Public policy professor Dr. John Kirlin, scientist Dr. Sam Luoma, and Deputy Secretary of Water Policy Karla Nemeth advise the Council on policies and principles related to Delta conveyance and storage as the Council considers a Delta Plan amendment
At the July meeting of the Delta Stewardship Council, council members prepared to tackle the issue of storage and Delta conveyance as they consider amending the Delta Plan.
Executive Officer Jessica Pearson began by explaining why the Council is tackling the issue now, noting that it was the Brown Administration’s announcement in April of its departure from the conservation plan approach that has triggered some changes.
“First, our role and our relationship to the administration’s proposals, both Water Fix and Eco Restore, have changed from the specific pathway described in the Delta Reform Act to the requirement of the standard consistency certification applicable to every project that meets the definition of covered action under the law,” she said. “The reason we’re discussing this issue now is the change in the approach triggered a provision that we had included in the Delta Plan to revisit the issue of conveyance and perhaps take council action to facilitate improved conveyance, which is what we say in our appendix A of the Delta Plan, should the BDCP not go forward by a conservation plan by a date certain. Because the Reform Act required non-discretionary inclusion of the Bay Delta Conservation Plan into the Delta Plan if it met certain criteria, we were reluctant at the time to include what could have ended up being duplicative or perhaps confusingly contrary recommendations regarding conveyance and its operations.”
Ms. Pearson said that staff is beginning this discussion with the Council on approaches to potential amendments to the Delta Plan because conveyance, storage, and operational decisions appear eminent in the next 12 to 24 months. She also noted that the Delta Reform Act expressly links conveyance and storage in its direction to the Council, so they thought it best to tackle these inter-related pieces at the same time.
For today’s agenda item, council members will hear from panelists about principles which can be amended into the Delta Plan and applied to guide future projects, Ms. Pearson said. They are hoping to get enough direction from experts and council members to develop a set of draft principles to bring back at the August meeting for further discussion.
Senior Engineer Anthony Navasero then gave some further information, noting that the first step in the process is to establish a problem statement to help target solutions and develop guiding principles which will establish goals and objectives. He read excerpts from the proposed problem statement contained in the staff report, pasted here in full:
“The state’s interconnected network of surface and groundwater storage is insufficient in volume, conveyance capacity, and operational flexibility to meet the coequal goals. Increasingly the system is tasked to satisfy demands from people and wildlife that it was not originally designed to address. At times of water surplus, the State’s surface storage is insufficient to reliably capture and convey water to meet Californians needs while also providing more natural, functional environmental flows into and through the Delta to help restore the Delta ecosystem. During dry years, conflicts between the needs of fish and people increase. The current method of conveying water through the Delta and exporting it to water users contributes, together with other stressors, to the continued decline of the Delta ecosystem.
In addition, risks to the Delta’s levees from floods and earthquakes impair the reliability of water conveyance through the Delta. Reduced surface water deliveries due to constrained surface storage both above and below the Delta and to limits on water conveyance through the Delta are increasing reliance on groundwater and depleting aquifers. Subsidence caused by this overdraft, especially in the San Joaquin Valley, degrades underground storage capacity and damages conveyance facilities. Too often, surface supplies and groundwater are not operated conjunctively.
Because of these factors, reducing reliance on the Delta to meet future water supplies is difficult. In addition, current conveyance and storage infrastructure and operating rules lack the flexibility to both quickly respond to current needs and substantially address long-term effects. Lack of a clear adaptive management approach impedes decision-making. Climate change threatens to compound many of these problems. As decisions about storage and conveyance are deferred and investments delayed, the crisis in the Delta watershed and California’s water infrastructure that the Delta Reform Act identifies grows more acute.”
“The purpose of today’s agenda item is to provide information which will lead to answers to the following question: What potential guiding principles should the Council consider as we determine how the Delta Plan should address pending changes in the current status of conveyance, storage, and operations?,” said Mr. Navasero.
Council member Susan Tatayon commented that the phrase in the problem statement ‘fish and people’ needs to be expanded – it’s more complex than just that. Council member Mary Piepho notes that some of these conflicts happen in both wet and dry years, so perhaps just specifying a dry year is to narrow.
Mr. Navasero then introduced the first panel: Dr. John Kirlin, professor of public policy at the University of the Pacific McGeorge School of Law; Dr. Sam Luoma, a research ecologist with the John Muir Institute of Environment at the UC Davis; and Karla Nemeth, Deputy Secretary for Water Policy at California Natural Resources Agency.
JOHN KIRLIN, Professor of Public Policy at the University of the Pacific, McGeorge School of Law
Dr. John Kirlin began by noting that the Council is working within the context of the Delta Reform Act and talking about amending the Delta Plan. “Your responsibilities are statewide, and there is a lot of storage and conveyance statewide,” he said. “The through-Delta is particularly important – it’s called out in several places in the plan, including the last section.”
