Crystal River, Gunnison County, Colorado. Carol Highsmith, 2015, Courtesy Library of Congress

Sarah Tory had an interesting piece Friday about an effort to keep water in Colorado’s Crystal River, a tributary of the Roaring Fork (Carbondale area, or Aspen for those of a certain geographical bent). Tory’s piece does a good job of explaining the institutional complexities of an agreement that spans potentially both opportunities for exploiting shared values but also risks of conflicting interests among a rancher, the state water rights regime, county government, and an NGO (the Colorado Water Trust).

It’s an interesting case study because it doesn’t involve fallowing land or some other sort of water use reduction on the Cold Mountain Ranch, but rather a re-timing of the ranch’s seasonal water use to put some more water in the Crystal in August and September.

The new deal is the culmination of a multiyear effort to help boost streamflows in the Crystal River, which runs from the Elk Mountains above Marble to its confluence with the Roaring Fork River at Carbondale.

During the drought of 2012, demand for water outpaced supply and the Crystal went dry, prompting the Water Trust to look for new sources of water for the river’s benefit.

Although the Colorado Water Conservation Board has an environmental instream flow right on the Crystal, the water right dates from 1975, far lower in priority than the major agricultural water rights on the Crystal – and thus is of little to no use when the river most needs water.

The folks involved in the project seem to have found a way to overcome some complex “use it or lose it” water rights problems associated with Colorado’s “doctrine of prior appropriation”. It’s an interesting example of the multi-faceted structure of these complex deals, seems hopeful, offers some great institutional learning, and makes me wonder about how examples like this can be scaled up.

decoupling in the Colorado River Basin

I’ve been thinking about the central communication challenge as we face down yet another dry year amid the continued drumbeat of Upper Basin talk about finding new ways to take more water out of the Colorado River.

It goes back to something I wrote in my book:

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.

I’m not sure that’s quite right in a couple of ways. First is the assertion of that the solution is some sort of “grand bargain”. In the two years since I handed off the manuscript for Water is for Fighting Over: and Other Myths about Water in the West to my editor Emily Turner at Island Press, I’ve come to a better understanding of the nature and value of incrementalism on the river – deals done from the bottom up, one irrigation district and municipality at a time, rather than the sort of top down solution the “grand bargain” phrase implies.

But my underlying point – that there is an understanding gap between people who work at the basin scale and those who use water at the local level – seems even more relevant to me today.

The Colorado is really just a 15 million acre foot a year river

The second weakness in that passage of the book is my assertion that everyone in “the network” really understands this dilemma – that the Colorado River Compact and the federal legislation and treaty that followed allocated 18 million feet of a 15 million acre foot river. I still want to think that everyone in that core group I describe in my book understands this, but there is a strong push from the people one layer removed in water governance – the city councils and irrigation district boards and state legislatures across the basin – to grab hold now of the water promised in the Law of the River. That provides a strong incentive for some of the people in the core network to avoid pursuit of grand bargains and honest recognition that it’s really just a 15 million acre foot river.

Decoupling is real

This problem is connected to a second, which has been the thing that most surprised me as I’ve traveled the West talking water since the book came out. People are often surprised by, and sometimes actually resistant to, the evidence for decoupling – the evidence that we’re actually using less water now, and that we’ve demonstrated communities’ ability to grow and thrive even as their supply of water has shrunk.

Repeat after me

Those of you who read my newspaper work over the years may have snapped to my schtick – saying the same thing over and over. I dressed it up in different outer garments, but my core messages were generally the same. I believe in the power of repetition.

So let me reiterate two points for emphasis:

• The estimated natural flow at Lee Ferry on the Colorado River in the 21st century has been 12.4 million acre feet per year.
  • This is not an 18 million acre foot river.
• Upper Basin water use in 2015, the most recent year for which we have data, was 3.7 million acre feet, the lowest since 1977. Lower Basin water use in 2017 (again the most recent year for which we have data, LB accounting is done more quickly) was 6.8 million acre feet, the lowest since 1987.
  • Decoupling is real.

Seems I may have buried the lead here, or “lede” as my annoying journalist friends insist on spelling it.

I’ll be yammering in public Thursday in Albuquerque, y’all should come!

What Did We Know and When Did We Know It:
How Much Water Does the Colorado River Really Have?

In retrospect, it is clear that the 1922 Colorado River Compact was negotiated during a
historically wet period, and that as a result the agreement allocated more water than the river could actually provide in the long term, leaving problems that remain unresolved today. But what was the state of the hydrologic and paleohydrologic science at the time? Was the information available to make better decisions if the negotiators had chosen to use it? The story of the relationship between science and decision-making on the Colorado River in the 1920s, and in the decades that followed, offers important lessons for coping with the challenge of managing water in the arid Southwest today.

This is the monthly AWWA/RMWEA luncheon, anyone can come just show up:

Le Peep Restaurant
4921 Jefferson St. NE
(South of intersection of I?25 & Jefferson NE)
No RSVP or Fee Required
Attendee Pays for Own Lunch
Thursday Jan. 18, 2018
11:30 ? 1:00 p.m.
Order food at 11:30; technical program starts at 12 noon.