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A groundwater recharge pond in the Coachella Valley (Photo: DWR)
While California is handling a record drought and a record budget surplus, the state is adding any new cash to proposals for surface water garage projects. and drought resilience package.
As a component of this allocation, a large amount of strategic flood cash will be available to recharge underground aquifers, a less expensive and faster option for surface water storage. formula that dates back to a time before the arrival of Europeans and that honors the tribal heritage of the state.
“We have a twentieth-century infrastructure for twenty-first century problems,” Natural Resources Secretary Wade Crowfoot said, borrowing a slogan from the chairman of the state’s Water Resources Control Board, Joaquin Esquivel. “This reservoir formula worked very well for us when there were far fewer people in the state and before the effects of climate change. With the demanding situations we have – this more variable hydrology, longer droughts, more severe floods – we depend on those reservoirs. “
“We know much more today about the effect of reservoirs on fish, adding our salmon that supports a fishing industry and is a component of our herbal heritage,” Crowfoot added.
Esquivel praised California’s Native Americans for the control of the land they have carried out for millennia.
“We don’t fully perceive what we got here and inherited,” he said. “And we’ve made a number of decisions that we now have to reconcile in the face of climate change. “
The paving of most of the state’s wetlands has altered the landscape in a way that now forces the state to return and rebuild herbal services, Esquivel explained.
“We’ll have to think differently about storage,” he said, lying with examples of water recycling projects and efforts to gather knowledge for water runoff and predict atmospheric rivers.
According to the California Public Policy Institute, the state’s aquifers have much larger garage capacity than existing surface reservoirs, and groundwater reservoirs can help farmers adapt to less stored water in the form of snow and water managers plan for more excessive flooding. that the existing garage and surface water transport infrastructure “is not in a position to take advantage of the water it has to recharge, especially in rainy years”. The researchers noted in a separate paper in 2019 that expanding local and regional transportation infrastructure is likely to be necessary, while also addressing capacity constraints due to subsidence damage.
Increasing groundwater materials and strengthening state water markets can also make agriculture adapt to new 20-year plans for the implementation of the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA). $300 million to local agencies to enforce the plans.
According to Nancy Vogel, the new undersecretary of water under Crowfoot, the Department of Water Resources (DWR) and the National Water Board “are working hard so that local agencies can capture those winter flood flows and use them to recharge groundwater. “it’s streamlining permitting programs for this through an effort Crowfoot calls “cutting the green stripe. “
In a budget briefing on Friday, Vogel noted that SGMA’s investment may be just part of the infrastructure that local agencies want for freight projects. invest some of that cash in multi-profit collection efforts. Another $200 million over the next two years will go to fix transportation channels, which is slightly less than the amount spent on getting better flows for wildlife conservation and well below the $800 million proposed through Senate Bill 559 for Quick Fixes.
On the federal side, the Office of Recovery and the Natural Resources Conservation Service provide irrigation districts with grants of up to $1. 5 million for efforts to improve agricultural water use in the state. of spillways.
In signing the budget package Thursday, Newsom said the state was “investing, yes, in the garage. But we describe the garage in a broad sense, not only the old hydrology of the surface garage, but also the underground garage. “According to a CalEPA spokesperson, Newsom most likely referred to 2014’s Proposition 1 water bond dollars. The administration has encouraged the California Water Commission to expedite the procedure for distributing this investment for projects such as the proposed reservoir site. investment for garage projects after determining that the benefits to the ecosystem would be minimal. The farm teams also criticized the commission for delaying the investment.
Although Newsom has the strength to appoint new commissioners, the framework is designed to be a clinical advisory organization operating separately from management. Proposition 1 gave new strength to the purse of this water bond, adding to its role as the parent of federal infrastructure funds. .
However, Commissioner Matthew Swanson expects the seven-project structure to move forward after achieving an investment milestone in January. In total, the projects would load approximately 2. 7 million acre-feet of new storage.
In an interview with Agri-Pulse on Friday, CDFA Secretary Karen Ross drew attention to a $550 federal infrastructure bill that could be put to a vote in the House this week. for deprecated infrastructure and $1. 2 bill for water garage, groundwater garage, and transportation projects.
Ross cautioned that this kind of spending, however, would not do so with the existing drought.
“There is no short-term cash that can solve this right away,” he said. “We just have to be realistic. “
Even the smallest well water power projects take time, he explained. For those grants, the budget includes $100 million over two years.
New large-scale groundwater garage projects are underway, but are still several years away from completion. Existing efforts have shown that this technique can bear significant fruit. However, this requires tedious coordination between agencies and local governments and has fewer prospects for the Central South. Valley without making an investment in transportation innovations and moving more water south of the delta.
Water rights similar to groundwater recharge have also been producers’ biggest fear.
“Groundwater recharge is excellent,” John Duarte, president of the Duarte Nursery near Modesto, told the Water Commission at a hearing in mid-September on water disruptions in the San Joaquin Valley. “But if we don’t have drinking water rights and there’s no added flexibility matrix. . . it will be challenging. “
Duarte added that the state wants the transportation formula and weather forecasts to be able to channel peak winter flows to collection sites. He also called the state’s mismanagement of resources that allow excess water to flow into the delta as a component of an “attempt to manage a single species” under the Endangered Species Act.
However, the state’s prompt reaction to the drought has been to factor relief diversion orders in several watersheds and use primary reservoirs for fish stocks, while offering water for fundamental human desires and keeping salinity at bay in sacrament. This will likely continue until 2022 as another dry year begins to develop, meaning no water allocation is planned for marketers in the southern delta.
DWR Director Karla Nemeth told the Water Commission how 3 Northern California reservoirs— Shasta, Oroville and Folsom — have played a pivotal role in water management across the state, but are no longer reliable for farmers.
“We are not assembling the wishes of the water source south of the delta with the water stored in those reservoirs,” Nemeth said. “These giant reservoirs are suitable regulators as we are doing this new year. “
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