I don't think it is just Colorado. The water law in the west (of the USA) is all messed up. Or at least was created in a different time with different needs and different rainfall.
> Or at least was created in a different time with different needs and different rainfall.
And straight up lies. The Colorado water compact “average flow” was known to be nonsense when it was established, but politicians ignored the engineers’ estimates of long-term averages which were significantly lower than the figure the compact is based on.
I'm sure it made sense at the time. It was essentially homesteading. Just like you could grab a chuck of untamed land and fence it, plow it, build on it, and then you owned it. Water worked the same way.
Of course this ignored the people who were already living there, but they had the wrong skin color and religion.
It’s messed up anywhere there are periods of sufficiency and insufficiency, no matter what the rules are.
Either ‘first user wins’, like here, or ‘all users get allotment’ - in which case you can be screwed by someone building a new subdivision, or ‘gov’t entity allocates’ in which case corruption/payoffs become the norm, etc, etc.
At least it’s better than ‘shoot anyone using your well without permission’ like used to be the middle eastern standard eh?
And straight up lies. The Colorado water compact “average flow” was known to be nonsense when it was established, but politicians ignored the engineers’ estimates of long-term averages which were significantly lower than the figure the compact is based on.