By Tony Perry and Richard Marosi, Los Angeles Times –
SAN DIEGO — After years of sporadic negotiations, the United States and Mexico Tuesday will sign an agreement to improve cooperation over the Colorado River.
Under the five-year deal, regional water agencies in Southern California, Arizona and Nevada will purchase about 32.6 billion gallons of water from Mexico’s share of the Colorado River — enough to cover the needs of 200,000 families for a year.
In exchange, Mexico will receive $10 million to repair damage to its irrigation canals from the magnitude 7.2 earthquake that struck the Mexicali Valley in 2010.
Jorge Zazueta Camacho, president of an irrigation district area near the earthquake’s epicenter, said the repair of hundreds of miles of canals is desperately needed to bring thousands of acres of farmland back into production. Only 20 percent of his district’s alfalfa, cotton and wheat fields have been cultivated since the earthquake, he said.
“The reconstruction effort has been very slow, and sometimes it stops for months because there’s no money,” Camacho said.
Beyond providing money to rebuild the Mexican infrastructure, the U.S. is promising to buy additional water from Mexico, at a quantity and price to be determined later, and allow it to flow to the delta south of the border — an area depleted in recent years by drought and increased consumption upstream.
To the dismay of Mexican fishermen and of environmentalists on both sides of the border, the river often is barely a trickle when it finishes its 1,400-mile journey to the delta and the Gulf of California.
The U.S.-Mexico agreement “is a major accomplishment for everyone who has worked to restore habitat in the delta and for the local communities who benefit,” said Francisco Zamora, director of the Colorado River Delta Legacy Project for the Sonoran Institute.
Under the agreement, Mexico will agree to take a lesser amount of water during times of drought and be allowed to store water in Lake Mead on the Nevada-Arizona border during times of surplus or when, because of infrastructure problems, it cannot use its entire annual allocation.
