Mediator Will Try to Keep Water War From Boiling Over

By TONY PERRY

April 6, 1999 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

HOLTVILLE, Calif. — As water cascades from sprinklers onto a field of red potatoes, farm manager Bartt Ries explains Imperial Valley’s irrigation policy.

“We flood, we furrow, we drip, we sprinkle,” said Ries, who manages the fields for Vessey & Co. of El Centro, which has 6,000 acres under cultivation. “We do anything we need to. Water is the only advantage we have here.”

But what Ries sees as an advantage, some see as an outrage. The irrigation practices of Imperial Valley farmers are being branded by some state legislators and the mammoth Metropolitan Water District of Southern California as wantonly wasteful and a threat to the state’s economy and future growth.

On Thursday, the MWD will carry its dire message to a negotiating session in Los Angeles with an Interior Department mediator working on behalf of Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt.

The mediator is trying to keep this classically California confrontation between big cities and big farms from erupting into litigation and political truculence that could disrupt, if not destroy, efforts to ensure an adequate supply of water for the entire region.

Bruce Kuhn, the Imperial Irrigation District’s board president, says the city-centric MWD just does not understand farming. “Conserving water while growing crops isn’t as easy as sticking a brick in the toilet tank,” he said.

Still, the numbers are stark: 16 million people in six Southern California counties use 3.5 million acre-feet of water each year.

By comparison, the 135,000 people of the Imperial Valley use 3.1 million acre-feet of water, 98% of it to irrigate 500,000 desert acres of crops.

With Southern California scrambling to meet an anticipated 37% increase in water demand in the next two decades, it is no wonder that thirsty eyes have turned to Imperial Valley and the alleged irrigation sins of its farmers.

The farmers have heard it all before and are unfazed. Imperial district officials are ready--even eager--to tell federal mediator David Hayes what they think is really behind the MWD’s concern about irrigation efficiency.

“They want to steal our water,” Imperial board member Don Cox said matter-of-factly. “One way to get it is to charge us with wasting water.”

In the zero-sum game of water, more water for the farmers of Holtville means less water for the heavily populated regions of coastal Southern California, which have had to learn to conserve water at the same time usage in Imperial County has risen.

“I urge you to recognize that you have taken the side of the largest water waster in the state,” David Freeman, general manager of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, wrote to an environmentalist who dared side with Imperial Valley.

Imperial farmers are unapologetic that Imperial, the Coachella Valley Water District and two smaller agricultural districts, under a 1931 federal agreement, get 85% of California’s share of the Colorado River.

“I’m a farmer in the Imperial Valley and I grow a lot of wheat, sugar beets and onions,” Imperial board member Lloyd Allen told the MWD board recently. “Those crops use a hell of a lot of water, and we’ve got a hell of a lot of water.”

The desert districts get the lion’s share of the Colorado River based on the principle of “first in time, first in right.” Imperial Valley was pulling water from the Colorado River four decades before the Colorado Aqueduct and Hoover Dam were delivering water from the river for Los Angeles and elsewhere in Southern California.

Desert Transformed by Water

With a supply of water that is cheap and unlimited, Imperial Valley farmers overcome the heat, the poor soil and plagues of pests to grow nearly a billion dollars worth of crops a year. All of this in a stony desert that was never meant for planting.

It is an article of faith among farmers here that cheap water is what makes agriculture economically viable. Water rights are seen as being as inviolable as property rights.

“Whenever I need water for wheat, I just pick up the phone and I say, ‘Lord, give me 10 foot of water for two days,’ ” Allen said, as MWD board members listened in wide-eyed annoyance. “The national average for wheat in the U.S. is about 35-36 bushels per acre, but our average is 130-140. And that’s because when we want water, we just call for it and get it.”

There have been significant improvements in the Imperial district’s maze of canals and pumping systems to reduce seepage and other water losses--more than $100 million of it financed, ironically, by Metropolitan. But the drive to get farmers to spend money on more efficient irrigation in their fields has had only limited success.

“We literally can’t get guys to buy water probes to check [water loss] in their soil because water is so cheap,” said David Bradshaw, Imperial’s irrigation supervisor.

There has been no economic incentive for Imperial Valley farmers to go into hock to install conservation systems that can cost $1,000 an acre or more. Not with water at $14 an acre-foot compared to, for example, more than $600 an acre-foot for avocado growers in San Diego County.

“Farmers down here are already borrowing money for seed and fertilizer,” said agronomist Kevin Grizzle, whose family has farmed here since 1911. “To borrow $1,200 an acre extra is just not possible. The banks just won’t go for it.”

To support its contention that Imperial Valley wastes water, the MWD points to numbers showing water use here increasing by 400,000 acre-feet in recent years while usage in coastal areas has been decreasing. Metropolitan Board Chairman Phillip Pace says Imperial Valley is “out of step with a new water-use ethic in California.”

