Arizona, water conservation, and the tragedy of the “paracommons”

Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., had a go at Deputy Interior Secretary Mike Connor during a Senate hearing last week, looking for assurances that if his state left unused water in Lake Mead as part of a Colorado River Basin conservation effort, the Interior Department wouldn’t just kype it and give it to someone else (mumble mumble California something mumble mumble):

The number one priority in Arizona is to make sure that when Arizona, or any other state, voluntarily contributes their water to the health of the Colorado system the contributed water actually stays in the system and doesn’t disappear along somebody else’s canals.

"system water" behind Hoover Dam - the "paracommons", wet water style

“system water” behind Hoover Dam – the “paracommons”, wet water style

This is the latest manifestation of something I’ve written about before, Arizona’s deep-seated paranoia that others (mumble mumble California something mumble mumble) have designs on their scarce water supplies. But it also gets to a really interesting issue that I think needs to be articulated carefully as we go about the project of using less water: where does conserved water go?

Bruce Lankford of the University of East Anglia, in his recent book Resource Efficiency Complexity and the Commons: The Paracommons and Paradoxes of Natural Resource Losses, Wastes and Wastages, coins a new term to try to get his arms around the issue – paracommons:

In a scarce world, society is increasingly interested in the efficiency of resource use; how to get more from less. Yet if you ‘save’ a resource, what does that mean and who gets the ‘saved’ resource? In other words who gets the gain of an efficiency gain?

Consider a few examples:

Las Vegas

As a result of its extraordinary water conservation success, Las Vegas reduced its use of Colorado River water by more than 30 percent over the last decade. That saved water remains Las Vegas’s. It has banked lots of water in aquifers around the West with the idea that it could withdraw that water for its own later use.

Phoenix

Phoenix also is not using its full Colorado River allocation, but the rules around its Colorado River water use are different. Any “saved” Colorado River water that might result from Phoenix’s conservation efforts reverts to other users. (see here and here for an explanation of the rules)

Yuma

red lettuce, Yuma County Arizona

red lettuce, Yuma County Arizona

Farmers in Yuma County (they’re the ones growing a big fraction of your lettuce in the winter) have reduced their water use by more than 30 percent in the last three decades as they have shifted to more efficient irrigation techniques. Like Phoenix, they have seen their water revert to other Arizona water users who are behind them in that state’s water allocation queue. They haven’t gotten a dime for the water.

Imperial

Farmers in the Imperial Valley of southeastern California have reduced their water use by 22 percent in the last decade. They have been compensated for this by other water users in California, with saved water going to Coachella Valley, San Diego, and the Los Angeles area. Some of the saved water is providing environmental flows to the Salton Sea.

Mexico

System improvements and operational changes in Mexico in recent years have saved water for a variety of reasons and purposes. Some of that water was used last year for an environmental pulse flow through the desiccated Colorado River Delta.

the paracommons

So we’ve got four different types of cases above:

  • conserved water retained by the entity doing the conserving for later use
  • conserved water going into the common pool for use by others
  • one group of water users paying for the water conserved by another
  • conserved water used for environmental benefit

The differences in the above cases illustrate the range of rules governing water management. The rules are crazy complicated, and importantly they generally weren’t written with this sort of “How can we best manage conserved water?” question in mind.

I hate the word “paracommons”, but Lankford is careful and deliberate in defending the need to coin a new word to deal with a resource category that, because it is poorly labeled, also has been poorly conceptualized. And strange word or not, as a conceptual category I find the paracommons quite useful. Lankford’s basic argument is essentially that efficiency yields something (in this case saved water) that has a lot of the basic characteristics of a common pool resource. Do we leave that water in the river to reduce the environmental damage our diversions have caused? Do we save it in a reservoir for future use? Do we just hand it off to another water user who’s come up short this year? This raises a whole bunch of institutional challenges that we’re only beginning to grapple with as we transition from water management under surplus to scarcity.

