As a public agency, Browns Valley Irrigation District, a northern California water purveyor, hires an outside accountant (CPA) to do an annual audit of the financial records. This process is one of the ways that we insure that public funds are being expended appropriately. As is the norm, there are always transactions that need to be clarified as the CPA works through the previous year’s records.
This year, I was hit with one question that made me take pause. The CPA saw that one of the budget line items was for “Delta Issues.” He posed “why on earth is an irrigation district that is located some 60 river miles upstream of the Delta, spending money on issues in the Delta?” Good question. This was not going to be one of those one or two sentence answers that simply tied the expense to a District project. I asked the CPA to sit down and I will try to explain.
Our water district is able to deliver water to our water users because we have water rights, both on the Yuba River and from our reservoir, Collins Lake. Without these water rights, we could not take water from these two sources, forcing the District to run out of water. In 2009, the State legislature directed the State Water Resources Control Board (SWRCB) to do a non-binding flow study on how much water the Delta needed to protect the in-Delta endangered species. This study showed that those flows would have to be dramatically higher than current flows but did not say where these additional flows might come from. This flow study also did not look at the impacts of those increased flows upstream of the Delta, both to water rights or water conditions for other endangered species (like salmon). It was this study, and concerns about where the additional water might come from, that got our water district, along with several other water districts concerned about the future reliability of our collective water rights. As a result, we have banded together as the Sacramento Valley Water Users Group to actively participate in the SWRCB process to protect our water rights, which are the key to the economy and the environment in this region.
The auditor was amazed but satisfied.
Thank you Walter. Shows that no matter where you live in northern California you are affected by issues in other parts of the state.