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Salinity The Colorado River carries 9 million tons of salts annually. Salts leach into its waters from the natural landscape. Return flows from agriculture and other uses contribute more salt. Extreme salinity can damage soil and crops and corrode pumps, household plumbing and machinery. Highly saline water is not suitable for munici- pal water, industrial or agricultural uses without extra - and more expensive - treatment to remove minerals. Yet the compact did not address water quality. According to Jack Barnett, executive director of the Colorado River Basin Salinity Control Program, there are two possible reasons for its absence in the compact. "One, they didn't think about it. Another, they knew so little about it that they couldn't talk intelligently about it. I tend to believe that they knew there was this water quality problem, but that would really be the straw that would break the camel's back so they left it for some of us to come to later." That time came 50 years later when water quality moved to the national agenda through passage of the 1972 Clean Water Act. The u.s. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) called for Colorado River salinity standards to be imposed at the state line boundaries. The states objected and instead lobbied for a basin-wide program. By 1974 the Colorado River Basin Salinity Control Act had passed and the seven states had formed the Colorado River Basin Salinity Control Forum. Numeric criteria require that the salinity not increase over 1972 levels at three downstream measure- ment points. Salts must be reduced by about 1.6 million tons to maintain the numeric criteria as the river gets further developed. About $400 million has been spent on salinity reduction programs. Barnett said the salt load has been reduced by about 60 parts per million. These programs are operated by the Bureau, Department of Agriculture and Bureau of Land Management July/August 1997 (BLM) to a tune of $20 million annually. The most controversial salinity control feature is the costly desalina- tion plant that was constructed near Yuma, Ariz. The plant was built to desalt some Colorado River water after its use in two nearby irrigation districts prior to the water reaching Mexico. The plant has never operated as it was designed. Environmental Issues The mindset of the '20s was to develop the river, develop the land. It was not until the 1960s and '70s that society's values shifted toward environmental protection. But if the past decades were focused mostly on water develop- ment in the Colorado River Basin, the next generation of issues are environmental issues. An increasing number of these issues relate to recreation - beach destruction and rebuilding in the Grand Canyon, fishing, and the issue of flows for river rafting vs. flows for power generation. On the horizon is talk of restoring the Colorado River Delta. "These issues are representative of a change in social values toward more protection for the environment. It's broad-based, and it's not going to go away," said Tom Moody of the Grand Beaches in the Grand Canyon were restored during the 1996 spring spike in which 360,000 acre.feet in seven days poured out of Glen Canyon Dam to simulate natural flooding. 11