Click the link to read the article on the InkStain website (John Fleck):

September 29, 2024

Two years ago, when the level of Lake Mead was hovering near elevation 1,040, my artist wife Lissa Heineman and I drove out over UNM’s fall break to see it for ourselves.

Out beyond the old Boulder Harbor, we walked a half mile across mud flats to get to the water. I could look out across the water to see the elbow of the old Southern Nevada Water Authority intake, above the water line. I was gut-punched by the visceral reality.

On the walk back to the car, Lissa carefully picked up some pieces of cracked mud. Her art has always been wrapped up in the conceptual properties of her materials. So she carefully packed up the cracked mud in a box and took it home. It’s been sitting in her studio ever since, and last month she tried firing some of it atop some small ceramic plates in her kiln.

It worked, and she gave me the results to give to my Lower Basin/Lake Mead friends. The texture of the mud, with ripples across the sandy and muddy reservoir bottom, captures a moment in history I hope we never repeat.

So last week, with the Colorado River brain trust in Santa Fe for the Water Education Foundation’s always-fascinating Colorado River symposium, I drove up to see folks and stuck a couple of Lissa’s pieces in my backpack.

I shared them with a message: That was scary. Let’s not go back there again. Please don’t fuck this up.

I’ve got a lot going on – revisions to the new book, teaching my fall semester graduate-level water resources class, nervously eyeing the levels in Lake Powell and Lake Mead, and the gridlock in Colorado River negotiations. So when my brain suggested listening to Rubber Soul Friday night, I was resistant. But we’ve been together for a long time, and I trust my brain’s judgment. So Rubber Soul it was.

What a great album.

This post is lengthy and rambly, so for those who are annoyed by my discursive side trips and just here for the Colorado River stuff, I’ve added anchors to the key material:

• Rubber Soul
• Path to 1,040
• Game theory and the game of chicken now being played on the Colorado River
• Buy me a coffee

Rubber Soul and my fascination with innovation

When Eric Kuhn and I set out to write Science Be Dammed, the project arose in part out of a mutual fascination with E.C. LaRue, the early 20th century hydrologist who first tried to map out the supply of water, and possible uses of it, across the entire Colorado River Basin. The thing that first drew me to LaRue, long before I knew Eric, was the fundamental innovation of what LaRue and the others working at the time on similar projects were doing. No one had ever tried to envision managing a continental-sized river at the full basin scale.

In an entirely different context and framework, it’s a theme Bob Berrens and I take up in our new book Ribbons of Green, about the making of a city.

The first time I remember thinking hard about this was when Lissa, my sister Lisa, and I saw the Hermitage exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1986. It was a magnificent sweep of early modern painting that had been collected by rich Russians before the revolution. I remember rounding a corner and being gobsmacked by a big Picasso canvas, Three Women, one of the first few cubist paintings that he and George Braque had been making in Paris in 1907-08. Lissa, who understood the history, took me back through the rest of the exhibit to see the roots – the impressionists breaking one way, Matisse another, and Cezanne sweeping them all away with the beginnings of the deconstruction of the picture plane that led to Braque and Picasso.

My own father had been deeply influence by the reverberations of that work, and I had always seen it in Dad’s work, but it wasn’t until Lissa held my hand and walked me through the history that I began thinking about pathways. How does this happen? Once I saw, read, and learned about it once, I became hungry for examples. My intellectual life is now littered with them. I have long since soured on Picasso himself (what an asshole!), but the genre of intellectual journey continues to fascinate.

The most interesting books I’ve read in recent years all document this – Patti Smith’s Just Kids, about the birth of punk and her invention of Patti Smith; Amartya Sen’s memoir Home in the World; Henry Threadgill’s Easily Slip Into Another World (I still can’t grasp the music, but his story of innovation is a joy); Stanley Crouch’s biography of early Charlie Parker, Kansas City Lightning. In each case (three memoirs, one not), the innovation is rooted in a deep understanding of the past and foundations, and then the ability to see, out of that, something entirely new. And all four books are ripping good reads.

I love playing this game with the Beatles, because thanks to streaming services it is possible to dive in and listen to them learning on the fly, to watch the way the bar band Beatles learned how audiences responded to the old things and began envisioning something new.

This is metaphor.

The path to elevation 1,040

As we near the Sept. 30 end of the water year, Lake Mead is at elevation 1,064 feet above sea level, twenty feet above where it was when Lissa picked up the cracked mud two years ago.

In 2021-22, it took one year to drop from the 1,060s to the 1,040s. Could this happen again?

The short answer is probably not in a single year, because of a couple of things that have changed since then. But in two years? Yup. Lissa and I could have a chance to collect more 1,040s cracked mud.

The first thing that has changed since 2022 is the release from Lake Powell. In 2022 the Basin was in the midst of its hair-on-fire crisis management because of fears of Powell dropping dangerously low, so the Powell release that year was just 7 million acre feet. This year, it’s 7.48 million acre feet. So more water coming into Mead.

Things are also better on the outflow side. In 2022, the three Lower Basin States used 6.66 million acre feet. This year, the latest forecast number is 6.09 million acre feet.

Between the higher inflows and lower use, the latest midpoint forecast has Mead ending next year at 1,059 feet above sea level, with Reclamation’s most pessimistic model runs (the “minimum probable”) at ~1,054. But the min probable clearly shows risk out at the edge of what our headlights can illuminate right now, of dropping back into the 1,040s again by the summer of 2026.

The game of chicken on the Colorado River

The “game of chicken” is a game theory classic. It involves a conflict which, in the classic storytelling version, involves two drivers headed toward one another on a collision course. We’ll call them “U” and “L”. Each has the option to swerve or stay on course. The best outcome for each driver is for the other to swerve and lose face (water), while the driver who stays the course demonstrates dominance (keeps its water). But if neither swerves, we end up with a catastrophic collision. In the game theory matrix, it looks like this, with the payoffs for each:

I’m obviously talking about the Upper Basin and the Lower Basin here, which are at impasse over the Lower Basin’s proposal to cut deeply up to a point (1.5-ish million acre feet total) and, if any deeper cuts are needed, to share them among the two basins.

The Upper Basin’s counter is basically “no.” If deeper cuts are needed, the Lower Basin should make them.

The payoff matrix, though, is a lot more complicated than my toy example above. First, both sides can gamble on good hydrology, which could avert the crash. So even if the impasse remains, the collision is not a sure thing. (In this regard, it’ll be interesting to see how the players’ strategies shift if we have a really bad winter.)

The second is the nature of the collision itself. No one knows quite what it will look like.

In the classic chicken game, both drivers know about the crash that happens if neither swerves. But part of the risk calculation we all have to live with right now is the uncertainty about what happens if the Upper and Lower Basin states can’t come to an agreement. We also have a situation where the nature of the game is changing over time.

