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 Sorensen
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.
TRANSCRIPT
Faith Kearns
Welcome to Water Talk. This week, we're going to be talking with John Fleck, who is at the University of New Mexico, who I'm certain many of our listeners already know, and Kathryn Sorensen, who is a colleague of mine at ASU. John and Kathryn are actually longtime collaborators, and I'm really excited to learn from their expertise and delve into a more, I guess, holistic view of the Colorado River, not quite so focused on the California side, but really on the entire Colorado River system all the way to Mexico. So Mallika, Sam, what are you guys looking forward to today?
Mallika Nocco
I'm just really excited to continue the conversation that we started last week about compacts, and to kind of have this comparative frame, right? Like, one of the things I've been thinking a lot about is the Great Lakes Compact that we talked about last week. That compact was formed in 2008 right? So that's pretty recent. So when we had that conversation with Professor Salim, he was mentioning a lot about how the science was actually pretty good that went into it at that point, and we were talking about some of the issues around allocation and just the amounts and how that compared to what we're going to talk about today, which is the Colorado River Compact, which is 1922 so over 100 years ago. And if you think about just how the science of water has changed, Sam, I know you call yourself as a scientist, a water accountant. I think that the science of water accounting has changed a lot over the last 100 years. And just even our concept of climate change and all of this stuff is really different and interesting to think about.
Sam Sandoval
Yeah, similar here. I'm really excited talking with John Fleck and Kathryn Sorensen. A huge admirer of both of them and their work, I do agree. I think that I really like both of them, they always when they are talking, they talk about the nine states, so the seven states, plus the two in Mexico, and then the other one that they are now thinking about, which is the First Nations conversation. I also think that as going in this bigger scale, I'm really glad that we're talking with two people that know the Colorado River locally, that knows the ins and outs that actually have been in the place, and that more than criticizing on pointing out some of these deficiencies as I was talking that the Colorado River is over allocated, they are proposing and ways to move forward.
I think that is extremely important, and the work that they are doing on the post 2026 document of the Colorado River and the United States, I think is an interesting document that not not only highlights the shortfalls, but how to move forward. And the reality is that as all of us, we are thinking climate change is here, like, don't we don't have to wait. It is already here. And they are calling for being more responsible that the nine states, and including the First Nations, to be more responsible in terms of acknowledging that there is no not not enough water there, and how we're going to reduce our water use. And that one, those are really difficult conversations for everyone, because no one wants to leave a drop of water on the table.
Faith Kearns
I think that's an interesting spot to get into the conversation because Mallika started talking about the history of the Colorado River Compact, and Sam ended on the note of where are we headed with all of this? And certainly the politics on the Colorado River are evolving and changing every day. There's been some really interesting changes in terms of the way the upper basin and the lower basin are collaborating and coming together in very different ways than they were even a short time ago. So let's go ahead and get into our conversation with John and Kathryn.
Welcome to Water Talk. For today's episode, we're talking with two of the foremost experts on the Colorado River. John Fleck is a longtime Western journalist turned academic at the University of New Mexico. John is the author of the critically acclaimed book, Water is for Fighting Over and Other Myths about Water in the West and co-authored Science be Dammed: How Ignoring Inconvenient Science Drained the Colorado River with Eric Kuhn. Dr Kathryn Sorensen is the director of research for the Kyl Center for Water Policy and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. Kathryn is trained in ag and resource economics, and while currently in academia, she spent much of her career as a practitioner, including at the as the director of Phoenix Water Services. Welcome John and Kathryn, we're so happy to have you on Water Talk.
John Fleck
Thanks for having us.
Kathryn Sorensen
Yeah, super excited.
Faith Kearns
Awesome. Thank you. So just to start, I've given pretty bare bones intros for both of you, given your very hard earned expertise and years at this. So we would love to hear more about your backgrounds and kind of what led you to where you are today. So let's start with you, Kathryn.
