Is San Diego reviving the idea of building its own Colorado River Aqueduct?

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A cryptic item in the agenda for Thursday’s meeting of the San Diego Water Authority Board suggests the agency may still harbor an interest in having its own canal to the Colorado River, separate from the current system through which it gets its Colorado River water from the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California.

SCDWA board memo, April 11, 2019

alternative conveyance options

There is history here. In 1934, San Diego signed its own contract with the federal government for Colorado River water. (The episode merits a footnoted digression in our new book, though the episode is an obscure enough piece of Colorado River history that I had to call my co-author, Eric Kuhn, who wrote the footnote, to refresh my memory. No episode is so obscure that it slips Eric’s memory.)

The original plan was for a “San Diego aqueduct”, an extension of the All-American Canal, which currently carries water to farms in the Imperial Valley. As detailed in the 1948 Hoover Dam Documents, the canal was superseded during the 1940s by the construction of an extension of the MWD system, something deemed a military necessity because of San Diego’s critical role as a Navy base during World War II and, presumably, the Cold War that was revving up thereafter. Contracts were changed, big checks were written by the federal government, and San Diego became tethered to Met’s system from the north, rather than to the All-American Canal to the east.

Over the years there also have been discussions of San Diego connecting via Mexico’s plumbing that currently brings Colorado River water to Tijuana. That also could be, in the language of the SDCWA staff memo, “alternative conveyance”.

A Good Runoff Forecast; The Language We Use

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The Colorado Basin River Forecast Center’s April 1 forecast is up 1.9 million feet from a month earlier. How to think about how much water that is?

CBRFC April 1 2019 forecast

A friend who thinks a lot about water and public communication, but who is not from the Colorado River Basin, was commenting recently on our euphemisms – the “structural deficit” in particular. For those not familiar with the term, it is the amount by which the Lower Colorado River’s water is overallocated. The system’s “paper water” – allocations handed out in the system’s rules – is 1.2 million acre feet greater than the actual available “wet water”.

Seeing our language from the point of view of a smart outsider was helpful, and gave me pause. I ultimately had to agree that structural deficit was a) a euphemism that doesn’t work at all well in communicating with the general public, and b) an incredibly useful language tool for the informed Colorado River community.

The alternative language, still commonly used, is “drought”. But drought offloads the responsibility to climate. “Structural deficit”, for those thinking hard about the river, moves the problem back within water management accountability. The difference involves which audience you’re speaking with.

Since I presume anyone patient enough to stick with my blog blathering this long is likely a member of “b”, I’ll double down on “structural deficit” for you.

The increase in the March forecast is equal to ~1.6 Structural Deficits.

Private utilities are better at conserving water than public ones

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Manny Teodoro, a Texas A&M researcher who’s been doing important work on municipal utility governance and rate structures, has an update today on the 2018 California water conservation data.

Point one, which is important given some breathless and totally premature journalism last year about California’s water conservation post-Big Drought, is that municipal water use remains lower than the 2013 benchmarks when the state began its aggressive statewide mandatory water conservation efforts. Even as drought pressure has abated, conservation behavior has stuck.

Point two is that private utilities continue to perform better than public utilities in terms of conservation:

Overall urban water use remained significantly lower in 2018, with average monthly conservation of about 14% compared with 2013. The public-private disparity in overall conservation also persisted.

This seemed counterintuitive to me when I first came across Teodoro’s findings. But his explanation makes sense, and is consistent with other research suggesting a connection between governance structure and water conservation performance. His essential argument is that municipal management, more directly accountable to voters, faces, in his words, “political headwinds” in implementing things like rate hikes and mandatory watering restrictions. Private utilities, accountable to state regulators rather than local voters, have a relatively easier time of implementing such measures, he argues.

Imperial, the Salton Sea, and the Colorado River Drought Contingency Plan

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Tuesday was a remarkable day for Colorado River Basin governance.

The Good

With the kinda sorta now approved Drought Contingency Plan, we have the first formal commitment from the basin states to quantified water use cutbacks of more than a million acre feet per year as Lake Mead drops. With important caveats, this is enough to stabilize the reservoir.

This is arguably the most important milestone in river management since the early 2000s.

