The $150 million project was to have been a joint venture between Cadiz Inc., a California agricultural company, and the Metropolitan Water District (MWD), which serves 17 million customers in southern California. The vote by MWD's board of directors to reject the project came less than two months after the project received final approval from the federal government on August 29. The MWD board said that it was rejecting the project due to concerns raised by environmental experts and lawmakers, along with drought conditions on the Colorado River that made it less likely that enough water could be diverted to make the project practical.
The proposed project called for Cadiz and MWD to share the costs of building a 35 mile pipeline to transport water from the Colorado River Aqueduct to an underground aquifer beneath the Mojave Desert north of Palm Springs.
During wet years, surplus Colorado River water would be diverted to the aquifer, which could hold up to 1.5 million acre feet along with a similar amount of groundwater stored their naturally. In dry years, Cadiz would sell water to MWD.
$500 million to $1 billion over the next 50 years, funds that the cash poor company sorely needs. The water storage would help southern California meet a federal mandate to reduce its current excess use of water from the Colorado River.
If California does not settle on a water saving plan by December 31, 2002, the state could be penalized by losing part of its current water allotment. But critics of the Cadiz project said that harming the Mojave Desert was not a fair tradeoff for an uncertain chance of meeting some of California's water needs. (Los Angeles, California, October 9, 2002 (ENS).
