The Brief

As pollution from burning fossil fuels drives higher average temperatures and longer and more extreme heat waves, communities and officials are grappling with ways to adapt. One essential need? A cool space to go when it’s too hot to be outside.

But increasingly, that space is not one’s own home. And given our historically mild southern California climate, many Southlanders have no air conditioning — some 20% of homes in Los Angeles have no AC, for example.

But even if you do have AC, renters and people with lower incomes are more likely to live in older, poorly insulated housing and spend a disproportionate amount of their income on energy bills, forcing many people to have to choose between paying for cool air or other necessities such as food and medical supplies.

And then, there are the rising numbers of people being pushed into homelessness and insecure housing, such as RVs and other vehicles.

As the climate crisis collides with the twin crises of housing and affordability, cities like L.A. promote places like libraries, senior centers and parks as cooling centers. The trouble is, not many people use them. And when the power grid goes down, these places go dark too.

Enter the concept of a “resilience hub.”

These are buildings that are already well-used and trusted in a community, that can provide helpful resources outside of air conditioning, water and some board games to play. They’re retrofitted with solar panels and battery power so they can ride out a disaster. They’re chosen by the community and aren’t necessarily run by a government entity.

From Boyle Heights to Wilmington, grassroots groups across L.A. are establishing some of California’s first “resilience hubs.” At the same time, the city of L.A. is working to retrofit certain existing cooling centers in strategic areas to serve as “resilience hubs” as well.

Where to put resilience hubs

In Wilmington, the grassroots group Communities for a Better Environment (CBE) did extensive surveying and engagement work to establish the Tzu Chi Clinic as a resilience hub that will be retrofitted with solar panels and backup power. The clinic is right near a high school and is already highly used. And the Wilmington Senior Center is another resilience hub they established — it’s already been outfitted with solar panels and battery storage. Boyle Heights is also getting a resilience hub (but we’ll go back to this one later).

“Resilience hubs are different from cooling centers because they have more resources and more space for people to just come together,” said Romeo Clay, a 17-year-old organizer with CBE. He goes to high school right near the Tzu Chi Clinic and regularly spends time there.

“A resilience hub is a place for a community to come together and really build resiliency,” Clay said. “If they need housing, if they need help paying their bills, or they just need someone to listen.”

The city of L.A. is close to completing a retrofit of the Green Meadows Recreation Center in South Los Angeles. The building will have solar panels and battery storage, as well as be turned into a microgrid, to help power the city in times of need.

“That's really the ideal resilience center for the city,” said Chief Heat Officer Marta Segura. She said the city is using climate and socioeconomic data and CalEnviroScreen, a statewide tool that identifies communities with the highest pollution burdens, to identify which existing buildings can be retrofitted in the areas of highest need.

Los Angeles appointed its first chief heat officer on June 3, 2022. Marta Segura will help coordinate the city’s emergency response to extreme heat.

(

Heidi de Marco

/

KHN

)

Segura said the city is already struggling to staff and fund cooling centers when hours are extended during extreme heat waves. Retrofitting buildings is a far bigger financial lift.

“When we have money available, we are attempting to prioritize these areas because this is where we can make the biggest improvements in the shortest amount of time,” Segura said.

“We’ll not just get the best results from a public health perspective and reduce the risk of heat injury or hospitalization, but we will also begin to lower emissions because we're going to bring climate adaptation to those areas — more tree canopy, more shade," Segura said.

She added that increasing coordination with non-profits already working on establishing resilience hubs is needed, as well as identifying resources for the most vulnerable residents who may not have viable ways to actually get to these hubs. For example, Segura said the Department on Disability, as well as the Department of Aging, have transportation vouchers and can help provide equipment like ACs for people with disabilities.

Building community and climate resilience

For Joey Rodriguez, the Boyle Heights Arts Conservatory on East César Chávez Avenue is already a resilience hub. He’s been coming here since he was 15. Now 20, he’s gone from intern to program coordinator for the non-profit, which offers free classes and paid opportunities in film, art, music and digital production for young people in the area.

“I was originally supposed to, according to my parents, be a doctor or a nurse,” Rodriguez said. So he was sent to Francisco Bravo Medical Magnet High School. But it didn’t feel right.

“I had always been the kid that went straight to school and straight back home,” Rodriguez said. “Prior to becoming a part of the Boyle Heights Arts Conservatory, I had never really connected with my community. So once I found out that this place existed, I started coming and I never left.”

Now, it’s a second home.

