Daniel Salzler No. 1032
EnviroInsight.org
Five Items January 17, 2020
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1. MLK Day Clean Up with Friends of the Verde River
January 20th. Join us for a morning of service and rewarding work towards cleaning the Oak Creek and Verde River Watersheds! Oak Creek Watershed Council and Friends of the Verde River have collaborated this MLK Day in order to improve the overall quality of these watersheds. Be sure to RSVP at www.cvent.com/d/9hqvq8.
We’ll meet at the Arizona Cypress Trailhead in Sedona off of Boynton Pass Rd. on Forest more about Oak Creek and its watershed. At 9, we will break into groups to target certain areas that need some TLC! At around 11:30 we will meet back at the starting point to sort and weigh the trash and recyclables and end the event with an official total amount of trash and debris removed from the watershed.
Bring warm hearts, hiking shoes, appropriate clothing for both the morning and afternoon in Sedona (it could be very cool in the morning to very mild by the end of the event), sunscreen, enough water for three hours, snacks and/or lunch. We will provide all cleaning supplies, including gloves, safety vests, and trash bags.
Invite your friends and family, and again, be sure to register!
Please do not hesitate to contact OCWC Lead Ambassador, Elise Guzman with any questions at elise.guzman36@gmail.com.
2. Teamwork will be key to balancing the overcommitted Colorado River. PHOENIX – Along with long-term drought and climate change, the overcommitment of the Colorado River is a big reason why Lake Mead has dropped to historic levels in recent years. Fixing it could be a big problem for Arizona. “Unfortunately, Arizona’s facing some of the largest cuts, and it really puts Arizona in a political vice,” said Brad Udall, a research scientist at Colorado State University. “You can’t take that much water out of the (Central Arizona Project) canal, the entire 1.2 million acre-feet, and do justice to Arizona’s water needs. Yet that’s what the 1968 law says.”
The 1968 law is the Colorado River Basin Project Act. It loaned federal money to build the Central Arizona Project but created a long-lasting downside for the state: The water rights for Central Arizona Project customers are junior to California’s water rights when there’s a shortage. CAP customers currently receive roughly 1.4 million acre-feet a year. So the easy answer to the structural deficit could be, tough luck, central Arizona. But that’s definitely not the view of Tom Bushcatzke, director of Arizona’s Department of Water Resources. He said the river’s structural deficit is due to evaporation in Lake Mead and evapotranspiration as water travels from Mead to Mexico. In his mind, it’s not just Arizona’s responsibility.
“Arizona, Nevada, California and Mexico, in order to get their allocations delivered to them, are all part and parcel of the creation of the structural deficit,” he said. “We all need to participate in the resolution.”
John Fleck, co-author of “Science Be Damned: How Ignoring Inconvenient Science Drained the Colorado River,” called Buschatzke’s stance “very reasonable” and said evaporation in the Lower Basin of the Colorado River simply isn’t accounted for right now.
“To be more realistic about how evaporation is allocated I think is a smart way to do this,” said Fleck, who teaches water resource management at the University of New Mexico.
But that may prove too simple, given the long legal history of the allocation-priority system and the need to get all seven Colorado River Basin states on board to adjust the water rules.
Bill Hasencamp manages Colorado River resources for the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which serves water to utilities in six counties in the Los Angeles and San Diego areas. He is open to sharing the pain but said the priority system is important.
“I think there’s some balance where the priority system is recognized and Arizona maybe has to do a little bit more, but that all states and all water users have to be part of the solution,” he said.
California as a whole has the largest allocation in the Lower Basin: 4.4 million acre- feet a year. Hasencamp doesn’t think basin states have to explicitly close the structural deficit. “The entire Colorado River Basin is out of balance and all states, all seven states and Mexico have to figure out how to permanently live with less water,” he said.
Augmentation
Buschatzke pointed out something else about the 1968 law: It says the federal government should look into augmenting the Colorado River. The text of the law reads “the Secretary of the Interior shall conduct full and complete reconnaissance investigations for the purpose of developing a general plan to meet the future water needs of the Western United States.” It also requires periodic progress reports. Buschatzke said that augmentation plan hasn’t happened. “There’s never been a mechanism found to do that. That would certainly have changed the reliability of Arizona’s water supply, of all of our water supplies in Nevada, California and Mexico if that had been done,” he said. “It hasn’t been done.”
Fleck called the law’s language on augmentation “extremely weak” and said there’s an argument the feds have done enough already.
The most likely option for meaningful augmentation is desalinated ocean water. Investment in “desal” has grown around the world, although it has significant environmental consequences. However it might be achieved, augmenting the river would be costly and long term.
Conservation
Another way to close the structural deficit might be to reduce water use in a multitude of ways – something that’s already happening. All four Lower Basin states are on track to use less than their full allocations this year. The question is whether those savings can be made permanent. Ted Cooke, general manager of the agency that runs the Central Arizona Project, said Arizonans “know how to do this,” even if closing the gap takes ideas that haven’t yet materialized.
“We’re really good at balancing those things in Arizona to have the lifestyle and the economic vibrancy that we enjoy by making sacrifices when we have to,” he said.
