The State Water Resources Control Board is gearing up to approve this year a long-awaited update to its Bay-Delta Water Quality Control Plan. The state is endorsing a more holistic approach to the intractable debate over preserving a greater portion of river flows to protect endangered fish species while curtailing allocations to farms and cities.
After taking office in 2019, Gov. Gavin Newsom vowed to “move past the binaries” in water policy battles to develop lasting solutions. His partnership with water districts and cities on the Bay-Delta Plan will be a test of his voluntary pathways approach and, with less than two years left in his term, it will likely dictate his water legacy.
Yet the return of President-elect Donald Trump to the White House has thrown further uncertainty into a process plagued with mistrust and political vulnerability. Delta fish protections were at the center of a lawsuit Newsom filed against the Trump administration in 2020, after federal agencies released a new environmental plan governing Delta pumping operations, known as biological opinions. Along with the court challenge, California began operating its State Water Project separately from the federal Central Valley Project for the first time in history, with the goal of offsetting any efforts to increase water exports.
Jeffrey Kightlinger, at the time the general manager of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, reflected in an interview with Agri-Pulse that the politics overshadowed the reality of the “rational” day-to-day discussions among water experts over the new biological opinions.
“There was a lot of rhetoric—opening up the floodgates and making the water flow, etc.,” said Kightlinger. “But you know, at the end of the day, the people who were in there were pretty sensible, good, smart water people… These were all people who were long-time water professionals and knew their business.”
The former officials he named included Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Brenda Berman, Reclamation Regional Director Ernest Conant and Interior Secretary David Bernhardt, a figure often maligned by Democrats and environmental interests for having previously lobbied for the Westlands Water District. Kightlinger said the content of the biological opinions “was not that radical.” The general feeling of the officials who parsed through the lengthy document was that the protections “were pretty sensible.”
“But the politics were such that no one could seemingly say that,” he said.
The protracted legal battle led to considerable uncertainty for farmers and other water users, according to David Guy, president of the Northern California Water Association.
“We basically had a federal court running the process, running the operations of the projects,” Guy told Agri-Pulse. “Let's be honest, judges are not equipped to operate major water projects.”
After President Joe Biden took office, his administration brokered an interim operating plan with the Newsom administration, reverting to pre-2019 operating plans and pulling back on the lawsuit. Last month Reclamation finalized a long-term plan for the CVP, after the state crafted a new plan for the SWP, which opted to maintain its independence in case California decides to again operate the project separately when a federal administration takes a different approach to Delta fish protections.
EPA Regional Administrator Martha GuzmanDespite the change in administration with Biden, Reclamation has remained onboard with the softer voluntary alternative to the water board’s blunt regulatory tool of the unimpaired flows dynamic. The parties have dropped the word “voluntary” and renamed the proposal Healthy Rivers and Landscapes to reinforce their message that the parties would be bound by strict regulatory enforcement and the program would not subtract from existing species protections.
At a recent board workshop on the Bay-Delta Plan, Reclamation Regional Director Karl Stock noted that the discussions over voluntary agreements have continued for more than a decade and the parties have “a fairly good understanding” of how to implement them to benefit communities and ecosystems.
“Relying solely on the Central Valley Project and the State Water Project to achieve the flow-dependent objectives established by the board is not by itself sustainable,” said Stock, referring to the board’s initial plan to preserve a consistent 55% of river flows in northern watersheds, toggling it up to as much as 75% of flows as needed.
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Regional Director Paul Souza warned endemic species like the Delta smelt are “deeply in trouble” and at risk of going extinct, applauding HRL for the immediate ecosystem benefits.
“We love species, and we want to keep them healthy and recover them when they're in trouble,” said Souza. “Our assessment is that the flow regime in the Healthy Rivers and Landscapes is consistent with our Endangered Species Act standard.”
The assessment was part of the agency’s new biological opinions underpinning the operating plan.
While flow proposals “get an unbelievable amount of attention,” Souza stressed that local, state and federal agencies are already investing billions of dollars into habitat restoration for fish and other wildlife along critical corridors. He pointed to floodplain restoration in the Sacramento Valley, where submerged rice fields in winter present crucial feeding grounds for salmon heading upstream to spawn.
In a subsequent workshop, U.S. EPA Regional Administrator for the Pacific Southwest Martha Guzman praised the inclusion of tribal beneficial uses in a staff report laying out the board’s options for the update. She urged the board, if it chooses the HRL approach, to develop a robust and transparent system to account for the water and monitor for success.
The tone, in the waning weeks of the Biden administration, was markedly different from a year prior, when EPA pressured the water board to abandon HRL and maintain the traditional approach of unimpaired flows, reasoning it offered more assurance with its specific numeric targets.
Guy feels the HRL approach has positive momentum going forward and hopes the new administration will be supportive.
“The bottom line is we just really are trying to stabilize these processes over the next year,” said Guy. “The business community and the environmental community and everything depends upon that stability.”
He explained that the proposal, combined with a local drought protection program for the Sacramento River, will establish a plan to prepare water managers for all year types.
Kightlinger called the HRL approach, along with the new CVP plan, “pretty sensible” and “very sound.”
“I would hope that the Trump people, when they come in, will take a look at it on the merits, as opposed to them having a political reaction,” he said.
