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LOIS HENRY
THE BAKERSFIELD CALIFORNIAN, first ran Feb. 13, 2016

Perhaps it seems crazy that Bakersfield has actually ramped up home construction during one of the worst droughts in California history.

Especially crazy since the city’s river rights dried up last summer, bringing 20,000 residents harrowingly close to running out of water.

Add to that the fact that we have a boatload of development left over from the pre-recession days already approved.

Oh, and we sit atop one of the most over-pumped aquifers in the state, something new law aims to change.

Yet from 2012 through 2015, the drought years, Bakersfield issued a combined 5,139 building permits for new single-family homes.

All of which got me wondering how much more development Bakersfield’s water supplies can sustain.

So I asked around.

I kind of figured there’d be a number. Or a guesstimate. Or someone besides me mulling over the issue considering we actually hit the bottom of the barrel last summer.

Mostly what I heard back was “That’s a really good question.”

Hmph.

To be fair, water and planning agencies do track development and water supplies. To the drop.

But that’s just it. Each entity tracks its own supplies, its own use and its own development plans.

Since all those straws are poked into the same milkshake (nod to “There Will Be Blood”), I thought there must be some way to figure out the cumulative demand versus total supply.

Simple, yes? No.

RABBIT HOLE

No one agency keeps an overall running tally of our water supplies and the impact each new development will have on that supply.

If a development includes more than 500 homes, a full-blown environmental review, including cumulative water impacts, is required. But I noticed a lot of large developments appeared to be done piecemeal, staying under that 500-home trigger.

And urban water reports (required by the state every five years), which are typically used to give developments the OK, contain vague averages in terms of water supplies and the reports aren’t uniform from one purveyor to the next, making it difficult to find definitive numbers for how many more houses our water can support.

New groundwater legislation passed last year by the state will force a much more strict accounting, but not for several years.

Meanwhile, we have about 58,000 housing units either approved or in some stage of construction in and around Bakersfield.

Of those, I counted about 12,500 lots in developments in the city that are in some phase of construction, leaving about 37,500 lots in the approved but holding stage, which could mean they are months, years or forever from being built. About 8,000 lots are in county areas around metro Bakersfield but the county didn’t track which are under construction or in the holding stage.

(By the way, that 58,000 doesn’t include the 12,000 homes proposed by Tejon Ranch at the base of the Grapevine, nor the already approved 3,000 homes in Shafter just over the city line at 7th Standard Road.)

So, if you figure each of those 58,000 homes will hold about three people, that means an increase in population of 174,000 people, assuming it all gets built, of course.

Each of those folks will use, say, 250 (a number that will go down if conservation measures are kept in place) gallons of water per day, which works out to about 16 billion gallons a year, or 52,000 acre-feet.

That would be on top of the 120,000 acre-feet a year that existing residents, businesses, parks and lakes require.

Arguably, that wouldn’t be a huge amount of “new” demand assuming most of that development occurs on existing farmland and ag to urban is considered a wash in terms of water use. A lot of those new homes, though, are slated for the unfarmed northeast.

Either way, such expansion would be more “hard” demand on what has already been deemed a critically overdrafted aquifer.

When I say overdrafted, I mean we pump about 300,000 and 400,000 acre-feet a year more than goes back in. (During the drought, it’s been a million acre-feet). That’s, of course, including the draw from Kern’s 800-pound economic gorilla — agriculture.

When water is short, almond trees can be pulled up and cotton plowed under. Houses can’t go dry.

KERN RIVER, DEVELOPMENT LIFELINE

The City of Bakersfield has always boasted a healthy water supply thanks to its ownership of a large chunk of the Kern River.

That didn’t stop a near catastrophe last summer when the river all but dried up and Cal Water had to do some fast dealmaking to get water to its northeast and northwest treatment plants. (See side box.)

Aside from the river, Bakersfield and Cal Water (the main water purveyors in the city) buy some water from the state through what’s known as Improvement District 4 (ID4).

