Biden to spend more than $580 million to fix aging water systems in West
The Interior Department will spend more than $580 million to repair canals, dams, fish hatcheries and other water systems in the West, the department said Wednesday.
The funding, from the bipartisan infrastructure law, will go to 83 projects across 11 states and is intended to upgrade equipment and help conserve water in a region that has been reeling from two decades of drought. More than half the money - some $308 million - will be spent in California, which is in a standoff with the other six states of the Colorado River basin over how much to cut its river use.
Deputy Interior Secretary Tommy Beaudreau and other administration officials announced the funding during a visit Wednesday to the Imperial Dam along the Colorado River in Yuma, Ariz., which is receiving more than $8 million to fix basins that filter silt, according to the department.
"As we work to address record drought and changing climate conditions throughout the West, these investments in our aging water infrastructure will conserve community water supplies and revitalize water delivery systems," Beaudreau said in a statement.
Extreme drought has plagued much of the West in recent years, and federal and state officials are reckoning with how to conserve precious water supplies and ease the blow for communities forced to cut back on water. The recent barrage of atmospheric rivers in California have led to opposite problems, with widespread flooding testing reservoirs, levees and other water infrastructure.
"This winter's onslaught of devastating winter storms was just the latest in a long line of weather whiplash in California that overwhelmed and battered our aging infrastructure," Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) told reporters Wednesday during a call about the new funding. "And because we know that the threat of climate change is an existential threat, we have to be strategic and intentional about how we invest in infrastructure as extreme weather events come at us with more frequency."
Federal funding for water-related issues in the West has been ramping up, with an additional $4 billion allocated to alleviate the effects of drought as part of the Inflation Reduction Act. That funding will include paying for farmers to temporarily avoid planting crops to conserve water, as well as longer-term investments in more efficient irrigation systems and improvements to canals to reduce how much water is lost.
"Unprecedented conditions require new solutions," U.S. Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Camille Calimlim Touton said.
The big-ticket items in Interior's repair projects include $43 million to refurbish generators and turbines in the San Luis hydropower plant in Merced County, Calif.; $42 million to replace transformers at California's Spring Creek Power Facility for pumps that move water from the Trinity River into the Sacramento River; and $66 million for upgrading a fish hatchery on the Trinity River in California.
While much of the funding is aimed at repairing aging infrastructure, some is targeted at preventing water from being wasted. In Idaho, $4 million will go toward lining six miles of a Boise-area canal to help avoid seepage. Another $4 million will be spent to fix a canal in the Columbia River Basin in Washington state that has been leaking water for many years, according to a list of the Bureau of Reclamation's funded projects.
The issue of lost water - through evaporation or other forms of waste - has become a central point in the Colorado River negotiations. Several of the basin states want to attribute significant cuts in water use based on evaporation and other losses. California, which has the most to lose from that approach, has rejected the plan.
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