State Bond Spurs Surface Water Storage
Nov. 4, 2009 |
By Molly Peterson
I listened to NRDC's Barry Nelson and others on Larry Mantle's show Wednesday morning - and I almost pulled off the road when I heard Nelson say that he had been working on policy stuff, not the bond stuff, so he didn't know much about some of the bond issues - including Temperance Flat.
One reason I almost pulled off the road is that 6 years ago, when Nelson schooled me, a young reporter at KQED, patiently and in detail, in our state's water policy follies, Temperance Flat was very much a live issue. By which I mean: perchance he knows more than he thinks.
The other is Temperance Flat. I left California for a little while after I covered water issues on the San Joaquin River. When I came back I was gobsmacked to hear Temperance Flat again. How does this project turn up like a bad penny every time?
Oh, right. Because some of us want it to. Including the Governor, who said frequently and loudly he wouldn't sign a bond without surface storage in it.
After much delay, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation released a study that purported to find Temperance Flat feasible and a good idea. (Don't be fooled by the October 2008 date; it came out in August of 2009.) For those of you familiar with cost-benefit analyses (hello, the two of you), it's basically 1 - which means that even in the best "sell" of the project, it's barely worth it. And the report doesn't account for costs from taking away prime water for kayakers, for costs from destroying Native American archaeological sites, and for costs from changing - dramatically - habitat for at least three kinds of fish (including the trout I used to catch with my dad).
I wonder if all the pieces of the bond puzzle are awesomely news-rich targets like this. Hope so.
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4 days, 12 hours ago
Molly -- great blog!
Two things I'd add here. The first is self-promotional: KQED has put together a map of where the proposed spending in the Big Water Bond would go. It's here: http://bit.ly/4DwzmN. Of course, the $3 billion piece devoted explicitly to storage contains no details--so you won't find Temperance Flat listed anywhere.
But that leads to the second thing: The bond says the storage funds ought to go to projects identified as priorities in the CALFED Record of Decision. And when you go back to that you come to a handful of dam projects: the Sites reservoir in the Coast Range west of Maxwell (Glenn County, I think); expansion of Los Vaqueros Reservoir in Contra Costa County); and an unspecified project on the San Joaquin River -- either raising Friant Dam *or* a dam further upstream, which would be Temperance Flat. In all, the projects outlined in the CALFED document would add a maximum of 6 million acres feet to the state's storage capacity. Worth thinking and asking questions about!