3 Agencies Reach Truce on Colorado River Water

Setting aside years of acrimony and accusations, negotiators for Southern California’s warring water agencies reached an agreement early Wednesday designed to ensure that the state will have enough water to meet soaring future needs.

“We have reached closure on all core issues,” said David Hayes, acting deputy secretary of the U.S. Department of the Interior. “We’re very excited.”

The agreement includes details on how water will be saved, stored, bought and sold in an effort to gain concessions from the federal government and other Western states that also depend on the Colorado River as a major water source.

For several years, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt had threatened to reduce Southern California’s supply from the Colorado unless the California agencies could settle their differences. The pact could go a long way in influencing the discussions on federal rules governing how much surplus water will be available to Southern California in future years.

Negotiators for the state’s three largest users of Colorado River water--the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, the Imperial Irrigation District and the Coachella Valley Water District--agreed after marathon negotiations to settle grievances dating from the 1930s that had threatened to block California’s attempt at developing a new water strategy.

Facing an anticipated 37% increase in water demand in the next two decades, Southern California water officials are scrambling to increase water efficiency through conservation and also increase the reliability of its annual assured supply from the Colorado River. The Colorado supplies half to two-thirds of the water provided by Metropolitan to 16.5 million people in six counties.

But long-standing enmities between powerful water agencies have proved a hindrance to California “speaking with one voice” in negotiations with the federal government and other Western states, said Thomas Hannigan, director of the California Department of Water Resources. The agreement reached early Wednesday in Los Angeles is aimed at providing that unified voice and decreasing the fear and suspicion California engenders in other states.

The talks were mediated by Hayes and Hannigan, and as late as midnight, despite months of negotiations, the pair thought an agreement might be impossible. But there was a powerful motivation: Babbitt’s oft-repeated threat to reduce the state’s share of the Colorado River, which could wrench the state’s economy. The Colorado is the major source of imported water to California.

Under the tentative agreement, all three agencies will accept less water than they contend they are entitled to, pay more for infrastructure than they contend they should, and promise not to file legal complaints that their rivals are wasting water.

By mutual agreement, details of the pact will not be released until the governing boards of the three longtime combatants take up the issue in the next week or so. But for all three agencies, negotiators were in close contact with board members.

“California is in a period of change, caused by an era of limits in the way we acquire water,” said Phillip Pace, MWD board chairman. “Today we have come one step closer to facilitating positive change. This new era compels California to live within its allocation of Colorado River water.”

Pressure to End Dispute

The immediate goal is to permit the sale of water from the water rich but cash poor farmers of the Imperial Valley to the affluent but thirsty San Diego County Water Authority, an MWD member. The water will be delivered to San Diego through the Colorado Aqueduct, which is owned by the MWD.

The longer-range, and more important, goal of the agreement is to show the federal government and the other six states that depend on the Colorado River that California can stop its internecine feuding and learn to use its annual allocation of the river more frugally.

“Because of this agreement, the goal of bringing California’s take of the Colorado River under control is now more clearly in sight,” Babbitt said.

If water officials in the six other states concur, the chances increase that the federal government will modify the rules that govern the Colorado River, Hoover Dam and the Lake Mead reservoir in ways that would be enormously beneficial to California.

One way would be for the federal government to liberalize the definition of what constitutes a “surplus” that can be used by California beyond its allocation of 4.4 million acre-feet a year.

Another would be to allow more water to be directed to California from Lake Mead. Currently, hundreds of thousands of acre-feet of water a year--enough for the needs of millions of people--simply evaporate because the seven states that are part of the Colorado River Compact cannot agree on how that water should be distributed.

California has been using 800,000 acre-feet a year more than the 4.4 million, based on annual “surplus” decisions by Babbitt.

But Babbitt’s patience with California has grown thin and he has warned repeatedly that California had better learn to live within its allocation or face a cutback when, because of a lack of rainfall or a change in the political winds, it is determined that the Colorado River has no surplus water in a given year.

That warning loomed large as the negotiations dragged into the early morning Wednesday in a conference room at the MWD headquarters in downtown Los Angeles. At 3 a.m., an exhausted and bleary-eyed set of negotiators reached a compromise.

“I think all the parties finally realized that California was going to pay a huge price and so were all the parties individually,” Hayes said. “The next normal or dry year, California could literally be in a crisis situation.”

A year ago, after considerable arm-twisting by then-Gov. Pete Wilson, the Legislature appropriated $235 million to pave the way for the San Diego-Imperial water deal.

The deal, the largest shift of agricultural water to urban use in the nation, is thought to be key to the state’s water future because it provides an alternative to the state’s historic way of meeting growth needs: merely taking more water from the Colorado.

Under the deal, San Diego would buy up to 300,000 acre-feet of water a year from Imperial to meet growth. Farmers would use the money to install conservation devices on their land.

But before the water deal could be consummated, a six-decade dispute between Imperial and Coachella had to be settled. Although not as well known as some other California water skirmishes, the Imperial-Coachella dispute runs as hot as the desert summer.

In December, Babbitt announced proudly that a deal was at hand, but his optimism was short-lived when the MWD entered the fray and said that Babbitt was tilting toward the farmers and away from urban needs.

In announcing Wednesday’s agreement, Hayes and Hannigan praised the MWD for backing off from early hard-line positions.

“Metropolitan has completely changed its colors,” Hayes said. “Their willingness to make it happen was the key.”

A Bitter Feud Dating to 1930s

What makes water disputes so intractable is the tendency of all parties to believe that they have been aggrieved by history and generally misunderstood.

“I frankly didn’t think we’d get to where we got,” Hannigan said. “At one time or another, each of the parties said, ‘You can’t trust the others. We’re on the side of the angels. Things should go our way or no way.’ ”

The MWD--a water wholesaler to local agencies in Los Angeles, Orange, Ventura, San Bernardino, Riverside and San Diego counties--has resented and opposed the idea of member agency San Diego buying directly from Imperial.

The MWD board has also called outmoded the 1931 agreement giving Imperial, Coachella and two other agricultural agencies 85% of the state’s Colorado River allocation. When the board suggested in January that Babbitt consider changing the formula, the reaction was so adverse from Coachella and Imperial that negotiations stalled for several months.

Coachella believed it was tricked by the U.S. Department of Interior in 1934, and by Babbitt’s predecessor Ray Lyman Wilbur, into taking a back seat to the Imperial Irrigation District in terms of divvying up the Colorado River. Coachella also contended that Imperial has no legal right to sell water to San Diego.

Imperial, the nation’s largest agricultural irrigation district, looks at the MWD and Coachella as newcomers to the Colorado River. Imperial, whose water rights date to 1895, was pulling water out of the river for three decades before the Colorado Aqueduct was built to bring water to coastal Southern California.

Changing old attitudes, Hannigan said, is imperative if the state is to have “smarter approaches in the next century” to meeting its water needs.

Just how other Colorado River states view the agreement will not be known for some time. One sign will be their reaction to Babbitt’s proposal, currently being discussed, to develop criteria for determining when the Colorado River has surplus water.

Michael Pearce, general counsel of the Arizona Department of Water Resources, reacted cautiously. He noted that even with the agreement, California officials are saying that it will be 15 to 20 years before California can reduce its take to 4.4 million acre-feet.

“That’s kind of a free ride,” Pearce said. “That’s difficult for the other states to accept. We’d like to see a more dedicated effort.”