Last winter was cold and wet, which is some much needed good news for the Colorado River and communities that rely on its water to give them life. The bad news is, it was just one winter’s worth of rain and snow for a river trying to survive a 22-year drought.
That was the message Scottsdale Water Policy Manager Gretchen Baumgardner told the city council during its April 25 work study session on the issue.
“Obviously, this has been an amazing winter,” Baumgardner said. “It doesn’t matter if you can see the spill on the Verde and the Salt (rivers) or you’re up in the Rockies or the Sierra Nevadas or other parts of the country. It’s been an amazing, wet winter. Absolutely, it does give us a little bit of respite from what we’ve been; however, the system is still at 26% (full). The system is still doing what the system has done over the last 22 years, so we should take this respite and have those really great conversations with the stakeholders and the basin states and still keep the trajectory of what we want to do in conservation still moving forward.”
