Final Environmental Assessment: Tulare Irrigation District WaterSMART Funding Grant for Visalia Water Conservation Project and 25-year Exchange with the City of Visalia.

摘要

The Tulare Irrigation District (TID) and the City of Visalia (City) have proposed a cooperative and mutually-beneficial project to reduce local and regional water conflicts through conservation of treated wastewater supplies, which also allows for the diversification of TID’s and the City’s water supplies.Currently, the City discharges its treated municipal wastewater effluent to an existing creek system; however, the City has been ordered to discontinue this practice by the Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board (Regional Board). The City has proposed upgrading their existing wastewater treatment plant (Water Conservation Plant or WCP) to include a new tertiary treatment process in order to improve the quality of their treated water. The City prepared a Draft Environmental Impact Report (EIR) in 2011 pursuant to the California Environmental Quality Act that evaluated the environmental impacts of the construction of the treatment plant and a system of pipelines to distribute the effluent for reuse (City of Visalia, 2011). The final EIR was certified on February 19, 2013. The upgrade in the treatment plant is not part of Reclamation’s Proposed Action.One of the reuses of the tertiary treated water is the proposed delivery to TID under an exchange program. Under this exchange arrangement, TID would owe the City one acre-foot (af) of Central Valley Project (CVP) water for every two received from the treatment plant. The source of return water from TID is primarily from the Friant Unit of the CVP and TID’s contract for a water supply. Water returned to the City would be exclusively used for groundwater recharge in channels and facilities deemed advantageous to the City’s underlying groundwater supply.