What the Everyone Else in the Colorado River Basin v. Central Arizona Project fracas is really all about

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It’s reasonable to ask whether the fracas over Colorado River water management, which has pitted the Central Arizona Project against just about everyone else in the basin, is evidence that the thesis of my book – that we are in an era of unprecedented collaboration in Colorado River governance, that water is not really for fighting over – was wrong.

Lake Havasu and the Colorado River, courtesy Library of Congress

I think it’s the opposite. There would have been a time when it would have simply been assumed that of course the Central Arizona Project would optimize its water orders (a smart friend has steered me away from some of the more incendiary language I had used – “manipulated” or “gamed”) to maximize releases from Lake Powell. The uproar this month is striking precisely because the uproar is happening at all – that in a new era of collaboration, what CAP was doing is an offense to a new cooperative, collaborative norm.

In the “Contemporary Issues In Water Management” class we co-teach (still accepting applications for fall 2018!), my faculty colleague Bob Berrens spends a good deal of time helping students understand a subtle definition of what we mean by “institutions”:

Institutions: The rules, both formal and informal, that both liberate and constrain behavior in repeated choice interactions.

It was a bit of a challenge for me initially to get my head around this when Bob and I began teaching together five years ago, but our ongoing conversation about this issue in the end provided a key piece of the intellectual infrastructure for my book Water is for Fighting Over: and Other Myths about Water in the West.

Claudia Williamson does a nice job of summarizing the thing in this 2009 paper (for “development” in her sentence below, substitute “successful Colorado River Basin water management”):

Formal institutions represent government defined and enforced constraints while informal institutions capture private constraints. The findings suggest that the presence of informal institutions is a strong determinant of development. In contrast, formal institutions are only successful when embedded in informal constraints.

Central to my book’s myth-busting argument (Water! For Not Fighting Over!) is the evolution in the Colorado River Basin of institutions along two parallel and simultaneous paths. On the formal path, the “government defined and enforced constraints”, you’ll find the big written rule sets developed over the last two decades – the 2001 Interim Surplus Guidelines and the 2007 Colorado River Interim Guidelines for Lower Basin Shortages and Coordinated Operations for Lake Powell and Lake Mead. They were the first two major pieces added to the “Law of the River” since 1968, and they grew out of a process of collaboration and compromise. In parallel to that we have the evolution of what in Bob’s framework we describe as informal rules – norms of behavior that have come to be viewed as the way problems are now solved in the Colorado River Basin. They involve collaboration and effort at shared problem solving – crucial informal norms that allowed the more formal rule sets to be developed.

This is the key to understanding the letter representatives of the Upper Basin states sent to Arizona two weeks ago, triggering the fracas:

This is why pretty much everyone in the basin, including folks in California and Nevada as well as many within Arizona itself, have lined up against the Central Arizona Project’s position on this issue – because CAP’s brazenly public endorsement and defense of a process of managing water orders to maximize releases from Lake Powell, while within the formal rules, violated widely held informal norms of collaboration on efforts to solve the Colorado River’s problems.

Here’s University of Colorado Boulder Colorado Basin scholar Doug Kenney’s explanation in a piece by Luke Runyon and Bret Jasper:

“The [enforcement] mechanism is usually a social mechanism,” Kenney says. “And the mechanism is all of the other parties get in your face and say, ‘Hey, come on. This isn’t really the spirit of what we’re doing here, let’s get back to working cooperatively.’”

Faces will be gotten into next week at a meeting of Arizona and Upper Basin folks in Salt Lake City.

Fulp honored

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From the Bureau of Reclamation:

The Bureau of Reclamation’s Lower Colorado Regional Director, Terrance J. Fulp, Ph.D., received the Meritorious Service Award from the Department of the Interior this week. Fulp has devoted his 27-year federal career to the Lower Colorado Region by making lasting contributions to improving operations and developing solutions for complicated water issues.

Fulp was at the center of one of the telling scenes in my book:

It was early 2000 when Terry Fulp saw the first glimmer of the problems to come. The hydrologist was part of a team doing the math on a proposal to change the way the federal government operated Lake Mead and Lake Powell, the two big reservoirs on western North America’s iconic Colorado River.