The incoming administration has yet to signal a position on the Bay-Delta Plan, though the president-elect has pledged to send more water to farms and Southern California cities and threatened to withhold federal disaster funding if the state resists.
Trump has nominated North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum to serve as Interior secretary and an energy czar. While Burgum has championed biofuels and fossil fuel industries, he is new to the negotiating table for Western water policy. Kightlinger noted that the appointments for Interior assistant secretary and Reclamation commissioner will “probably tell us a lot about how things are going to shape up.”
The water board is still determining how it might respond if the federal government does not follow through with its HRL commitments. Board members have pressed for clarity on how the agency could quickly pivot from HRL to unimpaired flows as a regulatory backstop, dramatically cutting off exports to contractors to preserve more water in the rivers.
“I'll just be honest, we have a new federal administration. There's a lot of uncertainties,” said board member Laurel Firestone at a November workshop. “It's hard to get this level of collaboration. If things fall apart, we could see money not materialize on the federal side, which is a really big amount of money we're all hopeful we get.”
Jennifer Pierre, general manager of State Water Contractors, stressed that the water would already be set aside for the environment if one party fails to follow through on its commitments. She said the HRL program has mechanisms for enforcing the agreements among the parties.
“If we can't work that out, then we're going to be looking to you to help us with that enforcement,” Pierre told Firestone, adding that those users would be kicked down to the unimpaired flows pathway.
Pierre and others urged patience, noting that many of the environmental benefits may not appear until years after the completion of the HRL’s eight-year horizon. The parties had initially eyed a 15-year timeline to account for that progression.
Nevertheless, Firestone pushed for more safeguards “in the bad case that things fall apart or we don't get what we need from the federal side.”
For agriculture, the stakes are high. Farmers and trade groups have for years raised alarms over the potentially devastating impacts to rural economies under the unimpaired flows regime. Central Valley operations already gained a keen understanding of the challenges, after accommodating years of reduced water allocations under both projects. Last year, for example, the state delivered just 40% of the contracted allocations, despite full reservoirs following an average water year and, in 2023, a deluge of storms saturating the state.
Jeffrey Kightlinger, water consultant“If we continue to ratchet down the amount of water that's available and we pursue a policy of scarcity, who do you think's going to lose in a competition for water?” said Geoffrey Vanden Heuvel, director of regulatory and economic affairs at the Milk Producers Council, during a recent panel discussion celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act. “It's going to be our communities, our small farmers. This is already happening as these allocation systems get put into place.”
Another dairy farmer echoed the concerns at a water board workshop in December. Lynne McBride, executive director of the California Dairy Campaign, pointed to a staff analysis indicating unimpaired flows would lead to reductions of more than 1.3 million acre-feet during dry years, resulting in 260,000 acres of fallowed farmland in the San Joaquin Valley and a loss of $1.3 billion in crop value. She noted that researchers anticipate SGMA alone will leave up to a million acres fallowed. Even in normal years, she added, some areas would lose 800,000 acre-feet of their allocations.
“Now that more information is available about the likely cost of these regulations and programs, farmers understand they will be forced out of business if further water reductions move forward,” said McBride. “The negative economic and social ripple effects of further water supply reductions will be vast and irreversible.”
Aaron Fukuda, general manager of the Tulare Irrigation District, said it would force groundwater agencies to rewrite their plans or face probation at the water board, while harming valley ecosystems reliant on imported water.
“While [unimpaired flows] bring environmental benefits within the Delta, we often see that the environmental benefits in our region get sacrificed,” said Fukuda. “The socioeconomic disaster we're left with is a knot that we can't undo.”
The board’s decision will extend to watersheds well beyond the Delta, dictating policies for major infrastructure projects and influencing contentious negotiations underway for a long-term plan for Colorado River allotments.
The board’s administrative office has been steering through lengthy technical hearings to determine a water right for the proposed Sites Reservoir, a project proponents tout as bolstering sensitive fish populations with more environmental reserves. The office has also begun hearings for issuing a separate right for the Delta Conveyance Project, a tunnel proposal that increases the state’s capacity to divert more flood flows to water contractors south of the Delta. On the groundwater front, the board is reviewing plans for sustainability agencies that rely heavily on surface water deliveries to support recharge projects.
The board has another Bay-Delta Plan workshop lined up for Jan. 23. Staff will consider the feedback from the workshops and craft a recommendation to put before the board for approval later this year. If the HRL proposal remains intact through that process and the board approves it, environmental, sportfishing and tribal interests, which have staunchly opposed the HRL approach, are certain to contest the decision in court, potentially delaying the regulation for years.
“We'll soon have a president who wants to drill, drill, drill and irrigate, irrigate, irrigate,” said Peter Drekmeier, policy director for the Tuolumne River Trust. “There will be minimal checks and balances.”
Despite the politics and the potential delays, however, a central selling point for the HRL pathway has been that the parties are already implementing the habitat restoration projects. Kightlinger believes those efforts will make a considerable difference, though he cautioned the fish populations will never rebound in such an altered landscape.
“I've been involved in good habitat planning for 30 or 40, years,” he said. “Whenever we've done them, they work and they always exceed our expectations — without fail.”
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