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<br />erlL <br /> <br />~y; ~~~~ tiwan ~on~U~cln~ ~erVlces; 480 941 8658; Dec-23-02 12:27PM. <br />Fight over Colorado River has divided West for decades * l;zTL,UU:l * Nl,; lunes.nca, ' <br /> <br />Page 8/14 <br />J. 86" J V-. ... <br /> <br />California won't get any sympathy from New Mexico, ather, said Randy Kirkpatrick, <br />executive director of the San Juan Water Commission in the northwestern portion of that <br />state. <br /> <br />"Yau have been led not to be responsible in your water use, as you should have been years <br />ago, II Kirkpatrick said. <br /> <br />He said California should have listened when the Bush:administration's point man on <br />Western water issues --- Assistant Interior Secretary Bennett Raley -- threatened months <br />ago to turn off the spigot. <br /> <br />"l know Benn~" said Kirkpatrick. liRe usually says what he means and does what he says. <br />It was not a bluff." <br /> <br />While states welcome the government stepping in to enforce the law of the river, there was <br />a time when they wanted the feds to stay out of it. <br /> <br />Think of the '20s <br /> <br />fu fact, wrote Joe Gelt oftbe Arizona Water Resources Research Center, in a history of the <br />river, in the 1920s Colorado attorney Delph Carpenter.first proposed that states draw up an <br />agreement among themselves to avoid having the federal government decide the matter in a <br />perhaps inequitable way. <br /> <br />Then, as now, California was the big concem. <br /> <br />The smaller~ politically weaker states felt threatened by California's huge size and rapid <br />growth. They feared California might seize much of the Colorado's water by using it before <br />other states got a chance to, thereby establishing priority rights to it. <br /> <br />The states drew up the Colorado River Compact in 1922, and six of seven basin states <br />promptly ratitied it. But Arizona was so upset that the water was divided up only between <br />the upper and lower basins, rather than doled out state by state, that it refused to sign the <br />compact for another 22 years. <br /> <br />Others did it <br /> <br />Figuring the river reliably produced 15 million acre-feet a year, the parties awarded balf to <br />the upper states ofColorcwo, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming, and the other half to the <br />lower states of Arizona, California and Nevada. <br /> <br />The upper states managed to cooperatively detennine individual shares. <br /> <br />However, feisty Arizona and cocky California feuded over the matter until the U.S. <br />Supreme Court in 1964 resolved the matter this way: 4 A million acre-feet for California, <br />2.8 million for Arizona and 300,000 for Nevada. <br /> <br />Complicating matters, those original compact writerS miscalculated how much water was in <br />the river on a reliably regular basis. <br /> <br />http://www.nctimes.netlnewsl2002l20021222/11111.htrnl . <br /> <br />12/23/2002 <br />