A bit of history – when US Colorado River water users feared Mexico

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There’s a tangent in Henry Brean’s Las Vegas Review-Journal story about desalination and Las Vegas this morning that provides a reminder of just how far we’ve come in the power structure surrounding the management of the Colorado River in the last century.

Morelos Dam

Morelos Dam, on the US-Mexico border, where the Colorado River for all practical purposes ends

The main thrust of the story is a discussion of the possibility of coastal desal as an alternative to the controversial Las Vegas groundwater pipeline proposal. Pipeline opponents have been arguing that desal is a reasonable alternative – not directly, but through water swaps through which Vegas would fund coastal desal for California or Mexico water users, and get a share of their Colorado River water in exchange.

The tangent is this: Brean quotes Mexican official Jose Gutierrez on how “fiercely” Mexico will defend its share of the river – a share that’s frankly paltry. Its 1.5 million acre feet of water is roughly ten percent of the river’s flow. Given how little Mexico gets, that ferocity is understandable. It also makes it hard to believe that there was a time when US water users feared Mexico would dominate the river’s allocation. But in the 1920s that was, in fact, the case.

One of the great early Colorado River water management histories is a doctoral thesis done by Reuel Leslie Olson in 1926 – after the Colorado River Compact was signed, but before any of the big infrastructure was built to begin moving water around. It’s a fun read because it captures a lot of early uncertainties about things that have long since been settled in ways that in hindsight seem inevitable – as, for example, Mexico getting largely screwed in the allocation of Colorado River water. From the vantage point of the mid-’20s, it seemed anything but inevitable.

At the time, the water needed to irrigate the Imperial Valley flowed through Mexico on a looping path before heading north. There was pressure to build an “All American Canal” (which has long since been done) because of fears that the southern California farmers were at the mercy of Mexico for their water. In fact, it was U.S. landowners in Mexico, most famously Harry Chandler of the LA Times, who were providing the pressure for a larger Mexican share of the river. Here’s Olson:

Mr. George H. Maxwell, long interested in irrigation problems, declares that a great part of the trouble encountered in present plans for development of the Colorado River, arises from the fact that much is now being done to attempt “to nail the Colorado River down for Mexico.”

 

 

Species by species, system by system

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Dennis Wyatt, in the Manteca Bulletin, points to some intriguing language in the California Delta Protection Commission’s recent draft Economic Sustainability Plan (linked here) regarding my current hobby horse – the shortcomings of the Endangered Species Act as an environmental protection tool/water management tool:

While a $12 billion investment in isolated conveyance may allow for somewhat larger water exports, it doesn’t protect other critical infrastructure and billions in additional investments would still be required to protect highways, energy, and other water and transportation infrastructure. Just as a species by species approach is an inefficient and ineffective way to protect ecosystems, a system by system approach is an inefficient and ineffective way to protect the state’s infrastructure. (emphasis added)

Imperial Valley – What’s Plan B?

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Imperial Irrigation District

Imperial Irrigation District

Tony Perry has a nice take-out in the Los Angeles Times this weekend outlining the state of play in discussions over the fate of the Quantification Settlement Agreement and the water deal contained therein between the Imperial Irrigation District and San Diego. It does a good job of highlighting the dilemma – San Diego has become dependent on the water it gets from Imperial, and Imperial has become dependent on the money it gets from San Diego. But the whole thing’s in serious jeopardy in the California courts. Which is where Albuquerque water lawyer Chuck DuMars comes in:

To look for its own Plan B in the event the water deal dies, the Imperial board has hired one of the nation’s top water lawyers, Charles DuMars, a professor emeritus at the University of New Mexico law school.

Even by the standards of other Western water cases, DuMars said, the dispute over the Imperial district’s share of the Colorado River is complex in its details and intense in its passions.

Imperial Valley’s share of the river — greater than that of any other agency or state that uses the river — comes from a principle in water law called “first in time, first in right.”

Farmers in the valley were pulling water from the Colorado in the early 1900s — long before the rise of modern Los Angeles and San Diego and the thirsty suburbs in between.

“It’s more than just water, it’s cultural,” DuMars said of the dispute. “To most people in Southern California, water is something that comes out of the tap. In the Imperial Valley, it’s the lifeblood of the people.”

It’s not clear yet what Plan B might look like. A set of “organizing principles” approved by the IID board back in August makes clear that any modified water transfer plan will have to look out for the existing economic base in the valley:

In its role as a careful steward and in deference to its fiduciary responsibility as trustee of the Imperial Valley’s water rights, IID will ensure that the net result of any water transfer agreement to which it is a party does more than make the region whole: It must also make it better.

How that will be done remains to be seen.

On futurologists, water closets and jet packs

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jet packs would be awesome - or they were awesome at one point in the future that is past

The Telegraph’s “science correspondent”, Richard Gray, wrote a story over the weekend about the wonders that await in the the bathrooms of our future. The details are unimportant – click if you are curious about your toileting future. What matters more is the methodology. Because it turns out to have been based on a “report”:

The report, compiled for bathroom provider Ideal Standard International, shows how the way people use and behave in their bathrooms is changing.

Drawing on predictions by designers and futurologists, it also puts forward a vision for how our water closets of the future could look.

Here’s an insider tip from a “journalism professional”. If your “science correspondent” is quoting “futurologists”, run away. Unless the “futurologist” is talking about “jet packs”. Because that would be awesome.

Q: What’s behind the Bay Delta Conservation Plan process?

