Over the Horizon Line | Hal Rothman

Western Water: Solutions to Overallocation

By Hal Rothman, 2-12-06

Editor's Note: This is part two of a series on Western water from Hal Rothman. Click here for the part one.

The world of water has changed of late and it is about time. For almost 20 years, a gradual shift has been ongoing: water that was historically used for agriculture and ranching is increasingly going to western cities. Called reallocation, this process has become common throughout the West. It is so pervasive that the real question is no longer whether water will be transferred from rural to urban use. The debate concerns the terms of the transfer, how rural communities that cede water will derive fair and valuable benefits from it.

Although this process first gained momentum in California, the Southern Nevada Water Authority gets a good portion of the credit for its systematic implementation. Out of necessity, SNWA reinvented water in the Southwest. Nevada had received such short shrift from the original Colorado River Compact that the Silver State found itself backed against a formidable wall when growth in southern Nevada, began to outstrip groundwater supplies. Forced to rely on federal dollars to ferry its trickle of the Colorado from Lake Mead to Las Vegas, southern Nevada faced a crisis in the 1980s.

The solution was remarkable: change from local water districts that competed with one another like baby pigs fighting for a sow's nipples to a region-wide model that put everybody on the same side and let them sort out their problems among themselves. Rivals became partners, changing a nastily competitive situation, the famed “whiskey’s for drinkin’, water’s for fightin’� of legend, into a cooperative model in which everyone has a seat at the table and people negotiated like grown-ups rather than squabbling children.

In Nevada, this shared solution has already put an end to the travesties of yore, when communities opened up fire hydrants and spilled water into desert streets to maintain their claim to their “share.� This century-old pattern of wastefulness had been common practice, the legal requisite for maintaining a place at the table. That situation bred bad behavior. Better planning and an original way of thinking about the distribution of resources has already led to significantly better outcomes.

Stunningly, Las Vegas has produced substantive changes. The city that everyone loves to deride has developed a powerfully effective water conservation program. Since 2003, the community has added more than 150,000 people. In 2005, the Valley used 15 billion gallons of water less than it did in 2003, roughly 52,000 acre feet. While such an accomplishment is always subject to backsliding, Las Vegas has saved 1/6 of Nevada’s annual share of the Colorado River while adding a midsized city to its population. No southwestern city can match that accomplishment.

Such farsighted thinking is happening all over the region. The Salt River Project (SRP) in Phoenix has been a leader. 20 years ago, 80% of the project’s water went to agriculture and ranching. In 2003, SRP’s water use was more than 65% urban. Phoenix’s economy has carried the state, and SRP’s leadership is a crucial part of Arizona's success.

In February 2006, the river states agreed to reshape the way the river is managed, with all seven states signing on. This step, which is based around drought management, has created administrative rules that put all the river states on the same side of the table. This is unprecedented, an extremely valuable step forward. But it alone is not enough.

Let's scrap the existing Colorado River Compact and write a new one for the 21st Century. A new law of the river could take into account environmental legislation, the shift of population and income to cities, fluctuation in water quantity, water quality, and countless other contingencies that didn’t exist 80 years ago. It could create a Colorado River for the needs of today and tomorrow, not one beholden to a flawed and long gone past.

A real “law of the river� could begin by taking the federally legislated allocations of water and assigning those on the basis of existing law. Prior commitments and legislatively mandated uses would come first. This would allow for the fulfillment of federal mandates, make allowances for environmental and other kinds of legislation, and guarantee water for wildlife refuges, Native American communities, and others who depend on the river for survival. After these mandatory allocations, the rest of the water could be divided by participating stakeholders, who would decide the economic viability of proposed uses according to locally determined standards set in a regional, state-wide, and ultimately interstate framework.

Once this water was divided, it would begin to generate income. The funds from it could be split between those who gave it up and the entities that administered the process. In that way, two social goods would occur: the people who gave up the water will be fairly and justly compensated and be able to go forward with their lives. We would also have the resources to maintain existing infrastructure and to expand it to meet new demand, allowing economic growth to continue.

Nobody should be forced to give up their water. Nor should anybody be able to stymie economic progress for their own selfish purposes. There is a happy medium and we can achieve it. We must sit at the table and negotiate with a clear understanding of every stakeholder’s needs and wants. As the region grows, this question will become more acute. Attacking the real issue now rather than later puts us ahead of the game.

The solution is simultaneously revolutionary and painful: a fundamental reallocation of the river’s resources must take place. We are an urban society that produces its wealth in cities and enjoys its leisure in open spaces. The water that once irrigated cotton outside Yuma now figuratively powers the Schlitterbahn, an attraction at a New Braunfels, Texas, waterpark.

These changes will not take all the water in the rural West. In fact, what I propose will probably take less water from farmers and ranchers than the existing process. Former Secretary of the Interior James Watt once remarked that he believed that administrative changes were more permanent than statutory ones. If he's correct, then the rural West is in greater danger now that it would be if a new Colorado River Compact was implemented.

In any reallocation, there will be winners and losers and those who give up their water must be treated fairly and compensated in a uniquely generous manner. The long-delayed agreement between California’s Imperial Valley and San Diego can serve as a model. The deal could not be completed until the residents of the valley received safeguards for their economic future.

By centralizing water in an economically inefficient way, the existing Colorado River Compact impoverishes the future. It slows job growth in urban areas, making it harder for the middle-class of the future to thrive. It even hurts democracy, for it makes it harder for people to find their way to a vested interest in the system. That water could create good jobs that led to new mortgages, to prosperity for people until now left out of the American dream.

The economic realities of the 21st-century scream for a new Colorado River Compact. American demography has long ago shifted south and west; national politics are inherently a Sunbelt strategy; the last American president elected without claiming Sunbelt origins was John F. Kennedy. Even in its worst moments, California is the world’s fifth largest economy.

The result might very well be a kind of economic expansion we have not yet seen as well as better safeguards for nature, plants, and animals that we currently have. Not only can we erase nearly a century of bad policy, we can create a more efficient, fairer, more environmentally sound, and more productive system that lets more people have a shot at middle-class life. This revolution is already underway. We’re really discussing its terms. The West deserves a better distribution of its most precious resource.

Hal K. Rothman is Professor and Barrick Distinguished Scholar at the Department of History at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas. Considered the one of the nation’s leading expert on tourism, travel, and post-industrial economies, he is the award-winning author of countless books, including the widely acclaimed Neon Metropolis: How Las Vegas Started the 21st Century (2002), Devil’s Bargains: Tourism in the Twentieth Century American West, (1998 ), Saving the Planet: The American Response to the Environment in the Twentieth Century (2000), which received the 1999 Western Writers of America Spur Award for Contemporary Nonfiction, and many others.

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