Sustaining Our Water Resources (1993) / Chapter Skim
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Changinf Water Resources Institutions
Changinf Water Resources Institutions
Pages 66-77
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From page 66... ...
97) The nation's water institutions establish the opportunities as well as the incentives to use, abuse, conserve, or protect water resources.
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From page 67... ...
The third stage is characterized by ongoing attempts to mitigate the effects of past abuses and to deal with sharply rising water costs, increasing competition for available supplies, and changing values. The elements of a fourth stage in which future institutions provide appropriate incentives to conserve and protect the resource and opportunities to transfer resources readily in response to changing supply and demand conditions are outlined in a concluding section.
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From page 68... ...
The more easily irrigated lands were already developed, and drought as well as the low summer flows traditional of many western streams were a major source of uncertainty to holders of junior water rights. Additional irrigation development depended increasingly on storage to expand dependable supplies, but many irrigators and privately financed irrigation projects were already heavily in debt.
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From page 69... ...
New pumping technologies made it feasible to tap ground water supplies from greater depths and to transport water greater distances. And the development of hydroelectric power and electric transmission technologies provided a powerful new stimulus for undertaking water development projects.
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From page 70... ...
Moreover, the availability of generous subsidies and the First in time, first in right" doctrine of western water law provided powerful incentives for local communities and their congressional representatives to seek federal water projects. With the federal government paying all the costs associated with flood control and navigation works and subsidizing the costs of irrigation and other project benefits, water projects were desired for the jobs and federal funds they brought to a community regardless of the net impacts of the project on the use of the resource or the nation as a whole.
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From page 71... ...
The Pacific Southwest Water Plan submitted to President Johnson in 1964 proposed 17 new projects and programs, including pumping Colorado River water over the mountains into central Arizona, two big dams on the Trinity River in California and a tunnel to divert water from the Trinity to the Sacramento basin, a wider California aqueduct for delivering water to the central and southern parts of the state, and two large hydropower projects on the Colorado River at opposite ends of Grand Canyon National Park. Another proposal would transport more than 16 mar annually from the Mississippi River to the southern High Plains where irrigators were depleting the Ogallalla aquifer.
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From page 72... ...
And, third, the opportunity costs of storing and diverting water increase as the number of free-flowing streams declines and the demand for instream flows rises. The availability of federal funding for new water projects declined as the Vietnam war absorbed a larger share of the budget and as concerns over the size of the federal deficit grew.
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From page 73... ...
Also, many states have passed laws designed to protect instream flows and limit surface and ground water development. The Clean Water Act of 1972 established ambitious goals of restoring all navigable waters to a Fishable and swimmable" condition by July 1983 and eliminating all pollutant discharges to these waters by 1985.
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From page 74... ...
Other major legislation motivated in part by similar concerns includes the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act Amendments of 1975; the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976; the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act of 1977; the Clean Water Act Amendments of 1977; the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980 (Superfund) ; and the Safe Drinking Water Act Amendments of 1986.
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From page 75... ...
Improved management of existing supplies might provide relatively lowcost, environmentally benign opportunities for increasing safe water yields in some areas (Sheer, 1986~. These opportunities, however, are often constrained by institutional barriers such as multistate water laws, legal constraints on collaboration among separately owned suppliers, inadequate regulations providing for conjunctive management of ground and surface supplies, and the lack of a national water policy to reconcile the differences among the multitude of federal agencies pursuing narrow and often conflicting objectives in a river basin.
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From page 76... ...
Moreover, the numerous ongoing and proposed studies suggest that the board will continue to be a major contributor to the scientific knowledge and public understanding that are essential to developing institutions that will promote wise management and use of our scarce water resources. REFERENCES Frederick, K D
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From page 77... ...
1986. Managing Water Supplies to Increase Water Availability.
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