Only half of the Bay Area’s 12 proposed major bay-front developments have a strategy for the expected rise in sea level that experts warn could endanger hundreds of thousands of residents and cause some $56.5 billion in property damage in San Mateo, Alameda and Santa Clara counties by the end of the century.

With 2 million new residents projected to move to the Bay Area in the next 25 years, the issue of rising sea levels has added a new layer to a fierce regional debate over whether it is appropriate to build along the bay — or whether we should retreat from the water altogether.

“I think that, right now, Redwood City is like the canary in the coal mine,” said state Sen. Loni Hancock, D-Berkeley, who recently joined more than 125 current and former elected officials to lobby against a proposal to build thousands of homes and more than a million square feet of office space on Redwood City’s Bayside salt ponds.

Even though they are hungry for housing, cash-strapped bay-front cities are not inclined to spend millions of dollars on solutions to prevent future flooding. And no agency has the authority to require that cities take sea-level rise into account when planning a development.

So decisions over whether to build levees and how high to build them usually fall to a developer, said Will Travis, executive director of the Bay Conservation and Development Commission.

A few developers are taking up the challenge, but with wildly different solutions. While one developer proposes literally raising Treasure Island to keep future neighborhoods there high and dry, developers of Redwood City’s Saltworks property plan to build up earthen levees to protect thousands of people from flooding.

Others — like San Francisco’s Mission Bay project, which will boast more than 6,000 housing units when complete — have no flood-protection strategy at all.

‘Wait and see’ wins out

A growing chorus of regulators, legislators and environmental groups say the lust for prime real estate and a wait-and-see approach to sea level rise have taken precedence over cool-headed analysis of the pros and cons of building along the bay shore. They warn that the Bay Area needs a comprehensive strategy.

“For me, the major concerns are sea-level rise,” Hancock said, “and what is the public liability if we allow and permit development that will be affected.”

Scientists say global warming will melt glaciers and ice sheets in the coming decades, and combined with the fact that ocean water expands as it warms, the result will be a steady rise in sea levels. Since 1900, San Francisco Bay has risen 8 inches. California’s Climate Change Research Center predicts that sea-level rise in the bay could reach 16 inches by midcentury and 55 inches by century’s end.

Only two areas — Foster City and Hamilton Field in Novato — have Federal Emergency Management Agency-certified levees high enough to protect them from a 100-year flood event, defined as a 1 percent chance that each year will present a “perfect storm” of rains, wind and high tides.

The Pacific Institute estimates that it would cost San Mateo, Alameda and Santa Clara counties more than $2 billion to build and raise all the levees and sea walls to guard against flooding associated with maximum sea-level rise scenarios, but if measures are not taken, flooding could cause $56.5 billion in property damage by 2100.

Many of the planned developments lie partially or entirely within existing flood zones, as defined by FEMA — such as the Redwood City Saltworks site and others in Oakley and Alameda.

Parts of the Saltworks site are below sea level, but developer DMB has argued that building homes close to jobs in Silicon Valley is a benefit to the environment, preventing long commutes.

Lennar, lead builder of future communities on Treasure Island and Hunters Point, has decided to raise the land elevation and the building pads in both locations to a minimum elevation of 36 inches above the 100-year tide, rather than build a levee or sea wall that residents won’t be able to see over.

“Rather than building to a number, we are building to a strategy, a mechanism in place which is going to deal with any amount of sea-level rise that occurs out here,” said Dilip Trivedi, coastal engineer with Moffat & Nichol, the firm that is engineering the Treasure Island development.

Better way to build?

New growth is one thing; protecting existing development is another.

Privately, city officials say there’s no way they can plan for the kind of capital investment necessary to protect property from 55 inches of sea-level rise 90 years into the future.

As cities struggle to come up with the money to meet current flood-protection standards, there is a growing consensus among urban planners and regulators that it’s past time to initiate a regional strategy that involves retreating from the bay.

San Francisco, Silicon Valley, the airports — these are worth protecting at any cost, suggests Travis of the Bay Conservation and Development Commission.

Still, he said, other countries such as Holland and Germany have something to teach us about adapting to inevitable flooding.

“I think the better way of looking at it is we aren’t building communities anymore, we’re building long-term campgrounds. And if you think of it that way, we may decide to build in a different way,” he said “We may decide that the thing to do is have buildings that are specifically designed to only last 50 or 100 years, and then they can be moved away.”

People aren’t always ready to hear Travis’ message about the dangers of sea-level rise.

That’s why he takes them to San Francisco’s Pier ½ — so called because it’s only half a pier.

Wedged next to Pier 1, it used to receive ferries from Vallejo but was chained shut in 2008 when rising tides started breaking the deck’s underside apart.

It’s the first physical evidence of damage from sea-level rise Travis knows of, but it won’t be the last.

“The only thing that is certain,” Travis said, “is that every time a projection comes out, it’s higher than the last one.”

Environmental groups say the threat of sea level rise makes Redwood City’s Bayside salt flats the last place to build low-lying homes for 27,000 new residents, but developers say they’ll simply create taller levees. Second in a two-part radio series in partnership with Bay Area News Group.
Julia Scott reports for Crosscurrents on San Francisco’s KALW 91.7 FM.

How do you plan for something you can’t predict? That’s the question facing developers of San Francisco’s Treasure Island as they grapple with a variety future of sea level rise projections. First in a two-part radio series in partnership with Bay Area News Group.

Julia Scott reports for Crosscurrents on San Francisco’s KALW 91.7 FM.

How so we solve the nitrate problem? Listeners call in to KQED’s Forum with suggestions and concerns. Julia Scott and Sasha Khokha, Central Valley Bureau Chief with KQED, discuss their six-month investigative collaboration to draw attention to the issue of nitrates in groundwater.

Modesto officials began conducting regular tests of Grayson’s two production wells. The state Department of Public Health reacted to the results by requiring the city to install a treatment plant to rid the water of dangerous nitrate levels.

“I was angry. We just weren’t told. Every year they said the water was fine,” said Rosenda Mataka, who raised her son Emiliano on compromised tap water.

Although Emiliano and his parents show no indication that their health has been harmed by the water they drank for years, the Matakas worry about the long-term health impacts of exposure to tainted drinking water. Tap water spiked with high nitrate levels can lead to “blue baby syndrome,” which cuts off an infant’s oxygen supply. Some studies have found connections to certain cancers in lab animals.

