Suzanne Ticknor Central Arizona Project Arizona and other Lower Basin States have started yielding to the “many hard and sobering realities” of declining levels in Lake Mead, said Suzanne Ticknor, Director of Water Policy for the Central Arizona Project (CAP). The CAP delivers 1.6 million acre-feet of water from the Colorado River via a 336-mile aqueduct to more than four million people, 10 irrigation districts, 11 tribes and about 50 municipal and other subcontractors. Water levels in Mead have fallen 130 feet in elevation since 2000 even as upper basin states released at least 8.23 million acre-feet from Lake Powell in all but one year. “It’s tempting for some people in the lower basin to assume that the critical declines in Lake Mead are the result of the drought,” she said. Not so. The real problem the “simple fact that the lower basin uses 1.2 million acre-feet more water than is delivered.” This is called the structural deficit. CAP managers foresee potential reductions so severe that they could “dramatically impact Arizona’s entire economy, society and the environment.” The risk of this “existential threat” is regarded as a low probability, but could develop quickly and in the relatively near future, she said. At first, Arizona must bear the brunt of the Lower Basin overconsumption, as it has junior Colorado River rights under federal legislation authorizing the CAP. Irrigators have fallowed 10 percent of their acreage, saving 345,000 acre-feet of water and slowing the depletion of Mead. Arizona’s part of the 2014 pilot drought response action Memorandum of Understand will be met by the end of 2016, she said. A Pilot System Conservation Program of all seven basin states (Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, Wyoming, Nevada, Arizona and California) has been having “some impact” and could “potentially change the slope (of the Mead declines), at least a little bit.” More must be done in 2017. CAP expects a shortage declaration by the Department of Interior in 2019 for the Lower Basin. In response, Lower Basin States are negotiating contingency plans for larger and more rapid reductions, first by Arizona and Nevada but then also by California when the Lake Mead levels drop to an elevation of 1,045 feet. It’s at 1,112 feet as of early October. Ticknor said reductions in water use have been a “hard sell.” “People are having a hard time grappling with the size of the reductions and the nature of the impacts,” she said. Asked about the willingness to reduce water use for parks, and golf course and other urban greenery, she said “those conservations are ongoing.”