Fiddling along the South Fork American
It had always been a strange sideshow to the 2007-era negotiations surrounding the relicensing of the Sacramento Municipal Utility District’s (SMUD) Upper American River Project (UARP). El Dorado County, which might have prioritized protecting and developing recreational amenities along the South Fork of the American River, was plainly focused on another prize.
That prize turned out to be an agreement with SMUD(1) to use portions of SMUD’s UARP hydroelectric project to irrigate vineyards, orchards, and houses somewhere in El Dorado County. The agreement was not popular with the parties in the relicensing (it would potentially remove up to 40,000 acre-feet of water from the South Fork), so in the end it was just a side agreement between the County and SMUD.
Of course, the County would need to change secure water rights for consumptive uses. SMUD only has power rights. To do so, the El Dorado Water and Power Authority applied for the rights and completed a draft environmental impact report (EIR) back in 2008 and 2010. The resulting comments weren’t too complimentary, and the County effort went dormant until 2024, when the El Dorado County Water Agency revived the effort and released a second draft EIR(2).
So Friends of the River, joined by American Whitewater, American River Outfitters Association, California Outdoors, American River Recreation Association, California Sportfishing Protection Alliance, the Mother Lode Chapter of the Sierra Club, and Hilde Schweitzer, spent some of the Christmas and New Years holidays, preparing a 32-page comment letter to help the County understand its best choice(3).
Frankly, it was pretty clear that the best choice was to park the water rights application indefinitely. Surprisingly, the El Dorado Irrigation District’s (they deliver most of the water in the County) comments didn’t fall far from our conclusions.
The first parts of our comments explored the conflict between the requirements of the California Water Code’s that rights be diligently pursued and the County’s apparent goal to secure the water rights for some indefinite time when the rights might be used. Frankly, our comments here were solid, well-reasoned, and powerful, and I am still idealistic enough to believe that they will be persuasive.
Of course we could not fail to not raise issues that should arise if the proposed diversions actually materialize.
For now, we await the County’s response.
Resources
(1) EID’s 2008 Water Rights Application - see reference to “Cooperation Agreement”