He presented a map showing the location of the many dams in California. “They are of all different sizes, but as you can see, there’s a lot of them in Northern California on both sides of the valley; surprisingly few, in a way, in the southern San Joaquin Valley, and then another cluster down in the South Coast,” he said. “They probably reflect not only water supply but patterns of human development where people threw up a number of small dams to get water supply and they are still there.”
He presented a slide prepared by the PPIC depicting the dams and conveyance structures located across the state, pointing out that California has a tremendously complex system with multiple dams, interconnected conveyance, and multiple operators; overlaid are the regulators. “When you’re talking about the entire system, it is no longer a simple system of weirs and ditches,” he said.
He presented another slide by the PPIC, noting that the point here is the complexity of policy initiatives. “Most of our hardware systems – the physical systems, were designed and many of them built out before there was any form of regulatory system under the Endangered Species Acts and the environmental quality acts,” he said. “Almost the entire water infrastructure and many of the expectations about water use were developed in California before there was any formal expression of how we would protect species in ecosystems, so it’s an introduction of a new set of values into an ongoing policy dynamic and human use. That’s not unusual in public policy, but it always creates particular challenges and tensions.”
Dr. Kirlin said that both surface and groundwater storage are important; they are commonly used for different purposes and managed differently. He noted that California has an ‘interesting and some might say fictional’ separation of legal systems for dealing with groundwater and surface water. He also noted that the California Water Plan distinguishes between regional systems; inter-regional systems such as the Central Valley Project and the State Water Project; and the conveyance system of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.
There are several purposes for storage, including water supply delivery, flood management, energy production, water quality, ecosystem support, and recreation. “So the values that people are trying to get with storage and conveyance of water are multiple, and sometimes that gets brought into the regulatory framework explicitly and in the financing systems also,” he said.
He next presented a graph by Professor Lund and colleagues showing the historical development of surface storage and capacity. “Almost everything came online by 1980,” he pointed out. “We’ve incremented almost nothing since 1980, and this ends in 2000 and I do not know if much has come on since 2000 that would have changed that, except for Diamond Valley reservoir.”
He then presented a slide depicting groundwater change in the Sacramento Valley, the San Joaquin Basin, and the Tulare Basin, noting that the graph shows the very extensive groundwater depletions in that area.
He then presented a slide showing common operating ranges of surface storage and reservoirs, noting that the graph contrasts how the two different types of storage are used. “It goes back to the point that both systems are important and they serve somewhat different functions, so as you are thinking about principles, one of the principles could be that we need to address both of these and find a way to possibly get better integration, which is has been a long-standing goal of many policy makers and people in the water world.”
Dr. Kirlin noted that the Council is a policy making body that is trying to shape policies and affect systems through things such as legal instruments, review processes, and bringing information to bear.
“Like many systems, there are a lot of actors out there and a lot of actions already in place, so a lot of things have been done – dams have been built, canals have been built, contracts executed, etc, so you’re in a system that’s already complex,” he said. “The attention to ecosystem effects and species protection came late to the game. California had an endangered species act before the federal did – California in 1970, federal in 1973. … Almost all the dams were constructed by 1970.”
Dr. Kirlin said that our scientific understanding has evolved as well; we know much more about things such as flood risk, climate change impacts, and atmospheric rivers, for example. “We also have a lot of regional variation and context and in initiatives, so a principle you can think about is understanding the regional variation,” he said.
“Like most policy systems, over time they get more complex – We have a lot of conflict and we also have considerable uncertainty,” he said, pointing out that contributing to this complexity are the complex physical systems moving water greater distances, a better understanding of climate and weather variability, a hardening of demand, reduced allocation discretion, and more species being at greater risk. “The conflict is well institutionalized in the water world, so if you drop a pebble of an idea into the policy dialog, you can predict which ways the wave will fall, depending upon what the idea is.”
Dr. Kirlin pointed out that there are a lot of ideas already out there the Council might consider, such as system reoperation, increased regional storage, addressing old conflicts which have potential to be resolved, and habitat and ecosystem restoration.
Dr. Kirlin added that in preparing for this presentation, when looking at habitat restoration, he was reminded of his farming background of extension agents and field trials. “We’ve made huge progress in agriculture with focused efforts to understand small scale things, and cumulatively they’ll add up to a lot, and I hope they not only improve understanding but also actually get some restoration done, because very little has happened in the decades that it’s been attempted.”
“And lastly, the administration proposal regarding Delta conveyance and tunnels is the front of the cue of actions that might come forward to you in your consistency review processes, but there are of course other ideas out there about conveyance in the Delta that haven’t come to you as a project as I understand them, but there are other ideas, and if at some point, the tunnels are not advanced to completion, I would suspect someone might bring the other ideas proposed forward.”
Dr. Kirlin said that the Council is one responsible agency in an arena with a lot of other actors, so he advised them to figure out their role and perform it to the extent possible within their legal authority, but at the same time, figure out how to leverage others, such as Congress, the state legislature, the California Water Commission, and others.
