The clock is ticking for the Salton Sea.

The shallow, briny inland lake at the southeastern edge of California is slowly evaporating and becoming more saline – threatening the habitat for fish and birds and worsening air quality as dust from the dry lakebed is whipped by the constant winds.

(Read this excerpt from the May/June 2015 issue along with the editor’s note. Click here to subscribe to Western Water and get full access.)

Introduction

The clock is ticking for the Salton Sea.

The shallow, briny inland lake at the southeastern edge of California is slowly evaporating and becoming more saline – threatening the habitat for fish and birds and worsening air quality as dust from the dry lakebed is whipped by the constant winds.

In his revised May budget proposal, Gov. Jerry Brown noted that the Salton Sea “is one of the most important migratory bird flyways in North America” and that the state “faces significant air quality and natural resources threats with the shrinking of the sea.”

The sea benefits from a regular flow of runoff from the nearby farms of the Imperial Valley and Coachella valleys and flows from the Alamo, New and Whitewater rivers. Vast tracts of irrigated land grow a wide assortment of forage crops, fruits and vegetables.

However, the amount of return flows from the Imperial Irrigation District (IID) have been reduced – partly due to the nation’s largest agricultural-to-urban transfer that was the linchpin of bringing California within its 4.4 million acre-feet per year of the Colorado River.

The sea’s shoreline has receded over the past several years as a result of drought, more efficient agricultural water use and the resulting reduction in return flows. By the end of 2017, the state-mandated obligation for IID to provide mitigation water to the sea will end. Without that water, the sea will diminish faster, exposing more playa at a faster rate.

“We will have somewhere between 60,000 to 70,000 acres of exposed playa by the end of 2047,” said Jessica Lovecchio, environmental specialist with IID. Her task is to buffer the receding Salton Sea’s impacts with strategically placed projects designed to foster habitat and minimize dust emissions.

“It’s all concept right now; we are working on the actual design and potential layout for these things but the basics of the project is that as the sea starts to recede, with all this exposed playa, to cover it with different types of habitat air quality mitigation and renewable energy projects,” she said.

The plight of the Salton Sea highlights the state’s inability to meet its obligation to cover most of the costs of restoration. In 2007, the state released a $9 billion, 75-year restoration plan that featured a smaller sea and select habitat sites. The plan was never acted on by the Legislature and the subsequent economic downturn shut the door on it completely.

Brown’s revised budget proposal notes that “prior comprehensive plans to restore the sea are no longer feasible due to cost and decreased water availability resulting from the drought” and that the best course is a “phased strategy” involving the construction of more than 1,000 acres of habitat and dust abatement projects.

Yet the question remains as to what a scaled-down strategy would bring.

“Somebody’s going to pay, it’s just a question of who,” said the Pacific Institute’s Michael Cohen at a March hearing of the California State Water Resources Control Board (State Water Board).

Cohen authored 2014’s Hazard’s Toll – The Costs of Inaction at the Salton Sea, which challenged the assumption “that delaying action at the Salton Sea will result in business as usual, with no additional costs.”

“This is clearly not the case. Because the Salton Sea has changed over the past decade and will soon enter a period of very rapid deterioration, the costs of inaction are escalating rapidly,” Cohen wrote.

The need to take action at the sea has reached the highest levels, with a governor’s task force of the Natural Resources Agency, Department of Water Resources (DWR), Department of Fish and Wildlife, the State Water Board and the Air Resources Board assigned to come up with possible solutions.

“How much of that we can tackle right away is yet to be seen but we are trying to set up the framework for everything, with some decisions landing before others,” Keali’i Bright, deputy secretary for legislation at the Natural Resources Agency told Western Water.

According to the revised May budget proposal, the task force will come up with “achievable medium and long‑term restoration plans,” in coordination with local stakeholders.

In a statement, Assemblyman Eduardo Garcia, D-Coachella, commended the governor’s action but lamented the lack of local representation on the task force as well as what yet another committee could reasonably achieve.

“Too many task forces and not enough action,” Garcia said.

In February, Garcia asked the Little Hoover Commission to investigate the situation and report back.

“Though the issue has been studied and debated for years, an examination by the Commission will provide the unbiased and non-partisan type of policy analysis that is very much needed,” he wrote. “Once again, I strongly believe that all parties could benefit from a decision by the Commission to take a full and deliberative look at these and related issues.”

The Commission agreed to “examine the viability of different options” for the sea in a consultative process, including an exploration of how the state can help to “resolve the gridlock and move toward a solution.”

In a May 20 editorial, “Another day, another Salton Sea task force,” the Desert Sun in Palm Springs wrote that “there have been far too many task forces and studies and piecemeal programs nibbling at the problem. And the problem isn’t going away.”

“Maybe expecting a bold new announcement on a state fix for the declining sea in a budget revise where state law mandates the bulk of the projected surplus be spent on education and ‘rainy day’ savings was unrealistic” the editorial said. “But the governor himself chose this vehicle to announce his priorities for this environmental issue of great concern to our region.”

