Socio-economic impacts of land retirement in Westlands Water District

Presented during the USCID water management conference held on October 13-16, 2004 in Salt Lake City, Utah. The theme of the conference was "Water rights and related water supply issues."Westlands Water District (Westlands, or the District) in California includes more than 560,000 irrigated acres of diversified crops on some of the most productive soil in the world. Land retirement has been proposed as a solution to two serious problems confronting the District: inadequate drainage on lands overlying shallow groundwater, and insufficient and increasingly unreliable water supply. Large portions of the west side of the San Joaquin Valley are affected by salinity and drainage problems. This affected area includes approximately 300,000 acres of the District's farmland. The U.S. government has long been aware of these problems and congressional authorization of the San Luis Unit facilities mandated drainage service as part of this project. When Westlands entered into a water supply agreement with the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (Reclamation), the provision of drainage service was expressly included as a contract term. Although Reclamation has studied the issue for many years, the drainage service options identified are extremely costly and their effectiveness is uncertain. Land Retirement could address two of the District's most significant problems, those being drainage and water supply. But the decision to accept this proposal would not only affect the District farms. In addition, communities, employees, and businesses depend on the District's agricultural economy. In order to help the District make an informed decision on land retirement, Westlands completed an economic impact analysis.Proceedings sponsored by the U.S. Department of the Interior, Central Utah Project Completion Act Office and the U.S. Committee on Irrigation and Drainage

USCID water management conference

Presented at Upgrading technology and infrastructure in a finance-challenged economy: a USCID water management conference held on March 23-26, 2010 in Sacramento, California.Glenn-Colusa Irrigation District (GCID) is in the process of developing a Resources Plan (Plan) to establish improved policies and decision making processes to better and more actively manage its available water supplies. The first element of the Plan will address Water Supplies and Transfers; it will be developed through evaluation of the district's recent historical and future water demands relative to available surface water and groundwater supplies. The analyses will reveal the probabilities, magnitudes and durations of possible future water supply shortage and surplus conditions. When combined with supporting legal and institutional review, the analyses will provide a basis for managing available water surface and groundwater supplies, shaping conjunctive water management policy, and evaluating potential surface water transfers. GCID is developing a water balance model, including related refinements to the District's water measurement, data management and reporting systems, to analyze historical and possible future water supplies and demands. The water balance will be calculated on a monthly time step for up to ten consecutive years, including winter months when rainfall is appreciable and irrigation demands are generally low. Individual water balances will be prepared for each of GCID's ten water operator areas, which can be combined to form the balance for the overall District. This paper provides a background description of GCID and discusses ongoing development of the water balance model and related improvements to GCID's flow measurement and data management procedures

SCADA meets public policy

Presented at Irrigated agriculture responds to water use challenges - strategies for success: USCID water management conference held on April 3-6, 2012 in Austin, Texas.Looking into the future, water agency managers, consultants, board members and other decision makers will need to assess and consider using today's available technology to make more informed decisions to balance competing needs for water, to demonstrate improved water management, and to implement and manage water conservation programs. The initial investment and "growing pains" of using technology to install or update a system can streamline operations and serve multiple functions to improve efficiency and data acquisition. With this foundation, Glenn-Colusa Irrigation District (GCID) elected to proceed with installing and utilizing a Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system to improve operations and assist in addressing the myriad challenges associated with operating a large irrigation district in California. Internal to GCID, the SCADA system is part of a long-term strategic plan to enable improvements to control the distribution and delivery of irrigation water through GCID's extensive canal network. One of the most important components of GCID's SCADA system is the communication system, which is a high-speed endlessly expandable communication network capable of adding an unlimited amount of SCADA sites. External to GCID, California's policy makers continue to enact new legislation requiring water agencies to prove that they are accurately measuring water, to demonstrate that water is being efficiently managed and beneficially used, and to establish linkages between surface water and groundwater. GCID is in the process of expanding its SCADA system to meet these new public objectives