Surplus Water Losing Appeal, MWD Suspects

For many years, the Colorado River has supplied 30% of Southern California’s water. But as a prolonged drought pinches the river’s flow, local officials are questioning the value of a deal to preserve access to surplus river water that might cease to exist.

With the Colorado’s flow diminished by four years of drought, officials of the Los Angeles-based Metropolitan Water District are now saying the agency may abandon negotiations on a deal to transfer some Colorado River water from Imperial Valley farmers to users in San Diego County.

As a reward for signing that deal, the federal government would probably restore the MWD’s rights to draw surplus water from the Colorado until 2016. The surplus -- water in excess of the district’s legal allotment -- amounted last year to more than half of the MWD’s overall take from the river.

The MWD’s access to the surplus was suspended when details of the transfer between San Diego and the Imperial Valley couldn’t be worked out by the end of last year.

A new federal study suggests that even if the Bush administration reauthorized the transfer of surplus water, the Colorado might be too low to provide such a surplus. The study concluded that there is about a 65% chance that the surplus would be available between now and 2016. That represents a substantial decline from past estimates.

How depleted is the Colorado? The last time that Lake Powell -- the second-largest reservoir along the river -- was this low was when the artificial lake was being filled in June 1971, according to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, the agency that manages the lake.

As river flows decline, MWD officials say, the deal may cost more than the available water would be worth. Moreover, agency officials say, the deal might require tens of millions of dollars in Proposition 50 funds to help compensate Imperial Valley farmers.

The bond measure, passed by voters last fall, earmarked $3.4 billion for a variety of clean water and conservation projects, and for protection of the California coast. Officials of the MWD said Wednesday that if the Colorado surplus is starting to dry up, they would prefer to see the Proposition 50 money spent on projects to develop water supplies from other sources.

“The fuse is fairly short” on the Imperial-San Diego deal, said Jeffrey Kightlinger, general counsel for the MWD. “Our board is going to make a decision in the near future whether to continue this process or move forward” in another direction.

“We’ve walked through the deal and overall it’s still worth having, but it’s not the great deal we thought it was three years ago,” he said.

Dennis Cushman, the assistant general manager of the San Diego County Water Authority, maintains that the MWD would be making a huge mistake and possibly hurting its customers if it walked away from the deal.

Even with the drought, Cushman said, the MWD is still likely to get at least some surplus water if it signs the water transfer deal and the surplus water would be far cheaper than water the MWD would buy elsewhere.

The MWD’s “supplies have a greater level of certainty” with such a deal than without, Cushman said.

The statements by the MWD are the latest wrinkle in a seven-year struggle to complete the Imperial-San Diego deal, which is designed in part to rein in California’s profligate use of the Colorado River.

California is entitled to only 4.4 million acre-feet of water each year from the river under an agreement the state signed in 1931 with the six other states that rely on the Colorado.

Nonetheless, the state has drawn as much as 5.2 million acre-feet annually from the Colorado for many years because the other states weren’t using their full share. Most of that extra water went to the MWD.

In 2000, California was finally given a deadline of 2016 by the federal government to return to its legal allotment of 4.4 million acre-feet. The idea was to give the MWD enough time to enact more conservation measures or to find replacement sources of water.

Then in 1999 the drought hit.

By last year, the runoff from the snowpack in the Rockies, which feeds the Colorado, was 25% of normal, the lowest it has been in the past century. This year’s snowpack is bigger but still below average.

“I do a rain dance every morning,” said Robert Johnson, the federal Bureau of Reclamation’s regional director for the Southwest.

Even if river flows are high enough in future years to provide the surplus water, if the MWD is to regain access to the surplus, several obstacles to the San Diego-Imperial water transfer need to be overcome.

One of the biggest is the cost of saving the Salton Sea, which serves as an important habitat for millions of migratory birds. The sea is sustained by water running off Imperial Valley farms. The transfer of some of that water to San Diego could starve the sea and have dire consequences for wildlife.

“By now it should be clear to all parties involved that an agreement has to be reached and that compromise will be necessary,” said Byron Tucker, deputy press secretary for California Gov. Gray Davis. “If an agreement is not reached, everyone will lose.”

The MWD has already begun compensating for the Colorado River surplus that has been lost, at least temporarily.

The agency also voted last year to spend nearly $3 million on new measures to conserve water, and agency officials say the MWD will continue to strike deals with farm districts to buy water.

Last week, for example, the agency paid about $9.7 million to three districts in Northern California to purchase 97,200 acre-feet of water this year.