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The Game's Up
Strategists holed up in an environmental war room since October have been staring up at four big flickering screens, moving watery troops this way and that through California's trenches, across battlegrounds mined with smelt and salmon, and around Delta obstacles. Their mission: to save a kingdom of fish long under siege.
The opposing forces are formidable - droughts, floods, pumps, and battalions of thirsty people. The challengers - biologists, engineers and water managers - lack a commander and instead must collectively negotiate each advance and retreat. Their secret weapon is CALFED's proposed environmental water account.
This "gaming," as insiders call it, explores what can be accomplished when you give the environment its own allocation of water or resources to use or lend in California's water markets. The gaming is sponsored by CALFED, the cooperative federal-state program established to resolve California's war waters and balance the needs of fish, farms, cities and the environment in the long term.
Each "game" takes a period in history and punches information on the conditions that occurred in that period into the models, maps and minds of the assembled strategists. In one game period, fish are few, flows large, and water quality good, so the pumps go full bore. In another game period, export conditions are not so favorable.
"The account gives ecosystem advocates the collateral they need to say 'stop pumping temporarily to avoid grinding up fish and we'll give you our water which we have previously stored over here to make up for it,'" says game player Dave Briggs of the Contra Costa Water District. "This is the only tool we have in CALFED that addresses the interface between water project operations and ecosystem restoration."
The collective realization this March that the gaming was CALFED's only real forum for deciding how to better manage the water projects to achieve environmental and water quality benefits leant considerable heat to the effort, according to EPA's Bruce Herbold, a fisheries biologist.
Environmentalists have long said they won't vote for any new reservoirs or canals until CALFED has done its best to optimize use of existing water and infrastructure, which is exactly what the gaming is designed to do. More heat came from the realization that the account is CALFED's main tool for environmental protection in the short term, aside from the restoration program. "This represents a significant shift in the way environmental protection may be promulgated in the future," says Briggs. "Before, it was prescriptive standards - provide these flows, at these times, regardless. The new way is to look at things on a more flexible, "real-time," daily basis. If there are no fish in sight, why force the projects to stop pumping?"
"We can keep the water dancing around without actually consuming it, a benefit you never get with standards," says the Natural Heritage Institute's Dave Fullerton. "It's targeting resources at the highest payoff points rather than just blanket coverage."
So what lessons have the players learned in the games so far? First, everyone seemed surprised to find that contrary to popular perception, wet years are often harder to manage than dry. Though there's lots more water around, there's also fish all over the place and in the way, whereas in dry years with less livable conditions fish distribution is often more limited. In wet years, cutting down exports to save fish is very costly since the pumps are going full tilt to make the most of spring's bounty. In dry years, pumping rates are already very low so cutbacks cost little. Despite the challenges, gaming through wet year conditions in 1993 and 1995 suggests that managers could make very drastic cuts in export rates without bankrupting the environmental water account, according to Fullerton.
Another lesson learned concerns where water for the account is banked. "Having islands available for flooding in the Delta is going to be important for storage," says CALFED's Wendy Halversen Martin, referring to theproposed Delta Wetlands Project which would store water on two islands and restore two others. "We need local sources of water, with no delivery time, to help fish. Water from Shasta takes 22 hours to get here." Similarly, players have found that while banking relatively inaccessible groundwater may not help with immediate crises, water contractors do seem to see it as an acceptable form of collateral. Indeed the gaming suggests that any water held above or below ground south of the Delta may help account managers.
"Then we can say 'hey water contractors, we'll swap our 100,000 acre feet in the San Luis Reservoir for your 100,000 in Shasta,'" says CALFED's Ron Ott. "The users like that kind of swap because then they don't have to get their water across the Delta with all its restrictions and endangered species." With the Shasta water in their account, environmental water managers then get to enhance upstream river flows, where the fish are in need, and maybe even recapture the water downstream.
Though doing a better job of helping endangered fish was the original intent of the gaming, managing for water quality was soon added to the ticket. Water districts think water can be managed better to reduce bromides, largely from seawater intrusion, and total organic carbon (TOC, largely from soils and agricultural nutrients), in their water. The former can produce suspected carcinogenic disinfection by-products, and both can compromise drinking water quality.
