tive structure has gone as far as it can go. Furthermore, conservation in the agricultural sector has to be kept in perspective. “You would think there would be a lot of room in the ag sector – that’s not as true as I had originally envisioned, especially in the Upper Basin,” he said. “That unused water actually makes it back to the river. Conservation is region-specific best adapted for areas where you are actually exporting water from the Basin.”
90 by 20
Using water more efficiently is recog- nized as a necessary element of man- aging consumption of the Colorado River. That maxim is being pushed to an even greater level by those that believe the possibility of improved conservation is not only achievable but imperative.
A campaign launched in summer 2012 by a coalition of groups includ- ing Western Resource Advocates calls for a residential water user rate of 90 gallons per capita per day (gpcd) across the Basin by 2020. Residential gpcd presently varies across the Basin, based on climate and sources of water supply. Denver is at 85 gpcd, Tucson at 92 gpcd, Las Vegas about 125 gpcd, Phoenix at 110 gpcd, St. George, Utah at 152 gpcd, and Scottsdale at 219 gpcd, according to the report. “The 90 by 20 campaign is pref- aced around the idea that because all of the users on the Colorado River are interrelated and that demand on the river outstrips supply, we are going to have to change some things in order to make sure we have a sustainable water resource,” Beckwith said.
The 90 gpcd is the amount of water that goes through a meter throughout the 24-hour period for all uses divided by the number of people living in a household. Based on a monthly billing cycle, the math behind the calculation is monthly use divided by the days per month divided by the number of people in the household. “We picked residential water use as the metric in the 90 by 20 campaign
November/December 2012
because people pretty much do the same things inside and outside of their home,” Beckwith said. “Yes, there are regional differences in the Southwest, like weather patterns, lot sizes, and income, but experience has shown that once a community makes a commit- ment to reducing gpcd, it can do it – whether that community is in Arizona, Nevada, Colorado or Utah. The point of the campaign is to get everyone in the region pushing towards the same benchmark, for the express purpose of getting everyone to recognize that we’re all in this together.”
A report prepared for the coalition
called 90 by 20: A Call to Action for the Colorado River says the severity of the problem makes it easy for it to be pushed into a crisis mode where drastic and rash decisions are feared. “As dry summers pile up and demand continues to increase, it is easy to see the region’s water challenges as inevitable and unsolvable,” the report says. “Problems like climate change and drought are complex. The water debate is often divisive. Complicating matters, the solutions proposed by some policy leaders in response to water issues ap- pear overly burdensome or extremely expensive, like mandates to stop watering the lawn or proposals to spend billions on pipelines.”
Basin state officials recognize the role water conservation plays in Colorado River management and the extent to which improvements have been made. “We need to take direct intentional action to increase water use efficiency through new programs while recogniz- ing the cities in the Southwest have done a tremendous job of changing their water use patterns as well as some improvements at levels of ag water use efficiency,” Cullom said.
Finding a reasonable solution means avoiding substantial new investments or overly intrusive regu- lations, the report says, noting that solutions do not “have to pit urban communities against agriculture, state against state, and pool owners against conservationists.”
The city of Tucson Water Depart- ment’s Central Avra Valley Storage and Recovery Project includes eleven basins, totaling over 300 acres, along with pipelines to transport Colorado River water from the Central Arizona Project canal to the recharge basins. The project allows up to 80,000 acre-feet of river water to be recharged and stored under- ground each year.