someone said earlier about a holistic solution, that’s exactly what we need. The BDCP is narrowly focused but extremely important in terms of the conveyance and Delta habitat compo- nents. The Delta Plan is broader and bigger which I think we need to get to that holistic solution that involves storage and groundwater.
“[Gov. Brown]’s in a very strong position right now. It’s very clear that he’s worked up, he’s feisty, he’s got lots of energy, and I expect that water is going to be pretty high on his priority list.”
– Stuart Leavenworth, The Sacramento Bee
Leavenworth: That’s been one of my big issues with BDCP is it’s been premised on this big gulp theory that you take a lot of water in the big years and then you can maybe lay off the Delta during the more lean years. And that theory works fi ne for Metropolitan Water District [MWD] which has a big reservoir where it can store water. And it works well for Kern. But it doesn’t work so well for Westlands Water District and some others in the San Joaquin Valley. They don’t really have a place to store water during those big years. And that’s kind of been missing from BDCP. I agree with Anthony, you need to have some south-of-Delta storage either in large and existing reservoirs or some other way because otherwise, you’re not going to be able to operate the system on this premise of a big gulp. It’s just going to be demand every year, year in and out no matter what conditions are in the Delta.
Watch more of Stuart Leavenworth’s comments.
Hanak: What about the Delta Wetlands Project, the idea of having some storage within the Delta? It was one of the early storage projects that CALFED was looking at. The Delta has a lot of islands that are big bowls; that project had moved forward quite a bit. The idea was that you would set it up so it would be like reservoirs that could be then used to move water to the south of Delta at certain times. It recently passed a legal hurdle that had been blocking it for a while. Initially they were planning on just, in general, having the opportunity to transfer water to whomever, and that did not pass muster in court. They have a new project that they’ve come forward with together with Semitropic Water Storage District down in Kern County.
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The idea is specifi cally using it as a surface reservoir in conjunction with the kind of groundwater storage that’s done in Kern. And that’s the kind of thing that could potentially help folks that are in places like Westlands, too. It’s new and uncomfortable in some ways, but it’s the kind of thinking that we need to do because it’s probably a lot cheaper than some of the other projects people are thinking about.
Davis: It’s also important to remem- ber that there’s a management side of groundwater. You’re talking about not just what you can take and put into the groundwater recharge, but in lieu management where you’re using surface waters and you’re not pumping groundwater. And that actually is a lot of the way that during the wet years groundwater supplies actually come back up.
There is a bigger picture here and a more sophisticated one if you’re going to solve the reliability of water supplies for California. This is why you have to get into some of the bones of how you manage water supplies. How these systems actually fi t together. Where there’s complementarity in certain regions or between regions of how they manage supplies and where they have complementarity on the projects. For example, how Southern California is in a position to do in lieu management of water supplies from MWD is a really important part of how we can manage our way through droughts that leave water available that is able to come through the Delta for the farmers. There is another cut at how these
pieces fi t together that I don’t think we’ve reached yet. And part of it is because we’re very focused on how we get this next step on the Delta fi xed, which is a conveyance fi x. The other thing I’d add is one of the interesting discussions in the Delta Plan and which really came from [Delta Stewardship Council Member] Randy Fiorini, is to look at the metrics of reliability of pumping, both in terms of the pumps and water deliveries. Do we have problems with fi sh entrainment