‘Why was no one held accountable?’ Gray calls for state audit over water loss

Assemblyman Adam Gray says he has asked California’s Legislative Audit Committee to audit the Department of Water Resources and State Water Resources Control Board after the state miscalculated Sierra Nevada water.

According to a news release from Gray’s office, the loss of 700,000 acre-feet of water last year prompted his audit request. Gray said the water could have supplied 1.4 million California homes for a year.

“Why was no one held accountable after the state grossly miscalculated how much moisture was actually stored in the Sierras last year?” Gray, D-Merced, said in the release.

Other public agencies, including a federal agency that measures the snowpack and local irrigation districts, didn’t make similar mistakes, according to Gray’s office.

The Department of Water Resources released an unknown quantity of water before the spring runoff last year, just before last year’s drought that saw some domestic wells go dry and some cities run out of water completely.

Juvenile salmon in the Sacramento River and its tributaries were also victims of the water loss, Gray’s office said.

“The water is long gone,” Gray wrote in an opinion column published Monday on CalMatters. “All we are left with is questions.”

The announcement of the audit comes the same day as new restrictions ordered by Gov. Gavin Newsom, who mandated that cities and local water agencies reduce their water usage and tighten conservation rules.

While he didn’t agree to institute mandatory urban water use statewide, he ordered urban water agencies to follow through on the second phase of their water shortage contingency plans. Those plans are meant to take effect when water shortages approach 20%.

Just last month, the Department of Water Resources released nearly three times the normal water flows from Lake Oroville, the largest state-operated reservoir despite climatologists all over the country warning of a resumption of the drought, according to the news release.

“Until we understand what has gone wrong with the agencies charged with managing California’s water, we cannot understand how to fix the problem,” Gray wrote.

Drought concerns linger

The announcement comes just weeks after the state announced a cutback to 5% in water deliveries from the State Water Project, citing continuing dry weather. That in itself was a reversal from its previous allocation increase in January, signaling how much state officials are grappling with California’s characteristic wild swings in weather.

Amid the state’s water woes, Merced Irrigation District officials are doing their best to deliver water to local growers despite the challenges from the state.

MID officials just announced last week the completion of a $6 million main canal rehabilitation to bolster water delivery to Merced-area farmers, although surface water allocations from the district were reduced while costs went up.

The latest effort by the state to mitigate the effects of the drought might come too little, too late for many growers here, especially since officials with MID worried in a recent board meeting that the wet season wasn’t wet enough to yield more than one acre-foot of water in the dry season for many of the farmers it serves.

The Bay Delta plan, which was introduced by the state several years ago and will divert 50% of Merced County’s share of Lake McClure water, exacerbate those woes.