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Dammed up water rights could flow again

MENDOCINO, SONOMA WINEGROWERS PURSUE WATERSHED AGREEMENTS

NORTH COAST – Groups of winegrape growers in Dry Creek and Anderson valleys think they have come up with ways to breach a regulatory dam that has held back hundreds of water-rights applications in five North Coast counties for years.

State water regulators are under legislative mandate to keep enough water in streams, creeks and rivers to allow protected Coho salmon and steelhead to migrate from the ocean and spawn. At the same time, state and federal wildlife regulators and environmental groups want impediments such as in-stream reservoirs and old culverts removed or retrofitted to accommodate migration.

So the grower groups are proposing water and habitat management on a watershed-by-watershed basis rather than project by project to get action on applications and access to needed water.

The State Water Resources Control Board has entered a pilot charter agreement with a handful of growers in the Anderson Creek watershed, which drains to the Navarro River in western Mendocino County, to expedite the processing of their water-rights applications, according to board spokesman Dave Clegern. In return, the growers would work out with their neighbors how much water they would divert for irrigation and frost-protection needs while leaving a certain amount of water flowing downstream.

“It’s more effective when the people most affected determine how to accomplish this,” he said.

Participants in the Anderson Creek Watershed Group are Cakebread Cellars, Elke Dimmick Farms, Ferrington Vineyards, Premier Pacific Vineyards for its Anderson Creek and Philoville vineyards, Demuth Vineyards, Savoy Deer Meadows Vineyard and Schoeneman Vineyards. They collectively farm about 250 acres of vines and have been awaiting action on water-rights applications for three to 10 years.

This charter is a voluntary good-faith agreement that both water board staff and the applicants will follow an established process, according to the watershed group’s attorney, Peter Kiel of Alfred Schneider & Harris in Sacramento. The state and the applicants can leave the charter at any time if applicants lose faith in the process.

“We thought it was time to do something more efficient than what we had been doing,” Mr. Kiel said.

Vintner and grower Mary Elke, 61, has been waiting since 1998 for resolution on water rights for irrigation and frost-protection use of a 10-acre-foot pond she and her husband, Thomas, built in 1980 in Witherell Creek, which supplies Anderson Creek. After spending $70,000 on consulting and legal fees to comply with regulatory policy changes in 1998 and 2002, she’s eagerly working to resolve the matter.

“We kept making concessions or mitigation that seemed to be a one-way street,” she said.

Wagner & Bonsignore, a Sacramento civil engineering firm that had studied water availability in Anderson Creek, worked with Mr. Kiel’s firm to develop the charter concept in early 2007. After a year and a half, the group is expected to receive permits later this year after final environmental studies are completed in the next couple of months, according to Mr. Clegern.

The downside to such a watershed-wide effort is the cost of some additional studies an individual applicant would have to undertake, such as the hiring of a fisheries biologist to analyze a given watershed, according to Mr. Kiel.

Also, there’s the potential that progress on all the applicants could be hindered by lack of progress for one participant, though that hasn’t been the case so far with the Anderson Creek group, he added.

Meanwhile, in Sonoma County, the watershed approach is being applied to $500,000 in fish habitat restoration projects envisioned to be completed along Dry Creek tributaries Wine/Grape, Crane and Mill creeks by fall. About a half-dozen winegrape growers are working through the Sotoyome Resource Conservation District with the state Fish & Game Department and National Marine Fisheries Service on stream-improvement projects such as adding woody debris and creating deeper pools to help young fish.

Also in the works are Sonoma County Water Agency projects to improve fish passage past certain culverts and bridges.

These are the first projects being put forward by a coalition of a dozen farming, homebuilding and property owner groups plus the water agency, the city of Santa Rosa and gravel producer Syar Industries, according to Carolyn Wasem, a consultant that has been coordinating the group. The Sonoma County Salmonid Coalition formed two and a half years ago to show wildlife regulators that projected fish habitat could be restored without tighter Endangered Species Act restrictions.

However, the coalition is proposing that the state water board consider such collective land management efforts to meet some of the goals outlined in the draft North Coast Instream Flow Policy the board released late last year. The proposed policy, required under Assembly Bill 2121 adopted in 2004, has drawn strong dissent from farmers because of its strict controls on stream water use, including prohibitively costly fish-passage modifications and estimates on minimum water flow.

“The nice thing with the watershed approach is that we don’t rely on estimates,” said Brian Johnson, a Berkeley-based attorney with national fisheries advocacy group Trout Unlimited. “We have gauge data plus a biologist looking to see whether it is a spawning stream and the quality of it.”

Hearings and workshops on the draft stream flow policy, set for consideration by the state water board this fall, are planned this week and next. Assemblywoman Noreen Evans, D-Santa Rosa, and state Sen. Patricia Wiggins, D-Santa Rosa, plan to hold a hearing July 30 from 3 to 5 p.m. in the Ecolab Theater of the Culinary Institute of America at Greystone in St. Helena.

The state water board intends to host a workshop in the Red Rooms of Ukiah Valley Conference Center in Ukiah on Aug. 5. Another is set for Aug. 6 in the Merlo Theater of the Wells Fargo Center for the Arts in north Santa Rosa. Both are scheduled to run from 1 to 5 p.m.

For flow policy information, visit www.waterrights.ca.gov/html/instreamflow_nccs.html.