Friday, May 2, 2003 | 11:05 a.m.
The Bush administration rolled out an initiative today to deal with "crisis and conflict" over water in the West, warning that battles over the resource are likely to affect Las Vegas and other Western cities.
Las Vegas, Carson City, Denver, Houston and Salt Lake City are among the cities where conflict is "highly likely" within the next 25 years, Interior Secretary Gale Norton warned today. The Bush administration calls for increased dialogue on water issues among Western water stakeholders and more research and development for technological solutions.
Interior Assistant Secretary Bennett Raley said issues of population growth and tight water supply, already provoking legal battles and even armed conflict in the West, will only get worse if they are ignored.
"We simply want to have a straightforward debate about water-supply issues," Raley said. "Water 2025 is an attempt to start that debate, free of short-term or political implications, and simply talk about reality."
Raley said $11 million provided in next year's budget will be a small part of the Bush administration's overall effort. More important, he said, is the dialogue the initiative is designed to spark.
He said the Interior Department will have public meetings throughout the West to discuss the coming conflicts and strategies for heading those off.
"This is a straight up, nonpolitical analysis of where existing and future demand for water will exceed supply," Raley said. But there are options within existing legal frameworks to improve the situation, he said.
"We think that what we will see in the next decade will be a large number of proposals and concepts which will end up collectively getting water where it is needed," he said. "The communities in those basins, the people who live and work and play in those basins, have some choices to make.
"Doing nothing is a choice here. but doing nothing will result in crisis."
J.C. Davis, spokesman for the Southern Nevada Water Authority, said his agency is still looking at the details of the initiative. But the early reaction is positive, he said.
"We think the significance is a fundamental shift on how to approach water shortages in the West," he said. "The Southern Nevada Water Authority has asserted for quite some time that water managers need to look at the Colorado River not in terms of allocations, but as an integrated system.
"Secretary Norton's comments are an indicator that the federal government supports that view," Davis said. "All of the needs have to be looked at and balanced. There is no 'one size fits all' answer to water shortages."
Along the Colorado River, source of almost all drinking water for Southern Nevada, the needs include the thirst of urban dwellers in Las Vegas and Southern California, the huge agricultural enterprises in California and Arizona, recreational demands and other uses.
Norton, the master of the Colorado River, said the proposal will help communities weather conflict over water through the next 25 years. The proposal calls for concentrating existing federal dollars and technical resources in key western watersheds and in research and development to predict, prevent and alleviate water supply conflicts.
Norton noted that crises are becoming more common throughout the West. The three-year drought in the Rocky Mountains that has cut more than 40 percent of Lake Mead's water supply and threatens rationing if it continues is one example.
But even without the drought, conflicts will grow as population continues to surge and battle over a limited resource, Norton and her agency predicts. Norton said there is already not enough water to meet the existing needs of cities, farms, tribes and the environment under normal water conditions.
The map prepared by Interior shows red, "hotspots" throughout the West and along the Colorado River and Lake Mead, sites of likely conflict. A "substantial" possibility of water conflicts faces Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix and other cities.
Cities along the northern tier of western states from Oregon to Wyoming have a moderate chance of future conflict, according to the agency.
Those conflicts will sometimes be legal maneuvers, like the Interior Department's reduction of disbursement of as much as 800,000 acre-feet of water from Lake Mead for California after the state failed to ratify a deal to cut its historical dependence on overuse from the supply. Lost with the cut was about 35,000 acre-feet for Nevada, or enough water for more than 100,000 people.
But sometimes the conflicts have been physical. In 2001, armed federal officers were called in to protect Klamath River Basin supplies from farmers angry over the Interior Department's decision to cut off their water to protect endangered salmon. The department warned that the basin has substantial possibility for more conflict by 2025.
"Crisis management is not an effective solution for addressing long-term, systematic water supply problems," Norton said.
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