WSP09351

• File Number: 8220.111.J
• Description: Central Utah Participating Project
• State: UT
• Basin: Colorado Mainstem
• Date: 1/1/1993
• Title: The CUP Holds the Solution: Utah's Hybrid Alternative to Water Markets
• Water Supply Pro - Doc Type: Report/Study

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The CUP Holds the Solution:
Utah's Hybrid Alternative to Water Markets

1 can tell you just as sure as hell that change [in western water
policy] i8 coming, and it's going to happen. You will not be able to
hold it back. Some of you will carve out nkhes for another year of
privilege, for another year of subsidy. . . but eventually it will
happen, and 1 suspect it will be 11UJre painful each and every year it
i8 delayed.

Representative George Miller
Chairman, House Interior Committee'

I. INTRODUCTION

It is said that God, in fonning the Western States, provided all the
whiskey people needed, but only enough water to fight over. Today this
fight over western water policy continues. The speech given by
Representative George Miller to the Colorado River Water Users
Association documents the acerbic relations between three groups:
fanners, environmentalists, and urban communities! These parties
are caught in a zero-sum game,' in which. any reallocation of the West's
scarce resource inflicts losses on at least one of the parties. Faced with
'this economic and political reality, the parties have dug in their heels

1 Representative George Miller, Keynote Addres8 to the Colorado River Water User.
Association (Dec:. 12, 1991). Representative Miller is a California Democrat, who chair. the
House Interior and Insular Affairs Committee (now caned the Natural Resources Committee)
and also chaired the former House Subcommittee on Water, Power, and Offshore Energy
Resources.
II Many of the members of the Colorado River Water Users Association, reacting to
Representative Miller's first speech before the association, .saw [Representative MiUer] as a
hard.8B' S.O.B.- and felt that they really had their work cut out to beat him. Interview with
Don Christiansen, General Manager, Central Utah Water Conservancy District, in Orem, Utah
(Mar. 20, 1992).
, RONALD L. LrrrLE " THOMAS R. GREIDER, WATER TRANSFERS FROM AGRICULTURE TO
INDUSTRY: Two UTAH ExAMPLEs 8 (Institute for Social Science Research on Natural Resources,
Utah State University, Research Monograph No. 10, 1983) ("'Lately, 88 a result of intensive
agricultural practiee8, 8 fairly rapid pace of industrialization. and a massive increase in
population, the variable.sum pme of water politics in the West has become a zero.sum game.-).

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