A decade after initiating the process, Santa Cruz water officials have finally come up with a proposal for making sure key streams and rivers in Santa Cruz County have enough water to support endangered coho salmon and steelhead.
At press time, Santa Cruz Water Department Director Bill Kocher was preparing to make a Tuesday afternoon presentation of the Habitat Conservation Plan to the city council. Kocher says the plan involves reducing the amount of water the department takes from the San Lorenzo River and other streams by almost 20 percent—though he calls that a rough estimate and cautions that the figure would be higher in drought years and lower in wet ones.
Furthermore, Kocher says, in formulating this plan the department aimed for the middle of three scenarios, dubbed “Tier 2.” Leaving 800 million gallons—or about 18 percent of the city’s water usage—in the rivers for the salmonids would maintain “what our biologist considers to be minimum flows necessary to not harm the species,” Kocher says. Creating optimal (Tier 3) conditions would take much more water.
The waterways in question include the San Lorenzo River, Newell Creek (which feeds Loch Lomond Reservoir) and four North Coast streams: Laguna Creek, Majors Creek, Reggiardo Creek and Liddell Spring. The North Coast streams, Kocher explains, supply 25 percent of Santa Cruz’s drinking water and are so pure that they require a minimum of treatment; in fact reducing the water take from those streams could necessitate a treatment plant upgrade to the tune of $30 million.
Desalination opponents smell something fishy in the timing of the report. In an email to Santa Cruz Weekly, Desal Alternatives spokesman Rick Longinotti noted that during August 2010 talks with UCSC on extending water services to accommodate the school’s growth plan, the department said it had no idea how much water the fish would need. Now, desal opponents say, with another 3,000 water connections to manage and a crisis among the salmonids, the water department is better positioned to push a desalination plant as a solution to the worsening water scarcity problem.
“Eight months after approving the UCSC water service extension, the Water Department now is able to quantify the water supply reduction, and we’re told that desalination is the only way out,” Longinotti wrote.
Said Kocher on Tuesday morning, “I don’t want today’s discussion to have anything to do with augmenting supply, but the inescapable fact that if we don’t augment our supply we can’t meet these goals.”
