At odds over water cuts, Colorado River states still seek consensus as deadline nears
Negotiators for the states haggling over future cuts to their use of Colorado River water say they're committed to reaching consensus, though time and snow are running short.
The seven states are effectively under a deadline to reach a deal by summer or face whatever water-use restrictions the federal government or courts may impose after the existing shortage guidelines expire next year. Meantime, a slow start to winter precipitation has dialed up the stakes, possibly leading to painful new cuts by the end of next year.
The Upper Colorado River Commission, representing Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming, met virtually on Tuesday and heard projections from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation suggesting that current trends indicate the natural flow into Lake Powell this year will be about 71% of the 30-year average, accounting for near-normal snowpack atop soils that were parched heading into winter. It's not a great outlook for a reservoir that's currently 35% full and that holds the key to providing water to the Lower Basin.
'It looks like hydrology is calling us to action,' Colorado's river commissioner, Becky Mitchell, told colleagues.
While the Lower Basin states of Arizona, California and Nevada have conceded they will have to cut back when water levels dip too low in the river's largest reservoirs at Lake Mead and Lake Powell, the upstream states have argued that they already suffer outsize losses in dry years because they have no such massive storage pools.
A dispute over whether the Upper Basin should join the Lower Basin in taking additional cuts in the driest years led to an impasse at the annual winter meeting of river water users. The Rocky Mountain states use less water and argue that they have little more to give up.
Divisions on the river: Colorado River states fear a long legal battle as talks falter over shortage rules
The rift flows out of a math problem that a previous generation of negotiators set up in 1922. The Colorado River Compact and a suite of subsequent deals tied to it envisioned a river spilling 16 million acre-feet of water in a typical year. The Lower Basin, below Lake Powell, would get 7.5 million acre-feet, and so would the Upper Basin, with some left over for Mexico. But the river today, after decades of drought and warming, sometimes provides only about 12 million acre-feet.
Over the years, the Lower Basin maxed out its allowable use, while the slower-developing Upper Basin lagged, developing just over 5 million acre-feet in the best of years. Now the Lower Basin must cut back to keep water flowing our of the reservoirs, and the Upper Basin has little ability to develop without shorting the Lower Basin.
An acre-foot is roughly 326,000 gallons, or enough to support about three southwestern households for a year. Most of the river, though, supports agriculture.
Upper Colorado River Commission Executive Director Chuck Cullom on Tuesday spelled out the typical shortage that water users in the mountain states face. The Upper Basin states have developed capacity to use 5.2 million acre-feet in good years, but in practice fall short on average by at least 1.2 million acre-feet because of localized dry weather. So while the Lower Basin uses its 7.5 million, the Upper Basin uses about 4 million. Mitchell noted that the Upper Basin's shortages are not compensated, as some of the Lower Basin's have been — a water officials simply comes around to close a headgate and drain a canal.
Wyoming's top negotiator, State Engineer Brandon Gebhart, said ranchers in his state can't feed their cattle when that happens and must sell off herds that might have taken years to build.
'These existing and very real impacts must be adequately recognized and considered in our discussions,' Gebhart said.
Sharing resources: As the Colorado River is stretched thin by drought, can the 100-year-old rules that divide it still work?
The counterargument from Arizona and its neighbors in the Southwest has been that they can't realistically take all of the possible cuts — up to 4 million acre-feet in the worst years — out of existing uses without deep economic pain.
Arizona Water Resources Director Tom Buschatze was not available for comment on Tuesday, but at the December meeting of water users he noted that his state already has reduced its 2.8 million acre-foot share of the river to 1.9 million over the last decade. Heaping all of the future cuts onto the Lower Basin could actually zero out a major water supplier to Phoenix and Tucson, the Central Arizona Project, he told The Arizona Republic.
California continues to seek a seven-state consensus, its Colorado River commissioner, JB Hamby, said in an email. But, as he has before, he said that 'involves all users, states, basins, and both countries further reducing use to manage what the river now provides.'
