The Sacramento Valley: California's Great Exception?

The Sacramento River Watershed Program has released a fascinating online report on suburban sprawl and the demise of agriculture in the Sacramento Valley. It appears to be a work in progress, and the "best management practices" identified for governments to cope with sprawl are nothing new. But there is plenty of interesting information and analysis packed into the presentation. The GIS layer maps that accompany the text are especially noteworthy.

One of the more interesting observations related to the suburbanization and exurbanization of the Sacramento Valley concerns the availability of water. In most of the state, the availability of water is one of the principal checks on unrestrained sprawl. Not so in the Sacramento Valley, according to the authors:

Below the Delta and the federal and state pumping plants, water is the principal limiting factor for exurban sprawl. This is not the case for the Sacramento Valley and much of the Sierra foothills in the Sacramento Watershed. The groundwater basin in the Sacramento Valley recharges readily from the normally abundant rainfall in Northern California. In only a few areas has groundwater depletion become problematic, like in eastern Sacramento County where urban and medium density suburbs were allowed to develop solely reliant on groundwater pumping. Very likely, all the areas zoned for low density rural residential development have sufficient groundwater supplies.

Abundant groundwater resources are the exception in California, where most development has depended on guarantees of imported water. Thus, when making predictions about the build-out of the Sacramento Watershed, it is not prudent to look at the patterns from Southern California where local water supplies were the limiting factor, or the Bay Area, where confined geography have restricted exurban rural residential growth. Other areas of the nation may provide more accurate models for the potential of exurban build-out in the Sacramento Watershed.

Groundwater-fed development will also differ from development in regions that rely on surface water (including state or federal project water) in another important aspect. While surface water diversions are highly regulated and governed by a complex system of water rights and contractual obligations, comprehensive regulation of groundwater use in California is much less developed. Where the state plays an active role in overseeing the use of the state's rivers, streams, and reservoirs, the regulation of groundwater extraction is mostly a local matter. The jurisdictions charged with regulating groundwater uses are also those most directly embroiled in local disputes about land use and development. The state has little direct power to ensure the sustainable use of groundwater resources.

A Water Koan

How do you build your way to preservation and population control?

California's dual water projects are generally hailed as the foundation of both large-scale agriculture in the Central Valley and the massive growth of Southern California. Farmers and southern California land speculators were among the strongest proponents for construction of the system of reservoirs and conveyance facilities that crisscross the state. It goes without saying that federal and state subsidy of these twin water works was crucial to the growth of the economy and population of the state's arid and desert regions.

There is, however, a tantalizing alternative explanation for the motives of at least one key player in the construction of the State Water Project. Marc Reisner’s fabulous Cadillac Desert cites an oral history interview of former Gov. Edmund Brown, Sr., regarding his motives for tirelessly championing the construction of the State Water Project:

...Brown suggested another motive that had made him, a northern California by birth, want so badly to build a project which would send a lot of northern California’s water southward:

“Some of my advisers came to me and said, ‘Now governor, don’t bring the water to the people, let the people go to the water. That’s a desert down there. Ecologically, it can’t sustain the number of people that will come if you bring the water project in there.’

“I weighed this very, very thoughtfully before I started going all out for the water project. Some of my advisers said to me, ‘Yes, but people are going to come to southern California anyway.’ Somebody said, ‘Well, send them up to northern California.’ I knew I wouldn’t be governor forever. I didn’t think I’d ever come down to southern California, and I said to myself, ‘I don’t want all these people to go to northern California’.”

So you like the relatively sparse population and agreeable climate of Northern California? Thank Pat Brown for having the foresight to divert the sprawl to the expendable regions of the Southland...