by Allen Best

An extraordinary set of circumstances produced the Colorado River Compact of 1922. The question now is whether the compact and other laws and treaties collectively called the Law of the River are sufficiently resilient to prevent teeth-baring among the basin’s seven states during a 21st century.

For the most part, speakers at a recent conference sponsored by the University of Colorado agreed there’s no need to start over even if future circumstances require Southwestern states to “bend the hell out of it,” in the words of law professor Douglas Kenney.

Kenney, director of the CU Law School’s Western Water Policy Program, last winter released the first part of a study on the challenges of administering the river. While drought had reduced Lake Mead to its lowest level since 1938, demand had quietly crept up and overtaken supply during the last decade, he said.

Despite occasional wet years, projections foresee significantly hotter temperatures and close to a 10 percent decline in water volume in coming decades, according to the newest study issued this spring by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. Some believe earlier spring, warmer temperatures and extended drought of the last decade are harbingers of what lies ahead.

“For those of us on the ground, trying4 to manage supplies, the reality is that things are changing,” said Jim Lochhead, chief executive of Denver Water. The city already has a climate scientist on its staff to help identify its supply-side options, he said.

This year’s big snowpack has postponed some hard decisions. A shortage mechanism agreed to several years ago had been expected to occur next year but will be unnecessary until 2015 or beyond, said Michael Connors, commissioner of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation.

The river and its tributaries by some estimates deliver water to 30 million people, including many outside the basin: Cheyenne, Denver, Albuquerque, Salt Lake City, Los Angeles and San Diego.

In Colorado, the debate has been whether to build new dams and pipelines to develop Colorado’s remaining allotment under the Compact and a later compact, adopted in 1948. By some estimates, Colorado may have up to 900,000 acre-feet yet to develop, but nobody really knows. Some think already there is nothing left to develop, and a study now under way by state water officials seeks to get a thumb on that.

Eric Kuhn, general manager of the Colorado River Water Conservation District, said Colorado should be cautious before developing further so it won’t have to later curtail delivery of water, as has now occurred on the South Platte and Republican River drainages, and is likely to happen on the Rio Grande. All three originate in Colorado.

Drew Beckwith, water policy manger for Western Resource Advocates, argued against what he called “pipe dreams,” if for a different reasons. Instead of large-scale transmountain diversions, he said, demand-side management adopted by cities could reduce per-capita use 35 percent over the next 25 years. New diversions represent last-century thinking, he said.

But even more than cities, farms offer potential for savings, as they use upward of 75 percent of the river’s water, including up to 90 percent in Colorado. However, should federal subsidies end, 30 percent of crops now grown with basin waters may not be economically justified, said Bonnie Colby, of the University of Arizona’s Department of Agriculture & Resource Economics.

Jennifer Gimbel, director of the Colorado Water Conservation Board, spoke of changed sensibilities. “It used to be that if water left our state, it was wasted. If water got to Mexico, it was waste. We don’t think that way anymore, and that’s good,” she said.

And she noted a larger reality: global population, expected to explode from 6 billion in 2000 to 10 billion by 2050. She sees the need for continued efforts for cooperation, keeping in mind the wealth of cities that can create opportunities. She also stressed that environmental needs for water go beyond the needs of endangered species.

Perhaps the most articulate proponent of the need for a new spirit of cooperation is Pat Mulroy, manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority. She has good need to want cooperation. Clark County, where Las Vegas is located, surpassed Manhattan in population in 2004. However, Nevada was apportioned only 700,000 acre-feet annually of water from the Colorado, compared to 4.4 million acre-feet for California.

“Trust me, it keeps me awake at night,” said Mulroy, talking about the third tunnel into Lake Mead now being bored. It’s a $700 million insurance policy for Las Vegas in case the drought intensifies and Lake Mead drops further.

Twenty years ago, said Mulroy, the seven states were in their separate silos. “And at that point our neighbors in Mexico were not even talked about.”
In the 1990s, there were battles over surpluses –which yielded firm federal pressure on California to live within its appropriation. Later, a new concept called a groundwater bank was put into place, allowing Las Vegas to buy or borrow water from Arizona.

And lately, faced with drought that began in 1999, the seven states have come together in agreement on addressing shortages, at least in the short term. “The next steps will be even more daunting,” Mulroy said, talking about the impacts of climate change and reduced electrical production at Boulder Dam. “We can’t even get our hands around it,” she said.

And like Gimbel, she noted that the Southwest is not immune to population growth and food demands, which will likely impose challenges on the Colorado River. “This isn’t two lifetimes from now. This is the next generation,” she said.

Can the Southwestern solve its water shortages by creating more water? It already is, at a desalinization plant at Yuma, Ariz., but a thin study completed two years ago explored other options. For example, could water produced from coal-bed methane mining produce significant volumes? How about cloud-seeding (it’s cheaper, but some doubts remain about how effective it really is.) Perhaps the most audacious – and unlikely –is to import water in the Southwest from the Mississippi River.

Summing up the conference, Don Ostler, of the Salt Lake City-based Upper Colorado River Commission, stressed that the 1922 Compact has been flexible, but, he added, it will needed to be even more flexible. “We are in the early stages of dealing with shortages, and again, you haven’t seen anything yet,” he added.