\t\t\t\t\tWhat’s at stake?<\/p>\n
Friant Ranch is a billion-dollar new town proposal just south of the community of Friant, aiming to grow to the size of the city of Fowler.<\/p>\n
For three decades, developers have tried to build a new town at the foot of Friant Dam. On Tuesday, Fresno County supervisors may finally approve one, based on a water plan built on a claim the federal government says is false.<\/p>\n
Friant Ranch is a billion-dollar new town proposal just south of the community of Friant, aiming to grow to the size of the city of Fowler. To get through a drought, the county says, the town can count on a multi-year supply of water stored in Millerton Lake.<\/p>\n
But the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which controls releases from the lake, told Fresnoland that isn\u2019t so. Water can be held behind the dam for only one year, not several, according to David Hyatt, the Bureau\u2019s resource management division chief.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cUnder Reclamation\u2019s Friant Division rescheduling guidelines, rescheduled Class 1 water [what Friant Ranch relies on] cannot be carried over through multiple consecutive water years,\u201d Hyatt wrote in an email.<\/p>\n
That leaves Friant Ranch\u2019s water supply in limbo during a multi-year drought like the one in 2014 and 2015, a Fresnoland investigation shows. If such a scenario were to happen again, public officials could be left scrambling to find an emergency water supply for thousands of people.<\/p>\n
Never miss the top stories in Fresno \u2014 sign up for our free, daily newsletter.<\/p>\n
The paper-water problem traces to the county\u2019s planning department, which has a history of approving foothill subdivisions whose water systems later failed.<\/p>\n
From Mirabella<\/a> to Shaver Springs<\/a>, Fresno County has asked for state bailouts for one subdivision after another. County-approved supplies have gone dry; some turned up uranium. Residents are often left in distress, wondering who will answer for the county\u2019s planning failures.<\/p>\n With Friant Ranch, the county never formally analyzed the storage scheme, sparing itself the work that would have exposed the problem. Its only water supply analysis, done in 2008 for the project\u2019s environmental review, predates the scheme by eight years.<\/p>\n The county once promised<\/a> an updated water supply assessment, then dropped the commitment, reasoning it wasn\u2019t technically required to do a new one. Since then, it has leaned on a 2022 memo from the developer\u2019s own consultant.<\/p>\n The county\u2019s public works department and its communications office did not respond to multiple phone calls and texts requesting comment.<\/p>\n Friant Ranch still maintains it can store a multi-year supply.<\/p>\n \u201cWe get to carry over double the amount we used in the prior year, which basically gives us a two-year water supply,\u201d said Bryan Wagner, a lawyer for Friant Ranch.<\/p>\n The Bureau confirmed that the carryover can happen only for one year.<\/p>\n \u201cUnused rescheduled water cannot be rescheduled again into a subsequent water year,\u201d Hyatt wrote.<\/p>\n The Bureau declined to discuss the risks to Friant Ranch\u2019s water supply further, saying those questions belong to Fresno County.<\/p>\n \u201cLand-use decisions and evaluation of supporting water supply assumptions are the responsibility of local authorities,\u201d Bureau spokesperson Mary Knecht wrote.<\/p>\n Inside Fresno\u2019s paper water problem<\/p>\n The county\u2019s reliance on a stale analysis has roots in how the Valley has long handled water.<\/p>\n For generations, developers and farmers in the San Joaquin Valley ignored hard questions about water and drought, assuming they could pump groundwater in a pinch. Some<\/a> defied the drought entirely, firing up their pumps and expanding their acreage even as rain and snow dwindled.<\/p>\n But after a string of water crises over the last 20 years, that old fallback is largely off the table. The Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, or SGMA, now restricts pumping, and state<\/a> law requires that a large subdivision\u2019s water supply be shown to hold up through a multi-year drought.<\/p>\n Friant Ranch\u2019s developer tried to adapt to these new realities, but the county never checked whether the plan would work.<\/p>\n Friant Ranch\u2019s developers grew concerned after the 2012-2016 drought, when their main supply, Class 1 water from Millerton Lake secured under a 2011 deal with the Lower Tule River Irrigation District, a farm district 80 miles south, went dry two years in a row.<\/p>\n Those zero years were \u201con everybody\u2019s mind at the time after 2014, 2015,\u201d said Wagner, the lawyer for the developer.\u00a0<\/p>\n And the water wasn\u2019t cheap: $300,000 just to reserve it, then $400 an acre-foot every year on top of Lower Tule\u2019s own costs.<\/p>\n So in 2016, Wagner\u2019s team amended<\/a> the deal to protect that investment, turning Millerton Lake into a giant water piggy bank. Each year, Lower Tule would ask the Bureau to hold over twice the water Friant Ranch had purchased, so that, on the developer\u2019s reading, a two years\u2019 supply would always sit behind the dam.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWe wanted to make sure that we had a really strong water supply,\u201d Wagner said. \u201cWe keep rolling over, so there\u2019s always two years in the carryover bank account or whatever you want to call it.\u201d<\/p>\n Ultimately, the plan ran up against the limits of Friant Dam\u2019s control of nature.<\/p>\n Millerton Lake holds less than a third of the San Joaquin River\u2019s average yearly flow, so the water behind the dam is drawn down every year to make room for next year\u2019s run. As the Bureau of Reclamation put it in 2003, \u201cthere is little opportunity to carry over water from one season to another.\u201d<\/p>\n For this reason, an engineer at Provost & Pritchard, the firm that wrote Friant Ranch\u2019s water assessment, had warned against using Millerton Lake as a bulwark against multi-year drought.<\/p>\n \u201c[T]here is little reliance on reservoir surface storage to carry water over from year to year,\u201d the engineer wrote in a 2007 internal memo<\/a>, \u201cgiven the limited amount of capacity in these reservoirs and the reservoir space reserved for the flood control function that controls their operations in the winter and spring of each year.\u201d<\/p>\n It is unclear why that advice went unheeded by Friant Ranch\u2019s team. The 2016 amendment was not signed off by the Bureau of Reclamation, according to a copy of the contract reviewed by Fresnoland. The Bureau declined to say whether it was ever consulted about the amendment.<\/p>\n So why didn\u2019t the county catch the error?<\/p>\n County retracted promise to reanalyze water supply<\/p>\n For a while, it seemed the county might. Then it strayed.<\/p>\n