That other, still equal goal

We may from time to time forget that SB 7X 1 has teeth, and includes “protecting and restoring the health of the Delta estuary, and its native fisheries” language as a co-equal goal of the legislation. The implications of those teeth are starting to come into focus.

Via Aquafornia, this thought from the Met’s “Review of Delta Stewardship Council’s Delta Plan and Draft Environmental Impact Report.”

Additionally, the draft EIR states that the “no project” alternative, which is meant to analyze what will happen if no plan moves forward - in other words, the status quo - will result in greater water deliveries to export areas than will result from some of the Delta Plan alternatives the EIR is analyzing. It is troubling that the Council is analyzing Delta Plan alternatives that would reduce deliveries to export areas compared to the status quo, particularly given proposed BDCP investments and that such an approach will not meet the statutory goal of a more reliable water supply for the state.

Consider that last sentence for a moment. The key phrases, “reduce deliveries to export areas” and “more reliable water supply for the state” are negatively linked, misleadingly suggesting that increasing water supply is consonant with increasing its reliability, therefore trumping that other and equal goal.

That’s revisionist, if understandably partisan, framing. Increasing water export quantity from the Delta is not the objective of DSC/BDCP process - increasing water supply reliability is. Quite possibly there is a difference between the two, thinking that is well described here.

Of course it’s troubling to export areas that the DSC/BDCP is considering alternatives that would reduce water delivered to them. But given the primacy of the co-equal goals mandate (and not just its water supply side), it makes sense to consider such alternatives, and those doing the considering have no choice but to do so.

I have written elsewhere that it may be possible for the DSC/BDCP to demonstrate that a peripheral canal (but not a tunnel) could assure greater water supply reliability and benefit the Delta’s ecosystem by distributing higher quality fresh water from the north to the southern Delta.

But in my opinion, it is possible and possibly likely that the costs of “protecting and restoring” the health of the Delta estuary etc. will be so costly as to trigger one of two things:

1/ The status quo wins out. The Delta’s ecosystem continues to evolve at the mercy of judges and Sierra snowpack. That giant earthquake either does or doesn’t destroy the Delta’s levees, and/or sea level rise either does or doesn’t outpace the ability of public and private agency to bulk Delta levees up.

2/ Scarcity implodes environmental ethos. State and federal endangered species and other environmental protection laws are gutted, eliminating the legal requirement for costly habitat mitigation, and removing that pesky leg of the co-equal goals. A canal/tunnel is built like a railroad on the High Plains in 1870.

Whatever conclusions are reached in a cost-benefit analysis, there seems to be emerging a real sense of just what a daunting and contentious bit of political skill, economics, and science this is going to be.

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Democracy - win, lose or draw

I’ve been trying to get a simple answer to the Why isn’t the “fortress Delta” solution the most cost effective way of pursuing the co-equal goals question.

You know, the Delta ecosystem stabilization/improvement goal and the south of Delta water supply stabilization/reliability goal.

Nothing like a three-hour layover in O’Hare to find the time to respond to an interesting take on this question.

This came in something like a rebuttal to Prof. Jeff Michael’s cost/benefit analysis comparing canal.tunnel and fortress Delta.

I recently posted this query at Jeff’s blog due to Jeff’s own number-crunching on the issue. Jeff received an interesting response from “Greg.” From the comment string:

John [that’s me] said…
Have you received any response from any appropriate expert regarding your cost/benefit conclusions re canal/tunnel/levee upgrade? Based on your notes on Mr Gilbert’s testimony, it seems like he may be a good person to start with.
December 19, 2011 11:48 PM

The point of the post is that when asked about the Delta, most politicians respond like Brown did: there could be a disaster so we need conveyance.
Earthquake and floods are a risk for so much more than water export. Thus, the appropriate response is there could be a disaster so we need flood protection investment, emergency response/preparation, etc. not conveyance.
Jeff

That was an informative exchange. If I understand Jeff’s reply to Greg, then the answer goes something like this:

1/ Despite claims of the threat of earthquakes, the fortress Delta would likely mitigate seismic risk every bit as much as a peripheral canal or tunnel would. It would also cost significantly less money. So that argument for a canal/tunnel is difficult to make.

2/ Any version of a fortress Delta would necessarily involve raising levee crests approximately two metres to compensate for the most extreme scenarios for sea level rise over the course of the next century. That mitigates against the inundation/overtopping - Delta levees collapse, islands flood, whole place becomes brackish sea - argument.

What is left to examine in Greg’s comments are the problem of salinity incursion (which he attributes to sea level rise) and an Endangered Species Act mitigation processes.

