by Greg Walcher, E&E Legal Senior Policy Fellow
The Daily Sentinel
Western newspapers, blogs, and podcasts are humming this month with stories that the seven states on the Colorado River are close to an agreement on managing the river in future years. The existing agreements, designed to “supplement” the ancient and sacred Interstate Compact during drought years, are set to expire at the end of 2026, and the federal government has issued dire warnings about its impending take-over, should states fail to come up with an “acceptable” plan. An agreement may be close.
Over the past nine years, I have written 16 columns about these perpetual negotiations, and the consistently over-reaching federal role in the river’s management. I regularly take issue with both federal and state responses to the diminished flow of the river, compared to the flows expected by the century-old Interstate Compact that governs distribution of its waters. To the point that I often recall the famous Voltaire statement, “It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.”
Admittedly, I was for a while one of those “established authorities,” as Colorado’s lead negotiator while serving as executive director of the state’s Department of Natural Resources. That was 20 years ago, but even then, the solution was obvious, and though I was sometimes the only one naïve enough (brave enough?) to say it out loud, I certainly wasn’t the only one thinking it. I recently asked OpenAI’s ChatGPT how to explain that, and it came back with this gem: “Sometimes the truth is so obvious it hides in plain sight — ignored, not because it’s hidden, but because it’s uncomfortable.”
The simple solution has never been rewriting the interstate compact, as California has always wanted to do, but simply to distribute the water by the existing percentages — based on the river’s actual flow.
