BOARD01677

• Board Meeting Date: 7/26/1999
• Description: CWCB Director's Report
• Board Meetings - Doc Type: Memo

I acknowledge that, even though there is clearly enough water for our needs at the Conservation water hole,
there are cultural and political realities that constrain the changes that must take place.

So, let's move on to the second water hole: water markets.

Over the past century, western water supplies were developed at the. federal, state and local level with
intensive public fmancing and control. Given the scarcity of water and the huge investments necessary, this
bureaucratic model was perbaps inevitable, but today we are struggling with the constraints of that approach.

Water supplies are not responsive to market signals of supply and demand. Were water available in the
market place, communities in need of water could simply purchase water supplies from other users who have less
need, just as other resources are allocated. Third party impacts are a legitimate concern, particularly in rural
communities, but there are many ways to mitigate these impacts without freezmg water supplies in place forever.

As a practical matter, water markets usually means water transfers from agriculture to urban uses. The
reason is simple. Agriculture uses some 80% of the developed water in the West, and agricultural efficiencies could
easily save 10% of that amount which could augment urban water supplies by more than a third. In this
Administration, we have worked to overcome the institutional barriers and to facilitate water transfer agreements
between willing buyers and willing sellers.

And these efforts are bearing fruit. In recent months, the Department has worked intensively with the city
of San Diego, the Metropolitan Water District, the Imperial Irrigation District, the Coachella Valley Irrigation
District, and the State of California to reach an agreement ort the transfer of up to 200,000 acre feet of water from
the Imperial Valley to be conveyed to San Diego through the MWD aqueduct. We are now within closing distance
of this, the largest water transfer in western history, and when it is accomplished, it should put to rest the skeptics'
claim that water transfers are unworkable.

The Department has worked with Arizona and Nevada to augment the Colorado River water available to
Las Vegas through an innovative agreement that works like this: Las Vegas pays to store Colorado River water in
Arizona groundwater basins, and in return obtains credits allowing that city to take equivalent amounts of water
directly from Lake Mead. This arrangement demonstrates the creativity than can be applied to the solution of water
suppliproblems.

Well and good, the skeptics may say, but the West can have long droughts, and surely that means that we
must have huge amounts of storage. And that takes us to the third undeveloped water hole: groundwater storage.

In the reclamation era, the response to all water supply problems was the big, stream killing dam. Never
mind that surface storage is not very efficient; Lake Mead loses a million acre feet per year to evaporation as does
Lake Powell, that is more than ten percent of the average flow of the Colorado River, enough to supply a city the
size of Los Angeles.

The better alternative is to store water beneath the ground by recharging depleted groundwater basins.
When rivers have surplus flood flows, the water can be drawn off and stored without the destructive consequences
of building dams. Arizona is now recharging an average of 500,000-a.cre feet of water each year with Colorado
River water. In many states, however, the absence of adequate groundwater codes to defme the rights of users has
greatly slowed the move from surface to groundwater storage.

The move to groundwater storage does not mean that we can do without in stream dams. But some dams
have outlived their purpose or could have their functions served in less destructive ways. Last summer I joined state
officials in taking a sledgehammer to McPherrin dam, a small diversion dam on Butte Creek in the Sacramento
Valley, that blocked salmon from spawning upstream into the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. A simple siphon
system was substituted to deliver water to farmers. A year later some 20,000 spawning salmon were counted at this
site, where fewer than a thousand had appeared in previous years.

And where more storage is demonstrably necessary, and groundwater basins are not available, the better
alternative will be off stream storage, as this administration proposes for the Animas La Plata project.

It is time to acknowledge that the natural values of river systems can no longer be treated as table scraps
leftover after every conceivable consumptive appetite has been fully satisfied. A river is a living resource, entitled to
at least parity with consumptive uses. Aldo Leopold once wrote that to understand a landscape, it is necessary to
"Think like a mountain"; we must now pause to "think like a river."

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