 |
|
 |
| ||
|
Gangbusters on Efficiency
Squeezing the most out of every drop of water seems like it ought to be a way of life in the arid West, but farmers are tired of environmentalists and regulators saying "just do it," with little regard for local conditions and costs. Though CALFED's first stab at the efficiency question produced what many thought a weak program, its latest proposals seem to have spurred a small revolution in the efficiency game, at least according to those privy to the debate and talking up their cure-all at public meetings this fall.
"We've been stuck, in the West, with a concept of water conservation that says 'here's the bar, we want you to jump this high'," says Van Tenney of the Glenn-Colusa Irrigation District, which waters some 142,000 acres of farms in the Sacramento Valley. While such a bar may work for cities uniformly plumbed with pipes and faucets, it doesn't work so well for farm fields with different crops, soils and systems for irrigation, drainage and water delivery. "Moving away from the regulatory approach is the greatest step forward in conservation I've seen in 30 years. It's close to miraculous," says Tenney.
Rather than giving farmers and water districts a laundry list of Best Management Practices to carry out (line your canals, install drip irrigation, etc.), the new CALFED program would work by setting ecological and water quality objectives, assessing local and regional flow patterns, evaluating how area farms might change their water use to achieve the objectives, then providing financial incentives for them to do it.
"What's important is the outcome, not the specific actions for how to get there," says CALFED's Tom Gohring.
"It's a shift from command and control to an incentives- and objectives-based program," expands Scott McCreary of CONCUR, hired to help CALFED facilitate a steering committee of 14 stakeholders, including Tenney, that began brainstorming a new tack on efficiency in October 1998.
Van Tenney is not the only enthusiast for the new CALFED program. Environmentalists also see it as a breakthrough, particularly since they walked away from the table at a similar set of negotiations started with the passage of AB 3616 and the creation of the Ag Water Management Council years ago. "That wasn't a fair and objective process," says Friends of the River's Betsy Reifsnider, who serves on the steering committee with Tenney. "The people chosen to work on this new approach were willing to go beyond their usual positions. We sat down together and went through stacks of information, in a rigorous manner, and figured out a solution. For once, it wasn't the ag water districts saying 'just trust us.'"
Just how much water can be saved by fine-tuning agricultural water use is still in the realm of guestimation. CALFED projects potential savings of 260,000 to 350,000 acre-feet per year within seven years. The real benefits, say planners, won't come so much from the creation of new, "wet water," but rather from rerouting and optimizing use of existing supplies.
On-farm irrigation efficiency is already averaging 73%, according to the State Department of Water Resources. Of course some farms are more efficient than others, and not all improvements will occur at the farm level; some will involve districts working to reduce leaks, spills and evaporation from their canals and delivery systems. According to a region-by-region analysis in the CALFED paperwork, places with the most potential to recover losses by rerouting flows are the Sacramento River and the east side of the San Joaquin River. Regions most likely to recapture currently irrecoverable losses (those that do not re-enter rivers and groundwater systems) are Tulare Lake, the Colorado River and California's South Coast.
"We're trying to reduce losses that don't come back to the system or losses that come back degraded or in a place or time that isn't useful," says Gohring.
Losses occur throughout California's waterworks. What makes it difficult is that some of this "lost" water goes on to provide significant other benefits, like recharging rivers or groundwater, or supplying downstream fish, cities and other farms. But each basin has its own local flow path, water balance and resulting opportunities for greater efficiencies, all of which are now being carefully mapped and measured using the latest technology and data (a new, but as yet undefined, approach to measuring water is slated for creation by 2003).
"We're really trying to nuance, to get situation- and place-specific," says CONCUR's Bennett Brooks. "It's not efficiency for efficiency's sake, it's efficiency as a means to an end."
CALFED's water efficiency program lists 196 such ends, "targeted benefits" planners would like to achieve for 21 different basins and river reaches in the CALFED solution area. Examples include providing fall and spring flows in the Sacramento River below Keswick to improve ecosystem conditions, and reducing nutrients in the Delta to protect beneficial uses of the water.
But hopping on the efficiency bandwagon may turn out to be less a matter of warm and fuzzy aims and more a matter of cold hard cash. The new program will offer farms and water districts considerable financial incentives to do the right thing, in the form of competitive grants and loans.
Key in recent negotiations, according to Tenney, is a plan to ask locals to pay for anything that's clearly locally cost effective, but to offer state and federal dollars for improvements necessary for the greater good of the Bay-Delta's fish, ecosystem and water supplies. "We need to couple this new program with the existing, locally oriented AB 3616 program, but if the money isn't there, or the cost sharing is too stingy, then it could be a bust," he says.
Tenney is already worried about some of the financial language in the CALFED Record of Decision filed this August, which he says his stakeholder committee never would have given the nod. The language basically states that over seven years of implementation total program-wide investments in water efficiency improvements would average 50% local, 25% state, and 25% federal. "I have dim hopes for a program that expects us to cost share 50% of something that's not economically feasible," says Tenney. "Politics must have entered in here." CALFED's Gohring points out that while the ROD calls for a 50/50 split programwide, it does provide latitude for tailored cost share arrangements for individual projects.
Other loose ends are how the CALFED program will interact with existing regulations (such as conservation plans required for all those receiving Central Valley Water Project water), and whether there's any hope for phasing out old regs if the new program succeeds in accomplishing the same objectives.
Assurances are another big black hole. Planners and stakeholders need to negotiate what will happen if projected efficiencies don't pan out (farmers don't want to be held responsible), or if some regions go gangbusters on efficiency while others do nothing. Environmentalists, meantime, want to make sure that all conservation efforts are exhausted before anyone turns to new dams and conveyance systems, a stance that seems to have finally carried the day.
"To a person, everyone in CALFED is now committed to the soft path approach first," says Gohring, a consensus that represents a big change in the positional bargaining of the water wars.
"Everyone's been sitting around waiting for the ag water to come to them," says Roberta Borgonovo of the League of Women Voters of California, another of the 14-member committee. "But I don't want to see the wholesale conversion of ag land to urban development. I believe the soft path to saving the Bay and Delta will help the ag community stay in business."
Despite the uncertainties (plans are to flesh out a grant application process by December 2000 and an assurances package by August 2001), all stakeholders on the committee spoke of an unprecedented ability to see each other as colleagues rather than adversaries. Brooks and Tenney are quick to say that the process of bringing the larger ag and environmental community into the fold is still ongoing-the latest round of outreach was a series of public briefings held in late September and early October.
"We don't yet have a valley-wide huzzah but we've made a real breakthrough and are moving forward ," says Brooks.
"I think we have some buy-off from both sides now," says Borgonovo, "which will really help when we go to the legislature and ask for money." Contact: Tom Gohring (916)653-3790; Van Tenney (530)934-8881 or Roberta Borgonovo (415)931-4605 ARO
[ ABAG HOME | SFEP HOME ]
Copyright © 2002, San Francisco Estuary Project