Mike Connor and Dan Beard are wrong about the Bureau of Reclamation and replumbing the West

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I’d like to take issue with some recent comments by Dan Beard and Mike Connor, two former commissioners of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, about the agency’s future. (Audience sees closeup of Fleck crawling out on tree limb. Camera zooms back to show that it is the only tree for miles around, with no buildings and therefore no chance of rescue. Audience hears sound of sawing.)

Deadbeat Dams

Deadbeat Dams

Beard

In a weekend New York Times story Beard, who headed the Bureau during the Clinton administration, renews his call for the agency’s elimination:

Daniel P. Beard, a bureau commissioner during the Clinton administration, said the bureau should be abolished, with the authority for water management returned to the states.

“Here we are in the worst drought, climate change is providing a significant impact, and the Obama administration is just studying the problem,” he said. “They should transition to become an environmental agency, and they should just assist local and state agencies to solve water problems in the West.”

It’s an argument Beard lays out in his appropriately titled new book Deadbeat Dams: Why We Should Abolish the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and Tear Down Glen Canyon Dam. It’s an important book, raising challenging arguments that you need to wrestle with if you’re thinking about water in the western United States. But I disagree with Beard on this central point.

Water scholar and attorney Sarah Bates and Cadillac Desert author Marc Reisner wrestle with this question in Overtapped Oasis: Reform Or Revolution For Western Water, a book that serves as a sort of odd sequel to Cadillac Desert, helpfully clarifying (walking back?) some of Cadillac Desert’s central themes. Their quick laundry list of the problems posed by abolishing the Bureau makes a central point – the Bureau does a bunch of stuff, and if the agency were to be eliminated, someone would still have to do all that stuff:

[I]ts abolition would create a political, administrative, and water-rights nightmare…. Who would then “own” its canals and dams? What about the rights to more than 30 million acre-feet of water it provides? Who would be responsible for dam maintenance? For emergency decisions regarding drought allocations or fish-flow releases?

Bates and Reisner then raise an important political reality that I think undercuts Beard’s argument:

[A]ny attempt to abolish the Bureau of Reclamation would be fanatically resisted by many politicians and organized constituencies in the western states, precipitating a political battle that may not be justified by the results.

This is the “water nobility” about which Beard writes in much detail, and any attempt to abolish the current Bureau structure would, I believe, disproportionately empower this group in the political processes needed to create a replacement structure to do the stuff now done by the Bureau. These folks have really good lobbyists and lawyers.

Connor

Deputy Interior Secretary Mike Connor watches water flow through the normally dry Colorado River bed at San Luis, on the U.S.-Mexico border, March 28 2014, photo by John Fleck

Deputy Interior Secretary Mike Connor watches water flow through the normally dry Colorado River bed at San Luis, on the U.S.-Mexico border, March 28 2014, photo by John Fleck

I turn my attention now, gingerly, to the comments of Mike Connor, who was the Obama administration’s first Commissioner of Reclamation, now Deputy Secretary of Interior, and (important disclosure) has generously spent some significant amount of time teaching me about the governance of water in the western United States. (Audience hears sawing of the branch cease, replaced by cracking sound.) In the Times, Connor correctly suggests that the West’s water infrastructure needs a massive rethink:

“We have to think differently,” said Michael Connor, the deputy secretary of the Interior Department, which includes the Bureau of Reclamation. “It’s not enough just to conserve water. We need to rethink these projects. We have a lot of infrastructure, but a lot of it doesn’t work very well anymore. We need to undertake what amounts to a giant replumbing project across the West.”

The way Connor says it supports a central theme of the Times story that I think is wrong: the implication that the Bureau and western water management have been humming along unchanged since the days of Cadillac Desert and have suddenly come to the realization: “Hey, a giant replumbing is needed!”

The whole project of my book challenges that. When I set out to write it some years ago, it was with a post-Cadillac Desert notion that a giant replumbing was needed. What I found again and again, in fact, was that the replumbing has been underway for a while (urban water conservation all over, ag-to-urban transfers galore, re-operation of reservoirs, an environmental flow through the Colorado River Delta for chrissakes). Path dependance and historical contingency make this stuff really hard. People optimized their communities and their lives around the old system. You can’t just kick them off their farms or shut down their city water systems willy nilly. Even if you wanted to (and I think there are important questions of equity and justice that make willy nilly a bad idea), these people fight back, and they’ve got good lawyers. But understanding what replumbing is already underway, what has and has not worked, and what the impediments are as seen through the lens of these replumbing efforts, is the critical piece.

I’m pretty sure Connor would agree with this last bit, the idea that the replumbing is already underway, since’s he’s one of the one of the people who taught me about it.

Let’s just agree to blame the reporter. (Camera zooms back in to see Fleck’s desperate scramble to crawl back before branch breaks.)