Joey Rodriguez, 20, is program coordinator with the Boyle Heights Arts Conservatory. Here he sits in one of the building's multiple studios.

(

Erin Stone

/

LAist

)

“It was a home to me immediately and I recognized that the other community members that I was around also recognized it as a home,” Rodriguez said. “So when it was officially named a resilience hub, it only helped elevate the work that we were already doing.”

To become an official climate resilience hub, the Conservatory partnered with local non-profit Climate Resolve to get funding to retrofit the space so it can have solar panels and battery storage to provide a safe place during power outages and disasters. Those additions are expected to be completed by mid-2024.

In the meantime, they’re operating as a cooling center and working with staff to implement climate education into their work in the long-run. They've hosted events on disaster preparedness training, the impacts of the climate crisis, and practical resources for community members to access things like rooftop solar panels installation, help paying utility bills, or access to AC rebates and other resources that can help community members navigate the climate crisis.

Andres Rodriguez, who also grew up in Boyle Heights, is resilience coordinator with Climate Resolve, the non-profit partnering with the Conservatory on the resilience hub retrofit.

(

Erin Stone

/

LAist

)

“Resilience, you're being proactive,” said Andres Rodriguez, resilience coordinator with Climate Resolve. “When you're adapting, you're reacting. Having those deep ties within the community, gives [the Conservatory] the ability to be there when a climate emergency happens.”

And the benefits go far beyond a safe place to huddle during an emergency. One example of the space’s intersectionality at work —they hired local artists to paint a mural with a non-toxic paint that can help absorb air pollution. That also launched their Mural Workforce Academy to train artists in mural painting.

It’s a far cry from a typical “cooling center,” which is generally made up of temporary seating, a cooler of bottled water, and some board games in a designated room away from other activities.

The Mid Valley Senior Center on July 14, 2023. It's a city-run cooling center in the San Fernando Valley.

(

Ashley Balderrama

/

LAist

)

While a building retrofitted with solar panels and battery storage provides physical resilience, the space’s community building of the space is at the core of its ability to be a resilience hub, said Joey Rodriguez.

“What's the difference between a nice, fresh gym where you just huddle around and cool off versus this space? This space is made for us. It’s made by us,” said Rodriguez. “It's a cooling space, but it's also a healing space. It’s a healing space because we've made it that way."

Inside the Boyle Heights Arts Conservatory, the walls are lined with posters and artwork.

(

Erin Stone

/

LAist

)

A historic space long rooted in community

Josof Sanchez, better known as Mr. OG, walks into the entrance hall of the Conservatory. It’s lined with photos of iconic musicians and artists. He points to a portrait of a young Ray Jimenez.

“Little Ray was one of the first producers here in East L.A.,” Sanchez said. “He was known as the brown James Brown.”

There are portraits of many who performed here, including the best East L.A. bands, such as El Chicano and Willie G. and Thee Midniters, as well as artists such as Stevie Wonder and Sonny and Cher — the former pair lived in the building when they first started making music.

Artists including Stevie Wonder, left, and Little Ray Jimenez, first portrait in top row, spent time in the historic building now known as the Boyle Heights Arts Conservatory.

(

Erin Stone

/

LAist

)

For generations, this building has been a beloved and safe space for Eastside communities, particularly those experiencing marginalization. In the 1920s and 1930s, it was a resource center run by Jewish socialists. In 1949, it became The Paramount Ballroom, hosting local and internationally-renowned artists alike, then The Vex in 1980, where the east L.A. punk, rock and local music scene thrived. It was a place that challenged the racial segregation of the times, and served in opposition to the Hollywood scene, which largely excluded people of color.

Today, as a nonprofit that provides free and affordable arts programming for young people in the community, the place serves hundreds of families every year, many of whom have been impacted by gang violence and the criminal justice system, said Sanchez.

"We produce hope here," he said. "We're dream builders."

Josof Sanchez, or Mr. OG, left, and Julie Matsumoto, right, host a radio program out of the Boyle Heights Arts Conservatory and run a non-profit for local young people called Operation Street Kidz.

(

Erin Stone

/

LAist

)

Sanchez, a Vietnam veteran and former probation officer who grew up in Boyle Heights, is a motivational speaker who runs his own radio show — The Mr. OG Show, but OG stands for “opportunity giving” instead of “original gangster." Through his organization Operation Street Kidz, he works with young people impacted by gangs and the justice system.

When I visited on a recent afternoon, young people were mixing music on laptops during a class, others were recording or live on air in one of the building’s many studios.

