Arizona Turns on the Water From Colorado

A ceremonial push of computer buttons sent Colorado River water flowing into Phoenix Friday in a historic moment in the battle between Far Western states for water from the 1,450-mile river.

Formally opening the $3.5-billion Central Arizona Project, Arizona Gov. Bruce Babbitt and U.S. Interior Secretary Donald P. Hodel, seated side by side at a computer console, started a pumping plant west of Phoenix. As politicians and water officials applauded, the water began the final leg of its journey from Lake Havasu, a Colorado River reservoir, 190 miles north of here.

“This Administration pledged water would reach Phoenix by the end of the year,” Hodel said. Referring to how the state’s congressmen and senators have had to scrap for the project, Hodel said, “Your delegation may have extracted that pledge, but by God, we made it.”

Actually, Colorado River water has been coming to this area for a few months in tests of the Granite Reef Aqueduct. The water going to Phoenix Friday also will be for testing, and the area will not actually begin using the water until next year.

But once it does, the Central Arizona Project will mean less Colorado River water for Southern California, which has obtained a substantial amount of it for years.

By the end of the decade, officials said, the Central Arizona Project will be taking its full 1.2-million-acre-foot allotment from the river. (An acre-foot is the amount of water needed to cover an acre a foot deep.)

That will reduce the allotment of the Metropolitan Water District, which supplies water to Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, Ventura, San Bernardino and San Diego counties, from 1.2 million acre-feet to 550,000.

MWD Seeks New Sources

Anticipation of that has sent the MWD scurrying for new sources of water. The water district is trying to obtain surplus water from agricultural areas in addition to pushing conservation and, as always, attempting to increase water imports from Northern California. The desire to tap the north for more water continues to fuel a bitter regional battle in the state that is expected to spill over into next year’s state elections.

As Arizona’s political elite gathered under a red, white and blue tent outside project headquarters, they spoke of another battle--the one waged by Arizona for decades to secure a share of the Colorado from California and the other western states that have rights to its water.

This is conservative Republican country, although it has produced Rep. Morris K. Udall, a liberal Democrat and former presidential contender, and Babbitt, the Democratic governor. But there were no party lines on the platform as former Rep. John Rhodes and Sen. Dennis DeConcini, both Republicans, and Udall and Babbitt talked of the long congressional fight for CAP, in which Rhodes and Udall were leaders.

Remembering those days, Udall’s brother, Stewart, a former Interior secretary, told how a powerful Northern Californian, Democratic Rep. Harold T. (Biz) Johnson, gave the CAP, disliked by Southern California, a push at a crucial moment. “We split the state,” said Udall, still enjoying that long-ago congressional triumph. Johnson, long since out of Congress, was in the audience, basking in the praise.

The project is being built by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and is financed largely with federal funds, although, in a precedent-setting move, Arizona has offered to pay for flood control facilities, which it particularly wants.

Needed as Supplement

The project will eventually extend to Tuscon in the southern part of the state. That stretch is expected to be completed by 1989, according to some officials, although others say it will not be finished until 1991.

Arizona, which is mostly desert, says it needs the Colorado River water to supplement limited sources from other rivers and from underground. Officials say the underground supply is diminishing.

Although the CAP was conceived many years ago as a primarily agricultural water project, the largest share of its water will go for industries, commercial developments and residential subdivisions in the rapidly growing Phoenix and Tuscon areas. The cities are expanding into the desert as development-minded Arizona builds an economy patterned after Southern California’s, fueled by industry, construction and land development.

The next largest share of water from the CAP will go to 12 Arizona Indian communities. The remainder will be allocated to agriculture.

Completion of the project, however, will not end Arizona’s search for more water, one speaker said.

Arizona Rep. Eldon Rudd told the audience that the state “must start looking today for future water. With the tremendous needs for our growth here, we will not fail.”

Rudd did not specify where Arizona would look, but there have been discussions here about controversial plans to bring water in from Canada and the far north. But with the huge expense of water projects, this scheme is considered impractical by most water experts, who say the CAP is the last of America’s huge public water projects.

A different approach was taken by Babbitt, who said in his speech that “when the water reaches Tuscon, we will be moving from the era of water development to the era of water management,” with efforts shifting to water conservation and maintaining water purity.