2 Lawsuits Fault New Water Deal

Less than a month after it was signed amid hoopla about bringing “peace” to the Colorado River, a landmark deal for Imperial Valley farmers to sell water to San Diego County has been hit with two lawsuits alleging that the dealmakers failed to adequately evaluate damage to the valley’s environment and economy.

Although such lawsuits were anticipated, the source of them was not: the Imperial County Board of Supervisors, and a dissident faction of farmers known as the Imperial Group.

Both lawsuits contend that the Imperial Irrigation District, in effect, did a poor job of evaluating the impact of a reduction of water use on the county’s 500,000 acres of farmland and its 150,000 residents.

Under the 75-year deal, the Imperial district has promised to sell up to 200,000 acre-feet of water a year to the San Diego County Water Authority. An acre-foot of water is enough to satisfy the needs of two families for a year.

In a lawsuit filed in Imperial County Superior Court, the county Board of Supervisors complains bitterly that county officials were shut out of the negotiations that led to the deal, the largest shift of water from farms to cities in the nation.

The supervisors allege that the deal does not ensure that the region will not suffer air pollution akin to that of the Owens Lake area when the Salton Sea begins to shrink in size due to decreased agricultural runoff.

Like the deal itself, the lawsuits got a split reaction from Imperial Irrigation District officials.

Governing board member Andy Horne, who voted against the water sale, said he thought there was merit to the supervisors’ lawsuit.

“Very honestly, I can’t say I blame them” for suing, Horne said. “They’re protecting the interests of the people of the Imperial Valley, which is their responsibility.”

But John Carter, the district’s principal lawyer and one of the state’s leading water-rights lawyers, doubted that the lawsuits based on the California Environmental Quality Act would succeed. He said that officials had always realized that lawsuits claiming violations of the environmental act “would be the most likely way of challenging” the water deal.

As a result, “We did exactly what was required under the law. I think any concerns they have have been addressed” in the district’s environmental impact report, Carter said.

Board spokesman Bob Ham said the lawsuit was meant to “bring key state and district leaders back to a negotiating table, but this time where Imperial County is not excluded but treated as an equal.” County officials contend that in the rush to meet an Oct. 12 deadline to sign the deal, Imperial County was kept out of the final negotiating sessions. Also leading to the county’s being excluded, the lawsuit says, were the “distractions produced by the recall election.”

With the Salton Sea dependent on agricultural runoff, a reduction in water use will mean shrinkage in the size of the sea, which serves as an agricultural sump for Imperial Valley farms.

When wind hits the newly exposed sea bottom, the dirt particles will be swept up into what is already some of the most polluted air in the state, the lawsuit says. The deal provides a fund of about $300 million to compensate for environmental problems caused by the water sale, but no decision has been made on how that money would be used.

The lawsuits also allege that the economic impact on the county has not been adequately studied. The deal creates a governing board to decide how farm workers thrown out of work should be compensated, but the board has yet to devise a formula for distributing money provided by the San Diego County Water Authority.

The product of nine years of negotiations and occasional rancor, the water deal is the linchpin of a plan for California to begin living within its allocation from the Colorado River. For several years, the state has been receiving surplus water above its allocation. Other western states, however, have complained to the federal government.

After furious last-minute negotiations, the deal was signed Oct. 16 at a ceremony overlooking the Hoover Dam in Nevada, with Gov. Gray Davis and U.S. Interior Secretary Gale Norton in attendance. “With this agreement, conflict on the river is stilled,” Norton said.