Senators Negotiate Unallocated Water Dispute Over Colorado River

COLORADO RIVER: Western senators negotiate unallocated water dispute

Tiffany Stecker, E&E reporter

Published: Thursday, July 7, 2016

Western lawmakers are wrangling over language in a comprehensive Western drought bill to manage water resources from the country’s largest reservoir.

At the heart is the decades-old tug of war between Arizona and California over Colorado River water. Levels have dropped to historic lows in its lower basin reservoir Lake Mead, largely because of the drought.

Irrigators, municipal water districts and federal regulators agreed in 2014 to conserve enough to add up to 3 million acre-feet of water to Lake Mead by the end of 2019. But the lack of legal certainty to keep that water has Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) worried.

“We’re concerned with the voluntary arrangements to store water at Lake Mead without having assurance that that water stays,” he told E&E Daily last month. “So we’ve been working with some of the irrigation districts and others and seeing if, short of legislation, we can get those assurances.”

The 1964 Supreme Court decree in Arizona v. California could allow the Interior Department to send unused water allocations to other states, said Flake spokeswoman Elizabeth Berry.

Interior is expected to send a letter to clarify how it could use this “system” water, but it has yet to do so. The department declined to comment on the timing of a letter.

This system water “is generally available to the entire basin rather than earmarked to a particular user,” said Bart Miller, director of the Healthy Rivers Program at Western Resource Advocates.

Flake is pushing to include language in S. 2902 that would require Interior to develop criteria on how to keep this water from flowing to one state.

“It’d be like having a savings account and seeing your neighbor being able to reach and grab money from it,” said Flake at a hearing last October to Deputy Interior Secretary Mike Connor.

But with a packed schedule before the long summer recess, a hearing on the issue may not happen until September, at the earliest. And Arizona is skeptical that California won’t hoard the water if there are no legal protections over it.

“For many, many years, when Arizona was not using all of its water, California was taking that unused water,” said Tom Buschatzke, director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources.

The Golden State was taking as much as 5.4 million acre-feet total per year, although its allocation under the Colorado River Compact is 4.4 million acre-feet — more than half of the total allocation for the Colorado River’s lower basin.

“Now we’re in a situation where Lake Mead is falling, continually falling, and we’ve taken extraordinary steps in Arizona … to try to conserve water in Lake Mead,” Buschatzke added.

Buschatzke said he would try to seek a letter from Interior every year in the absence of a legislative outcome.

Colorado River Board of California Executive Director Tanya Trujillo told the Arizona Daily Star in April that, “We don’t see the need for legislation. If [federal lawmakers move] forward with something that we object to, that would be problematic.”

There are ongoing discussions to find non-legislative alternatives, said Berry in Flake’s office, but an alternative path would have to involve the major water users in the lower basin, including irrigators in both Arizona and Colorado.

Reporter Debra Kahn contributed.