Drought could bring water cutbacks severely affecting region

The ongoing drought in California has Imperial Irrigation District officials and local farmers concerned how this might affect water distribution.

IID Communication Specialist Robert Schettler said, “There’s a situation pending on the Colorado River that if the drought continues mandatory cutbacks could be enforced staring in 2020, at least that’s the forecast from the Bureau of Reclamation at that point.”

At a public discussion on Tuesday in El Centro, IID officials shared how they plan to prepare for those possible cutbacks.

“The situation at Lake Mead has deteriorated further and that era of limits has become something akin to, this time we really mean it,” said Kevin Kelley, IID General Manager.

The plan calls for California, Arizona, Nevada and Mexico to cut back on water usage and store that water at Lake Mead.

Some people disagreed with this plan.

Thomas Havens, of American Water Resources, said, “The entire effort and discussion is about storing water in Lake Mead. And yet the science says that Lake Mead will fall from 1075 to 1025 by 2023.” He explained how water levels would be so low that storing water there was useless.

Some just want to be part of future discussions.

Local farmer Ronnie Leimgruber said some of them want to be involved in the ongoing discussions.

“We have some of the brightest minds in the valley here. We have people that have been negotiating, working on this, and we’re excluded from it,” Leimgruber said.

Former IID Director Stephen Benson said there’s a lot of confusion in current Drought Contingency Plan (DCP) talks among other water agencies, as well.

“I did attend a meeting at Manhattan Beach. There’s a lot of yelling and screaming and essentially we did walk out at the end of that and said, there’s no DCP the way you want it,” Benson said.

IID said the Colorado River, which serves over 40 million people, began to lose water levels about 20 years ago. They said If allowed to continue, this could have a devastating effect in the region.

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