The drought drags on, and the thirsty residents of Southern California are preparing again to spend heavily to buy water from the farm fields of the Sacramento Valley.
The board of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California directed its staff Tuesday to start negotiating the purchases of as much as 100,000 acre-feet of water from the Valley — deals that would be worth millions of dollars.
Metropolitan has bought water from Northern California in eight of the past 16 years. The purchases can be a sensitive point in farm country, where water sales will result in fewer acres of crop grown and damage done to the local economy. Critics have long accused Metropolitan and its 19 million customers of trying to engineer “water grabs” along the lines of the movie “Chinatown” — the fictional account of Los Angeles’ infamous theft of water from the Owens Valley in the early 1900s.
Nonetheless, farm groups say they’re willing to listen to Metropolitan — up to a point.
“We want to help but we don’t want to hurt ourselves and our area,” said general manager Ted Trimble of the Western Canal Water District, which supplies water to a 58,000-acre swath of rice fields and other farmland west of Lake Oroville, the state’s second-largest reservoir. Western Canal’s farmers have sold water to Metropolitan in the past.
Last year, rice farmers in the Valley idled 100,000 acres of land, reducing the crop size by about one-fifth, according to the California Rice Commission. Spokesman Jim Morris said it’s too early to say how much planting will occur this year.
“We still have a lot of winter to go,” he said.
The California rice crop, almost all of which is grown in the Valley, was worth about $900 million in 2019, the last year for which statistics are available, according to the California Department of Food and Agriculture.
Metropolitan’s decision follows weeks of dry weather that have obliterated some of the gains made during a historically wet December. An acre-foot is 326,000 gallons; the water Metropolitan is trying to buy what would represent about 5% of the sprawling Southern California agency’s demands for the year.
Last year, Metropolitan amassed a $44 million war chest and tried to buy as much as 65,000 acre-feet of water from Northern California. But supplies were so tight, farmers were willing to part with only 5,600 acre-feet, at a cost of $5.3 million.
Metropolitan thinks this year will be better in spite of the lack of precipitation so far in 2022. December’s heavy rain and snow prompted California officials to announce they plan to provide a 15% allocation to the agencies that belong to the State Water Project, including Metropolitan. Just weeks earlier, the allocation had been set at zero.
That increased allocation suggests that Sacramento Valley water agencies will have more water to sell than they did last year, said James Bodnar, the program manager for water transfers at Metropolitan.
“We’re in a better position this year,” he said. “There’s more water in the system.”
Metropolitan spent $625 an acre-foot for last year’s purchases; Bodnar said he thinks prices this year will be comparable or slightly lower. That suggests Metropolitan is prepared to spend more than $60 million this year.
Separately, Metropolitan has an ongoing agreement with the Yuba Water Agency under which Southern California bought 33,000 acre-feet of water last year. Bodnar said a similar amount will likely flow south this year as well. Those water deals are made as part of a broad settlement Yuba made years ago with the state to provide water to salmon habitats as well as water agencies in the southern half of the state.
Water purchases from the north represent “part of our diversified portfolio,” Bodnar said. “It’s just one part of our strategy.”
DALE KASLER Tel: 916-321-1066
Dale Kasler covers climate change, the environment, economics and the convoluted world of California water. He also covers major enterprise stories for McClatchy’s Western newspapers. He joined The Bee in 1996 from the Des Moines Register and graduated from Northwestern University.
(Sources: The Sacramento Bee)
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