tl;dr: MY BOOK IS COMING OUT IN PAPERBACK IN MARCH YOU SHOULD BUY COPIES FOR ALL YOUR FRIENDS IT WILL FIT MORE EASILY IN YOUR BAG FOR PLANE FLIGHTS I STILL HAVE SHARPIES AND WILL SIGN IT FOR YOU WHEN WE NEXT MEET

longer: Writing a new “afterward” for the paperback edition of Water is For Fighting Over and Other Myths About Water in the West (DID I MENTION IT’S COMING OUT IN MARCH!!!!), I’ve been spending a bunch of time reflecting on the last couple of years. Writing a book bears a more than passing similarity to parenthood. You do your utmost to prepare your offspring. You send them out into the world carrying your best intentions, and then they life a life of their own, forever connected to you yet beyond your power to do much to influence their trajectory.

Boulder Harbor, Lake Mead, December 2016, © John Fleck

In the winter of 2015, as I was completing the manuscript of Water is For Fighting Over, I was optimistic about our ability to solve the Colorado River’s problems, and I said so, in a very public way.

In the rhetoric of the basin, with declining reservoirs and enduring water allocation struggles, optimism seemed odd. Every time there was news of a new water allocation struggle, I’d get the questions: “Still optimistic, Fleck?” “Turns out water is for fighting over after all” became my standard self-deprecating joke.

I tried to make a point in the book, which in retrospect I didn’t make clearly enough, that the collaboration/negotiation/compromise framework I advocate is not without conflict.

At the scale of the entire Colorado River Basin, in the messy complex of governance that manages decisions about who gets how much of the big river’s water, we have made tremendous progress. Governments have banded together to come up with a plan to reduce California’s overuse of the river, and they’ve developed a deal with Mexico to share surpluses and shortages, and even to spare some precious water to return flows to the Colorado’s parched channel through its old Mexican delta. This was rarely easy, but it resulted in deals that benefited a spectrum of water users and community values.

Underlying both of these models of success is a willingness to recognize water problems and collaborate in solving them, often across geographic, political, and organizational boundaries. Conflict is sometimes a part of these processes, but ultimately success comes by avoiding fights over water.

But these successes have not been enough, something that can be seen most clearly in Lake Mead itself, the first great reservoir that stores the Colorado River’s water for millions of people downstream. Despite the hope offered by the success stories described above, we have not done enough. Lake Mead continues to shrink. Water users continue to take more out of the Colorado River system than nature puts in, keeping us on an unsustainable path. (emphasis added)

Arizona’s current struggles to come up with a plan to reduce its Colorado River water use is a tremendous challenge to my optimism, the latest and most bitter subject of my “water’s for fighting over after all” jokes.

But if you look closely at the lingering obstacles standing in the way of progress in the Colorado River Basin, Arizona is only the most noticeable example of a common type of problem – the last gasp of an old way of thinking about this river system we all love.

My optimism comes from the fact that this old way of thinking is dying.

The great Charles Wilkinson, in his book Crossing the Next Meridian, called them “the lords of yesterday”, an outdated set of resource extraction ideas stubbornly resistant to our new realities. The “lords” are embedded in outdated laws that allocated more water than the river has, and in outdated expectations by communities around the basin that the water promised by those laws will someday trickle through their irrigation headgates or flow from their taps.

At the scale of the Colorado River Basin, we have largely abandoned the lords, in long and difficult revisions to the old “Law of the River” rules that, if we can actually figure out how to implement them, will bring the basin’s water use more closely into line with hydrologic reality.

But we continue to face a problem I talked about in Water is For Fighting Over – importantly, in the book’s chapter about Arizona:

Within the network of state and water-agency representatives working on Colorado River Basin problems, there is a clear recognition that eventually some sort of “grand bargain” will be needed that finds a way to reduce everyone’s water allocation. To keep the system from crashing, everyone will have to give something up. But each of the participants in that core network also understands the dilemma that follows: each must then go home and sell the deal in a domestic political environment that views the river’s paper water allocations as a God-given right.

