Grantee Research Project Results
Final Report: A Comparative Institutional Analysis of Conjunctive Management Practices Among Three Southwestern States
EPA Grant Number: R824781Title: A Comparative Institutional Analysis of Conjunctive Management Practices Among Three Southwestern States
Investigators: Schlager, Edella , Blomquist, William
Institution: University of Arizona , Indiana University - Purdue University - Indianapolis
EPA Project Officer: Hahn, Intaek
Project Period: June 1, 1996 through May 1, 1999
Project Amount: $198,000
RFA: Water and Watersheds (1995) RFA Text | Recipients Lists
Research Category: Watersheds , Water
Objective:
Among the more popular contemporary recommendations for improved watershed use and protection is the conjunctive use of surface and underground water resources, also known as conjunctive management. The purposes of conjunctive management are to coordinate resource use in ways that reduce exposure to drought, maximize water availability, protect water quality, and sustain ecological needs and aesthetic and recreational values. In general, conjunctive water management is intended to achieve these purposes by capturing surplus stream flows and storing them underground in aquifers. The underground storage builds up a nonevaporating "bank" of groundwater that can be tapped during periods of inadequate stream flow to sustain consumptive uses or supplement stream flows.
The longstanding policy recommendation of increased implementation of conjunctive water management has been offered even more frequently, more vigorously, and, most recently, from more quarters. One cannot say that the idea of conjunctive management has failed to catch on. Still, conjunctive management is not widely practiced throughout the West, or even in the Southwest where the need for it is arguably the greatest.
For the past several years, with support from the EPA, we have collected data on the development, organization, and performance of conjunctive management programs in Arizona, California, and Colorado. Using this three-state comparison, we are trying to advance the theoretical and empirical understanding of the effects of institutional arrangements governing the allocation, use, and protection of water resources upon the development, implementation, and performance of conjunctive use programs.
Several specific research objectives that emphasize the comparison among the different institutional settings across the three states were pursued. The first three objectives of the study set out to identify evidence to explain the role of each state's unique institutional setting in facilitating the development of conjunctive water management activities relative to the other two states. These research objectives focus on: (1) Arizona's relatively new statewide policies governing groundwater management; (2) Colorado's watershed level system of water governance and management; and (3) California's decentralized system of local special districts involved in conjunctive management. The fourth research objective of the study aimed to identify evidence that demonstrates how the states' different systems of ground and surface water laws affect conjunctive management. The fifth principal question of the study was to determine the role of large water projects in influencing conjunctive management activities.
Summary/Accomplishments (Outputs/Outcomes):
Conjunctive Management in Arizona. The institutional arrangements governing water management in Arizona stand out among the three states, particularly for their emphasis on conjunctive use. Arizona has a clear and deliberate state policy of promoting conjunctive water management, especially groundwater recharge and banking.
In 1980, the Arizona legislature adopted the Arizona Groundwater Management Act, which defined and allocated quantifiable rights in groundwater. The state permits and recognizes rights in water stored in groundwater basins; it recognizes exchanges of surface water for groundwater, and it has created two state entities to promote groundwater recharge. The Central Arizona Groundwater Replenishment District has as a subdivision of the Central Arizona Water Conservation District, which owns and operates the Central Arizona Project (CAP). The Groundwater Replenishment District has the authority to engage in groundwater recharge projects. The Arizona Water Bank contracts with Arizona organizations that have the ability and capacity to engage in recharge projects to store surplus CAP water. The Arizona Water Banking Authority (AWBA) is the state's institutional mechanism for ensuring that Arizona's current excess CAP supplies are stored and will be available when the state begins to face surface water shortages.
The Arizona Department of Water Resources maintained permits for 42 conjunctive water management in Arizona in 1997 and 1998. Of these 42 projects, 30 were located in the Phoenix Active Management Area (AMA), which surrounds the East and West Salt River groundwater basins that underlie the Phoenix metropolitan area. Seven of the remaining 12 projects were located in the Tucson AMA. Four were in the agricultural areas of the Pinal County AMA, which is located between Tucson and Phoenix, and one was in the city of Prescott, located in northern Arizona. Of the 42 projects, 5 hold 68 percent of the storage capacity for all projects in the state, 13 hold 25 percent of the storage capacity, and 24 hold 7 percent.
Access to surface water supplies is essential to engaging in conjunctive management. Sixty percent, or 25 of all projects permitted in Arizona use Colorado River water through the Central Arizona Project (CAP) for either direct groundwater storage or in-lieu groundwater savings. Another 38 percent, or 16, use treated effluent, and another four use other surface water supplies. The state encourages the use of CAP water for conjunctive use projects by allowing CAP contractors, the state water bank, and the CAP administrative agency, the CAWCD, to sell CAP water at reduced rates for groundwater recharge and savings.
