This coverage is made possible through a partnership with Grist and WABE, Atlanta’s NPR station.

Tybee Island in Georgia has a rain problem.

The small barrier island’s stormwater system, fed by storm drains across the coastal community, funnels into a pipe that comes out on the beach at the southern tip of Tybee. But that pipe gets regularly buried by sand.

“What happens is when it gets covered with sand, and the tide rises, there’s nowhere for the stormwater to go,” said Alan Robertson, a Tybee resident and consultant for the city. 

The water backs up in the system and wells up out of the drains, flooding the roads. It’s a chronic problem, he said, that the city is trying to solve. 

“The city has to clear this every day,” Roberston said. 

Tybee’s not alone. All over the country, old stormwater systems struggle to keep up with increased rainfall due to climate change. Rising sea levels and groundwater — also from climate change — squeeze the systems from the other end. Infrastructure like roads, hospitals and wastewater plants need to be shored up against flooding. Residents need protection from heat, wildfire, floodwater, and other climate impacts.

All of that is expensive. The good news for local governments tackling these problems is that lots of state and federal money is out there to fund resilience projects. The recent federal infrastructure law and Inflation Reduction Act are adding hundreds of billions of dollars to the pot.

But there’s also bad news: The money is often hard to actually get, and that difficulty can amplify inequities for communities that need help the most.

“All these great numbers and these great programs means absolutely nothing if communities that need it most can’t have access to it,” said Daniel Blackman, a regional administrator for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

The funding often comes through competitive grants, with applications that are complicated and highly technical. They take time and expertise that under-resourced local governments often lack.

“One of the major capacity constraints of a lot of these local governments are that they have few grant writers on staff,” said Michael Dexter, director of federal programs for the Southeast Sustainability Directors Network.

Local government staff with plenty of work on their plates can often struggle to keep track of the different funding opportunities, coordinate the necessary partners, or come up with the local match funding some grants require.

“A lot of communities shy away from going after grant funds just because of that,” said Jennifer Kline, the coastal hazard specialist with the Georgia Department of Natural Resources Coastal Management Program.

Without a dedicated, expert grant writer and plenty of staff, communities may miss out on these huge amounts of money. That’s especially true in communities of color where old, racist policies discouraged investment and growth, according to Nathaniel Smith, founder of the Partnership for Southern Equity.

“If you look at many of the communities that face the greatest challenges, a lot of times people just assume that it happened by happenstance,” Smith said. “And that couldn’t be furthest from the truth.”

He pointed to redlining, a set of policies under which banks refused loans in areas deemed to be high-risk, which were primarily Black neighborhoods, as well as the construction of highways that obliterated thriving Black communities. There were also federal policies that encouraged suburbanization and white flight from cities. When schools are funded with property taxes so that wealthier and whiter areas have better equipped schools, that also amplifies the inequities, he said.

“All of these things have helped to facilitate a competitive advantage of, in particular, white communities and well-resourced communities,” Smith said.

For many of the same reasons, those same historically disinvested places — often communities of color — stand to be hit hardest by climate change: they often have less shade to reduce heat, are less protected from flooding, and face more of the health problems that climate change makes worse.

The Biden administration is trying to address this disparity with its Justice40 initiative, which promises to put 40 percent of federal climate funding toward historically disadvantaged communities. The process for identifying those communities has been criticized for some of the metrics it uses, for failing to account for cumulative burdens, and for not explicitly incorporating race. Because it’s broken down by census tract, Dexter said, the program can miss “localized need.” In places where a poor neighborhood is near a wealthier one, for instance, the average income across the tract could be too high to qualify.

“There’s still obviously uncertainty about how that’s gonna be implemented in some of these various different grant competitions,” he said.

And communities that qualify still have to successfully apply for and win those grants.

Through a program called the Justice40 Accelerator, Smith’s group and several partners offer funding and technical support to help eligible places get that money. The program has so far trained two cohorts, a total of 100 environmental and community groups from across the country. Along with grant writing help and mentorship, the accelerator provides $25,000 to each participating organization to help them develop their proposals.

“It takes real resources and time and support to ensure that local communities are positioned to compete,” Smith said.

So far, the program boasts an 81 percent success rate for its cohorts’ grant applications, totaling more than $28 million in funding awarded.

Many of the state and federal agencies that dole out grants offer help as well. The EPA, for instance, recently announced $177 million in funding for 17 of what it’s calling Environmental Justice Thriving Communities Technical Assistance Centers. Their goal is to help “underserved and overburdened” communities access federal funds. The centers, mostly based at universities or environmental groups, will provide training on grant writing and management as well as practical assistance like translation services for community outreach and meetings.

“It’s not going to solve every problem,” said Blackman. “But what it’s going to do is it’s going to address the concern you have in those individuals being able to write and access federal funding and grants.”

Kline’s DNR Coastal Management Program also provides assistance in finding and applying for grants. Dexter said his group, the Southeast Sustainability Directors Network, does too.  

What’s not clear is whether all of that is enough.

“I was gonna say that’s the $100 million question,” Dexter joked. “No, that’s the $1 trillion, multiple-trillion-dollar question.”

And it’s just one of the looming questions in these early stages of the IRA and infrastructure law rollouts. No one knows yet if there’s enough help for places that need it, or if those communities know the help is out there. It’s also unclear whether the assistance programs will help local governments not just apply for and win grants, but administer them and deliver the projects on time – itself a time-consuming and difficult process.

There’s some reason for hope, Dexter said, even as communities scramble for funding and groups like his scramble to provide enough support: The new federal laws are designed to offer funding over several years, instead of immediately. This is an important lesson learned, he said, from 2009’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and its heavy emphasis on “shovel-ready” projects. This time, some of the funding can be used for planning, and there is a bit more time for cities to get their ducks in a row.

“Hypothetically, that leads to this great scenario where a community might come in, in year one, access planning funding, and then by year three or four be able to access the implementation funding for that project,” Dexter said. 

That’s exactly the system Tybee Island is working with now. Robertson maintains a spreadsheet of projects that need funding. He has plans for how some of the work can unfold over multiple grant cycles. 

“We’re in a pretty good space now,” he said. “We can be much more responsive to many more opportunities because we have identified these projects.”

While stormwater remains a problem, the city has gotten grants to build protective dunes and elevate flood-prone houses.

But Tybee Island got lucky: Robertson, a resident with grant writing experience, stepped up after Hurricane Matthew devastated the island in 2016. The city contracted with him, and he deliberately worked to build up this grant capacity.

As the wave of new federal funding comes, other communities are looking for similar help.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline There’s big climate money out there for small towns. But will they get it? on May 25, 2023.

On Sunday, The JOLT enters the start of Year 4 of its life as a startup news organization, one of about 1,000 hyperlocal newsrooms across the United States that have launched in the past 10 years. …

Austin Wall was attending an environmental law conference at the University of Tennessee not long ago when, during a discussion of natural gas pipeline projects, a map appeared on the screen and gave him a surprise.

“I’m like, hold up, that Google Maps looks really familiar to me,” the 25-year-old law student said. “I could find my family’s farm on that map.”

Wall’s family lives in rural Dickson County, and its ranch lies within a 10-mile “blast zone” of a pipeline planned for north-central Tennessee. That got his attention. A pipeline exploded in that area in 1992, scorching more than five acres of forest, and a similar disaster could decimate the family’s livelihood raising cattle. But what really dismayed him is why the Tennessee Valley Authority wants to build the project: It plans to replace two coal-fired power plants with natural gas facilities.

The TVA is the nation’s largest public power provider, serving a wide swath of seven southern states, including most of Tennessee. Its fleet of 29 dams, 14 small “solar energy sites,” and 25 power plants generates the electricity that it sells to 153 regional utilities. The agency once boasted 14 coal-fired power plants, including one that was for much of the 1960s the world’s largest. Today just five remain, and the agency wants to replace two in Tennessee, one in Cumberland and the other in Kingston, with gas-powered plants. Doing so all but commits its customers to fossil fuels for the next 25 to 30 years, obliterating the utility’s chance of reaching any national or international, or even its own, climate goals.

Despite that, the TVA argues that building the capacity for solar and wind energy takes too much money and time to allocate all at once. Its officials insist that methane burns cleaner than coal, and they echo a common argument in claiming that it provides a tidy bridge between coal and truly renewable energy. Some, including the Environmental Protection Agency, oppose the plan for climate reasons, arguing that, in addition to carbon dioxide, the plant will emit methane, an even more powerful greenhouse gas. Others worry about how the pipelines needed to serve the new operations will impact their communities.

Wall joined other opponents of the plan who gathered earlier this month in a cavernous middle school gym in Norris, Tennessee, for a TVA board meeting. Together, they told the agency exactly what they thought of the plan. Wall sees the plant slated for Cumberland as part of a history of exploitation throughout the rural South.

“It’s rich people coming in and stealing our stuff and then leaving,” he said. “And I think that when you look into it, it’s a cycle that TVA has the opportunity to stop or to break.”

The TVA bills itself as a proponent of sustainability, and the meeting was thick with branding proclaiming that. A video clip playing on a screen near the podium celebrated a utopian vision of the agency’s past and present: happy workers, hydroelectric dams, nuclear power plants, and glittering solar fields. “We made clean energy long before anyone asked us to,” the narrator intoned over the sound of an acoustic guitar.

Yet just 3 percent of the TVA’s energy portfolio comes from wind and solar alone. If you count hydropower and nuclear as clean energy sources, as the TVA does, that number bumps up to about 50 percent. Gas supplies another 22 percent. “I want the word sustainability to be synonymous with TVA,” Lyash said during the meeting.

