"The function of the Colorado River Compact and virtually all of the core components of the law of the river is to allocate shortage. In other words, if there's not enough to go around, who gets it and who doesn't?

"Well, if the drought continues and we have to start working with shortages in the basin, the compact will work very well, thank you."

With full utilization of water allocations and drought conditions, the West may be entering a time when there's not enough water to go around. In that case, the compact "sets up the rules of the road" about who gets how much.

Booming California has been using more water than it was entitled to under the compact — up to 800,000 acre-feet a year more than allowed, according to the Interior Department.

In November 2002, Interior Secretary Gale Norton drew the line to force California to stay within its water budget of 4.4 million acre-feet of Colorado River water, he noted. People said that with California's economic and political might, such a thing would not happen, Raley said.

"Well, it did."

If shortage criteria are triggered, the Central Arizona Project gets shut off first, he said. "That's another example of how the law of the river essentially functions," allocating water in time of shortage.

Allow subsidies?

McCool: Water policy subsidizes farmers at the expense of other users. A new system would "stop subsidizing the wasting of water," he said.

"We subsidize to an enormous extent corporate agriculture in the West. It's my contention that if we simply stopped (the practice of underwriting water for farmers) it would solve most of our water problems, if not all of them."

There are multiple layers of subsidies, he said, from construction of dams to delivery of water. "We subsidize repayment loans at lower than market rate or no interest. We subsidize the price of the crops."

Water subsidies, power subsidies, crop subsidies are all weaknesses in the system, in his view. Transportation is subsidized, from use of barges to the highways that trucks use. Meanwhile, the United States debt is approaching $7 trillion, he said.

Cotton farmers get billions in subsidies, McCool added. "Why are we growing cotton in the desert and subsidizing it?

"How sensible is this? We just had the biggest budget deficit in history. Subsidizing people to waste water is approaching insanity, given these debts and the water situation."

Raley: He said he does not know McCool and is not talking about him personally, but he disagrees sharply on the issue of subsidies.