The Tulare County Board of Supervisors approved a joint exercise of powers authority agreement with four other counties to lobby together to get a portion of California’s $7.5 billion Proposition 1 dollars to fund Valley water-storage projects.
In particular, officials in Tulare, Fresno, King, Madera and Merced counties could seek as much as $1.5 billion to cover half of the projected costs to build the proposed Temperance Flat Dam along the San Joaquin River Gorge, about 20 miles north of Fresno.
The Friant Dam was built in the early 1940s along that waterway, forming Millerton Lake, a federal reservoir that releases water into the Friant-Kern Canal. It extends south through eastern Tulare County and into Kern County, supplying surface water to farms, as well as some communities that include Lindsay.
But as reservoirs go, Millerton doesn’t have much storage capacity, a maximum of 520,500 acre feet of water. A single acre foot is the amount of water that would fill an acre one foot deep.
Because of that low capacity, a lot of water runoff in wet years, a lot of storm water and mountain snowpack runoff is released but not directed to water customers in order to keep Millerton from becoming too full and posing a flood risk.
“They had to surrender 600,000 acre feet of water in 2011,” a highly wet year, said Denise England, water resources program manager for Tulare County.
Efforts to build a dam upstream of Millerton to create a reservoir that could hold more than double the lake’s capacity have been in the works for more than a decade with water experts and community officials in the south Valley supporting the efforts.
But it wasn’t until last year that the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation finally issued a draft environmental impact report on the dam project after about a dozen years of work to get things moving.
Still, California’s fourth year of severe drought is reinvigorating the push to finally build Temperance Flat Dam, as did California voters’ decision to approve Prop. 1 last year, which would allow the state to sell billions of dollars in bonds to fund water projects and drought-relief efforts.