Grayson’s water treatment system provides an oddly incongruous sight: an assortment of gleaming pipes and tanks that tower above apricot orchards and alfalfa fields, with a tall fence wrapped around them and a big warning sign that says “Caution: Chlorine.”

It’s Grayson’s accidental landmark, a symbol of the hidden legacy that has prevented this rural outpost of 1,200 from becoming the prosperous Modesto suburb it could have been.

In a way, Grayson is lucky. Most small communities of its size with serious nitrate problems can’t afford expensive water treatment plants. That means these communities, made up largely of low-income families who work the fields, end up drinking whatever comes out of the tap, even if the water violates public health standards for nitrates.

At least one million Californians rely on private wells that have no public health oversight. These residents are at high risk for nitrate contamination because their wells are shallower than municipal wells. Nitrates are colorless and odorless, making them hard to detect without lab testing.

At the other end of the spectrum, cities in Southern California have spent millions of dollars on nitrate treatment plants because they have no other choice – dirty or not, the groundwater is crucial to meet population growth while access to imported water shrinks. The Irvine Ranch Water District, for instance, built a $33 million system to remove nitrates in 2007. It costs an additional $2.3 million a year just to operate and maintain. The plant itself serves 50,000 water customers in Orange County.

Other California communities will be facing the same tough choices in the coming years. California’s population is projected to increase 53 percent by 2050. Of the 50 million people who will one day call this state home, many will settle in the greater Los Angeles area, Inland Empire, and parts of the Central Valley – areas that overlie some of the most nitrate-contaminated groundwater in the state.

City planners are looking to groundwater to supply one-third of the water needed to accommodate California’s coming population boom, or 1.1 trillion gallons per year – more than any other source, according to the Public Policy Institute of California.

Looking around Grayson today, it’s hard to believe the town was once in the running to become a major suburb of Modesto. Twenty years ago, a developer was planning to build a 633-unit subdivision at the site of a peach orchard in Grayson.

Those dreams were dashed shortly after Modesto installed a de-nitrification plant. Although it can barely afford it, the city spends $800 per acre-foot of water to make water drinkable for Grayson’s 1,200 residents – up to $19,440 a month, four times the cost of the treated Tuolomne River water Modesto pipes to half its 210,000 residents.

Another problem is the leftovers: Grayson’s ion exchange process leaves behind hundreds of tons of saline brine that can’t be recycled or reused, so Modesto pays extra to export four truckloads of it each week to a Bay Area wastewater plant. At those prices, the city quickly concluded it couldn’t afford any new water connections in Grayson and banned them outright. The ban is still in place today, minimizing the area’s population growth.

“If water wasn’t a problem here, the whole area would be developed in a heartbeat,” said John Mataka, who works for Stanislaus County as a behavioral health specialist. He and Rosenda both advocate for environmental justice issues with a variety of local and state organizations.

Experts say the slow spread of nitrates underground has already affected millions of Californians, mostly due to a legacy of leaky septic tanks and intensive nitrogen fertilizer-based farming over the last 60 years. Nitrates are the leading cause of well closures in California. Scientists say that if nitrate concentrations don’t taper off, the pollution will eventually sink deep enough to affect the well water that millions of Californians depend upon.

Studies have shown that although only 3.5 percent of public water supply wells in the Central Valley exceed the public health limit for nitrates today, an additional 13 percent of wells are at substantial risk of contamination.

That message is somehow getting lost on people, says Karen Burow, a Sacramento-based scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey. Past farming practices have already contributed to tomorrow’s nitrate problems, and today’s contributions are making the problem worse.

“I think that’s the most important point we can get across – that there is a lot of nitrate in shallow groundwater and it’s moving, and we don’t see it going away very fast. There is some urgency for the policy people to figure out what to do,” Burow said.

Solving the groundwater problem will take imagination – and a lot more money than the state is spending. California voters have passed two water bonds since 2002, worth more than $8 billion. Roughly $2 billion was allocated for clean, safe drinking water.

No estimate exists for what it would cost to clean up the nitrates in our groundwater basins, in part because the state has limited knowledge about where the pollutants are and where they go when they reach the water table.

The Environmental Protection Agency has estimated that the cost of treating all the polluted groundwater in California over the next 20 years, including nitrates, would amount to $7.5 billion.

Tackling the source

Activists and regulators agree that the best way to solve the nitrate problem is to prevent it.  But that is easier said than done. State regulators have started requiring certain operations to limit the nitrogen they apply to land. Records show, however, that in many cases, officials have been aware of ongoing nitrate pollution for years – and took little action to address it.

One of the best examples of this is the state’s dairies, which grow crops with manure. Many dairies lack enough cropland to absorb all the nitrogen they produce. As a result, they over-apply liquid manure, causing nitrate problems.

Most dairies began testing their domestic wells for nitrates in 2007 and 65 percent of the dairy wells exceeded the public health limit for nitrates. Forty-two percent of wells had nitrate levels that were twice the drinking water standard.

Since 2000, the state has mandated that 48 dairies submit groundwater test results – in response to numerous other findings of nitrate contamination on their land. Yet none of the dairies were fined, required to cease operations or asked to clean up a nitrate problem identified by the state.

Dairies receive violation letters for not monitoring properly, but exceeding the nitrate limits rarely has serious consequences.

Records show some dairies were even suspected of spreading contamination to adjacent lands, potentially affecting the drinking water of neighbors and farmhands living onsite. But only one dairy, The Bosma Milk Co. in Tipton, received a violation letter specifically for high nitrates in groundwater beneath the property, according to an online database of state enforcement actions.

The Bosma Milk Co. has reported nitrate concentrations above the public health limit since 2003. Like many other Central Valley dairies with nitrate problems, nitrate concentrations in some of Bosma’s wells spiked as high as five times the pollution limit between 2000 and 2007.

The dairy received a violation letter in 2008, but no fine. The Central Valley Regional Water Board has asked the dairy to collect more information before it takes action.

Gary Bosma, co-owner of Bosma Milk Co., said he and his brother Jake have gone out of their way to comply with water quality requirements imposed by the state. He suggested that regulators would have a hard time proving that nitrates were coming from Bosma given that there are other dairies in the area.

“We have neighbors and the water moves around in the aquifer. Just because one well pops up positive doesn’t mean it’s coming from that dairy,” Bosma said.

Officials say they have been aware of nitrate issues at dairies for a long time.

