Governor Signs 2 Bills Easing Water Transfer

SACRAMENTO —  With Southern California’s water supply from the Colorado River at stake, Gov. Gray Davis signed two bills Monday intended to ease the transfer of water from Imperial Valley farmers to San Diego.

Both bills deal with the fish and bird life of the Salton Sea, an accidental lake formed by a canal break in 1905 that has become an obstacle to a proposed shift of water from farms to coastal city dwellers.

Water drained from Imperial Valley farms flows to the Salton Sea, which straddles Imperial and Riverside counties. If farmers use less water on their crops and instead send it by canal to San Diego, the Salton Sea could eventually become too salty--it now is 25% saltier than the ocean--to keep alive the fish that draw millions of pelicans, geese and other waterfowl.

Davis signed SB 482 by Sen. Sheila Kuehl (D-Santa Monica) to allow for the incidental killing of four species that could be affected by a water transfer. Those species--the desert pupfish, brown pelican and two varieties of marsh-dwelling birds called rails--had been on the state’s “fully protected” list, which dates to the 1920s and forbids any harm to them.

Under Kuehl’s bill, the four species would instead be covered by the state’s Endangered Species Act, which allows for some harm to the fish and birds so long as measures are taken to more than offset the damage.

Davis also signed SB 1473 by Sen. Mike Machado (D-Linden), which would earmark $150 million for the Salton Sea from Proposition 50, the $3.4-billion water bond on the November ballot. If voters pass the bond, the money must be used for a desalination, conservation or other project that creates new water to offset some of the farm runoff that won’t go to the 375-square-mile Salton Sea as a result of the water transfer.

Lawmakers and Davis administration officials heralded both bills as a sign of their strong intention to make a water transfer work.

The transfer is less important at the moment for the water it could provide to San Diego than it is as evidence for the federal government that California will keep its promise to scale back use of the Colorado River.

In many years, California has used about 800,000 acre-feet--enough to supply 1.6 million homes--more than it is entitled to take under a 1922 agreement among the seven states along the Colorado River.

California agreed in 1999 to limit itself to 4.4 million acre-feet within 15 years. A key part of that plan is to have the Imperial Irrigation District, which gets 70% of California’s Colorado River share, cut its consumption by hundreds of thousands of acre-feet and sell the water to other Southern California agencies.

Under the plan, California agreed to achieve certain milestones by the end of this year or risk being cut off from surplus supplies by the federal government, which manages the river’s reservoirs.

For the last few months, Assemblyman Bob Hertzberg (D-Van Nuys) has brokered meetings among the Imperial Irrigation District, San Diego County Water Agency, Metropolitan Water District of Southern California and other parties to cut a deal before the Dec. 31 deadline.