“My mission is to speak into the lives of young people and their parents and let them know that they're somebody, they're unique, they're rare," Sanchez said. "That’s what this place has done."

Lack of funding

In 2021, the state launched the Community Resilience Centers program to support and speed up resilience hub efforts. This year it’s set to fund a first round of projects.

The idea is to fund a wide array of resilience hubs that are centered in communities hardest hit by climate impacts, said Coral Abbott, the program's manager at the Strategic Growth Council, the state agency that's in charge of facilitating the effort.

“We wanted to think about how to make this program help communities get themselves set up to respond to whatever emergencies they're most at risk for,” Abbott said. ”Rather than say like, we want to see ‘X’ number of applications from local government or a community-based organization, we are really trying to have the underlying criteria be understanding what communities priorities are, understand how they were involved in selecting these sites because we want them to be places that they trust and are willing to go.”

But the program, originally allocated $160 million, has already seen significant cuts — the first round makes $98 million available and there’s no guarantee the program will continue, said Amar Azucena Cid, a deputy director with the Strategic Growth Council.

“Funding definitely impacts how we plan, especially if we're thinking about setting up this program as a long-term program with real solutions that I think communities are really looking forward to,” she said.

Cid said the state’s climate bond, which may be on California voters' ballots in 2024, could ensure the funding stays for at least a second round.

“I think the hard part with standing up a new program of this magnitude is folks want to test it out and I think that's what we were hearing from the Department of Finance,” Cid said. “I firmly believe that this is something that can be stood up long-term, but I think on the budget perspective it is like, let's get that proof of concept going and then we can move in towards what that looks like for long-term funding.”

Abbott said the department already expects funding to run out this first round.

“The amount of funding we have is not going to meet the demand,” she said.

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

More than 100 Boyle Heights and East L.A. residents packed a boardroom Wednesday in Diamond Bar to tell air regulators how air pollution and lingering odors from the Lineage warehouse fire have affected their health, homes and daily lives.

Some boarded buses before 8 a.m. to travel the 25 miles to the South Coast Air Quality Management District hearing, where the agency is considering whether to order stricter cleanup requirements and penalties against Lineage Logistics.

The hearing board is considering whether to issue an order of abatement, which would require Lineage to take specific steps to address air pollution from the warehouse fire and meet stricter cleanup standards at the site.

The hearing comes after AQMD said it received more than 4,000 odor complaints since early July and issued 19 notices of violation to Lineage, alleging the odors created a public nuisance.

Lineage said it had removed about 80% of the food waste from the facility and expects to spend between $80 million and $100 million on cleanup.

The air district hearing board is expected to continue its review Thursday as it considers issuing an order and possibly charging fines for the air quality violations. Board and Lineage representatives are scheduled to give presentations tomorrow on the cleanup and related pollution.

Here are five takeaways from the testimony.

1. Residents made the trip to make sure their voices were heard

Several speakers said it was frustrating that residents had to leave their communities, miss work and travel to Diamond Bar just to be heard. They called on AQMD to hold future hearings in Boyle Heights, closer to the people most affected by the fire.

On the bus ride to the hearing, residents told Boyle Heights Beat that they were coming to speak for their children, for neighbors who feared reprisal and because they had lived through environmental crises, like the Exide battery recycling plant, which contaminated neighborhoods in Southeast Los Angeles for years.

2. Weeks later, people say they still don’t feel safe

Speakers told the hearing board they are still dealing with foul odors from rotting food and health issues, including nausea, headaches, bloody noses, rashes, sinus and eye infections, asthma flare-ups and breathing problems. Many said they worry about the long-term effects of exposure and whether the air will be safe when kids return to school.

Amanda Diaz carried her newborn son with her to the microphone. She told the board her son was about two weeks old when the fire broke out . Her voice shaking with emotion, Diaz said she had to take her child to a hospital after he broke out in rashes, and she is worried that the exposure has caused harm that isn’t yet apparent.

“The fire has robbed me of these chances to recover from childbirth in peace and enjoy these precious first weeks with my son,” she said.

Several people said the impacts extend beyond the streets closest to the warehouse and that more people across Boyle Heights and East L.A. have been affected.

“Does the air have a ZIP code?” resident Margarita Gonzalez asked the board and Lineage’s representatives, inviting them to spend time in her home to better understand the extent of the odor problem.

“Our community deserves fresh air,” Erika Jimenez, who lives near Mariachi Plaza, added.

