The Politics of Water

...At EPA he acquired a reputation as an unapologetic environmentalist, and it soon becomes apparent in talking to him that he must have been at war, especially over water, with almost everyone else in Colorado...

...with the fact that there have been too many boom and bust periods in the past, making the state value, almost to the point of sacrosanctity, the stabilizing influence of an agricultural economy...

...Meanwhile, on the other side of the state, there are strong indications that energy companies are quietly purchasing water rights from irrigators and leasing them back until they need the water...

...Without these subsidies, it is unlikely that the pioiect would have been built at all, and young retired farmers who inherited good water rights would not be buying Winnebagos and moving their families to Fort Lauderdale...

...But groundwater development has its own host of problems, not the least that it often causes land subsidence and depletes stream flows down river...

...It is toward this region that the President's new energy creation-whatever its form after having been disassembled and rewired by Congress-will come lumbering: Most of the nation's coal and nearly all of its high-grade oil shale lie roughly within a 600-mile oval in the states of Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, and Utah...

...Aspinall decided that it was time to do something...

...The result is that Colorado, second only to California in the arid West in population, industry and irrigated acreage, has available for its use barely over one-tenth as much surface water...

...and was the most powerful person in the state (Merson had just told me Sparks was probably the most powerful person in the state...

...One of the most passionate participants in the debate is Alan Merson, who recently resigned as regional administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA...

...Between the demands of agriculture, population, industry, and environmentalists-not to mention the potential explosion in energy development-there doesn't seem to be enough to go around...

...The hit list was a group of ^authorized projects that the President announced in 1977 he wanted to terminate on the grounds that they were too expensive, wasteful and destructive of the environment to merit continuation...

...Even such impregnable bastions of pork barrel politics as Tennessee, Mississippi and Oklahoma were left behind...

...The first principle of an era of limits is that, as resources become scarce, some means must be found to allocate them...

...Surface water is, in fact, already being spread too thin...

...Carter was blown head over heels by the reaction to his announcement, proving that the water projects pork barrel is still an object of veneration to most members of Congress...

...The fact that Colorado has a permanently fixed quantity of only 7.7 million annual acre-feet (an acre-foot is 326,000 gallons) of surface water at its disposal, compared with California's approximately 70 million acre-feet, means that Colorado is approaching an "era of limits" much faster than the state whose incumbent governor popularized the phrase...

...How could he be saying such things...

...He's not big on industrial development, but he loves irrigated agriculture...

...Felix Sparks, the head of Colora-rado's Water Conservation Board (in the West, the phrase "water conservation" usually means capturing every available drop and putting it to some economic use before it runs out to sea), was dismissed by Merson as "an absolute disgrace...

...1 visited Wayne Aspinall at his home in Palisade, Colorado, on a bluff overlooking the Colorado River, and asked him if he was embarrassed by the fact that most of the water projects he championed had been on the Administration's hit list...

...What is more, the Arizona project and the Colorado projects would have to be completed ai the same lime...

...Coloradoans seem to feel that they have a right to those projects, but in our age of inflation and env iron-mentalism the rest of the nation no longer agrees...

...The two men are an extreme juxtaposition, but I was to discover that a lot of fighting is going on in Colorado, mostly over water...

...His man Harris Sherman is the same way," says Merson, launching out at the Director of Natural Resources...

...and with a perennial desire on the part of Westerners to watch the desert bloom, an attitude that Mason Gaffney, a professor of economics at the University of California at Riverside, refers to as an "atavistic cultural twitch...

...From an economist's point of view, and perhaps from the point of view of certain environmentalists, all of these developments are a good thing...

...Of the 19 hit list projects, five were in Colorado-An achievement matched by no other state, and a pretty good indication that Colorado had somehow become America's wonderland of water development...

...And "the whole Congressional delegation, except for Pat Schroeder," he said, "is on the run from the water developers and irrigators-not even all the irrigators, but Marc Reisnrr, a new NL contributor, is currently an Alicia Patterson Fellow...

...they would consume a great deal of water to irrigate very few acres and subsidize some farmers to the tune of several hundred thousand dollars apiece...

...Water use in the West, however, has never been a matter of mere economics...

...Easterners often blink uncomprehendingly when they are told that the amount of runoff in rivers has generally been the key to population growth, prosperity and development in the West...

...One must note, in passing, the irony in this: The construction of Colorado-Big Thompson vv as heav ily subsidized by the American taxpayers, who assumed-As they do with all Bureau of Reclamation enterprises-the interest obligation on the entire irrigation component of the project, and In the purchasers of the hydroelectric power it generates...

...Even the production of shale oil requires much less water than irrigated agriculture, and it might significantly strengthen the nation's security...

...Then I went to see Felix Sparks at the Water Conservation Board, and found him even more incendiary than Merson...

...His answer was absolutely not, they were good projects...

...Every wonderland needs a wizard, and in Colorado's case it was former Congressman Wayne Aspinall, a crusty political genius who was chairman of the House Interior and Insular Affairs Committee through much of the 1960s...