Salinity incursions are historical events as well as natural ones. The Delta Atlas (see “water quality” section for .pdf) has a great map showing salinity incursions (one thousand parts chloride per one million parts water) from 1921-1943. That’s a Delta liquid 1/1000/th salt. Not a pretty picture:

Once the dams, reservoirs and pumps were built, California learned how to control salinity intrusion (as an aside, the confluence islands were likely damaged for ag beyond repair back then, though), and eventually, how to control flows to maximize water export and ecosystem needs.

As for salinity:

1/ As sea level rises, so will the pressure of water from the Bay to push itself into the Delta, making the integrity of the Delta’s levees, especially those at the confluence, all the more critical if a fortress Delta is to function. The DWR can only do so much, and in a dry year, it can’t do enough as it is.

2/ But while it’s likely true that a fortress Delta will aid in repulsing brackish water that is a metre or two higher, but it is inarguably true that a Delta stewardship regimen in change of a landscape circumnavigated by a taxpayer-financed canal/tunnel solution will have no incentive or political agency to repulse this new salinity push.

Finally, there is the ESA argument.

This past year everyone was more or less satisfied with their water deliveries. Smelt rebounded. Ag posted banner years.

But this past year was a very wet year.

Greg’s argument that a fortress Delta solution doesn’t physically change Delta hydrology and by extension how the ESA limits water export - and therefore doesn’t address the co-equal goal of water supply reliability - is probably a legitimate one.

But I have yet to see the policy written that says that Californians will be willing to financially tend to the health of the Delta as anything more than as a no-maintenance habitat mitigation land and water bank. This is turning the ESA on its head.

But more than that, what would it say about the health of American democracy if “conflicts” between development and environmental legislation approved by most of its citizens can be circumvented and trumped by the interests of capital?

How can it be that two lines of text un-publicly inserted into a giant federal omnibus bill by a senator can open up millions of dollars in new water exchange opportunities?

With the present policy, everyone is in it together, winning, losing, or drawing. Including the Delta smelt.

With a canal/tunnel, it is very possible that whenever there is a water crunch, the Sacramento River will deliver its 3,000 to 15,000 cfs to the head of the canal/tunnel. From there it will be delivered to the pumps having entirely bypassed the recharging effects it otherwise would have had on the Delta’s ecosystem.

The Delta, recipient of the SJV drainage water and whatever water’s left over from the Sacto, will lose, and south of the Delta will carry on with little interference, and certainly less than the ESA provides.

What we have in terms of public advocacy for the canal/tunnel is a reactionary terrorizing claim of earthquakes, floods, salt water in your taps unless 22 billion dollars of action is taken. In fact, the argument is actually about the “conflicts” between the Endangered Species Act and 1/ Property development and 2/ Increasing opportunities for those invested in and the flexibility of water markets. I wish that those in favor of the canal/tunnel would just come clean on this.

From both perspectives, John Fleck has questioned whether it is a good idea to have the ESA, by default, defining some of the critical water policy processes in California and elsewhere (subreq).

Absent a better policy, it is clear to me that the ESA a reasonably good tool for water policy-making. As someone once said, democracy is the worst possible form of government, except for all of the other ones. And the ESA is a tool that casts democratic government in its most generous, hopeful and progressively conservative light.

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The multiple functioning bypass

...the following probably belabors thoughts begun in the previous post…edited 11:30PM 12/8…

I began the blog with the intention of staying focused on the Delta. But in my discipline, understanding the limits of a problem depends on knowing its extents. Staying focused requires good peripheral vision.

This is the only way to begin to understand interrelationships in a complex natural and cultural ecology. And to imagine possible solutions. That is why the Grasslands Bypass Project was so intriguing, since it seemed a promising hybrid of remediation and production, at least it did in my imagination.

Legal issues and facts are part of this ecology. Mike Wade provided a record that pretty convincingly answers the legal question of whose responsibility it is to “provide drainage services” to the owners of the salt-laden land he represents. It seems that responsibility falls to the alternately despised and depended upon government.

