The San Diego region appears well-positioned to weather sharp cuts to California’s share of Colorado River water.
The U.S. Department of Interior on Friday announced California, Arizona and Nevada need to reduce their water usage by 1.25 million acre-feet annually between 2027-2028, as climate change and overuse push the Colorado River watershed further into crisis. California is absorbing the second-largest cut, at 440,000 acre-feet of water.
But Felicia Marcus, former chair of the California State Water Resources Control Board, said in an interview that local leaders have spent “smart money” bolstering the water supply here.
“The folks in San Diego have recognized their vulnerability and invested. Which, frankly, as much as people complain about the cost — the cost is a pittance compared to the cost of inaction when the taps run dry,” said Marcus, who’s a visiting fellow with Stanford University’s Water in the West program.
A seawater desalination plant in Carlsbad supplies roughly 10% of the region’s drinking water (though some environmentalists say the process is too expensive and energy intensive). Additionally, the city of San Diego and other municipalities have pursued large-scale water recycling projects, like Pure Water, in recent years.
Marcus says the San Diego area also has a strong conservation ethos. She was the public face of mandatory water use restrictions during the worst California drought on record, which started in 2012. Back then, she found nonfunctional green lawns particularly distasteful.
“It was amazing to fly into San Diego — it was a sea of brown,” she said. “So San Diego is actually one of the more efficient urban areas in the entire state, probably trailing only San Francisco and Santa Cruz as major cities.”
The San Diego Water Authority also inked a 2003 conservation agreement that provides nearly 280,000 acre-feet of water annually.
“It's water that's been saved through smart agricultural management practices. And as a result of that, we're able to use that water in the San Diego region, which really gives us an amazing drought resiliency portfolio,” said Jim Madaffer, who sits on the Water Authority’s board of directors. “I think we're in fairly good shape no matter what the federal government ends up doing.”
Those factors have contributed to a supply glut for the Water Authority, which allows the utility to sell water to other California agencies. The Water Authority is also exploring how to sell water to other thirsty Western states, which has never been done.
“What that means is we, in San Diego and in California, would not take some of our share of Colorado River water, therefore leaving that for places like Nevada and Arizona, who could much more desperately use it,” Madaffer said.
Madaffer, who also serves on the Colorado River Board of California, said an interstate marketplace would create even more incentive to build infrastructure like desalination plants.
“Instead of debating on how to divide scarcity — start competing to create abundance,” he said. “I think that's how America has always solved some of its greatest challenges. And that's what we have going on right now. The Colorado River is a major challenge that needs to be solved.”
The Water Authority, its counterparts in other states and the federal government are working through some of the thorny legal questions tied to selling water across state lines while adhering to the Colorado River Compact.
