The federal government often makes deadlines on the Colorado River, but — in recent years — rarely has enforced them. Negotiations among California and the six other basin states now will continue into next year, as Arizona ramps up the rhetoric, demanding a firmer federal hand in the talks.
By Rachel Becker, Cal Matters
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After two fraught years of negotiations amid dire projections for the Colorado River’s reservoirs, California and six other states that rely on the river’s water have yet again failed to reach a deal — despite a federal deadline.
“While more work needs to be done, collective progress has been made that warrants continued efforts to define and approve details for a finalized agreement,” the states said. The written statement released Tuesday included no details about how they plan to manage the river after the current rulebook expires at the end of next year.
Officials at the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, the federal stewards for the river under the Department of the Interior, have threatened to impose their own plan in the absence of a deal.
“Two years. And the lack of progress, in light of how perilous the conditions are on the Colorado — it’s unacceptable,” said Mark Gold, former director of Water Scarcity Solutions at the Natural Resources Defense Council and a board member of the Southern California water import giant, the Metropolitan Water District.
The federal government frequently sets deadlines on the Colorado River, but it almost never enforces them.
Negotiations now continue in advance of another, February deadline for a seven-state deal. Scott Cameron, acting head of the Bureau of Reclamation, said in June that the goal is to “parachute” the states’ agreement into the ongoing federal planning process, in time to finalize a plan by May or June next year.
Yet the states remain deadlocked even as the agreements that currently govern the river near expiration.
Elizabeth Koebele, a political science professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, suspects that relationships between the states have become too fractured, and water too scarce, for deadlines to effectively motivate the warring states.
“We have less water, and it’s caused more rippling problems,” Koebele told CalMatters. “You’re cutting a smaller pie, for more people.”
Federal pressure or state collaboration?
A major conflict has been over how much each basin must cut back their use of the overtapped river, to close the ever-growing gap between dwindling supply and ravenous demand.
California, Arizona, and Nevada in the lower basin offered in March 2024 to cut their use by up to 1.5 million acre-feet of water per year, depending on reservoir conditions. They urged Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico upstream to share any belt-tightening beyond that, but the upstream states balked — saying that their water users must already conserve water when dry conditions shrink the river’s flows.
Becky Mitchell, Colorado’s Upper Colorado River Commissioner, said that the states “remain committed to collaboration grounded in the best available science and respect for all Colorado River water users. We are taking a meaningful step toward long-term sustainability and demonstrating a shared determination to find supply-driven solutions.”
But Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs has pressed the Trump administration to be more forceful in state negotiations. In a letter Tuesday to Trump’s Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, Hobbs and Arizona legislative leaders called the upstream states’ negotiating position “extreme.”
“We find it alarming that the Upper Basin States have repeatedly refused to implement any volume of binding, verifiable water supply reductions,” the letter said.
Experts say there’s no time to waste; even the time it takes to develop a new plan for the river may be too long for its dwindling reservoirs. The Colorado River basin is suffering a climate change-fueled megadrought, and the basin’s major reservoirs, Lake Powell and Lake Mead, are each less than one-third full.
California’s Colorado River use is on track this year to hit its lowest since 1949. Still, projections show another dry winter may yet send Lake Powell plunging below the levels needed to generate power by December 2026.
The problem is that even when it rains or snows, runoff is disappearing into thirsty soils before it reaches the river. The paltry runoff keeps driving up estimates of the conservation required to stabilize the basin and its reservoirs.
Jack Schmidt, director of the Center for Colorado River Studies at Utah State University, and others have urged more urgent conservation in order to protect operations at the dams and ensure that water can be released from Lake Mead and Lake Powell.
“We continue to drag our heels on not implementing additional cuts right now. That’s our fear: if it doesn’t snow this winter, we’ll really compromise the system,” Schmidt said. “We might get bailed out by a more decent winter, but that’s betting on a whole lot of hope.”
This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.
