Sharing the Water

After generations of struggle, Arizona finally--and properly--is getting its share of the Colorado River. At Lake Havasu the pumps of the Central Arizona Project are lifting test waters more than 800 feet up a mountainside and sending them surging toward Phoenix through a computer-run canal system. The project will be dedicated in November. Within five to seven years CAP will let Arizona take advantage of the state’s full allocation of Colorado River water--2.8 million acre-feet a year, compared with California’s 4.4 million.

California water interests have warned that the Golden State would have to relinquish much of the Colorado water that it has been using over the years once the CAP pumps started. Some skeptics have tried to minimize the effect of the project, suggesting that the warnings were just another Southern California ruse to get more water from Northern California. Not so. As Times City-County Bureau Chief Bill Boyarsky reported, Arizona is determined to pump its total CAP allotment, plus any available surpluses, as soon as possible.

Typical of federally subsidized reclamation projects, CAP has been the center of controversy. Once on President Jimmy Carter’s water-project “hit list,” CAP is running behind schedule and is over budget. But this project is different from others in many ways:

--CAP is primarily an urban water project. Farmers will take about half the water during the early years, but Phoenix, Tucson and other cities will have first call on supplies at all times. Promoters of new housing and commercial developments either must buy CAP water or demonstrate to local authorities they have a 100-year assured supply for their projects.

--CAP water cannot be used by farmers to supplement their diminishing groundwater supplies or to put new acreage into production, as has been done in many other projects. For every acre-foot of CAP water that a farmer uses, he must conserve an acre-foot of groundwater. While the project is subsidized by a low federal interest rate of 3.34%, farmers will pay more than $50 an acre-foot for their water--as much as 10 times what some California farmers pay for federal project water.

--To win federal support for the project, Arizona was pressured to adopt legislation to conserve its declining groundwater reserves. Marathon negotiations directed by Gov. Bruce Babbitt produced the West’s most revolutionary water-rights law. It severely limits groundwater pumping, mandates irrigation conservation and permits farmers to sell their water rights to cities, towns or commercial interests. The result is the development of a booming open market for water rights in Arizona. Many farmers will face the choice of staying in farming or selling their water for better profits.

--Arizona has assembled a $327-million finance package to help pay for completion of the project. While Congress now is insisting that local entities share the costs of their projects, the Arizona offer far exceeds the Washington-set requirements.

The long-range result of these developments is a startling one: Arizona consciously has set in motion a phase-out of much of its agriculture in order to have enough water to sustain urban development. It has done so in part through a legal and economic mechanism that is heatedly opposed by most traditional California water interests: the creation of an open market for water rights, for sale to the highest bidder.

The Central Arizona Project still has its problems. But Arizona finally is on the threshold of winning use of the Colorado River water to which it long has been legally entitled. In the process the state has restructured a traditional reclamation project, and its entire water-rights sytem, in imaginative and creative ways to meet the demands of the 21st Century.

Southern California will have to find new supplies to offset the loss of some Colorado River water. There is no doubt that it will be able to do it if it employs the same sort of creativity and tough political decision-making employed by Arizona.