Groups Oppose Westlands Water District Bailout

CSPA and C-WIN protest Westlands rescue through San Luis Drainage Resolution

by Bill Jennings, Executive Director, CSPA

January 17, 2009 -- The California Sportfishing Protection Alliance (CSPA) and California Water Impact Network (C-WIN) have submitted comments to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation regarding the proposed San Luis Drainage Resolution Act. The Bureau's proposed legislation is nothing more than an attempted bailout of Westlands obligations to control toxic drainage that has resulted from irrigating lands that should never have experienced a plow.

The Cretaceous sedimentary rock shales that underlie Westlands contain salts and trace elements like selenium, arsenic, boron and heavy metals. Several layers of virtually impermeable clay lie below the shales. Irrigation of these soils has led to high concentrations of these pollutants draining via surface and subsurface flow to the San Joaquin River.

Efforts to control these toxics led to the creation of Kesterson Reservoir and the disaster where selenium poisoning led to thousands of deformed birds. Kesterson Reservoir was ordered closed by the State Water Board in 1985.

Drainage from Westlands continues to discharge to the San Joaquin River at levels that are highly toxic to fish. CSPA and CWIN oppose the legislation under development by the Bureau, maintain that supplemental environmental review is required and believe that the only ultimate environmentally safe solution is to retire the drainage impaired lands in Westlands and to redirect water presently being used to irrigate those lands to protect endangered species in the Delta. Westlands currently receives almost a million acre feet of highly subsidized water exported from the Delta.

For more information, go to: http://www.calsport.org/index.htm. Here is the text of their comments:


January 11, 2009
Federico Barajas
U.S. Bureau of Reclamation
Mid-Pacific Region
2800 Cottage Way
Sacramento, CA 95815-1898

Re: Comments on November 26, 2008 Draft “San Luis Unit Drainage Resolution Act”
Dear Mr. Barajas:

The California Water Impact Network (C-WIN) and the California Sportfishing Protection
Alliance (CSPA) submit these scoping comments on the above-referenced Draft
Legislation and the so-called “collaborative process.” We also incorporate the attached
C-WIN/CSPA comments to Senator Feinstein of June 23, 2008 as part of our comments
on the proposed legislation. In this current letter, our comments focus on flaws we see
in the collaborative process. We strongly recommend that the Bureau prepare a
supplemental environmental impact statement on the draft legislation. Finally, we put
forward an alternative that must be considered as part of the supplemental
environmental review if realistic and cost-effective solutions are to be fully disclosed to
agency officials and legislators associated with this proposed legislation. Narrowness of
purpose does not excuse the Bureau from due diligence in evaluating reasonable and
cost-effective solutions to the drainage problems of the western San Joaquin Valley.

The draft legislation to resolve San Luis Unit drainage problems provides that the San
Luis Unit Contractors will receive a permanent 9(d) water contract and title to certain
federal facilities in exchange for assuming responsibility for drainage that is currently the
responsibility of the federal government.

We have not seen substantive changes in the draft legislation over the past several
months, despite numerous comments with significant legal, technical and economic
issues raised by C-WIN, CSPA and other organizations. We were told at our December
meeting with you that you were unable to incorporate most of the comments from the
stakeholders because your direction from the Senator was narrow. It is disappointing to
us that the process has not resulted in any substantive progress toward a cost effective
and sustainable solution to San Luis Unit Drainage problems that include some irrigated
agriculture in appropriately fertile areas, as well as a reduction in water service contract
deliveries for irrigation. With the framework apparently constrained sharply by Senator
Feinstein’s guidance, the process doesn’t feel very collaborative to us at all. We are
very concerned that outcomes of the process have been set ahead of time.

We request that you provide us and other stakeholders in attendance last
December with the letter from Senator Feinstein instructing you as to the
objective of your legislative effort so we may see the nature of the Senator’s
direction.

As you know, the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) requires analysis prior to
legislation or administrative actions. C-WIN and CSPA propose that a Supplemental EIS
be prepared.

Despite the lack of meaningful incorporation of concerns expressed about the proposed
Legislation, significant new information has become available since the San Luis
Drainage Record of Decision (SLDROD) that necessitates a new look at solutions to
this problem, prior to introduction of new legislation or implementation of the
SLDROD. The U.S. Geological Survey’s “Technical Analysis of In-Valley Drainage
Management Strategies for the Western San Joaquin Valley” and the “Feasibility
Report on the San Luis Drainage Feature Re-Evaluation Project” prepared by
Trussell Technologies, Inc., for Reclamation are both documents which illustrate that
the solution proposed in this legislation isn’t likely to work.

