There has been a breakdown on the way toward a long-term plan to save the shrinking Colorado River.
It isn’t clear how representatives for the states can bridge the gap between the dueling proposals — and whether it could fall on the highest levels of government to determine how to manage what is a vital source of water for 40 million people across seven Western states. A new approach is imperative for communities to be able to continue to rely on a river sapped by a historic drought and decades of overuse. The final plan could chart the river’s course for 20 years.
“These decisions will be made, if not by these seven humans, then by humans in black robes or humans sitting in Congress,” said John Entsminger, head of the Southern Nevada Water Authority.
Representatives for the states say they hope to find compromise on how to refill reservoirs and stabilize river flows, though they have no plans to meet soon.
The river’s short-term prospects are improving: The Biden administration said Tuesday that Lake Mead is at its highest level in three years — even though it remains historically low. Temporary water conservation measures brokered in a 2023 deal and healthy snowpack mean that, at least for a few years, it will avoid dropping to critically low levels that threaten water deliveries and hydroelectric power production.
But the latest disagreement among Colorado River states casts doubt on the waterway’s health for the coming decades. Federal water managers said they will begin a process of analyzing the proposals from the upper and lower basins of the river this month, to ensure a new plan governing use of the river is in place starting in 2027 — that will, for the first time, put climate change at the center of its planning.
A Department of Interior official downplayed any concerns of an impasse that could prevent that.
“I want to be clear — we are not expecting every single issue to be smoothed out between the upper and lower Basins tomorrow,” acting Deputy Secretary Laura Daniel-Davis said on a call with reporters. “We are all committed to a basin-wide solution and will continue to work honestly and collaboratively through any major sticking points until consensus has been reached.”
A ‘chasm’ between two plans for the Colorado River
The divide between the two plans concerns who should bear the brunt of water scarcity during the driest years.
A century-old agreement that forms the basis for water allocations along the river is based on an assumption that 16.4 million acre-feet of water will flow each year. But from 2000 to 2018, as the region suffered through a climate-change-fueled drought, the average was closer to 12 million acre-feet. (An acre-foot, enough to spread water across an acre at a depth of 1 foot, is equal to about 326,000 gallons — about as much as two to three typical households would use in a year.)
In their plan, the lower basin states of California, Arizona and Nevada agreed to reduce their total consumption of Colorado River water by at least 1.5 million acre-feet during any year in which water levels are at less than 70 percent of capacity across seven reservoirs, including Lakes Powell and Mead. That would allow for an equilibrium in those reservoirs between the water flowing in and out, representatives for those states said. California and Arizona would share 1.2 million acre-feet of the proposed cuts.
If levels across the reservoir system drop below 38 percent of capacity, then cutbacks would kick in across the entire river basin, including the upper basin states of Utah, New Mexico, Colorado and Wyoming. An analysis within the proposal showed such broad cuts would have been required in two of the past three years.
But the upper basin states are bristling at that idea, arguing that they already take cuts from year to year because their available water depends on the whims of weather and climate. In most years, Colorado water officials said, their communities take significantly less water than the 1922 Colorado River compact allows them to — a difference of as much as 4 million acre-feet per year across the upper basin.
“We are on the front lines of climate change without the protection of massive reservoirs,” Becky Mitchell, that state’s Colorado River commissioner, said in an email. “This is a much different reality than that of Lower Basin water users, who have been provided a level of certainty in water deliveries by drawing down Lake Mead.”
The upper basin’s plan focuses on how and when lower basin states can expect flows to pass through Glen Canyon Dam, which sits upriver of the Grand Canyon and creates Lake Powell, and the Hoover Dam, farther downstream impounding Lake Mead. The upper basin states propose that those releases be variable based on reservoir levels in Lakes Powell and Mead as of Oct. 1 each year, rather than a current guarantee of at least 7.5 million acre-feet a year.
Under the upper basin proposal, the lower basin states would bear the responsibility of water cuts in dry years.
“That’s quite a chasm,” J.B. Hamby, head of the Colorado River Board of California, said of the proposal’s distance from the lower basin’s plans.
The plans are the product of months of negotiations ahead of a deadline at the end of 2026. That’s when current rules governing water use expire — though the Bureau of Reclamation is looking to reach a deal by the end of the year, before a potential change in administration.
A war of words across the river basin
Sometime in January, those negotiations broke down.
Hamby said that is when the talks became “less focused on collaboration and compromise and became a lot more about PR and legal theories in the upper basin.” Mitchell said it was when time ran out to hammer out a seven-state compromise, with the federal Bureau of Reclamation asking for the states’ plans by this month.
Both sides of the river basin appeared to have only dug in on their differences in announcing their plans Wednesday.
The lower basin states stressed how their plan was fostered collaboratively — and that it came less than a year ago that California was at odds with the rest of the river basin over short-term water cuts. That crisis resolved when the lower basin states agreed with the federal government on unprecedented levels of water conservation to prevent the levels of Lakes Powell and Mead from falling too low to generate hydroelectric power.
“It’s very easy to craft an alternative that doesn’t require any sacrifice,” Hamby said at a news conference. “Adapting to climate change is not just the responsibility of one state or one basin. It is all our collective responsibility.”
But, the upper basin states suggested, that’s easy to say when the lower basin has been able to rely on the massive — yet extremely depleted — stores in Lakes Powell and Mead. Those reservoirs have helped fuel the growth around places such as Phoenix, the country’s fifth-largest city, whose metro area does not have enough groundwater to meet demands expected over the next century.
“We have to live within the means of what the river provides,” said Amy Ostdiek, chief of interstate, federal and water information at the Colorado Water Conservation Board.
Neither basin’s representatives would speak directly to the possibility of legal action but hinted that intervention is likely needed to resolve the differences.
Colorado water officials said compromise is their preferred path forward, adding that it will be up to the Bureau of Reclamation to ultimately impose a plan.
Any attempt to put the full burden of water scarcity on one state or basin, Hamby said, “will result in conflict.”
