Tribes Battle MWD Over Tunnel Projects

Elders in the Soboba band of Mission Indians remember when the grape vineyards flourished. They recall the rows of melons, beans and corn, and orchards that stretched for acres--peaches, pears, apricots and oranges. But then the tunnel came, the water disappeared and, as tribal Chairman Robert Salgado says: “We didn’t have anything but a bunch of dead trees, thirsty cows and dry land.”

The Sobobas of Riverside County recently sued the Metropolitan Water District, demanding that the district repair a 13-mile-long MWD tunnel that they claim has been draining water from their reservation for nearly 70 years.

The case is the latest in a string of legal actions by Indian tribes in the West, asserting their water rights and attempting to redirect massive utility projects that support the region’s onrushing growth.

“With urban sprawl and communities continuing to ooze out of their geographic boundaries into rural areas, we are going to see these conflicts increase,” said H. Eric Schockman, an associate professor of political science at USC. “There are tribal rights and there is the state’s desire to provide an equitable water supply to a growing population. It’s going to be a tricky balance.”

Already, a San Bernardino County tribe has helped shut down one of the West’s largest public works projects, a tunnel designed to bring water to the new Diamond Valley Lake, a reservoir near Hemet. A redesign and delays to protect the Indians’ underground aquifer are expected to add as much as $200 million to the cost of the Metropolitan Water District project.

In Arizona, some members of the Navajo and Hopi tribes are calling for the shutdown of a Southern California Edison coal-burning power plant that they contend is draining water from beneath their reservation.

In Imperial County, the Quechan tribe is fighting for water from the Colorado River that members said they lost when title to 25,000 acres of reservation land became clouded. Although the water the tribe seeks represents only about 1% of the allocation to Arizona, California and Nevada, water is so scarce that the states have been unwilling to make any concessions. The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in the case last week.

Native Americans have become increasingly aggressive in asserting water rights as tribes’ incomes and political clout have grown, partly as a result of the success of reservation casinos, said professor David H. Getches of the University of Colorado School of Law.

“There is a heightened awareness and capacity to take on these very complicated battles,” Getches said.

Other experts say the current spate of Indian water cases is a mere coincidence. They say the field has been rife with litigation since the U.S. Supreme Court guaranteed reservation water rights early in this century. Justices reasoned that the vast tracts of land given to tribes would be worthless without water entitlements.

San Manuel Band’s Hallmark Victory

Seldom has the power of these rights been as evident as in the case of the San Manuel band of Mission Indians, a tribe of 63 adults in San Bernardino County that has succeeded in stopping a section of pipeline that will help fill Southern California’s largest reservoir.

Diamond Valley Lake doubles the MWD’s capacity to store water from Central and Northern California. In an emergency, it could supply Southern California for six months.

But the reservoir’s main supply line, 44 miles long, is designed to pass through McKinley Mountain southwest of Lake Arrowhead and just north of the reservation where the San Manuel band makes its home.

The water agency failed to follow through on plans to securely line the tunnel to prevent seepage from surrounding aquifers, according to representatives of the tribe and the National Forest Service.

Water district officials deny that, saying they were lining the tunnel and proceeding carefully when they encountered unexpected seepage.

The San Manuel band protested to National Forest Service officials in San Bernardino when drilling began in 1998. Nearly three times as much ground water as expected was leaking into the tunnel, a forest service official said. The forest service shut down all tunneling in March 1999.

“This is a primary and precious natural resource that can’t be replaced,” said Richard Young, one of the tribe’s lawyers. “That is why we are doing everything possible to prevent any further damage to the aquifer.”

MWD Chief Counsel Greg Taylor said that the amount of water lost was “relatively nothing” and that a watertight tunnel would be nearly finished by now, if the tribe had not interfered.

The water issue loomed particularly large to the San Manuel people because the tribe plans to bottle mountain spring water, to supplement a tribal economy that now relies mainly on a casino. They recently broke ground on a bottling plant.

In a tentative proposal to settle the dispute, the MWD would employ technology similar to that used to seal the “Chunnel” under the English Channel. Workers would “mine and line” the passage at the same time--installing sections of concrete pipe immediately as a boring machine advances. Bolts and gaskets would pull the concrete sections together and make the tunnel watertight, MWD officials said.