“The solution isn’t usually to just shut down a dairy. The ones that we found having problems, we’ve worked with them to get more land, improve their cropping practices, in some cases line manure basins,” said Ken Landau, assistant executive officer of the Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board.

In 2007, Central Valley regulators started requiring most dairies to develop plans to manage their manure to reduce water contamination. Another rule, the first of its kind in the country, required dairies to sample their domestic wells for nitrates. If the levels are too high, the dairy needs to pay to install additional monitoring wells to gauge the extent of the contamination.

The program was welcomed by environmentalists, but Dairy CARES, a statewide dairy-industry coalition, feels the requirements are too burdensome. The group is working on an alternative that calls for installing wells in select regional locations to monitor contamination, an approach that would avoid pointing fingers at individual dairy operators.

“It’s a much broader scale than holding an individual responsible for their exact actions,” said Darrin Polhemus, deputy director of the State Water Resources Control Board’s division of water quality. “Obviously that’s what we’ll want to get to eventually, but that’s not the focus. It’s not designed to find that one guy out there.”

An expensive problem

It’s too late to prevent nitrate contamination in many Southern California groundwater basins, especially in heavily urbanized portions of Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties.

It’s a problem that harkens back to the region’s agricultural legacy. Land now covered with suburban neighborhoods once sprouted with citrus trees and vegetable fields where farmers used nitrogen fertilizer. Until recently, the Chino Basin was home to more dairies than anywhere in the world.

Nitrate problems were detected as early as the 1970s in the Chino Basin, one of the largest groundwater basins in the state. The area is at the heart of California’s Inland Empire and home to more than a million people. Nitrate concentrations in the worst-hit parts of the basin were double the EPA threshold in the 1980s and quadruple the limit by 2000, according to records.

Regulators with the Santa Ana Regional Water Quality Control Board tried with limited success to contain the problem by banning dairies from applying manure to land in the Chino Basin in 1999. 

Today, residents pay high water bills to bankroll multimillion-dollar nitrate treatment plants in places like Pomona and Riverside. The Inland Empire Utilities Agency in western San Bernardino County is in the midst of a $300 million project to expand its nitrate removal plant as part of an aggressive strategy to cope with drought-related limits on imported water.

“We recognized that imported water was vulnerable and less reliable,” agency General Manager Rich Atwater said. “We’ve literally hit the wall with the Delta. We’re in a huge economic recession and everybody recognizes that we’re going to go from 38 million to 50 million people in the next 25 years, and Southern California is a big part of the demand.”

Times have changed since the 1970s, when water managers could just shut down a well and dig a new one if nitrates became a serious problem. Atwater says the causes of nitrate contamination were ignored for too long, creating a problem for everyone in the region.

“All that nitrate contamination that we’re addressing today is literally a legacy of 50 to 100 years ago,” Atwater said. “Prevention is so much more cost effective – 10, 20 times as much. It’s so much more expensive to remove the contaminant from the groundwater basin than to keep it from getting there in the first place.”

In Modesto, the city has had to shut down 10 of its 140 municipal wells because of nitrate contamination in the past 15 years, and there will likely be more, said Allen Lagarbo, deputy public works director.

“All cities on wells in this area start developing contamination problems eventually,” he said.

The combined population of cities in the Sacramento Metro region and the San Joaquin Valley is projected to top 9 million by 2030. The population in the Central Valley has doubled every 30 years since 1900 as residents move onto former farmlands.

Meeting those future water demands is not as simple as building a new generation of nitrate treatment plants, as Modesto has discovered. The most common technologies to remove nitrates, ionic exchange and reverse osmosis, can be expensive and cumbersome.

“We do this crazy thing now and take pristine, beautiful water and put it on our farms, and the minute it soaks into the ground it’s filled with nitrate, and then we ask cities to clean up marginal water and use it as drinking water,” said Jean Moran, professor of earth and environmental science at CSU East Bay and a former groundwater research scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

A Sacramento solution?

In the Central Valley, farmers may soon face regulations on their use offertilizer similar to an order imposed on dairies in 2007. The agricultural industry wants those rules to remain voluntary and says it would be unfair for regulators to require farmers to comply with strict statewide water quality standards.

Nitrogen fertilizer use in California has stabilized at an average 700,000 tons each year, but it’s unclear whether voluntary strategies have made a difference for nitrate levels so far. It took 50 years to detect nitrate problems in many areas and it will take decades to see changes, experts say.

One option would be to require farmers to limit the amount of fertilizer they apply to their fields. That would require new legislation. The State Water Resources Control Board does not have the authority to impose those limits.

Lawmakers have directed hundreds of thousands of dollars of aid to small communities struggling with nitrates, and established demonstration projects for good farming practices through the University of California. But when it comes to tackling fertilizer itself, results have been mixed.

Former Bay Area state Assemblyman Johan Klehs tried to pass a bill in 2006 that would have raised the mill tax on fertilizer. The money would have been used to provide grants to communities affected by nitrate contamination. (In California, fertilizer is exempt from local and state sales taxes). The bill died in the Assembly’s Agriculture Committee.

“All efforts along those lines automatically go to the ag committee and they die there. Legislators are not friendly to anything that could negatively impact agriculture,” said Debbie Davis, legislative analyst with the Oakland-based Environmental Justice Coalition for Water.

State Senate Majority Leader Dean Florez, D-Shafter, calls nitrates “a backwater issue in Sacramento.”

“These are the kinds of things public policy makers need to hear,” he said. “It’s always difficult to get any of these things on the radar screen. … We’ve got to get our farmers to recognize the long-term impact of these materials on water systems. People say it’s the end of a major, multi-billion dollar industry without these fertilizers.”

Scientists with the U.S. Geological Survey have calculated that even if fertilizer inputs ceased immediately and forever, nitrate levels would continue to climb for many more decades before starting to decline because of the lag time in deeper aquifers.  

All the more reason to take preventative action, says Eli Moore, a research associate with the Oakland-based Pacific Institute.

“We can deal with nitrate contamination once it’s already reached the tap water, or we can try to prevent nitrate contamination before it becomes a problem,” Moore said. “It’s really a question of whether we as Californians are going to ensure that all Californians have access to clean drinking water.”

Grayson’s moratorium on new water connections hasn’t kept people from building new homes and simply digging their own backyard wells at the risk of exposing themselves to dangerous levels of nitrates.

Nitrate concentrations in Grayson’s raw water have tested as high as 65 milligrams per liter over the past 15 years. The public health limit is 45 milligrams per liter. One milligram is equivalent to half a teaspoon in a swimming pool. It may not seem like much, but for vulnerable populations, like infants, the effects can be acute, experts say.