“As a public policy person, I’m always interested in long term action capacity,” he said. “Many times stakeholders want their position adopted now and then freeze everything; as I’ve looked at systems in the long run, I don’t think that anything frozen was always good forever, except some basic principles like we will have a political system, or property rights … but whether we should have this dam operated in exactly in this way with this set of contractual relationships is something that I would like to have some capacity to make decisions about over time.”
Dr. Kirlin advised the Council to focus on action capacity and effectively matching actions to types of problems, noting that getting decisions made and actions done is a longstanding problem in water. “It’s very hard, and there are some times when decisions get made quickly – I call those low conflict, low uncertainty context, but there aren’t very many of those. That’s where your science or collaborative techniques are the most useful,” he said. “In all other combinations, you need politics and authority, and one of the challenges we’ve had in the water world is that from a policy perspective, the policy authority is fragmented; it’s also at sometimes incomplete.”
Dr. Kirlin pointed out that the authority given the Detla Stewardship Council is rather limited. “The consistency review project process you have as your main regulatory device is unique in the world; I know of no other structure that is like this,” he said. “As you’re thinking about the capacity to make decisions, it’s a weak capacity, generally.”
Understand the impacts of conflict and uncertainty in addressing problems, and if paralysis, consider an extraordinary decision process such as the Delta Vision process or the extraordinary efforts required in the 2009 legislative session. “The point is not to applaud Schwarzenegger who I think was effective there, but this was a political process, and you don’t make progress without expenditure of real political capital, and to imagine that it is a Kum-by-yah or only a science-based process or only a collaboration and talking process, I think is an invitation to continued inaction.”
Dr. Kirlin presented a four cell grid, calling it ‘Public Policy 101.’ He pointed out that on the left shows the certainty regarding cause-effects relations of both the phenomena you are trying to change and the instruments of action; across the top is the agreement or disagreement on goals and values.
The upper left cell, low uncertainty and agreement on goals and values is basically an engineering-type problem, he said. He used the example of the Southern California Coastal Water Research Project, which brought together a diverse set of agencies and treatment plants who joined together, created a JPA, and did the science necessary in order to comply with the Clean Water Act. “It was very successful. … It’s a classic example of where everyone agreed we needed to do this to comply, and the science was able to work effectively to do that.”
“For all the other cells, you have to have authority to move forward; you have to have political authority, so where do you get it? Where do you exercise it?”
In the next cell over to the right, there is some certainty about cause and effect but disagreement on goals and values, comparison strategies are often used. He used the example of conflicts in CalFed over water storage, which usually get results through a formal policy process or access to financing. “If you get it financed, you can move it forward, or if you can get it approved, you can move it forward, and it took really both, because if you got it approved but no money, you couldn’t get it done.”
In the lower left cell are the high uncertainty about cause and effect, but agreement on goals and values. Dr. Kirlin used the example of real-time operations where there is still disagreement on how the water should be used, but the State Water Board’s regulatory framework provides water quality targets they must hit with certainty, so they make adjustments. “We can move the water here, we can draw if from this reservoir, we have to hit this temperature,” he said. “That’s real time operations – where do we take the water to meet our standards, and that’s here in cell 3, and the only reason you can make those decisions is that the regulatory framework provides you the certainty. There’s still underlying conflict … “
The bottom right cell is where there is high uncertainty and high disagreement. “It’s politics,” said Dr. Kirlin. “You have to have rulemaking, you have to have authority, and you have to use it. What the State Water Resources Control Board is trying to do now in drought, and people are saying you don’t really have the authority to do that, you can only give us information, we have to have a hearing – that’s getting worked out.”
Lastly, Dr. Kirlin posted a slide with a quote on it from the Delta Vision process that said,
“… Task Force’s conclusion that there are two co‐equal goals that must drive water policy in California: restoration of the Delta ecosystem and creation of a more reliable state water supply. Co‐equal means just that: not secondary, not an afterthought, not something to be ignored until a lawsuit or catastrophe forces water users to change, or government to act. No, the Task Force means co‐equal in the most important sense of the word; requiring a coherent effort to join a desired Delta ecosystem together with the effort to provide water to Californians.”
He called it a bit of pure poetry that came out of the process. “It is a way to commit to resolving the tension between the introduction of an important set of societal values, about species and ecosystems, into a political system and a set of expectations of contractual relationships, physical hardware that was not designed for that, and it really says, enter with a real commitment.”
“And so that’s the end … “
SAM LUOMA, former Delta Lead Scientist and a research ecologist with the John Muir Institute of Environment at the UC Davis
Dr. Sam Luoma then gave his perspective about lessons learned from the Delta science experience. He began by mentioning that the science program tasked all the previous Delta scientists, himself included, with the assignment of producing a report on Delta challenges, and that while he will be drawing on a lot of his talk today from that, his comments reflect his own opinions and interpretations only.
