Water is for Fighting Over

by John Fleck

  Thus, on January 1, 2003, the big pumps that push water from Lake Havasu up 594 feet to Copper Basin reservoir and the start of the Colorado River Aqueduct were throttled back, and California began the difficult task of living within its 4.4 million acre-foot Colorado River allocation. Slowly, also, the cutbacks filtered down to a reduction in agricultural water diverted at Imperial Dam. California was forced to share.

  Whether this looked like success or failure depended entirely on where you sat. California’s attempt to negotiate a “soft landing” had failed. Efforts by the other six states to ensure that California lived within its 4.4 million acre-feet per year allocation succeeded.

  Yet there was another, more subtle element of success that was not apparent on January 1, 2003, as the water in the Colorado River Aqueduct slowed. Over the previous decade, through what at the time had appeared to be chaotic and often unproductive arguments, the river’s managers had been building an institutional framework for life in the era of limits. The contentious process had created a new approach to sharing the Colorado River Basin’s water. Success was not guaranteed, but the right tools, both within California and at the scale of the entire Colorado Basin, had been identified and were ready to be put to use.

  CHAPTER 8

  So Cal Cuts Back

  WAS SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA headed into a crisis as a result of the draconian 2003 cutback in Colorado River water? Recall the words of Congresswoman Grace Napolitano, who represents a slice of suburban Los Angeles County, in the run-up to the cuts: “California cannot afford the immediate reduction by that amount of water.”1

  Napolitano’s warning followed a pattern familiar in the arid western United States. Fear of water shortage is greater than reality, as communities underestimate their ability to cope when supplies run dry. When people have less water, they use less water, often with greater ease than they thought possible. What happened in Southern California in 2003 demonstrates that clearly.

  In public, area water managers were blasé. “There is clearly no emergency, due to Metropolitan’s foresight and planning,” Southern California Metropolitan Water District (Met) board chairman Phillip Pace told his colleagues at a January 6 emergency meeting to discuss the agency’s options.2 True, Pace was putting the best face possible on a difficult situation. Behind the scenes, managers were scrambling to make ends meet. They believed there would be enough water from the State Water Project, which brought Northern California water south across the mountains to Los Angeles and San Diego, to cover the 2003 shortfall in Colorado River water. But the plumbing issues were complex: different treatment methods were needed to balance the two sources of supply, and the necessary interconnects to get State Water Project water to communities that previously got their water from the Colorado were problematic.3

  Nevertheless, by 2003 Met was a changed system from the old days when it simply ran big aqueducts full blast. Following drought in the late 1980s and early ’90s, Southern California had made significant improvements—storage deals with Central Valley farmers, conservation initiatives, dry-year options to move water from farms to cities—leaving its water-delivery architecture far more flexible and robust, able to weather a significant shock, even if the specifics of the loss of Colorado River Aqueduct water were poorly anticipated.

  The Laguna Declaration

  Southern California was not always so thrifty. Like every major metro area depending on the Colorado River, it was built on imported water that was moved out of the river corridor to adjoining land that would otherwise have been dry. Albuquerque, Denver, Cheyenne, and Salt Lake City literally move the water physically out of the basin. Las Vegas, Phoenix, and Tucson are technically in the Colorado River Basin, but they have to pump the river’s water back uphill to use it. Initially, like the others, Southern California cities overreached their groundwater and built increasingly long pipelines and aqueducts to augment supplies. This began with the Los Angeles Aqueduct to the Owens Valley, completed in 1913, followed by the Colorado River Aqueduct, which delivered its first water in 1939, and the State Water Project, which moved Northern California water to the Southland over the Tehachapi Mountains beginning in the early 1970s.

  The political geographies of modern American cities are complex things. Los Angeles city government built the Owens Valley aqueduct, but the city limits encompassed only a fraction of the region’s population. To gain access to its water, communities had to give up their sovereignty and annex into LA. Preexisting cities like Pasadena had no intention of doing that, so in 1928 they banded together and formed the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, a regional water agency that would build the aqueduct to bring water from the Colorado River, spreading the water beyond the boundaries of a single municipality to an entire region. As the federal government was preparing for the construction of Hoover Dam, Southern California was preparing the governance structures needed to build the plumbing and use the water.

  But the creation of Met, initially encompassing Los Angeles and twelve suburban neighbors, simply raised a different version of the same question: what if neighboring communities wanted to join in the project and share in the water? The boundaries of who was in and who was out were still an issue. The initial Colorado River supply was far more than needed by Met’s thirteen charter members, leaving enough water for more communities to join the club. But who, and how many? In 1938, Met’s Water Problems Committee drew a line: the ultimate capacity of the Colorado River Aqueduct would set the limit, and decisions about annexation and extension of supply would depend on there being an adequate supply of water.4 Water scarcity would define the boundaries of how big Southern California’s cities could grow.

