To be honest, and this is probably an unpopular opinion..... but I'm almost to the point of hoping the lakes continue to drop to critical levels. Why? because that is what will be needed for action to happen and the terms of the agreement changed and updated to reflect the actual situation we are dealing with now.
It's very true that the best laid plans tend to go nowhere until there is a crisis, and at that point they are usually thrown out and replaced with something else less perfect as panic encroaches.
Although a lot of people today scratch their heads at the terms and poor underlying assumptions of the 1922 Compact, not all that many of them ask the key question: why did it ever happen in the first place? And of course the answer is rooted in what svivian suggests--it took a crisis. And as is almost always the case with crisis planning, the bread comes out half-baked. Blame the Supreme Court.
In the earliest part of the 20th century, almost nothing was known about the Colorado River other than to the ranchers and miners in the area, along with the few explorers following in Powell's footsteps. So when the first comprehensive surveys of the canyons began in 1921, it was with the intention of exploiting the future use of whatever resources were there, mostly water.
At the time, California was growing off the charts. In 1920, that state had already exploded to a population of nearly 4 million, with a booming agricultural industry that depended on water. This kind of development dwarfed the other six states in the basin. Nevada, for example, had a population of 77,000. Then the crisis happened. Not a drought, or a natural disaster--it was a legal crisis. In June 1922, in a landmark case, the Supreme Court upheld the doctrine of prior appropriation. Now it was possible to establish a water right just by using the water first, and the decision allowed for that water to be transferred out of state. That had huge implications, none of them good for any state other than California. And that is why, with great haste, a Colorado water lawyer convened the seven states and hastily worked out a deal--the 1922 Compact.
It was a frustratingly incomplete document. All it did was establish an Upper and Lower Basin, and divided a theoretical 15 maf flow between those two basins. It did not establish rights for the individual states. But it did guarantee the Lower Basin the first 7.5 maf, leaving the Upper Basin with whatever was leftover. At the time, it seemed to be a reasonable deal for the Upper Basin, since flows were huge in recent years. In the 20 years prior, the flow past Lees Ferry was never less than 12 maf (and then only 3 times), and usually well above 20 maf!
So they all signed onto the deal--except Arizona, wary of neighboring California. The Upper Basin states figured they got what they could, and the truth was they got about a good a deal as they could get at the time, considering they had next to no political clout compared to California. Uninhabited Nevada got a free ride for the moment too. But Arizona complained that the 1922 Compact should have established a fixed amount for each state, not just for each basin. They refused to ratify the document because for them the question loomed--how much water would California take? Under the Compact, they could theoretically take all 7.5 maf of the Lower Basin's share.
...which led to the beginning of piecemeal fixes. The first of these was the Boulder Canyon Act of 1928, which established the relative shares of water for the Lower Basin--an effort to limit California--but that state got what it really wanted--Hoover Dam, which provided the means to send almost unlimited water and power to California, no matter what the Compact said. Who was going to stop them?
It went from there. A treaty with Mexico in 1944. A compact between the Upper Basin states in 1948. A lawsuit between Arizona and California, which Arizona finally won. A never ending series of protocols and amendments. And of course, in the middle of it all, the 1956 Colorado River Storage Project, which gave rise to Lake Powell.
And so the Law of the River as we know it today is a series of fixes of an imperfect original document created in the wake of a crisis. We can see how well all that worked out.
Now, as that arrangement is somehow updated in the near future, we need to remember the lessons of crisis planning...