In putting forward several alternatives for future shortage guidelines, the Biden administration had envisioned putting most of the burden of new cuts on the Lower Basin, except for up to 200,000 acre-feet of voluntary conservation during wet years in the Rockies.
'We are working to reach a consensus during this (Trump) administration,' Hamby said.
Without offering specifics, Colorado's Mitchell closed the Upper Basin meeting on a conciliatory note, saying that everyone will have to give something to reach consensus and avoid the uncertainty that would arise from a lawsuit.
"Cuts are probable," she said. "We need to do that for certainty, and everyone needs to do that."
Brandon Loomis covers environmental and climate issues for The Arizona Republic and azcentral.com. Reach him at brandon.loomis@arizonarepublic.com.
Environmental coverage on azcentral.com and in The Arizona Republic is supported by a grant from the Nina Mason Pulliam Charitable Trust.
Sign up for AZ Climate, our weekly environment newsletter, and follow The Republic environmental reporting team at environment.azcentral.com and @azcenvironment on Facebook and Instagram.
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: As drought continues, the stakes for a Colorado River deal rise.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
San Francisco Chronicle
10 hours ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
One way Trump's DOGE cuts could actually help environmentalists in the West
No big government infrastructure project made an imprint on the landscape and economy of the West more than the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation's 20th century dam-building spree, which peppered 490 dams across the country, created an agricultural civilization dependent on federal hydrology civil engineering and brought about a welter of environmental difficulties after drying up dozens of once-healthy rivers. Today, the agency claims a $1.4 billion budget to maintain its fleet of aging dams. It was perhaps inevitable that the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, would seek to cut it down. Approximately 400 workers at the bureau — including dam tenders, emergency management specialists and hydrologists — received 'reduction in force' letters in March, raising fears that poorly monitored dams could fail, creating catastrophic flooding. This, just five weeks after President Donald Trump stoked fears of mismanagement by ordering billions of gallons of water released from two Central Valley dams, against the objections of officials, water experts and farmers. Turmoil in the federal dam management system represents potential disaster but also a prime opportunity: It offers environmentalists an opening to make a vigorous case for dam removal — a move that could save costs and please business interests while achieving a longstanding goal of getting rid of the most harmful and obsolete blockages on Western rivers. At Fossil Creek in the high country of north-central Arizona, a gorgeous waterfall now tumbles near headwaters where an Arizona Public Service hydroelectric dam stood until 2005. Ask people swimming below the falls where the dam was located, and you'll get some puzzled looks. 'There was never any dam here,' said one, unaware he was standing right next to its remnants, masonry concealed under travertine deposits that give it every appearance of a natural falls. Arizona built the dam in 1916 to run the ore-crushers at nearby copper and gold mines at Jerome and Crown King. Eventually, the dam also powered streetlights in Phoenix. But by the end of the century, the river had been killed and the antique plant was providing only .002% of Arizona Public Service's revenue. So the utility company took 14 feet off the top of the dam and let Fossil Creek flow, and a once-dead waterway sprang back to magnificent life. By 2009, Congress was impressed enough by the transformation to designate this once-tired industrialized trickle a National Wild and Scenic River. Twenty years after the removal, rare species like the Chiricahua leopard frog, southwestern willow flycatcher and yellow-billed cuckoo thrive in pools near the banks. Young cottonwood trees are growing. Algae are reblooming. About 500,000 dams stand in the United States today, and 90,000 of them are more than 25 feet high. The biggest are in the West, but obsolete remnants of 19th century and 20th century industrialization also litter New England and other Eastern regions. These dams have served many purposes — turning mill wheels, impounding water for crops, preventing floods, generating electricity and giving livestock a drink — but scientific consensus now holds that they do more collective damage than good. The stagnant pools, mounds of underwater silt, mosquito-breeding artificial ponds and detritus of long-shuttered factories do little to enhance the ecosystem or the landscape. But removing even useless dams is a complicated and often maddening process, according to Dartmouth College geography Professor Francis Magilligan. In some cases, it is unclear who owns