  Met governance has always been politically complicated. The largest and most powerful municipal water agency in the United States, Met functions as a water wholesaler, with a governing board made up of representatives of each of the municipal member agencies that pass Met water along to homes and businesses. Its decisions influenced critical growth policy as Southern California navigated its transition from an agricultural empire to a megacity.

  For many of the people operating at those boundaries between water supply and urban growth, the old 1930s thinking about limits simply would not do. As the state of California eyed a massive north-to-south project to bring water from the Sacramento River all the way to Southern California, the region’s postwar growth boosters wanted a piece of the action, as always in the arid West viewing water shortage as the defining constraint on economic growth. The boosters could see a time when they would grow into and eventually surpass the Colorado River allocation. They were keen to ensure that a shortage of water would not get in the way of Southern California’s never-ending boom. At the boosters’ side was Met, which acted as a sort of shadow regional government when it came to getting water supplies to the region and parceling the commodity out to local water agencies.

  Rapid territorial expansion pushed Met’s territory to the east, into valleys that remained at the time largely agricultural but were destined to become rapidly expanding suburbs. In 1952, the Met board, meeting in the coastal town of Laguna, made the policy official in what came to be known as the “Laguna Declaration,” an explicit statement that Met’s job was to get whatever water the booming metropolis decided it needed: “When and as additional water resources are required to meet increasing needs for domestic, industrial, and municipal water, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California will be prepared to deliver such supplies.”5

  That “tell us what you need and we’ll get it” philosophy dominated Met’s management approach for some four decades, and the agency did just that. From the east, it ran the Colorado River Aqueduct full bore, an artificial river larger than the Rio Grande pumping water through mountains to the Southern California coastal plain. California kept the aqueduct full in part by soaking up surplus supplies that other Colorado River Basin states weren’t using. With the Laguna Declaration in hand as its guiding principle, the agen
cy added the California State Water Project, the region’s third great artificial river, bringing water south from Northern California by the early 1970s. Initially, Met pursued its own canal project, which would have tapped the Eel River on the state’s rainy northern coast to bring water to the cities of the Southland. But eventually political reality made clear that the only way to pull off a project that big was a statewide effort that brought together the interests of farmers in the state’s big Central Valley (who had their own problems with groundwater shortfalls) and the cities of the south.6

  With 701 miles of pipelines and canals, twenty-one reservoirs, the ability to irrigate 750,000 acres of farmland and serve 25 million people,7 the State Water Project is a staggering hydraulic achievement. Southern California’s leaders were sure, with three independent sources of supply—one the state aqueduct from the north, the second the Colorado River aqueduct from the east, and the third serving the city of Los Angeles from the Owens Valley—that their water supply was secure. They were mistaken. Southern California first overdrew the available groundwater supplies, and then it overdrew the Owens Valley aqueduct. When drought began in the late 1980s and lingered into the early ’90s, their confidence was shaken. “We were wrong,” said Ronald Gastelum, Met’s president and CEO. “The state water project did not produce. Fortunately, we had the Colorado River supplies to rely upon and we barely got through that crisis. It was a wake-up call for us.”8

  This time, the region’s leadership faced up to the reality that simply adding new big aqueducts to import more water would no longer work. Met and its allies in Sacramento had already lost a bruising statewide political battle in the 1980s over construction of a new Northern California canal to help send even more water from the state’s wet north to its arid south, and options to move more water from outside the region were looking increasingly impractical.

  The policy shift took the form of a 1996 “Integrated Resources Plan” that turned the Laguna Declaration’s idea of delivering whatever water its members said they needed on its head. Rather than bringing water in from the outside, the plan called for being shrewder with the water they already had. Recycling was a major component—cleaning up sewage and putting it to a second use rather than just dumping it in the ocean, as had long been done. The oddly named strategy of “groundwater recovery”—cleaning contaminated groundwater so that it could be used—played a role. Expanded use of aquifers to store water during wet years so that it was available during dry years provided a buffer. They also built a new Southern California reservoir, in a place called Diamond Valley, as a hedge against drought. And desalination of both ocean water and brackish inland groundwater was added to Met’s toolbox.

  The document, which grew out of a three-year planning effort, opened with unusual literary flair, quoting Wallace Stegner: “And more important . . . was one overmastering unity, the unity of drought.” Its language marked a major conceptual shift in the relationship between Met and its member agencies. No longer would Met simply bring the water. Managing under the conditions Stegner described would require coordinated approaches across the boundaries between large agencies and small.9

  In keeping with the Laguna Declaration’s underlying philosophy, however, limiting growth was never an option for bringing long-term supply and demand into balance. Met would continue to support whatever population might inhabit the region.

