Shaun McKinnon
The Arizona Republic
Jul. 6, 2003 12:00 AM
Lesson No. 1 about water in the West: There's never enough to go around, and
no one's making any more.
Competition for what there is has intensified as growth and drought tighten
the supply. The struggle threatens everything from economic development and
tourism to agriculture and municipal water supplies.
Courts are deciding who can use the water and who can't. Cities are preparing to buy or lease from farmers or Indian tribes for 10 times the current cost.
Phoenix will host the first of eight regional meetings to discuss issues raised
by "Water 2025," Interior Secretary Gale Norton's blueprint for preventing
water crises and conflict.
The half-day conference will be held from 1 to 5 p.m. Tuesday at the downtown
Hyatt Regency Hotel.
Two sessions are scheduled, one to talk about specific Arizona issues and the
other focusing on resolving conflicts. Participants include Herb Guenther, director
of the state Department of Water Resources; Sid Wilson, general manager of the
Central Arizona Project; Douglas Nelson of the Arizona Rural Water Association;
and representatives from Indian tribes, environmental groups and local governments.
Additional sessions are scheduled throughout the summer in Las Vegas; Sacramento;
Salt Lake City; Boise, Idaho; Billings, Mont.; Albuquerque and Austin.
Input from the sessions could help shape Water 2025 as well as other Interior
Department water policies.
The Phoenix sessions are open to the public, but advance registration is required.
Information is available by logging on to www.doi.gov/water2025/az/main.cfm.
And on the eve of a series of meetings aimed at quelling some of the unrest,
the federal government lobbed its own bomb, ruling on Thursday that farmers
in California's Imperial Valley are wasting water and will receive less beginning
next year. Furious farmers are already preparing a legal challenge that will
likely drag on for months and could eventually draw in Arizona and other states.
The escalating battles pushed Interior Secretary Gale Norton to step in and
try to negotiate a truce. She introduced "Water 2025" in May as blueprint
for preventing crisis and conflict and planned to begin discussing it with regional
water leaders beginning Tuesday in Phoenix.
"When water crises and conflict pit neighbor against neighbor, species
against species and business against recreation, when they threaten your way
of life, we cannot afford to stand on the sideline," Norton said last month
from Denver. "The consequences . . . are just too severe."
Critics have already dismissed Norton's plan as, among other things, "Band-Aids
for gunshot wounds," as the environmental group Living Rivers called it.
State and local water managers bemoan its puny budget, fearing more unfunded
federal mandates. But some water experts believe it's a reasonable approach
to a nearly unreasonable situation.
"The water supply is finite, and the demands are growing," said University
of Arizona law Professor Robert Glennon, an authority on Western water issues.
"There will be no new Central Arizona Project, no second era of dam building.
That's just not going to happen. What the West is looking at is the fastest-growing
section of the country, a population boom that's going on unabated. The question
is, What's going to give?"
Among the issues that fuel the fiercest fights:??Growth. More than 25 million people rely on the Colorado River, which is now controlled by dams and reservoirs for much of its 1,400-mile length. Nevada has exhausted its legal allocation of the river and is now searching for alternatives. Colorado lawmakers recently approved a plan to build a new pipeline that will carry more of that state's share of the river to its most populous cities east of the Rockies.
The story is similar on other rivers, which strain to serve growing populations. "Almost every major river in the West is overappropriated," said John Keyes, commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation, the agency that operates most of the region's water delivery systems. In Arizona, the groundwater supply is at greater risk of depletion, especially in rural
areas.??Environment. Courts are increasingly siding with environmental groups
who want water set aside for wildlife and natural habitat. Salt River Project
must spend $20 million to create and maintain a habitat for the Southwestern
willow flycatcher, an endangered bird that moved into the drought-stricken edges
of Roosevelt Lake. Another court ordered the Army to reduce its pumping near
Sierra Vista, ruling that growth there was endangering the San Pedro River.
Just last month, a New Mexico court ruled that Albuquerque must take less water
from the Rio Grande to accommodate the endangered silvery minnow. That decision
is "huge," said Lisa Force, Arizona program director for Living Rivers.
"It has the potential of impacting Western water law."??Politics.
Few issues have fueled the kind of political battles that water has in the West.
And it has rarely been more evident than the past year in California, where
the powerful Imperial Irrigation District has dug in to protect its huge water
supply from San Diego, Los Angeles and the U.S. government.
