THE WORTH OF WATER
FROM FIELD
TO
NEGOTIATION TABLE:
INSIDE
JB HAMBY’S JOURNEY
INTO WHERE
THE COLORADO RIVER
FLOWS.
HEN YOU ASK JB HAMBY a question about his work as one of the country’s prominent water negotiators, he rarely answers straightforwardly. Instead, he dips into the past, often referencing the formation of compacts, acts, Supreme Court trials, flood conditions, and more, to provide historical context around the issue at hand. At 28, Hamby has two of the biggest gigs in water in the United States. He serves on the Imperial Irrigation District board of directors — a role he has held since he was elected in 2020 — overseeing the agricultural valley that uses the largest share of Colorado River water. And in 2023, he was appointed California’s Colorado River commissioner, responsible for negotiating for the state in the ongoing talks over Colorado River operations after its current guidelines expire in 2026. As Hamby is prone to saying, the past is prologue — and that is exceedingly true when it comes to his work on the Colorado River. Hamby serves alongside six commissioners representing the river’s other basin states of Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming. The waterway — an essential resource for 40 million people, including 30 tribal nations, and nearly 5.5 million acres of agriculture — has a history of management staked on the 1922 Colorado River Compact, which sought to “provide for the equitable division and apportionment of the use of the waters of the Colorado River System,” according to the document. The compact roughly divided the river into two halves, granting 7.5 million acre-feet to the upper-basin states of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming, and 7.5 million acre-feet to the lower-basin states of Arizona, California, and Nevada. Mexico also has a claim to Colorado River water,
though that is determined through separate negotiations governed by a 1944 treaty between the U.S. and Mexico. Because of “historic injustices and inequities,” tribal communities were not traditionally engaged in the initial negotiations, says Arohi Sharma, a senior policy analyst at the nonprofit environmental advocacy group Natural Resources Defense Council. The Biden administration, however, is making an effort to involve the tribes in negotiations. In April, the Colorado River Indian Tribes — whose members include the Mohave, Chemehuevi, Hopi, and Navajo — signed a landmark agreement with the federal government and state of Arizona that gives the group control over water use for their portions of the river away from tribal land. An issue that everyone who relies upon the Colorado River faces is the dwindling amount of water flowing through it. Today, the portion of the river that runs through the U.S. contains closer to 12 or 13 million acre-feet of water; this is significantly less than the amount of water — more than 15 million acre-feet — that was accounted for when the 1922 compact was drawn up. (One acre-foot amounts to a football field, minus the end zones, covered in a foot of water. That’s enough to supply a year’s worth of water for two urban households.) Over the past two decades, the amount of water has been decreasing, in part, due to increased temperatures and decreased precipitation with climate change exacerbating the problem. “There’s that Ben Franklin saying that goes ‘We don’t know the worth of water until the well is dry,’” Hamby tells The Rooted Journal. “That’s very much the case here — the well is starting to get very, very empty. When water is not there, that upsets a way of life or the ability to live at all for millions of people.”
by Zoe Rosenberg
112
113
ISSUE 01
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