Feds start process to manage Colorado River after states miss drought plan deadline

A view of Hoover Dam is seen from the Mike O'Callaghan-Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge on Wednesday, Aug. 28, 2018. (Jeff Scheid/The Nevada Independent)

By Daniel Rothberg
The Nevada Independent

Citing increasing risks of shortages on the Colorado River, federal water managers said they are starting a process to protect the overused and drought-stricken watershed, after the seven states that use the river missed a deadline Thursday to complete a drought plan.

On Friday morning, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, a federal agency that manages waterways and dams across the West, submitted a formal notice asking each Colorado River Basin state to submit comments about how to manage the river in lieu of a drought plan. In December, Reclamation Commissioner Brenda Burman told the states that the states had until Jan. 31 to finish negotiating a drought deal that has been in the works for about three years.

“While we are getting closer, we are still not done,” Burman said on a call with reporters.

Despite Friday’s action, Burman said the agency’s preferred approach would be to implement the drought plan, which is nearly complete. If a plan is approved before March 4, when states start submitting comments, Burman said the agency would rescind its action. But if Arizona and California, the two states that have not finished the plan, cannot come to an agreement before then, Burman vowed to move down a path giving her broad authority to manage the river.

Such an action, Burman said, was not the agency’s “preferred approach.”

“However, any further delay elevates existing risk for the basin to unacceptable levels,” Burman told reporters. “The basin is teetering on the brink of shortage and there is a potential for Lake Powell and Lake Mead to decline to critically low elevations in the very near future.”

For years, the basin states — Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming — have been working on a deal to cut usage amid a nearly two-decade drought. Lower average streamflows have intensified overuse on the Colorado River, a watershed that stretches from Wyoming to Mexico and supports more than 40 million people in the Southwest. As a result, the elevation of the river’s main reservoirs, Lake Mead and Lake Powell, dropped to historic lows.

Five states, including Nevada, have signed off on the deal, known as the Drought Contingency Plan (DCP). Several Southern California irrigation districts have yet to review and sign off on the final plan. For more than a year, the biggest roadblock to finishing the drought plan was in Central Arizona, a region that could be required to cut nearly half of its Colorado River supply under the plan. Those cuts, which will hit agricultural producers the hardest, had been the subject of intense negotiations between farmers, tribes and cities, as irrigation districts pushed for mitigation water.

But on Thursday, Arizona lawmakers reached an agreement passing legislation that allowed the drought plan to move forward. Burman called the development a “tremendous step forward” and said it was a signal that Arizona’s approval of the drought plan could be “imminent.” Still, Burman said she issued the notice because the final contracts were still not in place.

“We appreciate the acknowledgment of Arizona’s accomplishment and look forward to all parties across the basin to work together to complete the DCP process by the commissioner’s March 4 deadline,” said Crystal Thompson, a spokesperson for the Central Arizona Project, which controls a 336-mile canal that delivers Colorado River water from Lake Havasu to Tucson.

Nevada, through the Southern Nevada Water Authority, became the first state to approve the drought plan in November. Because the water authority is using less water than it is allowed to use under the Colorado River Compact allocation, it would be able to sustain cuts to its supply.

Colby Pellegrino, the water authority’s Colorado River manager, said the water authority is “pretty optimistic” that “we will have that seven-state consensus within the next few weeks.”

Intervention from the federal government would be a significant departure from the state-driven approach that has characterized Colorado River management. When it comes to the Colorado River, the agency has traditionally allowed the states to craft collaborative rules for how it should manage its complex rulebook for operating dams and processing water deliveries.

Burman did not elaborate on what a possible action would look like and noted that she had legal authority to take necessary action under Arizona v. California, a 1963 Supreme Court case. But Burman said that the best approach would be for the states to approve a collaborative plan.

“It’s better to have consensus,” she said. “These are questions that a lot of people don’t want to answer. It’s better to have consensus on the river than exploring a lot of legal hypotheticals.”

Long before Burman threatened federal action in December, the states have sought to avoid that outcome. Many water managers believe that handing over more control to the federal government would take away the certainty and predictability they have in making decisions.

“Certainty to us is being able to predict the quantity and timing of shortages,” Pellegrino said.

That certainty, Pellegrino said, allows the water authority to plan for shortages, create accurate modeling and conduct risk assessments. Under current streamflow forecasts, the Bureau of Reclamation is expected to issue its first shortage declaration for Lake Mead at the start of 2020.

Arizona joins Colorado River drought plan

Decision to join drought plan, authorized by lawmakers and Gov. Doug Ducey, went right up to edge of federal deadline.

In this July 28, 2014, file photo, lightning strikes over Lake Mead near Hoover Dam that impounds Colorado River water at the Lake Mead National Recreation Area in Arizona. (John Locher, Associated Press)

By JONATHAN J. COOPER
The Denver Post and Associated Press

PHOENIX — Arizona delivered one of the final puzzle pieces for a Colorado River drought plan, agreeing Thursday to join six other states and Mexico in voluntarily taking less water from the constrained river.

The decision to join the drought plan, authorized by lawmakers and Gov. Doug Ducey, went right up to the edge of a federal deadline that threatened to blow up the agreement. U.S. Bureau of Reclamation director Brenda Burman said all parties must agree to cutbacks by Jan. 31 or she would begin the process to impose them.

Arizona was the only state that required legislation to join the agreement to protect the water that serves 40 million people in Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada and California.

“We inherited as human beings a pristine land with pristine water, and we messed it up as human beings ourselves,” said Sen. Jamescita Peshlakai, a Democrat who represents the Navajo reservation in northeastern Arizona and voted to join the drought plan. “It is incumbent for us to safeguard, protect what we have left.”

The so-called drought contingency plan is an effort to keep the Colorado River’s major reservoirs from reaching catastrophically low levels.

The nightmare scenario for Arizona, California, Nevada and Mexico — which draw from Lake Mead — is a phenomenon called “dead pool,” in which the level of the lake’s surface falls below the gates that let water out. To avoid it, the agreement calls for an escalating array of cutbacks as the lake level drops.

Arizona has junior rights to river water and would be hit first and hardest if Lake Mead on its border with Nevada drops to shortage levels. Most residents will not see an impact from cutbacks, which will primarily hit farmers in Pinal County — between Phoenix and Tucson — who have the lowest-priority access to Colorado River water and stand to lose the most.

The Arizona legislation is the product of months of negotiations between major water users in the state, who agreed to reduce their take in exchange for cash or access to groundwater in the future. The farmers, who reluctantly supported the agreement, said it would require them to fallow as much as 40 percent of the county’s farmland.

“We know nothing is perfect, but this is pretty darn good,” said Senate President Karen Fann, a Republican from Prescott.

Arizona water officials say joining the agreement is critical to the state’s water future.

“The drought is real, and there’s less water in the river,” Dennis Patch, chairman of the Colorado River Indian Tribes, told lawmakers this week. “We can see it. We must all take a realistic view of this river and realize it does not have as much water as it used to.”

Opposition came from a handful of Democrats who said the deal didn’t do enough to rein in the state’s water consumption. Sen. Juan Mendez characterized the deal as a giveaway to interest groups that promotes unsustainable water policy, ignores climate change and doesn’t address the fact that Arizona will have less water in the future.

If Arizona were serious about the drought, Mendez said, “we would be entertaining an honest assessment of whether we can continue to base our state’s economy on continuous growth and on welfare for water intensive uses.” Mendez, a Tempe Democrat, was one of only a handful of lawmakers to vote against the measures.

Arizona lawmakers backed two measures. One allows Arizona to join the multi-state agreement. The other includes a variety of measures to help Pinal County farmers. Those include $9 million for the farmers to drill wells, dig ditches and build other infrastructure needed for them to change from the river to groundwater.

Tucson would get more groundwater credits for treated wastewater, allowing the city to pump more in the future in exchange for providing water to Pinal farmers.

The drought plan requires Arizona to find a way to reduce its use of Colorado River water by up to 700,000 acre-feet — more than twice Nevada’s yearly allocation under the drought plan. An acre-foot is enough for one to two households a year.

Still, the agreement is only the beginning of discussions about conserving Colorado River water. It lasts through 2026, after which point even steeper cuts are widely expected. Ducey created a commission Thursday to study ways the state can conserve water.

“There’s a lot more work to be done to ensure that Arizona is prepared for a drier water future,” Ducey said.

Feds hurting Lake Powell to prop up Lake Mead, scientists warn

The water level on Lake Powell, shown in 2013, dropped by about 100 feet from its high mark. That distance is indicated by the white marks on the canyon wall, often likened to a bathtub ring. (Mark Henle / The Arizona Republic)

By Tony Davis
Arizona Daily Star

Federal management of the Colorado River’s reservoirs is draining Lake Powell while keeping Lake Mead propped up out of shortage territory, says a team of scientists studying the river.

Since 2015, Lake Mead — the source of Central Arizona Project water serving Tucson and Phoenix — has typically finished each year barely above the level where CAP cutbacks would be required.

A key reason shortages were avoided is that for four straight years, federal officials sent the embattled lake an above-normal release of water from Lake Powell, the giant reservoir at the Utah border that’s separated from Mead by the Grand Canyon. The releases have been 9 million acre-feet, compared to normal annual releases of 8.23 million acre-feet.

These releases, welcomed by some Arizona users as “bonus water,” have worked with conservation efforts to prevent shortages. Otherwise, Central Arizona farmers would almost certainly have already suffered CAP cutbacks. Another 9 million acre-foot release is likely for 2019, federal officials say.

