Cadillac Desert (54 page)

What California demanded as the price for acquiescence was simple—devastatingly simple. Before Arizona received a drop of its entitlement, it wanted its full 4.4-million-acre-foot entitlement guaranteed. As far as California was concerned, there would be no equitable sharing of shortages, no across-the-board cuts in times of drought; it wanted satisfaction no matter what. In fact, what it was really asking was a legislative reversal of the lawsuit it had lost in the Supreme Court. It was an outrageous demand from Arizona’s point of view, and few believed that its Congressional delegation would swallow it. But, in the end, they did.

“How do I explain it?” asked Sam Steiger, then a junior committee member from Arizona, repeating the question just asked of him. “I can’t. Obviously a deal was struck. I was too junior to be in on it. Mo Udall, Stewart’s brother, and John Rhodes were the ones in a position to do it.
Why
did they do it? The only answer I can think of is that they didn’t really believe the river was overallocated—that, or else they really believed we were going to get an augmentation project, even without Bridge Canyon Dam. The Bureau of Reclamation wasn’t running around Capital Hill crying, ‘The river’s overallocated! The river’s overallocated!’ I don’t know what figures they were using, but we sure as hell weren’t hearing the ones that came out a few years later. They made like there was plenty of water for everyone.”

And so, before a real fight even developed over California’s imperious demand, the CAP legislation became saddled with what is known as the California Guarantee: 4.4 million acre-feet or bust. Come drought, come calamity, California must be satisfied first.

A few years later, the Bureau was finally forced to admit that its estimate of 17.5 million acre-feet a year was a convenient fiction, and amended it to around fifteen million acre-feet. A few years after that, even the latter figure looked optimistic; independent hydrologists were putting the Colorado’s average flow at somewhere around thirteen million acre-feet, perhaps a little more. Southern California was diverting its full 4.4 million acre-feet as it had for years. The upper basin had a diversion capability that had moved past 3.6 million acre-feet and was still building moderately. Evaporation varies from year to year, but averages close to two million acre-feet from all the reservoirs on the main stem and tributaries; and Mexico must get its 1.5 million acre-feet.

Work these figures out and the Colorado River is almost used up if its flow is as low as some say. If the higher estimates are used, there are two to two and a half million acre-feet left. Now consider the projects that are authorized and, in some cases, nearly built or being built. The Central Utah Project. The Animas-La Plata Project. The Dolores Project. The Fruitland Mesa Project. The West Divide Project. The Dallas Creek Project. San Miguel, Savery Pot Hook, Paonia, Florida, and the largest of them all, the CAP. Three or four of these could send the Colorado River into “deficit”; the rest will merely make the deficit hopeless. Everything has turned out exactly as could have been predicted twenty years ago—everything, that is, except the rescue project that was supposed to save the basin states from a Sumerian fate.

The prospects that an augmentation project would be built were already dim in the mid-1960s, before double-digit inflation, before double-digit interest rates, before environmentalism, before federal deficits four times larger than the federal budget was then. Meanwhile, northern Californians have grown so jealous of their “underused” rivers that in a 1982 referendum they emphatically refused to release more water even to the desperate supplicants in the southern half of their own state. The Klamath River alone has nearly as much water in it as the Colorado, and flows to the ocean almost entirely unused, and one could build a reservoir on it two-thirds the size of Lake Mead, but the odds of the Klamath River being rerouted to southern California so the Colorado Basin states can have more water are about the same as the odds of being bitten by a rattlesnake while crossing the street in Washington, D.C. If that is unthinkable, then the odds that Oregon’s rivers will be turned southward are even less so. As for the Columbia River diversion, it still has at least one champion, a Los Angeles supervisor named Kenneth Hahn who introduces a resolution calling for it every year, but his resolution cannot even make it past the board of supervisors of one of the most water-starved cities in the world, and that, with luck, is about as far as it will get.

The Colorado Basin, then, is a few years away from permanent drought, and it will have to make do with whatever nature decrees the flow shall be. If the shortages were to be shared equally among the basin states, then things might not be so bad for Arizona. But this will obviously not be the case; there is that fateful clause stipulating that California shall always receive its full 4.4-million-acre-foot entitlement before Phoenix and Tucson receive a single drop. What began as an Olympian division of one river’s waters emerged, after fifty years of brokering, tinkering, and fine-tuning according to the dictates of political reality, as an ultimate testament to the West’s cardinal law: that water flows toward power and money.