It’s hard to square that position with the agency’s plans for the Cumberland and Kingston power plants. Each is a juggernaut. Cumberland, the largest remaining coal plant in the TVA’s fleet, generates enough power for 1.1 million homes each year, according to the agency, and Kingston, about 700,000. These two plants burned coal for decades, exposing the surrounding low-income, rural communities to carbon, sulfur dioxide, and other pollutants. In Kingston, mismanagement of the plant’s massive coal ash landfill resulted in a notorious billion-gallon spill in 2008. Each is reaching the end of its service lifespan, and, combined with federal pressure to reduce emissions, no longer make economic sense to repair and run. Though bulldozing the units remains an option, the TVA believes a conversion to methane may give these plants a new life and benefit the climate.

“Replacing retired coal units with natural gas will reduce carbon emissions from coal chains by nearly 6 percent and accelerate the retirement of that coal,” Lyash said of the plan.

Of course, replacing those plants with renewables would reduce carbon emissions even further. The TVA is taking a step in that direction by replacing a coal plant in Paradise, Kentucky, with an operation that will combine solar and natural gas.

The agency considered a solar buildout for the Cumberland coal plant, but ruled it out on the grounds that it would require too much time and money. It also weighed distributed solar development as an alternative for the Kingston plant, but drafts of the plan indicate gas remains the preferred alternative there, too. This comes after years of slashing solar incentives and disinvesting in energy efficiency programs.

The favoritism mirrors a regional trend as Tennessee doubles down on natural gas. State lawmakers are pushing a bill that reclassifies it as clean energy. This follows years of other fossil fuel-friendly legislation, like a bill that explicitly blocks some local governments in the state’s majority-Democratic urban areas from fully decarbonizing. As usual, the argument follows these lines: You can’t see the sun for twelve hours a day, but gas plants can run anytime you need them.

The Biden Administration disapproves of the TVA’s plan for Cumberland and Kingston, noting that the only way it would achieve net-zero emissions by 2050 would be to institute expensive carbon capture technology, which the TVA did not factor into its math, or bring the plants offline early, leaving them a stranded asset. However, the EPA  did not challenge the decision.

Some commenters thanked the TVA for keeping the lights on, but others challenged the gas buildout, saying the agency reached a crossroads, took a look each way, then picked the wrong direction. Some called on it to immediately change course and cancel its plans.

“If you don’t move now, this will not happen,” one commenter told the board. “We are taxpayers who contribute to every TVA salary.”

That isn’t actually true, although it’s easy to see why people might think it is. Tax dollars do not support the TVA, though they once did, at its outset under the New Deal. Today the agency is a corporation run by the United States government, with leadership recommended by the President of the United States, and confirmed by the Senate, to serve five-year terms. Its board meetings are open, and decisions subject to public comment. But lately, some believe its decision-making has been less than democratic, and that TVA no longer feels beholden to those it serves.

“It’s a corporation clothed with the power of government,” said Amanda Garcia, a lawyer with the Southern Environmental Law Center. The Center, with other regional organizations like Appalachian Voices and the Tennessee Sierra Club chapter, has thrown its energy into pushing TVA away from methane. Part of the difficulty, she said, is the TVA is not regulated by the state Public Service Commission – it’s essentially an unregulated monopoly. That exempts it from the sort of oversight experienced by, say, Dominion Energy, which saw the South Carolina Public Service Commission reject its long-term plan in 2020, citing a need for lower-carbon options in its energy mix. Furthermore, utilities under TVA jurisdiction have negotiated what are called “never-ending contracts,” or perpetual power supply agreements that are difficult to exit. That lack of accountability and flexibility appears to be keeping the TVA on the fossil fuel train, Garcia said.

“I think there’s a fair amount of, just, institutional inertia going into planning for the future,” she said. “And a desire to continue to be able to control the electric system in a way that is inconsistent with really where we need to be moving from a climate perspective.”

Garcia and other climate activists believe Lyash, whom the board named CEO in 2019, holds outsized power over decision making. President Trump, who fired two of the board’s nine members over their pay and other issues, threatened to fire him for the same reasons. He relented, and the remaining board members voted in 2022 to hand Lyash the final call on a wide range of matters, including the last word on the gas plant buildout. After President Biden appointed four board members, the panel in May took back that authority, but ditching coal for gas in Cumberland and Kingston remains the official position. The TVA has refused to make board members available for comment, leaving that task to Lyash. TVA did not respond to an additional request for comment by the time of publication.

In an interview, Lyash told Grist that he wants the plants to eventually serve as backup energy sources, in the form of blackout-preventing “peaker plants,” that would provide power during high demand as the agency brings more renewables online. “If you wait for the perfect, you’ll be waiting a long time,” he said.

He also cited his oft-repeated mistrust in the reliability of wind and solar in defending the plan.

“If we could build 100 percent solar and operate a reliable, affordable system, we would have no reason not to. But we can’t. But that isn’t to say that doesn’t diminish the role of a solar bill on the portfolio,” he said, referring to the proportion of gas and solar in the energy mix. “The gas bill, you can’t take it in isolation. You have to think of it as part of the overall system.”

Tennessee’s larger cities, though, don’t think they have the time to wait on TVA’s creeping energy transition. Memphis Light, Gas and Power recently backed out of its “never-ending” 20-year contract with TVA, citing a desire to integrate more renewables and lower residents’ utility bills. Nashville Mayor John Cooper personally urged the TVA to scrap its Cumberland gas plant idea and start over.

“Even if TVA decides to retire the gas plants early and switch to renewables, they will pass the cost of the plant onto Nashville customers, consolidating the cost of a decades-long investment into customer electricity bills over just a few years,” Cooper wrote in a public comment addressed to the TVA. “Leaving Nashvillians on the hook for further pollution is unacceptable, whether the plants operate for years or are retired quickly.”

Climate activists and community leaders hope the conversions to gas are not a done deal. The Kingston plan was only just offered for public comment, and a lot can change before it is finalized in the spring of 2023. The Cumberland gas plan was wrapped up in January, but environmental advocates hope increased agitation over the planned pipeline could delay or even kill it, since that project requires an EPA-approved plan. A few bureaucratic steps remain before the future of the two power plants is set, and the public can still weigh in on it.

Austin Wall doesn’t want a gas plant, but also doesn’t want to see the TVA leave Cumberland. On the contrary. The plant provided 265 well-paying union jobs. But the 35 permanent positions expected from the gas buildout feels like a pittance in comparison, not to mention the public health hazards it will bring. Wall would rather see the agency support his community with renewed investment in energy efficiency and home upgrades, along with the construction of solar and wind infrastructure. That, he says, both help rural ratepayers and provide more opportunity for carpenters, electricians, and others in skilled trades.

A recent report by nonprofit organization Appalachian Voices suggested that as many as 739 direct, long-term jobs could be created in Cumberland and the surrounding area with investments in decarbonization, particularly in the energy efficiency sector.

“We’ve given up a lot of our land and a lot of our health and well being for this coal plant,” Wall said. “And we’d like to see a little bit of it in return.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Replace fossil fuels — with more fossil fuels? That’s one major utility’s plan. on May 19, 2023.

This story was produced in partnership with the nonprofit newsroom Type Investigations and is co-published with ICT.

In any given year, thousands of people are incarcerated in dozens of detention facilities run by tribal nations or the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Often left out of research on climate and carceral facilities, the tribal prisoner population is one of the most invisible and vulnerable in the country.

Now, climate change threatens to make matters worse.

According to a Grist analysis, more than half of all tribal facilities could see at least 50 days per year in temperatures above 90 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century if emissions continue to grow at their current pace. Ten facilities could experience more than 150 days of this kind of heat. Yet many tribal detention centers do not have the infrastructure, or funding, to endure such extreme temperatures for that long. This kind of heat exposure is especially dangerous for those with preexisting conditions like high blood pressure, which Indigenous people are more likely to have than white people.

“Tribal court jails are the worst jails in the country. They’re worse than any facilities you’ll ever go to,” said Diego Urbina, a public defender for the Pueblo of Laguna. “I worked at a [veterinary] hospital when I was 15 years old, and the vet hospital had better facilities than we have out here.”

In the Pueblo of Laguna jail, just 45 minutes west of Albuquerque, New Mexico, the air conditioner was often down, according to Brandon Chavez, a Laguna citizen who has been detained multiple times over the past few years. Even when doors were left open for cross ventilation, the effort did little to blunt the hot desert air, Chavez said.

“Climate change and excessive heat factors into Pueblo planning for all aspects of Laguna government and the Laguna community,” officials from the Pueblo of Laguna wrote in an email to Grist and Type Investigations. When asked whether Laguna currently has plans to manage climate impacts like excessive heat, officials wrote, “The [detention facility’s] HVAC system is less than 10 years old and normally keeps the occupants warm in the colder months and cool in the hotter months. Malfunctions will occasionally happen and are quickly repaired.”

While New Mexico’s Cibola County rarely sees a heat index over 90 degrees, both Chavez and Urbina said that the Laguna Tribal Detention Center, located there, can be unbearably hot. And temperatures are only expected to go up: According to data from the Union of Concerned Scientists, Cibola County — and the Laguna jail — could see about 50 days per year above 90 degrees by the end of the century if emissions and temperatures continue to rise at their current pace, a drastic change from the present day.

According to Chavez, the Laguna jail is already a grim place. “There was literally pipes exposed,” said Chavez. “There was mold on places, and we used to tell [the guards]. They didn’t care. I’ve been into some pretty huge jails around some places, and nothing still compares to the mistreatment [at] my Pueblo jail.”

Urbina said his clients detained in the jail have complained about backed-up toilets, overdue repairs, and overcrowding, including having to share a shower with 20-plus other people. “At one time, they packed that thing like sardines,” Urbina said of the Laguna jail.

