New Republic Nick Martin
<https://newrepublic.com/authors/nick-martin>/May 3, 2021
Severe Water Cuts Are Coming for Arizona. The Rest of the Southwest Is
Next.
The restrictions are essential to keep the states from running dry,
but vulnerable communities have already suffered from water scarcity
for years.
A woman fills water jugs at a public tap.
SPENCER PLATT/GETTY IMAGES
A member of the Navajo Nation fills water jugs at a public tap in New
Mexico.
Two months ago, researchers at Utah State Universityestimated
<https://newrepublic.com/article/161463/40-percent-water-colorado-river-arizona-california-nevada>that
Arizona, California, and Nevada would collectively have to cut their
intake of Colorado River water by 40 percent over the next three decades
due to drought. At a public meeting last Thursday, the Arizona
Department of Water Resourcesconfirmed
<https://www.cap-az.com/documents/departments/planning/colorado-river-programs/Joint-ADWR-CAP-Shortage-Briefing-4-29-2021.pdf>the
warnings: The cutbacks are coming, and soon.
Arizona will serve as a testing ground for how seriously and how quickly
the states and tribal nations in the upper and lower Colorado River
basins can tackle the water crisis. This is because, as part of the deal
that led to the creation of the Central Arizona Project, or CAP—the
giant canal that runs from Phoenix to Tucson—Arizona agreed to be first
in line when drought-induced water cuts were needed. And given the
current status of the Lake Mead reservoir, where water levels have
dipped below 40 percent capacity due to reduced snowpack upstream, those
cuts will need to be in place as early as next year,according
<https://kjzz.org/content/1679252/drought-continues-arizona-prepares-water-cuts-2022>to
KJZZ.
Both New Mexico and Nevada are expected to implement similar measures
before long, with California potentially staring down the same fate. But
Arizona will face some of the first and steepest cuts. And while it will
be absolutely necessary for the people of Phoenix and the state’s other
major cities to keep their water use levels down, it will be equally
important to provide those who entered the drought with unreliable
access to clean water with a viable path to drinkable, running water—not
just more water bottles and buckets. To put it another way: In crafting
this massive response to what is certainly an all-hands-on-deck crisis,
the responsible American government agencies and corporations must be
held accountable for simultaneously cleaning up the ones they’ve already
caused.
According to the tentative timelineoffered
<https://www.cap-az.com/documents/departments/planning/colorado-river-programs/Joint-ADWR-CAP-Shortage-Briefing-4-29-2021.pdf>by
Arizona’s Department of Water Resources, the first half of 2022 will
consist of engagement and consultation sessions with all stakeholders in
the state—a list including tribal nations, state government leaders,
municipal and local representatives, and Central Arizona farming groups,
among others. Then, by the final quarter of the year, around October,
the agreed-upon mitigation efforts will actually be put into practice.
/Arizona Republic/’s Ian Jamesreported
<https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona-environment/2021/04/30/arizona-preparing-cutbacks-colorado-river-water-amid-drought/7401706002/> Friday
that Arizona is anticipating a cutback of 512,000 acre-feet, or roughly
20 percent of its annual entitlement, next year. Water officials at
Thursday’s meeting said that as of now, they’re hopeful that the
multistate and tribal nation Drought Contingency Plan signed in 2019
will guide them for at least the next five years. Under that plan, the
signees are currently operating at the initial Tier Zero levels;
assuming the continuance of the drought and shrinking Lake Mead
supplies, the region is expected to reach Tier One levels next year,
triggering the heightened round of mitigation efforts, including the 20
percent cut for Arizona.
As things currently stand, state officials are not predicting the
conservation measures will begin on the extreme end. “You’re not going
to see a request for people in their homes to only shower twice a week,”
Tom Buschatzke, director of Water Resources, told KJZZ. “We’re not in
that situation, this is not a crisis at that level.”
And that might well be true: If the state and other stakeholders can
convince high-usage areas like Phoenix and the aforementioned
agricultural operations to limit their usage even marginally, then those
folks might just enter 2023 with a more hopeful vision of what future
usage can look like, at least in the short-term future.
One thing to keep in mind, though, as all of these mitigation efforts,
water compacts, and new routines are rolled out, is how they will
address the existing infrastructural inequalities that defined water
dispersement in the West long before Lake Mead’s bathtub rings started
to grow. Namely, for many of the 30 tribal nations in the full basin, a
question ostensibly about resource management and nation-to-nation
consultation has also become one of ensuring equity and justice.
Last week, /Inside Climate News/published
<https://insideclimatenews.org/news/29042021/the-pandemic-exposed-the-severe-water-insecurity-faced-by-southwestern-tribes/> a
report probing how water insecurity stood out as one of the defining
issues in Indian Country during the coronavirus pandemic. Swaths of
Native families and communities living on their sovereign lands were
systemically denied access to running water due to the federal
government’s long-standing attempts to route water and the accompanying
infrastructure away from reservations. CAP, for instance, is both a
stunning technical achievement and a product of tribal nations being
almost wholly ignored. When designing CAP, the state chose
<https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0263775821991537>to leave
Hopi and Navajo communities in the northern parts of the state with
increasingly dried-out springs and aquifers, in favor of flooding the
desert metropolises of Phoenix and Tucson with enough water to justify
and sustain rapid population growth. Speaking with/Climate
News,/University of New Mexico’s John Fleck deemed the water deals and
infrastructure of the past century “a result of racist colonialism.”
The affected tribal nations have made strides since then, particularly
in the past decade, as they’ve sought to use theirsenior water rights
status
<https://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/joannaallhands/2020/12/05/colorado-river-water-senior-rights-could-one-day-up-grabs/3813486001/>,
granted to governments and companies with long-standing claims, to
guarantee themselves a spot at the table. In the case of the crucial
Drought Contingency Plan, the//Colorado River Indian Tribes and the Gila
River Indian Community both played central roles in ensuring enough
water would be left in Lake Mead, something that CAP’s general manager
went out of their way to acknowledge at Thursday’s meeting. That same
day, the Navajo Nation’s treaty-guaranteed Colorado River water rights
wereupheld
<https://www.knau.org/post/navajo-nation-wins-court-victory-over-access-colorado-river-water>by
the Ninth Circuit, giving the nation a stronger foothold in future
compact negotiations.
There are now initiatives underway, such as the federal Interior
Department’s recentlyannounced
<https://www.doi.gov/pressreleases/white-house-launches-drought-relief-working-group-address-urgency-western-water-crisis>Drought
Relief Working Group and the White House Council on Native American
Affairs, that will seek to give these communities an elevated voice in
drought and climate crisis negotiations, as well as plan drafting, over
the coming years. Water use in the West is filled with bizarre stories
of inequity—Nestlé, for example, getting caught
<https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/apr/27/california-nestle-water-san-bernardino-forest-drought>going
25 times over its water allotment in California.
Cuts have never been as simple as lowering everyone’s water usage
equally across the board. To actually be effective, these efforts have
to take into account the communities that need and deserve to be brought
up to level, while regulating those who have been siphoning too much.
There’s no perfect ending here, because these negotiations are a jagged
affair. But there remains a chance at least to do right by those who
need it most.
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