The Bad

The last-minute deal cut out the Imperial Irrigation District and, in the process, Imperial’s claims and concerns about the environmental and health quality problems associated with a shriveling Salton Sea. There is blame to go around for this messy end, but at its root it is a profound failure of Colorado River Basin governance. One of the most important side effects of our efforts to reduce Colorado River water use over the last two decades, a problem that affects a lower income Hispanic community, was formally, visibly, and explicitly left out of the decision at the 11th hour.

Depending on what happens next, this could become a singularly important element of the above mentioned “most important milestone in river management”, and not in a good way.

The Good: Taming the Structural Deficit

At a talk during the 2013 meeting of the Colorado River Water Users Association, Arizona’s Tom McCann presented this slide:

Tom McCann, Central Arizona Water Conservation District, CRWUA 2013

It’s a pretty striking visual, given the assumptions that went into it.

This is not a measure of the impact of drought or climate change shrinking Lake Mead. This graph assumes that the states of the Upper Basin are meeting their full legal obligations under the Colorado River Compact, plus delivering half of the U.S. obligation to Mexico under the 1944 treaty. This is simply water balance arithmetic, a “structural deficit.” Given the structure of the Colorado River allocation rules and full Upper Basin deliveries:

  • Inflow: ~9maf
  • Outflow, including evaporation and system losses: ~10.2maf

Given that reality, as the Bureau’s Terry Fulp said in my last book, “Lake Mead will go down.” The math here is not hard.

It also is not hard, in principal, to see what is needed to fix it. Use less water. DCP does that.

Under DCP, the states (and Mexico, under a companion agreement) have agreed to a series of cutbacks as Lake Mead drops that would slow its decline and, when it reaches an elevation of 1,030-1,040 feet above sea level, would fully meet the 1.2maf “structural deficit”, as Tom described it in 2013.

Rather than trying to cling to their Law of the River-promised paper water allocations and lawyering up, water users of the Lower Basin have collectively agreed to reduce their use by more than a million acre feet per year.

This is a striking confirmation of the central hypothesis of my last book – that we have entered a new era of collaborative governance on the Colorado River, that water is no longer for fighting over.

The Bad: Imperial and the Salton Sea

But clearly we also have, as you can see in this from Desert Sun’s Janet Wilson, a counter-argument against my collaborative governance hpothesis:

“I have six grandchildren who live on the Salton Sea and five of them have asthma. On behalf of them, I say, ‘Damn them. Damn them,’” said IID board member Jim Hanks.

“As we gather here today on the shore of the Salton Sea strewn with bleached bones, bird carcasses and a growing shoreline,” Hanks said, “and as champagne is being prepared for debauched self-congratulation in Phoenix, remember this: The IID is the elephant in the room on the Colorado River as we move forward. And like the elephant, our memory and rage is long.”

The linked story by Wilson and the Arizona Republic’s Ian James explains the background, but in short the Imperial Irrigation District made a last-ditch effort to condition its participation in DCP on federal funding to help mitigate environmental and public health problems associated with the Salton Sea. In a push to get the deal done California’s other Colorado River Water users, led by the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, cut IID out of the deal and forged ahead without them.

In conversations with Colorado River leadership over the last week, I’ve heard a combination of sympathy for the stance taken by Hanks and his colleagues and frustration with the way Imperial handled the whole affair.

The process by which California worked out the details of its DCP agreement was relatively opaque, so it’s hard for those of us on the outside to understand exactly how this happened. Clearly until late last year, the Imperial Irrigation District was generally supportive of DCP, negotiating some valuable benefits – new water management flexibility and the ability to bank water in Lake Mead. Those things would have been of great benefit to Imperial and the rest of the basin. We all thought IID was on board.

The pivot in late 2018, with the added demand for money from the U.S. Department of Agriculture for Salton Sea mitigation, left a bunch of DCP negotiators frustrated. So I guess blame on Imperial here for not making more clear from the beginning what it needed from a DCP.

But there is a deeper issue here for which California’s entire Colorado River water management community, and perhaps the entire Colorado River Basin water management community, is to blame as well. The problems of the Salton Sea are in significant part the result of decisions made in the early 2000s to begin bringing the Colorado River Basin’s water use into balance through reductions in Imperial. It was clear even then that one of the consequences would be a shrinking Salton Sea, with environmental and public and public health effects. Commitments were made by the state of California that haven’t been kept.

