal water to state water contractors.

Ron Jacobsma, FWA’s general manager, said that Eastside citrus-tree growers might have their water replenished later in the year. Then he warned, “But that may mean putting water on dead trees.”

The San Joaquin River Restoration Project has been a contest between political parties. But farmers didn’t take issue with it until the onset of the 2014 drought made them see how bad it is to release water for fish runs.

More water but greater water diversions for fish

Ironically, the table below tells the story that there is more water than in the severe drought of 1977, but more outflow for fish flushes resulting in less net agricultural water in 2014.  

                         Central Valley Project 1977 vs. 2014 (October thru March)
                                                            (In million acre-feet)