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To Decimate Delta Farmingby Tim Stroshane CalFED, the joint state-federal water planning program, completed its comprehensive, $9 billion Bay- Delta plan for California’s water future August 28th. The plan affects California water users from Mount Shasta clear to San Diego, promising to restore "ecological health" to the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta estuary at the same time it would improve "water supply reliability" for the rest of the state. Despite its promises, CalFED’s plan is plagued by controversy over proposals that are seen as a thinly disguised power play and water grab.
Ironically, the Delta is the region whose complex aquatic environments CalFED professes to save; but while other farming areas of California would be affected by CalFED’s actions, CalFED’s environmental impact report says CalFED’s adverse effects on farming "would be most concentrated and most substantial in the Delta Region." To be sure, key CalFED programs aim to improve Delta drinking water quality, levee stability, watershed management, farm and urban water conservation, and Delta fish and freshwater habitats to comply with state and federal mandates. But a legitimate question never confronted in CalFED’s deliberations is whether depopulating the Delta’s farm communities for ecosystem restoration is equitable. Now, as Delta farmers and rural "area of origin" counties sue CalFED over its flawed "framework for action," statewide and Bay Area professional environmental groups find themselves defenders of an ultimately indefensible plan, clutching to a narrowly-conceived ecosystem restoration program in post-CalFED water politics. Overwhelmingly defeated by California voters in a June 1982 referendum, many water observers predicted that "the peripheral canal is dead." But Delta residents never believed it was dead. CalFED’s proposals bring back its spectre, and introduce an ecosystem restoration program that removes farms and people from the region, easing the canal’s return. Here’s how CalFED’s "framework for action" sells out the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. Why the Delta? Why is the Delta important to the state’s water systems, its major industries, to CalFED, the Governor, and the Clinton Administration? Located about 40 miles east of San Francisco, the Delta is a 750,000 acre farming region through which drains waters of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers from more than 61,000 square miles of the Central Valley watershed, about 37 percent of the state. The Delta is the largest coastal estuary in the American west and doubly unique because it is an inland estuary (the result of California’s mountain-rimmed bathtub topography). Over 7,000 individuals, agricultural and industrial corporations, and big and small cities divert fresh water from streams there, including some 1,800 diverters (mostly farmers) in the Delta proper. CalFED estimates the farm economy of the Delta averages about $500 million in gross value of farm output per year on average; it is a small part of the state’s multi-billion dollar agricultural industry. Nonetheless, some of the state’s best agricultural (peat) soils are found here, and smaller family-run farms are common, many tracing their histories back to the original 19th century reclamation of swamp land. The average Delta farm size is smaller than the state’s. Most farmers’ water rights here date from the 19th century and run with the land. Suction and Destruction
This is what the SWP and CVP do now. These water systems hoist Sacramento River from the Delta uphill to the federal Delta-Mendota Canal and the state’s California Aqueduct, south of the Delta. State Water Project water is also pumped over the Tehachapis for southern California. Water from the Delta irrigates 5 million acres of farmland (mostly in the San Joaquin Valley), and reaches 22 million residents (mostly in southern California, but also in the East and South Bay areas). To pull in fresh Sacramento River water for export, the suction of CVP and SWP pumps near Tracy must compete with the gravitational force of the Delta’s rivers draining to San Francisco Bay. These facilities help make pumping water the largest use of electricity production in California. This suction makes Delta river channels flow backwards at times, confusing anadromous (migratory) fish reliant on an aquatic sense of smell as they migrate between the Pacific Ocean and their upstream spawning grounds. Other times of year, eggs, fingerlings and young fry get sucked into the pumps, resulting in massive fish kills. Delta smelt, Sacramento splittail, and various stocks of chinook salmon are now listed as either endangered or threatened species by the state and federal governments. Operation of these vast water projects are largely responsible for their decline, and the projects thereby run afoul of the state and federal Endangered Species acts. Pollution remains an important cause of food chain collapse in the Delta too. "The United States Geological Survey has characterized the San Joaquin River and its tributaries as one of the most degraded basins in the entire nation," reports Jennings. Yet, the Delta’s water quality "has all too often been treated like the crazy aunt locked in the closet at home." The Delta’s aging levees hold back salt-water tides from San Francisco Bay by containing relatively fresh waters in their channels from the Sierras and southern Cascade Mountains. But they are vulnerable. As its rich peat soils of central Delta islands compacted, lands behind the levees sank as much as 25 feet below water levels in Delta channels. A Noachian flood or catastrophic earthquake today could undermine Delta levees and destroy many of these farming islands, threatening to create an inland salt-water sea that would disrupt the export of fresh water stored at the CVP and SWP’s huge Shasta and Oroville reservoirs. As God promised Noah a great flood, CalFED geologists assure us that relatively moderate earthquakes could cause "3 to 10 levee failures in the Delta, on one or more islands." Just imagine what the Big One tomorrow could do. Peripheral Canal Politics
