Some Things Never Change: Drought

The current mini-drought California finds itself in reminds me of events of 30 years ago when the Golden State experienced another short, but severe drought. The water battles in California then remain strangely the same.

Copyright 1978 Newsweek

Newsweek

June 12, 1978, UNITED STATES EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL AFFAIRS; Pg. 49

LENGTH: 2113 words

HEADLINE: Western Water Fight

BYLINE: RICHARD BOETH with GERALD C. LUBENOW in San Francisco, MARTIN KASINDORF

in Los Angeles and WILLIAM J. COOK in Washington

BODY:

The great two-year Western drought is over. In the high Rockies west of

Denver, an enormous new snow pack feeds the rivulets and streams coursing into

the Yampa, the White, the Gunnison, the Green, and thence to the Colorado, which

carves its way southward to the Gulf of California carrying all the water that

flows in 242,000 square miles of the American West. Grasses for grazing herds

grow lush in the high Wyoming valleys, and the lawns and golf courses of Las

Vegas, 800 miles to the south, stand incongruously green under the desert sun -

all nourished by the Colorado. Across the high peaks in California, water

engineers sit at computer panels, monitoring water levels, power capacity and

the pumping stations that move Colorado River water through hundreds of miles of

canals and pipelines to the cornucopial Imperial Valley. In 5 million homes in

Los Angeles, San Diego, Bakersfield and most other southern California

communities, toilets flush, taps run and swimming pools fill with Colorado River

water.

For the moment, the year, the decade perhaps, the Colorado watershed can

fulfill the multiple demands made on it - but the great river is running a

deadly race with human greed and government profligacy. Legal allocations of

water to the mountain states of the Upper Basin, to California and the

fast-growing desert states of the Lower Basin, to the Indians, and to Mexico

already add up to more water than flows (map, page 55).

THE DWINDLING CUP

The vast region has been getting by because the mountain states have not been

using all the water to which they are entitled. But now the end of sufficiency

is in sight. As demands on the lower river increase exponentially, the mountain

states are pressing feverishly for Federal dams and pipelines to divert their

full "share" from the thirsty south before it is too late. Farmers, city

dwellers, energy companies, Indian tribes, conservationists and state officials

are battling each other for control of the dwindling cup - and almost all of

them are fighting the Carter Administration, which for the past year has been

threatening to curtail the enormous Federal largesse that made the desert bloom

in the first place.

"The West wouldn't be here," says California Director of Water Resources Ron

Robie, "if it wasn't for water development" - but "development" is a word that

covers a multitude of sins as well. Water from Federal projects is so cheap

that there is little incentive to conserve the West's scarcest and most precious

resource. Farmers in California's Imperial Valley pay $4.50 for 326,000 gallons

of water that has been stored behind Federal dams and piped to them through the

mountains at colossal cost, while city dwellers in San Francisco pay $4.50 for

2,460 gallons of unsubsidized water. In justifying new Federal water projects,

the Interior Department's Bureau of Reclamation frequently underestimates costs

by a factor of ten and overestimates benefits by almost as much. Water users,

for example, are required to pay only for the capital cost of a water project,

not the interest - even though the interest charges wind up being triple the

capital cost.

Reacting to this profligacy a year ago, Jimmy Carter abruptly announced plans

to kill almost every Federal water project then aborning - only to run intoa

torrent of outrage out West. Despite the support of environmentalists, Carter

quickly backed most of the way down, then went through the motions of a

year-long "review" of Federal water policies. This week Carter is scheduled to

release the results, and they are indeed an anti-climax. The only substantive

proposlas are those calling for the states to pick up a small percentage of the

cost of new projects - a counter against the worst boondoggles - and the

establishment of an overview agency to monitor the notoriously rosy

cost-and-benefit projections of the Federal water bureaucracy.

FRONTIERSMAN'S FAITH

Even such minor pruning of the watermoney tree is taken as lese majesty in

the arid West, where the frontiersman's faith that God or somebody would provide

water is echoed today in the go-go boosterism of the Southwest. Arizona is the

fastest-growing state in the Union, its population already 40 per cent greater

(at 2 million) than a decade ago and headed toward 10 million by 2020. In

Tucson and Phoenix, where rainfall averages 11 and 7 inches a year,

respectively, water is so cheap that homeowners flood-irrigate their lawns from

unmetered water mains, and the farmers of central Arizona plant heavily in rice

and alfalfa, both egregiously water-intensive crops.

As a result, the state is overdrawing its underground desert aquifers by 2

million acre-feet* per year, steadily draining a subterranean water table that

took millennia to build. But Arizonans see no need to worry. Congress has

authorized an initial outlay of $1.6 billion for the first stage of the Central

Arizona Project (CAP), which will deliver 1.2 million acre-feet from the

beleaguered Colorado River to Tucson and Phoenix by 1987. Giant machines called

moles are already tunneling their way through the Buckskin Mountains, the first

link in a 300-mile aqueduct. Arizonans take this colossal project as their due.

"I implore you to forget about the economics," Sen. Barry Goldwater told a

Federal review panel last year. "The whole thing wraps around whether my

grandchildren are going to be able to live in the central Arizona valley in the

year 2000."

* An acre-foot is about 326,000 gallons, roughly enough to supply a family of

five for a year.

'STEALING' WATER?

In the high plains of Utah, Wyoming, New Mexico and Colorado, a fear is

abroad that the southern tier is "stealing" water under the terms of the 1922

Colorado River Interstate Compact. The compact provided that the Upper Basin

"deliver" half of the then average water flow - 15 million acre-feet - to the

south, and the courts have held that this means 7.5 million acre-feet even

though the Colorado has averaged only a 13.5 million acre-foot flow ever since.