Cooke also said people need to remember the basics as Arizona plans for the future: We live in a desert, water is scarce, and the price is only going in one direction: up.
He isn’t alone in his optimism. Many water experts are somewhat hopeful about fixing the structural deficit, even those mindful of how hard water policy can be politically. “If there’s any basin in the world that can solve this, I’m convinced it’s actually the Colorado River basin,” Udall said. “It’s the right size, it has people who know each other, it has years of goodwill. I mean, that’s the good news here.”
Watering the West required optimism, engineering and money. Sustaining it will, too.
This story is part of Elemental: Covering Sustainability, a multimedia collaboration between Cronkite News, Arizona PBS, KJZZ, KPCC, Rocky Mountain PBS and PBS SoCal.
3. CRWUA Conference provides clarity on “next steps” after this year’s historic DCP implementation 12/18/2019
4. Colorado River users – and the 40 million people served by the river – received clarity moving into 2020 at the 2019 Colorado River Water Users Association (CRWUA) conference in Las Vegas.
There, Secretary of the Interior David Bernhardt announced that “the Department will immediately begin work on a new report that will analyze the effectiveness of current Colorado River operational rules to ensure continued reliable water and power resources across the Southwest – a year ahead of when the current rules require the report.” The report will be a review of the effectiveness of Colorado River operations since enactment of the 2007 Guidelines, including the implementation of the Drought Contingency Plans (DCP) in 2019. The evaluation of the effectiveness of the 2007 Guidelines is a mandatory first step in what has come to be called the “Reconsultation” – the process that will lead to next set of rules for managing the Colorado River and the River’s major reservoirs when the current Guidelines expire at the end of 2026. The Secretary’s comments echoed the remarks made earlier at CRWUA by U.S. Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Brenda Burman, that it was too early to begin work on developing the next set of operating rules – that would get in the way of implementing DCP and the evaluation of the 2007 Guidelines. Arizona’s next steps in this process are already underway. Central Arizona Project (CAP) General Manager Ted Cooke and Arizona Department of Water Resources Director Tom Buschatzke began meeting with Arizona’s DCP Steering Committee delegates two months ago to initiate post-DCP discussions. The announcements from the Department of the Interior are consistent with the expectations and approach underway by CAP and ADWR.
At the federal level, the immediate work is to prepare a report that will analyze the effectiveness of the Guidelines. This will take some time to accomplish, but the early start sets the stage for the second step of the Reconsultation, which will be the development of the next program, which will need to be in place in 2026. The Secretary estimated it would take about a year to complete the new report. The Basin States and other experts would be consulted as part of the report preparation process.
Said Barnhardt, “This conference brings together the best ideas for managing the Colorado River. This year’s historic agreements once again demonstrated that the best way to protect the Colorado River is collaboration and cooperation, not litigation. Looking ahead, we are eager to complete a review of our current operations by leveraging that collaborative approach to identify lessons learned from rules that have guided our operations since 2007. Thank you to CRWUA for providing the forum for launching this initiative.”
CRWUA is the only association focused solely on Colorado River issues. It provides an opportunity for those with interest in the river to convene and discuss issues. The CRWUA conference also provides the opportunity for the U.S. Department of the Interior to speak to Colorado River users in one venue.
This year’s conference featured a resolution recognizing the 130th anniversary of the International Boundary and Water Commission (IBWC) and the 75th anniversary of the 1944 Treaty Concerning the Utilization of Waters of the Colorado and Tijuana Rivers and of the Rio Grande. The 1944 Treaty established a framework that provides significant and enduring benefits to Colorado River water users in the United States and Mexico and stands as an example of international cooperation and collaboration.
At this year’s conference, Central Arizona Water Conservation District (CAWCD) Board President Lisa Atkins moderated the Augmentation Colloquium, which featured a panel including CAP Colorado Programs Manager Chuck Cullom. Central Arizona Project General Manager Ted Cooke also served on a panel regarding the Interim Guidelines.
5. WRCC Registration for the WRRC Annual Conference, “Water at the Crossroads: The Next 40 Years”, is open at the special early bird rate of $110, with a student rate of only $50. Thank you to our sponsors for making these low rates possible! Because this year’s conference will explore a number of comprehensive water management topics, our conference planning committee thought it would be useful to hold a series of background webinars to refresh our knowledge and found our discussion on a common base of information. The seminars will provide an overview of the Groundwater Management Act, fill us in on the Governor’s Water
Augmentation, Innovation, and Conservation Council with an emphasis
on the Desalination Committee, and offer updates about CAP-connected management efforts, including the Drought Contingency Plan, water recovery and wheeling, and the Central Arizona Groundwater Replenishment District.
The conference is on Friday, March 27, 2020 from 8:00 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. at the Black Canyon Conference Center, 9440 North 25th Avenue, Phoenix, AZ 85021. For more information, go on line to https://wrrc.arizona.edu/wrrc-conference-2020 utm_source=WRRC+Weekly+Wave%2C+Vol.+7%2C+Issue+33+%2812%2F2 0%2F19%29+&utm_campaign=WW-12-20-19&utm_medium=email
