Jason Phillips of Friant Water Authority Maintaining Crucial Infrastructure in the San Joaquin Valley
T
he Friant Water Authority is a public agency that delivers over a million acre-feet of surface water annually to farmers in the Central Valley of California, thus stabilizing the Central Valley’s groundwater supply. The agency represents the interests of water users in the Friant Division of the federal Central Valley Project and operates and maintains the 152-mile-long Friant-Kern Canal. The Friant Division’s other vital infrastructure includes the Friant Dam on Millerton Lake and the 36-mile-long Madera Canal. Operating and maintaining these facilities takes work—and funding. Recently, ground subsidence has begun to severely hamper the functionality of the Friant-Kern Canal, affecting farmers on 330,000 acres of land. In this interview with Irrigation Leader Editor-in-Chief Kris Polly, Jason Phillips, the chief executive officer of the Friant Water Authority, discusses his agency’s plans for the Friant-Kern Canal and the challenges of securing funding for federal infrastructure in today’s fiscal climate.
Kris Polly: Please tell us about your background and how you ended up in your current position.
8 | IRRIGATION LEADER
Jason Phillips: I grew up in the Willamette Valley of Oregon and graduated with an engineering degree from Portland State University. In 1998, I moved to Sacramento, California, to take a job with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers as a civil engineer and project manager and worked there for a few years on civil works and flood control projects. In 2001, I was offered and took a position at the Bureau of Reclamation in Sacramento, specifically to manage a project to plan a new dam up at Millerton Lake known as Temperance Flat Dam. I took on some additional responsibilities, including dealing with the drainage issue on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley. I also got involved in the CALFED Bay-Delta Program, which was a systemwide effort to balance California’s water supply, water quality, fishery, and flood control needs. In 2006, still working at Reclamation, I became the program manager of the San Joaquin River Restoration Settlement, an unprecedented attempt to restore an extirpated salmon fishery on the San Joaquin River, from Friant Dam near Fresno all the way to the delta. The salmon fishery had been extinct for 60–70 years because the operation of
