March 10, 2017
CapitalPress.com
California
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Flood control benefits from
new storage projects debated
By TIM HEARDEN
Capital Press
Tim Hearden/Capital Press
Water is released from Shasta Dam in Northern California in late
February. State and federal officials say proposed storage projects
might have lessened flooding and other impacts from this winter’s
big storms.
Their comments come as
U.S. Reps. John Garamendi,
D-Calif., and Doug LaMalfa,
R-Calif., have reintroduced
legislation to speed up the
federal review of Sites Res-
ervoir and allow the federal
government to be involved in
construction. The two orig-
inally teamed on legislation
in 2015 that would have set
a deadline of late last year
for the feasibility study, but
the bill didn’t make it out of
the House Natural Resources
Committee.
“The recent feast-or-fam-
ine water years should remind
us all of the importance of
building safe, environmental-
ly friendly long-term storage
that can take advantage of wet
years and help provide for our
water needs during drier pe-
riods,” Garamendi said in a
statement.
Farm groups have been
quick this winter to use flood-
ing and other impacts to call
for more storage, For example,
as the California Farm Bureau
Federation was assessing dam-
age to crops and fields during
the Presidents’ Day weekend
storms, president Paul Wenger
argued flood control releases
show a need to enhance the
state’s storage capacity.
“Believe it or not, there are
people who think we don’t
need more water storage, and
that we should even tear down
many of the facilities we now
have,” Wenger, a Modesto area
nut farmer, said in a state-
ment. “These activists don’t
care how many people suffer
from devastating floods in
winters like this. They don’t
care how many people suffer
from water shortages during
drought.”
Sites is one of several proj-
ects around the state that have
been identified for potential
funding from Proposition 1,
the $7.5 billion water bond
passed by voters in 2014. The
California Water Commission
will begin taking applications
this year for $2.7 billion set
aside in the bond for large
storage projects.
Other potential projects
include the proposed $2.5
billion Temperance Flat Res-
ervoir near Fresno and a pro-
posal to raise Shasta Dam by
as much as 18 feet.
Sites would get about
500,000 acre-feet a year from
high flows in the Sacramento
River, Goyal noted. That op-
portunity would occur in most
years, he said.
“It’s not that you have to
have flooding, but you have to
have good flow and the (Sac-
ramento-San Joaquin River)
Delta conditions have to be
met,” he said.
Temperance Flat would
create 1.26 million acre-feet
of new storage above Miller-
ton Lake, easing flood risks
along the San Joaquin River,
Goyal said.
Scant demand for state’s
cap-and-trade pollution permits
By JONATHAN J. COOPER
Associated Press
SACRAMENTO (AP) —
California saw another three
months of weak demand for
pollution permits amid per-
sistent uncertainty about the fu-
ture of the state’s cap on carbon
emissions, according to state
data released last week.
California will take in only
about $8 million from an auc-
tion that could have generated
$592 million or more if all per-
mits were sold. The program
is a prime funding source for
projects including high-speed
rail and transit construction.
For years, each quarterly
auction consistently generated
hundreds of millions of dollars.
Fewer than one in five per-
mits were distributed at an
auction last month, according
to the data from the California
Air Resources Board. The vast
majority were sold by utilities,
which get them for free from
the state, while some were sold
to polluters in Quebec, the Ca-
nadian province that sells per-
mits at the same auction.
But revenue has plummeted
in three of the last four auctions
amid a series of pressures that
have depressed demand.
A glut of permits on the
market means companies don’t
need to buy them at auction to
authorize their emissions in
the near future. A state appeals
court is considering a case that
challenges the authority for the
state to sell pollution permits.
And the Legislature is consid-
ering whether to give the pro-
gram clear authority to contin-
ue past 2020.
“The incentives aren’t such
to be aggressively purchasing
allowances from the auctions
that you aren’t going to need in
the near term,” said Alex Jack-
son, a lawyer for the Natural
Resources Defense Fund.
The program, known as
“cap and trade,” limits the
amount of carbon that can be
released each year and requires
companies that pollute to buy
permits for each ton of carbon
they release. The scarce de-
mand for permits means reve-
nue will likely fall far short of
the $1 billion that Gov. Jerry
Brown projected for the cur-
rent fiscal year. Three-quarters
into the budget year, the auc-
tions have generated only about
$380 million, according to the
nonpartisan legislative analyst.
ROP-40-42-4/#17
SHASTA LAKE, Calif. —
If all of California’s proposed
water-storage projects were
already built, would they have
lessened the severity of flood-
ing and other impacts from
this winter’s heavy storms?
Perhaps, say federal and
state water officials.
For instance, Sites Res-
ervoir, a planned 1.8 million
acre-foot reservoir expected
to vie for Proposition 1 bond
funds, may have captured
enough water to prevent at
least some of the flooding in
the Maxwell area on Feb. 18,
said Ajay Goyal, chief of the
statewide infrastructure inves-
tigations branch for the Cali-
fornia Department of Water
Resources.
The proposed $3.6 bil-
lion reservoir would have
held back some water from
Stone Corral Creek and oth-
er creeks, which swelled and
prompted the evacuation of
Maxwell, he said.
“That creek will have less
water coming down because
it will be caught by a dam,”
Goyal said, adding that water
in area creeks would be sent
from the reservoir.
“You wouldn’t have un-
controlled water coming in,”
he said.
But the degree to which
flooding could have been
averted would depend on tim-
ing, cautions Louis Moore,
spokesman for the U.S. Bu-
reau of Reclamation in Sacra-
mento. Sites could have held
back water, but some of the
area’s flooding was caused by
torrential rainfall in low-lying
areas, Moore said.
“Even though you might
have the space (for water), it
would still require getting that
water there,” Moore said, add-
ing that “it’s not really clear”
how much of Maxwell’s flood
water could have been held
by, or diverted to, Sites.
Goyal agreed, noting that
Sites’ biggest benefits for
flood control would occur
when the torrential rains fall
upstream and can be captured.
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