‘There’s just no water to waste:’ Sonoma and Mendocino counties brace for renewed restrictions as drought deepens

“I hope our community doesn’t wait for their local retailer to have to pass a resolution to start conserving water,” said Jay Jasperse, chief engineer and director of groundwater management for Sonoma Water, which supplies more than 600,000 consumers in Sonoma and northern Marin counties.

“Everyone should be mindful of that and not waste a drop of water,” Jasperse said. “While the cities and district are going to take action, let’s not wait.”

Sonoma County Board of Supervisors Chair Lynda Hopkins said the urgency of the situation should be evident in recent, stark images of lakes Mendocino and Sonoma, the two main reservoirs for the Russian River basin.

“I don’t think we need to set (conservation) targets” to convey the reality of the crisis, she said, given the signals that nature is providing.

“I think people receive information in different ways,” she said.

The reservoirs supply water to most of Mendocino and Sonoma counties, as well as serving agricultural needs, sustaining aquatic life and providing recreational opportunities. Both reservoirs have never been lower at this time of year, with the dry months of high water use still to come.

The receding shorelines — shifted in places by hundreds of yards — have revealed expanses of parched and cracked lake bed, with barren embankments etched by lines from more plentiful years in the past.

“I will say it could be the drought of record,” said Jasperse. “It’s right there with 1976-77, depending where you get your rainfall data. It’s a severe two-year drought.”

Lake Mendocino, the far smaller reservoir, is holding about 44% of what it normally stores. Lake Sonoma is at about 62% of normal. Its supply, if carefully managed, should last through the year into next, water managers said.

“I think it’s very clear we all need to be conserving now,” Hopkins said Friday. “I recognize that there are analytical processes going on, in terms of the hard numbers right now, but my biggest message to the public is: ’Yes, it’s a drought. Yes, it’s urgent, and we all need to conserve.’”

Deeper cuts more difficult as historic use drops

Sonoma County residents have become fairly adept at cutting back where it is easy, as demonstrated by significant conservation efforts during the last drought.

In 2013, the average consumer in Sonoma and northern Marin counties was using 128 gallons of water per person, per day, compared to 107 gallons in 2019-20, according to the Sonoma-Marin Partnership annual report.

In Santa Rosa, residents managed to save so much water they were using only 86 gallons per capita, per day in 2016. The numbers had inched up by last year, but still remained well below a 129-gallon state target, Santa Rosa City Water Director Jennifer Burke said.

There are some encouraging signs that early conservation messages are sinking in. Since January, when Santa Rosa began messaging aggressively about dry weather and the need to conserve, municipal customers cut their water use across the first three months by 15% compared to the first three months of 2020, Burke said.

“Our community is responding,” she said.

Sonoma Water also is delivering 25% less water to local cities and water companies than it did more than a decade ago. The biggest drop overlapped with the last drought, going from about 54,000 acre feet in 2014-15 to about 45,000 in 2019-20. (An acre foot is roughly the amount of water needed to cover a football field one foot deep.)

“Use has gone down because of conservation,” Sherwood said.

Rabbitt and Hopkins said mindful consumers have mastered the “low-hanging fruit” — the easy things like washing full loads of laundry and dishes, taking shorter showers and turning off faucets while brushing teeth.

Changes in landscaping and land use come next.

“It becomes a little more difficult to conserve water here on out,” Rabbitt said.

Call for earlier action, lasting changes

Still, Russian Riverkeeper Don McEnhill, whose organization is focused on stewardship and advocacy, said he wishes more robust conservation messaging and measures had been employed last year, before waiting for a second dry year, “when there was a chance to keep some water in the lake.”

Lake Mendocino is so small, it can really only store a year or two worth of average rainfall, so having a year with only half of normal precipitation or less translates to significant supply impacts. Some of those dependent on releases into the upper Russian River also have wells and reservoirs to supplement withdrawals, but not all of them.

“We’re really all just looking around to see where we put the next foot forward,” said Dennis Murphy, co-owner of Murphy Vineyards in Alexander Valley.

McEnhill said the entire watershed needs to readjust how it views water supply and efficiency, given the extremes of dry and wet weather are going to be more pronounced as climate change advances.

“We’ve got this massive change in the availability of water, especially in the upper Russian (River) but our water use patterns are static,” he said. “We haven’t adjusted them to this new reality.”

Newsom made a similar point about climate change and California’s imperiled water supply in his visit to Lake Mendocino last week.

“The hots are getting hotter. The dries are getting drier,” he said. “We need to disenthrall ourselves with old ways of managing water supply and distribution.”

Vexing challenge for complex system

The ripples of this new drought are growing in magnitude for the region’s drinking and irrigation water, recreation and wildlife, setting motion a host of complicated moves to stave off the worst effects.

The Russian River water supply includes diversions from the Eel River through the Potter Valley Power Plant and is primarily rain-fed, but for a small amount of snow melt that finds its way into Lake Pillsbury and eventually into Lake Mendocino.

That reservoir east of Ukiah is near the top of the system and sends its water downstream through the river to Sonoma County. Lake Sonoma, which lies west of Healdsburg, is drained by Dry Creek, which enters the river near Forestville, the hub of the region’s water supply system, with pipelines stemming out to municipal suppliers.

Releases from the two reservoirs are governed by the state under an old system of historic water rights and rules that differentiate several kinds of claims landowners can make and give priority to senior right holders over junior ones.

Sonoma Water, which manages the two reservoirs in partnership with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, holds rights to divert 75,000 acre feet water released from Lake Mendocino into the river each year. That’s well over twice what’s in the lake at present, some of which also can be claimed by others along the main stem of the upper river.

The water agency already has received permission from state regulators to release less water than is normally required for minimum protection of imperiled salmon and steelhead trout in the upper river. It is now is working on a new petition for lowered in-stream flows throughout the length of the river, stretching from Mendocino County to the Sonoma Coast at Jenner.

The negotiated agreement will also help establish how much water Sonoma Water has to provide to its retailers, including city agencies, some of whom may have alternate sources to bring into play, including wells or reservoirs, to offset reduced wholesale supplies.

But the bottom line is it could be some weeks before those thresholds are established.

Farm Bureau officials in Sonoma and Mendocino counties, the Russian River Flood Control & Water Conservation Improvement District outside Ukiah, county officials and others are trying to work out a shared solution to propose to the state. It would ensure senior and junior right holders could acquire some limited water from the river without anyone having to give theirs up entirely.

It’s an effort to “maybe spread the pain a little bit more,” rather than “all or nothing,” said Erik Ekdahl, deputy director for the Division of Water Rights at the State Water Resources Control Board, who has been working with them.

Absent sufficient voluntary reductions, the state water board could take action to curtail water use as early as the next one to three months, a spokeswoman said.

Devon Jones, executive director of the Mendocino County Farm Bureau, said cooperating stakeholders have to develop a proposal that’s both acceptable to the state and palatable enough for junior and senior rights holders to buy in.

But she said she’s hopeful of success in both areas. A changing environment means the kind of collaboration at play now will be needed in the future, as well, she said.

“The alternative is pretty much 100% curtailment, which will create some pretty significant impacts in the Russian River watershed,” she said.

“It’s the something-is-better-than-nothing mentality,” she added. “I think this is a good model not just for this year ... (and) this is something that could be applicable to not just the Russian River watershed.”

You can reach Staff Writer Mary Callahan at 707-521-5249 or mary.callahan@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @MaryCallahanB.