When the highest stakes water negotiations in a century opened this fall, the largest, most powerful state — California — was represented by the youngest person at the table, a 27-year-old named John Brooks Hamby, who graduated from college barely four years ago.
Wyoming, the Cowboy State, is at the other end of the Colorado River from the Imperial Valley. Its Green River starts high on the western slopes of the Wind River Mountains, and as the largest tributary to the Colorado River, plays a major role in sending us water 1400 miles away.
The federal government is designating $4 billion from the Inflation Reduction Act for drought mitigation work in the Colorado River basin.
On Wednesday, the Department of the Interior announced that total, indicating that $500 million will go to efficiency upgrades in the river’s Upper Basin states of Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Wyoming. Another chunk of IRA money will be set aside for direct payments to farmers and ranchers to forgo water deliveries from Lake Mead in the river’s Lower Basin, primarily in Arizona and California. Federal officials are not specifying how much money will be available for that first round of payments.
CHEYENNE – For nearly a century, the Colorado River Compact has practically been seen as scripture for states from Wyoming all the way down to the Mexican border.
The compact – written in the years populations in the American Southwest first began to explode – has been the code by which life along the Colorado River Basin has been granted, a strict allocation of the snowmelt from the highest peaks of the Rocky Mountains to the Arizona desert and the parched reaches of the expansive fields of Southern California.
The Water News Network is San Diego County’s source for water news and information.
