"Western Water Policy --From Reclamation to Restoration"
University of Colorado, Boulder June 8, 1999
Natural Resource Law Center's Program on Western Water Law and Policy
Remarks of Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt

Like the rivers of the West, western water policy is continually changing course, meandering, eddying, running in new channels, building by accretion on one bank while eroding the other. Sometimes, however, a stream makes a clean break, abandoning the old channel to create a new course - a process known as avulsion.

As we come to the end of this century, western water policy is now going through an avulsive change, taking us into new channels. Many of these changes are documented in the Report of the Western Water Policy Review Advisory Committee which will be discussed at this conference. The report also makes important recommendations for the future, all of which merit serious discussion. For my part, I would like to review the changes that I have been party to during this Administration.

The era of the large reclamation project is winding down to conclusion. The water supplies that have been developed over the past century of reclamation are truly impressive and they should be sufficient for the next century. Our challenge is not to build more dams, but to operate them in a more river friendly way as we are now doing at Glen Canyon and Shasta. Our task is not to irrigate more lands, but to promote more efficient use of water on lands now in production. Our task is not to develop new supplies, but to make better use of those that already exist. We do have allocation and distribution problems, but they can be resolved through use of water markets, conservation and other innovations. The big task of the coming century will be to restore rivers, wetlands and fisheries.

Not everyone agrees with these views. I recall, back in 1976, when a western Attorney General signed an amicus brief in a dispute over protection of a rare desert fish found only at a place called Devil's Hole. If the Supreme Court were to rule for the pupfish and against nearby groundwater pumpers, he predicted that "Arizona as we know it today will not survive." The decision, he warned, would wreak "economic havoc" on his state, "possibly preclud[ing] future growth and development, " and make cities like Tucson "ghost towns." It would make state water rights "worthless."

Well, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the pupfish, and Arizona, twenty five years later, has hardly withered away. And the prophet who gave those warnings is the speaker before you today.

Today I intend to show: that we can live in balance with our natural environment and how there is sufficient developed water for today and for the future, provided that we use it efficiently, and engage markets, modern science and conservation to live and develop within sensible limits.

'Well and good,' you may say, 'but what about Phoenix and Las Vegas and San Diego? Aren't they running out of water? How can they continue to absorb thousands of new residents each month?

To answer that question, let me lead you to three existing water holes; water holes that can be tapped without further destruction of our environment. If I cannot induce the skeptics to drink, I can at least show them the water in confidence that sooner or later they will begin, however cautiously, to sip.

Let's start with the nearest water hole - with the name of "Conservation and Efficiency." This water hole is no mirage shimmering on the far horizon: it is water already paid for and ready for delivery on demand. In Phoenix, Los Angeles and other western cities, 40 percent of the water supply is used for watering lawns and landscaping. Conservation should begin by recognizing that western cities were not meant to resemble Brazilian rainforests or suburbs of Minneapolis. If a city wants more growth it already has the water at hand by moving toward sustainable, desert friendly landscaping.

In southern California the Metropolitan Water district has managed to hold water consumption level, even as the population of its service has grown by twenty percent: it has managed this by pricing policies, encouraging low head showers, more efficient toilets and other water reuse practices. Pricing policies are demonstrably effective, yet many communities, including Reno, Sacramento and Fresno, still do not use water meters, thereby perpetuating the notion that water is so plentiful as to be virtually a free commodity.

There are equally large savings available in agriculture through lining of canals to prevent seepage, laser leveling of fields, pumpback systems, drip irrigation systems, and effluent exchanges.

I acknowledge that, even though there is clearly enough water for our needs at the Conservation water hole, there are cultural and political realities that constrain the changes that must take place.

So, let's move on to the second water hole: water markets.

Over the past century, western water supplies were developed at the federal, state and local level with intensive public financing and control. Given the scarcity of water and the huge investments necessary, this bureaucratic model was perhaps inevitable, but today we are struggling with the constraints of that approach.

Water supplies are not responsive to market signals of supply and demand. Were water available in the market place, communities in need of water could simply purchase water supplies from other users who have less need, just as other resources are allocated. Third party impacts are a legitimate concern, particularly in rural communities, but there are many ways to mitigate these impacts without freezing water supplies in place forever.

