Farmers and ranchers in the seven states involved in the Colorado River Drought Contingency Plans (DCPs) are concerned about their future. With possibility of losing all or part of their irrigation through the current plan, there may not be enough water to go around.
Arizona agriculture has a lot to lose, according to David Brown, an attorney with Brown and Brown Associates in Chandler, AZ. He belongs to the Arizona Cattle Growers, and for the past several months sat in on some of the water meetings as a Cattle Growers representative. At these meetings he stated that the Cattle Growers support the Pinal County farmers in their efforts to achieve a full mitigation in these water issues. His law practice represents numerous irrigation companies, municipalities, and ranches in Maricopa and Pinal counties.
Brown says the purpose of the Colorado River drought plan is to keep a certain level in Lake Mead, because if it gets below the 1,075-foot elevation level, there will be drastic cuts in water use. He added that Arizona is on the short end of the deal.
“According to legislation in 1968, Arizona takes cuts first, and California doesn’t take any cuts. This was a legislative reversal of a court decision (Arizona versus California), which was a huge case that Arizona won. Then in 1968 politically (legislatively) California took away most of those victories, so we take the shortages first,” says Brown.
“Arizona has worked hard for more than 20 years to forestall the eventuality that if we had severe drought the lake would drop to where we would take the shortages. In 2007 the seven states in the Colorado Basin went into an agreement about how they would share shortages, an agreement forced by the Bureau of Reclamation, since the states needed to have a plan. But during the past 11 years everyone felt this was too harsh.
“So, they came up with interim guidelines—a new plan, which is not yet final—the proposed Drought Contingency Plan (DCP) stating they would do multiple things to store water in Lake Mead, rather than using it,” he says.
“For instance, Arizona for many years has been taking their excess CAP (Central Arizona Project) water and storing it in the ground, as part of our bank of water. We have also banked some of Nevada’s water for them in our aquifers. The cities have a big bank of water built up,” Brown explains.
“There is also ‘intentionally created surplus,’ which some of the tribes have been putting into Lake Mead instead of using it, and they get certain benefits (including money) for doing that.” The goal is to make sure the surface level of Lake Mead doesn’t go below 1,075 feet elevation, or water usage to certain areas would be reduced.
“Even if it goes below that level, it doesn’t hit the next trigger point until it gets below 1025 feet, after which water usage would be reduced more. There’s a complicated formula on how the water levels are distributed between Lake Powell and Mead. When Powell has a certain amount of water and Mead has a certain amount, there is an equalization formula, and there are also timing factors to help the habitat through the Grand Canyon.”
There are environmental concerns that dams and controlled flow have negatively altered the river habitat in that canyon. “Sometimes they release a big flood of water, to replicate flood flows,” explains Brown.
Recent drought history
Paul Orme, an attorney who represents four irrigation districts in Pinal County, helps manage his family’s cattle ranch in central Arizona, which has been in his family since 1929. He says that in 2004 the Colorado River Basin states became very concerned about the drought. Storage levels in Lake Powell in the Upper Basin and Lake Mead in the Lower Basin had begun to decline, after being essentially full in 2000.
“The seven states got together with Department of Interior and Mexico and negotiated what they called the 2007 Guidelines. Those guidelines stated that Lake Powell and Lake Mead would be operated conjunctively (water levels) depending on inflow from snow melt into Lake Powell. This would govern how much would be released into Lake Mead, also depending on the levels of Lake Mead,” he says.
“The 2007 Guidelines also introduced delivery restrictions, based on levels of Lake Mead, for the Lower Basin, and particularly for Arizona, Nevada and Mexico and not necessarily for California, since California had the highest priority in the Lower Basin,” explains Orme.
“If Lake Mead were to drop below 1,075 feet, under the 2007 Guidelines, Arizona would take a 320,000-acre-foot reduction in deliveries from the Central Arizona Project (CAP). Arizona utilizes two types of Colorado River water. One is direct delivery to the folks next to the river who have a high priority right dating back to the late 1800s. The central Arizona folks receive water from the river that’s delivered more than 300 miles via the CAP canal system. This is a lower priority because it’s a relatively new project dating back to 1968,” he says.
“The 320,000-acre-foot reduction was to come out of the CAP supply. At that time, back in 2007, there was a lot of what we called excess water—some CAP water that was not being utilized. It might have been under contract but was not being used so no one was that worried about it, at that time,” says Orme.
Fast forward to 2015. The drought continued, and concerns were greater that there was likelihood Lake Mead would drop below 1,075 feet, and that more had to be done to protect the lake levels.
“This is when the Drought Contingency Plan (DCP) was introduced as a possible regulatory overlay, on top of the 2007 Guidelines. For Arizona that meant an additional 192,000-acre-foot reduced delivery if Lake Mead got below 1,075. That would be a total of 512,000-acre-foot reduction in delivery, which would be a full one-third of Arizona’s CAP water supply,” Orme explained.
