7777

• UCREFRP Catalog Number: 7777
• Author: Ward, R. C.
• Title: Proceedings 1993 Colorado Water Convention, Front Range Water Alternatives and Transfer of Water from One Area of the State to Another, January 4-5, 1993, Denver, Colorado.
• USFW Year: 1993.
• USFW - Doc Type: \
• Copyright Material: NO

hundred years; and along the coast and some inland areas we have high
dissolved solids. Nevertheless, we have a strong commitment to make
use of those groundwater basins. Keep in mind: Metropolitan has no
rights to the groundwater basin. When Metropolitan was formed some
people called it "disjointed incrementalism." In other words, when
Metropolitan was being formed, no one gave up any of their authority
within their city or within their water district. Metropolitan was
formed to create a new district, build new facilities, and develop a
supplemental supply for the area with no direct authority regarding
water use or water supply within our service area.

Statewide, agriculture uses almost 85 percent of the water.
Urban use is about 15 percent. Within the Metropolitan service area,
because our water is very expensive, we carefully sell the water for a
little over an average cost of $300 an acre-foot. The average
agricultural water use in California is probably more like $15 an
acre-foot. So within our service area, only high value agriculture
survives, and only 10 percent of our water is sold for agricultural
use.

We've tried to deal with the unreliability of our supply. We've
developed in the last few years what we call an integrated strategy or
solution. It gets into demand management, conservation, water
pricing, and strong use of wastewater reclamation. In that regard,
Metropolitan has recently implemented a program of subsidizing our
member agencies to the tune of $154 per acre-foot for every acre-foot
of water reclaimed in our service area, and a new program of $250 an
acre-foot subsidy for member agencies using desalination technology
for cleaning up contaminated ground water. We've gotten into water
transfers (particularly in the last five or six years), primarily from
agriculture, and we have a large infrastructure program in order to
make our existing system more flexible to deal with the uncertainty of
all of our sources of supply. We're building an 800,000 acre-foot
reservoir. We've completed the environmental documentation, and, in
the area of environmental commitment, we have strong support from the
State and Federal Fish and Wildlife agencies, the Nature Conservancy,
and we're through the permitting process. I should hasten to add, it
wasn't cheap.

Future utilization of Colorado River water: for the last ten
years we have been working on programs for storing groundwater in the
Coachella Irrigation District near Palm Springs, the Imperial
Irrigation District conservation program, the land fallowing
demonstration program in the Palo Verde Valley, and a new program
whereby we're storing water today in the groundwater basin of central
Arizona.

The Palo Verde Irrigation District, a district of 100,000 acres,
has senior rights on the river in California -- they get water first.
There is another area that I don't have time to talk about -- the
Imperial Irrigation District. I'm going to talk about the land
fallowing program in that Palo Verde district, about 100 miles south
of Lake Mead on the Colorado River. It is a two-year program, a
demonstration program, that turned out to be a key concession in terms
of putting this together with the local farmer group. It had to be
approved by the other irrigation districts of California and the

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