FEATURE
COOPERATION AMONG WATER AGENCIES BRINGS WAVE OF SUCCESS: HOW CAN YOUR AGENCY RIDE THE WAVE? By Kristin Withrow, CSDA Communications Specialist
Y
ou don’t have to live in California long before someone brings up water. The topic is nearly as ubiquitous as commenting on the weather when making small talk. The history of California’s water struggles, particularly the “north vs south” mentality of it, runs far, far back. The perpetuation of dogmatic opinions began in the early 1900’s and is, perhaps, even more entrenched today. Yet the statewide political battles over water that plague our state don’t seem to bring us any closer to more cohesive management of this shared resource. As a brief history and overview, there are two main water management systems in California. The oldest is the Central Valley Project (CVP), which was dithered over and fought about for 80 years before its inception in 1933. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal was what ultimately enabled the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation to put the project in forward motion. It is a series of water management systems, dams, lakes, canals, rivers and pipelines that today provide irrigation water for over
20
3 million acres of farmland. It includes the Shasta, Trinity River and American River divisions in the Sacramento Valley and the Delta and canal systems, San Joaquin and Stanislaus Rivers and offstream storage and aqueducts in the San Joaquin Valley. The other primary management system is the California State Water Project (SWP) operated by the California Department of Water Resources, which was established in 1960. The SWP provides drinking water for over 23 million people. The portion of water drawn into the system is allocated 70% to southern California and the bay area and 30% to the central valley for irrigation. It begins with the Feather River and Oroville Dam and flows into the Sacramento river, Delta, the north and bay aqueducts and into the California aqueduct which in turn branches into Coastal, West and East sections. These main systems all work with surface water to capture and store rain and snow in the wet seasons, mitigate flooding while the rains come down, then provide a critical water source in the dry season.
California Special Districts • September-October 2021