Given that CAP water is used predominately in Arizona's conjunctive management projects, it is not surprising that most of the providers of conjunctive management in Arizona are municipalities and irrigation districts that hold CAP contracts. Municipalities are responsible for 19 of the state's 42 permitted projects. Irrigation districts, which are special purpose governments authorized by the state legislature, maintain permits for 10 projects. Private corporations and private utilities hold permits for nine projects. The state's Central Arizona Water Conservation District (CAWC), which is a special purpose government, provides funding for four projects.
In Arizona, projects tend to be developed primarily by single organizations. Of the 42 projects, 23 were developed by a single organization, and 13 had between 2 and 4 developers. Only 6 had more than 5 participants.
The benefits of conjunctive management projects in Arizona can be defined based on the goals of the organizations participating in these projects. The most common benefits reported by organizations in Arizona were: (1) groundwater storage credits (88 percent); (2) more efficient allocation of surface and groundwater supplies (62 percent); (3) increased storage of groundwater (57 percent); and (4) stabilizing the water table (38 percent). With the exception of stored groundwater credits, the benefits of Arizona's conjunctive management projects can impact multiple jurisdictions because increased groundwater storage and more efficient use of supplies affects all water users who share groundwater and surface water supplies.
Conjunctive Management in California. Three of the largest surface water systems in California-the Sacramento, San Joaquin, and Colorado Rivers-comprise much, perhaps most, of the surplus water stored in conjunctive-use projects in California. Each large-scale system operator in California has explored possibilities for placing surplus water into storage, and recapturing it during shortages. In several cases in California, these explorations have resulted in additional contracts to store water underground in areas that have available storage capacity. These are often areas that have experienced groundwater overdrafts in the past.
Although it shares some similarities with Arizona and Colorado, California's body of law and regulations governing rights to the use of surface water and groundwater, taken as a whole, is one of the most complicated areas of law in the United States. In California, the normal case (i.e., not in adjudicated basins) is that water in underground storage is treated as a common resource available to all overlying landowners, with no specific user rights assigned. Furthermore, most local agencies have had no clear authority to manage either groundwater pumping or groundwater storage. Although, some local water agencies-most notably water storage districts, water replenishment districts, and groundwater management agencies-are authorized to manage groundwater extractions or to develop and operate water replenishment program, they are the exceptions among California water organizations.
Because most types of conjunctive management operations involve or require some control of groundwater storage and/or groundwater extractions, the institutional structure of California water management organizations has not facilitated the development and implementation of conjunctive management programs. The state legislature attempted to ease the difficulty of engaging in groundwater management by passing AB 3030. AB 3030 is understood to have opened a door to the development of conjunctive management programs almost anywhere in the state, as long as one or more local water districts take the lead in initiating and completing the consensus-building and plan-development processes created by the law. On the other hand, 8 years after the passage of AB 3030, many of the locations in which the process has been undertaken remain in the plan-development stages.
Because of the composition of water management organizations in California, almost any large-scale conjunctive management project will involve multiple entities. At least one of the agencies that manage the major surface or imported water projects in the state (i.e., the California Department of Water Resources, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power) will be involved in supplying the large quantities of surplus surface water when it is available. One or more other agencies that contracts for and receives deliveries from that project (e.g., State Water Project contractors, Central Valley Project contractors, Metropolitan Water District member agencies) will be involved, because only they have legal rights to receive the water. One or more (usually many more) of the "retail-level" local water suppliers or users, because they are the ones who must adjust their operations to employ surface water or groundwater supplies, as well as cooperate in any financial arrangements involved with those adjustments. Where applicable, the local government unit or units responsible for management of the groundwater basin itself (e.g., a water storage district, water replenishment district, or a special-act district charged with basin management) will be involved.
Conjunctive management programs were being implemented in only 12 of 70 basins we sampled in California. Programs were being planned or actively considered in another four. Seven of the 12 California basins with conjunctive management projects we found and studied were in highly-developed, high-demand irrigated agricultural areas with histories of severe groundwater overdraft but with access to controlled or imported surface water supplies. Eight of the basins with conjunctive management programs were in highly developed, high-demand urban or urbanizing areas overlying relatively large groundwater aquifers.
Under these conditions, benefits from conjunctive management (or the potential losses from failing to implement conjunctive management) appear to be large enough to offset the substantial costs of assembling and maintaining the interorganizational coordination needed to accomplish conjunctive management in California. The institutional arrangements governing water resource management in California have probably discouraged smaller-scale projects in areas of lesser water demand, but have allowed conjunctive management to occur where the stakes have been high enough for organizational participants to sustain the endeavor.
