U.S. Agency to Seek ‘Partnerships’ With Water Users : Resources: Bureau of Reclamation leader says dam-building era is over. He unveils plan for conservation, efficiency.

The head of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, unveiling a 10-year “strategic plan,” said Tuesday that the former dam-building colossus will step up “creative partnerships” with water users to wring the most out of water already streaming through the federal system in California and the rest of the arid West.

In an interview, Commissioner Dennis B. Underwood conceded that the bureau’s days of building massive dams are over. The new plan includes getting electric utilities to share costs of upgrading hydropower plants and getting farmers to help finance new irrigation methods that conserve federally subsidized water, he said.

With federal funds increasingly scarce, “the challenge we’re going to put on all our project managers is: Don’t just come in with a technical solution. You’ve also got to come in with a financial package” that embraces cost-sharing by water users, Underwood said.

He will appear at a ceremony today with Manuel Lujan Jr., secretary of the Interior, to announce the plan for guiding the 90-year-old Bureau of Reclamation through 2002. The commissioner said that he has received “very positive” reaction to the blueprint from congressional leaders, environmental groups and water users.

“People agree that we are changing direction (away from dam building) and are doing reforms that are greatly needed right now,” he said.

However, an aide to House Interior Committee Chairman George Miller (D-Martinez), a leading critic of the bureau’s policies, called the plan “vague and full of generalities. It speaks mountains about what the Administration is doing on water resource management.”

Underwood, suggesting that the criticism was politically motivated, said that the admittedly sketchy plan of “principles, goals and strategies” would be followed by 25 implementation documents by the end of the year. Flipping through the first such document, “Hydropower 2002,” he noted that it contains 94 pages of specifics.

The commissioner went on to discuss many projects, either planned or under way, that he said represent the agency’s new direction.

One includes an effort to address the contention of environmentalists that California rice farmers waste huge amounts of water.

“Many of these rice fields on the Sacramento River and elsewhere are located right next to wildlife refuges,” Underwood said. “We are working on cooperative agreements that get farmers to leave the water in the fields a little bit longer after the harvest. Then it becomes an enhanced wetland and ducks have an opportunity to go over and peck at the rice stubble. Otherwise, farmers generally drain the fields and burn the rice stubble, which can cause air pollution problems.”

A major thrust of the bureau, he said, is to get more out of aging hydropower plants, such as the one at Hoover Dam--and to get the beneficiaries to pay for it.

When it was built, Hoover’s generating plant could produce 1,300 megawatts of electricity. But with the installation of more efficient turbines, capacity has been increased to 2,000 megawatts.

“Who paid for it? The people who are getting access to the new capacity,” he said--namely, Southern California Edison, the Southern California Metropolitan Water District, the states of Arizona and Nevada and the cities of Los Angeles, Burbank, Glendale, Pasadena, Vernon, Anaheim, Azusa, Banning and Colton.

To get more out of the water used for irrigation--and thus free more for urban users--the bureau is trying to get Central Valley farmers to share the cost of a new underground drip system that can use 25% less water than sprinklers and 15% less than above-surface drip methods.

Underwood said that the underground drip system not only conserves water but increases yields, reduces tillage costs and cuts down on runoff pollution from pesticides and fertilizers.

“We’re looking at challenge cost-sharing programs to spread this technology,” he said.

The bureau also is hoping to spread a promising project developed at the Shasta Dam hydropower plant in Northern California, he said. To protect the winter-run chinook salmon in the Sacramento River, cool water is being released from the Shasta reservoir during the summer. Power generation is maintained at Shasta by transferring water from upstream dams.

This program has cut recreational use of the upstream reservoirs, he said, but has helped the spawning salmon.