TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/040389/04038900.046

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 10.5 KB | 200 lines

                                                                                AMERICAN IDEAS, Page 8

Water Marketing

A Deal That Might Save A Sierra Gem


Negotiators are trying to sustain Mono Lake by buying
irrigation water from unused fields

By Richard Conniff


    Get your hackles up, California. We are here to discuss
that choke-thy-neighbor word, water. Here being a
quintessentially innocuous looking and provocative setting, the
Los Angeles water intercept on Lee Vining Creek in the eastern
Sierras. On a brilliant winter afternoon, knee-deep snow covers
the intake pond behind a small concrete dam, and a Steller's jay
swoops among the evergreens. Mount Dana, lacking only an Ansel
Adams moon, is lit up crisply against a cloudless sky. And in
the background (the sticking point), there is the sound of
rushing water.

    By recent court order, some of the creek's water pours over
a narrow spillway and meanders seven miles down its ancient
route to Mono Lake. "There's probably 5 c.f.s. flowing in
there," a water activist remarks in the technical shorthand
(c.f.s. meaning cubic feet per second) that characterizes
California water talk.

    But since 1941, most of the Mono Basin's mountain water has
been disappearing from here and from three other streams down
a tube that leads about 225 miles south to Los Angeles. The
result, as bumper stickers, outraged postcards to the Governor,
and sober scientific studies have all amply declared, is that
this country's oldest lake, and one of its most unusual, is
being destroyed. Even the Los Angeles department of water and
power concedes that the Mono Lake ecosystem could collapse. "We
feel comfortable that we have 20 years before it's going to
happen," says David Babb, a staff naturalist. There is time for
more studies. But for now, he says, the department has no way
to replace its Mono water, 100,000 acre-feet a year, 17% of the
city's supply. The Mono Lake Committee, a courtroom adversary,
says it sees an "incremental unraveling" happening at Mono right
now. It wants the diversion reduced to 30,000 acre-feet to
stabilize the lake at a safe level.

    What to do? An acre-foot is the amount of water it would
take to flood an acre one foot deep, and if you can find 70,000
of them lying around for the taking in Southern California, you
can probably change your name to Yahweh and begin collecting
burnt offerings. No obvious replacement source presented itself
in the Mono Lake dispute until recently, when an economist named
Zach Willey suggested that the city and the environmentalists
get together to buy water from farmers on the western side of
the Sierras in California's vast central valley.

    Water marketing, first debated in the 1970s, was an
appealing idea: farmers use about 85% of California's water, and
because they get it from state and federal water projects at
subsidized rates, they tend to squander it. An acre-foot that
costs Southern California urbanites $230 may cost farmers as
little as $10, so even adding in the heavy cost of transporting
the water in the state's vast aqueduct system, there is room for
both sides to benefit from resale of unneeded irrigation
allotments. The idea had two minor drawbacks: many California
farmers would sooner spread salt on their fields than surrender
an acre-foot of the water they regard as their birthright, and
second, Willey's employer, the Environmental Defense Fund, has
a reputation for fighting the new water projects coveted by a
lot of farmers. But Willey and E.D.F. offered to find farmers
willing to sell, and the Mono Lake litigants agreed to pay for
the search.

    Thus at 5:30 on a recent morning, Willey and a partner,
E.D.F. lawyer Tom Graff, headed from their Oakland office down
Highway 5 to dicker with irrigation districts on the west side
of the San Joaquin Valley. An odd pair: Willey, somewhere over
6 ft. 5 in. in his cowboy boots, lean, green-eyed and with an
easy grin; Graff, short and with a squared-off boxer's nose,
but unpugnacious. As environmentalists go, they speak softly
and strangely: California water distribution suffers under
misguided socialist precepts, they argue. What it needs is fewer
bureaucrats and more capitalists. Turn water into a commodity
people can buy or sell, and the market will soon straighten out
inefficient ways of using the stuff.

    "We've had 100 years of development, and the environment's
been kicked around pretty bad," Willey says. "We're trying to
figure out a philosophy to rehabilitate things over the next 100
years. You're not going to do it by wholesale taking away of
resources from industry and farmers, or they're going to wind
up litigating you for the next 100 years. You're going to do it
through a system of incentives." His approach is to "go out and
make some deals" with the people who control water rights -- the
farmers.

    Willey, himself a product of the central valley, has spent
years scouting irrigation districts. "It's taken a decade of
learning local customs to get where we can have this little
discussion," he says of the morning's talks. "There are still
some groups in the valley that wouldn't sit in the same room
with us." E.D.F. hopes to entice two of the more progressive
irrigation districts, Firebaugh and Broadview, to risk heresy
and agree to a 10,000-acre-foot pilot project. "The party line
is that nobody takes water from agriculture. That's what they're
going against."

