Minutes of January meeting

WESTSIDE RESOURCE CONSERVATION DISTRICT
BOARD OF DIRECTORS

Draft Meeting Minutes
January 15th, 2009

The following is a summary of the Westside Resource Conservation District Board of Directors special meeting held on January 15th 2009, at the Westlands Water District Five Points office.

President Phil Erro convened the meeting at 10:10AM. A quorum was present and the agenda was found in order. Staff circulated a sign-up sheet that is attached and a part of these minutes. A copy of the draft minutes of the December meeting were posted on the web site and transmitted to the Directors for review. On a motion by Director Clausen seconded by Director Finster the minutes were unanimously approved as submitted.

There were no public comments.

Under financial report, the Manager outlined the current financial condition of the District. At this time there was the ability to address some of the payables. The proposed payables list was presented to Finance Committee Chair Director Clausen. Based on the income received, Director Clausen moved to issue the warrants submitted. The motion was seconded by Director Diener and then unanimously approved.

Under the “President’s Corner” of the Director reports President Erro presented several items.  He announced that now that we had the web site for posting current information, the minutes of this meeting and all future meetings would be posted to the site within one week of the meeting. He also indicated that the IFDM manuals, the “annual plans” and numerous links were available on the site. Finally, the agenda would be posted to the web site at least one week before the meetings.

The next item President Erro presented was the summary elements and implementation effort of the IFDM program the District sponsors. The program needs more effective communication because it could be an important component of the Westlands effort to exchange responsibility for drainage management from the United States Bureau of Reclamation for water supply reliability. IFDM is the only salt management strategy that has the capability to meet the current stringent regulatory controls imposed on drainage water management. The problem originates from both the natural salt accumulation of evapo-transpiration/evapo-concentration and importation of salt in CVP irrigation water. President Erro discussed the measurement units and methods for evaluating salt in water and soil. The main assessment tool is electrical conductivity which then can be roughly calculated into the salt components. The most significant salt constituents are sodium and chloride ions. The IFDM process manages water tables with precision water application and drainage systems. Precision irrigation minimizes the amount of water that has to be drained in a specific field and precise sub-surface drainage design minimizes the amount of both applied and regional drainage water that has to be managed by the system. Current IFDM systems succeed by growing the highest return crops on at the largest amount of areas possible before using drainage water for irrigating ever more salt tolerant plant materials before finally sending concentrated brine to a solar evaporator. Both the drainage areas and solar evaporator are subject to regulatory controls but the highest levels of controls are on the evaporator. This is especially true where some drainage waters can contain small amounts of ionic selenium species, particularly selenate. Selenium in relatively low concentrations is a toxicant to avian and other terrestrial animal species. The key management element is to have no standing water in drainage re-cycling areas or in the solar evaporator system. Some IFDM systems are three-stage and others are four. Three stage have high-value crops, re-cycling of drainage on salt-tolerant plants and the solar evaporator. A fourth stage adds an element of blending the first re-cycled drainage water with fresh water to grow cereal, tree or forage crops that have a potential significant economic return for the grower.  The IFDM activities are incrementally expanding but we need to promote the technology to get better adoption and acceptance as an on-going viable solution.

Under Director reports, Director Diener gave an update on the design and technology involved in the Forever Water distillation unit that will be featured at the next Board meeting. This technology will be evaluated and compared to reverse osmosis (RO) for efficacy and cost. RO still has the issue of calcium (in drainage water) fouling and the need for pre-treatment or high membrane maintenance costs. One potential difference with adding the distiller that Director Diener has identified is that by distilling the drain water instead of doing some of the re-cycling the ratio of productive farmland goes up from 40/640 for drainage management to just 3 acres for a distiller and solar evaporator with 637 acres available for high-value crops. Next, Director Brughelli talked about the almond field day he attended that discussed pest management and husbandry practices that minimized use of chemical treatments. Some of the tested practices have shown promise and wider adoption while others have perhaps less success. The field trials were done at Locke properties near Firebaugh. The trials were modeled after the sustainable cotton trials developed a few years ago.  Issues for almond production that remain as high priority that need further assessment include; aflotoxins for food safety, navel orange worm, band canker and dormant spray use.

Finally, President Erro mentioned Director Anderson was attending the range water quality seminar and he would attend the Lorman seminar on San Joaquin Valley groundwater conditions to be held in Fresno.

Under the Manager’s report the “Annual Plan” was presented by the manager on a motion by the Director Clausen seconded by Director Brughelli the plans for watershed management, salt and drainage and habitat restoration were approved.

There were no further reports and the meeting was adjourned unanimously at 11:55AM.

                            Sargeant J. Green, Secretary-Manager