California Water Resources Board issues its first enforcement penalty
By Patrick Ruckert
July 20, 2015
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The California Water Resources Board issued its first enforcement penalty today to put teeth in its June 12 order to irrigation districts and individuals to cease and desist from withdrawing water from California’s rivers and streams. Employing the jack boot of Governor Jerry Brown’s fascist policy of only conservation to manage the shrinking water supplies of the state, the Water Board’s announcement today included the imposition of a $1.5 million penalty.
Subject to this heavy-handed penalty is the Byron-Bethany Irrigation District, which the Water Board claims diverted water that the Board had prohibited them from doing.
The June 12 Water Board order forbid about 300 senior water rights holders, who had water rights dating before 1914, from withdrawing water. The Byron-Bethany Irrigation District was one of those included in that order. The Water Board’s complaint claims that between June 12 and June 25, the water district continued to divert water despite the district knowing that water was no longer available, according to the Board, under the district’s priority of right.
On the heels of the June 12 order to senior water rights holders, on June 17, it was announced by the Water Board and the Bureau of Reclamation that water releases from Lake Shasta will immediately be reduced by 20 percent to keep water temperatures in the lake cool enough to protect threatened Salmon, but by doing so, the already planted crops of thousands of more farmers are threatened.
Then on June 26, the Board announced restrictions on water rights holders that go all the way back to 1858, which directly cut-off water to more than 300,000 acres of already planted crops.
During the same week, for the first time ever, to ensure that six Northern California water districts don’t run out of water, the Delta-Mendota Canal will be reversed to transfer water north from the San Luis Reservoir in Merced County to the city of Tracy in San Joaquin County.
Tracy is the center of the Byron-Bethany Irrigation District territory, so how this plays out is yet to be seen. But, the juggling of water resources by the Water Board becomes more difficult each week as they add a new ball to those they already have in the air.
As in any physical system, one can run it to its limits and then it breaks, the California Water Management System is about ready to break. At some point soon, somewhere in that remarkable and productive system that provides water to 38 million people and the most productive agricultural system in the world, something is going to break. And then, the truth of the results of the criminal policies of the past 40 years will be in our faces.