Kathryn Sorensen
What led me here? I'm from Arizona, so I think growing up, I just understood how important water was. As a senior in high school, I took a course in economics, and I just fell in love and knew I would be an economist, and for me, it was pretty easy to connect to water and economics. I studied the economics of water as an undergraduate, and then, of course, in graduate school, and made it my dissertation. And I really lived in this world ever since, never looked back, loved every second.
Faith Kearns
And how about you, John, can you talk just a little bit about your background and where you are now?
John Fleck
So I spent much of my life as a newspaper journalist, and when I was working, originally in Southern California, was covering a municipal government city of Pasadena, and the city government had a water department, and I thought, well, that's kind of interesting. Wonder where all the water comes from. And one of the things that I realized right away as I tried to understand and explain Pasadena's water is that thinking about water is a way to start thinking about a community as a whole. Because one of the first things communities have to do to be a community is solve the collective action problems around water.
And so as a journalist trying to understand communities, I realized I could always start with the water and I spent most of my life in New Mexico, but water was always in the background as a thing that I wanted to write about. And then this connects up to the story of how Kathryn and I got to know one another, because I was writing for newspapers, and I was also blogging, you know, a very active blogger, because that’s what I know how to do, you know, I just have my words and I write in public. That's a characteristic of academics, but also journalists.
I was writing this blog, and one day I was at the Water Resources Program at the University, and there's little sticky note on my door when I came in, that someone named Kathryn Sorensen had called the Water Resources Program and wanted to talk to me. I'd written something about water in Phoenix, and Kathryn had called and tracked me down, and that that was the start of a long and fast friendship as Kathryn helped me understand Arizona water, the Colorado River, but also the challenges of being a municipal water manager, keeping the taps flowing for a city of a million and a half people, which is just a fascinating challenge.
Faith Kearns
I'm going to switch into the nominally the main topic of our conversation today, which is the Colorado River. Obviously, it's hard to jump in with a single episode, but I know, John, you've spent a lot of time thinking about this, obviously, written a couple books about it. So could you talk to us, maybe, about, I don't even know if this is the right number, sort of like the top three events that led us in where we are in the Colorado River Basin these days?
John Fleck
Yeah, so it's, it's actually a really great question and I'm going to be fuzzy about how we define event, right? But one of the things that interests me in my work, which is an underlying motivation for both of the books that I've written, is the evolution of the policies, the evolution of the rule sets. You know what the Nobel laureate Eleanor Ostrom would call institutions. By institutions, we don't mean government agencies. We're talking about the rules that we make as communities to govern our shared use of a resource, and then how we make those rules, and then how those rules change and evolve over time in response to changing communities and community values and changing resources.
And there's really sort of three, I think, events. In the 1920s we did two things, and I'm going to call them a single event. And it was the negotiation of the Colorado River Compact in 1922 which was seven US States coming together to try to negotiate a shared agreement around the Colorado River. It was a year of negotiations, a very difficult and complex process to lay out. A sort of foundational set of rules that we all could agree on. And then a period of six years that followed, that culminated in action by Congress to authorize the Boulder Canyon project, the Boulder Canyon Project Act, and those two things collectively became the foundational rules that needed to exist before we could have government agencies do things, build stuff, dams, canals, to do things that sort of fundamentally changed the landscape of the western United States.
And it's fascinating in studying and writing about the history of this to think about nobody had ever really thought at this scale before trying to manage a large river at the scale of an entire basin, because we didn't have the capability to act at that scale, we wrote the rules, and then they didn't work very well, as often happens with this rule writing process, and they culminated in the second event, which was a really important lawsuit filed by the state of Arizona against the state of California, but it really invoked much larger questions about how the rules worked.
And this came about because we were unable to come to agreement among ourselves about how to change the rules, and we handed the responsibility off to the courts, to the US Supreme Court Arizona versus California, Supreme Court decision in the early 1960s which in many ways was a terrible, ham handed, frustrating decision that caused us decades of problems going forward, because we couldn't work it out ourselves. We asked somebody else to write rules for us. They didn't do a great job.