The benefits of Imperial’s water use reductions accrued to all of us – certainly to California, but also to the rest of the basin. Dealing with the resulting Salton Sea problems has been left to Imperial to push for and sort out. Imperial had to bargain away other benefits it might have wanted to get the Salton Sea dealt with. This is why, sitting in my university office in far-off Albuquerque, I was cheering on Jim Hanks. As I wrote in the Sacramento Bee two years ago, “To solve the West’s water problems, California needs to solve the Salton Sea.”

It shouldn’t be Imperial’s responsibility to solve the Salton Sea, it should be all of our responsibility.

So a good outcome, or a bad one?

My co-author Eric Kuhn has been making the argument that the next steps in Colorado River Basin governance require a new rural-urban social contract. What just happened seems a huge step backward in that regard. As Eric wrote here a couple of weeks ago:

Leaving IID out of the Lower Basin DCP might make sense for a number of good reasons (especially with the great snowpack which reduces the risk faced by the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California in shouldering the DCP burden without IID’s help), the question policy makers should consider is in the long run (post 2026 for the Colorado River Basin) is such an action going to make it easier or harder to manage conflicts on a shrinking river?

On balance, I think it was a good week. We got a DCP, with commitments to water use reductions that are sorely needed. And while Imperial didn’t get what it asked for, I hope we’ve all learned that we can’t solve the West’s water problems without solving the Salton Sea.

We seem to have a Colorado River water use cutback plan, without the river’s largest user

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From Janet Wilson at the Desert Sun:

The Colorado River Board of California voted 8-1-1 Monday to sign on to a multi-state drought contingency plan, which, somewhat ironically, might not be needed for two years because of an exceptionally wet winter.

The process was fractious until the very end, with blistering rebukes from the river’s largest water user, and charges that state and federal laws were possibly being violated to cross the finish line. The Imperial Irrigation District, a sprawling rural water district in the southeastern corner of California, refused to sign on until the federal government pledged to provide $200 million to clean up the Salton Sea, which has not occurred.

Full story

Water is For Fighting Over, out in paperback tomorrow

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The paperback looks a lot like the hardback, but it has a new afterward!

Publishing a book is a weird exercise in time shifting.

Last fall, I was finishing Science be Dammed, the new Eric Kuhn-John Fleck book, while simultaneously working on a new afterward afterword to Water is for Fighting Over, out in paperback, well, tomorrow.

My friends at Island Press helpfully reminded me this morning that it would be good to reach out to y’all and encourage you to buy the paperback, so consider that box checked. But it’s also nice moment to catch my breath and reflect on what it is I’m doing here, and why.

Last fall was a tough time in the Colorado River Basin. Coming off of a very bad water year, nerves were fraying, deals were collapsing, and it very much looked like the rosy scenario I had sketched in Water is For Fighting Over, a story about our ability to solve problems, was in doubt.

As I turned to my brain trust to talk about what was happening on the river, I asked the same question over and over: “What should I write in the new afterward? Am I optimistic or pessimistic?”

At one point – we were at a reception at Hannah Holm’s wonderful Upper Colorado River water forum – one of my smartest river friends looked at me hard and said, bluntly, “John, you have to be optimistic.” Her point was not that optimism was right, but that someone has to frame this with an optimistic narrative, to help model what a good outcome might be.

Steven Pinker has tried unsuccessfully to coin a new word for this thing that I do – “possibilism“. It rightly hasn’t caught on – it’s a terrible word. But it nicely captures what this exercise of mine is about.

Water is For Fighting Over was about what a successful Colorado River, western water process might look like, based on storytelling, backed by numbers. It was a description of where our adaptive capacity might come from, what it might look like.

Science be Dammed is a chronicle of many of the mistakes that were made in the use of science on the Colorado River, mistakes that created much of the mess that we’re in now. But it too is “possibilist”, suggesting a path to solve problems by better use of science in the future.

And the new afterward afterword to Water is For Fighting Over remains cautiously optimistic. I hope you enjoy it.