“First of all, one of the most important things that we have learned from our decades of working in this system is increasing appreciation of the complexity of the problems we’re dealing with,” said Dr. Luoma. “There are multiple dimensions to each of the problems that we consider and those dimensions interact, and so making decisions in that kind of system is extremely difficult. An additional aspect of the complexity is that the world is also changing around us. It’s changing at a rapid rate, so although we have a really complicated system here, complexity cannot lead to paralysis. I think the fact that the world is changing is a reason for urgency to address the problems we’re dealing with in water issues. Everybody agrees, and I think the science supports that, and is increasingly supporting that.”
One thing heard over and over is that bold actions are needed, and there’s no doubt we need to be more bold than we have been, he said. “But what do we mean by bold actions? Maybe what we also have to think about is taking in mind the multiple dimensions that we’re dealing with and redefine, think about redefining what we mean by a bold action. Is a bold action just re-engineering? One dimension of the problem and not thinking about the others? Is a bold action daring to consider multiple dimensions as we push forward with new ideas?”
“In a complex system like this that has multiple dimensions, I think a really important principle is that we’re not going to solve this problem,” Dr. Luoma said. “This is not a problem for which there is silver bullet solution. This is a problem that we need to manage, manage actively, and manage progressively in perpetuity, and that requires some things that are perhaps not always in great supply.” Things like persistence of purpose, a collaborative process, investment in learning, and the courage to look at performance measures, he said.
“So let’s talk about those dimensions,” he said. “First of all, there’s the economic dimension. California is to some degree the envy of the world in terms of the economic powerhouse that it is, and in many ways is built around the assumption that water is plentiful. The whole idea of the problem that we have now, which is a widening demand to a shrinking resource, is one that means water is scarce. We can no longer make that assumption, so economically, what are the implications of that?”
Dr. Luoma pointed out that it also is not just a California problem. “This is a node in the whole western water system in the US, so every decision we make in the Delta has an implication for that happens in the rest of the Colorado basin, so these are big decisions that we make in the Delta with widespread implications and for the national economy and the global economy as well.” He noted that we’ve learned that California’s economy has been pretty resilient when it comes to water crises, but that report also concluded that will become increasingly more difficult. “We have to address the many dimensions of this water problem and we have to address them with increasing urgency.”
The second dimension is water supply; Dr. Luoma said there were four pillars to that dimension. “One of them is the storage, conveyance and redisitrubution that was built in the 1950s,” he said. “This is an aging system, this is an old system, and of course we’re going to have to do fixes to this system to make it more effective for the modern situation.”
Two of the pillars will make it more difficult to adjust, he said. “One is snowpack,” he said. “What’s alarming is that we have 5% of normal snowpack in April in the Sierra Nevada. Snowpack provides about 40% of our water supplies. The reservoirs drain as we go into the early summer. The melting snow fills them; this fall, how do we get the water that has to go into those reservoirs? There are interactions among these pillars of the water supplies.”
Another pillar is the levee system. “The most important thing that happens in the Delta with the levees is its facilitation of the transfer of water,” he said. “That water system depends upon a hydrologic barrier that prevents estuarine and marine water from coming in to the freshwater water supply. Now we can probably clean up a lot of salinity for drinking water but you can’t’ do that for agriculture so that hydrologic barrier is critical. As our reservoirs drain this year, our engineers and scientists are struggling to figure out how to keep that water system fresh enough so that we can take advantage of it.” Dr. Luoma noted that while we’ve learned a significant amount about modeling and hydrodynamics in the Delta, we haven’t gotten so good with models to deal with crisis situations; this is an area for more investment.
The fourth pillar of the water supply system of course is groundwater. “In California, one of the secrets of our success has been that when we get into a drought, we can use groundwater to make up for it,” he said. “But increasingly in recent years, we’ve been unsustainably pumping groundwater during the good years as well, so now we’re in a system where we’re back into where we were before the infrastructure was built that moved surface water around. Land subsidence are indications of going deeper and deeper for water which will be more and more expensive and poorer and poorer quality, so that’s a shrinking water supply, that’s a shrinking buffer.”
He pointed out that climate change projections continually reinforce that there is likely to be less snowpack in the future. “Now if that was all we had to resolve, we could probably do it. You can never underestimate human ingenuity, but we also have the ecosystem side,” he said.
The ecosystem has been massively transformed beginning with the Gold Rush, the building of levees and the development of agriculture; the second phase was the development of the water system, and then the chemical industrial revolution with the contamination that brought in, he said. “It’s a massively transformed system,” he said. “The science to study this didn’t begin until the 1960s and didn’t really get started until the 1980s, so we have now a system with the Pelagic Organism Decline that’s been going on for about 15 years, which is a decline in the abundance of some of the native fishes that live in the water column. Interestingly, one of our most iconic organisms and indicators of the ecosystem is the salmon, and about the same time as the Pelagic Organism Decline occurred, survival of salmon migration through the Delta declined from 40% in the 1990s to 5% today. So in the last ten or twelve years, 5% of the salmon that are released at the head of the Delta make it through, so we understand this kind of statistic but we don’t understand completely why.”
