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tl!'l1'l1l1'1 water in the Colorado for the Secretary of the Interior to declare surplus- es, in recent years California has been able to make use of additional supplies. However, things are looking less rosy down the line. According to Bureau of Reclamation projections, Arizona could be taking its full 2.8 maf apportionment by 1995, while Nevada expects to take its total 300,000 acre- foot apportionment by 2006. Being on one of the bot- tom rungs of California's water-use ladder, Metropolitan Water District - serving more than 15 million urban dwellers - is the first to take the hit when water supplies are reduced and, in fact, had already had its dependable supply reduced from 1.2 million acre-feet a year to 550,000 acre-feet when the Central Arizona Project was placed into operation. Therefore, Metropolitan, working cooperatively with Imperial, Coachella and Palo Verde, has sought creative ways to stretch supplies - programs that provide winwwin situations. Imperial Irrigation District and Metropolitan struck a deal that was implemented in December 1989 under which Metropolitan pays for water-saving improve- ments in Imperial's service area in exchange for the conserved supplies. 110 provides irrigation water to about 780 square miles of farmland located in the southeast corner of the state - that's close to half a million acres, more than half of all the crop and pas- ture land irrigated with Colorado River water in the lower basin. With an annual use approaching 2.6 million acre-feet, Imperial is California's largest con- sumer of Colorado River water. When the conserva- tion projects are complet- CRWUA gated land - in the neigh- borhood of 20,000 previ- ously producing acres - for two years in a test land fallowing program with Metropolitan Water District. Over the two-year period, MWD will pay farmers for each acre laid fallow, and will reimburse ed, more than 100,000 acre-feet of Colorado River water will be saved each year and Metropolitan will divert that amount from the river for delivery to urban cus- tomers through its Colorado River Aqueduct. Palo Verde Irrigation District holds the earliest formal appropriation of the lower river of "95,000 miners' inches" of water filed by Thomas Blythe in 1877. Today Palo Verde provides approximately 450,000 acre-feet of Colorado River water each year to some 100,000 acres growing primarily alfalfa, cotton, wheat, melons and lettuce. In an effort to stretch California's river supplies, about 60 farmers in Palo Verde's service area have agreed to idle up to 25 percent of their irri- Palo Verde Irrigation District for administrative costs. This program will make nearly 93,000 acre- feet of water available to urban users each year. Though agreements were signed for Colorado River water in 1919, Coachella Valley Water District's first imports began in 1948 with the completion of the Coachella Canal branch of the All-American Canal. The All-American carries water some 80 miles west from the southernmost reaches of the river in the U.S. to irrigate fields in Imperial Valley. In a con- tinuing effort to stretch limited water supplies as far as possible, Congress, in 1988, authorized lining portions of the AlI- American and Coachella canals, through which more than 70,000 acre-feet of water currently soaks into the sand each year. Water conserved by this project, which will be fund- ed 100 percent by California's river allotees, will be available to these agencies in proportion to the funding provided. The increasing coopera- tion among California agen- cies with interests in the Colorado is evidenced by the variety of discussions, studies and negotiations under way - further land fallowing and a modified alfalfa irrigation program, groundwater storage and exchange efforts, water banking, remote sensing of land use acquired via satel- lite imagery to project w~ter use that could le~d to fur- ther agreements. But per- haps the most far-reaching of all is the landmark pro. posal in which water for California cities would be stored underground inthe Arizona desert - an imagi- native exchange program that provides another envi- ronmentally conscious attempt to solve California's serious long-term urban supply problems. Innovative thinking all, these programs show posi- tive energy at work to make the most of California's share of the Colorado. ~~ ~LJ