The third event is a very personal one for me. It was in the spring of 2022 and I was actually on a bike ride out of Moab in Colorado, down the old potash mine road. It's a paved road that follows the Colorado River. You know, long day by myself on vacation before I headed into a water conference. And this is the place where the Colorado river enters the Canyon Country before it's heading into Glen Canyon Dam and Powell. And just as I was about to lose cell service, I got a text from a friend of mine who had been in the operating room at Glen Canyon Dam when the elevation of Lake Powell dropped below elevation, 3525 feet above sea level. And that was sort of a marker for all of us. That was a level that we thought we would never have to go below. And it was a realization that the rules were failing us.
And so it's sort of three events that I've laid out here, rules that have been enormously successful in many ways we've built the West, but ultimately have not proven adaptable enough to deal with the modern realities of climate change.
Kathryn Sorensen
I'm gonna add to that with maybe a slightly different take. I'm gonna add that in 1944 the United States entered into a treaty with Mexico for the delivery of 1.5 million acre feet of water from the Colorado River to Mexico. And we talk a lot about priorities on the Colorado River, who has the highest, who has the lowest, who gets cut in terms of shortage and all of those things. But I think it's really important to keep in mind that, because this is an international treaty, Mexico actually has the highest priority on the river system.
And one of the issues with that treaty is that it did not really detail or account for the fact that there are evaporative losses from the Colorado River system, and it assigns none of those losses to the Republic of Mexico. And so that was, I think, also a major kind of issue or point in time that got us to where we are today.
I would also add in 1968, a year of both celebration and infamy for the state of Arizona, that Arizona successfully managed to get federal authorization to build the Central Arizona Project Canal, which is the canal that imports Colorado River water from the main stem in western Arizona into central Arizona, into the Phoenix, Tucson urban corridor. So for that reason, there was celebration, but it was also a day of infamy for us, because the price that California extracted from Arizona in Congress was that the water imported through that canal would be cut first in times of shortage before water that California and western Arizona uses is cut in times of shortage.
And what that has meant is that tribes, cities, power companies, mining companies in central Arizona have Colorado River water access, but it's lower in priority than pretty much everyone else in this system. And so I think that's also a really big marker in terms of what got us here, where we are today.
But then my third thing is what you might call mega drought, or aridification. So we know that over the last 20 odd years we have experienced not just a drought, but basically the worst drought in the last 1200 years, according to the people who measure these things with tree rings. So it's not just a drought, it's a super, super bad drought. And scientists are telling us that the whole river basin is just drying up, right? It’s aridifying. And so it's one thing to combat a drought, reservoirs are built for that purpose. They store water when there's lots of snow pack and precipitation, and then you drain those reservoirs during dry years. We've just been handed this really, really difficult 20 year period by mother nature, and no one knows if it's going to be another 20 years, another two or another 100.
Faith Kearns
Yeah, it's very interesting to hear the differences in your answers, and I think that probably is a more robust accounting of things. And what really struck me, honestly, John, was in the beginning when you said that nothing like that had been tried at that scale before. And just thinking about the fact that Arizona had just become a state, honestly, in 1912 right? Arizona, I think, became a state in 1912 if I have my eighth grade Arizona history, right? So, you know, to have that kind of, I guess, that large scale agreement set up, or that compact set up so early in the history, really, of the entire western United States, is really kind of a sobering fact to think about.
John Fleck
Yeah, and it should be not surprising that the rules didn't quite work like, how could you possibly think this far in the future, you know? And how could we possibly have written rules? Because Kathryn's absolutely right about the climate that has now been handed us. You know, Eric Kuhn, a mutual friend of Kathryn's and mine, likes to say that those rules were written for a different river and how we adapt to that change is crucial.
