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Director's Report

2008-2009 was a challenging and transitional year for the Water Department.  Long-time Department employees Irene Rae, Irene Yamashita, Derik Olson, and Sally Manning retired after long service to the Department and Inyo County.  Their knowledge, expertise, dedication, and humor is missed at the Department.  We wish them all well in their future endeavors.  The Department is currently seeking to fill three positions: an Administrative Secretary, a Mitigation Projects Manager and a Scientist-Vegetation.  These positions will fill the Department’s need for a smoothly functioning front office, oversight of mitigation projects, and monitoring and analyzing Owens Valley vegetation. 

As the Department moves forward, our overall mission is unchanged: to assist in the implementation of the County’s water resources policies through the Inyo/Los Angeles Long-Term Water Agreement (see Water Agreement), which provides for County involvement in LADWP water-related activities, and the County Ordinance 1004 (see Groundwater Ordinance), which regulates inter-basin groundwater transfers proposed by non-LADWP entities.  This mission is accomplished through four general Department activities: oversight of LADWP water management; environmental monitoring to assess impacts of LADWP activities and compliance with Water Agreement goals; planning, monitoring, and implementation of mitigation measures associated with the Water Agreement; and assessment of impacts and development of monitoring and mitigation measures related to conditional use permits applied for under the Groundwater Ordinance. 

Oversight of LADWP’s Annual Operations Plan is a critical task for the Water Department.  The Water Agreement provides for the Water Department and LADWP to jointly manage groundwater pumping through the Annual Operations Plan, monitoring of plant water requirements and soil moisture (see soil moisture conditions) at key monitoring sites, and turning wells on or off according to whether monitoring results show that adequate soil moisture is present.  The technical appendix to the Water Agreement, the “Green Book,” describes the methods and protocols for conducting the measurements and analysis to manage pumping.  The Green Book was developed and adopted nearly twenty years ago, and since then, it has been recognized that managing pumping based on water table conditions would be more effective than the present method based on soil moisture and vegetation abundance.  In 2006, the Standing Committee adopted a three-year Interim Management Plan to streamline the annual planning process and cap pumping to allow staff to focus on developing alternative pumping management strategies.  The Interim Management Plan caps wellfield pumping based on water levels in monitoring wells and allows pumping for certain sole-source uses of pumped water within the County, such as town supply and supplies to fish hatcheries (see Groundwater Conditions).  Runoff year 2009-2010 is the third and final year managed under the Interim Management Plan, unless the Standing Committee decides to extend the Plan.

The Department has continued its annual program of monitoring vegetation conditions for the purpose of assessing vegetation conditions relative to the mid-1980s baseline conditions established by the Water Agreement (see Vegetation Conditions).  Among the Water Agreement’s primary goals are commitments to avoid adverse impacts to groundwater dependent vegetation, and collecting vegetation data to assess those goals is a central activity at the Department (see Vegetation Conditions).

The Water Agreement and 1991 Final Environmental Impact Report specify over fifty mitigation projects associated with the Water Agreement.  The Department’s role in these projects includes implementation of the Saltcedar control program (see Saltcedar Update), joint implementation with LADWP of the Lower Owens River Project, development of plans for as-yet unimplemented projects, and monitoring progress of projects that have been implemented.  Important progress in the last year was made on the Hines Spring/1,600 acre-feet project, yellow-billed cuckoo habitat enhancement, the Independence Eastside Regreening Project, and the Lower Owens River Project (see Mitigation Project Status).

Under the County Groundwater Ordinance, the Water Department and Water Commission provide input to the Planning Department and Planning Commission regarding conditional use permit applicants that propose to transfer groundwater out of groundwater basins within Inyo County.  Coso Operating Company, a geothermal power producer, applied for a permit to transfer groundwater from Rose Valley to their geothermal power project in the Coso Range.  This water transfer requires a conditional use permit, and during the past year, the Department worked with other County departments to develop an Environmental Impact Report and monitoring and mitigation plan for the project (see Coso Operating Company Conditional Use Permit).  This application was considered by the Water Commission, Planning Commission, and the Board of Supervisors, and was granted by the Board on May 6, 2009.  The Environmental Impact Report has been challenged in court by the owners of Little Lake Ranch, and is currently in litigation.