Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [196]
In 1984, Congress began to demonstrate why the farmers might not be so foolish after all. Early that year, it voted to lend them $200 million to help build distribution systems—an interest-free loan, as one might have expected, but the sum was only about half of what they would need, and there was a lot of resistance to lending them the rest. But they still weren’t out of the woods. For one thing, the Indian water-rights issue was still substantially unresolved. There was a good chance that the white farmers would have to lease water from the Indians, who could well end up with most of the water in the CAP. The Ak Chin and the Papago tribes had recently settled with the Interior Department for 300,000 acre-feet, about the consumption of Phoenix. The Papago tribe’s water will come directly out of the Tucson Aqueduct—water which the farmers, most of whom had conveniently ignored the Indian water-rights question, had always expected to get. More and more, the CAP was metamorphosing from an agricultural rescue project into an expensive atonement for travesties visited on the Indians, and, perhaps, into a municipal water supply project for Phoenix and Tucson—if they feel they can afford it.
“The cities in Arizona are going to get hit even worse than the farmers,” Bill Martin told an interviewer in 1984. “The farmers at least get the interest-free subsidy, which is worth a fortune to them. They also get interest-free loans on things like the distribution systems. The cities get none of that. They pay full fare.
“Here in Tucson, we’re already drawing groundwater out of neighboring basins because we’ve depleted ours, and we pay around $430 per household, which seems like a lot. But most of that, I’d say around $400, is to pay off the water mains, the infrastructure, the bureaucracy. It’s a distribution cost. It only costs us $30 or a little more to pump the water. But to pump CAP water all the way from the Colorado River to Tucson is going to cost at least $250 per acre-foot; that’s what the water is worth when you get rid of all the interest subsidies and so forth. Add $250 to $400, the distribution cost, and people are going to be paying $650 for water. There are families around here who only earn ten or fifteen times that much in a year. So what’s obviously going to happen is people are going to conserve, and use a lot less water, and there will be less and less of a need for the CAP.
“It’s already happening,” Martin continued. “We’ve all gotten water-conscious, even if we weren’t before. Tucson uses a third less water than Phoenix, because up there they still get cheap water from the Salt River Project. Once Phoenix starts paying $600 a year, though, they’re going to conserve just like we are.”
But if the farmers can’t afford the water, and the cities can’t afford the water, then who is going to buy it and justify the whole expense?
“Damned if I know” was Martin’s response.
If it seems implausible that Arizona’s farmers will buy here-today, gone-tomorrow water that costs three times what farm economics suggest they can pay; if it seems implausible that cities will want to waste millions of dollars a year buying turbid, alkaline water from the Colorado River when they can pump cheaper, fresher groundwater instead—if all of this seems unlikely, what is even less likely is that Arizona and the Bureau of Reclamation will permit a giant concrete aqueduct to sit empty in the desert, a ruin before its time. For the aqueduct to remain full as long as it can, however, the farmers must receive most of the water; their collective thirst is much greater than that of the cities. (And in 1985, work on the