3. Elected leaders call lingering odors a public health crisis

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass addresses the board and residents via remote video at a hearing held in the William A. Burke Auditorium of the South Coast Air Quality Management District (South Coast AQMD) in Diamond Bar.

(

Gary Coronado

/

The LA Local

)

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, District 14 City Councilmember Ysabel Jurado and State Sen. María Elena Durazo urged the board to require stricter cleanup standards and impose financial penalties against Lineage.

Bass called on the board to use its enforcement authority to require a stronger cleanup plan, including financial support for impacted residents.

“What the residents of Boyle Heights are facing is not just a nuisance, but it is a public health crisis that requires urgent and actionable measures,” Bass told the board.

Bass said Lineage should be required to establish a fund dedicated to the ongoing support of impacted residents, including relocating them until the issue is completely resolved. She added that the company has made some effort to provide help but only after pressure from residents and elected leaders.

Jurado said the sheer volume of complaints and notices of violations is evidence enough that Lineage’s management of the crisis has been inadequate.

“Residents should not have to file complaint after complaint to force a multi-billion-dollar corporation to contain the harm that it created,” Jurado told the board.

She added that any order against Lineage should include firm deadlines, aggressive odor control, public reporting and meaningful consequences if it is violated.

Durazo echoed outrage that residents are expected to endure unsafe conditions while the cleanup unfolds at the “company’s pace.” She said the rotting material should be removed before students are expected to return to school on Aug. 12.

Durazo said Lineage should pay for the full cost of housing and home remediation for residents, and the board should enforce the maximum financial penalty against the company. She also asked that another hearing be held in Boyle Heights rather than miles away during the workday.

“Residents deserve to be heard,” Durazo said.

Concerned residents of Boyle Heights and East Los Angeles at a hearing held in Diamond Bar. The South Coast AQMD Hearing Board held a hearing listening to proposed conditions to reduce odors impacting the nearby community from the Lineage Warehouse fire cleanup in Boyle Heights.

(

Gary Coronado

/

The LA Local

)

4. Residents say they don’t want history to repeat itself

For many speakers, the Lineage fire was not an isolated incident. They said it was another example of Boyle Heights and East L.A. communities being forced to live with the impacts of policies and businesses that create health hazards for the community.

Several people compared the situation to Exide. Others questioned why communities near industrial facilities are often asked to endure pollution and health risks while waiting for action.

“We are witnessing environmental racism,” Eve Sanchez said.

Alma Martinez, of Monterey Park, weeps during public comments at a hearing held in the William A. Burke Auditorium of the South Coast Air Quality Management District in Diamond Bar.

(

Gary Coronado

/

The LA Local

)

Some called for the warehouse and other industrial facilities to move away from residential neighborhoods.

“I need you to pay attention to what’s happening in our community and for these factories to move from their location please,” said Cristina Fernandez, an East L.A. resident, with help from an interpreter.

She also invited Lineage representatives to visit her home and experience the poor air quality.

5. Students and parents describe a disrupted summer and back-to-school concerns

Leonardo Gutierrez, 8, and mother Maria Patiño Gutierrez, of East Los Angeles, address the board at a hearing held in the William A. Burke Auditorium of the South Coast Air Quality Management District (South Coast AQMD) in Diamond Bar.

(

Gary Coronado

/

The LA Local

)

Several youth who are members of East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice spoke on behalf of their families and their neighbors and highlighted the uncertainty of going back to school in the aftermath of Lineage.

“Am I expected to go into my senior year in these conditions? It’s ridiculous,” said Isabella Hernandez, a Boyle Heights resident.

“Lineage is banking on the fact that we’re poor,” Hernandez said. “They think we’re stupid and uneducated and that we’re just going to lie down and take this.

“We’re not. We deserve clean air and a safe place to live,” she continued.

Another Boyle Heights youth spoke about a lack of purifiers being distributed.

“I come from a multigenerational home and we only have one air purifier … How does this make sense?” she said.

Maria Patiño Gutierrez said she’s not comfortable with her son going back to school, which is less than two miles away from Lineage.

“Our summer plans were ruined because of this fire,” she said.

Her son also addressed officials during the hearing.

“It was my birthday when the fire started," he said. "My baseball game was canceled. Everything was canceled because of the fire.”

An effort to put a rent control measure on the November ballot in Anaheim has fizzled. That means Santa Ana is likely to remain the only Orange County city with rent control, at least for now.

