Russ Schumacher
speaker
46 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2026
last heard 2 Aug
Russ Schumacher’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
In the West, with water in the Colorado River Basin, there's a somewhat complicated compact that was established a little over 100 years ago about who gets to use how much water in the Colorado River.
It's divided between the upper basin states, which are Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and New Mexico, and the lower basin states, California, Arizona, Nevada.
And so essentially the upper basin states and the lower basin states get an equal allocation of water from the Colorado River Basin, but there's not as much water in the system now as there was in the 1920s when that compact was established.
There's more demand for water because a lot more people are living in the West.
And so it's led to this complicated situation of negotiations between the upper basin and lower basin states and the federal government about what to do with the declining water supplies.
And the plan that was released by the federal government indicates that the lower basin states especially would be subject to reductions in use of Colorado River water.
Yeah, and what a lot of that Colorado River water supports is agriculture in those states.
And so it'll mean that most likely in dry years, those states will have to reduce their use of the Colorado River water, whereas the upper basin states, the cutbacks will be more voluntary.
The majority of the reductions or the conservation requirements will be on the lower basin states.
The negotiations or some of the tension over the years have been that generally the lower basin states have been using more of their allocation, whereas the upper basin states haven't.
But at the same time, the agricultural production in those lower basin states is crucially important.
big populations.
And so this is where a lot of the tension comes around.
The supply is up where we are in Colorado, in our mountains.
So the snow that falls in our mountains in the winter is the source of that water that goes into the Colorado River as it melts out in the spring and summer.
And then it goes into those reservoirs and then gets released for use further downstream.
So when we have bad snow years like this one, there's less water on the supply side.
The demand tends to go up in the dry years, and we've had a lot more dry years than wet years in the last couple of decades.
And so that's brought us to the challenges that we have here today.
Yeah, we've had years with not very much snow in the southwest or in the mountains.
Showing 1–20 of 46 · page 1 of 3
Next →