Rivers with Ron

Unfinished Business Persistence can be a virtue. That particularly applies to river savers. In the 1940s and 1950s, the U.S. Department of the Interior (Bureau of Reclamation) and the California developed ambitious plans to construct great canals leading from Sierran Rivers to the water hungry fields of the San Joaquin Valley. Not all were built, and those not built can linger as ideas in the hearts of the dam builders. One such Federal plan started with the planned Auburn dam and a large canal leading from the American River all the way south to Tulare. Work on the dam started, but the canal only made it to the Rancho Seco Nuclear Power Plant in southeastern Sacramento County. Then the 1960s happened. Auburn dam ran into seismic safety problems, and the canal was stopped by a federal judge in response to environmental advocate lawsuits. Reclamation never managed to get these projects back on the rails—although not for lack of trying from the dam’s supporters well into the 2000s. Still, the project remains federally authorized, although stripped of its water rights with the help of Friends of the River in 2008. Ever persistent, in 1990 one of the beneficiaries of the project, San Joaquin County, applied for water rights for a variation of the project—a large dam and diversion at Salmon Falls on the South Fork of the American River. That project application, too, has largely remained dormant, prompting us a decade ago to support extinguishing the application for lack of diligence. Well, even the State Water Resources Control Board may want to clear old applications lingering on its books. Last autumn, a hearing was held in front of the Board’s Administrative Hearing Office. Parties to the proceeding and others offered their advice. For a peek at some of the arguments, check out some key filings from Friends of the River and the California Sport Fishing Protection Alliance (CSPA): Expert testimony from Ron Stork. Closing brief from CSPA. Last week the hearing officer released her draft proposed order to “deep six” the application. If it manages to become an order, there no longer will be a pending application to, potentially, convert the South Fork American River from Coloma to Folsom Reservoir to another reservoir/bathtub reach. If so, persistence just might pay off. Oh, and we have a period (mid-1950s) map showing the proposed Salmon Falls and Auburn Dams and the canal heading south. Let’s make sure those days don’t return. (Yes, elections can have consequences.)

What's in the BIB

What’s a BIB you say? Well that’s the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill of 2021 (“BIB”), more formally known as the “Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act”. Yes, it was all over the news last year. What is not well known and buried deep in its many titles is Title IX – Western Water Infrastructure. Yikes, that’s us. 

No doubt Title IX was indeed bipartisan, with strong support from the dam-building crowd in both parties. Title IX was clearly fashioned to keep California’s U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein’s expiring “Water Infrastructure Improvements for the Nation Act of 2016” (the “WIIN”) going in hopes of reviving the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s (Reclamation) dam-building enterprise — an enterprise sputtering since the 1970s. (It ran out of good dam sites and had problems with government bean counters.)

BIB’s Title IX establishes spending for a WIIN-like subsidy program. It authorizes $1.150 billion for water storage, groundwater storage, and conveyance (canal) projects and $3.2 billion for rehabilitation of projects identified in Reclamation’s Asset Management Report.

Once the Congressional appropriators do their work, the Secretary of the Interior will have $1.150 billion for construction for federally authorized projects (for example, Auburn dam) and, more outrageously, unauthorized projects that received federal WIIN feasibility study dollars (in California, that would include the proposed non-federal Sites, Del Puerto, and perhaps Pacheco Dams). And unlike the WIIN, BIB Title IX lumps canals with dams, so federal money might also be available for federal and even state canals damaged by excessive groundwater pumping from either the $1.150 or $3.2 billion dollar account. The expansion of the giant San Luis Reservoir, poised to begin construction, might also qualify.

Unfortunately, it gets worse. Coronavirus relief funds to state and local governments can now be used for the cost-sharing dollars required from non-federal partners at authorized Reclamation projects!

Pretty outrageous, but it takes a lot to embarrass the lobbyists for the dam builders.

If you want to take a deeper dive into what the BIB and state funding means to dam and canal construction proposals in California, you can check out a draft status memo covering what the BIB and Proposition 1 means to the dam proposals in California.

The “Water Infrastructure Funding Act of 2022” Tries for 2024 Instead?

The game has been going on for a long time — paying for dams, diversions, and canals with other people’s money.

One of the later iterations of this was (or is) to be the “Water Infrastructure Funding Act of 2022,” known by its proponents as the proposed “More Water Now” ballot measure. Its critics, including Friends of the River, sometimes call it less charitable names (“Billions for Billionaires” is one example).

Whatever the name, if passed, the initiative would set aside 2% of the state’s budget ($4 billion a year more or less) for water projects, starting with the 2014 Proposition 1 dams. With that kind of subsidy, the state could fund a very large dam every year or two or three for the indefinite future — assuming they could find enough rivers to dam. Yikes!

Well, that’s the kind of proposal that draws a crowd of concerned environmental organizations (yes, including Friends of the River) and folks who count on funds from the state budget (think education, health care, wildfire, natural resources).

