By Roger Cornwell, Chair, and Thad Bettner, Executive Director
Sacramento River Settlement Contractors
The Sacramento River Settlement Contractors (SRSC) this week joined the Bureau of Reclamation to sign an agreement for a Drought Protection Program (DPP) for the Sacramento River. The DPP contains a series of investments that will lead to improved water supply reliability in future years to benefit our farms, communities, economy, and the environment.
The DPP is independent but related to the new plan for the Long-Term Operation of the Central Valley Project and Delta facilities of the State Water Project adopted in December, presenting a path forward with more predictable actions for endangered fish species and a more reliable Central Valley Project response to multi-year droughts. The revised operating plan will improve regulatory certainty for water users and provide a more stable water supply for communities, farms, and fish.
The goal is to ensure stability and resilience in our water system and avoid repeating the devastating impact we saw in 2022 to the west-side of the Sacramento Valley, where there was only an 18% water supply to farms, wildlife refuges and cities, and disadvantaged communities. As a result, 370,000 acres were fallowed, there was a $1.3B hit to the regional economy, bird and snake habitat was impacted and we saw the lowest salmon survival rates in decades. (See The Sacramento River Watershed Experienced an Unprecedented Dry Period from 2020-2022.)
Attempting to improve water supply certainty, Shasta Lake 2022The DPP will be implemented in specific critically dry years with low carryover storage and less than 2.5 million acre-feet of inflow into Shasta Reservoir. In these critically dry years over the next decade, our contract supplies will be reduced up to an additional 500,000 acre-feet, over the current contract reduction, with water suppliers receiving infrastructure funding intended to help replace or mitigate for this new water supply shortage. Importantly, the contracts will remain in place and the SRSC’s will receive at least 50% of their contract supply. For more details on this program, see the Drought Protection Program Outline.
The DPP is a short-term program designed to immediately help winter-run salmon; the long-term program is to improve water infrastructure, the operations of Shasta Reservoir, and advance the recovery plan for salmon by working with federal and state agencies to implement a Winter-Run Action Plan (WRAP)—a holistic approach to salmon recovery in the Sacramento River watershed. This includes a portfolio of collaborative actions in river reaches and historic floodplains designed to provide flows with function–the sufficient water necessary to reactivate the landscape-scale patterns of biophysical habitat conditions that robust, resilient populations of salmon and other native fish, bird, and wildlife populations depend upon. The WRAP looks broader than temperature management below Shasta and Keswick Dams and aims to improve every freshwater life-stage of winter-run Chinook salmon, with agencies coordinating efforts to execute science, habitat, and infrastructure activities that will yield the most significant survival benefits for salmon.
The DPP is also related to a larger action plan on the west-side of the Sacramento Valley to address resilience to drought, both for water users and the environment, and as shown below, it dovetails with water management in all year types, including the Healthy Rivers and Landscapes Program; sustainable groundwater management and accelerated groundwater recharge; and the completion of Sites Reservoir. See Building on Success: An Action Plan for Modern Water Stewardship in the Sacramento River Watershed for the Next Decade.
