News Release Archive

Assistant Secretary Raley Recognizes Water 2025 Challenge Grant For Truckee Canal Improvements

Media Contact: Jeffrey McCracken, 916-978-5100, JMCCRACKEN@mp.usbr.gov

For Release: September 21, 2004

Assistant Secretary of the Interior Bennett W. Raley today recognized the Water 2025 Challenge Grant awarded to the Truckee-Carson Irrigation District and the City of Fernley at a ceremony held on the bank of the Truckee Canal near Fernley, Nevada.

The grant will provide funding for the automation of gates and telemetry on Gilpin Wasteway on the Truckee Canal, part of the century-old Newlands Project. Also participating in the event were Ernest Schank, President of the Board of Directors, Truckee-Carson Irrigation District, David Stix, Jr., Mayor of the City of Fernley, and officials from the Bureau of Reclamation. They collaborated to apply for the matching funds grant from the Department of the Interior. The total project cost is $300,000, with a Water 2025 contribution of $150,000.

"This project exemplifies the principle of cooperative conservation and local decision-making, which are central to Water 2025," Assistant Secretary Raley said. "The grant will provide funding to begin a local, long-term modernization effort to more efficiently meet urban, irrigation, and instream needs."

There are two primary benefits of the project. First, technical improvements at Gilpin Wasteway will allow the Truckee-Carson Irrigation District to make more frequent and timely changes to meet demand more precisely, thus reducing the amount of water diverted from the Truckee River. The saved water, approximately 3,000 acre-feet per year, will flow downstream and enhance instream flows or be stored upstream to meet future needs. The City of Fernley and other downstream areas will also benefit during emergency flood situations. The enhanced control of the structure will enable greater control of flood flows in the Truckee Canal, thus reducing the potential downstream flood impacts.

"Water 2025 has identified areas where potential crises and conflicts over water may occur," Raley noted, "and the Challenge Grant projects, such as the one here in Fernly, have proposed innovative ways to head off problems by conserving and distributing this critical resource more efficiently and more effectively."

The Water 2025 Challenge Grants - administered by Reclamation - provide local irrigation districts throughout the West with matching funds to support a variety of projects to make more efficient use of existing water supplies through water conservation, efficiency, and water market projects. The Challenge grants program focuses on meeting the goals identified in Water 2025: Preventing Crises and Conflict in the West. This year, Interior Secretary Gale Norton approved more than $4 million in water conservation grants under the Water 2025 Secretarial Challenge Grant Program. President George Bush has requested $21 million for the initiative in Fiscal Year 2005.

The Truckee Canal is part of the Newlands Project, initiated by Reclamation in 1903. Both the Truckee-Carson Irrigation District and the City of Fernley hope that the Gilpin Wasteway modernization effort will extend to other Truckee Canal facilities in the future. Operational benefits could also be realized by automation and telemetry at the Fernley check structure and five other check structures along the Truckee Canal.

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