U.S. to Set Aside Water Guarantee for Central Valley

In an effort to clarify enforcement of one of California’s most controversial water laws, federal officials plan to announce today that they will not guarantee delivery of all the water prescribed for environmental needs under the 1992 Central Valley Improvement Act.

The act, touted as the most sweeping reform of state water policy in 50 years, reallocated 800,000 acre-feet of water annually from the state’s vast Central Valley Project to environmental needs--principally to restore endangered salmon and other fish stocks dangerously depleted by diversions of water to agriculture.

Since the 1930s, the federally funded Central Valley Project took up to 7 million acre-feet a year from the Sacramento and San Joaquin river systems and funneled it south to the Central Valley via a system of dams, reservoirs and canals.

The legislation that sought to keep some of that water in the rivers has been under challenge by agricultural interests, which say that it violates their contract rights to Central Valley Project water.

Now, in a statement of proposed policy to be finalized in November, the U.S. Department of Interior intends to commit itself to meeting the environmental needs, spelled out in the act, without guaranteeing the 800,000 acre-feet.

“We are going to provide the amount of water necessary for the fisheries,” department spokesman Jeff McCracken said Thursday. “If that requires the 800,000 acre-feet, then we’ll use it. But if we can meet the fishery needs with less water, we will do so.”

Moreover, under the proposed new policy, the department believes that it can meet some of its environmental obligations by purchasing water from other sources, he said, and by relying on a $30-million fund set up under the act.

In addition, the department reserves the right to pump water to agriculture that has been first used in the rivers to help the fisheries, McCracken said.

Anticipating the department’s proposed policy--which is to be formally unveiled in San Francisco by Deputy Interior Secretary John Garamendi--a number of environmental groups have argued that the federal government has yet to deliver the 800,000 acre-feet stipulated in the act. They accuse federal officials of reneging on their obligation in response to political pressure from agribusiness interests.

“While we finally have a decision, it is defective in major respects,” said Tom Graff of the Environmental Defense Fund.

McCracken said Thursday that the federal government “has never really counted acre-feet [allocated to environmental needs] because we haven’t had the tools.”

But because of abundant rainfall for the past five years, he said, it has been possible to support fish populations without holding back from agriculture all the contested 800,000 acre-feet.

Water set aside under the 1992 act is one of the crucial ingredients in the state’s most ambitious environmental restoration project--the rehabilitation of the Sacramento Delta-San Francisco Bay estuary, which contains the largest wetland habitat in the western United States.