At the end of 2017 IID will stop sending mitigation water to the Salton Sea as part of the 2003 Quantification Settlement Agreement (QSA). The QSA is one of several agreements that have helped California reduce its use of water from the Colorado River from 5.2 million acre-feet to its legal annual apportionment of 4.4 million acre-feet.

One of the largest components of the QSA is a water transfer between IID and San Diego County Water Authority (SDCWA). The transfer requires a mitigation approach that minimizes Salton Sea impacts by relying solely on fallowing for transfer for the first decade of implementation during which 1 acre-foot of mitigation water is required for every 2 acre-feet of water transferred from fallowing.

As IID converts to greater water efficiency measures, the mitigation requirement increases to 1 acre-foot of mitigation water for every 1 acre-foot of transfer. IID last year petitioned the State Water Board to “hold the state … to its obligation” to restore the Salton Sea.

“Given the mitigation water ends in 2017 IID felt the State Water Board should step in and convene a facilitated process to agree upon a smaller but sustainable restoration plan and funding mechanism, and then condition the transfers moving forward on the appropriate implementation of that plan,” said Tina Shields, IID’s manager of Colorado River resources. “Otherwise IID is concerned that in 2018, when the mitigation flows cease, there won’t be adequate mitigation measures in place to effectively offset the air quality and environmental impacts and thus put the continued QSA implementation at risk.”

IID’s petition states that “the looming environmental and public-health crisis at the sea, unless checked, will cause significant damage to the residents and the economy of the Imperial and Coachella valleys and will threaten one of the state’s most important environmental resources.”

The document notes that IID “remains committed to the QSA as an essential component of statewide water policy in California and along the Colorado River, and does not seek to undo the many years of painstaking negotiations that were required to arrive at the delicate compromise the QSA parties struck.”

At the State Water Board hearing, state Sen. Ben Hueso, D-San Diego said “it’s been a challenge bringing all the stakeholders together,” and “I feel like the ball in a ping pong game going from agency to agency and bouncing back.”

Part of the problem, Hueso said, is the lack of urgency regarding the sea’s status. The sea “hasn’t risen to the level” of the challenges presented by the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta or the drought.

The sea’s complexities do not lend themselves to up front solutions.

“It’s certainly disappointing after all these years that there still no plan in place for a sustainable future,” said Thomas Howard, executive director of the State Water Board.

Cohen lamented the “real disconnect between the imminence of the catastrophe in 2018 and the somewhat passive and reactive response that we’ve heard from the state.”

With no state plan forthcoming, officials do not want the QSA threatened by the lack of a Salton Sea plan. “The sea is not shrinking due to QSA water transfers,” Dan Denham, Colorado River Program director with SDCWA, told the State Water Board. “There is a meaningful role for the State Water Board but not from a regulatory standpoint.”

But Kim Delfino, California program director with Defenders of Wildlife, said the State Water Board “has a unique role to play” because it approved the QSA and has “ongoing jurisdiction and responsibility over this matter.”

The difficulty in saving the sea issues begs the question of whether preserving its heritage and protecting its shores is even possible.

“Back when we were doing the QSA the sense was if you didn’t have the solution in place by 2015, the sea would be dead,” said former assemblyman Richard Katz. He was the State Water Board member who helped negotiate the deal. “Here we are in 2015. There’s no solution in place, the sea is dying but it was dying in 2002 and 2003. Sometimes you wonder whether we really know what’s going on at the Sea or not.”

Katz said the sea’s woes do not imperil the QSA.

“The QSA wasn’t about the sea to begin with,” he said. “It was about water usage and Southern California taking more off the Colorado than they had a right to and it had to do with Imperial giving up some of what they’d been taking. The sea wasn’t the driver for the QSA. It solved a number of problems but it wasn’t about the Salton Sea.”

Katz said the $9 billion restoration plan was “a reasonable attempt to come up with something that would work,” but that the subsequent economic downturn made dollars “very hard to find.”

The sea’s role in the Pacific Flyway – the 5,000-mile route for migratory birds from the Arctic to South America – has earned it the designation of a bird area of global significance by the Audubon Society. More than 400 species of birds make regular use of the Salton Sea, including the Yuma ridgeway rail, California brown pelican, Western snowy plover, black-necked stilt, Western sandpiper and American avocet.

Absent a grand, sweeping restoration of the Salton Sea – a virtually impossible proposition – IID and others believe measures can be taken to keep a different version of the sea alive.

“Even at one-third smaller, it still would be the largest lake in California,” said Kevin Kelley, general manager of IID. He compared the task of solving the sea’s problems to the decades-long effort to rid Los Angeles of smog, which resulted in “appreciably better” air quality.

State Water Board member Steven Moore, an engineer, said the solution for the Salton Sea needs to be designed “with what nature does in a sink setting.”

