John McCain proved to be a uniter not a divider with his suggestion that the 1922 Colorado River com- pact be renegotiated to allocate more water to his home state of Arizona as well as Nevada and California.
McCain’s comments in an interview with Charles Ashby of the Pueblo Chieftain united practically every political figure in Colorado, regardless of party, to denounce the GOP presidential candidate’s proposal.
“Over my dead body,” snapped Colorado Democratic Sen. Ken Salazar.
“Over my cold, dead, political carcass,” echoed Republican U.S. Senate candidate Bob Schaffer.
“On this issue, [McCain] couldn’t be more wrong,” Democratic Senate candidate Mark Udall said.
In fairness to McCain, he did tell Ashby, “I’m not saying that anyone would be forced to do anything because I’m a federalist and believe in the rights of states. But at the same time there’s already been discussion amongst the states, and I believe that more discussion amongst the governors is probably something that everybody wants us to do.”
Well, not “everybody.” Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter quickly disagreed, noting, “Just last year, the seven states entered into a new implementing agreement, and that agreement is working as intended. It would be sheer folly to re-open the compact at a time like this when all of the states are working cooperatively on this issue.”
As Ritter acknowledged, the 86-year-old compact has developed problems — but not in a manner that suggests Colorado and its three upper-basin sisters, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico, should give more of their dwindling allotments to the lower-basin states.
The original idea of the compact was to roughly split the river’s flow — originally thought to average about 15 million acre-feet a year — between the upper-basin states, whose snowmelts feed the river, and the lower-basin states. The upper basin states, relying on a 10-year hydrology study during which the river averaged 16.4 million acre-feet a year, opted to guarantee delivery of 7.5 million acre-feet to the lower-basin states and keep any water left over for themselves. They’ve regretted that decision for many decades because the 10-year study period turned out to be much wetter than the river’s average yield since 1922.
And in recent years, the Colorado’s flow is getting even sparser. Some scientists argue that global climate change is drying up the river; others argue that the basin is simply entering another of its periodic drought cycles. But all camps agree the river is producing less and the problem is likely to get worse — meaning still less water in the future for Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico.
The river’s reduced yield was what prompted former Interior Secretary Gale Norton to begin the review that led to the implementation agreement cited by Ritter. Far from allocating more water to the lower basin states, the new pact requires them — especially California — to start living within their allotments under the compact.
The new rules recognize that Arizona, Nevada and California have benefitted from extra water in the past in wet years because Colorado and its neighbors didn’t have enough reservoirs to store all their allotments. Such surpluses are unlikely to recur in the future.
McCain’s comments were thus not only political poison in Colorado, they displayed a disturbing ignorance of the realities of the West’s scarce water resources.
To say Westerners are disappointed in McCain would be an understatement. For the first time since Barry Goldwater’s and George McGovern’s 1964 and 1972 disasters, we finally get a son of the Rocky Mountain states running for president. And on the region’s most vital issue — water — McCain unthinkingly mumbles the same parochial tripe he doubtless delivered dozens of times to rave reviews at luncheons of the Phoenix Rotary Club.