In response, James Burson, an in-house attorney for the Pueblo of Laguna, told Grist and Type that a renovation of showers, toilets, and sinks in the facility was completed in February 2022.

Tribes have their own justice systems, including courts, law enforcement, jails, and prisons. In a given year, thousands of people are incarcerated in these detention facilities. In 2021, more than half of those detainees were held for nonviolent offenses, and a majority had not been convicted of a crime.

Tribal jails have a long history of mismanagement. In 2004, the Department of Interior, which oversees the Bureau of Indian Affairs, issued a report that called the state of tribal jails a “national disgrace.” It examined everything from deaths in facilities, attempted suicides, and escapes — serious incidents that were not reported to supervisors 98 percent of the time — to smaller issues including broken lights, malfunctioning cameras, faulty plumbing, and leaking water pumps. “Nothing less than a Herculean effort to turn these conditions around would be morally acceptable,” investigators wrote at the time.

​​In the aftermath of the report, funding for facilities increased, the percentage of certified officers grew, and new jails were built. However, multiple reports and investigations over the years have shown that little else has changed since 2004. According to an NPR report in June 2021, at least 19 people had died in tribal detention centers since 2016, while one out of five correctional officers had not completed required basic training. Reporters also highlighted facilities with broken pipes, dirty water, and other infrastructure problems.

“Under Interior’s new leadership, we are seeking increased funding and conducting a comprehensive review of law enforcement policies, practices and resources to ensure that [Bureau of Indian Affairs] detention center staff are adequately trained, that our facilities are upgraded, and that we respect the rights and dignity of those within our system to the fullest extent,” Darryl LaCounte, the director of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, or BIA, said in a written statement to NPR at the time.

In an April report, the Office of Inspector General, or OIG, highlighted serious health and safety concerns at three tribal detention facilities: San Carlos Apache Adult/Juvenile Detention Center, the White Mountain Apache Adult Detention Center, and the Tohono O’odham Adult Detention Facility. The report comes as part of an ongoing performance audit of BIA-funded or BIA-operated detention programs, and says that the problems identified need immediate attention. Issues include holes in walls, broken air-conditioning, nonoperational toilets and sinks, and moldy shower ceilings. Many of those challenges were also included in a 2016 OIG report.

“The safety issues raised in this report are disturbing enough on their own, but the fact that they span multiple administrations is inexcusable,” U.S. Representative Raúl M. Grijalva, a ranking member of the House Natural Resources Committee, said in a statement on the recent report.

In 2022, The Intercept assessed the growing risk of extreme heat in jails and prisons across the United States. But of the roughly 6,500 facilities The Intercept analyzed, only 16 were tribal detention centers and jails, excluding the vast majority of tribal facilities across the country. Grist and Type Investigations built on The Intercept’s reporting to fill this gap.

Based on an analysis from the Union of Concerned Scientists, information collected via Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, requests from the BIA, and research conducted in partnership with the Carceral Ecologies Lab at the University of California, Los Angeles, we tracked heat risk for 81 tribal jails and prisons spread across 20 states.

In 2019, the Union of Concerned Scientists published a county-by-county analysis of just how hot the contiguous U.S. could become under different levels of global climate action, from rapid action to reduce global emissions to effectively no action. The researchers then looked at the heat index, or the “feels like” temperature, which takes both humidity and air temperature into account, to paint a holistic picture of how heat would actually be experienced by communities on the ground. The National Weather Service also uses the heat index when issuing advisories or excessive heat warnings.

The researchers found that by mid-century, under a no-action scenario, “the average number of days per year with a heat index above 100°F will more than double, while the number of days per year above 105°F will quadruple.” In other words, in just a few decades, dangerous heat will become much more commonplace unless aggressive action is taken to limit climate change.

Jails across the country already face challenges when it comes to managing heat. The Intercept’s analysis found that “hundreds of thousands of incarcerated people are being subjected to prolonged periods of high heat every year.” Tribal jails are no different.

According to information Grist obtained through FOIA, most tribal facilities are in the Western U.S., where climates tend to be arid or hot. Nearly 20 percent of tribal facilities already face more than 50 days per year with a heat index above 90 degrees — the point at which heatstroke and heat exhaustion become much greater risks, particularly for vulnerable groups, such as elderly and obese people, and those with preexisting health conditions.

Within 80 years, if emissions continue to grow at their current rate, three out of four tribal facilities could experience 50 days or more in those temperatures.

Hundred-degree temperatures are a key marker for the National Weather Service. Generally, heat advisories are issued once the heat index reaches 100 degrees for 48 hours. Just five tribal facilities typically experience more than 50 days per year where the heat index tops 100 degrees F. But at the world’s current rate of emissions growth, that number will more than triple by the end of the century, with 17 tribal facilities experiencing 50 or more days per year where the heat index tops 100 degrees. Places like the Colorado River Indian Tribes Female Adult Detention Center and the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Department of Corrections Juvenile facility, located in Parker and Scottsdale, Arizona, respectively, could experience well over 100 days per year in 100-degree heat.

In states not historically considered “hot,” like Montana, Idaho, or Washington, tribal detention facilities could also see dramatic increases in excessive heat, according to Grist’s analysis. Facilities typically accustomed to experiencing only a day or two of temperatures above 90 degrees could see up to 24 days per year where the heat index tops 90, just within the next few decades.

“That ramp-up from zero to 10 [days out of the year] — that’s really significant for places where the infrastructure is less prepared,” said Kristina Dahl, the principal climate scientist for the Union of Concerned Scientists’ climate and energy program. “Generally, in any given year, heat kills more people in the U.S. than any other hazard like a hurricane, a flood, tornadoes, etc.”

Dahl and her fellow researchers have called for aggressive action to limit global warming, but for some communities in the U.S., more frequent extreme heat is inevitable.

Even if world leaders take rapid action to curb global temperature rise and reach goals set by the 2015 Paris Agreement, the number of tribal jails and detention centers experiencing more than 50 days over 90 degrees could increase by roughly 70 percent by the end of the century.

The Union of Concerned Scientists used statistical models to predict the number of days each county in the contiguous United States would experience temperatures above 90, 100, and 105 degrees F by the end of the century. But a county’s risk of experiencing extreme heat can change, depending on the degree to which world leaders are able to lower fossil fuel emissions and stop global warming.

A “rapid action” scenario represents the fulfillment of the goals set forth in the Paris climate accord, or limiting temperature rise to 3.6 degrees F above preindustrial temperatures.

Under the “slow action” scenario, greenhouse gas emissions will have declined by mid-century and temperature rise would be limited to roughly 4.3 degrees F by the start of the next century. Scientists consider this scenario to be the most likely.

According to Grist’s analysis — which combines Union of Concerned Scientists’ data with information on detention center locations obtained via FOIA requests — under this scenario, roughly one-third of tribal facilities would see more than 50 days per year with a heat index reaching at least 90 degrees F.

Roughly 14 percent would see more than 50 days with a heat index topping 100 degrees F.

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One of the biggest hurdles to understanding and addressing the heat risks tribal facilities face is gathering even the most basic information about them.

The Bureau of Indian Affairs places tribal corrections facilities into four categories: direct, 638, self-governance, and tribal. Direct means the facility is run directly by the BIA; there are 23 of these programs. Meanwhile, 638 programs, which receive BIA funding but are contracted out to tribes to operate, make up roughly half of all facilities, according to BIA documents. Self-governance facilities can also receive federal funding and allow tribes more control. Tribal facilities are run and funded directly by tribes themselves.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security publishes hundreds of datasets related to critical infrastructure for public use. Among them is a database containing addresses for over 6,700 correctional institutions in the United States. Of these records, only 16 are tribal facilities, representing less than 20 percent of tribal detention centers in operation.

The BIA does not make publicly available the exact number and locations of many tribal jails and detention centers, including the physical address of the jail at Pueblo of Laguna — Department of Interior Secretary Deb Haaland’s home community. In an email to Grist and Type, a BIA spokesperson attributed this lack of transparency to “security reasons.” When asked to explain the nature of these security concerns, BIA did not expand, but instead wrote in an email that tribes are “not required to report address changes to the BIA.” The agency added that it provides oversight, including onsite visits to monitor compliance with federal standards.

Last year, Grist filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the specific locations of all tribal detention facilities, including those previously kept private by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The BIA released the locations of 23 active detention centers managed by the agency, but withheld the addresses of tribally operated detention centers. Those include 638, self-governance, and tribal facilities.

A second FOIA request for these locations revealed only the cities in which these facilities are located, and no street or mailing addresses. The Salt River Pima-Maricopa Department of Corrections juvenile and adult facilities, for instance, are located in “Scottsdale, AZ,” but where those centers are in the city’s roughly 185 square miles was not revealed. Grist has appealed the agency’s response.

Grist partnered with the Carceral Ecologies Lab at the University of California, Los Angeles, to begin answering these questions.

The U.S. Department of Justice tracks information about the population in tribal jails through the Annual Survey of Jails in Indian Country. According to its midyear surveys from 2010 to 2019, an average of 70 percent of tribal jail detainees were held for nonviolent offenses. By midyear 2021, that percentage had dropped slightly to roughly 60 percent of detainees. According to the Justice Department, the average length of stay for a tribal detainee in 2021 was roughly 11 days, with 53 percent of those held in these facilities that year having not been convicted of a crime.

Heating and cooling are common problems in tribal jails, according to tribal public defenders, who also said water quality, bathroom maintenance, overcrowding, and staff training are of concern.

Those conditions can make incarcerated people, as well as those who work at carceral facilities, more susceptible to health risks associated with extreme heat. Preexisting conditions such as asthma, hypertension, and obesity can increase susceptibility to heatstroke and heart attack.

