A Little Background

In 2007, the Texas Legislature acknowledged the need to protect water for fish and wildlife with the passage of Senate Bill 3. This landmark bill recognized the critical role environmental flows play in maintaining the ecological health and productivity of Texas rivers and estuaries and the economic factors associated with them. It set in motion a stakeholder process to create flow standards for each of Texas’s major river basins and associated bays that would be applied to any new water permits that are granted.

Under this law, the state appoints a committee of stakeholders for each region that includes representatives from a diverse set of interests including river authorities, municipalities, industries, environmental interests, regional water planning groups, commercial and recreational fishermen, agricultural interests and others. Each committee, with assistance from their science advisors, is tasked with developing consensus-based recommendations for flow standards that find an appropriate balance between protecting the environment and providing for human water needs in the basin. These recommendations are then submitted to TCEQ, which has one year to consider them and adopt rules for the region.

Stakeholders Recommend Balanced Protections

In September 2011, the stakeholder groups for the Central and South Central Texas regions – the Colorado and Lavaca Rivers/Matagorda and Lavaca Bays committee and Guadalupe and San Antonio Rivers/San Antonio Bay System committee – submitted  flow recommendations to TCEQ that provide a reasonable level of protection for fish and wildlife while also allowing for future uses of water to provide for human needs.

Developing these recommendations was no small feat, as noted in a recent San Antonio-Express News opinion piece. For one, striking a balance between the needs of fish and wildlife and future human water supply demands is never an easy task. Making matters more difficult, these committees were faced with the reality that much of the water flowing in these region’s rivers has already been permitted for use with little or no consideration of the impacts on fish and wildlife.

Despite these challenges, after months of deliberation and compromise, the Colorado/Lavaca stakeholder committee unanimously approved flow recommendations that struck a reasonable balance. The Guadalupe/San Antonio comittee also developed comprehensive recommendations, endorsed by a super-majority vote of 21 to 3.

Proposed Rules Beg for Improvement

To the frustration of the vast majority of the stakeholders, the rule proposed by TCEQ for Central and South Central Texas rivers and bays fails to incorporate key aspects of the stakeholder recommendations with insufficient explanation from agency staff as to why those key aspects where left out. This leaves the region’s fish and wildlife populations at risk. Fortunately, the public comment process provides an opportunity to improve these flow standards before they are adopted by the three TCEQ Commissioners in August.

We urge you to join the National Wildlife Federation and our Texas Living Waters Project partners in asking the Commissioners to safeguard Central Texas’s fish and wildlife populations – and the jobs that depend on them – by strengthening the proposed rule. TCEQ is accepting comments on the rule until May 14, 2012. Send them a letter today through our alert system.

For more information on environmental flows and other Texas water issues, visit www.TexasWaterMatters.org.

Washington east of the Cascade Mountains is dry – parts of it have only 7 inches of rain a year, making all but desert.   Yet that is some of Washington’s richest farm land, growing most of the nation’s hops, and an awful lot of cherries, apples and pears, not to mention dairy and increasingly respected wine.   Water for those crops comes from the Cascades, where snowfall in the winter feeds rivers and farms in the summer.  Salmon too rely on that melting snow to provide river flow and cold water needed for spawning.

Climate models suggest that the snowpack is going to largely disappear.  Not that there will be much less precipitation, just that it will more and more fall as rain, running off rapidly, rather than as snow, melting into summer.   This research about Mt Adam’s glaciers directly feeds into that story.

Pacific Northwest agriculture is not the only area impacted by the melting glaciers from climate change. Water supplies dependent upon the Andean and Himalayan glaciers are also threatened. In the Himilayas the Food and Agriculture Organization predicts that water for agriculture in Asia is expected to decline by 20% by 2030. This causes local and global leaders to worry about the future of food production.

Even Yakima agriculture is starting to worry.  This is the political “red” country – deeply Republican.  It is represented by Rep. “Doc” Hastings, Chairman of the House Committee on Natural Resources, a Republican a dismal record on the environment (League of Conservation Voters scores of 0% for the 106^th through 109^th Congress, rising to a whopping 3% in the 110^th and 4% in the 111^th Congress)  . Yet in his district, people in agriculture are starting to ask questions like “what are we going to do about this climate change stuff and our water supplies?”  Guys in coveralls know that their livelihood depends on snow.

So what are we going to do?  Conserve water – use it more efficiently and maybe switch away from water intensive industry like dairy?   Yep – everybody agrees that has got to be on high on the agenda.  But there is also a need to restore salmon to the Yakima River.  When federal dams were built and the river engineered, the 800,000 to a million salmon dwindled to a few thousand.  The Yakama Nation, a salmon tribe, had its treaty rights to fish made meaningless, once there were no fish.  Restoring salmon is a tough sell in that Congressional district.

NWF and our allies are working towards a comprehensive approach – using the need for change that climate disruption is causing.  After more than 2 years of discussion, every major interest in the Yakima basin has agreed on a plan that will help fish, farms and families.   It involves a mix of ambitious salmon restoration, protection about 200,000 acres of private and public lands to support a healthy watershed,  better use of existing water supplies and infrastructure and expanding water storage.

Look for more on the Yakima in the coming months – its an exciting and innovative project.

You can learn more about our work at the National Wildlife Federation Pacific Regional Center by going to our website and following us on facebook and twitter – @nwfpacific!