Resource Crisis of the Century Lacks a Water-Based Solution

The last time a spring-run Chinook salmon was spotted in the upper San Joaquin River was in 1950. That was a few years after the completion of the Friant Dam just outside Fresno, which would eventually provide irrigation water to a million acres of some of the most productive farmland in the world at the expense of turning much of the river into a dry arroyo.

One of the very few surprising things about this situation is that it took 38 years for the first major lawsuit to get filed. But that finally happened in 1988, when the San Francisco office of the Natural Resources Defense Council, at the head of a coalition of more than a dozen environmental groups, sued to keep the federal government from renewing a series of leases awarding San Joaquin water to the irrigation districts served by the dam.

Over the next 11 years, the environmentalists enjoyed an unbroken record of success in federal courts on their claim that the dam operators were violating state law by failing to protect downstream fisheries.

At that point, they entered into settlement discussions with the Friant Water Users Authority, which represents irrigation and water districts with claims on the dammed water. The aim was to find a way of restoring the river to health (the environmentalists’ goal) without seriously disrupting the users’ way of life (the authority’s).

Those discussions, part of which were conducted under federal mediation, broke down four years later, when it became clear that the restoration of a thriving salmon population and the absence of disruption to the farmers were not “achievable at the same time,” in the words of Kole Upton, a Chowchilla grower of cotton, wheat, corn, potatoes and almonds who is chairman of the Friant Water Users Authority.

That brings the timeline up to today, when each side is probably more bitter and mistrustful of the other than on the day the lawsuit was filed.

“Everybody’s beginning to realize this is really an attack on our water supply,” says Denis Prosperi, a Madera almond and grape farmer active in the fight.

“It doesn’t sound to me like they’re acknowledging their stewardship responsibility to the river,” Jared Huffman, an attorney for the NRDC, says of the water authority. “It sounds to me like hostage taking.”

Now, city dwellers separated by a comfortable swath of geography from the state’s big middle might find it easy to dismiss something that sounds like a parochial dispute between a bunch of San Joaquin Valley farmers and a clutch of Bay Area fish-huggers.

But the fact is there’s no fight more emblematic of what is certain to be the California resource crisis of the 21st century: water. No issue is more all- encompassing and none harbors more potential effect on the economy of the entire state.

The San Joaquin River dispute, in particular, touches on some of the critical questions hovering over California’s future, including what steps we will take to preserve our first-in-the-nation standing in agriculture; how much residential growth we are willing to accept; and where we will strike the balance between development and its inevitable environmental impacts.

This is also one of those issues, by the way, that underscore the peril of placing California’s future in the hands of political novices who think they can solve problems by switching on the star power and cranking it up to “dazzle.”

In fact, if Governor-Anoint Schwarzenegger is hankering for a taste of what he’ll be in for in Sacramento, he should take a close look at the intertwined interests, all of them arguably legitimate and many of them seemingly irreconcilable, demanding a voice in statewide water policy. Then he can go on Leno to tell us what he’ll do about it.

In this case the details are particularly complex because Friant Dam not only serves, but helped create, the local farm economy. Part of the vast Central Valley Project of the 1940s, the dam produced a reliable source of irrigation water and helped stem the flood threat downstream, both prerequisites for making the area’s fields, vineyards and orchards flourish.

When the dam was completed in 1944, farm demand was so low that most of the inbound water was released downstream. But as agriculture expanded, the farmers claimed more of the water for their own ends; by the mid-’50s so little flowed downstream that two stretches of the river, starting about 30 miles from the dam, were rendered all but permanently dry.

Not only was the salmon fishery destroyed, but the lack of dilution from any upstream flow also left water reaching the Sacramento Delta from the lower San Joaquin heavily polluted by farm runoff.

In time, the regional water demand far outstripped even what was produced by the dam. Users in the three-county Friant service district today draw an estimated 700,000 acre-feet of water more from the ground than can be replenished by natural flows every year. They know this is untenable, because the farmers know how much deeper the water table lies under their land every year. When he acquired his farm in 1975, Prosperi says, he had to drill down 85 feet to hit water. Now it’s 135 feet.

This much history is pretty much stipulated by both sides in the lawsuit. The devil, to paraphrase a cliche, is in the future.

The plaintiffs contend that the court rulings mean, in effect, that the U.S. Interior Department, whose reclamation bureau operates the dam, will have to restore the river by allowing as much as 450,000 additional acre-feet of water a year to flow downstream.

That’s equivalent to about 30% of what the reservoir yields to the farm users every year, but the environmentalists say it could be absorbed by the farmers if they implemented a combination of novel water management techniques. Among them: out-of-district water purchases, conservation and recycling.

The users say the only way to produce that much new water is by building a new dam a few miles upstream of Friant, preferably at a spot known as Temperance Flat. This would increase storage on the river enough to yield 200,000 more acre-feet, while producing enough seasonal flexibility to keep the lower river wet and further mitigate the flooding threat.

The problem is that “dam” is the dirty word, so to speak, in this conversation. The Natural Resources Defense Council opposes new dams as a matter of principle. If nothing else, the group says, the projected $1-billion price tag for Temperance Flat makes it a pipe dream.

But it’s also clear that the need for a new dam is almost an article of faith to many influential people in the San Joaquin Valley. “Our restoration plan is based on new water,” says Upton, using a code phrase for the new dam.

To say that the two sides in this fight don’t speak a common language is an understatement. When I asked Upton about the NRDC’s proposals for freeing up water by recycling and conservation, he summed them up with a blunt: “Horse manure!”

“We’re the most conservation-minded farmers in the world,” he says. “On my farm, every drop is recirculated.” He and other farm spokesmen in the region suggest that the environmentalists are either too ignorant of agricultural practices to properly assess the remaining potential of conservation and recirculation, or determined to restore the river at any price (to the farmers, that is).

The plaintiffs, in return, argue that one group of users -- “the fundamentalist dam builders,” in Huffman’s words -- have fixated on a dam project because they imagine it’s a way to get the federal government to take them off the financial hook for the river’s restoration. The plaintiffs argue that the dam lobby has overstated the economic loss farmers would suffer from any non-dam alternative to producing water for the river. To persuade local forces to support the dam, Huffman says, “they’ve set up a false choice.”

One thing that isn’t fair is to suggest that the farmers are oblivious to the serious changes they face in their way of life.

During a boat trip I took last week to see the Temperance Flat dam site at the behest of dam supporters, I found them fully alive to the obstacles and the expense confronting such a huge project. They also understood that a new dam producing 200,000 acre-feet a year would scarcely make a good-sized dent in the region’s annual overdraft of 700,000 acre-feet a year.

“We’re going to have to take land out of production,” I was told by Jim Cobb, a Fresno farmer and vice president of the Resource Management Coalition, a group of water users working on its own restoration plan. “There’s no way around it.”

But the accommodations farmers make to water policy, he argued, have to be part of a discussion about the chronic imbalance of water supply and demand in California, which spends billions of dollars to move water from areas that have more than their share to those that use more than exists in their local watersheds.

I’ve heard NRDC spokesmen say that regional self-reliance is the key to solving the state’s water issues. But the truth is that only when people understand that a desalination plant in Southern California may help relieve the strain on supplies in Fresno and Madera counties will we be on our way to a sensible statewide water policy.

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Michael Hiltzik can be reached at golden.state@latimes.com.