Western Leaders Have Failed The Colorado River

Western leaders, from governors and state representatives to unelected bureaucrats manning water conservancy districts, to federal officials, have utterly failed the American people with their lack of leadership and vision while managing the Colorado River.

I’m no expert in water right laws, hydrology, or the complex systems that collect, treat, and distribute water to our homes and fields. I’m a former schoolteacher-turned-podcast host who’s increasingly leery of government authority, and someone who spends quite a bit of time fly fishing.

I grew up in the Great Basin in Utah, but most of my fly fishing has occurred within the Colorado River Basin (or in water diverted from it to supply Utah’s Wasatch Front). I remember winters when the school buses got stuck, honest-to-goodness snow days, and a few where we got rain on Christmas Day instead of snow.

What I don’t remember is anyone, in any position of leadership authority or power, ever presenting a realistic idea of how to manage water in a landscape that never seems to have enough of it. Politicians either stick up for the farmers and ranchers, who tend to have the oldest, most senior water rights in every drainage, or developers, who think an empty Rocky Mountain valley is an abomination, and the view would only be improved with cookie-cutter high-density housing. Even where water is concerned—you know, the stuff we can’t live without—politicians never seem to look past the impact to their bank account.

If any Western leaders understand the severity of the water crisis, they haven’t been successful in convincing anyone else that this issue needs to be handled immediately. And this isn’t just some fly angler playing the part of Chicken Little. Numerous reports and studies back up the fact that we’re essentially out of time to help the Colorado River Basin.

The most recent study from Colorado Law paints a stark picture: reservoirs in the Basin that once stored four years’ worth of river flows are two-thirds empty, which means that a single dry year could impact hydropower generation, water deliveries, and even impact water physically flowing down the Colorado River.

The study’s authors don’t pain a doom-and-gloom picture, however. They see solutions on the horizon if Western leaders are motivated by enough urgency.

“Authors stress that many challenges are self-inflicted and, in their view, solvable with technical, legal, and financial tools already available,” reports Amy Joi O’Donoghue with the Deseret News. 

Imagine that. Self-inflicted problems that we could fix if only there was urgency to do so? Isn’t running out of water enough of a cataclysmic situation to force leaders into action?

Right now, that doesn’t appear to be the case, thanks largely to interstate bickering and political differences the size of the Grand Canyon.

The Colorado River Basin is generally divided into two groups—Upper and Lower Basin states. Upper Basin states include Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico. The Lower Basin states are California, Arizona, and Nevada. Each state depends on water in the Colorado River Basin, and since the 1,450-mile long river serves roughly 40 million people, they’ve been governed by a century-old water compact. Under the compact, the Upper Basin states are required to send 7.5 million acre-feet of water downstream to the Lower Basin each year. Throughout the history of the compact, Upper Basin states have never failed to deliver on their end of the bargain.

That water then ends up in Lakes Powell and Mead, the nation’s two largest reservoirs, and diverted for use to California’s Imperial Valley and other residential and agricultural areas that have a claim to the Colorado River.

Lower Basin states often accuse Upper Basin states of not doing enough to conserve water, as California’s Colorado River Commissioner JB Hamby said in a recent meeting among water officials in Las Vegas.

“There’s no difference in size between the lower basin and the upper basin’s water use. What the difference is, is a willingness to actually conserve water, not put more to use, and further drain the river,” Hamby told 8 News Now.

Upper Basin states claim there isn’t any water left to cut, with Wyoming’s State Engineer Brandon Gebhart telling 8 News Now that “the rhetoric, the saber-rattling, and other distractions going on are bullshit. It needs to stop.”

And these are the people we’re dependent on to ensure there’s not only enough water in the Colorado River Basin to support humanity, but ideally, enough for fly fishing in the region to not become a thing of the past.

Call me crazy, but I don’t have high hopes these folks will get anything meaningful accomplished. Most likely, they’ll end up in court, where federal officials who’ve likely spent little time in the West will determine the fate of the Basin.