Agriculture across the West has suffered to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, and power-generating reservoirs are so low that federal and state officials might have to reduce the amount of water released from places such as Glen Canyon Dam in order to keep the lights on across the Southwest. The situation is so dire at Lake Powell that one Las Vegas water official claimed last week that within two years, the reservoir and recreation hot spot could be a "dead pool."

Against that gloom-and-doom backdrop, scientists, government officials, conservationists and a few students gathered Thursday at the University of Utah for a conference on water management in the Colorado River Basin. Most of the discussion was driven by the drought and how long-standing laws such as the 1922 Colorado River Compact or the 1944 treaty allotting Mexico 1 1/2 million acre-feet of water might need to be adjusted as water managers deal with a seemingly dwindling resource.

"The Colorado River used to flow to the sea," said Rick Van Schoik, managing director for the Southwest Consortium for Environmental Research & Policy, hosts of the conference. "It doesn't anymore. It flows to Phoenix. It flows to L.A. It flows to agriculture."

Except, with the drought enveloping the West, it's flowing more slowly to those cities and through dams and reservoirs in the states of the Colorado River Basin. Speakers argued it is time to look carefully at how the country, states and native tribes manage the river. Many current management practices are based on the 1922 compact that divvied up the river's flow between "Upper Division" states - Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, Wyoming - and the "Lower Division" states of California, Arizona and Nevada.

"Wherever you go across this world, it seems like rivers have been over-appropriated," said David Wegner of the Glen Canyon Institute, a 21-year veteran of the Bureau of Reclamation and Fish and Wildlife Service who now works as a consultant on ecosystem rehabilitation and management. Noting that the Upper Division and Lower Division states are each appropriated 7 1/2 million acre-feet annually of Colorado River water, and taking into account Mexico's water rights, "we have obligated 16.5 million acre-feet on a river which delivers an average of 13.5 million acre-feet," Wegner said.

Larry Anderson, director of the Utah Division of Water Resources since 1985 and a member of the Upper Colorado River Commission, said, "I don't know if the river is over-appropriated." He noted that "both Lake Powell and Lake Mead have functioned as they were intended" under what he called "The Law of the River," a series of 11 laws, compacts and treaties that affect management of the Colorado.

Among the impacts he has seen are a drop in hydropower generation at Glen Canyon Dam by 25 percent to 35 percent and a drastic reduction in agricultural water use. Under a worst-case scenario of the drought continuing several more years, Anderson said Lake Powell could drop to the point where the power plant would have to be shut down for 10 of the next 17 years, recreational use there would cease and states in the lower Colorado River Basin could start seeing severe water shortages by the end of the decade.