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Farmers angry at new rules to stop channel fish kills

Published in the Stockton Record on 01/28/05

Farmers angry at new rules to stop channel fish kills

By Hank Shaw - Capitol Bureau Chief
Published Friday, January 28, 2005

RANCHO CORDOVA -- Central Valley water regulators approved a controversial plan Thursday that it hopes will stop routine fish kills in the Stockton Deep Water Channel.

Growers in San Joaquin County and elsewhere along the San Joaquin and Sacramento rivers say they're being unfairly hit by the new regulations, which would lower the amount of oxygen-consuming substances -- such as fertilizer -- they can let flow into the river.

Those substances, plus ammonia from the treated sewage flowing out of Stockton and its environs, collect in the Deep Water Channel. That can cause low levels of oxygen in the water and suffocate the fish.

Written by regulators at the Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board, the new rules will, with a few exceptions, ban discharge of oxygen-consuming substances into the rivers by 2011. Meanwhile, the board will continue to study the issue and could revise the rules in 2009.

Fertilizers and treated sewage discharged into the San Joaquin River can cause unnaturally large algae blooms. When algae hit the channel, they sink below the point where they can produce oxygen by photosynthesis, die, then decompose. That decomposition burns oxygen fish need to breathe.

The last major fish kill was in February. Steelhead trout, salmon, shad, striped bass and sturgeon are among the fish affected by the problem. Bill Jennings of the Stockton-based environmental group DeltaKeeper says the oxygen-starved area acts as a wall preventing migratory fish from entering.

"It's just as if you had a dam there," Jennings said.

Stockton's sewage plant is among those blamed, and the new rules could lead to more costly restrictions on how and when the city can discharge its treated sewage into the river.

The city has begun work on a $42 million upgrade to the plant, however. Funded by Stockton ratepayers, the improvements should cut the ammonia discharged into the river by more than 90 percent.

Yet farmers and the residents of Stockton aren't the only reason the Deep Water Channel is suffering.

The new rules also blame the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for the poor water conditions. The Corps maintains the channel, and regulators say its decision to cut the 35-foot-deep path through the center of the river also contributes to the fish kills; a shallower channel would not have the same oxygen problems. But it would be useless for shipping.

A Corps spokeswoman said Thursday that the board has no authority to tell the Corps what to do, but she added that her agency would not oppose a study on how to ease the oxygen problem if Congress provides the money to fund it.

Water flow is another major factor. So much of the San Joaquin River water gets piped to cities and farms that it saps the river's natural flow, leaving too little to flush dead algae from the channel.

For the past five years, polluters and other agencies have argued about who primarily is to blame. Jennings called it an exercise in "trying to pin the tail on someone else's donkey." Agricultural interests say that the Port of Stockton and dredging by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers are mostly responsible.

"The prohibition of all agricultural discharges into the San Joaquin River upstream of the Deep Water Ship Channel would not cure the dissolved-oxygen problem," said Steve Chedester, executive director of the San Joaquin River Exchange Contractors Water Authority.

The farmers who make up the exchange contractors organization say they're being forced to pay for the cleanup largely because the regional water board has no authority to compel the upstream dams to increase water flow or to force the Corps to do anything.

The new rules skirt the blame issue by holding each equally responsible.

The state water board and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency must still approve Thursday's actions by the regional water board before they take effect.
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* To reach Capitol Bureau Chief Hank Shaw, phone (916) 441-4078 or e-mail sacto@recordnet.com

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