Archive of entries posted by jfleck
Quoting John Entsminger
If you distill down what my six partners just said, I believe there’s three common things: Here’s all the great things my state has done. Here’s how hard/impossible it is to do any more. And here are all the reasons why other people should have to do more. As long as we keep polishing those …
Quoting Huckleberry Finn
When you got to the table you couldn’t go right to eating, but you had to wait for the widow to tuck down her head and grumble a little over the victuals, though there warn’t really anything the matter with them,—that is, nothing only everything was cooked by itself. In a barrel of odds and …
Colorado River Deadlines & Incentives
A guest post by Friend of Inkstain Michael Cohen…. By Michael Cohen, Senior Fellow, Pacific Institute December 15, 2025 Key Takeaways Missing Deadlines Way back at the end of the last century, at the annual Colorado River conference in Vegas, Marc Reisner repeated the Margaret Thatcher quote that consensus is the absence of leadership. On …
Quoting Katie Hobbs on Colorado River Negotiations
I don’t envy Secretary Burgum the position that he’s in, but we do need federal leadership. Secretary Burgum already reached out to convene a meeting. He invited the governors and the chief negotiators to DC earlier [last] week. That meeting didn’t happen because three of the four Upper Basin governors weren’t willing to go. [Nevada …
Continue reading ‘Quoting Katie Hobbs on Colorado River Negotiations’ »
Water is For Fighting Over, ten years on
Ten years after I handed in the manuscript for my book Water is For Fighting Over, about the governance past, present, and future of the Colorado River, my Utton Center colleague Rin Tara and I took a look back at the book on our Water Matters podcast. Writing it changed my life, reading it changed …
Continue reading ‘Water is For Fighting Over, ten years on’ »
Equity in the Colorado River Basin
Bonnie Colby and Zoey Reed-Spitzer: Access to water, a concern around the globe, is constrained in many areas of the Colorado River Basin (CRB) by water scarcity, pollution and lack of delivery and treatment infrastructure. These constraints disproportionately affect the basin’s Native American, Hispanic and Black populations, groups which often have lower access to resources …
Quoting Jack Schmidt
Jack Schmidt on New Mexico water managers’ pushing 1,700 cfs down the Rio Grande in the middle of December to tidy up our annual Rio Grande Compact accounting: Thanks for the reminder of the tragedy of moving water at the wrong time of year when that water provides no ecological benefit. If that water were …
Happy Holidays From a Flowing Rio Grande
The Sunday bike ride included a brief detour to check out the river. The Rio Grande was flowing at 1,700 cfs, the highest sustained flows of the year, as water managers move water downstream to meet their annual Rio Grande Compact accounting goals. The “Happy Holidays” graffiti is, of course, there year ‘round. I love …
Continue reading ‘Happy Holidays From a Flowing Rio Grande’ »
Autumn Rains Delay Colorado River Basin-wide Reservoir Depletion
By Jack Schmidt | December 3, 2025 Autumn Rains Delay Basin-wide Reservoir Depletion In BriefUnusually wet conditions in the Basin in October and November 2025, combined with reduced releases from some reservoirs, led to a basin-wide increase in storage for the two-month period. The combined contents of Lake Powell and Lake Mead increased during the …
Continue reading ‘Autumn Rains Delay Colorado River Basin-wide Reservoir Depletion’ »