Both reports reflect the reality that alleged drainage solutions proposed in both the
Record of Decision and the Reclamation/Westlands “collaborative resolution” process
are fraught with risks, are neither economically nor technically feasible, and do not
include the only two proven and cost effective methods of reducing drainage -land
retirement and selective groundwater pumping. There is a continued lack of a
meaningful decision making process that amounts to window dressing for technological
fixes that will not address scientific, economic or ecological issues and will therefore be
unsustainable. In the words of the USGS:

“The treatment sequence of reuse, reverse osmosis, selenium biotreatment,
and enhanced solar evaporation is unprecedented and untested
at the scale needed to meet plan requirements.”

“Given the amount of analysis and documentation available from
the SJVDP and recent re-evaluations of drainage management, the USGS
identifies not a lack of information, but rather a lack of decision analysis
tools to enable meeting the combined need of sustaining agriculture,
providing drainage service, and minimizing impacts to the environment.”

“If the goal is to reduce drainage, then the strategy would be to retire down-gradient waterlogged
lands. If the goal is to create a sustainable integrated production/habitat system, then upgradient
land retirement emerges as the most logical strategy.”

From the standpoint of NEPA and the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA),
these two reports provide significant new information about the technologies under
consideration by the Bureau and the San Luis contractors. When significant new
information or new alternatives come forward which were not considered as part of the
original San Luis Drainage Record of Decision, both federal and state environmental
review regulations state that a supplemental EIR/S should be prepared. Such a
supplemental environmental review should reasonably include analysis of alternative
proposals from the San Luis Contractors, Reclamation, as well as the C-WIN/CSPA
alternative described below.

To assist the Bureau with scoping this supplemental environmental review on the draft
legislation, the C-WIN/CSPA alternative would have the goal of putting prime
agricultural land back in production and significantly reduce selenium mobilization,
discharge, and loading from irrigated agriculture in the western San Joaquin Valley. The
alternative would contain the following actions:

1. Retire up-gradient marginal lands with highly seleniferous soils. These lands are
presently not scheduled for land retirement, but produce large amounts of
seleniferous drainage affecting downslope areas. In some cases, those lands
were never considered suitable for irrigation. A meaningful alternative would
consider the environmental, economic, and social effects of retiring these lands
to remove or drastically reduce natural sources of selenium contamination from
the San Joaquin Valley watershed and aquifers.

2. Target groundwater pumping to reduce groundwater levels in waterlogged areas.
Over time, this action would facilitate resumption of agricultural production,
especially along western riparian lands, and wetlands restoration along the San
Joaquin River.

3. Significantly reduce water service contract amounts with water savings going to
other non-irrigation beneficial uses, including the environment.

The C-WIN/CSPA alternative would provide a distinct, meaningful, and sustainable
alternative as compared with adopted alternatives and options considered through the
draft legislation. The San Luis Drainage ROD, as well as the proposed legislation to a
lesser extent, would instead retire the most historically productive agricultural lands in
order to have a more reliable water supply to irrigate upslope agricultural lands with
highly seleniferous soils, thus creating even more toxic seleniferous drainage, some of
which is leaching into the confined aquifer below the Corcoran Clay Barrier.

None of the alternatives considered in the draft legislation is “generally consistent” with
the alternatives considered in the San Luis Drainage Plan Formulation Report EIS and
Record of Decision to avoid the need for a Supplemental EIS, especially in light of the
USGS and Trussell Technologies reports which literally throw cold water on the
proposed solutions offered so far in the San Luis Drainage ROD and the contractors’
proposal.

Therefore, C-WIN and CSPA urge you to initiate a Supplemental EIS which includes our
alternative and others (including land retirement of 379,000 acres as recommended by
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service) prior to further meetings and legislation drafting. This
process cannot possibly be legitimately or legally supported without further analysis
under NEPA, and a truly collaborative stakeholder process. To take up the
supplemental environmental review would be a far better use of agency staff’s time, and
result in a more sustainable and cost effective solution that Congress would have far
more confidence in as it considers the draft legislation sometime in the future.
C-WIN and CSPA look forward to participating in a supplemental environmental
process, or at a minimum, a rational Decision Analysis Process, as recommended by
USGS.

Sincerely,
Carolee Krieger, President,
California Water Impact Network
808 Romero Canyon Road 3536 Rainier Avenue
Santa Barbara, CA 93108 (805) 969-0824, caroleekrieger [at] cox.net

Bill Jennings, Chairman
California Sportfishing Protection Alliance
Stockton, CA 95204
(209) 464-5067, deltakeep [at] aol.com