When the Colorado River Compact was negotiated by representatives of seven western states at Bishop’s Lodge, near Santa Fe, in 1922, everyone signed the compact except the Arizona delegation. Arizona refrained from ratifying the agreement for 22 years, finally signing it 1944. Arizona wanted a larger allotment of water, even though it was a sparsely populated state.

 

This week in Denver, Arizona Senator and Republican candidate for president, John McCain, echoed his state’s historic discomfort with the original deal by calling for a renegotiation of the compact as a whole, apparently in an effort to give the “lower basin” states, Arizona, California and Nevada, a larger share of the water, at the expense of upper basin states of New Mexico, Colorado, Utah and Wyoming.

 

In response, Colorado U.S. Senator Ken Salazar, a San Luis Valley Democrat, was quoted in the Pueblo Colorado Chieftain this week as saying “Senator McCain’s position on opening up the Colorado River Compact is absolutely wrong and would only happen over my dead body.”

 

Such is the nature of water disputes in the parched American West.

 

What’s behind McCain’s improvident statement? Was it a bid to get more votes in water-troubled, lower basin, big Western states, letting the little guys take the hindmost? And why would he say such a thing now? It seems like a needlessly aggressive and provocative position, one that could cause all involved eons of political and legal grief.

 

It’s not as if regional and state water planners weren’t aware that the compact needs fine tuning. It’s abundantly clear that all seven states have vastly larger populations than they did when the 1920 census was taken. Between 1920 and 2007, Arizona’s population grew from 334,162 to 6,338,348; California’s exploded from 3,426,861 to 36,553,215; and little New Mexico shot up from 360,350 to 1,969,915.

 

The distribution scheme in 1920 was not only calculated on those old numbers, as it had to be, but also on what is now seen as an abnormally wet period in the Colorado watershed.

 

As it stands, all seven states have increasingly urgent needs for the Colorado River water. Southern California for instance, gets some 60 percent of its drinking water from the Colorado. And Arizona cannot grow much more if the Colorado snow pack remains fragile and often inadequate.

 

State, regional and federal water planners reached something of a historic agreement only last year in delicate negotiations over fine-tuning the compact to more practically meet emerging conditions.

 

At the time, President Bush’s Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne called the historic “Record of Decision” between the seven states “a remarkable consensus.”

 

He called it “the most important agreement among the seven basin states since the original Colorado River Compact of 1922.”

 

The reality of that assessment, of course, remains to be seen. But why would McCain decide to propose a re-do of the compact itself, or even mention it, knowing how inflammatory any call for re-visioning water agreements in the West would be? To overhaul the compact would be akin to renegotiating the U.S. Constitution.

It would take decades to sort out.

 

The 2007 Record of Decision signed by the seven states fully recognizes the severity of the current drought and its impact on the snow pack in the Rocky Mountain National Park, and the water shed for the Colorado River.

 

According to the Department of Interior, the Record of Decision “adopts four key elements of river management”:

 

  • Guidelines “establish rules for shortages – specifying who will take reductions and when they take them.”

 

  • New “operational rules for Lake Powell and Lake Mead will allow the two massive reservoirs to rise and fall in tandem, thereby better sharing the risk of drought.” Lake Powell stores water for upper basin states, and Lake Mead stores water for Southern California and Nevada. Arizona gets its water directly from the Colorado River via the Central Arizona Project which diverts water near Lake Havasu City.

 

  • The new guidelines also set rules for distributing surpluses, if ample runoff ever returns to the region.

 

  • Lastly, the Record of Decision addresses “the ongoing drought by encouraging new initiatives for water conservation,” like allowing water users to get future credits for not using water in Lake Mead, a huge departure from the traditional use it or lose it view of water management. Cities can also deal with farmers to temporarily leave fields fallow in times of grave water shortages without having to sell their water rights. This is another major departure from the past.

 

So why is John McCain putting a burr under everyone’s saddle blanket over the Colorado Compact now?

 

It must be, in part, that his political strategists understand that putting the fantasy of renegotiating the Colorado River Compact in the minds of California voters will be a strong campaign tactic, forcing perhaps Sen. Obama to try to explain in rebuttal the complicated realities of the Record of Decision the seven states already agreed to last year.

 

Once again, politics rides the coattails of make-believe as it smokescreens reality, then blows it away.