Auburn dam may be dealt death blow

A long-stalled Auburn dam on the American River has suffered many defeats. But the next could be truly fatal.

The State Water Resources Control Board plans to revoke the water rights held by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation for the project. The unfinished dam, in other words, would no longer have any water to hold back.

Reclamation halted construction on a dam more than 30 years ago due to earthquake concerns, leaving the river's north fork heavily scarred but not permanently blocked. A host of environmental concerns and ballooning costs have delayed the project ever since.

Though still coveted by some officials in the region, a dam is probably doomed without water.

"If they lose the water rights, it would be very problematic, I would think," said Bruce Kranz, a Placer County supervisor and chairman of the American River Authority, a joint-powers agency and leading dam advocate.

The original Auburn dam was approved by Congress in 1965. It was designed to store 2.5 million acre-feet of water behind a dam nearly 700 feet high adjacent to the city of Auburn.

Reclamation secured water rights for a dam from the state in 1970. Those rights allowed the agency to store a staggering amount of water – 5 million acre-feet – at different times of year for purposes ranging from power generation and recreation to farming and urban consumption.

Under state law, water rights expire if not used. But Reclamation was granted an extension in 1984 on the condition that it present a revised project for approval by Dec. 31, 1987. It failed to do so and has asked for three more extensions since 1988.

The state did not grant those extensions, nor did it revoke the permits as a result.

Bill Rukeyser, a spokesman for the state water board, said Reclamation has run out of chances by failing to make progress on the dam.

"It's our understanding they will not strongly contest it, because obviously the project is not going ahead," he said. "Basically, time is up, so this is simply a matter of the water rights division taking care of business."

But Reclamation spokesman Jeff McCracken said his agency will argue to keep the rights. It requested a hearing on the matter before the water board, set for July 21 in Sacramento. A prehearing conference will be held June 4. Both are open to the public.

"This remains a congressionally mandated project," McCracken said. "The bottom line is, we continue to want to hold onto those rights because Congress told us to do something and it hasn't yet been completed."

In reality, the project is moldering in legal limbo. It remains federally authorized, but costs have grown so dramatically that restarting construction would require a new vote by Congress.

That is unlikely, because the project's environmental consequences would be far more controversial today than when the dam was first proposed. Also, the new water supply it would create is much less than Reclamation's paper water rights.

Ronald Stork, a senior policy advocate at Friends of the River, estimated an Auburn dam would yield something less than 300,000 acre-feet of new water supply. That's not nearly enough to justify the project's huge cost, he said.

The most recent estimate, completed last year by Reclamation, put the cost to finish the dam at a minimum of $6 billion. That's 12 times greater than the originally authorized cost.

"You either have to find very wealthy beneficiaries who are prepared to pay a heck of a lot for the water, or some taxpayers somewhere who are prepared to be fleeced," Stork said.

The project also is losing its most committed supporter, Rep. John Doolittle, R-Roseville, who announced in January he wouldn't seek re-election.

If the water rights are revoked, another party can apply for them. But they would likely get much less water, because science has shown the environment can't sustain the diversions allowed by the 38-year-old permits.

For his part, longtime dam supporter Kranz has turned his focus elsewhere.

"Politically, it's not there right now," he said. "I want to work on things that have a chance of being successful."

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