In their new report, the scientists studying the Colorado warn that the continued extra water releases threaten to lower Powell to the point where its operations will be jeopardized.

“This is not all good news, and is not evidence of successful crisis management,” the report says of Lake Mead’s continued narrow escapes from shortages. “The reality of the situation is that the dominoes have already begun to tumble, and the proof lies upstream in Lake Powell.”

Lake Powell cannot rescue Lake Mead forever, said Karl Flessa, a University of Arizona geosciences professor who worked on the report.

“Those of us here in the Lower Basin are so focused on Lake Mead, but what’s propping up Mead is Lake Powell, and Lake Powell is going down, too,” Flessa said.

A total of about 11 million acre-feet of the extra water has been sent from Powell to Mead since 2000, the report says. That’s more than seven years’ worth of CAP water. Powell has dropped 94 feet since 2000. Had all that water stayed in Powell, that lake wouldn’t have dropped at all since 2000, the report says.

“The math suggests that, without these extra releases, we could today have a full Lake Powell and an empty Lake Mead. We are certainly not saying that would be a ‘better’ outcome; that would be chaos,” said another researcher involved in the report, Douglas Kenney, director of the University of Colorado’s Western Water Policy Program.

“What we are saying is that it’s important to understand that the actions taken to keep Lake Mead out of shortage have had real impacts upstream at Lake Powell, and all users dependent upon Lake Powell now face risks associated with looming Lake Powell shortages.”

The scientists say “the status quo (of reservoir management) is untenable,” and that a crisis on Lake Powell may already be at hand.

“It is impossible to keep a bathtub full while the drain is left open,” the report says.

ELECTRICITY GENERATION AT RISK

If the river’s operations continue like this, Lake Powell will drain further, eroding the lake’s ability to generate electricity, the report says.

Also threatened is “the delicate interbasin truce” of the river’s seven states that was made possible by the two massive reservoirs, the researchers say.

Besides generating power, Lake Powell serves as a water bank repository, storing water so it can be released when needed for the Upper Basin to meet its legal requirements for delivering adequate supplies to the Lower Basin, as required under the 1922 Colorado River Compact. The river’s Lower Basin states are Arizona, California and Nevada; the Upper Basin’s are Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico.

The report comes from a team of 10 researchers, including Flessa, that calls itself the Colorado River Research Group. Its stated goal is to “provide a nonpartisan, basin-wide perspective on matters pertaining to the Colorado River.”

Three of the 10 researchers, including Flessa and UA economics professor Bonnie Colby, work in the Lower Basin. Six, including Kenney, work in the Upper Basin. The 10th, former UA climate scientist Jonathan Overpeck, is now dean of the University of Michigan’s School for Environment and Sustainability.

In part, their new report blames Powell’s problems on federal guidelines, approved by the seven basin states, under which the river has been managed since 2007.

The guidelines seek to balance water levels in the two reservoirs to provide maximum benefit for people living in both basins. But they are triggering the extra water releases that the report says threaten Lake Powell.

The river’s continuing structural deficit “is the true villain in this story,” says the report. That deficit is caused by the three Lower Basin states taking more water out of the river than nature provides each year. The deficit is estimated at about 1.2 million acre-feet a year.

The deficit is seen as the key cause of Lake Mead’s continuing declines. At the end of this year, Mead is expected to be 1,080 feet above sea level, five feet above where a shortage is declared. There’s a 57 percent chance of a 2020 shortage at Mead, the Bureau of Reclamation predicted.

But, the report says, “To view the structural deficit as a Lower Basin and/or a Lake Mead problem is ... much too simplistic; it is central to all the basin’s water supply woes.”

Powell is expected to drop to 3,587 feet by the end of 2018, the report says. At 3,525 feet, the lake’s power deliveries can be jeopardized.

The Upper Basin states take 4.5 million acre-feet, or less than two-thirds of the 7.5 million they’re legally entitled to take from the river each year, the report says. The Lower Basin states have diverted a far greater slice of their annual 7.5 million acre-foot share, although last year’s diversions were the lowest in 25 years. Another 1.5 million acre-feet of river water goes to Mexico annually.

The Bureau of Reclamation, which operates the two reservoirs, defended the management system, saying the two dams are operated jointly to meet the water needs of both basins.

The Central Arizona Project, whose water supply has benefited from the extra Powell releases, said through a spokeswoman, “CAP is not going to comment on the report at this time.”

The Arizona Department of Water Resources, which seeks to protect Arizona’s Colorado River supply, also would not comment on the report.

The past four years of 9 million acre-foot releases from Powell helped to balance the contents of the two reservoirs, the Bureau of Reclamation told the Star.

“Without the storage in both Lake Powell and Lake Mead, the basin would not have been able to withstand this long into the ongoing drought,” the bureau said.

“Maintaining their operation, coupled with basin-wide efforts like a completed drought contingency plan, is crucial,” the bureau said, “to continued reliable and consistent water for the 40 million people who rely on the Colorado River.”

As Colorado River Basin reservoirs drop to near-record low levels, possibility of unprecedented water shortage declaration rises

Climate shift to hotter, drier conditions worsening current water crunch

Colorado River Basin

By BRUCE FINLEY
The Denver Post

The Colorado River is so strained amid population growth and a climate shift to hotter, drier conditions that federal water managers may declare an unprecedented “shortage” and cut releases from reservoirs.

The feds are imploring Western states to do more now to cut water use.

A U.S. Bureau of Reclamation forecast issued Wednesday for water in the Colorado River — an over-subscribed lifeline for 40 million people — anticipates declaration of a shortage in September 2019 that would trigger the reduced water releases from federal reservoirs in “lower basin” states including Nevada and Arizona.

Colorado and other “upper basin” states Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico would face increased scrutiny of flows from headwaters into the Lake Powell reservoir. On Wednesday, Lake Powell measured 49 percent full and Lake Mead measured 38 percent full.

“Water stored in Lake Mead and Lake Powell has blunted the impacts of the ongoing drought and helped ensure consistent, reliable water and power,” said Brent Rhees, the bureau’s regional director for the upper basin. “We must continue to work to protect water in the basin. Completing drought contingency plans this year will provide better certainty. …. We can’t afford to wait for a crisis.”

Colorado Water Conservation Board Director Rebecca Mitchell said “there’s no doubt” managing the river presents challenges. “Realistic predictions on the Colorado River are for increasing demand and decreasing supply,” Mitchell said.

Declaration of a water shortage along the Colorado River would be unprecedented. Federal officials are committed to waiting until the water level in Lake Mead drops below the elevation of 1,075 feet above sea level. Then they’d cut deliveries, first targeting Arizona, Nevada and Mexico.

The water level on Wednesday: 1,078 feet.

“We’re within three feet. We’re not going to declare a shortage in 2019,” agency spokesman Marlon Duke said. “There’s a 52-percent chance we will have to declare a shortage in 2020. … We cannot just sit back and think the river is going to provide all the water we need, especially as our cities continue to grow. It all depends on what Mother Nature sends us next year.”

Beyond the booming Western cities that rely on Colorado River water, including Denver, Phoenix and Las Vegas, strains on the river have food supply implications affecting salad bars as far away as New York and Washington, D.C. Colorado River water irrigates 15 percent of the nation’s vegetables, nuts and fruits.

For nearly a century, Western states have shared the river water under a treaty that divvies up portions and specifies the amounts states must leave in the river to maintain healthy major reservoirs. The problem is that population growth and agriculture has been withdrawing more water each year than the river supplies. And climate conditions, far drier than the relatively wet period that was the basis for the treaty, hasten the draw-down of reservoirs meant to serve as savings accounts.

“We see this train coming, and we’re trying to get ready for it,” said James Eklund, Upper Colorado River Basin commissioner for Colorado, who negotiates river matters with commissioners from the other states, including California.

“Right now we’re OK. If they declare a shortage in the lower basin, it is going to pull more water out of Lake Powell. That would mean we are going to have to put more water into it,” Eklund said.

“The ‘shortage’ is like a yellow traffic signal that says, ‘Hey. Watch out. You’ve gotta be mindful of demands exceeding supply to such a degree that our system doesn’t work.'”

U.S. Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Brenda Burman has warned states they must act. Burman demanded “drought contingency plans” by the end of the year. The publication of the Colorado River forecast covering the next two years is expected to spur planning, if not immediate smarter use of water.

Federal government scientists have concluded that climate change is creating conditions in the Colorado River Basin that are more variable with more extreme precipitation and more extreme drought. Scientists say precipitation increasingly will come from rain, rather than snow, as temperatures increase. The reservoirs constructed along the river have become increasingly important in easing the impact during a dry period that began 18 years ago and ranks among the driest periods in 1,200 years.

The forecast says river flows into Lake Powell from Colorado and other upper basin states, from snowpack, probably won’t exceed 75 percent of average next year. It says 8.23 million acre-feet of water will flow from Lake Powell to Lake Mead in 2019. That’s more than the amount expected to flow into Lake Powell.

Colorado, Wyoming and Utah depend heavily on mountain snowpack and have been delivering water to Lake Powell as required under the Colorado River Compact. The efforts in these states to develop a plan for conservation should a shortage be declared reflects a common interest of states in managing the river cooperatively — avoiding a federal intervention to control flows into and out of reservoirs.

That plan will be done by the end of the year, Eklund said.

