Officials say Southwest growth straining water supplies

Friday, Aug. 26, 2005 | 9:48 a.m.

SAN DIEGO -- Explosive population growth in the desert Southwest is straining water supplies to their limits, officials said Thursday at a meeting of water agencies here.

"If there is a resource limitation on the growth of the American West, it really is water," said Grady Grammage, an Arizona lawyer, real estate developer and adjunct professor of law at Arizona State University. "It is not land."

Grammage suggested two changes to the way that communities in the West do business. One would be that water agencies get more involved in the zoning and land use process. The other change would be that communities set "population horizons" for how many people could be absorbed in an area.

Such proposals have come forward in Southern Nevada but have been resisted by agencies including the Southern Nevada Water Authority. Water Authority officials have said zoning decisions should be made by elements of local government, and population by the market.

A study released last year by the Water Authority found that setting artificial constraints upon growth would lead to severe economic problems in Southern Nevada.

Grammage, however, said that the West struggles with explosive population increases, largely because the laws and policies inherited from the federal government were designed to attract people to the desert.

The result is that people are being asked to conserve water, remove turf or stop washing cars, while developers continue to build new subdivisions for newly arrived residents. "We have created this immense cognitive dissonance with the voters," he said. "We have to engage, and we have to start talking about how far the urbanization of the West can go with existing water supplies. Policies to encourage population growth are an anachronism that has to be rethought." Other speakers, among them Mark Limbaugh, assistant secretary of the Interior Department, said new approaches can help meet the demand. He admitted that is a major challenge for governments.

"There are limitations on some of our most precious resources," Limbaugh said. "Increased competition for water coupled with aging infrastructure is taxing the system beyond its capabilities."

Interior Secretary Gale Norton, the Bush administration's top official overseeing the Colorado River and use of water from the river, defined this time as "the era of limits" both in terms of the availability of the water resource and federal funds to deal with the issue, Limbaugh said.

But new technologies, greater conservation and, most of all, cooperative partnerships among the local, state and federal agencies can address the challenge, he said. These elements would allow states to develop such resources at desalting technologies that could allow the use of seawater.

"Development of new technology has to be a priority," Limbaugh said.

Failure to work together would be dangerous, he said.

"What are the results of not working together? Quite simply, crisis and conflict. When that happens, uncertainty rules."