“[Incarcerated people] have limited mobility and suffer from a disproportionate amount of mental health and medical comorbidities that are exacerbated by exposure to extreme temperatures,” environmental epidemiologist Julianne Skarha and her coauthors wrote in a 2020 paper in the American Journal of Public Health assessing the health effects of extreme heat among incarcerated populations.

There is limited research on the intersection of extreme temperatures and carceral facilities, and in research Grist reviewed, tribal jails were not included.

However, between 1988 and 2019, Skarha and her team inspected at least 100 legal cases citing violations of the Eighth Amendment — that no imprisoned person can be subject to “cruel and unusual punishment” — based on exposure to extreme temperatures. In Texas alone, Skarha found that approximately 270 heat-related deaths occurred between 2001 and 2019 in carceral facilities that do not have air-conditioning. Yet no national database tracks air-conditioning availability in jails, let alone tribal jails.

In Arizona, one of the hottest states in the country, three tribes have seven facilities that face the greatest risk for excessive heat among tribal jails. These facilities include the Colorado River Indian Tribes’ male, female, and juvenile detention centers, and adult and juvenile centers for the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community’s Department of Corrections and the Gila River Department of Corrections.

The Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community Department of Corrections adult and juvenile facilities are located in Maricopa County. Last summer, temperatures in Maricopa County reached a high of 115 degrees, with the National Weather Service issuing 17 heat warnings for the Phoenix area in 2022. As of October 2022, the total number of heat-associated deaths in the county reached nearly 380 — up at least 50 percent from the same month in 2021.

“As a tribe, we’re starting to realize climate change,” said Wi-Bwa Grey, a member of the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community tribal council. “We’re in the desert, where the sun hits us the most. Now, leadership, our council, is starting to really take that into consideration.”

About a four-hour drive northeast of Salt River, the Zuni Pueblo adult and juvenile detention facilities in McKinley County, New Mexico, have historically seen very few days where the heat index tops 90 degrees. But by the end of the century, Zuni Pueblo could experience more than roughly 55 days a year with temperatures above 90 degrees if emissions continue at their current rate, representing a massive change to the area’s typical climate.

Tyler Lastiyano, Zuni Pueblo’s director of public safety, said the Zuni jail, a 638 facility, recently updated its HVAC system. To deal with rising temperatures and higher energy costs, he hopes that the facility can transition to renewable energy. “If we can get the funding to do that, it’ll help us in the long run,” he said. For now, however, Lastiyano has to make trade-offs.

“Our tribal government can help. They can advocate, and they have advocated, but it’s the Bureau [of Indian Affairs] that has to approve our funding,” he said.

Of the 27 tribal jails visited by Department of Interior investigators in 2004, 10 were run directly by the BIA while 17 were 638 programs, run by local tribes with a combination of federal and tribal funding. Investigators noted that, in general, the 638 facilities were better managed.

In 2022, after NPR’s reporting, the BIA announced reforms to its corrections program, including updated policies for death investigations, revised processes for cell checks, and improvements to staff training.

But Ed Naranjo, a member of the Confederated Tribes of the Goshute Reservation and a former supervisory special agent for the BIA who helped spark the 2004 investigation, says that not enough has been done since the report’s release. “You got people sitting in D.C. in these offices, and they don’t really give a damn about what’s going on in the field,” Naranjo said. “It seems that they just neglect what’s going on as long as nobody makes any waves, and everything’s supposedly fine.”

In a statement, a BIA spokesperson wrote, “In accordance with procedures developed in partnership with Tribes, facility conditions are monitored quarterly to assess facility needs and to prioritize projects to be completed with available funding.” The BIA also wrote that it does not track how much funding tribes contribute toward detention facilities or whether optimal staffing levels are fulfilled. In response to a question about how many functioning HVAC systems there are in tribal detention centers, the spokesperson wrote that there is no centralized monitoring program relating to the maintenance of HVAC systems, but that “essential airflow systems are closely monitored and maintained by Tribal/BIA maintenance crews.”

For 2023, the BIA has budgeted over $15 million for “public safety and justice facilities improvement and repair,” roughly two-thirds of which is earmarked for “minor improvement and repair,” which can include accessibility updates and disposal of property. Just $1 million is designated for environmental projects like managing air and water quality, which comes to just over $12,000 per facility if divided equally among the 81 facilities listed by the BIA.

In its 2023 budget, the BIA plans for the construction of nine new detention centers, including three 638 facilities, most of which are replacing existing facilities. According to the BIA’s 2023 Budget Justifications report, without these new facilities, “Employee and Inmate safety will also continue to be impaired by inadequate facilities incapable of addressing modern detention requirements.”

Derrick Marks, a Yankton Sioux Council Member, says one of the biggest issues with relying on federal funding is that money is tied to the whims and policies of the administration in power. “As Native Americans, the less that we can have other people making decisions on our behalf, the better it is,” said Marks.

The Yankton jail, located in Wagner, South Dakota, less than 15 miles north of the Nebraska border, is currently run directly by the BIA. While Marks says he would prefer the tribe manage the jail itself, he’s hesitant about pushing for a shift to a 638 contract. Although 638 facilities receive BIA funding, Marks says that the amount provided would not be sufficient to properly run the jail and the tribe simply doesn’t have the resources to fill in the gaps. Beyond day-to-day upkeep and administration, preparing for a more extreme climate future comes with its own hurdles. “I don’t know where the next administration is going to go with this stuff, with climate change,” Marks said. “It’s just so up in the air.”

Some Indigenous activists, however, are not convinced that tribal management and increased funding are real solutions. Some, like Brandon Benallie, who is Diné and a member of the K’é Infoshop, a Diné Anarchist and Communist Collective, believe that jails are part of a punitive justice system that has never worked for Indigenous people. Instead of spending millions on upgrading tribal jails, tribes should be spending money on resources to build culturally appropriate treatment centers for substance use disorders and working to address the root causes of crime, argues Benallie.

“We can’t just call everything an experiment of sovereignty when it harms our people,” said Benallie. Later in the interview, he explained, “We’re looking for short-term or nearsighted solutions to handle things that take an immense amount of time and responsibility.”

Experts and tribal officials who Grist spoke to for this story underscored the obligations the federal government owes to tribes but routinely violates — legal agreements between Indigenous nations and the United States that exchanged large swaths of land for guarantees like education, health care, and financial support.

“The feds can always help out more,” Urbina, the public defender at Pueblo of Laguna, said. “They have a trust obligation to the Native American tribes, and I think they can always do a better job, considering the historical trauma, the stuff that’s been done by the federal government to these tribes.” Officials from Laguna wrote to Grist that they need additional resources from the federal government for the detention facility and regularly request additional funding for staff and facility improvements.

In lieu of relying on the United States, though, tribes have adapted. When heat reached dangerous levels in Arizona this past summer, tribal council member Grey said Salt River detainees were kept inside, safe in indoor recreation areas with air-conditioning, tablets, and televisions. According to Grey, the center is able to avoid infrastructure problems found in some other tribal jails because it is a self-governance facility funded by the tribe, in part through tribally operated casinos. In addition to infrastructure, funding goes to initiatives such as language classes for detainees and culturally appropriate programs that focus on rehabilitation.

“We’re blessed because we’re able to have our own HVAC people on staff dedicated to the facility,” said Grey. “A lot of communities aren’t that blessed to have that.”

To help close the gap and protect some of the country’s most vulnerable prisoners, advocates say that the federal government needs to uphold its obligations.

“Tribes need to raise a lot more hell about this whole thing, demand things,” said Naranjo. “I don’t think a lot of tribes realize they have a voice. If they unify and get together, they can make some changes and get things done.”

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Additional research by Precious Ivy Molina, Liz Barry, and Nicholas Shapiro of Carceral Ecologies at UCLA

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Extreme heat will take an unequal toll in tribal jails on May 10, 2023.

Former colleagues blame a lack of oversight for continued exploitation of practitioners and patients By…

The post It’s not the first time this Puget Sound psychologist faces accusations he shortchanged workers appeared first on InvestigateWest.

Olympia is seeking proposals from qualified consultant teams to conduct research and provide recommendations, specifically in increasing the number of units permanently affordable to low-income …

This story is published in partnership with the Reno Gazette-Journal, with support by The Water Desk, an independent journalism initiative based at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center for Environmental Journalism.

For the first two decades of the 21st century, not even a once-in-a-millennium drought could deter real estate developers from building vast suburban tracts on the wild edges of Western U.S. cities. But in 2021, a reckoning appeared on the horizon. The Colorado River sank to historic lows, winter rains never arrived, and communities from California to Texas found their groundwater wells going dry after decades of overuse.

Western officials had seldom let questions about water availability get in the way of population growth, but suddenly they seemed to have no other choice. Faced with an unprecedented shortage, many local governments tried to pump the brakes on new developments. A small town in Utah halted all new housing permits, fearful that more homes would sap a local river. A suburb of Colorado Springs, Colorado, told developers that it could no longer allow new subdivisions to connect to the city’s water system. Most significantly, the state of Arizona has all but paused new housing in some Phoenix suburbs, citing a shortage of groundwater.

This pivot to conservation was bad news for D.R. Horton, the nation’s largest homebuilding company. Buoyed by pandemic-induced demand for cheap, spacious housing across the West, Horton netted $6 billion constructing more than 80,000 homes last year alone. The company had long been able to assume that if it built a development, someone else would provide water for it — usually a local government eager for tax revenue. All of a sudden, Horton had to find the water itself.

Luckily, there was a third party who could help.

In April of last year, Horton acquired Vidler Water Company, a tiny outfit whose dozen employees worked out of an unassuming faux-Mediterranean office park in Carson City, Nevada. Though Vidler’s annual revenue was less than a tenth of a percent of Horton’s, the real estate titan spent big to snap it up: The price tag on the acquisition was an eye-popping $291 million.

