A change is as good as a rest.
Cowboy Proverb
Water policy, like religious principles,
should change slowly for if it changes too fast then it rocks our world and
shakes our foundations. How do we make commitments, investments and plans for
the future if the rules keep changing? Change
is better when it is transitional, measured and predictable. Unfortunately, change is not linear; it is
geometric or exponential at a counter intuitive spiral rate. Realistically, water policy changes are
inevitable and desirable to adapt to a changing world. Alas, the winds of change are in the air, for
our water and our future.
Water is the condition for life.
Werner Heisenberg
We imagine that we get lots of
water out west. It falls, ostensibly, in limitless quantities in our
mountains. What the forest does not use,
flows effortlessly down to the populace via our stream network and basin-range,
artesian aquifers. But that is changing. As it gets warmer, precipitation and
snow patterns change so that runoff and supply patterns are shifting. The Colorado River system, according to the Bureau of
Reclamation, may see 20% less water by the end of the century when there could
be three times as many of us living in the west.
We have historically used most of our water for agriculture, but that is
changing. As we grow and sprawl, we transform Agriculture water use to
Municipal water use for our homes. Historically
we have used mostly surface water for agriculture but with the perfection of
the centrifugal pump in the 1930s we have tapped into ancient aquifers full of
fossil water from eons ago. In addition,
for our increased Municipal water use, we have changed to cool clean
groundwater. With surface water use, when you run out you obviously stop using
it. With groundwater, when you run out, you dig a deeper well. But we can only
dig so deep.
The world hates change yet it is
the only thing that has brought progress.
Charles Kettering
We used to have a gatekeeper to
make sure that water distribution was fair, equitable, orderly, certain and
consistent. This was either the State Engineer or some kind of judicial board
or magistrate. The powers of these gate keepers has been diminished and
decimated with the changing values as people and politicians see water more as
a personal ownership issue rather than as a public health and welfare
commodity. In the west where personal rights and property ownership is king and
the socialistic overtones of the common good are increasingly anathema, water
has become something to speculate on and hoard.
The gatekeeper was historically
needed to protect the water resources, prevent infringement and impairment of
other users and consider the natural stream environment and the public
welfare. With the increasing demand and
without the ability to strictly reserve flow for fish and riparian plants and
animals, that is getting harder to do.
Determining what the societal values are, now and in the future, is a
slippery slope even the sociologist will not go down, let alone engineers and water
regulators.
Water is the material cause of
all things.
Aristotle / Thales
Water itself used to be free, a
public health commodity, usually owned and distributed by the states. It was appropriated for the common good and
public welfare, simply by an application with only a promise of beneficial use.
Its priority and preference were determined solely by its application
date. But that is changing. Now there is
no more free water left and it can only be bought from someone who has it.
Water is developing a free, if not fair market, with its own preferences and
values system driven by price and cost. No longer ‘a commodity held in the
public trust’, water has evolved into personal property to be bought and sold
by the highest bidder.
On the other hand, water delivery used to be cheap, developed locally years ago
with low/no interest federal and state subsidized projects that have long been paid off. That is changing and new
subsidized projects are rare because of lack of funding and environmental
constraints. The good dam sites (and
some bad ones) were all developed years ago and gravity powered plumbing was
put in place. With all the good sources
spoken for we need to reach further a field for new water, store it off stream and
pump it to the people who demand it. It may just take a new nuclear power plant;
say in Green River Utah, to pump water from
Flaming George to Denver, Lake
Powell to St George or from Snake Valley
to Las Vegas.
We used to make power with water, creating enough energy and money to fund
future water projects. Now water delivery is costing us money and power. All
that water purchasing, plumbing and pumping is expensive. Now water is costing us power.
Never change horses in the middle of a stream.
