Busted Water Project

Back in November of 1985, Arizona celebrated a victory that was decades in coming--decades punctuated primarily by bitter fights with California. At long last, Colorado River water flowed across the Arizona desert through a gleaming new canal and into the Phoenix area. With the dedication of the $3.5-billion Central Arizona Project built by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, Arizona finally had the means to use most of the 2.8 million acre-feet of water a year to which it was entitled from the Colorado.

But today there is crisis and panic in Arizona. Many of the farmers and ranchers who looked forward to CAP water for so many years now say they cannot afford it. Unless some accommodation is reached--and none is in sight at the moment--as much as 300,000 acre-feet of CAP water could go unsold. That would represent about 38% of the project’s non-Indian agricultural supply, enough water to serve a city of about 1 million. It also creates havoc in the bookkeeping accounts of the Bureau of Reclamation since the sale of water is the sole source of the revenue that, over time, would pay back the U.S. Treasury for money borrowed to build the project. City customers of the CAP fear they will get stuck with the bill.

One source familiar with the situation commented, “There is complete chaos within the state of Arizona. Nobody knows what to do.”

Well, actually the farmers do, but no one is jumping to their proposed solution: lowering the price of the water, or amending the Reclamation Reform Act of 1982 that prohibits the use of subsidized federal reclamation project water on more than 960 acres of land per farmer. The Reform Act requires farms to sell off land in excess of 960 acres in order to receive the water at the subsidized rate. The water currently is going for $38 to $48 an acre-foot and the price is expected to increase to $51 next year, according to Western Resources Wrap-up, a Washington-based newsletter that detailed the Arizona problem recently.

If the farmers refuse to sell, but still want the water, they can buy it at the non-subsidized rate, which currently ranges from $200 to $250 an acre-foot. They say they cannot afford the non-subsidized price of water, but they don’t want to sell off any land to qualify for a lower price. Arizona irrigators can buy pumped water from underground wells for as little as $20 to $65 an acre-foot, Western Resources Wrap-up said.

In part, the irrigation districts got stuck with sticker shock. While some California farmers now pay as little as $3.50 an acre-foot for reclamation water, that price is based on what it cost to build dams and canals that were constructed 30 to 50 years ago. Since the Central Arizona Project was built at modern construction costs, the price of the Arizona water is running far higher than anticipated when the project was authorized in 1968.

The irony here is that CAP water was to be sold to farmers and ranchers strictly to ease the overuse of well water. The water was not to irrigate any land not already in production. A major purpose of the CAP was to stop the depletion of Arizona’s aquifers, occurring at an estimated 2 million acre-feet a year. If farmers shun the CAP water and continue to pump, that purpose of the project is defeated and the goal of Arizona’s modern ground-water conservation law is severely undermined.

Another irony is that if the Arizona farmers do not use the water, the excess might be used in California. That would be only a short-term bonus for California, since ultimately most of the Arizona land is expected to be developed and the water converted to municipal use.

There is some talk of using the water to help settle Indian claims. And Phoenix and Tucson have indicated they might be willing to help the farmers buy the water if they can take title to it sooner than they had expected. But this concept touches frayed urban-rural nerves, and there is no sign of such negotiations at the moment.

The Arizona irrigators will find no sympathy for their appeals to be exempted from the Reclamation Reform Act. They had plenty of warning that the law would wind up the way it has. Nor should the Bureau of Reclamation grant them any more than temporary relief merely to buy time for working out some solution to this self-inflicted problem.