Colorado River Compact

And water rights go back 100 years, and there's senior water rights.

And, you know, the senior water right on the entire Colorado River is, you know, is the Colorado Compact, which is the feds.

You know, that's 13 states, I believe, in that compact, or maybe seven, at any rate.

But the problem is they divvied it up in 10 of the wettest years in the history of record keeping, which was back in the 20s.

talk about that, too.

But so the Colorado River Compact expires this year.

it expires in october oh okay so we've been as seven participating states we've been negotiating the credits and you know efficiency and technology use and everything else for the last couple years with a set department of interior and we could never come to a consensus so they issued it's called the the the record department of the record decision of record dor And it says, OK, for the next two years, you're allowed to use this much water for each state before you're penalized.

And all of us agreed to that for two years.

We had to figure out a way to systemize this river system such that we could not run it dry before its time.

In 1922, Congress passed an act called the Colorado River Compact, which divided the Colorado River basin watershed, which consists of seven basin states.

And that includes Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and a little sliver of the northeast corner of Arizona as part of an upper Colorado River basin.

the lower Colorado River basin would be Arizona, California, and Nevada.

So it's twofold.

So you have the seven state agreement with the Colorado River Compact.

That in itself is over allocated.

When we first started filling up Lake Powell and Lake Mead, it was in wet years.

Oh, boy.

So the last major time the Colorado River Compact, or at least the thorniest issues in the compact, came close to being litigated was in 1952.

That's when Arizona sued California.

And that case took 11 years to get to a ruling.

Yeah.

Is it dumber than the Colorado River Compact?

Yes, because it impacts more of the country.

But not by a lot.

Colorado River Compact is failing more regularly, but a failure of the debt ceiling would be more severe.

Yeah.

i actually i should i should be more careful about this because i think the debt ceiling is an appropriation saying as opposed to explicitly us code so i need to i need to go look this up

I mean, it, it would just be dry fields and weeds and decimated economies.

The 1922 Colorado River Compact divides up water between seven western states, split into the upper and lower basins.

The compact says that a certain amount of water must flow by Lee Ferry over 10 years.

It's a beautiful bend in the river in Arizona, and it's the dividing line between both basins.

Really, the Sierra Club had successfully stopped dam building on the Colorado River and filling a Glen Canyon dam facility.

It wouldn't be enough to satisfy the water needs for the seven states and the Colorado River Compact.

So the Bureau of Rec came up with the idea of storing water in the form of snow

in the

She actually went through this exercise, which makes everything quite compact.

The Colorado River Compact of 1922. gave 7.5 million acre feet of water per year to the upper basin.

And it gave 7.5 million acre feet per year to...

the lower basin.