Soured Deal Will Be Talk of Water Meeting

In the middle of a desert, in the middle of a drought, officials from four suspicious and sometimes feuding Southern California water agencies are trying to revive a water deal that can satisfy farmers and city dwellers and keep the federal government from cutting into California’s share of water from the Colorado River.

At issue are complex and divisive matters of money, hydrology and, perhaps most important, psychology.

Faced with a Dec. 31 deadline to make a deal, the Imperial Irrigation District, the San Diego County Water Authority, the Coachella Valley Water District and the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California are pledged to meeting before, during and after the annual convention in Las Vegas of the Colorado River Water Users Assn., which begins Sunday.

This year’s convention was supposed to be a convivial gathering where the California agencies could explain triumphantly how they reached an agreement on the nation’s largest transfer of water from agricultural to municipal users.

A panel discussion was scheduled for Tuesday in which representatives of the four agencies could bask in the glow of success and receive the thanks of water wonks from six other drought-beset states that depend on the Colorado River and have been eager for California to reduce its overuse of the river.

Instead, the convention will open amid controversy and rancor among the California agencies and between California and other Colorado River Basin states.

What has the water world so riled is the Imperial board’s defiant decision last week to reject a proposed 75-year, $2-billion deal to sell water to arid San Diego -- a deal that the Imperial board negotiators had tentatively accepted two months earlier.

As they arrive in Las Vegas, Imperial officials say they need assurances that their district will not be soaked for hundreds of millions of dollars to save the Salton Sea, the landlocked lake that exists on agricultural runoff.

They also want more assistance in offsetting economic damage to farm workers and farm-dependent businesses caused by letting farmland go fallow so that water can be sent to San Diego.

And possibly as important, they want a different tone.

Somewhere in the seven-year negotiating process -- some say it was last fall, when state Assemblyman Bob Hertzberg (D-Sherman Oaks) assumed the role of mediator -- the tone shifted from negotiation to intimidation, Imperial officials say.

“We want to be part of the solution but not at the expense of devastating the Imperial Valley,” said board President Stella Mendoza. “If the other agencies are willing to treat us as equal partners, with dignity and respect, we’re willing to talk and try to work out a deal.”

Neil Grigg, engineering professor and water expert at Colorado State University, said he is not surprised the deal fell apart when the Imperial board members began to resent suggestions that without a water deal the Legislature might move to disband their district or take water without compensation.

Farming communities take as a given that city people do not understand the difficulties of farming, Grigg said. When that lack of understanding lapses into disrespect, he said, the tendency of farmers is to conclude: “Let’s follow our built-in conservatism and see if we can make this go away.”

“We see that repeatedly in agricultural communities in Colorado” when dealing with water transfers, Grigg said.

David Hayes, a Washington-based environmental lawyer who was involved in the early years of negotiations as assistant Interior secretary during the Clinton administration, agreed that the tentative agreement of Oct. 15 may have failed to hold because “somewhere the stick took over for the carrot.”

Hertzberg and other officials say they were not threatening Imperial, just pointing out the real-life consequences of refusing to sell a portion of their water. For historic reasons, Imperial is entitled to 75% of California’s share of the Colorado River.

Assistant Interior Secretary Bennett Raley, the Bush administration’s point man on Western water, made an unscheduled visit to El Centro in the days before this week’s vote.

Drawing on his background as a lawyer representing an agricultural water district outside Denver, he tried a more congenial, I-feel-your-pain approach.

As the West grows, transfers of water from farms to cities are inevitable, Raley said.

Best to cut a deal and make some money than wait for the cities to use their considerable political clout, he added.

“I know what it’s like to live under the threat of seeing water that has been in a community for years being taken and used to support growing needs in urban areas,” he said.

In a keynote speech to the convention Monday, Interior Secretary Gale Norton is expected to deliver a tough ultimatum: Cut a deal now or face swift and unpleasant consequences.

Norton is expected to announce that unless a deal is reached, surplus water allocations from the Colorado River to coastal Southern California will be immediately suspended, and steps will be taken to reduce the enormous allocation of water to Imperial Valley farmers.

For the coastal region, it could mean an immediate loss of 600,000 acre-feet to 800,000 acre-feet of water a year.

The Metropolitan Water District, wholesalers to six Southern California counties, says that it has enough water in storage to offset the loss for two years and long-term plans in the works for conservation measures and other water purchases.

For Imperial, Norton may threaten to rule that its enormous water allocation is not a beneficial use, a legal finding that could lead to reducing its share of the Colorado.

That water, in theory, could be transferred to other Colorado River states, allowing coastal California to continue receiving the surplus.

“We hoped to get away from the war mode into a more collaborative mode on the Colorado River,” said Joseph Sax, professor at Boalt Hall School of Law at UC Berkeley and former top water advisor to former Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt.

“Instead, the river could well be reverting into a wartime setting,” Sax said.