But farmers say there are good reasons for their increased water use--and that the MWD’s refusal to understand those reasons belies an ignorance of agriculture.

Grizzle and other farmers say that water use has increased because fluctuating prices have forced them to shift to more water-intensive crops and to grow two or three crops a year on the same acreage.

A truism bears mentioning: Agriculture in the Imperial Valley and elsewhere is an annual crapshoot. A drop in agricultural commodity prices can make a crop not worth harvesting.

“It’s not unusual to see a field of perfectly good broccoli plowed under,” Grizzle said.

The current confrontation between the Metropolitan Water District and Imperial Valley is a result of an attempt by Interior Secretary Babbitt and Hayes to solve a feud between Imperial Valley and its northern neighbor, Coachella. It’s an old water story: Solve one problem, cause another.

The essence of the dispute is that the MWD believes Babbitt flinched rather than back up his tough talk about forcing Imperial Valley to curb its take from the Colorado River.

Babbitt has been threatening for several years to reduce California’s allocation from the Colorado River, which would hit the California economy like a body slam applied by a big-time wrestler.

To get California on the road to using less water, Babbitt favors a proposed deal whereby Imperial would sell water to San Diego County, an MWD member. San Diego County would pay the farmers to install conservation devices in their fields.

But before that deal can be consummated, Imperial and Coachella need to reach a compromise on thorny allocation issues. Coachella has been alleging since the 1930s that Imperial conspired with the federal government to cheat it of its rightful share of the Colorado River.

In December, Babbitt told a Colorado River convention in Las Vegas that a “peace agreement” between Imperial Valley and Coachella was at hand.

Coachella would get more water and drop its threat of a lawsuit. Imperial would get an allocation roughly at its current usage level. Both sides would agree not to hurl water-waster insults and to refrain from hiring consultants to check up on each other’s irrigation practices.

“Considering the intensity that marks the Colorado River water wars, I would classify the progress to date as a minor miracle,” Babbitt said. His optimism proved short-lived.

The howling from the MWD began immediately.

Board members accused Babbitt of settling the skirmish between the two irrigation districts by taking water from Metropolitan and letting Imperial farmers get away with a “rush to the pump.”

That’s a nasty phrase suggesting that farmers are using more water than necessary because they want to increase usage and have lots of excess water to sell to San Diego at enormous profits.

State Officials See a Waste of Water

The MWD is not the only voice charging Imperial Valley with using water in a profligate manner.

In the 1980s, the state Water Resources Control Board accused Imperial of wasting water through inefficient irrigation. In the 1990s, the federal Bureau of Reclamation did the same. Imperial fought back with its own experts, who came to opposite conclusions.

Last summer, an attorney for the Coachella Valley Water District wrote to Hayes: “The time has come for the Bureau [of Reclamation] and the state to tell [the Imperial Irrigation District] to put up or shut up; to stop talking and instead take meaningful action to reduce” waste.

In March, Assemblyman Michael Machado (D-Linden), chairman of the Water, Parks and Wildlife Committee, publicly scolded Imperial Irrigation District General Manager Jesse Silva. He plans a full hearing later this month.

“I just don’t think IID has employed the water conservation measures that farmers elsewhere have had to employ,” said Machado, a farmer. “I raise alfalfa and some of the crops they do, and my costs for water are almost double.”

Machado and others, farmers here say, don’t understand desert farming or realize that irrigation methods that work elsewhere are sometimes useless here. They say they would gladly trade their cheap water for the kinder soils and gentler conditions in the state’s agricultural midsection.

“People who think farming is easy in the Imperial Valley should come take a look,” Ries said. “They would leave with a different idea.”

In January, the MWD suggested that Babbitt alter the 1931 agreement that allocates Colorado River water. That produced a volley of angry words from Imperial, Coachella and environmentalists. Babbitt said he lacked authority to tinker with the 1931 pact.

As a political strategy, attacking the 1931 agreement proved to be a dog that simply refused to hunt. MWD officials have since dropped that line of attack in favor of an insistence that Imperial farmers are grossly inefficient and should not have to be paid to install water conservation equipment.

After all, the MWD says, state and federal law requires that water be used efficiently, which, alas, is an enormously ill-defined concept.

A fly on the wall at Thursday’s session at MWD headquarters between mediator Hayes, state water chief Tom Hannigan and the combatants would doubtless get an earful of water realpolitik.

The MWD fears that Hayes and Babbitt favor the farmers. The farmers fear the political muscle of an agency that provides water to 16 million people.

“Our only tool is fairness,” Cox said. “They may have enough horsepower to steal our water but we hope not.”