Fortunately, at this writing, the initiative’s backers have officially withdrawn the initiative from qualification.

But ever persistent, the initiative backers are now talking about switching from the 2022 election to the 2024 election (perhaps counting on the excitement and increased turnout from some GOP voters to see ex-President Trump on the ballot once again).

Stay tuned. More about all this later. Democracy can be a contact sport.

Reflections on Part of the Arc of Time

It’s been going on a long time. The West’s and California’s rivers are small in comparison to the land that they could irrigate. Nevertheless, the stories of valiant engineers and their financiers to keep these rivers from “wasting to the sea” and “to make the desert bloom” are legends.

But by the time that I came of age in the mid-twentieth century, most of the rivers had been “tamed”—and all too well. It was also the time that California Governor Edmund G. (Pat) Brown and Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan put the brakes on the madness of draining every last drop (or more) of the west’s rivers by one simple measure: that beneficiaries of had to pay for the water and power features of these projects.

The effect was electric: the mad dreams became just that - dreams of mad men (and a few women) unaccustomed to modern sensibilities. It became a time that rivers threatened by dams could be made state or federal wild and scenic rivers instead. That work was by no means easy—epic sometimes—but it could be done. These were comparatively happy times

But while the innocent among us slept easily, staff of water districts, their boards of directors, their PR machines, and the beneficiaries of cheap taxpayer-subsidized water were working tirelessly to change the narrative: phrases like “a great new dam-building era” or a “new era of abundance” became the talking points. If only the Brown (the elder), Carter, and Reagan “beneficiaries pay” constraints could be removed… Of course, subtler talking points were invented to soothe and disguise.

Such talk proved to be a powerful allure to the post-Reagan Republican Party and to enough powerful Democrats to establish a new consensus: subsidies are good, water projects at any price should go unquestioned and paid for by others. Whatever the water plutocrats wanted needs to be delivered by the politicians that serve them. And serve them they will.

The fiscal restraint wheels came off most obviously in California in 2014 with the passage of Proposition 1, the California Water Bond, championed by Pat Brown’s son, Governor Jerry Brown. $2.7 billion would be funneled to storage projects, mostly to previously deadbeat dams long relegated to the dust bins of history by agency bean counters. In quick succession, California U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein gave California and the west the Water Infrastructure Improvements for the Nation Act of 2016 (WIIN), a statute to revive the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s Great Depression-era dam-building program and also make it the vehicle for shoveling out federal taxpayer dollars to dam projects being proposed by others. And soon the Trump-era Department of the Interior decided to call the reconstruction and expansion of the giant 1930s to 1960s-era federal canals “storage projects.” Eager Congressional appropriators followed with gifts of federal funds.

California Governor Newsom called on his administration to speed up the permitting of the Proposition 1 deadbeat dams. His Water Commission was called on to recommend that state taxpayer funds be used to support the reconstruction of the California Aqueduct (long the responsibility of the state water contractors) and of federal canals (the responsibility of the federal water contractors). And this year, the California legislature complied with a hundred million or two—and the prospect of more in flush years in the future.

The WIIN, thankfully, expired in mid-December, with a prayer of quiet thanks from me. But the momentum of the push for taxpayer subsidies was also heavy on my mind. Weeks earlier, back in our nation’s capitol, the Biden Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill had replaced the WIIN with the same kind of subsidies for deadbeat dams and canals that had appeared in the WIIN—or been invented by the Trump Administration or Congressional appropriators.

But that was 3,000 miles away. The December California Water Commission meeting was not. Here, Friends of the River and a number of other environmental groups had penned a letter explaining why three deadbeat dams were not feasible under the provisions of Proposition 1. If the Commission agreed, that would mean no Proposition 1 money for them. With the opposite finding, they would be permanently eligible for such funding. The stakes were high.

Joined by some northern California tribes, we presented our case to the Commission directly—and we lost unanimously on the big proposed 1.5-million-acre-foot reservoir off the Sacramento River (Sites). We were not surprised.

More surprising was the Commission’s finding that the proposed Pacheco reservoir that would occupy a part of Henry Coe State Park was feasible. An 8 to 0 loss. Amazing. Apparently the Commission feels that state park lands should be preserved for later occupation by reservoir projects.

The Commission then added two projects to the seven the Commission had promised to fund—Including one, the proposed Del Puerto Canyon dam, a project for which even the Commission staff could not recommend feasibility determinations. We got three votes there, but we lost nevertheless.

It was not a good day. Neither was it followed by a good day when California U.S. Senator Alex Padilla demonstrated that he had fallen into Senator Feinstein’s pro-dam orbit when he joined in supporting federal taxpayer funding for three non-federal deadbeat dams: Sites, Pacheco, and Del Puerto.

Recent days and years are the result of decades of hard work by the dam builders and river diverters. It will take diligent, competent, and well-resourced work and people to reverse their work. It may take, will take, time, but that is the work that we must do.