Water: Optimism, but--

This was to have been a year of impending water crisis for Southern California. After a decade of delay the Central Arizona Project will go into operation in late 1985. At last Arizona will begin to savor the spoils of its ancient water battles with California. In December federal officials will open the headgates of the Granite Reef Aqueduct, and the first waves of Rocky Mountain snow-melt water will rush toward the Phoenix area 200 miles away.

For Arizona it will be a historic occasion, comparable to the opening of the Los Angeles Aqueduct from the Owens Valley in 1913 or the Colorado River Aqueduct from the Colorado in 1941. Since 1928 Arizona has been entitled to 2.8 million acre-feet of Colorado River water a year. Until now there has been no way to get the water to where it was most needed. Within two years Arizona should be taking more than a million acre-feet annually.

For Southern California it means that the Metropolitan Water District no longer can draw at will on the unused waters of the Colorado to help satisfy the needs of the 13 million people in the MWD service area. That was not perceived to be a problem just a few years back. California would expand the State Water Project so that new supplies coming down from the north would make up for any Colorado River loss.

That has not happened. Completion of the State Water Project has been stymied by bitter disputes over construction of the Peripheral Canal or other means of routing water around or through the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to the California Aqueduct.

So where’s the crisis? It’s not here--yet. The Colorado’s reservoirs are brimming with water after two flood years. Another heavy runoff is expected this spring. Legally, the start-up of the Central Arizona Project means that California will be cut back to its 4.4 million acre-foot Colorado allotment, most of which goes to agriculture. MWD’s share drops from 1.2 million acre-feet a year to 550,000. But in practice the district will not be denied the use of any excess so long as there is enough water in the river for everyone.

Additionally, MWD is negotiating with the Imperial Irrigation District for the use of about 250,000 acre-feet of water a year in exchange for MWD’s financing of water-conservation facilities in the Imperial Valley. There is the prospect of picking up some more water from other Colorado River irrigators and unused federal irrigation water in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. Such supplies were not available until recently--partly because of an ethos in the water world that “if we can’t use the water, nobody else can.” That sort of attitude is changing as water supplies become ever more limited.

Other factors are at work that provide optimism about California’s ongoing water dilemma: increasing conservation, higher and more realistic pricing for federal irrigation water, alleviation of environmentalists’ fears over tapping the wild rivers of the North Coast, an MWD campaign to persuade Northern California that the south does not squander water and, finally, an effort to come to grips with the problem of irrigation waste water.

These efforts allow north and south to make incremental progress as tempers cool over the Peripheral Canal. They provide breathing room, but do not add up to a solution. At some point everyone will want his loaned water back. And good times on the Colorado can turn to dust very quickly.

Some say that you can’t solve water problems without the impetus of a good drought. But a good drought is likely to lead to bad planning. The political consensus is that Sacramento will be ripe for another Peripheral Canal debate in 1987. Now is the time to lay the groundwork.