Episode 60: Colorado River Compact
“The cuts that we need to make now because the river basin is aridifying, are just so deep that it is really hard to get there! We are talking about needing to cut somewhere between 1.5 to 4.0 million acre-feet per year.”
“There is just not enough water for all the lawyers to be right. ”
A conversation with John Fleck (author, journalist, University of New Mexico) and Kathryn Sorenson (Senior Global Futures Scientist, Kyl Center for Water Policy, Arizona State University) about the Colorado River Compact. Released November 8, 2024.
guests on the show
Kathryn Sorenson
Dr. Kathryn Sorensen is the director of Research and a professor of practice at the School of Public Affairs at Arizona State University. She is also a Senior Global Futures Scientist with the Kyl Center for Water Policy and Morrison Institute for Public Policy at Arizona State University. Kathryn earned a PhD in Agricultural and Resource Economics from Texas A&M University and a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from the University of Michigan. In her professional career Kathryn significantly advanced the sustainable management of water resources in Arizona and the Colorado River basin. As Director of Phoenix Water Services she was responsible for the reliable delivery of safe, clean drinking water in a desert city of nearly 1.7 million inhabitants. She also oversaw the city’s wastewater collection system as well as wastewater treatment for approximately 2.5 million people in the Valley of the Sun. Prior to this, she served in the City of Mesa for many years as a water resource manager, in which position she led Mesa’s efforts in the Gila River Indian Community water rights settlement as well as the White Mountain Apache Tribe water rights settlement, and ultimately steered the water and wastewater utilities as director for four years.
Kathryn’s service in water management included positions as a governor-appointed Member of the Arizona Water Banking Authority Commission, Member of the Arizona Colorado River Reconsultation Committee, Member of the Board of Directors of the Water Research Foundation, Member of the State of Arizona’s Colorado River Steering Committee, Advisory Committee member of the Water Resources Research Center at the University of Arizona, Secretary of the Board of Directors of the Association of Metropolitan Water Agencies, Member of the Water & Health Advisory Council, Member of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Effective Utility Management Utility Leadership Group, as well as Member of the Rates and Charges Subcommittee of the American Water Works Association. She has provided numerous presentations on water resource issues at neighborhood, city, state, federal, and international levels, including testimony before the United States Senate on drought and water resilience.
John Fleck
John Fleck joined the Utton Center in fall 2021. He was director of the University of New Mexico Water Resources Program from 2016-2021, and has been affiliated with the University's water research and teaching programs since 2013. A former science journalist, Fleck spent more than two decades at the Albuquerque Journal, where he wrote about a range of political and policy-relevant science and environmental issues, from nuclear weapons and waste policy to climate change and water. He has written about water since the 1980s. An expert in Colorado River management and governance, he is a member of the Colorado River Research Group and has written two books on the river - Water is For Fighting Over (and Other Myths about Water in the West) and Science Be Dammed: How Ignoring Inconvenient Science Drained the Colorado River.