a dam or has jurisdiction over it. Local groups may consider a dam a historic site. And even though it is almost always cheaper to remove a defective dam rather than repair it, the process involved can stymie those efforts. Only about 2,200 dams in the U.S. have been successfully removed, Magilligan notes. Decommissioning Fossil Creek was possible because it presented a unique political case. Many people at Arizona Public Service felt proud of the dam and the plant, and resisted shutting it down. Even though it was practically an antique, the flume leading down from the dam to the Childs and Irving power plants was still helping generate 4 megawatts of electricity (enough to power about 1,000 homes) and making about $500,000 per year for the Fortune 500 company. But the company was Arizona's largest utility and a powerful lobbying force in the state Legislature with a long-term interest in good public relations. There was also a personal quirk. Bill Post, the CEO of the utility's parent company, happened to be childhood friends with the outspoken environmentalist Robin Silvers, co-founder of the Center for Biological Diversity. Silvers appealed to Post's outdoorsman side in making the case for Fossil Creek. Over the objections of colleagues, Post approved the dam removal as a goodwill gesture and a concession to Silver's lobbying just before it was up for relicensing by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. The greatest environmental threat at Fossil Creek now comes not from stagnant water or unhealthy biomes but from a crush of human sunseekers and water hounds in the summer who create traffic and litter. Scientists are looking at the long-term implications of shutting down the dam, assessing the movement of the 90-year silt buildup behind the dam walls, and the potential reentry of nonnative fish like bass and sunfish. And Fossil Creek is not the only recent high-profile test case for Western dam removal. A coalition of Native tribes in California convinced Berkshire Hathaway Energy to transfer ownership of four dams on the Klamath River to a nonprofit organization to oversee their dismantling in the name of rehabilitating a salmon fishery. Not that science is a major concern of the federal government right now. Trump administration officials have proposed expanding the capacity of the Shasta Dam to hold back more of the McCloud River in Northern California. However, if DOGE is truly interested in saving money instead of making blind layoffs, it will take a serious look at a dam removal program and sell it to the public as a cost-cutting measure, ironically making the 'drill, baby, drill' Trump administration a champion of riparian health.
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Yahoo
A deal in sight? Colorado River talks are moving again, officials say
BOULDER, CO — Metaphors about divorce and grief defined an emotional presentation about the Colorado River in Boulder, Colorado, on June 6. Those metaphors, however, did not represent strife or disaster in stalled water negotiations, but apparent progress and the willingness to let go of past ideas and move toward compromise. "We've heard about the stages of grief ... about denial and anger and the need to be at bargaining," said Chuck Cullom, executive director of the Upper Colorado River Commission. "Well, I believe the basin states are there." Officials involved in tense negotiations over how to manage shortages on the Colorado River suggested that months of harsh talk and stalemates have ended and negotiators are exploring new options. Federal officials indicated that even parts of the "Law of the River," a 100-year-old legal framework that governs Colorado River allocations, could change as a result of the negotiations. 'We're trying to pivot to something else and be creative, and we have good engagement on that right now," said Colby Pellegrino, deputy general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority. While most of the negotiators from the seven Colorado River basin states did not attend the conference at the University of Colorado in Boulder, the speakers who did attend were cautiously optimistic about their chances at making a deal. The states have been wrangling for two years over how to distribute water cuts as reservoir levels and stream flows have plummeted in the river. Existing operation guidelines for the river expire in 2026, and the federal government will impose its own regime of water cuts unless states can reach a deal. Now, officials are signaling that progress has resumed toward a deal. Alternative urged: How will Arizona deal with Colorado River shortages? Cities need a 'Plan B,' expert says The Colorado River is a critical source of water for Arizona, providing 36% of the state's water, according to the Arizona Department of Water Resources. Populous counties in central and southern Arizona — Maricopa, Pinal and Pima — are the most vulnerable when it comes to water cuts as their water rights have lower priority. Negotiators from the upper and lower basins of the Colorado River have blown through