Tensions around a wastewater reclamation collaboration in Southern California

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There’s some fascinating tension around a proposed wastewater reclamation collaboration in Southern California.

The project, if it goes forward, would provide some 150 million gallons per day (~170,000 acre feet per year) of treated effluent. Water now being discharged into the ocean would instead be available for aquifer recharge within Southern California.

There are a number of technical and environmental questions, most notably the project’s cost effectiveness, to be analyzed before the so-called “Regional Recycled Water Program” goes forward. But there’s a really interesting set of institutional threshold questions to be resolved as well, which are lurking in agenda items at this week’s Metropolitan Water District of Southern California board meeting.

Whose Project Should This Be? Local or Regional?

This is a perfect case study for concepts we’ve been discussing in our crazy Zoom session classes this fall with students in the UNM Water Resources Program. The question – where do you draw the boundary(ies) around a water resources problem, and its potential solution.

The preliminary discussions about this project have drawn the boundaries quite broadly. Pilot-scale work has been done through a partnership between Los Angeles County Sanitation District No. 2 and the Metropolitan Water District. Under this model, should the project go forward, the water produced would become a regional supply, alongside water from the Colorado River Aqueduct and State Water Project, which Met provides as a wholesaler to its 26 member agencies.

That’s an institutional model that draws broad boundaries around the project.

Whether that’s the right model, though, is subject to some debate among Metropolitan’s member agencies. The San Diego County Water Authority, for example, seems to favor a more “local control” sort of model, where individual member agencies build their own projects, using the water themselves, rather than having Met build big regional projects, sharing water (and costs) among all.

Should This Be an Interstate Project?

But there is a proposal on the table that would drawn the boundaries even more broadly. In May, Met and the Southern Nevada Water Authority (Las Vegas, Nevada’s big regional water wholesaler, a sort of Met equivalent there) signed a letter of intent that opened the door to SNWA’s possible participation in the Southern California Project. In return for picking up some of the cost, SNWA would get a share of the water. (You wouldn’t actually pipe the water to Las Vegas, that would be crazy expensive, it’s much easier to just do an accounting swap.)

Readers of my work will know that I love deals like this – water bargaining, or sharing, or whatever you call it, collaboration across boundaries. But according to a letter sent over the weekend, San Diego is not so enamored of the idea: “We oppose potential exchange of Colorado River water with other states,” wrote SDCWA board member Michael Hogan on behalf of the agency’s board.

What Happens Next

This is still early days for this project – more study needed, as we academics like to say. But based on Hogan’s letter, there might be some lively discussion at this week’s MWD board meeting about where the boundaries should be drawn.

Election night pizza

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Five plus years on from my career spent in newsrooms, I mostly don’t miss it, except when I do.

The great joy of a newsroom was the intensity of being in the midst of All the Things. A newsroom, at least the ones I worked in, was a boisterous place, with chatter about whatever the thing is that we were working on. Those things were, by construction, “important”, else why would we be working on them?

The accelerating buzz as 6 p.m. deadlines approached, the chatter quieted, the tensing stares at computer screens as deadline approached, was a blast. I hated it the first time I really lived through it those deadline moments, as a young intern at the Los Angeles Herald Examiner back in the 1980s. And yet I stuck around newsrooms for the next thirty years.

They were a cauldron of stress, something I only fully grasped when I finally walked away from it. It’s hard to describe the calm that settled over me, quite literally the day I walked out for the last time. I’d carefully constructed my departure to leave open a chance that I might return to a newsroom after I finished the book I’d left to write. But as the peace of the next morning settled over me, sitting quietly in my university office to work on my book, the thought of return to a newsroom never crossed my mind, and has not done since.

And yet I pined today when my old newsroom friend Astrid Galvan mentioned election night pizza. Everyone worked election night, and we’d gather around 6-ish for a meeting to go over all the assignments and then eat pizza. Early in my career I was one of the foot soldiers of journalism dispatched to some gawd-awful hotel ballroom to chase candidate quotes, trying to get a word with the loser in State House District Umpty. Later, I spent evenings in the newsroom crunching numbers for the many vote tables we’d publish in the Wednesday morning paper, shuttling back and forth to the reporters writing on deadline, pushing up against wave after wave of deadline through the evening until sometime well after midnight we’d push out the final edition.

By the time I left journalism five years ago, I was getting old for that game. I don’t miss the stress. But I do miss the pizza, the urgency of deadline, and the sense of shared purpose.