Arizona’s belligerence in the summer of 2015 was a stark reminder of the way domestic in-state politics stands in the way of real solutions to the basin’s problems. Without a change in attitude, Arizona’s belief that “water’s for fightin’ over” could become, rather than a myth, a self-fulfilling prophecy.

As the next piece of the “grand bargain”, the ill-named “Drought Contingency Plan”, inches toward completion, it is again Arizona that stands in the way. Farmers in Pinal County, staggeringly uneconomical absent massive subsidies to pump Colorado River water their way, are engaged in a bitter “lords of yesterday” fight to expand their subsidies and thwart Arizona’s best efforts to come to terms with a declining Colorado River water supply.

The remaining points of friction share the “lords of yesterday” thinking, what Eric Kuhn calls “keeping the dream alive” – a pipeline to St. George, the expansion of a dam in Wyoming, or the quiet belief that one more Colorado trans-basin diversion might yet be possible.

These represent genuine conflicts. But as I write a new “afterward” to Water is For Fighting Over, I remain optimistic. These are not fundamental challenges to the new use-less-water order we are trying to build. They are instead last gasps of an old way of thinking.

tl;dr: A feud over how to implement Colorado River conservation adds another hurdle to final completion of the Colorado River Drought Conservation Plan.

longer: While Colorado River Basin folks have been paying obsessive attention to Arizona’s struggle to come up with an internal agreement to cut back on its use of Colorado River, a second within-state argument, less noticed, has emerged into public in the state of Colorado that also poses risk for getting the Colorado River’s Drought Contingency Plan signed by the end of the year.

At issue is the path Colorado takes to reducing its use of water in the event of an Upper Colorado River Basin shortage. For years, the mantra has been “voluntary, temporary, and compensated.” If there is a shortage, the mantra suggests, some water users – most likely farmers, and the most likely farmers are on Colorado’s west slope – would be paid to temporarily curtail their uses.

confluence of the Colorado River, left, and the Roaring Fork, in Glenwood Springs, Colorado. Note coal train for scale.

The water would go into a new storage pool being created by the DCP, water set aside to meet the Upper Basin’s delivery obligations under the Colorado River Compact, a sort of watery savings account. It would be used, in times of bad hydrology, to make sure the Upper Basin can meet its Lee Ferry delivery obligation under the Colorado River Compact. The question of how to fill the account ahead of time, before the risk becomes too great, has been difficult. “Voluntary, temporary, and compensated” has been a guiding principle. No farmer could be forced to contribute.

But in the last month, an alternative idea that had been discussed behind the scenes has been creeping into public view – the question of whether “voluntary, temporary, and compensated” would be enough. It first appeared in a memo last month from the staff of the Colorado Water Conservation Board, the state’s primary water policy agency. One of the key questions, the memo noted, was “whether the program would be limited to temporary, voluntary, and compensated conservation activities or be expanded to include something more”.

In a report last week to the Colorado River Water Conservation District Board*, river district director Andy Mueller was blunt in describing the ensuing discussions at the CWCB meeting during which the issue was discussed:

The Front Range representatives affirmed their position … that a voluntary program was a fine goal but that they believed the state needed to roll out a program which includes rules and requirements for mandatory anticipatory curtailment. The presentation from the string of Front Range entities confirmed the River District Staff’s concerns that major water users in the state would like the Upper Basin Demand Management pool established quickly with the intent that it be filled with water from a program highly or exclusively dependent upon water contributed via uncompensated, anticipatory, mandatory curtailment of water rights in the Colorado River Basin.

This is a manifestation of Colorado’s historic east-west water divide, a source of political tension that goes back nearly a century. Growing cities in the urbanizing east covet water. The rural west has water. This tension makes solving the problem of how to fill the compact compliance pool contemplated by the DCP tough. And you should add it to your list of outstanding problems that could derail the seven state interstate agreement.

