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| Photo Credit: AP. |
DENVER (AP) — The intensifying crisis facing the Colorado River amounts to what is fundamentally a math problem.
The 40
million people who depend on the river to fill up a glass of water at the
dinner table or wash their clothes or grow food across millions of acres use
significantly more each year than actually flows through the banks of the
Colorado.
In fact,
first sliced up 100 years ago in a document known as the Colorado River
Compact, the calculation of who gets what amount of that water may never have
been balanced.
“The framers
of the compact — and water leaders since then — have always either known or had
access to the information that the allocations they were making were more than
what the river could supply,” said Anne Castle, a senior fellow at the
Getches-Wilkinson Center at the University of Colorado Law School.
EDITOR’S
NOTE: This is part of a collaborative series on the Colorado River as the 100th
anniversary of the historic Colorado River Compact approaches. The Associated
Press, The Colorado Sun, The Albuquerque Journal, The Salt Lake Tribune, The
Arizona Daily Star and The Nevada Independent are working together to explore
the pressures on the river in 2022.
During the
past two decades, however, the situation on the Colorado River has become
significantly more unbalanced, more dire.
A drought
scientists now believe is the driest 22-year stretch in the past 1,200 years
has gripped the southwestern U.S., zapping flows in the river. What’s more,
people continue to move to this part of the country. Arizona, Utah and Nevada
all rank among the top 10 fastest growing states, according to U.S. Census
data.
While
Wyoming and New Mexico aren’t growing as quickly, residents watch as two key
reservoirs — popular recreation destinations — are drawn down to prop up Lake
Powell. Meanwhile, southern California’s Imperial Irrigation District uses more
water than Arizona and Nevada combined, but stresses their essential role
providing cattle feed and winter produce to the nation.
Until
recently, water managers and politicians whose constituents rely on the river
have avoided the most difficult questions about how to rebalance a system in
which demand far outpaces supply. Instead, water managers have drained the
country’s two largest reservoirs, Lake Mead and Lake Powell, faster than Mother
Nature refills them.
In 2000,
both reservoirs were about 95% full. Today, Mead and Powell are each about 27%
full — once-healthy savings accounts now dangerously low.
The
reservoirs are now so low that this summer Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner
Camille Touton testified before the U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources
Committee that between 2 million and 4 million acre-feet would need to be cut
next year to prevent the system from reaching “critically low water levels,”
threatening reservoir infrastructure and hydropower production.
The
commissioner set an August deadline for the basin states to come up with
options for potential water cuts. The Upper Basin states — Colorado, Utah, New
Mexico and Wyoming — submitted a plan. The Lower Basin states — California,
Arizona and Nevada — did not submit a combined plan.
The bureau
threatened unilateral action in lieu of a basin-wide plan. When the 60-day
deadline arrived, however, it did not announce any new water cuts. Instead, the
bureau announced that predetermined water cuts for Arizona, Nevada and Mexico
had kicked in and gave the states more time to come up with a basin-wide
agreement.
A week
before Touton’s deadline, the representatives of 14 Native American tribes with
water rights on the river sent the Bureau of Reclamation a letter expressing
concern about being left out of the negotiating process.
“What is
being discussed behind closed doors among the United States and the Basin
States will likely have a direct impact on Basin Tribes’ water rights and other
resources and we expect and demand that you protect our interests,” tribal
representatives wrote.
Being left
out of Colorado River talks is not a new problem for the tribes in the Colorado
River Basin.
The initial
compact was negotiated and signed on Nov. 24, 1922, by seven land-owning white
men, who brokered the deal to benefit people who looked like them, said
Jennifer Pitt of the National Audubon Society, who is working to restore rivers
throughout the basin.
“They
divided the water among themselves and their constituents without recognizing
water needs for Mexico, the water needs of Native American tribes who were
living in their midst and without recognizing the needs of the environment,”
Pitt said.
Mexico,
through which the tail of the Colorado meanders before trickling into the
Pacific Ocean, secured its supply through a treaty in 1944. The treaty granted
1.5 million acre-feet on top of the original 15 million acre-feet that had
already been divided, 7.5 million each for the Upper and Lower Basins.
Tribes,
however, still don’t have full access to the Colorado River. Although the
compact briefly noted that tribal rights predate all others, it lacked
specificity, forcing individual tribes to negotiate settlements or file
lawsuits to quantify those rights, many of which are still unresolved. It’s
important to recognize the relationship between Native and non-Native people at
that time, said Daryl Vigil, water administrator for the Jicarilla Apache
Nation in New Mexico.
“In 1922, my
tribe was subsistence living,” Vigil said. “The only way we could survive was
through government rations on a piece of land that wasn’t our traditional
homeland. That’s where we were at when the foundational law of the river was
created.”
Agriculture
uses the majority of the water on the river, around 70% or 80% depending on
what organization is making the estimate. When it comes to the difficult
question of how to reduce water use, farmers and ranchers are often looked to
first.
Some pilot
programs have focused on paying farmers to use less water, but unanswered
questions remain about how to transfer the savings to Lake Powell for storage
or how to create a program in a way that would not negatively impact a farmer’s
water rights.
Antiquated
state laws mean the amount of water that a water right gives someone access to
can be decreased if not fully used.
That’s why
the Camblin family ranch in Craig in northwest Colorado plans to flood irrigate
once a decade, despite recently upgrading to an expensive, water-conserving
pivot irrigation system. Nine years out of 10, they’ll receive payment from a
conservation group in exchange for leaving the surplus water in the river. But
in Colorado, the state revokes water rights after 10 years if they aren’t used.
Not only
would losing that right mean they can’t access a backup water supply should
their pivot system fail, but their property’s value would plummet, Mike Camblin
explained. He runs a yearling cattle operation with his wife and daughter, and
says an acre of land without water sells for $1,000, about a fifth of what it
would sell for with a water right attached.
There are
other ways to improve efficiency, but money is still often a barrier.
Wastewater
recycling is growing across the region, albeit slowly, as it requires massive
infrastructure overhauls. San Diego built a robust desalination plant to turn
seawater to drinking water, and yet some agricultural users are trying to get
out of their contract since the water is so expensive. Some cities are
integrating natural wastewater filtration into their landscaping before the
water flows back to the river. It’s all feasible, but is costly, and those
costs often get passed directly to water users.
One of the
biggest opportunities for water conservation is changing the way our landscapes
look, said Lindsay Rogers, a water policy analyst at Western Resource
Advocates, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting water and land in the West.
Converting a
significant amount of outdoor landscaping to more drought-tolerant plants would
require a combination of policies and incentives, Rogers explained. “Those are
going to be really critical to closing our supply-demand gap.”
After years
of incentive programs for residents, Las Vegas recently outlawed all
nonfunctional grass by 2026, setting a blueprint for other Western communities.
For years, the city has also paid residents to rip out their lawns.
In Denver,
Denver Water supplies about 25% of the state’s population and uses about 2% of
the water. The city has had mandatory restrictions in place for years, limiting
home irrigation to three days per week.
This summer,
in southern California, the Metropolitan Water District instituted an
unprecedented one-day-a-week water restriction.
Still,
regardless of the type of water use, more concessions must be made.
“The law of
the river is not suited to what the river has become and what we see it
increasingly becoming,” Audubon’s Pitt said. “It was built on the expectation
of a larger water supply than we have.”
Outcalt is a
reporter with The Colorado Sun and Peterson is an Associated Press video
journalist. Both reported from Denver.
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