In 2000, Lake Mead was full, water lapping at Hoover Dam’s spillway gates. The full reservoir was a reassuring sight for the residents of the water-dependent farms and cities dependent on the Colorado’s supply. But gathered in a nondescript Southern California office park going over calculations with a team of technical experts, Fulp realized that things would not always be this way.

The team had been working “all hours of the day and night” on the final numbers needed for a federal report. As they sat down over pizza and beer one evening, one of the bosses asked a question: “If you could put something on a bumper sticker about what we’ve learned, what would it be?”

Fulp’s answer was simple: “Lake Mead will go down.”

“we don’t have water”

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Hay stack in Delta County, Colorado, 1940, Russell Lee

I had a nice talk Friday with Norman and Paul Kehmeier, father and son farmers in Delta County, Colorado, who get their water from Surface Creek, a tributary to the Gunnison.

I called after getting a note earlier in the week from Norman, who I’d met last year on a trip to Grand Junction:

Thought you might be interested to learn that Paul and I will be wasting very little water on alfalfa this spring for the simple reason that we don’t have water.

Grand Mesa, which sits above them, has less than 50 percent snowpack, Norman wrote, and with strong demand from downstream municipal water users and apple orchards, it may make sense to lease what little water they do have rather than growing alfalfa, as they usually do with it.

While those of us down here in the lowlands log in to the Colorado River Basin Forecast Center and check out the latest maps and streamflow forecasts, Norman and Paul can look out the window to see what’s coming. This year, a lack of snow in the lower elevations posed the biggest problem. It’s the low snow that melts off early, providing the spring runoff. That’s how it works in a system where you don’t have big reservoir storage above you.

They’re in the Colorado River Basin – the Gunnison meets the Colorado at Grand Junction – but in many ways it feels like a completely different thing from the Colorado River Basin many of us spend our time talking about. Despite the noisy arguments you hear, the supply of water from Lake Mead is rock solid stable and reliable compared to the year-in, year-out reality of farming in a place like Delta County, where there were 25,000 acres of alfalfa last year.

The Kehmeiers have some great water rights to irrigate their 300 acres. Their Surface Creek right is the fourth-oldest on the creek, dating to 1892. But that doesn’t help if there’s no snow in the high country above them.

Lake Mead, behind Hoover Dam, can hold 30 million acre feet of water when it’s full. Kehmeier Reservoir, the Kehmeiers’ little private reservoir, can hold 300 acre feet of water when it’s full. Neither will be full this year. The purpose of Hoover Dam is big, multi-year storage – to hold water over from wet years for use when it gets dry. The sort of reservoir the Kehmeiers use (there are many above the farmers in Delta County) holds some of meltwater from early in the year for use late in the year, stretching high spring flows out to supply farms during the low flows later in the year. Shortage in Delta County happens every time there’s a single year of low snowpack, which is often these days.

Paul explained the added problem they face that, when the snowpack is low, the water that’s left in the creek is primarily groundwater base flow. With geology dominated by the Mancos Shale, he said, the salinity is high.

So the Kehmeiers are hunkered down this year, “resolved,” Paul said, “not to be pessimistic.”

“There is one thing we won’t worry about,” Norman wrote, “and that is the viability of our alfalfa stands, because we have learned with some experiments over the past few years that alfalfa will survive quite well under deficit irrigation. It is a remarkable plant.”

Santa Fe, NM: Not like Cape Town

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Julie Ann Grimm has a piece this week in the Santa Fe Reporter explaining Santa Fe’s approach to water management this year that’s a nice demonstration of why we don’t have incipient “Cape Town” situations (cities about to run out of water) in New Mexico:

Groundwater wells that have mostly been resting on the city’s west side since the construction of a Rio Grande diversion are likely to get put back into action this summer.

Dismal snowpack and low rainfall so far this spring mean water in the river is scarce.

