SALLY SPAULDING The Daily Sentinel | Posted: Tuesday, November 1, 2005 12:00 am
GRAND JUNCTION, Colo. (AP) - Some Colorado River experts worry a new federal process aimed at figuring out how to operate Lake Mead and Lake Powell in times of drought is being overly generous in its assumptions of how much water is available.
They caution the overestimate could cause problems in the future, echoing the mistake the West's water honchos made in the early 1920s when they divided up the river's water during a time of plenty.
Years after the 1922 Colorado River Compact, the document that divided the water among seven western states, officials discovered the allocation was much higher than the river's historical flow. The result was a serious water deficit that left water lawyers in the 21st century to figure out the mess.
"They knew they were overdeveloping the system back then, and they left us to deal with it," said Jim Lochhead, an attorney in Glenwood Springs who represents a group of Colorado cities and water districts in system discussions.
Officials with the Colorado River Water Conservation District don't want to repeat the past mistake.
The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation is working on a series of models that analyze a number of scenarios for operating Lake Powell and Lake Mead in tandem, eventually calculating how much water should be released from Lake Powell during dry spells to satisfy users downstream.
Feds hope the process will be completed by 2007, with the goal of minimizing water shortages to the Lower Basin states of California, Arizona and Nevada. The Upper Basin states of Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico also hope their water shortages will be minimal.
Eric Kuhn, general manager of the Colorado River Water Conservation District in Glenwood Springs, said the bureau's current modeling looks at the period from 1906 to 1995 to calculate the reservoir scenarios.
"The future may not look like the recent past," he said. "Using the entire 1906 to 1995 period understates the probabilities of shortage in today's current climate conditions."
Kuhn worries the bureau's hydrology could lead this round of Colorado River Compact negotiators down the same slippery slope their ancestors sent them hiking to, setting up even more problems for the future.
There's not enough worst-case scenario thinking, he said.
But the bottom line for Upper Basin states is that many of the operating scenarios put Lake Powell in the shallow end of the pool.
"A lot of options on the table right now benefit the Lower Basin, and most of them reduce water in Lake Powell," Kuhn said.
Some of the scenarios even bring water levels at the reservoir below minimum power pool, eliminating the ability to create hydropower at Glen Canyon Dam.
"It's one of the proposals on the table, but I don't know if it's serious," he said.
All seven basin states have agreed that strategies should be in place to delay the extent of water shortages to the Lower Basin during drought, but the Upper Basin doesn't want to increase its own risk in the process.
Hydropower, recreation on the popular Lake Powell and a host of side issues keep the process as complicated as ever.
As a result, discussions have become a tennis match of wish lists.
Scott Balcomb, the water attorney appointed by the governor to represent Colorado in the basin state discussions, said the basins were slowly working toward consensus.
"We're trying to process each other's issues, concerns and wishes," he said.
"Colorado wants to keep all of our water and learn to operate the system more efficiently."
The basin states have agreed to some vague ideas of how to minimize shortages on the system, pushing ideas such as conservation, tamarisk removal and the potential to exchange desalinated water into the Colorado River system.
But it's Nevada, a Lower Basin state, that has led the charge in generating wish lists, offering an array of unconventional ideas for solving its own water woes.
The state receives one of the smallest apportionments from the river, but Las Vegas, the main recipient of the water, has only enough water to continue its current rate of growth until 2013.
Pat Mulroy, Nevada's representative to the negotiations, has suggested diverting water from the Virgin and Muddy rivers east of Las Vegas to the city, but both rivers are tributaries to the Colorado River.
Colorado and the other Upper Basin states argue those rivers, and others like them in the Lower Basin, should be considered part of the Colorado River.
They contend that Lower Basin states are using the tributary water illegally when Upper Basin tributaries, such as the Gunnison River, already are calculated in Compact deliveries.
Colorado has threatened in the past to sue to bring tributary water in the Lower Basin into the Compact's jurisdiction.
Nevada presented the idea of diverting the Virgin and Muddy tributaries again during a meeting of the basin states in Denver on Friday.
"Nevada is pressing ahead on all of its options, including the Virgin and the Muddy," Balcomb said.
"They don't believe they have another choice."
Nevada did, however, back off a previous proposal to buy water from other states in the Upper Basin.
Utah has expressed an interest in the idea, but Colorado has remained vehemently opposed.
"Nevada knows that is one place we in Colorado will not go," Balcomb said.
"They know bringing up that concept again does not further any opportunities to truly discuss these new management scenarios."
For now, basin state representatives will continue to gather and peruse graph after graph of hydrological information, trying to come up with future reservoir operations from the Bureau's assumptions.
"It's a fairly complex process on a tight timetable," Lochhead said. "The issues are framed, but now is the hard part, talking about them."