“If this is an issue now, can you imagine a town three times the size?” asked John Mataka. “It would have been a calamity.”

This story was produced in collaboration with KQED Central Valley Bureau Chief Sasha Khokha and Christopher Beaver of CB Films. It was edited by Mark Katches. It was copy edited by William Cooley.

Nitrates are now the most common groundwater contaminant in California and across the country. A byproduct of nitrogen-based farm fertilizer, animal manure, wastewater treatment plants and leaky septic tanks, nitrates leach into the ground and can be expensive to extract.

The problem affects both rural Californians and wealthier big-city water systems. State law requires public water systems to remove nitrates. Many rural communities, however, don’t have access to the type of treatment systems available in metropolitan areas.

Nitrates have been linked to “blue baby syndrome,” which cuts off an infant’s oxygen supply. Some studies have found connections to certain cancers in lab animals.

The State Water Resources Control Board acknowledges that nitrates are a problem affecting vast regions of California. And the situation is worsening, especially in the Central Valley, Central Coast, and the Los Angeles and Imperial Valley regions. High nitrate levels have already impacted public water system wells in many areas, and the contaminants continue to migrate toward groundwater supplies that could ultimately impact the water supply for millions of additional Californians.

Statewide, the number of wells that exceeded the health limit for nitrates jumped from nine in 1980 to 648 in 2007. Scientists anticipate a growing wave of nitrate problems in some parts of the state if remedial steps aren’t taken.

And yet the state’s patchwork regulatory efforts remain riddled with gaps that have allowed nitrate contamination to spread virtually unchecked. Consider:

- Nothing is being done to regulate the use of the leading source of nitrate pollution in many regions of the state – nitrogen fertilizer. A lettuce farmer can apply as much fertilizer as he wants, within feet of the nearest water supply well, without having to worry how much of it might contaminate the groundwater with nitrates. Officials aren’t even equipped to determine the sources of contamination, meaning no one is held accountable.

- Sixty-five percent of domestic wells at Central Valley dairies test over the public health limit for nitrates, putting local residents at risk of potential exposure. Yet, according to records obtained from the State Water Resources Control Board, none of the dairies were fined for a nitrate problem identified by the state.

- When polluters are found responsible for nitrate contamination, the state rarely does anything to correct it. California has issued 248 enforcement actions against 44 polluters for nitrate contamination in the past six years. But only once has the state ordered a polluter to clean up contaminated groundwater.

In one of life’s ultimate ironies, families in poorer, rural communities typically pay more for tainted water than ratepayers hooked up to clean water systems.

Residents in the tiny town of Seville in eastern Tulare County, for instance, pay a flat monthly fee of $60 for nitrate-laden water they have been warned by local health officials not to drink. By comparison, the average metered bill is just $26.50 a month for San Francisco residents, who consume water from the pristine Hetch Hetchy water system.

“The people who are polluting the water, they don’t pay for that cleanup – the ratepayer does,” said Debbie Davis, a legislative analyst with the Oakland-based Environmental Justice Coalition for Water, a statewide network of grassroots groups that advocates for clean, safe water. “If California is going to meet the water challenges of the future, we have to figure out how to deal with nitrates.”

State officials, meanwhile, say that efforts to regulate and clean up nitrates have taken a backseat because the state has too many other environmental dangers to worry about. California finds itself grappling with a host of difficult water issues – ranging from the logistics of delivery and supply to basic safety and health concerns. Nitrate contamination is just one challenge facing regulators.

Darrin Polhemus, deputy director of the State Water Resources Control Board’s division of water quality, said his agency has chosen to spend more time and resources dealing with chemicals such as perchlorate and dry cleaning solvents, which cause more acute health effects when leached into groundwater.

“On the scale of things we deal with, while nitrates is certainly a concern and we’re managing for it, I don’t rank it high up there as something that makes me stay awake at night,” he said.

It’s unclear how often nitrate exposure has led to serious health consequences, because the dots aren’t always connected. For instance, more than 2,000 cases of acute “blue baby syndrome” have been tied to excessive nitrate consumption around the world since the mid-1950s, but scientists say many cases go undiagnosed. Bottle-fed infants whose formula was prepared using water are at greatest risk if the water exceeds public health limits for nitrates. Pregnant women are also at risk.

Many of the state’s fastest-growing regions overlie vast stores of nitrate-polluted groundwater. In the Eastern San Joaquin Valley, one of every three domestic wells has nitrate levels that exceed public health limits.

One of those wells is located on property owned by Camelia and Manuel Lopez in East Orosi, a small Central Valley town in Tulare County.

The Lopez family volunteered to have their family’s private well tested by the state last winter. The water contained nearly three times the federal health limit for nitrates. Follow-up testing of the family’s tap water by California Watch confirmed these results.

“You would never imagine in this country, that someone would have this problem,” said Camelia Lopez, who emigrated from Mexico as a young woman and moved to the countryside from the Bay Area.

Now the family buys bottled water for drinking and cooking at a cost of $60 a month – a real hardship since Manuel Lopez, a contractor, is unemployed.

Their three boys, age 6, 16 and 18, take the bottles to school as a precaution. A local high school has had nitrate problems for years. Camelia Lopez has taught them how to brush their teeth with bottled water and keep their mouths closed when they’re in the shower. Putting filters on all the taps in the house would cost at least $750.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has estimated that as many as 52 percent of community water wells and 57 percent of domestic water wells in the United States are contaminated by nitrates. And 15 percent of contaminated wells in agricultural and urban areas have been found to exceed levels considered safe, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.  

Much of the nitrates are only deep enough to affect private wells, which are shallower than their public counterparts. But the contaminant is starting to sink further into aquifers, deep enough to affect towns and cities, according to Karen Burow, a Sacramento-based scientist with the USGS.

“In the absence of some sort of mitigation, it’s likely that the water that’s at the domestic wells now is going to move downward and eventually reach the public supply wells,” Burow said. “So the question is, how long is it going to take until that really high-concentration water gets deeper in the system?”

Don’t drink the water

In parts of the state where serious nitrate problems have already taken root, communities have a limited menu of options available to cope with the contamination.

Large municipalities can afford to pay millions of dollars to remove contaminants like nitrates before they reach the tap. But these kinds of solutions are beyond the scope of many small communities, which are often home to the poorest and most disenfranchised residents in California.

