Posted By: Jessica IñiguezTo: Members in Restore the DeltaNews from Restore the Delta
On Monday, the Legislature voted to postpone the water bond to 2012, demonstrating once again that they are incapable of making decisions about water with calm deliberation and in the light of day.
The Senate backed postponement from the outset, but the Assembly took several votes, with Jared Huffman arguing to keep the measure on the ballot or pull it altogether and revise it, leaving the ballot date open. It took until 9:35 p.m. for the last Assembly holdouts, Assembly Member Pedro Nava (D-Santa Barbara) and Assembly Member Sandre Swanson (D-Alameda), to respond to pressure from legislative leadership and vote to postpone.
Thanks to Food and Water Watch, we know exactly who is behind the pressure. In a fact sheet published last week, FWW reported on research into contributions to the Alliance for Clean Water and New Jobs, the primary pro-water bond PAC. The big contributors:
• the Western Growers Association, a leading agricultural trade group
• the construction industry
• Southern California developers
• land conservancies, especially the Nature Conservancy
FWW reported that the pro-bond campaign also got money from Schwarzenegger’s California Dream Team, which itself had received funding from the energy industry, agribusiness (including Resnick, of course), and developers.
Once the dams are built, once the houses in the desert are built, what happens to the jobs? This isn’t about long-term benefit for the construction sector of the economy. It’s about short-term benefit for interests who are creating additional demand and setting themselves up to market water at ongoing profit.
And what about farm jobs? Is this water going to be used to put large numbers of farmworkers back to work in the fields? Unlikely. In the long run, agribusiness stands to benefit more from marketing water than from growing crops. (If they can’t make money growing cotton, they’ll make money growing houses.) Water cutbacks were not responsible for last year’s job losses, and nothing proposed by the water bond can guarantee more stable economies in communities that have grown up depending on unsustainable water deliveries.
And wherever we are going to grow in California, traditionally-landscaped housing in arid regions of the state is not the way to do it.
When green is not “green”
Let’s look at development in arid regions of the state. We really hate to quote the Public Policy Institute of California, creator of the Apocalypse vision of the Delta. But in a 2005 report, “Lawns and Water Demand in California,” the PPIC estimated that the amount of irrigated landscaping in California equaled the size of Westlands Water District.
According to our own researcher, Deirdre Des Jardins, “The report says that California’s Landscape Task Force concluded that outdoor use constitutes about half of residential demand in the state (California Urban Water Conservation Council, 2005), which was about 5.8 MAF in 2005, according to the 2005 California Water Plan.
“That would mean that residential landscaping uses as much as 2.9 MAF of water - almost three times what Westlands uses. . . . Furthermore, the water use for residential landscaping in desert areas is much higher, per capita. The PPIC report says,
"’The water provider for the Las Vegas Valley, located in the Mojave Desert, estimates that roughly 70 percent of residential demand goes to outdoor irrigation. Officials in Riverside County estimate that 80 percent of residential water in the Coachella Valley - an area with a similar climate - is used outdoors (Bowles, 2005).’
“This is because not only do lawns in inland areas use a lot more water than in coastal areas due to higher evapotranspiration -- the lots are generally LARGER than coastal areas. That's why water use in Bakersfield is about 300 gallons per day per person, twice the use of 150 gpd per person in the East Bay area.”
Deirdre uses California Water Plan figures to estimate that landscaping is 40.4% of urban water use in California. She says, “So if urban users simply cut their landscaping use by 40%, they could reduce their use of water by AT LEAST 16% statewide.” (That’s 40 percent of 40%.)
Metropolitan Water District, which gets 30% of its water from the Delta, could manage with about half of that by implementing some of the same water-saving techniques that agriculture has been using for decades – smart irrigation scheduling, and moving to drip systems. But we cannot expect MWD to use any water it saves to serve a larger number of customers, because MWD is only relevant if it is moving water.
What percentage of California’s water comes from the Delta?
While calling for smarter use of the water we have (a subject short-changed by the water bond), we need to keep pointing out the flawed implication in DWR’s oft-reported statement that two-third of Californians are served by water from the Delta.
The suggestion, always, is that the well-being of a large percentage of Californians depends on fixing this fragile region we call the Delta.
Really, how many Californians rely on water from the Delta?
There are lots of questions here, including what constitutes reliance on water from a particular source. If you rely on that source, how much do you “need”? Enough to drink? That plus enough to flush your toilet, shower, and run your garbage disposal? All those plus enough to wash your car and keep your lawn green in August?
Also, do you get all of your water from one water source? For example, some people in the Bay Area get their water almost exclusively from the Delta, while others get part of their water from some other source, such as Hetch Hetchy.
DWR is the source of the statement that water from the Delta serves more than 25 million people. But other information from DWR suggests that the State’s reliance on water from the Delta is not as high as this figure implies.
Steve Evans of Friends of the River has done an estimate using a bar graph from the 2005 California Water Plan. This bar graph shows California Dedicated Water Supplies for Water Years 1998, 2000, 2001 and lists supplies in six categories: Local Projects, Colorado Project, Federal Projects, State Project, Ground Water, Reuse & Recycle, and Instream Environment.
First, Steve averaged each category. Then he added the Federal Projects and State Project columns, getting a total of 9.3 MAF from those two sources of supply.
Finally, he divided 9.3 MAF by the total amount from all six categories, 80.4 MAF. That produced a percentage of 11.56%.
So based on DWR’s own bar chart, the Federal and State water projects supply less than 12% of the water from all sources.
Steve notes that quite a bit of federal water is diverted and used by contractors before it even gets to the Delta, so the actual amount exported from the Delta is less than this calculated percentage.
Deirdre Des Jardins suggests another way of doing this calculation. She takes the total Agricultural and Urban Water Use in California in 2000 (which was 43.1 MAF according to the Pacific Institute) and divides that into Delta exports that year (a bit over 6 MAF according to DWR). This produces a figure of about 17.5%. That was in an average (rather than a dry or wet) year.
So statewide, it looks like at most 17.5% of the water Californians use comes from the Delta.
In July of 2009, there were just under 37 million of us. If some imaginary subset of Californians used only water from the Delta, and they used all the Delta exports, we would be talking about at most 6.5 million people.
Let’s get back to reality here. Let’s stipulate that two-thirds of Californians (as many as 24 million people) probably do rely to some extent on Delta water. But overall, water from the Delta provides less that 20%, and perhaps as little as 10%, of the state’s overall water supply.
If we ended exports tomorrow, we wouldn’t have two out of three Californians dying of thirst.
Restore the Delta will keep taking apart conventional wisdom this way over the next two years while the water bond lingers on life support. And we will keep telling the story of the Delta, a place of ecological, economic, cultural and historical importance, that is under attack by those promoting California’s unsustainable 20th century water policies.
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