With a canal in place, the Delta and San Francisco Bay become expendable to the state’s "peripheral" water system. "I don’t think the environmental consequences [of a peripheral canal] would be that great, but the bigger issue here is motivation," says Tom Graff, an attorney and long-time water politico for Oakland-based Environmental Defense. "It may improve export water, but it will significantly degrade water quality in the Bay and Delta. The more water you export, the more the Bay and Delta suffer." Dante Nomellini, a Stockton water lawyer who is chief counsel for the Central Delta Water Agency, has pleaded the Delta’s case for over 30 years, and says the peripheral canal "would destroy the Delta ecologically and economically." He also cites as threats to Delta farming communities not only the canal taking 4,500 acres of important farmland out of production, but CalFED ecosystem restoration projects that may take up to 112,000 acres of farm land out of production, and a CalFED proposal to flood Delta islands to create a fresh water reservoir there. Acquiring Delta farmland now to restore 30,000 to 45,000 acres of tidal wetlands, Nomellini adds, makes it easier for CalFED to let more tidal salt into Delta channels, simultaneously harming Delta cultivators and making the "need" for a peripheral canal a self-fulfilling prophecy. If Sacramento River water is diverted to a peripheral canal, or its CalFED euphemism, the "isolated conveyance facility," the cost of peripheral canal water will come dear, ruining the bottom line for most Delta farmers. A CalFED’s economic report on water management options analyzes "isolated facility" average costs and allocates these costs to each major urban region in the state, strongly implying that CalFED does not think that Delta farmers will want water from the peripheral canal, though thirsty cities will. Is that perhaps because there would be no Delta farmers to buy it from the peripheral canal? "CalFED says, `oh we don’t expect to solve everybody’s problem,’" says frustrated Manteca (south Delta) corn farmer Alex Hildebrand, who was a member of CalFED’s citizen advisory council. "But they are very politically motivated about what they say is within their prerogative and what they say isn’t. It depends on how many votes are involved and how much the public understands the problem." The CalFED environmental impact report backs up Nomellini’s claims:
Channel widening of Old River in the southwestern Delta region would accommodate increased SWP export pumping and would convert another 4,500 acres of Delta farmland, the equivalent of about 20 average-size Delta region farms. Construction of the peripheral canal would dig up and convert another 4,500 acres of farmland as well. The regional economic impacts of CalFED’s "preferred program alternative" (no peripheral canal, but with a diversion at Hood) includes up to $225 million in lost farm revenues (about 20 percent of the Delta region total), loss of up to 11,000 farming jobs (about half the Delta’s ag employment base), and those are just the direct effects. Indirectly, all economic sectors may experience losses approaching $500 million in output, and up to 20,000 jobs foregoing $400 million in lost personal income. "These effects," the CalFED environmental impact report concludes, "could substantially affect the region, especially small communities that depend on agriculture for their income. Some adverse effects also could be expected in the urbanized areas that surround the Delta: Sacramento, Stockton, and Pittsburg/Antioch. The form of these effects would be reduced employment and income, a reduction in property tax base through land conversion and reduced residential property values, and increased costs for social services and other local services -- especially in the short run." Sword of Damocles
CalFED officials insist a peripheral canal is not a self-fulfilling prophecy with the Hood diversion, which some wags refer to as an "on-ramp" for the canal. CalFED also hopes to fine-tune the Delta by widening river channels, strengthening levees, and providing tidal barriers for key south Delta channels to protect water depths for adjacent farmers and keep anadromous fish fry away from the big CVP and SWP export pumps, making the Delta more reliable as a source of fresh water. But if these actions fail to improve Delta water quality, sustain restored sensitive aquatic habitat, and replenish the battered populations of endangered fish and other aquatic species that rely on the Delta and many skeptics think they will fail -- then CalFED says the Peripheral Canal, or the isolated conveyance facility would be all but necessary. CalFED’s "strategy" for getting water to the pumps dangles the peripheral canal like a sword of Damocles over the planned shrinkage of the Delta farm economy. It should not be necessary, as CalFED claims, to depopulate a large proportion of the Delta region to achieve ESA goals, because most Delta farmland was reclaimed and cultivated there long before the CVP and SWP pumps were installed to export Delta water south. This means that water rights held by Delta farmers have first priority over the more recently granted CVP and SWP rights. Yet CalFED plans ignore these rights in a fashion reminiscent of a case recently decided by the California Supreme Court that gave older farm water rights holders more priority to water than latecomer urban interests in the Mojave River basin. CalFED’s plan proposes, Hildebrand wrote to CalFED in June 2000, "that existing impacts of the projects on fishery [sic] should be mitigated to the extent feasible with `no net loss to exports.’ It does not propose to mitigate existing impacts of the projects on the Delta’s in-channel water supply and water quality and does not provide for `no net loss’ of water to water users in the Delta and area of origin water users. This reverses the priority of water rights." In other words, CalFED’s plan ignores existing higher priority water rights. In doing so, large chunks of CalFED’s whole program become vulnerable -- after six difficult years of work -- to litigation, and to the charge of being a huge waste of taxpayer money. Hildebrand, the South Delta Water Agency, and a coalition of Delta and Feather River water rights holders sued CalFED over its Record of Decision in September. They were followed by the California Farm Bureau Federation a few days later. Tim Stroshane is an urban planner in the Bay Area and is editor and publisher of SPILLWAY, a newsletter about California water, land, and people. From the Winter 2001 issue of the Environmental News. |
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Most troubling among its proposals are the CalFED ecosystem restoration program (ERP), and a strategy reminiscent of the sword of Damocles for determining when to build the peripheral canal. These proposals will convert nearly a fifth of the Delta’s agricultural land to aqueduct, wetlands, or wider river channel, reducing the supply of agricultural land and increasing competition among California farmers for cultivable land.
Decades ago, state and federal engineers viewing California’s virgin waterscape made the Delta the "switching yard" for the state’s major developed water projects, including the Central Valley Project (CVP) and the State Water Project (SWP). The engineers came up with two methods of moving pure northern California water to their pumps for export to the south. One way is to suck the water through the Delta using huge pumps.