Many communities rely on at least one well that contains dangerous levels of nitrates, forcing residents to use water they’ve been warned not to drink, say clean water advocates.

The Community Water Center, based in Visalia, has helped dozens of residents, schools and communities across the Central Valley deal with nitrate problems.

Co-founder Susana De Anda says many communities pay twice for water each month: once for contaminated well water, once for bottled water.

Some communities have used state money to drill a test well, only to find nitrate problems there, too. And they can’t trace the nitrates back to their sources, so they can’t hold anyone accountable.

“The community has to figure out how to fix the problems when they didn’t pollute the water,” De Anda said. “It is not OK for communities to have to subsidize the cost of pollution through their health and their pocketbooks.”

Schools struggle with tainted water

On the other side of Tulare County from East Orosi, nitrate problems have been one long, expensive headache for Norm Brown, principal of Citrus South Tule Elementary School in Porterville. Several years ago, Brown applied for a state grant to dig a $100,000 well on school property to alleviate the school’s chronic nitrate problem, only to learn that the school’s entire local groundwater basin was loaded with nitrates.

“I was really going to make a difference on that,” Brown recalled. “But if they’re digging a well they’re not going to find clean water. It’s a waste of money.”

The school, which has 53 students, is one of 12 across the state now coping with nitrate contamination in their well water, affecting a total of about 3,000 students, according to public health records.

Testing by California Watch showed the school’s well water contained twice the public health limit for nitrates. A second set of tests analyzed the DNA fingerprint of the nitrates under the school and traced the contaminant back to its likely sources, including local citrus farms and natural sources in the Sierra foothills. The DNA test, known as a nitrogen isotope tracer test, indicates the general type of source the nitrates came from but can’t isolate exactly who would be responsible.

Bottled water is the only affordable remedy now but only barely. The school pays more than $2,000 each year to stock its water coolers and distribute plastic cups. Brown is also required to test the well water every month, which cost $2,500 in 2009, a hardship for a school that has just three teachers for six grade levels and was forced to tap its small reserve fund this year just to avoid laying off one of those instructors. Brown sends the test results to the Tulare County Department of Environmental Health.

Boiling water isn’t an option. It can actually make matters worse, scientists say, because it concentrates the water without eliminating the nitrates, making the dose of contaminants even more potent.

Even though no one has ever suspected the school of being the source of nitrates, last year, Citrus South Tule Elementary School had to pay $750 in fines for water quality. Brown calls it adding insult to injury.

“They get their money, they’re happy. I will pay a bill and buy the water. But don’t make me test the well,” he said. “I don’t care if you dig to China. There’s going to be nitrates.”

Enforcement doesn’t keep pace with spreading nitrates

Nitrogen fertilizers are an essential component of California agriculture, but they are also the leading source of nitrates in many agricultural areas, scientists say. In 2008, farmers applied 855,699 tons of nitrogen-based fertilizer to 6.7 million acres of irrigated farmland.

Dairies contribute an additional 240,000 tons of nitrogen from cow manure used to grow forage crops for the cows. Although crops absorb some of the nitrogen, up to half of it reaches the water table, scientists say.

In soils with enough oxygen to support it, nitrogen compounds convert to nitrates. Some of these eventually sink deep enough to affect drinking water.

Officials say nitrates are so common and mobile that they are difficult to track once they get into the groundwater, making the contaminant hard to monitor.  And it can be just as hard to pinpoint the exact source of nitrates. Regulators can trace a gasoline tank leak to its source, or rocket fuel leaching from a factory. It’s not as simple with nitrates.

The regulatory challenges are even more vexing because so much of the nitrates seeping into the groundwater began their migration decades ago. It’s nearly impossible to know if contamination identified in 2010 came from a modern-day farm or from the same farm owned by a different family in 1970.

“It is much more difficult to go out and identify a single cause of a nitrate problem in the area, and it can be also very difficult to identify responsible parties and figure out what corrective action needs to be taken,” said Ken Landau, assistant executive officer of the Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board.

But clean water advocates say the State Water Resources Control Board could be doing more to protect ordinary Californians with stronger regulations, tougher enforcement and more monitoring to better understand what’s happening underground.

“Unfortunately, the (state) water board sort of throws up their hands and says, ‘If we can’t find the source how can we enforce?” said Davis, of the Environmental Justice Coalition for Water.

Even if the state board has reason to believe that a dairy farm or a food processor is leaching nitrates next to a residential area, it rarely requires farmers to test the nearest homeowner’s well to see if the contaminants have spread.

Farmers and companies are urged not to degrade groundwater but are mostly left to employ voluntary strategies to comply. Fruit and vegetable farmers are completely exempt from enforcement oversight when it comes to groundwater, according to a review of agricultural policies across the state.

State water board staff members say they’re doing the best they can with limited resources. The Central Valley Regional Board, for instance, has six staff members to handle enforcement and compliance issues for hundreds of sewage treatment plants, food processors and other facilities that discharge waste, records show.

Critics charge that when it comes to regulating the industrial and municipal causes of nitrate leaching – farmers, dairies, food processors and sewage plants among them – economic considerations take precedence over public health.

Richard McHenry, a 20-year veteran of the state water board, says that when he worked for the regulatory authority, he felt pressured to write permits that did not place undue economic burden on certain operations. McHenry retired in 2008 after a final stint with a special investigations unit in the Office of Enforcement.

He says some companies have benefited from a clause in the Porter-Cologne Water Quality Control Act, enacted in 1969 to limit the spread of contaminants, which allows authorities to waive waste discharge requirements if it is in the “best interest” of Californians.

“The regional boards just make off-the-cuff remarks that a dairy employs people and produces milk, and therefore it’s in their best interests to pollute,” McHenry said. “What kind of analysis is that? You’re not looking at the whole big picture. It’s not only about jobs.”

Landau of the regional board said he knows of no regulatory agency that approaches its job in the manner McHenry described.

“This absolutely does not reflect the view of the boards,” he said. “Might a single board employee ever have said or thought something like this? We’re not privy to employees’ private opinions, but that statement certainly does not reflect the boards’ opinion. The boards’ view is that current regulation is vigorous and appropriate.”

Pollution yields few consequences

While the state water board and its regional entities have begun treating nitrates as a significant issue, regulations vary greatly by industry and region.

Where regulations do exist, former inspectors say a toothless enforcement system enables polluters to pay small fines for nitrate problems – if they are fined at all – rather than bring their operations into compliance.