 

 

 

Climate change and the water policy funnel

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Climate change, as I’ve often heard Brad Udall point out, is water change. By that, Brad means that the effect of a changing climate on people and ecosystems is most clearly felt through changes in how much water there is.

I’ve been thinking about this question a lot as I work on three related projects – one in class with UNM Water Resources Program students, and two collaborations on papers with students and colleagues – that look at the implications of declining river flows on the Lower Colorado River.

In trying to model the impact of climate change on a particular piece of the environment (perhaps the Colorado River Delta or the Salton Sea) or some human community (Las Vegas, for example, or agriculture in the Imperial Valley) we want to model the impact of a reduction in available supply of water. So we model the baseline – how much water we have now – versus some sort of climate change projection of reduced flow. Brad’s “Twentyfirst Century hot drought” paper, with Jonathan Overpeck, offers some numbers. We should expect a 20 to 30 percent reduction in flow by mid century, they found, maybe 35 – 55 percent by the end of the 21st century.

I’m not saying these are the right numbers, but they’re reasonable and citable numbers that we can plug into the models my colleagues are developing to say “What if?”

It’s not wrong to do it that way, but it avoids by simplification one of the central climate change impact questions, because in reality the impact of climate change’s “water change” won’t play out that way. Reduced flow in the Colorado River is funneled through a bunch of upstream dams and diversions, which are managed according to a set of rules.

Those rules in effect act as a funnel through which the impact of climate change flows. If climate change reduces the flow in the Colorado River by 20 percent, does everyone share in those reduction equally? Do some users see a 40 percent reduction, while others see a 10 percent reduction? Do the farmers in Imperial have a senior right, meaning they won’t lose any water? Does the environment take an even bigger hit, or do we decide the environment has suffered enough and impose bigger cuts on farms and cities?

Partly this is in part about contested interpretations of existing rules, and in part about negotiating new rules. This is where the interesting climate change questions lie for me right now – in the water policy funnel.

On a bike, fighting through the pandemic fog, with Silver Surfer’s help

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Fall colors, Rio Grande, Albuquerque, New Mexico, October 2020

I barely have anything to say, so I ride my bike.

Last Thursday, I rode through my 5,000th mile of 2020, something I’ve never done before. Like much of 2020, there will need be an asterisk next to this accomplishment, but it felt good to take the morning off and ride. Cycling has become my refuge – masked, helmeted, clad in my construction worker reflective vest, with my crazy flashing lights and computer data collection systems. In the fog of the pandemic – I don’t have the disease itself, just the grey cloud of life that surrounds it – I have been largely unable to write beyond the most perfunctory of work. I “don’t have the brain share”, is my shorthand. To ride creates an inexorable structure for the mind to follow.

“And I shall be true to my trust, for as long as I live.”

So in the days leading up to Thursday’s ride I carefully mapped a route, picked up the necessary miles ahead of time, so I could pass my 5,000th mile on Albuquerque’s Central Avenue Bridge over the Rio Grande, my favorite of favorite spots. I came close, mile 4,999.9 at my river overlook, so far within the margin of error of the data as to be indistinguishable from my arbitrary arithmetic goal.

The route included my favorite bits of the city – both secret tunnels beneath the railroad tracks (one going, one coming), the stretch of gravel levee along the river’s west side, long stretches of old Route 66, the “Bandidos’ park” for one of Albuquerque’s great city views.

On the way home, I paid a visit that’s become a ritual nearly every ride since early summer – a visit to the Silver Surfer. The creation of @irotism and @release1201, Silver Surfer showed up in late June or early July, filling plywood space left by the boarding of downtown Albuquerque windows.

In our time of need, Silver Surfer has become a ritual comfort. I don’t really know Silver Surfer beyond the downtown paintings and a bit of reading on Wikipedia, but I imagine something helpful every time I visit.

My miles haven’t lifted the fog, but rather have created a safe space within it.

What do we mean at the UNM Water Resources Program by “interdisciplinary”

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One of the ongoing struggles for me as an academic outsider working in a university is mastering the language. In the course of a recent discussion of the term “interdisciplinary” (the UNM Water Resources Program is “interdisciplinary”) I ran across this language I put in a program report I wrote last year in which I attempted to understand disentangle the terminology:

Interdisciplinarity

The program is, by construct, “interdisciplinary,” interpreted broadly. There are a number of different definitions and labels for this concept:

  • “Multidisciplinary” – researchers from more than one discipline bringing their separate disciplinary perspectives to a problem, each retaining their own disciplinary focus,
  • “Interdisciplinary” – the use of an innovative blend of more than one disciplinary focus, creating a synthetic approach to a problem,
  • “Transdisciplinary” – the incorporation of non-academics along with academics in a research effort, bringing a more practical problem-based focused to the integration across disciplines.

