As Western Governors Meet In Vegas (Naturally); Mead Water Level 9 Feet Above Benchmark For Cutbacks

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Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval will host Western Governors' Association counterparts from Colorado, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico, South Dakota, Utah and Wyoming this weekend to consider several issues, including water. Two days of drought workshops follow.

"The motto is: We save the system as a whole," said Pat Mulroy, longtime general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority in Las Vegas and now a senior policy fellow with the Brookings Institution. "If we get into, 'I'm going to win,' and, 'You're going to lose,' there won't be a winner," Mulroy said.

But Wockner said Colorado, Wyoming and Utah are considering dams and diversions in the mountains to capture water they're entitled to before it reaches the Colorado and flows to the deserts. New Mexico has plans to divert and store water from the Gila River for cities and farms before it flows into Arizona and empties into the Colorado River near the Mexico border.

"Diversions extract water from the system," said Jack Schmidt, professor of watershed sciences at Utah State University. He just completed three years studying the Grand Canyon for the U.S. Geological Survey. "More water use and more water retention in the upper basin means less water flowing through the Grand Canyon to the lower basin."

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The goal is to prop up Lake Mead, which stood Friday at 1,084 feet above sea level ? just 9 feet above the crucial 1,075 level that would trigger cuts to Arizona, Nevada and California. The federal Bureau of Reclamation this week projected a better than 50 percent chance that it will declare such a shortage in January 2017. The Central Arizona Project would face the first cutbacks, and farmers would be hit hardest, agency chief David Modeer said. "Hoping for snowpack is not sufficient to solve this," Modeer said. "It's going to take cooperation and sacrifice among all of us to stave off disaster in the river."

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http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/water-woes-topics-governors-vegas-27398084?singlePage=true

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1. "It's going to take cooperation and sacrifice"

Hope nobody is holding their breath for that.