The $140-million mortgage, a loan from the US Treasury to build Hoover Dam, will be paid in full today. Residential and industrial users of electricity have been paying back the government $5.4 million a year at 3% interest over the last 50 years as part of their monthly utility bills…
— From an article by Charles Hillinger in the Los Angeles Times, May 31, 1987
In 1921, when Colorado attorney Delph Carpenter brought forward his crazy idea, the Colorado River Compact — a multi-state agreement between the seven states dependent upon the Colorado River for its irrigation and drinking water — he was imagining a future Colorado fully populated with family-owned, irrigated farms and ranches, growing crops, raising livestock, and living gloriously independent lives. How far in the future this might be, he could not say; the population of the state in 1921 was about 960,000 people, and more than a quarter of that population — 255,000 — lived in Denver.
By comparison, the population of California in 1921 was already around 3.8 million. Los Angeles County alone had a population as large as the entire state of Colorado. And Los Angeles, in the middle of a desert basin, was hungry for water. The city had already spent seven years, from 1906 until 1913, buying up water rights and building the then-longest aqueduct in the world — a pipeline that ultimately dry up the Owens River, 250 miles away. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power won voter approval for that aqueduct partly by secretly draining all of the local LA reservoirs into the Pacific Ocean, thereby creating the appearance of a municipal ‘drought.’
Preliminary plans were already underway to build the Colorado River Aqueduct, which would ultimately drain 1.2 million acre feet per year out of the Colorado River.
Delph Carpenter and the rest of the political leadership in Colorado believed that their own ‘Colorado Doctrine’, granting perpetual ‘first rights’ to whatever water user first develops a water source, would leave Colorado and other slower-growing states in the ‘Upper Basin’ — Utah, New Mexico and Wyoming — without sufficient water to develop to their full water-based potential.
But rather than fight it out in the courts, Carpenter was determined to cobble together a compromise. In a rather remarkable feat of diplomacy, he managed to get the seven states — California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming and Colorado — to approve the Colorado River Compact in 1922.
The agreement granted the Upper Basin states perpetual access to 7.5 million acre feet of water per year, with Colorado entitled to about half of that total. The three Lower Basin states were allocated the same amount — 7.5 million acre feet per year — with California getting almost two-thirds of that total.
So then, 15 million acre feet per year, split between the seven states. Enough for everyone. (Not every state was immediately happy with the agreement, however. Arizona did not sign the Compact until 1944.) Additionally. 1.5 million acre feet are allotted to Mexico in a different agreement. Grand total: 16.5 million acre feet, allocated to various parties. The allocation was to be measured a Lee’s Ferry near Paige, AZ.
One little problem. The period used to calculate the “average” flow of the Colorado River (1905–1922) included years of abnormally high precipitation. Subsequent calculations estimated the historical flow of the Colorado River at perhaps 13.5 million acre feet per year. The annual flow at Lee’s Ferry revealed itself to be extremely erratic, ranging from a low of 4 million acre feet to a high of 22 million acre feet, leading to an inability of the Upper Basin states to consistently meet the minimum delivery requirements to the Lower states in dry years, and to a “loss” of significant surpluses in wet years.
One of the bargaining chips in the Compact negotiations was a plan by the US Reclamation Service (later the Bureau of Reclamation) to build a 726 foot tall dam “for flood control and hydroelectric power” in the Black Canyon on the Nevada-Arizona border. The Lower Basin states favored the dam project; by agreeing to the dam concept, the Upper Basin states made a significant compromise — and moved the Compact towards approval.
As noted at the beginning of this article, in 1987 electricity customers finished paying off the principal and interest for the Hoover Dam, completed in 1936. At a rate of $5.4 million a year in electricity purchases, those customers apparently paid about $270 million for a dam that originally cost $49 million to build. (In 1987 dollars, the original construction cost would have been equivalent to about $400 million.)
This project funding technique — using hydroelectricity generation to pay off the debt for dam construction, rather than expecting irrigation users to repay the cost of the project — had been tried before in the American West, and remained a favorite pattern for numerous future dams along the Colorado River and its tributaries. That river system now sports at least 45 major dams, built between 1911 and 2002. Many of them are generating hydroelectric power to justify their existence.
But Delph Carpenter’s dream of a Colorado full of independent farmers and ranchers, benefitting from the Colorado River Compact, was focused on irrigated agriculture rather than electricity. It turned out to be not much more than that: a dream.
By the time the Compact was signed in 1922, most of the Colorado land suitable for irrigated agriculture had already been settled, and had acquired water rights. Colorado was heading into a very different future from what Delph Carpenter had imagined. Newcomers to the state, generally speaking, were settling in Denver and other urban areas. The sugar beet industry — the number one crop in Colorado during the early 1900s — was already on its way out. The oil and gas industries were rising to prominence, as was manufacturing.
But in terms of water use in Colorado, agriculture remains king of the hill, even today.
Is that the state’s saving grace?
Or it’s worst problem?
Bill Hudson began sharing his opinions in the Pagosa Daily Post in 2004 and can’t seem to break the habit. He claims that, in Pagosa Springs, opinions are like pickup trucks: everybody has one.