Opinion ID: 207966
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Overview: The CVP and Changing Priorities

Text: When the CVP was begun in the 1930s, the stated purposes of the Project were improving navigation, regulating the flow of the San Joaquin River and the Sacramento River, controlling floods, providing for storage and for the delivery of the stored waters thereof, for the reclamation of arid and semiarid lands and lands of Indian reservations, and other beneficial uses, and for the generation and sale of electric energy.... [22] The dams and reservoirs were to be used first, for river regulation, improvement of navigation, and flood control; second, for irrigation and domestic uses; and third, for power. [23] As earlier noted, under the terms of the Congressional enactments establishing the CVP, the Federal Government in building and administering the Project was to be subject to the same state rules that applied to other water users in California. That meant complying with the State's regulations applicable to water users, particularly users who wished to capture the water for consumptive uses. A brief refresher of key terms may be helpful. Consumptive uses refers to uses, such as irrigation, domestic uses, and industrial processes, that involve withdrawals from the water source, a lake or stream or in this case a man-made reservoir. These withdrawals may result in diminished quantity and quality of water available to downstream users for their consumptive uses, and may significantly impair such non-consumptive uses as boating, fishing, and wildlife habitat. In the arid western states, development depended on assured supplies of scarce fresh water for consumptive use. In contrast to the riparian rights regime in the Eastern United States, [24] where water was abundant, the legal regime that developed for Western water rights is called prior appropriation. [25] As a general proposition, under prior appropriation doctrine the right to a consumptive use of water belongs to the first person to make beneficial use of it. That person becomes the owner of a right to the quantity of water put to beneficial use, and that right takes priority over later claimants to the water. [26] For purposes of this case, the important point is that when the CVP was established and for many years after, both federal and state water law and policy gave high priority to making the water resources available for consumptive uses. This meant providing water for irrigation, which created the fertile fields of California's central valley agricultural industry, and later for withdrawals for domestic and industrial uses in support of the state's burgeoning population and its cities. That was still the state of affairs when the New Melones project was undertaken in 1962, and this focus on consumptive uses was reflected in the 1983 contracts between the Districts and Reclamation governing consumptive use of the water in the New Melones reservoir. However, by the late 1980s and early 1990s, as environmental concerns became more pronounced and fish and wildlife interests moved more to the forefront, Government policy began to shift. For example, in 1973 when the SWRCB initially approved Reclamation's permit for New Melones, it required 98,000 acre-feet of water to be released annually for fish and wildlife. However, under a 1987 agreement entered into by Reclamation and the California Department of Fish and Game, Reclamation was required to release for the same purpose up to 302,100 acre-feet of water annually. At the same time, while Reclamation anticipated when it signed the 1983 contracts that water quality standards mandated by the state would be attained with annual releases of 70,000 acre-feet from New Melones, significantly greater releases were necessary in later years to meet the standards. At the federal level, the shift in policy culminated in the Congressional enactment in 1992 of the CVPIA. The legislation added mitigation, protection, and restoration of fish and wildlife to the purposes of the CVP [27] and for the first time under federal law specified that substantial quantities of water from the CVP were to be dedicated annually to non-consumptive usesfish, wildlife, and habitat restoration. [28] Furthermore, and significantly, the Act expressly altered the priorities for use of the CVP dams and reservoirs to now include fish and wildlife, adding the italicized phrases: first, for river regulation, improvement of navigation, and flood control; second, for irrigation and domestic uses and fish and wildlife mitigation, protection and restoration purposes; and third, for power and fish and wildlife enhancement.  [29] As the trial court found, the ever-increasing imposition of additional obligations for salinity and fisheries water releases led to a clash of management objectives and priorities, the unpredictability of available water supply, and an inherent conflict between demands for consumptive use by plaintiffs and environmental concerns. Stockton, 75 Fed. Cl. at 338. Ultimately the changing priorities required Reclamation to alter the manner in which it made operational decisions regarding the allocation of water to the Contracting Parties pursuant to the 1983 Contracts. Id. at 338-39. Reclamation's own website sums it up by noting that the New Melones Dam is a reminder of the conflicts surrounding growth, the environment, and water in the West: Even without the environmental controversy that surrounds the project, the operational and water yield problems will certainly cause continued difficulties well into the future. With the enormity of the problems facing New Melones, it seems unlikely that the project will ever realize its full potential as a multi use unit. Indeed, New Melones may become a case study of all that can go wrong with a project. [30]