California’s extreme drought ended two years ago but far Northern California remains in the grip of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s emergency drought declaration.
Atmospheric rivers are pummeling the region this week, leading to flood warnings and saturated watersheds — a landscape far removed from the drought-plagued portrait painted by the State Water Resources Control Board. It is gearing up to readopt a drought regulation next month. The hope is to buy time for developing a long-term strategy to save endangered salmon species.
In recent years the administration has initiated a flurry of actions to save the salmon. Most notably, it is removing four dams along the Klamath River to enable the fish to reach traditional upstream spawning grounds. The governor has also struck a deal with irrigation districts over voluntary agreements to dedicate more Sacramento River flows to salmon while investing in critical habitat in tributaries along the watershed. The Sustainable Groundwater Management Act and related state and local investments have led to an unprecedented amount of information on the interaction of groundwater and surface flows in the Scott and Shasta river watersheds.
The battles playing out in the watersheds have served as fodder for a four-year push to overhaul the state’s water rights system and ramp up fines for illegal diversions.
Farmers and ranchers swept up in the action have felt unfairly targeted and under the microscope. In October the water board held a day-long workshop to comb through the immense archive of scientific studies on the salmon and to hear arguments from agriculture, commercial fishing interests and tribes, all to inform the gradual effort to develop a permanent plan for reviving the salmon populations.
The board directed staff to consider readopting the emergency regulation to ensure minimum stream flows for the watersheds in the meantime, which authorizes the board to continue issuing sudden curtailments based on readings from local flow gauges.
Ryan Walker, Siskiyou County Farm BureauLast week staff held a listening session to gather input as it considers slight modifications to the regulation. Agricultural representatives were resigned to fact that pleas for rescinding the drought rules were likely to go unheeded.
“We disagree that there should be an emergency regulation being adopted simply due to the fact that we haven't had any kind of even moderate drought here since April of 2023. We have had two good winters in a row. We've had some pretty good flow years,” said Theodora Johnson, speaking on behalf of the Scott Valley Agriculture Water Alliance. “I do understand this is likely a fait accompli. It's going to happen.”
While Johnson felt the regulation was unfair, she said the state has made it worse by removing any predictability with curtailing water diversions, making it challenging for farms to stay in business. The last four years of emergency rulemaking, she argued, have provided enough time for the board to handle the situation with more precision and less of the blunt regulatory hammer. She claimed the curtailments have not slowed the decline of water levels.
Ryan Walker, president of the Siskiyou County Farm Bureau, suggested the board is setting farmers up for failure by tying curtailments to flow gauges in the Scott Valley. He pointed out that the board’s base flow targets were not achieved in the extremely wet year of 2023, demonstrating that reducing agricultural water use has not helped. Despite the low levels, however, Chinook salmon have recently returned to the valley and found adequate rearing habitat in the tributaries, he added.
Walker urged the board to focus more selectively on meeting the flow needs of the salmonids in the places and times that matter most.
“We need a more nimble approach,” he said. This constant [emergency regulations] — the hurry up and do something [approach] — prevents us from getting to that.”
In the Shasta Valley, water users have met the minimum flow standard, creating what Walker described as the perfect opportunity to negotiate a permanent solution to implement as early as next year. Working with local producers, the county farm bureau has drafted a proposal that would provide the flows all year, except for July and August, the period “that hurts farmers the most.” They would have a little more water to irrigate at that time but provide more water to fish at other times of the year that fall outside the scope of the emergency rules.
Walker also claimed the board has issued or extended curtailments when flows were already above the threshold, adding as much as a 25% cushion to the standard and leading to confusion and uncertainty for producers.
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He blasted the emergency rulemaking approach for removing due process, environmental reviews, the appeals process and other protections embedded in state law, and argued the board is now shifting the flow targets without warning.
“I would hope the next round of [emergency regulations] make clear that, whatever the trigger flow is, that's when curtailments are issued,” said Walker. “Not at some unknown number that's going to be decided by some unknown person using some unknown model.”
More arguments for local control came from Matt Parker, a natural resources specialist overseeing the groundwater sustainability agency for the Scott and Shasta basin. The GSA has pushed for voluntary, collaborative solutions, rather than the current top-down approach. Parker argued it would create more flexibility with watershed management. He pointed to state grants that have helped the GSA collect the most robust set of hydrologic data available and noted that the state water board does not expect to have a usable model for Shasta flows until as late as 2026.
“We've continued to state our frustration with the use of the emergency regulations, removing that authority granted by SGMA,” said Parker. “We should be part of the management decision.”
The California Department of Fish and Wildlife, however, encouraged the board to stay the course and readopt the regulation. Michael Harris, environmental program manager for the department’s Klamath watershed program, said the emergency measures have led to improvements in habitat, flows and water temperatures.
Several advocacy groups echoed the comments, while pressing the board for stricter enforcement and more monitoring to root out bad actors.
“The minimum flows we're talking about are specifically designed for species survival in drought years and not long-term management,” said Nathaniel Kane, who directs the Environmental Law Foundation and spoke on behalf of the Karuk Tribe and the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations. “There's no cushion in these numbers.”
Kane pushed back on Walker’s comments as well as Parker’s, arguing SGMA “cannot achieve what these emergency regulations do,” since it does not cover surface water diversions.
“The state board has both the authority and the duty to manage all of these water resources together to protect the public trust and to avoid waste and unreasonable use,” said Kane.
While the board plans to readopt the regulation as a short-term fix, staff are developing a case for establishing a permanent mandate for unimpaired flows and have already initiated the process to assess the potential economic impacts of such a paradigm.
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