U.S. Water News Online
SAN DIEGO -- A bipartisan group of 22 California lawmakers signed a letter blaming the Bush administration for the collapse of a landmark water pact aimed at reducing the state's dependence on the Colorado River.
In a letter to Interior Secretary Gale Norton, Republican Rep. Duncan Hunter wrote that her department's lack of leadership helped unravel the deal last month.
``The federal government's contribution ... during the past several months has been limited mainly to the issuance of threats and provocations that have impeded, rather than encouraged agreements among Southern California water agencies,'' Hunter wrote in the two-page letter signed by a host of Democrats and Republicans from across the state.
Rapid growth across the West and the worst drought in the river's recorded history is leading Norton to end an arrangement that let California claim more than its fair share. The arrangement had been in place for years because the six other states that drew from the river failed to use their full allotments.
Recently, the interior secretary said she would cut the amount of water California may take from the Colorado unless the state reached a deal by Dec. 31 that would transfer water from desert farms to coastal cities.
The deal collapsed when a water board in California's poorest county refused to relinquish any of its massive share of river water, in large part due to concerns over the future of the Salton Sea, the state's largest lake.
The Bush administration has tried to stay on the sidelines by insisting that California has to come up with a way of using less river water.
Bennett Raley, the administration's point man on Western water issues, denied the lawmakers' claims, saying the interior secretary under former President Clinton sent Congress a report in early 2000 that satisfied the law.
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