County bails on water agency after failed compromise

Calaveras County supervisors pulled out of the region’s largest water planning board this week after failing to reach a compromise on membership dues owed to the Tuolumne-Stanislaus Integrated Regional Water Management Plan.

Board members fell one vote shy of the four-fifths approval needed to renew county membership in the water planning panel, a loose collective of more than a dozen local water agencies and advocacy groups jockeying for Proposition 84 water and flood-control funding.

The water planning board remains the county’s only route to those bond dollars, a point leaned on by membership proponents Steve Wilensky and Merita Callaway throughout Tuesday’s debate.

Wilensky, who earlier defended the panel’s role in promoting county water rights, reiterated his view that membership in the planning board provides the best tool for keeping county resources safe from a state Department of Water Resources board that he said “betrayed” county interests.

“This process was designed to allow more input and control from local entities to be able to access these tax dollars,” he explained. “The question is who should decide how to spend them? Is it better to have local agencies make those decisions, or is it better to have DWR, which is spurred by interests from Los Angeles and the Central Valley, handle it?

Callaway, the board’s representative on the planning panel, renewed her earlier battle with board Chairman Gary Tofanelli over whether the water planning board was fit to protect those local interests in the first place.

The panel, in her view, is not a perfect vehicle for advancing county interests, but one that’s made “considerable progress” in the days since each member agency held a single-vote veto.

Besides, she said, any avenue for project funding is better than none at all.

“You have to start somewhere,” the District 3 supervisor explained. “And this is where any funding for water projects is going to come from, is through the IRWMP.”

“The likelihood of this county having a project sell (to the Department of Water Resources) would be small,” Callaway explained. “The likelihood of selling a project through the IRWMP is great. So the idea is to be able to support that, because any funding for (water) projects will be coming through them.”

The problem, according to board chairman and recent water panel attendee Gary Tofanelli, isn’t the viability of the projects, but the plan itself.

“They crafted this grandioso plan but they didn’t consider the fact that they were only going to have 11 projects,” Tofanelli explained. “Of those 11 projects, they don’t come close to covering the objectives they said this plan was for. So instead of crafting a plan that would work for their projects, they crafted a plan around objectives that the projects don’t fit into.”

“It didn’t look to me like they were going to say, at any point, ‘Hey, maybe we need to adjust the plan,’” he added.

Supervisor Darren Spellman also opposed the effort, citing “obstructionist” special interest environmental groups – like the Sierra Club – he said shouldn’t be allowed a water-panel vote.

Supervisor Tom Tryon struck a middle ground with his support for the water planning group, one he said counted as a start toward protecting county interests despite a formerly “dysfunctional” procedural framework.