The agency that brings Colorado River water to the Phoenix area has taken a step toward legal action over the river’s management.
The Central Arizona Water Conservation District is not suing anybody yet, but voted to take a step that opens the door to a future lawsuit. The agency’s board, an elected group of 15 people, manages the Central Arizona Project. The CAP is a 336-mile canal that carries water from the Colorado River on Arizona’s Western border, across the desert, and into the Phoenix and Tucson areas.
A new federal plan for managing the Colorado River deals big cuts to Arizona, California and Nevada. The CAP will be perhaps the hardest hit water system in the entire river basin, which spans seven states. Meanwhile, the plan does not force mandatory water cutbacks on Colorado, Utah, New Mexico or Wyoming.
State governments and water users around the region had been tiptoeing toward a legal battle over the river’s water for years. State leaders could not agree on a plan to manage the shrinking river and the federal government released one instead.
Those failed negotiations over the river’s future appear to have left the door open to lawsuits by those who feel their legal rights to water have been violated.
Nevada already sued the federal government over concerns with the process the federal government used to draw up its new rules.
Now, officials in Arizona are exploring their own lawsuits, but have not yet taken formal legal action.
They are working to finalize a three-way deal between Arizona, California and Nevada. The agreement would work in tandem with the new federal plan for water cuts, spreading out the pain of those reductions across users in the three states.
“Our top priority is finalizing a three-state Lower Basin deal,” Brenda Burman, CAP general manager, wrote in a statement. “If litigation becomes necessary, the Board has taken action to ensure that we are in a position to defend our rights.”
Leaders from the Arizona Department of Water Resources, which is separate from the CAP, have neatly spelled out some of the legal concerns that could lead to a lawsuit.
The CAP has dropped some hints as to possible grounds for legal action. In a recent board meeting, CAP leaders mentioned a few potential avenues.
For example, Terry Goddard, the board’s president, mentioned that federal officials may have operated “contrary to federal law” by failing to consider the amount of water stored in certain Rocky Mountain reservoirs while looking for ways to keep a certain amount of water flowing downstream to Arizona.
Other CAP board members and employees said that upstream states – Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Wyoming — may be violating the law if they do not send enough water downstream to meet requirements under the Colorado River Compact, the 1922 document that provides the foundation of river management policy.
Vineetha Kartha, CAP’s director of water policy, said the lack of mandatory reductions for those upstream states “completely and entirely” ignores water delivery requirements outlined in federal law.
