Testimony of
Jason Phillips, Chief Executive Officer, Friant Water Authority
Before the
House of Representatives Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development and Related Agencies
Public Witness Written Testimony
March 31, 2020
My name is Jason Phillips, and I am the Chief Executive Officer of the Friant Water Authority in California. The Friant Water Authority (Authority or Friant) is a public agency formed under California law to operate, maintain and replace the Friant-Kern Canal, a component of the Central Valley Project (CVP) owned by the Bureau of Reclamation (Reclamation) and to represent our members in federal or state policy, political, and operational decisions that could affect the Friant Division’s water supply. Our goal is to provide dependable, sustainable water from Millerton Reservoir to Friant Contractors.
Thank you for the opportunity to share Friant’s views on the potential funding priorities for the Fiscal Year (FY) 2021 for the Energy and Water Development appropriations bill. Friant is particularly well positioned to comment on the topic of appropriations to support investments in infrastructure, given: (1) our role as the local operator and responsible agency for the Friant-Kern Canal, and (2) the significant water-related challenges Friant and others face in the San Joaquin Valley (Valley) and elsewhere in California.
The 152-mile-long Friant-Kern Canal and the 36-mile-long Madera Canal, together with Friant Dam and Millerton Lake on the San Joaquin River, form the Friant Division of the Central Valley Project. On average, the Division delivers 1.2 million acre-feet of irrigation water annually through the Friant Kern Canal and the Madera Canal to more than 15,000 farms on over million acres of the most productive farmland in the world. Friant Division deliveries also are vital to meeting the domestic water needs of many small communities in the San Joaquin Valley, as well as larger metropolitan areas, including the City of Fresno – California’s fifth-largest city.
The Friant Division was designed and is operated as a conjunctive use project to convey surface water for direct beneficial uses, such as irrigation and municipal supplies, and to recharge groundwater basins in the southern San Joaquin Valley. The ability to move significant water through the canals in wetter years to store in groundwater recharge basins is critically important for the project to work as intended.
The San Joaquin Valley is home to about 5 million acres of productive, irrigated farmland and includes 4 of the top 5 agriculture-producing counties in the United States. More than half of all produce and nuts grown in the United States come from the Valley. The Valley’s economy is largely centered around agriculture.
Over the past 30 years, federal and state regulations redirecting surface water away from agriculture to flow through the Sacramento – San Joaquin River Delta (Delta) in an attempt to address declining fish populations have forced San Joaquin Valley water users to rely more heavily on groundwater supplies to maintain economic viability. Additionally, in 2014 the State of California imposed new groundwater regulations that will severely restrict future use of this supply, including during droughts.
The resulting human impacts looming on the horizon are nothing short of catastrophic. A study by Dr. David Sunding, Thomas J. Graff Professor in the College of Natural Resources at the University of California, Berkeley, estimates that the Valley’s water imbalance will result in retirement of up to 1 million acres of currently productive farmland. As a result, the state is poised lose 85,000 jobs annually, with 45,000 of those losses occurring to Valley farmworkers, farm managers, and people in the agricultural service sector. This is equivalent to an increase in the regional unemployment rate of about 4% per year annually. The associated annual wage loss is estimated at $2.1 billion. Annual farm revenue losses are estimated at $7.2 billon.
From 2012-2015, the Valley’s water imbalance problem was compounded as California weathered its worst drought on record, and many farms and communities faced severe cutbacks to their available surface water supplies. This left the San Joaquin Valley in a state of extreme groundwater overdraft, which occurs when groundwater is extracted faster than it is replenished over the long term.
The effect of overdraft in the Valley has caused subsidence of ground levels in some areas of a foot or more per year which has significantly reduced conveyance capacity of three major canals serving the Valley: the Friant-Kern and Delta-Mendota canals, which are both part of the CVP, and the California Aqueduct, which is part of the State Water Project.
In the case of the Friant-Kern Canal, a portion of the facility sunk more than three feet from 2013 through 2017 due to land subsidence, and we’ve now lost 60% of our ability to deliver water past this point. The canal is a gravity-fed facility and does not rely on pumps to move water, which means small changes in elevation can have major impacts for water delivery. Subsidence has caused parts of the canal to sink in relationship to other parts. As a result, the canal must be operated at a lower flow-stage to ensure that water does not overflow its banks or several bridge crossings.
In 2017, 300,000 acre-feet of water could not be delivered through the southernmost third of the canal. Most, if not all, of this water would have been used to support groundwater recharge – a desperately needed and critical function the canal was designed to achieve for the communities and industries that rely on it.
Action must be taken now to restore access to surface water by fixing the Friant-Kern Canal and other conveyance facilities. For more than two years, we have worked on the planning, design, and permitting for a project to restore the conveyance capacity of the most-severely affected portion of the canal. Current engineering cost estimates are in the range of $500 million simply to address this problem only; addressing other, less-critical conveyance pinches in the canal could cost another $200 million.
Friant Water Authority is financially responsible for the operation, maintenance, and replacement (OM&R) on the Friant-Kern Canal but the cause of the subsidence impacting the canal is caused by a number of factors that are completely out of our control. Friant cannot afford to pay for this scope of repairs on its own. We have not been able to borrow the large amount of money needed for these repairs from the Federal government due to the lack of appropriated dollars for these loans. We cannot finance the repair through private bonds at an affordable rate because we do not own the canal itself as an asset. Instead, we are pursuing a multipronged approach to build a partnership of local, state, and Federal investment in restoring the canal’s conveyance capacity. In fact, we are working with the State of California to secure a state investment in the Friant-Kern Canal capacity correction project.
We understand the constraints that Federal agencies and the Congress face in funding or financing infrastructure projects. However, we would like to propose a few recommendations that would help on the Friant-Kern Canal capacity correction project and many others like it:
The Congress should work to appropriate significant funds for long-term affordable loans, authorized under P.L. 111-11 to address aging federal water infrastructure repairs, such as the subsidence-driven conveyance challenges in for the Friant-Kern Canal and other affected infrastructure in the West, since these facilities are owned by the Federal government.
Low-interest loans for water infrastructure, such as those available through the U.S. Department of Agriculture and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency under the WIFIA program, should be made available to local agencies with transferred works agreements, as they are legally responsible to pay for this work on federally owned facilities.
Even with these policy changes and the infrastructure improvements they support, more must be done. The Friant-Kern Canal represents only a small fraction of the overall solution to this larger crisis in the Valley. The directors, staff, and communities served by the Friant-Kern Canal stand ready to work with you and your colleagues to find solutions to help keep the breadbasket of the world productive and to keep food on America’s tables.
Thank you,
Jason Phillip, CEO
Friant Water Authority