Reclamation district boundaries within the state of California

Reclamation district boundaries within the state of California. This delineation represents the eigth major revision of this dataset, after the seventh revision from 3/2006, after the sixth revision from 2/2006, after the fifth major revision from 1/2005, the fourth major revision from 10/2004, the third major revision from 6/2003, the second version from 10/2002, and after the first version produced by Office of Emergency Services during the 1997 floods. It was recognized that certain district boundaries in that GIS coverage were inaccurate, which prompted DWR Delta Levees Program to undertake an improvement of the entire dataset beginning in May of 2001.



Version 8 notes: Dataset was restructured prior to release of new general distribution "Reclamation Districts". The major change was in whittling the fields with all contact information out, because a lot of that information was outdated. From now on, the contact information will be maintained as a separate geoDB table ("reclamation_district_contacts"), created from the occasionally-updated Directory of Flood Officials. Not only is this more current information, but it includes a lot more contact information for the various District officers and employees. In addition, for Version 8, a few attribute errors were cleaned up and corrected.



Version 7 notes: 3 of the Suisun Marsh Districts were completely remapped. Due to a suspect shared boundary between Honker Bay Club & Simmons-Wheeler, the District engineer (MBK Engineers) was contacted for updated levee stationing, which revealed the more correct versions of those three districts as seen here. In the case of S-W & Honker Bay, the levee centerlines supplied by MBK Engineers were used to delineate the District boundary, so the actual boundaries are more waterward of these boundaries. For Van Sickle Island, the 2003 color ortho of Suisun Marsh was used to guide the boundary draw, following the levee in the ortho and the stations from the files, as they indicated. The original field info was carried over into the new polys, and the old polys were deleted.



Also, RD 2121 Bixler Tract was added. There isn't much info on this district anywhere that I can find. They aren't even in the directory of flood officials. But it is an active district. This may have been a remnant district created after the merger and re-alignment of Palm & Orwood into one RD, and it's numbering would be consistent with that, although that's speculative.



Version 6 notes: Palm & Orwood Tracts (RD 2024 & 2036) were combined into Palm-Orwood Tract (RD 2024) to reflect that these districts were merged in the late 1990's.



Version 5 notes: Two districts were added to version 4, Winter in Contra Costa County and Atlas in San Joaquin County. Winter had been represented by a now-defunct earlier district with a more extensive boundary. This represents the current district for that island. Atlas is a very small district right by Stockton that had previously been unknown to Delta Levees Program, and is now in the database.



Version 4 notes: Updated to include new Reclamation District 2137, Dutch Slough. District drawn according to plat map included with Legal Description filed with Contra Costa County LAFCO dated 7/8/2003. Parcels indicated on that map were selected from the Contra Costa County Assessor's office GIS layer and built into this Reclamation District boundary. So it was not drawn literally from the legal description metes and bounds.



Version 3 notes: The RD boundaries were improved to reflect: 1) changes to Hotchkiss Tract, approved by LAFCO, in 1/2003, 2) additional RDs in Suisun Marsh, and 3) updated contact information for some Delta districts. The Marsh district boundaries were drawn by interpretation from a hand-drawn map, of the general boundaries, then estimating the actual boundary based on imagery and other scanned maps. Otherwise, the data is as in version 2, described below.



Legal descriptions of individual Reclamation District boundaries were obtained wherever possible and used as the primary source for all boundaries. Although these boundaries are generally based on legal descriptions, and are therefore potentially relatively accurate, the boundaries in this dataset do not constitute a survey boundary for any land delineation application whatsoever.



In some cases, there were some problems with using the legal descriptions. For example, in some cases legal descriptions were simply not readily available, even though efforts were undertaken to obtain the descriptions from DWR Land & Right of Way, and from the individual district files themselves. Oftentimes, the legal descriptions were based on previous records were which either difficult and/or impossible to locate. For example, many Swamp Land Surveys, which themselves are of questionable "basemapping" practicality, were referenced in the legal descriptions. The mapping project did not warrant sufficient expenditure to locate and accurately map from such sources. Problems encountered where insufficient records were obtained are described below for the individual districts, so if the user is interested in an individual district, this dataset can be a helpful start.



This dataset, therefore, is somewhat of a Frankenstein, although the source of Frankenstein's body parts is fairly well documented. There are four primary mapping qualities (a database field describes which for each district) here: 1) districts mapped entirely from legal descriptions, 2) districts mapped from legal descriptions, but where some references of the description were either unavailable or otherwise insufficient for mapping, 3) districts mapped from DWR Land Use maps, as shown on those maps, and 4) districts mapped by the original Office of Emergency Services GIS coverage. This list also indicates the order of preference used in building this final RD dataset. Hotchkiss Tract was mapped from a revised boundary provided by KSN Engineers to DWR Delta Levees during 1/2002. Walnut Grove (RD 554) was modified to include the other side of the Slough, and the southeast corner of Union Island East, on the other side of the back levee, was included as appropriate. A few other districts remain in glaring question, for example, the actual boundary of Drexler Tract.



The table also includes information on whether or not certain districts are active and some contact info (from the OES '97 table). The active/inactive information is as discussed in Bulletin 37, 1930, Division of Water Resources report "Financial & General Data Pertaining to Irrigation, Reclamation, & Other Public Districts in California." RD 1619 (Bethel Island), 317 and 407 (Brannan-Andrus) were changed to inoperating as per current knowledge.



Some districts which are not reclamation districts, but which previously have been lumped into RD shapefiles and coverages, were not included in this dataset. Most notably, Stanislaus (an irrigation district), American River (a flood control district), Bethel Island (a municipal improvement district), and Brannan-Andrus (a levee district), are not in this dataset. Bethel Island Municipal Improvement District's predecessor, RD 1619, is in this database, but this is an inactive RD. See other feature classes in the "districts_water_management" geoDB for these boundaries.



Mapping was conducted as follows: Melissa Lee, under DWR Delta Levees, worked with Jean Woods (DWR Central District) on an AutoCAD station to map the boundaries according to the Land Use maps. It became apparant that this method was insufficient for many cases, so Melissa obtained DWR Land & Right of Way copies of Reclamation District boundary legal descriptions as available. Melissa completed some of this mapping. In 9/2001, Joel Dudas provided Chico State University Geographic Information Center with the legal descriptions and with the draft shapefiles from land use and legal boundaries. Additional boundaries, including more legal descriptions, swamp land surveys, and old maps, were obtained by Joel Dudas from the State Archives, the State Lands Commission, and the RD legal representatives, as available. Chico State (contact Jason Schwenkler) mapped from legal descriptions onto 1:24000 quads as physical control. The completed districts were sent to Joel Dudas in 9/2002 in one large merged file. Dudas then augmented the Chico State work with the existing attribute data, merged the districts absent in either the legal or land use collections, and compiled the results in 10/2002 for review. The documentation of the individual district issues, contained below, was prepared by Chico State. In effect, the legal boundaries are mostly from Chico, the "land use" boundaries are from DWR Land Use maps, and the others are from the original OES '97 shapefile. Some boundaries in the Delta were modified by Delta Levees as known.



There are undoubtedly improvements which can be made to this dataset. Comments and improvements should be forwarded to DWR Delta Levees Program (Joel Dudas) 916-651-7002 for synthesis.