The San Benito County Water District will soon have to cough up
more money for the water it imports from the Sacramento-San Joaquin
Delta every year.
The district is still negotiating its contract with the Central
Valley Water Project, the historic irrigation enterprise that some
call a hydrological wonder and others consider a
environment-busting boondoggle.
Hollister – The San Benito County Water District will soon have to cough up more money for the water it imports from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta every year.
The district is still negotiating its contract with the Central Valley Water Project, the historic irrigation enterprise that some call a hydrological wonder and others consider a environment-busting boondoggle.
The CVP is a federal project managed by the Bureau of Reclamation. Every year, it pumps about 7 million acre feet of water that serves three million municipal and industrial users and irrigates about 3.5 million acres of mostly arid terrain that a CVP spokesman called “some of the world’s premier agricultural land.”
“If the Bureau was not here and never built the facility, California wouldn’t be what it is today,” said CVP spokesman Jeff McCracken. “You couldn’t live in a lot of places because of floods, and California wouldn’t be the fourth largest agriculture producer in the world.”
McCracken compared turning what is essentially desert into verdant farm land to the evolution of Santa Clara Valley into Silicon Valley.
“Silicon Valley is the premier producer of computers because the people who settled there developed it and did what was needed to make that happen,” he said.
The CVP, along with the State Water Project, provides about 43,000 acre-feet of water to San Benito County every year at a rate of around $60 an acre-foot, according to McCracken. An acre-foot is equivalent to an area about the size of a football field filled to a depth of one foot. It is enough water to supply two families of five for about a year.
CVP and SWP water originates well north of here and collects at Shasta Dam just north of Redding. From there, it flows down the Sacramento River to the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta where it is pumped farther south. Santa Clara County’s water is delivered via the San Felipe Project and stored at the San Luis Reservoir east of Gilroy adjacent to Highway 152.
Construction of the project began in the 1950s and many of the hundreds of contracts the CVP holds with local districts are more than 40 years old. This is the first time they’ve been renewed.
The SBCWD began taking delivery from the project in 1978. The Santa Clara Water District began taking delivery in 1987, just in time to alleviate the drought in the Santa Clara Valley that lasted through the early 1990s, a point that district executive Walt Wadlow emphasizes to those who say the water deliveries are a waste of money, especially for South County residents who, in a typical year, can rely on groundwater.
“I have to take people back to the drought, when well levels were dropping precipitously,” Wadlow said. “If we had not had the federal water, we would have had an essentially empty reservoir. In a wet year, South County does very well, but we have to plan for dry and very dry years.”
The CVP is designed to take water from relatively wet regions where there are relatively few people and deliver it to dry, dense areas in the Central and San Joaquin valleys and southern California. San Benito County does not keep track of what water goes where, McCracken said, so it’s hard to say who actually uses most of the CVP water.
Factory farmers in Fresno, Tulare, Kings, Merced and Kern counties are some of the project’s largest benefactors, which infuriates environmental advocates who say the project is a short-sighted corporate subsidy.
“The Reclamation Act was designed to meet the needs of California at the end of the 19th Century,” said Barry Nelson, a senior policy analyst with the Natural Resources Defense Council, of the 1902 legislation that established the Bureau of Reclamation. “We’re now in the 21st century and nothing has really changed. The bureau spends very little time trying to figure out how to help California meet the needs of a modern western economy.”
The biggest problem, Nelson said, is that water is not realistically priced. The water delivered to major farming operations is heavily subsidized. He said it’s a good start that new contracts for the water district and other urban areas are moving into line with the true cost of water.
“Urban agencies pay pretty close to full freight,” Nelson said. “There’s a very close correlation between the efficient use of water and its cost.”
The district’s water rates with the CVP are scheduled to go up in 2006, according to SBCWD Manager John Gregg. By reopening the contract, the district allows federal officials to conduct another environmental review of the San Felipe Project. The environmental effects on San Benito County won’t be known until after the contract with the CVP is fully negotiated because the environmental review can’t be done until then, McCracken said.
