Click the link to read the article on the The Palm Springs Desert Sun website (Janet Wilson). Here’s an excerpt:
August 13, 2024
Less than 12 hours after the Biden Administration and the Imperial Irrigation District approved an unprecedented deal to conserve 700,000 acre feet of Colorado River water through 2026, the flow of river water to the rural valley three hours south of Los Angeles slowed. District personnel moved out before sunrise to install more than 1,600 locks on gates to canals supplying hundreds of farm fields, cutting off water deliveries for up to 60 days this year. The process will be repeated over the next two summers.
In exchange, the powerful agency and farmers who volunteer to not receive the water and hold off on growing hay in hot summer months will be paid nearly $700 million in federal funds — by far the largest of numerous agreements struck with water agencies and tribes to prop up the overused, drought-ravaged river and its reservoirs. For irrigation district officials, the agreement, which will conserve a huge amount of water, about as much as the state of Nevada uses annually, caps years of arduous negotiations and multiple federal reviews…
But the way the deal was finalized and its potential impacts on the also rapidly dwindling Salton Sea and local public health angered numerous environmental justice and policy groups. They said the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and the powerful water agency rushed through cursory approvals and ignored much of their lengthy comments, including ideas on how to monitor and reduce air quality and wildlife impacts that they say will occur from holding back such a huge amount of water.
The irrigation district board on Sunday hastily scheduled a special meeting for Monday night to approve the agreement, before reclamation staff had even released their final determination that cutting so much agricultural runoff into the sea would have “no significant environmental impacts.” Five hours before the meeting on Monday afternoon, the feds released their final determination and posted 150 pages of responses to the lenghty comments submitted by more than half a dozen groups and several individuals who have studied the Salton Sea for decades, including a major annual transfer of water to suburban San Diego that is rapidly depleting the water body, California’s largest.
In an email headed “IID’s quickie action,” Joan Taylor, chairperson of the Sierra Club’s California/Nevada Desert Committee wrote, “It’s commendable that IID recognized a responsibility to cut down on water use to help protect the water supply for the West, but what they’re doing is akin to doubling the water transfer to San Diego. We know that already has profound impacts. So this is a very big deal … and will suddenly increase dusty lakebed exposure around the Salton Sea by 13,000 acres.”