Consider the case of Monterey Mushrooms Inc., the country’s largest marketer of fresh mushrooms. Its wells have exceeded nitrate limits 17 times, according to records reviewed by California Watch.

In 2006, the Central Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board cited Monterey Mushrooms for four of those violations. “Nitrate out of control!” one staff member scrawled on a lab report obtained by California Watch.

Yet the facility has never been fined or required to limit the amount of nitrate-contaminated water it sprays onto adjacent fields. This nutrient-rich wastewater is left over from the process of spawning, growing, and processing the mushrooms.

Monterey Mushrooms is hardly alone. In the past six years, state regulators issued 248 enforcement actions against 44 polluters for problems specific to nitrates in groundwater, records show. Most received routine violation notices. Even repeat violators are rarely fined.

Polhemus, of the State Water Resources Control Board’s division of water quality, says his agency has put greater emphasis on regulation than enforcement when it comes to nitrate polluters.

“We certainly don’t approach it from the same standpoint we do a chemical contamination, where we’re trying to find who released it, make them clean it up and penalize them for that,” he said. “Nitrates are so much everywhere that you’d spend too much time trying to track them down and the levels are such that it wouldn’t make sense to go after it that way.  We think it’s much more important to try to get ahead of the curve through our different programs.”

The impact on towns and communities is steep. Several drinking water wells in Royal Oaks, a community neighboring Monterey Mushrooms, have already been shut down due to nitrates. Since 1983, residents have been asking the Central Coast Water Board to limit the amount of undiluted wastewater it allows Monterey Mushrooms to apply. Environmental studies conducted by the company show the Royal Oaks facility has applied far more nitrogen than the land can actually absorb – 36 times more.

The regional water board has said it is “concerned” about the potential for nitrate problems. But the agency has been unable to pinpoint the cause of the contamination.

Wayne Bautista, general manager of Monterey Mushrooms, says the high nitrate readings come from a well that’s closer to other fields on a ridge above the mushroom plant, and are not attributable to his plant’s operations. He also said the company has “significantly” reduced the amount of wastewater it applies to land, due in part to five newly lined wastewater ponds that help the plant reuse water in its composting process.

Monterey Mushrooms is located in the Salinas Valley – the heart of Monterey County’s $3.8 billion dollar agricultural industry. The region ranked first in the state for the most severe nitrate contamination back in 1995, according to a report prepared by the Central Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board. The water board has not updated its numbers since then.

Yet the regional board does not require all growers to conduct groundwater monitoring. They are required to fill out a checklist of water quality management techniques they may be using on their farm, but they won’t face consequences for operating without them.

Farmers in both the Central Coast and the Central Valley may soon face new regulations that could require them to limit the amount of fertilizer they apply to crops. Farmers in areas known for heavy nitrate contamination would have to deal with more restrictions.

Fresno County farmer Parry Klassen says farmers shouldn’t be blamed for legacy nitrate problems that may have migrated in groundwater from elsewhere.

“Cities can’t say the farmers did it, the farmers can’t say the cities did it. I don’t think it should be set in someone’s lap. We need to figure out what the problems are and solve them where we can,” said Klassen, who is president of the East San Joaquin Water Quality Coalition.

Although nitrates are considered a pollutant under the Porter-Cologne Act, they have never been regulated that way, according to Davis, of the Environmental Justice Coalition for Water.

Back in East Orosi, Camelia Lopez feels helpless about her family’s nitrates problem, which testing has traced to animal manure, possibly from nearby cattle ranches, or a leaky septic system.

The reasons Lopez moved to the San Joaquin Valley – a simpler, rural life among the vineyards and the orange trees, the cows and chickens – may be harming her home and her community.

She knows nitrates are a big problem that will require a Sacramento-sized solution. But today she’s starting small – going door-to-door, talking to other mothers about getting their wells tested. She’d like to tell lawmakers what it’s like to be unable to drink water from her own tap. She’s even been practicing her testimony.

“Please care a little bit about this community,” she says. “Just like I’m worried about this, there are other mothers with a lot of kids who are worried about this issue, too. If it were you and your kids in this community, what would you think? What would you do?”

This story was produced in collaboration with KQED Central Valley Bureau Chief Sasha Khokha and Christopher Beaver of CB Films. It was edited by Mark Katches. It was copy edited by William Cooley.

The Markegard family’s 250 cows, steers, calves and yearlings live lives of total freedom, with nothing to do but wander around and graze hundreds of acres of lush grassland, reproduce, and take in the views of the ocean from their idyllic domain 800 feet above sea level.

Until June, that is, when one-tenth of the herd is slaughtered. In July, 12,000 pounds of Angus and Belted Galloway beef will be delivered to local customers who purchased a share of the ranch’s Community Supported Agriculture project.

Erik and Doniga Markegard say they make a much better profit selling their certified grass-fed beef directly to 100 local families and three Half Moon Bay restaurants each year than they would by auctioning their animals to a food processor. Their customers like knowing the beef comes from animals raised without antibiotics, on pesticide-free grass fertilized by the animals themselves.

“The cow is not designed to stand in one place and eat out of a bin. It’s not correct,” said Erik Markegard, the family’s voluble patriarch, sitting in his 100-year-old ranch house one sunny day last month in a checkered shirt and dirt-stained jeans.

Markegard, a sixth-generation cattle rancher going all the way back to Norway, grew up on Neil Young’s ranch in rural La Honda, less than 10 miles away as the crow flies. His father managed the ranch, and Markegard took over after he got sick.

Markegard, 41, was raising sheep at 10 and bought his first cow at age 14. His father taught him how to rotate cattle on land divided by cross-fencing to preserve the grass. At a time when most of the ranchland in San Mateo County was overgrazed to the point of erosion, Markegard realized that keeping grassland healthy was just as important as the health of his animals.

He and his wife, Doniga, a permaculture expert, launched Markegard Family Grass-Fed in 2006 to contribute to the burgeoning local food movement. Word spread fast, and the Markegards have doubled the amount of beef they offer each year. They lease 3,000 acres in San Mateo and Sonoma counties.

Their farmhouse — a dwelling out of “Little House on the Prairie” with a single wood-fired stove to keep their three young children warm — sits on a 1,000-acre working ranch owned by the Peninsula Open Space Trust, which supports the Markegard’s land management ethic.

