173 



Obtain Additional Colorado River Water by Financing Conservation Investments for the Imperial 

 Irrigation District (1983> . In this report, EDF strenuously argued for the greater introduction of 

 economic (or free market) principles into the management of western water resources tiian had been 

 the dominant paradigm up to that point-in-time. In very complete detail, we demonstrated that it was 

 substantially less expensive for the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (MWD) to 

 obtain any supplemental water supplies it might need by buying water (or by investing in conservation 

 measures) under the control of the Imperial Irrigation District (IID) (and by extension others similarly 

 situated) than it was to build expensive new publicly subsidized water projects. We also demonstrated 

 that private entrepreneurs within IID (and elsewhere) could make substantial sums of money by selling 

 conserved water to MWD, without any loss of agricultural productivity whatever. 



Initially, although we were supported by such conservative publications as the Wall Street Journal. The 

 Economist, and the San Diego Union, our report was greeted with some skepticism by MWD, IID, and 

 other prominent water leaders in California and in Washington, D.C. Eventually, however, by the end 

 of the 1980s, a deal for a 100,000 acre foot annual transfer, nearly identical in broad outline to the one 

 EDF proposed in 1983, had been concluded by MWD and IID. With this breakthrough, and the nearly 

 contemporaneous establishment of a State Water Bank by the State Department of Water Resources, 

 the era of water marketing had been launched in California, and the introduction of free market and 

 economically rational principles to water resources management in the state had established a 

 significant beachhead. 



The 1980s also brought new controversies respecting CVP operations to the fore in the public's eye. 

 The most notorious of these involved the Kesterson National Wildlife Refuge, which at the time was 

 also the terminus for the infamous partially-constructed San Luis Drain. By early 1985 it was 

 uncontested tliat the selenium-laden agricultural drainage return flows from Westlands Water District 

 being conveyed in the Drain to Kesterson were causing massive bird deaths and deformities. As a 

 result, in mid-March of 1985, then-Interior Secretary Model and Regional Director Houston of the 

 Bureau of Reclamation announced the closure of the Drain, based on the Migratory Bird Treaty Act 

 and other federal obligations to protect migratory waterfowl. EDF's response was to open discussions 

 with Westlands regarding alternative means of handling drainage water, leading to a joint Westlands- 

 EDF proposal in September 1985 for research on drainage solutions, which Congress approved in that 

 year's Energy and Water Appropriations bill. Unfortunately, that initiative came to naught, as it was 

 killed by the Interior Department early the next year on a legal technicality. 



Other EDF water initiatives in the 1980s included our attempted intervention in a lawsuit on behalf of 

 Secretary of the Interior James Watt, who at the time was engaged in a controversy with Westlands 

 over tlie scope of the United States' water commitments to that district; our participation in the 

 seminal consensus-based Coordinated Operation Agreement legislation of 1986; our collaboration with 

 then-Representative Pashayan in the defeat of a bill sponsored by Representative Coelho to commit a 

 new Bureau water supply to tlie Pleasant Valley Water District (an area dominated by one large 



