Chapter 14 INTEGRATED WATER RESOURCES MANAGEMENT: DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOU'RE GOING TO?

• Jurisdiction: United States

Water Law Institute
Chapter 14

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INTEGRATED WATER RESOURCES MANAGEMENT: DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOU'RE GOING TO?¹
Tina Cannon Leahy ² State Water Resources Control Board Sacramento, CA

TINA CANNON LEAHY is a Staff Counsel IV with the State Water Resources Control Board Office of the Chief Counsel where her primary duties include assisting with the amendment, implementation, and enforcement of the Water Quality Control Plan for the San Francisco Bay/Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta Estuary and serving as lead attorney to the Groundwater Management Program implementing California's landmark Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA). Before coming to the State Water Board, she was the Principal Consultant for the California Assembly Water, Parks and Wildlife Committee where, from 2010 through 2015, she served as the Assembly's water law and policy expert, including serving as a principle technical drafter of SGMA. Prior to the Assembly, Ms. Leahy was Senior Staff Counsel at the California Department of Fish and Wildlife specializing in water law and natural resources issues, including California Endangered Species Act permitting, and an associate attorney in private practice counseling clients and litigating water, environmental quality, and endangered species matters. In addition to her duties with the State Water Board, Ms. Leahy is a water law Lecturer in the University of California, Davis, Department of Land, Air, and Water Resources. She is also a Board Representative to the California Lawyers Association and Co-Chair of the Alumni Advisory Board for the California Environmental Law and Policy Center at King Hall, the UC Davis School of Law.

Water is the lifeblood of every human endeavor, so it is unsurprising that the management of water implicates thorny questions of who profits, who pays, and how the environment is adequately protected and preserved even as we dam, divert, and transform the natural world. Into this breach, integrated water resources management (IWRM) has long held promise of helping to achieve balance and amplify benefits. As defined by the Global Water Partnership, IWRM is "a process which promotes the coordinated development and management of water, land, and related resources, in order to maximize the resultant economic and social welfare in an equitable manner without compromising the sustainability of vital ecosystems."³

But what does IWRM really mean? In a rather acerbic assessment of international IWRM efforts, Professor Asit K. Biswas argues that while the concept has been floating around for half a century, it is vague, trendy, and mostly empty.⁴ After questioning the meaning of literally every term in the Global Water Partnership definition, he likens IRWM to a "roadmap" where "we do not even know where we wish to go, except in a very vague manner, and since we have no idea as to how to identify the final destination, we would have no idea when we have reached that destination, even if we reach the destination by some miracle."⁵

But is IWRM really void for vagueness? The issue may be one of scope. IWRM implementation on a global scale is made more challenging because, as Prof. Biswas points out, "the world is heterogeneous, with different cultures, social norms, physical attributes, skewed availability of renewable and non-renewable resources, investment funds, management capacities and institutional arrangements. The systems of governance, legal frameworks, decision-making processes and types and effectiveness of institutions mostly differ from one country to another, and often in very significant ways."⁶ California's IWRM efforts - called Integrated Regional Water Management or IRWM - while plagued by some of the same flaws that Prof. Biswas has leveled at international efforts, provide a more manageable and potentially useful case study.

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Everything Is Everything.

— Lauryn Hill⁷

One could argue that IRWM, on a massive scale, has gripped California since at least the 18^th century when Robert B. Marshall, chief geographer for the United States Geological Survey, published his fever dream of damming the headwaters of major northern rivers and conveying that liquid bounty south through two giant aqueducts.⁸ Integrate means to "form, coordinate, or blend into a functioning or unified whole."⁹ True to that ideal, Marshall believed that his coordinated and unified plan would address regional water scarcity in other parts of the state. It was never realized on the scale Marshall originally envisioned. But during the Great Depression, State Engineer Edward Hyatt successfully proposed a scaled-down version that led to the federal government building the Central Valley Project (CVP), a system of dams and reservoirs wholly within California starting with Shasta Lake in the north.¹⁰ In the economic boom following World War II, Governor Pat Brown renewed state efforts to build dams and canals that could move 4.23 million acre-feet of water north from the Feather River watershed to the south and the parallel State Water Project (SWP) was born.¹¹