While the University of New Mexico Water Resources program embraces the label of “interdisciplinarity,” and does work that most closely matches “transdisciplinary” as defined above, it is agnostic about the details of the labeling, comfortably doing work that matches many different flavors of work across disciplines, in and out of the academy.

This remains for me a helpful framework for thinking about what we do. The bit above even had a footnote!

The question of reservoir evaporation – How much water are the Lower Colorado River Basin states really using?

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Accounting for Lower Colorado River Basin water use, with and without evaporation

The conventional simplification of the Colorado River Compact’s water allocation scheme is that it set aside 7.5 million acre feet of water use for the “exclusive beneficial consumptive use” of the states of the Lower Basin – Nevada, Arizona, and California.

In the 21st century, the official accounting shows the Lower Basin states using an average of 7.4 million acre feet per year (the blue line in the graph above), so we’re good, right?

Well, actually….

When the states of the Upper Basin gathered in the late 1940s to negotiate the Upper Basin Compact, they recognized that if you’re going to build a reservoir to enable the consumptive use of water, you need to account for the evaporative losses from that reservoir.  Article V of the Upper Basin Compact goes into some detail about how to account for “all losses of water occurring from or as the result of the storage of water in reservoirs” built by the states and the federal government.

But, as Eric Kuhn reminded us in a post yesterday, we don’t have a corresponding Lower Basin Compact. Instead, we have the 1963 Supreme Court decision in Arizona v. California, and the subsequent implementing decrees, to set the parameters for the water’s allocation. The court didn’t require an accounting of evaporation, only the water actually released from the reservoir.  Here’s Eric:

I have no doubt that the 1922 compact negotiators considered this evaporation a man-made beneficial consumptive use to be covered by the (water) apportioned to the Lower Basin, but it is not covered in the Supreme Court’s decision.

Not everyone agrees about the compact negotiators’ intent. See for example Jason Robison and Larry MacDonnell in their review of AZ v. CA. But Robison and MacDonnell also note that the subsequent failure to fully wrestle with the question of reservoir evaporation and related questions like Lower Basin tributary use – the sort of things that negotiating a Lower Basin Compact might have adressed – has left a bit of a mess.

Legal nuances aside, the reality is that in the absence of a Lower Basin Compact to come to a negotiated agreement on questions like this, we’re left with significant uncertainties on this and other questions. And by my math, if you count reservoir evaporation, the Lower Basin states have been using an average of 8.4 million acre feet a year in the 21st century (the pinky-orangey line above). On this point Kuhn, Robison, and MacDonnell agree – that’s a problem.

The Lake Powell Pipeline and the problems posed by the lack of a Lower Colorado River Basin Compact

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By Eric Kuhn

The Lake Powell Pipeline, moving Upper Colorado River Basin water to the Lower Basin

As the Colorado River Basin’s managers wrestle with thorny questions around the proposed Lake Powell Pipeline, a colleague who works for a Lower Colorado River Basin water agency recently asked a question that goes to the heart of the future of river management: With land in the Lower Colorado River Basin, why doesn’t Utah have a Lower Basin allocation?

The answer, arising from deep in the history of the Law of the River, goes far beyond the possible use of some of Utah’s Upper Basin water in the Lower Colorado River Basin’s Virgin River Valley. It strikes at the heart of important and as yet unresolved questions in the river’s future – about accounting for reservoir evaporation, and who bears the responsibility for, and benefits from, water flowing down the Lower Basin’s tributaries.

The lack of a “Lower Basin Compact”

The simple answer to my colleague’s question is that Utah has no apportionment of Lower Basin water because there is no Lower Colorado River Basin Compact.

The negotiators of the 1922 Colorado River Compact allocated water to the Upper and Lower Colorado River Basins with the clear intention that the states of each basin would return to the negotiating table to work out the details of how their share of the water would be allocated and accounted for. The states with Upper Basin interests completed the task in 1948, negotiating the Upper Colorado River Basin Compact. Notably Arizona, which is not an “Upper Division State”, but which has land in the Upper Basin, participated, and was allocated a share of the Upper Basin’s apportionment.