Kathryn Sorensen
But I also want to say, you know, in support of the rules, I do fundamentally agree with John, but the rules have been surprisingly successful in that here we are. There are still seven states. There's still the Republic of Mexico. You know, this river is still able to support massive amounts of agricultural industry, you know, all of these disparate uses. We're definitely at a point of real difficulty, and it will be interesting to see how the rules are changed to deal with that.
But I think it's super important to understand that whole economies are built on these rules. And so there are a lot of people out there who will say things like, well, let's get rid of prior appropriation. Or, you know, let's throw things out wholesale. I just don't think they understand exactly what that really entails. Certainly, change is necessary in the Colorado River Basin, but we need to be careful about understanding what those types of wholesale changes might really entail. And I think John would agree with that. I hope.
John Fleck
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Faith Kearns
Thank you both for that. And I guess just, jumping a little bit from the history, so to speak, and into thinking a little bit about the future I think maybe both of you address this idea of the post 2026 river operations, and where we're headed at this point. I feel like you can read a news article about the Colorado River every day, and so trying to really keep up with what's going on is a challenge. And I'm just thinking, I've more recently learned a little bit about this, just this shifting politics of Colorado or Arizona versus California, and now sort of it sounds like this shift between the upper basin and the lower basin. And, yeah, just sort of thinking, what is the outlook as we move into what I assume is a fairly important 2026 date.
Kathryn Sorensen
So the operations of lakes Powell and Mead, they're operated conjunctively, and they're operated under a 20 year agreement that is about to expire. And that's really important. When we say the operation of the lakes, what we really are talking about is the levels at which those reservoirs are held for recreational purposes, for water supply purposes, for hydro power purposes, for all sorts of purposes. And we're talking about the levels at which involuntary shortages will be assessed in the lower basin, primarily against, like I said, the urban corridor of Phoenix and Tucson, but some others as well.
So when we talk about the expiration of these operating guidelines, we're talking about the expiration of all the really, really important rules that govern pretty much everything on this river system. So it's a super big deal. And the problem is that there just is no agreement about what those rules are going to look like post 2026. There is some agreement in the lower basin that there is what we call structural deficit, meaning that the water uses in the lower basin are oversubscribed, that we're using too much. And there has been some agreement, not total, but some agreement in the lower basin that the lower basin needs to deal with that and cut uses.
Beyond that, there is no agreement between the upper basin states of Utah, New Mexico, Wyoming and Colorado, and the lower basin states of Arizona, Nevada and California. And then, of course, Mexico is in the mix, not to mention 30 tribes. So the federal government has been going through a required process under NEPA, the national environmental laws, to scope out and do an environmental assessment of what different alternatives for operation might look like. But of course, it's an election season, and no one wants to show their hand right before a major presidential election, so we won't see what that scoping report even looks like until after the election. And I presume, could be wrong, that the federal government will present such a broad array of options that it really won't hint very well at what the federal government might be thinking in terms of post 2026 operations. And I'll stop and see what John has to say about that.
John Fleck
In my academic career, which is not terribly academic, because I'm mostly a journalist, this is a moment where I really wish I understood game theory better, right? Where you've got complicated negotiation patterns involving different players with different interests. And I mean, Kathryn laid out the challenges really nicely. And the bottom line is that right now, the status of the negotiations is that lots of people are afraid to offer solutions that require them to give up water. All of them have a lawyer that says, well, if we end up in court, we're not going to probably have to give the water and probably win. And you know, to quote a line that I've used myself in several different things I've written, there's just not enough water for all the lawyers to be right, and so we kind of don't know where we're at as a result.
Kathryn Sorensen
I think that's very much true, and it's interesting. I do think that one of the reasons that up until now, the seven states, the Republic of Mexico, the tribes, everyone has been able to come together and come up with solutions, is that the lift to date has not been quite so extreme as lift is now. And by that, I mean, you know, in the past, we had to make some amount of cuts to help the river system, but the level of cuts that we need to make now, because the river basin is aridifying. The level of cuts is just so deep that it's really hard to get there. We're talking about needing to cut somewhere between one and a half million acre feet of water per year to as much as 4 million acre feet of water per year. And to put that in perspective. You know, the entire lower basin is entitled to seven and a half million acre feet of water. So, I mean, it's just such a big amount of water that really creates a huge obstacle to coming forward with solutions.
