Click the link to read the article on the AZCentral.com website (Brandon Loomis). Here’s an excerpt:
December 14, 2023
The seven states that share the Colorado River’s water celebrated some conservation wins at their annual meeting here this week but quickly began sparring over who will bear the brunt of future pain that they agree a drying climate will dole out. Talk of cutbacks has long focused on the three states collectively known as the Lower Basin — Arizona, California and Nevada — and on Wednesday, representatives of California water districts and tribes signed federally funded deals to leave more water in the river’s largest reservoir over the next two years. On Thursday, interstate rivalries re-emerged as officials from the Upper Basin made clear they expect the Lower Basin to cut back much further before coming after their water. Farmers and other users in the headwaters states of Wyoming, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico already go without in dry years because they don’t have a giant storage pool like the Southwest’s Lake Mead to augment nature…
The upper and lower basins split just downstream of Lake Powell’s Glen Canyon Dam, at Lees Ferry in Arizona, though Lake Powell’s storage is primarily used to ensure the Upper Basin has enough water to fulfill its yearly obligations to the Lower Basin. The Upper Basin states use roughly half as much, and less in years when mountain streams dry up, and concerns over that disparity surfaced Thursday.
“We can’t accept something that continues to drain the system, that puts 40 million people at risk,” Colorado’s river commissioner, Becky Mitchell, told her interstate colleagues at the annual Colorado River Water Users Association conference…
“The one person that you cannot negotiate with is Mother Nature. She will win every time. She’s been telling us what to do,” Mitchell said. “I want an agreement that lessens the pain for all of us, not just some of us.”
