The city of El CENTRO in California: the California farms awash in the Colorado river water even in a dry dry dry drought

The city of El CENTRO is located in California. The Colorado River could be saved if a few hundred farms in southern California located near the Mexican border are included.

The Imperial Valley is a place of jarring contrasts. The other half is in a desert that is bone-dry. There are miles of green fields lined with irrigation canals. A few fields are covered in water from long lines of sprinklers.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/10/04/1126240060/meet-the-california-farmers-awash-in-colorado-river-water-even-in-a-drought

The Imperial Valley’s Water Management: A Brief History of the Collapse and Regeneration of the Salton Sea in the 1908 Colorado River Valley

He says it’s very early. There’s a bad crop in northern California. It has been a high market. They’re trying to jump on the market early and have the first lettuce to be harvested.”

These fields owe their existence to fortune-seeking land speculators and engineers who, starting in 1901, dug a canal to bring water to this valley from the Colorado River. Geography was the key. Most of the Imperial Valley actually lies below sea level, and well below the canal’s starting point on the Colorado River near Yuma, Ariz. The canal powered itself by gravity and the water flowed through it.

Construction of the original canal was marked by epic engineering failure. The Salton Sea was created after the Colorado burst out of its channel and carved a new path into the Imperial Valley. It took two years to redirect the river back into its original channel. The Salton Sea still exists, although it’s in deep trouble. It’s now more salty than the ocean, heavily contaminated with agricultural runoff, and shrinking.

The Imperial Irrigation District’s irrigation land is covered by 5 inches of water each year thanks to the All-American Canal, which was built during the New Deal.

As less and less water has been flowing through the river and its reservoirs, US Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Camille Touton last year called on the basin’s seven states – California, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah and Wyoming – to figure out how to cut 2 to 4 million acre feet of usage, or as much as 30% of their river water allocation.

Sarah Porter is the director of the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University and she says that the Imperial Irrigation District is at the center of the negotiations.

Water Rights in the Valley: The Californian Water Crisis and Its Effects on Irrigation Districts, Lake Mead, and the Colorado River

“We have the laws in place, you know, when water comes anywhere west of the Mississippi, it’s first-come, first-served, and that’s how it’s always been,” he says.

The split between California and the six other basin states raises the likelihood that the water battle could end up in the nation’s highest courts, especially if the feds propose steep cuts for California and its powerful water districts believe their senior water rights are under threat. The Imperial Irrigation District provides water to Southern California farmers and has a senior right to Colorado River water – a priority claim because it was established before other districts’ and states’ rights.

In reality, nobody really expects cities to get cut off completely. The farmers don’t think swimming pools or lawns are the way to use water for health and safety.

famers in the Imperial Valley will have to cut back on their activities because of the crisis. Their legal rights won’t help if there isn’t more water coming from Lake Mead.

“The river has a gun to everybody’s heads, and it’s in everybody’s interest to try to work out this thing,” says JB Hamby, a member of the irrigation district’s board of directors.

If nothing changes, within a few years, Lake Mead would drop to a level called “dead pool” and water would stop flowing through Hoover Dam. It would never reach the canal that supplies Imperial Valley.

“I think we would rather come up with voluntary agreements to live with a little bit less, to ensure that we have water,” he says. If you go to a point where you’re at dead pool, you don’t have anything.

It also said Reclamation may also need to restrict downstream water releases from the Hoover Dam itself “in order to protect Hoover Dam operations, system integrity, and public health and safety.”

The Colorado River Irrigation District: How much do we need to share? Mexican-American activist John Benson says it’s a national crisis for the most impoverished communities

Farmers are hoping the government will pay them to use less water. One draft plan that’s circulating among irrigation districts proposes annual payments of $1,500 per acre – almost $1.4 billion in total – in exchange for cutting water use by roughly 20 percent on almost a million acres of farmland. Half of those acres lie within the Imperial Irrigation District.

“Instead of eight cuttings of alfalfa, we might turn off the water in the summer and dry up the field, and let it come back in the fall,” Benson says. We probably will be taking more of our summers off. My kids will be happy.

