Hustling to get Imperial Irrigation District water reduction tools in place

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Janet Wilson had a super helpful piece this week in the Desert Sun about steps being taken (in a hurry) to get the institutional widgets in place to meet Lower Basin commitments to reduce water use under a deal hashed out in spring 2023 to head of Colorado River NEPA litigation.

If all goes as planned, growers and owners of farm fields could be paid $300 per acre-foot for not irrigating alfalfa and other perennial feed crops for between 45 and 60 days. The plants would be stressed but would survive, and substantial water supply would instead be left in drought-depleted Lake Mead, which provides water for millions of people and millions of acres of farmland in California, Arizona and Nevada.

I wrote (with youthful enthusiasm) in my book Water is For Fighting Over about the potential of “deficit irrigation” as a water use reduction tool in Imperial and places like it. One of the reasons we have converged on alfalfa as a crop in the arid southwestern United States is how robust it is when the water runs short. From the book:

Farmers have known for years that when their water supply runs short, they can get away with skipping an irrigation cycle and their plants will survive. They’ll just have fewer bales to feed to their cattle or send off to their dairy industry customers.

Do that intentionally, for money, and you have an adaptation tool that avoids fallowing entire fields or “buy and dry”. This also works with Bermuda grass and klein grass, two other forage crops grown in Imperial. Taken together, the three crops accounted for 233,000 of Imperial’s 333,000 acres under active irrigation in June, according to IID’s latest irrigation acreage report. (Total Imperial “farmable” acreage is 436,000 acres, the rest is either being fallowed or between crops right now.)

Deficit irrigation is one of three water conservation tools on the table for Imperial, as discussed in a draft Environmental Assessment released last week. Also on the table are on-farm efficiency improvements and straight up fallowing.

All involve federal money to compensate farmers (and their irrigation district).

 

Failure to fix New Mexico’s Rio Grande delivery shortfall could force drastic water cuts on central New Mexico

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Central New Mexico’s Rio Grande water users are perched on the edge of a dangerous precipice because of our failure to deliver enough water to Elephant Butte Reservoir, according to a June 28, 2024, letter from the New Mexico Office of the State Engineer to the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District.

We’re currently 121,500 feet behind in deliveries, up from basically zero six years ago. If our debt rises above 200,000 acre feet, according to the letter:

Under U.S. Supreme Court precedent, the use of water rights under state law is subordinate to a state’s obligations under an interstate compact. In Hinderlider v. La Plata River & Cherry Creek Ditch Co., 304 U.S. 92, 108 (1938) the Supreme Court ruled that a State could curtail uses by senior water users when necessary to honor interstate obligations, because no user within a state is entitled to use any greater right than the state’s equitable share under the compact.

If New Mexico exceeds the 200,000 acre-foot threshold, Texas could file an original action against New Mexico seeking an injunction requiring New Mexico to take all actions necessary to deliver water to Texas until the debit falls below 200,000 acre-feet. While it would be impossible to know what relief a court would ultimately order, all diversions of native surface or groundwater within the middle Rio Grande, other than Pueblo water rights, could be vulnerable to a Compact call.

The only water rights that would not be subject to curtailment in the event of a Compact call would be Pueblo water rights, which are protected against impairment under Article XVI of the Compact, and San Juan-Chama Project (SJC) contract allocations, which are protected under Article X of the Compact. The amount of SJC water that MRGCD could use, however, would be limited to MRGCD’s SJC allocation in that year, any carryover SJC storage from previous allocations, or any leased water acquired from other SJC contractors.

The use of groundwater wells, including pre-basin wells and wells with pre-1907 rights, for irrigation, stock, municipal, and domestic use would all be vulnerable to a Compact call as well. This would have an impact on many farmers and ranchers, as well as many municipalities. While New Mexico would seek to protect the ability of municipal and domestic users to utilize water indoors, there could be extreme restrictions on other municipal and domestic uses of water, such as outdoor watering or washing cars.

To be clear, this is separate from the ongoing Texas v. New Mexico litigation on the Lower Rio Grande. This is the scary new Compact threat that Norm Gaume and others have been warning about as the Compact debt creeps inexorably higher.