several informal deadlines to reach a deal, sniping at one another in public remarks and propping up their own proposals for shortage management. The debate often centered on whether upper basin states (Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming) should take any administered water cuts, as lower basin states like Arizona have already taken cuts. Now, the basin states have begun the process of 'letting go,' Pellegrino said, backing away from some of the ideas they clung to at the beginning of the process and imagining new compromises. The states, along with federal officials, have met every other week since the end of March, according to Scott Cameron, acting assistant secretary for water and science at the Department of the Interior. Cameron said the Trump administration is looking to rework and expand the alternatives for river management that the Biden administration put forward in January. Cameron said Trump officials like Interior Secretary Doug Burgum are seeking to engage intensely and support Colorado River basin states in reaching a deal. Although the administration has fired large numbers of federal employees working in water modeling, Cameron said he was working to shield this process from those cuts, and state representatives have said they are receiving strong services from federal agencies. California's representative on the river, J.B. Hamby, said in an interview on June 5 that renewed support from federal officials has helped jump-start negotiations. 'For the longest time, states weren't meeting all that often, or were certainly not inviting the feds into the room," Hamby said. "Now that the Trump administration officials are actively engaged in our discussions, I think everyone who supports the basin-state process has seen that as a material benefit.' Cameron said he has also met with several of the 30 tribes in the Colorado River basin to learn about their unique and differing positions and incorporate their views into official negotiations. Less water: Worsening climate outlooks raise the stakes for an agreement on the Colorado River The Colorado River is expected to carry about half of the water it should, according to the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center, pushing states dangerously close to trip wires for legal action under contracts that govern the river. Scientists expect climate change to bring more erratic flows to the river in the long term, with an overall decline in water levels. Brian Richter, scientist and president of the nonprofit Sustainable Waters, presented preliminary estimates on June 5 that potentially a quarter of human water use in the Colorado River basin over the last decade has been unsustainable, meaning it is drawing on limited water reserves that natural water cycles have not replenished. 'There is a massive cultural change that has to happen in this space, and about how we use water, and that is going to affect the culture of every single water user,' Pellegrino said. "And we need to be doing that cultural change very rapidly." Cameron indicated that the negotiations could mean big changes in the bedrock laws that govern the river, saying some of the legal framework defining river management can be changed by Congress or state legislatures. The Colorado River is governed by a long list of compacts, court decrees, and international agreements with Mexico. "We don't take all aspects of what people lump together as the 'Law of the River' right now to be fixed," Cameron said. "If the needs of society change, we ought to be open to having a conversation about changing existing law." Cameron said his team has notified federal lawmakers that they might seek congressional action in the spring of 2026. The federal team aims to have a final decision in place by the summer of that year. Interested in stories about water? Sign up for AZ Climate, The Republic's free weekly environment newsletter. But to even reach a state-approved deal, Pellegrino said, state negotiators need to be better shielded from stakeholders and interest groups in their states that keep squashing ideas for deals before they can be fleshed out. 'If every whisper of what we are working on results in every person who's worried about how it might affect them running and saying, 'This isn't the deal for us,' we're never going to get there,' Pellegrino said. Cullom and Pellegrino said the basin is dealing with a hydrological reality in the river that no one can change. 'People are trying to turn this thing upside down and sideways, trying to find a unicorn," Cullom said. "But there is probably not an operational scheme that prevents us from the challenges that this drier future brings.' Austin Corona covers environmental issues for The Arizona Republic and azcentral. Send tips or questions to Environmental coverage on and in The Arizona Republic is supported by a grant from the Nina Mason Pulliam Charitable Trust. Follow The Republic environmental reporting team at and @azcenvironment on Facebook and Instagram. This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Colorado River negotiations are getting unstuck, officials say
