The plan, which includes some California cuts, mainly targets Arizona and other states with less legal rights to the water, and aims to preserve all of the Golden State's rights, most of which stretch back more than a century. The Imperial Irrigation District, tucked in the state’s arid southeastern corner and a major producer of the nation’s winter crops and livestock feed, is entitled to more water than Arizona and Nevada combined.
But Phoenix, Denver, Las Vegas and farms and suburbs across Arizona, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, Colorado and Wyoming also rely heavily on the river water, which is disappearing due both to overallocation and unprecedented drought and rising temperatures linked to climate change.
On Monday, those states submitted a proposal that also called for more than 3 million acre feet of conservation and reductions — squarely within the 2 to 4 million acre feet that U.S. Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Camille Touton said last year was necessary. An acre foot is about enough water for two households for a year. Much of the cuts in their proposal would come from California, not them.
Under the six-state plan, if the massive reservoirs — currently just a quarter full — sank to ever lower trigger levels, ever larger cuts to water deliveries would kick in for some, with the biggest amounts coming from California. Accounting for evaporation in the reservoirs and seepage as water is piped from the river to state systems would save another nearly 1.6 million acre feet, largely impacting Arizona and California, which have the longest aqueducts in the hottest parts of the watershed.
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The Golden State, which provides drinking water to 19 million of the nearly 40 million people across the West dependent on the river supplies, has by far the largest legal share of its water, totaling 4.4 million acre feet of the 7.5 million acre feet distributed annually to each of the states, tribes and others.
That has made it a target of other states' ire for decades, particularly as their urban and suburban development boomed, upping their water needs. Monday's six-state proposal is the latest attempt to upend the established system, said some.
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