Board moves forward on conservation
The Imperial Irrigation District voted Tuesday in favor of moving forward with recommendations brought forward regarding on-farm water conservation and fallowing programs.
In the first of the items brought up Tuesday, the board approved the $285 per acre-feet of water conservation incentive payment rate for the 2017-18 on-farm efficiency conservation program, authorize the staff to close the 201617 solicitation period effective Sept. 30 and allow staff to establish and publish an ongoing schedule for future on-farm efficiency conservation program to keep the growers aware of it.
Under the water transfer set in the 2003 Quantification Settlement Agreement sets a target of transferring 100,000-acre feet of water to the San Diego County Water Authority for 2017 and will steadily ramp up until 2020 when the IID is obligated to transfer 193,000 acre-feet of water from on-farm conservation.
For 2016, IID generated 138,585 acre-feet of conservation through more than 100 proposals from growers and was only required to transfer 80,000 as part of the water transfer.
Division 3 Director James Hanks wanted to know what was the expected excess conservation for 2017, Water Manager Tina Shields said because contracts with growers still have to be finalized, it’s difficult to determine that number, but did estimate that they expect anywhere from 30,000 to 50,000 acre-feet of water through on-farm conservation.
“We’ve seen good participation and I think that is one of the challenges when you convert from fallowing to on-farm (conservation), you don’t know what the exact number is going to be until January and February of the following year,” Shields said.
According to the information on the IID’s meeting agenda, the water department budgeted onfarm conservation to generate 120,000 acre-feet of conservation in 2017 for a total of $34.2 million in payments to growers this calendar year.
The Board unanimously approved the requested action.
Fallowing
The IID Board had previously voted on June 6 in favor of allowing the Local Entity to move forward with the allocation of funding for the accepted claims under the fallowing program for the previous three years and also to start the one week period for applicants to appeal if their application failed to meet the established criteria.
This will be the final round of the fallowing program as it came to an end this year.
Funding for the final round totals more than $12.3 million.
After a hearing was held July 19 to consider the appeals, staff presented the Board a list of 51 applications containing approximately 2,500 claims for more than 6,000 activities affected by participating fields in the 2014-17 fallowing programs to be in complete compliance and eligible to receive compensation through the Local Entity.
Although the final calculation of how much funding each applicant will get has not been finalizing, the approval Tuesday will allow staff to begin sending checks to the farm service providers once the calculations are finalized within the next seven to 10 days.
The authorized disbursements are subject to a per applicant cap of $100,000 per year of fallowing, with a cumulative 2016 program total of $300,000 cap per applicant.
Once the final claim calculations are done and the first round of disbursement payments are made, staff will then proceed to make recommendations to the board regarding a secondary disbursement options.
The Local Entity was created to mitigate the socioeconomic impacts of land fallowing as the primary means to generate conserved water under the water conservation and transfer agreement with the San Diego County Water Authority.
Since it was established the Local Entity has disbursed more than $19 million to farm service providers, the total amount to be disbursed is more than $12.3 million of mitigation funding for the 2014-2017 fallowing period, increasing the total to nearly $32 million.