Roughly 180,000 people, most of them Mexican-American, live here in towns that include El Centro, Calexico, and Brawley. Imperial County is one of the most impoverished places in the state. Some fear that less water, and less farming, means fewer jobs and economic decline.

John Hernandez, a Mexican-American activist, says that there’s also a question of fairness if most of the money that the irrigation district gets for using less water – potentially hundreds of millions of dollars each year – gets passed out to just a few hundred farms.

On the one hand, you have the most disadvantaged community, but on the other hand, you have some of the richest farmers! He says so. “Something is not right when that’s going on in the neighborhood.”

Hernandez says that the crisis on the Colorado River provides a time for the predominantly white people who’ve claimed that water — and the wealth and power that came with it – to share more of it.

The Colorado River is experiencing a serious water shortage, and the US Department of Interior is about to start a fast process to change the water flow operations.

Hydropower is distributed to customers across eight Western states, but experts fear that power could be cut off in the near future because of a decline in the levels of the two Dams.

Negotiations have dragged on and proved contentious, and still it is unclear whether states can come to an agreement. If they do not act, the federal government will take over to save the river system.

At a recent virtual event she said she would rather strike a deal with the states, but the Bureau was prepared to act on its own.

“To me, it expresses a hope that there would be a consensus agreement, which would make life so much easier for the bureau and Secretary of Interior,” said Sarah Porter, the director of the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University. “It’s certainly a signal that the bureau has not forsworn unilateral action.”

A source familiar with the meeting said that California wanted to cut agencies all the way to zero but it also wanted to have one of the options follow the river’s current strict priority system.

A so-called “framework agreement” option where Colorado River basin states, tribes, cities and farmers come to agreement on how much water they can save through voluntary cuts to restabilize Lakes Mead and Powell

Even though a ‘no action’ alternatives is standard in federal environmental impact statements, Porter said it might be useful for Interior to include it to show how huge an absence of action would be to the river system.

The Colorado River System is Protected by the Interior Secretary and the Department of Interior, Mines, and Military Operations – A State Water Official Announces the Arizona Cuts

A final decision on the changes will be released in the summer of next year, according to the bureau. It would go into effect for the next water year in the fall of 2023.

The Interior Secretary said in a Friday statement that they were ready to protect the Colorado River system and everyone who depended on it. The Department is working to better protect the system by changing the interim guidelines for Glen Canyon and Hoover Dams.

And it’s not just farming operations. Other sectors in Arizona, which have a huge presence in the state, like mining and the military,benefit from the state’s water laws. It’s difficult to know how much water is being used up by one of the state’s largest employers, Raytheon Missiles and Defense, which, like Almarai, has a footprint in Arizona and Saudi Arabia. Making missiles has a water cost as well. The product is going to Saudi Arabia.

Failing to do so means either of these lakes, the largest manmade reservoirs in the country, could reach “dead pool” in the next two years, where the water level is too low to flow through the dams and downstream to the communities and farmers that need it.

Western state officials wrote a letter in May agreeing to leave 1 million acre-feet of water in Lake Powell. They watched as the amount of water disappeared due to system losses.

The top Arizona water official said everything they tried to do through the May 3 letter was wiped out by Mother Nature. That could happen again if we don’t understand it. It’s been happening to us almost every year for the past few years.”

There is growing anxiety in the West. The Lower Basin states of California, Nevada and Arizona have had tense negotiations with each other on voluntary water cuts.

There is disagreement on how much water each state should sacrifice and how much money should be paid to reduce their water use.

State negotiators are themselves waiting for the feds to decide how it will dole out $4 billion in drought relief money, which the Biden administration fronted from the Inflation Reduction Act to essentially pay people to not use water.

But, he says, “it makes it a little more difficult because of the uncertainty and not knowing” what the difference will be between the money the federal government is offering, and the voluntary cuts districts are willing to make.

If voluntary cuts don’t come close to what’s needed, the federal government may step in. A court challenge would almost certainly be greeted with that plan.

According to Sarah Porter, the director of the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University, the federal officials are working to prepare for the possibility that they will be sued because of the mandatory cuts.

At a December conference of Colorado River water users, Assistant Secretary of the Department of the Interior Tanya Trujillo addressed that likelihood, according to Porter.

The forecast from the National Weather Service suggests the snow melt will be close to average.

