This story, like many, starts with rejection.
Jose Gruenzweig grew up in the lush, green hills of Switzerland and studied the cold, wet forests of Alaska before settling into his current position as associate professor of Agriculture, Food and Environment at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
A few hundred farms in the southern tip of California, along the Mexican border, may hold the key to saving the drought-plagued Colorado River from collapse.
These farmers, in Imperial County, currently draw more water from the Colorado River than all of Arizona and Nevada combined. They inherited the legal right to use that water, but they’re now under pressure to give up some of it.
This summer, officials of the U.S. Interior Department gave seven states in the American West an ultimatum – either come up with a voluntary agreement to curtail their use of water from the Colorado River, or the federal government will impose mandatory restrictions. Lake Mead, the reservoir created by the Hoover Dam on the Colorado, is now at just 25% of its capacity.
I don’t see how this ends well.
Most of the major players – the ones that matter, anyway, by which I mean Arizona, California, and the federal government – appear boxed in by constraints they can’t seem to overcome, while the water in the Colorado River’s big reservoirs is circling the drains.
These days it can feel almost cliche to throw around the word “dystopian.” But it’s hard not to use it while standing on the narrow road crossing the Hoover Dam as tourists gawk at the hulking structure’s exposed columns that for decades were underwater.
Some members of Congress from Colorado and New Mexico are encouraging the Bureau of Reclamation to use new funding to find long-term solutions to the Western drought, and particularly the dwindling and overextended Colorado River.
In a letter to Camille Touton, commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation, the lawmakers shared their priorities for how the $4 billion in drought money from the Inflation Reduction Act should be used.
The Imperial Irrigation District board voted 3-0 Tuesday, Sept. 20 to save $24 million dollars by paying off the balance of the 2003 QSA JPA balance.
When the Quantification Settlement Agreement (QSA) was signed in 2003, creating the largest rural to urban water transfer, another agreement came from that, the Joint Powers Authority Creation and Funding Agreement. The funds contributed to this second agreement would come from the three water districts involved in the QSA – the IID, the Coachella Valley Water District and the San Diego County Water Authority – along with the State of California.
The city of Tucson has agreed to cut back the amount of water it takes from the Colorado River over the next year and possibly longer. The deal comes with compensation from the federal government.
Late last year the Bureau of Reclamation, which manages the Lake Mead reservoir, offered customers the chance to get paid for not taking their full share of Colorado River water.
It’s human nature to mark big-number anniversaries, but there’s a centennial looming just ahead that Californians — and other Westerners — might not want to celebrate.
It’s the 100th anniversary of the Colorado River Compact, a seven-state agreement that was signed Nov. 24, 1922.
A top Centennial State official warned Colorado River Basin states that the system’s federal reservoirs could effectively empty in a few short years barring aggressive reductions to water demands.
Colorado River Water Conservation District General Manager Andy Mueller painted a bleak future for the basin’s seven states — Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming — on Friday, during his organization’s annual conference in Grand Junction, Colo., on the river’s future.
