The proposals presented Wednesday could stir further negotiation between the states as well as the 30 tribal nations with rights to the river's water, said Rhett Larson, a water law professor at Arizona State University. "It seems likely to me that instead of making everyone happy, they'll make everyone mad," Larson said of the proposals. But that might be a good thing, he said. "If it's something that's distasteful to both basins, it might unite both basins," he added. 

“They’re not going to take the any of the proposals,” said Sarah Porter, director of the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University. “The federal government put the components together in a different way ... and modeled them to provide near-maximum flexibility for negotiations to continue.”

Jay Famiglietti is a hydrologist and Global Futures Professor at Arizona State University, as well as the former executive director emeritus of the Global Institute for Water Security at the University of Saskatchewan. “I would describe the faucet as non-existent.” said Famiglietti. “There’s no such infrastructure in place, that’s just imaginary.”

“We see tremendous potential in this approach,” says Paul Westerhoff, co-corresponding author and Regents’ Professor in the School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment at ASU. “By continuously improving its accuracy and expanding its reach, we’re laying the groundwork for proactive water safety measures across the globe.”

Legal experts, however, warn that proving groundwater abuse under Arizona’s existing laws will be challenging. Rhett Larson, a professor of water law at ASU's Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law, said Arizona’s current laws give agriculture a wide exemption to nuisance laws. 

Rhett Larson, a professor of water law and an environmental law expert at Arizona State University, argued that Canada should treat water as it treats gold or oil. Larson acknowledges that water is unique among natural resources “because of its esthetic, cultural and ecological significance, as well as being essential to all life on earth.”

“They're world leaders in chips, and they want to be world leaders in all these other things,” said Paul Westerhoff, an ASU professor and Fulton Chair of Environmental Engineering who has worked for more than a decade with the semiconductor industry. He leads a dozen scientists in research for semiconductor water treatment. “What we're trying to do is to figure out how they can take that wastewater, clean it up and make new chips again with it.”

According to a statement from the research director of the Kyl Center for Water Policy Kathryn Sorensen, “Groundwater across the state is a hugely valuable supply, there isn’t enough water for everything, right? Human wants are always unlimited. Our ability to meet those wants is always somewhat limited. I hope you think of these trade-offs in terms of which developments are worth the water.”

“Everybody’s running for reelection,” said Kathleen Ferris, who crafted some of the state’s landmark water legislation and now teaches water policy at Arizona State University. “Nobody wants to sit around the table and try to deal with these issues.”

"This is long overdue, but better now than never," said Kathleen Ferris, a senior research fellow at Arizona State University's Kyl Center for Water Policy, who previously directed the Arizona Department of Water Resources when the state's groundwater laws were passed in 1980. "It is really important that the Department of Water Resources takes these actions because we need to protect these groundwater supplies."