These have long been the plans in Santa Fe, where officials decided in the early 2000s to build a massive infrastructure project to draw water off the river. The Buckman Direct Diversion went online in 2011, becoming a fourth source in the water supply portfolio for Santa Fe’s homes and businesses, along with two well fields and the Rio Grande. Since the reservoirs on the smaller Santa Fe River are also low due to the drought conditions, that leaves the wells.

Santa Fe has multiple sources of water that are relatively independent of one another, so they’re not vulnerable to the sort of single-point failure that has hurt Cape Town so badly. Albuquerque is likely to use a similar approach this year. This is one of the keys to municipal water supply resilience.

 

Meanwhile, Texas is newly mad at New Mexico over water stuff

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Not to be outdone by our neighbors in the Colorado River Basin to the west, here’s a letter from Texas Rio Grande Compact Commissioner Pat Gordon to New Mexico State Engineer Tom Blaine complaining that proposed water rights for a New Mexico copper mine would further cut into Texas’s share of the Rio Grande, a subject about which we’re already engaged in litigation before the U.S. Supreme Court.

 

The “anticommons” revisited: that time Phoenix tried to leave more water in Lake Mead

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Ry Rivard, a reporter for Voice of San Diego who is part of the Colorado River journalism posse, had the most tweetable summary of the dustup within Arizona and among the seven Colorado River basin states:

 

Four years ago, when I was young and naive, I pointed to what in retrospect I now realize was a warning sign of the train wreck we’re now seeing. Phoenix had rights to some extra Colorado River water it wasn’t using, and it wanted to leave it in Lake Mead. The Central Arizona Water Conservation District, the government agency that runs the Central Arizona Project, had the power to block this, and did.

It’s an example of what an academic colleague described to me at the time as “the anticommons” – where single users of a common pool resource have the power individually to block solutions that are in the collective best interest of the users as a whole.

Daniel Rothberg at the Nevada Independent did a great job in a piece yesterday of showing how politically and diplomatically isolated the Central Arizona Project’s managers have become right now, both within Arizona and in the basin-wide process of coming to terms with how to use less Colorado River water. It’s not just other states mad at Arizona. It’s other states mad at one water agency within Arizona – the CAWCD – and a bunch of other people within Arizona also mad at that the CAWCD.

 

Denver Water accuses Central Arizona Project of manipulating water orders to take more water from Lake Mead

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Denver Water today joined state leaders in the Upper Colorado River Basin with a letter accusing the managers of the Central Arizona Project of manipulating water orders to get more water out of the Upper Basin’s reservoir at Lake Powell. The actions of the CAP’s managers “several compromise the trust and cooperation” needed to solve Colorado River problems, the letter from Denver Water’s Jim Lochhead said. Full text:

 

Background here.

On the U.S. part of the Rio Grande, the San Luis Valley is where most farming takes place

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In water management, it’s normal to zero in on one’s local geography and not think about the larger system – especially when state lines carve up a watershed. Thus, faced with a terrible snowpack year on the Rio Grande, we’re having three largely separate conversations about agricultural water management on the U.S. part of the Rio Grande:

  • The San Luis Valley (the headwaters valley in Colorado)
  • The “Middle Rio Grande” (that stretch through Albuquerque where I live)
  • The “Lower Rio Grande” – New Mexico south of Elephant Butte Reservoir, plus El Paso County in Texas

Here is some interesting data by way of comparison about how people are using the water in those three sub-watersheds. It’s total crop revenue, which is a good measure of how much farming is happening in each place. Water people are often surprised to learn that the San Luis Valley is, by this measure, the most productive part of the system. These are 2016 (the most recent year available) total crop revenue numbers from the Department of Commerce.

  • Middle Rio Grande: $16.1 million
  • Lower Rio Grande: $376 million
  • San Luis Valley: $412 million

 

Colorado River Upper Basin states accuse Central Arizona Project managers of threatening the health of the Colorado River system

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Upper Colorado River Basin state leaders, in a letter Friday (April 13, 2018), said the water management approach being taken by the managers of the Central Arizona Project “threaten the water supply for nearly 40 million people in the United States and Mexico, and threaten the interstate relationships and good will that must be maintained if we are to find and implement collaborative solutions” to the Colorado River’s problems.

