Water in the West: the Thirst for Power

A massive amount of romantic legend flows about water in the West. The cowboy has his counterpart in the Mormon immigrant who began diverting streams and irrigating Utah’s Salt Lake Valley the very day he arrived with Brigham Young in 1847.

In Colorado, the pioneer farmer is symbolized by the character Hans Brumbaugh in James Michener’s novel “Centennial.” The 32-year-old Russian immigrant went to Colorado in 1859 to prospect, but found his gold by irrigating fields along the South Platte River to grow potatoes and then sugar beets.

The murals in the rotunda of the Colorado capitol in Denver are an idealized notion of water development, accompanied by the words of poet laureate Thomas Hornsby Ferril: “Here is a land where life is written in water . . . And man shall fashion glaciers into Greenness and harvest April rivers in the Autumn.”

But a few blocks away, water lawyer John M. Sayre gazes out the corner window of his 26th-floor office and expounds a more realistic notion of water development in the West:

“Those that have, get. That’s the history of water.” As Sayre spoke, he could look out at the checkered fields of Brumbaugh’s South Platte Valley, now irrigated with the help of Colorado River water brought by tunnel through the Continental Divide to Colorado’s eastern plains.

Sayre’s “those that have,” for years, mostly meant Californians. The 1,400-mile-long Colorado River system gathered waters from the Rockies of Wyoming, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico and sent them into the desert Southwest, to bestow Poet Ferril’s Greenness on arid places like the Imperial Valley and to fuel expansion of the Los Angeles suburbs.

But times are changing. With the construction of the Central Arizona Project, water now used freely by California soon will be pumped out of the lower Colorado to Phoenix and, later, to Tucson. California’s virtually unlimited use of the Colorado is coming to an end.

At the same time, the upper-basin states are struggling to develop their share of the Colorado--in part out of historic fear that if they don’t, California will find a way to get it. The old water doctrine of “use it or lose it” remains a viable war cry.

Western water development has been a particular struggle since Jimmy Carter’s water project “hit list” of 1977 and a Reagan Administration insistence that state and local governments share costs of water development. Projects already under way have been plagued by delays and inflation. No longer can the Western water boys call on a powerful House or Senate member to be assured of full funding for next year’s Bureau of Reclamation construction schedule.

Other political forces are at work. Environmental groups fight projects or push for changes. Water needs shift from farms to the exploding metropolitan areas of Denver and Salt Lake City. Rural areas resent city people taking their water.

The jumbled geography of the Rockies makes water development vastly more complicated and expensive than in places like California. In Utah, the immediate goal is finishing the key Bonneville Unit of the Central Utah Project. Bonneville’s 120 miles of aqueducts and tunnels will transfer Colorado River water through the Uinta Mountains to the Salt Lake Valley. One tunnel is eight miles long.

Authorized by Congress in 1956 at a cost of $324 million, Bonneville now will run nearly $2 billion. The soaring cost requires the 12-county Central Utah Water Conservancy District to hold an election this fall to increase the local tax share of the project by $335 million through a new cost-sharing repayment contract with the Bureau of Reclamation.

Many Utahns are irked that the federal government is not absorbing the full overrun. They claim that the cost went so high only because the bureau was so slow in getting the project built. Nonetheless, Clifford Barrett, the bureau’s regional director, is confident the ballot issue will pass. “They’ve got the money,” he said.

The project has run into new problems with members of Congress, who also are not pleased with the bureau’s track record and have challenged the legality of methods proposed to finance the Utahns’ share of the costs.

Completing Bonneville is a critical priority for Utahns. Once done, Utah will be able to put to use most of the 1.2 million acre-feet of Colorado River water allocated to the state by the Colorado River Compact of 1922 and subsequent agreements. “Utah wants to develop Colorado River water first so we won’t lose it,” said Paul C. Summers, assistant director of the state Division of Water Resources.

Construction is even more of a problem in Colorado where the mountains spawn seven separate river systems flowing in various directions out of the state. New irrigation projects are difficult to justify because of short growing seasons in mountain valleys. The city of Denver has adequate water now, but is running out of the surpluses it has been selling to the booming suburban areas. The water developers run into competing economic interests in the form of tourism and outdoor recreation. Projects once promised to Colorado were on Carter’s hit list and have been slow to develop.

Thus Colorado lags behind other states in developing in-state use of its own Colorado River allotment--more than half of the Colorado’s upper-basin waters--and there may be growing concern in Colorado about losing water because it cannot be used now.

“There’s a high level of fear, you might say paranoia,” said David H. Getches, director of the state Department of Natural Resources. Getches, a lawyer, is counting on the legal integrity of the 1922 water compact to safeguard Colorado’s share of the river against any permanent appropriation by out-of-staters.

Even if Colorado is able to use all its allocation in the future, some will say the state and its upper-basin sisters will never get their full share. The 1922 compact theoretically divides the Colorado’s waters evenly, with the upper and lower basin each getting 7.5 million acre-feet a year and Mexico 1.5 million acre-feet. Records now show there is not enough water to meet those commitments. But the way the compact was written, the upper basin still must guarantee 7.5 million acre feet to California, Arizona and Nevada at Lee Ferry, Ariz., the basin dividing line. During dry periods, the upper basin would be left with far less than 7.5 million acre-feet.

“It may not seem fair in a cosmic sense now,” Getches said. But in 1922, the political reality was that Southern California was booming and would get the water one way or another. As it happened, California got the water when the rules of the water development game were far simpler to play.

At Denver’s state capitol, poet Ferril’s water ode also includes these words: “The West is where the water was and is.” True. But most of the Colorado springs from the upper basin and will be used in the lower basin.

One upper-basin official, asked if he feared California stealing the region’s water, scoffed: “The lower basin doesn’t have to steal the water. It runs down there.”