Sherman & Howard water attorney James Eklund is a featured speaker in a “Ten Across Conversations” podcast about the ongoing Colorado River crisis and the difficult legal and cultural struggles among all water users on the river. As the architect of the Colorado River Drought Contingency Plan, James consistently advocates for creating proactive solutions to the crisis rather than kick the problem down the road to someone else.

In the podcast, James discusses the ongoing negotiations among seven states that use the Colorado River for agriculture and municipal use to come up with a solution to the rapidly depleted water storage in lakes Powell and Mead, which provide water and power to 40 million people in the western side of the country. The federal government has put deadlines on the states to come up with solutions, on which the states have yet to agree.

Here are some of James’ comments in the podcast.

“I look at everything like a basketball analogy. You can think of it like we’re playing against the clock, and we are down, and we are behind. We’ve got to score, and we’ve got to score quickly and a lot. All this snowpack has done is put a few more ticks on the clock. That’s all. It still means we’re behind, and it’s going to be a stretch to make up the difference. We’ve got a little more of the clock to play with, and if anything, it just means we’ve got to start being more urgent, use the time as wisely as we possibly can…”

“It’s important for people observing this crisis to really appreciate the ripple effect … how we deal with this situation … how we get to what is incredibly important, and the regime itself will have ripple effects through water policy throughout the country.”

“The interesting thing is here we are talking about water, and everybody is focused on the system going down very precipitously because of the water levels. In reality, the reason we’re here… the driver is hydroelectric power. …. The elevations of those reservoirs really drives the pressure of water on the turbines, which dictates how much electricity they can produce. When you go below the elevations we’ve targeted,… you start to compromise the ability to generate, not just power, and clean power, it’s load-following power.  When the sun may be going down, they need that load-following power to really pop on the grid at the right time. If you want to replace that power, … you have to go to the spot market … It’s a financial and an electric problem.”

Listen to the entire podcast here:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ten-across-conversations/id1582715331?i=1000603505457