San Joaquin Valley water districts have sued to stop releases of Central Valley Project water down the Trinity River for fish, and farm advocates say a federal agency is sending mixed messages about the drought.
The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation on Aug. 21 announced it would begin releasing as much as 88,000 acre-feet of water from Trinity Reservoir to provide cooler and higher water in the Klamath River for returning chinook salmon.
The Westlands Water District and San Luis and Delta-Mendota Water Authority immediately sued in U.S. District Court to stop the releases, arguing that more than 200,000 acre-feet of water has already been flushed down the Lower Klamath River for fish in the last four years.
“It has a water-supply impact to folks in our region,” said Dan Nelson, executive director of the 29-district San Luis and Delta-Mendota authority. “A lot of our water users this year got a zero allocation from the Central Valley Project, and the reason they got a zero allocation was there supposedly wasn’t enough water in storage to be able to dedicate for endangered species and still be able to make a delivery (to farmers) in this type of year.”
“On the other hand, all of the sudden this water becomes available for another use on the Klamath side,” he said.
Nelson said federal officials had cited a need to keep enough water in the Sacramento River for endangered salmon as the reason no CVP water was allocated for agriculture south of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta.
However, the water sent down the Trinity from the Lewiston Dam wouldn’t have been available for the Sacramento system this year if it hadn’t been released, said Shane Hunt, a Reclamation spokesman in Sacramento, The Associated Press reported.
“It is water that would have stayed in the Trinity for next year for temperature management and other project purposes,” Hunt said. “It could have been water we would have moved over next year depending on what happened this winter.”
The releases were requested by the Hoopa Valley and Yurok Tribes and Humboldt County to prevent an outbreak of a gill-rotting disease which spreads in low and warm water conditions.
Bureau officials said the measure was necessary to stave off a large-scale salmon die-off like one that occurred in the Klamath River in 2002, which environmentalists blamed on Reclamation’s decision to restore irrigation water to farms.
For the second straight year, the Bureau of Reclamation allocated no water this year for agricultural land without senior water rights either north or south of the Delta, leaving the bulk of the CVP’s nearly 2 million acres of irrigated farmland without surface water.
“It’s frustrating to see water that, when others have a zero water allocation … may be a potential opportunity for additional water resources, and it’s literally flushed out to the ocean,” Westlands spokeswoman Gayle Holman said.
Ryan Jacobsen, executive director of the Fresno County Farm Bureau, agrees. He said “even a small fraction” of the 55 million acre-feet flushed through the Delta for environmental purposes in the last four years would have “made a huge dent” in the drought for farmers.
As it is, about 25 percent of the farmland in Fresno County — the nation’s top-producing agricultural county — is fallowed because of a lack of water, he said.
“It’s a lack of leadership in Washington, D.C., to change some of these practices that are taking place,” Jacobsen said.
The water districts have requested a temporary restraining order to stop the releases and had not received a decision as of the Capital Press deadline. Last year a federal judge denied the injunction sought by irrigators. The bureau’s Hunt declined to comment on the litigation.
The districts assert the water planned for release is enough to farm 31,000 acres of food or serve more than 175,000 urban families for a year. Nelson laments that the releases appear to be becoming an annual occurrence even though the bureau characterizes them as emergency measures.