Despite one of the most spellbinding and expensive waterworks of all time, Arizonans from now until eternity will be forced to do what their Hohokam ancestors did: pray for rain. During wet cycles, when Lake Mead and Lake Powell are sending water down the spillways as they were in 1983, the Granite Reef Aqueduct may be delivering something close to peak yield. During drought cycles, the aqueduct may run half empty, if that, and the odds are extremely high that it will run progressively more empty as the years go by. It would be foolish, at this stage, to surmise that all or even most of the upper-basin projects are going to be built, but a few of them are likely to be, and each one will cut into the CAP’s supply. The Colorado River, to which Arizona decided to marry its future hopes, will prove no more trustworthy than a capricious mistress, delivering a million acre-feet one year, 400,000 the next.

And this, in turn, raises a bizarre possibility, as unthinkable to modern Arizona as it was to the planners of the CAP: the people of Arizona may not even
want
the modest amount of precious water this $3 billion project is able to deliver.

In early 1980, Phoenix experienced a series of damaging winter floods. The Salt River goes through the center of town and is usually an utterly dry bed of pebbles and rocks; therefore, city streets are laid right across the river, as if it had long since gone extinct. In 1980, however, it rolled cars like boulders—cars whose owners were so used to driving through the riverbed that, despite repeated warnings on the radio, they didn’t bother to detour and cross on a bridge as the waters began to rise. Even if they had, it wouldn’t have done them much good. Only two of Phoenix’s bridges were designed to withstand a flood flow greater than twenty-five thousand cubic feet per second. In February of 1980, the Salt River peaked at 180,000 cfs.

Phoenix owes its existence to this ephemeral desert river, but even so it doesn’t seem to hold the Salt in high esteem. On both banks, the floodplain is encroached on by industrial parks, trailer parks, RV parks, but no real parks. The flood channel itself has been developed to a degree, playing host to establishments which are, by nature, transient: topless-bottomless joints, chop shops, cock-fighting emporia. Paris built its great cathedral by its river, Florence its palaces of art; Phoenix seems to have decided that its river is the proper place to relegate its sin. When the Bureau of Reclamation performed a cost-benefit analysis for Orme Dam, once a central feature of the Central Arizona Project, it included as a benefit the flood protection the dam would offer to the cock-fighting and striptease establishments downstream.

That particular dam—a $400 million structure intended to store Colorado River water shipped over in the Granite Reef Aqueduct, and to hold back the occasional flood surge—was one of the main topics of conversation in 1980. On February 27, just after the biggest flood hit, the
Arizona Republic
ran a huge editorial that read, “Are you fed up sitting in traffic, creeping to work, because floods have taken out all but two of the major bridges crossing the Salt River? Are you fed up with reading stories about a new study and more hearings into whether construction of Orme Dam would interrupt the nesting habits of bald eagles ... of this community playing second fiddle to high-and-dry special pleaders who shed tears over nesting eagles, but can’t find compassion for the thousands of families who endure hardship, fear, and ruin as flood waters rampage through the valley?

“I’m mad!” continued the editorial, which was signed by the
Republic’s
editor-in-chief, Patrick Murphy. “I’m mad as hell that high-and-dry Washington bureaucrats have been dilly-dallying for at least ten years over approval of Orme Dam.... Now, dammit, give us our dam!”

The “special pleaders” Murphy referred to numbered among them the Yavapai Indians, whose remnant population of three hundred or so lives on a reservation near the confluence of the Salt and Verde rivers, and who would lose their homes to the reservoir. The Yavapai, who appear to be some of the most peaceful, sweet-natured souls on earth—many of them are old and still weave baskets for a living—had won a lot of well-placed sympathy, which was apparently what Murphy was complaining about. Cecil Andrus, then the outgoing Secretary of the Interior—and someone who spent a good part of his term trying to stop the Bureau from carrying out its plans—vowed that the tribe would be relocated over his dead body, and one local attorney who was preparing to fight Orme Dam on their behalf was Stewart Udall—the man who, as much as anyone, had made the CAP and Orme Dam possible. (In later years, Udall, unlike the Bureau, was to rue much of what he said and did in the 1960s; he even spoke at a testimonial dinner, in 1982, celebrating the seventieth birthday of his old nemesis, David Brower.) The dam was in the news so often that one could almost imagine the dancers in the bars debating the pros and cons between acts. What was most striking about the debate, however, was that practically no one seemed to be asking the more fundamental question about Orme Dam. As a $400 million flood-control structure, it made little economic sense; it would be much cheaper to move the relatively few threatened structures and reinforce the bridges. Only if it received and stored a substantial amount of Colorado River water—which implied not only a decent flow in the river but a demand for the water, and an ability to pay for it—did Orme Dam make any sense. Would the water arrive, and arrive predictably and often enough, and be economical enough, so that anyone would want to buy it?