Flake’s grandstanding in the Senate hearing was annoying (can you Grand Canyon staters chill already about the “California’s gonna steal our water” meme? increasingly sounding to me like fingers on a blackboard). But his political play to the home crowd is enabled by confusion on this issue. The water in question is what Colorado River Basin managers are calling “system water”, by which they mean water that is intentionally conserved and just left in the common pool, with no one’s name attached and no purpose delineated for its use. All the cool kids are trying to pull off system conservation deals right now as a way of reducing the decline in Lake Mead (see here and here). Ambiguity about the status of that saved water as it enters the common pool is exactly the problem Lankford is writing about. And it is precisely that ambiguity that leaves the door open for Arizona’s old fears that someone’s trying to screw them in a water deal.

I’ll be speaking in Albuquerque Oct. 31 about the fate of the Rio Grande

I’ll be yammering on about “New Mexico’s Rio Grande: Fate of a 21st Century River“, Oct. 31, 10 a.m., at the Albuquerque Open Space Visitor’s Center. We tried to schedule it for a time when the sandhill cranes had arrived. You’ve already heard me, but the OSVC is one of the best places in town to hang out and watch cranes on a fall day.

Conservation and the municipal water finance dilemma

Matt Weiser takes us into the strange world of California municipal water infrastructure finance, where costs are relatively fixed and vendors are trying to sell less of their product:

[M]any water agencies are feeling the strain because they had already delayed imposing rate increases for a number of years due to the drought and a reluctance to strain ratepayers. The drought aggravates things because water conservation mandates reduce the amount of water they sell, thereby reducing revenues.

 

Thoughts on federal drought legislation circa October 2015

Some thoughts after today’s Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing on federal western California New Mexico etc. drought legislation….

On Congressional process

We currently have two “California drought bills” – H.R. 2898 developed by California House Republicans and S. 1894. They are very different. As a matter of process, the details of the difference don’t matter as much as the very fact of their difference. The rest of Congress is unlikely to meddle in California’s water management affairs unless and until its own Congressional delegation can come up with a unified approach. The fact that we’ve got two such different bills means the likelihood of a California drought bill this year is close to nil. Next year is an election year. So California, don’t expect much help from the federal government beyond that which is possible under current authorizations and appropriations.

the downside to litigation

Deputy Secretary of the Interior Mike Connor, in criticizing the House bill, described it as a recipe for litigation. I don’t know enough about the bill to know whether he’s right, but he made a central point that is crucial to water problem solving. Litigation provides narrow solutions and increases constraints. Collaborative, negotiated solutions have the potential to expand options and provide flexibility.

the Middle Rio Grande

Adrian Oglesby, director of the Utton Center* at the University of New Mexico School of Law and vice-chair of the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District board, suggested a new flexibility on the part of central New Mexico’s largest water agency. The conservancy district, which provides irrigation water to farms and other farm-like properties, has long opposed the creation of water leasing programs that would provide temporary transfers to provide environmental flows. The agency’s position has shifted, Oglesby told the Senators, which creates an opening for S. 1936, sponsored by Tom Udall. Udall’s bill would begin to create the institutional infrastructure for such leasing programs, which could keep water rights attached to old farmland while allowing temporary use of the water elsewhere.

This is a big deal.

Since I handed in my press card, I’ve lost touch with Congressional process issues such that I’m not entirely clear about the path forward for the Udall bill. My impression is that its best hope is to be folded in with other federal drought legislation into some sort of omnibus package. My comments above about the California legislative logjam leave me less than optimistic about S. 1936’s chances this year, but this is the sort of legislation that has to go through a learning process, and the simple fact that the Senators wanted to hear from Adrian today suggests that progress is being made in fleshing this stuff out.

* disclosure: Adrian and the Utton Center have provided me, in my new capacity as University Dude, with funding for my contributions to a study currently underway into resilience and New Mexico water law and policy.

