The states comprising the Colorado River Compact — Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and New Mexico for the “Upper Colorado” and California, Arizona, and Nevada for the “Lower Colorado’ — now have negotiating offers on the table. And they leave as big a gap as there is in the ability of the river to support current usage.
The Lower Colorado group have offered to cut about 1.5 million-acre feet per year — an acre-foot is pretty much one large swimming pool — or about the amount of water to fill all the swimming pools in California. In return, they keep the guarantee of 7.5 million-acre feet per year. The Compact allocated 15 million acre-feet equally among the Upper and Lower groups plus an additional 1.5 million acre-feet were allocated to Mexico under a 1944 treaty — call it 16.5 million. California and Arizona were allowed to split an additional 1.1 million acre-feet under “surplus” conditions.
The problem is the river has averaged closer to 14 million acre-feet per year since the year 2000. That already leaves a big gap — and California and Arizona have been taking the “surplus” out of the big reservoirs (Lake Mead and Lake Powell) even though the river hasn’t been at 17.5 million acre-feet.
The Upper Colorado River states look at the Lower Colorado River states offer and realize that the 7.5 million acre-feet guarantee plus 1.1 million for Mexico totals 8.6 million acre-feet. At least twice in the last 2 decades, the total Colorado River flow has been less than that number. They read the Lower states offer as requiring them to cut off all water flow from the river in some years. Just to make that clear in impact, I will Colorado Springs as an example. 70% of annual water usage in Colorado Springs comes from the Colorado River waters. That is 72,000 acre-feet per year. Colorado holds post 1942 “conditional” water rights that would be available under the current water compact but would likely to be unusable under the new compact as the cut in water available to Upper states might cut that water away. The City has storage but two consecutive drought years under the Lower compact proposal would literally mean Colorado Springs would have no water supplies.
The Upper states have proposed that the annual flows be split but the Lower States on an annual basis be controlled by the amount of water in Lake Mead and Lake Powell. Since the Upper States can probably live on the current split based on current flows — since that is about 3.5 million acre-feet, about what Colorado uses in a low water year.
But the Upper states offer could cut the Lower states by almost 2 to 2.5 million acre-feet in drought year, if not more. And they can’t make that up.
Climate change is likely to make this even worse.
This is the dilemma — the allocation proposed by the Lower states protects their citizens but could literally turn Colorado and Utah into deserts but the allocation proposed by the Upper states would basically cut off agricultural water in California and Arizona in drought years. The question becomes who will be more at risk for running out of water?
The agricultural cuts are likely to cause big increases and produce and meat prices (much of the Colorado River water goes to feed for cattle, dairy, and other animals) which would cause political turmoil but Upper states cut will severely impact their residential and manufacturing customer.
And I have, for simplicity, completely left out the new participants at the table — indigenous tribes. They were screwed in 1922, causing many nations to be very water poor. They are at the table and want their fair share — it will have to come from somewhere.
There are no easy answers when the result is likely to massively impact future growth in one if not all regions.