Water is for Fighting Over

by John Fleck

  Among these ideas was the construction of a new storage reservoir to capture excess flows on the lower river that frequently happened during rainstorms, when farmers couldn’t use water they had ordered from Lake Mead. The workgroup also suggested water-conservation steps on the Mexican side of the border, to which the wealthier United States would contribute. The group recommended finding a way to make use of excess groundwater in the Yuma area, a suggestion that remains a central option among decision makers today. And the group recommended managing flows to the Cienega as an environmentally valuable phenomenon, rather than simply an accident of history. Once heresy for water managers, this concept is now a given in Colorado River Basin water policy discussions.

  Even more significantly, the workgroup recommended a “pilot, Basin-wide, consumptive-use reduction and forbearance program.” This was revolutionary. Up to that point, water conservation programs had narrow, specific purposes: save water over here so that we can use it over there. But the Yuma group was recommending something different—conserving water in order to simply leave it in the river or the basin’s reservoirs, in trust for all. The group’s report led to a pilot test of the desalting plant to gain information about its technical operation and the costs of its future use, something that before the detente would almost have certainly led to conflict between environmentalists and the water-management community.

  Most importantly, the working group’s recommendations provided a framework for formal, multiparty negotiations that eventually expanded to include the Mexican government and that nation’s water agencies and environmental groups. These talks led to the historic Minute 319 US-Mexico agreement that for the first time intentionally released environmental river flows back into the Colorado River Delta.11 It was Minute 319’s environmental flow that drew me to the San Luis Bridge in March 2014. But the historic agreement, rooted in large part in the Yuma-Cienega discussions, had a far broader reach in that it began to deal with important cross-border environmental and water-management issues.

  All of the successes that grew out of the Yuma working group are place-specific. They depended on active participation by experts in the unique geographies where the water had to be managed. So the specific solutions do not generalize to other parts of the Colorado River Basin, or to other challenges in water management. What does generalize is the method, the ability to break down barriers, starting with “cheap talk.” What began on a Grand Canyon river trip laid the groundwork for real cooperation between environmentalists and water managers, poking holes in the myth of inevitable conflict and creating a model that can be replicated across the West.

  CHAPTER 5

  Arizona’s Worst Enemy

  IN THE STRUGGLE TO SHARE THE Colorado River, Arizona has always been its own worst enemy. From the time statehood was established early in the twentieth century, Arizona politicians viewed the Colorado River flowing down their western border as the key to the desert state’s economic future. But their approach was always pugnacious rather than collaborative. The state refused to sign the Colorado River Compact, the basin’s first grand water-sharing deal; it took its neighbors to court again and again; and Arizona once went so far as to dispatch its National Guard in a “war” against California and the federal government over water.

  Arizona’s behavior is driven by psychology as much as geography. Life in the desert can be harsh, stifling. In the aptly nicknamed “Valley of the Sun,” the Phoenix metro area where nearly two of every three Arizonans live, you can feel the summer heat press in around you. Water, especially imported water pumped up from the Colorado River to the west, has always offered a cocoon of cool comfort. Those palm trees, pools, and lawns in the cities of central Arizona provide more emotional than economic benefit, but they come at the expense of significant water use.1

  Fountain Hills, outside Phoenix, Arizona (© John Fleck).

  Along with an unforgiving landscape, Arizona has long had an inferiority complex that dominates its relationship with California, its bigger, richer, more-populous neighbor. When it comes to water, the complex has played out in a century-long political psychodrama of fear that Californians were out to steal all the Colorado River’s water. Arizona’s unwillingness to collaborate meant it was largely left out as the Colorado River’s big water-distribution projects were being built during the first half of the twentieth century. When Arizona finally got its big canal, its decades of intransigence left it with little bargaining power, forcing it to accept a deal on unfavorable terms that have left the state’s water supply vulnerable as the river runs short.

  The irony is that within the state’s boundaries, Arizona has done a far better water-management job than it is frequently given credit for, gracefully handling the reduction in desert agriculture that so many argue is essential for sustainable water use in the Colorado River Basin. That and important groundwater regulations have made the populous southern two-thirds of the state the largest major groundwater-using area in the West where scientists have actually documented aquifers on the rise after decades of over-pumping. Imported water from the Colorado River helped, but reductions in groundwater pumping played an even bigger role, such that the state’s total water use peaked around 1980 and has been declining ever since.2

  But Arizona’s pugnacious style keeps surfacing, jeopardizing the cooperation needed to reduce water shortages across the basin. Arizona still seems to believe the old canard that “water’s for fightin’ over.”

  The Valley of the Sun

  Standing on the roof of Phoenix’s old Verde River water treatment plant, you can readily see how an uneasy relationship with water has defined life in this desert community. A ribbon of green, the aptly named Verde River, snakes through tan hills staked with saguaro cactus. Just as the Verde pinches between hills one last time before flowing out into the valley, the treatment plant scoops up the river’s precious flows, treating the water and putting it to what in the lingo of the West has always been called “beneficial use.”