“One of the reasons we don’t understand is that because two-thirds if not even more of the ecosystem change that happened, happened before we even began to study it,” he continued. “So we’re studying the remnants here and trying to figure out what’s going on because we need to understand the cause of these changes before we can figure out fully how to recover them.”
Dr. Luoma said while we have learned a lot about restoration, we still have some key things to learn, but we also have a chance to recover one of the ten areas of the world that is most diverse in the world. “So addressing this and taking advantage of those opportunities along with dealing with the water supply problem is a really important coequal goal,” he said. “It’s also really challenging, so every time we think about an engineering decision, we have to think about the ecological implications, as seriously as we think about the water supply and economic implications.”
“The other level of complexity lies in the institutional structure and the challenges of making decisions,” he said. “Even though it sounds like a formula of inaction, I think it’s a reality. These decisions have to consider all aspects, every dimension of the problem as we move forward and develop principles. It seems to me that it’s an underlying principle that we’re talking about.”
So what are the bold initiatives that are needed? “One of them is incrementalism,” he said. “For example, in the Kissimmee River restoration project in Florida, most of our restoration projects are so young, we don’t even know exactly how they are going to proceed, but the Kissimmee proceeded over the course of 30 years in an incremental way, learning as you go, and improving the system as you go. I think that’s a really good model for us to look at.”
Incrementalism is important for big engineering projects. “Economics might play into the difficulty of doing a big engineering project, but if we have milestones that consider multiple dimensions and if we have performance measures, we should be able to follow as we go along and learn from increments, rather than just bull our way into something,” he said. “In some of these large projects, the big problem that we run into is the potential for catastrophic outcomes, so I would suggest we need to move incrementally and carefully evaluate as we move along. That’s a bold approach.”
It’s a bold approach to invest in learning as we go, Dr. Luoma said. “There’s a lot of uncertainty about the future,” he said. “We don’t exactly know where we’re going. It seems to me it’s quite bold to suggest that if we’re going to do an engineering or a restoration project, a certain investment in learning about how that is operating and how that might operate in the future is really bold idea. … It’s sometimes legally a discussion whether you can do those things, but I think that’s as important as engineering plans, learning as you go.”
Dr. Luoma said he agreed with Mr. Kirlin that we need to have flexible, nimble organizations if we’re going to move into a future that’s fairly uncertain. “But I don’t think it excludes collaboration. I’ve been involved in a collaborative process; I am now in the collaborative management process which I think is working extremely well in a very narrow arena, of course. I think the Delta Stewardship Council has a role in pulling together the coordinating with these multiple organizations are involved and this is a really important role. I think collaboration has got to be a very important part of what we do in the future.”
“Again I think that’s bold,” said Dr. Luoma. “I think including collaborative process and transparency in an authoritative decision is a line to walk, but I think that by excluding that, in the long run makes things move more slowly than if you don’t. That’s an opinion on my part. Something one learns from watching this for a very long time. One of the things we’ve learned from what we’ve done right in California is that this process of investing in learning as we go can benefits us to a great degree.”
Dr. Luoma said that he thinks there are two big structural things missing in our science efforts, he said. “One of the things that we’ve lost in the last ten years is the collaboration and the incorporation of the best minds in the country at the universities into what we’re doing. Collaborative work that includes the agencies and the universities and the stakeholders – these kinds of projects have lost their support in the last few years. I hear colleagues of mine from the university saying, well there are other places in the country I could work, because I’m not getting those kinds of collaborative projects here. I really think that’s one part of our science I think we have to strengthen.”
The other thing missing is the development of a set for each dimension of the problem of performance measures, he said. “This sounds so easy, and we have them implicitly. We have ad hoc things that we look at: Delta smelt numbers, and a few things like this, but we do not have a systematic way of evaluating performance for any dimension of the problem as we go along. … There are examples in the world where this has been done in ways that keep the public informed about the good things that we’re doing. We have not had success in doing this. Part of it might have to do with a lack of courage. Are we really willing to evaluate how we’re doing and tell people? Part of it has to do with a lack of organization, and part of it and probably the most important, has to do with the fact that the agencies have multiple missions, multiple monitoring programs, and it’s very difficult to bring a single unified performance measure program together with them. I think that can be done, but it’s something that has to be a part of any series of programs where we reflectively move forward, evaluate, reevaluate, and decide what to do next, we’ve got to have ways to evaluate performance.”
“Thank you very much for the invitation.”
KARLA NEMETH, Deputy Secretary for Water Policy at California Natural Resources Agency
Karla Nemeth began by saying she would be giving a different perspective, which is as someone who had been working intensely on the Bay Delta Conservation Plan for years. “A result of that very intense process which was fundamentally guided by a concept of a 50-year conservation plan was something that the Brown Administration, after careful review of public comments and a variety of input, came to a couple of very important conclusions about the feasibility of pursuing that kind of an approach to conveyance and ecosystem restoration in the Delta,” she said. “That has fundamentally focused our thinking from a conveyance only perspective to what are the problems we’re trying to solve in this context of coequal goals. What are the water supply reliability problems we’re trying to solve, and what are the ecosystem and flow problems that we’re trying to solve, relative to appropriate Delta conveyance, so that is one key piece and certainly that’s the point of entry for the Brown Administration.”
