According to political debate and the popular press, the purpose of adding surface water storage reservoirs to California’s existing system is to provide water for urban growth and agricultural crops. But that viewpoint touches only the surface of a more complex policy and operations issue spelled out in the CALFED Record of Decision (ROD): the need to expand storage capacity to increase the existing system’s flexibility, improve water quality and provide water for fish, as well as meet the needs of a growing population.

Although the ROD was intended to provide the blueprint for a new approach to managing the Bay-Delta system, one piece continues to invite much debate among stakeholders three years after it was adopted – construction of new surface storage projects. With CALFED studies underway on five potential projects, the question of whether to add to the network of dams, reservoirs and canals that already crisscross the state has taken on powerful symbolic meaning to the California water triad: agricultural, environmental and urban water interests.

Agricultural water stakeholders are the biggest proponents of building new surface storage – voicing strong support for the new Sites Reservoir in the Sacramento Valley or an additional reservoir on the San Joaquin River. In recent weeks, the agricultural community, backed by some members of Congress, seems more determined than ever that a surface project must be built to prove that the CALFED solution is implemented in a balanced manner.

“Within the Central Valley Project community, the CVPIA took 1.3 million acre-feet of water away, mostly from farmers within the San Joaquin Valley, as a result of pumping restrictions imposed by regulators to provide the 800,000 acre-feet of water dedicated to the environment [and other CVPIA measures],” said Robert Stackhouse, manager of the Central Valley Project Water Association (CVPWA). “We see that 1.3 million acre-feet as needing to be made up. Unfortunately, the agricultural community continues to be seen as the reservoir that everyone is trying to tap to meet additional needs.”

Environmental groups, on the other hand, remain skeptical that any new surface water reservoirs are needed. To boost supplies, they first favor more groundwater banking, water use efficiency and water transfers, pushing hard to fund water conservation and recycling projects. For a new surface storage project to move forward, they say there must be strong evidence that it will not cause too much environmental damage; and that the “beneficiary pays” concept of CALFED is followed, with users, not the state or federal governments, financing the new project.

“The issue is not that under no circumstances could a new storage facility be expected, but there is a very high threshold,” said Gary Bobker, program director at The Bay Institute of San Francisco. “Dams have a much bigger environmental footprint than any other facility. They have site impacts and downstream impacts. We’re not building your father’s dams, true, but even with offstream storage, you’re moving it off the main stream, but you’re moving it onto a tributary, and you are destroying habitat.”

When it comes to the CALFED storage proposals, urban users say it is the flexibility of the system that is at stake – not building new reservoirs to satisfy new growth – and supplying water for things such as fish flows and to improve water quality.

“To get to the right public policy decision – do we need more surface storage – we need to get to the right debate. And we’re not having the right debate right now,” said Tim Quinn, vice president of State Water Project (SWP) issues for Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (MWD.) “Some people still talk like we need storage because the urban population is growing. The fact is that no major urban water supplier is counting on these CALFED surface storage projects to meet new demand. We’re still having the fight of old.”

Nowhere is that fight of old more evident than in Congress where Californians on both sides of the aisle have introduced competing CALFED authorization/funding bills amid the continuing debate over the role of new storage, with those elected officials who favor new storage citing the state’s expected population growth as the reason.

The continued congressional stalemate coincides with release of Water 2025, the Department of the Interior’s new blueprint aimed at predicting, preventing and alleviating water crises in the West. Water 2025 acknowledges that the region will have a difficult time meeting new water demands, but emphasizes that agricultural and urban water users need to conserve water, store water underground and transfer water rather than count on new surface storage – at least not new federally funded surface storage. “Water 2025 doesn’t say there will be no new storage,” Assistant Interior Secretary Bennett Raley said at the July 10 Water 2025 hearing in Sacramento. “But, there are not a lot of federal dollars for new storage. California and the locals may decide to fund new storage.”

Given California’s record budget deficit, the Water 2025 message has left the state’s water stakeholder community wondering how any of the surface storage projects identified in the CALFED ROD will be built. Local funding is not impossible; Contra Costa Water District (CCWD) and MWD both built new offstream reservoirs with no state or federal financing. But so far, no one has stepped up to the plate with an offer to foot the bill for a new Sites Reservoir or a larger Shasta Dam. And the one privately developed storage proposal, Delta Wetlands, is now studying with state and federal agencies whether to complete the project in public ownership.

“I think the key question will be, ‘Is anyone willing to pay for these new storage facilities’?” said Gerald Meral, president of the Planning and Conservation League Foundation and co-chair of the Bay-Delta Public Advisory Committee’s (BDPAC) Water Supply Subcommittee. He added that he is “doubtful anyone wants to pay for any of that big storage.”

Quinn is more confident. “A meritorious project can get funded and will get built,” he said. Emphasizing that urban water users are firm believers that “beneficiaries should pay,” he said patience is needed in order to demonstrate that whatever project is chosen, that it can and will benefit public values such as the Environmental Water Account (EWA). “The public will help pay for a proposal,” he said. “It will not be all water user fees.”

The question of beneficiary pays and the different views among stakeholder groups over the value of storage rests in some part on the issue of establishing a baseline for how much water the state’s system should have for different uses. Many within the water community want new projects to be built to reinstate surface supplies allocated to the environment through the Endangered Species Act, CVP Improvement Act and the Bay-Delta Accord. Environmentalists want to go forward with today’s water supply as the baseline; viewing additional supplies as necessary for restoration – not mitigation, which could provide a stronger argument for the use of public funds from the state and/or federal governments.

Moving people away from their historic yes or no positions on new surface storage to an honest evaluation of the scientific and engineering pros and cons of five potential projects is the unenviable task facing CALFED, the state-federal-stakeholder consortium working to implement a collaborative vision for Delta environmental and water supply reliability improvements. The projects under study: raising Shasta Dam, creating in-Delta storage, expanding Los Vaqueros Reservoir, constructing Sites Reservoir and expanding storage on the San Joaquin River system.

“The most difficult thing about evaluating these projects is that people think which one supplies the most water at the least cost is the most important factor,” said Mark Cowin. Cowin is chief of the Division of Planning and Local Assistance at the California Department of Water Resources (DWR) and oversees CALFED’s water storage studies for the state. “But the value of a particular project may be beyond the formula of the most acre feet for the least cost to include such things as when can water be diverted into and released from the project, how it can improve water quality and what it can do to improve the flexibility of other water project operations.”

New surface storage aside, water users say the issue of conveyance is as important, if not more important, than the question of which, if any, CALFED project to build. Exporting water from the Delta is a major issue in the overall success of any new storage project – above or below ground. Moving water to and through the existing system may give one or more of these proposed projects an edge.

“All of these CALFED elements need to work in synergy,” said Steve Hall, executive director of the Association of California Water Agencies (ACWA), and co-chair of BDPAC’s Water Supply Subcommittee. “In order for new surface storage to work to its optimum, you have to improve conveyance through the Delta and increase the [SWP’s] Banks pumping capacity to 8,500 cubic feet per second. And unless you improve conveyance through the Delta and build additional storage you can’t optimize groundwater banking, water transfers and water recycling.”

This issue of Western Water explores the question of whether the state needs more surface storage, with a particular focus on the five proposed projects identified in the CALFED 2000 ROD and the politics and funding issues of these projects.

NOTE: A complete copy of this 16-page magazine is available from the Foundation for $3. Visit our Products Page and add the September/October 2003 issue of Western Water to your shopping cart.

Editor’s Desk