Agreement doesn’t give water away to Mexico

Lisa Snedeker

Saturday, Dec. 16, 2000 | 10:05 a.m.

An agreement between the United States and Mexico to study solutions for the parched Colorado River delta doesn't mean Western states automatically will be forced to share more water with their neighbor across the border.

Federal officials tried to reassure a group of Colorado River water users who met Friday in Las Vegas about the agreement signed earlier this week.

"There is a lot of misunderstanding about the minute (agreement)," said Susan Goodwin, U.S.-Mexico coordinator for the Interior Department. "It's an amendment to the 1944 water treaty. There are no specific action items."

The agreement signed earlier this week is merely a concept, Goodwin said, with no specific actions to help restore the delta, a vast wetlands in Mexico where the Colorado River empties into the Gulf of California. The wetlands began disappearing after dams on the Colorado River began to keep almost all of its waters on the U.S. side of the border.

"With the delta, it has to be a matter of hearing from Mexico about what they want and setting some common priorities and goals," Goodwin said.

Environmental groups have long been concerned with the health of the delta, while Colorado River states don't want to see more of already scarce water resources flowing south.

Several representatives from southwestern states including California and Arizona said they want more information before decisions are made about sending additional water to the delta.

Michael Cohen, with the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment and Security, expressed his concerns about Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt's plans for reducing California's water consumption to its official allotment within the next 15 years using interim surpluses from Lake Mead.

"The interim surplus guidelines have a very good potential to reduce the probability of water getting down there," he said.

A coalition of U.S. and Mexican environmental groups filed suit in June in federal district court in Washington, D.C., to force the Reclamation Bureau to measure the effects of diverting the river's waters from the delta's plants and wildfire.

"The Colorado River delta doesn't require all that much water," Cohen said. "The real challenge to us now is working on arrangements to overcome the institutional obstacles."

Research shows that the base flow needed to restore the delta is only 32,000 acre feet of water annually, Cohen said.

An acre foot of water would provide about enough water for an average family of five for about a year.

"Then there's a need every four years for a flood flow of perhaps 260,000 (acre) feet per year," he said. "But it's nothing like the $8 billion pricetag we're talking about to restore the Everglades."

A recent study found that marine life in the delta plummeted after its flows were mostly dammed and diverted in the 1930s.

Almost no fresh water reaches the delta, said University of Arizona paleontologist Karl W. Flessa. The United States takes about 90 percent of the water in the Lower Colorado River Basin for booming cities in Southern California, Arizona and Nevada, and Mexico takes the rest.

Scientists agree that even a fraction of the water that once flowed through the delta could partially restore the river in Mexico and help preserve species including the endangered Southwestern willow flycatcher, the Yuma clapper rail and the desert pupfish.