In the 1920s and ’30s, there were many attempts, all unsuccessful, to negotiate a Lower Basin compact.  They came close in 1927 when the basin governors met in Denver for the specific purpose of resolving the differences between Arizona and California.  The Senate used the deliberations from 1927 as input to the mainstem apportionments to Arizona, California, and Nevada provided for in the 1928 Boulder Canyon Project Act. But the language of the Act clearly suggests Congress expected a Lower Basin Compact to be negotiated to flesh out the details, much as later happened in the Upper Basin.

That never happened, though, and in the absence of a Compact, the present-day apportionments we all know so well – 4.4 million acre feet for California, 2.8maf for Arizona, and 300,000 acre feet for Nevada – are based on the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the intent of Congress when it debated and passed the Boulder Canyon Project Act in 1928. But in the absence of the a careful process of negotiation to cover the full range of issues that needed to be considered (as happened in the Upper Basin), the Supreme Court’s decision was narrow. It only covered under contracts between the federal government and water users downstream of Hoover Dam – not for water consumed on the Lower Basin tributaries or on the Lower Basin’s portion of the mainstem above Lake Mead.

In the 1930s, William Donovan came close

In 1930 President Hoover appointed Colonel William Donovan as special mediator to negotiate a Lower Basin compact.  Donovan came close, but Arizona and California just could not make one final compromise. In both the 1927 and 1930 near misses Utah and New Mexico would have received from the 8.5 million acre-feet apportioned by the 1922 compact to the Lower Basin “all water necessary for use on areas of those States lying within the lower basin” – (see Science Be Dammed, chapter 8).

In 1952 when Arizona filed its Supreme Court case against California, one of its initial goals was a Court ruling that would be functionally equivalent to a Lower Basin compact. Among its claims for relief was that the court find that Arizona had the right to use all the one million acre-feet apportioned to the Lower Basin under Article III(b) subject only to the “rights of New Mexico on the Gila River and Utah on the Virgin River.”  As the case proceeded, Arizona changed its tactics.  It amended its original claims for relief arguing that the case was no longer about the compact.  Instead, it was only about the intent of Congress to apportion water under the 1928 act.  The Special Master and Supreme Court agreed and ruled that the Colorado River Compact need not be interpreted to decide the case. Since the court’s decision was limited to the water used in and below Lake Mead and avoided the compact, it falls well short of a Lower Basin compact.

Would we be better off with a Lower Basin Compact?

The entire basin would be much better off with a functioning Lower Basin compact. The problem is that to get there, the five states with Lower Basin interests – Arizona, California, and Nevada (the “states of the Lower Division”), plus Utah and New Mexico, which also have watersheds falling within the Lower Basin’s boundaries – would have to negotiate through several difficult issues that have never been resolved and for the moment are conveniently tucked away.  These issues include dividing up the one million acre-feet of III(b) water, the “bonus water” provision added to the compact late in negotiations to sweeten the deal for Arizona. In addition to addressing the Lower Basin needs of Utah and New Mexico, Nevada also needs a piece of III(b) water to cover its uses on the Virgin and Muddy Rivers.  Water from the dry-up of previously irrigated lands in these two drainages supplies the Southern Nevada Water Authority.

A second issue is dividing up the substantial evaporation use on the Lower Basin mainstem reservoirs.  I have no doubt that the 1922 compact negotiators considered this evaporation a man-made beneficial consumptive use to be covered by the 8.5 million acre-feet apportioned to the Lower Basin, but it is not covered in the Supreme Court’s decision.

Third, there are difficult Lower Basin accounting issues to resolve, including how compact apportionments are to be measured. Yes, a century after the compact was signed, this fundamental issue has never been resolved (see Science Be Dammed, chapter 12). Another unresolved accounting  question is how to address the depletion of groundwater hydrologically connected to the Colorado River.

These accounting issues point to a bigger issue. The primary purpose of a Lower Basin compact would be to allocate among five states 8.5 million acre-feet of beneficial consumptive use – the amount apportioned to the Lower Basin by the 1922 compact. How would a compact address the reality that when tributary uses, reservoir evaporation, and hydrologically connected groundwater are considered, the Lower Basin is currently using more than 8.5 million acre-feet?

These major unresolved issues are why in Science Be Dammed John Fleck and I conclude that there is little incentive and major downsides for important playsers to a Lower Basin compact, thus it is unlikely to happen. The problem from my perspective as a former manager of an Upper Basin water agency is that through the 1948 Upper Basin compact, reservoir evaporation, hydrologically connected groundwater, and overuse are all addressed. Without a Lower Basin compact, important elements of the equity between the basins are missing.