“When grazers are managed properly, you sequester carbon, create perennial grasslands and reduce the need for a lot of external inputs,” explained apple-cheeked Doniga Markegard, 29, over a breakfast of homemade chocolate-chip scones.

The ranch has 50 CSA shares available at this time. Shares are sold by quarter-animal, half-animal or whole beef, as well as by pound and by cut of beef. Customers pick up their shares in Half Moon Bay, San Francisco or Petaluma, although most customers live in San Mateo County.

Proponents of grass-finished beef have long touted its health benefits. The meat contains less fat and more beneficial fatty acids than that of cows kept in pens and fed corn or other grains.

But the taste is what keeps Half Moon Bay’s Pasta Moon coming back for more. The restaurant, which serves dishes with homegrown vegetables and locally caught fish, buys two or three Markegard Family cows a year and uses all the parts in the kitchen, even the tongue.

“I know where the cattle come from, I know what they eat,” said Kim Levin, owner of Pasta Moon. “They’re allowed to roam free, which makes them healthier and makes the meat more flavorful,”

Local demand for grass-fed beef is so strong that Pescadero’s TomKat Ranch will be launching its own brand, LeftCoast Grassfed, in late April. The 2,000-acre ranch was purchased by San Francisco hedge fund manager Tom Steyer and his wife, Kat Taylor, in 2002.

They got their first set of heifers in 2007; today the ranch has nearly 90 cows. LeftCoast anticipates selling up to 10,000 pounds of certified grass-finished beef this year.

Throughout the country, an increasing number of ranches are lining up to offer beef certified by the American Grassfed Association’s rigorous third-party auditing process. Sixty grass-fed beef producers became certified in 2009, the first year the AGA started certifying ranches. Now another 320 producers are seeking certification.

Carrie Balkcom, the association’s executive director, calls it a movement fueled by a series of recent cultural shifts that shape how Americans think about their food. Balkcom said the association’s Web site “lit up” after journalist Michael Pollan went on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” in January and talked about the virtues of grass-fed beef.

“People aren’t buying into the ‘farm fresh’ label anymore,” said Balkcom. “They’re asking the butcher, ‘Where did this cow come from? What did this farm look like?’ With Internet searches, they’re finding out what’s on the label is not in fact a happy family farm.”

Markegard Grass-Fed has tried to take advantage of this fledgling national trend by finding more ranchland to expand on. Unfortunately, that’s easier said than done.

Although POST and the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District have recently begun to see the benefits of sustainable grazing to the grasslands they maintain, including benefits to wildlife, only 1 percent of the 50,000 acres of grazing land in San Mateo County are actually in production, according to the county Farm Bureau.

Erik Markegard has driven to every corner of the nine-county Bay Area, talking to ranch owners about leasing their land. He says people are hesitant to agree to a five-year lease, the minimum it takes to restore a piece of land, because the market could change and they could get a better offer to sell.

“We’re seeing people coming in with millions of dollars and they can just buy their business. I’ve lost leases to people who just want to play cowboy, and paid more for the land than they will ever make on the cattle,” said Markegard. “The family farm is getting kicked out of San Mateo County and it’s because of that.”

The Markegards will never own the land they ranch on, leaving them exposed to the whims of landowners as well as the market. Lea Markegard, 7, has already decided she wants to be a cattle rancher like her dad, coming home after school to check her flock of sheep and chickens and put out salt licks for the cows. Her father would like to see her get that chance.

To learn more about Markegard Family Grass-Fed, visit http://markegardfamilygrassfed.wordpress.com or e-mail doniga@designsbydoniga.com. To inquire about LeftCoast Grassfed, call 650-879-2147.

More than 3,000 feet deep in San Pedro Mountain is an eerie, half-lit universe of grinding and pounding as machines scrape and drill and blast the rock apart. Hard-hatted workers carrying flashlights pass by in tall rubber boots and orange construction vests. Sparks punctuate the semi-darkness. Dripping water coats the ground, creating muddy currents that flow toward daylight.

Every day, workers at Devil’s Slide get 5 feet of rock closer to conquering the longest, most-ambitious tunnel project in modern California highway history. They detonate dangerous explosives, mine rock, lay rebar, spray concrete — over and over again, in rotating shifts 24 hours a day.

It’s painstaking work, but well worth the rewards. Caltrans is 79 percent of the way through the tunnel and is on schedule to break through to the north side of the mountain in late fall. Workers will then connect the tunnels to a cantilevered bridge that spans a valley in Pacifica.

Standing in the dank recesses of the northbound tunnel, it’s hard to believe that just two years and six months have passed since the late U.S. Rep. Tom Lantos broke ground on the double-lane $300 million tunnel that will re-route Highway 1 traffic away from the landslide-prone cliff side.

“It’s a once-in-a-lifetime sort of job, if you know what I mean,” said Ivan Ramirez, Caltrans senior engineer for the project.

A recent visit to the excavation site, 3,205 feet into the belly of the mountain, felt like a vaguely dangerous yet thrilling spelunking expedition to the center of the world. A suiting up with an emergency oxygen supply was followed by a walk of more than half a mile past dozens of workers laying concrete over metal rebar that covers the “crown” and “ribs” of the tunnel. The rebar itself is installed over a thick, yellow PVC membrane designed to keep the tunnel dry. Final touches will include alarms, a fire and traffic alert system, permanent lighting and ventilation.

Powerful fans circulate oxygen through the tunnels, allowing workers to breathe in spite of being enveloped by a mountain that stretches 656 feet above the rock they’re standing on. The fans can’t mask the smell, though — a combination of diesel exhaust and paint from the curing compound applied to the concrete.

“There’s a lot of chemicals in here. That’s what tunnels smell like,” shrugged Ramirez.

For 10 hours a day, this is the only world workers inhabit. They don’t get out to see daylight. They take meal breaks at a picnic bench in one of the tunnel’s cross-passages.

Suddenly, there’s no more tunnel to walk through — just a flat gray wall with a tunnel excavator parked in front of it, trimming the crown of the tunnel into a smooth dome with a carbide-tipped cutter head. Sparks fly as the yellow machine grinds down the jagged rock with care and precision. A worker stands next to the excavator, hosing down the cutter head to keep the dust down. Tonight, workers will set another round of plastic explosives.

“He has to learn how to measure how much he needs to cut, and that only comes from experience!” Ramirez yelled over the din.

Turning around, the entrance to the tunnel has shrunk to the size of a dime.

