If cities were stocks, you'd want to short Phoenix. Of course, it's an easy city to pick on. The nation's 13th-largest metropolitan area crams 4.3 million people into a low bowl in a hot desert, where horrific heat waves and windstorms visit it regularly. And it depends on an improbable infrastructure to suck water from the distant (and dwindling) Colorado River.

At a time when many cities and states in the West are grappling over water, a south-central Arizona Native American community has found itself in the enviable position of having rights to more water than it can use. The Gila River Indian Community established along the Gila River faced severe water shortages after the river was dammed upstream in the 1920s.

Government officials from the United States and Mexico have set a Tuesday date in San Diego to sign a landmark agreement to share Colorado River water during times of drought and surplus. A time and place for the announcement weren’t immediately made public. But International Boundary and Water Commission official Gustavo Ramirez on Friday confirmed the day and place.

Set amid the wheat fields and melon patches west of downtown, the 60-acre Yuma Desalting Plant is a technological marvel — capable of cleaning 73 million gallons of brackish farm runoff a day, enough for 110 Olympic-sized swimming pools. Built in 1992 at a cost to the federal government of $250 million, the plant was meant to help the U.S.

For more information and/or to register, contact the Water Education Founation at (916) 444-6240 or visit their website.

After decades of litigation that produced the largest water-rights settlement ever in Indian country, the Indians here are getting some of their water back.

The combined population of three of Arizona's most populous counties could double in 40 years and that has water experts dreaming up plans for the future. One scenario could have three desalination plants on line by 2048 to increase the supply of Central Arizona Project water flowing to Phoenix and Tucson.

The mussel-coated debris is unmistakable evidence of an event occurring silently and largely out of sight — the colonization of the Colorado River by the quagga mussel, a fingernail-size Eurasian bivalve with an astonishing sex drive and a nasty reputation for causing economic and ecological havoc.