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Show APPENDIX J 291 preme Court, in 1922, in the case of Wyoming v. Colorado, applied this rule on an interstate stream, regardless of state lines. The Upper states obtained this insulation in the 1922 compact. The Colorado River Compact The Colorado River Compact was signed by representatives of all seven states at Santa Fe, New Mexico, November 24, 1922, subject to ratification by their legislatures and the consent of Congress, the latter being a Constitutional requirement. Article II defined the Colorado River system as including the main stream and its tributaries, the "Upper Basin" as being the drainage area above Lee's Ferry (a point on the river in northwest Arizona), and the "Lower Basin" as the drainage area below that point. The four states of Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Wyoming were defined as the "States of the Upper Division" and the three states of Arizona, California and Nevada as the "States of the Lower Division." The negotiators gave up any attempt to allocate all the water, or to allocate to individual states. They hit on the idea of allocating "beneficial consumptive uses" instead of the flow of a stream, and made a general division as between Upper and Lower Basins, leaving to the future any allocation to states as such. Nor did they attempt to dispose of all the water supply, leaving, as they thought, about twenty-five per cent of it unallocated and untouched by the Compact. The Compact Articles In Article III(a) the Compact apportioned in perpetuity the "beneficial consumptive use" of 15,000,000 acre-feet of water of the Colorado River system, one-half to each basin, to include any rights which "may now exist." This was the protection against the law of priority of appropriation demanded by the Upper Basin. As Article n defined the system to include the tributaries, the apportionment in Article III (a) includes the uses on the tributaries as well as on the main stream. The Compact did not define the term "beneficial consumptive use." Article IH(b) permitted the Lower Basin to "increase its use" of waters of the system by 1,000,000 acre-feet per annum. These two paragraphs thus disposed of 16,000,000 acre-feet, |