The full letter is included at the tail end of Monday’s (7/8/2024) MRGCD board packet, and is on the agenda for a possible discussion at that meeting.

 

“sad havoc” – what happens when you build a city in a flood plain

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A vibrant nighttime scene featuring a colorful mural on a wall. The mural depicts three stylized faces with abstract designs in rainbow colors. In the foreground, a wet surface reflects the mural's colors, creating a kaleidoscopic effect. Spotlights illuminate the mural, and a table is visible in the foreground.

Flooding in downtown Albuquerque, June 29, 2024. Photo by Roberto Rosales, City Desk ABQ, used with permission, licensed under Creative Commons

This remarkable image by Roberto Rosales, my former Albuquerque Journal colleague now taking pictures for City Desk ABQ, captures a sharp reality of Albuquerque. We built our city in a flood plain, and in particular downtown beginning in the 1880s in a low area that was part Rio Grande flood path, and part swamp.

That most erratic of streams

Here’s how Bob Berrens and I describe it in Ribbons of Green, the book we’re writing about Albuquerque’s relationship with the Rio Grande:

Albuquerque’s broad, flat valley was vulnerable to the Rio Grande long before the railroad arrived. With no levees, the river caused “sad havoc” in the valley lands around Albuquerque, in the words of a correspondent known in the manner of the day simply as “H.R.W.” “That most erratic of erratic streams – the Rio Grande – has been doing unspeakable damage in this county lately,” H.R.W. wrote in an Aug. 5, 1868 dispatch published in the Santa Fe New Mexican. In July, the river’s flood waters had destroyed the church in Corrales, a village 14 miles upstream.  By August, it had spread beyond the banks both east and west of the river downstream from Albuquerque, destroying the homes of, among others, Jesus Barela, a likely descendant of the namesake founding family of the community still known as “Barelas.”

The place our forbears chose for a new downtown when the railroad arrived in 1880 was particularly vulnerable, at the downstream end of a secondary path for the river in high main channel flows, which was also vulnerable to inflows from the heights during our storied summer thunderstorms.

With dams and levees to manage the main channel, drains to lower the water table across the valley floor, and a robust network of concrete-line arroyos to safely channel away most of the summer thunderstorm action, the risks are far less than H.R.W.’s 1868 “sad havoc”. But our Sunday morning bike ride showed havoc nevertheless. Left to gravity, rain that falls on the inner valley – close to two inches Saturday night – has no place to go.

Pumping out downtown

In Barelas, we saw a massive storm sewer cover blown out by the force of water surging up from below. The ballfields by the zoo, built below grade to catch and hold storm water until it can be pumped away, look to have filled up to five or six feet (~2 meters) deep.

Here’s the Downtown Albuquerque News explanation of the lay of the land:

Turns out the area between roughly Broadway – the base of the hill that leads up to UNM – and the river is essentially flat. In fact, historically speaking, it may as well be the river bed. Before the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District took steps (beginning about 100 years ago) to keep the river in what we now think of as its “natural” place, it moved and meandered all over what we know today as Greater Downtown, creating all sorts of wetlands in the process. Get in a time machine and go back to the Civil War era, and the river might have been flowing through what is now Fourth Street. Go back another 50 or 100 years before that and it could have been using a completely different channel. Or two channels. During floods, it could get even more unruly, as with one in the 1790s that washed away much of the first incarnation of San Felipe de Neri in Old Town.

The water needs help to get to the narrow channel between the levees where we have confined the Rio Grande, in the form of massive banks of pumps.

This is a crucial piece of the deep theme Bob and I explore in the new book, scheduled for publication in 2025. Rivers and their cities live in an uneasy embrace, each shaping the other’s movements, neither really in charge.

Inkstain is reader supported

Thanks to Inkstain’s supporters for helping keep the lights on. Also, thanks to the other journalists out there hustling business models to keep the information flowing, in this case City Desk ABQ and the Downtown Albuquerque News.

Entropy and the modern automobile

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A chain link fence encloses a littered junkyard full of old tires, trash, and stripped down cars.

