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Budgeting Water for Fish and Flows

The next time endangered fish swim too close to Delta export pumps, environmental managers will have a new way to save them. It's not a cutting-edge technology, but rather the Environmental Water Account developed by CALFED architects, who hope it will prove to be the holy grail of water management - a means of achieving species recovery without reducing water deliveries to farms and cities.

"This is the first time water will be acquired and set aside specifically for environmental use," says the Department of Water Resources' Leo Winternitz. As described in CALFED's recently unveiled Framework for Action (see p.5), the account will be authorized to purchase approximately 385,000 acre-feet per year, which will be stored underground and in existing State Water Project and federal Central Valley Project facilities, and managed by U.S. Fish & Wildlife, Cal Fish & Game and the National Marine Fisheries Service. The projects will operate within a regulatory baseline consisting of the biological opinions on Delta smelt and winter-run chinook, the 1995 Delta Water Quality Control Plan and the Central Valley Project Improvement Act, which requires that 800,000 acre feet of CVP yield be dedicated to species recovery. If the fishery agencies determine that the baseline is not sufficient to protect fish, they can require that the pumping be slowed or halted, and deliver EWA water to users instead. They can also release water upstream to augment instream flows. "The basic concept is that we give the environment a share of the acquired water and let the environmental managers manage it as they see fit," says Winternitz. "The account will provide protection for species and flexibility for project operations, and could also result in increased Delta outflow."

At press time, negotiators were still hammering out the operational details of the account, which were to be included in CALFED's Record of Decision (scheduled for release on August 25). For example, the account will be authorized to borrow water, but how much and under what circumstances were still being decided. "We're still figuring out how we're going to make this work," says CALFED's Ron Ott. According to Ott, one big question is what priority EWA water will have when it comes to the use of state and federal facilities: "What happens if there is no room to store the water and no capacity in the canals to move it?"

Another question is how much , if any, of the EWA's $50 million annual budget will have to be used to cover increased pumping costs - estimated to be between $5 million and $25 million per year - that may result from changing pumping times. "Most pumping happens in the spring, when there is a lot of water and electricity is cheapest," says Ott, "but with the EWA we see pumping shifting to the late summer and fall when there are fewer fish around. But that's when power is most expensive. So who is going to pay the added cost?"

Beyond the operational issues, there are still big unknowns about how the account will work in practice. A team of biologists, engineers and water managers have spent more than a year modeling and manipulating different historical conditions to try and determine how the account should best be used to protect endangered fish. However, the so-called "gaming" has some significant limitations, says the Bay Institute's Christina Swanson. "The more you manipulate the historical data on which you based your models, the more problematic your results become and the greater the probability that your predictions of how the system functions will be far from reality," she says. "The models can't take into account all the impacts of your actions." Swanson says the only way to determine how the EWA will work is to test it using the real system. "Decisions will have to be based on lots and lots of information: where the fish are, what the outflows are, what's ratio of inflow to export is, how much water you have upstream left over and whether you need to hold that back to have water available for temperature control later. It's very, very complex."

The account's managers will also have to figure out how to allocate EWA water among different species. "Are we going

to use all the water for salmon or Delta smelt?" asks the EPA's Bruce Herbold. "Are we going to use some of it to protect other species? How are we going to decide?"

The EWA is based on the assumption that together with the baseline conditions, EWA actions will satisfy Endangered Species Act requirements regarding take limits at the pumps. Indeed, CALFED is providing water users with "assurances" that for the first four years of the program no additional water will be required to meet protection requirements for ESA listed species. However, says Swanson, an analysis of the gaming reveals that when the projects export more water than they historically have, take limits are exceeded even when the EWA is used. At best, she says "the EWA does not benefit fish but only mitigates for increased pumping." She gets no argument from Ott: "She's right. If demand increases a lot we'll have to make the EWA a lot bigger," he says.

Whatever it's limitations, says Winternitz, "when the EWA starts working it will totally change business as usual."

Contact: Leo Winternitz (916)653-0758, Christina Swanson (415)721-7680, Ron Ott (916)657-2486

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