It falls to the technical and spatial apparatuses and budgetary capacity of government to find ways to implement this charge. But in this context (as in many others in these anti-tax days) its agencies are in a most difficult bind, well-expressed by USBR Commissioner Keys in 2005:

Seven action alternatives are evaluated in the Draft EIS.  The alternatives can be grouped by their final discharge location - Delta, ocean and in-valley evaporation.  Four alternatives - Delta discharge at one of two potential locations, ocean discharge, and in-valley evaporation, provide drainage service to all 379,000 acres of land that require it.  Three additional alternatives combine in-valley evaporation with varying levels of land retirement.  Land retirement, defined as removal of lands from irrigated agricultural production, would reduce drainwater production and thus reduce the size of the in-valley treatment and disposal facilities.  The alternatives would cease irrigation on 92,600, 194,000 and 308,000 acres respectively, reducing drainage production from 70,000 acre-feet per year to 61,000, 45,000 and 27,000 acre-feet respectively.

and

The estimated construction costs identified in the draft EIS of the alternatives range from $589 million to $918 million.  On a present worth basis, which is the combined construction and annual operation, maintenance and rehabilitation costs presented as a one time cost, three full-service alternatives - Ocean Disposal, Delta - Chipps Island, and In-Valley Disposal are nearly identical at about $562 million.  The In-Valley Disposal with Land Retirement alternatives range from $626 million up to $857 million on a present worth basis.  All of the alternatives exceed the spending limit authorized under the San Luis Act.

That last sentence is worth reading twice, in a post-2008 economy. Thanks to Chris Gulick for sending the link.

The extents of the Delta’s ecology applied here means that it is inevitable that the water and toxicity issues of the San Joaquin Valley and Tulare Basin must be understood as they impact policy making for the Delta. These extents eventually scope back to the limits of the Delta, and to a less public rationale for why a peripheral canal or tunnel is inevitable.

The Grasslands Bypass Project is extolled as an example of a successful experiment at controlling selenium in Salt Slough and managed wetlands in the area just downstream from the Westlands Water District. An EPA article, titled Grasslands Bypass Project Reduced Selenium in San Joaquin Basin may be technically true, but is highly misleading.

Yes, the drainage infrastructure reroutes toxic water around Salt Slough and the managed wetlands, but it does this by concentrating it in Mud Slough. It is a useful and to a degree successful experiment that foreshadows what a rerouting infrastructure writ large might be in the Delta.

From a 1998 UC report:

The Grasslands Bypass Project in the western San Joaquin Valley of California was conceived as a means of diverting selenium-contaminated agricultural drainage water from fresh water channels serving Grassland wetlands.

and

Sediment selenium concentrations are anticipated to increase in Mud Slough as a result of increased selenium concentration and loading, and to decrease in Salt Slough, which no longer conveys selenium-contaminated agricultural drainage.

So, the question remains: okay, you created a way to isolate it, but what do you do with the stuff you’ve collected?

Microcosmically (I know, but it should be a word), is Salt Slough the canal/tunnel, and Mud Slough the Delta?

I increasingly have the sense that the (unspoken, but perhaps equally important) function of the tunnel/canal would be no more about ensuring water security for CVP and SWP clients than it would be about bypassing the selenium-, boron-, and mercury-laced waste water to be deposited in the (South?) Delta.

The government must “provide drainage services,” and dumping back into the Delta from the South Valley is definitely the cheapest option if one doesn’t include the cost of the Delta’s bypass infrastructure, which is say $15-30 billion dollars.

It’s a win-win for everyone but Delta folks, and they know it.

Treating the Delta as a drain was the original plan, after all. It remains arguably the least expensive one, just to let the San Luis Drain do what it was intended to do in the first place, which was to dump west side drain water into the “Contra Costa Delta.”

Three types of bypassing function are in play in or near the Delta.

1/ The Yolo Bypass is a time-based function related to flood control. It has the happy side benefit of providing lots of seasonal marsh habitat.

2/ The Grasslands Bypass Project separates and collects toxic water and allows the perception of improvement elsewhere in the form of measurable reduction of selenium’s presence. I like happy side benefits, and wanted so much to like this project, but it is very possibly a smokescreen. Allowing postponement of inevitable solutions that don’t involve taking hundreds of thousands of acres of ag land on the westside out of production benefits everyone scrambling to find a final solution when all of the choices suck.

3/ Bypassing in the Delta via a canal or tunnel would depend on a three-dimensional system of siphons, where two entirely separate systems of water, one headed around and out, one headed in, are allowed to move independently of each other.

Bypassing is usually a form of reactive problem-solving. That seems to be so for these three case studies.

And as the Fresno Bee reports today, bypassing is not without its local tensions and economic challenges on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley/Tulare Basin, just as it is in the Delta.

As for judging the extent of costs involved with draining selenium into the Delta (or any of the other alternatives) and creating a bypass to avoid its reintroduction into the export water supply, I await the cost-benefit analysis Jeff Michael has repeatedly asked for.

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“Providing drainage services” to where?

