1 Water War Nearly Over, Babbitt Says

It was a day of good news and bad news for California as Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt on Thursday assessed his attempts to end California’s seemingly endless water wars in a speech to 1,000-plus water officials from seven states that depend on the Colorado River for survival.

Even as he announced a “peace accord” between two feuding water agencies in Southern California whose bitter dispute has threatened the entire state’s water future, he revealed that the 4-year-old struggle to find a solution to equally complex and important water and environmental issues in the Sacramento River-San Joaquin Delta has come up short.

Babbitt announced that the Imperial Irrigation District and the Coachella Valley Water District have agreed on major issues that have been points of contention between the two neighbors since 1934. Although several key points remain, Babbitt was confident that the two agencies can reach agreement in the next six months, with his office acting as a goad.

“I am not going away, I’m going to continue the pressure,” said Babbitt, who has threatened to reduce the amount of water California takes from the Colorado River unless the state learns to be more efficient and, in effect, do more with less.

Although little known to the public, the Imperial-Coachella feud is classic in water circles and, given the domino effect of water issues, could block the historic water transfer between Imperial and San Diego.

That transfer has been praised by Babbitt and Gov. Pete Wilson as the linchpin of the state’s ability to have sufficient water in coming decades by reallocating water from water-rich farm areas to thirsty coastal communities.

“I am very impressed that Imperial and Coachella have at last discovered their fraternal bonds,” said Babbitt. He called their newfound cooperative spirit “a minor miracle.”

But no such familial warmth has yet been achieved in the negotiations between water agencies, agricultural interests and environmentalists in solving the problems of the delta.

The delta and the Northern California rivers that feed it make up the state’s largest watershed, a 61,000-square-mile system that provides water for 22 million Californians. It also is the principal irrigation source for the state’s $24-billion-a-year agricultural industry, while supporting one of the richest ecosystems on the continent with close to 1,000 plant and animal species.

Babbitt had hoped fervently to join Wilson on Friday to announce an agreement under the joint federal and state project called Calfed that would lay out a final blueprint for a 30-year project to ensure the equitable distribution of water from the delta to agriculture, growing urban areas from San Francisco south and to the environment of the delta. The idea is to serve the needs of a big and growing state, simultaneously improving water quality and keeping enough volume in the delta to repair an ecosystem so starved for water in the past it has been in danger of collapse.

It was a dream deal promised with great fanfare in 1995 when Babbitt and Wilson brought the “stakeholders” together, put the Calfed bureaucracy at their disposal and invited them to come up with a formula that would end an escalating water war between environmentalists, agribusiness and urban water agencies.

Instead of announcing the end of the war Thursday, Babbitt called the parties “intransigent” and said they are not yet to the point of signing an agreement “and I’m not sure we ever will be.” Babbitt has spent considerable time in Sacramento attempting to broker a Calfed compromise.

By their own admission, the environmentalists were the spoilers.

They would not sign on to an approach they thought all but committed taxpayers to an old-fashioned, multibillion-dollar public works project that might well guarantee sufficient supply to agricultural interests and metropolitan areas but would require diversions potentially harmful to fisheries and the delta ecosystem.

Moreover, critics of the plan argued that Calfed was relying on inflated forecasts of water demand while overlooking the water savings achievable through conservation, recycling, new irrigation technology, ground water banking and water marketing.

Touting the performance of low-flush toilets, horizontal axis washing machines, drip irrigation and water pricing formulas that discourage profligacy, Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute, a Bay Area think tank, said that Calfed and the state’s Department of Water Resources grossly underestimated potential water savings.

“DWR estimates that in 2020 the shortfall between supply and demand will be 2.4 million acre-feet. We think the errors in their analysis show far more than 2.4 million in potential water savings.”

Activist Criticizes Officials’ Reasoning

Gary Bobker, one of the environmental holdouts in the Calfed process, said the impasse could be explained by one word: “storage.” “There is an engineering logic to the idea that you can build a lot more flexibility into the system if you can bank more water in more pots,” said Bobker, a policy analyst with the Bay Institute. “What is not proven is whether you can take more water out of the system and bank it without doing harm to the environment.”

Lester Snow, who directs the Calfed process, disagrees.

“I think it’s fair to say conservation alone won’t do it,” he said, adding that even if more reservoirs are built, there will be no net gain in such facilities.

“After we are done, fewer streams will be blocked by dams. We have torn one down already, and we have identified four or five more to take down.”

Bobker and other environmentalists readily acknowledge that environmental gains have been made.

“I think there are a lot of areas in the Calfed process where amazing progress has been accomplished,” he said.

Close to a billion dollars has been committed to ecological restoration including rehabilitation of marshes and wetlands, replanting of riverside forests, the construction of fish ladders to help migrating salmon and the installation of fish screens to prevent fish from being drawn into irrigation canals.

The turmoil in the southeast corner of the state, meanwhile, dates to 1934, when the federal government was taming the Colorado River to transform the area from a forbidding and unprofitable desert into a land of homes, farms and economic growth. In a nutshell, Coachella feels it got cheated in the allocation of Colorado River water and the feeling has been festering for six decades.

Unless it gets more water from the Colorado River, Coachella has threatened to sue to block the San Diego-Imperial Irrigation District deal.

The agreement announced Thursday includes more water for Coachella and a concession by Imperial to agree to a cap on the amount it draws from the Colorado River. But issues involving timing and cost remain; the negotiations also include the mighty Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, water wholesaler to 16 million people in six counties.

Before MWD will agree to pay for $50 million or more of storage facilities to keep Coachella happy, it wants assurances of more Colorado River water through new rules for the operation of Lake Mead, the system’s main reservoir. That will take agreement from the six other Colorado River-dependent states, which look upon California with suspicion and annoyance.

“There are seven sovereign states on the river, not one sovereign state and six lesser partners,” said Patricia Mulroy, general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority. “California needs to remember that.”

Still, Mulroy and other officials sent a letter to Babbitt expressing interest in changing the Lake Mead rules to aid MWD as long as their states also profit. Negotiations may began as early as next week.

Perry reported from Las Vegas and Clifford from Los Angeles.