Ms. Nemeth acknowledged that it was challenging to try to get ecosystem restoration off the ground because it was connected to a very controversial conveyance proposal. “One of the things we felt we needed to do to make significant advancements in habitat restoration was to separate that program from the conveyance piece, because fundamentally we know that restoration is not going to work unless we’re working closely with the local counties and with local landowners in a way that connecting to a larger 50-year compliance program with conveyance was just simply infeasible.”
With respect to California Eco Restore, Ms. Nemeth emphasized that none of the projects in Cal Eco Restore have anything to do with mitigation for any kind of conveyance project. “That’s the threshold determining factor and the administration certainly looks forward to making more rapid progress than we’ve been able to make in the last several years,” she said. “The Delta Stewardship Council and it’s implementation committee is going to be a pivotal place where we have good discussions across the multitude of state and federal agencies. There is a real organizing function there that we absolutely want to avail ourselves of, and we’ll be working with Chair Fiorini and Taryn Ravazzini to continue to pursue that as an important venue.”
The context of conveyance has changed since the Delta Reform Act described the relationship of the Delta Plan to the Bay Delta Conservation Plan and there are a couple of things that are worth pointing out, Ms. Nemeth said. “One is that we have a lot more tools on the table that tell a much more complex story about how California is going to improve its water supply security,” she said. “We do have a water bond that provides significant investment, but importantly leverages local dollars to stimulate investment in regional water supplies, and we’re going to have to do that, and that’s as real as it gets in terms of getting those Prop 1 dollars out the door and implemented and supporting a statewide goal of water supply security.”
“The other real change in context is the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, which was signed by the Governor last year,” she said. “That also starts to put together a more comprehensive picture of the interrelationship between surface water supplies and groundwater sustainability in a way that I think is going to be very important as California thinks about what role that conveyance in particular plays in stabilizing water supplies.”
Ms. Nemeth acknowledged there’s a lot of work to do, but these two accomplishments together create the potential for a real comprehensive solution statewide. “We certainly need to realize and understand the way in which we make decisions on reliable water supplies coming out of the Delta, how well that supports recycled water in particular in urban areas, and supports parts of California that very much have very severe subsidence in the drought, as we’re really in a dramatic situation in some parts of California.”
In regards to the Council’s approach to conveyance, Ms. Nemeth pointed out that one of the unique features of the Council is that it is focused on 100 years. “You’re looking at Delta sustainability for the next 100 years, and there’s no other government agency that has that unique set of responsibilities, so I would urge the Council to really take a look at the big picture,” she said. “The new climate change information that we’re getting and the new studies that really demonstrate the dramatic qualities of change that we’ll have in California hydrology and that really is fundamental to how you all approach conveyance issues.”
Ms. Nemeth said that the degree to which any kind of conveyance proposal helps California adapt to the climate reality – rising sea levels, decreased snowpack, and more intense storms moving through the system – that will be essential for the water supply reliability goal. “The other essential element for water supply reliability goal would be the degree to which conveyance makes those water supplies more seismically secure, and I won’t say anything more about that, I think that speaks to itself.”
With respect to the ecosystem side, Ms. Nemeth advised them to hone in on the flow problems the conveyance structure is meant to fix. “A key piece of that is the reverse flow conditions in the central part of the Delta, so that might be something that I think the Council develops principles around,” she said. “The degree to which any kind of a proposal enables our ability to move towards a ‘big gulp, little sip’ kind of operations of the state and federal water projects, the degree to which it can reinstate more natural flow patterns in the central part of the Delta, and the degree to which they interact with providing for a more natural hydrograph, and one that can flexibly respond to changing conditions.”
“The real bridge between water supply reliability and ecosystem restoration absolutely is operational flexibility, so to what degree does a conveyance proposal offer an ability to operate the system more flexibly,” Ms. Nemeth said. “That is only as good as how transparently it’s operated. People need to have confidence that it’s going to operate in pursuit of both the ecosystem restoration goal and the water supply reliability goal and of course part and parcel to that is both transparency but also a real integration of adaptive management.”
Ms. Nemeth said in this drought, the Administration has learned what it means to operate in real time. “I will even go out on a limb to say how limited we are in our communication abilities over a very complex system, and when we have a lot of folks in this historic water year type – certainly fish and wildlife agencies making decisions and contingency plans they’d never contemplated and water agencies who thought they had supplies that were unaffected essentially by the hydrology in California – they really found themselves in a new world,” she said. “Our challenge in putting out good information that was helpful information is that it is difficult to distill the complexities of the system and the complexities of the decision making into a way that the public can understand and have confidence in, and so I think that a conveyance project needs to learn from this period of drought that we’ve been in and the intensity around the transparency and communications around how we actually operate a system.”