If the system is approved, it would cost about $20 million just to obtain the customized boring machine to do the work, water district officials said. The total increased cost of the work would be as much as $200 million. (Construction of Diamond Valley Lake ran $115 million over budget.)

“It’s costing a bloody fortune,” Taylor said of re-engineering the tunnel. But he promised: “We are sensitive to their needs. . . . It will not leak.”

The forest service and lawyers for the San Manuel people said they believe that the new tunnel design should prevent the loss of their ground water. They have requested more details before giving final approval.

One band of Navajos in Northern Arizona appears to have much less leverage, as it uses the water issue in its protest against a coal-burning plant in Laughlin, Nev. The Indians contend that the Mojave Generating Station drains about 3 billion gallons of water a year from tribal lands.

Last week, a group of elders from northeastern Arizona came to Rosemead to protest outside the headquarters of Southern California Edison over the loss of the water.

The Navajo group said the power company’s generating station has already sapped enough water from under their land to dry up creeks and destroy wildlife. They called for a shutdown of the plant, which also has been identified by environmental groups as the leading contributor to air pollution over the Grand Canyon.

Lake Water Proposed as Solution

But the majority of the Navajo and Hopi people and their tribal representatives have been negotiating with Edison to find an alternative water source for the plant, rather than pushing to shut it down. Edison officials said they are close to an agreement that would draw the water from Lake Powell, rather than from underground aquifers, said Nader Mansour, manager of environmental regulation for the utility.

Edison officials said the Navajos from Big Mountain, Ariz., who staged the protest are a splinter group, attempting to use the water issue to gain leverage in a decades-old land dispute with the Hopi.

The plant clearly raises mixed emotions in Indian country. Both the Navajo and Hopi tribes receive royalties in the tens of millions of dollars for coal mined from the Black Mesa and burned at the power plant. Many tribal members have jobs in the coal mines.

In Riverside County, the 600-member Soboba band has presented a more unified front against the MWD, ever since the utility began boring the San Jacinto Tunnel in 1933.

The 13-mile-long tunnel was something of an engineering marvel in its day.

Today, the MWD concedes that the tunnel’s porous walls soak away a substantial amount of water from communities along the San Jacinto River. But they said it is unclear whether water is lost by the Sobobas, whose 6,000-acre reservation is 3 1/2 miles southeast of the tunnel.

But tribal members said they have seen the difference over the years. First, the creeks dried up, then the wells began to go dry, they said.

Tribal Chairman Salgado said he went out for football in high school to get a regular shower in the locker room, because there was so little water coming to his home.

Through the 1940s and 1950s the Bureau of Indian Affairs tried to help hash out a settlement. A lawsuit from that era was finally settled in 1991, with the tribe receiving $12 million from the federal government.

But the Sobobas maintained their claim that they were losing water to the giant water district. Soboba officials charged last week that the MWD has enriched itself with that extra water by as much as $140 million.

In their lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, they asked for an injunction requiring the MWD to repair the tunnel to prevent the loss of more ground water or for payments for their losses over the decades.

Salgado complained that the Metropolitan Water District has “never taken the Indians’ losses seriously.”

But MWD Chief Counsel Taylor said the agency has been negotiating in good faith over many years. He noted that the agency helped arrange a settlement that was approved by Congress and signed into law in 1970. It would have given the tribe membership in the water district and the right to buy water, without paying upfront costs of millions of dollars that most users have to pay, Taylor said.

The tribe, however, voted down the settlement. Now, the district has another proposal on the table that would give the tribe access to water piped in from Northern California and allow it and other local users to store the water in an underground basin, Taylor said.

He said the water agency has proved that it is willing to compensate fairly for draining off the aquifer. It provides about $1.6 million a year in water to a smaller water provider near San Jacinto free of charge, Taylor said.

“We have done everything we possibly can to work with the tribe,” Taylor said, “but I cannot settle all the problems among them and the other [water] users.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Struggle Over Water

For nearly 70 years, the Soboba Band of Mission Indians has complained that a Metropolitan Water District tunnel drains water from their reservation. To the northwest, a new MWD tunnel has been put on hold and will be redesigned at a cost of up to $200 million. San Manuel Indians had protested that the tunnel would drain water from their lands.

*