The CVP and the SWP are extraordinary engineering accomplishments that promised to address regional water scarcity, but in other watersheds. The CVP, operated by the U.S. Department of Interior, Bureau of Reclamation (Reclamation), was meant to salvage 200,000 to 250,000 acres in the Central Valley suffering from groundwater depletion but was relied upon to expand irrigated agriculture to 3 million acres.¹² The SWP, operated by the California Department of Water Resources (DWR), allocated almost half of its yield to the Metropolitan Water District, 460 miles away in Los Angeles County, and another almost quarter to the Kern County Water Agency 350 miles away in Bakersfield.¹³ However, far from "integrating" regions, the building of the CVP and SWP exacerbated mistrust between the north and south.

Starting in the 30's, California passed a series of statutes meant to "reassures users of water in the geographic area where such water originate that their water supply needs will be protected from impacts of exporting water out of the area of origin."¹⁴ Dubbed "Area of Origin" laws, they were meant to protect northern Californians from the fate of the Owens Valley,¹⁵ which contained a once-majestic lake and river that the enterprising Los Angeles Department of Water and Power acquired to feed its growing city through a series of maneuvers called "chicanery,

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subterfuge, spies, bribery,... a campaign of divide and conquer, and strategy of lies,"¹⁶ fictionalized in the movie Chinatown.¹⁷ The feat, while infamous to many, reflected the attitudes of the era as captured perfectly by one of its great architects, the self-taught civil engineer William Mulholland, who upon witnessing Owens River water first spill from the gates of the then 233-mile long Los Angeles Aqueduct stated to all assembled, "There it is, take it."¹⁸ Despite the apprehensions that engendered them, Area of Origin laws remain a relatively untested wildcard for IRWM, notwithstanding their promise to invert the rule of priority and reserve to the area of origin "an undefined (inchoate) preferential right to future water needs."¹⁹

But I'll meet you at the Delta Where the rivers run into the sea... What's behind, I can clearly see But that beyond, that's beyond me.

— Mumford & Sons²⁰

Managing California water - either by moving it from north to south or from east to west in the case of the San Francisco Bay area - has its challenges and opportunities but the epicenter of these struggles is the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta Estuary (Delta). The Delta is formed where the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers converge as they journey towards the ocean. Previously a "vast wetland complex of low islands" that reclamation efforts transformed it into a "patchwork of largely agricultural islands separated by deep channels and protected by 1,100 miles of aging levees," the Delta is a biodiversity hotspot that is home to more than 750 species of plants and animals²¹ while also serving as the "water supply crossroads" of the CVP and SWP.²² Unsurprisingly, these manifold strains have pushed species to the point of collapse, made water supplies unreliable, and spurred litigation and conflict driven in no small part by the "multiplicity of agencies and actors involved."²³ The Delta struggle, dubbed a "wicked problem" due to the complex number of challenges all needing to be addressed simultaneously,²⁴ was a main driver of early IRWM efforts in California.

The late 1950s and 1960s saw a rise in environmental awareness that crystalized into action in 1969 when, in January, a Union Oil rig six miles offshore from Santa Barbara, California, blew out causing what was, at the time, the worst oil spill in United States history.²⁵ This was followed in June by an inferno on the terminally polluted Cayahoga River when sparks from a passing

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train caused its oil-slickened surface to catch fire.²⁶ The following year, Congress created the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) and passed or strengthened many environmental protection laws.²⁷ This included sweeping amendments to the Federal Water Pollution Control Act of 1948, now commonly known as the Clean Water Act (CWA).²⁸ In 1969, California had already adopted its own water pollution control statute, the Porter-Cologne Water Quality Control Act (Porter-Cologne)²⁹ and portions of the CWA used Porter-Cologne as a model.³⁰

In 1978, the State Water Resources Control Board (State Water Board) adopted its first Water Quality Control Plan for the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and Suisun Marsh (Delta Plan) following 32 days of evidentiary hearings. The 1978 Delta Plan was intended to satisfy the new CWA and Porter-Cologne requirements.³¹ Like every Delta Plan revision after, it sought to protect agricultural, municipal, industrial, and fish and wildlife beneficial uses in the Delta by adopting water quality...