In addition, California in recent years has frequently "borrowed" more than its

share. The Upper Basin fears that unless it quickly completes development of

its water resources, the Lower Basin will continue to overdraw its

allotment.When the CAP was voted through Congress in 1968, Colorado horse-traded

for five new dams of its own. Four of them landed on Carter's hit list, as

environmentalists cheered, but two have since been restored.

When not fighting the Lower Basin or Washington over water, Coloradans fight

each other over water. The city of Denver, which lies on the eastern slope of

the Continental Divide, has prepared blueprints for a $3 billion pipeline

through the mountains, and has been buying up water leases on the western slope.

Energy companies, looking toward the development of the state's vast - and

water-intensive - coal and shale-oil reserves, have been doing the same thing.

Since the state does not either regulate or oversee the sale of water leases,

ranchers and environmentalists have already begun to feel the pinch from

powerful interests. "We have a giant water grab going on," says conservationist

Robert Weaver of Trout Unlimited. "Developers with water rights are rushing to

get their projects built before we're out of water."

Taking dead aim on all of these competing interests are a passel of Indian

tribes ranging in size from the 140,000-member Navajo nation to much smaller

settlements. Eight Arizona tribes have lawsuits going for a share of ground and

CAP water, and the Federal courts are responding as never before. Five small

tribes near Phoenix were awarded 20 per cent of all the water in the CAP, on a

first-priority basis. And the Navajo are threatening a suit claiming up to a

third of the whole flow of the Colorado River - two-thirds of everything the

Lower Basin is entitled to - an action that "could put the entire Lower Basin

out of whack," in the words of CAP spokesman T. Richard Johnson.

CORPORATE AGRICULTURE

In water-proof California, the fight is not over water leases but over costs

and distribution - indeed the whole rationale of subsidizing corporate

agriculture. As critics see it, the vital job of making the land productive was

finished decades ago, but agri-business, farm-area congressmen and the

user-oriented Bureau of Reclamation have combined to keep water and power costs

extremely low on the farm - to the detriment of other legitimate users as well

as taxpayers. Farmers in the Central Valley Project (CVP) still pay $3.50 per

acre-foot for water, while other purchasers of CVP water pay up to $22.40. The

bureau set a power rate of 4 1/2 mills per kilowatt for farmers in 1950 and has

recently proposed a raise to about 12 mills - which is still only a third of

commercial rates.

Some wildly inaccurate cost -and-profit projections by the bureau have

become the major source of latter-day discontent. A portion of California's CVP

called the San Luis Drain was estimated by the bureau to cost $7 million in

its feasibility report 23 years ago; the current estimate is $185 million, and a

special task force projects costs as high as $275 million. The bureau had

also forecast a $300 million surplus in power sales to CVP farmers, while an

Interior Department audit predicts an $8.8 billion deficit over 50 years. "The

Bureau of Reclamation is out of touch with reality," fumes California's Robie.

"They've only worried about their water contractors and let the rest of the

public be damned."

For years the bureau's answer rested simply in the enormous leap forward in

productivity from Federal projects, whatever the cost and subsidy. With only

marginal lands left to develop, however, even that justification is coming under

attack. Glenn Petry, a professor of finance at Washington State University,

charges that the bureau vastly overestimated the benefits from the second Bacon

Siphon Tunnel, an irrigation project in east central Washington. Petry

estimates that the cost/benefit ratio will run closer to 25 cents on the dollar

than the 82 cents the bureau projected. "The better projects have been done,

and everything from now on is going to be much more costly, economically and

environmentally," argues Tom Graff, a water specialist with the Environmental

Defense Fund. "We just can't go on forever building huge new water projects

without looking at how the water is used."

Other critics are asking questions - including powerful congressmen such as

San Francisco's Phillip Burton and suburban Oakland's George Miller, who are

concerned both with the inequities in city-farm water rates and the preservation

of California's few remaining free-flowing streams. And Eastern politicians

have begun to eye the West's extravagance with something akin to jealous lust.

"We have an old, antiquated water system, and it needs to be rehabilitated,"

says William Horne, chief water aide to Gov. Hugh Carey of New York. "All we're

asking for is equity."

GETTING RID OF DOGS

No such thing is possible until the government brings some sort of order to

the Spanish Main traditions of Western water - and Carter's new policy moves

only the tiniest step in that direction. Carter's key concession - Congress

would hardly have allowed him to do otherwise - is to permit the states to

retain jurisdiction over water allocations. His suggestion that the states

share the cost of all major water projects may or may not bear fruit, though

Utah's Gov. Scott M. Matheson, chairman of the Governors Subcommittee on Water

Management, agrees that cost sharing "would get rid of a lot of dogs."

Another innovation is Carter's attempt to establish an overseer agency to

review proposals from each of the 25 Federal agencies that collectively do $5

billion worth of water-related construction each year. Heretofore, if a

beneficiary couldn't get what it wanted - including the most alluring financial

projections - from one agency, another agency would be happy to oblige. "We

were all set to change the rules, and then we found out they were pretty good,"

says Joseph Nagel, a special assistant to Interior Secretary Cecil Andrus. "But

nobody had been assigned the task of seeing they were applied uniformly."

Carter's actions are likely to do little to staunch the hemorrhage of water

and money in the West. And they look modest coming after his initial, perhaps

naive, belief that the whole tangle could be resolved quickly and on command.

But no previous President had the nerve to tackle the problem at all - though

the Reclamation Act and its accumulating abuses have been with us since 1902.