“We in the upper basin face water shortages every year because the nation’s two largest reservoirs sit below, not above, us. We have to work with whatever falls from the heavens. Anytime we have to administer water under our priority system, someone in the upper basin is taking a shortage. That happens every year,” he said.

“We have ways to use less water. We fallow fields. We take water out of pipelines. We conserve. But we have less snow to work with than in the past and more people than ever reliant on the Colorado River system,” Eklund said.

“In a system that supports 40 million people in seven states, tribes, and Mexico, a unique environment, and several billion dollars of economic output, this challenge requires contingency planning in both the lower basin and the upper basin,” he said.

“These contingency plans will have to be implemented.”

Water advocacy groups embraced the forecast as evidence the West’s water challenges are reaching a critical point.

People in the seven southwestern states “must learn to live with less water,” said Kim Mitchell of the Boulder-based Western Resource Advocates. “Unless we take decisive, proactive steps now, major water users, farmers, cities, businesses, and the environment all will lose water. … Leaders at all levels throughout the basin must understand that more water is being pulled out of the Colorado River than is being replaced and the problem is compounded by a long-term drought and climate change.”

Preparing for a drier future along the Colorado River

The Colorado River flows beside a hay field near Blythe. (Jay Calderon/The Desert Sun)

Ian James
The Desert Sun

After a 17-year run of mostly dry years, the Colorado River’s flow has decreased significantly below the 20th century average.

Lake Mead, the largest reservoir in the country, now stands just 39 percent full. The level of the reservoir behind Hoover Dam has been hovering a bit above historic lows during the past year, helped by a bigger snowpack last winter and strides in water conservation.

But with scenarios of the reservoir falling to critical lows looking very possible in the coming years, managers of water agencies in California, Arizona and Nevada have signaled their interest in finalizing a deal under which they would take less water from Lake Mead in an attempt to head off severe shortages.

It’s not clear how much longer it might take for officials at water districts in the three states to agree on the details of the proposed Drought Contingency Plan, which they’ve been discussing since 2015. But given the enormous strains on the river, the disconnect between its flow and the amounts diverted, and the growing impacts of climate change, experts say this sort of agreement seems a necessary first step toward preparing for a hotter and drier future in the Southwest.

“It’s great to have the structural deficit taken care of, and that’s frankly what the Drought Contingency Plan does is take care of that,” said Brad Udall, a water and climate scientist at Colorado State University. But if the flow of the river decreases more in the coming years — by say, more than 20 percent, for example — he said those measures won’t go far enough in “dealing with the conflict that will fall out of such declines.”

In March, Udall and fellow climate scientist Jonathan Overpeck published research in which they found that reductions in the river’s flow averaged 19 percent per year between 2000 and 2014. They estimated that somewhere between one-sixth and one-half of that loss in flow was due to higher temperatures — 0.9 degree Celsius, or 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit, above the average over the previous 94 years.

In the study, which was published in the journal Water Resources Research, they described the conditions since 2000 as a “temperature-dominated drought.”

Using climate models to estimate a business-as-usual scenario of greenhouse gas emissions, they also projected that without changes in precipitation, warming will likely cause the Colorado River’s flow to decrease by 35 percent or more this century.

“We have real challenges ahead,” Udall said. “Climate change is here now. It’s real, it’s getting increasingly worse, and the old way of doing business is not going to suffice.”

Managers of water agencies from across the West met this month at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, near Lake Mead, for the annual meeting of the Colorado River Water Users Association. Officials from the Lower Basin states — Arizona, California and Nevada — all expressed support for having rules in place before a shortage hits.

“To a person, they all noted how important it is that we reach an agreement in the basin,” said Jennifer Pitt, the National Audubon Society's Colorado River project director, who attended the meeting.

In the long-term, Pitt said, it will be important to have policies in place to prepare for longer and more severe droughts.

“What if we had another 20 years like we just had, another 20 years of super-dry conditions? Are we prepared for that?” Pitt said. “I’d say today, we are not prepared.”

But she added that a U.S.-Mexico Colorado River deal signed in September provides a policy that’s “ready to be triggered” to help the situation. Under the accord, dubbed Minute 323, Mexico agreed to cut the amount it takes from the river alongside the U.S. states — as long as the Drought Contingency Plan is in place, and whenever the states end up shouldering reductions under that plan.

The agreement also provides for Mexico to continue storing water in Lake Mead, helping to boost the reservoir’s levels.

More than a year ago, officials representing California, Arizona and Nevada had said they were hopeful they would finalize the Drought Contingency Plan soon. But disagreements flared in Arizona, and California water districts have also had issues to work out.

One potential obstacle apparently was removed in November when California water regulators adopted an agreement that commits the state to following through on plans of building wetlands and controlling dust around the shrinking Salton Sea over the next 10 years.

The Imperial Irrigation District holds the biggest single water entitlement along the Colorado River and supplies water to farms producing crops from alfalfa to Brussels sprouts. The Salton Sea is shrinking under a water transfer deal that is sending water to growing cities in San Diego County and the Coachella Valley.

The Imperial district’s leaders had warned California officials that that they would only take part in the Colorado River deal if there is a credible “roadmap” for dealing with the decline of the Salton Sea. IID officials praised the Salton Sea agreement, indicating that their condition has now been met.

The Colorado River and its tributaries provide water for about 40 million people and more than 5 million acres of farmland from Wyoming to California.

The legal framework that divvies up the Colorado River was established during much wetter times nearly a century ago, starting with the 1922 Colorado River Compact. That and subsequent agreements have handed out more water than what flows in the river in an average year, leading to chronic overuse.

The treaties that originally divided the river among seven states and Mexico allocated 7.5 million acre-feet of water per year for states in the river’s Upper Basin, including Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico; 7.5 million acre-feet for the Lower Basin states of Nevada, Arizona and California; and 1.5 million acre-feet for Mexico.

For decades, so much water has been diverted from dams all along the Colorado that the river seldom meets the sea. The river’s delta in Mexico has become a dusty stretch of desert.

Lake Mead is managed together with Lake Powell, on the border between Arizona and Utah, and the combined amount of water in the two reservoirs has been much smaller since the mid-2000s than in the previous two decades. While the reservoirs’ levels have retreated, heavy pumping of groundwater has also led to declining aquifers in parts of the river basin.

Yet, even as water policymakers have widely agreed that the outlook calls for changes to adapt, there have also been some significant water-saving successes, which have helped somewhat in pushing back potential shortages at Lake Mead.

John Fleck, director of the University of New Mexico’s Water Resources Program, pointed out in a blog post this month that Colorado River use in Arizona, Nevada and California is set to end the year at the lowest level since 1986.

Pitt said a key objective now will be developing approaches for maintaining the reliability of water supplies and avoiding a crash, in which Lake Mead falls so far that it triggers painful cutoffs of water deliveries.

“We have to put some policies in place to prevent those catastrophic outcomes,” Pitt said. An agreement like the proposed Drought Contingency Plan, she said, would be a step in that direction.

“A certain amount of incrementalism seems to be appropriate in this case,” Pitt said, “because dealing with this level of change in hydrologic conditions is something we don’t have a huge history of.”

There are also other challenges, Udall said, including the idea among some water officials in parts of the Upper Basin such as Utah and Colorado that “it’s OK to still go develop additional water resources in the Colorado River Basin.”

Udall pointed to Utah, where water districts are proposing to build a 140-mile pipeline — at a projected cost of between $1.1 billion and $1.8 billion — to carry water from Lake Powell to growing communities in two counties. The pipeline would transport up to 77 million gallons per day, or 86,000 acre-feet per year, to a reservoir near St. George.

“Why would you want to pour gas on the fire and use more, set up a system … that takes another 100,000 acre-feet out of the river and just digs a deeper hole for us to solve?” Udall said. “In law, they are allowed to do that. But it’s like doubling down on a bad bet and it’s just going to make the pain all the more serious if and should we have to deal with large declines in flow.”

The pipeline proposal is undergoing a review by federal regulators. Officials at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission announced on Dec. 11 that they are starting to carry out an environmental analysis and for the next 60 days will accept comments from the public on the project.

Colorado’s runoff has peaked

Lake Powell 65 percent full, but much of it going to Mead

Lake Powell

By Gary Harmon
The Daily Sentinel

The runoff of 2017 is over and officials expect Lake Powell to rise to 65 percent full, but that relatively high level won’t last long as the inflow into the reservoir will be sent downstream to Lake Mead and Mexico.

In all, Lake Powell is to release just under 9 million acre-feet of water downstream this year, or 7.5 million acre-feet to meet the terms of the 1922 Colorado River compact, and 750,000 acre-feet for Mexico under a 1944 treaty.

Lake Powell functions as a savings account for the Upper Colorado River Basin states, which are required under the compact to release 7.5 million acre-feet per year, based on a rolling 10-year average, from Powell.

Lake Powell can contain just over 24 million acre-feet of water.

The high-runoff year ultimately won’t buy much insurance for the upper basin states, said Chris Treese, spokesman for the Colorado River Water Conservation District.

“It won’t make things worse,” Treese said. “We will continue to bump along about the 50 percent level” in Lake Powell.

While 9 million acre-feet amounts to a third of the capacity of Lake Powell, water continues to flow into the reservoir throughout the year, though well short of runoff levels.

The Bureau of Reclamation operates Lake Powell so as to keep enough pressure to generate electricity at Glen Canyon Dam. The dam’s eight turbines can produce up to 1,320 megawatts of electricity and the dam supplies power to 5.8 million customers.