  Kathryn Sorensen, head of the city’s water department, took me to the roof to explain just how water moves through the Phoenix valley. An Arizona native and economist by training, Sorensen is responsible for making sure 1.5 million people in the desert get water when they turn on the tap. The greater Phoenix area grabbed its native rivers, the Salt and the Verde, early on. Look at the old pictures and you will see an incongruous sight—vast acres of cotton, an empire of irrigated agriculture on the desert floor. But from the beginning Phoenix needed groundwater to supplement the supplies it got from the Salt and the Verde Rivers, and everyone knew that in the long run that was unsustainable. Phoenix always yearned for more, looking with longing and anxiety off to the west at the Colorado River. Throughout the twentieth century, groundwater depletion accelerated as the region’s farms and cities grew.3 They were mining “fossil water” left in the region’s valleys of sands and gravels over eons, and they were taking it out far faster than nature could replace it. “It doesn’t recharge at a very fast rate,” Sorensen explained.4

  Arizonans watching their population grow have always yearned to wean themselves from groundwater, and a fresh supply of water imported from the Colorado River long seemed the only answer; the alternative, they feared, was doom. A cartoon from the 1940s shows the grim reaper scratching “NO WATER” with his bony fingers across a map of Arizona, with the fat, wide Colorado River flowing untouched down the state’s western edge. “Without water,” the cartoon’s caption read, “Arizona’s economy will perish.”5

  The native landscape here has always felt like destiny. Back in 1970, a pair of young economists, William Martin and Bob Young, wrote that Arizonans believed that the “stark vistas of our desert surroundings” offered “self-evident proof” that water was the region’s limiting resource. Martin and Young disagreed. Arguing, as economists do, from data, they showed that Arizona’s economy was doing better even as water grew scarcer.6 But whether or not water controlled the state’s economy was beside the po
int. Arizonans have always believed it to be true. Arizona’s first grand dam was not even complete when delegates to the state’s 1910 constitutional convention enshrined their vision of the future in the state seal: “. . . at the right side of the range of mountains there shall be a storage reservoir and a dam, below which in the middle distance are irrigated fields and orchards reaching into the foreground, at the right of which are cattle grazing. . . .”7 The seal embodied Arizona’s ambition for water and Arizonans have feared its lack ever since.

  Throughout the twentieth century, it was an unquestioned article of faith that central Arizona needed more water, and that the Colorado River was the place to get it.8 Arizona’s greatest politician, the swaggering county sheriff turned congressman turned senator Carl Hayden, built a career on the drive for Colorado River water, and the battle over how best to get it defined the state’s politics for half a century. Water was “fuel for growth.”9

  The Skinny Kid

  In Colorado River water politics, Arizona has always played the skinny kid, bullied by a burly California neighbor bent on kicking sand in its face and stealing its water. The “victim” narrative was often false, but what mattered is that Arizona believed it. The state’s inferiority complex has played a central role in the Colorado River Basin’s water politics for a century, creating a pattern of obstruction that delayed the very water projects Arizona said it needed and a history of conflict that continues to this day.

  Arizona’s pugilistic stance was summed up in the 1920s in a comment by Phoenix resident Ralph Murphy, as Congress considered legislation to enable the great concrete plumbing needed to move the river’s water across the West. Murphy described the bill as many Arizonans saw it—as a scheme to deprive his state of water that could otherwise be used to irrigate Arizona farms, sending it to California instead: “I believe Arizona will fight this scheme to the last ditch.”10 Never mind that the system of federally subsidized dams that Arizona was fighting to stop were the same dams it would ultimately need to corral its share of the river. For decades, Arizona lived up to Murphy’s pledge.

  From the beginning, Arizona felt outmatched. In 1912, at statehood, it counted a population of just 217,000 to California’s 2.7 million.11 Residents saw a raw desert with little going for it other than the waters of the Colorado River flowing down its western border.

  That water should rightfully be ours, Arizona state senator Fred T. Colter argued. Arizona had “one-half of the entire drainage area of the Colorado River Basin” and was, Colter contended, entitled to half of the water. If Colter’s geography was a little bit wrong (Arizona did not make up half the basin, though it was close), his legal analysis was in left field (no law allocated a river’s water by basin acreage). But the idea that Arizona was being bullied into giving up its hydrologic birthright resonated. Arizona, sparsely populated, growing slowly, newly admitted to the union, was “a baby state” set upon by powerful neighbors, Colter charged.12

  When Congress appeared ready to push its way forward without Arizona’s consent, Hayden thundered on the floor of the Senate that the waters of the Colorado were being unjustly divided “primarily for the benefit of California.” Hayden and Arizona senator Henry Ashurst launched a filibuster that delayed action for a time, while nearly bringing senators to blows, but in the end the Arizonans lost.13

  Arizona was never entirely clear about what it needed the water for beyond fighting off the stark vistas of its desert surroundings. In the early years, it argued that the water was needed to prevent the collapse of its agricultural economy, but this gradually shifted until, by the 1960s, the water was needed for the great cities growing in the state’s central valleys. Whatever the reasons, the perpetual need for more water became Arizona political dogma, and Arizonans followed Colter’s charge.14 Their effort not only failed but, for most of the twentieth century, had the opposite effect. Arizona’s neighbors grew, as did their use of the Colorado River. Arizona meanwhile painted itself into a political corner that prevented it from getting the water it so desperately wanted.