Walking down a Santa Fe sidewalk Wednesday evening after dinner, one of my Colorado River friends observed that both sides seem to think that, if the collision comes, they have a winning legal argument.

If you think that, your understanding of what happens in the bottom right quadrant of the matrix, the crash scenario, is very different.

The Upper Basin seems to have convinced itself, at least based on public pronouncements, that it has a winning legal argument in terms of its obligation, or lack thereof, to send water downstream past Lee Ferry. This seems dangerous to me given my understanding of the history and the law, but it doesn’t matter what I think. The Upper Basin seems happy to keep hammering down the road.

Once deliveries past Lee Ferry drop below one of the “tripwire” triggers (82.5maf / ten years or 75/10), the Lower Basin states have nothing to lose by suing. And when that happens, my community’s water supply is at risk if my basin’s lawyers aren’t right.

Crash!

A few years back Kaveh Madhani and Bora Ristic wrote a paper working out the details of a game theory example that seems to fit what we’re currently seeing in the Lower Basin’s proposal to “own” the 1.5 million acre feet of structure deficit, and to try to negotiate some sort of sharing arrangement if the cuts need to go deeper. This would appear to be what Ristic and Madhani describe as “strategic loss.”

Which seems to model what the Lower Basin has done.

I would prefer to live in the upper left quadrant of the chicken game matrix, where both sides compromise. My values: mindful shared reductions across the basin can leave us all with healthy, thriving communities. I wrote a whole book about this path. But one of my smart friends pointed out something that is a reasonable hypothesis: The model I laid out in that book, written a decade ago, was sufficient on a river that shrinks some, but seems to be failing on a river that has shrunk a lot.

Risti? and Madhani seem to be suggesting a game theoretic path that could get us back on track.

Buy me a coffee

Thanks so much to Inkstain’s supporters. You can join them here.

Click the link to read the article on the KUNC website (Alex Hager and Melissa Sevigny):

July 15, 2024

This story is part of ongoing coverage of the Colorado River, produced by KUNC in Colorado and KNAU in Arizona. It is supported by the Walton Family Foundation.

The future of the Colorado River hangs in the balance. The states that will decide its future are stuck at an impasse. They can’t agree on a plan to divvy up the shrinking water supply.

At the heart of that disagreement are three words written over 100 years ago.

It’s all rooted in a document called the Colorado River Compact. None of its authors are alive today, but the words they wrote in 1922 are still shaping life for millions today.

“The content of this particular document, the Colorado River Compact, is the foundation of the law that is governing the Colorado River at this point,” said Patty Rettig, who manages the water archive at Colorado State University’s library.

Her archive includes the writings of Delph Carpenter, one of the eight men who penned the original document. Sitting at a library table, Rettig carefully flips through the pages of his notes — thin, carbon-paper drafts marked up with pencil — looking for clues from history about how we arrived at the water policy fights of the 21st century.

“I know they were thinking about the future,” she said. “We have evidence they were thinking about the future, but I don’t think they were thinking 100 years into the future.”

Taking a closer look at those three words — why they were chosen a century ago and how they’re being interpreted today — tells us a lot about the big, complicated problems facing the Southwest’s most important water supply.

Where are we now?

The Colorado River supplies 40 million people across seven Western states and parts of Mexico. Rules about sharing water are decided by representatives of those seven states. Mostly appointed by governors, they meet, usually behind closed doors, to decide who should get how much.

Right now, the clock is ticking for them to agree on new guidelines for water sharing since the current set of rules expires in 2026. Meanwhile, more than two decades of dry conditions have only increased pressure for the entire region to cut back on demand. The Colorado River has been in the grips of a megadrought, fueled by climate change, and demand has remained mostly steady.

As a result, the region’s reservoirs have plummeted to record lows, and big changes are needed for a sustainable future.

In March, the states split into two camps and published their ideas for managing the river after 2026. Those two groups were divided along familiar lines. The Upper Basin states of Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico found themselves pitted against the Lower Basin: California, Arizona and Nevada.

Those two camps have been at odds since the earliest days of Southwestern water management, and 2024 is no exception.

What do they disagree about?

The two proposals for managing water lay out a major philosophical difference between the Upper and Lower basins. They disagree about who should take responsibility for the gap between supply and demand.

The Upper Basin is legally required to let a certain amount of water flow to its downstream neighbors each year. After more than 100 years of complying with that standard, Upper Basin states want the ability to allow less water to flow, and their proposal puts that idea into writing.

About 85% of the Colorado River starts as snow in the Upper Basin’s mountains. Climate change, the catalyst for the region’s water shortages, is shrinking the amount of snow that falls in those mountains each year.

Because of that, the Upper Basin states argue, they feel the sting of climate change more sharply than the Lower Basin. Cities and farms within its four states have to adjust their water use in accordance with recent snowfall, Upper Basin leaders say, but the Lower Basin can count on predictable water deliveries from upstream.

The Upper Basin’s proposal basically outlines a legal loophole that would let them, under certain circumstances, allow less water to flow downstream without breaking their contract with California, Arizona and Nevada.

“[The proposal] protects Lake Powell storage for the benefit of both the Upper and Lower Basins, mitigates the risk of either Lake Powell or Lake Mead reaching dead pool, and is consistent with the Law of the River,” the Upper Basin states wrote in their proposal.

What are those three words?

In 1922, eight men spent 11 months going back and forth about the language of the Colorado River Compact. They were very deliberate in their choice of words.

One of the most important ideas laid out in its pages is the division of water between the Upper and Lower Basin. Half of it — 7.5 million acre-feet — stays in the mountain states where it starts as snow. Those Upper Basin states are on the hook to let the other half flow downstream.

Article III, Section D of the Compact explains it this way.

“The States of the Upper Division will not cause the flow of the river at Lee Ferry to be depleted below an aggregate of 75,000,000 acre-feet for any period of ten consecutive years reckoned in continuing progressive series beginning with the first day of October next succeeding the ratification of this compact.”

The water leaders of Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico are, today, zooming in on one tiny part of that sentence.

“Will not cause.”

The Upper Basin states, in 2024, say the agreement does not require them to send a particular amount of water downstream every year. Instead, it requires them to not be the reason that amount doesn’t make it downstream.

They’re arguing that climate change, not the states themselves, is the reason that less water is making it downstream. The Upper Basin states say they have less water to begin with, and it isn’t their fault – it’s the fault of a warming climate.

And they’re saying the Colorado River Compact, written more than a century ago, gives them legal permission to allow less water to flow downstream because they aren’t the ones causing the water supply to go down.

Whose idea was this?

The Colorado River Compact has not always been interpreted in this way. The idea to blame climate change as the “cause” of depleting water supplies, by most accounts, came around in the early 2000s. The people who drew it up are still around today.

“I might have been one of them,” Eric Kuhn said with a chuckle. “I plead guilty.”

