Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [313]
We didn’t have to build main-stem dams on rivers carrying vast loads of silt; we could have built more primitive offstream reservoirs, which is what many private irrigation districts did—and successfully—but the federal engineers were enthralled by dams. We didn’t have to mine ten thousand years’ worth of groundwater in a scant half century, any more than we had to keep building 5,000-pound cars with 450-cubic-inch V8’s. We didn’t have to dump eight tons of dissolved salts on an acre of land in a year; we could have foresworn development on the most poorly drained lands or demanded that, in exchange for water, the farmers conserve as much as possible. But the Bureau still sells them water so cheaply they can’t afford to conserve; to install an efficient irrigation system costs a lot more. The Israelis, who have far too little water to waste any of it, are stunned when they see the consumption of a typical western farm. And it is no coincidence that most of the water-saving innovations of the past years, such as drip irrigation, originated in Israel instead of here.
But the tragic and ludicrous aspect of the whole situation is that cheap water keeps the machine running: the water lobby cannot have enough of it, just as the engineers cannot build enough dams; and how convenient that cheap water encourages waste, which results in more dams. No one loses except, of course, the taxpayers at large.
Recently, the magnitude of these losses has finally begun to come to light. In August of 1985, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) released a report on the Central Valley Project that it commissioned from a team of economists supported by a Ford Foundation grant. Through that report, a window was thrown open for the first time on the kinds of liberties the Bureau has been taking with public funds and the law in order to perpetuate the myth of abundance and keep up the demand for more dams.
According to the report, the Bureau not only has been giving its California clients—the nation’s richest farmers—cheap water; it has been inventing a whole new realm of subsidies, which are quite possibly illegal, in order to keep the price from going up. For one thing, it adopted, years ago, a completely unwarranted interpretation of the principle of “ability to pay,” which is one of the main instruments by which water prices are set. Originally, adjusting water rates according to the farmers’ “ability to pay” meant that the price of water could vary from good years to bad ones, as long as the momentum of the fifty-year replayment schedules was maintained. But the Bureau undercharged its client farmers so regularly that the CVP repayment schedule had fallen drastically into arrears by 1985. By that year—some three decades after the project was essentially completed—the farmers had repaid a mere $50 million of the $931 million in capital costs that they are obligated to pay back. (Remember that the farmers are exempted from paying interest on this amount, a subsidy worth at least a couple of billion dollars in its own right.) What is worse, since 1982, payments for water and power have not been sufficient even to cover the operation and maintenance costs of the project, and the Bureau has been cannibalizing the capital-cast fund to keep it from running out of operating funds. This, of course, is robbing Peter to pay Paul, and according to the NRDC it is perfectly illegal. It would have been perfectly legal for the Bureau to raise its water rates—it may even have been required by law—but that was never done.
A multibillion-dollar interest exemption, a repayment schedule