The Lower Kern River May Flow Again
The Kern River, as it runs through the city of Bakersfield, has been mostly dry for more than half a century. Credit: Bring Back the Kern.
By John Shelton and Ron Stork
Exciting things are happening on the Lower Kern River. After more than half a century of being dewatered in most years, there’s a serious chance of getting the lower river flowing again.
Almost two years ago, Bring Back the Kern, Water Audit California, Kern River Parkway Foundation, Kern Audubon Society, Sierra Club, and Center for Biological Diversity sued the City of Bakersfield in Kern County Superior Court over the failure to protect river flows under the Public Trust Doctrine and California Fish and Game Code §5937. Five local agricultural districts intervened on the side of the city.
As last fall’s high flows filled the river channel with water (and fish) through Bakersfield all the way down to the California Aqueduct, the court granted a Preliminary Injunction(1) to prevent the river from drying up and subsequently ordered that 40% of the unimpaired flow of water in the Kern River be maintained as an “interim flow regime.” Unfortunately, the 5th Court of Appeals stayed the injunction this spring.
While fighting the injunction, the plaintiff coalition is gearing up for the effort to secure permanent flows for the lower Kern River. As part of that effort, they have brought on river restoration experts from Friends of the River to advise the coalition and prepare expert testimony and exhibits on aquatic ecology, water operations and related areas. It’s not FOR’s first rodeo on the Kern (see below for a brief history).
There’s tremendous public support for re-watering the Kern, not only for the health of its fish and wildlife, but to provide access to a living river from the headwaters to its lower reaches. Bakersfield(2) and Kern County(3) have several parks along the River and a bicycle/pedestrian path that is over 30 miles long.
The 165 mile-long Kern River, once known as el Río de San Felipe, drains a 2,420 square mile area of the southern Sierra Nevada that starts with the western slope of Mt. Whitney. It’s one of the few rivers in California that generally flows in a southernly direction, ultimately to Lake Isabella reservoir, built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) in 1953. From Isabella, through the “canyon reach,” the river flows towards Bakersfield. Historically, the River had distributaries that flowed to Kern Lake, Buena Vista Lake, or Goose Lake and eventually northward to Tulare Lake. Some of the earliest changes to the geography of the Southern San Joaquin Valley was the building of levees to contain the Kern from flowing toward Kern Lake and then more work to keep Buena Vista Lake from overflowing into swamplands.
Prior to 1914, several entities claimed rights to the Kern River. The City of Bakersfield’s water rights were initially recognized in the 1888 "Miller-Haggin Agreement," which memorialized a compromise between the riparian and appropriative water rights on the Kern River and established the two points of measurement of water flow: an upstream "First Point" of measurement and a downstream "Second Point" of measurement, managed by the city. In 1976, the City of Bakersfield purchased some Kern River rights and diversion structures in the river channel.
FOR’s History on the Kern
North Fork Kern River, FOR Archives.
Friends of the River first became involved with the Kern River in 1987, when we had just concluded our Three Rivers Campaign — a team effort with our L.A. and Orange County chapters. Our objective had been to designate the North Fork of the Kern as part of the national wild & scenic river system. We had done that from the headwaters to the Tulare/Kern County line and picked up the South Fork Kern within the Sequoia National Forest as a bonus (there is a longer story about that one).(4)
The stage for the 1987 bill had been set earlier by the work of Senator Alan Cranston (D‑CA) with Idaho’s Senator Frank Church for the passage of the National Parks and Recreation Act of 1978. That Act had included the NF Kern from Isabella Reservoir to the headwaters as a Congressionally designated study river.
In the 1980s and the early 1990s, ever plucky, we spent some time trying to convince Rep. Bill Thomas (R‑Bakersfield), who had joined the House of Representatives in 1978, to carry similar legislation for parts of the Kern River below Lake Isabella Reservoir. He dodged giving a finite “yes” or “no.” We never asked his successor, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R‑Bakersfield), but perhaps we should have.
Throughout this time, FOR participated in Kern hydroelectric project relicensings before the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). Hydropower relicensings are a critical forum to achieve meaningful improvements for rivers, including ecological and recreational benefits.
On the Kern we were working on the relicensing of Southern California Edison’s (Edison) run-of-the-river hydroelectric project (KR 3) on the NF Kern (the “Upper Kern” rafting and wild & scenic river reach) and Edison’s Isabella storage-influenced KR 1 around the popular “Jungle Run” of the Kern River. Those projects got relicensed (with some conditions). Interestingly, enough time has elapsed that they are once again being relicensed (5), this time with American Whitewater taking the lead for the California Hydropower Reform Coalition (of which we are a member).
Given some of the problems FOR had with another Edison project back in the day, it’s ironic that Edison’s Borel Hydroelectric Project (from the Isabella Auxiliary Dam to KR1) (6) recently got erased by a force mightier than Southern California Edison: the Corps of Engineers Dam Safety program. (The Corps just spent a half a billion dollars rebuilding its “Lake” Isabella dams, Edison was in the way, and like the Vogons of Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, they don’t move aside easily).
Resources
(1) Preliminary Injuction preventing the Kern from drying
(2) Bakersfield Kern River Parkway Trail
(4) Act to designate the Kern River as a national wild and scenic river
(5) Relicensings of KR1 and KR3
(6) Borel Project