The letter accuses CAP of “disregard(ing) the basin’s dire situation”, providing more water for Arizona at the expense of the rest of the basin. In doing so, it highlights a rift within Arizona, where an internal political feud over this and related issues has pitted CAP against the state Department of Water Resources and many of CAP’s own customers. That rift, in turn, has stalled diplomacy over efforts to develop a broad new plan to cut back water use across the Colorado River basin.

The letter, using language that is striking in the normally staid interstate diplomacy of Colorado River interstate water management, takes issue with CAP’s practice of using more water than it might otherwise – avoiding “overconserving”, in CAP’s words – in order to ensure continue big releases from Lake Powell upstream. That has the effect of expanding water use in the Lower Colorado River Basin at the expense of draining Lake Powell, the critical reservoir for protecting Upper Colorado River Basin supplies. The managers of the Central Arizona Project are “disregard(ing) the (Colorado River) basin’s dire situation at the expense of Lake Powell and all the other basin states” by using more water than they need to, the letter said.

 

On Twitter last week, in response to something I wrote here, Central Arizona Project General Manager Ted Cooke defended CAP’s practice, calling it wise placement of water orders under the 2007 rules governing reservoir storage on the Colorado River. Those rules attempt to even out storage between Lake Mead – which supplies the Lower Basin states of Arizona, Nevada, and California, plus Mexico – and Lake Powell, which maintains a storage bank for the Upper Basin states of Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico (I raise my hand to declare an Upper Basin bias here) and Utah. The rules have created an incentive for the Central Arizona Project, which manages a big fraction of Arizona’s supply of Colorado River to avoid “overconserving” – again, this is CAP’s word – at a time when everyone in the Colorado River Basin is trying to use less water. The Upper Basin states (the letter was signed by the top water officials from all four) say that “attempts to maximize demands to increase releases from Lake Powell could ultimately accelerate lower reservoir conditions in both the Upper and Lower Basins and cause shortages in Lake Mead.”

The issue of the Central Arizona Project’s approach to this issue has been simmering for more than a year. Water managers have long known the rules created this incentive for the CAP’s managers, but the agency’s increasingly brazen public discussions of it have become problematic. The public version of the debate goes back to a March 2, 2017 meeting of the board of the Central Arizona Water Conservation District, the agency that runs the CAP. Tony Davis at the Arizona Daily Star nicely documented the debate in this story, quoting CAP water policy director Suzanne Ticknor explaining to her board the risk to Arizona of “overconserving”.

That word echoed through the Colorado River water community at a time when other states were struggling with how to conserve more water, not worrying that they might be conserving too much.

It also highlighted an increasingly divisive breakdown within Arizona on this issue. Kathryn Sorensen, director of Phoenix’s water department, was quoted in Tony’s story criticizing CAP’s approach. “The ‘risk’ of overconserving is a Colorado River that is less vulnerable to shortages and more resilient over the long run, a river that is more protective of our economy and our quality of life,” she told Davis. Others in Arizona have become increasingly critical of CAWCD/CAP approach. “CAWCD does not speak for Arizona,” Carol Ward-Morris of the Arizona Municipal Water Users Associated tweeted this week in response to my blog post about the allegation that CAP is “gaming” Colorado River water management rules.

The full letter, which has spreading quickly through Colorado River management circles this weekend, is here:

 

One of the worst years in a century of records on New Mexico’s Rio Grande?

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Experimenting with some data visualizations to try to help make sense of where this very dry year on the West’s rivers fits into historical context, I came up this morning with this:

The spaghetti is daily flow for each year in the USGS historic record for the gauge at Embudo in northern New Mexico – the oldest gauge in the country, with a nearly continuous record back to 1895. The red line is this year.

I’m not sure this visualization works for a general public audience, but for me it did the trick.

As you can see, at this point in the year, the river should be rising as snowpack melts. It’s dropping. And a quick glance at the graph showed that this year is, in fact, historic – the second driest at this point in April on record.

Code here.