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Chapter 7: Colorado River
Water
SAN DIEGO’S PIECE OF THE PIE
In 1926, as the Colorado River Compact
looked like it would become a reality — five
years before the Seven Party Agreement
—
the city of San Diego decided to stake its
official clai
m for some of the river’s water.
Shelly J. Higgins, the city attorney, recounted
this process:
We were going to stake San Diego’s
clai
m, and file on the river just the way
an individual
— say, a miner
— would
do … I remember asking the council-
men how much water we should
clai
m, and Council
man Fred Heilbron
said not less than 112,000 acre-feet.
… With what amounted to secrecy,
…
my deputy and I
went by auto over
the then-unpaved mountain and
desert highway and onto the plank
road through the sand dunes to
Yuma. This was in midsummer,
mind
you. Early one morning — the sun was
working itself into a white-hot rage at us
creatures daring to venture across the
desert
— we went for a distance up
river and piled rocks into a cairn and in
the middle we placed our legal notices
of filing for water and power, stuffed into
a tin can.
4
The 112,000 acre-foot clai
m-in-a-can
became official in a 1933 contract with the
U.S. Department of Interior. But there were
conditions. First, the 1933 contract provided
that San Diego’s water was allocated to the
“City of San Diego and/or the County of San
Diego” and that the water “shall be used within
the County as the City and the County may
agree ...” In other words, the County now had
a voice in allocation of San Diego’s Colorado
River water. Second, San Diego shared a fifth
priority for California’s share of
Colorado River
water with Metropolitan, and it would receive
the water if there was surplus water after the
six upstream states received their allotments.
Furthermore, San Diego was the most remote
of the parties, as it lies physically (as well as
figuratively) at the end of the pipeline.
Indeed, San Diego had no means for receiving
the Colorado River water. Metropolitan was
building the Colorado River Aqueduct to take
delivery of its water. San Diego wanted to
build an extension from the All-American Canal
to take delivery of its share. The city of San
Diego signed another contract with the Interior
Department in 1933 to build a diversion from
the All-American Canal, partly for economic
reasons and partly to remain independent
of
Metropolitan.
Imperial Valley produce farm.