The following is an excerpt from Roger Cornwell’s chair remarks at the NCWA Annual Meeting on March 7, 2025 at Sierra Nevada Brewery in Chico.
By Roger Cornwell
Let me open my remarks as Chair today by saying what a pleasure it is to see all of you at Sierra Nevada Brewery. It is also a privilege to be selected as your Chair of the Board of Directors. We have an amazing community–the NCWA Board, the elected officials, landowners, water resources managers, counsel, engineers, biologists, hydrologists, geologists and the NCWA team. We all live, work, and play in this dynamic region with a community of engaged, active, energetic, committed people–a place that continues to evolve and integrate fresh new ideas for water management into our common mission to ensure water for our communities, farms, families, and the environment, making Northern California the amazing place we call home.
As we think about 2025, the NCWA Board of Directors in January adopted the Five-Year Strategic Priorities that is on your table. These are your priorities for the region, so please read this document and let us know at any time if you have any other thoughts on how we can be strategic and support your work in the region. NCWA and the leaders in the region are dedicated to fostering a resilient Sacramento Valley where water resources support economically vibrant communities, thriving farmlands, abundant wildlife habitats, and healthy rivers and landscapes.
We have a riverscape vision for the Sacramento River Basin that looks at the entire region and blends the wisdom of leading scientists and our local knowledge to better understand our water resources, and to then take action to integrate our wonderful rivers and creeks into our landscapes and communities in a way that brings the entire region to life through our precious water resources.
The Sacramento River Basin is also a critical piece of California’s water management puzzle. Since much of California’s water supply originates in and flows through the Sacramento River Basin, effective stewardship actions and management practices in our region deliver important benefits for the entire state.
In looking at our priorities, let us start with the word “vitalizing.” The word vitalize means to give life, to give vitality, to give strength and energy, and to animate. The word vitalizing is an action word. Creating a place that is full of life – plants, animals, people, communities – resilient and regenerative. Isn’t this what each and every one of us does in this region—in our own special way through our precious water resources?
We do this as individuals, collectively through our water districts and companies, and through our various partnerships throughout the state. Can I take a moment to see who is in the room today? Please raise your hand if you are a farmer? Raise your hand if you work for a municipal utility? Raise your hand if you are a conservationist? Let us see the hands of those who provide support for agriculture in the region? How many of you serve on an elected Board? Please raise your hand if you work for a governmental agency. Thank you all for being here and engaging in making this region a better place.
Now let me take a moment to recognize the NCWA staff shown on the screen. We are very fortunate that we have a team that is so dedicated to the people and landscapes in our region. They all have a strong passion for what we do, and they truly like working together and with all of us to help tell your story. Thank you for all your commitment to NCWA and this great region!
For our 2025 priorities, let me describe three themes that capture our priorities and the actions in the region to vitalize this region through the riverscape vision. I have appreciated the wisdom of both Bryce Lundberg and Jim Mayer in thinking through our priorities—you will see our blog in the packet in front of you. These actions together will help us all ensure water supply reliability and bring the region to life.
1. First, help ensure the human right to clean water for local communities.
Sacramento River Basin leaders are committed to expanding and ensuring access to clean, safe, and affordable drinking water for all communities in our region. Every person in our region needs and deserves safe drinking water and NCWA convenes the North State Drinking Water Solutions Network as a forum to assist communities in their efforts to have safe and affordable drinking water. In addition, NCWA convenes the Sacramento Valley Water Quality Coalition, which coordinates water quality monitoring and protection programs with state regulators and other key partners, including the California Rice Commission, Agricultural Commissioners, Farm Bureaus, Resource Conservation Districts, Groundwater Sustainability Agencies, and commodity organizations. The Crystal-Clear Award you just heard about embodies this spirit!
2. Second, implement holistic, nature-based solutions that restore ecological functions and support multi-benefit water management.
The Sacramento River Basin provides water for three million Californians, two million acres of productive farms and ranches, and critical wildlife habitats. Ensuring that our limited and variable water supply serves all these interests simultaneously requires modern, holistic water management from ridgetop to river mouth.
- Starting at the ridgetop, we need healthy watersheds as the Sacramento River Basin includes the headwaters for most of California’s water supplies, and responsible and active forest and meadow management is a foundational component of efforts to promote healthy headwaters. Programs implemented by our region’s water managers are the path forward, such as Placer County Water Agency’s French Meadows Forest Restoration Program in the American River watershed and the Yuba Water Agency’s pioneering efforts in forest protection and watershed restoration in the Yuba watershed. We appreciate this work and will continue working with our partners to provide innovative, collaborative, and scalable models for improving the health of our headwaters and reducing wildfire risk.