Entropy and the modern automobile

Soto Avenue in Albuquerque’s Old Town Neighborhood is more “alley” than “avenue”. It’s one of our bicycling work-arounds for the unrideable stretch of Central Avenue – old Route 66 – on the east side of the Rio Grande in Albuquerque.

I ducked down Soto this morning at the tail end of a wandery bike ride. I love it because, like all alleys, it has a respectable honesty. Just look at those two cars, out beyond an abandoned car repair shop – the entropy that has long since settled over the place. Nobody’s puttin’ on airs here.

beautifully restored classic cars parked on a tree-lined street, with a historic adobe church and lush greenery in the background.

The restored cars of Old Town Plaza – locally decreased entropy.

Two blocks to the east, I settled on a shady bench in Albuquerque’s Old Town to finish the El Modelo breakfast burrito I’d stashed in my jersey pocket for bike ride food. It’s a Sunday thing. I often triangulate my ride on Old Town as I’m heading home, stopping to enjoy the theater of humanity – the tourists, the working church, the shade, and the informal car show. They’re out there, every Sunday, arriving early enough to lock down the prized parking places along the north side of the plaza.

The compare and contrast between Soto’s back lot junk and Old Town’s gleaming works of automotive art was striking. I’m pushing the boundaries of the metaphors of theoretical physics when I draw on the idea of entropy here, but if we’re careful about those boundaries, it works.

Left in the elements, with no one investing energy in their maintenance and repair, the old junkers are tending toward disorder. That’s increasing entropy. Enormous amounts of love and energy have been invested in the Old Town masterpieces. They are tending toward order. That’s decreasing entropy.

I’m at the edge of breaking this metaphor, but it slots nicely into Candide’s tending of the garden. Absent tending, gardens, like old cars in a back lot, tend toward disorder. Here’s Stanley Crawford talking in his book Village. He’s talking about “the idea of the perfect front yard, the perfect courtyard, the ideal patio, even the perfect vegetable garden“:

Once achieved, what inevitably followed was degradation, decay, the maddening weeds of imperfection, the cracks in the expensive paving, trees that grew too tall and trees that refused to grow fast enough, trees that failed to blossom at the right time, trees that gave fruit that wasn’t quite what was wanted or that came all at once, too much to deal with.

Texas v. New Mexico ruling creates interesting questions for Arizona v. Colorado on the Colorado River

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The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision Friday in a lawsuit between Texas and New Mexico over Rio Grande water reframes discussions in Colorado River Basin, where the threat of a similar Supreme Court action looms.

Texas and New Mexico schemed a water-sharing agreement to settle the thing, but the Department of Interior intervened to say “Nope” to the deal, and the Supreme Court said “Yup” to Interior’s “Nope,” essentially saying the federal interest in water management was sufficient to block the states’ attempt to settle their own affairs.

The Rio Grande Compact is fundamentally a contract among the three states that share the Rio Grande – Texas, New Mexico, and Colorado. (Colorado is technically a party to all of this, but the lawsuit’s a Texas versus New Mexico dispute.)

But while it’s a state-to-state thing, the Supreme Court’s rulings in this case make legally clear that the United States government has a “distinctively federal” interest in water management on the Rio Grande in southern New Mexico and Texas, parallel to the states’.

This interest arises from the federal government’s responsibilities under the legislation creating the Rio Grande Project, and the contracts flowing from that project.

To ensure that Texas receives its share of water, the Compact relies on the United States Bureau of Reclamation to operate the Rio Grande Project, an irrigation system in southern New Mexico.

So we have here a) states arguing over the meaning and interpretation of key terms of an interstate compact, and b) the federal government with a legal standing to step into that argument resulting from a “distinctively federal” interest in the outcome of that argument.

This seems analogous to the situation on the Colorado River.

First, as in the initial phases of Texas v. New Mexico, we have states in disagreement – in the Colorado River case over the meaning of Article III(d) of the Colorado River Compact, which discusses the flow of water past Lee Ferry. Is it a delivery obligation, or a non-depletion obligation?

Second, we have at least the potential for a “distinctively federal interest” flowing from the 1928 Boulder Canyon Project Act, which authorized construction of Hoover Dam and the resulting federal contracts for the delivery of water therefrom. To ensure that the Lower Basin states receive their share of the water, the Colorado River Compact relies on the United States Bureau of Reclamation to operate Hoover Dam and the irrigation and river management works downstream.