Vidler is an unusual company. It doesn’t actually deliver water to people, nor does it own any facilities for water treatment or desalination. Instead the company functions as a broker for water rights, finding untapped water in rural communities and marketing it to developers and corporations in fast-growing cities and suburbs. For 20 years, the company has bought up remote farmland and drilled wells in bone-dry valleys to amass an enormous private water portfolio, then made tens of millions of dollars by selling that portfolio one piece at a time.

This kind of business inevitably involves some guesswork, and often that guesswork looks like classic real estate speculation: You can make money by bringing water to places where people already want it, but you can make even more money bringing it to places where people will want it in the future. This is exactly what Vidler has tried to do, and it has led the company’s critics to contend that its business model violates the anti-speculation spirit of Western water law.

Indeed, suspicions that Vidler is profiteering off a vulnerable public resource have made the company more than its share of enemies over the years: Top officials have been pilloried in courtrooms and threatened by rural residents, and an early executive once had to jump out a window to escape an angry crowd at a public meeting.

Horton’s purchase of Vidler has no real precedent, but it is a clear indication of where the West is headed. The region has grown twice as fast as the rest of the United States since the 1950s, and national builders like Horton are relying on it to fuel future profits. If these companies want to capitalize on migration to the booming suburbs of Phoenix and Las Vegas, they’ll need to find creative new water supplies that will allow them to keep building even as regulators try to clamp down on unsustainable growth.

In this regard, Vidler is a pioneer. The company was the first in the West to make a business model out of finding and flipping water. In the past few years, a new crop of upstarts has sought to mimic this model, buying up water rights in rural areas and marketing them to developers and suburbs that need them for future growth. These companies include Water Asset Management, which has bought up agricultural land in Colorado to secure water rights, and the investment firm Greenstone, which organized a first-of-its-kind deal to move Colorado River water from farms in western Arizona to a city near Phoenix. Both companies boast former Vidler executives in top leadership positions.

Vidler still stands at the front of the pack, tapping water in hard-to-reach aquifers and pursuing aggressive litigation to push new construction forward. If the company’s tactics become more common, the effects will be far-reaching — not only could rural areas and desert ecosystems see their precious water siphoned off, but thousands of people will buy and occupy homes fed by water sources that may turn out to be unreliable. A major part of Vidler’s strategy has been to pump water from small underground aquifers, squeezing every available drop from finite water banks that may someday run dry, especially as climate change contributes to the long-term aridification of the West.

Kevin Brown is the manager of a water utility in the southern Nevada city of Mesquite, where Vidler has been trying for years to build a pipeline that could bring new water to the city. The company has proposed tapping a virgin aquifer and using the water to supply new housing developments on the edge of town, but Brown doubts the pipeline is a good idea. Instead he has focused on reducing water usage across the city and recycling water where he can.

“In the world we live in, and the market we live in, if you put enough money against it, someone will make it happen,” Brown told Grist. “If these developers aren’t building homes, then they’re going out of business. But at some point, somebody needs to say, ‘You know what, we can’t grow anymore. It’s not sustainable.’”

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In most Western states, water is public property regardless of whose land it flows through or sits under. Private entities can only own the right to use that water for a specific purpose. Individuals and companies can apply to use any unclaimed water source, but they have to convince the state government that they plan to put the water to a productive use. By the same token, owners can sell or lease their existing water rights to each other as long as the buyers keep using the water for something.

In this arrangement, the new breed of water brokers has found an opportunity to accumulate assets and generate profits. But the law requires them to tread cautiously.

At the turn of the 20th century, a Transcontinental Mining executive named Rees Vidler tried to dig a tunnel through the heart of the Colorado Rockies. It was supposed to link the mineral-rich mountain towns around Breckenridge with the young Denver metro area, but Vidler never completed the project. The shaft sat unused until an engineer bought it in the 1950s and repurposed it to move water rather than ore. He acquired the rights to river water on the Breckinridge side of the tunnel, built a water pipeline through the shaft, and proposed to sell the river water to people in the fast-growing cities around Denver. The engineer didn’t have any confirmed buyers for the water, but he could store it in a reservoir until he made a sale.

In 1979, the Colorado Supreme Court dealt a blow to that scheme. A judge ruled that the engineer’s water purchases were “grounded on no interest beyond a desire to obtain water for sale.” If Colorado allowed such purchases, it would “encourage those with vast monetary resources to monopolize [water] for personal profit rather than beneficial use,” the court wrote. In other words, speculating on water was unacceptable. Judges in other states soon adopted similar rulings, creating a precedent that some legal scholars have called “the Vidler doctrine.”

About 15 years later, the Vidler tunnel and its water rights fell into the possession of one John Hart, a swashbuckling financier who was beginning a decades-long corporate takeover spree. Hart and his business partner had just taken over the Physicians Insurance Company of Ohio, or PICO. They transformed the moribund Midwestern insurance company into an umbrella corporation for buying and flipping distressed assets, including a Swiss railway operator, an Australian oil company, a million acres of rural land in Nevada, and a canola-seed crushing facility.

The Vidler tunnel’s history gave Hart an idea. He lived near San Diego, which relies in part on the Colorado River, and he could see that water was only going to get more valuable across the region, especially if real estate kept booming. Many farmers who had fallen on hard times were selling their irrigated land to developers, who repurposed irrigation water to supply new homes and golf courses. Hart wanted to profit from this slow transition away from agriculture, and he thought he saw a way to do it: Buy up water rights in the driest states, wait for the rights to rise in value, and sell them later on to developers that needed them for new housing. As long as the population of the West continued to increase, the price of water would increase as well — and with it PICO’s investment profits.

By acting as a broker for water rights, the PICO subsidiary that Hart called Vidler Water Company could get around the anti-speculation doctrine invoked in its very name. The tunnel engineer had sought to hold onto his water rights and make money by selling water to people who needed it. Vidler would just buy and sell the water rights themselves. This amounted to an elegant form of arbitrage: If a water right was worth more to a developer than it was to a farmer, Vidler could profit by flipping the right from the latter to the former.

The only problem was that Hart didn’t know very much about the nitty-gritty details of water law, and he knew even less about the science of hydrology. In order for his plan to work, he had to find someone who could handle both. That someone was Dorothy Timian-Palmer, an engineer who had been Carson City’s municipal utilities director for around a decade before Hart poached her in 1997. Timian-Palmer declined to speak with Grist, but several sources who worked with and against Vidler described her as one of the nation’s foremost water experts.

“She is the most knowledgeable person about water in the country,” insisted Hart in an interview. He recalled how he and Timian-Palmer used to attend investment conferences where skeptical audiences heard the legendary oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens talk in vague and confused terms about his water investments. But when Timian-Palmer took the stage, introduced herself as a water engineer, and started rattling off facts about hydrology and hydraulics, all the attendees perked up and started taking notes.

“She’s very smart, very shrewd, and very tough,” said Paul Hultin, a lawyer who sued Vidler over one of its later projects in New Mexico.

Armed with an infusion of cash from PICO, Timian-Palmer and a small group of Nevada-based lawyers and engineers set about flipping water. They bought agricultural water rights along a river in Colorado and sold them to Denver-area developers. They bought tens of thousands of acres of farm- and ranchland in Arizona, Idaho, Nevada, and New Mexico and either sold the water rights to urban utilities, leased them back to farmers, or sold the land to developers. In one case the company made a fivefold profit after six years.

When developers wanted to use the water they’d just acquired on former farmland, they could fallow the irrigated fields and start pumping water into their subdivisions and power plants, fueling further housing expansion. Marc Reisner, the journalist who wrote that “water flows uphill towards money” in his seminal book Cadillac Desert, also joined Vidler for a few years as a part-time political consultant, believing the company’s projects could enable growth while avoiding the construction of harmful new reservoirs and dams.

In other cases, Vidler chose to sit on the water it acquired until its value went up. In California and Arizona, the company bought and stored water in so-called “underground storage facilities,” artificial aquifers that serve as subterranean reservoirs. The cities and farmers who typically use these kinds of water banks are usually trying to squirrel away water for use during dry years, but Vidler’s goal was to profit on the gradual increase in water prices.

In California’s agriculture-heavy Central Valley, for instance, the company took partial ownership of an artificial aquifer, then flipped its share to real estate developers and water utilities, making $25 million off the transaction in just a few years. In Arizona, meanwhile, the company built its own large storage facility west of Phoenix and filled it with more than 250,000 acre-feet of water from the Colorado River. (An acre-foot is equivalent to around 326,000 gallons, or roughly enough water to supply two homes for a year.) Vidler executives wrote in a 2004 financial statement that “continued growth of the municipalities surrounding Phoenix” and “the low level of Lake Mead,” the largest Colorado River reservoir, were both “likely to increase demand” for the water.

No one has ever accused the company of breaking the law with these transactions, but its strategy clashed with the legal principles established in the 1979 ruling against the original Vidler tunnel scheme. In order for Vidler to secure new water rights, it had to identify a “beneficial use” for each water source it wanted to claim. The company would tell state regulators that it wanted to use each given water right to supply a power plant, or a suburban development, or a farm. In its own financial statements, though, the company made it clear that using water was merely incidental to the company’s mission.

“Vidler seeks to acquire water rights at prices consistent with their current use, with the expectation of an increase in value if the water right can be converted to a higher use,” the company said in a 2001 annual report. “Vidler’s priority is to develop recurring cash flow from these assets.”

Kyle Roerink, a water-conservation advocate who runs the nonprofit Great Basin Water Network, told Grist that he’s observed Vidler trying to find ways around the “beneficial use” doctrine for almost a decade.