- From ridgetop to river mouth, we need to reenergize our rivers and creeks in the right place and time for salmon recovery. The holistic approach to Sacramento River Basin salmon recovery outlines our comprehensive approach to improving conditions for every freshwater life-stage of salmon migrating up and down our region’s river systems. Developed in collaboration with state and federal regulators and leading conservationists, the approach aligns flows with function to ensure a sufficient volume of water is available at the right time and place to support robust, resilient populations of salmon. Taking a holistic approach that accounts for all salmon life stages and freshwater habitats – instead of focusing solely on Sacramento River temperature management below Keswick Dam – provides the best opportunity for salmon recovery in the Sacramento River Basin. These actions are all designed to restore the ecosystem functions of the landscapes and riverscapes, while concurrently helping secure water supplies for communities, farms, other fish and wildlife, recreation, and hydropower.
- For the lower part of the system, we need to scale up our efforts to reactivate the historic floodplains for multiple benefits. We strongly support the Floodplain Forward Coalition, an innovative collaboration between 30 organizations based in conservation, biology, water management, farming, and local government that is advancing a ‘landscape scale’ vision to build resiliency in our region’s ecosystems and water systems. The Coalition’s dynamic conservation strategies will help sustain the abundant return of migratory birds along the Pacific Flyway, revitalize river food webs to support the recovery of salmon and other fish populations, recharge groundwater aquifers, and improve flood protection in an era of increasing storm severity and climate variability.
3. Third, prepare for and adapt to extreme weather and climate change, which requires saving excess water wherever possible.
In response to unprecedented dry conditions statewide, the state administration in 2022 released California’s Water Supply Strategy, which calls for the modernization of our water management system as the state adapts to our new climate reality. Karla talked about this strategy this morning. There are similar efforts now underway with the new federal administration that is emerging. Let me highlight three of these priorities:
- Sustainable Groundwater Management. Working in coordination with DWR and local Groundwater Sustainability Agencies, the NCWA Groundwater Management Task Force has developed a Pathway for the Future: Sustainable Groundwater Management in the Sacramento Valley, a roadmap for building the institutional capacity necessary for effective regional groundwater management. Active groundwater management is critical for our region’s future, and the Groundwater Task Force is working with you all to focus on and advance groundwater recharge—a nature-based solutions to support aquifer health in the Sacramento River Basin.
- Sites Reservoir. As Sacramento River Basin water managers look to serve multiple benefits far into the future, the importance and need for Sites Reservoir is clear. Sites Reservoir is an innovative 21st century water project: an off-stream regulating reservoir on the west-side of the Sacramento Valley that can capture and store water during high runoff periods for various beneficial uses at a later time. Sites Reservoir would dramatically enhance California’s water management system, providing flexibility to address uncertainties created by a changing climate and improving environmental and water supply resilience. We are fully supporting the Sites Project Authority and look forward to the project receiving its water rights later this year and the project breaking ground in the next several years.
- Lake Shasta Management. There are new discussions around Lake Shasta and an opportunity to manage operations more effectively, including the possibility of enlarging the reservoir. To help us better understand these opportunities and advance these discussions in a thoughtful way, Don Bransford is chairing a NCWA task force on Lake Shasta Management to explore ways to optimize the operations of Shasta Lake and the related facilities to provide flood protection and serve multiple benefits in the Sacramento Valley, including for fish and wildlife. We are hoping, through the task force, to serve in a supporting role to help unify the region, look at Shasta Lake management in a broader way, and ensure that we can effectively advance the project and a package of related actions for the benefit of the entire Sacramento Valley, including public safety, our farms, cities and rural communities, recreation, and fish and wildlife.
In thinking about these three priorities, our vision for success relies upon an increased pace and scale that will require working even more closely with state and federal agencies to align and modernize the three elements on the screen. We need the regulatory processes surrounding these actions to support our goals and not get in the way of progress. This is why we are working so hard on the Agreements to Support Healthy Rivers and Landscapes and many other programs–to align our values to vitalize healthy rivers, landscapes, and communities with our regulatory framework in California. This will require leadership and creativity by state and federal agencies!
It will also require deeper partnerships. We appreciate our many collaborators, including our MOU partnership with the California Rice Commission, Ducks Unlimited and CalTrout. We hope you and many others will be inspired by this approach for a functional Sacramento Valley and will join our effort to work hard, scale-up and harmonize our priorities with state, federal, and other regions’ priorities to advance our collective goal to ensure greater water and climate resilience throughout California for our people, communities, the economy, and the environment.
In conclusion, I am honored to be part of this region and what we do together as a region to make California a better place! NCWA was formed to bring us all together to safeguard our precious water supplies and to help advance and evolve water management with the changing landscape in California. We look forward to working hard in 2025 with our many collaborators to advance multi-benefit water management to cultivate a shared vision in the region for a vibrant way of life. Thank you for allowing me to share our 2025 priorities.
Roger Cornwell’s leadership comes as we continue our commitment to supporting healthy rivers, landscapes, and communities, and we look forward to progress ahead under his guidance. Learn more about NCWA’s new Chair of the Board of Directors in our recent announcement.
The NCWA Board of Directors always appreciates hearing addition thoughts, ideas or questions for the Sacramento Valley. Please share them at info@norcalwater.org.
