A new proposal from the Lower Basin states of Arizona, California and Nevada would base future Colorado River cuts on how much water is in the system, not just how low Lake Mead may be.
At first glance, this might seem like it wouldn’t make much difference. Sort of like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
But there’s more to it.
Everyone knows the river, which feeds reservoirs that provide water for 40 million people, isn’t producing the kind of water that it used to.
And that’s a problem, because we’ve got a century of inflexible laws and court rulings that guarantee more water to users than the river now reliably produces.
Those laws and rulings are the basis for the 2007 guidelines that spell out how we operate Lake Mead and Lake Powell, which are set to expire at the end of 2026.
Not surprisingly, neither the guidelines nor the slew of emergency measures we’ve enacted since have been nimble or aggressive enough to keep us from nearly draining the nation’s two largest water reservoirs.
Even with billions of dollars in federal money now paying Lower Basin users to temporarily conserve more water than they ever have before, that is simply holding the line on lake levels, not building back storage.
How do we change direction in the new set of........