Here’s the dilemma. In addition to a package of interstate agreements, DCP seems to require federal legislation. And if you look at the documents released Oct. 10, you’ll see that one key piece of the puzzle is that the Upper Basin is insisting as part of the package on legislative authorization to create the drought storage savings account. This gives Mueller and the River District (the central governance entity looking out for West Slope water interests) the leverage to demand that “voluntary, temporary, and compensated” be built into the idea of drought storage from the beginning. From Mueller’s memo to his board (“UCRC” here is the Upper Colorado River Commission, which represents the four Upper Basin states; “FRWC” is the Front Range Water Council, representing east side, largely but not entirely municipal water agencies):

We believe that if a Demand Management pool is created through federal legislation and action by the UCRC (starting with the execution of the currently contemplated DCP documents), that there will be a significant push by the members of the FRWC to move immediately to an anticipatory, non-compensated curtailment model of contribution to the pool. We respectfully, but strongly disagree with the concept that the push for federal legislation and the execution of the Upper Basin DCP documents are not inherently tied to the establishment of a demand management program within the state of Colorado. If the pool is established without a commitment to principles designed to protect Western Colorado agriculture and initially limited to the publicly vetted concept of a voluntary compensated program, Western Slope agriculture is at risk of quickly becoming the sacrifice zone.(emphasis added)

Brent Gardner Smith has been doing a nice job of covering this for Aspen Journalism:

“This just shows how important it is to get the demand-management program right, and that we don’t rush into a demand-management pool in Lake Powell before we’ve had this discussion and before we’ve agreed to a policy and principles to guide us,” said Tom Alvey, the current president of the district’s board, who represents Delta County. “From all the perspective of water users on the Western Slope, there is huge concern about this.”

And therein lies the dilemma for the seven-state DCP. It is generally accepted that federal legislation only happens if all seven states (and therefore their 14 U.S. senators) agree. If they do, we could see something after the election, in the lame duck session of Congress. But Alvey and his River District colleagues may have blocking power. If Colorado’s water users aren’t on the same page on this, there is a risk that Colorado’s senators may not go along with a DCP bill.

The CWCB’s Brent Newman tried to reassure the River District Board at last week’s meeting. Per Brent Gardner Smith’s story:

Newman … emphatically told the river district’s directors Tuesday that the state is not working on a mandatory curtailment program to avoid a call on the river system under the 1922 Colorado River Compact.

“Not myself, not the CWCB staff, not our board, not the Attorney General’s Office, not the division of water resources, not the state engineer, none of us at the state are assessing or recommending any kind of mandatory anticipatory curtailment scenario,” Newman said. “That is not in our books. Yes, we’ve had some water users say that if voluntary, temporary and compensated isn’t sufficient, you may have to look at this. We are not doing that.”

So I guess add Colorado’s name below Arizona’s on your list of “places where stuff needs to be worked out before the DCP can happen.”

* Disclosure: I have worked in the past as a consultant to the River District on a study of the risks of drought and climate change to Colorado River supplies, specifically intended to answer questions about how much water might be needed to fill the kind of savings account described above. I am also currently collaborating on a book with former River District General Manager Eric Kuhn.

It’s apparently Colorado River Drought Contingency Plan week! Documents here. This is when we all gather around and try to make sense of the sweeping effort to ratchet up efforts to reduce Colorado River water use to keep the system from crashing.

The plan you see before you is really not that different, at the interstate level, from what was essentially agreed to nearly three years ago – Arizona and Nevada agree to bigger reduction in their Colorado River supplies earlier, based on the elevation of Lake Mead. If Mead drops far enough, California joins the party, where by “party” I mean “sees its Colorado River supplies cut as well”. So this is one of those parties you really don’t want to go to, because you’re super introverted, but….

The most interesting bit now seems to be the halting progress toward a new set of rules that allows the states of the Upper Colorado River Basin – Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and New Mexico – to create a conservation storage pool in Lake Powell. One of the sticking points in planning for water reductions up here (in the Upper Basin) is that if we conserve water and prop up Lake Powell in the process, under the current rules, we risk simply increasing the release to Lake Mead. We risk losing a chunk of the water we conserve.

The idea under DCP would be to create a separate accounting category in Powell for conserved water that’s “invisible” (the word people have been using) to the Powell->Mead water sharing rules. The details here are hairy, in terms of ensuring that conservation is really happening and accounting for it in a way that’s transparent and agreeable to the states of the Lower Basin.

But the fact that we seem to be getting something of this sort, or at least an agreement on the general outline of how it might work, is a big deal.