But, by and large, the main source is groundwater.

The city has long maintained that because of recharge from the Kern River, it has a solid groundwater base.

That’s probably true.

Unless you’re in a severe, sustained drought, as we’ve been.

Even without drought, the days of assuming that groundwater is an unending supply are over.

PLANNING KNOCKED FOR A LOOP

“The whole world’s turned upside down and I honestly don’t know how it will all sort out,” said Kern County Planning Director Lorelei Oviatt.

Land-use planning has become an evolving issue under the state’s new Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA).

“Because now we have a new regulation over the groundwater that we didn’t have before,” she said. “What if it turns out that things in the General Plan that we said we were going to build, we don’t have the water for? How’s that going to turn out? I don’t know the answer to that.

“Right now, the (ag) water districts are all worried about the new law, but planning seems like an afterthought.”

Under the new state law, everyone with a stake in the aquifer (pretty much everyone) has to agree on how much each entity can pump without creating an overdraft.

We’re a long way from a number, but what if it were only a half acre-foot per acre of land? What would that do to planning? To property rights? Who gets priority for that water?

These are questions the county has been wrestling with in different forms for a number of years in other parts of Kern.

For instance, some developments in outlying areas have been required to provide proof of two water sources, homes have been assigned individual water budgets and anyone seeking a General Plan amendment first has to show the county its water source, Oviatt said.

“Those are some of the ideas we’re going to discuss when we start our General Plan update in a couple of months,” she said. “But for some county areas in the metro Bakersfield area, like western Rosedale, I don’t have any solutions yet.”

For her part, Bakersfield’s chief planner, Jacqui Kitchen, agreed that local land use and water agencies must be on the same page going forward.

Though the planning future is murky for both, Oviatt acknowledged the city is in a better position by virtue of its river ownership.

“It may go down some years, but they still have it.”

Or do they?

WATER ACCOUNTING 101

Even the city’s river rights are getting a critical eye as the deadline for a groundwater plan under SGMA approaches.

What if recharge from Kern River water run down the river channel couldn’t be claimed by any particular entity? What if, once it seeped into the aquifer, it was considered “native water”? How would that affect the city’s water assumptions and its planning?

“In adjudicated basins, native river water is claimed by the entire basin,” said Eric Averett, general manager of the Rosedale-Rio Bravo Water Storage District and director of the Kern Groundwater Authority, which is working to create a Groundwater Sustainability Agency per SGMA rules.

An adjudicated basin means water supplies have been sorted out by a court rather than through mutual agreement. If such adjudications have any kind of precedent, that could change how Kern River recharge is accounted for, according to Averett.

No. No. No. And heck no, was the essence of the response I got from Bakersfield’s water resources manager, Art Chianello. (He’s too nice a guy to say “hell no.”)

There’s nothing “native” about the Kern River. It’s divvied up, spoken for, stored and carefully controlled as to when it comes down the river channel.

“It’s not willy-nilly stream water,” he said. “It has someone’s name on it.”

He noted that ID4 claims losses (recharge, seepage, all the same thing) incurred when it moves water through the unlined portion of the Cross Valley Canal.

The city’s claims on river recharge are no different.

OK, but I recall that the city was extremely watchful when ID4 pumped a load of water from wells near the Cross Valley Canal in 2014 and 2015, saying it hadn’t specifically banked water to those wells.

“Shell game” was a phrase I heard from a number of city officials concerned about that pumping.

Funny, that’s the exact same term I heard in reference to how the city accounts for water as well.

“I think it’s an open question,” Averett said of Kern River water. He said that except under certain very limited circumstances that Rosedale-Rio Bravo can’t run its water down the river channel and call it “banked.”

“Rosedale wouldn’t get credit for that water,” he said. “This is just one of the difficult questions we’re working with in groundwater of who counts what, how’s it counted and who gets credit.”