Nevada also had additional reductions, though they had smaller allocations to begin with, that they were not fully utilizing.
“It wasn’t going to hurt Nevada as much. Then California agreed to take reductions if Lake Mead got below level 1,040. So, for the first time California’s DCP agreed to take reductions. The whole goal is to try to protect Lake Mead so it never drops below 1,020—which would impact water deliveries to the big cities in Arizona (Phoenix, Tucson) and to Las Vegas, Nevada. It could even impact higher priority users if it continued to drop,” Orme says.
Department of Interior through the Bureau of Reclamation told the states that they must have their internal plans in place by Jan. 31, 2019.
“Arizona was the only state that required their legislature to approve the plan,” Orme explained. “We’d been negotiating for two years, but very intensively for about six months to come up with our internal plan, which was rammed through our legislature in three days and signed by our governor on Jan. 31.”
However, there are a couple irrigation districts in California that have not agreed to the plan yet.
“So, the commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation made good on her threat and began initiating a federal cut-back process, which probably can’t be implemented until August 2019 because there’s a lot of process that has to be done. She started the process, however, to try to light a fire under California folks who are straggling,” says Orme.
“The Upper Basin has their house in order on this, so it really only involves the Lower Basin. Most of it in Mexico is done, and now Arizona seems to be done, so this leaves just one or two parties in California to finish up.”
Agriculture suffers
“Farmers got the lowest priority in the CAP so they are the first to suffer when that water gets short,” Orme pointed out.
“The CAP has the lowest priority on the river, and the farmers have the lowest priority within the CAP. Farmers were told they needed another 192,000-acre-foot reduction in water, on top of the 320,000-acre-foot reduction that the 2007 guidelines required.”
The 2007 guidelines would have taken half the farmers’ water supply, and then with the DCP on top of that, they lost it all.
“The past few years we’ve been negotiating what we call a mitigation agreement, in which that lost water is somewhat mitigated (a portion of it). Under the DCP, when we go into shortage, in the first three years of the mitigation period (2020 through 2022) we would face reduction of about 60 percent of our surface water. We still have our ground water wells, so we could irrigate with those to a certain degree, but we’d lose 60 percent of our surface water. After the first three years, we would get no surface water,” says Orme.
“The state and others have agreed to help us develop our ground water supply, which we would be fully on (with no other source of water) by 2023. That shows how the mitigation plan works for us. The next highest priority users in the CAP are some water supplies held by the tribes and cities. It’s not their highest priority source but is part of their lower priority water. Some of that gets mitigated 100 percent in the first three years and then it declines to no mitigation after 2025,” he says.
“The goal is to provide a glide path to the lower priority CAP users to being off the CAP water altogether because if we stay in shortage we will be without one-third to half of our CAP supply,” says Orme.
“The drought plan is a compromise, a very painful compromise for my clients—the farmers who have to give up water. We estimate they’ll have to fallow 30 to 40 percent of their land.” It will be lost production and lost income, and some farmers won’t be able to continue in business.
“We are very concerned and going forward as best we can. The states will negotiate a new plan. The 2007 Guidelines for the DCP only go through 2026, so the states have to start negotiating a new plan to take its place after that date. I doubt there will be very much water for us, in that future,” Orme says.
“Environmentalists are concerned because they don’t like the idea of going back 100 percent to ground water. They don’t like ground water pumping in general, but they need to understand that it’s either that or the farmers go out of business. Pinal County has a robust economy, driven by agriculture, and loss of water will affect Arizona’s economy,” he says.
The farmers in Pinal County produced a video to tell their story regarding water issues. There are 100,000 acres of irrigated agriculture in Pinal County.
“Half the state’s milk supply comes from Pinal County dairies and 60 percent of Arizona’s cattle come through our county’s feedlots. There are feed crops for dairies and feedlots, and most of the state’s cotton is grown here. The University of Arizona did a report on the financial impacts of Pinal County losing all this water. There’s a lot of food grown and processed in the county, and one in five jobs are tied to agriculture. Ag is a $2.3 billion business for the county,” Orme says.
For 50 years, the farmers only used ground water, pumping from wells.
“We are going back to the old paradigm, before we had canals and surface water irrigation. It was great having the surface water for 30-plus years because it enabled agriculture to expand and also increased and fed the ground water tables, helping keep aquifers full. This was very valuable and now we’re being forced to go back to the old situation and a much smaller scale. There won’t be as much farming as there was,” says Orme.
“We’re in the process of putting together all the agreements to implement specifics of the plan. They say the devil is in the details and we still don’t know if we will get federal money for help with our well infrastructures. About half the money is coming from the state and other local sources, which will help, but we are still depending on applications through NRCS and the farm programs for the rest of the money, and this is an uncertain situation,” he says.
Everyone is hoping for more rain and snow to ease the drought, but it would take a lot of years to come up from so far behind. — Heather Smith Thomas, WLJ correspondent
