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Of the current crop of one-liners about Bushite foreign
policy, my favorite is What is our oil doing under their
sand?
Closer to home, though, we've seen a similar
question about Arizona: What is our water doing on their
sand?
One Denver television station announced that water from
Colorado was greening lawns in Phoenix, where there was no
water rationing. Our governor then implied this was wrong.
But we ought to look at the Law of the River
before
dispatching the National Guard to get our water back from
those wastrels in the Grand Canyon State.
We can start with the Colorado Doctrine of Prior
Appropriation, which holds that the first party to divert
water to a beneficial use
has the first claim on
that water. If there's a shortage, then later users have to
quit using water until there's enough for those with prior
claims.
Extend that across state lines, and it could lead to trouble. That's what Coloradans were thinking 80 years ago. California was the most populous state in the West, and it had designs on the Colorado River.
If California diverted the river and put it to beneficial use, it would have senior water rights. California was be big enough to do this all on its own. Upstream states like Colorado were too poor to build their own water projects, and besides, they had no current need for the water.
Under the Doctrine of Prior Appropriation, though, the upstream states would just lose out if California got there first. So if they wanted to use the water someday, when they might have grown enough to need it, they needed a way around the Doctrine -- a way to reserve water for themselves without immediately putting it to beneficial use.
That was the impetus for the 1922 Colorado River Compact. The
river's watershed was divided into two basins, Upper and Lower, at Lee's Ferry, Ariz., which is a few miles downstream from the Glen Canyon Dam that came later. Each basin got half the water, then estimated at 15 million acre-feet a year. Colorado and Wyoming are Upper Basin; Nevada and California are Lower; Utah, New Mexico and Arizona have parts in both basins.
To keep things simple here, we'll assume all of Arizona is Lower Basin, which is close to the complicated truth. We'll also ignore any obligation to Mexico, and the fact that the average annual flow of the Colorado River is closer to 13 million acre-feet than 15 million.
The Upper Basin is obliged to deliver 7.5 million acre feet a year to the Lower, although this is an average -- the statutory duty is to deliver 75 million acre-feet in any given 10-year interval. After they make that delivery, the Upper Basin states can use the remaining water themselves -- Colorado has a right to 51.75 percent of the Upper Basin water, under a 1948 agreement.
Powell Reservoir, since it's just a few miles from Lee's Ferry, is a good place to check on deliveries. The 30-year average annual inflow to Powell is about 12 million acre-feet, even though the Upper Basin needs to deliver only 7.5 million.
But in 2000, the Upper Basin delivered only 7.4 million. The next year was dry, too: just 7 million. And last year, when the drought got serious, only 3 million acre-feet. Reservoir storage has helped us meet our obligations so far, but the reservoirs are low.
The downstream obligations remain even if there's a drought. So if this dry spell continues, Colorado and the other Upper Basin states could end up in legal trouble for failure to meet their delivery obligations.
Phoenix television stations might show Denverites in
swimming pools, or floaters on the Arkansas River, all
enjoying water diverted from the Colorado River basin on
the Western Slope, and ask Why are they playing in our
water?
Then the governor of Arizona might observe that
there's something wrong with an upstream state failing to
meet its sworn obligations.
Arizona is not a state to trifle with in these matters. It refused to ratify the Colorado River Compact until 1944. When California began building Parker Dam in 1935, across the Colorado where it forms the state line, Arizona sent its militia to halt construction. Arizona gets 2.8 million acre-feet a year -- 64 percent as much as California, which is much larger. Arizona's powerful congressional delegation delivered one of the juiciest pieces of federal pork: the $4 billion Central Arizona Project, designed to put some of Arizona's share of the Colorado River to beneficial use on the lawns of Phoenix.
So it's probably not a good idea for us to question what Arizona does with its 2.8 million acre-feet of Colorado River water. We can either shut up and meet our obligations, or start a new water war -- and if history is any guide, Arizona would win.
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