...This adds a national dimension to the water wars in Colorado, which though they have been going on for more than a century, have in a sense just begun...

...Yet the continuing obsession with irrigated agriculture will leave them with fewer and fewer valleys to visit, and with precious few streams that have much water left in them...

...There are large unused reservoirs of groundwater in Colorado that the state may fall back on in the future...

...East Slope Colorado-ans who cursed West Slope Coloradoans, West Slopers who cursed East Slopers, boosters of industry who cursed boosters of agriculture and vice versa, water lawyers who spun conspiracies before my eyes, and environmentalists who, railing against nearly everyone, were in turn railed against by nearly everyone else...

...have rarely seen such intensity of feeling or levels of exasperation as in Colorado...

...While there appears to be enough water in the immediate vicinity to supply a 400,000 barrels per day shale oil industry, if the om nations were drastically to tighten exports and we decided to dev elop the industry to its full potential of perhaps 2-3 million barrels per day, there could be too little water storage in the right places, and too much in the wrong places, to support it...

...He told me that Merson, whom he called "an idiot," ran "the most dictatorial agency, the most dictatorial body in the United States...

...In 1922, the waters of the Colorado River and its tributaries were apportioned among the upper basin states (Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, and Utah) and the lower basin states (California, Nevada and Arizona...

...Why Colorado, a rapidly changing state with a predominantly urban population, should be behaving in this way is something of a mystery...

...Colorado's rivers carry just slightly more than one-fifth the annual runoff of California's (the state actually is more arid than many people realize) and they all cross into neighboring states that are mostly desert...

...It has a lot to do with the entrenched power of agriculture in what has been primarily an agricultural state...

...His answer was essentially that Colorado is first and foremost an agricultural state, and that there would be plenty of water in the future for everyone...

...California, despite its semi-arid climate, its 23 million people, its huge industrial base, and its 10 million irrigated acres, gets enough rainfall in the mountains and along the North Coast to allow nearly half of its water to run out to sea without having first been put to some purportedly beneficial use...

...In addition, since irrigated agriculture is far more water-consumptive than any other use-it currently accounts for between 80-90 per cent of all water consumption in Colorado, but returns a much smaller fraction of the state's income-Greater efficiency allows economic growth without paying the price of damming every riparian wetland and flooding every beautiful river valley in the state...

...With a provision thrown in that nobody was to so much as think about diverting water from the Columbia River to the parched Southwest-to mollify Senators Henry Jackson and Warren Magnuson of Washington, who had been hearing too many suspicious rumors-the Colorado River Basin Project Act was ready for the President's signature and, in 1968, it became a part of the body of enlightened legislation that issues forth from the United States Congress...

...In any event, the state is doing little about groundwater, and continues instead to follow blindly an archaic philosophy of water development?usually at the expense of many and for the benefit of few...

...At the same time, according to Clarence Kui-per, the recently retired Colorado State Engineer, the Bureau of Reclamation -which is always looking for something new to build-began raising the specter of prior appropriation, the terrible "use it or lose it" imperative that has always haunted the West...

...I then asked him if it made sense to tie up so much of Colorado's scarce water in some irrigation projects that will contribute virtually nothing to the nation as a whole and might inhibit future growth in other parts of the state, not to mention their effects on the environment...

...Colorado is no exception to this rule...

...Even in my home state of California-where battles over water have been going on almost from the day the first white settlers arrived, and where so many sides are now attacking each other that the imperial alliances formed before World War I had, by comparison, an infantile simplicity about them...

...What is more, nearly all the rivers with their headwaters in California also empty into the sea in California, so their water belongs, in a legal sense, to the state...

...So he thought, by God, we'd better impound some more water...

...He was elected as en environmentalist, but then I think he got religion late in life...

...I interviewed upstream farmers who cursed downstream farmers, ditch irrigators who cursed pump irrigators...

...This was accomplished with the Colorado-Big Thompson Project, an engineering wonder that took sev er-al hundred thousand acre-feet of water per year out of the headwaters of the Colorado and piped them across the Continental Divide through a 13-mile tunnel underneath Rocky Mountain National Park...

...The Bureau would build both the Central Arizona Project (which had not been started largely due to Aspinall's opposition) and a group of five smaller irrigation projects in the upper Colorado basin-All, coincidental^ of course, in Aspinall's district...

...An amiable, intense man with a disarmingly candid manner, Merson is a former law professor and occasional tester of political waters...

...A substantial part of Colorado's economy also is maintained by tourism, and many tourists who visit the state want nothing more than to fish in a mountain stream in the middle of an unspoiled mountain valley...

...He upset Congressman Wayne Aspinall in the Democratic primary of 1972, but lost in the election to the Republican candidate, James Johnson...

...Dick Lamm," he said, referring to the Governor, "is a perfect symbol of what's the matter with this state...

...It was a clever move on Aspinall's part, because many people, including Kuiper, were rolling their eyes over the Colorado projects...

...Within a couple of decades, Arizona was growing nearly as fast as California and already over-drafting its groundwater, so it began to lobby strenuously for what had for many years been the gleam in its eye: the Central Arizona Project, a scheme of truly Herculean proportions that would hoist its Colorado River water over the Black Mountains and send it into the populated central part of the state...