Ms. Nemeth said she agrees with everything Dr. Luoma said about science and learning. “We do have some processes underway right now that are associated with the existing water delivery system where I think there is some good engagement from scientists, different stakeholders, and project operators on how do we actually look at science and make the connection to management decisions, and that’s the Collaborative Adaptive Management Team that’s associated with the existing biological opinions and their administration on over the existing water projects,” she said. “I think certainly something like that that is more transparent, more predictable and applied also to any new kind of diversion point I think would be very helpful in achieving what we need to achieve in a conveyance system and that is something that supports the dual goals.”
“It is certainly not the silver bullet from a water supply reliability perspective in California,” said Ms. Nemeth. “All these things need to be integrated, certainly not the totality of the flow questions that relate to the ecology of the Delta, but fundamentally assessing the degree to which adding a point of diversion, adding that flexibility, adding the science and transparency, does that help us achieve more of what we need to achieve relative to an improved ecology in the Delta.”
“I’ll stop there, but I would just reiterate you all are the one agency that really has the long view, and I would just urge the Council to keep that in mind as it moves forward in a Delta Plan amendment.”
“Thank you very much.”
Discussion highlights
“We are tentatively thinking that conveyance improvements, storage improvements, and water system operation details must work together and one element cannot be ignored if you wish to get the highest possible benefit out of the other,” said Vice Chair Phil Isenberg. “Does that tentative starting point sound half-assed reasonable?”
“Yes, and now the question is how,” replied Dr. Kirlin. “I think both are most effective when harnessed to a purpose, so if your purpose is to identify the linkage between conveyance, storage, and water operations, I would recommend you create a process in which you structure collaboration and you inform it with science and you give a work product you want in a time frame you want it. That’s what we did with Delta Vision, we had a robust collaboration process, we actually had work products developed by four working groups that included stakeholders, scientists, etc. and that was science peer-reviewed later, and then in the final draft, it had real time science review of the document. … I would not say, plop out a general question and ask people to discuss the question generally in some sort of format. Ask for a work product in a time frame that fits into you responsibilities and if possible helps others.”
“I would emphasize the importance in this process of including ecologists and including people who know the hydrodynamics and the linkage between flows and fish because we’ve learned quite a bit about that in the last 15 years,” said Dr. Luoma. “I think there are certain performance measures that are biological performance measures that might be ignored if we’re just thinking about the already complex three elements you’re thinking about, but there are certain things like OMR flows and certain flows in the Delta that we know are important to native species and to restoration, and certain changes in the landform that are important, so I would expand the group of people that fit into this structured process that John described, but maybe that was implicit.”
“No, it was not at all limited only to the engineers of conveyance and storage – your charge is coequal goals, so you must bring that in, so thank you for requiring that clarification,” said Dr. Kirlin.
“You don’t have to move into deep uncertainty; there are some areas of relatively high certainty,” added Dr. Luoma.
Ms. Nemeth asks for further clarification of the question. Mr. Isenberg said that it goes back to the statutory direction to ‘promote options for new and improved infrastructure relating to water conveyance in the Delta, storage systems, and for the operation of both to achieve the coequal goals.’ “That’s the statutory direction on our statewide promotion, and the staff memo and our staff discussions have linked all three, and I understand you can’t commit to an abstract thing, but is that the right starting point for a discussion, now that BDCP has morphed into something else, a statement, a policy, a recommendation of those that the Council would do … should we amend the Delta Plan?,” says Mr. Isenberg.
Ms. Nemeth said that the thing that strikes her most about the interrelationship of those things is the degree to which we have some uniformity across various kinds of performance measures, for example. “Some of that will be very much addressed in the Water Commission’s approach to assessing the expenditure of bond storage dollars. I think the other piece of that is the regulatory agencies and their recovery plans for species that extend to capture some of the interrelationships between storage, reoperation, and conveyance and what we’re trying to achieve ecologically … it doesn’t do a darn bit a good to help salmon runs upstream if 95% aren’t going to make it out of the Delta, so I think there are places to go, and I think that linkage is an important one. I would just recommend that the Council and its staff really plumb some of the information that’s available at DWR and with Fish and Wildlife agencies as to how they think about system-wide components and the degree at which they come together in a head in the Delta under your jurisdiction of supporting the coequal goals in the Delta. I think that would be a reasonable and important approach over the 50, 100 year kind of time frame.”
Councilmember Mary Peipho notes that in Dr. Kirlin’s presentation, he said that ecosystem restoration was ‘problematic’. She asks him to elaborate.
“Problematic was a shorthand for saying we are learning quite a bit about it, and almost nowhere in the world have we brought a large scale ecosystem restoration to a point where we can say we either knew it was a success or it failed,” replied Dr. Kirlin. “I’ve looked at the South Florida Everglades and the Chesapeake Bay efforts – both large scale ecosystem restoration projects, and both have run into severe problems in implementation, and some of the problems have been ones of authority and organization, and in some cases it’s been hard to get the science developed, but overall, we have learned a lot about this Delta and restoration projects. But when you look at what has actually been achieved, in terms of restoration projects completed … it is very, very small. … When I say it’s problematic, it’s mostly on the execution side, and I think there are a variety of reasons why it’s problematic. … I think we’ve learned a lot and we’ve too often found it easy to move the goal posts … ”
“Is it hopeful that if we implement the appropriate or enough thorough adaptive management priorities, that might address some of those complexities?” asked Council member Mary Piepho.
