Southern California has finally come up with a plan to reduce its reliance on the Colorado River and keep water flowing to fast-growing San Diego. Since the 1930s, Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming, and California have had an agreement to divvy up water supplies from the Colorado River, but California has guzzled more than its fair share for years. The Bush administration has threatened to cut the state’s take if it does not agree on a plan to reduce it on its own by the year’s end. The plan would shunt water from Imperial Valley, California’s agricultural hotbed, to San Diego, thereby decreasing California’s dependence on the Colorado. Imperial Valley would receive between $258 and $400 per acre-foot of water transferred to San Diego; farmers in the valley would also need to adopt more efficient irrigation techniques and let some of their land lie fallow. The plan, which still must be ratified by four separate agencies, exemplifies a shift in water-use priorities from farmland to cities.