“It’s a model where you’re trying to squeeze blood, profits, and water from stone, and they’ve been pretty successful at it,” he said. “[They’re] pushing the boundaries and testing the limits of what the foundational principles of Western water law are. It’s among the most dangerous elements of capitalism at play here.”

Indeed, Vidler’s loose regard for beneficial-use requirements has sometimes landed the company in hot water. In 1999, Vidler asked Nevada officials for permission to pump around 2,000 acre-feet of groundwater in Sandy Valley, a remote community of trailers and tumbleweeds about an hour southwest of Las Vegas. Vidler claimed to be applying for the water on behalf of a real estate company in Primm, a casino town on the California border. It laid out a far-fetched plan to build a pipeline that would move Sandy Valley’s water down to Primm across 25 miles of mountains, allowing developers to build housing and a theme park. The state government gave Vidler only some of the rights it asked for — but it amounted to almost as much water as the entire town of Sandy Valley used at the time.

When Sandy Valley residents heard about the project, they were furious. The area’s aquifer was already overdrawn thanks to a number of irrigated farms nearby. Residents depended on shallow household wells for their water, and they were terrified that those wells would go dry if the state let Vidler take its share.

“Vidler is a four-letter word here in Sandy Valley,” Al Marquis told me when I visited the town in February. A retired real estate lawyer who sued to stop Vidler on behalf of his town, Marquis is a quintessential Sandy Valley personality: He wears a ten-gallon-hat, flies amateur planes, and writes books of what he calls “cowboy poetry.” He recalled that a Vidler representative who showed up at a public meeting about the application found himself greeted by shouts and death threats from angry residents, who reminded him in no uncertain terms that nearly everyone in the valley owned a firearm.

In 2006, a judge overturned the state government’s decision to grant Vidler’s application, ruling that the company hadn’t proven it could put Sandy Valley’s water to beneficial use. Vidler claimed that the Primm real estate company needed the water to build apartments and a theme park, but the company couldn’t demonstrate that any of that development was really going to happen — the main evidence it had was a one-page wishlist drafted by the real estate company itself. In the absence of a clear beneficial use, the judge wrote, Vidler had no claim to Sandy Valley’s water, and the state had erred in giving the company permission to pump.

“It appears to me that the company was formed for the sole purpose of speculating in and the hoarding of a public resource,” Marquis told Grist. He hypothesized that Vidler never wanted the water for Primm at all, and instead just wanted to flip it to someone else later on. “I gotta give them credit, in that they had foresight.”

Timian-Palmer and her fellow executives saw that the West didn’t have enough water, and they knew that was good news for Vidler: As drought got worse, the company’s assets would only get more valuable.

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As the nation’s housing market boomed in the early 2000s, Vidler evolved. Instead of just buying and selling water rights that were already in use, the company began to search for unclaimed groundwater in remote parts of Nevada. It drilled new wells to bring that water to the surface, built new infrastructure to move it toward big cities like Reno and Las Vegas, and marketed it to developers and utilities. If Vidler could sell a new water source for more than it cost to develop and transport the water, the company would turn a profit.

“There seemed to be a void in terms of developing new supplies of water,” said Hart, explaining the opportunity. “Governments don’t really like to spend money for future citizens or future residents, and developers don’t want the upfront risk of having to go out to develop water for projects somewhere down the road.”

At the same time, major water sources like the Colorado River were showing signs of vulnerability as the region entered its current climate-fueled megadrought, lending more urgency to the search for untapped water. It could take years to secure regulatory approval for new groundwater pumping and even longer to build infrastructure to move that water around. Hart and Timian-Palmer were some of the only people in the West with the capital and expertise needed to pursue this kind of project.

The company’s first major experiment was a public-private partnership with a massive rural county about an hour north of Vegas. Lincoln County is one of the most sparsely populated counties in the nation — its population of 4,500 occupies a land area larger than Massachusetts — but it also boasted a hoard of untapped groundwater, most of which no one had ever tried to use. This water sits in some of the state’s shallowest and most remote aquifers, where it has accreted over thousands of years beneath chalk-white valleys.

In the late 1980s, Las Vegas’s powerful water utility filed applications for almost all of Lincoln County’s unused water, more than 100,000 acre-feet in total, and proposed to build a pipeline that could bring it to Sin City. Officials in Lincoln County were still trying to fend off the big city when Vidler showed up and offered to act as a white knight. The company said it would invest millions of dollars to find and pump the county’s groundwater resources while also protecting those resources from Las Vegas. In exchange the company would get half the proceeds from any water the county sold.

Depending on whom you ask, this was either a boon for an impoverished rural county or a corporate takeover of a public resource. Wade Poulsen, the county employee who runs the water partnership, told Grist that Vidler had been “fantastic” and claimed that the county “would be nowhere without them.” But conservationists allege that Vidler was mining Lincoln County’s resources for profit.

“Vidler has turned Lincoln County into a water colony,” said Patrick Donnelly, a conservation biologist with the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity who has litigated against groundwater usage in Nevada. “They own some serious water up there, and there’s this ideology of, ‘This water exists for us to benefit economically from it.’”

The business thesis for the Lincoln-Vidler partnership was based on the assumption that the growth of Las Vegas would one day extend so far that it crossed the border into Lincoln County, more than 50 miles away from the city’s downtown. In the heady days of the early 2000s housing boom, this seemed like a real possibility; a number of real estate developers had staked out housing projects that could use Lincoln County’s water.

Chief among them was Harvey Whittemore, a friend of the late Senator Harry Reid and powerful casino lobbyist, who agreed to buy 1,000 acre-feet of water rights from Vidler in 2005. Before he went to prison for campaign finance violations in 2014, Whittemore spent more than a decade trying to build a megadevelopment called Coyote Springs in Lincoln County, pitching it as a desert metropolis that would someday contain 160,000 homes.

He managed to build a golf course on the development site, but a regulatory battle subsequently derailed the project and Whittemore never used Vidler’s water. Whittemore’s green, which was designed by golf legend Jack Nicklaus, still stands by itself on an empty desert highway, flanked by a massive sign announcing the future site of Coyote Springs, which another company is still trying to push forward. A tortoise habitat sits just a few feet away.

“They said at first they were gonna provide water for everybody, but the only people that [the Lincoln County partnership] ever actually tried to develop water for were [real estate developers],” said Louis Benezet, a longtime county resident. He said the water district initially discussed agricultural projects and growth opportunities in the county’s small towns, which were more attractive to county residents, but later focused on exporting water toward Vegas.

Timian-Palmer also pursued a similar strategy in fast-growing Reno in the early 2000s, targeting a property called Fish Springs Ranch about an hour north of the city. The land under the ranch contained enough groundwater for thousands of homes, and officials in the Reno area had long eyed it as a water source that could reduce the city’s reliance on the Truckee River, which drains out of Lake Tahoe. Instead of asking the local utility to help with the costs, as past entrepreneurs had, Vidler used private capital to push the project forward. The company built a pipeline that snaked through 28 miles of hilly terrain, ending in a cluster of valleys that were primed for future construction.

It was a transaction only Timian-Palmer could have managed, and one that demonstrated Vidler’s clout on water issues: Getting permission to build the project required conducting multiple federal environmental reviews, placating officials in multiple states, negotiating with the nearby Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe, and passing a bill to ratify the details in Congress. Even after spending almost $100 million to permit and build the project, Vidler still stood to profit by selling the water to developers in Reno’s suburbs — there were almost no alternative water sources in the valleys north of Reno, so Vidler would be able to set the price.

Alas, Hart and Timian-Palmer had terrible timing. Just as the company’s projects in Reno and Vegas seemed to be taking off, the U.S. housing market started to wobble, led by a wave of foreclosures in Nevada and other Western states. When the market collapsed, builders and developers nixed all their suburban development projects, sold off their land, and pulled out of their agreements to buy water from Vidler. The company had moved heaven and earth to secure water for Nevada’s future growth, but that growth seemed to evaporate overnight.

“When Vidler started construction on the pipeline project, essentially, all of the water was spoken for,” said John Enloe, an official at the water utility that serves the Reno area. Enloe worked with Vidler on the pipeline project. “By the time construction was completed, the Great Recession hit, and everyone backed out. There just wasn’t a need for the water.”

Even as the housing market started to rebound from the Great Recession, Vidler spent much of the next decade running up against a very simple problem: The company had spent millions of dollars to develop new water resources across the West, paying to drill test wells and fill out lengthy water-right applications with the state government, but it couldn’t find buyers for all the new water it had developed.

That was in part because regulators had started to question the logic of growth. By the time the Western real estate market surged back to life in the late 2010s, the megadrought that gripped the region was well into its second decade. Major reservoirs in the Sierra Nevada and the Colorado River were bottoming out, and many rural communities were starting to see their wells go dry. This shortage had begun to stoke new concerns about overreliance on groundwater, and Vidler soon found itself facing new opposition from courts and regulators.

In a sign of its commitment to aiding development, Vidler fought back against these restrictions with a vengeance, litigating and lobbying to ensure its projects could move forward.

A case in New Mexico demonstrated how aggressive the company could be in snapping up water. In the early 2000s, as Vidler was looking to expand into the state, Timian-Palmer connected with a rancher named Rob Gately. Gately owned a large chunk of land in the mountains east of Albuquerque and was seeking to build a big suburban development on the empty parcel. The area was far from prime real estate: It boasted a few dozen houses scattered across a stretch of wind-blown desert, but nothing else in the way of commerce. At least one other proposed development had already fallen through. Even so, Vidler offered to help Gately secure water. It applied to the New Mexico state government for permission to pump 700 acre-feet of water from the area aquifer, spending almost $6 million during the application process.

But Vidler’s own models showed that water use from the new development would cause water levels in the aquifer to drop, endangering residential wells. “People are already having problems with water, and that’s well-known here,” said Joanne Hilton, a hydrologist who lives in the area around the proposed development site and relies on a household well.

