The Region's Precious resource

What’ll You Pay for Western Water?

By Dan Whipple, 6-09-08

Despite being lectured frequently about water constraints and the preciousness of the resource, I have always been a closet agnostic on the topic. Doubtless, this is because I don’t know enough. But in my thirty-plus years of living on the spine of the continent, I’ve yet to hear of a single project that’s been delayed or canceled because of a water issue. We were once promised that rain would follow the plow. That turned out to be wrong. Water, it seems, actually follows the real estate developer.

I’m an agnostic but not an atheist on western water because lots of smart people keep telling me how valuable it is. They were doing it again on Friday at the University of Colorado Natural Resources Law Center’s Annual Summer Conference. Bart Miller of Western Resources Advocates said, for instance, “Water in the West is too precious to use for intermediate crops – crops that are given to animals.”

But Miller was skeptical about the ability of market forces to establish a proper value for water. “Market forces, if left to their own resources … we’ll end up with a lot of things we don’t like.”

Dave Feldman of the University of California-Irvine, said, “The future of irrigated agriculture should be determined. California’s subsidized irrigation arguably benefited the nation, producing food at a fairly cheap price. On the other hand, the failure to regulate the amount of acreage and develop a fair system led to the concentration of water rights in the hands of the elite.”

Another reason I’ve been skeptical about the value of Western water is that the people who have it don’t treat it like it’s very valuable. Most of the water in the West belongs to the individual states. But they simply turned it over it to the first people who showed up asking for it and have never looked back. State laws governing water allocations have been virtually unchanged since the Earps took out the Clantons. It would seem to me that someone who had an equity position in a valuable commodity would take time to re-examine his investment every couple of hundred years.

Wyoming, for instance, has a water law that says if claimants divide up the water in a stream according to their allocations but there’s still water left, what the heck, just go ahead and take that, too.

What ever happened to the public interest? CU law professor Mark Squillace asks rhetorically. Every Western state except Colorado has a language in its water laws requiring the state to administer water “in the public interest.” But says Squillace, “Despite explicit public interest standards in the laws of most Western states, and despite universal recognition of water resources as public property, states often fail to consider public interest criteria ‘on the record’ of agency decisions.”

And those people who got it on the first-come, first-served basis those many years ago – 80 or 90 percent of Western water (depending on who’s counting) is used in irrigated agriculture – use it mostly to grow stuff we don’t need much, like hay. If the water’s so valuable, how come we’re not swimming in artichokes? These farmers and ranchers don’t act like water’s valuable, either. They make no attempt to save it by using it efficiently. They won’t build storage unless the government pays for it. They don’t fund research. If they ran the oil business that way they would be … well, maybe that’s a poor comparison. But if somebody blessed you with a truckload of hundred dollar bills, would you just spread them around atop the dry land, hoping some of them blossomed into hundred-dollar trees? I didn’t think so.

Herein, it seems to me, lies the crux of the West’s water problems. Such water as there is has been given practically for free to farmers and ranchers. When everybody in the West was a farmer and rancher a hundred years ago, this was no big deal. But now when people want to do things besides raise cows – fish and raft in the rivers, keep the infield dust down at Coors Field, green up their suburban homes and lawns – this distribution of the resource seems old-fashioned.

CU law professor Charles Wilkinson said that recent innovations in Western water law have been “quite inventive.” Several states have passed instream flow legislation, public interest water law firms have been established. But he said, “This is a field where change comes slowly … Is it possible for political leaders or water managers to advance their careers arguing for anything other than predominantly supply-side approaches to addressing water scarcity issues?”

Apart from trying to steal it from one another, the cities and towns also don’t act like water is worth much. Most of them don’t ask developers if they can provide enough water for the houses they plan to put up. In Denver, Albuquerque, Phoenix and lordonlyknows where else, the aquifers on which many people depend are going to dry up before the houses fall down.

And if you think that you’re just going to build another dam to catch some of the precipitation before hit heads downstream, you can forget about it. “Large-scale storage is a thing of the past,” said Bart Miller. “Most good reservoir site have already been used. New ones are likely to have even greater evaporative loss.”

And what about you, Harry Homeowner? How valuable do you consider your water? When you bought your house, did you ask where the water was coming from? Did you check to see if there was enough supply either from your wells or your city to handle existing residents and expected growth during the time you’d be living in it?

No, neither did I.

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