Tijuana: A reminder that *nine* states depend on the Colorado River

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There are seven states in the U.S. and two more in Mexico that depend on the Colorado River’s water. Here, from Sandra Dibble, is a reminder that when shortage descends, it is not just Arizona (as I have been guilty of saying) that takes the first hit:

In Mexico, the first impact of cutbacks on the Colorado River — a basin that links seven U.S. states with northern Mexico — is likely to be felt in the sprawling Mexicali Valley in the neighboring state of Sonora, where the smaller San Luis Valley also relies on deliveries of river water and a series of wells fed by seepage of river water.

If there is a shortage declaration in 2017 (as seems likely), Mexico would see a 50,000 acre foot cutback. Sandra’s story is a good primer on the discussions now underway to clarify who will take the hit.

Water policy and the West’s housing market

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One of the intellectual frustrations with trying to wrap my head around water policy in the western United States is that it’s really sort of everything policy. There’s climate science and hydrology and history and law and agricultural economics. And, the subject for this afternoon, there’s urban development economics.

Much of the policy struggle has been driven by the explosive growth in sunbelt cities. We started building houses in the 1980s like gangbusters, without a whole lot of thought about how we were going to get enough water to flush their toilets. Here, for example, is single family homes by number of annually issued building permits in Las Vegas:

 

But then, as you can see, around about 2006 or so we stopped building so many houses. What’s up with that?

Here are the three major metro areas that interest me right now – Albuquerque, Phoenix, and Las Vegas (indexed so that 2001=100 so you can get a feel for the trends in all three, independent of absolute numbers):

My former Albuquerque Journal colleague Richard Metcalf wrote about our situation in this morning’s paper:

The pace of home construction in the Albuquerque metro area has taken a step backward during the first five months of the year, getting off to the second slowest in what is likely decades, according to building permit numbers from DataTraq.

“Population is a huge driver of home construction,” said John Garcia, executive vice president of the HBA, the home builders group in the metro. “We focus on job growth, where we’re at the mercy of business. We need to improve our population growth.”

There’s a rhetoric around this, which you can see in Garcia’s comments, that suggests that many of the region’s economic boosters presume that growth is the norm, and the current situation is not the norm, that we’re gonna somehow “pull out of this slump.”

I’m frustrated that I don’t know enough about the economics of urban development to understand what’s going on here, because the water policy implications of whether this is the new normal, or a slump we’re going to pull out of, are huge. I suspect that if I did understand more urban development economics, I’d simply have a clearer understanding of why we can’t really know what comes next.

What does all this mean as a matter of water policy? Mainly, I guess for now it means that the west’s water policy problems are a lot easier right now, since we’re not building so many new houses. It means that those pie-in-the-sky population growth projections that have driven a lot of the planning and analysis about how much water we have and will need (like the Bureau of Reclamation’s Colorado River Basin Study) are wrong, in a good way. (Yay, our growth-based economies have tanked! We don’t need as much water!)

 

On “water wars” rhetoric and policy options

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This, by OtPR, on the why the “water wars” “fight or die” rhetoric in the midst of California drought is not only wrong but harmful:

This rhetoric narrows people’s perceived choices, keeps their limbic system activated and postpones mutual solutions.  Responsible reporters and editors should stop using it.

I have long thought the various possible roles of journalists maps nicely to Roger Pielke Jr.’s typology of possible roles for scientists in assisting in the policy process. I prefer for myself the role he characterizes in which a scientist engages in “an effort to expand (or at least clarify) the scope of choice for decision-making in a way that allows for the decision-maker to reduce choice based on his or her own preferences and values.” As OtPR correctly observes, “water wars” rhetoric in our work does not expand the range of political and policy choices. It narrows it.

Reclamation funding preliminary Rio Grande basin study work

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It’s not a full-on “Basin Study” like the Colorado River got, but the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation today announced $84,000 for preliminary work to define the scope of a Middle Rio Grande (that’s lingo for the New Mexico big) basin study. There’s bigger bucks in the announcement for Salinas and Carmel River Basins in California and the Santa Cruz in Arizona.

These are important bits of institutional infrastructure, providing some dollars and technical muscle in a collaboration with basin stakeholders to improve shared understanding of resources.

Walton on native water rights in the Colorado River Basin

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Brett Walton has done us all a great service with a thorough look at the issues surrounding Native American water rights in the Colorado River Basin. Importantly, he’s looking at it not just as a problem, but as an example of what the solution space can look like. The stuff from Kathryn Sorensen, Phoenix’s water manager, is a great example:

Years of careful negotiations, spurred by a desire to avoid long-running court battles, produced legal settlements that provide water for tribes, cities, and industries. Beneficial to all sides, the settlements were a catalyst for urban development and a tool for funding Indian water systems. Perhaps more importantly, the settlements are the foundation of a partnership, an inescapable union, between tribes and their neighbors, a union that will grow in importance as water becomes scarcer in the warming and drying American West.

“We’ve developed tremendous and valuable relationships with each other from being in the same room for years,” Kathryn Sorensen, director of the Phoenix water department, told Circle of Blue. “Water is always important and contentious in Arizona. But having relationships helps you have conversations when you want new solutions.”….