As a practical matter, water markets usually means water transfers from agriculture to urban uses. The reason is simple. Agriculture uses some 80% of the developed water in the West, and agricultural efficiencies could easily save 10% of that amount which could augment urban water supplies by more than a third. In this Administration, we have worked to overcome the institutional barriers and to facilitate water transfer agreements between willing buyers and willing sellers.

And these efforts are bearing fruit. In recent months, the Department has worked intensively with the city of San Diego, the Metropolitan Water District, the Imperial Irrigation District, the Coachella Valley Irrigation District, and the State of California to reach an agreement on the transfer of up to 200,000 acre feet of water from the Imperial Valley to be conveyed to San Diego through the MWD aqueduct. We are now within closing distance of this, the largest water transfer in western history, and when it is accomplished, it should put to rest the skeptics' claim that water transfers are unworkable.

The Department has worked with Arizona and Nevada to augment the Colorado River water available to Las Vegas through an innovative agreement that works like this: Las Vegas pays to store Colorado River water in Arizona groundwater basins, and in return obtains credits allowing that city to take equivalent amounts of water directly from Lake Mead. This arrangement demonstrates the creativity than can be applied to the solution of water supply problems.

Well and good, the skeptics may say, but the West can have long droughts, and surely that means that we must have huge amounts of storage. And that takes us to the third undeveloped water hole: groundwater storage.

In the reclamation era, the response to all water supply problems was the big, stream killing dam. Never mind that surface storage is not very efficient; Lake Mead loses a million acre feet per year to evaporation as does Lake Powell, that is more than ten percent of the average flow of the Colorado River, enough to supply a city the size of Los Angeles.

The better alternative is to store water beneath the ground by recharging depleted groundwater basins. When rivers have surplus flood flows, the water can be drawn off and stored without the destructive consequences of building dams. Arizona is now recharging an average of 500,000 acre feet of water each year with Colorado River water. In many states, however, the absence of adequate groundwater codes to define the rights of users has greatly slowed the move from surface to groundwater storage.

The move to groundwater storage does not mean that we can do without in stream dams. But some dams have outlived their purpose or could have their functions served in less destructive ways. Last summer I joined state officials in taking a sledgehammer to McPherrin dam, a small diversion dam on Butte Creek in the Sacramento Valley, that blocked salmon from spawning upstream into the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. A simple siphon system was substituted to deliver water to farmers. A year later some 20,000 spawning salmon were counted at this site, where fewer than a thousand had appeared in previous years.

And where more storage is demonstrably necessary, and groundwater basins are not available, the better alternative will be off stream storage, as this administration proposes for the Animas La Plata project.

It is time to acknowledge that the natural values of river systems can no longer be treated as table scraps, leftover after every conceivable consumptive appetite has been fully satisfied. A river is a living resource, entitled to at least parity with consumptive uses. Aldo Leopold once wrote that to understand a landscape, it is necessary to "Think like a mountain"; we must now pause to "think like a river."

That means that, in every watershed we should work toward a baseline necessary to maintain a healthy, natural system, below which water depletions should not take place.

Setting a river entitlement for in stream flows is hardly a new idea, but in recent years it has gained new vitality. In 1983, the California Supreme Court resurrected the public trust doctrine to save Mono Lake and its migratory bird populations by limiting upstream diversions into the Los Angeles aqueducts. In 1992 the Congress directed the Interior Department to scale back transbasin diversions from the Trinity River as necessary to restore the salmon fisheries. In the California Delta, the Clean Water Act was the basis of the Bay Delta Accord setting salinity standards to protect both fisheries and agricultural lands. And on the Animas River in Colorado, the Endangered Species Act has established minimum flows as the pre-condition for proposed off stream storage in the Animas La Plata project.

Finally, I would like to discuss the process by which we make water policy within river basins. In the reclamation age now past, decisions affecting rivers were made one project at a time by a priesthood of technocrats - the Bureau of Reclamation, the Corps of Engineers, state water engineers, and a few key committee chairmen in Washington.