In 1980, one of the few people in the state who seemed to be asking this question was William Martin, an economist at the University of Arizona at Tucson. For having done so, and answering negatively, Martin had been accused in local newspapers of being a paid agent of California, where he was born. The dean of his department denied him merit raises for eight years, and even led a campaign to discredit his academic qualifications, though he wouldn’t go quite so far as to try to have him fired outright.

Large and bearded, inclined toward jeans, cowboy boots, and western shirts, Martin looks as if he would feel more at home in the cockpit of a Peterbilt than at a professor’s desk, even if his writings are nationally known. His first notoriety came in 1973, when he and a colleague, Robert Young—who was so wounded by the hounding he got that he opted to leave the state—published a book called
Water Supplies and Economic Growth in an Arid Environment,
an innocuous-sounding little tract which, in Arizona, was almost as revolutionary as
Das Kapital.
They first asked, as a matter of speculation, what might happen if the Central Arizona Project was not built. The underground aquifers, Young and Martin reckoned, would undoubtedly be depleted as the farmers continued to pump them out (in the 1960s, the rate of overdraft—use over replenishment—climbed as high as four million acre-feet per year). As pumping costs rose due to the dropping water table, some farmers would begin to go out of business. But there was still enough water so that the decline would be very slow. Arizona’s farm income, by Young and Martin’s calculations, would be reduced by about one-fifth of 1 percent per year. The reason the decline in income would be so modest was self-evident: as pumped water got more expensive, the farmers would conserve it better and switch to higher-value crops, and they would do more with less. The way to see if the Central Arizona Project Was worth building, then, was to see if each acre-foot of water it brought in would be cheaper than the value (in lost farm income) of each disappearing acre-foot from the aquifers. Martin and Young figured that every acre-foot that was being mined was causing a loss of $5.35 in farm income—a conservative estimate, as far as they were concerned. Could the CAP deliver water cheaper than that? By the Bureau’s own calculations, CAP water would cost at least $10 per acre-foot—without even figuring the cost of distributing it. As a result, the farmers would make
more
money if they continued pumping groundwater than if they bought water from the CAP. In fact, if the price of distribution systems—which the farmers would presumably have to build themselves—was as high as it promised to be, buying CAP water might be a ticket into bankruptcy.

Twice since then, Martin has repeated the analysis, and his results confirm his earlier conclusions—only far more emphatically. By 1977, the projected canalside price of CAP water had reached $16.67 per acre-foot. Add the cost of a distribution network, and farmers growing any kind of low-value crops—alfalfa, small grains, perhaps even the state’s main crop, cotton—could not afford it. In 1980, he and another colleague from the University of Arizona, Helen Ingram, did a detailed study, region by region, of the likely cost of distribution systems, and were amazed by what they found out. In one irrigation district, Maricopa-Stansfield, the price of the distribution system—hundreds of miles of canals and laterals, headgates, and people to operate them—would likely come to $160 million, leaving each farmer a bill of $100 per acre-foot of water
per year
just for distribution. The Bureau’s canalside estimate for CAP water had, by then, risen to around $30 per acre-foot, per year. The price of pumped groundwater
was nearly $100 less
per acre-foot at Maricopa-Stansfield—around $39. It was an extreme case, but Ingram and Martin couldn’t find a single irrigation district where CAP water promised to be cheaper than groundwater. In most of them, it would cost half again or twice as much, sometimes more. One of the main arguments the farmers had always made for the CAP was that they couldn’t all switch to high-value crops as the groundwater table went lower and pumping costs became intolerable. The American consumer, they said, could only eat so many lemons and oranges. But if Martin’s figures were right, farmers who signed contracts to buy CAP water might not even be able to raise oranges on it. In 1980, about the only crop you could raise with water that cost $130 per acre-foot was marijuana.