House OKs Central Valley Water Projects Pact

The House, moving toward ending a feud between the federal government and California that has lasted more than two decades, approved legislation Monday implementing an agreement to coordinate operation of the federal Central Valley Project and California’s state Water Project.

Both projects draw water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, but their operators had been unable to agree on whether the federal government should comply with state water quality standards, and the deadlock has virtually halted water resources development in the state.

The agreement, reached last spring by the Interior Department’s Bureau of Reclamation and the California Department of Water Resources, requires the federal government not only to meet state standards but also to absorb the estimated $1-million annual cost. The Reagan Administration had argued that water users, primarily farmers, should foot the bill.

Under the pact, the federal government may use state-owned canals and aqueducts to carry water from its project to the San Joaquin Valley.

California Rep. George Miller (D-Martinez), chairman of the House Interior water and power subcommittee, which drafted the bill, said it represents “a peace treaty to kind of bring an end to those wars and at the same time allow some sort of reasonable development to go forward.”

The disagreement, dividing environmentalists and farmers, arose as heavy pumping from the area by both the federal and state projects drew salt water into the delta from San Francisco Bay.

California responded to the problem by adopting delta water quality standards in the 1970s. Meeting the standards meant keeping the salt water out of the delta by releasing enough fresh water from upstream reservoirs to provide an adequate delta outflow.

The federal government refused to legally commit its upstream supplies to meeting those standards, although federal water has been made available when supplies were plentiful. Therefore, to meet its own standards, the state had to reduce its water withdrawals. The results were occasional water shortages for customers of the project, upon which the Los Angeles area is heavily dependent.

It also brought a stalemate between Southern California’s push for facilities to import more water and the north’s fear that more water development would ruin the delta.

The legislation, which passed the House by a voice vote Monday, “now means that both the state and federal projects will play by the same rules, which has not been true in the past,” according to Bob Will, a Metropolitan Water District lobbyist in Washington.