Mother Lode elected reps urge easing of dam operation rules

Congressman Tom McClintock and Assemblyman Frank Bigelow sat shoulder to shoulder Saturday to urge worried Copperopolis residents to help push for reform of environmental regulations that the two legislators say threaten the viability of the town’s water supply.

“Fish are being put above human needs. This needs to simply stop,” Bigelow said.

The crisis is due, in part, to the drought that is now in its fourth year. New Melones Reservoir is storing so little water this spring that irrigation district officials say it could cease releasing water by the end of summer.

Tulloch Reservoir in Copperopolis is just downstream on the Stanislaus River from New Melones. If New Melones stopped releasing water, then officials for the South San Joaquin and Oakdale irrigation districts say they would be forced to draw down the level of Tulloch to serve customers downstream.

Sinking water levels in normally full Tulloch, in turn, could jeopardize the water intake that Calaveras County Water District uses to serve 2,500 connections in the Copperopolis area. The agency is already planning ways to move the intake into a deeper part of the reservoir.

Officials with the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and the California Department of Water Resources, meanwhile, are asking the California Water Quality Control Board to ease flow and water quality requirements for the next six months. If that happens, the bureau, which operates New Melones, says it would still have about 115,000 acre feet of water in the reservoir at the end of September, and would still be releasing water.

As part of that proposed easing of the rules, South San Joaquin and Oakdale irrigation districts would agree to only take 450,000 acre feet of water from New Melones this year, rather than the 600,000 acre feet to which the two agencies are entitled.

That proposal to ease environmental rules, officials at the meeting said, would solve the drinking water issue for Copperopolis at least temporarily.

“It looks like this summer we are going to be OK as long as this goes through,” said Joel Metzger, community relations manager for Calaveras County Water District,

Whether it will go through is not certain, however. George Kostyrko, a spokesman for the State Water Resources Control Board, confirmed that the agency had received the petition and said board Executive Director Tom Howard could act on it in the next few days.

Jeff Shields, manager of South San Joaquin Irrigation District, said he doesn’t assume that Howard will simply approve the petition on his own, because it is likely to be controversial. “He probably won’t do it. He’ll probably kick it to the board,” Shields said.

Doug Demko, a biologist whose firm has done extensive work for South San Joaquin and Oakdale irrigation districts, said he’s found little evidence to show that the water released from New Melones to benefit steelhead or salmon actually does so.

“If pulse flows really worked to increase survival, wouldn’t I be able to see it in the data?” Demko said.

Fish flows are on the minds of many Copperopolis residents. At tables outside Saturday’s meeting, some signed a petition asking the federal government to cease fish flows during the drought. Their hope is that eliminating the flows would result in more water remaining late in the year in New Melones, and thus increase the chance that Tulloch won’t be lowered.

The proposal to reduce flows to the delta involves a number of state and federal dams. If the flows are reduced it will likely be over the objection of many downstream interests including farmers in the delta.

If major dams don’t release water to dilute salt from the San Joaquin River and to prevent salty ocean water from entering the delta, then salinity levels will rise. That would prevent farmers from using the water to irrigate, because it would kill plants.

Bill Jennings, the executive director of the California Sportfishing Protection Alli-ance, said allowing conditions in the delta to deteriorate will also push a number of fish species there closer to extinction.

“They want to further weaken those already-inadequate standards,” Jennings said of federal officials and irrigation district representatives.

“They get most of the water,” Jennings said of the Oakdale and South San Joaquin irrigation districts. “Now they are saying, ‘We want it all during a drought.’”

Jennings pointed out that the 1,100 acre feet of water required to serve homes in Copperopolis for a year is a tiny fraction of the water that goes to farms downstream.

“You may have to fallow some land,” Jennings said.

Shields said the drought is already a hardship for farmers. He said some farmers this year are making do with only 36 inches of water per acre, rather than 150 inches some use in wetter years.

Shields said that if the petition to weaken the water standards and flows in the delta is not approved, he anticipates that his agency and others will sue. The matter is particularly urgent because the drought could continue making it even more important to hold water back in New Melones.

“I’ve got 200,000 people that drink this water and they’ll need it next winter, too.”

McClintock sees the issue as larger than just a question of whether or not to allow water from New Melones Dam to flow through the delta this year. He is a long-time critic of the Endangered Species Act, a law that requires efforts to protect species in danger of extinction.

“The problem is that about 30 years ago, a radical and retrograde ideology began to take control of our environmental policy,” McClintock said.

McClintock told those in the audience that he believes it should be possible to expand the water supply for California.

“We won’t build more dams until we overhaul the radical laws that are preventing them,” he said.

McClintock on Thursday introduced a bill that would allow federal dam operators to cease releasing water for the purpose of adjusting water temperatures in rivers. Flows like those released last week from New Melones are intended to provide cooler water temperatures required by some species of fish, in this case baby steelhead.

McClintock’s House Reso-lution 1668, the Save Our Water Act, would suspend such water releases during extreme and exceptional droughts like the present one.

Jennings, in contrast, said he believes it is common sense to preserve the Delta, a drinking water source for millions of Californians as well an irrigation source for farms there.

In Jennings’ view, officials with the Oakdale and South San Joaquin irrigation districts are manipulating Copperopolis residents to back big agriculture in the fight for water against other users.

“Basically, the estuary and the rivers that are tributary to it are the village commons. They belong to everyone. You don’t have the right to destroy the property of others.”

And he said the fight distracts everyone from the fact that California simply does not have enough water to meet all the demands on that water.

“It is just like a family spending more than they make and they can’t stop running up additional credit card debt,” Jennings said. “They can’t live within their means.”