Water officials support CAP Despite controversial past, advocates push plan forward

Editors Note: This is the second in a two-part story on the Central Arizona Project in the Santa Cruz Valley.

Assassinations and war gloomed 1968 for most of America, but in Arizona, the tumultuous year marked the beginning of the West's last great experiment in reclamation.

For decades, the state's congressional delegation had pestered a mostly uninterested Congress to pass and fund one plan or another for a canal to transport Arizona's share of the Colorado River inland across the desert, where the water was needed to slake thirsty and growing urban centers and a thriving agriculture industry.

The Colorado River Compact in 1922 had divided the river into two basins and among seven states, with 7.5 million acre-feet of water per year allotted to each basin.

A long fight

Arizona, in the lower basin with ever-burgeoning California, has had to fight for its 2.8 million acre-feet per year ever since.

Democratic Sen. Carl Hayden led the effort to realize what would eventually become the Central Arizona Project for more than 40 years, and when Democrat Morris Udall went to Washington in the early 1960s, he joined Hayden, Republican Barry Goldwater and others in a bipartisan push to secure funding for the project.

It wasn't easy.

The project was Roman in its scope and hubris—the water would need to be lifted nearly 1,000 feet from the river and travel more than 330 miles across the desert— and scientists, environmentalists, attorneys, judges and others had expressed serious and varied doubts about the aqueduct scheme from the start.

Still, despite predictions from some corners that the amount of water the seven states could expect from the river over the years had been seriously miscalculated, President Lyndon Johnson signed the CAP into law.

Arizona's congressional delegation had to keep fighting into the 1980s to get all the money and to convince Congress and the Carter administration, among others, that the project wasn't short-sighted pork.

Eventually, it took about $4 billion and several decades to get the water to Tucson.

It was a huge victory for the small state, and one that was supposed to allow the Phoenix and Tucson valleys to keep growing without worrying about their groundwater giving out—and make sure that Arizona, not California, used its share of the river.

And yet, in their 2001 biography of Udall, Donald Carson and James Johnson write, "If Mo Udall regretted any action he advocated in Congress, it might have been the (CAP). . ."

In 1963, Udall said that without the CAP, Tucson, lacking surface water, could not "safely grow" beyond 400,000 inhabitants. With it, Udall said, the city could support about 800,000. "And for my part," he's quoted as saying, "that just might be a good place to stop."

There are about 1 million people living in Pima County these days.

Shift in sentiment

Why did Udall regret his hard work on the CAP? As Professor Michael Logan explains in his 2002 book about the Santa Cruz River, "The Lessening Stream," Udall's change of mind corresponds with a similar shift in public sentiment about the CAP.

There has been a "loss of consensus behind the modern faith in the engineers' ability to solve the basin's water dilemma," Logan writes.

"The CAP had been the silver bullet solution for decades, regardless of whether that expectation was fair or accurate. In part, politicians had created support for the expensive project by over-selling it. . ."

When the CAP finally arrived, at its current terminus just outside of Tucson in the early 1990s, it was met with unprecedented skepticism.

Minerals and solids concentrated as the water traveled uncovered (and evaporated) for hundreds of miles, creating, even after expensive treatment, an unappealing, destructive brew.

The water leached rust out of pipes and came out of the faucet a dirty orange, and Tucson Water had to pay out more than $1 million for property damage.

These days, according to its Web site, Tucson Water is using about 20 billion gallons of its 44 billion-gallon yearly CAP allotment, mostly for recharge at its Avra Valley and Clearwater facilities, and is "developing several recharge projects to augment our groundwater supply."

Despite what happened in Tucson, Kenneth Seasholes, director of the Tucson Active Management Area, a section of the Arizona Department of Water Resources responsible for the valley's long-term water planning, says he's " a staunch advocate of bringing the CAP to Green Valley."

Arturo Gabald—n, head of Community Water of Green Valley, which has a CAP allocation of about 3,000 acre-feet per year, announced this week the co-op's ambitious plan to pipe CAP water from Pima Mine Road to Green Valley and Sahuarita as part of a long-term goal to achieve "safe yield" in the Santa Cruz sub-basin.

The Tucson AMA has a "statutory goal" to achieve safe yield (putting back in as much as you take out) throughout the management area by 2025, and maintain it thereafter. Seasholes said that, according to the most recent projections, that's not going to happen.

"The last time we did formal projections was for the Third Management Plan, and that said we'd come close but fall somewhat short of the goal," he said. "We have been making progress on reducing our reliance on groundwater, and use of renewable supplies is critical to achieving our goals."

And the CAP is the only renewable supply going right now.

"Extending the CAP is about reducing overdraft," Seasholes added. "If the infrastructure can be extended then the recharge can occur more beneficially where the pumping is occurring.

"We have encouraged the use of CAP water," he continued, "because there are subcontracts in place; it's a critical resource and it would be very beneficial for the community to have that, but making that happen takes community support and financing."

Gabald—n will speak about such things, and other aspects of the co-op's CAP plans, during a public meeting Thursday, Feb. 15, at 1 p.m., at the Green Valley Elks Lodge, 2951 S. Camino Mercado.

Tim Hull is a freelance writer for the Green Valley News.