From The Pueblo Chieftain (Matt Hildner):
A dispute with Texas over the calculation of water deliveries under the Rio Grande Compact won’t have an impact on how Colorado manages its share of the river in the San Luis Valley. Craig Cotten, the division engineer for the valley, said the difference in calculations was roughly 300 acre-feet. “It’s a very small amount of water,” he said.
The amount of water in the Rio Grande that has crossed the Colorado state line in the last decade has ranged from as little as 68,000 acre-feet in the drought year of 2003 to as much as 430,000 acre-feet in 2005.
Colorado and New Mexico have disagreed with Texas over how the Bureau of Reclamation has calculated evaporation rates from a pool of credit water contributed by the upstream states that ends up in Elephant Butte Reservoir. Cotten said Colorado and New Mexico would prefer to see the calculations done at the end of the year as opposed to a running basis.
The dispute, which started in 2011, prevented the three states from signing off on the final delivery totals at Thursday’s meeting of the Rio Grande Compact Commission. The calculation of evaporation rates in the pool of credit water is the subject of a lawsuit between New Mexico and the bureau in U.S. District Court in New Mexico.