CHICO, Calif. (CN) - A plan to transfer water from the Butte Water District to Kern County and two other areas could harm several species, a group claims in court.
Last month, the Butte Water District (BWD) approved a plan to transfer up to 16,850 acre-feet of water from the Feather River in Butte County to the water districts for Dudley Ridge, Kern and Palmdale counties, according to AquAlliance, a group that monitors water use in the Sacramento River watershed.
Representing 60 percent of Chico's annual water demand, 93 percent of the water will go to Kern, 4.8 percent to Dudley Ridge and 2 percent to Palmdale, AquAlliance says.
The nonprofit and its executive director Barbara Vlamis sued Butte Water District in Superior Court for violations of the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). The three other water districts are named as real parties in interest.
"BWD would make the water available to the real parties in interest by idling cropland or through groundwater substitution," the complaint states.
AquAlliance also says groundwater-use restrictions in Butte County will confine groundwater substitutions to BWD's service areas in Sutter County.
"BWD would also generate transfer water by replacing surface water from district wells located in Sutter County with water pumped from the groundwater basin underlying Butte and Sutter Counties," the complaint states.
AquAlliance says the BWD approved the project after an initial study purportedly showed no major negative effects on the county's groundwater supply or on the surrounding environment by the water-transfer project.
The so-called negative declaration also found that the project would have "less than significant effects" in four areas required for analysis under CEQA: visual effects, biological resources, cumulative effects and hydrology, the complaint states.
But AquAlliance says the declaration did not comply with CEQA and that the district should have prepared an environmental impact report.
AquAlliance attorney Michael Jackson did not want to speculate about the district's motivation, but said its reliance on an initial study rather than a comprehensive impact report fits a pattern.
"They've been getting by with doing only initial studies for the past 10 years," Jackson told Courthouse News in an interview. "They keep transferring small amounts of water without figuring out if it's causing impacts on the environment."
Though Kern County irrefutably has groundwater problems, AquAlliance says pumping from other districts is not the solution.
"The Kern River is one of the world's best examples of what happens when you pump too much groundwater: the water dries up, and you end up with a river of dirt," Jackson said.
Though the Butte district concluded that the project would have no significant effect on the environment, AquAlliance says the study failed to consider the project in combination with the plan of the California Department of Water Resource (DWR) to transfer 250,000 acre-feet of Northern California water to regions south of the Delta.
"By segmenting many BWD and DWR projects into numerous pieces and preparing only portions of the environmental review (and regulatory permitting) consecutively as opposed to concurrently, the lead agencies have failed to consider the whole of the project and therefore have failed to analyze the broader ecological implications of the project," the group said in a joint letter to the district with two other water groups.