Cowboy Proverb
We used to know the price of
water when we built the dams, dug the wells and cut canals by hand and with horses. That has changed. We really don’t know or see the true market
price for our water any more; what it cost, and what it is worth. The feds and
the states like to subsidized water development out the general funds and out
of the power profits of previous water projects. Now we bury and hide the cost of
water in property tax, sales tax, development fees, general funds, special
assessments and impact fees. We don't know the true worth of water or the cost
of its development. We give lip service to conservation now but deny any
economic incentive to really conserve with truly punitive. rates. Water is a
semi-elastic commodity and as rates increase, use and waste goes down,
dramatically. That is a slippery slope for water providers who depend on
selling water, lots of water.
There is nothing permanent except change.
Heraclites
John Wesley Powell urged Congress
to draw new western state boundaries according to hydrological drainage basins
that could be self sustainable in their growth and their resource use. They
didn't listen, preferring random box shaped states. We are therefore left to
create artificial boundaries for allocation and use of rivers and our water
resources that foster the concept of "mine". We share and we steal
and impair and infringe on each others surface and groundwater, in the field
and on paper, with agreements and compacts. We give and take ‘virtual water’
from each other knowing that the sum of the parts is not really equal to the
whole. We kick the can down the road for the next generation to mitigate and
pay for.
The current short term political will is to slowly shake up the system that has
formed our foundation and to turn it over to a capitalized free-for-all market.
The priority system will take care of any future shortages and the market will
sort out the preferences and value system of water use. This is a dangerous precedent when dealing
with a public health resource and our assumed inalienable right of access to
clean water. The water industry used to be about people doing the right thing
for the common good. Now it is about politics and politicians, doing the wrong
things, for short term profit and popularity.
He that will not apply new
remedies must expect new evils.
Francis Bacon
There are solutions out there if
we choose to recognize them. Even in east
coast riparian water appropriations, where landowners can use the water on
their property, there is a recognized value of water to the owner and to
society and in disagreements the economic efficiencies and value of various
uses are considered. In California, the concept
of common law and the public trust doctrine has been recognized in saving water
for lakes, fish, rivers and natural aesthetics.
That is what saved Mono
Lake if not the Owens
valley. They also have a Correlative
Theory that encourages competing users to share the losses equally during times
of scarcity. In France this is called the Principal
of Solidarity where historical users share the diminishment of the resource. The idea of Conditional Water Rights is
developing where Water Rights can be subordinate to other rights for other
reasons besides priority or development dates, such as reserved Federal or
Indian rights. Water Banking allows for
traditional uses in times of plenty but also allows for temporary transfer of
water to more critical uses in times of drought. The concept of ‘more’ beneficial use is being
explored while values and preferences are being placed on traditional Water
Right allocations
Things don’t change, we do.
Henry David Thoreau
These changes can be
generational, brought about by a timely long term evolution of ideas and habits
thru the education of people and politicians.
Old habits die hard while fear and greed dominate our resistance to
change. Existing rights and uses must be
recognized and respected while paving the road to the future. The opportunity
is here and now, before we reach the tipping points of criticality. By starting slowly and accelerating, we can
now match the exponential rate of the change of the world as we think in terms
of a new sustainable water reality for the future.
Matthew C. Lindon, PE
Retired Assistant State
Engineer, Utah Department of Natural Resources
Adjunct Professor of Civil
Engineering - Water Resources, University
of Utah
Consultant with Loughlin Water
Associates and Otis
Bay Ecological Company
4964 E Meadows Dr.
Park City Utah, 84098
435-659-1326
We took a prosaic road trip down
I-15 to San Diego last fall, my wife Tracey and I, and decided to take the
scenic, long way home on coastal California State Highway 1, also called The
Pacific Coast Highway (
We followed the winding,
split-level local streets up into the hills to the original 
Further north, the road
alternated between a shamelessly commercialized 2-lane and a standard freeway
thru the towns of Carmel, Monterey and the agricultural top of the Salinas
valley where at least there were some killer farm stands and the apparent last
sighting of Bobby McGee. Further on is Santa Cruz which prides itself on 'still
being weird', and it is, but I still don't get it. With Trophy beach front
homes and a sleazy pier, a yuppie downtown and a campy carnival, it is
contrarian more than a contradiction, more awkward than an anomaly. There is a
Coastal Redwood preserve up winding Highway 9 that gave us a sense of what the
area was like before it was weird. After
