Garcia slams Newsom’s water policies, explains how he made the outrageous discovery that California water districts can’t collect water prior to November 1st of each wet season.
Herman Garcia is the ultimate do-gooder. Three Presidents – Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton – each bestowed on him the title ‘Top Civilian Crime Fighter’ in formal commendations. Garcia retired from a 40-year career as a professional poker player in 2006. He made a good living and was widely known as ‘The California Kid’.
Since then, he’s worked to clean up California’s waterways, creating a network of volunteers that has pulled thousands of tons of garbage out of rivers and creeks. He founded CHEER, a non-profit that addresses coastal habitat education and environmental restoration. The organization has an extraordinary body of accomplishments, like getting the Pajaro River watershed cleaned up in just three years after it was named a Most Endangered River in the United States in 2006. His organization is widely credited for restoring the steelhead trout population in the watershed.
Chairwoman Charlene Nijmeh and the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe have partnered with Garcia and his organization for the past 20 years on environmental initiatives in the Tribe’s homeland and beyond. Garcia’s no-nonsense common-sense environmentalism is aligned with the Tribe’s views on responsible land and water management. Chairwoman Nijmeh has long applauded Garcia’s integrity, independence, and blunt honesty.
Garcia’s environmental organization has conducted 43 investigations. Every one of them either resulted in the offending party coming into compliance with environmental laws, or they were prosecuted.
Jaw-dropping discovery of California’s wasteful water management policy
During the drought of 2014-15, Garcia made a startling discovery that upended common conceptions about California’s water crisis – a discovery that made its way to the Oval Office and manifested a tweet by President Donald J. Trump in 2018 that blamed State water and environmental policies for magnifying the size of wildfire disasters at the time:
“California wildfires are being magnified and made so much worse by bad environmental laws which aren’t allowing massive amounts of readily available water to be properly utilized. It is being diverted into the Pacific Ocean…” Trump tweeted on August 6, 2018. That same day, President Trump approved disaster aid for a wildfire-ravaged area of Shasta County.
At the time, Jerry Brown was Governor and was proposing new dams that would be funded with rate increases in his ‘California Water Action Plan’, which was signed into law in 2014. But that legislation failed to address 70-year-old state policies that restrict local water districts from collecting rainfall prior to November 1st of each wet season.
Garcia discovered this policy in October of 2016, three days of badly needed rain drenched the area. The Uvas creek sub-basin was flowing at 1,600 cubic feet per second. The river’s tributaries all topped out. It was estimated that the Uvas Reservoir captured 1,000 acre-feet of water during those three days.
In the days that followed, Garcia continued to monitor flow measurements in the river and was shocked to discover that flows of 60 cubic feet per second were being released. He monitors the waterways regularly and knew that was far too high. Normal flow should have been somewhere in the range of 10 to 15 cubic feet per second. He estimated that the Reservoir was releasing 120-acre feet of water each day into Monterey Bay.
In fewer than ten days, the Santa Clara Water District intentionally released the entirety of what the dam had captured in those three days of heavy rains. Garcia was outraged and demanded an explanation from authorities. He was told that water districts across the state were required to enter into operating agreements when the dams were built that prevent them from retaining any rainfall that is captured prior to November 1st of each wet season. Water that is captured in the fall before November 1 had to be released immediately.
At the time these reservoirs were constructed, the State had a much less demanding need for water and could afford to forgo the retention of water outside of the wet winter season. But Garcia believes that times have changed and these agreements should be modernized to take into account contemporary realities for the 21st century.
When he brought the issue to John Laird, who at the time was the Secretary of the California Natural Resources Agency during Governor Brown’s administration, in July of 2017, Laird told Garcia that nobody in the administration had any idea that this was going on and he promised an investigation. Laird confirmed to Garcia that the problem was enormous, and it impacted nearly every reservoir in California and likely was leading to the unnecessary release of billions of gallons of water.
In the weeks before the gubernatorial election in 2018, at age 72, Garcia walked 150-miles from Gilroy to Sacramento to raise awareness for the issue and to demand that State officials reverse the policy. And then he returned to Sacramento following the election to make sure that Governor Newsom’s new Secretary of the California Natural Resources Agency, Wade Crowfoot, to ensure that the incoming administration was made aware of the situation.
But Garcia worries that the policy has not yet changed and that water districts across the State are forgoing the capture of the vast majority of California’s rainfall. An investigation by then-Congressman Devin Nunes reported that 76% of California’s water flows into the Pacific Ocean. In recent years that number has been estimated to be much higher.
“I don’t think that Gavin Newsom has been a good Governor. California is being very wasteful and operates without any common sense,” Garcia explains.
“Steelhead trout, for example, are protected as a threatened species under the federal Endangered Species Act,” he explains. “But I had to fight California for six years just to get rescue permits to save some steelhead trout. When water levels are low, the trout get stuck in isolated pools upstream. If you don’t relocate them, they’ll die off. The environmental regulators refused to issue NGOs rescue permits for six years, so for six years the fish died,” Garcia explains. “The stupidity is maddening.”
Garcia is hoping to meet with President Trump’s incoming administration.
“I’ve tried taking this to Sacramento several times under two Governors. It’s time to go right to the top and put this on President Trump’s desk,” Garcia explains. “He has a chance to do a lot of a good, and quench the thirst of this land.”
Collecting water outside of traditional wet seasons will become increasingly important as climate change has intensified the frequency and severity of droughts, which happen less predicably. With rising temperatures leading to reduced snowpack in the Sierra Nevada, the state’s primary water source, there will be increased need for reservoirs to retain stormwater runoff that a larger snowpack would have been able to retain.
With a population exceeding 39 million, California can expect increased demand for water to support growing residential, agricultural, and industrial needs straining the existing supply.
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