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A: The Endangered Species Act

Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta

Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, courtesy Delta Stewardship Council

A useful question came up on the Twitter last week about California’s Bay Delta Conservation Plan that’s nicely answered by a state legislative analysis I read this afternoon.

The BDCP is a key part of  process underway now in California that seems to be headed toward creation of a Peripheral Canal/Tunnel to shuttle water around the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. At its bureaucratic process core, though, this in theory is not about building a Peripheral Thingie, but rather is about protecting endangered species like the delta smelt.

Here’s the description from a brief report last week from the California Legislative Analyst’s Office (pdf):

The BDCP is a planning process being conducted by the Department of Water Resources (DWR) to provide the basis for the issuance of endangered species permits necessary to allow the operations of both state and federal water projects in the Delta for the next 50 years. The BDCP planning process will develop a combined Habitat Conservation Plan and Natural Community Conservation Plan (NCCP), key components of which are ecosystem enhancement above and beyond required environmental mitigation and alternative conveyance to improve water supply reliability.

To translate to lay terms, in order to get the necessary permits to operate under state and federal endangered species laws, the state and federal water agencies that suck so much water out of the delta have to come up with a plan to convince state and federal environmental officials that their suckage won’t kill endangered fish. (I apologize for the clumsy “state and federal” construction over and over, but to those outside California, the strange parallel processes y’all have out there in the Golden State are a thing of great marvel and mystery. The parallelism gets even more intriguing with the separate state/federal Environmental Impact Report/Environmental Impact Statement process, but that’s a topic for another few posts.)

This may sound like a process-heavy way of thinking about the decision-making behind construction of a Peripheral Thingie, which is most often discussed in terms of raw California water politics. But the fact that this is an ESA process, rather than a broader water/environmental decision-making process, constrains the discussion in significant ways.

This is not, in fact, a process by which California decides in some broad way how to best manage its scarce water supplies. Instead, it’s a process driven by the folks currently removing water from the Delta. That is because, as the LAO’s report last week pointed out, the water agencies are voluntarily paying the bill for the BDCP studies. That is perhaps appropriate under the notion of “beneficiary pays”, the LAO report noted:

The BDCP planning process is appropriately paid for by the contractors because they would be the primary direct beneficiaries of the improved conveyance and the regulatory assurances that are anticipated to result from the completion of the planning.

But the fact that water contractors are paying the bills for the study also gives them leverage over the process, the LAO notes. The LAO’s report suggests this is probably perfectly legal, but has important policy implications:

In informal discussions with staff at Legislative Counsel, we were advised that the above contractual provisions do not appear to raise any legal concerns, such as an improper delegation of the authority of a state agency. However, these provisions raise policy concerns because they may potentially allow the contractors greater editorial influence over the content of BDCP than for other stakeholders.

One can imagine, for example, a Habitat Conservation Plan process that concluded Delta exports need to be reduced. Such a plan might have a hard time making it past this bottleneck. I’m not arguing that is what the HCP ought to conclude, merely that the deck seems stacked against such a possible outcome.

My discussion here shortcuts a key issue, which is that BDCP is not the only game in town. The Delta Stewardship Council also is tasked with looking at this question, in a way that seems intended to balance out this inequity. How these two processes fit together in practice remains to be seen.

All of this goes to a question that came up in a discussion at the Delta National Park blog, a point about which I hope to write more soon – that the Endangered Species Act has weaknesses as an environmental tool, as well as a water management tool. But it’s the tool we seem to using over and over to settle our western water policy arguments.

Links:

On the nature of nature

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We spent Saturday at the Bosque del Apache, a wildlife refuge south of Albuquerque. It’s early in the season for the well-known sandhill crane wintering grounds, but in addition to cranes we saw mobs of pintails, a cormorant, a family of grebes (I’m reasonably certain they were westerns, though they’re tough to tell at a distance from Clark’s) and a hilarious flock of flying killdeer.

The winter juncos are starting to arrive, and we kept seeing marsh hawks on patrol.

It’s a spectacular place, but in a piece over the weekend in the Socorro paper, refuge assistant director Aaron Mize reminds us that it’s anything but natural:

Mize said, as a land manager, he was also struck by all the comments about the beautiful “natural” environment of the Bosque.

“Anyone that’s familiar with what we do at the Bosque knows what we do is anything but natural — what we do is mimic a natural environment,” Mize said. “I would almost dare to bet we move more dirt than any other refuge in the country. There are 340 days per year I bet we’ve got tractors and bulldozers moving dirt, making it happen.”

The measurement problem

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In a worth-reading piece today in the New York Times, Robert Crease uses this example to illustrate the disconnect between our ability to measure things and our ability to effectively use our ability to measure things:

Is the ability to measure tiny levels of toxins making us safer, or leading us to spend enormous sums of money unnecessarily to eliminate toxins just to make us feel safer?

 

 

the end of an era of good fortune?

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From Jim Hamilton’s new look at the risks of an oil production plateau:

Most economists view the economic growth of the last century and a half as being fueled by ongoing technological progress. Without question, that progress has been most impressive. But there may also have been an important component of luck in terms of finding and exploiting a resource that was extremely valuable and useful but ultimately finite and exhaustible. It is not clear how easy it will be to adapt to the end of that era of good fortune.

the potentially lucrative field of wine stain removal

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From the inbox:

I would like to know if you are interested in purchasing the domain name removingwinestains.com. Based on your contact information I see that you own inkstain.net, correct?

Yes, I do own inkstain.net. No, I’m not interested in branching out into the potentially lucrative field of wine stain removal.