Kuhn, now retired, was the head of the Colorado River District from 1996 to 2018. The taxpayer-funded agency was founded to keep water flowing to the cities and farms of Western Colorado. He said warming temperatures, which pushed river supplies into a steady decline starting around the year 2000, was the spark for the idea.

“We have fixed obligations at Lee Ferry, and because of climate change, we’re going to see less and less water in the river,” Kuhn said. “A fixed obligation with a declining resource means our water supply is caught between the two. So, I called it the ‘Upper Basin squeeze.’”

Lee Ferry, also called Lee’s Ferry, is a place on the Colorado River in Northern Arizona. The architects of the Compact designated it as the river’s halfway point. The measuring equipment installed there is still important today.

Kuhn doesn’t blame today’s water leaders for pushing the idea during negotiations about the future. He said they wouldn’t be doing their jobs if they didn’t highlight climate change. But he doesn’t see this interpretation — the idea of “not causing” drops in the water supply — as the silver bullet to the Upper Basin’s water woes

“I think it’s a negotiating stance,” Kuhn said, “And hopefully will give them some maneuvering room to come up with a different proposal than what they’re saying right now.”

What did the Compact’s authors mean?

A certain faction of powerful people are choosing to interpret the language of the Colorado River Compact in a very specific way. But was that the intention of the people who wrote it?

In short, it’s hard to tell. But people with a knowledge of water history think they probably weren’t trying to create a loophole. Patty Rettig, the archivist at Colorado State University, has read through a lot of documents that can provide some context.

The collection she manages contains extensive writings from Delph Carpenter. He was Colorado’s delegate to the 1922 meetings that resulted in the Colorado River Compact. His family turned over his papers, which includes an original copy of the Compact itself, to the CSU library. The collection also includes pages upon pages of handwritten notes and work-in-progress drafts that accrued during the months-long deliberations.

Rettig has read through the meeting minutes from 1922 – a word-by-word transcription of what state negotiators talked about during their brainstorming sessions in Santa Fe. New Mexico. She does not think Delph Carpenter would have deliberately chosen wording about the Upper Basin’s delivery obligation to provide 21st century leaders a way to find some wiggle room in how they manage water.

“I think it is plausible, but I think that also might be stretching his intentions some,” she said. “I don’t have the sense that he was trying to do something underhanded or trying to get specific benefits for his state.”

The compact’s authors — a group that also included representatives from six other states and Herbert Hoover, who was the U.S. Secretary of Commerce at the time — may not have been thinking about water policy discussions in the year 2024, but they were decidedly choosy with their wording.

Flipping through a mishmash of undated drafts of the Compact, many marked with Carpenter’s own scribbles and notes, that now-important “will not cause” sentence takes a few different forms.

At one point, the authors write that the Upper Basin states will not cause the river to be “diminished” below the set amount of water. At another, they use the word “reduced.” Finally, they settled on “depleted.”

But throughout all of the drafts, or at least the ones that made it into CSU’s collection, they did not change the wording about the Upper Basin’s responsibility to not “cause” the river to drop.

What happens if this goes to court?

The Upper Basin’s idea was met with swift dismissal from downstream states. JB Hamby, California’s top water negotiator, put that dissent into words.

“Arguing legal interpretations until we’re all blue in the face doesn’t do anything to proactively respond to climate change,” Hamby said in a press conference on March 6, the day the proposal was released.

For Robert Glennon, water law expert and professor at the University of Arizona, the Upper Basin’s argument only makes sense if you laser-focus on those three words — “will not cause” — and ignore the context of the Colorado River Compact as a whole.

He said it’s a simple document, laying out a sequence of steps to split the river in half at Lee’s Ferry. The document itself is only a few pages long. It was written before Glen Canyon Dam and Hoover Dam were built or extensive canals tapped the river’s flow.

Glennon said the compact’s authors “didn’t know what the Upper Basin states might do, but they wanted to make sure there was no hanky-panky.” The phrase in question, demanding the Upper Basin send water downstream, simply reinforces the agreed-upon split.

That, in Glennon’s mind, is the most “sensible interpretation” of the Compact’s language. But if the states decide to take the question to court, Glennon said, a lawsuit over the language “would be a disaster.”

“What, you’re trying to cram modern theories and the science of climate change into a 100-year-old document?” Glennon said.

He pointed out the Colorado River Compact is short — considerably shorter, he joked, than a lease for an apartment. It doesn’t contain any legal definitions for key words like “depleted” or “cause.” No one could predict what the courts would do, and court cases over Western water rights, in the past, have sometimes dragged on for years or even decades.

Glennon adds that if the Upper Basin really wanted to reopen the terms of the Colorado River Compact in a courtroom, there is a stronger argument at hand. The founders who divided up the water in 1922 judged the river’s flow by a period of extremely wet years — in fact, some of the wettest in more than a thousand years. Even setting aside long-term drought and climate change, the compact divvied up more water than the river normally holds. In legal terms, that’s called a “mutual mistake” – and it’s the kind of thing a lawyer could use to void a contract.

“I think that’s a legal argument with some heft to it,” Glennon admitted.

But he wasn’t suggesting anyone take that road. Glennon said it’s in no one’s interest to tear apart the Colorado River Compact. Instead, he expressed faith in the ongoing negotiations.

“We’re pretty close to finding ways to get through this really quite terrible period,” he said. “The people who are working on these issues at the state and federal level are smart, they’re earnest, they’re determined to get through this, and I think they will.”

What’s next for negotiations?

Glennon isn’t the only one who believes the states can hash this out at the negotiating table without leaning on controversial readings of old laws.

Jim Lochhead was Colorado’s top water negotiator in the late 90s, and among the first people to push the “will not cause” interpretation. But now, he said, isn’t the right time for lawyers to make “arcane and complex arguments.”

“Making strident arguments about those interpretations ultimately ignores the responsibility of the basin states to come together and reach agreement on managing a crisis that we all face together as a basin,” Lochhead said.

His comments join a chorus of other Colorado River experts who, despite their differences about how exactly to solve the supply-demand crisis, agree on one thing: the river’s future should be decided by the Western states that use its water.

“I think the fundamental lesson is that we’re much better off controlling our own destiny than putting our future in the hands of nine justices on the United States Supreme Court who don’t understand Western water law, who don’t understand life in the West,” Lochhead said.

Proposals from both basins are on the desk of the Bureau of Reclamation, the federal agency which manages Western dams and reservoirs. They’re joined by suggestions from tribal nations and a coalition of environmental nonprofits.

Reclamation officials are calling on the states to find some consensus before the November election, so federal water managers can start the paperwork to implement post-2026 river management plans before any potential disarray that could be caused by a change in presidential administrations.

In June, state water negotiators said they plan to take longer than that, hinting that they are more likely to find common ground closer to the 2026 deadline.

