But it is a step in the right direction. So there have been at least very incremental steps in groundwater over the last decade. We have a long way to go before we’re into the sustainable management scenario that I think we all desire.
Davis: I don’t think I’ve ever seen as radical of change in water planning, at least in the urban sector, as what occurred in the last 10 years. Much of it is better integrated water manage- ment planning. I think the IRWM [Integrated Regional Water Manage- ment] process has been transformative. I think the funding from water bonds over the last decade has allowed water agencies to seriously start stepping up to the plate, leveraging the outside funding
and making investments in their own backyards to better manage existing water supplies and develop new ones that had not been used previously. For example, recycled water has boomed. You see better groundwater manage- ment. You see watershed management efforts now going on throughout the state of California, but most notably, there are some exciting initiatives go- ing on in the Central Valley. The complacency that existed in urban water management planning prior to 2000 has changed dramati- cally. And I don’t see the genie going back into the bottle. I see that particu- larly with the implications of climate change and how serious a challenge it is. There’s not a water manager in California who wants to stand up in front of his or her public and say, “I don’t have the water that you need,” or “I can’t meet the needs of the growth that is coming.”
I see agencies doubling down and getting far more serious about how to improve diversifi cation of the water supplies in all respects, from effi ciency to investments in local water supply development. And I see that as coming into harmony with the need for near- term actions to help get us through
January/February 2013
this time period while the Delta fi x is being developed. It’s essential. And so I think that we need to have more information about what is changing for water agencies and how they are better able to better meet the needs of their communities, how they’re going to be able to integrate the Delta and prepare for the future. But they need to make changes now.
Read BLM’s report on the McCormack-Williamson Tract.
Leavenworth: From a political stand- point, the thing that I noticed that has changed a little bit is I think we’re a little less provincial. There are still the North-South fi ghts over everything, but even on the Delta fi x you have [Senate President] Darrell Steinberg and other Northern Californians playing pretty key roles on kind of pushing the
debate forward. You could argue that Steinberg had to do that if he wanted to stay majority leader. He stuck his neck out on that issue passing the 2009 legislation, and that’s kind of an inter- esting dynamic that is a lot different than the last time we had the Periph- eral Canal debate.
The other thing that’s really important to take note of is there is a lot of concern on a very local level about drinking water quality and it probably doesn’t get enough attention in Sacramento but certainly down in the San Joaquin Valley there’s a lot of towns where people are just being denied what I think should be a fundamental right to clean drink- ing water. And I think you’re going to see increasing activism on that if that doesn’t change and if this next water bond doesn’t try to address that issue. That’s something that’s a lot different than 10, 15 years ago when all this stuff was happening kind of out of sight out of mind.
Hanak: I started working on water in California about 10 years ago. It’s hard for me to track well with what I think has really changed, but I can tell you what I’d like to see change over the
next 10 years. I’d like to see us getting more sophisticated about how we think about managing the environment because I feel like almost everybody I talk to, water managers, land use managers agree that we’re tripping over ourselves with various kinds of permit- ting to make sure we’re not doing harm. Just as an example, The Nature
Conservancy’s one island in the North Delta – McCormack Williamson Tract – which everybody agrees is good to go, a perfect place to get some good habitat, provide a little bit more fl ood protection, the works. The locals are buying into it. But in order to get the restoration effort to happen, we’re looking at potentially nine different permits, another ten consultations, and another eight reviews by 18 different agencies. Every one of those is going to be its own process, and they all have good intentions behind them, but not necessarily the same specifi c things that they’re worried about. And that’s a little project that
everybody agrees on. Multiply this everywhere around the state and you think about how many times we’re tripping over ourselves because our way of managing the environment and eco- systems is just so fragmented now. I feel like we could save a lot of money and get a lot better performance out of our system if we started to really integrate this in the same way that we’re starting to connect the dots on the stormwater and recycled water and effi ciency. So the Delta is a start. It’s a hard one, but we’ve got opportunities for sure. ❖