As winter turns to spring in cash-strapped and soon-to-be parched California, an $11 billion water bond slated for the November ballot is re-igniting old divisions over the Golden State’s water policy.
The flashpoint of disagreement is $3 billion in the bond that would likely be funneled toward dam construction projects and dam expansions, drowning portions of some of the state’s most beloved rivers — the Mokelumne, Merced, and the nearby Bear.
‘It’s one of the worst things we have seen proposed for the Sierra in the last 10 years,’ said Joan Clayburgh, Sierra Nevada Alliance executive director, of the Garden Bar Dam proposal on the Bear River, one of the dams that could be funded by the fall bond.
Clayburgh says the bond is ‘looking to the old answers of the past’ — a statement that encapsulates the divide between conservationists, legislators, and water users even as the state confronts a water shortage that is laying waste to San Joaquin farmland and threatening to turn the faucets of new subdivisions into useless ornaments.
While legislators, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, and many water providers are pushing for more reservoirs, the Sierra Nevada Alliance and others are opposing the bond while backing aggressive water conservation, aquifer recharging projects, and some desalinization plants. This is the first water bond the Sierra Nevada Alliance has publicly opposed, Clayburgh said.
‘The potential is there to meet our needs without damming our last rivers,’ she said.
At the Truckee River Watershed Council, Executive Director Lisa Wallace says her organization has relied heavily on water bond money to fund restoration projects, but this bond comes with a big downside — wasteful water storage practices. The council has not taken an official stance on the water bond, but has criticized certain portions of the November funding measure. ‘If you look at how water is managed in California, it is not a good bond,’ Wallace said.
Reservoir storage, which allows enormous amounts of water to evaporate unused, is inefficient when compared with new underground storage techniques that do not require building dams, Wallace said.
There are local examples of how water conservation can make up for the state’s growing thirst. The Truckee Donner Public Utility District knew that it had leaks in its water delivery system, but only recently did the TDPUD find out that approximately one-third of the water it thought was being piped to homes was actually leaking into the ground. And while the district uses well water, much of the rest of the state’s water delivery system is aging, allowing enormous amounts of precious water to leak unused into the ground.
Water conservation is one issue everyone agrees on. Gov. Schwarzenegger recently released a plan to reduce per capita water consumption across the state by 20 percent by 2020. The governor and organizations such as the Association of California Water Agencies, which did not return Moonshine Ink’s request for an interview, are pushing for new dams as well as aggressive water conservation as the solution to the state’s water future. Agricultural water use, however, is an area where conservation is not as widespread. While some agricultural businesses have embraced innovation, agriculture still consumes 80 percent of the Sacramento Delta’s water, and 60 percent of California’s agricultural watering is still done by flooding, according to the Pacific Institute, an independent research organization based in Oakland.
But the dam issue is just one portion of the water bond proposal, which has organizations like the Truckee River Watershed Council torn about the water bond. By Wallace’s calculations, the council and its local partners have received $7 million from state water bonds for large-scale restoration projects like their work in Coldstream Canyon and at Merrill-Davies creek near Stampede Reservoir.
The November bond would likely supply similar funding, allowing TRWC’s restoration projects to continue in a time when state funding for such projects is drying up almost as quickly as the state’s water supply.
‘After another 18 months, unless a state water bond passes, the only money for restoration would be from sources like the Environmental Protection Agency,’ Wallace said.
No matter how the water bond fares on the November ballot, water issues will persist in California, where a unique cocktail of fast-paced population growth, an enormously thirsty agriculture industry, and the impacts of climate change are conspiring to strain the state’s water resources. The Department of Water Resources estimates that the Sierra Nevada snowpack will shrink 25 percent by 2050, and that rising sea levels could threaten the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, which supplies 25 million people with drinking water.
Clayburgh foresees the water bond failing at the polls in November. If it does, however, a new water bond will likely be back on the ballot in the near future, Wallace said. Some groups are already working to come up with a new bond that could be put to voters if November’s fails.
‘At this stage, the watershed council is not panicking that it looks like this bond will not pass,’ said Wallace, ‘because we believe there will be a more appropriate bond in the future.’
In a time when a surprising number of California dams are being demolished at enormous cost to taxpayers — including the world’s biggest dam removal project on the Klamath River, the demolition of the San Clemente Dam, and, locally, the prospect of Martis Dam’s demise — conservationists are hoping any new bonds leave out the idea of drowning more of California’s rivers.
‘Our history of analysis of where and why we build dams — we don’t have a great track record,’ Wallace said.
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