Creative also means selling the temporary right to use water to others, an action called leasing, which is common in the Phoenix metro area. Home to 4.5 million people, Phoenix and its Sonoran Desert neighbors are the biggest beneficiaries of these creative arrangements.

Phoenix leases water from three tribes, and a fourth agreement is nearing completion. The terms of the deals are straightforward. Phoenix makes an upfront payment, typically millions of dollars, to the tribe and pays an annual charge to cover the cost of pumping the water to operators of the Central Arizona Project (CAP) canal, which transports Colorado River water hundreds of miles to the dry heart of the state.

I recommend clicking and reading the entire article.

Some thoughts on the bathtub ring and Lake Mead’s historic drop below 1,075

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I’ve had my head down the last ten days reading and writing about 1940s and ’50s-era Los Angeles water management, and I look up to see that Lake Mead last week dropped below elevation 1,075, a level freighted with meaning. But what meaning, exactly? Drew Beckwith at Western Resource Advocates, in Caitlin McGlade’s story, wins for quotability:

“This is the check-engine light,” Beckwith said.

I agree. But rather than start with the usual imagery of the bathtub ring, let’s start with some engine diagnostics, courtesy of a talk the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s Terry Fulp gave today as part of an on line series organized by the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science:

Colorado River water supply and use, courtesy USBR

Colorado River water supply and use, courtesy USBR

The green line is scary as hell, as is the gap between green and yellow. We’re using more water than the system seems capable of providing. But if we’re going to make sense of the decline in Lake Mead, we also have to think through why the yellow line, the line showing water use in the Colorado River Basin, is bending down.

The L.A. history stuff I’ve been working on for my book is a chapter about the development and evolution of water management institutions Southern California’s “West Basin” (beachy cities like Santa Monica and inland communities like Hawthorne and Inglewood). I’m using it for two reasons: first, it’s an example of a collective water management regime in a group of communities that successfully confronted shortage. The result was a transition from a rapidly dropping aquifer to an aquifer that was healthy enough to provide a drought buffer when later dry times hit. How did they do that? Secondly, I’m using it because it’s where Elinor Ostrom did her thesis, and a) she is awesome, and b) her thesis is a gold mine for a storyteller. (spoiler alert: squabbling mayors)

The basic message, seen time and again in arid western North America, is that people tend to speed recklessly toward the water supply cliff, but when they near it, they almost inevitably hit the brakes. It would be great if we weren’t so reckless in the speeding part, but that seems to be an inevitable result of historical contingency, the problem of path dependence, and human nature. Blame our historical selves if you must, but whatever. That’s done. The key here is the “hitting the brakes” part.

So what bent the yellow curve down?

The first thing is the undertold story of the reduction in California’s Colorado River allocation. Up until 2002, California regular was allocated more than 5 million acre feet of water from the river, for use in desert farming and urban/suburban communities. In 2002, it peaked at 5.3 maf. In 2003, that was cut to 4.4 maf. In response, Southern California showed remarkable adaptive capacity with conservation, conjunctive ground-surface water management, innovative ag-to-urban transfers and a bunch of other stuff. (Buy my book! As soon as I quit with all the blogging and write the damn thing!)

The second thing is just same old same old in the Upper Basin. As Mike Cohen likes to remind me, when you’re up at the headwaters part of the system without a big reservoir above you, when there’s less snow in the mountains above you, you use less water. “Shortage” is a normal part of variability. These people have the “adaptive capacity” already built in.

There are two common themes that emerge here. The first is a boundary condition: once the water gets scarce, people use less water. The second is the nature of the adaptive capacity, which is a bunch of fuzzy social and human and institutional stuff that you’ve got to be able to call on to either succeed or fail when the boundary condition whacks you upside the head and says, “Yo, less water this year!” It’s that adaptive capacity (the ability to pivot to conservation, or ag-urban transfers, or some such) that determines whether you succeed or fail.

The yellow line on Terry’s graph suggest we’re already stomping on the brakes, but yellow is still above green, meaning water use still exceeds supply. What can we learn from the stuff that’s already working to help us step on the brakes a bit harder?

With that out of the way, here’s the obligatory picture of the bathtub ring, with bonus ominous sky:

Hoover Dam, Lake Mead bathtub ring, February 23, 2015. Elevation 1088.97

Hoover Dam, Lake Mead bathtub ring, February 23, 2015. Elevation 1088.97, by John Fleck

Drought adaptive capacity, Kings County CA edition

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In your latest reminder that California agriculture has shown some remarkable capacity to adapt to that state’s crushing drought, Todd Fitchette in Western Farm Press reports that total agricultural farm gate receipts in Kings County, in California’s drought-devastated southern Central Valley, were up 9 percent last year:

Kings County agricultural values advanced 9 percent from the previous year’s figure to over $2.47 billion, due primarily to strong commodity prices for dairy, tree nuts and processing tomatoes.