Post-2026 Colorado River rules, a bilingual law of the ditch, and the cities that already know how to share
By a regulated optimist who grades in pencil, votes with both hands, and still believes maps should tell the truth.
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I. Prologue: a map that runs downhill
Every politics is water politics in disguise. Draw the United States by rivers and you get a biography of arguments: the Colorado's improbable slingshot through seven states and two nations; the Rio Grande's long parable about scarcity; the small, stubborn acequias that lace New Mexico like cursive written with a shovel. The future—electrified, hotter, more populous—will be won not with bigger speeches, but with better plumbing and kinder rules.
This is an editorial for the way out: how to write the post-2026 law of the Colorado River without repeating the adolescent bravado of the 20th century; how to learn—finally—from Hispanic water governance first practiced here before Jamestown had decent thatch; and how coastal cities can stop throwing a freshwater ocean back into the sea.
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II. The clock everyone can hear
On January 1, 2027, the river's current rulebook ages out. The Bureau of Reclamation is deep in the Post-2026 process; it published an Alternatives Report in January 2025 summarizing the options it intends to carry forward into a Draft EIS. This is the scaffolding on which the next two decades will hang. It is also the last polite moment before the bargaining turns operatic.
Meanwhile, the near-term triage continues. The Lower Basin plan—the consensus adopted by Interior to conserve 3 million acre-feet by 2026, beyond the cuts already in the 2007 Guidelines and the Drought Contingency Plan—has been the sandbag wall keeping Lake Mead from mutiny. But sandbags are not dams; they buy time, not absolution.
Reclamation's August 2025 study still projects Lake Mead hovering in Level 1 Shortage for 2026 (about 1,056 feet by year-end in the most-probable track). Under the U.S.–Mexico Minute 323 scarcity plan, Mexico shares reductions alongside Arizona and Nevada when Mead sits at or below 1,075 feet—a binational courtesy written as arithmetic.
The point is not to brood; it's to plan with the courage of a measured forecast.
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III. Revision without nostalgia: five rules for a grown-up compact
1) Retire the fiction of the "average" river.
The 1922 Compact divided a flow it did not possess; climate change took the remainder as a tip. Post-2026 rules must index deliveries to observed hydrology (Reclamation is already modeling this family of alternatives) and prevent withdrawals that depend on miracles. The river must be treated as a budget, not a myth.
2) Pay for water you don't take—where it hurts most.
The Lower Basin's 3 MAF conservation through 2026 proved the concept: cash for conserved system water can keep Mead and Powell from electrical and legal catastrophe. Bake permanent, verifiable conservation markets into the new rules—but prioritize hotspot reaches (Imperial, Yuma, Palo Verde) and tribal water partnerships, with hard auditing and third-party monitoring.
3) Make binational scarcity the default, not the exception.
Minute 323 (2017–2026) was a modest masterpiece: shared shortage, salinity cooperation, restoration dollars, and the legal plumbing for Mexico to store water in U.S. reservoirs. Its successor must be automatic, not heroic—copy the thresholds, publish the accounting, and expand the toolbox (desalinated or reused supplies that are genuinely additional, jointly verified).
4) Stop treating reuse as a lifestyle and start treating it as supply.
San Diego's Pure Water will produce roughly 30 MGD in its first phase (ramping by the end of 2025) and about 83 MGD by 2035—nearly half the city's demand—using advanced purification to turn wastewater into drinking water. The State of California has already mapped hundreds of potable-reuse projects toward 2030/2040 targets. If coastal metros still dump a freshwater ocean outfall into salt water in 2035, that's not scarcity; that's hobbyism.
5) Try desal last—and only with honest math.
Arizona's water agency (WIFA) is again reviewing Sea of Cortez desalination proposals (and other importation schemes). Feasible? Perhaps. Inevitable? No. Cross-border desal is capital-thick, power-hungry, brine-complicated, and geopolitically touchy. Evaluate it as an augmentation after aggressive reuse, conservation, canal lining, and ag-urban partnerships have done the cheaper work. The good news: WIFA's 2025 solicitation keeps desal in a comparative queue, not on a pedestal.
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IV. The law beneath the law: acequias as curriculum, not nostalgia
Before the Compact, before canals that could be seen from space, water governance in the Southwest was carried in Spanish and Pueblo vocabulary: acequia, mayordomo, turno—a schedule as ethics. Under New Mexico law, acequias are political subdivisions with authority over diversions and transfers; they are irrigation ditches and little republics at once. Read the handbooks and you hear the old sentence: "Water is a covenant."
The relevance is not quaint. In a hotter century, the institutions that endure will be those that force neighbors to see one another. Annual clean-outs (the saca), shared gates, elected ditch bosses—this is governance that calibrates law to scarcity with dignity. Legal scholars have traced the system's lineage from Iberian-Moorish practice to colonial New Mexico; more recent papers document the drift from communal rights to individual adjudicated rights—useful for courts, dangerous for rivers without a social spine. The fix is not to retreat; it's to hybridize: embed acequia-style local compacts into the new macroscale rules, with real teeth on shortage sharing and transparency.
If the post-2026 playbook remembers the ditch as well as the dam, the river will have a chance to behave like a community again.
