Click the link to read the article on the Las Vegas Review-Journal website (Alan Halaly). Here’s an excerpt:
December 5, 2024
At the second day of the Colorado River Water Users Association conference, the Bureau of Reclamation provided more details about its five proposed paths forward for post-2026 river operating guidelines. And both the Upper and Lower Basin states spoke openly about their frustrations in separate panels about talks that haven’t yielded compromises needed to sustain the system that provides water to more than 40 million people, including Las Vegas residents. Rather than considering the competing proposals set forth by the Lower and Upper basins this year, the bureau put together a “Basin Hybrid” plan that regulators feel is the beginning of a compromise. Some have suggested that the disagreement could result in a costly Supreme Court case against the federal government…
The fate of the Colorado River is something that would directly affect Southern Nevada, a region of the state that sources 90 percent of its water from Lake Mead. Scientists say the river has faced unprecedented shortages in the 2020s, with less water available for use than ever because of climate change and historic overuse. Thus, the need for sweeping changes to 2007 operating guidelines that will no longer apply in 2026.
Depending on how conversations proceed, the Lower Basin states of Nevada, California and Arizona could continue to bear the brunt of mandatory cuts to their allocations from the river. The Lower Basin has proposed basin-wide cuts should a shortage exceed 1.5 million acre-feet, the amount of water known as the “structural deficit” that the river loses to evaporation and transport…The Upper Basin states of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming have argued that declining snowpack and a lack of reservoir storage already set them back 1.2 million acre-feet. Northern states have floated putting more dams and reservoirs on the river that could, in total, store the equivalent of Nevada’s allotment from the river.
“We really need to understand that the enemy we’re battling right now is not the Upper Basin; it’s not the Lower Basin. It’s hydrology,” said Brandon Gebhart, Wyoming’s state engineer and Colorado River negotiator. “All of the rhetoric and other distractions going on right now are [bullshit]. It needs to stop.”
