City doing water policy right way
Two important stories appearing in recently illustrate divergent approaches to the crucial issue of water supply and the American West. (“Will development in Santa Fe dry up?” Aug. 28, and “Years later, California voters still wait on water projects,” Aug. 31).
Having spent nearly decades working in the U.S. House of Representatives on Western water issues (including seven years as staff director of the Natural Resources Committee), it is gratifying to note that Santa Fe’s water planners have the far more enlightened approach to water management and therefore a far greater chance for long-term success.
True, there are significant differences both in population size and water usage; nearly 90 percent of California’s supply — both state and federal — is used for agriculture. Historically, conservation has been easier to achieve in municipal and industrial settings while irrigators, who enjoy massive taxpayers subsidies on their multibillion dollar storage, drainage and distribution facilities, have opposed reform for decades, with considerable success thanks to their financial and political power.
Nowhere is that more true than in California, where the federal government began construction of the Central Valley Project in the 1930s primarily to offset the massive overpumping of groundwater by farmers. But without a law to manage groundwater pumping, the exhaustion of the aquifers has continued even as billions of gallons of impounded water has been steered to the farms every year. The gigantic corporate farms that primarily benefit — having evaded the “family farm” principle on which the 1902 Reclamation Act and its water subsidies were predicated — has strenuously opposed efforts to reduce the subsidies that have encouraged over-irrigation and the planting of water-consumptive crops like alfalfa and, more recently, over 1.5 million acres of almonds, pomegranates and pistachios.
The impact on water quality, fisheries (also an important economic resource) and farms in Northern California, from which the irrigation water is diverted, has been devastating. But California, which was the last Western state to
enact a groundwater law (which does not go fully into effect until 2040), has responded with thinking more akin to 1921 than 2021: Build more reservoirs to irrigate more desert to grow more water consumptive crops. The Sites reservoir highlighted in The New Mexican‘s story is a prime example of chasing a 21st-century problem with a 19th-century net. Proponents plan to fill the $3.9 billion reservoir with heavy flows from the Sacramento River, but scientists tell us the greater probability is for reduced flows as climate change impacts precipitation in the Sierras. And who will pay for this and other white elephants? Not the farmers, who claim they don’t have the money: urban water customers and taxpayers.
While California has done little to address the root causes of its water crisis, Santa Fe has been working for nearly three decades to promote groundwater recharge and conservation. Unlike California, Santa Fe has reduced dependence on groundwater and is expanding reliance on water reuse that Congress authorized as a low-cost, environmentally sound alternative to major dam construction in 1992 (an option largely overlooked by Californians hooked on pouring concrete). Importantly, business leaders like Miles Conway of the Santa Fe Area Home Builders Association are supportive of green building codes instead of fighting sound management like the California irrigation lobby.
Residents of Santa Fe hardly need additional rationales for calling the City Different home as opposed to the sprawl, congestion and expense of California, but smart water policy, as illustrated in The New Mexican‘s coverage, is another good reason.
John Lawrence is a part-time resident of Santa Fe and worked for 38 years in the House of Representatives, the last eight as chief of sta≠ to speaker Nancy Pelosi. He is the author of The Class of ’74: Congress After Watergate and the Roots of Partisanship.