MORE than 100 of California’s most senior water rights holders will face sharp cutbacks amid a fourth year of drought, state officials announced Friday, June 12. The move is the first time since 1977 that regulators ordered those possessing such rights to reduce their water use.
Officials said rights dating back to 1903 would be restricted and that they would grow as the summer progresses. A total of 276 rights will be curtailed, the State Water Resources Control Board announced Friday. The order primarily falls on farmers, but will also affect individuals, small city and municipal agencies, and state agencies that supply water for agricultural and environmental use with long-standing access to the Sacramento and San Joaquin river basins, and the delta.
“We have been waiting for the recent weather system to pass in hopes of adding water,” said Caren Trgovcich, the board’s deputy director. “It did stretch the timing a couple of days, but now we are at the point that demand exceeds supply.”
State officials have said for months that water for senior rights holders would be curtailed, but they repeatedly delayed such a decision given the cooler and wetter weather during the last several weeks.
It is still unknown how much water the curtailments will save, which prohibit farmers from taking surface water. California has about 7.5 million acres of farmland, and the impact of the order will vary, depending on the source of water. Many possess water in storage that they can continue to use. Utilities are allowed to continue using flows for hydropower production under the condition that water is returned to the rivers. Other farmers have access to groundwater supplies, which are not restricted by the order.
“Each water rights holder has a different situation, with different options available,” said Tom Howard, executive director of the state water board, according to San Jose Mercury News. “When they run out of options, they’ll have to abandon whatever crops are cultivated at the time.”
Last month, the state struck a deal with some farmers in the delta to voluntarily reduce their water usage by 25 percent so as to avoid more severe cuts later in the growing season. About half of the 400 farmers in the region eligible for the program signed up, state officials said.
George Hartmann, a water rights lawyer who assisted in creating the agreement, said the majority of growers prepared for such cuts.
“We all knew this was going to happpen,” he said, according to The New York Times. “The state had made it very clear that was part of their plans, so I doubt people spent a lot of money planting for something they weren’t sure they could grow.”
The most significant impact, however, may be the precedent the state board is setting, Jeffrey Mount, a senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California, told the Times.
The effects of the cutbacks are likely to be felt more widely than they were in the 1970s, as the state now possesses greater authority to impose cuts and a better ability to monitor usage of water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. Curtailments during that time also focused only on the Sacramento River Basin.
But several lawyers have made clear they would take the matter to court, claiming the state board does not have the right to curb rights predating 1914, when California first began regulating water diversions.
“People are so dug into their rights that regardless of what we do it’s likely they will ask for a rehearing,” Delta Watermaster Michael George said last month, according to Los Angeles Times. “There’s going to be lots of litigation coming out of this.”
Steve Knell, the district’s top official, told San Jose Mercury News that because those affected by the order have rights older than the state’s water board, it does not possess the legal authority to curtail them.
Jeanne Zolezzi, an attorney representing two irrigation districts that serve farmers in the San Joaquin area, told The Associated Press she plans on going to court to halt the board’s order. She told the news agency her clients include small family farms that grow permanent crops such as apricots and walnuts, and have no alternative supplies in reservoirs or wells.
“A lot of trees would die, and a lot of people would go out of business,” she said. “We are not talking about a 25 percent cut like imposed on urban. This is a 100 percent cut, no water supplies.”
Offenders of Friday’s order will be subject to daily fines of $1,000 and $2,500 per acre-foot of illegally diverted water. However, enforcing the restrictions will be the biggest challenge for state officials, Peter Gleick, president of non-profit research institute Pacific Institute, told The New York Times. In addition, more than 9,000 junior water rights holders – those whose rights were established after 1914 – were given orders to curtail usage earlier this year.
“This is an indication of how broadly water is used in California,” Gleick told the Times. “These curtailments are the next step in spreading the growing pains of the drought to a growing number of users, and it is going to get worse as the hot summer drags on.”
About 620,000 acres of land are expected to be fallowed in California this year, mainly in the Central Valley, according to statewide agricultural groups, The New York Times reported.
Jonas Minton, an adviser at Planning and Conservation League, a private environmental group, told The Associated Press that droughts of this magnitude are not unprecedented in California. However, the state population has grown to 38 million and has many acres of farmland to irrigate.
State bureaucrats and environmentalists can’t be blamed, he told the news agency.
“Today’s curtailments are not being done by choice,” Minton said. “They’re a reaction to the reality of the shrinking water supply.”
Separately, the Obama administration on Friday announced $110 million in additional funding to provide temporary jobs for dislocated Californians, to support farmers and to enhance water efficiency. (With reports from Los Angeles Times, San Jose Mercury News, The Associated Press and The New York Times)
(LA Midweek June 17 – 19, 2015 Sec. A pg.5)