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V. Cities that stopped pretending
San Diego chose reuse. Its Pure Water program is not a press release; it is concrete, membranes, valves, and a financing stack that includes an EPA WIFIA loan. Phase 1's 30 MGD is due by end-2025; the full build toward 83 MGD by 2035 is procurement-hard and litigation-tested. Results will be measured in fewer miles of imported water and a political culture that has learned to trust a clean loop.
Arizona, by contrast, is simultaneously a pioneer and a parable. The Lower Basin conservation deals have been real and painful; the state is also fielding six augmentation proposals (desal, surface imports, reclaimed water) under WIFA's 2025 solicitation. The correct answer is plural: go fast on reuse and agricultural efficiency; study desal in public with binational guardrails and brine accounting; do not let dreams of pipes distract from the cheaper acre-feet still on the table.
And across New Mexico, after wildfire and flood choked ditches, the Legislature had to relearn that acequias are infrastructure, not folklore. When the canals go dry, so do orchards and a centuries-old civic habit. A republic that funds highways and forgets ditches has mistaken speed for civilization.
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VI. A bilingual operating manual (you can ship this in 12 months)
1) Bring "natural flow" into the contract.
Model allocations off observed inflows (not paper averages), with automatic shortage triggers—and publish the math as a public ledger any high-schooler can audit. The Post-2026 Alternatives Report signals this turn; the Draft EIS should lock it.
2) Make the binational annex permanent.
Extend Minute 323 with explicit recovery rules, ICS-like credits for conservation, and joint verification of any desal/reuse counted as "new water." Publish annual Mexico-U.S. storage and reductions on a single bilingual site.
3) Set a Lower Basin reuse floor.
By 2030, require the coastal metros (LA/OC/SD) to hit the State Water Board's planned reuse trajectories; by 2040, meet or exceed the 1.8 million acre-feet/year statewide target as projects come online. Tie a slice of federal funding eligibility to verifiable milestones.
4) Fund the ditch like a road.
Create an Acequia Resilience Fund (state + federal) with three tabs: post-fire reconstruction, metering & modernization, and local drought compacts that pay irrigators for conserved flows with clear ecological targets. Treat acequias as critical infrastructure in hazard plans and bond decks.
5) Desal with consent.
If WIFA selects a Sea of Cortez proposal, require an IBWC-supervised impact and equity pact: brine dispersion science, habitat offsets, community benefit agreements on both sides, and firm energy sources that don't make the water saltier by burning more gas. The 2025 WIFA slate is the right time for grown-up scrutiny.
6) Translate the river.
All postings (allocations, shortage tiers, conservation contracts) in Spanish and English. The river's households already live bilingually; its bureaucracy should catch up.
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VII. Three rooms where the future shows up
Yuma, a packing shed, 5:45 a.m.
A foreman reads the new work-rest schedule on a bulletin board. The farm traded a sliver of its rights into a system conservation contract; those dollars paid for shade over the loading dock and a reuse hookup that waters trees along the canal. Nobody calls it justice. They call it a good day.
San Diego, 11:20 a.m.
A teacher points at a diagram: sewer → purification → reservoir → tap. The kids make faces—then the engineer talks about membranes and ultraviolet light—and the faces change to curiosity. The city will drink its own homework by the time they graduate.
Chimayó, Saturday, spring.
Neighbors rake silt from the ditch. The mayordomo jokes about the new meter; the ledger is now digital. When the gate opens, nobody cheers; they listen. The sound is older than the country; the word for it is ours.
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VIII. Epilogue: courtesy is a hydrologic principle
The river doesn't care about sovereignty; it cares about gravity and promises. The post-2026 rules will either be an index of what the river can give or a suite of euphemisms for theft from the future. We can choose the grown-up version: flows that match physics, cuts that match capacity, investments that reduce demand, and institutions that make neighbors legible to each other—in Spanish where Spanish is spoken, in public where the public pays.
The desert never wanted poetry from us. It wanted discipline and shade and law that remembers. If we write that law now, the map will teach our children a gentler geometry: water that moves, cities that reuse, ditches that bind, and a river that is a republic again.
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Sources (validated)
• Post-2026 process & Alternatives Report: Bureau of Reclamation hub and Jan. 2025 report summarizing alternatives carried forward to the Draft EIS.
• Near-term conservation: Interior adoption of Lower Basin 3 MAF plan through 2026 (Record of Decision / DOI statements).
• Reservoir outlooks: Aug. 2025 Reclamation 24-Month Study (Powell/Mead elevations); Reclamation news release confirming Level 1 Shortage operations for 2026.
• U.S.–Mexico arrangements: Minute 323 (2017–2026) and IBWC Aug. 2025 allocations bulletin explaining shortage sharing and recovery.
• Potable reuse: Pure Water San Diego program overview and schedule (City; EPA WIFIA), plus delivery targets through 2035; California State Water Board list of planned recycled-water projects to meet 2030/2040 goals.
• Arizona augmentation: WIFA 2025 notice of six proposals (desal, surface imports, reclaimed water) and local reporting on Sea of Cortez options.
• Acequia governance: New Mexico OSE/Interstate Stream Commission description of acequias as political subdivisions; governance and legal background from UNM/Utton Center and NMAA.
• Acequias after wildfire: AP coverage of 2023 damage and the funding debate, illustrating acequias as critical infrastructure.