9298

• UCREFRP Catalog Number: 9298
• Author: Water Education Foundation.
• Title: Colorado River Project
• USFW Year: 1999.
• USFW - Doc Type: Symposium Proceedings.
• Copyright Material: NO

a trust responsibility with all that that law trusts
them, brings to bear upon that subject. I don't know
what you think about it, John, but that's how I look
at it.

SAYRE: I think it's inevitable the Secretary of
Interior, with all the various agencies that overlap,
and some of it's redundant, that he's going to have,
quote, "what appear to be conflicts," but he's charged
by law to take care of those. And on trust responsi-
bilities, I once asked the Solicitor, "What do you
think if I went up and asked him for an opinion from
the Solicitor's office about what the trust responsibili-
ties were." He told me I'd never get an answer so
there wasn't any use to ask.

JOHNSON: I think it's fair to observe that every
public official has conflicting public values that have
to be dealt with. I don't think the Secretary of
Interior's conflicting public values are any different
than any other public official, state official, local
official. It's a problem in government that you have to
deal with - conflicting values.

QUESTION FROM THE AUDIENCE: I'm very
concerned about the way the water use is being
happening in my state, which is Baja, California.
Baja, California depends on 58 percent of the
Colorado River. On the other hand, what I've been
seeing and noticing is that the United States users of
the Colorado River are fighting and they scrambling
for the water use and my question is, how far this
struggle for the water will come in order to say to
Mexico, listen, Mexico, we got a bigger problems here
at home and we have to solve them first before we go
with your water use in respect to international treaty
that we have to deal with you too, but first we have to
deal with our own problems. My question to your
panel is, how do you see the near and the future, the
relationship between water quality and water
allocation for Mexico, according with the position
that you did take in the former administrations?

MARTIN: I make one suggestion, and it will not sit
well with everybody, but I think it's worth consider-
ing. Right now, on the Colorado, there are a number
of environmental compliance actions, including the
Lower Colorado Multi-Species Conservation Plan. I
consider that a very valuable process. The ultimate
outcome of that process, over a long period of time, if
it comes to fruition and if it delivers results, is to
improve the environmental standards which are
brought to bear on Colorado River management with
respect to species.

Environmentalists who participated in that study
have withdrawn from it, I don't know all the details,
based on the insistence that the conservation plan
doesn't intend to include provisions for Mexico.
Almost everybody that I know believes that plan can't
deliver results to Mexico, that this must be done in a
different context. My own sense of it is that the
multi-species process can't result in a multi-species
plan and a provision for water to Mexico.
What I would recommend, if you could do it, is
not to go along with the environmentalists, but rather
to increase your understanding of that process and see
if you can become persuaded, as I have, that you
shouldn't focus on that process as the way to solve the
Mexican issues. You
should begin to
look at other
strategies. Once
you do that, I think
you will get help
from a lot of the
interests that are on
the Colorado.

THE
CHANGING
ROLE OF TH E
SECRETARY ON
TH E COLORADO
RIVER

I don't think any
Secretary can be in this

office without running

into an institutional

conflict of interest.

- John Carver

SYMPOSIUM
PROCEEDINGS
SEPTEMBER 1999

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