10/26/06 River Settlement

River settlement ends long litigation. I'm Greg Martin with today's Line On Agriculture. A settlement agreement has been reached that would restore 142 miles of the San Joaquin River below Friant Dam which was constructed in 1947 to provide flood control, irrigation and municipal water for the valley. Jason Peltier - Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Water and Science - says farmers cooperated to end 18 years of litigation. PELTIER: Last year we had kind of a breakthrough on the part of the farmers who thought if we can actually find a way to settle we could have more certainty and more reliability going on into the future. And they sat down with the Natural Resource Council and started negotiating to find common ground and we found common ground. Restoring the San Joaquin River will be one of the largest environmental restoration projects in California history. Peltier says the plan calls for rebuilding dry river channels - removing barriers to fish passage and constructing levees. He says it will benefit the entire state. PELTIER: There are collateral benefits all down the river in to the Sacramento, San Joaquin delta and in fact potentially all the way into southern California which gets a significant portion of its water supply from northern California. Water conditions in the San Joaquin River will improve, water conditions will improve. There's just many collateral benefits people will see. The Friant Dam provides water for more than three-million acres of crops as well as municipal water supplies to numerous cities and towns in the San Joaquin Valley. But according to Peltier - the issue of salmon runs and river flows found new life in 1988 - when the initial 40-year water contracts for the Friant Division came up for renewal. PELTIER: The goal was, let's build this damn and the in the post war era we'll have a place for veterans to grow an economy here basically based on this new water supply and it has worked fabulously. Now obviously public values have changed and farmers have found a way to cope with that and entering into this settlement and dedicating water to the fisheries. Water users and environmental groups came to an agreement that will support irrigation and other uses while restoring the river flows. Success of the restoration will one day be marked by the return of the Chinook salmon run. Peltier says the fish will be transferred to the river in hopes they will know it as their own when they come to spawn. PELTIER: The plan is to go up to northern California and capture spring run fish in the streams where they have spawned and transport them down to the San Joaquin River, rear them and have them go to the ocean. They will have imprinted on the water of the San Joaquin River and the hope is that they will return to that as their natal stream three years later. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.