“No, because the adaptive management process that is at least as described and advocated in the science document and the Delta Science Plan are unattached to any authority structure,” replied Dr. Kirlin. “So if you look at that circle, it ends up with a ‘someone’ decides. But the ‘someone’ is really critical, because action takes place and a lot of this is local government actions, and they have specific authorities, and specific political constraints and economic constraints. I’m a huge believer in starting with the authorities and then structuring your processes. If those authorities aren’t sufficient, change them, but work within those authorities, and that’s where I’ve seen success that I can point to, but if you start on the other side, let’s just think about the problem and talk about how we might do it, it’s very, very hard to get there. I don’t want to characterize the other parties as only saying, we’re going to talk about it and figure it out eventually, but effectively that’s the way they behave. And that’s the processes. And I think that’s the wrong starting point.”
“The administration really came to the realization that there really are some fundamental coordinating and integrating issues when you look at how many different government agencies have a role to play in the Delta,” added Ms. Nemeth. “The real struggle with habitat restoration has been the interaction between the project proponents – sometimes it’s DWR, sometimes it’s flood head on or it’s the State Water Contractors trying to interact with the Corps of Engineers trying to interact with DFW … In the Yolo Bypass, it’s a tremendous amount of leadership that’s required in pulling all of those agencies together … it’s really getting folks who are more practiced in working within more limited frame of reference, getting them to sit down with our colleagues and other agencies at the beginning and establish how they are going to actually put restoration in the ground with that goal. We can’t really do much of the on the ground learning unless we get it in the ground.”
Council member Susan Tatayon asks, given our current statewide system and the way we operate, how would you better incorporate or reoperate such that ecosystem values are fully integrated, rather than our current way of mitigating or having take permits, etc.?
“There’s an argument in the ecosystem world as to whether you manage on a species basis or whether you manage on an ecosystem basis,” said Dr. Luoma. “We manage largely on a species basis here because the hammer is the Endangered Species Act. That’s the driving legal force. I don’t think we can change that legal force in any way without the danger of losing that impetus on one hand. On the other hand, we have to evolve towards an ecosystem-based set of performance measures. Right now our performance measures are how many salmon are there, how many Delta smelt are there; if we are going to restore the native species, and that’s where our opportunities lie, we want to find these opportunities. … I think our measures should be more ecosystem performance based and more ecosystem function based. Evolving towards using those as some of our performance measures to determine how well restoration is working I think is the way we can do this better. … I think what we’re doing in California with the coequal goals is remarkable in the world. It’s not easy; it’s remarkable in the world in fact, but I think we can do it better and we can do it better moving towards these ecosystem-based approaches.”
“When reservoirs were constructed, it was about water supply and flood control, and I think one of the good things about the process that the Water Commission is now engaged in is how do we define and understand public benefits that really do fit in with what the species need, be it water quality, temperature, timing and volume of flows,” said Ms. Nemeth. “I think that as a structure for defining appropriate lawful state support of those kinds of storage project is going to be an important template and the fish and wildlife agencies that in their recovery plans look at a little bit more broadly … I think their expertise is going to be essential at informing the Water Commission’s decisions, and I think that is a really good platform as we consider other kinds of ideas around reoperation, potentially.”
Dr. Luoma said that restoration is perhaps problematic, but there are places we have succeeded, such as Clear Creek. “I don’t know the latest data on Clear Creek but I know that the restoration at Clear Creek in the early days for spring run salmon was extremely successful in bringing back spring run salmons into that area. There were a number of restoration actions that happened, but we haven’t looked at that, figured out what worked the most effectively and used that lesson elsewhere as effectively as we could, so looking at the places where we have succeeded and building a lessons learned from that might be as effective as trying to evaluate overall how successful we are.”
“A very specific suggestion that might be considered in amending the Delta Plan is to look at the language that is in the Delta Reform Act, particularly at section 85302, which identifies elements of ecosystem performance and of water supply reliability,” he said. “Those that are in there about ecosystem were derived almost verbatim from the Delta Vision strategic plan, the intent of which was to facilitate a shift to an ecosystem-based approach to many actions in the Delta, Our current regulatory framework is species driven and that is unlikely to be abandoned, but the performance standards … if you chose to work collaboratively with science, I think there is a framework in which you could begin to develop some ecosystem performance measures which could inform the way in which you looked at these things, and that is a way to make real that political language about the coequal goals.”
Coming tomorrow: Part 2: Two panels will discuss environmental and water supplier perspectives.
For more information …
- Click here for the full agenda and meeting materials. This is agenda item #10.
- Click here to view the webcast.
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