About
Founded in 1945, CRWUA has served as a organization where members from throughout the Colorado River Basin develop personal relationships to allow frank discussions of the many issues involving the Colorado River.
The Colorado River
The Colorado River – shared by seven States and the Republic of Mexico – has been called one of the most regulated rivers in the world. This regulation is both structural, with more than 20 major dams in the system, and legal, through compacts, public laws and an international treaty, all part of “Law of the River.” Modern development of the river began in the early 1900s. Today, the river’s reservoirs can store more than 60 million acre-feet of water, or approximately four years of average annual river flow.
The Colorado River Basin was divided geographically into an “upper” and a “lower” basin by the 1922 Colorado River Compact. Lee Ferry, 16 miles downstream of Glen Canyon Dam, is the boundary between the upper and lower basins.
The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation operates all the major dams on the river. Its Upper Colorado Region, headquartered in Salt Lake City, UT, manages the facilities that are in the “Upper Basin” – parts of Utah, Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico. The Lower Colorado Region, headquartered in Boulder City, NV, manages the facilities in the “Lower Basin” – which includes most of Arizona as well as southern Nevada, southern California, and small sections of western New Mexico and southwestern Utah.
Mission
The Colorado River Water Users Association is a non-profit, non-partisan organization providing a forum for exchanging ideas and perspectives on Colorado River use and management with the intent of developing and advocating common objectives, initiatives and solutions.
Annual Conference
Annually CRWUA hosts a conference in December in Las Vegas where issues of concern are featured on the program.
At the annual conference, CRWUA membership update and adopt a comprehensive set of resolutions addressing the major issues affecting the sharing, use and further development of the Basin’s water supply. As the Colorado River is one of the most regulated rivers in the country, a complex set of state and federal statutes, regulations and judicial decrees, interstate compacts and an international treaty (collectively referred to as “the Law of the River”) govern the allocation and water management decisions affecting conservation storage, releases and uses made by the 33 million people who depend on the River for their water supply.