In the summer of 1931, as the Bureau of Reclamation was launching work on Hoover Dam, flows on the Colorado River dropped to what, at the time, were low flows unprecedented in the few decades’ records on the river. In retrospect it should have been a clue that there was not going to reliably be enough water in the Colorado River to meet the water supply numbers locked into law via the Boulder Canyon Project Act of 1928

Digging through archives yesterday afternoon for The New Project, I ran across this wonderful headline from the New York Times:

New York Times, Dec. 4, 1932

It sits atop a 1932 New York Times letter to the editor from M.J. Dowd, Chief Engineer of the Imperial Irrigation District, which even then I’m pretty sure was the largest user of Colorado River water. Down and his Imperial Valley community really wanted Hoover Dam – to protect from “the flood menace” (“menace” was a common word at the time to describe the river we all know and love).

With Lake Mead now hovering at low levels not seen since its first filling, shortly after Dowd’s optimistic missive, it is perhaps time for a rethinking of his confident premise.

Which, as Eric Kuhn points out in this piece by Luke Runyon on Colorado River “drought contingency planning”, seems to be what is happening:

Kuhn says the Drought Contingency Plan negotiations mark a change in how even the staunchest water managers, often criticized for a narrow focus on claiming as much water as possible and storing it in reservoirs, think about the Colorado River. In the past, he says, conversations were about who would claim the next drop of the river’s water.

“Now we’re talking about when we cut back, which we will probably have to, who’s going to take those cutbacks?” Kuhn says.

At the risk of putting words in Eric’s mouth (disclosure: We’re in the midst of writing a book together, so we’re quite literally in the midst of putting words in one another’s mouths, so to speak.) I think he’d agree that the pivot from conversations about claiming the next drop to talk about how to cut back have been underway since the 1990s. This stuff takes time, but as Eric points out, the current shape of the Drought Contingency Plan suggests most everyone (not all of everyone, knowing side eye glance at Utah) is on board.

Boulder Harbor, Lake Mead, December 2017

LAS VEGAS, NV – When I stopped at Boulder Harbor on Lake Mead Tuesday morning as I drove into Las Vegas, I saw this field of salt cedar taking hold on what had been a mud flat left by Mead’s declining water levels. It’s a clumsy metaphor for what happens when you get comfortable with the levels of a 39 percent full/61 percent empty reservoir.

At this morning’s Colorado River Water Users Association plenary panel, five of the basin’s water management leaders spoke up about the status of the Drought Contingency Plan, the mystical “DCP”. A year ago at this meeting, the DCP seemed close, maybe (I boldly and perhaps naively argued) inevitable. The basic terms – specified water use cutbacks by Nevada, Arizona, and California as Lake Mead drops – have been in place for two years, now it’s just arguing over implementation details.

This year new problems have set in that, the morning panelists made clear, are making this seem harder, not easier. Chief among them is the struggle to get consensus within Arizona about how to accommodate shortfalls on the river, and seems to be getting harder, not easier. “Our challenge is growing, not contracting,” Arizona Department of Water Resources Director Tom Buschatzke said.

With Arizona an obvious holdout, California has taken a bit of a breather as well, to work out issues involving the Salton Sea, the Sacramento Bay-Delta, and the complicated relationship between the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California and Imperial Irrigation District. Met and IID say they are very close, so it seems like once Arizona sorts out its mess, California will be quick to finalize as well.

But that leaves the thorny question of federal legislation. It’s arcane, but there’s a belief among most of the basin states and the federal government that a legislative fix is needed to make DCP work, involving Interior’s authority to manage releases from Lake Mead during drought conditions. And OMG Congress, who wants to ask them to do an important thing right now? And if we do, should we tack on some other things that some of us have wanted to do Congressionally as well, as long as we’ve cracked open that pop-top?

But here’s the thing. Even though we don’t have DCP done, all the basin users are acting, operationally, like it’s a done deal. The states of the Lower Basin are leaving significant quantities of water in Lake Mead this year, kinda like if DCP was already in place. And, crucially, Nevada and Southern California seem to be presuming, in leaving that water in the lake, that the new rules for taking it out under drought conditions, embodied in DCP, will be in effect when they’re needed. Absent DCP, this would pose significant risk for them that they might not be able to get their water out of Lake Mead. This is a strong vote of confidence that DCP, while not done, soon will be.

Those salt cedars growing on Boulder Harbor’s mud flats are operating under the presumption that Lake Mead’s levels are stabilizing. Maybe it’s a vote of confidence in the DCP.

LAS VEGAS, NV – “Dry for Decades,” the tourist placard at Hoover Dam’s Nevada spillway says. “The last time the waters of the Colorado River flowed through this spillway was in 1983.”

On my way to this year’s annual meeting of the Colorado River Water Users Association, I spent some time yesterday at Hoover Dam and Lake Mead, the great reservoir that stores water for Las Vegas, central Arizona, Southern California, and Mexico.

The reservoir was at elevation 1,081.5 feet above sea level, which in another time would have set off alarm bells in the water management community. But in the years since 2010, when Mead first dropped into alarm bell territory, the sound of the warnings has become muted. In 2010, Mead in the low 1,080’s felt dire. But in the years since, for better or worse, the river management community has become accustomed to operating under the constraints of low reservoirs.

Colorado River water use, data USBR, graph by John Fleck, University of New Mexico Water Resources Program

The “for better” part of this is the increasingly sophisticated operations skill set, the juggling of levels between the various reservoirs on the Colorado River to keep the system operating, and the remarkable conservation success, especially in the Lower Basin, that has stabilized Mead’s levels in the 1,070’s to 1,080’s, at least for now. The latter is remarkable. Lower Basin use of Colorado River water – in Arizona, Nevada, and California – is on track to end the calendar year at 6.7 million acre feet, its lowest since 1986.

The “for worse” part of becoming accustomed to Lake Mead’s bathtub ring and the math that goes with it is the waning sense of urgency.

Policy happens in the hallways at CRWUA, which in this case was a striking conversation outside the elevators last night at Caesar’s Palace as a clog of basin water managers formed on their way to dinner, blocking the hallway so that every new water manager who walked past had no choice but to stop and join the conversation. I’m not a journalist any more, so I’ll happily leave the details unsaid – folks need space to work this stuff out, and I’m confident that they’re trying. But in general, the conversation included two key elements. The first was an enumeration of the various stumbling blocks in the way of a new Drought Contingency Plan, the almost-but-not-quite-done scheme to rejigger Colorado River water allocation and management in times of shortage. The basic terms of the deal have been set for two years, but there are a lot of niggling details.

Folks were very close a year ago at CRWUA to signing the deal. But then we had a reasonably wet winter, the big reservoirs rose a bit, and the pressure was off.

In the classic Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies, the political scientist John Kingdon describes how policy entrepreneurs work and refine their ideas, awaiting the convergence of problems and politics to open a window of opportunity. One example of how that might happen is when the problem gets bad enough – say, for example, a plummeting reservoir – that the issue rises onto the action agenda.

So it is not surprising that one of the questions that came up in the Caesar’s Palace hallway, outside the Palace Tower elevators, was the question of what would happen if we had a bad snowpack this winter. At that point, a Kingdon-style “policy window” will likely open. You could think of CRWUA as a gathering of the policy entrepreneurs, preparing for that moment.

Lake Mead is currently 39 percent full (or 61 percent empty, as one wag said in reply when I tweeted about this yesterday). Interesting to ponder what the trigger point is for action.