Interconnection of states’ waterways a regulatory, economic tangle

IUPUI’s Blomquist studying water resource policy issues

By Susan Williams

“The biggest surface water scarcity problems in the U.S. right now are on the Rio Grande system in New Mexico and Texas and the Platte River system in Colorado, Wyoming and Nebraska,” said William Blomquist, chairperson and associate professor of political science at IUPUI. “Additionally, there are problems with some smaller rivers that cross state boundaries between California and Oregon and between California and Nevada.”

And water problems in the West don’t stop with surface water, said Blomquist, who just returned to Indiana from California, where he spent the last year researching water resource policies. The most severe groundwater problems in the country are in the Central Valley of California and in the Great Plains.

Photo by Paul Martens

According to Blomquist, layer upon layer of policy designed to regulate water usage sometimes complicate the issues, especially in surface water situations where rivers run for hundreds of miles and through several states.

“In each of the surface water cases I mentioned, for example, there are combinations of problems,” Blomquist said. “Water uses by upstream interests reduce the flows available to downstream interests and cause conflicts over who’s entitled to what. Then, there are regulatory or treaty obligations to sustain or dedicate certain flows to Indian tribes or to the habitat of threatened or endangered species. Those combinations of issues bring together complicated mixes of institutions that include federal regulatory agencies, states, tribal governments, local governments, water users and other interest groups.”

By contrast, he said, groundwater cases are somewhat more locally specific.

“In California’s Central Valley, the persistent problem has been the absence of a system of groundwater rights, which has allowed overpumping of the aquifers to continue with little restraint,” he explained. “In the Great Plains, the problem has been an extended stretch of insufficient rainfall and stream flow, so the groundwater has not been replenished at normal rates, while at the same time, the drought has reduced surface water availability and caused farmers and communities to pump more groundwater.”

Some of our country’s most arid, but agriculturally productive states, fall into the West. So do some of the fastest growing cities, including Denver, Las Vegas, San Antonio, Salt Lake City, Albuquerque and Phoenix. The Platte and the Rio Grande have headwaters in the drought-ridden Rocky Mountains, as does the Colorado, another major water source in the West. The river runs 1,440 miles along the Colorado River Watershed from Denver through Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, New Mexico and Arizona before it reaches California, where river usage issues are heating up.

According to a recent news article, California uses 20 percent more water than its legal allotment and federal officials are inching toward enforcement. Blomquist explained that rights to use Colorado River water are apportioned among those seven states, based upon an interstate compact with origins back to 1922, meaning that the states, with mediation by the federal government, together defined their own water allotments. California, he said, was allowed to use as much as 4.4 million acre-feet of water per year. But since the 1920s, some states haven’t used their full allocations, so technically there has been a “surplus” of water on the river, a condition that the U.S. Secretary of the Interior has the authority to declare.

What does all this mean for California? That because it is at the downstream end of the Colorado, unused allocations by any or all of the six states above it are conceivably available for California to use, said Blomquist. And since in most years, the six other states combined have been far short of using their entire claims, California has been taking a large amount of the surplus.

“But,” said Blomquist,” it’s important to be clear that, when people hear reference to California taking ‘more than its share,’ it doesn’t necessarily mean that California’s uses are coming at the expense of its sister states. Rather, California has come to rely on the fact that its sister states haven’t been using all the water they could.”

But there is another “wrinkle to the story,” said Blomquist.

“Because California has become dependent on the surplus, the U.S. Secretary of the Interior has felt pressure to declare ‘surplus’ conditions on the Colorado, even in very dry years, when it was reasonably clear that no actual surplus existed,” he explained.

“The secretary would order releases from the large surface water reservoirs on the Colorado, such as Lake Mead and Lake Powell, to create enough flow in the downstream reaches of the river to accommodate the three downstream states—Nevada, Arizona and California—including California’s ‘surplus.’”

And this, said Blomquist, is what the other states have come to resent and have recently demanded to stop. If the secretary were to end the practice of declaring phony surpluses on the river, California would have to figure out how to live within its means.

Nearly 80 percent of the water in the arid states is allocated to agricultural use, which translates into powerful economics. California’s Imperial Valley, for example, irrigates 450,000 acres, growing fruit, vegetables and grains worth $1 billion per year in revenue.

The same is true of the vast middle section of the U.S., another area Blomquist highlighted as problematic. The Great Plains are less populated over all, but cover about 1.4 million miles. Extending approximately 1,000 miles from the foothills of the Rocky Mountains to Indiana, and 2,400 miles from the Canadian provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba to Texas and into Mexico, the Great Plains produce about 334 million tons of wheat, oats, barley, rye, sorghum, corn and soybeans a year, or roughly 25 percent of the world’s total food source.

Blomquist said there have been recent studies for the San Francisco Bay area and San Diego County, both of which rely on water pipelines laid across the state through active fault lines, to estimate the economic impacts of interruptions in water supplies.

“The San Diego study estimated that a two-month reduction of just 20 percent of water supplies would result in combined employment and other economic losses of $2.3 billion,” he said. “A two-month loss of 60 percent of water supplies would have estimated economic consequence of $13 billion. And, if the shortage extended for six months instead of two, the projected losses would jump to $8 billion for a 20 percent shortage and $32 billion for a 60 percent shortage.”

For the Bay Area, said Blomquist, which receives its water from the Sierra Nevada Mountains, losses ranging from $17 billion to $28 billion would result from a break in the pipelines.