7020

• UCREFRP Catalog Number: 7020
• Author: Oamek, G. and S. R. Johnson.
• Title: Economic and Environmental Impacts of a Large Scale Water Transfer in the Colorado River Basin.
• USFW Year: n.d.
• USFW - Doc Type: \
• Copyright Material: YES

to wait out the litigation. Among the more notable barriers are the Colorado River
Compact, Arizona v. California, the Upper Basin Agreement, state water laws, and
Bureau of Reclamation contracts rying water to certain project areas.
Challenging this institutional structure are the above recent state level changes and the
well publicized Sporhase decision, which ruled that water is an article of interstate
commerce as defined by the Commerce Clause (102 S. Ct. 613, 1982) and states that any
legislation or regulation which poses an "impermissable burden" on interstate commerce
can be judicially invalidated.
A serious obstacle to the success of the Galloway proposal was the ajudication of the
water they claimed rights to. Colorado, like most states employing the prior
appropriation doctrine, allows only the consumptive use portion of a water right can be
transferred. Much of Galloway's water is suspected of having no history of consumptive
use, making it difficult to assess the volume eligible for transfer.
OBJECTIVES
This paper analyzes the direct economic and offsite environmental impacts of the
Galloway proposal assuming that the water rights in question come out of one of the
lowest valued, quantifiable use in the Upper Basin, namely irrigated agriculture.
Specifically, it estimates the marginal value of water for irrigated agriculture to the
Upper Basin for the amount involved in the transfer, and estimates the land use,
production, agriculture income, and input expenditure changes in the region that result.
It also estimates the changes in river quality, as measured by salinity, and changes in the
river flow, measured by hydroelectic energy produced at the intervening dam sites,
stemming from the transfer. The recipient of this transferred water is presumably San
Diego, but the analysis could apply equally to any Lower Basin user.
MEMOD OF ANALYSIS
Three mathematical programming models were developed to measure the value of water
to irrigated agriculture, each corresponding to a sub-basin within the Upper Colorado
River. The models were originally subsets of the Center for Agricultural and Rural
Development (CARD) linear programs of U.S. agricultural production and
corresponded to their producing areas (PA's) 82, 83, and 84 (). PA 82 represents the
Green River system, including the Yampa and White Rivers (Figure 1). PA 83
encompasses the Colorado train stem, and the Grand, Dolores, and Gunnison Valleys.
The upper and lower San Juan Valleys are represented by PA 84. These PA's
correspond to the Water Resource Council's aggregate subareas 1401, 1402, and 1403,
respectively. The three models were developed with a profit maximizing criteria,
incorporating both dryland and irrigated crop production activities. Irrigated crops
include corn grain and silage, wheat, barley, alfalfa, and 'other' hay. Wheat and other
hay are the dryland crop alternatives. Rotations, rather than single crop alternatives,
were considered for this analysis. Both irrigated and dry cropland are divided into 8
groups reflecting qualitative differences in land and corresponding yield differences.
Although land and water are the only constraining resources, other resources and inputs
are tracked with accounting rows for insight to the severity of secondary impacts on the
local economies. Land contraints for endogenous crops and potential cropland were
obtained from the 1982 National Resources Inventory (8). The upper limit on surface