Albuquerque has cut its per capita water use in half. We celebrated with cupcakes.

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Albuquerque’s 125 gallons per capita per day cupcakes

Update based on questions on Twitter and in the comments: This number represents all Albuquerque municipal water use – residential, commercial, parks, system losses, etc. Frequently per capita usage numbers quoted are for residential use only, so beware apples-oranges comparisons.

Previously: There were cupcakes on a table by the door at the most recent meeting of the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority: “125 GPCD”.

I have some schtick in my standard water talks: “Albuquerque has, since the mid-1990s, cut its per capita water use nearly in half.” That’s a pretty remarkable thing – a large community cutting its per capita use of a critical resource nearly in half, with no ill effects, in a bit more than two decades.

Now, I can drop the “nearly”. The 2018 numbers are in, and we’ve reached 125 gallons per capita per day.

Courtesy Carlos Bustos, ABCWUA

When I was covering this stuff for the newspaper, I was a skeptic. As I talk about in the first chapter of my last book, I was steeped in the “tragedy narrative” I learned from Marc Reisner and those who followed in his tradition. In fact, I was one of them:

Like many who manage, engineer, utilize, plan for, and write about western water today, I grew up with the expectation of catastrophe…. [A]s drought set in again across the Colorado River Basin in the first decade of the twenty-first century, I was forced to grapple with a contradiction: despite what had Reisner taught me, people’s faucets were still running. Their farms were not drying up. No city was left abandoned.

I didn’t talk about it in the book, but one of the keys for me was Albuquerque’s aquifer. As we pushed the conservation above – along with a significant supply shift to make use of our imported Colorado River water – our aquifer began to rise.

USGS groundwater measurements, Del Sol Divider, Albuquerque, New Mexico

Our water use is down, our aquifer is rising. And we’re still meeting our legal delivery obligations to Elephant Butte Reservoir under the Rio Grande Compact. The system is not only in balance, net storage here is going up.

I know, I know, past performance is no guarantee of future results. Things get harder, not easier, with a growing population and a warming climate. But we’re doing pretty well.

Have a cupcake.

For now, a Lake Mead “shortage” is off the table

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The booming Rocky Mountain snowpack has eliminated the risk of a formal Lake Mead “shortage” declaration in 2020, and has substantially reduced the risk in 2021, according to the latest Bureau of Reclamation 24-month study. More importantly, in my view, is the reduction of a longer term risk of a legal battle over the Upper Basin’s Mexican Treaty delivery obligation.

The current forecast calls for Mead ending 2019 at elevation 1,080, five feet above the threshold at which a set of rules previously developed by state and federal governments would have reduced allocations to Arizona, Nevada, and Mexico. That is more than eight feet higher than the projected elevation just a month ago.

More importantly, the new projections suggest now that there will be another 9 million acre foot release from Lake Powell in 2020, rather than the 7.48maf 2020 release projected just a month ago. The result is a preliminary end-of-2021 Mead forecast 20 feet higher than was expected just a month ago:

Comparison between Lake Mead elevation forecast in February vs. March 2019

 

It’s that shift from a 7.48maf release next year to a projected 9maf release, the result of operating rules in the 2007 Interim Guidelines governing balancing the contents of Mead and Powell, that’s the huge deal here. It means the water users in the Lower Colorado River Basin will continue to get extra water, above and beyond their legally expected 8.23maf releases each year. If this forecast holds, it would mean that since 2011, the Upper Basin would have delivered an excess of at least 9.4 million acre feet, above and beyond the legal requirements of the Colorado River Compact.

A series of 7.48maf releases from Powell – possible under the current operating rules if we were to have really bad Upper Basin hydrology – would have put us into dangerous legal territory, in terms of how the rules governing water delivery obligations under the Mexican treaty are interpreted. One of the basin’s unresolved legal questions is the extent of the Upper Basin’s obligations to deliver half of the water needed to meet the U.S. obligation to deliver 1.5maf per year to Mexico. A series of 7.48maf release years could have forced a legal test of that question, which is one of my “how the legal system could crash” fears.

This year’s snowpack seems to have significantly reduced that risk for the foreseeable future.