Penalty Urged Over Water Quality Lapses : Hearing: Decision to give Southland cities and farms usage priority during drought caused salinity standards to be violated in delta, environmentalists report.

State and federal officials repeatedly violated water quality standards in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta in the past two years to deliver more water to the farms and cities of Southern California, environmentalists charged Friday.

John Krautkraemer, senior attorney for the Environmental Defense Fund, said the State Water Project and the federal Central Valley Project made a conscious decision to deliver as much water as possible to Los Angeles and other points south. The policy caused Northern California reservoirs to be drained so low there was no longer enough water available for release into the environmentally sensitive delta, he said.

As a result, Krautkraemer said, delta salinity standards were violated at least 200 times in 1991 and 1992.

“The guiding principle seemed to be that the delivery commitments of the federal and state water projects held higher priority than the water quality commitments of those projects,” said Gary Bobker of the Bay Institute of San Francisco.

Observing that officials were allowed to violate the standards for nearly two years before state regulators took any action, both Bobker and Krautkraemer urged the State Water Resources Control Board at a hearing Friday to “signal a new era in water management” by penalizing the projects for the violations.

But officials from Los Angeles, San Diego and the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, pleaded with the board to consider the impact any punitive action against the two water projects would have on the state’s urban areas.

Hoover Ng, an engineer for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, said stringent enforcement of the delta water standards would require the state project to further reduce deliveries to Southern California. A reduction in water supplies, he said, would only encourage more businesses to leave Los Angeles, which is already “severely impacted” by an economic recession.

“Many of our businesses are seriously considering relocating out of state to a friendlier environment, where water is reliable and where businesses stand on equal ground with other competing interests,” he said.

Los Angeles gets about 60% of its water from the Metropolitan Water District, which in normal years gets about half of its supply from the State Water Project.

The agencies that operate the huge water projects--the State Department of Water Resources and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation--defended their water delivery decisions, saying the delta violations could not be avoided due to six years of drought.

State attorney David Anderson said limited water supplies forced both projects to operate within such a small margin of error that unexpected tidal flows and high winds pushed delta water quality out of compliance with salinity standards.

James Turner, an attorney for the Bureau of Reclamation, said federal environmental agencies also required the two projects to curtail reservoir releases at certain times to protect endangered salmon in the Sacramento River.

The comments from both sides came during a hearing called by the Water Resources Control Board to determine if the projects should be penalized for the violations. Although the board has never taken such action, it has the authority to fine the projects or require additional water releases into the delta.

After nearly seven hours of testimony, the board deferred a final decision until later in the month.

The delta, a 1,153-square mile maze of islands, marshes and sloughs, is the point where California’s two greatest rivers--the Sacramento and the San Joaquin--converge and flow west through the Carquinez Strait into the northern arm of San Francisco Bay.

A haven for fish and wildlife, the delta is also the critical link in the complex water system that serves about two-thirds of California’s population.

Channels through the delta are used to transport water from the upstream reservoirs of the two projects to the estuary’s southern end. From there, water is pumped into aqueducts and canals that carry it to farms and cities in Southern and Central California as well as the San Francisco Bay Area.

In 1978, determining that the state had a responsibility to protect water supplies in the delta from the intrusion of ocean saltwater, the Water Resources Control Board issued standards that became known as Decision 1485.

The standards set allowable levels of salt content at various points in the delta and created a monitoring system to gauge compliance. The two projects were expected to meet the standards either by releasing more water from upstream dams or curtailing pumping whenever the saltwater content exceeded allowable levels.

Biologists with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said they do not know specifically what impact the recent water quality violations have had on fish and wildlife in the delta. But they said they do know generally that “the reduced and precarious status of many fish species in the delta is largely the result of (water) project operations.”