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Water
can't be used to control growth,
but growth has profound effects on water
By
Doug Kenney
for Headwaters News
In
1998, the Western Water Policy Review Advisory Commission surprised
many observers by identifying population growth as the single most
important driver of water-management decisions in many locales.
Certainly this is the case in Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, Utah and
Idaho, the nation’s five fastest-growing states in the 1990s
(by percentage). The regional salience of growth in the West is
expected to continue, as census projections call for 30 million
new residents from 1995 to 2025.
A more recent report of the Natural Resources Law Center at the
University of Colorado found some notions about the relationship
between water and growth are wrong, while others may be more profound
than previously thought.
Based on approximately 70 interviews with a "who’s who”
of Colorado water leaders, as well as a review of recent water studies
and legal documents, Water and Growth in Colorado (2001) describes
existing water problems and potential solutions in the state.
While many of the issues identified are not the direct result of
population growth, the rapid increase in municipal water demands
has brought a greater sense of urgency to almost all facets of Colorado
water development and management.
One
goal of the study is to interject water issues into ongoing state
discussions about growth and growth management. It begins by dispelling
the popular notion that water development is a precursor to growth,
and that a lack of water will slow growth.
Abundant water supplies in Pueblo have done little to promote growth,
just as a lack of renewable water has not tempered development in
the nation’s fastest-growing region: Douglas County.
Managing growth through water policy, therefore, is probably not
an option worth considering.
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Region's
water use dictated by growth
By
Greg Lakes, editor
Headwaters News
July 17, 2002
Parts of the region that grew the most in the past
decade are now panting through the worst drought in a half-century,
yet most of the envisioned solutions are aimed at feeding more growth.
In Colorado, observers were stunned at the progress one
bill made in the state's special session last week, a proposal
that would have given a state panel $10 billion in bonding authority
for new water projects that cleared the House in just three days.
Supporters, including Gov. Bill Owens and Front Range cities officials,
farmers and developers, said it was a way to provide the water the
region would need for future growth.
Critics, including environmentalists and Western Slope officials
and farmers, said it was yet another assault on their water by the
more populous and more powerful cities across the Divide.
Both sides said the politics were shrewd, pushing for massive spending
authority when most of the state's voters were watching their lawns
and gardens wilt.
The bill started at $1 billion and ramped up to $10 billion in two
quick amendments, and while backers insisted it would be spread
in small amounts over a variety of smaller projects, critics feared
a return of massive dams and grand schemes.
Two often-mentioned proposals still on the drawing boards are a
project to catch some of the headwaters of the Gunnison River and
send it east, and another to siphon water out of the Colorado River
near the Utah border and pipe it back over the Divide to the Front
Range.
Even if new projects deliver more water, there's a built-in inequity
over who gets it. In
Phoenix and Tucson, there are no restrictions on lawns or car-washing,
or on water parks, swimming pools, golf courses and new developments.
Farmers in certain areas have yet to see their irrigation restricted,
and they're reaping a windfall selling alfalfa to their less-fortunate
brethren who rely on shriveled rangeland.
The difference is due to the state's distribution system: Phoenix
and Tucson get their water from the Colorado, by treaty and interstate
agreement, via an established infrastructure.
Other parts of the state depend on runoff and ground water, and
are more susceptible to drought.
Developers and officials in the big cities aren't about to give
up their water, lest they forfeit their legal rights, and even if
they were willing, they say there's no way to distribute it elsewhere.
And again, those hardest hit by the drought are those with the least
political clout, particularly Arizona's Navajo. Tribal ranchers
have been liquidating herds they can't water, for prices driven
down by the crisis.
One tribal hydrologist said most
of the reservation's 7,500 ponds have dried up, deep-water aquifers
are empty and as many as 10,000 animals already have died.
So what do water-starved communities envision? Santa Fe officials
are considering water-driven limits on growth, but a study by the
University of New Mexico concluded that imposition of a "water
budget" would only
push new development outside the city and contribute to increased
sprawl.
In rapidly growing Reno, city leaders picked through a dozen scenarios
and backed a $32
million plan that would tap three creeks, build two treatment
plants to remove arsenic and supposedly supply water for 20,000
new homes until 2028.
Throughout the region, cities have progressively usurped an increasing
amount of the available water. In Arizona, in the 1960s, 80 percent
was used for agriculture and 20 percent for residents and businesses,
a ratio that is now reversed.
The Central Utah Project -- part of the Bureau of Reclamation's
last big effort on the Colorado, built to deliver water to farmers
in the Salt Lake Valley -- was turned over to the Central Utah Water
Conservancy District in 1992 to supply
the increasingly urban Wasatch Front.
Since, those thirsty Front cities have proposed a series of dams
on the three tributaries that provide 70 percent of the inflows
to the Great Salt Lake.
Two of the most controversial dams on the Bear River, which would
have drained the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge, were eliminated
from consideration by Gov. Mike Leavitt last February. But that
leaves
at least four proposed dams on the Bear River alone. And the words
of one Salt Lake City activist doubtless will apply across the region:
"It's going to be fights and fights and fights."
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