Hiltzik: The ancient enmities over the Colorado River’s water

Arizona was girding for warfare with California over the Colorado River.

The yr was 1934 and the place was the development website of Parker Dam, downstream from the almost accomplished Hoover Dam.

Arizona Gov. Benjamin Baker Moeur, irked {that a} federally permitted interstate compact had awarded California extra water from the Colorado than he thought it deserved, dispatched a squad of Nationwide Guard troops to the river on a ferryboat to dam the brand new dam’s building.

The ferryboat Julia B., derisively dubbed the “flagship” of the “Arizona Navy” by a Occasions warfare correspondent assigned to cowl the skirmish, promptly ran aground on a sandbar.

After Inside Secretary Harold Ickes imposed a truce between the 2 states, the guardsmen returned dwelling from the warfare zone to be hailed as “conquering heroes.”

This encounter, bristling with Gilbert & Sullivan absurdity, solely hints on the bitter animosities among the many seven states of the Colorado River Basin which have simmered since they reached a compact — primarily an interstate treaty — apportioning the waters of the river in 1922.

Extra exactly, six of these states — Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah and Wyoming — have seen California with alarm, satisfied that any apportionment proposal supplied by the most important and most populous state within the basin is subtly designed to make sure its domination of the river’s bounty.

During the last century, California has fought fiercely to protect its legally sanctioned proper to 4.4 million acre-feet of Colorado River water per yr. (An acre-foot, about 326,000 gallons, is sufficient to serve one or two households for a yr.)

This battle, born in negotiations over the seven-state compact reached in 1922 and the Boulder Canyon Venture Act of 1928, which approved the constructing of Hoover Dam, explains why the states failed to satisfy a Jan. 31 federal deadline to restructure their water rights to accommodate the calls for of almost unrestrained development and the implacable realities of worldwide warming.

California’s voracious urge for food for Colorado River water was not essentially an unreasonable concern in 1922: Though solely 6,000 of the 244,000 sq. miles of the Colorado watershed are in California, the state was by far essentially the most totally developed of the seven states, accounting for 415,000 of the 587,000 irrigated acres within the river basin north of the Mexican border.

Neither is it unreasonable even now: California’s inhabitants of 39 million is almost twice that of the opposite six states mixed.

As my colleague Ian James reports, the deadlock has resulted from California issuing its personal restructuring proposal whereas the opposite six states agreed amongst themselves on a framework for negotiating reapportionment. California‘s plan would decrease its losses within the renegotiation whereas imposing extra stringent reductions on Arizona and Nevada.

Reflecting the lengthy historical past of competition, the Colorado River Board of California, which drafted the plan, was — let’s assume? — lower than fully gracious towards the opposite states, particularly Arizona, when it presented the proposal to the Inside Division.

Noting that California had labored for years to succeed in shortage-sharing agreements amongst its personal competing agricultural, city and environmental stakeholders, board Chairman J.B. Hamby wrote that “California’s intrastate agreements aren’t properly understood exterior of California.”

Simply as California discovered methods to “stay inside its legally designated water rights,” Hamby continued, “so too might the state of Arizona be required to make comparable preparations to stay inside its obtainable Colorado River water provides.”

Much more pointedly, Hamby maintained that the failure to succeed in a seven-state consensus would imply that the “Regulation of the River” would prevail — that’s, the compact, the Boulder Canyon Act, and subsequent courtroom rulings and different agreements which have ruled apportionment so far, together with California’s 4.4-million-acre-foot assure.

That’s a place the opposite states think about to be unduly legalistic, given the modifications within the Colorado watershed wreaked by development and world warming during the last century.

It’s value going again in time to revisit the origins of the interstate friction. The impetus for the enormous dam on the Colorado got here from California farmers within the Imperial Valley, whose livelihoods had been nearly destroyed by a flood in 1905-06 attributable to the incompetent building of a canal to deliver irrigation water west from the river.

Constructing a dam for flood management and irrigation would plainly be unattainable except the seven states of the basin might agree on tips on how to divide up the water. Supervision of the contentious negotiations was positioned within the palms of then-Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover, who was regarded as sufficiently tough-minded to deliver the states to heel.