The parallel to the Rio Grande situation is striking.

If for whatever reason Colorado River management ends up at the Supreme Court when deliveries past Lee Ferry drop below a legally argued “delivery obligation,” it would be consistent for Interior to assert a federal interest in ensuring that flows from the Upper Basin are sufficient to meet the requirements of the federal government’s “distinctively federal interest.”

It also would be consistent for the U.S. Supreme Court to be OK with that.

That would be bad for an Upper Basin being squeezed by climate change.

I am Not a Lawyer

There’s a legal tangle in the decision’s footnotes that I don’t understand, but that’s probably important. In the Rio Grande case, Texas filed suit, and the U.S. government intervened. Might the federal government have standing to initiate a lawsuit if the deliveries at Lee Ferry cross the tripwire? From said footnote tangle:

As with our 2018 decision, today’s opinion says nothing about whether the United States could have initiated a Compact suit on its own.

I am a writer

While I am not a lawyer, I am enough of a water writer to have been charmed by the cheesy use of water imagery in the ruling. My favorite bit:

Conventional wisdom posits that, because time changes all things, no one can step into the same river twice.

My original joke here was going to be about my disappointment that Justice Jackson didn’t cite to Heraclitus. But then upon further research (You didn’t think I’m just wingin’ it here, did you? You’re payin’ good money for this blog, I do my research!) I find that there is question about whether Heraclitus really said it.

Revised joke:

I’m just disappointed that Justice Jackson didn’t cite to Wittgenstein.

 

 

 

No bad days on the bike

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Fence in the foreground, with a missile and bomber in the background and trees on the right hand side of the picture.

“We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” – Dwight D. Eisenhower, Jan. 17, 1961

I was on the service road out behind the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History when I got a text this morning about the Supreme Court decision.

I pulled up Scotusblog on my phone, read the headline.

“Oh shit,” I texted back.

And then I put the phone away and went back to pedaling my bicycle.

Grumpy John

I woke up grumpy this morning.

Maybe it was the wind, or the forest fires. Maybe it was the flow in the Rio Grande, collapsing, the fierce uncertainty of adapting to climate change.

Maybe it was the sinus headache that lurked all night at the edge of my dreams.

I rode to the end of the block and turned left instead of right. It’s an old trick I’ve been playing on myself for years when I need to clear my head – ride the unexpected. Instead of downhill toward the Rio Grande, I turned uphill, toward the foothills, only thinking a few blocks ahead, seeking out interesting.

It took a while for the drugs to kick in. (Not literal drugs, it’s metaphor.) I stayed grumpy at the broken crosswalk button at Mountain and Pennsylvania, the sprinklers watering the road and sending a stream down the gutter at Los Altos Golf Course, the locked gate between the golf course and the bike path. I hadn’t really wanted to go that way anyway. I was just trying to piss myself off.

“Fuck locked gates,” Grumpy John muttered to himself.

And then I looked at the map on my phone and realized that I’d never ridden the block of Garcia St. down from the golf course.

Bombs Away

Tan building with "Bombs Away" and a picture of a bomb stenciled on the sides.

Home of “Black Ops Lager”

A bike ride enforces a narrative structure – a beginning, middle, and end.

Across Central Avenue (old Route 66), I spotted a pub called “Bombs Away,” which has always amused me. It’s in what I now know, based on post-ride research, to be called “Albuquerque’s up-and-coming Skyline Heights district.”

I have never heard this neighborhood, which I’ve ridden through (checks GPS ride records) 43 times, called either “Skyline Heights” or “up-and-coming”. It’s one of the light industrial districts that ring the northeast edge of Kirtland Air Force Base. I love reading the signs in these neighborhoods, imagining the dreams housed in the noble little businesses inside. It’s where you’ll find Sam’s Paint and Body, and Roof Korean Custom Gunsmithing. (“Save who needs to be saved. Kill who needs to be killed.”)

