Gila River Indian Community says it doesn’t support latest Colorado River sharing proposals
The Gila River Indian Community says it does not support a three-state proposal for managing the Colorado River’s shrinking supply in the future. The community, which is located in Arizona, is instead working with the federal government to develop its own proposal for water sharing. The tribe is among the most prominent of the 30 federally-recognized tribes that use the Colorado River. In recent years, it has signed high-profile deals with the federal government to receive big payments in exchange for water conservation. Those deals were celebrated by Arizona’s top water officials. But now, it is diverging from states in the river’s Lower Basin — Arizona, California and Nevada. Stephen Roe Lewis, The Gila River Indian Community’s Governor, announced his tribe’s disapproval of the Lower Basin proposal at a water conference in Tucson, Ariz., while speaking to a room of policy experts and water scientists.
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