vb-price-bw-pic21When the New York Times did a major spread in late March on “Reinventing American Cities: The Time Is Now,” I tried to imagine what a reinvented city in the American West might look like if our decade-long drought extends another ten or twenty years.

What kind of a city would a severely water starved Albuquerque have to become to survive? People who think about cities always do so with ideal scenarios in mind. It’s not that they are usually spoken of, but they are there, improbable and pie-in-the-sky though they might be.

My ideal of the perfect Albuquerque comes from a mixture of images from the past and the future in which the city had definite edges, was a fertile agricultural paradise along the Rio Grande or the American Nile as it used to be called, had a strong downtown core, flourishing local neighborhoods and businesses, and no sprawl at all into the oceanic landscape around the city.

Add to that the image of Albuquerque as a college town and a research and technology hub for America to think its way into a sustainable future, and you have a garden city that is still a regional center and one that has maximized its potential as a think-tank city too.

But now I read in a recent edition of High Country News of the possibility of New Mexico finding itself with no water at all coming from the Colorado and its tributary the San Juan. And I wonder if my ideal will go the way of the boomer’s ideal of Albuquerque as L.A. on the Rio Grande.

That vision is dead as a doornail now. And mine could well be too. How does a city reinvent itself in a deep drought with its aquifer shrinking and the dream of drinkable river water snatched away like candy from a baby by the ogre of Western water wars?

Here’s the gist of the trouble. And the implications of what I’m about to write are positively chilling.

When the Colorado River Compact was signed in 1922, the seven states involved grouped themselves into Lower and Upper Basins. The Lower basin included water guzzling California, Nevada, and later Arizona. The Upper Basin is made up of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming. Both the Upper Basin and the Lower Basin states were guaranteed by the compact to get 7.5 million acre feet each year.

That was some three to four million acre feet more than the Colorado could supply even in good years.

Eighty seven years ago, California’s population was tiny in comparison to what it is today. Growth was just in its infancy in the other states as well. But in order for the Upper Basin states, including New Mexico, to get their share they had to make a concession to California and the other Lower Basin behemoths-to-be. The Upper Basin had to agree that the Lower Basin had senior rights to the Colorado’s water, and could make what’s known as a “priority call” on its water in tough times.

No one in New Mexico, Utah, Colorado and Wyoming ever thought such a thing would be possible. But as Matt Jenkins writes in the High Country News:

“After nearly a decade of drought, the reservoirs [Lake Powell and Lake Mead]are half empty. If they continue to drop, that will touch off a fight over what little water is in the river, like creditors battling over the carcass of a bankrupt company. And… California and the other Lower Basin states can make a legal ‘call’ on the river and demand that the Upper Basin not take any of its Compact water” until California, Arizona, and Nevada got their senior share.

Now there’s a thought that’s starting to chill the bones of Denver water planners and all Coloradoans who might find themselves actually closed out by law from using water from their own snow packs and water sheds flowing into the Colorado river.

The implication for Albuquerque is not quite as catastrophic, but it could cripple any kind of re-invention of our city, a boomer’s vision or green R&D vision, or anything in between.

Losing Colorado River water for five years or ten or twenty would put cities in untenable positions, would cause them to raid nearby agricultural holdings with rapine ferocity, and would surely see the exodus of tens of thousands of Albuquerqueans and perhaps millions of Californians, Nevadans and Arizonans to wetter climes.

In such a dire situation, the real trouble would come from trying to figure out the terrible tangle of existing water rights, existing “dedication” of water rights that cities have gambled with to swell their populations, and the actual disparity between paper water and wet water in a time of crisis.

The lawsuits would be like the machines in a toilet tissue factory going wild, filling room after room with useless paper.

Can any of this be averted? Is the notion of “reinventing cities” in the American West less about new rail and other transportation infrastructure than it is about finally being honest about water and doing something about it?

But what could be done?

Must we place a moratorium on all new building in our region?

Must counties in the Middle Rio Grande Valley and adjacent communities actually do water planning together?

Do we finally have to have real numbers that add up, not projections based on funny math and politics?

Will we be forced to spend the money and time it takes to get an ever more accurate assessment of how much water our aquifers still actually contain?

And what about the impact of water pollution?

Will we have to face the facts and find out how dirty our water really is after 66 years of the nuclear industrial complex, along with other companies, septic systems, and underground gasoline storage tanks and gas lines, sullying our ancient underground water?

Has the Western United States dramatically outgrown its water capacity?

That’s the real question and there’s good reason to believe it has. As long as this drought lasts, and it could well go on for decades and decades, every city in the West has to ask itself what its realistic, sustainable population size actually is.

Perhaps in the West reinventing cities means nothing less than watching natural forces shrink them as populations migrate to the Midwest and New England.

Shouldn’t our city and state be spending all the money it takes to convene the best thinkers it can find to start brainstorming what to do to prepare for a drastic reduction in available real water in the event that California and Arizona make a priority call on the Colorado River?

Shouldn’t this issue be on everyone’s mind?