The group Tenants United Anaheim launched an effort in January to put rent control on the November ballot. The initiative proposed to cap rent increases in the city at 3% annually. It also would have required landlords to pay relocation assistance to tenants forced to move through no fault of their own, such as when an owner takes a rental unit off the market.

Why did it fizzle?

Tenants United Anaheim has yet to release an official statement, but an organizer with the group told LAist the group had decided to suspend signature-gathering in order to improve and strengthen the text of the ballot measure.

This week is the deadline to submit ballot initiatives for the November election in Orange County. The group expects to resume the effort for a future election.

The context

Tenant advocates in Anaheim had hoped to follow in the footsteps of neighboring Santa Ana, which became Orange County’s first city to adopt rent control in 2021. It was upheld by voters in 2024. The efforts in both cities have faced strong opposition from the California Apartment Association, which represents landlords.

What's next

Some cities have had to pare down their protections for renters after negative court rulings. Los Angeles and Pasadena have stopped enforcing mandatory relocation assistance following legal victories by landlord groups.

Tenants United Anaheim's members hope their revised rent control proposal will make it on the ballot in 2028.

Dire water conditions, missed deadlines and uncertainty on the Colorado River are complicating critical water decisions in California.

No single state, water agency or federal official has shown the power, or the will, to break the deadlock among Colorado River basin states over how to share the dwindling supplies.

Years of fraught negotiations have failed to yield consensus even as major reservoir storage plummets to record lows — ratcheting up the tensions, and the stakes, for the states’ negotiators.

Now, key agreements for managing the river are expiring at the end of this year. These include agreements reached in 2007 that lasted nearly two decades, which took fewer than three years to craft.

This round of talks has already taken longer — and, so far, produced nothing so durable.

The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, the federal steward for the river under the Department of the Interior, last week released a 10-year framework that establishes rough parameters for managing the river, but imposes no specific long-term plan.

The federal provisions include cuts of up to 40% to the shared supply of California, Arizona and Nevada in the lower basin. They also allow releases from Lake Powell, which collects flows from the upper basin, to dip low enough that they risk violating a legally required threshold for water deliveries to downstream states.

These dramatic cuts are an upper limit for future operations. The federal government plans to roll out more detailed management plans every two years if the states continue their impasse.

The agency will release the first of those plans any day, imposing cuts in the downstream states of California, Arizona and Nevada — an estimated 10% cut to California's supply through 2028, or roughly 440,000 acre-feet a year.

No mandatory cuts are expected in the upper basin states of Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico, according to those involved in negotiations. The Los Angeles Times first reported the split.

It reflects the limits of federal power and political will: The Interior Department can force cuts in the lower basin, but has no comparable authority to impose cuts in the upper basin states — the limits of which the Congressional Research Service said are the subject of “ongoing debate.”

This isn’t the long-term plan that California’s water suppliers were hoping for.

Building anything to store, move or make more water typically takes decades and billions of dollars. Without longer-term certainty about how states will share the river’s water supply among 40 million people, millions of acres of agriculture and two states in Mexico — cities and irrigation providers are struggling to plan how to close the gaps.

“A cut is never fun, but you can deal with it. But not if you say, ‘Well, we have a cut here, and then maybe a cut in two years, and maybe another cut in two more years,’” said Bill Hasencamp, Metropolitan Water District’s manager of Colorado River resources.

“We need to plan for our future. And this deal does not let us do that.”

The future of Southern California’s water 

In California, where the availability of water is never certain, nature-defying engineering keeps dry parts of the state flush with water even when little falls from the sky.

Much of that engineering converges around one Southern California supplier: the Metropolitan Water District. The giant wholesaler imports water from Northern California and the Colorado River to supply cities and other retailers serving 19 million people across six counties.

Metropolitan’s imports are so central to the region that when its Northern California supplies dropped to a trickle during the most recent drought, 6 million Southern Californians faced unprecedented water restrictions in 2022.

Southern California isn’t facing such serious shortfalls again yet. But uncertainty over the Colorado River compounds the risks the next drought will bring.

“There's a good chance it'll be as bad as it's been, and there's a reasonable chance that it'll be worse,” said Hasencamp’s colleague, Keith Nobriga, whose job as an operations manager at Metropolitan is helping the district prepare for the future amid climate change.

The uncertainty also throws a wrench in Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration’s water machinations to the north. Metropolitan's board will play an outsized role in deciding the fates of Sites Reservoir and the Delta tunnel because of the district's water needs and spending power.

Both multibillion-dollar projects, decades in the making, aim to send more of Northern California’s water south. Metropolitan is also planning a large-scale water recycling and reuse program, called Pure Water Southern California, with the Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts.

