After more than seven months of fruitless negotiating over how to slash Colorado River water use, the seven river basin states' officials will now talk some more.
But while water officials for both Arizona and its fellow basin states and their adversary, California, express hopes of finding a negotiated settlement, many outside water experts are a lot less optimistic.
"We finished the first quarter. We didn’t reach agreement after the first quarter, but most of the game is still left," said Bill Hasencamp, Colorado River program manager for Southern California's Metropolitan Water District, adding,"It’s Super Bowl season and the Super Bowl is in Arizona." Four said said they think litigation is likely or will be difficult to avoid. Three others said they weren't sure —"50-50, could go either way," said one, University of New Mexico water researcher John Fleck.
"They'll sue, saying you have to follow the priority system," Porter said."I can even imagine cities bringing emergency actions to say that somehow public health and safety for their residents overrides" higher priority water rights. "This is too big to fail. It's like the banks. We can't fail. We have to face up to reality and get into some equilibrium and it's going to involve something different than what we've been doing," Megdal said.
All state officials agree the reservoirs could be virtually useless in a few years without quick action to stem the gap between water supply and demand. Both proposals seek computer modeling from Reclamation to analyze their impacts on the river and the general environment. The six-state proposal"gives us room to keep talking to California, to try to come up with something. It also could end up that California could adopt the six-state proposal; it leaves several different paths forward," Buschatzke said."It's going to be difficult to come up with an agreement with California. I’m committed to trying my best to make this happen.
“For over 20 years, Metropolitan has met the challenge of reducing our use of Colorado River water, and we are committed to doing more now," said its general manager Adel Hagekhalil."But we must do it in a way that does not harm half of the people who rely on the river — the 19 million people of Southern California."
"I think having numbers on the table is more helpful than having to guess what the other side may propose in the future," Koebele said."We actually have something concrete to negotiate from ... Everyone seems to realize that there’s a lot of room for discussions, changes in position. Those aspects make me feel optimistic."
The authority did this analysis so it would science-based, tied to the amount of water actually leaving the system, Entsminger said."This is physical reality. Whatever solution we come up with should be reality based." But author-researcher Eric Kuhn said he's not sure compromise can be found on this issue. One outcome of the prolonged Arizona v. California legal dispute over river rights in the 1960s — a dispute that otherwise was won by Arizona — was that a special master in the case classified evaporation as a limitation on the water supply, not on water use — an approach Kuhn said legally favors California and predominantly hurts users with lesser priorities such as Arizona.
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