About a hundred miles upstream is Elephant Butte Reservoir, built in 1916 to help the United States meet its commitment to Mexico. The amount that states along the river owe each other, based on the 1938 Rio Grande Compact, is determined by complex formulas based on snowpack and the like, but in an average year, Colorado owes New Mexico 60,000 acre-feet. In this case, Colorado started going into hydrologic debt in 1949, and by 1966 it owed Texas and New Mexico 944,000 acre-feet. Texas and New Mexico sued in federal court. No single entity using Rio Grande water in Colorado was big enough to handle a court case of that magnitude, and so the Rio Grande Water Conservation District was formed in 1967.
Conservation districts attempt to protect water rights in a basin, and Colorado has only three.
So we formed the conservation district, hoping we could reach some kind of settlement with Texas and New Mexico. The alternative would have been a court case that would have resulted in having an administrative judge take over all our water management. Rio Grande irrigators in Colorado, under strict supervision of the state engineer, made do with less water after 1968, and Colorado met its obligations. But it wasn't easy, and they started looking for more water. Well, there was the Closed Basin, just north of the river.