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A Plumbing Fix for Tainted Ag Runoff
Refuge and hunt club managers on the San Joaquin Valley's west side have already begun "flooding up" their wetlands to make them hospitable, after a long dry summer, to the rafts of waterfowl soon to stop over. These first floodwaters may have contained selenium - a naturally occurring trace element eroded from west side soils via crop irrigation and linked to water quality problems and wildlife impacts such as the dead and deformed bird embryos found at Kesterson in the 1980s. But this winter's wetland floodwaters may be cleaner by early December, at least in the Grasslands area.
December is when officials hope to reopen 28 miles of the long-closed San Luis Drain so that the selenium-tainted drain water from 97,000 acres of croplands can be removed from around 90 miles of channels serving 51,685 acres of private and public wetlands. Officials renamed this 28-mile stretch the "Grasslands Bypass Channel" to prevent confusion between their new plumbing project and other proposals for use of the entire 85-mile- long, Kesterson-associated San Luis Drain. And though everyone hastens to call the Bypass Channel project an interim, short-term solution, it could offer the first measurable test of potential long-term strategies for reducing west side selenium pollution in over a decade.
"The bypass almost totally remedies our wetland problems and lays a good foundation for us to start dealing with our water quality problems in the San Joaquin River," says Dan Nelson of the west side's San Luis-Delta Mendota Water Authority. The irrigation drainage rerouted through the San Luis Drain will be discharged via a new connection into Mud Slough six miles upstream of its confluence with the river.
"By putting it all together in the one drain, and by coordinating drainers through a single entity, we'll get a much better handle on which management strategies produce the most significant water quality improvements," says Penny Howard of BurRec, which owns the San Luis Drain.
BurRec's proposed bypass project agreement with the drainers includes a system of selenium load targets and penalties for exceedances to be administered by a new regional entity and overseen by a new committee of federal and state agency head honchos. Under the system, the entity - comprised of six districts within Nelson's water authority - must make sure its drainage stays within recent average selenium load levels in the first two years (6660 pounds per year) and then make reductions of 5% annually over the following three years. If limits are exceeded, the government can charge the new entity monthly fees of $700-$20,800 and annual fees of $25,000- $250,000.
"It's the right structure but the wrong numbers," says Terry Young, who works for the Environmental Defense Fund, which proposed a more stringent system in its 1994 report Plowing New Ground. Young thinks the load limits are too high and the fees too low to be effective incentives for farmers to reduce selenium pollution. And she's critical of what the limits are based on: "soft information regarding the drainers' ability to meet the limits rather the wealth of hard data on the environment's capacity to assimilate selenium."
But the drainers' Dan Nelson says the level of the fees was almost a "deal breaker" in the last days of the project negotiations, adding that monthly and annual penalties could add up to a pretty steep $500,000. Young argues that this only comes down to about $5 per acre. Both agree that the important thing is that fees, and thus a real system of accountability, have been established at all.
Meanwhile, the public agencies governing this project - BurRec, U.S. Fish & Wildlife and U.S. EPA - have been struggling to attach enough environmental commitments to the drain-use agreement to make it acceptable to the enviros but not unpalatable to the drainers. One key commitment is that water quality in the San Joaquin River can't become any worse than it would be without the bypass project. If the careful monitoring associated with the project shows that the new drainage management strategies aren't working and that environmental conditions are getting worse, the project will be terminated, says Howard.
Another major environmental commitment is the linkage of the project's continuation after the first two years to key long-term protections now being considered by the Central Valley Regional Board. Under the agreement, use of the San Luis Drain can only continue if the Board adopts a Basin Plan Amendment with a long-term strategy for achieving water quality objectives for the San Joaquin River.
Making this link, and getting the drainers to endorse it, which they did, will help increase the Regional Board's political comfort zone with moving from voluntary to mandatory regulation. Agriculture has always had a lot of clout in the Golden State, and the politically appointed board has not been immune to it, frustrating efforts by federal regulators such as EPA and other environmental interests to crack down on ag drainage pollution. But the Board's Bill Crooks is optimistic about his agency's readiness to take the next step.
Indeed, the Central Valley Board has already drafted a staff recommendation for a Basin Plan Amendment that would set a water quality objective for selenium in Mud Slough and the San Joaquin River of 5 parts per billion on a four-day average for all water-year types. To meet this objective, staff estimate that the area's annual selenium discharges may have to be reduced by up to 70%. The table above shows the probability of exceedances of load targets necessary to meet the 5 ppb objective in wet and dry years. Board staff have also drafted an implementation plan that will set load targets as part of a waste discharge requirement for drainers. If all goes well, an amendment could be approved in 1996.
"Although the drainers have made great strides in selenium reductions on a voluntary basis, it's not quite enough," says Crooks. "Clearly, it's going to take more than just irrigation efficiencies. It's going to take land retirement, treatment and more direct control on our part. If our Board approves it, this will be a first for California and perhaps even the nation. No one has ever adopted a waste discharge requirement on irrigated agriculture."
"If we don't get the Board to move ahead with a strong requirement, then we've blown it," says the Defense Fund's Tom Graff.
Contact: Bill Crooks (916)255-3000; Penny Howard (916)979-2476; Dan Nelson (209)826-9696; Terry Young (510)658-8008
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