Water Authority's pipedream through Anza Borrego wilderness park isn't over yet
$5 billion Colorado River conveyance proposal threatens the unique natural resources of the Anza Borrego Desert State Park and the local tourist economy
By J. David Garmon, MD
President, TCDC
David Garmon is president of the Tubb Canyon Desert Conservancy, a non-profit “established to preserve habitat and biodiversity, protect native plants and wildlife, and conserve scenic vistas and historic sites in the vicinity of Tubb Canyon and the larger Anza-Borrego Sonoran Desert in southeastern California.” This is an updated version of his article published on the TCDC website in September, 2020.
The Tubb Canyon neighborhood is still in the crosshairs of a major San Diego utility, the San Diego County Water Authority (CWA).
In 2019, the CWA Board of Directors allocated $3.9 million for a two-phase study of the feasibility of building a Regional Conveyance System (RCS) that would bypass the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California to deliver 280,000 acre-feet of Colorado River water (55 percent of CWA’s total water supply) to San Diego County, annually.
Phase B of the RCS study is “in progress, with study work ongoing over the next several months,” CWA spokesperson Mike Lee said in a recent email response to SoCal Water Wars.
The Phase A report, published June 2020, recommended the northern aligned route, 3A, over two more-costly alternatives (Fig. 1).
Route 3A would consist of 46.7 miles of canal, 38.8 miles of pipeline, and 46.5 miles of tunnel that would pass through and under the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park (ABDSP) and the community of Borrego Springs.
Cost estimates for this project are $5-6 Billion, and the construction, which would not begin before 2031, is estimated to take up to 15 years.
The preferred Northern Alignment (3A) route passes through the State Park, through the community of Borrego Springs, up Tubb Canyon Rd, to a “tunnel portal” in Tubb Canyon.
From the Tubb Canyon Portal a tunnel 14 feet in diameter would travel 46 miles under the Pinyon Ridge Wilderness area to the CWA’s Twin Oak facility near Escondido. A massive pumping station would be constructed in the vicinity of Tubb and Glorietta Canyons (Figs. 2 and 3).
The Tubb Canyon Desert Conservancy (TCDC) opposes the proposed Northern Alignment (3A) route of the RCS for myriad reasons— both regional and local.
Regionally, TCDC shares the concerns described in the Member Agency’s Managers Group report of July 2020—that the project is not cost competitive and that the CWA’s Phase A report employed highly implausible economic assumptions.
Additional regional concerns about the RCS include:
environmental constraints create “fatal flaws” that would prevent this project from traversing the State Park just as they did the Sunrise Powerlink;
the project would provide no new water for San Diego, but would simply create a different pipe by which to obtain the water that already flows to San Diego;
the project would saddle the next three generations of San Diego ratepayers with exorbitant and unnecessary debt;
the proposed route would cross six active fault lines;
sending water over the proposed route would take 40% more energy than the conveyance system currently in use;
the increased energy use would increase San Diego’s greenhouse gas emissions;
the proposed route would impinge upon the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, the Cleveland National Forest, the community of Borrego Springs, and;
the proposed route potentially would impact groundwater resources near the San Pasqual Indian Reservation.
On a local level, TCDC has concerns that are specific to the ABDSP, the community of Borrego Springs, and the Tubb Canyon region.
Chief among these concerns is that the 1,000 square miles that compose the Park and the Community are not industrial. Together they are a predominantly state-designated wilderness area that provides a valuable and irreplaceable service to citizens and residents of San Diego County, Southern California and neighboring states.
Visitors have come, and will come again after the pandemic, from around the world to experience the vastness of the Park and its undisturbed vistas. The inevitable disruptions of a massive industrial project like the RCS to the uninterrupted majesty of pristine desert landscape would be antithetical to the identity of what we are as a community.
Because of its geographic location in the center of the ABDSP, Borrego Springs is surrounded on all sides by the State Park and is uniquely positioned to transition its economy to ecotourism, which it has been doing for the past five years under the rubric of the National Geographic-inspired Geotourism Program currently being implemented by the Borrego Village Association.
The community of Borrego Springs knows it must reduce its water consumption by 75 percent by 2040, which means it can no longer depend on local agriculture and residential development as economic drivers.
Thus, TCDC is concerned that an industrial project of the scale of the proposed RCS would be detrimental to the undisturbed wilderness that is the basis of Borrego’s ecotourism initiative and, therefore, detrimental to our critical economic pivot.
Finally, the Borrego community worked diligently for more than a decade to create a plan to address our over-drafted aquifer. Our Groundwater Sustainability Plan (GSP) was the first in the state to be presented to the Department of Water Resources. And on April 8, 2021 we signed a Stipulated Agreement that will implement our GSP through our newly created Watermaster Board.
This means that we have a plan for achieving water sustainability for our community by 2040 without sacrificing the wilderness that surrounds us and is the draw for a tourism economy that will sustain us into the future.
And Borrego Springs will achieve water sustainability at least 5 years before the RCS could be completed. Thus, the proposed RCS would have no impact on the necessity to reduce our water consumption by 75 percent by 2040.
For all these reasons, TCDC will continue in its efforts to provide information to the Board of the San Diego County Water Authority demonstrating the folly of attempting to site this industrial scale utility project through the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park and the community of Borrego Springs.