Federal officials said Thursday that the district is wasting some of its allocation
and will lose up to 9 percent of its water next year. Imperial holds the rights
to more water than any single user on the river, more than the entire states
of Nevada, Wyoming and New Mexico.
In Arizona, tribal water claims are crawling through Congress, the Legislature
and the courts. The Navajo Nation earlier this year filed suit to force action
on its claim to the Colorado and Little Colorado rivers, a move that could set
off new skirmishes over who must give up water to satisfy any settlement.
If the tribes decide to lease water back to urban providers, they could demand
premium costs. Valley cities that now pay roughly $30 to $100 per acre-foot
could find bills topping $1,000 per acre-foot, according to water experts. (An
acre-foot equals 325,851 gallons.)??Agriculture. Despite the urban growth explosion,
farmers still use more water than anyone else in the West. The Imperial Irrigation
District in southern California holds the largest single allocation on the Colorado
River, larger even than all of Arizona's. That gives farmers power, but in many
cases, it also gives cities a source of water for new growth. The battles will
focus on how farmers will reduce their consumption and how much cities will
have to pay them to do so.??Drought and climate. The one pressure point out
of anyone's direct control, drought has reshaped many of the arguments in recent
years simply by reducing the amount of water available. Both the Colorado River
and the Salt and Gila rivers in Arizona produced record-low runoff last year,
forcing cities to draw heavily on reservoirs. Lake Powell is now at half-capacity,
and Lake Mead dropped low enough to trigger limits on some states.Drought cycleUniversity
of Arizona hydrologist Julio Betancourt predicts the Southwest is headed into
a long-term drought cycle that would choke the water supply for years or even
decades. But that may be just the beginning, according to Tim Barnett, a researcher
at Scripps Institution of Oceanography who is studying abrupt climate change.
Warming seasonal temperatures will shorten the snow-melting season in the West's
high country and will reduce runoff by 17 percent to one-third on the Colorado
River and other systems, leaving them unable to meet demands for the foreseeable
future, Barnett asserts.
Those pressure points form much of the foundation for Norton's Water 2025 initiative,
which begins with what she calls "the five realities:" growth, existing
water shortages, conflicts caused by those shortages, aging water delivery and
treatment systems, and ineffective crisis management.
From there, she proposes four tools to help stave off future crisis and conflict:
improving water management through conservation, efficiency and water markets,
such as Arizona's water bank; collaboration among cities, farmers, environmental
groups and others who have a stake in the West's water; boosting supplies with
technology such as desalinization of water that otherwise would be wasted; and
adjusting policy and even law to more efficiently use existing supplies.
The proposal included an $11 million appropriation for the first year, an amount
reclamation chief Keyes acknowledges would barely address issues in Phoenix
but still "money to get things started." The Interior Department will
encourage state and local leaders to develop ideas and plans suitable for their
specific situations.
Water experts say the plan falls short of addressing some of the most critical
conflicts still looming. One potentially blockbuster showdown is brewing just
over the border in Mexico, where environmental groups in that country and this
one are trying to force their governments to restore the Colorado River Delta.
That once lush riparian area most years now receives no water from the overtaxed
river.
Restoring it would cost tens of millions of dollars and billions of gallons
of water, which someone would have to give up at such a significant cost that
few U.S. leaders will even consider it. Some delta advocates have tried instead
to focus on minor successes that could lead to a long-term approach.
One such example is a tiny edge of the delta just south of Yuma, where runoff
from farms has created a new riparian habitat that supports birds and other
wildlife.
"The big lesson is that it is possible on very small water budgets to finally
incorporate wildlife and the river itself into the way we manage the river,"
said Charles Bergman, whose book Red Delta chronicles the transformation.
The one hitch: The water that runs into the marshes is the same water that some
officials want to treat and desalt, making more efficient use of it.
The only way around such conflicts is to settle feuds, set aside differences
and cooperate, said Patricia Mulroy, general manager of the Southern Nevada
Water Authority.'This is all political'"The consequences of not cooperating
are very real and very immediate," Mulroy said. "If this drought continues,
there is no way, given the current separatist approach of the lower basin states,
that we can all make it through. This is all political. The hydrology of the
river has made those politics more acute."
She said Arizona's willingness to bank water for Nevada is one sign that politics
aren't forever. Norton actually cited the water bank in her initiative as an
example of what should happen throughout the West.
"Long-lasting solutions will come from the people who must live with or
learn to live without the water they need," Norton said.
"Doing nothing is an option, but only if we are willing to accept the drastic
consequences that follow."
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