SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — When Don Cox was looking for a reliable place to build a family farm in the 1950s, he settled on California's Imperial Valley.
The desert region had high priority water rights, meaning its access to water was hard for anyone to take away.
“He had it on his mind that water rights were very, very important," said his grandson, Thomas Cox, who now farms in the Valley.
He was right. Today the Imperial Valley, which provides many of the nation's winter vegetables and cattle feed, has one of the strongest grips on water from the Colorado River, a critical but over-tapped supply for farms and cities across the West. In times of shortage, Arizona and Nevada must cut first.
But even California, the nation's most populous state with 39 million people, may be forced to give something up in the coming years as hotter and drier weather causes the river's main reservoirs to fall to dangerously low levels. If the river were to become unusable, Southern California would lose a third of its water supply and vast swaths of farmland in the state's southeastern desert would go unplanted.
“Without it, the Imperial Valley shuts down,” said JB Hamby, a board member for the Imperial Irrigation District, which holds rights to the largest share of Colorado River water.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is part of a collaborative series on the Colorado River as the 100th anniversary of the historic Colorado River Compact approaches. The Associated Press, The Colorado Sun, The Albuquerque Journal, The Salt Lake Tribune, The Arizona Daily Star and The Nevada Independent are working together to explore the pressures on the river in 2022.
A century ago, California and six other states — Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming — created a compact that split the water into two basins and set rules for how much water each would get. A series of deals, laws and court cases that followed led California to get the most water and made it the last to lose in times of shortage.
Fear and frustration over California’s use of the river has driven the compact since its early days. In western water law, the first person who taps the source gets the highest right, and California cities and farmers have relied on the river for more than a century.
Other western states worried California would lay claim to all the river’s water before their own populations grew. The compact and the series of deals that followed attempted to find a balance to protect California’s supply while ensuring other states got some too. California, meanwhile, benefitted when the federal government began building the Hoover Dam to help control the river’s flow.
Today, the states are now gearing up for a 2026 deadline to renegotiate some of the terms to better deal with drought and protect two major reservoirs, Lake Powell and Lake Mead. But before that, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation has demanded the states find a way to cut their use by roughly 15% to 30% to stave off a crisis. The states failed to meet a mid-August deadline to reach a deal, but negotiations are continuing and no new date for an agreement has been set.
All eyes are on California and its major water rights holders — namely the Imperial Irrigation District and Metropolitan Water District of Southern California — to see if they will give up some of their share. Both districts say they're willing to use less water or pay others to do so — especially if cooperating means they can avoid challenges to their senior rights.