Trump’s water ignorance is glaring. Two San Joaquin Valley lawmakers know better | Opinion
There is no more complex subject than California water, thanks to years of legal wrangling for a resource that is too limited to meet all the demands.
So President Trump got tripped up recently when discussing the Los Angeles-area wildfires. He tried to make it seem simple when he said Gov. Newsom had wrongly kept water from flowing to Southern California in order to protect an obscure little fish. The firefighters did not have enough water to battle the flames, Trump said.
Not so fast, Mr. President. Southern California had all the supply it needed from water projects; the hoses ran dry because there was too much demand in real time. Besides, SoCal doesn’t rely only on water from up north. It gets major shares from the Colorado River and the Eastern Sierra, facts any president should know. And, when the fires broke out, Southern California’s main reservoirs were full.
Trump probably does know all that, and he just wanted to criticize Newsom and California’s Democratic leaders. In fact, one of the executive orders Trump signed upon taking office for the second time has the unwieldy title of “Putting people over fish: Stopping radical environmentalism to provide water to Southern California.”
The order directs the secretaries of commerce and the interior to restart efforts from Trump’s first term “to route more water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to other parts of the state for use by the people there who desperately need a reliable water supply.”
While sounding reasonable, the order ignores how the fish in question — the tiny Delta smelt — has federal protection as a threatened species, and it is listed by the state as endangered. Those protections are legally binding.
Court battles will surely follow the president’s new order. That’s because even a president cannot just flip a switch and send more water flowing south. Water is a commodity, with rights to it divided up hundreds of ways between cities, farmers and the environment.
Water bills offered
Fortunately, two veteran congressional representatives in the San Joaquin Valley understand water better than Trump, and are proposing a pair of bills that would provide some meaningful new supplies.
Democrat Jim Costa of Fresno has introduced the bills and Republican David Valadao of Hanford is the primary co-sponsor. Another co-sponsor is Democrat Adam Gray of Merced. The bills would provide funding for groundwater recharge projects in the Valley, the key means for improving supply in this era of climate change.
HR 338, called the Every Drop Counts Act, would make it easier for groundwater recharge projects to qualify for federal funding. One of the projects that would be helped is the Upper Kings River Water and Climate Resiliency Program. It seeks to construct new basins covering a total of 3,300 acres. The basins would be located throughout Fresno County.
“These newly constructed basins will capture and recharge surface water supply in wet years to allow for groundwater pumping in dry years,” says a fact sheet produced by three local water districts involved in the project.
Costa’s second bill, the Groundwater Recharge Technical Assistance Act, or HR 337, would provide $3 million a year for projects to store water underground, improve flood protection and provide more clean drinking water. Gray is also a co-sponsor of this bill.
“Groundwater recharge is one of the most effective ways to build resilience against drought,” Costa said in announcing the new legislation.
Drought returning?
That drought might be returning was evident when I took a recent trip to the mountains.
I used the MLK Day holiday to head into Sequoia National Forest. My wife and I ventured to Hume Lake to hike the easy trail around it. The weather was superb: crisp winter air, bright blue sky, light breeze.
And no snow.
Normally, Jan. 20 means at least ankle-deep snow covering the forest around Hume Lake. Not this year. There were barely patches of snow in the shaded areas. Where the sun broke through, there was bare, dry ground. The highway was completely clear all the way to Hume.
My wife and I have been venturing to Hume Lake for decades, and I had never driven out from the Christian camp on Ten Mile Road in the winter. Normally the roadway is covered in snow drifts and the Forest Service has it closed off. Not this year. We headed out on Ten Mile and got up to Quail Flat with no problems. It was lovely — and scary.
January is normally one of California’s wettest months. But this January has been exceedingly dry. The Bee’s weather page, as of Jan. 21, showed the city receiving only .05 inch of rain this month. Normally, Fresno would have had 1.39 inches.
There has not yet been a drought declaration for this year, and the northern Sierra snow pack is in better shape than in the mountains near Fresno.
But droughts are a fact in California. So is legal fighting over water — and the threat of wildfire. These challenges do not yield to quick fixes by a new president.
This story was originally published January 22, 2025 at 5:30 AM.
