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It would be impossible to overestimate the complexity of California Water Management.
Hundreds of federal, state, and local agencies dictate who or what should be procured waterwhen and how much will be delivered and the prices the recipients must pay.
Furthermore, there are differences in policies within these broad categories. For example, local agricultural water agencies and municipal suppliers to homes and businesses often have different priorities.
Water policy is even more complicated, involving not only public agencies but a seemingly myriad of external stakeholders, ranging from developers who need water commitments for their projects to commercial fishermen who want to protect spawning salmon.
The proliferation of competing agendas explains why it is so difficult to achieve the consensus needed to move policy forward. It is not uncommon for proposed projects and policies to move for years, if not decades, before anything concrete happens.
For example, on proposed sites reservoir on the west side of the Sacramento Valley now looks likely to be built, but only after 70 years of promotion by supporters. The long planned expansion of Los Vaqueros Dam in Contra Costa County collapsed recently when the East Bay Municipal Utility District pulled out, citing ever-increasing costs.
More than six decades ago, state water officials proposed a canal to carry water around the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. After receiving legislative approval, a 1982 referendum. blocked construction, and 40 years later proposed tunnel under the delta remains stalled by political impasse.
Operations of existing dams and canals are equally strained, especially dividing water between farmers, municipal users and streams to protect fish and other wildlife as supplies fluctuate due to climate change.
For years, federal and state officials have sought to reduce diversions from agriculture — by far the biggest users of water — to help habitat flows. Farmers are resisting.
The state has asked for “voluntary agreements” from farmers in the San Joaquin River watershed between Stockton and Fresno to improve natural flows, threatening to order reductions if agreements are not reached. But unilateral action by the state would trigger a legal battle over water rights whose outcome cannot be predicted.
Another player in California’s high-stakes water game emerged eight years ago when Donald Trump became president for the first time. He strongly supported farmers in their conflict with state water managers, ordering the Bureau of Reclamation and other federal agencies to adopt policies more favorable to agriculture.
Read more: Tracking California’s Water Supply
Four years later, after Trump was defeated by Joe Biden, the policies were reversed. Just days before the end of Biden’s term, federal and state water managers last month announced new operating agreement.
This week, when Trump became president again, he basically tried to do it cancel this agreement and reinstate your previous policies. Based on a memo to federal water agencies, he ordered them to come up with a plan “to divert more water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to other parts of the state for use by the people there who desperately need a reliable water supply.”
Not only did Trump cite farmers’ needs for a reliable water supply, but he reiterated his belief that a lack of water supplies in Southern California is making it harder to fight deadly wildfires — a claim that no factual basis. Los Angeles had enough water to fight the fires, but hydrants ran dry because the system was designed to fight individual building fires, not mass forest fires, and was overtaxed.
Despite the media hype, it’s doubtful that Trump’s executive order will be more than a relatively brief pause in efforts to resolve California’s water conflicts, simply because they are measured in decades, not any president’s term.