Beyond “Skyline Heights,” the road opened out past the nuclear museum to the neighborhood Dwight Eisenhower was warning about more than six decades ago. The names puzzle, with the ring of consultants and focus groups and then more consultants to design the logos (“BlueHalo,” “Cyber Engineering Laboratory,” “RocketLab”). Where the buildings in “Skyline Heights” are rundown and honest, the military-industrial complex business park beyond is too manicured for its own good, like it’s trying to put something over on us.

The narrative structure now defined, I turned back to follow a favorite route back down toward home, through the atomic museum parking lot, past their replica of the shot tower beneath which hangs a replica of Fat Man, the first nuclear explosive, zigging and zagging through the neighborhoods bordering the Air Force base, past a muffler shop and “Tint Pros” and the incongruous doggie day care, because the military industrial complex includes doggies. (“Pet who needs to be petted.”)

Urban Riding

There’s always a turn toward home in the narrative structure of a ride, where the decision options narrow.

Urban riding requires a special focus – when to hop up on a sidewalk or take the lane, dodging (cheerfully, they have nowhere else to be) the tent camp spilling out of the park, slipping past the line at the Starbucks drive through, negotiating turn lanes filled with the urgency of people late for work. I love this part because of the focus demanded. It leaves no space for the Supreme Court. A meditative flow.

And then the narrative arc bends toward the increasingly familiar streets of my neighborhood, and home.

Grumpy John banished.

Works every time.

 

Gila River Indian Community proposal for post-2026 Colorado River Management

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Given the apparently unproductive state-to-state negotiations over post-2026 management of the Colorado River, it’s worth examining, in our search for a path forward, some of the other proposals submitted to the Department of the Interior. (If you need some bedtime reading….)

One of the most interesting comes from the Gila River Indian Community. (Their March 29 letter to Reclamation lays it out.) Spanning the Gila River along the southern edge of Phoenix, the Gila River Indian Community has long done a masterful job of leveraging water in defense of its sovereignty – or maybe sovereignty in defense of its water?

This 2021 piece by Sharon Udasin does a great job of explaining the GRIC’s success:

A riverbed that has been parched since the end of the 19th century — a portion of the historic lifeblood of the Gila River Indian Community — is now coursing again with water, luring things like cattails and birds back to its shores.

“You add water and stuff just immediately starts coming back naturally. Birds have returned and it’s just such a different experience,” says Jason Hauter, an attorney and a Community member. “It’s amazing how much has returned.”

The water, the cattails, and the birds, are part of a complex legal tangle that led to the 2004 Arizona Water Settlements Act, which ensured Central Arizona Project water – Colorado River imports, pumped up into the Gila River Valley from the river’s main stem – to replace water stolen from the Gila River Indian Community by settlers a century before.

Access to that water has made the Community a power player in central Arizona water politics. But that water is now at risk as a result of efforts to cope with declining flows on the Colorado River. In particular, the Community views the Lower Basin States’ proposal for post-2026 river management as (my words, not theirs) an assault on their sovereignty. Here’s how they put it in their March letter to Reclamation:

Our initial analysis of the LB Alternative indicates that under their static reduction proposals, at a minimum, the Community’s Colorado River supplies that we are currently using would likely be reduced by 130,000 acre-feet, 42% of our entire Colorado River supply, even after Arizona’s firming obligations are met. These cuts
would become more draconian under both the LB Alternative and the UB Alternative when additional reductions beyond 1.5 million acre-feet are needed, which would be often based on our review of the various models we have seen.

Allocation of CAP water is crazy complicated, and I’m still trying to get my head around these details. But the Gila River Indian Community is essentially arguing that in the current proposal, which calls for cuts deep enough to eliminate the “structural deficit,” Arizona is essentially bargaining away the Community’s water.

So the Community has concerns with the Lower Basin proposal. But it has even greater concerns about the Upper Basin proposal, which argues that if even deeper cuts are needed, they should all fall on the Lower Basin.

The UB Alternative does not appear to us to present a reasonable or balanced approach at all, shifting all of the burden for addressing the current drought crisis onto the Lower Basin States.

