KNAU’s Melissa Sevigny spoke about the plan with Arizona State University water policy expert Sarah Porter.
Yeah.
Writ large, the Drought Contingency Plan with the rules for saving water in Lake Mead and the schedule of cuts, that’s been agreed upon in principal by the Basin States and Mexico.
But how Arizona would share the cuts that Arizona would take is what has been the subject of a lot of negotiation this summer and fall.
To be specific, Arizona has a lot of different Colorado River users… it’s really the central Arizona and southern Arizona—the CAP customers—that have junior priority.
What’s happening with negotiations between users in cities, farms, tribes: why is this so difficult for Arizona to work out?
It’s very hard for large water users to go without water.
That’s, from their perspective, not desirable at all.
We have a lot of freshman legislators, who may have not had much contact with water policy, so we’re asking a lot of our lawmakers.
Technically what happens the Bureau will give the states 30 days to submit their suggestions about how to handle Lake Mead, and water deliveries, and then it would be up to the Bureau of Reclamation to decide how to proceed.