"From the urban water agency perspective, we want to move down a path where water quality continuously improves, and where the health risk of disinfection by-products decreases," says Contra Costa's Briggs. Putting water in the right places to achieve these reductions is a different task than helping fish survive Delta obstacles. Briggs says the bromide problem occurs largely in summer and fall when outflow is low and saltwater creeps upstream, so pumping should be reduced at that time. In terms of TOC, water management actions might include not pumping during February and March when farmers release all their agricultural drainage and cause a TOC spike. Downstream districts like his are concerned that using Delta islands to store account water will produce more TOC, as the water sits atop highly organic peat soils.
The trade off between water quality and quantity is still unclear in the game, adds Herbold. "The Metropolitan Water District has said that if water quality falls below a certain point they will need more water. Is the reverse true? If we can deliver them higher quality water, do they need less?"
Though juggling water quality and fish needs in one water account may be possible, some enviros would prefer separate accounts. "We must be careful not saddle the account with multiple and sometimes conflicting objectives. We've got fisheries agencies and export water users both setting the bar very high on both sides. Let the account be for fish, and develop other mechanisms for water quality," says Fullerton.
Despite the possible conflicts, the gamed shifts in pumping patterns for fish have frequently proved good for water quality. "We're getting more multiple benefits that we anticipated," says CALFED's Ott. "It's the synergistic effect of doing it all at once, getting all the parties to think at the same time in the same way."
"It's been immensely educational for everyone," says Herbold. Educational and exhausting. According to Ott, "It's like playing three-dimensional chess all day long. When we get out of the gaming room we're all brain dead." But the work that follows the game is even more important. "For every eight hours of gaming, it takes another 12 hours to figure out if you did any good. Did we do better than a standard? Did we make more water? Did we use it more efficiently? How many fish did we lose?"
Other questions arising from games are: how accurate are the assumptions plugged into the models (water demand greatly affects management of fish water); how realistic are the assumed assets (water and money to buy it) in the account; how strong is the link between project operations and species recovery; and how should management of the account best be set up to keep it able to make fast decisions but protect it from politics.
In terms of the assumptions, Herbold is concerned that water demand projected by the Department of Water Resources model used in the games does not always square with reality. The model, for example,asssumes demand for water from the Central Valley Water Project is constant in all years, but it isn't. When it rains a lot, farmers don't need as much water. If demand is really lower, game players may be "greatly exaggerating" the work the environmental water account might have to do in deluge, says Herbold.
In terms of the assets, different players have different views. Herbold calls the assets assumed in the games to date "aggressive" because they include up to 400,000 acre feet of water and up to $30-40 million per year to pay for it, as well access to water stored in Delta Wetlands, which is still only a paper project. Such big assets may not be available in a drought year or with a change in politics, which is why others say the assets assumed are not nearly powerful enough. It's not like having a water right or a million acre feet of environmental water sitting in storage in your own reservoir, says Briggs, adding that assumed water purchases are "nothing" compared to water generated for the environment by Bay-Delta Accord standards and the Central Valley Project Improvement Act's b(2) water.
"We need to make sure the resources available to the account are adequate and firm," says Fullerton. "We need a diversified portfolio." The account also needs a home, and a strong legal and institutional framework. Such a framework could work with centralized management, modeledperhaps on Fish & Wildlife's and BurRec's joint management of CVPIA environmental water. Management could also be decentralized, suggestsFullerton, with fish and water quality each having their own independent resources and then interacting with each other and suppliers.
"By definition, the account is a model of decentralization. It is empowering the environment (via a trustee) to provide for its own welfare, without the need for consensus from the water users," he says. Some suppliers might see the latter as a recipe for chaos. They're also worried that the new account throwing its weight around may drive up water prices and absorb all the current water transfer capacity of the system.
Some of these problems and particulars may be worked out by Christmas, when Ott hopes to provide more detail on the account in CALFED's final programmatic EIS/EIR.
"People's expectations of gains to be made may be more than this tool can deliver," cautions Briggs. "But the approach is novel. If we continue to work through this, we may be able to achieve more."
Contact: Dave Briggs (925)688-8073 or Ron Ott (916)657-3319.
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