And human-caused climate change is “almost certainly” going to make dry years worse, said Isla Simpson, climate scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

The Southwest region has seen a decline in precipitation over the last 30 years. Simpson said lack of rain and a rise in planet-warming emissions had worsened the situation.

During long periods of heat, dry air can evaporate water from the soil. There is enough rain to fill the Colorado river reservoirs, but the air still sucks up water from what is left of them.

She said there was a high chance that the lack of rain and low snow levels wouldn’t go away soon. Jet streams that carry storms around the globe are expected to shift northward through the winter because of La Nia. That means less rainfall for a region that desperately needs it.

Valley Water: The Colorado River River Problem is a Problem for California, Arizona, and the U.S. Congress can’t “play with fire”

The maximum amount of basin-wide cuts the six states are proposing in their model is 3.1 million acre feet per year. It accounts for water conservation and evaporation and, if approved, could kick in if reservoir levels fall to catastrophically low conditions.

Behind the rift is a decades-long, rancorous relationship between California and Arizona that has collided with a river system in crisis due to years of overuse and climate change-fueled drought.

“The lack of a consensus and six states moving forward with an approach that does not harmonize with the law is troubling,” Hamby said. It is everyone’s best interest to avoid litigation, but being put into a situation where you have six states approaching things in this way raises the risk.

“I think California is playing with fire here,” said David Hayes, a former top climate aide to President Joe Biden, now at Stanford University Law School. “This issue is bigger than any group of water rights holders. The implications of not addressing this issue could affect the economy of the entire state of California.”

As state consensus proves difficult to reach and pressure grows on the federal government to act unilaterally, many negotiators and outside observers are expecting this year to bring litigation that could wind up at the Supreme Court.

Wade Noble, a lawyer for farmers and irrigation districts in Arizona, told CNN that he wasn’t certain if the Supreme Court would take it. I think lawyers want to make sure their team has Supreme Court experience. These are the types of issues that get there.”

Every year, the Imperial Irrigation District uses 3 million acre- feet of Colorado River water, using the same amount as Arizona and Nevada.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/30/us/colorado-river-water-california-arizona-climate/index.html

Water Laws in the Valley of the Colorado River: Proposed Californian Water Law and its Implications for Public Health, Public Safety, and Water Supply

“We’re not going to give up a century of history and position and things that people worked for over a century to protect in two days,” Hamby said of the recent negotiations. Doing away with the priority approach is not acceptable.

“Decisions to cut back water deliveries below the Hoover Dam cannot wait for a complex water rights case to be litigated up through the Supreme Court. That can take years,” Hayes said. “Plus, no legal decision will solve the fundamental problem of insufficient water. That reality has to be faced.

California was proposing following the “law of the river,” which gives farmers in major agricultural districts first dibs on water because they have a priority claim established before other districts’ rights – including Californian cities like Los Angeles, which receives around half of its water from the Colorado River.

The proposal was immediately rejected by the other state officials at the negotiating table, people familiar with the discussions said.

John Enstminger, the general manager for the Southern Nevada Water Authority who was not present at this particular session, told CNN the proposal was a major concern for public health and safety in Western cities.

“If you want to model cutting off most or all of the water supply of 27 million Americans, you can go through the exercise but implementing that on the ground would have the direst consequence for almost 10% of the country,” Entsminger said.

I would not allow the federal government to model a scenario in which the Central Arizona Project goes to zero, even if that was the case under a modeling scenario. “I will not do that. The implications would be pretty severe if CAP went to zero. For tribes and cities, it was severe.

Six-State Water Agreement: a “positive outcome” for the Upper Colorado River Commission and Arizonan Water Official Xiem Buschatzke

Multiple states told CNN that they will try to continue to get an agreement even though talks have been difficult.

The Executive Director of the Upper Colorado River Commission says that they are committed to working together as seven basin states.

Buschatzke, Arizona’s top water official, called the six-state proposal a “very positive outcome” and said he and others would try to keep conversations going with California.

More discussions and negotiations would be ongoing over the next few months, Buschatzke said.

He said that they have not shared any cumulative ballpark with them. I think it is important that we have a ballpark and specific number so we are able to close the necessary reductions.