The Navajo Nation has joined the long list of Southwesterners thirsting for the waters of the Colorado River, filing a lawsuit that is sending a mighty ripple downstream to California and neighboring states.
The tribe contends that the U.S. Department of the Interior has ignored its water rights while divvying up the flow in the Lower Colorado River Basin and has thus breached its trust obligations to the Navajo.
Several water rights experts predicted the suit would be a difficult one for the Navajo to pursue. And water litigation is notorious for taking decades to resolve. But the March filing has drawn attention in the Southwest's water world. States and water agencies are moving to intervene.
"I think they would have a hard time advancing their claim -- anything of real substance," said Dennis Underwood, a vice president of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California who handles Colorado River issues for the giant agency. "But funny things can happen in court. It is challenging things that are of immediate interest to the lower basin states."
In particular, the suit asks the courts to set aside guidelines dealing with surplus Colorado flows used by California, Arizona and Nevada, questioning a water-banking program for Arizona and Nevada that Metropolitan wants to get involved in and challenging guidelines for repaying inadvertent overdrafts of the river by Colorado users.
"It has the potential of having a profound impact on the politics of the river," said Robert Glennon, a University of Arizona law professor who writes on water issues.
Growth in the Southwest is making every drop of the Colorado desirable, spurring water negotiations and settlements that are leaving the Navajo feeling like wallflowers. Their suit, filed this spring, adds yet another tangle to the knot of demands tightening around the 1,400-mile-long river.
Colorado water sprinkles the lawns of Arizona subdivisions, fills the irrigation ditches of desert farms in Southern California and sustains the artificial lakes of Las Vegas. But it doesn't do anything for the Navajo Reservation sprawling to the east of the river above Lake Mead.
That has long bothered the Navajo, many of whom don't have running water in their homes. They have tapped the Colorado's tributaries, but have never gotten very far with claims to its main branch in the lower basin.
