Learning to live with less water

It is ironic that last week's class-action lawsuit to stop the lining of the All-American Canal was filed in Las Vegas. According to the plaintiffs' attorneys, they chose the U.S. District Court in the West's fastest-growing city because it serves as the nominal headquarters of the Bureau of Reclamation, one of the defendants in the suit.

But Las Vegas is also the thirstiest metropolitan area in the West, with rights to just 300,000 acre-feet annually from the Colorado River, from which it derives 90 percent of its water supply.

What's more, the only place where the progress of the QSA is followed more closely than in the Imperial Valley is in Las Vegas, probably because the people there have as much to gain from its implementation as those of us here have to lose.

This would seem to make the jury trial being demanded by the consortium of environmental, recreational and economic interests behind the lawsuit an iffy proposition, since the pool of potential jurors might reasonably be expected to have a built-in bias where water is concerned.

That consortium of aligned interests is a curious one. It consists of Desert Citizens Against Pollution, Citizens United for Resources and the Environment and the Consejo de Desarrollo Economico de Mexicali. Its lawsuit against the bureau, which also names Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton and the U.S. government as defendants, is of the kitchen sink variety, alleging not only the illegal taking of desert wildlife but the wholesale destruction of desert habitat and air quality.

But these ecologically based challenges to the bureau's environmental documentation for the $135 million project, whatever their merit, are of less critical concern locally than the claims being asserted by the economic development group from Mexicali.

That's because the Mexicali Valley stands to lose about 70,000 acre-feet of water per year when this 23-mile section of the All-American Canal is lined. This is seepage water that Mexicali growers, industrial users and the government have come to depend on over the years, and the prospect of losing it is not a happy one south of the border.

Unfortunately, this is water to which Mexico has no legal right; in fact, the right-holder is the state of California, which, by virtue of the QSA, has assigned it to the San Diego County Water Authority. That doesn't mean some accommodation won't eventually be made at the diplomatic level, but it won't involve the outright gift of water that has been the custom to this point.

If the so-called era of limits on the Colorado River applies to the Imperial Valley, and we have frequently questioned whether it applies anywhere else, then it also must apply to Mexico.

Our friends and neighbors in Mexicali don't have to like it. But they're undoubtedly going to have to learn to live with it.

http://www.ivpressonline.com/articles/2005/07/25/opinion/ed01_7-24.txt