1972, June, Pg. 44. The Environment.

1 Colo.Law. 44

Colorado Lawyer

1972.

1972, June, Pg. 44.

The Environment

44Vol. 1, No. 8, Pg. 44

The EnvironmentThis month's column was prepared for the Committee on Environmental Problems by Allen T. Johnson, a third-year student at the University of Denver College of Law. Mr. Johnson is on the staff of Colorado Environmental Legal Services, a non-profit organization devoted to the preservation and enhancement of the environment.Water, one of Colorado's most valuable resources, is rapidly becoming a scarce commodity. Population growth and industrial development place extravagant demands on water supplies, causing legal controversies between appropriators who claim a right to use water and state officials who assert that there is no more water available for use. The primary conflict is between compact limitations on the quantity of water available and the appropriations doctrine permitting use of that water, both of which are federally sanctioned. A comparison of available water with water already committed to use in light of federal and state sanctions reveals the problem.

In 1922 representatives from California, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, New Mexico, Wyoming, and Colorado drew up the Colorado River Compact.(fn1) Negotiators estimated that the flow of the river varied from 5.5 to 25.0 million acre-feet per year. Assuming an average flow of 15.0 million acre-feet at Lee Ferry, Arizona, chosen as the dividing point between the upper and lower basins, the representatives allocated even shares of 7.5 million acre-feet per annum to each basin. Mexican water rights recognized by the United States(fn2) were to be supplied first out of the surplus above the aggregate of the quantities; if this surplus was not enough, the deficiency would be borne equally by the two basins. The negotiators failed to convince Arizona that her tributaries would be protected from the Mexican burden, and Arizona refused to ratify the Compact, holding off until 1944(fn3) after it had already become effective by the six-state ratification permitted by the Boulder Canyon Project Act.(fn4) The Act was a complete statutory apportionment intended to put an end to the longstanding dispute over Colorado River water, but neither it nor the Colorado River Compact solved the problems of apportioning shares of water among the states of the upper and lower basins.

Subject to the provisions of the Act and the Compact, Congress ratified the Upper Colorado River Basin Compact(fn5)...