The spring’s high runoff isn’t operationally significant, James Eklund, the former director of the Colorado Water Conservation Board who headed development of the Colorado water plan, said in an email.

From a strategic perspective, however, “it underscores that even in what seemed like a banner water year, we’re still a long way from recovery from the last 16-year dry spell” and highlights the need to keep enough water in Powell high enough to generate electricity, Eklund said.

Even though the runoff has peaked, people looking to enjoy the water should take care, said Andy Martsolf, emergency services director for Mesa County.

“The water in the Colorado is moving fast and it is cold,” Martsolf said. “People recreating on the river should always use a personal flotation device, multichamber inflatables, and tell someone who is not in their party where they are going and when to expect their return.”

Delayed Colorado River deal will likely fall to Trump administration to finish

The Colorado River flows near Arches National Park in Utah in February 2016. (Photo: Jay Calderon/The Desert Sun)

Ian James
The Desert Sun

Several months ago, managers of water agencies in California, Arizona and Nevada were expressing optimism they could finalize a deal to use less water from the dwindling Colorado River before the end of the Obama administration.

Now that Jan. 20 deadline no longer seems achievable and parties to the talks acknowledge they likely won’t be able to finish an agreement until at least several months into President-elect Donald Trump’s administration.

With Lake Mead’s water level hovering near record low levels, representatives of the three states, water agencies and the federal government say they’ve made progress in negotiating the so-called Drought Contingency Plan, which would involve temporarily drawing less water from the reservoir near Las Vegas to avert a more severe shortage. The deal is being held up by complications, though, and one of the major sticking points is the Salton Sea.

Managers of the Imperial Valley’s water district, which is the largest single user of Colorado River water, are demanding California officials first present a detailed plan for addressing the Salton Sea’s accelerating decline. They say they want to see a credible “road map” for dealing with the thousands of acres of lakebed that will be left exposed in the coming years and that could turn their valley into a dust bowl, posing a serious public health hazard.

So far, they say they’re still far from satisfied.

“There has got to be a going-forward plan we can believe in at the Salton Sea,” said Kevin Kelley, general manager of the Imperial Irrigation District. “We remain willing, but we’ve got to be able to answer this open question at the Salton Sea.”

Kelley has been voicing that stance for months, and he reiterated his concerns on Thursday in Las Vegas, where he and other managers of water districts from across the West were attending the annual conference of the Colorado River Water Users Association.

“We’ve had more progress at the Salton Sea in the last 14 months than we’ve had in the last 14 years,” Kelley said in a telephone interview. “So we’re closer than we’ve ever been to a breakthrough that the region could believe in. But that isn’t going to be enough. We need to cross the finish line together. And it may be that time’s run out with the current administration and that it extends into the next one.”

After substantial progress in negotiations on the proposed Colorado River drought plan, “the outline of a deal is there,” Kelley said, and IID would like to participate by temporarily storing some of its water in Lake Mead. “But we have this problem at the Salton Sea, that we’ve got to have a clear path forward on in order to participate.”

His district’s unresolved concerns reflect the complexity of the negotiations on the over-allocated and drought-stricken Colorado River. Recalibrating water flows to keep more water in Lake Mead and boost its levels will inevitably lead to less farm runoff flowing into the Salton Sea, which will further accelerate its decline at a time when the Imperial Valley is already transferring increasing quantities of water to cities in San Diego County and the Coachella Valley.

Last month, Kelley laid down a deadline and called for the state to present a plan for the Salton Sea by Dec. 31.

A week ago, the Imperial Irrigation District received an internal draft of the state’s 10-year plan. Kelley said it’s too soon to pass judgment on the unfinished document, but based on his initial review, “it still lacks the specificity that we called for.”

The document, which was obtained by The Desert Sun, summarizes the state’s proposals for a “smaller but sustainable lake” and lays out broad goals for building new wetlands along the lake’s receding shores to cover up stretches of exposed lake bottom and provide habitat for birds.

The document says an estimated 50,000 acres of “playa” will be left dry and exposed around the lake by 2028. The construction of “water backbone infrastructure” is to begin with ponds where water from the lake’s tributaries will be routed to create new wetlands. According to the 24-page document, which describes the Salton Sea Management Program, initial construction will start on exposed lakebed west of the mouth of the New River “to take advantage of existing permits.”

The draft says that in addition to building wetlands, the state also will use “waterless dust suppression” techniques in some areas. Those approaches can include using tractors to plow stretches of lakebed to create dust-catching furrows, or even laying down bales of hay on the exposed lake bottom as barriers to block windblown dust.

Kelley said the document lacks key details on funding and timing. He pointed out that it also doesn’t mention the proposed Colorado River Drought Contingency Plan, or DCP.

“The milestones are, I think, still ambiguous and certainly not enforceable,” Kelley said. “As it stands today, based on what we’ve seen in this response from the state, we cannot participate in a DCP.”

Bruce Wilcox, who was appointed last year by Gov. Jerry Brown to lead the state’s efforts at the Salton Sea, said he expects more details will be added to the plan before it’s publicly released later this month. He pointed out that the plan does include a schedule for the construction of projects, with the aim of keeping up with the rate at which the lakeshore recedes.

“I’m sure IID wants more. It’s difficult to give them more,” Wilcox said. “The next level of detail is where you actually start construction drawings.”

After years of delays, state officials budgeted more than $80 million this year to start building canals and wetlands at the Salton Sea. The federal government announced $30 million this year to support projects at the sea, and newly passed federal water legislation includes an additional $30 million. The state’s 10-year plan will likely cost much more, and it’s not clear where the money will come from.

Wilcox said state officials will prepare an analysis of the costs and funding in the next several weeks.

The Salton Sea was accidentally created between 1905 and 1907, when Colorado River water broke through irrigation canals in the Imperial Valley and flooded into the basin. Since then, the lake has been sustained largely by runoff from the Imperial Valley’s farms, which produce hay, wheat and vegetables like carrots and Brussels sprouts.

A 2003 water transfer deal is sending increasing amounts of water out of the Imperial Valley, and flows of “mitigation water” to the sea will also be cut off after 2017, accelerating the lake’s decline.

Kelley said the state’s plan, as it stands now, seems too ambiguous at a time when the lake is about to shrink so dramatically. The Imperial Valley is already struggling with high asthma rates, and the sea’s decline threatens to release more dust laden with salt, heavy metals and pesticides.

“This is about an existential threat to the public health of the region that we all live in,” Kelley said. “It is unsustainable, untenable that we continue to transfer these large volumes of water outside the region at the same time that we lack any coherent plan – or have any confidence in the clear obligation that we see the state having at the Salton Sea.”

Interior Secretary Sally Jewell also attended the conference, where she met with representatives of states across the Colorado River basin. She expressed optimism that the states will keep making progress toward a deal, and that the U.S. and Mexico are close to finalizing an agreement to replace a Colorado River water accord that expires in 2017.

“We have an agreement that is pending with Mexico that we need to get across the finish line in order to address our water needs between the two countries and a balancing of that, and that has to take first priority,” Jewell told reporters. As for the negotiations between the states, she said, “we want to get as far as we possibly can, and that’s what we’re going to be urging everybody to do.”

Jewell signed a new 20-year framework for managing Glen Canyon Dam and touted government programs that have produced significant water-savings across the Colorado River basin in recent years.

The federal officials at the meeting emphasized that the water challenges along the Colorado River remain daunting. Lake Powell and Lake Mead are holding less than half their full capacity. Lake Mead reached its lowest point on record this year and has recently been at 37 percent full.

The river basin is in a 17-year drought, the most severe in more than a century of record-keeping. Scientists say climate change is increasing the strains on the river, and federal water officials estimate the odds of the reservoir slipping into shortage conditions in 2018 at nearly 50-50.

“The challenges are outpacing the accomplishments at this point in time and that’s the reality, so we need to keep momentum going,” Deputy Interior Secretary Mike Connor said. He said officials from California, Arizona and Nevada are continuing to work on the drought plan, calling it a “complex set of agreements.”

“I think we’re making very good progress. Whether or not we can get that done within this administration is questionable, but we’re still giving it a try,” Connor said. “I’m optimistic that one way or the other, if it’s not by January 20, hopefully it’s within the first few months of 2017.”

Officials with several agencies said they had hoped to finalize a deal before the end of the Obama administration in part because otherwise it takes time for appointees in the new administration to get up to speed on the complex issues of the Colorado River.

Jewell said the negotiations have been productive in moving the parties toward solutions and have prevented political disputes.

“We do not want politics to enter this,” she said.

Both Jewell and Connor stressed that managing the flows of the Colorado River isn’t a partisan issue.

“I think we’ve laid a strong foundation that’s nonpartisan, that’s viewed as good public policy, good strategies to deal with these challenges,” Connor said. “And so I would expect that in some way, shape or form, they will continue into the next administration.”

Rep. Ryan Zinke, Trump’s pick for Interior secretary, has been criticized by environmentalists for his stances in Congress on energy and climate-related measures, as well as his votes relating to clean water protections, wildlife and public lands issues. But it’s not clear how, if at all, he might change the federal government’s current approach to shepherding the Colorado River discussions.

Under the proposals that have been discussed, Arizona and Nevada would forgo larger amounts of water than they have previously agreed to under a first-level shortage at Lake Mead, while water users in California would also pitch in before they would otherwise be legally required to.

Bill Hasencamp, manager of Colorado River resources for the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, pointed out that the drought plan wouldn’t take effect until 2018.

“So as a practical matter, there isn’t a need to get it done by Jan. 20, provided that the new administration is willing to pick up the ball and continue to run with it. And that’s our hope and expectation,” Hasencamp said. “Everyone is still engaged, still working. But the schedule slips sometimes.”

He said the Salton Sea isn’t the only issue that will require more time to clarify. The Metropolitan Water District has made clear it wants to have a better idea of future reliability of water supplies from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta before it participates in the Colorado River agreement. Hasencamp said the district first wants to see a federal environmental review and pending biological opinions relating to the Delta. Those opinions, when released in March or April, should provide the district with clearer projections of how much water it can count on from the Delta in the future.

Even if the states aren’t ready to announce a deal, the adoption of a plan looks inevitable sooner or later because demands for water are outstripping the available supplies.

“Even if it can’t be signed in the final days of the current federal administration, it'll quite likely be signed sometime in the next year because the cost of inaction is simply too high to the water users in the lower basin,” said Jennifer Pitt, who leads the National Audubon Society’s Colorado River Project.

The decline of Lake Mead threatens not only the water supplies of farms and cities but also the electricity generated by Hoover Dam.

“There is an inevitability because notwithstanding the winds of political change, the fact is that the reservoirs continue to decline,” she said, and it’s an issue that will have to be dealt with.

Lake Mead hits new record low

The levels of Lake Mead, near Las Vegas, have declined in recent years and are approaching critical shortage levels. (Photo: Jay Calderon/The Desert Sun)

By HENRY BREAN
LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL

For the next two months, the news from Lake Mead could sound like a broken record.

The nation’s largest man-made reservoir slipped to a new record low sometime after 7 p.m. Wednesday, and forecasters from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation expect see its surface drop another 2 feet through the end of June.

The latest dip into record-low territory comes as officials in Nevada, Arizona and California consider a new deal to prop up the declining lake by giving up some of their Colorado River water.

But some river advocates argue that those voluntary cuts could be rendered meaningless by proposed water developments that will further sap the overdrawn and drought-stricken river before it ever reaches Lake Mead.

Gary Wockner is executive director of Save the Colorado, a nonprofit conservation group based in Fort Collins, Colorado. He said the first round of cuts proposed by Nevada and Arizona would leave an extra 200,000 acre-feet of water in the lake, while the river system as a whole stands to lose approximately 250,000 acre-feet under new diversion projects being planned in Utah, Colorado and Wyoming.

“At the same time the agencies in the lower basin are discussing cuts, the agencies in the upper basin are working to suck more water out of the river,” Wockner said. “It’s a zero-sum game.”

Others see reason for hope.

Colby Pellegrino, Colorado River programs manager for the Southern Nevada Water Authority, said the “silver lining of this cloud” is the cooperative work among water managers, regulators and policymakers across the river basin. She said some of those collaborations have already made a tangible difference at Lake Mead, where the water would be even lower than it is now without some of the banking agreements and conservation efforts agreed upon by the states.

The voluntary reductions being discussed are designed to stave off deeper, mandatory cuts for Arizona and Nevada if the lake sinks below levels outlined in a 2007 agreement.

Nevada would leave 8,000 acre-feet of water in Lake Mead each year under the first round of voluntary cuts, while Arizona would give up 192,000 of its 2.8 million acre-foot Colorado River allocation to benefit the reservoir.

One acre-foot of water is enough to supply two average Las Vegas Valley homes for just over a year.

The annual reductions would increase to 10,000 acre-feet for Nevada and 240,000 acre-feet for Arizona should Lake Mead drop another 30 feet to 1,045 feet above sea level.

Elevation 1,045 is also where California would see its first voluntary cuts, which start at 200,000 acre-feet a year and increase by 50,000 with every additional 5-foot drop in Lake Mead. Under existing law, California is not required to give up any of its 4.4 million acre-foot river allocation, which is the largest among the seven states that share the Colorado.

Lake Mead’s new record low will erase the old mark of 1,074.71 feet above sea level set just over a year ago on June 26.

Federal forecasters expect the lake to finish this June at elevation 1,070.98. The last time Lake Mead had so little water in it was May 1937, the month of the Hindenburg disaster, when the reservoir was filling for the first time behind a newly completely Hoover Dam.

Record-low water levels present more of an access problem than a supply problem for the Las Vegas Valley, which depends on the lake for 90 percent of its water.

Southern Nevada Water Authority officials insist Nevada’s comparatively small 300,000 acre-foot share of the Colorado River can be stretched enough through reuse and conservation to serve the growing community for decades to come. But to keep that water flowing from the shrinking lake, the agency is spending almost $1.5 billion on a new deep-water intake and pumping station.

Wherever this year’s low-water mark eventually lands, the record is not expected to stand for long. The current forecast calls for Lake Mead to start 2017 about 4 feet higher than it is now, then dip downward again into record territory in April. The reservoir should bottom out near elevation 1,063 sometime in June 2017.

The Drought Goes On: As Lake Mead Sinks, States Agree to More Drastic Water Cuts

Lake Mead, the West's largest reservoir, is dropping at a rapid rate.

Written by Sarah Tory
Coachella Valley Independent

Three years ago, state hydrologists in the Colorado River Basin began to do some modeling to see what the future of Lake Mead—the West’s largest reservoir—might look like. If the dry conditions continued, hydrologists believed, elevations in Lake Mead—which is fed by the Colorado River—could drop much faster than previous models predicted.

For decades, the West’s big reservoirs were like a security blanket, says Anne Castle, the former assistant secretary for water and science at the Interior Department. But the blanket is wearing thin. Under normal conditions, Lake Mead loses 1.2 million acre-feet of water every year to evaporation and deliveries to the Lower Basin states plus Mexico; that all amounts to a 12-foot drop. Previously, extra deliveries of water from Lake Powell offset that deficit, but after 16 years of drought and increased water use in the Upper Basin, those extra deliveries are no longer a safe bet.

“There’s a growing recognition that even these huge reservoirs aren’t sufficient to keep the water supply sustainable anymore,” says Castle.

For the three Lower Basin states—California, Arizona and Nevada—that rely heavily on Lake Mead, the situation is particularly urgent. For the last several years, Mead has hovered around 1,075 feet above sea level, the point at which harsh water-rationing measures kicks in. And if conditions in the reservoir continue to worsen, the Interior Department could even take control of water allocation from Lake Mead.

So with the threat of a federal takeover looming, water policy leaders in the Lower Basin states, along with the Bureau of Reclamation, the reservoir’s operator, began meeting last summer to discuss ways they can jointly boost water levels in Lake Mead. Some of the details are now available and indicate that all three states are now willing to accept additional water cuts from the reservoir on top of the cuts that they previously agreed to make in 2007.

Those measures follow a set of federal guidelines adopted nine years ago to manage water deliveries from Lake Mead, given the likelihood of future shortages. The guidelines established a series of thresholds for the reservoir’s water levels that would trigger increasingly severe cutbacks for the Lower Basin states. At the time they were negotiated, few people anticipated that the drought would last as long as it has, but as Lake Mead inched closer to the critical 1,075 mark, water managers in the Lower Basin realized the existing guidelines were not enough to prevent an eventual shortage.

While the terms of the new agreement between California, Arizona and Nevada are still being negotiated, a few details have emerged. For starters, the Bureau of Reclamation has pledged to cut 100,000 acre-feet annually through efficiency measures such as lining irrigation canals to prevent seepage, or possibly by re-opening the long-shuttered Yuma Desalting Plant.

The three states’ willingness to collectively ration their water use would have been unthinkable just a few decades ago, when states fought each other in court to win as much water from the Colorado River. The cooperation is a nod to how new climate realities are re-shaping old water politics in the West. Take California, for instance. Legally, the state could hold on to every drop until Lake Mead is nearly down to mud, since the 1968 law that authorized the Central Arizona Project’s construction gave California the highest priority water rights to the Colorado River. But at that point, says Castle, they’re just as impacted as everyone else.

Other collaborative agreements to reduce the strain on the Colorado River include a 2014 Memorandum of Understanding between the big water providers in the Lower Basin states, the Bureau of Reclamation and the Central Arizona Project, pledging “best efforts” to conserve 40,000 acre feet in Lake Mead. In 2014, major municipal water providers in Arizona, California, Nevada and Colorado also agreed to fund new water conservation projects through a pilot initiative called the Colorado River System Conservation program.

For the Lower Basin especially, the negotiations are necessary to avoid the potential federal takeover, says Tom Buschatzke, the director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources. Although the secretary of the interior, Sally Jewell, has not voiced any immediate plans to that effect, in the past, she has made public statements on the matter.

For Buschatzke, the threat is clear: “She’ll take action if we don’t collaborate,” he says.

Here are the cuts states could face:

Arizona would lose 512,000 acre-feet of its total 2.8 million acre-feet per year allotment if Lake Mead dips below the 1,075 feet threshold. That’s 192,000 acre-feet more than the 320,000 acre-feet it had previously agreed to cut under the 2007 guidelines. Further cuts occur if the reservoir continues to drop. In another unprecedented move, Arizona water officials are talking about trying to spread cuts across all sectors of the state’s economy that rely on CAP water for drinking and irrigation—cities, farms, industries, Indian tribes and others—instead of letting only farmers take the brunt of the cuts, as dictated by their junior water rights.

California: Thanks to the 1968 law that authorized CAP’s construction, California’s 4.4 million acre feet allotment is shielded from most of the cuts should a shortage on Lake Mead be declared. But as part of the new negotiations, the state has volunteered to cut its water use from Lake Mead by 200,000 acre feet if the reservoir’s levels fall below 1,045 feet, and up to 350,000 acre-feet if levels sink to 1,030 feet.

Nevada: The state with the smallest allotment of Colorado River water, Nevada would take a much smaller share of the cuts—8,000 acre-feet if Mead drops below 1,045 feet, and 10,000 acre-feet after that—because it has the rights to only 300,000 acre-feet.

According to Buschatzke, the three states anticipate finalizing the agreement by early this fall, at which point negotiators will begin working the new measures into law. Those changes in law will likely not happen before 2017.

For Castle, the discussions are part of a new era in water politics—one that looks increasingly collaborative.

“We haven’t seen states versus state or state versus feds for a long time,” she says. “There’s a recognition that litigation is failure—that we need to come together and make things work.”

Sarah Tory is a correspondent for High Country News, where this story originally appeared.

Water Agency's Land Purchase Rattles California Farmers

Bart Fisher, farmer and president of the Palo Verde Irrigation District, looks at the Colorado River. The third-generation farmer who was born in Blythe, left 29 percent of his farmland fallow this year. The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, the nation’s largest distributor of treated drinking water, became the largest landowner in the region including Blythe for good reason: The alfalfa-growing area sits at the top of the legal pecking order to Colorado River water, a lifeline for seven Western states and northern Mexico.(AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

By Elliot Spagat and Jae Hong
Associated Press

BLYTHE, Calif. (AP) -- The nation's largest distributor of treated drinking water became the largest landowner in a remote California farming region for good reason: The alfalfa-growing area is first in line to get Colorado River water.

Metropolitan Water District of Southern California's play in Palo Verde Valley, along the Arizona line, tapped a deep distrust between farm and city that pervades the West over a river that's a lifeline for seven states and northern Mexico.

Farmers recall how Los Angeles' modern founders built an aqueduct a century ago to bring water hundreds of miles from rural Owens Valley, a story that was fictionally portrayed in Roman Polanski's 1974 film, "Chinatown."

"Are we going to dry up our rural, agricultural communities just to keep Los Angeles, San Francisco and San Diego growing? I think it would be a sad state of affairs," said Bart Fisher, a melon and broccoli farmer who is board president of the Palo Verde Irrigation District.

Metropolitan tried to calm nerves by sending its chairman in September to a public forum in Blythe, 225 miles east of its Los Angeles headquarters. It pledged to honor a 2004 agreement that caps the amount of land it pays farmers to idle at 28 percent of the valley.

That agreement, which expires in 2040, is hailed as a model for farms and cities to cooperate. Metropolitan pays farmers about as much as they would profit to harvest - $771 an acre this year - to bring foregone Colorado River water on its 242-mile aqueduct to 19 million people in the coastal megalopolis it serves.

Palo Verde enjoys California's highest rights to the river, making their immune to drought.

The dynamic changed when Metropolitan paid $256 million in July to nearly double its Palo Verde holdings to 29,000 acres, or about 30 percent of the valley. The agency denied its purchase from Verbena LLC, a company that bought the land several years earlier from the Mormon church, was part of an orchestrated plan.

"It's made the farmers out there nervous that we are the largest owner but there was a strategic opportunity that came up," Metropolitan's general manager Jeffrey Kightlinger said.

Metropolitan stirred similar angst this month in Northern California when its board expressed interest in buying farms on several islands in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. Its staff said the land could provide water storage and wildlife habitat.

Blythe, a riverside town of about 13,000 people in the Mojave Desert with two state prisons, is an oasis of gas stations, motels and fast-food restaurants on Interstate 10 between Los Angeles and Phoenix. Thomas Blythe staked claim to the river in 1877, beating Southern California cities under a Gold Rush-era doctrine called 'first in time, first in right.'

Los Angeles and its suburbs founded Metropolitan in 1928 to build the remarkably durable Colorado River Aqueduct. Parker Dam and the reservoir it created in Lake Havasu empties into a gray Art Deco-style building with nine pumps that quietly pipe water 300 feet up a steep slope. Teal metal cases that cover the pumps vibrate so little that a nickel placed on top stands on its side.

The water goes uphill through four more pump stations and through tunnels, canals and pipelines before reaching Southern California's coastal plain two days later.

The Colorado's huge man-made reservoirs have made the river an unheralded savior in California's four-year drought. Last year, the river supplied two-thirds of the 1.7 billion gallons of drinking water that Metropolitan delivers daily, up from a third three years earlier.

The river sustains 40 million people and farms 5½ million acres, but white "bathtub rings" lining walls of the nation's largest reservoir in Lake Mead, near Las Vegas, are evidence of shrinking supplies. California took more than it was entitled to until Sunbelt cities like Phoenix and Las Vegas clamored for their share and forced the nation's most populous state to go on a diet in 2003.

"It's really the only supply of water to this otherwise bone-dry region," said Bill Hasencamp, Metropolitan's manager of Colorado River resources.

Metropolitan has diverted up to 118,000 acre feet of water a year from Palo Verde since 2005, enough for about 250,000 households. It paid $3,170 an acre to farmers who committed for 35 years, plus an annual fee for fallowed land. It idles 7 percent to 28 percent of the valley each year, depending on its needs.

Jack Seiler, a grower who volunteered 900 acres, calls the agreement a "poster child" for farms and cities to cooperate but Metropolitan's July purchase of nearly 13,000 acres unsettled him. It gave Metropolitan the largest voting bloc on Palo Verde's water board.

Metropolitan says it won't have to pay someone else to idle the land it now owns and will lease it to farmers, cutting its net cost to about $50 million. It voted for incumbents in a September election to Palo Verde's seven-member board, which includes Seiler.

"I obviously don't know why they bought all this land," Seiler said. "It puts us a little bit at odds."

Ghost Town Emerges As Drought Makes Nevada's Lake Mead Disappear

Many of the buildings used to lie 60 feet below the lake surface

A sign showing the trail to the ghost town of St. Thomas in the Lake Mead National Recreation Area, Nevada in August 2015.

Nick Visser
The Huffington Post

Lest anyone forget, the drought in California and across the Southwest is still raging on. And one of the places where its effects can be observed most clearly is Nevada's Lake Mead.

The nation's largest reservoir has hit a series of troubling milestones over the past year, sinking to a record low in late June. Now, in the latest benchmark for the new Lake Mead, a town that flooded shortly after the completion of the Hoover Dam in 1938 has literally risen from the depths.

The ghost town -- once called St. Thomas, Nevada -- was founded as a Mormon settlement in 1865 and had six bustling businesses by 1918, according to Weather.com. But for nearly a century, it's been uninhabited and uninhabitable, existing mostly as an underwater curiosity.

Captured by two Getty photographers, the photos [at the link] below show the shell of the former settlement. St. Thomas has appeared under similarly dire drought conditions several times in the past decades.

The National Park Service has opened up a pathway from a parking area down to the ruins, which you'll be able to visit for the foreseeable future. Take a look here.

The ruins of a school in Mormon pioneer town Saint Thomas, flooded 70 years ago by the rising waters of the Colorado River when it was dammed to create Lake Mead.

Las Vegas completing last straw to draw Lake Mead water

A worker stands near the end of a tunnel still under construction beneath Lake Mead near Boulder City, Nev. When operational, the three-mile-long tunnel and intake will allow the Southern Nevada Water Authority to draw water from Lake Mead even if its water level falls below the two current intakes. (AP Photo/John Locher)

By KEN RITTER
MyWay.com

LAS VEGAS (AP) — It took $817 million, two starts, more than six years and one worker's life to drill a so-called "Third Straw" to make sure glittery casinos and sprawling suburbs of Las Vegas can keep getting drinking water from near the bottom of drought-stricken Lake Mead.

The pipeline, however, won't drain the largest Colorado River reservoir any faster. It's designed to ensure that Las Vegas can still get water if the lake surface drops below two existing supply intakes.

"You turn on the tap, you don't think about it," said Noah Hoefs, a pipeline project manager for the Las Vegas-based Southern Nevada Water Authority. "These are the things being done in order to live the lifestyle we want in the places we want to live."

It's the latest example of ways the parched West is scrambling to deal with 15 years of unprecedented drought.

California is encouraging homeowners to rip out thirsty lawns and asking farmers to turn off spigots. And in New Mexico, a $550 million pipeline project would supply drinking water to several communities that run the risk of having wells go dry within a decade.

Las Vegas started in 1999 to conserve, reuse and replenish supplies. When Lake Mead water levels plummeted in 2002, regional water officials began drawing up plans for the pipeline.

"Unlike California and our other partners on the river, we are almost entirely reliant on Lake Mead," said John Entsminger, water authority general manager. "We couldn't afford to wait."

Sin City gets about 90 percent of its drinking water from the lake behind Hoover Dam, itself an engineering marvel that cost the lives of about 100 workers during five years of construction before it was completed in 1936.

The need for the new pipeline can be seen in the wide white mineral band marking rock canyon walls where lake water has receded and the sun-bleached docks at abandoned marinas, left high and dry.

The water level has dropped almost the equivalent of a 20-story building since Lake Mead last topped the dam's spillways in 1983.

The pipeline resembles a subway tunnel 55 stories below Lake Mead's Saddle Island, reinforced with more than 2,400 6-foot jigsaw sections of concrete. A $25 million drilling rig the length of two football fields ground nearly 3 miles through solid rock to reach the intake structure a minute before noon last Dec. 10.

Jim Nickerson, project manager for Vegas Tunnel Constructors, a subsidiary of Italy-based Impregilo, peered during a recent tour into the circular intake, which is designed somewhat like a big bathtub drain. The 100-foot structure was lowered in March 2012 into what once was a Colorado River canyon and cemented into place with the equivalent of 1,200 truckloads of concrete.

Its dome roof was capped by a 1,900-pound stainless steel ball.

A steel cap on top of a water intake riser holds back the water of Lake Mead in a tunnel still under construction near Boulder City, Nev. (AP Photo/John Locher)

Above that was about 300 feet of water. The lake is about 37 percent of capacity, but still contains trillions of gallons of water — mostly snowmelt from the Rocky Mountains in Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming.

When the intake is flooded, water pressure in the tunnel will approximate water pressure in the lake. Nickerson said the ball plug will become buoyant enough for a crane on a barge to lift it.

"End of the year, we're done," he said.

Pumping will mark completion of a perilous project.

The tunnel flooded in July 2010, when a drilling machine hit a geologic fault, and flooded again five months later. Project engineers abandoned and capped the first tunnel and started a new one in a different direction.

In June 2012, tunnel worker Thomas Albert Turner died. He was a married, 44-year-old father of two from Henderson whose brother also worked on the pipeline.

Pulling the plug won't hasten creation of the "bathtub ring" around the lake. Blame drought for that — and exponential growth in a desert area that averages just over 4 inches of rain per year.

Las Vegas had about 126,000 residents when it began drawing water from Lake Mead in 1971. It now has 2 million residents and 40 million tourists a year.

The top of the new intake structure is at 860 feet. That's 40 feet below so-called "dead pool" at which Hoover Dam electricity turbines would be idled and no water would flow downstream.

Water managers let the Lake Mead level fall to a new record low late Tuesday, at 1,074.98 feet. They say the lake level will rise by the end of the year to about 1,081 feet. That's 6 feet above the trigger point that would require a percentage cut in water supplies to Arizona and Nevada.

Officials are currently giving Lake Mead a nearly 50-50 chance of ending 2016 below the 1,075-foot trigger point — unless the drought is broken.

As the River Runs Dry: The Southwest's water crisis

ARIZONA AND THE SOUTHWEST SEEK A BALANCE OF GROWTH AND WATER CONSERVATION AS SUPPLY CONTINUES TO DECLINE

Evening and water levels fall at Hoover Dam and Lake Mead.

Brandon Loomis and Mark Henle
The Republic | azcentral.com

LAS VEGAS – The patroller stopped his water district truck and grabbed his camcorder.

"Here we go," he said, sliding from the cab and pointing his lens at the fine spray of water and rainbow rising from pop-up sprinklers on the lawn of a low-slung ranch home.

"Thursday," he spoke, recording the day as evidence. No watering allowed on Thursdays.

Welcome to the future, where every drop of Colorado River water is guarded and squeezed. Only here, in the city that gets 90 percent of its water from the fickle and fading river, the future is now.

The vast and highly urbanized Southwest, built on the promise of a bountiful river propped up by monumental dams, is up against its limits. Already tapped beyond its supply, the river is now threatened by a warming climate that shrinks its alpine source.

To support fast-growing urban populations in a time of dwindling supply, the Southwest is due for rapid and revolutionary changes.

A region that uses two-thirds of its water outdoors, and mostly for agriculture, will have to find ways of sharing and boosting efficiency — a shift that many experts believe will mean city dwellers paying to upgrade rural irrigation systems.

Cities such as Phoenix and Las Vegas, which have reduced their per-person water usage through better landscaping and appliances, will have to do better. They lag behind Los Angeles, whose growing population, by necessity, uses no more water than it did 40 years ago.

Water suppliers from Denver to San Diego will spend billions of dollars to squeeze more out of each drop, and to clean and use wastewater and salt water. It means a future of higher water bills, further promoting conservation.

Problem can't be deferred

"We're in a drought," water patroller Robert Kern said after hanging a warning notice on the home's doorknob. Two more violations and the water district will fine the owner $80.

"Everyone has to do their part."

Residents in this part of town — known as Zone C to the Las Vegas Valley Water District — may only water on Monday, Wednesday and Friday from fall through spring. They're freer to soak their grass at will in summer, when the withering heat demands it.

The cooler months are for austerity, to give the plummeting water levels behind Hoover Dam a break. The river's massive storage tub, Lake Mead, is draining.

The Colorado isn't all that we thought it would be when we divvied up the rights in the Roaring '20s. Most years, it gives less than it once did, and there are more users taking from it.

A 2012 government study of supply and demand predicted a 2060 annual shortfall of nearly a trillion gallons — enough to cover the sprawling city of Phoenix 9 feet deep or to supply 6 million Southwestern households for a year.

How the Southwest's leaders, farmers and lawn waterers respond will help decide how many millions of people this drying corner of the continent can sustain in the next century.

Throughout this year, The Arizona Republic will examine the twin stresses of climate change and population growth, and ways to ensure reliable water for the next generation of Southwesterners.

"This is not one of the problems you can defer and let your grandkids deal with," said Doug Kenney, a University of Colorado law professor.

Last year, the Arizona Department of Water Resources published a "strategic vision" for the coming century. The department stopped short of calling the state's current situation a "crisis," but said Arizona is at a "crossroads" and needs to decide on actions to secure new water.

Many potentially costly steps for metro Phoenix were included: conservation, treated water recycling, watershed forest thinning, cloud seeding and seawater desalination among them.

Kenney chairs the newly formed Colorado River Research Group, an independent group of 10 river and climate experts from regional universities. This winter, they made a simple recommendation that would have sounded outlandish in the past century.

Use no more water.

Cities will have to grow within their means, through conservation and by paying farmers to save and transfer water, he said. When the river already falls short of supplying everyone who has a legal right to it, there's no sensible way of taking more from it.

"If everyone takes what they're legally entitled to," Kenney said, "the system crashes."

That's true even if the wetter 20th century hydrology repeats. But that's not what the big water suppliers are expecting.

"In my opinion, the future of the Colorado Basin is a future where we have less water than we have right now," said John Entsminger, general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority.

"The future of the Colorado Basin also has less grass."

But it won't be just the urban lawns that attract scrutiny. Farmers from Wyoming to Mexico — by far the biggest users of the river — will have to back off on hay production

They'll also have to embrace expensive but efficient drip irrigation, Entsminger said. Urban water users will help pay for that through higher rates.

"Everybody's going to have to figure out how to do the same or more with less water."

More than river can give

At Lake Mead, America's most voluminous water impoundment when it was full and a lifeline to everyone from Phoenix to San Diego, the crisis has already arrived.

Desiccated palm trees flap over the cracked and peeling shell of a resort hotel at Echo Bay Marina at the northern end of the lake, the tattered banners of a man-made oasis now drained and vacant. Dormant boat docks lie stacked against each other.

To nearby innkeeper Chris Wiggins, it's a sign of government mismanagement.

"Climate change?" he scoffed. "That's the biggest joke."

You don't have to believe in a climate connection to recognize the risks in doling out on paper more water than a river can give.

"In the lower basin, we use more water than in a normal year we receive," said Chuck Cullom, Colorado River program manager for the Central Arizona Project, whose canal pumps water to Phoenix and Tucson.

"Even absent the drought we would still be facing a declining Lake Mead."

A sustained regional drought that started in the late 20th century shrank the reservoir to its record low by last summer. Federal officials say there's a 1-in-4 chance it will sink low enough — to 1,075 feet above sea level — by next year that Arizona will have to cut back substantially on what it takes from the river.

After that, the government projects, the odds are better than even — about 60 percent — for a declared shortage and restrictions in 2017.

The reservoir has fallen by more than 100 feet since 2000. Its stored water, paired with upriver sister reservoir Lake Powell, is at about half-capacity.

The water's retreat is a slow-blooming crisis that many have seen coming for years. Some communities have used the time to curb their thirst.

Los Angeles residents use 129 gallons a day each. That's stingier than the 160-gallon average in Phoenix, whose use rate has nonetheless plummeted in recent years.

Now, though, even conservation-minded Los Angeles is following the unlikely lead of a gaudy, electrified billboard for sustainability. Still ridiculed in some corners as a wasteful and whimsical boomtown in the desert, metro Las Vegas has nonetheless turned its precarious relationship with the river into a powerful incentive to cut back.

Southern Nevadans use 212 gallons a day, which is more than their counterparts in either Los Angeles or Phoenix. But they also return almost 40 percent of that to the river as treated and reusable wastewater, making their net usage rate 124 gallons.

They have slashed usage steeply and deeply, by more than 100 gallons in about a decade.

Las Vegas has cut use of the river by nearly a third in a 12-year period that saw its metro population grow by 25 percent.

Vegas did it by regulating outdoor watering, and by paying $205 million — up to $2 a square foot — to entice people to remove lawns and "embrace living in the Mojave Desert," Entsminger said.

That was crucial, because in 2002, Nevada was using more than its legal entitlement to the river.

Now Los Angeles is following, paying homeowners even more money to strip lawns.

Time of reckoning

For decades, the Colorado River hasn't typically flowed as high as it did about a century ago, when Congress authorized impounding it at what would become Hoover Dam.

Climate scientists say there's a strong chance it never — or rarely — will again. Yet unlike in those pioneering days of last century, more than 30 million people and several billion dollars in farm production are now counting on a river that is so tapped that in most years it no longer reaches the sea.

What's left after the U.S. uses most of the water is diverted to farmers in Mexico.

"The Colorado River Compact appears to have been negotiated during an unusually wet period," said Connie Woodhouse, a University of Arizona geosciences professor who has studied historic flows on the river. "I don't think anyone would argue with that."

Hoover Dam: Before and after

Hold and drag the slider in the middle of the image to show the difference between a photo taken at Hoover Dam in 1983 compared with one taken in 2009.

The 1922 agreement split the river's flow between upper- and lower-basin states, with the divide just upstream of Grand Canyon, at Lees Ferry. In the first few decades of the 20th century, an average approaching 17 million acre-feet — each acre-foot gushing 326,000 gallons, 51/2 trillion gallons in all — flowed past Lees Ferry every year.

For most of the past 90 years, though, the average flows have sagged below even the 15 million acre-feet that the states legally share, let alone the 1.5 million owed to Mexico by treaty.

The enormous but shrinking reservoirs at Lake Mead and Lake Powell, capturing spikes in runoff during occasional wet years, have forestalled shortages. The flow was 20 million acre-feet in 2011, and just half that in 2013.

That Colorado, Wyoming and Utah weren't using their full shares also postponed a reckoning.

Until now.

Increased flow less likely

The drought that started in 2000 and sent the reservoir holdings plunging is a preview of expected dry spells unprecedented in recent centuries, Woodhouse said. Temperatures are higher than those of the last century's droughts, compounding the intensity.

"The (rising) temperatures are only going to exacerbate conditions that we would normally expect under natural conditions," she said.

There are lots of reasons to think the droughts of coming decades will be worse than anything we've ever experienced — regardless of whether there's any change in precipitation.

The first is that as the region warms, the trees and plants using the snowmelt will need and tap more of it before it ever reaches the river or pipes.

The next and arguably bigger threat is that the warmth will melt snow faster or even make it fall instead as rain. Either change will lead to more evaporation and less seepage into the soils that, in turn, release water to streams feeding the river.

Four years ago, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation — the Southwest's federal water managers — crunched all of the climate model projections for the Colorado River watershed and determined the average outlook was for a river pumping 9 percent less water through the region by 2050.

There is always a chance that monstrous snowstorms and winter rains will bring enough new winter precipitation to offset the warming's worst effects, said Jeff Lukas, climate scientist with the University of Colorado's Western Water Assessment team.

"Increasing flow isn't precluded," he added. "It just appears to be less likely."

Past warm spells, etched as living history in the West's tree rings and lake beds, indicate that where there's heat there's often stinging drought, according to Woodhouse's work.

She co-authored a 2010 study using regional tree rings from an unusually long and hot medieval drought to project that each increase of a degree Celsius results in a decrease in Colorado River flows of between 2 percent and 8 percent.

Most of the region already has warmed by more than a degree on average in the past quarter-century, according to last year's U.S. National Climate Assessment. Further warming of at least a couple of degrees in a few decades and up to 5 degrees by 2100 is expected even if global carbon emissions are substantially reduced.

The medieval drought, in its worst decade, baked the river down to about two-thirds of what the U.S. and Mexico draw out of it today.

The drought lasted 60 years, but it was not as hot as today. So it seems the next time there's a repeat of whatever natural phenomena conspired back then to produce such a long, dry spell, the river will be even drier.

Since Woodhouse's study, a team of 14 university and government researchers has conducted what Woodhouse calls the "best synthesis" of existing climate and flow models — with jaw-dropping, if imprecise, predictions.

The river's flow probably will drop between 5 percent and 35 percent in response to warming by midcentury, according to that team, which published a January 2014 report in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.

Lukas' University of Colorado colleague, snow researcher Jeffrey Deems, said there's reason to believe the bureau's predicted 9 percent reduction in flow is optimistic.

Already, the Rocky Mountain snowpack is melting three to six weeks earlier than before American settlement of the region, Deems' studies have found, because dust drifting up from grazing lands and other disturbances collects solar heat on the snow's surface. Today's snowmelt is measured by direct observation and compared with computer models of older trends.

Without emissions curbs, Deems said, his modeling and others project flows slashed by about a fifth on average by midcentury.

"Even if it's only 9 percent," he said, in a nod to the Bureau of Reclamation study, "that's a huge shock to any overallocated system."

A 9 percent reduction would roughly equal the 1.5 million acre-feet that Arizona is allowed to pump through CAP's 336-mile canal every year.

But that's a midcentury outlook with lots of climate variables. What about the near-term effects of the existing drought?

Must act now

If the government declares a Lake Mead shortage because the water drops below the mandated trigger elevation of 1,075 feet — the 58 percent probability that managers have projected by 2017 — then Arizona would lose 320,000 acre-feet every year that the water is so low.

An acre-foot of water is about the amount two Southwest families use each year. So the loss would be about three times the potable water that Tucson Water pumps to customers each year. But it's not the cities and their residents who will suffer first or most.

CAP was built largely to fuel growth in metropolitan areas of Arizona. The farmers who have used what until now was excess water have the lowest legal priority. Some of them will voluntarily cut back on watering hay and other crops this year, in an effort to help keep Lake Mead from falling.

In December, CAP signed an agreement with the Bureau of Reclamation and water providers for Southern California and Nevada to save 740,000 acre-feet over the next three years, and to keep it in Lake Mead. Each of those organizations would sacrifice water or improve efficiency.

Arizona, with the most to lose from a shortage, is responsible for the largest share: 345,000 acre-feet.

Of that, the deepest cuts — nearly half — will come out of farm irrigation districts. But CAP will pay those farmers $5 million.

"It could actually protect us (from shortage) for a couple of years, and that would more than repay our efforts." said Cullom, CAP's Colorado River program manager.

But in the same agreement, the states predicted that these savings might be only half the job of restoring reliable water by 2019. So they also will join Denver Water in sponsoring $11 million in pilot programs that other customers can use to suppress their needs — some of it perhaps for farm upgrades such as drip irrigation or laser field leveling.

If Lake Mead drops another 25 feet after the first shortage, central Arizona would lose nearly a third of what it draws off the Colorado. Farmers there would get nothing from the river, and cities such as Phoenix, Mesa and Scottsdale could start to lose some of the canal water they're now leasing from Indian tribes.

Best to act now, Cullom said, and reload Lake Mead.

"It's like a scene from 'Jaws,' when one of the characters says, 'We need a bigger boat,' " he said. "We're trying to find ways to get a bigger boat."

Solution can't be imported

Some water managers and politicians have mused about importing the solution, from the Great Lakes or the Mississippi River Basin by pipe, or even from Alaska by ship. But the U.S. Interior Department effectively called those schemes pipe dreams, in a study of options for the Southwest.

For one thing, other states may guard their resources as jealously as Arizona would covet them in a water-strapped future. The Great Lakes states even have a compact prohibiting export, and it is being invoked to prevent a Wisconsin county that touches on the drainage from piping water over the line.

Also, the costs, both environmental and financial, caused the Obama administration to reject the idea. Pumping water from the Missouri River to Denver would cost 21/2 times the predicted price to conserve the same amount within the Southwest.

Conservation probably can provide only a third of the new water needed in 50 years.

Environmentalists generally have recommended starting there, though, and then adding treatment plants to clean salt from used irrigation water and return it to the river. Utility managers are also looking to add costlier, more energy-intensive seawater desalination, which could reduce coastal cities' reliance on the river.

The biggest sponge out there, though, is agriculture. Its use of two-thirds of the Colorado's bounty offers future urban residents a tantalizing buffer for growth — or a water grab — if it can be reallocated.

About a third of the Colorado River's annual flow goes just to alfalfa, pasture and other forage for livestock, according to a 2013 analysis of farming in the 256,000-square-mile watershed, conducted by the Pacific Institute.

Much of that grass is flood-irrigated, putting to work water that farmers earned through settlement claims under a "use it or lose it" system that predates the West's urban population explosion.

The institute modeled other options for ranchers — modern irrigation equipment and a more judicious schedule for watering — and projected a potential savings of 1 million acre-feet a year.

Farmers won't give up water if they think it means losing their rights to it, and to the income it can bring them, said Kenney, the University of Colorado law professor. But states are free to change the laws, to ditch "use it or lose it." They can ensure that farmers and rural areas are compensated.

Kenney expects change to come, and city dwellers to pay up, as the Central Arizona Groundwater Replenishment District is doing in an experimental program that gives 33 farmers $750 per acre per year for three years to cut and fallow some citrus orchards.

"Scarcity drives innovation," he said.

Awareness crucial

Back in Las Vegas, water patroller Robert Kern spotted a wet sidewalk near the first violator he nabbed. It wasn't a sprinkler, though. What grass the lawn had was yellowed and crisp.

"I had to mow her lawn the other day because I was afraid there'd be a fire," said a neighbor, Danny Hinchcliffe, standing on his own dewy grass.

Kern climbed from the truck, knelt to find moss growing in a slight but steady stream of water flowing from a broken underground pipe. He attached another warning to her doorknob.

Hinchcliffe said his own yard used to be rock, but he switched to grass because it helped cool his home and keep down the electric bill.

Reminded that his grass blades shouldn't be glistening with water on a day when sprinkling is banned, he said his landscaper likely hadn't had a chance to adjust his timer for the season.

But he didn't get a citation.

Kern can't issue a warning or a ticket unless he actually sees the water spraying.

"Our biggest thing is education," he said. "Without the water, we're not going to be here.

"We're in the middle of a desert."