The footnote to that paragraph is wonderful:

Reclamation has indicated that it will model any reasonable set of assumptions presented for consideration. The Community, for its part, does not view the UB Alternative as a reasonable set of assumptions, so the Community would understand and support Reclamation if it determined not to model the UB Alternative.

The Gila River Indian Community offers an alternative suggestion for managing Lower Basin cuts that’s super interesting. Rather than what the Lower Basin Proposal offers – essentially a negotiated who-cuts-what set of numbers based on talks among the three states – the Community suggests cuts across the Lower Basin proportionally, based on the calculation of evaporation and system losses (which we’re now supposed to shorten, apparently, as ESL):

We believe the United States has the authority to apply ESL to consumptive use in the Lower Basin in a proportional manner. It is our understanding that United States believes it has the authority to apply ESL to consumptive use in the Lower Basin on a proportional basis and, as such, we believe this should be modeled.

The Community’s letter includes a strong emphasis on the federal government’s trust responsibility to the basin’s 30 Tribal Sovereigns. The letter makes clear that the federal government has a legal obligation “to find alternative water supplies for tribes that will be negatively affected by the Post-2026 Operations.” As Gila River Indian Community Gov. Stephen Roe Lewis put it at this month’s Getches-Wilkinson conference in Boulder, “First peoples of this land should be the last to be cut.”

Lowest flows ever recorded on New Mexico’s Gila River

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Graph showing declining flow on the Gila River

Lowest ever flows on New Mexico’s Gila River

 

Update 6/17/2022: Update: Based on a conversation with a friend familiar with the plumbing in and around the Gila gage, caution is in order pending a USGS recalibration, which we’re hoping for soon. Measuring flows this low is hard!

Thanks to a question from alert Inkstain reader S, I see that flows on the Gila River at the “Gila near Gila” gage seem to be the lowest they have ever been since the gage was installed in 1927.

Previous low flows, the only other time it seems to have dropped below 10 cfs, were in 2006.

(Note that this is the log scale version of the graph with the maximum and minimum lines, all of which you need to see these very low flow events.)

Water Flowing, Again, in the Colorado River Delta

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Water flows down a concrete channel into a riverbed

With engineering help, water flowing into the Colorado River Delta. Photo courtesy Raise the River

Forgotten in all of the noise around the Colorado River right now is this moment of hope – water again flowing in the Colorado River Delta.

Under the 2017 agreement between the United States and Mexico known as Minute 323, we have 210,000 acre feet of water set aside for environmental flows through 2026 – one third provided by the United States, one third by Mexico, and one third by environmental NGOs – in the long-dry river channel through the Colorado River Delta.

Audubon’s Jennifer Pitt’s mention of the flow came during the last panel of last week’s Getches-Wilkinson Center annual Colorado River conference at the University of Colorado Law School. Managing the pulse flow to maximize environmental benefit requires, ironically, the same sort of engineering that on a much larger scale dried the delta river channel in the first place – routing water through an irrigation system to deliver it at the point of maximum environmental benefit, feeding a strip of riparian vegetation. That’s how we do environmental flows now.

It made me smile, remembering the joy of watching the pulse flow a decade ago, an event that was a pivot point in my life. It was a reminder that, amid sturm und drang of the current Colorado River, good stuff is possible.

Out of the shadows

Co-sponsored by the Water and Tribes Initiative, the conference again moved the role of the Colorado River Basin’s 30 sovereign Tribal Nations into the foreground, in particular celebrating the new water settlement among the Navajo, Hopi, Southern San Juan Paiute tribes, the state of Arizona, and the federal government. It’s a sweeping agreement that could, if it can cross the next hurdles before it, ensure water supplies for what one a member of my brain trust once described as the place of greatest water poverty in the nation.

“We refused to be in the shadows any longer,” Hopi Chairman Tim Nuvangyaoma said during a Friday morning session.

Lorelei Cloud, vice chair of the Southern Ute Tribal Council and a member of the Colorado Water Conservation Board, talked about the importance of normalizing tribal voices at the decision making table, which should have been obvious a century ago, but is increasingly a no-brainer today.

As the Colorado River community debates where and how cuts should be made to bring water use into line with a climate change-shrunken supply, “First peoples of this land should be the last to be cut,” Gila River Indian Community Gov. Stephen Roe Lewis said.

