Why no one won this year’s water wars

SACRAMENTO, California — California is having a really good water year. But all the rain and snow is doing almost nothing to lubricate the state’s perpetual conflicts between fish and farms.

Neither farmers, cities nor environmentalists feel like they’re getting enough water from the State Water Project and the federally run Central Valley Project, a semi-coordinated labyrinth of reservoirs, canals and pumping stations that together irrigates nearly 4 million acres.

Farmers and cities are arguing that the storms mean they should get more than the 40 percent of their contractual deliveries that they’ve been promised so far (they get about 63 percent on average). They’d have more of an argument if endangered fish weren’t also getting massacred at the pumps: The water projects have already exceeded their take limit for the season for steelhead trout, meaning they’re violating the Endangered Species Act.

Everyone is frustrated with Gov. Gavin Newsom and President Joe Biden’s administrations, which operate the systems, as well as with themselves:

“That water is not recoverable,” said Jennifer Pierre, general manager of the State Water Contractors, which represents the 27 water agencies that get supplies from the State Water Project, including the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California and the Santa Clara Valley Water District. “We should all be in timeout right now.”

With so many cooks in the kitchen, there’s a variety of culprits. Westlands Water District, which gets its water from the CVP, is blaming the Biden administration, which runs the project through the Interior Department’s Bureau of Reclamation and the Commerce Department’s National Marine Fisheries Service.

Westlands General Manager Allison Febbo said she thinks the high steelhead losses could have been due to the fish returning in above-average numbers, rather than to pumping decisions. She’s calling for a hearing in the Republican-led House into how the CVP applied the Endangered Species Act this year.

“We are frustrated,” she said in an interview. “The actions being taken have real world consequences in our district, and we don’t see those actions particularly substantiated.”

Jon Rosenfield, science director of the environmental group San Francisco Baykeeper, is pointing at Newsom’s Department of Water Resources, which he argues loosened protections for fish during the last drought.

“This is a direct result of the Newsom administration waiving its water quality rules, which it already acknowledges are inadequate, for three years in a row,” he said. He also said the state ran its pumps too early, when there were a lot of fish present.

Newsom administration officials are penitent and vowing to change, but are also making the argument for more investment.

DWR Director Karla Nemeth called the low allocations “unusual” and traced them in part to more real-time efforts by the state to protect endangered fish after a severe die-off roughly two decades ago prompted lawsuits.

She outlined a series of “fixes,” including increasing genetic testing of fish to better figure out which ones absolutely need to be protected and building the Delta Conveyance Project, a controversial tunnel to reroute deliveries underneath the overplumbed Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

“This year was kind of a poster child for infrastructure that’s not really up to the challenge of the next century, and more work that needs to be done,” she said in an interview.

(Reclamation didn’t respond to a request for comment, while NMFS said “We limit impacts on threatened and endangered species based on all of the best available science to protect them and provide opportunities for their recovery.”)

The fight will continue playing out in several venues: State and federal agencies are currently renegotiating the underlying fish-science documents that guide management decisions, which are still governed by Trump-era rules.

And last week, they kicked off the monthlong process to plan summer releases from Lake Shasta, the largest reservoir in the state, which will crystallize the conflict as well as anything: Water managers will try to find a balance between releasing water for farms when they need it in the summer and maintaining cool-enough water reserves to send down rivers to protect endangered salmon eggs in the fall.

On one point, everyone agrees: California’s water system is broken, whether it’s a wet, a dry or average year.

“I don’t think that we are well-positioned for the type of adaptive management and real-time response that’s going to be needed in order to maximize our resources for the environment and for people and farms,” Pierre said. “This year really highlighted that.”

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