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CSPA and Other Groups Tell Merced Irrigation District to Take Responsibility for Merced River Salmon and Steelhead
July 15, 2009. In a lengthy comment letter filed today with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, a coalition Conservation Groups including CSPA performed a legal and factual dissection of Merced Irrigation District’s attempt to delay and evade responsibility for salmon and steelhead declines in the Merced River.
MID has tried to completely avoid studying the effects of its Merced River Hydroelectric Project, and its associated water supply deliveries for irrigation, by using a procedural dodge. The goal is to keep FERC from exercising its authority and to keep fisheries advocates from having a voice. The means is to say that an agricultural diversion dam downstream of MID’s Merced River Hydroelectric Project ends FERC’s authority to set flows for the protection of fish, even though FERC has been setting those flows for 45 years.
Chris Shutes, CSPA’s FERC Projects Director, issued the following statement:
These guys have been saying since 2002 that they’d address anadromous fish when they relicensed their project. CSPA filed a complaint in 1995. MID stalled for seven years, then begged off till relicensing. Now they want to slam the door, and say that the operation of their million acre-foot storage reservoir, the only significant storage in the watershed, doesn’t affect the river downstream and can’t be mitigated. Since power production isn’t the only use of the river, someone else should be in charge downstream of the first place that there is some other use.
Of course, that first downstream user is also MID, but with its agricultural hat on. It wouldn’t surprise me to see a water rights process where MID claimed that the state has nothing to say because the authority is pre-empted by FERC.
Then there’s the passage issue. MID says the hydroelectric project doesn’t block passage because of the diversion dam downstream. We went into the history of the river and showed that passage was restricted by the irrigation diversions and by the tiny
The immediate issue in the FERC proceeding is to get studies underway to see what is needed to improve salmon and steelhead numbers downstream of the project, and to get salmon and steelhead upstream of the New Exchequer rim dam. The Conservation Groups proposed five studies, and supported thirteen others filed by resource agencies, with whom the Conservation Groups coordinated their action.
Brian Johnson, staff counsel with Trout Unlimited, and Michael Martin, fisheries biologist with the Merced River Conservation Committee, were the principal authors of the document along with CSPA’s Chris Shutes. Friends of the River, Golden West Women Flyfishers, the Northern California Council of the Federation of Fly Fishers and American Rivers are also signatories to the filing.