Recommendations call for no new dams or diversions
By Heather Sackett, Aspen Journalism
In a new report, a group of nonprofit environmental organizations are calling for a change in mindset for Colorado River managers.
The Great Basin Water Network, Sierra Club, Living Rivers, Utah Rivers Council, Save the Colorado and the Glen Canyon Institute released a report this week with what they say are nine common-sense recommendations to avoid conflict and prepare for a drier future. In it, they implore representatives from the seven states that use water from the drought-plagued Colorado River to consider these approaches for stabilizing the system as they negotiate how shortages should be shared in the future.
“I think moving forward, what I would want is the public at large asking better questions of state officials and federal officials, and talking about how we are going to manage the supply and demand imbalance,” said Kyle Roerink, executive director of the Great Basin Water Network.
Released on the first day of the new water year, Oct. 1, There’s No Water Available calls for no more new dams or diversions; curtailment plans for all states; better data; altering Glen Canyon Dam; prioritizing tribes; tackling municipal waste and reuse; protecting endangered species; making farms resilient and stabilizing groundwater declines.
The first two recommendations apply especially to the state of Colorado, where despite declining streamflows, entities have plans to store more than 2.6 million additional acre-feet in not-yet-built reservoirs on the Western Slope and officials have been slow to outline a plan for how mandatory cutbacks might work.
“One of the easiest ways to ensure a stabilized system is by prohibiting new infrastructure that impounds and diverts additional water away from the river system,” the report reads.
Roerink said that recommendation two – that all states need curtailment plans – is the most important one of the nine. Mandatory water cuts could become a reality if the Colorado River flows fall below a rolling average equivalent of about 82.5 million acre-feet delivered to the Lower Basin over a decade. The Lower Basin states (California, Arizona and Nevada) could demand the Upper Basin states (Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming) implement cuts to send more water downstream. This hypothetical legal concept is known as a compact call, named after the Colorado River Compact, which split the water evenly between the two basins.
Despite requests from water users, Colorado officials have been reluctant to provide clarity about how cuts could be implemented within the state, saying the Upper Basin states have always been in compliance with the compact. But officials recently took a small step in the direction of curtailment rules. In August, head engineer with the Colorado Division of Water Resources Jason Ullman told state lawmakers that his office was planning to reach out to key water user groups to have small listening sessions about the need for compact administration regulations, which would then be expanded to broader public meetings.
“We need standards, triggers and thresholds and once we have that, then we’ll have more certainty,” Roerink said, referencing projections that available water will continue to decline across the river system. “But right now, the rhetoric of the Upper Basin officials has been completely undercut by science.”
NEPA process
The report comes at a pivotal time for Colorado River management. Representatives from each of the seven basin states are hashing out how the nation’s two largest reservoirs, Lake Powell and Lake Mead, will be operated and how cuts will be shared after the current guidelines expire at the end of 2026. After an early summer announcement that the Upper and Lower basin states were in agreement that new guidelines should be based on annual streamflows (supply) instead of demand, talks once again seem to have ground to a halt.
“Right now, I don’t think the public has a lot of reasons to be inspired by the back room negotiations that are going on amongst the seven state negotiators where we have very little insight into what is being devised,” Roerink said.
The Lower Basin states think Upper Basin states should share in cuts, while the Upper Basin states blame plummeting reservoirs on Lower Basin overuse and want those states to take deeper cuts first.
The new guidelines must go through the National Environmental Policy Act review, which includes an Environmental Impact Statement. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation is leading that process and federal officials have released a list of five alternatives they are evaluating.
Reclamation officials say that the NEPA process remains on schedule and that they expect to have a draft Environmental Impact Statement by the end of the year.
“The alternatives being analyzed in the draft EIS will provide a broad range of Colorado River operations that capture an appropriate range of potential environmental impacts from implementing new operational guidelines post-2026,” officials said in a prepared statement.
But water managers across the basin are still hoping that the seven basin states can come up with their own guidelines, which most water managers agree would be better than unilateral federal action. A consensus proposal could then be plugged into the NEPA analysis.
John Berggren, a Colorado River policy expert with Western Resource Advocates, said that while an agreement earlier this year would have been better, “any alternatives would be expansive enough that any seven-states agreement would be within the realm of what is being analyzed. If the seven states come in November with an agreement, Reclamation doesn’t have to restart the NEPA process or restart the analysis.”
This process would be somewhat expedited, unique and, for some, it raises concerns about transparency and whether the public comment periods that are typically a part of an EIS process will be shortened. The NEPA process can vary depending on the project’s complexity, but a typical draft EIS usually takes between one and two years, followed by a comment period; then the final EIS takes between six months and a year, followed by a 30-day waiting period before the Record of Decision, which marks the end of the NEPA process.
At a June conference on the Colorado River at the Getches-Wilkinson Center for Natural Resources, Energy and the Environment at the University of Colorado Boulder, former Denver Water CEO Jim Lochhead compared the state negotiations to a secretive conclave and said the previous process for developing the 2007 guidelines was much more open with more stakeholder input.
“I think most of us feel like we’re in the dark at this point as to how the process is going to work moving forward for this particular decision on the post-2026 guidelines,” Chris Winters, executive director of the center.
Berggren said there’s an argument that the seven state negotiators need some privacy to discuss and understand ideas before presenting them to the public. On the other hand, water is a public resource, and the Colorado River is crucial to life in the American Southwest.
“In general, it lacks all transparency,” he said. “To have the whole negotiation be something that is kept completely from the public feels like a loss and I wish there was more opportunity for public engagement with that.”
Experts say new guidelines need to be in place by the beginning of the 2027 water year — Oct. 1, 2026 — meaning water managers have less than one year to finalize a plan. Reclamation officials have set Nov. 11 as the deadline by which they need to know the broad outline of an agreement between the states; by Feb. 14 they want details of that plan.
The clock is ticking and Roerink hopes the report will be used as a blueprint for taking action. Lake Mead and Lake Powell are each less than one-third full and a recent report from a panel of Colorado River experts said that if next year is a repeat of this year and water uses remain the same, usage will exceed supply by at least 3.6 million acre-feet.
“We’re hoping to use this report as an opportunity to highlight the grave uncertainties that face us,” Roerink said. “I think we wanted the report to be a springboard to a greater conversation about what we can and cannot expect. But right now, we’re getting nothing.”