Yahoo
04-06-2025
- Yahoo
Shared risk at the heart of dispute over Colorado River
Railroad tracks run along the Colorado River as it flows along Interstate 70 through Glenwood Canyon near Glenwood Springs. (William Woody for Colorado Newsline) A version of this story originally appeared in Big Pivots. Even-steven. That was the intent of delegates from the seven basin states in 1922 when they met near Santa Fe to forge a compact governing the Colorado River. But what exactly did they agree upon? That has become a sticking point in 2025 as states have squared off about rules governing the river in the drought-afflicted and climate-changed 21st century. The negotiations between the states, according to many accounts, have been fraught with tensions. Becky Mitchell, Colorado's lead negotiator, delivered a peek into that dispute at a forum on May 22 in Silverthorne along the headwaters of the river. The Colorado River Compact was a quid pro quo. California, in particular, but also Arizona, was ready to see the highs and lows of the rivers smoothed out. They, as well as Nevada, wanted a giant reservoir in Boulder Canyon in Nevada near the small town of Las Vegas, which then had a population of 2,300. Those Southwestern states couldn't do it alone, though. They needed the federal government to build the dam later called Hoover. For that, they needed the support of Colorado and the three other upper-basin states. SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX Colorado, represented by Delph Carpenter, and the three other headwaters states realized that they had best reach a compromise, as they would more slowly develop the rivers. If the doctrine of prior appropriation that they had all adopted within their own states prevailed on the Colorado River, the water would be gone by the time they found need for it. This was the foundation for Article III of the Colorado River Compact. It apportions 7.5 million acre-feet in perpetuity for the exclusive beneficial consumption by each of the two basins. On top of this 15 million acre-feet, they knew there would be water lost to evaporation, now calculated at 1.5 million acre-feet annually, plus some sort of delivery obligation to Mexico, which later turned out to be 1.5 million acre-feet. In Santa Fe, delegates had assumed bounteous flows in the river, as had occurred in the years prior to their meeting. And so, embracing that short-term view of history, they believed the river would deliver 20 million acre-feet. It has not done so routinely. Even when there was lots of water, during the 1990s and even before, as Eric Kuhn and John Fleck explained in their 2019 book, 'Science be Dammed,' troubles ahead could be discerned. And by 1993, when the Central Arizona Project began hoisting water to Phoenix and Tucson, the river ceased absolutely to reach the ocean. Then came the 21st century drought. Those framing the compact understood drought as a temporary affliction, not the multi-decade phenomenon now perplexing the states in the Colorado River Basin. Nor did they contemplate a warming, drying climate called aridification. Similar to drought in effects, it is rooted in accumulating atmospheric gases. Unlike drought, it has little to no chance of breaking. Now, faced with creating new rules governing the sharing of this river, delegates from the seven states are at odds in various ways, but perhaps none so much as in their interpretation of compact's Article D. It says that the upper-division states 'will not cause the flow of the river at Lee Ferry to be depleted below an aggregate of 75,000,000 acre-feet for any period of ten consecutive years.' The lower division states have so far received 75 million acre-feet over every revolving 10-year period. The upper-basin states have not fully developed their apportionment, although Colorado has come close. In the last 25 years, the upper-basin states have been using 3.5 million to 4.5 million acre-feet. The lower-basin states that a decade ago were still using 10 million acre-feet have cut back their use to 7.5 million acre-feet. Lake Powell serves as a water bank for the upper basin states. The storage in 2022 had declined to 22%, although a good snow winter in 2022-23 restored levels somewhat. Today, the two reservoirs are at a combined 34% of full. 'That means 66% empty,' said Mitchell at the forum along the Blue River in Silverthorne at a 'state of the river' forum organized by the Colorado River Water Conservation District. Mitchell, an engineer by training, has a large on-stage presence. She's not one to mince words, sometimes straying into the colloquial. This outspokenness is more evident when she speaks exclusively to a home-town crowd. Silverthorne certainly counted as one. Shared risk is at the heart of the dispute. Colorado and other upper-basin states want the lower-basin states to accept that the river will not always satisfy all needs. 'How do we handle drought? We know how to do that in the upper basin, and most of the people in this room know that you get less,' said Mitchell, Colorado's representative on the Upper Colorado River Commission. 