I did not begin here. The earlier versions of this proposal, Beyond the Compact, treated a unified governing body as one component among several, inside a choice between two options. A cap, a trigger, a trading registry, a litigation shield and a baseline all sat on the same list, and the body was one more item on it.
What changed my mind was asking a plain question about each of those items: who performs it, every year, after the signing ceremony? The answer was nobody. The basin has no one to do continuing work. That is why governance moved from the list to the foundation, and why the proposal is now one package, the Basin Accord, and not a choice between two.
Trading cannot reach a cap by itself
A trading registry only works beneath a cap that already exists. It cannot bring the basin to one. If a roughly equal mandatory reduction is coming regardless, no rational rights-holder sells voluntarily at any price, because holding out costs less than selling.
Australia’s Murray–Darling reforms ran the same way. They built trading alongside “a basin-wide cap on water extractions,” and the cap came first. So the cap has to arrive by agreement, adopted at founding, and it has to bind both basins.
An agreement is a single act. A cap is a continuing one.
The parties can adopt a cap on one day. Someone has to hold it every year.
Storage has to be measured and certified against agreed thresholds. The pre-agreed formula has to be applied without a new vote. Use has to be monitored against a baseline. Conserved water has to be verified as it moves across state lines. Prices and volumes have to be published, and every signatory has to be held to the litigation shield for the life of the deal.
A cap that is not measured and enforced every year is a number in a document. None of these functions belongs to any one state, and none can be performed by the agreement itself.
Nobody holds those functions now
Each existing candidate fails for a specific reason.
Interior. Its contract power reaches the Lower Basin, which is how the Supreme Court read the Boulder Canyon Project Act in 1963, and Upper Basin officials dispute that it reaches them. The 2026 federal plan ordered cuts in the Lower Basin while relying on voluntary conservation upstream. The party that can compel is not the party that is hardest to move.
The states. Neither side describes itself as able to commit. New Mexico’s Estevan Lopez said in December 2025, “We don’t even have the statutory framework to make it mandatory at this point.” Interior’s Andrea Travnicek asked the states to “send us representatives that have the authority to best serve your interests.”
Each side also holds a position that is correct about its own constraint. Arizona’s Tom Buschatzke: “My water users will not have any choice, and we need that parity from the Upper Basin.” Colorado’s Becky Mitchell: “For many water users across the Upper Basin, this has led to a death of 1,000 cuts over the last 20 years.” After the February 14 deadline passed, Buschatzke said the Lower Basin’s offers had been “rejected outright.” The Upper Basin governors answered that they had come together “in good faith” and were putting “every tool on the table.” Both can be sincere. An institution that holds both constraints at once is the only thing that can reconcile them.
A one-time deal. Nevada’s John Entsminger put the cost of the current course most clearly: “As long as we keep polishing those arguments and repeating them to each other, we are going nowhere.” He later said the best realistic outcome was “a five-year operating plan to keep us out of court.” A deal that expires in five years and has no one to administer it is a delay, not a resolution.
The market alone. A market with no cap above it does not reach one. That is the first step again.
Trust is produced by the institution, not given to it
The Accord’s second phase asks the basin to accept a proportional rule that cuts when a measured trigger fires, without a vote in the moment. Parties accept a rule they cannot vote on later only if they have watched the institution that applies it behave over years: verified trades, published prices, honored commitments.
The body is where that record is made. That is why a single leap to proportionality fails, why Phase One exists, and why governance cannot be a reward for trust that arrives later. It is the way trust is produced.
The test
The cleanest test of “necessary” is to remove the body and see what is left. What remains is voluntary leasing with no independent verification, a short-term operating plan, and the threat of litigation.
The June 1, 2026 storage update puts the basin’s gap at 2.59 million acre-feet in another dry year, with 3.63 million acre-feet of realistically accessible storage remaining. Against numbers like that, measures that are short-lived, unenforceable and reversible are the ones the basin has already tried.
Why the states would form it
They will not form it as reform. Governance proposed for its own sake is a case the basin states have heard before. The route is to show each party that what it already says it wants cannot survive past a signing ceremony without someone to administer it. That means protection from Compact litigation, protection for undeveloped entitlements, and enforceable reductions from the other basin. Governance is the fine print of that deal, not the ask.
The pattern has worked here before. In the 1955 hearings on the Colorado River Storage Project Act, Wyoming Senator Barrett said, “If you will let us get those projects constructed up there so that we can store the water, you will have your 75 million acre-feet.” Shared authority was paid for with something concrete.
What would change my mind
This is a necessity claim, so it can be tested. It would weaken if someone showed an enforcement route that needs no standing body. A self-executing federal rule the Upper Basin would accept would do it, as would a verification system run entirely by existing agencies.
I don’t think those exist. The Upper Colorado River Commission covers only the Upper Basin. Reclamation operates the reservoirs but does not set Upper Basin use. None gives both basins a vote and an obligation.
The body also does not answer who carries the cut. It makes any answer enforceable. Australia’s experience adds a warning on design. It built one authority to set the plan, and in 2021 it moved enforcement into an independent Inspector-General. Who should verify compliance with a Colorado River cap is a question the Accord has to answer, and I’d like to hear from people who know how.
From argument to text
An argument for an institution is cheap until someone tries to write the institution down. So the next step in the Accord’s own sequence is a founding instrument, and I have drafted a first version: a 16-page discussion draft that turns the design into operative articles. It sets out the Authority’s membership and voting, the founding cap, the registry, the dormant second-phase rule, the Upper Basin terms, the litigation shield with tolling, and the route to ratification.
Writing it showed me where the design is thin. The level of the cap and the meaning of the Compact’s delivery obligation have to be settled by the parties, so the draft leaves the first blank and offers two options for the second. In three places the Core Paper states an aim without a mechanism, and the draft proposes one for the parties to improve or reject. Groundwater is not covered, and it is the largest gap. I am not publishing the draft yet. It is a working document for people who would help correct it, and if you are one of them, tell me.
The papers
The full proposal is in two parts. The Basin Accord (11 pages) sets out the design: the founding cap, the registry, the dormant second-phase rule and the Upper Basin basket. The Basin Accord: Evidence and Background (33 pages) gives the sources behind each claim, and lists the few items still to be sourced.
The Basin Accord: Evidence and Background
If you work on this river and think the argument fails, tell me where.
David Maness · The Centaur Desk