Colorado River Management Section

Overview - Future Distribution of Water

Under the Arizona Water Settlements Act, the Secretary of the Interior (Secretary) will reallocate the first 197,500 acre-feet of non-Indian agricultural (NIA) priority CAP water for Indian uses.  All remaining NIA priority water, up to 96,295 acre-feet will be reallocated by the Secretary to the Arizona Department of Water Resources (Department) and held under a contract in trust for future reallocation and use by non-Indian municipal and industrial (M&I) water users.

The Department cannot make a recommendation to the Secretary for reallocation of this water supply prior to January 1, 2010.  Similar to the 1999 CAP reallocation process conducted by the Department for uncontracted M&I CAP water, the Department will conduct an in-depth public input process to develop criteria for the CAP NIA reallocation.  The criteria will be used by the Department to determine its recommendation to the Secretary regarding the allocation of water between the interested qualifying parties.  Following the development and adoption of the criteria, the Department will circulate a statewide request for letters of interest from water providers that wish to be considered for an allocation.  The Department anticipates that the process to develop the CAP NIA reallocation criteria may begin sometime during 2008.  At this time the final amount of water that will be available for reallocation is not known.  Due to the limited availability of unallocated CAP water, the Department expects the process to be very competitive.

 

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