The local water district that controls the Twitchell Dam reservoir will be required to consider the health of the steelhead trout population when it determines its water release schedule, according to a recent court ruling.
Environmental groups have long argued that Twitchell Dam operators are ignoring state and federal endangered species laws by not releasing water down the Santa Maria River during wet winters and springs—when the steelhead trout can journey upstream to form hatcheries.
On the other side, the dam operators—the Santa Maria Valley Water Conservation District and U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which originally built the facility in the 1950s—argued that doing so would violate the original intent of the reservoir: to conserve water and recharge the Santa Maria Valley Groundwater Basin during dry seasons.
After litigating the issue for years, on Sept. 23 a federal appeals court overturned a prior ruling that favored the water district, granting a win to the environmental groups, the Los Padres ForestWatch, SLO Coastkeeper, and Environmental Defense Center.
“What the Ninth Circuit’s ruling says is … the water agencies do have discretion to adjust the timing of their water releases, and that they have an obligation to do so to protect endangered steelhead,” Jeff Kuyper, executive director of the Los Padres ForestWatch, told the Sun.
According to Kuyper, water releases for the steelhead out of Twitchell Dam would only be necessary during rainy winters, and in those wet years, the releases would total about 4 percent of the reservoir capacity.
“In low water years, where we don’t get many storms and we get low precipitation amounts, the dam likely won’t have to do anything different,” he explained. “And in years we have abundant water, they will likely have to look at releasing a relatively small amount of water and timing those releases to coincide with those storms.”
Kuyper added that there’s still much to be decided about the dam’s management, and the specifics will be negotiated in federal court in the coming months. The long-term goal, though, is to help the steelhead return to a river that once saw robust hatchery runs.
“The current release [schedule] is the exact opposite of what the steelhead need,” Kuyper said. “This ruling is an important first step toward restoring a healthy steelhead fishery to the Santa Maria River.”
Santa Maria Valley Water Conservation District officials declined to comment to the Sun on the ruling.
