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3 weeks ago
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SAN BENITO, Texas – Craig Harmon, general manager of Cameron County Irrigation District No. 2 and Cameron County Drainage District No. 3, recently had a private meeting with U.S. Rep. Vicente Gonzalez.
Also at the meeting were officials with the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation.
In his power point presentation, Harmon did not hold back. He said he wanted to give the bottom line up front. So, the first slide said:
1. There is a sustained water crisis in the RGV.
2. The water crisis is destroying the RGV agricultural community and industry.
3. The water crisis is threatening municipal water security.
4. Funding is desperately needed to mitigate the impact of 2 and 3 above.
To find out exactly what he said in that private meeting, the Rio Grande Guardian asked Harmon for an audio in-depth interview. He obliged. The interview is attached at the bottom of this story. Here are some of the highlights.
Food security
“The water security aspect of it really is scary to me. And it’s not only water security, but also food security,” Harmon said. “When you think about – and that’s what I mentioned during the meeting (with Congressman Gonzalez) – this (the RGV) is a breadbasket of the country in many ways, vegetables, onions. A large portion of onions used to be solely grown here. Citrus is almost gone. Now, many of the vegetables are gone, and we see them coming across the border almost daily, coming from Mexico, probably grown with the water that, quite frankly, should be here.”
Harmon said growers are going where the water is. And that is Chihuahua, Mexico.
“Just knowing that we have to rely on foreign food… if push comes to shove, if something really bad happens in Mexico, it’s going to get bad for us. And we’re already seeing the end results of the water policies that Mexico has that are impacting our water security.”
Water rights
Harmon explained the meaning of what is known in Valley agriculture as push water.
He said push water is when cities now bear the burden of transporting water from the Rio Grande all the way to their pumps.
“Right now, they don’t have to pay for that because that water is paid for by irrigators, by the farmers. So, they’re riding the coattails of the farmers all the way to their pumps, and all they pay for is the water that’s delivered,” Harmon said.
“If they (the cities) have to pay for the rest of that, that will exceed what they have in their water rights, and they run the high risk of cavitating their water systems, probably by the middle part of next year. If we don’t have more water behind the (Falcon) dam, I can see that there will be multiple cities within the Rio Grande Valley that will run out of water rights.”
Implications for farming community
Harmon said because of the ongoing drought, Valley farmers have been left stranded.
“Pretty much, the farming community has been written off. Even today. One, there’s no water. They have a lower priority. We’re at a situation now because of the water security issue, of people going and turning on their water faucet and it not working. That’s the thing that, quite frankly, I don’t think, really, your average citizen understands. Just how close we are. But the farmers have been written off because there’s no water. That’s not a Texas state policy. That’s not an IBWC policy. That’s just a reality of life. At this point, because of the priorities.”
Alternative water sources
Harmon says he supports alternative water sources such as desalination. However, he also wants a greater emphasis placed on water conservation.
“I’m delivering water to the cities at 29 cents per 1,000 gallons. A lot of people have said, we need to find alternative water sources. True. Agreed. But we run into… like desalinization, we had an individual who came and talked about desal. Thirty-one dollars per 1,000. Even with a third government subsidized you’re still looking at $21 and that’s not delivered. So, there’s no incentive, really, for the cities to look for other alternatives if they’re already relying on something that’s so cheap.”
Inefficiency of irrigation districts
Harmon said there is no doubt Valley irrigation districts like his are inefficient. But he would like the opportunity to address that. And that can happen with federal funding.
“I was trying to make sure they (the Bureau of Reclamation and Congressman Gonzalez) understand that, yes, we are very inefficient, but we want to get after this. We owe it to not only our stakeholders, the irrigators, but also to the cities.”
It was put to Harmon that the Valley’s canals are one hundred years old. Surely, they could have been lined or covered by now, to prevent leakage and evaporation?
Harmon responded: “Absolutely. Absolutely.”
Agricultural industry will fold
Harmon was asked in the interview to read aloud the key takeaways he presented to Congressman Gonzalez and the Bureau of Reclamation. He did so.
“Cameron County Drainage District No. 2 is committed to improving the district’s efficiency. Irrigation districts need to be considered a Public Water System. Legislation is needed to allow federal funds to be matched to federal funds in the case of disaster to leverage timely, existing shovel-ready projects,” Harmon said.
“The RGV water crisis is real and if nothing changes cities will cavitate and the agricultural industry will fold.”
Harmon said he stood by this analysis. “Wholeheartedly, I think that’s where we’re going.”
Not an alarmist
Harmon said he did not want to come across as alarmist.
“I don’t want to be an alarmist. That’s the last thing I want to do. I just want to bring attention to what is a significantly difficult and important issue. Difficult in the sense that there’s not an easy solution. We can’t just throw dollars at it. But I do think, from my seat, there’s a way for us to conserve water. It still makes sense to invest in conservation. We can’t just jump to reclamation, new water sources.
“We need to be doing that. We need to be researching all those kinds of things, because that is definitely where we need to be in the future and to make sure that we have water security.
“But we can’t siphon what limited government funds that are out there away from what is, quite frankly, a target-rich environment of real water savings (through conservation) here within the districts.
“So, it’s incredibly important, and in my mind, it’s something that we need to make sure that people are aware of, so that they could appropriately talk to their representatives, and make sure that they understand that it’s important to them as well. And that’s really all I’m trying to do.
“I’m not trying to be an alarmist, or even to go so far as to say any one person is responsible for this. They are not. It’s just where we are today.
“And I want to look at it from a balanced approach of, it’s not just Mexico. We’d like to blame someone, and I think that’s just natural human desire to blame someone for something that in this reality… it’s all of us, we’ve all used the water. We’re all in this situation together.”
The post Harmon tells federal officials about the RGV’s ‘sustained water crisis’ appeared first on Rio Grande Guardian.
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