John Fleck
When I wrote my book, Water is for Fighting Over, it was an optimistic book. It's a book that chronicles the processes of coming together collectively to agree to use less water and to collaboratively share the river. And you know, I documented how we had done this again and again over time, and I documented how communities had successfully used less water and still thrived. And I projected that into the future. In that book, you know, I went out on a limb and said, look, I think we can do this. And when the book came out, I was, you know, it was sort of a novelty. Oh, my God, someone has written an optimistic book about the Colorado River. What's up with that? And they would invite me to conferences and speak.
You know, I was on the speaking circuit at water conferences for the next year, and I would get up there and give my optimistic spiel, and then one of the climate scientists would get up and would offer the sort of dire possibilities. And the dire possibilities were, well, maybe it'll be this bad, meaning some more cuts needed, and maybe it'll be a lot bad. And I would sort of have my head in my hands at that point and think, well, if it's a little bad, what I'm writing about can can deal with that, but for the reasons that Kathryn explained, it's a lot worse, and it's not clear that the water sharing mechanisms,
Kathryn Sorensen
And for perspective, you know, it's one thing to cut 20% of your water use, right? You can pull from efficiencies of the major cities of the basin, for the most part, have done that. I know in the city of Phoenix, just as an example, per capita water use has fallen basically 30% over 20 years, right? I know every city in the basin can claim a similar statistic. A lot of the irrigation districts you know have done similar things. But when you've done the 20% and then someone turns around and says, okay, now give me 50% more, right? It's just a very different problem. And I think that's where we're at, and that's that's really difficult to confront.
Sam Sandoval
I think that is difficult because it may be just on the shoulders of a few, or if you spread that load throughout the different stakeholders. I mean, don't get me wrong, it is painful, but you're spreading it out, rather than on the few, and going back to John, like, who is in charge, and figuring out the law of the river. And I think I'm really glad that the two of you always talked about the seven states, plus the Republic of Mexico, plus 30 tribes and and I think really speaks of the basin wide approach that you do so in terms of disenfranchised groups. I'm not sure if it is the First Nations, the tribes or Mexico, but could you talk about where you see some of the challenges that remain in getting the full participation during the decision making process by groups that have not been typically included?
John Fleck
So I'll start, and then I know this is something that Kathryn actually from her perspective, in Arizona, has thought a lot about in some really useful ways as well, but I want to start broadly, because I think one of the really important things that has happened in the last 20 or 25 years is the creation of an institutional framework. And by institutions, I mean both the rules, but also the informal norms that have expanded the discussion to include the Republic of Mexico, so that where, you know, there was a period of time in the late 90s, in the early 2000s that I wrote about in my book, where Mexico was ignored in a way that became extremely problematic with some actions that we were taking on the US side of the border and the California Mexico border.
But, this has happened before, going back to the 50s and 60s, with a crisis where we were delivering highly saline water, and we seem to have emerged from that with a structure of both governance, but also informal norms that it's now expected that as we try to negotiate these changes, the Republic of Mexico will be included, and I feel better about that from from my side of the border, looking down at that process.
The tribes are a more complicated issue, and we've made enormous progress. And when I say we've made, I think the tribes as sovereigns have insisted on a place at the table, and we now see some really hopeful rhetoric about the need for the tribes to have that place at the table, but we're not seeing that turned into reality in the process yet. And there's constant, two steps forward, one step back, as we look at this in part because of, you know, the issues that that Kathryn talked about, how hard it is for water users to realize they're going to have to cut even more because, to the extent that we really take seriously our obligation to the tribes, then the existing water users have to cut even more to honor the tribal water rights.