Metropolitan has already committed hundreds of millions of dollars to the Delta tunnel’s planning costs and about $31 million for Sites Reservoir. The board hasn’t committed to receiving water or contributing to construction for either yet, though board votes on whether to approve the tunnel and recycled water project could come as soon as next year.

Subtracting one part of the equation, such as the Colorado River, could change the calculus for the others. But Metropolitan has to know how much water it stands to lose, and for how long.

The consequences of picking the wrong path could leave Southern California thirsty during the next drought, on one hand, or unnecessarily increase water rates, on the other.

Nobriga compares his job to insurance planning. The costs of nudging these water projects along, he says, are like paying an insurance premium.

“We'll keep these projects alive. We'll keep looking down the road,” he said. “And if it gets to a point where we really think these droughts are imminent, then we'll … construct and pay the big money for one or several of these projects. And we don't know which ones yet.”

Agriculture in limbo

California uses the largest share of the Colorado River’s water among the states. And the Imperial Irrigation District uses the largest share of that to supply half a million acres of alfalfa, grasses, winter vegetables and other crops in the southeast corner of the state.

As climate change and a megadrought plunged the Colorado River into its driest decades in over a century, the Biden administration struck a deal with the Imperial Irrigation District, trading more than half a billion federal dollars for short-term water conservation.

Growers cut irrigation to their alfalfa and other forage crops for weeks at a time, and the district conserved enough water to add more than 12 feet to Lake Mead on the Colorado River, according to Tina Shields, water manager for the irrigation district.

Now, those conservation programs are coming to the end of their funding and regulatory lifetimes. Starting new ones would require new plans and approvals to address the environmental impact of reduced irrigation runoff that feeds the Salton Sea.

Seeking those permits and environmental approvals “needs to be done on a longer term, not on a two-year term,” Shields said. “Because it’ll take us at least a year to negotiate, probably longer, the environmental actions necessary to move forward.”

In the meantime, negotiations are ongoing with other California water users about how they’ll share the coming cuts, including who is going to pay for it, Shields said. The district has not yet committed to anything.

“The district's perspective is: We've done a lot. We're doing a lot. It's challenging to do more,” she said.

Art of the deal

Though the U.S. Department of the Interior has not yet released its plan for the river’s next two years, those involved in negotiations expect that it will call for reductions and conservation in California, Arizona and Nevada similar to what the states proposed in May.

The three lower-basin states then must agree among themselves and with the federal government on how to implement it. After that, individual water suppliers in California will seek approvals from their boards for their share of the cuts.

Jay Weiner, an attorney representing the Fort Yuma Quechan Indian Tribe, whose reservation lies on both sides of the Colorado River, compared the plan to a Band-Aid, not a long-term path to sustainability.

“To a large extent,” Weiner said, “it leaves us at the mercy of this coming winter.”

The Trump administration relied on the states reaching consensus rather than imposing terms — an approach that so far hasn't broken the deadlock.

Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs called for the federal government to step in and broker a deal. But federal leverage looks different in the upper and lower basins. Lower basin stakeholders say there are other strings the federal government could pull upstream, such as forcing water out of reservoirs, but isn’t. And cloistered negotiations and hardline positions among negotiators have driven an impasse.

Arizona negotiator Tom Buschatzke publicly lambasted the upper basin in The Denver Post for failing to propose “One. Single. Gallon.” of mandatory, verifiable reductions. Colorado negotiator Becky Mitchell wrote in The Colorado Sun that had the lower basin states lived within their means, “the reservoirs would not be in crisis today.”

Elizabeth Koebele, a political science professor at the University of Nevada, Reno said that negotiations have been most productive when participants had strong working relationships. Without clear federal leadership, she said, the same conflicts keep resurfacing.

The fraying relationships, she said, could stem from turnover. But years of constant crisis have also worn people down.

“We have been governing in crisis for a long time, and so every time we meet at the table, there's this big problem to solve,” she said. “The house is on fire.”

While the lower basin may sue the upper over deliveries that dip below a legally required threshold, both sides would risk the uncertain outcomes of litigation.

“In essence, this federal action has 40 million people living from paycheck to paycheck on water supply,” said Mark Gold, an environmental scientist and board member of the Metropolitan Water District.

That paycheck comes due again in two years with the same states, and the same asymmetry of power, still in place. Until then, the interior secretary can still force deeper cuts on the lower basin. No one, right now, is willing to force the upper basin to do the same.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.