Plan Would Let BLM Halt Water Pumping

Faced with claims by environmentalists that the Mojave Desert could be harmed by a water project, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California on Friday proposed giving a federal agency the power to terminate the project if damage is detected.

An environmental impact report on the plan to store water in an aquifer in eastern San Bernardino County says the Bureau of Land Management would have authority to stop the storing and retrieving of water if a complex monitoring system showed that the desert’s fragile ecology was imperiled.

The report will be published next week in the Federal Register, giving critics and boosters 30 days to weigh in with their opinions. After that, the BLM and the MWD governing board are set to make a decision.

In previous plans, both the MWD and Santa Monica-based Cadiz Inc., which owns the land atop the aquifer, would have had a role in determining whether the project should continue if more water is being pumped out than is being replenished by rainfall.

MWD official Adan Ortega said the new report “is a significant milestone in meeting the environmental concerns” and pushing the project toward approval.

Environmentalists, who have argued that the project will drain the desert aquifer to a harmful degree, expressed disappointment.

Making the BLM the pumping referee is an improvement but does not solve the project’s basic environmental problems, said Simeon Herskovits, staff attorney for the Western Environmental Law Center. The center represents several environmental groups that contend far more ground water will be pumped than can be naturally replenished. They also fault the monitoring system, saying it will not detect ecosystem damage until it is well advanced.

“It takes many years for the overall [water] table to drop and the effects to radiate out through the system,” Herskovits said. “You won’t be able to see any clear sign of that until 20 or 30 years down the road, at which point it will take many decades for the system to repair itself.”

He said environmental groups will submit their views within the 30-day comment period and, if necessary, go to court to challenge the adequacy of the environmental review.

Water officials see the project as a way to store surplus Colorado River water for use during dry years. California is under pressure by the federal government and other Western states to significantly reduce its annual take from the Colorado River.

Other storage projects are underway in the desert region of Riverside County and the MWD also has begun negotiations with Arizona. But the Cadiz project is controversial because it involves a private company that stands to make sizable profits. The company’s principal owner, Keith Brackpool, is a water advisor and major contributor to Gov. Gray Davis.

The project would last 50 years and cost up to $1 billion if the MWD buys the maximum amount of water envisioned in the environmental impact report. The agency needs BLM approval to build a 35-mile spur from its Colorado Aqueduct to take water to and from the aquifer beneath the Cadiz and Fenner valleys.

At the heart of the environmental dispute is disagreement among hydrologists about how much water is beneath the desert and how quickly the aquifer is replenished.

To sidestep this dispute, the MWD and Cadiz have devised a complex monitoring system to warn when the aquifer, about 200 feet below the desert floor, starts receding faster than predicted.