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Once I heard Hal Rothman talk about the tourist industry. Rothman, who died recently, wrote book about tourism in the West called Devil's Bargains, and he taught at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas.
Rothman agreed that Las Vegas was phony, artificial, superficial, gaudy, etc. Get used to it, all you people who live in 'authentic' places, because Las Vegas is the future. No matter where you are, if you need tourism, you're going to be like Las Vegas. Over time I've seen some truth in his prediction.
Last week, at the annual Colorado Water Workshop in Gunnison, I heard another forecast from Las Vegas: The Colorado River Compact will have to be overhauled.
This came from Patricia Mulroy, who heads the Southern Nevada Water Authority. That agency, formed in 1991, supplies water to the tip of Nevada, most notably Las Vegas.
One of her beefs with the Colorado River Compact is easy to understand, once you're familiar with the Law of the River.
It's a 1922 agreement among the seven states where the Colorado River flows, and it was the brainchild of a Colorado water lawyer, Delph Carpenter. He knew well the Colorado Doctrine of Prior Appropriation -- the first user to divert water to a beneficial use has the senior water right.
So if there's not enough water for everybody, the first claimant is the last one to lose his water. Junior rights lose their water first.
Carpenter saw that California was developing much more quickly than upstream states like Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, and Utah (the Upper Basin). So under prior appropriation, California might eventually claim most of the Colorado River.
Thus the Compact. The river's annual flow was estimated at 16 million acre-feet. The Upper Basin would have to deliver 7.5 million acre-feet to the Lower Basin (California, Arizona, and Nevada), and the Upper Basin states could keep the rest. Mexico later got some water, each basin providing half.
Each basin could later divvy up its share among states. In the Lower Basin, California got 4.4 million acre-feet, Arizona 2.8, and Nevada all of 300,000. In 1920, Nevada had 77,000 people, and most of them lived around Reno, a long way from the Colorado River.
Things have certainly changed in Nevada, Mulroy pointed out. Now Clark County, home of Las Vegas and close by the Colorado River, has more than 1.7 million residents, and 1,000 more move in ever week.
The seven water providers in Clark County fought with each other all the time, Mulroy said. Under use it or lose it, she said, we had Boulder City opening its hydrants to run water down the street while other places were banning all outside water use.
Under the 1991 Water Authority, we agreed to share our shortages, instead of going by who had the senior water rights. They have since done other things, such as paying people to rip up their water-guzzling lawns.
Such co-operation should spread throughout the Colorado River system, she said. The Compact is so segmented, divided into an artificial Upper and Lower Basin, then by states, everybody out for himself, nobody looking at the river as a whole. Why can't we just agree to share shortfalls all through the basin?
There were other indications that the Compact may need revision. Snowpacks melt sooner now, which changes storage options. The Compact assumed an average annual flow of 16 million acre-feet, and now it looks more like 13.5 million. Various Indian tribes are in the process of quantifying their senior water rights, which means more demand on a river that is already over-appropriated.
So while the Compact has worked reasonably well, it is 85 years old, and may be starting to show its age.
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