Dedication of Dam Is Almost-Dry Run : Drought: County’s largest public water project in over 30 years is opened with only a symbolic flow.

About 300 people convened on the banks of the dry Santa Clara River Friday to dedicate a $31-million dam and canal built to combat saltwater intrusion that threatens the water supply to the farmlands of the Oxnard Plain.

The Freeman Diversion Improvement Project, a 60-foot-high dam and a canal system near Saticoy, is the county’s largest public water project since the Casitas Dam was built to form Lake Casitas 32 years ago.

United Water Conservation District officials opened sluice gates to release a single acre-foot of water through the system, a symbolic gesture to mark the completion of the project after 10 years of planning and three years of construction.

Because of the continuing drought, it had taken all week to accumulate that much water, which engineers said was predominantly runoff from up-stream sewage treatment plants.

County hydrologists said Friday that the 1.57 inches of rain received at Saticoy during the current rain year that began in October is only 15.8% of normal to date, allowing for little or no river flow.

But during normal years of 16.13 inches of rainfall, the Freeman diversion dam will capture 55,000 acre-feet of water a year. That is 12,700 acre-feet a year beyond the capacity of the earthen dam that the Freeman project replaces.

“Water was flowing out to sea, bypassing thirsty farms and homes,” Rep. Robert Lagomarsino (R-Ventura) told the crowd during his dedication remarks. “This project will be like a bank account to see us through the dry years.”

Lagomarsino praised United officials and county Supervisor John Flynn for their work to design, fund and build the dam.

The Freeman dam is designed to capture river water and divert it into a 3,500-foot-long adjacent canal. The canal leads to a pipeline that carries the water another mile to settling ponds, where it seeps into the ground, replenishing underground basins. The project includes a $2-million fish ladder that allows fish to swim over the dam and away from intake pipes.

The structure is named after Vern Freeman, general manager of the Santa Clara Water Conservation District in 1929 when the first earthen dam was built.

“Everyone told him then it wouldn’t work” to dam a river that is predominantly dry nine months of the year, said Freeman’s son, Clay Freeman, a retired San Diego County rancher. “But he was dedicated to this dam.”

Although effective in capturing rainfall from the river, the earthen dam was washed out with every heavy rainstorm. The problem continued even after 1954, when the newly formed United Water Conservation District reinforced the dam.

The concrete structure that spans much of the wide wash of the Santa Clara River is United’s centerpiece in a plan to replenish underground basins drawn down by decades of overpumping by cities and growers.

The overdraft, which began in the 1920s, had allowed seawater to seep into the freshwater pools by the 1940s, rendering parts of the basins beneath the Oxnard Plain unsuitable for drinking or irrigation.

Seawater intrusion has worsened steadily over the last 50 years, water officials say. Ultimately, they say, seawater intrusion could make the water supply under the Oxnard Plain unsuitable for agriculture.

The project was funded mostly with federal and state loans, which will be repaid through pump taxes charged to well owners on the Oxnard Plain. United board President Lynn E. Maulhart praised legislators for their assistance in securing the necessary funding, despite tight budgets.

“You can dream it, plan it and design it, but unless you have the money, you aren’t going to build it,” Maulhart said.