Click the link to read the article on The Palm Springs Desert Sun website (Janet Wilson). Here’s an excerpt:
February 9, 2024
Will seven Western states be able to rapidly craft a voluntary plan to keep the Colorado River afloat for decades to come? It’s increasingly unclear, as negotiations have foundered between two sides, according to key players. There are sharp differences between northern and southern states’ proposals, with representatives of the mountainous Upper Basin states of Colorado and New Mexico unwilling, to date, to shoulder large future cuts, both because of historic underuse of their share of the river and because of heavily populated California and Arizona’s historic overuse. The southwestern states have for years taken twice as much as their northern neighbors.
Upper Basin officials, including Colorado’s plainspoken river commissioner, Becky Mitchell, said they have been informed of a proposal under discussion by California, Arizona and Nevada, collectively known as the Lower Basin, where the Lower Basin and Mexico would agree to take 1.5 million acre-feet of water less from the shrinking river each year. Mitchell said far more details are needed. That amount would be enough to both to make up for evaporation and leakage from delivery canals snaking across the hot desert, and to help stabilize the nation’s largest reservoirs, based on a report released Thursday by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation that showed average annual losses to evaporation and river banks of 1.3 million acre-feet in the Lower Basin.
Lower Basin officials, including California’s Colorado River commissioner JB Hamby, who is leading the state’s negotiating team, declined to confirm numbers while they hash out specifics, but pointedly said major reductions need to be contributed by every state. One California official did confirm the numbers. Tom Buschatzke, Arizona’s top representative on the river talks, also wouldn’t confirm the 1.5 million acre-feet number, but emphasized the structural magnitude of what the Lower Basin is offering to do, noting his state and California, with help from Nevada and Mexico, would address evaporation and leakage for decades to come, and contribute more atop that to help stabilize the system. But, he said, more needs to be done, by everyone.
“It’s hugely important for folks to know that the Lower Basin is going to step up, and that we see a desire and a need for the rest of the problem to be solved collectively,” he said. “We can’t do it all. It is not physically possible.”
[…]
For now, negotiations between the two sides have ground to a halt, even as a deadline looms to produce a draft agreement by next month. The last time representatives from all seven states met face to face was in early January, when they convened at the Woolley’s Classic Suites, at Denver Airport. Since then, at the urging of U.S. Reclamation Commissioner Camille Calimlim Touton, there have been two Zoom calls with all the states that highlighted the fundamental differences, one participant said. The northern states recently invited their southern counterparts to Salt Lake City to resume full talks, but none chose to attend.
“We’ll keep inviting them,” Mitchell said. “I do not think we are at an impasse, and I do not believe we need to be at an impasse.”
