Drought’s end will not stop West’s water woes, Raley says

Suzanne Struglinski

Wednesday, March 10, 2004 | 11:17 a.m.

WASHINGTON -- Even if Western drought problems stopped tomorrow, water supply will still be a serious issue for Nevada and other Western states without proper planning, administration officials told a Senate panel Tuesday.

Beyond drought, growing populations, farming, cities, tribes, endangered species and environmental needs all place demands on a limited supply of water, Bennett Raley, Interior Department assistant secretary for water and science, said.

The water debate has shifted, he said.

"Water-supply issues are no longer going to be on drought alone," Raley said. "We have the potential for crisis under normal circumstances. ... I guarantee that without action today we will have crisis in normal years."

Raley said that in the past, conflicts over water only occurred in drought years and in local areas, but now "water supply-related crises in this century will affect economies and resources of national and international importance unless we take action now."

Raley told the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee that the administration's plan to handle the Western water situation, Water 2025, could prevent a pending crisis.

"Most solutions to water-supply crises, regardless of whether they are institutional in nature or include new or additional infrastructure, take years, if not decades to implement," Raley said. "Process without progress is failure."

The administration's Water 2025 program would control water supply decisions over the next 25 years while following interstate agreements, Supreme Court decisions and water rights established under law. The program has set up a framework for discussing water decisions and a way to handle conservation and other water issues.

The administration requested $21 million for the program budget, a $13 million increase from its budget for 2004.

"We no longer have the luxury of debating this for decades to come," Raley said.

The committee's top Democrat, Sen. Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico, said he supports the Water 2025 program in concept but questioned why the administration would recommend cuts in other water programs.

"My only response is that actions speak louder than words," he said.

To help take action, the Bureau of Reclamation will be accepting proposals for matching grants from irrigation and water districts that want to leverage their money and resources to create water markets and make more efficient use of existing water supplies through water conservation and efficiency projects.

By law, proposals must have matching nonfederal funds of at least 50 percent and can be matched up to $300,000. The department has $4 million for the program this year. It will accept proposals until April and grants will go out in August.

The Southern Nevada Water Authority is planning to apply for the grants, authority spokesman Vince Alberta said. The application would likely be for new technology to help with irrigation.

Alberta said the Water 2025 plan reinforces what water officials in the state have been discussing over the last few years.

"There are more demands on the Colorado River system than ever before," Alberta said. "What happens in one state impacts another."

He said conservation efforts need to happen across the west and southwest.

"We have to think of this as a whole, not just a state issue, if we are going to achieve sustainability of the Colorado River," he said.

Raley said the department will not pursue any changes to the existing agreement Nevada has to take 300,000 acre-feet of water from the Colorado River.

Southern Nevada is allocated 300,000 acre-feet a year from the Colorado River Commission. California gets 4.4 million acre-feet and Arizona gets 2.8 million acre-feet. An acre-foot is equal to about 326,000 gallons, or about enough water for a typical family for one year. Nevada had initiated an informal discussion about changing the plan, but Raley emphasized Tuesday that the ideas for the river get discussed all the time and there is nothing new on the table.

Raley did not address a plan by the Southern Nevada Water Authority to take water from the Muddy and Virgin rivers. The water authority has hoped to take extra water out of Lake Mead in exchange for water from the rivers. The Colorado River Compact, which dictates the water allocation, outlaws such moves.

The authority plans to build a pipline, at an estimated cost of $1 billion, to bring water from the rivers to the Las Vegas Valley.

Raley said the agreement in Nevada, which has been in place since 1922, limits what the 2025 program can do for the state, but noted that last year's agreement that limited California's use of the river helped.

"Nevada would be in worse shape today" without that agreement, he said.

He said that even despite the fourth consecutive year of drought affecting the Colorado River, Arizona, California and Nevada received their basic annual portion of water.

Raley said it is too early to accurately predict future drought conditions, and although the recent rain will do little to help the drought's effects, it did provide some hope.

Raley said the years 2000 to 2003 rivals 1953 through 1956, which were previously the driest four years in the Colorado River Basin. He said precipitation in the basin so far this year is near normal, but the dry soil conditions reduces actual runoff to a current projection of 76 percent of average. Despite the drought, the Colorado River reservoir system is still 53 percent full and will allow limited surplus water deliveries in the lower basin this year, he said.

As of Feb. 1, reservoir storage for all western states except California is running below historic February averages, with Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah and Wyoming reporting the largest storage deficits.

Colorado River Basin storage this winter has been the lowest in more than 30 years, with Lake Powell at its lowest since 1970 and Lake Mead at its lowest since 1968. Since Lake Mead began declining in late 1999, water storage has dropped nearly 40 percent, according to Louis Uccellini, director off the National Centers for Environmental Prediction at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.