"Hello, I'm John McCain. I'm from Arizona and I'm here to take your water." It's
a line the Republican presidential candidate has reportedly used
as an opening joke at appearances in Colorado, a state that doesn't take too
kindly to suspected water thieves. But after McCain told the Pueblo
Chieftain that the Colorado River Compact, which governs the allocation of the river between Colorado, Arizona, and the five other states in the
watershed, "obviously needs to be renegotiated," the Obama camp went into
hyperdrive trying to convince Coloradans that the man from Arizona was never
really joking. Colorado governor Bill Ritter denounced McCain's remarks on an
Obama-organized press call, emphasizing that renegotiation would almost
certainly reduce Colorado's share of the river's water. A McCain p.r. flak has
since "clarified" his boss's statement, but re-winning the trust of
Colorado voters may be about as easy as getting water to flow back
uphill.
That's a shame, because McCain's suggestion is by no means absurd
on its merits. True, he failed to mention that the seven Colorado basin states
recently negotiated a plan for how to deal with extreme droughts—an
omission that calls into question whether the Western senator spends any time
keeping up with Western issues. But it's also true that a lot has changed since
1922, when the Colorado Compact divided the river's water more or less equally
between the "upper basin" and "lower basin" states, and 1928, when the Boulder Canyon Project
Act divided the lower basin's water between Arizona, Nevada, and California.
Nevada had only 77,000 residents at the 1920 census, and it got the rights to
just 300,000 acre-feet per year, about 4 percent of the river's water. Now it has a
population of 2.5 million, the vast majority of which lives in the Las Vegas
metro area. Las Vegas is desperate for water, and if it can't get more from the
Colorado, the alternatives aren't
pretty.
If there's a fatal flaw in McCain's suggestion, it's that
none of the seven states—not even Nevada or Arizona, which have the most to
gain—have shown much interest in renegotiating the compact. They worry that
negotiations could descend into expensive, time-consuming lawsuits—lawsuits
that, due to the interstate nature of the dispute, would have to be argued
before the Supreme Court. And the states, unlike McCain, have a sense for
staying out of trouble.
--Rob Inglis, High Country
News