Within the occasion, Hoover struggled with the duty. The primary stumbling block throughout negotiations in Santa Fe, N.M., was California’s insistence {that a} assure of a dam on the decrease Colorado be a part of the compact, a situation not one of the different states would settle for.

Lastly, Hoover summoned the California delegation to his resort room to upbraid them crisply for his or her “outrageous, scandalous” demand. He threatened to “disband this convention, announce that Boulder Dam venture is useless, and that you’re the individuals who killed Cock Robin.”

To his dismay, the Californians rose collectively and stomped out of the room — forcing Hoover to comply with them out the door, pleading with them to remain. Because it occurred, his risk labored: The subsequent day, the seven state delegations permitted the ultimate draft of the Colorado River Compact, together with a separate decision urging “the early building of works within the Colorado River to manage the floods” as a nonbinding sop to California.

The Colorado River Compact would develop into the founding doc of the Regulation of the River. However solely six of the seven states ratified it in 1922. The lone holdout was Arizona, whose governors lengthy cherished the assumption that the compact was merely a plot to permit California to empty the river to its coronary heart’s content material.

Arizona lastly ratified the compact in 1944, with an eye fixed towards a possible postwar surge in inhabitants. It subsequently scored what appeared to be a serious victory with a choice by the Supreme Court docket in 1963 within the epic lawsuit Arizona vs. California, which staggered to its conclusion after 11 years within the federal judicial system.

The courtroom restricted California to the 4.4 million acre-feet written into the Boulder Canyon Venture Act, which had approved the constructing of Hoover Dam, and assured Arizona 2.8 million acre-feet a yr. But on nearer inspection this was a Pyrrhic victory at finest, for the courtroom additionally dominated that the only real authority to apportion surpluses and shortages from the Colorado belonged to the federal authorities.

Henceforth, all of the conflicts over water in California and the West — between cities and farms, humid areas and desert zones, Southern and Northern California — can be adjudicated within the Washington workplace of the secretary of the Inside. For many years, successive Inside secretaries have tried handy that duty again to the states, however nearly invariably they should step in and impose some kind of order.

That appears to be occurring once more. Now that the states have breached the Inside Division’s Jan. 31 deadline, the company might should step in to mandate a settlement.

That won’t be straightforward. Each time an answer to battle over the Colorado appears to have been reached, it has been undone by nature and man’s handiwork. It was thought that the compact and the constructing of Hoover Dam would put an finish to 50 years of battle over the water of the Colorado. They didn’t.

The Supreme Court docket’s 1963 choice appeared to verify Arizona’s declare, however 5 years later the state goaded the federal authorities into funding the Central Arizona Venture, right this moment a 336-mile system of pipelines, pumps and electrical producing vegetation that serve some 80% of the state’s residents, placing ever extra pressure on its apportioned water provide.

In 2003, then-Inside Secretary Gale Norton got here out to the dam to signal 24 agreements transferring water rights amongst varied claimants — together with Indian tribes, irrigation districts, Western cities and the federal government of Mexico. She proclaimed, “With these agreements, battle on the river is stilled.”

That didn’t occur. The reality is that battle on the river won’t ever be stilled as a result of there’ll at all times be extra demand for the water than there’s water. As I reported in “Colossus,” my 2010 book about the building of Hoover Dam, Hoover and his deputy, Arthur Powell Davis, connived in 1922 to magnify the Colorado River’s circulate to be able to persuade all seven states that it carried sufficient water to serve their pursuits, then and into the long run.

Hoover Dam made the fashionable West, but additionally confined it in a straitjacket.

The dam’s promise of plentiful water and energy took the brakes off the expansion of Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix and Denver; it inspired farmers to complacently plant essentially the most water-thirsty crops similar to alfalfa and almonds; and it gave metropolis dwellers the impression that they might water their lawns daily with out worrying about waste.

Is there an answer to the battle over the Colorado? Sure, however right now it’s confounded by historical past and politics.

California and Arizona agriculture should be remade to accommodate new irrigation applied sciences and a shift to much less thirsty crops. Urbanites should step up their conservation and recycling efforts. The states should acknowledge their shared pursuits in pretty distributing a shrinking useful resource.

And federal officers should work towards a settlement that each curiosity group finds acceptable. Want them luck.