The federal government is heralding an agreement reached last week with California, Arizona and Nevada on sharing water from the Colorado River as a breakthrough in efforts to avert a catastrophic "doomsday" scenario for the cities and farms in the three states that rely on that water.
But the agreement—which must be ratified by the seven states that make up the Colorado River basin—ensures that the negotiators will be heading back to the table, probably before the ink is dry: the deal expires in 2026.
The compromise announced by the Interior Department was made possible by an unexpected shift from an unexpected source: the record winter snowfall in California's mountains, which erased the effects of what had been called a 1,500-year drought and postponed what the Feds had been calling a "doomsday" scenario.
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