Lawmakers blame Bush administration for failure of water deal

Thursday December 19, 2002

By SETH HETTENA
Associated Press Writer

SAN DIEGO (AP) A bipartisan group of 22 U.S. lawmakers from California signed a letter Thursday that blames the Bush administration for the collapse of a landmark water pact aimed at reducing the state's dependence on the Colorado River.

In a letter to Interior Secretary Gale Norton, U.S. Rep. Duncan Hunter wrote that her department's lack of leadership helped unravel the deal earlier this month.

``The federal government's contribution ... during the past several months has been limited mainly to the issuance of threats and provocations that have impeded, rather than encouraged agreements among Southern California water agencies,'' Hunter wrote in a two-page letter signed by a host of Democrats and Republicans from across the state.

The Interior Department is forcing California to live with less water from the Colorado. Rapid growth across the West and the worst drought in the river's recorded history is leading Norton to end an arrangement that let the state to claim more than its fair share.

On Monday, the interior secretary said she would make good on threats to cut the amount of water California draws each year from the Colorado unless the state reached a deal by Dec. 31 that would transfer water from desert farms to coastal cities.

The deal collapsed earlier this month when a water board in California's poorest county refused to relinquish any of the region's massive share of river water, in large part due to concerns over the future of the Salton Sea, the state's largest lake.

The Bush administration has tried to stay on the sidelines of the matter by insisting that California has to come up with a way of using less river water. But Hunter's letter attempts to put the department back in the fray, by claiming Interior has a role to play in the confusion over the Salton Sea that scuttled the deal.

The sea is fed by salt-laden farm runoff from Imperial Valley farms that use a trillion gallons of water to crops in California's southeastern desert. The salt is slowly killing the sea, and in 1998 Congress required the Interior Department to review possible solutions for the sea and come up with a cost estimate to fix it.

Hunter, whose district includes the Salton Sea, wrote that the department has not complied the law, leaving state and local agencies with an impossible quandary: How to protect the sea, and at the same time transfer water that replenishes it to San Diego?

Bennett Raley, the administration's point man on Western water issues, denied the lawmakers' claims Thursday, saying that Bruce Babbitt, Clinton's interior secretary, sent Congress a report in early 2000 that satisfied the law.

Despite that, Raley said the Interior Department is continuing an analysis of options for the sea at the request of individual members of Congress. That report is not yet completed, he said.

``Some of the reason for some of the delay is in response to the people who signed the letter,'' he said.

In one instance earlier this year, Hunter asked the department to review a scientific study of the Salton Sea, Raley noted.

He said the Salton Sea was such a massive problem that its solution and the more than $1 billion needed to fix it must come from Congress.

Tom Kirk, executive director of the Salton Sea Authority, said the Interior Department and the water community made a decision long ago to first solve water problems in California through water transfers and then deal with the Salton Sea.

``It's become painfully clear to all of us that you can't separate the tail from the dog,'' he said.

(Copyright 2002 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)