Gustavo Solis

The Desert Sun

MEXICALI, Mexico – Francisco Torres Gallardo wants to buy three camels.

“Each one costs $5,000 without tax,” Gallardo says.

The camels are for a roadside tourist attraction Gallardo is building outside Mexicali, about 50 miles south of the U.S. border. Every Sunday for the last two years Gallardo has cleared the area of trash and planted date palms near the mouth of a dry 35 by 11 mile lake basin known as the Laguna Salada.

A small canal connects the Laguna Salada – a barren lakebed that the indigenous tribe who owns it used to fish from once – to the Sea of Cortez about 25 miles away. During high tides water from the sea flows to the southern end of the dry lake, where Gallardo plants palm trees and dreams of camels.

“We are building an oasis,” the resident of Mexicali told the Desert Sun, speaking in Spanish. “We are going to charge people for camel rides.”

Boating again at Salton Sea: Ramp aims to spur activity

Apart from sprouting promise of a roadside tourist trap, this source of water less than an hour drive from the United States could be the key to preserving the shrinking Salton Sea and preventing what some contend is an impending environmental catastrophe.

Gallardo isn’t the only person drawn to this piece of real estate. Last Sunday, a U.S. businessman teamed up with an environmental activist to organize an expedition from the Salton Sea to the Laguna Salada. Their goal was to drum up support for a plan to import water from Mexico to the Salton Sea.

Guests included ecologists, biologists, a desalination expert, lawyers, and a Desert Sun reporter. Also invited was Bruce Wilcox, California’s Assistant Secretary for Salton Sea Policy and the man appointed by Gov. Jerry Brown to oversee all Salton Sea projects.

The north side of the Laguna Salada is about five miles from the U.S. border and approximately 40 miles from the Salton Sea. Gary Jennings, a businessman pitching the project to the state of California, says this water is key to saving the sea’s ecosystem and preventing toxic dust from blowing throughout Southern California.

Jennings developed the plan with attorney Dan Johnson. In order to execute the plan, Jennings and Johnson need the state to buy in.

Filling the Salton Sea with imported water from Mexico is not a new idea. The proposal has been around in one form or another since the 1970s. While the idea has a track record of inspiring excitement, support hasn’t translated to funding.

Previous studies – including by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and the Salton Sea Authority – deemed it too costly to pull off.

But the tides have changed.

At the beginning of 2018 the Imperial Irrigation District is set to cut off flow of water from Colorado River into the Salton Sea, as required by the 2003 Quantification Settlement Agreement. Once that happens, the lake's decline is expected to accelerate.

The threat of toxic dust from the floor of the Salton Sea floating around Southern California and the destruction of a key stop in the Pacific flight path that hundreds of species of birds rely on to migrate north and south are now more pressing than ever.

If the Salton Sea’s deterioration is not addressed, “the long-term social and economic costs” could range between $29 billion and $70 billion over the next 30 years, according to a 2014 report by the Pacific Institute, an Oakland-based nonprofit that studies and advocates for sustainable water policies.

In unorthodox campaign for Salton Sea, activist looks to Mexico

Potential environmental, economic, and health concerns have produced renewed interested in a sea-to-sea solution. They’ve also turned the state into an interested party.

“Ten years ago when the evaluations were made there was a big difference, at least in my opinion,” said Wilcox.

“Those evaluations were done under the premise of completely filling the sea back to its 2000 elevations. Now we are looking at more of a surgical fix to it where we wouldn’t necessarily import as much water for the Salton Sea so that fits better into some of these incremental projects we got.”

That surgical fix includes a two-lake solution which requires building a series of wetlands along the shore and maintaining a larger body of water in the middle of the Salton Sea. The immediate goal is to reduce dust and save the ecosystem.

Sunday’s 150-mile expedition took Wilcox and company along the route Jennings plans to expand an already-existing canal and lay about 40 miles of new pipeline to import water from the Sea of Cortez.

Jennings, a businessman whose father grew tomatoes in the Imperial Valley, organized the trip along with Kerry Morrison, an activist dedicated to saving the drying lake and who plans to walks from the Sea of Cortez to the Salton Sea next year.

“Business guys like problems because we make a living fixing problems,” said Jennings.

“One person’s problem is another person’s opportunity. We’ve always believed that if you want to fix the dust we need more water. We’ve been working on this since 2010 but I think the idea has been around since the 70s. We’re not the originator of that idea, we’re just the current guys working on it.”

Like Gallardo with his date palms, Jennings simply wants to dig a hole. Albeit, a much bigger one.

Jennings began pitching the project to the group while driving a 14-seater van from the Mexicali border crossing to the northern end of the Laguna Salada.

The plan is to expand the existing canal that connects the Sea of Cortez to the Laguna Salada by making it 300 feet wide and 15 feet deep. The expansion will allow enough water from the sea to fill up most of the lake.

Once the Laguna Salada fills up, it will serve as a storage facility for water that will travel about 40 miles through a pipeline and into the Salton Sea. The Laguna Salada will also become a wetland that the thousands of birds who stop at the Salton Sea can use on their long flights.