  Fighting wasn’t working, but Arizona seemed to know no other way.

  The Arizona Navy

  When the seven Colorado River Basin states negotiated the 1922 Colorado River Compact, an agreement to divide the river’s water, Arizona was at the table and agreed to the deal. It was the first uneasy attempt at sharing the Colorado River’s water rather than fighting over it. But when Arizona’s negotiator, Winfield S. Norviel, took the deal home for ratification, the state’s political establishment balked. Arizona’s political leadership changed in the November 1922 election, and newly elected Governor George Hunt feared that the agreement locked in California’s advantage, leaving his own state uncertain about future access to the water. At every turn, Arizona opposed the ensuing legal and legislative steps needed to develop the Colorado River’s water.

  In 1928, Hayden and other Arizona politicians fought a losing battle in Congress against the Boulder Canyon Project Act, the federal legislation that authorized construction of what would become Hoover Dam, along with the infrastructure needed to move the Colorado River’s water to California. The legislation was the next step needed to move the agreement embodied in the 1922 Compact forward. But Arizona’s refusal to ratify the Compact had left the state out of the ensuing distribution of the political pork as the necessary implementing legislation was being drawn up. The other states went ahead without Arizona and crafted the 1928 legislation needed to build Hoover Dam. Despite Arizona’s intransigence, the bill included provisions to ensure that a share of the water was allocated to Arizona, as the 1922 Compact had decreed. But the 1928 legislation included no federal money to build the infrastructure needed to use it.

  Robbed of the chance to develop a share of the river’s water, Arizona resorted instead to fighting with its California neighbors over theirs. In the fall of 1934, Arizona’s struggle with neighboring California came the closest the West has ever come to a literal war over water.

  On November 12, Arizona National Guard Major Franklin Pomeroy sent an urgent telegram to Joe Bush of Parker, Arizona: “WILL REQUIRE USE OF YOUR SMALL BOAT COMMENCING WEDNESDAY.”15 Bush and his wife, Nellie, ran a ferry service near the Colorado River’s junction with the Bill Williams River, close to the future site of the Parker Dam. By the mid-1930s, they were busy toting survey crews from the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California back and forth across the river.

  Parker Dam was to be built on the Colorado River some 150 river miles downstream from Hoover Dam, then under construction on the Arizona-Nevada border. Hoover would store huge volumes of the river’s big flows, then pass them downstream as needed to Parker Dam, creating a reservoir that would be the diversion point for Southern California’s Colorado River Aqueduct water. Parker Dam’s west-bank abutment would be in California, its east-bank abutment in Arizona. On their side of the river, Californians were already at work on the 242-mile Colorado River aqueduct, which would carry Colorado River water to the rapidly growing Los Angeles Basin.

  While the state had played a losing game in Congress and the courts, the physical reality of Parker Dam’s eastern anchor on Arizona soil gave the state some leverage. Arizona governor Benjamin Moeur (“a showman politician in the grand carnival style,” in journalist Marc Reisner’s words) dispatched 100 National Guardsmen to block construction work on the dam’s eastern footings.16

  Nellie Bush flew the Arizona flag on her ferry boat, the Julia B—the sole vessel in what a Los Angeles newspaper laughingly called “the Arizona Navy.” The Los Angeles Herald-Express documented the affair with a half-page cartoon in the manner of a military campaign map, with cowboy-hatted politicians storming out of the state capital in Phoenix declaring, “I tell you we’ve been invaded! Violated th’ sovereign rights of our state, it’s war!”17

  Arizona deserved to be mocked. No one was going to shoot anyone over the question of whether a dam could be built at Parker. Yet while Major Pomeroy’s feeble armada w
as more theater than a genuine call to arms, it established a precedent. Conflict had become the norm. More often, the battles were waged in the halls of Congress and in the courts, but the results were the same. After a promising early twentieth-century effort to share water, Arizona decided that it didn’t like the results of the process and turned away from collaboration. The ongoing clashes damaged efforts to manage the Colorado River, with consequences that linger today. Yet the biggest harm came to Arizona itself, which learned far too late that when it went to the battlements, it lost more often than it won.

  Congress resolved the Parker Dam standoff the following August with the Rivers and Harbors Act of 1935, which swept away Arizona’s objections and cleared the way for the dam’s construction. Within a month, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was standing 150 miles upstream atop the nearly completed Hoover Dam to, in his words, “celebrate the completion of the greatest dam in the world.” Despite the dam’s eastern footings being anchored in his state’s bedrock, Arizona governor Moeur did not attend the ceremony.18

  Preparing for Litigation

  In the summer of 1944, Arizona’s water managers knew they were living on unsustainable groundwater and borrowed time. Spread along the Gila River southwest of Phoenix, the Roosevelt Irrigation District began drilling wells in 1928. Just fifteen years later, its pumping had more than doubled, and its aquifer was dropping fast.