High Sierra Topix

Activists have launched a new round in their long-running campaign to restore Yosemite National Park’s Hetch Hetchy Valley to its natural condition by draining the reservoir that serves San Francisco and most of the Peninsula.

In a lawsuit filed last week in Tuolumne County (embedded below), the group Restore Hetch Hetchy renews arguments that featured prominently in a 2012 San Francisco ballot campaign — namely, that the water supply from the San Francisco’s Sierra Nevada reservoir can be readily and relatively cheaply replaced by altering management of the Tuolumne River.

San Francisco officials, who have opposed studying the idea of emptying Hetch Hetchy, say the suit is “baseless” and that even suggesting draining the reservoir as the state contends with a severe drought is “outrageous” and “crazy.”

The lawsuit alleges that Hetch Hetchy violates a 1928 provision of the California Constitution that requires the “beneficial and reasonable” use of the state’s water. The action points to later interpretations of the provision, Article X, Section 2, which have held that “the public interest requires that there be the greatest number of beneficial uses which the supply [of water] can yield.

The suit says San Francisco’s use of a swath of Yosemite National Park fails to do that:

[The city has] eliminated or seriously impaired the beneficial uses of the Tuolumne River as the river flows through the Hetch Hetchy Valley. Respondents’ method of diverting the Tuolumne River’s waters eliminates important aesthetic, scenic, fish & wildlife habitat, fishing, recreational, and preservational beneficial uses in furtherance of water supply storage for remote cities and replaceable electric power production.
The suit also says the city’s water project robs Yosemite visitors “of the wonder that would be experienced by millions … journeying to view Hetch Hetchy Valley’s sublime landscape.”

The suit uses an approach similar to the one Restore Hetch Hetchy employed in 2012 as part of its campaign to pass Proposition F in San Francisco. The measure would have required the city to undertake a study of draining Hetch Hetchy and reconfiguring the system that delivers water from the Tuolumne watershed to the city and Peninsula. The suit asks for a court order requiring the city to “prepare an engineering and financing plan for altering” the Hetch Hetchy system.

Prop. F went down to a resounding defeat, with a 77 percent “no vote.”

“This is just another attempt to grab the spotlight on an issue where we’re talking about taking the water supply away for a large part of California,” said Tyrone Jue, spokesman for the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, which runs the Hetch Hetchy system.

Jue repeated the city’s talking points in fighting the 2012 ballot measure: the Hetch Hetchy system is efficient, it delivers pure mountain water and does it inexpensively while producing clean hydroelectric power. As city officials have said for years, he added that the cost of restoring Hetch Hetchy would be prohibitive.

“It was estimated to be between three and ten billion dollars in investment to remove Hetch Hetchy Reservoir and restore the valley,” Jue said. “And if you put that cost on each customer, that’s a range of approximately 550 dollars per year to two thousand dollars per year is San Franciscans were to have to pay that cost.”

But the lawsuit argues that a restored Hetch Hetchy Valley would become a magnet for visitors and become an economic engine generating as much as $8.7 billion in recreational benefits to visitors and local businesses for the first half-century after restoration.

“We intend to show that the value of a restored valley is greater than the cost of restoring it,” said Spreck Rosekrans, Restore Hetch Hetchy’s executive director.

And Rosekrans said the process of restoration would itself be a magnet for future visitors.

“You would have tourists going to see this marvelous place almost immediately,” he said. “People would come back every five years, every 10 years with their families, with their kids, and it would be a really incredible thing to watch this valley come back to life.”

WarrenFork wrote:The 1971 Master Plan for the park called for the elimination of the private auto from the Valley as well as the removal of most accommodations apart from campsites.

The latest revival occurred at a recent show-and-tell for the new spillway under construction at Folsom Dam. Congressman Tom McClintock, R-Auburn, seized the occasion — not so much for congratulations — but to decry recent releases of water from dams on the American River.

“It infuriates me that for the past three days, we have seen releases of water out of dams on the American River triple in order to meet environmental regulations that place the interests of fish above those of human beings.”

The congressman then pivoted and called for completion of Auburn Dam, a long-stagnant project on the North Fork of the American River originally green-lighted by Congress in 1965, near the end of what the late writer Marc Reisner called the “go-go years” of American dam building. McClintock’s colleague from across the aisle, Sacramento Democrat Doris Matsui, sat nearby, literally shaking her head.

McClintock told the assembled dignitaries that a brimming Auburn Lake reservoir upstream, “could fill and refill Folsom Lake nearly 2 1/2 times.” The current drought has left Folsom Lake at alarmingly low levels this spring.

Indeed, the project, designed by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, would create one of the state’s biggest reservoirs, with a capacity of more than 2 million acre-feet of water, about half the volume of Shasta Lake.

Then McClintock took aim at Governor Jerry Brown’s plan to construct bypass tunnels to carry water through the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

“Even with the inflated costs we’re seeing today,” said McClintock, “[the dam project] could be done for much less than the current proposal to build a cross-Delta facility that produces zero additional water storage.” (According to Reclamation, there hasn’t been a reliable cost update on the project since 2006.)

He went on to extoll other potential advantages, such as, “power for a million homes” and “a major new recreational resource for our region.”

rlown wrote:I would just open the floodgates to Hetch Hetchy dam and let her stay as a monument as to what not to do in a National Park!