For Star subscribers: Arizona and California, which have battled over the Colorado River for nearly a century, are at it again. This time, Arizona leaders are blaming California, and other states, for putting the burden of stemming the river's impending…
Tony Davis Arizona and California, which have battled over the Colorado River for nearly a century, are at it again. This time, Arizona leaders are blaming California, and other states, for putting the burden of stemming the river’s impending crisis on their backs alone.
The path to an agreement is clogged by concerns about priorities for use of the declining river water, Ferris said. Arizona and California “hold the keys to the kingdom,” said Arizona State University water researcher Sarah Porter. At a news conference that day, ADWR and CAP executives said Arizona and Nevada had offered to cut around 2 million acre-feet, but that other “parties in the room” had rejected it. CAP General Manager Ted Cooke said the other parties were California and the federal government.
A divided basinArizona and California’s role is important because without federal intervention, there’s no way a seven-state deal will be reached unless Lower Basin states and the Upper Basin states — Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming — agree to one. Conversely, “We want to see more numbers and certainty out of them. The closer we get, the more they’ll do. The more they do, the closer we’ll get,” Buschatzke said.
How the additional 2 million acre-feet in cuts would be divvied up wouldn’t have been “completely proportional” to the three states’ existing shares of river water, but “it was very similar to that,” Cooke said. ‘California holds all the cards’Both Arizona officials said, however, that they believe California is negotiating in good faith — “I don’t think that they’re messing around with us, or being disingenuous with us at all. I think we’re on the right path,” said Cooke, despite the remaining issues between them.
The board said it also “was not respectful or in line with the existing priority system” for river water users. That system was laid out in the final U.S. Supreme Court decree that ended the protracted Arizona v. California Colorado River water rights litigation of the 1950s and ‘60s and in the 1968 law authorizing CAP’s construction, it said. The board is California’s official negotiator on Colorado River issues.
But in responding to Arizona’s concerns about taking a disproportionate share of water use cuts, the California board said, “The plain reading of the existing relevant elements of the ‘Law of the River’ states that in periods of insufficient mainstream water supplies, the Central Arizona Project’s use of mainstream Colorado River water is subordinated to California’s basic mainstream apportionment of 4.4 million acre-feet.
Voluntary vs. mandatory cutsThe dispute is not just about numbers, Buschatzke and Cooke said at their news conference. It’s that in the early days of these negotiations after June 14, Arizona officials thought the water use cuts would be “enforceable, mandatory, whatever words you want to use, so we had certainty thought that the reductions would be completed,” Buschatzke said.
Once an agreement is actually signed, water use reductions become mandatory, he said. That was the arrangement Metropolitan worked out last year to pay $38 million over three years to the Palo Verde Irrigation District near Blythe to leave some of its water in the lake. Saying they’re disappointed with the lack of progress among the basin states, CAP Board Chairman Terry Goddard and his predecessor Lisa Adkins said they’re equally disappointed that the Bureau of Reclamation was unwilling to impose water use curbs on them, as Touton had threatened in June to do if no agreement was reached.
‘It’s time to pay up’Ferris has for years criticized her former agency and the CAP management for what she felt was a lack of aggressiveness in protecting the Colorado from depletion. But last week, she praised Buschatzke and Cooke for what she called their candid comments.
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