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Monday, Nov. 09, 2009
MID gets fed grant to help cut water diversions
The Bureau of Reclamation said it awarded $5.9 million for the CALFED Water Use Efficiency Grant Program.
Included in the grants was one for the Merced Irrigation District. The district plans to reduce operational discharge of irrigation water from the Garibaldi Lateral by eliminating seepage and preventing spillage into the Merced River.
Conserved water will be redirected to the McCoy Lateral to meet existing demands within the system. This could reduce MID diversions by an estimated 5,600 acre-feet of water a year, according to a bureau news release..
The federal agency said that with combined local cost shares, more than $17 million in water management improvement projects will be implemented in the next 24 months. It estimated that more than 26,000 acre-feet of water will be better managed or conserved each year.
(An acre-foot of water is about 326,000 gallons, or a year’s supply for an average family in the Valley.)
This will help meet CALFED Program objectives to improve ecosystem health, water supply reliability and water quality.
The bureau said projects were selected through a competitive process, and priority consideration was given to projects that addressed CALFED Bay-Delta Program goals on a statewide basis. The bureau said it awarded a total of 16 projects, spanning California from the city of Grimes in Northern California to Orange County in Southern California.
The CALFED Bay-Delta Program is a 30-year Program (2000-2030) among 25 federal and state agencies with responsibility in the Sacramento San Joaquin Delta. The program is based on four major resource management objectives that guide its actions to achieving a Delta that has a healthy ecosystem and can supply Californians with a reliable water supply.
They are levee system integrity, water quality, water supply reliability and ecosystem restoration.
For more information on the CALFED Water Use Efficiency Program, contact Anna Sutton, at 916-978-5215 or asutton@usbr.gov.
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