'That hasn't been the case in the lower basin.' The two basins differ in three fundamental ways. One is the pace of development. The lower basin developed quickly. The upper basin still has not used its full allocation. From the upper-basin perspective, that does not mean that the lower-basins states should expect something beyond a 50-50 split. 'The main thing that we got from the compact was the principle of equity and the ability to develop at our own pace,' said Mitchell. 'We shouldn't be punished because we didn't develop to a certain number. The conversation now, she added, is 'what does equity look like right now?' Another difference is that the upper basin has thousands of individual users. Sure, there are a few big ones, like Denver Water and the other Front Range transmountain water diverters who collectively draw 400,000 to 450,000 acre-feet annually across the Continental Divide. The lower basin has just a handful of diverters, and the diversions are massive. Also different — as alluded to by Mitchell — is that the lower basin has the big reservoirs lying upstream. The largest is Mead, with a capacity of almost 29 million acre-feet, followed closely by Powell at a little more than 25 million acre-feet. Mead was created expressly to meet needs of irrigators and cities in the desert southwest. Powell was created essentially to ensure that the upper-basin states could meet their delivery obligations. Mitchell shared a telling statistic: More water has been released from Powell in 8 of the last 10 years than has arrived into it. Upper-basin states must live within that hydrologic reality, said Mitchell. If it's a particularly bad snow year in the upper basin, the farms and ranches with junior water rights and even the cities can get shorted. The lower basin states? Not a problem. They always get their water — at least so far. But the two big reservoirs have together lost 50 million acre-feet of stored water. 'We're negotiating how to move forward in a way different place than we were negotiating 20 years ago,' said Mitchell. Upper-basin states have managed to deliver the 75 million acre-feet across 10 years that the compact specifies, but what exactly is the obligation? That has long been a gray area. At a forum two days before Mitchell spoke in Colorado, her counterpart in Arizona, Tom Buschatzke, reiterated at a conference in Tucson that they see the compact spelling out a clear obligation of upper-basin states to deliver 75 million acre-feet plus one-half of the water obligated to Mexico. What if the water isn't there? That's the crux of this dispute as the upper and lower basin states negotiate in advance of a September deadline set by the Bureau of Reclamation. In theory, if the situation were dire enough, Colorado could stop all its post-1922 diversions to allow the water to flow downstream. But is that what those gathered in Santa Fe in the shortening days of November 1922 had in mind? Will lawsuits toss this into the court system for resolution? That process might take decades and, if it ended up at the Supreme Court, it might not yield a nuanced outcome. Mitchell didn't address that directly, although she did say everybody on the river wants to avoid litigation. The situation described by Mitchell and other upper-basin proponents is perhaps analogous to a divorce settlement. The settlement may call for a 50-50 split of all earnings between the partners, but what if one becomes destitute and has no money to pool? Upper-basin states do have reservoirs to help buffer them from short-term droughts. Altogether, however, they don't come close to matching the capacity of Powell. Again, from the perspective of upper-basin states, California and Nevada have a sense of entitlement. Not that the upper basin states are angelic, said Mitchell. It's because they have no choice. 'I say we use three to four million acre-feet less than our apportionment. It varies. You know why? Because hydrology varies. And so we respond to hydrology. It's all based on snowpack and it's all gravity. Most of it is gravity dependent. We don't have those two big reservoirs above us like the lower basin does. We don't have those reservoirs to equal out the flows or allow us to overuse. We have to live with variable hydrology, and we take cuts every single year.' Upper-basin states want a willingness in this settlement for agreement that focuses on the water supply, not the demand. 'Common sense would tell you, maybe Mother Nature should drive how we operate the system.' That, she said, is the bedrock principle of the proposal from the upper division. With plentiful snowfall, greater releases from Powell might be possible, said Mitchell, and in times of extreme duress, water from Flaming Gore and perhaps the Blue Mesa and Navajo too. She said there might be room for greater conservation measures in the upper basin states. But there must be 'real work happening down in the lower basin,' she said. SUPPORT: YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE
