Hostility and mistrust are at the heart of the inability of California and six other states to reach an agreement on the Colorado River.
The year was 1934 and the place was the construction site of Parker Dam, downstream from the nearly completed Hoover Dam.
Over the last century, California has fought fiercely to preserve its legally sanctioned right to 4.4 million acre-feet of Colorado River water per year. Reflecting the long history of contention, the Colorado River Board of California, which drafted the plan, was — shall we say? — less than entirely gracious toward the other states, especially Arizona, when itNoting that California had worked for years to reach shortage-sharing agreements among its own competing agricultural, urban and environmental stakeholders, board Chairman J.B. Hamby wrote that “California’s intrastate agreements are not well understood outside of California.
It’s worth going back in time to revisit the origins of the interstate friction. The impetus for the giant dam on the Colorado came from California farmers in the Imperial Valley, whose livelihoods had been almost destroyed by a flood in 1905-06 caused by the incompetent construction of a canal to bring irrigation water west from the river.A desalination project in Huntington Beach is the wrong idea in the wrong place at the wrong time.
To his dismay, the Californians rose together and stomped out of the room — forcing Hoover to follow them out the door, pleading with them to stay. As it happened, his threat worked: The next day, the seven state delegations approved the final draft of the Colorado River Compact, along with a separate resolution urging “the early construction of works in the Colorado River to control the floods” as a nonbinding sop to California.
Henceforth, all the conflicts over water in California and the West — between cities and farms, humid regions and desert zones, Southern and Northern California — would be adjudicated in the Washington office of the secretary of the Interior. For decades, successive Interior secretaries have tried to hand that responsibility back to the states, but almost invariably they have to step in and impose some sort of order.
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