...Sparks' sentiments about most of the state's political leaders were at least as negative as Merson's, except he felt they were behaving in exactly the opposite manner that Merson had indicated...

...But it became extremely uneasy watching the blooming deserts and sprawling cities of its neighbors to the south, and wondered whether, in a crunch, they might not have the political power to rewrite the Colorado River Compact to their advantage...

...Much more, it has been a matter of politics...

...thus Colorado has to share a great deal of the water in its rivers with them...

...The growth of population and industry along the water-short Front Range exceeded anyone's expectations, and today the same shares of Colorado-Big Thompson water that originally sold for $40 are being sold for about $1,700, a rate of appreciation matched by only a few items in contemporary American life-perhaps Xerox stock certificates...

...Still, Colorado can only afford to give 80-90 per cent of its water to irrigated agriculture-At the expense of everything else in a coming era of shortages-if the Federal government continues to build all the subsidized water projects it asks for...

...Merson went on like this for over an hour, stopping every now and then to apologize for "character assassination" and then starting all over again...

...I had hardly settled down in his office before he was complaining about the "goddamn bunch of jackasses in the EPA...

...Why was all this feuding going on...

...They mean, first of all, that water is searching for its highest use, which encourages efficiency and maximizes (to borrow that economists' verb) the economic benefits obtained from each unit...

...It has a nasty habit as well of creating bitterness, distrust and lots of work for lawyers...

...What Aspinall did was brilliant and simple...

...Those who bought the shares did the smartest thing in their lives...

...New York City ta.xicab medallions, or certain Washington, D. C. or Beverly Hills, California real estate...

...in some areas, farmers were devastated by the recent drought because there was too little emergency storage...

...California, growing at a phenomenal rate, quickly diverted its entire apportionment and the unused portion of Arizona's toward the the Imperial Valley and Los Angeles...

...If you don't let us build you some projects so you can start using your water, said the Bureau to Colorado, you might lose that water to California and Arizona...

...Irrigators along the Front Range could buy shares in the project for $40, with each share entitling them to one acre-foot per year, and after that they paid a few dollars per acre-foot purchased for the operation and maintenance of the project...

...No better illustration exists than was provided by Colorado's contribution to the Carter Administration's so-called hit list of water projects...

...In 1947 the Colorado River, which had already had a number of unnatural acts performed upon it, was made by the Bureau of Reclamation to flow toward the Gulf of Mexico instead of toward its usual destination, the Pacific Ocean...

...PORK BARRELING IN COLORADO The Politics of Water BY MARC REISNER Denver Since the summer, when President Carter proposed his energy policy, a debate has been raging here about how his call for the Federal-Iy-subsidided production of millions of barrels of synthetic fuel per day from coal and oil shale will affect the availability of water in the arid Rocky Mountain and High Plains states...

...Colorado, whose Colorado River allocation was the next largest behind California's, did not really need to begin developing its apportionment until later...

...He saw that the great capitalist machine cranking out filth and ugliness and devastation was also making his constituents fat and sleek and happy, and he realized that, out here, the whole damned machine runs on the impoundment of water...

...I had come to Colorado with visions of John Denver in his Rocky Mountain aerie-of an environmentalist governor, an environmentalist Congressional delegation, and hundreds of thousands of people who had moved here only because it was one of the last unspoiled places and everyone wanted to keep it that way...

...Together with Floyd Dominy, the then Bureau Commissioner (and a brilliant politician and inveterate dam-builder), he cooked up a deal with Arizona...

...just that small bunch lucky enough to be out there sucking off the big Federal teat...

...The first means of allocation is usually price...

...He is an example of how fast you can go from being a lawyer for the Environmental Defense Fund, which he was for a short while, to being a guy who never met a water project he didn't like...

...The reason why soon became clear enough...

...This was a state, I thought, where some sort of mystical harmony existed among the various citizenry, where the lion lay with the lamb-so I was rather startled by Mer-son's diatribe...

...The Bureau now says-having corrected its 2 million acre-foot overestimate of the flow of the Colorado-that the five projects, together with several other Aspinall-inspired projects that were authorized later, could also use up Colorado's entire remaining apportionment from the river...

...But others are not so sure, and the display of emotions I had seen earlier in Denver makes me believe they are right...

...Under such an arrangement the contract need not be recorded and its very existence, along with the price paid lor the water, can be kept secret...

...But the general feeling seems to be that farmers are selling water for 10-40 times what they paid for it-thanks again, in part, to Federal subsidy...

...it is, in fact, almost a paradigm of it...

...The cities on the Front Range, which contribute far more to the state's prosperity per acre-foot of water consumed than marginal irrigation on the West Slope, could bring more water across the Divide and could certainly use it, but this option may be circumscribed if the West Slope projects are built and the Colorado River entitlement is used up...

...There is a certain pathos in the spectacle of a state where water has always been scarce blindly continuing policies that will rapidly bring it up to the absolute limits of its water supply...