“The idea of a static Sea level is a fantasy,” he said. “It is a dynamic situation. From an engineer’s perspective, we don’t want to have stranded assets.”

Nearly $500 million is available in the $7.5 billion 2014 water bond for restoration projects, of which the Salton Sea will receive a portion. Still, it’s a far cry from the billions needed for full-scale restoration.

“The Salton Sea will see funding from the bond but it’s important to temper our expectations,” Bright told the State Water Board. “The money there should be seen as a catalyst.”

The Resources Agency is pursuing a three-phase strategy for the sea to address the needs of fish, birds and air quality. Progress is slower than they’d like.

“It’s a challenge to mobilize projects that are roughly the size of Golden Gate Park [1,017 acres],” Bright said.

Then there is the problem of what to do about the Salton Sea for the long-term.

“While we have a lot of projects that are shovel-ready, what we don’t have is a comprehensive vision … of how a restoration plan will co-exist with all the other needs,” Bright said.

More than 3,000 acres of habitat ponds near where the Alamo and New rivers empty into the Sea are planned for the benefit of fish and birds. Kent Nelson, manager of DWR’s Salton Sea Program, told the State Water Board that the plan is to mix the relatively fresh water from the New River with the more saline Salton Sea water and distribute it into the habitat ponds.

“What we are hoping to do is to learn whether these retention basins can be constructed with material from the bed of the sea,” Nelson said. He cautioned that “it may turn out there are things about this that we abandon” because of expense or sustainability.

Moore expressed concern about installing pump stations, which can be a “maintenance headache” and because of the greenhouse gas emissions associated with powering them.

It’s possible that royalties generated from further renewable energy production in the desert could be used for Sea mitigation efforts. Brown has called for 50 percent of the energy generated in California to come from renewable sources by 2030.

The south end of the sea is a hot bed of geothermal energy, which has been tapped for decades. There are about 375 megawatts (MW) of existing production and experts believe the area can support as much as 2,000 MW of baseload generation capacity from 2016 to 2046. One MW supplies enough power for as many as 750 homes.

The year-round sun has attracted solar energy investment, which, combined with geothermal, is being eyed as replacement wattage for Southern California after the 2013 closure of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station.

“Renewable energy should be an integral part of our thinking as we approach Salton Sea restoration,” California Energy Commissioner Karen Douglas told the State Water Board.

According to IID, there are an estimated 2,000 MW for projects located on IID, federal and privately owned land, with the “economic and achievable resource potential” on IID and federally-owned land an estimated at 1,675 MW.

While most of the potential power is geothermal, solar energy projects could be sited on 5,000 to 10,000 acres of IID land. Those potential projects would have to account for building in the sea bed and dust.

– by Gary Pitzer

Editor’s Note: Ticking Time Bombs

The drought gripping California, the state’s first-ever law regulating groundwater and the water bond’s power to fund new storage have certainly taken center stage over the past year while the environmental woes of the Delta and the Salton Sea have lingered in the background.

But the governor pushed the Delta back into the forefront recently when he told critics of his controversial proposal to build twin tunnels to divert water south of the Delta to “shut up” if they had not read the thousands of pages contained in the plan documents. Then, he reiterated the need to build the tunnels again to a group of business owners. He told them that all that stands between the salt water of San Francisco Bay and the fresh water running through the Sacramento-San

Joaquin Delta to the 25 million people and farms to the south are an aging network of levees and berms that are “going to crash at some point” because of rising sea waters cause by climate change or an earthquake.

While it’s unknown exactly when those rising sea waters will cause a major Delta collapse, there is a more precise ticking time bomb at the Salton Sea in the state’s southeastern corner. At the end of 2017, Imperial Irrigation District (IID) will stop sending “mitigation” flows into the sea to help sustain it. The District called on the state to live up to its promise to help restore the ailing inland lake, at the heart of a major water transfer between IID and San Diego that brought California into compliance with its legal take – 4.4 million acre feet – from the Colorado River. Some say the impact from the sea’s demise could be more costly than a restoration. The sea provides key breeding grounds and rest areas for birds on the Pacific Flyway and, as it shrinks, will pose a major air quality issue for surrounding residents as winds whip up the exposed seabed. You can read more about the challenging issues with the sea in this issue of Western Water.

In the meantime, we will be visiting the labyrinth of levees, channels and islands that make up the Delta during our annual Bay-Delta Tour on June 24-26, when the twin tunnels or “pipelines” as some are now referring to them, are sure to be discussed as we venture into the heart of California’s water hub. We’ll also be seeing infrastructure vital to managing water through the Delta, and speaking to the experts who operate the projects. Key stakeholders representing a broad diversity of specialties, including farming, ecology, history and land management, will be on hand to give us their take on the issues.

I hope some of our readers will join us for the adventure!

Jenn Bowles, Executive Director