Why all the hand wringing over news that Judge Wanger, in his new career as attorney Wanger, will be representing Westlands Water District?

First, so what? Second, is it really a surprise, especially after his final, September ruling/rant? The case he is involved in is an important one, and a similar thematic of the relationship between shifting ideological winds, fact and science is likely to play out in it.

As we know from Judge Wanger’s last rulings, lots of science is, like a Jackson Pollock painting, open to too much interpretation.

Attorney Wanger will be representing WWD in a case against Westlands that asserts the district should be treated as a polluter, and therefore be required to obtain a state waste water discharge permit.

That Westlands’ soil leeches toxic salts that kill living things is not in dispute. What is in dispute is whether (ethically, ideologically, fiscally) the government should provide a “service” to deal with this privately produced pollution or - depending on your point of view - simply whether it is a matter of legal record that the government agreed to do this.

I suppose a secondary (perhaps even primary) question is whether the government can require the polluter to pay (through toxic discharge permitting fees) for the right to access this service.

Here are a string of comments exchanged between Mike Wade and others at Mr Carter’s blog - that gives a pretty clear sense of the chicken or the egg argumentation likely to be heard at the trail.

Which gets me back to Judge Wanger. And the likely logic of his WWD defense. This is not a question of overly speculative science about the degree of environmental harm Westlands toxic runoff produces. Stipulated - Westlands is toxic - but that’s not the issue.

What is at issue is what Mr Wade refers to in the comments string - the history of a promise made during the negotiation of the Central Valley Project Improvement Act (CVPIA) - that the government, that generally evil regulatory body of lying scientists and overzealous treehuggers, agreed to “provide drainage services” (aka: build a drainage infrastructure) to capture toxic drainage water discharged from the lands of a small group of private landowners.

Gotta love a euphemism that can make agreeing to create a very large and expensive government-built infrastructure sound like hiring a plumber to clear a clogged pipe.

But as anonymous asked at Mr Carter’s blog: A drain to where? The answer to that simple question lies in the legal geography where navigating facts becomes confusing, ideological, baseless and finally, Not My Problem.

I have a few basic public policy and engineering questions about this infrastructure:

Will this system be the agricultural (that is, the very horizontally extensive) equivalent of a mine’s tailings pond or dairy farm’s manure basin? If so, what are the precedents for things like mine tailing ponds or dairy farm manure capture basins, the products of private industry, being paid for by the government? Is it anticipated that the system will include water purification to remove the toxic salts before sending the water on its way north to the Delta or migrating birds die on its surface? If not, will the toxic water be stored and separated from the ecosystem indefinitely, like a Yucca Mountain for toxic drainage water?

From what I can infer from Mike Wade’s position, ex-Judge Wanger will likely argue that Yes, the government is contractually obligated to build this infrastructure, and therefore they are the appropriate body to answer these sorts of questions, and besides, are irrelevant to this case, and not the obligation of my client to answer.

Because they agreed to “provide drainage services” to Westlands in a legally binding contract. That’s all that matters.

What it costs and how to engineer it is the government’s problem, not the landowners’. As Kevin Bacon, aka Capt. Jack Ross, once said, “[t]hese are the facts of the case, and they are not in dispute.” What is, perhaps, is whether WWD will have to pay to use a government service, and if so, how much.

And once that’s determined, determining whether it makes more sense to buy out the WWD landowners than it does to indefinitely pay for lawyers to haggle, engineers to design, and remediation infrastructures to (possibly) correct an error in judgment made decades ago.

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Private fox, meet public henhouse

How does a group of water agencies, representing many interests but very few agendas, get made into a public funding entity?

Why is it okay that that group is allowed to underwrite an enormously challenging and important process of defining public policy? I use the word “allowed” instead of “required” purposefully.

Is it really any surprise that those water agencies will take as much advantage of this arrangement as they can?

The NRDC’s Barry Nelson recently wrote a piece questioning the extent to which water agencies may be granted control over the Bay Delta Conservation Plan process.

He points out that the proposed BDCP memorandum of agreement

Provides export water agencies with a privileged role in selecting the BDCP consultant team and in providing direction to them.

Commits state and federal agency support for listing the export water agencies as “permittees” under the ESA.

Why shouldn’t the water agencies get this kind of access, spin capability, veto power, etc.? They are paying for the BDCP, after all - as the California Farm Water Coalition’s tireless Mike Wade reminds us all.

And that is the problem. This is a public issue, and should be paid for by the public, not by a (nearly) single-interest constituency. This is a fundamental flaw with the process.

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