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February 17, 2017
California
State may curb pumping near aqueduct
By TIM HEARDEN
Capital Press
SACRAMENTO — Water
regulators are considering re-
stricting groundwater pump-
ing in the San Joaquin Valley
near the California Aqueduct
and other man-made canals
because of subsidence.
State Department of Wa-
ter Resources officials say
they’re considering legal op-
tions for preventing facility
damage in light of a new Na-
tional Aeronautics and Space
Administration report on sub-
sidence — the sinking of land
as the water table drops.
The Feb. 8 report asserts that
two main “subsidence bowls”
covering hundreds of square
miles grew wider and deeper
between spring 2015 and fall
2016 and that a seven-mile area
in Fresno County has settled up
to 20 inches.
Scientists say subsidence
threatens flows in the aqueduct,
which supplies water to near-
ly 25 million Californians and
nearly 1 million acres of farm-
land. The canal has dropped
more than 2 feet in one area of
Kings County, losing 20 per-
cent of its carrying capacity, the
report said.
The DWR is considering
Courtesy of Calif. Dept. of Water Resources
A truck approaches the West Washington Road Bridge over the
high water in the Eastside Bypass west of Chowchilla, Calif., on
Jan. 25. The bridge is buckling because of subsidence, which state
officials say is causing wear and impeding flows in canals and
aqueducts throughout the San Joaquin Valley.
measures to curtail groundwa-
ter pumping, create ground-
water management zones near
critical infrastructure, and de-
veloping county ordinances, of-
ficials said. Some of these mea-
sures may be enacted through
legislation, said Jeanine Jones,
the agency’s interstate resourc-
es manager.
Thousands of wells exist
near state facilities that could
be contributing to subsidence,
state officials contend.
“The question for us is,
what’s the status of those
wells?” Jones said. “Are they
all causing subsidence? ...
That’s the due diligence we
need to go through.
“Perhaps the remedy is
some kind of infrastructure pro-
tection zone” in which drilling
couldn’t occur within a certain
distance of a canal or could
only go a certain depth, Jones
said.
The DWR is conducting
its own study of the effects of
subsidence along the 444-mile
aqueduct, the State Water Proj-
ect’s main artery, and other
facilities and will identify po-
tential actions in the coming
months.
Much of the effort will like-
ly be done through local enti-
ties as part of the Sustainable
Groundwater
Management
Act, a 2014 law that requires
local governments to regulate
pumping and recharge.
Local leaders face a July
1 deadline for setting up new
groundwater
management
agencies.
NASA scientists compiled
their latest report using radar
satellite maps and additional
aircraft-based images focused
on the California Aqueduct, ac-
cording to a news release.
The report follows the
agency’s August 2015 study
finding that all the drought-re-
lated groundwater pumping in
the valley was causing land to
sink at historic rates. That study
showed land in the valley was
sinking by nearly 2 inches per
month in some places.
Since then, the University
of California and others have
begun numerous groundwa-
ter-recharge projects in the
valley, and storms this win-
ter have provided as much as
double the normal rainfall in
some places.
But whether the wet winter
helps groundwater recharge
in an area depends largely on
the soil, Jones said. With “in-
elastic” surfaces such as fine
grain clay soils, the ground-
water that’s removed can’t be
replaced, she said.
Groundwater
recharge
projects wouldn’t necessari-
ly help the aqueduct or other
at-risk facilities unless they’re
close by, she said.
A comprehensive rebuild
of the aqueduct to its origi-
nal capacity would likely cost
hundreds of millions of dol-
lars, and even a focused triage
to fix the most affected parts
of the canal could cost tens of
millions of dollars per loca-
tion, officials said.
Already, subsidence-relat-
ed repairs have cost the SWP
and federal Central Valley
Project an estimated $100
million since the 1960s.
The DWR set aside $10
million from the $7.5 billion
water bond voters approved
in 2014 to help communities
with depleted aquifers enact
pumping ordinances and con-
servation plans. But no Prop-
osition 1 funds were set aside
for repairs of existing facili-
ties, Jones said.
“The bond was really
about building new things,
not” operations and mainte-
nance, she said.
7-2/#4N
Tim Hearden/Capital Press
U.S. Rep. Tom McClintock, left,
talks with Bruce Ross, field
representative for California As-
semblyman Brian Dahle, after
making a presentation Feb. 9
at the Sierra Cascade Logging
Conference in Anderson, Calif.
McClintock:
Congress can
use funding
authority
to curb
bureaucracy
By TIM HEARDEN
Capital Press
ANDERSON, Calif. —
The chairman of a federal
lands subcommittee says
Congress can use its funding
authority to wrest control of
land management and other
government functions from an
ever-expanding bureaucracy.
U.S. Rep. Tom McClin-
tock, R-Calif., said Congress
is forbidden to fund unautho-
rized programs and must reau-
thorize them every few years,
which enables lawmakers to
fight back against administra-
tive overreach.
“There’s a movement in
the House (of Representa-
tives) that’s gaining steam to
use the reauthorization pro-
cess to take back the legisla-
tive and judicial powers that
we’ve given the executive
branch over the past century,”
McClintock told the Capital
Press.
“In some cases the bureau-
cracy has exceeded its legal
authority,” he said.
A person is 10 times more
likely to be accused of break-
ing an administrative rule
than of breaking a criminal
law, said McClintock, who
chairs the House Natural Re-
sources Committee’s federal
lands subcommittee.
His comments during an
interview followed his pre-
sentation Feb. 9 at the Sier-
ra Cascade Logging Con-
ference’s kickoff breakfast,
where he said a turning polit-
ical tide is improving chances
of passing bills that open up
federal lands to more logging
and other uses.
Already, water legislation
approved in December in-
cluded environmental waivers
for Lake Tahoe Basin forest
thinning projects of fewer
than 3,000 acres to prevent
catastrophic fire, said McClin-
tock, whose district includes a
vast swath of eastern moun-
tains and foothills stretching
from Sacramento to Fresno.
With Republican majori-
ties in Congress and President
Donald Trump, McClintock
sees a better chance of passing
the Resilient Federal Forests
Act, which would enable fed-
eral agencies to use disaster
funding for firefighting, and
his own Emergency Forests
Restoration Act, which would
fund the removal of dead trees
from forests.
Lawmakers may also seek
to amend the Antiquities Act
to divert funds from the ac-
quisition of new lands to bet-
ter managing existing ones, he
said.
“The mood (in Congress)
is, ‘Please, God, don’t let us
screw this up,’” McClintock
told the breakfast gathering.
“This is our one chance to
save our country. ... We’re
going to be judged on the
success of the policies them-
selves.”
Often referred to as the
“fourth branch of govern-
ment,” the federal bureau-
cracy has increasingly been
accused of usurping powers
delegated to Congress or the
courts. U.S. Supreme Court
nominee Neil Gorsuch wrote
in one recent opinion that “ex-
ecutive bureaucracies” can
“concentrate federal power in
a way that seems more than a
little difficult to square with
the Constitution of the fram-
ers’ design.”