Click the link to read the article on the Circle of Blue website (Brett Walton):

June 14, 2024

As the Colorado River declines, one fundamental question hangs over the Southwest’s most important waterway: can its people and industries slash their water use, thus aligning their water demands with a shrinking supply?

The answer so far – with important caveats – is a clear but qualified ‘yes.’

The latest evidence: the three lower basin states of Arizona, California, and Nevada whittled their take from the river last year. Their combined consumption of just under 5.8 million acre-feet is the lowest annual total since 1983. That represents a decline of 13 percent compared to 2022, when Lake Mead, the basin’s largest reservoir hit a record low and a simmering crisis morphed into a full-blown emergency.

The 2023 water consumption numbers are detailed in a Bureau of Reclamation report published last month. Reclamation is the federal agency that oversees the basin.

The report comes as the seven basin states – including Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming in the upper basin – plus the basin’s tribes and the federal government are negotiating how the river should be managed in the future. The centerpiece of those talks is how to reduce demand.

Tom Buschatzke, director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources, told Circle of Blue that the drop in water consumption last year is an indicator that longer-term reductions are possible.

“I think it is a good precursor to getting used to living with less water as the river is expected to shrink,” Buschatzke said.

The report provides headline numbers, but it does not explain why demand fell. Water agencies in the basin point to at least three factors that contributed to the drop.

One is the availability of other water sources. California’s Colorado River consumption was just 3.7 million acre-feet last year, the lowest since 1949, according to Bill Hasencamp, the manager of Colorado River resources for the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, a big regional wholesaler.

Met, as the district is known, is California’s largest municipal user of Colorado River water, and it reduced its take from the river by 40 percent last year. It was able to do so, in part, because of a robust snowpack in the Sierra Nevada mountains. That meant more water was available from the State Water Project, a canal system that exports water from Northern California to purveyors like Met hundreds of miles away.

“When you have a good year from the State Water Project, we can back off on our Colorado use,” Hasencamp explained. “So that has this ‘yo-yo effect’ for our demands on an annual basis. Sometimes more, sometimes less.”

For Met, the unreliability of these distant sources is a second factor, Hasencamp said. Met and other agencies are attempting to source more water locally, through reuse, desalination, or cleaning up groundwater basins contaminated with industrial chemicals. Met is in the design stage of the country’s largest water recycling facility, a roughly $8 billion project that will eventually provide water for 1.5 million people.

The move away from distant sources is already evident. Hasencamp said that Met’s imported water from Northern California and the Colorado River combined is down by more than half in the last two decades.

The third and most essential factor is conservation. Some reductions have occurred organically as outdated and wasteful appliances and toilets have been replaced with newer, more efficient models, as residents have swapped grass lawns with drought-tolerant landscaping, and as subdivisions have supplanted irrigated farmland, the largest water user in the basin.

Much of the recent conservation, however, has taken a different form. Some of the cuts were voluntary and compensated with cash payments. But most were mandated by rules put in place in 2007 and then expanded in 2019 under the basin’s drought contingency plan, or DCP. For instance, Arizona’s voluntary and mandatory conservation, compared with the volume of water it is legally entitled to consume from the river, was nearly 1 million acre-feet last year.

Conservation got an extra boost in 2022, when Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act. That law provided $4 billion for drought response in the Colorado River and other western states. In effect, it enabled payments to farmers and cities to conserve water. Arizona, California, and Nevada worked out a deal last year that their water users would be paid not to use 2.3 million acre-feet over the next three years, through 2026.

Payments are an appealing carrot when forced to cut demand rapidly. What happens when that funding runs out? Current operating rules for the basin will expire at the end of 2026, and future conservation is not likely to be so generously compensated.

“Clearly the Inflation Reduction Act conservation money was a critical piece of achieving the additional conservation beyond our required DCP and 2007 guidelines shortages in Arizona,” Buschatzke said. “And there is a question about how or if you can maintain that post-2026.”

Cuts in water demand last year have stabilized – but not rescued – the basin’s reservoirs. Lake Powell is 38 percent full, and Lake Mead just 34 percent. There are still sharp disagreements between states, farmers, cities, and tribes about the distribution and severity of future water cuts. The conservation success in 2023 provided a rosy view of possibility. But take off the glasses, and the outlook is a bit fuzzier.

Click the link to read the article on the Colorado Politics website (Marianne Goodland). Here’s an excerpt:

June 7, 2024

An unprecedented public appearance by six of the seven commissioners who are negotiating the future of the Colorado River revealed how divided they are on solutions, and just as importantly, where they agree. The commissioners and state representatives spoke at Thursday’s 2024 Getches-Wilkinson conference on the Colorado River at University of Colorado Boulder’s law school.  The commissioners showed up together at a critical juncture — they are in the thick of the talks to come up with an agreement that would manage allocations and ensure that America’s two largest reservoirs, both located in the Southwest, don’t fall below critical water levels.   In addition, the negotiations are geared toward protecting the health of the river, which 40 million residents across several states rely on for drinking water.  That agreement is supposed to be in place starting in 2027.

One of their more striking differences is in just what defines the health of the Colorado River system. The proposal submitted to the Bureau of Reclamation in March by the Lower Basin states wants to judge that health based on seven reservoirs in the system. In addition to Lake Powell and Lake Mead, that also includes Flaming Gorge in Utah, Blue Mesa in Colorado, and Navajo, which straddles the Colorado-New Mexico borders. The Upper Basin states of Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico and Utah want that health judged only on the two largest reservoirs — Powell and Mead, both directly on the Colorado River. 

Click the link to read the article on the KUNC website (Alex Hager):

June 7, 2024

This story is part of ongoing coverage of the Colorado River, produced by KUNC in Colorado and supported by the Walton Family Foundation. KUNC is solely responsible for its editorial coverage.

The future of the Colorado River is in the hands of seven people. They rarely appear together in public. This week, they did just that – speaking on stage at a water law conference at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

The solution to the Colorado River’s supply-demand imbalance will be complicated. Their message in Boulder was simple: These things take time.

“We’re 30 months out,” said John Entsminger, Nevada’s top water negotiator. “We’re very much in the second or third inning of this baseball game that we’re playing here.”

The audience was mostly comprised of the people who will feel the impact of their decisions most sharply – leaders from some of the 30 Native American tribes that use Colorado River water, nonprofit groups that advocate for the plants and animals living along its banks, and managers of cities and farms that depend on its flows.

The conference comes in the middle of a tense time for the Southwest’s most important river. The fate of the water supply will have an impact on kitchen faucets in major cities like Denver, Los Angeles and Phoenix, as well as sprawling farm fields which grow produce that gets consumed across the nation.

The current rules for managing the river expire in 2026, and state negotiators are under pressure to agree on a set of replacement guidelines before then. The Biden Administration wants those states to find compromise before the November election, but negotiators hinted that they may take longer than that.

