Mulroy: Water cooperation needed

It will take cooperation not litigation to make it through the hard times ahead should climate change turn drought conditions into the "new normal" for the Colorado River.

So said Southern Nevada Water Authority chief Pat Mulroy during a congressional subcommittee meeting held Friday at UNLV's Boyd School of Law.

Members of the House Committee on Water and Power took testimony from Mulroy and others on the future of the Colorado and the roughly 25 million people who depend on it for water and electricity.

In the early 1990s, Mulroy said, relations were "very frigid" among Nevada and the six other states that share water from the river, and a crippling legal showdown seemed inevitable.

Since then, though, the seven basin states and the federal government have collaborated on a series of sweeping agreements to collectively operate the river's reservoirs and hydroelectric dams in good times and bad.

That spirit of togetherness must continue, Mulroy said, if the river continues to dwindle amid changing weather patterns and the over-allocation of what water there is.

Right now, the states have agreements in place that parcel out shortages in stages should Lake Mead continue to shrink another 75 feet. But no rules yet exist beyond that once-unthinkable water level, which will see power generation cease at Hoover Dam and leave Lake Mead with barely enough water in it to supply a single year's worth of downstream demand.

"These are the conditions under which we are going to be testing these relationships we have established," she said.

Current federal forecasts give a 20 percent chance that the surface of Lake Mead will fall about 25 feet over the next two years, prompting the first round of water shortages on the river.

The good news, if there is any, is that the system of dams and reservoirs on the Colorado is working exactly as designed, said Lorri Gray-Lee, regional director for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation.

"Yes, they're half empty," Gray-Lee said of lakes Mead and Powell, "but they're also half full" after a decade of drought.

Committee chairwoman Grace Napolitano, D-Calif., and ranking Republican member Tom McClintock, also of California, were joined at the field hearing by Nevada Reps. Shelley Berkley, Dean Heller and Dina Titus, none of whom serve on the committee.

The theme of Friday's oversight field hearing was "Collaboration on the Colorado River: Lessons Learned to Meet Future Challenges."

Contact reporter Henry Brean at hbrean@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0350.