By Eric Kuhn and John Fleck As the Colorado River Compact Commission negotiators returned to their discussions for a short 8 p.m. Sunday evening meeting Nov. 12, 1922, they began trying to dive into the details of how to divide up the great river. In trying to make the broad concept of dividing the river …
Continue reading ‘A century ago in Colorado River Compact Negotiations: Turning to Murky Details’ »
By Eric Kuhn and John Fleck With the arrival of all of the commissioners and their key advisors, the Commission got back together on Saturday morning. The purpose of this meeting had been agreed to back in early April. Each commissioner would be given the opportunity to suggest the form of a compact. Nevada’s James …
By Eric Kuhn and John Fleck Santa Fe, New Mexico, was off the beaten path in November 1922. That was the point. After a logjam and a seven-month break, the Colorado River Commission finally reconvened in Santa Fe, New Mexico at the Bishops Lodge on Nov. 9, 1922, to try to find common ground …
Continue reading ‘A century ago in the Colorado River Compact: Converging on Santa Fe’ »
Colorado River political and policy discourse is tangled right now around an increasingly unhelpful set of questions. They involve process: Should the federal government step in and impose cuts? Should the Lower Basin states, especially Arizona and California, do more to save themselves? Should we pay farmers to fallow? How much? Should the Upper Basin …
Continue reading ‘a Colorado River hypothetical and an attention-getting cuss word’ »
Helpful piece by Luke Runyon on steps toward accounting for Lower Colorado River evaporation and riparian system losses. During a September Colorado River symposium held in Santa Fe, both Interior Department Secretary Deb Haaland and Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Camille Calimlim Touton told attendees that the issue of evaporation and transit loss in the Lower …
Continue reading ‘Accounting for Colorado River evaporation’ »
I don’t see how this ends well. Most of the major players – the ones that matter, anyway, by which I mean Arizona, California, and the federal government – appear boxed in by constraints they can’t seem to overcome, while the water in the Colorado River’s big reservoirs is circling the drains. Arizona’s giving up …
Continue reading ‘The Colorado River at the end of water year 2022: a status report’ »
By Eric Kuhn, John Fleck, and Jack Schmidt With most forecasts pointing toward another below-average winter of precipitation in the Rocky Mountains in 2022/2023 and with total basin-wide reservoir storage now less than 20 maf (less than 17 months of supply at the rate water has been consumed in the basin since 2000), it is …
The White House announced today it has appointed Anne Castle as the federal representative on the Upper Colorado River Commission. Anne is former Assistant Secretary of Interior For Water and Science, where she helped steer the federal boat through chaotic Colorado River rapids. She’ll be an important asset now that the rapids seem that much …
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Count me among those in the Colorado River community who was disappointed last month with the lack of Department of Interior action on its threats should the states not come up with a plan to sufficiently reduce their water use. But let’s remember the core issue here: the states of the basin, especially the Lower …
Continue reading ‘A reminder that the federal government does not use Colorado River water’ »
As we watch the quivering uncertainty about the nature of the federal threat on the Colorado river, it is perhaps worth a look at past moments of progress in Colorado River governance, and also past roadblocks. Anne Castle and I ran this stuff down for a paper we published last fall. Some history shows a …