In March, they found themselves divided into two groups, along lines that have split Colorado River states since the early 20th century. Those two camps – the Upper Basin states of Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico, and the Lower Basin states of California, Arizona and Nevada – submitted two competing proposals for managing the river.

Since then, they’ve been meeting behind closed doors and say they’re working towards compromise. Details from those meetings have been scant, but negotiators do not appear to be finding much common ground, and are instead divided over major ideological differences about who should reduce their demand on the river.

“I wouldn’t call it a breakdown, but I do think that there was kind of a hiatus,” said Estevan López, the water negotiator from New Mexico. “It’s indicative of just how difficult these issues are and how passionate people are about protecting their state’s interests.”

López and his peers stressed their commitment to reaching agreement eventually, but did not explain exactly how they plan to bridge major divisions in their ideas about water-sharing.

The states do seem to agree on one thing: they all say they’d prefer to avoid this issue going to court. But when asked by the panel’s moderator whether they would commit to avoid taking Colorado River negotiations to the supreme court, none of the state representatives said yes.

Nevada’s Entsminger said the threat of legal action, and the threat of the federal government stepping in and making a decision because the states can’t agree, are actually motivators to work towards compromise. He said the “federal anvil” hanging over negotiators has long been a part of negotiations.

New federal funding

When asked what success looks like on the Colorado River, the federal government’s top Western water official said this.

“Success is continuing the tradition of this basin.”

Camille Calimlim Touton, commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation, said she sees success as “continuing dialogue,” expressing optimism that the region’s leaders will find some agreement about managing the Colorado River’s next chapter.

But the “tradition of the basin,” is marked by disagreement and century-old rivalries.

When it comes to Western water, the federal government pretty much does what the states tell it. Reclamation, the federal agency which manages the West’s dams and reservoirs, ultimately puts new water rules into law, but depends on the states to help write them.

States, throughout the messy recent history of Western water management, have had trouble navigating the region out of crisis. Climate change has depleted the Colorado River’s water supplies, and the states that depend on it have struggled to cut back on demand.

Previous agreements to limit water demand have staved off catastrophe, but ultimately kicked the can down the road and set up the region’s current crisis.

But there is one thing the federal government can do. Spend.

And spend they have. The Biden Administration has earmarked billions of dollars for water projects in communities around the Western U.S. On the first morning of the conference in Boulder, they allocated a big chunk of infrastructure spending for even more water conservation.

Touton and her colleagues announced that $700 million from the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) would go to water saving in the Colorado River’s Lower Basin. The agency said that money will go toward “innovative projects like water distribution structures, advanced metering infrastructure, farm efficiency improvements, canal lining, turf removal, groundwater banking, desalination, recycling water and water purification.”

That’s a continuation of existing work. The federal government has already spent a big portion of the $4 billion of IRA money that was allocated for Colorado River projects. Perhaps most notably, sending payouts to farmers and ranchers that offered to pause growing in exchange for a federal check.

This latest $700 million spend may do some of the same. The agency said it could save more than 700,000 acre-feet of water in Lake Mead. That amount is fairly substantial – smaller than the 3 million acre-foot in water conservation proposed in a $1.2 billion deal struck in 2023, but larger than a 100,000 acre-foot conservation deal with the California farm district that uses more water than any other city or farm district in the Southwest.

The Biden Administration’s big spending on Colorado River water conservation has been a key part of buying time for water negotiators, helping to prop up water levels at major reservoirs and create space for talks about longer-term solutions. However, the spending pattern has raised some anxieties about the precedent it might set for the river’s long-term future.

Basically, this kind of funding might not come around again soon.

On the other hand, it could be a means of giving new momentum to a variety of projects that each represent a small piece of the puzzle that is a sustainable future for the Colorado River.

As one state negotiator put it, the Colorado River crisis won’t be solved by a silver bullet, but instead “silver buckshot.”

That buckshot approach is already underway. Hundreds of millions of dollars are currently at work to save water – from programs that pay farmers in rural Wyoming to pause growing and leave their water in the river to massive purification facilities that can help the Los Angeles area keep using more of the water it already has.

Tribes still calling for more representation

Tribes have long been left onthe sidelines of talks about sharing water from the Colorado River. In Boulder, tribal leaders celebrated recent moves to bring Native voices into negotiations, but made it clear that there is still work to be done.

After more than a century of exclusion, tribes are still asking for more representation. Leaders say that a seat at the table for tribes is especially important at this juncture in Colorado River negotiations.

“We’re not participants,” said Dwight Lomayesva, Vice Chairman of Colorado River Indian Tribes. “Our engagement is secondhand at best.”

Some tribal leaders pointed to new government coordination efforts over the past few years as signs of progress. Lorelei Cloud, vice-chairwoman of the Southern Ute Indian Tribe, pointed to a new agreement between the six tribes and the four states that make up the Colorado River’s Upper Basin.

She said leaders in water management need to build on that work.

“I’m asking everybody in here to normalize tribal voices being at the decision making table,” Cloud said. “Letting us make those decisions that affect our people.”

One state negotiator raised the question of whose responsibility it is, exactly, to make sure tribal input shapes the next set of guidelines for the Colorado River.

JB Hamby, the water negotiator for California, said his state had made progress with including tribal leaders, but said the federal government is on the hook for making sure tribal voices are included.

“Everybody’s comments get evaluated equally,” he said. “And ultimately, that’s a Reclamation/Interior decision about how that goes.”

States split into two groups to submit proposals. At least one major tribe, the Gila River Indian Community, has said publicly that it does not support the proposal put forth by Arizona, the state in which its land resides. The two competing state proposals were joined by a letter from tribal groups. A majority of tribes that use Colorado River water added their signatures to the memo, outlining common values they’d like to see represented in post-2026 river management.

Some tribal leaders said Indigenous people aren’t just being excluded, but there are active efforts to keep them from having an influence on the next chapter of water-sharing rules.

“There are whisper campaigns from some of you trying to undermine tribal positions and efforts to try to pit tribes against one another,” said Stephen Roe Lewis, governor of the Gila River Indian Community. “The old divide and conquer strategy.”

Lewis said those campaigns are not public, but thanked Jordan D. Joaquin, president of the Quechan Indian Tribe, for calling out those efforts at a recent meeting.

“During Westward expansion we were conquered by the divide and conquer strategy,” Lewis said. “We can’t let that happen again here in the midst of what we’re dealing with in regards to water policy.”

Lewis said those tactics won’t work, because “at the end of the day, all the basin tribes have a common bond, a historic bond, a sacred bond that trumps the artificial constructs that non-Indians have and still use to carve up” the Colorado River.

