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supply back in 1913. So people in the water business who think that the future is going to be a lot like the past -- I think you are either living in vastly different political and regulatory circumstances than we are in California, or you must have some tricks up your sleeve that we didn't think that we had in California. Q: How much are you paying the farmers in Palo Verde Valley? .A: GEORGESON: We're paying them $620 per acre per year, figuring they use 4.6 acre-feet per acre, so we're paying them about $120 an acre- foot, and they get the water free, essentially, out of the river. It might cost them a dollar or two for their gravity diversion. I think that is a pretty good price, from our stand point, when you look at the cost of developing alternative sources of supply or when you look at the alternative. What we are looking at in that situation is not just a two-year program but an opportunity to convert that into seven or eight years of supply with a contract with Bureau of Reclamation to store that 200,000 acre-feet in Lake Mead for use any time between now and the year 2000, recognizing that if Lake Mead spills, our water is the first to go over the spillway. Q: What keeps us from vastly expanding our land fallowing program in California? A: GEORGESON: I think what we're looking to is utilizing a variety of strategies of meeting our water needs, and we think it is very short sighted to look only to land fallowing, or to agricultural water transfers even if they are voluntary, because of the political price that you pay if you don't clean up your conservation and your efficiency in your own backyard before you go out to the Colorado River qr northern California and start to have some impacts. We think the impacts, as I mentioned in the case of Palo Verde, are small, but we think in order to have credibility, we've got to be doing everything that is reasonably possible in terms of conservation. We are spending $21 million this year, a lot of it for ultra-low flush toilet retrofits at $100 a throw. We are spending a lot of money. We expect to be spending, our district alone, $35 million in subsidized wastewater reclamation in ten years, about $35 million in groundwater desalting, and a lot of money in groundwater conjunctive use. The point I am making is that I think the water is available. With political assistance at the state and federal level, water for urban needs is available from agricultural areas, providing you're doing a respectable job managing the water resources within your service area so that you are not relying exclusively on agricultural water transfers to meet your future needs. Q: Do you consider the land fallowing as a short-term or long-term program? A: GEORGESON: I guess in a sense we've given up in California trying to find-long term solutions. Jerry Brown had a guru, and one of his sayings, I think fits the water business, at least in California: "Life. is not a problem to be solved, it is a mystery to be lived." That certainly fit California during the Jerry Brown years and I think it's a pretty good rallying cry for trying to plan urban water supplies in California. 45