DMB Associates, an Arizona-based company that specializes in upscale mixed-use developments close to wilderness, plans to pipe 591 million gallons per year from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta to as many as 12,000 homes on the Redwood City Saltworks site via a series of complicated and unprecedented water exchanges that originate 300 miles to the southeast in Kern County.

But DMB had more than Redwood City’s needs in mind in late 2008 when it bought the rights to 2.7 billion gallons of water per year — about 12 percent of the annual water demand for San Mateo County — from Kern County-based Nickel Family, a land- and water-holding company with some developments of its own and roots in more than a century of Central Valley farming.

“We look at water rights as an asset, just like securing rights to land,” said John Bruno, general manager of the DMB Saltworks venture.

The water is guaranteed for 35 years, with an option to renew for another 35 years.

DMB has yet to outline its water plan to Redwood City in a formal proposal that would demonstrate exactly how it would transfer the water to Redwood City, which purchases water only from the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir through the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC) and not State Water Project deliveries to the delta.

But the company did provide some details to a third-party consultant for a report analyzing the water plan, which was released in late January.

The report preliminarily concluded that DMB’s proposal is plausible as a potential source of potable water supply, pending further analysis and approvals from local and state agencies.

The city is now embarking on an extensive environmental review of the entire project, which a number of local environmental groups vehemently oppose.

With 80 percent of its water up for grabs after supplying the Saltworks site, DMB is poised to become a Bay Area water dealer, selling water to public agencies in need. In 2009, the company sold almost 652 million gallons of water to the Santa Clara Valley Water District for $550,000, according to the report. It sold the balance to Tejon Ranch Co., with whom DMB has partnered to build a new 3,500-home community called Tejon Mountain Village on Kern County’s Tejon Ranch, the largest privately owned piece of land in California.

Documents show that Tejon Mountain Village is getting its water from sources other than DMB, at least for the next 20 years.

But the Tejon Ranch Co. is planning two other major developments at Tejon Ranch, a 23,000-home property named Centennial and an industrial park. DMB sold its water allocation to Tejon Ranch in 2008, according to David Smith, a lawyer and vice president with DMB.

“It just happened that we had water and they needed that water,” Smith said.

He would not say what the water was used for, but it might have been stockpiled underground in one of the region’s many water banks until it is needed by a development.

The most obvious potential customer for DMB’s water in coming years is Redwood City, which is facing a housing needs scenario that will create a water supply deficit of tens of millions of gallons by 2040 despite the city’s water recycling and conservation efforts, according to City Manager Peter Ingram.

And the city won’t be receiving any extra water from the SFPUC, which has required cities to cut back.

Environmental groups fear that could prove to be a tempting incentive for Redwood City to approve the Saltworks project.

Bruno, DMB’s general manager, acknowledges his company’s extra water could help “address the long-term needs of the community.”

“The whole genesis behind securing the water was making sure we were self-sufficient,” he said, “and as a potential benefit to Redwood City.”

Ingram acknowledged the appeal of DMB’s extra water but said city officials wouldn’t use it as a factor in deciding on the Saltworks proposal.

“I would divorce that question from whether that project should or shouldn’t be approved… But Redwood City, like any city on the Peninsula, would want to explore that possibility because we all know that is going to be difficult to add a new water supply in this area,” he said.

It’s increasingly common to see water rights change hands between agricultural interests and developers in the Central Valley, where water once intended to grow produce is used to make homes sprout instead, water experts say. The Nickel Family, which inherited generous water rights on the Kern River, has sold water to developers before, according to news accounts.

It promised 521 million gallons of water per year for 35 years to help supply the huge 20,000-home Newhall Ranch development, west of Santa Clarita. But never before has a Bay Area developer moved this much private water north of the Delta, or sought to resell it to a public agency. DMB’s Smith said his company is just paving the way.

“I think a lot of people are thinking about the need for exchanges everywhere. While it hasn’t happened a lot, I don’t think people were shocked to hear someone step forward and propose it, because things are really tight.”

If Saltworks developer DMB Associates is to succeed in its bid to import 591 million gallons of water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta every year to supply as many as 12,000 new homes on the Redwood City salt flats, it will need to enlist a lot of outside help. And environmental groups will be there to try to stop them every step of the way.

“This project relies on a complicated, controversial, unprecedented and illegal water transfer from Southern California water interests. It doesn’t belong in the Bay,” said Stephen Knight, political director of Save the Bay.

Only a few details have emerged about the mechanics behind the company’s proposal, but it’s clear that the water would need to be “wheeled” through a third-party Bay Area water agency such as the Santa Clara Valley Water District, which buys Delta water from both the State Water Project and the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC). The water agency would take a greater share of Delta water and forgo an equivalent amount of SFPUC water, which would be forwarded to Redwood City.

But the water’s history indirectly originates in the Kern River. According to a summary report prepared by a Redwood City consultant, DMB purchased 70 years’ worth of water in December 2008 from Nickel Family LLC, a land and water holding company that formerly held major water rights in the lower Kern River. In 2000, Nickel sold those water rights to the Kern County Water Agency for $6.4 million and a guaranteed annual supply of 3.3 billion gallons per year from the Delta, which was seen as a more reliable source than the intermittent flows along the Kern River.

The Kern County Water Agency, one of the world’s largest water banking projects, has rights to more than 325 trillion gallons of Delta water per year.

The report concludes that the Nickel water rights are “secure,” meaning the water would still be delivered to Redwood City even if continuing drought and legal wrangling over Delta pumping result in drastic water cutbacks.

DMB representatives are keen to head off environmental concerns, emphasizing that the Saltworks water would not add to the overall impact on the Delta since, absent DMB, Nickel would be getting the water regardless.

“This is not a new delivery of the Delta,” said David Smith, vice president of regulatory affairs for DMB.

The Kern River is another issue. It’s been a long time since water flowed down the Kern River year-round. Most of the river has been diverted for irrigation, an issue that is currently subject to legal dispute by the city of Bakersfield.

Although the link to the Saltworks project is indirect at best, the summary report does recommend that Redwood City study the environmental impacts of transferring Nickel water out of the Kern River basin for the purposes of “a specific development proposal.”

“There’s huge controversy right now in that part of the state about the availability of agricultural water,” said Save the Bay’s Knight. “That agricultural water has been sold out of the Kern River and is being transferred to help develop a Bay salt pond in Redwood City.”

Smith wouldn’t comment on the notion that the DMB deal could impact the Kern River. “Talk about speculation,” he said.