California Gov. Jerry Brown and the Obama administration quietly signed onto the “Salton Sea Management Program” to cut water to Imperial Valley farmers — just before the November elections.
The Salton Sea, at 35 miles long by 15 miles wide, and up to 45 feet deep, is currently California’s largest lake. For millennia, it has gone through 400–500 year cycles of filling up and then drying-out.
The only reason it is a lake today is that the California Development Company in 1905 tried to reduce silt buildup in the Colorado River by cutting a notch in the river’s bank. But the notch quickly expanded and caused a two-year flood that filled the entire dry Salton Basin, which is just 5 feet higher than Death Valley, America’s lowest point.
With California, Nevada and Arizona continually fighting over the allocation of Colorado River water for the last century, the only reason the Salton Sea did not dry up again and drive away migratory bird populations was due to irrigation runoff from Imperial Valley farmers.
The bird population has been protected over the last decade by environmentalists, who negotiated a temporary agreement with the Imperial Irrigation District (IID), holder of the largest Colorado River water entitlement, to send some irrigation water to Southern California coastal cities through January 2018.
The Imperial Irrigation District also agreed under the Quantification Settlement Agreement in 2003 to sell increasing amounts of water to the Coachella Valley Water District and the San Diego County Water Authority. Water deliveries totaled 141,000 acre-feet in 2016, but will jump to 303,000 acre-feet by 2026.
Environmentalists tried to force a $9 billion agreement with IID in 2007 that would have pumped water to a series of new dikes and canals to cut dust pollution from the drying lake bed. The real goal was to create massive new saltwater ponds to expand the habitat of marsh birds and desert pupfish.
But the Great Recession killed the grandiose plan. The new “Salton Sea Management Program Phase I: 10-Year Plan,” signed in August, but only quietly released in March, features an effort to build shallow ponds to double the wildlife and reduce dust storms from the dry Salton Sea shoreline. The plan sets a short-term pond-building goal of 12,000 acres and medium-term goal of up to 25,000 acres at an estimated cost of $383 million.
The so-called environmental mitigation plan will lead to a short-term expansion of Salton Sea wetlands to support an expansion of bird and fish habitat. But spreading the “un-natural” water surface across a wider area will also accelerate the natural evaporation of the Salton Sea.