My colleagues with the Colorado River Research Group have a new policy brief out today taking another whack at the question of “assigned water” – water kinda sorta conserved, but left in storage so water agencies can pull it out again at some future date. Think “Intentionally Created Surplus” (ICS). At this point, nearly 40 percent of the water in Lake Mead is tagged as some agency’s private storage account, rather than being available for general system use.
By so effectively propping up reservoir elevations, Assigned Water delays or completely prevents the triggering of some mandatory shortage?based curtailments spelled out in the current rules…. [T]his approach has the unintended consequence of hiding the current paucity of shared (i.e., System) water available in Lake Mead, something that will ultimately become obvious when those waters are someday recalled.
This is the issue Arizona State’s Kathryn Sorensen (one of my CRRG colleagues) has been raising, and that Kathryn (with help from Sarah Porter and I) wrote about in October. The new CRRG paper argues that, as we move toward expanding the assigned water programs available to basin water users, we need to be mindful of the risks.
Nuts!
Exactly. As I continue to watch the Colorado River drama play out, I increasingly suspect that people have not learned their lessons from the last few years, and will not do so until the next hair-raising crisis, if at all.
Since the assigned water is sitting in a reservoir with evaporative losses, perhaps the amount of assigned water should decay at a rate proportional to the reservoir losses
John, ICS accounting is just the tip of the iceberg, or perhaps, just the deck chairs on the Titanic would be the better metaphor. Imagine where we’d be today if back in 2007 Reclamation had started allocating water to the Lower Basin in a way that actually charged those states for the evaporative losses that everyone knows – and most knew back then – was the root of the problem.
Here’s the back of the envelope math: 1.3 MAF/yr of unaccounted for evaporative losses x 17 years since the 2007 Guidelines were finalized = 22.1 MAF of additional water + Mead’s current storage of about 8.5 MAF = 30.7 MAF. Voila!
John C – Agree, with one important caveat – your assignment of blame to Reclamation. All seven states signed off on the ’07 guidelines. The Upper Basin agreed to approaching things this way. Blame for this problem lies on all of us.
JF, wasn’t assigning blame to Reclamation, and yes the 07IGs were a negotiated agreement, but ultimately the only entity that can “dictate” allocations – via their contracts with the various LB water users – is Reclamation. Of course that is a political nuclear warhead.
John C – It’s not as clear to me as it is to you that Reclamation has the authority under the AZ v. CA decree that you describe and want them to exercise. Neither of us is a lawyer, but the lawyers disagree on this point, which means that if the federal government had gone down this path, it would be judges managing the Colorado River, not us. This is the heart of our two options: Trying to rely on rules written (as Eric loves to point out) for a river we no longer have, which will inevitably hand it over to judges, or coming together as a basin to write new rules for the new river.