Lake Mead, for the first time since filling, ends water year below 10 million acre feet

It’s one of those milestones that’s an entirely arbitrary result of the units we use to measure, but it’s probably nevertheless worth marking: for the first time since it was filled in the 1930s, Lake Mead ended the “water year” below 10 million acre feet of storage.

The finally elevation at midnight last Wednesday, Sept. 30, was 1,078.1 feet above sea level at the big Colorado River reservoir, which holds water for use in Nevada, Arizona, California, Sonora, and Baja. That translates to an estimated 9.854 million acre feet in storage, down from 10.121 maf a year ago. That is 38 percent of capacity.

Total storage in Mead and Lake Powell, the reservoir upstream of the Grand Canyon that holds most of the rest of the Colorado River Basin’s stored water, ended the water year at 22.187 maf, down from 22.407 maf a year ago.

Mead, Powell storage

Mead, Powell storage

A few notes on this….

As Central Arizona Project board president Lisa Atkins noted this week, a combination of a wet late spring and summer and efforts by lower basin water uses to conserve and leave water in Lake Mead has postponed a “shortage” declaration until at least 2017 and possible later. More on that here.

The crazy accounting system used to manage the river measures some things on a “water year” basis (Oct. 1 – Sept. 30) and some things on a calendar year basis, so we won’t have final water use accounting until the end of the year, but the latest forecast numbers published this morning (pdf) project water users in California, Arizona, and Nevada will collectively use 7.165 million acre feet of their 7.5 million acre feet 2015 allotment. If this holds, that would be the lowest water use for the three states since 2005 and 17 percent below “peak Lower Basin Colorado River water use” in 2002.

 

Happy 80th birthday, Hoover Dam

Harold Ickes delivering Boulder Dam dedication, Sept. 30, 1935, courtesy USBR

Harold Ickes delivering Boulder Dam dedication, Sept. 30, 1935, courtesy USBR

From his Sept. 30, 1935 speech dedicating what was then called “Boulder Dam,” U.S. Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes:

I venture to hope that this dam, with its great storage of health and wealth and happiness for thousands of people, will stand as a definite opening of a new era with respect to the natural resources of America; an era of conservation, which means the prudent use of all our natural resources for the greatest good of the greatest number of our people; an era that will recognize the principle that the riches of forest and mine and water were not bestowed by God to be ruthlessly exploited in order to enhance the wealth of a small group of rugged individualists, but were beneficently given to us as an endowment to be carefully used for the benefit of all the people. On no other theory would the Federal Government be justified in so generously opening the doors of its treasure house for the building of this and other similar projects that will turn large sections of this breathtaking Western country into rich homesteads where a happy and contented people will find it possible to live those comfortable and worthwhile lives that we covet for every man, woman and child in these United States.

I love this. It was such a hopeful time. Listen to the audio here.

Why pumping water from the ocean to save the Salton Sea is a bad idea

Brandon Loomis, in an excellent recent piece on the problems of the Salton Sea, quoted a resident along the troubled inland California lake who thinks the answer to its decline is straightforward:

Rod Jeffries, a 64-year-old urban refugee from San Francisco, is confident the state will act….

His favored solution is to pipe seawater from the gulf, since the water is already so salty.

This idea has lingered for generations, but it’s a really terrible idea. The reason the Salton Sea is so salty is because the water flowing in currently, from Imperial and Coachella ag runoff has only a modest amount of salt, but evaporation leaves all that salt behind. If you add ocean water, which is much saltier than the current ag inflow, the evaporation would make the sea way saltier. So you’d have to not only pump salt water in from the ocean, but also pump salty water back out from the Salton Sea. The amount of water involved, and therefore the energy and infrastructure costs, are staggering. Michael Cohen at the Pacific Institute has put together a helpful video that explains all this:

 

Cohen has posted more useful info on the problems with “sea to sea” schemes here.