Two longtime staff members at Friends of the River, an environmental organization that works to preserve and restore California’s rivers, streams and watersheds and advocates for sustainable water management, questioned whether there was actually excess water or the political ability of Arizona to tap the state’s water supply.<\/p>\n
“If you define ‘excess water’ as well, in some years, water flows out of the delta in excess of the minimum salinity control standards and other water quality standards, then yeah, there’s excess water,” said Ron Stork, a senior policy analyst with the group, who has decades of experience working on both river protection and flood safety issues. “The question is, how do you capture the excess water?”<\/p>\n
Competition for the water<\/p>\n
Competition for the excess water is the other big issue, Stork said.<\/p>\n
“Arizona is not the only people who are scrambling for water,” he said, noting that the southern San Joaquin Valley alone has a 2 million acre-foot per year overdraft that must be addressed.<\/p>\n
He also pointed to California’s “utterly unattainable” goal of finding 9 million acre-feet more per year of water.<\/p>\n
“So Arizona’s got some competition,” he said. “So trying to squeeze more water out of the Sacramento and the San Joaquin rivers, rivers are already pretty thoroughly squeezed, some would call it a fool’s errand.<\/p>\n
“I realize, however, that desperate people may do desperate things and try and roll the dice and hope that nature and the gods of the civil engineers can provide,” Stork said.<\/p>\n
Gary Bobker, Friends of the River’s lead policy analyst and spokesman, was just as blunt.<\/p>\n
“The point is that state of California considers itself to be facing severe water supply deficits for all purposes,” Bobker said. “And the idea that you start banking water in California to ship it off to other states just seems kind of delusional.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Two longtime staff members at Friends of the River, an environmental organization that works to preserve and restore…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":441499,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[7,9,8,129710,1957,4017,8386,174927,2879,13928,10528,80552,7370,16425,646,13921,28345,174928],"class_list":["post-441498","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-california","tag-california","tag-california-headlines","tag-california-news","tag-central-arizona-project","tag-colorado-river","tag-contract","tag-environmental-science","tag-epcor-utilities","tag-flood","tag-fresh-water","tag-groundwater","tag-hydraulic-engineering","tag-hydrology","tag-river","tag-water","tag-water-and-the-environment","tag-water-supply","tag-wifa-am"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/441498","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=441498"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/441498\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/441499"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=441498"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=441498"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=441498"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}