By 2017, residents had taken Vidler to court in an attempt to stop the project. Several key executives had to take the stand, including Timian-Palmer and her longtime right-hand man, executive vice president Steve Hartman. During a series of testy depositions, it emerged that Vidler seemed to be stretching the truth about the “beneficial use” it planned for the water. The company claimed that Gately was the mastermind behind the development, but the Montana holding company he was using for the project had been dissolved and no one from Vidler seemed sure about where he was based.

During one deposition, the lawyer for the area residents asked Hartman if he could provide specifics about how Vidler wanted to use the water. Just what kind of development was Gately trying to build, and how much water would it need? Hartman struggled to answer.

“So assuming that you get the permit and the case becomes final, then at that point you and Mr. Gately are going to sit down and talk about what’s next, is that right?” the lawyer asked.

“Yes,” Hartman said.

“And at this point you have no idea what that is?” the lawyer asked.

“I do not,” Hartman replied.

Two years later, the court tossed out Vidler’s application, ruling that the project would have risked taking water away from area residents and would conflict with New Mexico’s statewide goals for water conservation.

Faced with obstacles like these, Vidler had to go on offense. The company donated more than $275,000 to Nevada political candidates between 2008 and 2022, increasing its annual contributions in the years that followed the Great Recession. Hartman became a fixture in the Nevada legislature, lobbying on dozens of water bills, many of them concerned with obscure points of water law. During the present legislative session, as the company prepares to defend its water interests in Lincoln County, it has hired Nevada’s premier lobbying firm, whose other clients include Amazon and Uber.

In recent years, Timian-Palmer and Hartman have tried to scrape value from Vidler’s water assets wherever they can. They sold off some of their banked Arizona water to a golf course in a Phoenix suburb, making a more than threefold profit. They returned to Sandy Valley in 2016 to apply for water on a different patch of land, only to run into trouble once again with Marquis, who discovered that the company hadn’t told an area landowner it was going to apply for the water under his land. In litigation over the Coyote Springs development in Lincoln County, they conducted geological testing to prove that they should be able to tap an aquifer the state had deemed too vulnerable, alleging the existence of an underground fault they named “Dorothy’s Fault,” apparently after Timian-Palmer. They even went so far as to demand that Nevada cut off water deliveries to a town near a basin where Vidler had been prevented from pumping water, arguing that the town shouldn’t get to use water, either.

“They’re engaging in these processes for one reason and one reason only, and that’s to one day make money,” said Roerink, the water conservation advocate.

Neither Vidler nor D.R. Horton responded to extensive requests for comment on this story. Dorothy Timian-Palmer initially agreed to an interview in response to a request from Grist, but a Horton spokesperson later said that the company wouldn’t be participating in the story. After Grist visited Vidler’s office in Carson City, a Horton spokesperson offered to respond to a list of questions, but company representatives failed to do so before publication.

Even as Vidler sought buyers for its water rights, PICO went through a shakeup: Shareholders grew dissatisfied with Hart’s high salary and with the slow return on their investments. They ousted Hart and replaced him with a new chairman who soon cut costs, selling off PICO subsidiaries. Vidler’s assets were more difficult to cash out: The company had spent tens of millions of dollars on water projects like the ones near Reno and Albuquerque, and it wasn’t clear when those projects would start making money. The easiest way to make the company’s shareholders whole was for another company to buy Vidler outright.

Timian-Palmer and her fellow executives started trying to find a buyer as early as 2017, when they hired a bank to solicit potential offers, according to a corporate filing. The bank contacted more than 150 different potential buyers, but none of them showed much interest. The main problem was that nobody seemed to be interested in acquiring Vidler wholesale. As the search continued, it became clear that Vidler needed a company that wanted to use its executives’ water expertise, not just sell off the assets Timian-Palmer had acquired — in other words, a company that needed Vidler as much as Vidler needed it.

It took a few more years and a millennium-scale drought, but in the final months of 2021, Vidler found a company that could finally make its development dreams a reality.

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D.R. Horton is a tight-lipped company, and it didn’t say much about its purchase of Vidler. In a press release published on the day of the acquisition, the company noted that “Vidler owns a portfolio of premium water rights and other water-related assets … in markets where D.R. Horton operates.” A few weeks later, when a stock analyst asked about the purchase on an earnings call, an executive replied that “we put out pretty much what we’re going to say about Vidler in the press release.”

Even so, the logic of the transaction was apparent: The places where Vidler owned substantial water rights were also places where Horton was building homes. At a shareholder meeting in 2021, Timian-Palmer told investors that Horton was “moving like gangbusters” in the north suburbs of Reno, planning multiple subdivisions that could purchase water from Vidler’s long-dormant Fish Springs Ranch pipeline. The valleys north of Reno are now home to a horde of uniform subdivisions, most of them sandwiched against each other just off the freeway. Many of the largest belong to Horton. If the city’s recent growth spurt continues, Vidler’s pipeline will be the only available water source for future builders.

Horton is also building several developments east of Carson City on a fast-growing industrial corridor near a Tesla factory. In a 2021 financial statement, Vidler noted that “there are currently few existing sustainable water sources to support future growth and development” in that corridor, except for Vidler’s own supplies. Horton also has numerous active projects in central Arizona, where Vidler has banked almost 300,000 acre-feet of water underground. Together, the two companies have everything they need to capitalize on the West’s post-pandemic population boom.

Vidler has always operated more like a fixer than a financial trader, not just flipping assets but developing new water resources in the driest areas. Several sources who spoke to Grist theorized that this was why Horton paid so much to acquire the company.

“If you’re a homebuilder, your best option is to do what Horton has done — go out and find more supply,” said Grady Gammage, a real estate lawyer who has represented Greenstone, another water broker founded by a former Vidler employee, and several homebuilders. “What Horton is likely thinking is that you’re faced either with doing a deal [to get new water], or trying to build that expertise in-house.”

The future of the West depends on whether, and to what extent, these companies can secure these deals and expertise in the face of new regulatory restrictions and supply constraints.

Nowhere is this dynamic clearer than in the western suburbs of Phoenix, where developers and builders have thrown up tens of thousands of homes that rely on groundwater from fragile aquifers. Earlier this year, Arizona’s new governor released a study that showed the area has much less water available than was previously thought. State law requires developers to show that proposed homes have a hundred-year water supply, and officials have now decreed that there isn’t enough groundwater in the area to provide for any more new subdivisions in the southern and western outskirts of the city.

This has left several gigantic development projects stuck in limbo, including ones with which Horton was involved. It has also forced developers and homebuilders to look for alternate sources of water, including from underground storage facilities like Vidler’s. The company’s biggest underground aquifer contains enough water to supply about 2,000 homes for a hundred years each.

“It’s a challenge to find other supplies right now, to say the least,” said Spencer Kamps, vice president of legislative affairs at the Central Arizona Home Builders Association, which advocates for builders and real estate. “A number of investments have been made out in the area under the assumption that there was water available for growth.” But many people in the industry now worry that those assumptions were mistaken.

You wouldn’t know it from visiting the area. Earlier this year, I presented myself as a potential home buyer in the Phoenix suburbs where the state has identified a groundwater shortage, touring several Horton developments. These developments are tight clusters of cookie-cutter homes, surrounded for the most part by empty desert or isolated alfalfa fields. Construction appears to happen rapidly: As I drove through the developments, I found myself slipping back and forth between streets full of finished homes with xeriscaped lawns and streets where construction crews were still hammering at open timber frames.

In speaking with Horton sales representatives on my tours, I asked about water access, saying I’d heard there were issues in the area. The representatives brushed off my concerns, saying they “try to stay out of politics,” or that they “don’t believe they would allow growth out here” if there wasn’t enough water.

That is far from certain. Timian-Palmer and her colleagues have spent decades finding water sources for suburban developments like these. While the homes they helped build will last for many decades, the water that supplies them may not. Without ample rain to replenish them, the small and fragile aquifers that Vidler has tapped could someday empty out, leaving future homeowners high and dry. This has already started to happen in rural parts of the West where agriculture is dominant, and it may ultimately happen to the suburban developments Vidler is now helping to build.

Mike Machado, a former California state senator who served on PICO’s board of directors between 2013 and 2017, said the company’s business model makes him worried for the future of those developments.

“The biggest challenge for Vidler is whether or not the resources they have are renewable,” he told Grist. “It’s great to be able to have these resources, but if all you’re doing is mining them, at some point in time, you’re not going to have them. So that is creating a false sense of security for those that are relying on the resource.”

Horton’s sales representatives in Arizona have no such misgivings. For the moment, at least, the building boom is very much alive.

“If we continue to grow out here, the people living here will have water,” one sales representative told me. “What, are we just not gonna have water when we turn our faucet on?”

Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly referred to Patrick Donnelly of the Center for Biological Diversity as an attorney.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The little-known Nevada company making millions off the western water shortage on May 3, 2023.

The Department of Health’s expanding climate health team, which also includes a scientist who studies insects as disease vectors and experts on water quality and climate justice, is part of a deepening understanding of how profoundly climate change affects human health. Recent studies paint a grim picture: In addition to increasing the severity and frequency of both extreme heat events and wildfires, climate change is creating disease hotspots while also making some infectious diseases worse. This realization is changing health experts’ training, including at Harvard Medical School, which recently added a climate curriculum to all four years of instruction.   

The Washington climate team members approach their work with the foundational understanding that climate exacerbates historic injustices. “Communities of color, children, older adults and pregnant people are all more sensitive to the impacts of climate change,” said Kelly Naismith, the agency’s newest climate epidemiologist. “They’re more vulnerable.” She plans to monitor emergency room data in close to real time to see how high temperatures drive diagnoses and patient numbers. “One thing we’ve learned in the past couple years, during heat waves, is that there’s a pretty big increase in ER visits,” she said.

