Salinas Valley growers say much of flood damage due to choked river

SALINAS – With the financial influence from the January and March flooding estimated at $1 billion, many growers are left feeling pissed off as a result of they are saying a lot of the injury to their croplands may have been prevented.

For many of the previous century, growers may go into the Salinas River channel and filter out sandbars and vegetation so as to improve move capability and stabilize levees. Throughout heavy rains like what was seen in January and March, the water costs down the river after which hits shallow depths due to built-up sediment, in addition to massive quantities of brush that impede the river’s capability. The sediment and brush impediments have a damming impact. Water will move alongside the trail of least resistance, and when the channel is clogged, that path turns into cropland.

The one saving grace this yr, if there was one, is way of the cropland was fallow, ready for the spring planting. Nonetheless, the Monterey County Farm Bureau estimates the quantity of injury is someplace north of 15,000 acres. An estimated price ticket of $1 billion in injury has been cited by native officers. That determine contains misplaced wages and impacts on help companies.

Any injury to the ag economic system is crucial because it represents the biggest financial driver within the county. The pre-pandemic worth of agriculture in 2019 was $4.41 billion, in line with that yr’s Monterey County Agricultural Report. By comparability, the tourism business generated an estimated $3.2 billion for a similar yr, in line with the Monterey County Conference and Customer’s Bureau. The county’s high 10 crops alone surpassed $3.4 billion.

However crop worth is barely a part of the image. Agriculture’s complete estimated influence on the native economic system is over $11.7 billion when making an allowance for wages and all of the help companies like fertilizer and tools provide, in line with knowledge from the Monterey County Farm Bureau.

Growers perceive the dynamics of move capability in order that they traditionally have gone into the channel in the summertime and in the reduction of brush – together with an invasive species known as Arundo – and cleared the built-up sand and different sediments. In doing so the move capability is elevated and the river is extra more likely to keep between its banks.

George Fontes, president of the Salinas Basin Water Alliance and a fourth-generation farmer who’s now retired and leases out his ag land, stated final week that whereas none of his land was impacted, quite a lot of growers throughout the alliance did endure losses.

There are methods for growers to clear the river channel to a point, however Fontes describes it as an “costly, cumbersome and restrictive” allowing course of from state and federal regulators. Up till about 2008-2010, growers had been often going into the principle channel to clear vegetation and particles.

Environmentalists started objecting to the follow of clearing due to the influence it was having on steelhead trout, an endangered species. Threats of lawsuits emerged from teams just like the Monterey-based Otter Mission which claimed the Monterey County Water Assets Company, the Nationwide Marine Fisheries Providers and the U.S. Military Corps of Engineers had been violating the Endangered Species Act and the Clear Water Act by permitting channel clearing.

Two sorts of channels

The Salinas River has not at all times been confined to a single-channel location. The river is “braided,” defined Brandt Bates, the Watershed Program Supervisor for the Useful resource Conservation District of Monterey County. Traditionally the river would transfer laterally alongside the valley ground and move into quite a lot of secondary channels that will meander for some time, after which join again to the principle channel in some unspecified time in the future downstream. The Stream Upkeep Program, or SMP, permits far larger work within the secondary channel than state and federal regulators enable in the principle channel.

The stream upkeep program that Bates oversees permits growers to get into these secondary channels and take away brush and sediment. The concept is that when the principle channel reaches sure flood levels the water conveys into the secondary channels which have been cleared for larger move capability. This diversion of river move permits the principle channel to remain inside its banks and off cropland.

One of many regulatory businesses, the Nationwide Marine Fisheries Service, has issued what’s known as a “organic opinion” indicating that the kind of work the stream upkeep program is conducting doesn’t negatively influence steelhead. The Useful resource Conservation District is a nonregulatory company and the SMP is a volunteer-based program. Since permits are already established by way of the SMP, solely submitting a piece plan is required, which is much cheaper for landowners than going by way of state or federal regulators for particular person permits.