Kathryn Sorensen
It is super complex. There is a lot of focus on this fabled table, right? Who's at the table, who isn't, who's invited, who isn't, where do these meetings take place? And I think that is healthy and productive, but I think it's probably more productive to focus less on the table and more on okay, but who wields influence? Because those two things are not necessarily the same. They often are, but not exclusively.
And case in point, there are tribes that wield enormous influence on the river basin by nature of the seniority and size of their water rights or by nature of their own tribal governance structure and the actions that they've taken. So to me, what matters is who is influencing the decision. And I will tell you that the table is so small that even the cities of the Colorado River Basin are, for the most part, not included. There are major exceptions to that, but particularly in California, I think the cities wield, you know, more power at the table.
But you know, that was long a frustration of the city of Phoenix as an example. So you know, the fifth largest city in the country, the largest city in Arizona is the state capital. Does not have a place at the table, and they are actually the entity providing tap water to 1.7 million people. So let that sink in. But what matters is okay, are these entities able to wield influence? And there are different ways of doing that, some successful, some not.
But I also think it's important to understand that, you know, when you're talking about 30 tribes, you know, all the major cities of the basin, all the major agricultural producers, you know, all the different stakeholders who are all important, right? Every single one of them. If you had a table that held all of them, there would just be too many people. It's just you can't conduct negotiations in that style. So I think by its nature, it's going to be a messy process no matter what. But it is important that we give voices to those who have been disenfranchised in the past. To those you know who have not been able to exert the influence.
Mallika Nocco
Thank you for that. And kind of related to this issue of how governance is happening, we've talked quite a bit already about climate change and aridification, and you mentioned the amount of reductions that we need to see, and just their scope is so vast to me to consider, how do we get to those numbers? What's the path? If the path isn't what we thought the path was 10 years ago, what is the path for achieving the reductions in this aridifying climate? Or if you have ideas for what that might end up looking like, or what it needs to look like?
John Fleck
I want to start with talking a little bit about the science itself and how the science has been used in policy making. You know, Eric Kuhn and I wrote a book, Science be Dammed. And that title, “how ignoring inconvenient science” is really important, because we documented a process over much of a century of people making political decisions that were made easier when they ignored the science that said there would be less water. And they were able to do it because the basin was still developing and we had not yet maxed out our ability to use the water. So they got away with it over and over again, just kicking the can down the road.
Sometime around the late 90s or early 2000s the hydrologic reality collided with the fact that we finally had developed all the dams and canals and pumping stations to begin really using all the water that was allocated over the previous century's rules. And the reality began sinking in in the early 2000s and one of the important things is that I think now the people in charge of the basin are doing a much better job of taking the science seriously, and I think that's one of the reasons that the political decisions are so much harder. It would be easy for us to pretend, yeah, it'll get wetter again. Let's just not worry about this. We're not doing that, which is good, and the decisions are really, really hard as a result.
Kathryn Sorensen
I agree 100% with that. And taking a step back there, there's really only two things that you can do to get to the numbers that we need to get to, and that's voluntary cuts that usually means someone gets paid to not use water. That is a mechanism that we deploy at scale right now. A lot of the drought contingency plan, which was put into place in 2019, when John got that text as he was riding his bike, and it looked like things were going downhill really fast. You know, a lot of the mechanisms that we put in place in the drought contingency plan are just that like, let me just, you know, pay you to use less water, and that's great, because there are actually people who are willing to be paid not to use water, tribes, agricultural districts, cities, others. So that's wonderful. But the problem is, of course, money is not always plentiful, and so it's uncertain.
The other path that you can take are involuntary cuts, and you know, you can imagine how politically painful involuntary cuts are. To date, Arizona, of course, has taken the vast majority of the involuntary cuts because of that infamous year, 1968, and central Arizona's lower priority on the system.
