Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [197]
One person who thought he had it figured out was Sam Steiger, a former Congressman from Prescott, a small city up in north-central Arizona. In the 1960s, Steiger was a prototypical Arizona Republican—crew-cut, jut-jawed, archconservative—who nonetheless had little trouble voting for the CAP. “Of course I was for it. Any Arizona politician who wanted any kind of political future had to be for it. Besides, I was on the Interior Committee, which authorized the thing—one of two Arizonans versus five Californians on the committee. If I had voted against it, I would probably have been shot.” In the 1980’s, however, Steiger, no longer in office, had gotten into the water-brokering business, which was becoming a cottage industry in western states whose laws permitted some degree of free market in water rights. Suddenly Steiger had an economic interest in the very condition the CAP would pretend to relieve—scarcity—because he was earning a living helping people with good water rights—mainly farmers—sell those rights to people who could pay top dollar for them—usually subdevelopers and cities. If the CAP suddenly brought in a big volume of water to be sold at vastly subsidized rates—or if CAP water was somehow forced on cities that didn’t really want to buy it—it would create an artificial glut and hurt his business. But that was exactly what Steiger thought would happen: subsidy and political coercion were going to create a “demand” for CAP water which, even in this third-driest state in the country, would otherwise not exist.
“In the first place,” Steiger said during an interview in 1985, “we passed a strict groundwater law here in 1980, one that was supposed to have been passed ten years earlier. The CAP legislation we passed in 1968 demanded it—what was the point of approving the project if the farmers kept sending the aquifer down to hell anyway? When the Carter people threatened to withhold funds for the CAP until the law was passed, it finally went through the state legislature. What that law does, besides restrict pumping, is demand that any developer who sells a new home guarantee the buyer a hundred-year supply of water. Otherwise, he can’t sell. Hell, I can sell you a home and guarantee you that in a hundred years I’ll give you desalted water from the ocean. I’ll be dead then anyway—that’s how ridiculous the provision is. But the way it’s being interpreted by the Department of Water Resources is this: no developer gets his certificate unless he’s signed up for CAP water, and without that certificate he can’t sell his house. The odds that there’ll be water in the Granite Reef Aqueduct in a hundred years are probably lower than the odds we’ll be getting water from the ocean, but the developers are stuck. So are the cities. If a city wants to grow, it has to buy water from the Central Arizona Project.”
That, by Steiger’s reasoning, was how the cities would be forced into the hand. The farmers, he felt, would be corralled by the new law’s restrictions on groundwater pumping; at some point, they would have to rely more on surface water, and the only available surface water would be the CAP. The problem with the farmers, though, is that their demand is, to use that economists’ word, inelastic: charge them too much and they’ll go belly up. So the farmers, according to Steiger, will be brought in with the carrot rather than the stick. In 1984, the first fifty-year contracts for cheap Hoover Dam power expired—the dam was finally paid off. The new contracts negotiated by the Interior Department didn’t raise the rates much, but they did tack on a surcharge of four mills per kilowatt-hour which is to go as a direct subsidy to the CAP. Four mills per kilowatt-hour—a few cents per day—may not sound like much, but multiply it by a couple of