Pressure Fails to Break Through Water Impasse

Despite the intervention of legislators and other high-level state officials, the water district here has failed to break an impasse between arid San Diego County and water-rich Imperial Valley that threatens the supply for all of Southern California.

Unless the San Diego County Water Authority and the Imperial Irrigation District can reach agreement by Dec. 31, the U.S. Department of the Interior has threatened to reduce the amount of “surplus” water the state receives from the Colorado River.

The cutback could initially be offset by water in storage. But it could quickly lead to a severe reduction in water for the six counties and 17 million people served by the Los Angeles-based Metropolitan Water District of Southern California.

In a response made public Saturday night, officials of the Imperial Irrigation District rejected as inadequate a revised proposal by San Diego to buy some of the Imperial Valley’s enormous annual allocation from the Colorado River.

The San Diego revision called for providing $135 million to the Imperial Valley at the beginning of the 75-year deal; allowing a five-year period before farmers have to allow land to go fallow; and helping the farmers pay the cost of restoring the Salton Sea.

But Imperial Irrigation District officials said the proposal would provide no new money, just accelerated payments; could damage the Salton Sea; and would not come close to offsetting the effect on the area’s agricultural economy of letting fields go fallow.

Although California water disputes tend to be measured in decades, this one appears headed for crunch time.

Imperial Irrigation District Director Andy Horne said that the San Diego proposal--billed as a sweetened revision of a tentative agreement reached in 1998--would leave the district vulnerable to a bill of hundreds of millions of dollars for environmental damage to the Salton Sea.

A reduction in water use in the Imperial Valley would mean less runoff to replenish the sea and thus an increase in the salinity level, which could kill vast numbers of birds and fish. Under state and federal laws, much of the burden of repairing such damage could fall on the Imperial Irrigation District because it is profiting from the water sale.

Horne and other directors also oppose the requirement in the proposal that farmers let as much as 10% of the district’s 500,000 acres go fallow to save water for San Diego. The proposal would leave the district and the Imperial Valley “holding the bag for the socioeconomic and environmental mitigation costs,” Horne said.

Horne was involved in two days of negotiations last week in Sacramento arranged by Assemblyman Bob Hertzberg (D-Van Nuys).

Legislators and Davis administration officials, including Resources Agency Secretary Mary Nichols, urged the Imperial Valley to reach an agreement with San Diego to help the state meet the Dec. 31 deadline.

On Friday night, after a six-hour closed board meeting, the Imperial district had its lawyer, John Carter, send a letter to the general manager of the San Diego County Water Authority branding the San Diego proposal unfair and far below what is needed to keep the Imperial Valley economy from being ravaged as land goes fallow.

Still, Dennis Cushman, assistant general manager of the San Diego agency, found the letter encouraging. “We read their response as ‘Let’s talk,’ ” he said Sunday.

Horne said the San Diego offer would only shift around money from the 1998 agreement and would not provide any additional money. San Diego disagrees. “In our view, we put a very generous offer on the table,” Cushman said.

Maureen Stapleton, San Diego County Water Authority general manager, is set to go to El Centro this week to address a session of the Imperial County Board of Supervisors.

California for several years has enjoyed “surplus” water from the Colorado River beyond its assured allocation, under a maze of agreements involving the seven states that depend on the river.

The Metropolitan Water District has received about 800,000 acre-feet of surplus water a year, enough for 1.6 million families. The surplus water is in addition to the assured allocation of about 550,000 acre-feet. The surplus water belongs in large part to Arizona and Nevada, which have pressured the federal government to wean California away from receiving the surplus water. But the Clinton administration brokered a deal among Western states giving California 15 years to learn to live without surplus water. But the other states set a number of deadlines, including Dec. 31.

Because Imperial Valley farmers were taking water from the Colorado River long before the Metropolitan district was created, the Imperial district gets approximately 3 million acre-feet of water each year, making the desert bloom with a $1-billion agricultural economy.

A bipartisan succession of state and federal officials have said that voluntary sales of water from Imperial Valley to the coastal regions are key to California’s learning to live within its allocations.