What that might look like post 2026 I think, is really up for grabs, but that is a major issue. You know, all the other states and the Republic of Mexico, I get it, they love to point their fingers and say, well, sorry, central Arizona, you know, you took that deal in 1968 you have the lowest priority. It's all on you. But that means cutting off water to the tribes in central Arizona that rely on that water. And like I mentioned, to the nation's, you know, fifth largest city, and to some other, you know, very important uses. And so it's easy to fall back on that thinking, I think implementing it in reality is going to be a very different thing. So, where this combination of voluntary and involuntary cuts comes from, you know, I don't know, but that's how you got to get there. There really is not another alternative.
Sam Sandoval
Following on that. I mean, these are incredible challenges to surpass. A lot of this, all of a sudden becomes a conversation of not only water and water amounts, but also values, moral values on those I don't know. I always think that in water it is not an individual properties a shared resource. And that one opened the doors of what you're mentioning, Kathryn. Like, why should we also only have the burden of the short end of the stick, not having water or distributing it? So I don't know. I think here definitely we're not short of challenges. But what are some of the biggest challenges that you see in the Colorado River? And going back to John's optimism, where do you see the possibilities? Where do you see where we can make some good progress?
Kathryn Sorensen
Okay, John is being really quiet. That's because this is hard. I'm optimistic because you have a group of people who care so deeply about this river system, and not just for its uses, for growing crops or delivering drinking water to cities or to environmental uses, but as a flowing, you know, living thing. I think that is a shared value among all the stakeholders of the basin. So that gives me optimism. And I think everyone has the best of intentions. I think money solves a lot of problems, but then we have to figure out how to make sure the money is secure and there when we need it.
John Fleck
This is a question of values, and so, you know, there's no a priori way to argue for the correct set of values, but I think it's really important for me to state mine and my moral and ethical guiding principle, as I think about the governance of the Colorado River, that I try to argue for and influence, is a belief that every single community within the Colorado River Basin is of value and has a right to continue to exist. That's my personal set of values. Because a lot of the argument is turning now as people get mad at one another into an us versus them kind of argument, and people are trying to stake out a legal position where the other people have to make all the cuts.
We share this space. You know, seven states in the United States, two in Mexico. We all are here now. I believe it is possible to approach the task of responding to the reality of climate change and adapting to climate change in a way that shares the burden across communities, because I believe that every single community in this basin can continue to exist and can continue to thrive with less water than it's now using.
I would prefer that my community of Albuquerque be as green as it can be, right? Because that's what we're using the water for, is to be green, whether it's the pastures, whether it's the alfalfa fields down in the valley, whether it's the trees in my neighborhood, there will be less green stuff all over across the Colorado River Basin. But if we manage it mindfully and collaboratively, everybody can kind of scale back and approach the adaptation to climate change collectively. And this sounds really Pollyanna-ish, and I often don't see how we get from here to there, but that is my value, and that is my goal, and I believe we can still do this.
Kathryn Sorensen
I do too, and I think that was well said.
Mallika Nocco
So we always like to ask our guests if there's anything more that you would like people and our listeners to know about your work and how we can support your efforts.
Kathryn Sorensen
I'll start because I think this is a really wonderful question. A version of this question is often what I turn to when I'm giving talks, when I'm speaking publicly, and that is to ask two things of the people who are who are listening to this, who are part of the Colorado River Basin communities as users of water. One is to not be afraid, because when we're afraid of that future, it creates this limbic response, and we become defensive, and it contributes to conflict and cuts off the avenues for collaboration that we will need. And then this relates to a sort of political ask of people. I would ask you to have the grace and generosity toward your local political leaders, to give them permission to bargain away some of your water, because if you demand that they defend your water, all hell's going to break loose.
John Fleck
I think that's good advice and I would say that it's really important that the public ask questions and be engaged. It's hard, you know, in this day and age, there's so many things to distract it's hard to pay attention to water, but it is so critically important to every community, and it's so important that people just ask questions of their elected officials and be part of the conversation.
Faith Kearns
Thank you both so much for your time. I feel like I could ask you 400 more questions. We're gonna have to leave it at this for now, but thank you so much for sharing your time and your expertise with us, we really appreciate it.