Click the link to read the article on the Utah State University website (Jack Schmidt):

May 22, 2024

On April 3 2024, the snow accumulation season in the Colorado River watershed ended and the snow water equivalent of the snowpack of the Upper Basin peaked. Two weeks later on April 17, the watershed’s reservoirs¹ dipped to their lowest level of the year. Now runoff is underway, and the watershed’s reservoirs are beginning to refill. This is a good time to assess how well water managers did during the past nine months to retain the bounty of 2023’s excellent runoff season, an essential part of rebuilding reservoir storage and regaining basin-wide water supply security. 

The good news is that water managers did quite well, and reservoirs lost only 26% of the total amount accumulated during the 2023 runoff season. This was the smallest loss of any year in the last decade. Most of the decrease in storage that followed last year’s snowmelt inflow occurred in Upper Basin reservoirs, and Lake Mead and Lake Powell lost only 5% of the storage that accumulated in those two reservoirs. It is imperative that water managers continue to work to reduce consumptive uses, reduce losses, and retain the bounty of the few unusually wet years of the 21st century, as they did following the 2023 snowmelt.

Opportunities to rebuild basin-wide reservoir storage have been rare in the 21st century, and there have been many years in which there is significant risk of basin-wide reservoir storage depletion. Hydrologic and reservoir storage data between 2014 and 2023 indicate that annual snowmelt-derived gains in reservoir storage exceeded losses when natural flow at Lees Ferry exceeded 13.7 million acre feet per year (af/yr). Annual flows less than this amount occurred in 16 years of the 21st century. Opportunities to significantly rebuild basin-wide reservoir storage existed when natural flow exceeded 15.8 million af/yr, which only occurred six times in the 21st century. Development of a sustainable policy for managing Colorado River reservoir storage must focus on reducing consumptive uses and losses in both wet and dry years.

To recap, the natural flow of the Colorado River at Lees Ferry in 2023 was the third highest of the 21st century and was exceeded only in 2011 and 2019 (Table 1). Unregulated inflow to Lake Powell in Water Year (WY) 2023 was ~13.4 million af².

In response to this large runoff, the basin’s reservoirs recovered a significant amount of storage. The watershed’s reservoirs reached their maximum in mid-July (13 July 2023) when total storage was 29.7 million af. The increase in basin storage between mid-April and mid-July was 8.38 million af and was the largest single-year increase in storage in the last decade, and approximately 1 million af more than the increase in storage that had resulted from the inflows of 2019 (Table 2).

However, the runoff in 2023 did not eliminate critically low reservoir storage conditions. The increased reservoir storage that peaked in mid-July 2023 recovered storage to the amount it had been in mid-February 2021 in the early stages of the 2020-2022 water crisis (Fig. 1). Based on average annual water consumption³ 2023’s runoff would need to be repeated five more times to refill the reservoir system. Good runoff years rarely occur consecutively. The projected unregulated inflow to Lake Powell in 2024 is estimated to be only 81% of average.

When we entered mid-summer 2023, I expressed concern about water managers’ ability to conserve the benefit of 2023’s runoff season, because we had not done so in previous years of good runoff. In those years, the benefit of reservoir storage recovery was not retained for more than two years (see blog post from October 2023). The benefit of 2011, the largest runoff of the 21st century, had been completely consumed in 19 months, and the benefit of large runoff in 2019 had been consumed in 24 months. I suggested that public understanding about the status of reservoir storage and the need to conserve the bounty of good years would be improved if water managers regularly reported how much of the previous year’s inflow benefit was retained. Such a metric could highlight success in rebuilding water storage or could be used to sound a warning of the need for additional conservation. 

Throughout winter and early spring 2023 and 2024, I reported on the status of reservoir storage and showed that water managers were successfully conserving reservoir storage. Between mid-July (13 July 2023) and mid-April (17 April 2024), total basin-wide reservoir storage lost only 2.2 million af (Fig. 2) which was 26% of the total “gains” of the 2023 snowmelt season. Most of this decrease in storage occurred upstream from Lake Powell, where reservoirs lost 1.4 million af. In contrast, storage in the Lake Powell-Lake Mead reservoir system decreased by only 0.83 million af.

The percentage of the accumulated snowmelt in 2023 that was consumed or otherwise lost from reservoirs in the subsequent months was less than in any other year of the past decade and was less than following the 2019 runoff season and significantly less than the years between 2014 and 2017 when runoff was moderately good (Table 2). I compared the rate and magnitude of decrease of reservoir storage in 2023-2024 with similar data for the previous nine years. The results are presented in a complicated Figure 3. Each line on this graph is the loss in storage in each year, plotted as the cumulative decrease in storage from the peak that had occurred in early summer. Lines that plot higher on this graph reflect smaller decreases in basin storage. The decrease in storage was notably large after the 2020 snowmelt season; total basin storage was nearly 7 million af less in spring 2021 than it had been in summer 2020. There were also large reductions after the snowmelt inflows of 2018 and 2021. In contrast, the reduction in storage after the 2023 runoff season (the thick blue line) was smaller than in the other years; this pattern is reflected by the thick blue line that plots higher on Figure 3 than in most other years.

Although the combined storage contents of Lake Mead and Lake Powell reflect the balance (or imbalance) between basin water supply and consumptive use, the trajectories of individual reservoirs also result from reservoir operational rules specific to each facility. Lake Powell reached its peak storage of the year in early July (8 July 2023; 9.67 million af) and subsequently lost 2 million af by mid-April, because water was transferred downstream (Fig. 4). Storage began to accumulate again in Lake Powell in mid-April (18 April 2024). In contrast, storage in Lake Mead steadily increased between August 2022 and early March (4 March 2024), gaining 2.7 million af of storage. Lake Mead has been losing storage since early March.

The trajectory of storage in Upper Basin reservoirs differed between those facilities authorized or linked to the Colorado River Storage Project (CRSP)⁴ in contrast to other facilities (Fig. 4). Peak storage upstream from Lake Powell peaked in early (facilities unrelated to the CRSP peaked on 5 July 2023 at 3.69 million af ) to mid-July (CRSP related facilities peaked on 15 July 2023 at 5.79 million af). Storage in facilities unrelated to the CRSP was quickly reduced to approximately 3 million af by mid-September, and storage was maintained at that quantity until the beginning of the 2024 snowmelt season. In contrast, storage in CRSP related facilities progressively lost storage of approximately 0.8 million af until mid-February 2024 when storage stabilized at approximately 5 million af. The longer period of declining storage in CRSP-related facilities was caused by policies related to transferring water to Lake Powell.

Insights about the Future

The data and analyses presented above provide insight about the likely trajectory of future Colorado Basin reservoir storage if no changes are made in policies concerning consumptive use and reservoir operations. During the past decade, the increase in basin-wide reservoir storage is well predicted by a power function based on the natural flow at Lees Ferry⁵ (Fig. 5).