The project is expected to cost less than $1 billion, Jennings said.

To pay for it, Jennings wants to ask the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) to raise electric bills under a program that raises funds for projects that benefit the public.

Under this plan, CPUC would approve two increases to Californians’ electric bills. The first would be an estimated $2.37 increase per electric meter per month for 36 months. This would generate an $850 million construction fund to pay for the canal, pipeline, infrastructure, habitat, and pumps. The second increase would be 21 cents per month. This would generate $24 million a year to pay for operational costs like labor, management, and overhead.

“We are asking for a little bit of money from a lot of people,” said Jennings.

The first stop on Sunday’s expedition was the northern end of the Laguna Salada, which is dry and barren. Although some water from the Sea of Cortez is flowing into the southern end of the dry lakebed, the body hasn’t been filled in nearly 40 years.

On the way south, Jennings compared the cost of his project to the cost of doing nothing.

“The numbers are scary,” he said, alluding to the 2014 Pacific Institute study on the potential social and economic costs. “If you do nothing, its $70 billion – so they say.”

“Let’s say they’re off by half. That’s $35 billion. I think my project is under $900 million but let’s say it’s $1 billion. If you do nothing it’s 35 times more expensive. For a dollars and cents guy like me, that’s like me chopping off my hand because I got a scratch on my finger.”

Wilcox noted that while Jennings’ project would cost less than $1 billion, additional Salton Sea restoration projects the state is exploring add up to about $3.5 billion. So the cost of doing nothing is closer to 10 times more expensive than all of the plans.

At this point the entire project is just a proposal because California hasn’t signed off on any of it. Jennings would like to start working on the canal and the pipes but he can’t do it unless the state agrees to buy the water he plans to bring to the Laguna Salada.

That’s not to say the entire project is on hold. Jennings spent four months pitching the project to an Indian tribe that owns the Laguna Salada.

The Cucapa people first settled in the region 3,000 years ago. Throughout their history the Cucapa have made their living from fishing the Colorado River delta that pours into the Sea of Cortez and the Laguna Salada – when it isn’t dry.

Antonia Torrez Gonzalez, daughter of the tribe’s matriarch, caught fish and shrimp from the Laguna Salada when she was 18. Now at 52, she works at a small museum and store. Nobody has fished on the Laguna Salada since 1979, the last time it was filled with water, she said.

Without water in the lake, most of the Cucapa make a living from fishing Corvina in the Sea of Cortez. The fishing season lasts from March to May and there is a lot of competition from commercial fishermen, Torres Gonzalez added.

“Here it would be much easier for the Cucapa to fish,” she said in Spanish. “We wouldn’t have to be fighting out there in the Sea of Cortez. We would be fishing on our land.”

The tribe is on board with Jennings’ plan because it would bring jobs and economic development to its land.

Under Jennings’ proposal, the Cucapa would negotiate the price of the water directly with California.

Once the group reached the southern end of the Laguna Salada last Sunday, the sound of flowing water could be heard nearby. The visitors happened to arrive during a particularly high tide and water was pouring into the lake.

Each member of the expedition reacted differently to the discovery.

Jim Wood, manager of the Imperial Valley Research Center, climbed up to the highway bridge over the canal to survey the land to see if one of the organizations at the research center can use seawater to grow crops.

Morrison filmed footage for an educational film about the trip that he plans to show politicians in Sacramento over the summer.

Tom Sephton, who runs a desalination plant in the Salton Sea, collected a water sample to test for salt levels.

Sea of Cortez salt levels are lower than those in the Salton Sea. In the short-term importing seawater would reduce the lake’s overall salinity levels through dilution.

After it all sunk in, the group huddled at the back of a pickup truck to look over a map of northern Mexico. Jennings and Sephton pointed out possible pipeline routes while Wilcox listened to the alternatives.

Big projects floated to save the Salton Sea

The man in charge of overseeing Salton Sea projects seemed pleasantly surprised by how much of the work was already done by the existing canal.

“The big deal is that you’ve got the right of way established,” said Wilcox, who added that he was “cautiously optimistic” about the project.

He is reviewing dozens of proposals for the Salton Sea and is expected to make recommendations to the state by the end of the month.

While Jennings waits to dig his canal and pipeline, he will keep working with the Cucapa and finalize a plan to refill the Laguna Salada with water, fish, and shrimp.

In the meantime, Gallardo is free to work on the roadside oasis. Some of the palm trees are starting to grow. He hopes to buy the three camels within a year and have them domesticated in another year.

He’s already come up with a name for the place.

“El rancho de Pancho,” he said.

$850 million: Est. project cost

$24 million: Est. cost of operations

40 miles: Approx. pipeline length

150,000 acres: Approx. wildlife habitat size

Reporter Gustavo Solis can be reached at 760 778 4443 or by email at gustavo.solis@desertsun.com and twitter @journogoose.