  The plan included a conservation push that was unprecedented in Southern California, where lawns and swimming pools seemed a God-given right. That was something that was already under way, beginning in the drought of the late 1980s, but the Integrated Resources Plan locked it in as a matter of regional water governance policy. Per capita water use had been dropping, but not fast enough to make up for Southern California’s population growth. If Met had reached the limit of available imported supplies, more steps would be required.

  But the 1996 Integrated Resources Plan also included what, in hindsight, was a critical mistake. The document discusses the risk that Southern California might not, in the future, be able to depend on the surpluses it had been using to keep the Colorado River Aqueduct full. But when it came time to total up the final numbers, Met’s planners concluded that their full allotment of 1.2 million acre-feet per year would be reliable at least through 2020.10

  Just seven years later, they found out how wrong they were. But they also discovered that the water-management widgets they had built in the meantime—things like recycling, conservation, and groundwater storage—left their system robust enough to handle a problem they had not anticipated. Southern California passed a resilience test caused by a shock larger than the region’s water managers had planned for.

  Water Storage Deals

  When Met’s Colorado River supply was slashed in 2003, one of its key safeguards was a series of groundwater storage agreements it had developed over the previous decade. The basic principle was to find a place where Met could store surplus underground in wet years, to be called on in dry years. In all, this surplus amounted to more than a million acre-feet of groundwater stored outside of Met’s primary service territory—an amount equivalent to nearly an entire year’s worth of Colorado River supply.11

  These agreements belie the popular image of California city dwellers and farmers in a death struggle over scarce water, reflecting instead collaborative relationships that maximize resources. Met’s agreement with the Semitropic Water District located near Bakersfield in California’s Central Valley is an example of how this works.

  Semitropic is a mountain range away from the Colorado River Basin, but the water-swap agreement with Met signed in 1994 shows how a combination of physical and institutional plumbing can help balance out the ups and downs of water supplies in the two basins.

  The managers of Semitropic had begun offering their aquifer, for a price, to store surplus water from the California State Water Project, the system of pumps and canals that delivered water from California’s wet north to its arid south. Whereas for most of its life the Colorado River Aqueduct had delivered a stable supply year in and year out, the State Water Project deliveries were always more variable, depending on whether the Sierra Nevada, which feeds the system’s water, had a big snowpack or a small one. Storage would help to even out those ups and downs. Serving a marginal Tulare Basin farming area that had long relied on groundwater, Semitropic connected to the State Water Project beginning in the 1960s. During wet years, Semitropic’s water banking project allowed State Water Project contractors who had more water than they needed to send the extra to Semitropic. The agency would either divert the water to spreading basins to recharge its aquifer, or provide it to farmers in lieu of groundwater the farmers would otherwise have pumped.12

  For Semitropic, the financial benefit was significant, an example of a rural-urban partnership that uses water-management income to help support agricultural communities. In 2012, for example, the agency made $14 million from its water-banking customers, the same amount of revenue that it got from the local customers actually using its water.13

  Aquifer storage and recovery, used in a wide variety of settings, offers the same basic function as a dam: hang on to water now so that you can use it later. It offers both advantages and disadvantages over dams. On the plus side, there is no evaporative loss, you don’t have to block off a free-flowing river, and you don’t need to shoulder the huge up-front capital cost, usually borne by state or federal government, to make it happen.

  On the minus side, there are some losses, because you can never reclaim all the water you put into the ground. In the short run, that means reservoirs are more efficient despite their evaporation, though it only takes a few years’ storage to make aquifers a better deal. In addition, getting the water out requires a bit of cleverness. To work, for example, the Semitropic-Met agreement also requires a second bit of water-management cooperation and flexibility between the two water agencies when the time comes to take the water out. Semitropic and Met have two options. Semitropic has
the ability to pump water out of the aquifer, moving it back through its canals to the State Water Project delivery system to be shipped on to Southern California. But the best option is simply to do an accounting swap. Semitropic farmers pump out Met’s groundwater to use on their farms, and a portion of Semitropic’s allocation in the year it is used is left in the aqueduct to be pumped on to Southern California.14

  By the time the Colorado River shortage hit in 2003, Met had stashed more than 400,000 acre-feet of its surplus Northern California water in Semitropic’s aquifer, along with similar stored water with three other California agricultural water agencies. In the first year of Colorado River shortfall, Met didn’t need to call on its Semitropic water, getting enough to carry it through the year from a similar groundwater storage arrangement with the Coachella Valley Water District, plus other water stored within the agency’s system in various places around Southern California. Over time, as drought continued, Semitropic became critical to keeping water flowing to Southern California’s water users. The physical and institutional systems, operated in tandem, gave Southern California the resilience to withstand the Colorado River Aqueduct curtailment.