The proportion of snowmelt-derived gain in storage subsequently lost during the following nine months is well predicted as an inverse power function⁶ of the increase in storage. The greater the increase in storage, the smaller the proportion of that increase subsequently lost. In years when there is little increase in storage, basin-wide consumptive uses and losses far exceeded the annual increase in storage (Fig. 6). Such was the case in 2018 and between 2020 and 2022.

These correlations indicate that annual consumption and losses in excess of annual storage gains occurred when gains were less than approximately 3.2 million af. Between 2014 and 2023, storage gains were less than this amount when natural flows were less than approximately 13.7 million af, which occurred in 16 years of the Millennium Drought. Significant retention of reservoir storage, defined as retention of at least 50% of the annual accumulation, occurred when storage increased by at least 5.7 million af. Such an increase of storage only occurred when natural runoff exceeded 15.8 million af (Fig. 5), which only occurred six times between 2000 and 2023.

Take-Home Messages

The essential purpose of negotiating new reservoir operational guidelines for the Colorado River basin is to maintain sufficient reservoir storage to provide a reliable and secure water supply. At the beginning of the 2024 snowmelt season, basin-wide reservoir storage is comparable to what it was in late spring 2021, demonstrating that the Millennium Drought water crisis persists. The opportunity for significant retention of the benefits of significant increases in reservoir storage exist when natural flow exceeds approximately 15.8 million af, a situation that has rarely occurred since 2000. When natural flow is less than approximately 13.7 million af, there is significant risk of depletion of basin-wide storage. Development of a sustainable policy for managing Colorado River reservoir storage must focus on reducing consumptive uses and losses in both wet and dry years.

Click the link to read the article on the Sibley’s Rivers website (George Sibley):

May 28, 2024

Way too much is happening in the world today, beyond the Colorado River. An Armageddon is shaping up in the mideastern Cradle of Too Many Civilizations that makes Colorado River problems look like sandlot scuffles; we’re in a long slog toward an election in the Untied (sic) States that would not even be close in a rational nation-state but somehow, ominously, is close here; a so-called Cold War is heating up again between competing military-industrial complexes that are again dragging us to the brink of unimaginable disaster. As if the changing climate were not already enough unimaginability. Much about our future is unimaginable today.

Those apocalyptic challenges make a focus on my favorite river almost feel like a guilty diversion, but there’s a lot of fundamental roiling and boiling going on along and around the Colorado River too – a lot of it dependent on intelligent adaptation to unimaginables like the supercharged climate. Will the Upper and Lower River Basins reconvene – together – in time to get serious about planning for the Post-2026 era? Does the expiration of the beat-up and bandaged Interim Guidelines also mean the expiration of the dysfunctional Colorado River Compact and its two-basin wet dream for a pluvial river that no longer exists? Will the Bureau engineers have to breach Glen Canyon Dam to get water past it, once the bypass tubes collapse, raising dead pool to a third of the reservoir capacity? And –  oh yeah, will the seven states actually incorporate the 30 First People tribes into actively helping plan our water-based future?

This post will follow through on that last question. In my last post, I was trying to provide some historical and cultural context for a letter sixteen of the Basin’s First People tribes sent to Reclamation Commissioner Camille Touton in late April, reiterating emphatically their strong desire to become a full partner in the future planning and use of the Colorado River:

We, the undersigned tribal leaders, believe it is now time to more specifically explain the Basin Tribes’ key principles that must be adhered to if the United States, as our trustee, and the Basin States expect our support of any proposed or preferred alternative for the Post-2026 Guidelines.(Emphasis added)

That’s a fairly emphatic government-to-government demand from people historically confined to the role of powerless petitioners, signers of ‘in perpetuity’ treaties that often barely lasted a decade before their trustees broke them. What can the First People do if, as usual, that demand is ignored, and their federal trustee and the seven states continue to not be unduly concerned about having the support of the tribes in what they do (including what they do to the tribes)?

I actually think the First People could probably do quite a bit at this point, not with bows and arrows, but by applying what they’ve learned from civilized America and taking their self-appointed trustee, the U.S. government, to court – not just the warpedy judicial system, but also the ‘world court’ of mediated public opinion. For the last third of the 20^th century, since the American Indian Movement, with Western Civilization beginning to show cracks and peeling facades, public awareness of, interest in, and concern about the First People and their cultures has increased; thay have developed a voice that is heard.

The shape of the future may have been set this year, at roughly the same time the 16-nation letter went to the Bureau: the Upper Colorado River Commissioners held their first formal meeting with representatives of the six tribes in the Upper Basin; both parties have committed to regular meetings in the future.

What will they talk about? Probably they will talk first about the three ‘key principles’ in the letter to the Bureau: first, that their alleged trustees ‘take actions to actively protect Tribal water rights’ as the permanent cuts in use begin for the post-2026 epoch. Second, that the Tribes themselves finally be empowered ‘to determine how and when to use their water rights by adopting and supporting a portfolio of flexible tools’ for the Tribes. And third, that the government and states ‘provide for a permanent, formalized structure for Tribal participation in implementing Post-2026 Guidelines, and in any future Colorado River policy and governance.’

A first question in contemplating these principles might be – what are the ‘Tribal water rights’? They were first asserted by the U.S. Supreme Court, in the 1908 Winters v. United States decision, that granted tribes confined to reservations enough water to achieve the reservation purpose (‘civilizing’ the First People). A number of the tribes have actually acquired substantial portfolios, mostly dating to the creation of their reservation. A compilation from two reputable studies indicates that 23 of the 30 First People tribes have paper rights to 4,379,375 acre-feet of water – a full third of the current annual flow of the river. Because this information might sound a little unbelievable, these are the two documents that reveal it: first, a joint study by the Bureau of Reclamation and a ‘Ten Tribes Partnership’; the second, a Congressional Research Service study on ‘Indian Water Rights Settlements.’

First People water rights, you might recall from an earlier post, are obtained in two ways – either of which typically takes years, even decades, to execute: one is to take the federal or state government to court, suing for their rights. Their rights were ‘federal reserved rights,’ but they had to be adjudicated through the legal processes of the state they were in.

The other way was for the First People to engage in direct negotiations with the Euro-American entities – mostly irrigators and private and public domestic users – who have been legally using their ‘federal reserved’ water. The federal government rides shotgun with the tribes on such negotiations, putting on the table the amount of money Interior lawyers figured it would cost the government to go to court for the First People. The farmers and municipalities and others using the water are willing to negotiate as an alternative to going to court in what might ultimately be an expensive losing case.

These negotiated ‘settlements’ have become the preferred method for both the tribes and the governments, offering a lot more flexibility in ‘horse trading’ than the courts allow. Eighteen of the First People tribes in the Basin have obtained rights through negotiated settlements, five through the courts; the remaining seven First People nations with no decreed rights will probably follow the settlement course. If you are interested in browsing a copy of a settlement agreement, this links to the one for the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community – the People whose Great Seal is the maze illuminating the last post here. Just a quick look at the table of contents will show why the maze is an appropriate symbol for these still-evolving relationships.

