 The Imperial Irrigation District has been talking about a contingency plan for the equitable distribution of water during times of shortage ever since it signed the Quantification Settlement Agreement. In signing on to the QSA in 2003, the district voluntarily agreed to cap its water entitlement from the Colorado River at 3.1 million acre-feet per year.
By doing so, IID was legally required to implement a ratable method for delivering water to its agricultural users whenever the demand exceeded the available supply. This was the triggering event that made it essential for the district to adopt a system of apportionment in times of shortage that ensures not only compliance but fairness.
In 2004, IID hired Dr. Michael Hanemann and Bennett Brooks to perform a comprehensive survey of various apportionment models, consult with local stakeholders and select a preferred alternative. Their study analyzed several possible approaches, including soil type, water history, crop-based, assessed valuation and straight-line. Of these methods, the consultants recommended an apportionment that would, over time, transition from soil/group history to straight-line.
There are problems, from the district's perspective, with virtually all of the identified methodologies of apportionment. If the overriding goal, though, is basic fairness, then the straight-line model is the most equitable from among all those studied by Hanemann and Brooks. It places the same constraint on every water user while affording each the same opportunity.
The chief criticism of the straight-line approach is that it somehow confers an allocation, or water right, to the gate. According to the state water code, it explicitly does not do this, but the specter of private ownership has attached to this issue and, frankly, stymied the
public process of resolving it.
This is, by definition, a temporary measure that gives to agricultural water customers nothing more than they already receive from the IID - the right to use water reasonably and beneficially. Assigning a predetermined amount of water to individual landowners under shortage conditions isn't the same as awarding them an individual water right.
If it were, the IID, a public agency acting as steward of a public resource, wouldn't even be considering it.
But the district also has a unique relationship with agricultural landowners, who use 97 percent of the Imperial Valley's annual water entitlement and on whose behalf the IID holds its water rights in trust. In fact, by adopting such a plan now, when the supply of water is adequate to meet agricultural, urban and industrial needs, the district's role as trustee is strengthened, not diluted, and its water rights made more secure.
By the same token, failing to plan ahead for the day that demand outstrips the available supply would jeopardize not only the Valley's water rights but its economy and the well-being of its residents.
Water in the Imperial Valley is a finite resource, and the need to conserve it will only grow in importance as pressure on the Colorado River watershed increases. This was the rationale behind IID's decision to sign the QSA and enter into the nation's largest agricultural-to-urban water transfer with the San Diego County Water Authority. That decision, while still controversial, has delivered a measure of certainty to the district and its agricultural water users that would not have otherwise been there.
We believe that IID's agricultural customers deserve to know how much water they can use in the event of a shortage, and to plan accordingly. That is why we are contemplating the adoption of a straight-line method for the equitable distribution of water.
To do less would be to deny both our role as trustee of the Valley's water rights and our duty to defend the public good. |
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