A longtime water observer told me he could see Averett’s point but predicted if anyone tried to make a serious claim for the city’s (or any Kern River rights holders’) recharged river water, that would provoke a fight with all the river interests.

LIVING IN OUR WATER MEANS

All of which gets me no closer to an answer to my initial question, how much development can our water sustain?

I posed the question to City Councilman and City Water Board Chairman Harold Hanson, whose ward covers the rapidly expanding southwest area of town, and Kern County Supervisor Mike Maggard, whose district encompasses the growing northeast.

Both men agreed it’s a serious question. But neither had an answer.

“In Bakersfield, kind of fortunately and unfortunately, water hasn’t been a real issue up until the last few years so people haven’t really thought about it,” Hanson said. “I think there will come a time when we’ll have to build up, rather than out. And that will be a result of water.”

Maggard said the city and county would have to have a “meeting of the minds” and the place for that is a joint General Plan.

“We need to understand how much water is available to us and figure out how to divvy that up,” he said. “Of course, if there are already thousands and thousands of approved lots, well, the cat’s already out of the bag.”

Don’t worry, but do your planning was the advice I got from Metropolitan Water District Executive Director Jeff Kightlinger.

“If you look at the raw numbers, we are adding people to California and most of that growth is coming from births,” he said. “You can’t forestall it, so we plan for it. We figure that’s our job.”

The giant water district that has kept Southern California watered works on reducing water use and finding new supplies whether that’s recycled water or potentially buying islands in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta (another story for another time).

“We use less water now than we did 25 years ago and our planning shows we can do it for the next 25 years,” Kightlinger said.

Well, if anyone knows how to make water magically appear to keep the growth train on track, it would be these guys.

Opinions expressed in this column are those of Lois Henry. Her column runs Wednesdays and Sundays. Comment at http://www.bakersfield.com, call her at 395-7373 or email lhenry@bakersfield.com.

LOIS HENRY ONLINE

Read archived columns by Lois Henry at Bakersfield.com/henry.

 

 

 

ALMOST DRY

So here’s how 20,000 Bakersfield residents were nearly left high and dry in summer of 2015.

The Kern River ran at a historically low 12.3 percent of normal. So low that Bakersfield’s rights to the river dried up.

That doesn’t mean the city ran out of water since it also buys state water and has ample groundwater.

The problem for those 20,000 residents is that the city sells river water to California Water Service Co. for use in its northeast and northwest treatment plants.

The plants were built to take water straight off the river, as in the case of the northeast plant, or have it delivered via the Beardsley Canal, as the northwest plant does.

So, when the city’s river rights stopped, Cal Water could see it was headed for trouble.

The only entity getting any river water was Kern Delta Water District. And even its supply was only a dribble.

“The river almost went dry last year,” said Mark Mulkay, Kern Delta’s general manager

But it agreed to give Cal Water part of its river supply in a four-way swap.

Kern Delta gave Cal Water water, then pumped a like amount to deliver to its farmers. The Kern County Water Agency’s Improvement District 4 pumped water that was previously banked by Cal Water and ran it to the California Aqueduct on Kern Delta’s behalf to repay Metropolitan Water District, which needed its stored water back from Kern Delta.

“Without this program the northeast plant would have stopped,” Mulkay said. “I don’t think residents understood how close they came to having no water.”

Some observers raised an eyebrow at that, saying the city had an obligation to be much more upfront with residents served by those treatment plants.

I agree.

Either way, I note the city has taken last summer’s lessons to heart.

The council voted on Wednesday to spend $3.5 million to bring a handful of old, inactive wells back online as an back up water source to “keep pressure in the system.”

The city took that step because the Kern County Water Agency said it could no longer guarantee the city extra water on a short-term agreement.

The city insists none of this is “emergency water,” that there is no risk of the city going dry.

Hmmm. I’m sure everyone thought that before last summer, too.