Click the link to read the article on the KUNC website (Alex Hager). Here’s an excerpt:
December 15, 2023
The future of the Colorado River is being hashed out behind closed doors, and negotiators appear far from a long-term solution to the wide gap between water supply and water demand. At the Colorado River Water Users Association annual meeting in Las Vegas, representatives from the seven states that use the river spent three days opining on the progress of ongoing talks to determine how water will be managed after 2026, when the current set of rules expires…In a massive ballroom at the Las Vegas Paris Hotel, John Entsminger, Nevada’s top water negotiator, forecasted that the next river-sharing agreement will be “a messy compromise that will be judged harshly by history.” He and delegates from six other states that use water from the Colorado River are trying to agree on a new set of rules for sharing the dwindling supply. The current guidelines expire in 2026. Entsminger said a final agreement may join a patchwork of deals that have incrementally, but perhaps insufficiently, tweaked water use in response to two decades of dry conditions fueled by climate change.
“If you look at the last 25 years of the Colorado River, you know these imperfect, messy compromises step by step by step have gotten us much closer to equilibrium than we were at the turn of the century,” he said…
Some experts rallied for updates to the way water is measured. The Lower Basin states have come under fire for failing to account for “system loss,” or the water lost to evaporation and leaky canals, and critics say the official tally of how much water is in the Colorado River needs to account for that. Those losses total about 1.5 million acre-feet each year, mostly due to evaporation from the surface of Lake Mead, the nation’s largest reservoir. An acre-foot is the amount of water needed to fill one acre of land to a height of one foot. One acre-foot generally provides enough water for one to two households for a year.
“I don’t think the Lower Basin is going to agree to call it what it is, because there are a lot of political and legal issues around it,” said Andy Mueller, general manager of the Colorado River District. “But if they would just permanently reduce their use, including that 1.5 million, I think we’d be a whole lot better off as a system.”
