Water Rights Protests
Attached are Objections to two water right applications from the Eastside Water District (Merced and Stanislaus Counties) to divert seasonally high stream flows to groundwater storage. Because of the governor's and SWRCB's interest in diverting seasonally high streamflows and water from high flow events to groundwater storage, I fear they will not require adequate Water Availability Analysis and that could result in entities grabbing high streamflows as is proposed in the two applications from the Merced/SJ watershed to which the Coalition is objecting.
Here's how each of the Objections ends:
The diversion of high flows from California's streams for storage in the ground has great potential benefits but also great potential harms. Healthy streams need high flow events but can also safely yield some portion of their high flows for storage in groundwater. Flow criteria are a good way to identify the flows needed to sustain beneficial uses and those that can be safely diverted. We applaud the Board's work to develop regional flow criteria and a state-wide flow needs assessment methodology.
Below the protests is a response by Eastside Irrigation District to one of the protests the Coalition filed on temporary water right applications for diversion to groundwater storage from streams that do not have flow criteria developed. The two proposals we protested are in the lower Merced River watershed.