    The farmers who've come out to meet Willey are neither
heretics nor hayseeds but businessmen in a carpeted
irrigation-district boardroom. They hem and haw in their own
argot. They are worried, for instance, about load-flow
relationships: if the government sets stringent new standards
on selenium in their runoff, they may need to dilute it with
the very water Willey is proposing to buy. Life is terribly
uncertain. The regulatory agencies, they observe, "just agreed
that water runs downhill about two months ago." The farmers also
have this uneasy feeling that the environmentalists want them
to save water by shutting down farmland.

    Willey reads the unspoken cue; they are imagining Owens
Valley: The Sequel, in which Los Angeles, having glommed up
water and put farmers out of business in the now infamous valley
south of Mono Basin, casts a thirsty eye their way. He tries to
reassure them. The idea is to spread the water-marketing deals
around to avoid a concentrated effect on any single farming
area. No one is telling farmers to take land out of production
or move to the city. A textbook negotiator, Willey subtly points
up benefits that the farmers would rather temporarily overlook:
Wouldn't the income from water marketing help pay for new
irrigation methods that save water? Could be. Isn't that the
sort of thing farmers are looking at anyway, because it can also
boost production? Maybe so.

    Both irrigation districts are firm on one point. The bid of
$60 an acre-foot that Willey has presented on behalf of the Mono
Lake litigants will cut no deals. One farmer states the
proposition from Willey's point of view: "You get the price up,
and if farm prices aren't so good, you're going to get other
districts saying, `Look what those fellows are doing over
there.' " A price upwards of $125 might begin to stir their
interest. Then they grimace and stare at their thumbs as if to
say they honestly wished they could do better.

    All this is about as expected, Willey says on the drive
home. If he can get all sides to settle on a price, his next job
may be more difficult. In its last days, the Reagan
Administration stated it had no objections to water marketing
(in a memo written by an Assistant Secretary now handling
water-project bonds at Drexel Burnham Lambert). But other voices
may object to the idea that farmers who receive subsidized water
for crops, and further subsidies not to grow those crops, should
profit handsomely on the sale of the subsidized water. Willey
argues that the profits will be going to produce new public
benefits: irrigation systems that use less water and produce
less pollution. A Mono County businessman suggests that the sale
of water rights ought to be regulated to prevent profiteering.
But here Willey hews to the free-market line: even if the price
per acre-foot starts out high, he says, competition will drive
it down to a fair level as other irrigation districts try to get
in on the action. Beyond that, someone has to pick up the bill
for the replacement water. Los Angeles has agreed to pay part
of the cost of the pilot project. E.D.F. has committed itself
to raising the remainder, partly by lobbying the state and the
U.S. Forest Service, which has declared Mono Lake a National
Forest Scenic Area. If tax dollars are unavailable, says Graff
from the backseat, E.D.F. may propose turning the lake over to
a private trust and setting up a tollbooth.

    He is only half kidding. "The idea that the
postcard-writing public should pay as well as write cards is not
an easy one for preservationists to swallow," Graff concedes.
But "if there was more of a willingness to pay for maintaining
the environment, we wouldn't have to rely on bureaucratic whim."
It is evident that Willey and Graff believe in their
neo-capitalist approach. The bottom line then naturally presents
itself: Gentlemen, what do we get for our money?

    Pursue that question downstream from the Los Angeles
intercept a day or two after the bargaining session, and find
Mono Lake looking a little depleted, like an old man who has got
too small for the collar of his best shirt. It has shrunk from
more than 80 sq. mi. in area to about 60. But in the warm
months, 40,000 California gulls still nest on the volcanic
islands, and migratory grebe and phalaropes turn the lake into
an ornithological stew. The tufa towers produced by geological
turmoil under the surface still stand, gnarled spires made of
a material that Mark Twain likened to "inferior mortar dried
hard": here a Giacometti sculpture, there a bust of Richard
Milhous Nixon. Nature's freakish pranks. To the west, snow
billows off the high ridge of the Sierras as the sun drops
behind. The light catches on jagged volcanic peaks along the
south shore of the lake. It turns the clusters of tufa white
against the leaden water. Everything is silent, and there is a
sickle moon overhead (not quite Ansel Adams, but getting
there). The light changes from red to wine dark to a milky
bruised blue, and the mountains fade into the sky. In a
visitor's register nearby, someone has scribbled a note: "Es ist
wunderbar hier. Danke, Amerika."