We were sitting around the table at the San Juan Water Conservancy District Board meeting on October 15, discussing a request from Western Water Consultants (WWC) to help fund their cloud seeding efforts this coming winter. As far as I could tell from our conversation with WWC owners Eric and Mike Hjermstad, there’s no specific scientific data showing that cloud seeding in Archuleta County directly benefits the people of our community — or showing that it directly benefits anyone, for that matter — even though cloud seeding has been going on for decades.
Should Pagosa taxpayers continue funding an unproven project that — even if it actually works — might simply send additional water downstream to Arizona and California? That was the question facing our Board.
One Board member suggested that, assuming cloud seeding is effective here, there is at least additional water in the river. (For rafting and recreation, I suppose.)
“We’re going to have more water in our streams, if you believe that cloud seeding works. And the estimates range from 2 percent to 15 percent more snow out of a particular storm.”
I reminded the Board that these vague estimates are coming from the same people who are being paid to do the actual work.
Board member: “Bill, I have more faith in people, that they’re not just in it for themselves. Is that possible, that they’re in it for themselves? Yes, but I guess I’m not as much of a skeptic as you are…”
Anyone who has spent much time studying — with an open mind — the history of water development in the arid American West, comes to understand that the public has often been presented inaccurate data about the probable costs and benefits of federal, state, and local water projects. Sometimes, the data has been outrageously inaccurate.
I experienced that kind of “outrageously inaccurate data” for the first time, when I was writing about the Dry Gulch Reservoir controversy, beginning in 2008. The same type of deception has been going on all across the American West since the early 1900s… if we are to believe the well-researched stories included in Marc Reisner’s 1987 book, Cadillac Desert.
Whether the people skewing and inflating water data were doing it “just for themselves” is not always clear. They may have believed the taxpayers would benefit anyway — even if the project ended up costing twice the original estimate or supplied a small percentage of the estimated water, or if the water was used in some manner other than what the taxpayers were promised.
Nevertheless, data has indeed been been “jerked around”, and certain politicians have been willing to swallow the inaccurate cost/benefit figures, especially if the water project happened to be serving their home district but was financed by all the nation’s taxpayers.
For example.
In 1922 the Colorado River Compact allocated 7.5 million acre feet of Colorado River water per year between California, Nevada and Arizona. Subsequent negotiations granted Arizona 2.8 million as their allotment. But the allotment was essentially worthless, because in order to use the water, Arizona would have to transport it from the western part of the state to the southern part. Even the spendthrifts at the Bureau of Reclamation called it a “mad man’s dream.”
From a 2012 analysis by Chris Edwards and Peter J. Hill, Cutting the Bureau of Reclamation and Reforming Water Markets:
By the 1960s, however, the situation had changed. For one thing, the Bureau of Reclamation was eager to find big new projects to keep the agency’s large workforce employed. The Central Arizona Project (CAP) fit the bill since it would be hugely expensive to construct the needed pumps to lift water up great elevations and to deliver it more than 300 miles through aqueducts to Phoenix, Tucson, and surrounding areas. The bureau seized on the opportunity and “refused to believe any expert who told it what it didn’t want to hear.”
Dan Dreyfus was the Bureau of Reclamation official in charge of providing benefit-cost estimates at the time, and he later confessed: “I had to fly all the way out to Denver and jerk around the benefit-cost numbers to make the [CAP] look sound.”
In 1968 after years of political infighting, Congress authorized the Central Arizona Project within a broader bill that included numerous other projects. The bill exemplified the power of congressional logrolling — new projects were spread across many different states and congressional districts. Dreyfus later said that some of projects in the bill were “pure trash,” but stubborn members of Congress, defending their states, wanted them in the bill.
The Central Arizona Project was completed in 1993 at a cost of about $5 billion. Economists Steve Holland and Michael Moore completed a detailed analysis of the benefits and costs of CAP. They found that rather than providing net benefits to society, it resulted in imposing deadweight losses on society of more than $1 billion. Like numerous prior Bureau of Reclamation projects, the CAP was a net waste of resources.
One huge problem with Reclamation projects is that the price of the water sold is highly subsidized by taxes. Farmers often pay a tiny percentage of what the water actually cost to produce. In 2003, for example, California’s Imperial Water District offered to sell a portion of their Reclamation water to the City of San Diego for $225 per acre-foot. The Imperial Water District was buying the water for $15 an acre-foot.
Here in Archuleta County, where most of our water still flows like… well, like water… most agricultural users don’t have to pay for water at all, except perhaps the cost of belonging to a ditch company. They simply divert it from local creeks and rivers, the same way many have done for the past century. As we noted earlier in this editorial series, agricultural water use appears to account for about 94 percent of the water use in Archuleta County.
“Use-it-or-lose-it” rules require agricultural users to make full use of their water allocations year after year, or risk losing them in the future. These rules and others create disincentives for water conservation. If farmers and other end users risk losing their water rights if they don’t consume their allocations, and if they can’t profit from selling excess water, they have little incentive to use water efficiently.
As the water levels dropped in Lake Mead and Lake Powell and numerous other Reclamation reservoirs over the past 10 years, water experts came up with ideas about further draining the Colorado River.
But we — most of us — actually don’t want our rivers drained, despite what our federal, state and local governments might believe.
Is there, instead, some way to resurrect our rivers that truly makes sense? I mean, more sense than Proposition DD? …the ballot measure that asks us to ask gambling addicts to pay out millions of dollars in gambling taxes, to be spent on new Colorado water projects…?