Monday, October 21, 2002
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

EDITORIAL: Water deal is good news

Weaning California farmers from using water helps Nevada

Back in the 1920s, before the Hoover Dam was built, California agreed to settle for an annual 4.4 million acre-feet -- still the lion's share -- of water drawn each year by the seven states that make use of the Colorado River.

But in recent years -- in part because of inefficient use to raise water-hungry crops in the sun-baked Imperial Valley -- the Thirsty State has been overdrawing that allocation by some 700,000 acre-feet.

To avoid an immediate, Draconian water cutback threatened by the federal Department of the Interior, California agreed to come up with a new intra-state water allocation plan by Dec. 31, designed to eventually wean the state back to its original 4.4 million acre-foot allocation.

And individual communities within California must agree to the plan in order to win Interior Department forbearance -- the federals wisely warning they're not going to wait around for years as California's farms and cities sue each other over the deal.

So California water officials were slapping high-fives at the signing of "a billion dollar water transfer agreement" early Wednesday.

The proposed plan called for pumping water from the farms of the Imperial Valley to suburban San Diego. Farmers would be paid to conserve water and in some case allow their land to lay fallow, passing on that water savings to other districts.

Negotiations had previously been snagged on the price of the water and protection of the Salton Sea -- a large intermittent lake in the Imperial Valley, forming and then evaporating off a number of times over the centuries as the Colorado regularly silts up its channel and diverts to the west in search of an outlet. But the agreement was finally hammered out after three days of marathon talks at the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California.

The agreement is good news to the upriver states of the Colorado, including Nevada. No one proposes banning agriculture in the Imperial Valley. But as demand for water increases in the growing urban centers of the Southwest, providing this precious commodity at below-market rates -- in effect, subsidizing the economically absurd undertaking of growing rice and other water-hungry crops in a desert -- makes less and less sense.

Eventually, the Colorado's waters may need to be reallocated by mutual agreement between the affected states, in line with their most economically beneficial uses. Wednesday's agreement demonstrates that such deals can be reached amicably and by mutual consent ... and marks a small first step toward that more sensible allocation.