Common use of Yuba River Clause in Contracts

Yuba River. In 2008, the State Water Resources Control Board (the SWRCB) adopted minimum streamflow requirements and related measures proposed by Yuba County Water Agency (YCWA) that implemented the Yuba River Accord Fisheries Agreement, which YCWA developed with the Department of Fish and Game (DFG), the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) and several conservation groups. The Accord and the SWRCB’s related order – Corrected Order WR 2008-14 – resolved 20 years of disputes concerning the Yuba River’s minimum streamflows. The Accord streamflow requirements, as implemented by the SWRCB, are depicted in Exhibit A. The SWRCB adopted Corrected Order WR 2008-14, after considering a $6 million environmental impact report that YCWA certified and that was not challenged in court. The Yuba River Accord is summarized below and additional information is available on YCWA’s website at xxxx://xxx.xxxx.xxx/projects/detail/8. Disputes concerning the Yuba River’s streamflows began in 1988 and continued through a 14- day SWRCB hearing in 1992, a 13-day SWRCB hearing in 2000 and a three-day SWRCB hearing in 2003. In 2003, the SWRCB adopted Revised Water Right Decision 1644 (RD-1644). Many lawsuits, including one by XXXX, were filed to challenge RD-1644. As an alternative to litigating these disputes to a conclusion, YCWA, DFG, NMFS, USFWS and environmental groups engaged in a collaborative, science-based process to identify and prioritize the key stressors on salmon and steelhead in the lower Yuba River and then to develop streamflow requirements that would address these stressors. The resulting Yuba Accord Fisheries Agreement sets new, substantially-higher streamflow requirements that allocate more water to fishery benefits than RD-1644 would have required. Specifically, the Fisheries Agreement’s streamflow schedules include up to more than 174,000 acre-feet of water annually, and more than 100,000 acre-feet in the springtime of about 60% of all years, to fishery benefits than RD-1644 would have required. The Fisheries Agreement allocates these fishery streamflows in a manner that enables YCWA to deliver approximately 350,000 acre-feet of water per year for consumptive use in Yuba County and to transfer water to downstream water users, including Delta-export agencies, for irrigation, municipal and environmental uses. The Fisheries Agreement is one of four agreements that make up the Yuba River Accord. The other agreements are: (1) Conjunctive Use Agreements with local Yuba County water suppliers;