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Leave the venerable Colorado River Compact be, says Mulroy: Water authority says renegotiating Nevada’s take won’t increase our share because climate change is slowing the flows

Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on November 14, 2008 at 6:35 am

From the Las Vegas Sun:

Nevada’s share of the Colorado River is so small that it seems only logical that a rewriting of the 80-year-old law that divvies up the river would go our way. The Colorado River Compact, after all, allocates Nevada a paltry 300,000 acre-feet of the river’s water, by the far the smallest amount among the compact’s seven U.S. states.

Still, Southern Nevada Water Authority General Manager Pat Mulroy wants to leave the agreement alone.

At an Oct. 28 Brookings Institution event, Mulroy said she is going to make the case “whenever and wherever I can” that the key to the region’s water future can’t be found in any renegotiation of the compact. The reason: Nevada is unlikely to benefit from any attempt to change it, according to Mulroy and Kay Brothers, the water authority’s deputy general manager.

“I don’t think we’d get any more water. In fact, I think we would lose water,” said Brothers, explaining that the law was written during a particularly wet period and that climate change has further sapped an over-allocated river. “When they allocated, they gave away 15 million acre-feet (a year). We know the flows are much less than that.”