The Gage Selfie Collection: Rio Grande at Albuquerque

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One of our recent University of New Mexico Water Resources Program graduates suggested an extra credit assignment for this year’s students: stream gage scavenger hunt, with selfies.

Here’s the measurement point for USGS 08330000, Rio Grande at Albuquerque, NM. Flow at the time I took it yesterday morning measured 111 cubic feet per second.

Am I eligible for the extra points?

Record low flows on New Mexico’s Rio Grande

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Record low flows on the Rio Grande at Embudo

Flow on the Rio Grande at Embudo in north-central New Mexico as I write this is measured at 156 cubic feet per second, which is the lowest for this date in history. And its quite a history – Embudo was the first gage installed by the USGS, back in the winter of 1894-95.

Note that I’ve switched to log scale for the graphs, which better distinguish the really flows. Of which 2020 is one.

Happy New Water Year, where’d all that Colorado River water go?

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End of Water Year 2020

Shrouded in pandemic fog, I’m only now getting to my sorta annual “Happy New Water Year!” post, where I traditionally look on in alarm at dropping Colorado River Basin reservoir levels and make fun of the Lower Basin for using too much water.

The alarm remains – after a crappy runoff, combined storage in the two big reservoirs behind Lake Powell and Lake Mead is down 1.7 million acre feet from a year ago. For the ~40 million people depending on the Colorado, this is cause for concern. But the water use trends continue to bend in a way that has taken some of the steam out of my old jokes about users wasting all their bonus water on “hookers and blow”.

Reviewing the ’07 Guidelines

The start of water year 2020-21 offers a good moment to look back beyond a single year and see how the basin’s been doing.

Doing trend line analysis is always a rigged game, because so much of what you see depends on the arbitrary starting point you use.

But with the Bureau of Reclamation in the midst of its review of the basin’s 2007 Interim Guidelines, we have a non-arbitrary starting point at which to look at trends. 2007 is when the basin first adopted what we might think of as “drought operation rules”, aimed at reducing the decline of the two big reservoirs.

So, since 2007, how has the basin done?

Shrinking supply

From the supply side, things look bad. The river’s flows since 2007 have been ~1.2 million acre feet below the long term averages fed into the model projections done in support of the development of the 2007 guidelines, an 8 percent reduction in flow. The climate change shark is, as Brian Richter noted recently, circling nearby.

But despite that reduction in flow, total storage behind Glen Canyon and Hoover dams, the two primary system reservoirs, has dropped only 2.6 million acre feet. That is far less than you’d expect from 12 years of 1.2 maf per year flow reductions alone.

That kind of a flow reduction should have been enough to nearly empty the reservoirs. Why hasn’t that happened?

Shrinking demand

Because we also have been using less water.

Municipal and agricultural use of Colorado River water since 2007 has averaged 1 million acre feet per year less than the projections used to underpin the analysis done in support of the 2007 interim guidelines. With growing water conservation efforts, 2020 water use is on track to be 1.5 million acre feet below the demand projections used in the 2007 guidelines’ analysis.

Across the Colorado River Basin, among both Upper Basin users and Lower Basin users, folks are using less than their legal entitlement under the Law of the River. This is not enforced conservation. This is folks realizing they’ve got less water, so they’re using less.

As regular readers of this blog know, I think a better understanding of this demand side change is crucial to mapping out our policy options for keeping the reservoirs from collapsing. Here is how a group of academics (myself, Anne Castle, Jack Schmidt, and Doug Kenney) put it in a May 1 letter in response to the Bureau’s request for comments on the scope of its current review of the Interim Guidelines (full letter here):

The bottom line

In fact the modeling done for the ’07 guidelines, when you look at the projections for reservoir levels for the last 12 years, looks pretty good. The levels of both Powell and Mead are well within the range of likely scenarios the Bureau modeled for the Interim Guidelines EIS – a bit below the median, but well above the “OMG SCARY” scenarios the Bureau considered as unlikely but plausible. Our misunderstandings of both supply and demand were, to first order, offsetting errors of roughly the same magnitude. But as we look back in preparation for looking ahead to the next round of negotiations, it’s important to to dig into the details of what we got right and wrong in that remarkable ’07 planning exercise, and why.

nota bene: A huge thanks to Jack Schmidt and Jian Wang at Utah State University for their analysis of Upper Basin demand projections, and especially to Jian for open-sourcing the underlying data.