Nonetheless, landowners need to get into the principle channel to carry out upkeep work and don’t essentially like working with allowing businesses. Out of 125 of those secondary channels alongside the 92 miles of the river this system serves, solely 46 have had upkeep work by way of this system.

The issue with doing nothing turned evident this January and March. Fontes famous that throughout the devastating flooding in 1995 the river was flowing at about 95,000 cubic ft per second. The January and March flows had been far much less. How a lot much less will depend on which river gauge is used. For instance, in Bradley the move was 45,600 cubic ft a second, however on the Spreckels Bridge it was 19,400 cubic ft a second. Fontes’ level is that the latest flooding was brought on by a much smaller move fee than in 1995, but the channel was choked with vegetation and sediment forcing the river to high its banks.

Farmer frustration

Mike Scattini, a associate in Scattini Household Farms in Salinas, stated the frustration growers have is constant to develop. A particular characteristic of the river is that the landowners on both aspect personal the land underneath the river, whereas the state owns the water that flows by way of it.

“It’s an enormous frustration not having the ability to get into your individual property,” Scattini stated. “It’s like for those who lived in Carmel and an enormous pine tree was about to fall on your home however they wouldn’t can help you minimize it down.”

Norm Groot, the chief director of the Monterey County Farm Bureau, stated the diminished capability move is essential to flooding, and to open up any of that move capability is a prolonged and costly course of.

Mechanical tools aside from massive mowers is forbidden in the principle channel, Groot famous. Many growers select to not be saddled with the expense and time it takes to get a allow. It’s a crap shoot, with growers hoping that the winters gained’t carry torrential rain and flooding. This winter growers threw snake eyes.

“Many of those fields gained’t have a spring planting and that’s a considerable portion of a farmer’s revenue,” Groot stated.

Loud and clear

The Farm Bureau is working with a number of teams to attempt to carry a unified voice to elected officers. Growers need the method streamlined and the allowing interval prolonged to permit for efficient work on the channel, in addition to ratcheting again charges charged to growers for the permits, Groot stated.

“The state shouldn’t be shy about charging cash,” he stated. “We’re bringing a unified voice to inform elected officers we will’t undergo this once more.”

Public businesses have additionally famous the injury prompted in areas of the river which can be overgrown with Arundo. Arundo can develop tall and thick and have impacts on all the river ecosystem. Worse, it’s not a local plant.

Arundo donax in California got here principally from Europe, although Europe doubtless obtained its personal Arundo from India. Starting within the mid-1800s, Arundo was broadly planted in California for erosion management. Like many invasive species, it grew uncontrolled.

The Useful resource Conservation District of Monterey County, or RCD, wrote a proposal for 2022 grant funding from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation for the fifth part of a set of tasks to take away the Arundo. The tasks are carried out in numerous segments of the river. The RCD has an Arundo Removing Program that pays for and implements Arundo elimination on personal property.

The tasks are a partnership with the Salinas Valley Basin Groundwater Sustainability Company, the Monterey County Agricultural Commissioner’s Workplace, the California Wildlife Conservation Board and personal landowners alongside the river. It, too, acknowledges the issue with river clogging.

“The venture addresses the impacts of a 1,500-acre infestation of Arundo throughout the Salinas River floodplain, which embrace degradation of habitat for fish and wildlife, alteration of hydrologic processes, decreased water availability within the riparian zone, elevated hearth danger and elevated flood danger to neighboring lands,” the proposal states.

Chris Lopez, the Monterey County supervisor whose district covers a majority of the Salinas River, has heard from residents in his district in addition to growers that the flood injury may have been thwarted by channel upkeep. He, like others, is encouraging upkeep strategies that everybody can dwell with, if not totally embraced.

“My constituents have informed me that the impacts may very well be prevented or mitigated by an everyday program of river upkeep that’s good for farmers, for the setting and for wildlife,” he stated.

Customers look out