Still in the shadows

The shadowy ongoing discussions among the seven U.S. basin states got a brief airing in a panel of six of the seven states’ principals – the governors’ representatives in the ongoing negotiations. They appear as stuck as they’ve been since December’s CRWUA fireworks and the competing proposals of March.

I am sympathetic to the difficult position these people are in – political demands from the home crowd to fight for their water colliding with the reality that the water the homers want is simply not there in the quantity they would like. The result was a litany of “praise us for the conservation we’ve already done” without much clarity beyond everyone’s public negotiating positions: the Lower Basin’s “We own the structural deficit and if deeper cuts are needed they need to be shared,” and the Upper Basin’s “We already suffer cuts, it’s on the Lower Basin to cut deeper if needed.”

On its face that’s a conflict being readied for the Supreme Court, and I’ve begun to think seriously about what such a path might look like in practice. Everyone says they want to avoid this, yet seem powerless to prevent it. A friend noted the seeming powerlessness being voiced by the state officials, helpless to keep the bus they’re driving out of the ditch.

They’re like Howard the Duck, “Trapped in a world they never made.”

Back out of the shadows: A C-SPAN for Colorado River Basin water management talks?

My favorite question of the day came from an audience member asking whether there should be some sort of a C-SPAN-like public forum so we could all watch the discussions now conducted behind closed doors. There was a time not that long ago that I would have seen that as a terrible idea. The people involved need a safe space to explore the sort of compromises that would get them crucified back home if they did it in public, I used to think.

But given the current logjam in the states’ discussions, which seems to leave us at increasing risk of potentially disastrous litigation, I’m not so sure that the safe space is serving us particularly well. While the Basin States’ discussion remains opaque and unproductive, in a way that increasingly doesn’t seem to be serving me as a “stakeholder” whose community’s water depends on the river, a bunch of parallel processes happening in far more public ways – see for example the discussion of tribal issues above, and the work on restoring environmental flows in the delta – seem increasingly to be where the useful action is.

John Berggren, from Western Resource Advocates, made this point in a talk about Colorado River process, quoting here from a chapter he and I and some other folks wrote for the book Cornerstone:

Inclusivity does not threaten the special status of existing decision-makers; inclusivity puts those decision-makers in a setting where they have more resources, information, and perceived legitimacy to bargain. The Colorado River Compact, after all, is a bargain—a negotiated agreement born from the realization that it was better to make a deal than to do nothing, to litigate, or to delegate important regional decisions to a distant national government.

Along the C-SPAN lines, Berggren noted the work of the Arizona Reconsultation Committee, which has been super C-SPAN-like in the way it has created a framework for a big messy public discussion in Arizona about the important questions.

The flaw in the current process is made clear by basin states’ impasse.

Berggren warmed my heart with this quote from Reuel Olson, whose 1926 doctoral thesis was the first detailed academic look at the Colorado River Compact:

It does not help much to say that what is needed is an equitable division of water between the states. What is needed is a standard which may be applied in order to determine what is an equitable division.

(Fun aside: Comparing notes after his talk, both John and I seem to have bought our copies of Olson’s book from the same Salt Lake City used bookstore.)

A century after Olson said that, we seem to have the same impasse. Tough negotiations by the various states trying to protect their own interests leaves out all kinds of equities, all kinds of values – including mine.

To paraphrase California’s J.B. Hamby, all water users in the basin can reduce their use. I’m sure Hamby wasn’t paraphrasing me when he said that, but he could have been. Here’s how I put it in the concluding chapter of my book Water is For Fighting Over:

Recent years, especially during the drought in the twenty-first century, saw a rash of … articles: “Scarce Water and the Death of California Farms,” “The Dust Bowl Returns,” “A ‘Megadrought’ Will Grip US in the Coming Decades”, “Colorado River Water Supply to Fall Short of Demand.”

These dire stories fuel fears that the only way to save yourself is to fight your neighbors for every last drop. But if you are able to sidestep the crisis narrative and recognize that your community can thrive with less water, then the fight with your neighbors seems less necessary and the risks of water wars and a crash diminish. It’s time to stop fighting over water….