MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
There’s news of a potential deal on sharing the Colorado River. About 40 million people, from Los Angeles to Phoenix to Denver and beyond, rely on the Colorado for drinking water. It also irrigates fields that grow food for most of America, but it’s also shrinking because of climate change. Alex Hager reports on the river for KUNC in Northern Colorado and is with us now to tell us more about it. Good morning, Alex.
ALEX HAGER, BYLINE: Good morning.
MARTIN: So the current agreement for how states share the Colorado is now more than 100 years old, and the federal government set a deadline for a new one to be signed by next year. Now, you’ve reported that it has seemed unlikely that they’d meet that deadline. But now you’re telling us it looks like they might?
HAGER: Yeah. Like you said, climate change is making the river smaller. And the states that use it – they know they have to use less, but they have been stuck on one big question. You know, who exactly should have to cut back? You’ve got the mountain states where the river starts – that’s Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico – and the downstream states, California, Arizona and Nevada. And for more than a year now, talks between those two groups had basically been at a total standstill.
MARTIN: But your sources involved in the negotiations are telling you that the states in the Upper and Lower Basins have now reached some kind of a compromise.
HAGER: Yeah. Up until now, states were really digging in their heels. Some of them were trying to find legal loopholes that would let them skirt around big, new cutbacks. Some were trying to stick to century-old rules that were written when the river had a lot more water in it. But now we are seeing a big shift in philosophy. They are considering a new plan that would look at how much water is actually in the river each year and give each side a percentage of that. And this is a pretty big deal. The top water negotiator in Arizona said before, he was worried the states would end up in big, messy lawsuits. Now he says he’s optimistic they are going to avoid that.
MARTIN: Wow. That is big. So while the states have been sorting out their differences, the Trump administration in June tapped the new person to represent the federal government in this process. His name is Ted Cooke. He was nominated to run the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. What do we know about him?
HAGER: Well, Cooke spent more than two decades with the Central Arizona Project, which brings water from the Colorado River to Phoenix and Tucson. And by all accounts, he is a qualified technical expert. People who worked with him say he’s thorough and deliberative and a good mediator for negotiations like the ones we’re seeing now. But some people are a little worried. Those upstream states are concerned he could be biased. Basically, they don’t want the top federal agency for the Colorado River being run by a guy who spent his whole career on one side of the debate about how to share it.
MARTIN: I want to mention that Cooke still faces confirmation by the Senate. By the way, has he had anything to say about concerns that he may be biased?
HAGER: Yeah, he did. I got in touch with him over the phone. And he said, look, if we want someone with intimate knowledge of the Colorado River in the federal government, it will inherently have to be someone who has worked on it before, which probably means someone who has worked on one side of debates about the river.
TED COOKE: I don’t really appreciate being prejudged by folks saying, oh, he’s just going to be a Lower Basin or an Arizona partisan. I call that projection.
HAGER: There’s no confirmation hearing for Cooke scheduled quite yet. But in the meantime, states are still meeting pretty frequently. They are starting to agree in principle about sharing this smaller river. But figuring out exactly how much each state gets – that is going to be the next big question.
MARTIN: That is Alex Hager with member station KUNC. Alex, thank you so much.
HAGER: Thanks for having me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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