U.S. Water News Online
SAN DIEGO -- Four Southern California agencies that have failed to reach a major Colorado River water-sharing pact were still bickering recently with just a month left to clinch a deal.
As state and federal officials held a news conference touting all they had done to bring the four agencies to the brink of a deal, the head of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California told his board that talks were going nowhere.
The four agencies will have to resolve the disputes that have held up a deal by Sept. 12, when the California Legislature adjourns for the year, said Richard Katz, a senior adviser to Gov. Gray Davis on water issues. Key environmental and financial provisions of the water pact must be approved before then.
Katz, speaking at a news conference in Sacramento, said the Oct. 7 gubernatorial recall had not affected the water talks.
``This has a timeline of its own and a critical mass of its own that is independent of anything else going on,'' he said.
An agreement continued to elude the four Southern California water agencies that met again behind closed doors this week in Sacramento. Discussions appeared to be hung up on who would bear the costs of environmental mitigation.
Negotiations broke down when three agencies rejected demands by Metropolitan that the costs should be borne by water users, according to a memo by Metropolitan's chief executive, Ronald Gastelum, to his board.
The 75-year water-sharing deal long sought by the Interior Department and the six other Western states that share the Colorado is designed to reduce California's long-standing overuse of the river so the other states can claim their fair share.
Interior Secretary Gale Norton cut the amount of water California can draw from the river this year by 15 percent as punishment for the state's failure to reach an agreement by Dec. 31, 2002. The state will be able to draw the surplus water until 2016 when a deal is approved.
Metropolitan, however, has decided not to accept surplus water from the drought-stricken Colorado and says it has sufficient supplies to satisfy of its 17 million people.
The drought may eliminate the possibility of any surplus water, according to an Aug. 12 letter from Gastelum to state and federal officials. If it accepted surplus water, Metropolitan would be obligated to provide Arizona up to 1 million acre-feet of water if drought persists and Arizona faces shortages, Gastelum wrote.
Assistant Interior Secretary Bennett Raley said any outstanding federal issues related to the deal had been resolved. He said he had drafted a 10-page summary that eliminated exit clauses for the first 35 years in the hopes of resolving some of the concerns raised by six other Western states that share the Colorado.
``From a federal perspective, our work is done,'' Raley said in Sacramento.
The Salton Sea remained another stumbling block in the talks. The sea, a huge sump created a century ago by an engineering mishap, would quickly become too salty for fish and birds if it weren't for water running off farm fields in the Imperial Valley.
The state Department of Water Resources has agreed to explore a billion-dollar plan to shrink the size of the sea and restore it to health. If the plan is feasible, farm runoff that would otherwise have flowed into the sea could be desalinated and offered to the rest of the state.
While Imperial offered to make 800,000 acre-feet of water available over 15 years, Metropolitan balked at a request to ship the water at a discount of up to $200 million through its vast aqueduct, according to Gastelum's memo to the board.
``They're basically doing what we would call an aqueduct grab,'' said Adan Ortega, a Metropolitan spokesman. ``They accuse us of trying to steal their water and they're trying to steal our aqueduct.''
Return to the U.S. Water News Archives page Or Return to the U.S. Water News Homepage
Editor@uswaternews.com
*Your Name:
*Your Email:
*Friend's Email:
Use a comma to separate e-mail addresses:
*Your Comments:
Hi, I thought you might like to read this article.
*Required Fields