But this tally of 4.4 million acre-feet (maf) of water rights for 23 of the 30 Colorado River Basin tribes is, as noted, ‘paper water’ – the right to use the water. To actually put the water to use – turn it into ‘wet water’ serving some purpose – requires expensive infrastructure, especially in the desert. On average, the individual First People tribes have only turned, on average, a fourth of their decreed paper water into wet water, according to the 2018 study by the Bureau and Ten Tribe Partnership. The rest of their decreed water is being used (free) by others – mostly farmers and municipalities, all with legal rights.

In trying to address this situation, the First People tribes are well aware that the Colorado River is already over-appropriated almost everywhere, and that their federal reserved water has been used productively for more than a century by other users with legal water rights that would become ‘junior’ if contested by the tribe’s senior reserved rights. But forcing those longtime users to give up the Indian water would just push them to pumping more groundwater, still (unbelievably) unrestricted in most of Arizona. The tribes specifically asked in their letter to the Bureau that the government ‘facilitate the creation of compensated forbearance agreements that enable Basin Tribes to benefit from their water rights in a manner that avoids increasing cumulative consumptive demand.’ (Emphasis added) In other words – don’t make us make the situation worse for everyone else in making it better for us.

The logical, common sense action would be to allow the First People to charge current users of their water to continue using it and not be forced to the expense of pumping groundwater, with the First People using the proceeds to improve their own water infrastructure, making their water go further. This logical, common sense action, however, is illegal under the antiquated 1834 ‘Indian Non-Intercourse Act,’ forbidding First People nations to lease or sell their reservation land and resources without Congressional approval.

One First People community right on the Colorado River has gone to Congress to seek that approval, and in 2022 Congress passed the ‘Colorado River Indian Tribes Water Resiliency Act,’ which, despite the omnibus sound of the title, only permitted the First People community on one reservation to address the opportunity of ‘compensated forebearance agreements.’

The ‘Colorado River Indian Tribes’ (CRIT) reservation was created in 1865 for the groups of the Chemehuevi and Mojave tribes – at their request. Well into their own transition from hunter-foragers to farming, they were concerned that their traditional lands were being overrun by the white tsunami unleased by the gold and silver ‘rushes,’ and they were willing to sacrifice their upland hunting grounds if they could be have their floodplain farmland along the river. Indian Affairs agent Charles Poston made that happen for them, generating a relatively large reservation, 353 square miles in Arizona and 67 square miles in California, and 113 miles of Colorado River access. A reservation town is named for Poston, an agent who treated them like humans.

After that unusual 19^th century beginning, the People experienced the usual traumas imposed by American Indian policy, combining general neglect with efforts at forced assimilation – a combo that the tribes barely survived.There were also unintentional challenges: their farming technique was to plant their ‘three sisters’ – corn, beans and squash – in the rich mud as the annual spring flood of snowmelt receded, with no additional irrigation required. That was disrupted when Hoover Dam was completed, ending the floods. They petitioned Indian Affairs for assistance in setting up an irrigation system with marginal results.  And the Indian Affairs Office also doubled the number of First People tribes in the CRIT community, bringing several bands of Hopis and Navajos onto the reservation, an unwelcome addition crowding an already inadequate irrigation infrastructure.

But then, as the nation descended into World War II, the four-tribe community got way more crowded: the reservation became host to the largest internment camp for American citizens of Japanese descent relocated from the West Coast – 17,000 people by 1945. But this was followed by a most unexpected but welcome development. In the early years of World War II, with all the nation’s industrial resources diverted to war production and most of the traditional workforce in the military, the Bureau of Reclamation found enough concrete and steel and workers to build the Headgate Rock Diversion Dam across the Colorado River, to divert irrigation water onto – an Indian reservation? And internment camp?

I searched the Bureau’s websites in vain for information on this project, and found nothing – from an organization that has excellent histories for nearly all of the projects it has built; they don’t even list Headgate Rock as a project – perhaps because the Bureau of Indian Affairs manages it. But accounts of the internment camp note that the Japanese Americans worked with the CRIT First People in developing the irrigation works, and all who survived the experience did so in part because of the extensive new irrigation system. Typically for the internment camps for Japanese Americans, by the time they were released in 1945, the camp itself had become a more livable place with gardens and trees; after the war, the Hopi and Navajo people were moved into some of the housing.

The CRIT then received a big break in 1964. In the decree resolving (sort of) the ongoing feud between Arizona and California, the U.S. Supreme Court included water rights for all the First People tribes and the CRIT multi-tribe community living along the Colorado River, rights quantified in the 1970s; CRIT, being the largest Colorado mainstem reservation with the most existing water development, got consumptive use decrees for 719,000 acre-feet in Arizona and California, the largest decree for any single entity in Arizona. They have managed to put to use about half of their decree, and want to lease some of the rest to those already using their water, which is why they petitioned Congress recently for the 2022 act to do that.

And that brings us to the photo at the beginning of this post, which is the signing of the agreement between the CRIT People and the Arizona and federal governments. Any reader with a sense of history will see immediately what is unusual about this picture: the signers are all women – and two of them are of the First People: on the viewer’s left, Amelia Flores, Chair of the CRIT community; in the center, Deb Haaland, U.S. Interior Secretary (Laguna Pueblo); and on the right, Arizona governor Katie Hobbs, who had the gumption to shut down part of Arizona’s growth juggernaut, the ‘Hassayampa romantics’ who could not verify a hundred-year water supply for their developments.

Everyone in the Colorado River region today talks about a need to be ‘thinking outside the box.’ That picture seems to me to be ‘outside the box’ – as does the meeting between the Upper Colorado River Commission and the six First People tribes in the upper basin states. Congress might follow that by repealing the 1834 Indian Non-intercourse Act and generalizing the 2022 CRIT Water Resiliency Act with a uniform policy for all First People reservations – although uniformity has never been an international feature of the Indian nations.

Of course, that will all change if Trump wins the presidency: he promises to take us back to the past to avoid the unimaginable future.

But that note is no way to end this; I’ll instead give the last word to the ‘Poston (Arizona) Community Alliance’ on the CRIT reservation, committed to carrying forward ‘Poston’s unique multicultural history, involving Japanese Americans and Native Americans.’ In 1992, the 50^th anniversary of the internment camp, the Alliance raised a 30-foot monument with this quotation:

This memorial is dedicated to all those men, women, and children who suffered countless hardships and indignities at the hands of a nation misguided by hysteria, racial prejudice, and fear. May it serve as a constant reminder of our past so that Americans in the future will never again be denied their constitutional rights, and may the remembrance of that experience serve to advance the evolution of the human spirit.”

That’s the way to make America great – finally.