Milestone Water Accord OKd

Southern California water officials agreed Wednesday to shift water from desert farms to San Diego County, a costly and complicated transfer aimed at averting a federal cutback next year of Colorado River water used by millions of people from Ventura to the Mexican border.

The deal -- still subject to formal approval by four agency boards, including the Imperial Irrigation District, which controls most of the water involved -- marks a milestone in a trend to divert water from rural, agricultural regions to expanding urban areas across the West.

“Times have changed. Urban interests are now knocking at the door,” said UCLA historian Norris Hundley Jr., who has written several books about water in the American West.

With deals like this one, Hundley said, “we are acknowledging a new reality. When people, meaning cities, need water, they are going to get priority. When there are cutbacks, farmers will be cut back before cities.”

Final approval of the pact would also buy the state more time to wean itself from a steady diet of water from the Colorado River to which other states and Mexico have legal claims.

The agreement, which is to last for up to 75 years, would pay farmers in the Imperial and Palo Verde valleys not to grow crops. Water transferred by existing canals from those valleys would give San Diego County a major new source of water as well as long-sought independence from the Los Angeles-based Metropolitan Water District.

The agreement may represent a windfall for some farmers, but others worry that by taking land out of production, the deal could increase Imperial County’s unemployment, which is already the highest in the state.

Under the deal, Imperial Valley farmers would fallow land over the next 15 years and transfer up to 200,000 acre-feet per year, enough water to meet about one-third of San Diego County’s needs.

The farmers would be paid $258 to $400 an acre-foot for water that costs them $15.50 per acre-foot.

To buy the water and pay for the social and economic costs of idling farmland 100 miles away, San Diego expects to invest $2 billion.

“Peace has broken out on the river,” said Assemblyman Bob Hertzberg (D-Sherman Oaks) in a ceremony outside Imperial Irrigation District offices in La Quinta.

During the last month of his final session in the Legislature, Hertzberg drove four days of nearly round-the-clock negotiations to reach the multi-party agreement involving the Imperial Irrigation District, the San Diego County Water Authority, the Coachella Valley Water District and the MWD.

The urgency was dictated by a Dec. 31 federal deadline for California to show how it will reduce its dependence on water from the Colorado River. For the last 29 years, the state has been using more of the river’s water than it was entitled to take.

One of the biggest challenges facing urban water agencies such as the MWD has been to persuade irrigation districts along the river, who have rights to most of the state’s share, to sell water secured by their ancestors a century ago.

“These are tough, tough fights,” Hertzberg said, “but people were fair, they were open and honest in this process, and it really is a great day.”

The agreement must still be ratified by the boards of the four agencies by the end of the year for California to avoid losing Colorado River water sufficient to supply 1.6 million Southern California families.

Ratification is not certain.

Two of the five-member Imperial Irrigation District board expressed reservations.

Andy Horne, one of the two, said he is reserving judgment until valley residents scrutinize the agreement.

“It’s a settlement, and it’s going to involve for us some benefits and some sacrifices,” he said. The valley produces $1 billion a year of food and fiber with its share of Colorado River water. Some people there fear that fallowing will cost jobs and shrink income as farmers stop repairing equipment, buying seed and hiring field hands. Other landowners see profits in water sales to faraway cities.

At a maximum, Horne said, 30,000 acres of the 450,000 farmed in the district could be fallowed.

Imperial board member Stella Mendoza called that too much.

“Once fallowing is allowed to occur, it will continue,” she testified at a legislative hearing shortly before weary negotiators signed the agreement. “The unemployment rate is at 22%, and we cannot afford the loss of any additional jobs.”

The agreement requires water officials to compensate farmers, who use 80% of California’s developed water supply, so the water can be shifted to new subdivisions and office parks.

Such transactions are still shadowed by the draining of Owens Valley, a farming community east of the Sierra Nevada that dried up when Los Angeles acquired most of its water supply in the 1920s. But modern water deals are also driven by historical inequities that give farmers enough water to flood orchards while factories ration water.

Bennett Raley, assistant secretary for water at the U.S. Department of Interior, called Wednesday’s agreement a key solution to water scarcity in the West. Although relatively new to California, he said, such long-term negotiated transfers have shifted water for decades in Arizona, Colorado and New Mexico.

“We firmly believe that one of the answers to the challenges we face with growth in the West is that there will be market-based transfers from farms to municipalities,” he said. “This is not rocket science.”

Nor is it the first time the Imperial Irrigation District has agreed to sell water to city dwellers. In the mid-1980s, accused of wasteful irrigation practices by state regulators, Imperial arranged to conserve and sell 100,000 acre-feet of water a year to the MWD.

In 1997, San Diego sought to make a similar transfer as a way to reduce its dependence on the MWD, the region’s chief wholesaler of water.

But a deal was complicated by disputes over how much San Diego should pay the MWD for using its Colorado River canal and, more recently, by feared harm to the environmental health of the Salton Sea.

The water that runs off Imperial Valley farms drains into the Salton Sea.

An artificial lake that is 30% saltier than the ocean, the sea provides food for millions of migrating geese, ducks, pelicans and other birds.

Environmentalists fear that water transfers will dry up the runoff that sustains the sea, making it too salty to support fish or birds.

The agreement reached Wednesday requires that a water transfer cause no significant increase in the sea’s salinity for the next 15 years. To meet that demand, the Imperial Irrigation District will have to agree to fallow land, rather than simply conserve water. Fallowing frees up more water so that some of it can still make its way to the Salton Sea.

Under the agreement, Imperial farmers are responsible for sustaining flows to the sea for the first 15 years. Federal and state officials hope that after that, they will have worked out a long-term plan to protect the sea from becoming hyper-saline. Environmentalists are apprehensive.

“If you can incorporate protections for the Salton Sea for 15 years,” said Tom Kirk, executive director of the Salton Sea Authority, “why can’t you do it for 75 years.”

He estimated that when water transfers hit a peak under the agreement, the sea will lose 25% to 30% of its intake.

Not all of the water to be transferred to San Diego will come from Imperial Valley farmers. Some will be delivered by growers in the neighboring Palo Verde Irrigation District who are close to finalizing an agreement to fallow land and sell water to the MWD, which has agreed to shift some of that water to San Diego. The Palo Verde district is in the Blythe area.

San Diego County Water Authority General Manager Maureen Stapleton said the deal will not lead to an immediate rate increase, although customers can expect to pay more over the next 10 years as water becomes scarcer and the agency invests in conservation, desalination and recycling.

The agreement “increases our water reliability and it diversifies our water portfolio,” she said.

“This is a critically important step, but not the only step.”