LAS VEGAS — The second day of the nation's largest water conference began with a prayer from the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, indigenous people located in southwest Colorado who rely on Colorado River water as their main source of drinking water.
"We need to come to the table. Time is of the essence," said Chairman of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe Manuel Heart. "This water is for each and every one of us, and for our children."
In the spirit of cooperation, the prayer kicked off the second day of the Colorado River Water User Association's 2022 conference. A series of panels and discussions between representatives from Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming will work to cement the next century of river water policy.
DAY ONE: Saving the Southwest's lifeblood: Live updates from the Colorado River conference's first day
Here are updates from the second day of the conference:
State of the River: On the cusp of a new century
What began as an outlining of facts turned into a difference of opinion between representatives from the Colorado River's upper half and lower half.
Ted Cooke, the general manager of the Central Arizona Project, represented Lower Basin states during the first panel of day two.
The facts painted a picture of critical water levels being reached at Lake Powell and Lake Mead within the next two years. However, with innovations in policy and augmentation, Cooke believes there can be a resurgence in water.
"Eventually, if we are diligent ... we can work our way out of this situation, even without approved hydrology, and there can be a renaissance in the Colorado River Basin," Cooke said.
While the Lower Basin states agree on the possibility of a renaissance, they envision a different best road. A slide during Chuck Cullom's presentation, the executive director of the Upper Colorado River Commission, laid out all of the current differences between how the Upper Basin states and Lower Basin states treat water.
Among those differences were two points Arizona water officials have been hinting at for the past few months: litigation over evaporation and stopping the storage of water underground.
Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming have historically been taxed for water lost to evaporation in federally-run reservoirs. Arizona, California and Nevada haven't needed to account for evaporation. Both of these practices were determined by previously set legal challenges, but upper basin states see now as the time to change that.
Another inequality Cullom listed was the differences in storage rights between upper and lower. The Bureau of Reclamation reportedly guarantees lower basin states their allocation of water each year, even if that comes from upper basin storage.
"In the upper basin ... the state engineer can come and politely say 'you're out of priority' and shut you down," Cullom said.
Despite the focus on differences, Cullom ended his presentation with a call for cooperative "collective painful action."
The next 100 years begins now
The lower basin, upper basin differences continued in the day's second panel, where an expert from each state answered questions relating to the next century of the Colorado River.
The new century will be marked by changing how each state approaches water usage, according to the panelists.
"The single biggest issue that is a roadblock to solving the problem of stabilizing the river is the priority system," said the Director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources Tom Buschatzke. "It's going to be really hard to come up with solutions that will not be implemented across the board if we follow the priority system."
Buschatzke asserted the fact that Arizona has taken the brunt of water cuts for the Colorado River. Representatives from California and Nevada agreed that lower basin states will continue to see the most cuts, but also clarified the laws that lay out what those cuts look like must look different in the future.
"If 27 million Americans don't have water, then those laws will not be followed," said John Entsminger, general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority.
Upper basin representatives disagreed that following laws are the biggest hurdle lower basin states face. It isn't laws that are forcing cuts, but the river itself.
"Today, it's not the federal government that is standing there, it's the hydrology saying 'if you don't do this, the reservoirs are empty'," said Gene Shawcroft, general manager of the Central Utah Water Conservancy District. "That's the reality we're facing. It's an entirely different scenario than what we've faced in the past."
Evaporation continued to be a point of contention between upper and lower states.
The basin is expected to soon be tasked with finding two to four million acre-feet in additional water cuts, and lower basin states are also expected to face the majority of those cuts with the 1.5 million acre-feet of water lost to evaporation.
The feasibility of accounting for evaporation is a different story, according to the lower basin.
"We need to somehow account for evaporation and system losses in a direct way ... but I don't often necessarily have the support of [Arizona's] water users for addressing that problem, and I don't necessarily know that I could go to [Arizona's] legislature ... to get approval for that," Buschatzke said.
But each representative shared that time is running out to gain that support, and the hurt is being felt in all states, whether they're upper or lower.
"We are in an incredibly critical time right now," said Becky Mitchell, the director of the Colorado Water Conservation Board. "We have to make hard decisions that we will not like. This morning, I said to [Colorado representatives] that you will not like all of our decisions because they will be painful."
Trade-offs and turbulence: Lessons for times to come
The rifts caused by previous and upcoming water management decisions were touched on by experts in the day's third panel. The talk moved away from winners and losers, and focused on where the river has failed, and where it can succeed, for all.
"Let's admit we failed when the river stopped reaching the Sea of Cortez," said Andy Mueller, the general manager of the Colorado River Water Conservation District. "We failed when we failed to include tribes in these discussions and governance in the river. We failed when we failed to include the environment."
The failure to adequately include tribes was also brought up by Amelia Flores, the chairwoman of the Colorado River Indian Tribal (CRIT) Council. Flores is a Mohave American Indian and lives on the CRIT reservation, whose borders stretch along the boundary of Arizona and California.
The Colorado River is a living being to Flores, a being who can't speak for itself. Tribes have known the river the longest, but haven't been invited to speak for it when some of the most drastic river policy decisions were made.
"The river has a much longer history ... a history of drying up and flooding, and my people have had the resilience to overcome those obstacles," Flores said.
"The compact is a huge puzzle, and that puzzle is dividing us. It's dividing people today the same way the writers of the compact divided water users 100 years ago. Now is the time for us to give back to the river, to keep the river flowing, and it's going to take all of us to do that."
Along with tribes, panelists also advocated for collaboration among all water entities to weather the coming storm.
"Vilifying each other is silly and unproductive," said Kathryn Sorensen, the director of research at ASU's Kyl Center for Water Policy at Morrison Institute. "I do feel like we've moved past that."
Collaborative options for a second century
Day two's final panel focused on a desperately needed topic: examples of collaborative solutions that sounded too good to be true, including:
- A water pipeline across Kansas for $450 per acre-foot
- Arizona's legislature contributing $1 billion to new water projects
- Getting a fiscally-conservative Utah area to invest in water conservation
- Los Angeles makes drinking water out of wastewater for $1,800 per acre-foot
The last panel was a fitting end to a day fraught with oftentimes passive-aggressive confrontation over future collaboration needs. As one of the panelists put it, collaboration is only needed on a difficult topic, which is exactly what the Colorado River is today.
"You don't have to collaborate on the easy things," said Zach Renstrom, the general manager of Washington County's Water Conservancy District in Utah. "The easy things have been done already. They've been solved. Now we have to get together and talk about hard things."
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