California's institutional arrangements provide protection of multiple interests, and virtually assure that no conjunctive water management programs will be implemented unless each of those multiple interests has been accommodated. However, those institutional arrangements also contribute to a project-by-project, deal-by-deal approach to the development and implementation of conjunctive use programs. The number of parties involved tends to be larger than would be the case in a state with a more centralized water policy and management structure, and almost every party to a potential deal wields a veto. Accordingly, the transaction costs associated with the development and initial implementation of conjunctive use programs are very high in California.
Conjunctive Management in Colorado. Given the numerous physical and socioeconomic similarities between Colorado and Arizona and California, it would be reasonable to suppose that conjunctive management in Colorado is similar to conjunctive management in Arizona and California. Rapidly growing urban areas and irrigation districts encompassing rich agricultural land are located in the driest section of the state and are seeking additional sources of water. This same area is laced with groundwater basins, surface storage reservoirs and canals. Water can be transported throughout the region. The eastern portion of Colorado contains all of the necessary ingredients for the long-term storage of surplus surface water in groundwater basins, and yet that is not the type of conjunctive water management that is practiced. Instead, conjunctive management is used to maintain flows of surface streams to protect senior surface water rights holders and to allow Colorado to meet the terms of interstate river compacts.
For the first 100 years of European settlement of eastern Colorado, cities and farms satisfied their demand for water by developing surface water supplies. Initially, water was diverted from the South Platte and Arkansas Rivers and their tributaries and directly used or stored in reservoirs for later use. As demand for water continued to expand, major transmountain surface water projects were developed.
In the 1950s, when drought gripped Colorado, farmers turned to groundwater to irrigate their crops. Even after drought subsided, farmers continued to drill wells. Many of these wells pulled groundwater that was tributary to surface water streams. By the 1960s the effects of well pumping on surface water flows was becoming increasingly apparent. Under the prior appropriation doctrine, a first-in-time, first-in-right doctrine, senior rights holders who held rights in surface water, began demanding the shutdown of junior rights holders' wells to protect their senior water rights.
Instead of foreclosing the use of groundwater, the state legislature allowed for augmentation plans. Augmentation plans allow junior rights holders, whether of surface or ground water, to augment surface water supplies, thereby satisfying senior rights holders and avoiding shutting down their own junior water diversions.
In the South Platte Basin, well owners use a combination of direct recharge and in-lieu recharge to replace the water in the river that their wells take in violation of the prior appropriation doctrine. Direct recharge involves running surplus surface water in irrigation ditches and ponds typically between October and March. The water percolates into the tributary aquifer and migrates back to the river during the summer months of peak water demand. Indirect recharge involves purchasing or leasing surplus surface water supplies and making them available to senior rights holders as needed.
In the Arkansas River Basin, pumping of tributary groundwater was brought within the prior appropriation system only after Kansas sued Colorado in the mid-1980s over violations of the Arkansas River Compact. Well-owner associations covering several thousand wells purchase and lease surplus surface water, primarily from state and federal water projects, and make the water available to senior water rights holders and to Kansas in a timely manner. Thus far in Colorado, there are no long-term groundwater storage projects as are found in Arizona and California. Conjunctive water management in Colorado is used to support surface water flows.
The distinct institutional arrangements each state uses for governing water, shape the nature of conjunctive water management. California does not recognize quantifiable rights in groundwater or in underground storage in most basins. Consequently conjunctive management requires the cooperation and coordination of multiple water entities. Arizona recognizes quantifiable rights in groundwater and underground storage in its most heavily used basins. Consequently, more than half of the conjunctive management projects have a single participant. In Colorado, which also recognizes well-defined rights in surface and groundwater, conjunctive management has taken a different path. Given the historical development of water rights in Colorado, with rights in surface water the first to be developed, and rights in groundwater developed much later, conjunctive management is used to support surface water flows while still allowing for the use of groundwater.
Journal Articles:
No journal articles submitted with this report: View all 11 publications for this projectSupplemental Keywords:
watersheds, groundwater, surface water, public policy, decisionmaking, community-based, conservation, social science, surveys, southwest, Arizona, AZ, California, CA, Colorado, CO., RFA, Scientific Discipline, Geographic Area, Water, Water & Watershed, Hydrology, Ecology, State, Wet Weather Flows, Geology, Watersheds, water resources, canals, flood control, watershed, decision making, draught, surface water, conjunctive management, decision model, comparative institutional analysis, Arizona (AZ), aquatic ecosystems, public policy, California (CA), groundwater, conjunctive management practicesProgress and Final Reports:
Original AbstractThe perspectives, information and conclusions conveyed in research project abstracts, progress reports, final reports, journal abstracts and journal publications convey the viewpoints of the principal investigator and may not represent the views and policies of ORD and EPA. Conclusions drawn by the principal investigators have not been reviewed by the Agency.