Dry weather alters Trump’s water promise to California farmers
Turns out President Donald Trump is no match for another California drought.
Less than a week after Trump told San Joaquin Valley farmers in Bakersfield that he was taking bold steps to increase their water supply, his administration announced Tuesday farmers on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley may only receive about 15 percent of their contracted water supply for the upcoming growing season.
A profoundly dry January and February has the Sierra snowpack at only about half its average amounts, and no major storms are in the forecast. The new rules Trump signed earlier this month were intended to boost water supply to Trump’s farming allies in the San Joaquin Valley. But they can only do so much, said Ernest Conant, the Bureau of Reclamation’s mid-Pacific regional director.
“We are still constrained by the amount of water nature provides us,” he said at a press conference Tuesday.
Conant’s remarks came as the federal government announced its initial water allocations from California’s massive federal water storage and delivery system known as the Central Valley Project. The amount of water actually provided to farmers later in the year could increase if the state sees a rainy spring.
Earlier this month, the Trump administration finalized an updated set of environmental rules that govern how much water is taken from the California rivers that supply the Central Valley Project, which includes the massive state and federal pumping stations at the southern end of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, the fragile estuary between Sacramento, San Francisco and Stockton.
The state of California sued the Trump administration the day after Trump’s Bakersfield rally, saying the federal plan puts endangered Delta fish species in more jeopardy.
“Despite the hurdles brought on by litigation from the state and others, we remain committed to providing reliable water for families, farms, cities and the environment,” Reclamation Commissioner Brenda Burman said Tuesday in a written statement.
More water in wet years
The rules Trump signed increase water deliveries primarily during wet years. For instance, last winter, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation could have sent an extra 1 million acre-feet through the Delta pumps to the southern half of the state, officials have said. An acre-foot is 326,000 gallons; 1 million acre-feet is slightly bigger than Folsom Lake when it’s full.
The Delta pumps supply water to the influential Fresno-based Westlands Water District on the westside of the San Joaquin Valley, which has been fighting for years to get more water to its farmers who in the last drought pumped massive amounts of groundwater to compensate from their lack of federal water deliveries.
Westlands’ former lobbyist is Trump’s Interior Secretary David Bernhardt, who oversees the Bureau of Reclamation and who pushed hard for more water to go to his former clients.
On Tuesday, Trump, speaking to a cheering crowd at an airport hangar in Bakersfield, said his water plan will bring “a massive amount of water for the use of California farmers and ranchers and all these communities that are suffering.” He decried state policies that have allowed “millions and millions of gallons (to be) wasted and poured into the ocean.”
Farm groups in the San Joaquin Valley, including Trump’s supporters at the Bakersfield appearance on Wednesday, have long complained about environmental restrictions that have forced cutbacks to their irrigation water supply.