In the coming century water policy must be made in the context of the entire watershed. Water is a natural resource with no fixed address, any water use inevitably affects many other uses, both upstream and downstream. That means that all stakeholders have a stake in every decision, and that in turn requires that they be included in the decision making process.

Moreover, water policy making at the watershed level draws in many agencies in a unique blend of judicial processes (steam adjudications), classic rulemaking (Clean Water Act), interstate compacts, administrative licensing (Federal Energy Regulatory Commission), discretionary policy (reclamation and restoration), and a new hybrid process (Endangered Species Act) all stirred together with state laws and regulations. No agency is a law unto itself and the best results can emerge only from the process of engagement, disputation and consensus building.

In this context, I have reservations about the various proposals for "River Basin Governance" set forth in the Commission report. These concepts surface anew in each generation, and reflect the political scientist's desire for administrative efficiency, tidy organization charts, and streamlined decision making -all noticeably lacking at present. But water is so central to our communities in the West that we are understandably reluctant to delegate to anyone, at whatever level, expanded authority over the use of this resource.

This emerging style of multiparty, multiagency, stakeholder intensive policy development is inefficient, time consuming, slow, expensive - and effective. It works and that is the best reason for continuing on this path. Let us examine a few examples.

Consider the spike flow at the Glen Canyon. Standing on a catwalk at dawn on March, 18, 1996, I turned a valve and stood back as huge jets of water arced outward from the dam face, starting a controlled flood of 45,000 cubic feet per second on its way downstream through the Grand Canyon. The flood that I was releasing to restore the beaches and the habitat of the Grand Canyon was the result of 10 years of study, a multi-volume environmental impact statement and endless meetings and consultations among federal agencies, state agencies, cities, trout fishermen, Indian tribes, river runners, the National Park Service and three other land management agencies.

Ten years is a long time considering that it took only seven years to build the dam. Back then, however, there were only a few stakeholders (power companies and irrigation districts) and one decision maker (The Bureau of Reclamation). No one bothered to think of, much less study, the effects on downstream river habitat as variable dam releases flowed through Grand Canyon National Park.

The Platte River is another example. The crisis was triggered by the expiration of a hydro power license at McConaughy Dam in western Nebraska. But intervention in the licensing proceeding promptly expanded the issues into a consideration of the rights of irrigation water users on the North Platte in Wyoming, storage rights on the South Platte system in Colorado, groundwater pumping in Nebraska, protection of the river habitat used in the spring by the great migrations of sandhill and whooping cranes, and interstate delivery obligations. As a result the licensing proceeding metamorphosed into a process where the Department and the Governors of Wyoming, Colorado and Nebraska have created a process to negotiate and adjust conflicts within the entire basin.

In Arizona, the largest Indian water settlement ever attempted is now under negotiation in a cooperative effort with Senator Kyl, the Arizona Department of Water Resources, the Interior Department, Arizona Indian tribes and other water users. In reality, the process, because it involves so many parties, might be more accurately labeled, not an Indian water settlement, but a greater Arizona water settlement.

The most comprehensive approach to developing stakeholder consensus on an entire watershed is now underway in the Central Valley of California. As that desert blossomed into vast tracts of irrigated agriculture, rivers like the San Joaquin disappeared into irrigation canals. Huge pumps sucked water from the Delta, sending it south to the thirsty cities of southern California. The great salmon stocks that once ran from the Pacific to the Sierra declined toward extinction.

In 1993, the Department and the state of California convened stakeholders in a protracted negotiation that lead to the Bay Delta Accord of 1994. The process was then formalized into Cal-Fed, charged by Governor Wilson and President Clinton with working toward a comprehensive water resource plan. In 1994, California voters signaled their support for this process by approving a billion dollar water bond issue. Congressional support has followed.

Many similar processes are now underway in Nevada, Oregon, Montana, and other states. Each of them is characterized by a desire to step away from stale ideological arguments, to get down on the ground, and to find workable compromises that will enable every community to prosper and to live in harmony with Creation. And that is our task for the coming century.

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