4-14 Senate Committee

• Title: 4-14 Senate Committee
• IBCC - Doc Type: Legislation

4-14 Senate Committee
Interviewer, Interviewee

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making and SWSI is moving that way and this bill is designed, if
you will, to be the next step that will, will put in playa similar, in
some places, same network of discussions in the basin.

We've long since learned since John Wesley Powell first started
talking about water in the West, that we needed to be making our
decisions based upon water basins. That that had more to do with
how we make decisions than any other jurisdictional lines that
we've applied, county lines, even state lines, city boundaries; none
of this really recognizes what drives decision making. And
particularly in water, it's the basins. So, it makes abundant sense
for fi.lture discussions to occur; first out in the basins where the
uses are and where the, the water is.

The rest of the philosophy was; why hadn't we done this already?
What has been the problem? Well, we all know that there's
nothing more contentious in human legal activities than issues of
water. And in thinking about that, a number of us began to wonder,
well, "This has been so before? This is reminiscent of something
we know about the past." That is, the political state, we are in
water politics in Colorado today has been looking more and more
like the Western United States water battles of the turn of the last
century. And particularly on the Colorado River and the seven
states who were beginning to understand that they were in
competition with their neighbors on the limited supplies of water in
the Colorado River.

The more we remember that, the more we studied that, the more
we realized that those people should never have been able to come
to the agreement that they did. That the issues were so dramatic,
that the politics so hard that for them to have come to an agreement,
which we now know to be the Colorado River Compact, this
should not have happened. Well, it did and it has sustained the test
of time. And still see - it seemed all of these years later, since
1922 when it was signed until now, as a very good bit of work.
They did it by negotiation. A lot of the political forces and the
physical forces at play there look a lot like what we have in
Colorado today. Some differences, of course, because there are
legal differences when states talk to each other than there are when
palis of one state got together.

But the similarities were so great that it really nurtured the thought
among a number of us that, "Why don't we learn from those
brilliant people back in the 1900's? How it was they could settle
their differences and come to such a good conclusion without
having to litigate it, without having to invest enormous wealth that

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