Yaudanchi: Local treasure saved or public land lost?
There are three things Mehmet Mcmillan wants to see regarding the Porterville Yaudanchi Reserve: restoring public access to the reserve, putting the reserve’s signs and amenities back up, and hiring a good management agency to manage the reserve.
Simple requests, but ones that won’t be simple to get. Why?
Because in the Fall of 2017, with no public notice and no public input, the Porterville Developmental Center (PDC), which owns the reserve, terminated its agreement with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife to manage the Yaudanchi Ecological Reserve.
Located east of Porterville, Yaudanchi consists of over 160 acres of rare undeveloped Tule River floodplain habitat, providing upland and wetland habitat for a wealth of plants and animals, and until recently, people.
“The reserve was established in 1977 as the result of a campaign by Porterville citizens and organizations and agencies including the State Hospital (now PDC) and local politicians,” said Mcmillan, founder of the nonprofit organization Wildplaces. “For 40 years, the reserve has served as a public space with hiking trails, open to visitors and serving as an educational outdoor classroom.”
When concerned citizens discovered last fall the reserve had been closed to the public, their repeated calls to the PDC yielded no information other than the fact that Yaudanchi was no longer a reserve.
“The only reason given was that the reserve was no longer going to be managed for habitat and wildlife because of a pipeline,” Mcmillan said. “Gates were locked and signs removed. We wanted to know what happened.”
In November 2017, a few persistent citizens learned that “the pipeline” consisted of piping an unlined section of the Campbell-moreland Ditch.
Seepage from the ditch, dug in 1860, that had sustained the downstream
lands (now in the Yaudanchi Reserve) after construction of the Success Dam greatly reduced natural river flows in the floodplain.
A small classified ad in The Porterville Recorder on Nov. 16, 2017 stated that the Vandalia Water District (VWD) was intending to adopt the proposed pipeline project.
“It failed to mention that the ditch section to be lined was on the Yaudanchi Reserve and would effectively ensure its demise,” Mcmillan said.
However, Steve Drumright, the general manager for Vandalia Water District and Campbell-moreland Ditch Company, said the proposed pipeline project, which consists of replacing an open ditch, has been put on hold.
“At our last regular Vandalia Board Meeting, we just decided that we would put the project on hold due to the opposition from the environmental community,” Drumright said, adding that the environmental community is not looking at the big picture. “They are just seeing a small ditch that has been there for many years and the loss of habitat for plants and animals. The big picture is to take a lot more water from different agencies and put in there via recharge basins, different ditching configurations and everything else through that property that would benefit a lot more people, a lot more animals and support a lot more plant species.”
If the project were to move forward, Drumright said it would have virtually no impact to the reserve.
“Basically, we would just move over 10 feet within our easement, put a pipeline in, put a headwall in the east end and a few valves to mitigate for the little patch of oak trees that is on the west end of the property and then turn water out in there as the trees would normally have had them,” Drumright said. “In other words, the existing channel would stay there, we would just move over 10 feet and put a pipeline in and run the water through that.”
But local conservation groups such as Wildplaces, and chapters of the California Native Plant Society (CNPS), the Audubon Society, and the Sierra Club say that stopping the critical seepage from the unlined ditch into the reserve would drastically impact the habitat and wildlife that the reserve was established to protect.
“The whole project and the whole ecosystem has to be considered,” said Joan Parker, representing Audubon. She expressed concern that the pipeline project documents did not adequately describe how both resident and migratory birds rely on the reserve habitat and how shutting off the extensive historic flow of water from the ditch into the reserve would affect them.
Drumright said the reason for proposing the pipeline project in the first place was to prevent losing water.
“Our desire was to put a pipeline in because it is the old Tule River bottom and it is pure sand and through that 2,660 feet, we'd lose about 13 percent of the overall ditch flow, 13 percent of the water that goes down there,” Drumright said. “So by putting in a pipeline, we would be able to designate that water to downstream users via either farmers or shareholders of Campbell-moreland Ditch to be able to use that more productively.”
Nevertheless, Drumright said he believes the Vandalia Water District will attempt to get the project going again in the future.
“We had so much opposition and have spent so much money on this already that we just finally said just pull the plug on it until a later date,” Drumright said.
Mcmillan said even though things aren't working out right now with regard to the pipeline project, he is hopeful about the future.
“Although the environmental community put pressure on the Vandalia Water District to the point that they decided not to build a pipeline, there's still things that we can work on together with this agricultural community to help them meet some of the tough regulations that they have to deal with in their line of work,” Mcmillan said.
Whatever ends up happening, Mcmillan said he just wants Yaudanchi to be intact.
“There are some great things about this little site,” Mcmillan said about Yaudanchi. “It's got a great history and there's great potential for it to be one of those centerpieces of an urban area. It could be the Central Park of Porterville one day.”