The rebirth of the San Joaquin River can be traced to Dec. 21, 1988, a cool and rainy Sacramento day when environmental and fishing groups filed suit to restore the flow of water.

Many deals and melodramas were to follow.

“Frankly, it was touch-and-go quite a bit of the way,” said Rep. George Radanovich, R-Mariposa.

Four presidents have left the White House since the Natural Resources Defense Council and 14 other groups filed the initial suit against the federal Bureau of Reclamation. No San Joaquin Valley congressman or California senator in office at the time remains in power. Some former rivals now collaborate; some former allies now disagree.

Three turning points stand out in the 21-year history of the river restoration deal:

t December 1988: The lawsuit is randomly assigned to U.S. District Judge Lawrence J. Karlton, an appointee of President Jimmy Carter. Over the next 18 years, Karlton will repeatedly rule against the government and water users who had joined the case.

t May 1999: The U.S. Supreme Court declines to hear farmers’ appeal, prompting farmers to initiate negotiations for a potential compromise. Four years of experiments and discussions eventually collapse short of a final deal, but they set the foundation for what happens next.

t July 2005: Alarmed at the prospect of Judge Karlton making San Joaquin River allocations, Radanovich and Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California quietly urge farmers and environmentalists to resume negotiating. The congressional pressure helps keep negotiators working until an agreement is announced in September 2006.

The dealmaking, in turn, has had other consequences far beyond the river restoration itself. Some are still being played out.

For example: The decision in late 2006 by Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Visalia, to fight the restoration plan roiled his relations with congressional colleagues.

And Feinstein’s decision in late 2008 to effectively cut the bill’s price tag eased the path for congressional approval, but left some decisions to another day.

The Chowchilla Water District, once a backer of the restoration deal, divorced itself from other Friant-area water districts because of their disagreements. The Madera Irrigation District supported the deal, then backed away from it, then supported it again.

The plan is to restore continuous water flows and salmon to the San Joaquin River’s 150-mile stretch between Friant Dam and the Merced River. The deal calls for the salmon to be reintroduced by Dec. 31, 2012.

Currently, an average of 116,000 acre-feet of water flows from Friant Dam annually. Assorted river channel improvements will enable this water flow to increase to between 247,000 acre-feet of water in dry years and 555,000 acre-feet in wet years.

“After this long effort, it is good to finally be focused on the restoration work,” said lawyer Hal Candee, who filed the original environmental lawsuit. “We were always aware that it would be a difficult case and would have many challenges, but we also felt very strongly that the federal or the state government wouldn’t accept a permanent condition of a dry San Joaquin River.”

But Kole Upton, a Chowchilla Water District director who also helped negotiate the deal, is now one of its leading opponents. He asserts the government, environmentalists and “some of my fellow partners … reneged” on the original compromise.

Upton cited revised plans for “recirculating” San Joaquin River water that is used for river restoration. This entails pumping water out of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and sending it back via the California Aqueduct to some of the affected Friant districts.