Drought contingency plan faces hurdles

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The Arizona Republic reported that with a deadline approaching for Arizona to finish a deal that would divvy up Colorado River water deliveries, negotiations are proving difficult with points of disagreement over how the cuts should be spread around.

The state’s top water managers canceled a Thursday meeting saying in a statement that they wanted to “give time for additional discussions and analysis related to the four essential elements involved in this process.”

The Arizona Department of Water Resources and the Central Arizona Project said in a joint statement that progress is being made through discussions between groups of stakeholders, “which we believe will lead to Arizona’s Drought Contingency Plan.”

“We have every possibility that they will come up with an agreement,” said Sarah Porter, director of the Kyl Center for Water Policy at ASU Morrison Institute. “But we’ve always known that there was a likelihood, some possibility, that they wouldn’t be able to get to agreement. If it were easy, we would have already had an agreement.” 

She said she hopes the contract-holders “keep in mind that we have this almost hundred-year history of states working cooperatively to negotiate agreements along the Colorado, and right now Arizona is kind of the lone holdout in terms of joining in to the DCP, and the optics of Arizona not participating in DCP could be troublesome.”

READ: Arizona cancels water meeting amid difficult negotiations on Colorado River deal