“Communities of color, children, older adults and pregnant people are all more sensitive to the impacts of climate change.”

Michelle Fredrickson is quantifying the unequal distribution of climate impacts. She’s using LiDAR, or Light Detection and Ranging, a type of laser scan, to determine how tree canopy, green space and asphalt coverage affect neighborhood temperatures during heat waves. Her work builds on research that has already shown how widespread those inequities are. A nationwide study published in 2020 found that areas subject to racist housing practices in the 1930s experience hotter temperatures today: Lower-income people and people of color live in areas with less greenery and more asphalt, which magnifies heat.

Washington epidemiologists are using existing data about air quality and heat-related deaths, things that are historically monitored by public health departments, for a new purpose: illuminating their connections to climate change. “When you start pulling together climate data and environmental hazard data, it starts to paint a clearer picture of the existing environmental justice issues in the state,” said Rad Cunningham, senior epidemiologist. “You start seeing patterns of how those issues are going to get worse over time.”

But they’re not just addressing current issues; they’re also trying to determine what the future will look like and how to prepare for it. “It’s a paradigm shift,” Cunningham said. A proactive approach can help states save lives, blunt unhealthy trends and be better prepared for emerging climate-driven threats.

That may improve the situation on the ground in Washington in the coming years. School evaluations could show where state funding is most needed to retrofit buildings and design new ones to make spaces cooler and cleaner on hot, smoky days. The team is working to make public health tools and messaging — such as tips on how to protect yourself from wildfire smoke with box fans and filters — less jargony and more useful. The epidemiologists are collaborating with newly created, climate-focused local public health positions across the state.

The climate health team’s total budget — $1.8 million this fiscal year — comes from state and federal sources. Washington is looking to climate health programs in other states like California and Colorado for inspiration. And the epidemiologists hope to learn from places dealing with problems that aren’t as prevalent in Washington — yet. For example, warmer temperatures are allowing ticks to spread into areas they previously weren’t able to survive. In response, Michigan’s Department of Health has become an expert on ticks and tick-borne diseases, such as Lyme. “We have a lot to learn from them,” Cunningham said. “We have a chance to do what they wish they would’ve done.”

Kylie Mohr is an editorial fellow for High Country News writing from Montana. Email her at kylie.mohr@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy. 

Follow @thatsmohrlikeit

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

California and Arizona are currently fighting each other over water from the Colorado River. But this isn’t new — it’s actually been going on for over 100 years. At one point, the states literally went to war about it. The problem comes down to some really bad math from 1922.

To some extent, the crisis can be blamed on climate change. The West is in the middle of a once-in-a-millennium drought. As temperatures rise, the snow pack that feeds the river has gotten much thinner, and the river’s main reservoirs have all but dried up.

But that’s only part of the story: The United States has also been overusing the Colorado for more than a century thanks to a byzantine set of flawed laws and lawsuits known as the “Law of the River.” This legal tangle not only has been over-allocating the river, it also has been driving conflict in the region, especially between the two biggest users, California and Arizona, which are both trying to secure as much water as they can. And now, as a massive drought grips the region, the law of the river has reached a breaking point.

The Colorado River begins in the Rocky Mountains and winds its way southwest, twisting through the Grand Canyon and entering the Pacific at Baja California. In the late 19th century, as white settlers arrived in the West, they started diverting water from the mighty river to irrigate their crops, funneling it through dirt canals. For a little while, this worked really well. The canals made an industrial farming mecca out of desert that early colonial settlers viewed as “worthless.”

Even back then, the biggest water users were Arizona and California, which took so much water that they started to drain the river farther upstream, literally drying it out. According to American legal precedent, whoever uses a body of water first usually has the strongest rights to it. But other states soon cried foul: California was growing much faster than they were, and they believed it wasn’t fair that the Golden State should suck up all the water before they got a chance to develop.

In 1922, the states came to a solution — kind of. At the suggestion of a newly appointed cabinet secretary named Herbert Hoover, the states agreed to split the river into two sections, drawing an arbitrary line halfway along its length at a spot called Lee Ferry. The states on the “upper” part of the river — Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, and New Mexico — agreed to send the states on the “lower” end of the river — Arizona, California, and Nevada — what they thought was half the river’s overall flow, 7.5 million acre-feet of water each year. (An acre-foot is enough to cover an acre of land in a foot of water, about enough to supply two homes for a year.)

This agreement was supposed to prevent any one state from drying up the river before the other states could use it. The Upper Basin states got half and the Lower Basin states got half. Simple.

But there were some serious flaws to this plan.

First, the Law of the River overestimated how much water flowed through the river in the first place. The states’ numbers were based on primitive data from stream gauges placed at arbitrary points on the waterway, and they took samples during an unusually wet decade, leading to a very optimistic estimate of the river’s size. The river would only average about 14 million acre-feet annually, but the agreement handed out 15 million to the seven states.

While the states weren’t able to immediately use all this water, it set in motion the underlying problem today: The states have the legal right to use more water than actually exists in the river.

And you’ll notice that the Colorado River doesn’t end in the U.S. — It ends in Mexico. Initially, the Law of the River just straight-up ignored that fact. Decades later, Mexico was squeezed into the agreement and promised 1.5 million acre-feet, further straining the already over-allocated river.

On top of all of this, Indigenous tribes that had depended on the river for centuries were now forced to compete with states for their share of water, leading to these drawn-out lawsuits that took decades to resolve.

But in the short-term, Arizona and California struck it rich — they were promised the largest share of Colorado River water and should have been primed for growth. For Arizona, though, there was a catch: The state couldn’t put their water to use.

The state’s biggest population centers in Phoenix and Tucson were hundreds of miles away from the river itself, and it would take a 300-mile canal to bring the water across the desert — something the state couldn’t afford to build on its own. Larger and wealthier California was able to build all the canals and pumps it needed to divert river water to farms and cities. This allowed it to gulp up both its share and the extra Lower Basin water that Arizona couldn’t access. California’s powerful congressional delegation lobbied to stop Congress from approving Arizona’s canal project, as the state wanted to keep the Colorado River to itself.

Arizona was furious. And so, in 1934, Arizona and California went to war — literally. Arizona tried to block California from building new dams to take more water from the river, using “military” force when necessary.

Arizona sent troops from its National Guard to stop California from building the Parker Dam. It delayed construction, but not for very long because their boat got tangled up in some electrical wire and had to be rescued.

For the next 30 years, Arizona and California fought about whether Arizona should be able to build that canal. They also sued each other before the Supreme Court no fewer than 10 times, including one 1963 case that set the record for the longest oral arguments in the history of the modern court, taking 16 hours over four days and involving 106 witnesses.

That 1963 case also made some pretty big assumptions: Even though the states now knew that the initial estimates were too high, the court-appointed expert said he was “morally certain that neither in my lifetime, nor in your lifetime, nor the lifetime of your children and great-grandchildren will there be an inadequate supply of water” from the river for California’s cities.

A few years after that court case, in 1968, Arizona finally struck a fateful bargain to ensure it could claim its share of the river. California gave up its anti-canal campaign and the federal government agreed to pay for the construction of the 300-mile project that would bring Colorado River water across the desert to Phoenix. This move helped save Arizona’s cotton-farming industry and enabled Phoenix to eventually grow into the fifth-largest city in the country. It seemed like a success — Arizona was flourishing!

But in exchange for the canal, the state made a fateful concession: If the reservoirs at Lake Powell and Lake Mead were to run low, Arizona, and not California, would be the first state to make cuts. It was a decision the state’s leaders would come to regret.

In the early 2000s, as a massive drought gripped the Southwest, water levels in the river’s two key reservoirs dropped. Now that both Arizona and California were fully using their shares of the river, combined with the other states’ usage, there suddenly wasn’t enough melting snow to fill the reservoirs back up. A shrinking Colorado River couldn’t keep up with a century of rising demand.

Today, more than 20 years into the drought, Arizona has had to bear the biggest burden. Thanks to its earlier compromise decades earlier, the state had “junior water rights,” meaning it took the first cuts as part of the drought plan. In 2021, those cuts officially went into effect, drying out cotton and alfalfa fields across the central part of the state until much of the landscape turned brown. Still, those cuts haven’t been enough.

This century, the river is only averaging around 12.4 million acre-feet. The Upper Basin states technically have the rights to 7.5 million acre-feet, but they only use about half of that. In the Lower Basin, meanwhile, Arizona and California are gobbling up around three and four million acre-feet respectively. In total, this overdraft has caused reservoir levels to fall. It’s going to take a lot more than a few rainy seasons to fix this problem.

So, for the first time since the Law of the River was written, the federal government has had to step in, ordering the states to reduce total water usage on the river, this time by nearly a third. That’s a jaw-dropping demand!

These new cuts will extend to Arizona, California, and beyond, drying up thousands more acres of farmland, not to mention cities around Phoenix and Los Angeles that rely on the Colorado River. These new restrictions will also put increased pressure on the many tribes that have used the Colorado River for centuries: Tribes that have water rights will be pressured to sell or lease them to other water users, and tribes without recognized water rights will face increased opposition as they try to secure their share.

And Arizona and California are still fighting over who should bear the biggest burden of these new cuts. California has insisted that the Law of the River requires Arizona to shoulder the pain, and from a legal standpoint they may be right. But Arizona says further cuts would be disastrous for the state’s economy, and the other five river states are taking its side.

Either way, the painful cuts have to come from somewhere, because the Law of the River was built on math that doesn’t add up.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The very bad math behind the Colorado River crisis on Apr 26, 2023.