As goes water, so goes Sonoma Valley
SUN EDITORIAL
Once famous for its precious metals, it’s now water that’s precious here in California. Our northern region was so water rich Southern California became America’s food basket, the California water aqueduct system moving millions of gallons of Northern water south and huge pumps pushing vast amounts of water over mountains for the south’s agriculture and expanding cities and suburbs.
Here in Sonoma Valley, 95 percent City and Valley of the Moon District water comes from the Russian River, itself a diminishing resource due to over-extraction, gravel mining, fishery protection and low rainfall. The expansion of vineyards, ground water pumping and expanded residential and commercial projects have all placed great stress on our water resource, and our prolonged drought is exposing the costs of such growth. Brackish water is infiltrating our southern valley’s underground aquifer, and has moved more than a mile up the valley from the Bay in the past 20 years as extraction rates exceed recharge rates.
Meanwhile, we still have only voluntary restrictions on drilling wells on private property and no clear data about what represents safe yield of water for extraction. Lack of required metering and reporting contributes to our ignorance. Obviously, water crosses all jurisdictional boundaries, and even if the City of Sonoma adopts tighter regulations, it has little effect if the larger unincorporated Valley maintains the status quo. Competing interests vigorously defend their rights to our common pool. Those who conserve water quickly discover that others wait in the wings to consume the very savings their efforts have produced. An ethic of economic growth above all else dominates public policy in the hopes that more money will solve all problems.
In this issue of The Sun we’re exploring the issue of water from a variety of perspectives. We’re convinced water — it’s availability, conservation, allocation and cost — will dominate discussion and the economy of our Valley for years to come. At this point, it looks to us as if most regulatory and pricing policies are contradictory and self-defeating. Based on the example in its letter to customers, our calculations show that in 2015 an increase in water rates proposed by the City will deliver water to commercial customers at a lower cost per gallon than to residents. The five-year plan will increase city residential water rates by 29 percent and commercial rates by 39 percent in an effort to encourage conservation and keep up with costs, but there is no plan in place to limit new commercial development that will easily consume all the water that is conserved. This is what we mean by self-defeating.
Granted, water policy in California has been a confusing mess for a long time. We are one of the few states in which ground water rights allow landowners to sink wells and extract as much water from the common aquifer as they choose with no metering or records required. In flush times of ample rainfall, surging rivers and filled reservoirs such a laissez faire approach may have seemed workable, but climate change has altered our appreciation of water. Hopefully it is not too late to develop policies and plans that guard against a continuation of the wasteful and profligate consumption of the past.
We need to look for ways to be innovative, creative and smart and not let our attachment to the ways of the past hobble our vision and efforts to craft new solutions. Water is the one thing we cannot do without; everyone has a stake in making sure we don’t continue to do “business as usual” and risk waking up one day with our taps running dry. Now is not the time to be timid or greedy; we still have a chance to make a plan for a dryer future but we’re running out of options.
We hope some of the suggestions and ideas contained in this issue will prompt our leaders — political, business, agricultural, environmental and scientific — to set aside their self-interests enough to really take a hard and honest look at our water future, understanding that when it comes to water if that does not happen, Sonoma Valley’s future may be not at all what anybody wanted.
