By Don A. Wright
The Kings River Water Association held its Tuesday, September 17, 2024 Executive Committee and board meeting at its Fresno headquarters. The gathering was a two part event. The first part was the Executive Committee meeting and following that the regular board meeting. Both were being played out at the same time as the State Water Resources Control Board was holding its probationary hearing in Sacramento regarding the Tule
Subbasin. The State Board did put the Tule Subbasin in probation with some waivers for the Delano Earlimart Irrigation District and the Kern Tulare Irrigation District. And as many of you know, a Kings County Superior Court Judge granted a Preliminary Injunction against the same State Board over the Tulare Lake Subbasin probation decision.
The Meeting
The Meeting began at 10:00am exactly as Chairman Ryan Jacobsen is known for. Roll was called and Steve Haugen, Water Master gave the communications report.
Assistant Water Master Matt Meadows reported on water conditions on the King River. He expects to end the water year with 80 percent of the average precipitation on the Kings River watershed. There is still water running to Lemoore down the South Fork of the river. Meadows said at about midnight last Saturday the power plant went off for a while.
Pine Flat Lake will flatten out at about 400,000 a/f and outflow will be about 145 cfs. Upstream storage is drawing down by 1,000 a/f per day. There is some planned maintenance at Courtright Reservoir so that’s why the releases are as high as they are.
The Water Year ends at midnight September 30th and it looks like the Kings River yielded 1.6 million a/f if I understood Meadows correctly. He showed a recent temperature outlook for September through November which is above average and drier than normal. Are you sitting down? The weather forecast for 2025 is about 50/50 for a normal or not year.
Administrative Activities
Kings River Conservation District’s General Manager Dave Merritt reported the Pine Flat Dam power plant FERC license application only received one comment and that was from the State Board. They will have to conduct a water quality update. For some reason the Department of Water Resources owns part of one of the transmission lines.
Merritt said the Department of Energy has listed Pine Flat for a $5 million grant. Discussions with potential contractors have begun to install a small turbine bypass for the power plant at Pine Flat Dam.
ASO Flights
Meadows next reported getting Airborne Snow Observatory flights paid by the DWR is in jeopardy. He said these flights have been helpful in developing more modeling. However, funding for flights over the Kings River watershed are going to experience a significant
cutback due to the state’s budget problems. A grant application was submitted to the feds but the competition was fierce and KRWA will have to search elsewhere for funding for all the needed ASO flights. Haugen said many in California and in Colorado applied. Meadows said getting the data processed from a flight is a very heavy lift. It costs about a third of the money to process this data, whatever you call the measuring unit, it’s several amounts bigger than tetra bites. The other third is for equipment and the remaining third is for the flights themselves.
WADE
Water Accounting Data Environment, I believe is the name of a water data crunching software program KRWA is participating in. It takes several data bases and provides figures for different categories of water information. Meadows apologized for the reproduction
displayed on the screen. It wasn’t readable but it looked like spreadsheet, but not an Excel spreadsheet.
The program can build reports from different dates, so you can get a figure of how much inflow on the 2nd of February impacted power was generated and how much water it took to do so. I think, not sure. Meadows said this program not only does a good job of crunching numbers much faster than previous efforts, it also limits data entry errors. Haugen added member units should be able to interface with WADE to get their balances and other data.
Consolidated Irrigation District GM Phil Desatoff asked how far back in history can the data be accessed. He wanted tree rings, ice cores and isotope data but it only goes back as far as the 1960s or so. Haugen said that type of data has to be hand entered. Meadows added there are multiple cloud storage locations in case Seattle gets clobbered by a volcano or earthquake or some such.
Jack Paxton, Director at Kings River Water District asked if this data will be available to the member agencies if they walk in. The answer is yes.
Water Rights Fees
Haugen said the State Board will be adopting new fees. Maybe this week. This is a $50 increase over the previous $350 cost per individual water right and a $.12 per a/f cost. There has also been a steep and significant increase in late fees.
Haugen said this is the first year of a five-year preliminary Operations & Maintenance period for Pine Flat. The cost is $2,450,000 per year. This breaks down to reimbursing the Army Corps for underpayment for recent period O&M actions, a new water operations manual and paint and custodial services. It was said Calvin Foster has been the KRWA contact with the Corps for many years and he is retiring. So, they are going to have to get used to some new faces. The new manual is going to cost about $6 million due to the gold leafing. Attorney Doug Jensen asked why so much. Haugen said the Corps is supposed to update it every 10-years and hasn’t done so since 1979. I’ve heard the average Army Corps project takes 20-years to complete.
Haugen said the elevator in Pine Flat Dam has been repaired by the Corps and it is possible to conduct tours there again. It was suggested to wait until the Corps use it for a while before taking a ride. I guess it was pretty shaky last time. This also gives KRWA time to lobby for better music.
Legislative Report
Alex Dominguez reported AB 828 would exclude wetlands and some DACs from State
Board control from SGMA. Assembly Bill 460 by Rebecca Bauer Kahn was started last year and has been fought over. It will require the increase of State Board fines to keep up with inflation or better. It sets the new fine at $10,000 per day. AB 1390 would impact moving flood water into recharge but it died.
On the federal side the House is looking at a continuing resolution and that includes a voter identification provision. There isn’t a lot of hope for this to pass the Senate.
Other
Haugen spoke about a request by California Fish & Wildlife’s request to have access to property to hunt nutria, also known as swamp rats. He showed slides of where the little
furry guys have been found. All over the Kings and San Joaquin Rivers. The problem with them is they burrow into levees and canal banks which makes a mess of things. They are clean animals, completely vegan and you can find them on the menu in fine restaurants in New Orleans. It was also mentioned there might be some money savings if some undocumented aliens from Ohio were imported to eradicate the nutria.
Finances
The financials, including an audit committee report were approved. The meeting adjourned at 11:13am. The special Board meeting started immediately at 11:14am. Role was called and that increased the voting by a few folks who were already in the room. There were no public comments and the minutes were approved. The meeting then went into closed session. And that was that.
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KINGS RIVER WATER ASSOCIATION – 4886 E. Jensen Avenue, Fresno, CA 93725 559/237-5567 www.kingsriverwater.org
Staff: Water Master – Steve Haugen, Attorney – Joe Hughes, Assistant Water Master – Matt Meadows
Board: Frank Zonneveld – Chair, Ryan Jacobsen – Vice Chair, Phil Desatoff, Jerry Halford, John Mendes, Ronnie Silva, Bill Stretch & Jeof Wyrick
