Seven state representatives ‘spinning their wheels’ for two years
By Heather Sackett, Aspen Journalism
Water managers from each of the seven states that share the drought-stricken Colorado River repeated familiar, divisive arguments at the Colorado River Water Users Association conference Thursday, but they also said they are still committed to reaching a consensus for future management.
The last session of the conference, featuring perspectives from the states, was a late addition to the agenda and the most highly anticipated session of the largest annual gathering of water managers in the basin. But representatives delivered little new information and reiterated some of the same talking points they have been repeating for two years as they negotiate how to operate reservoirs and share cuts after 2026.
Representatives recapped conservation measures that their states have already taken, stressing how painful, morally right and helpful those have been to keep the Colorado River system from crashing. Some representatives expressed frustration with their counterparts and how little progress has been made toward a new river-management paradigm over the past two years.
“As long as we keep polishing those arguments and repeating them to each other, we are going nowhere,” said Nevada’s representative, John Entsminger.
California’s representative, JB Hamby, said that when the Lower Basin (California, Arizona and Nevada) promised at CRWUA in 2023 to take an initial 1.5 million acre-feet in cuts, that commitment was meant to move forward basinwide progress.
“It’s now 2025 and we’re here in a different hotel a couple years later with the same problems on the table,” Hamby said. “In the last two years, we have been spinning our wheels.”
The Upper Basin (Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming) still cannot find agreement with the Lower Basin about 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. The two sides have been negotiating for two years without consensus and are now up against the clock: The federal government has given the states a Feb. 14 deadline to come up with a detailed plan for future river management. The states blew past an initial Nov. 11 deadline to deliver the broad outline of a plan.
“Time is running short,” Hamby said. “You’ll hear it in lots of newspaper articles and panels here this week, the countdown and how many days to the next deadline. I’m also here to tell you that time has been wasted, and like water, that’s a very precious resource.”
The 2007 guidelines set annual Lake Powell and Lake Mead releases based on reservoir levels and do not go far enough to prevent them from being drawn down during consecutive dry years. In 2022, Lake Powell flirted with falling below a critical elevation to make hydropower, and recent projections from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation show that it could be headed there again in 2026 and 2027.
Same sticking points
A few sticking points have emerged as the cause for the Upper Basin/Lower Basin impasse, and the positions of Colorado, which is the de-facto leader of the Upper Basin, and Arizona, the junior water user on the river, are at the center of it. Arizona’s representative, Tom Buschatzke, repeated these points again Thursday, the biggest being that the Lower Basin wants the Upper Basin to share in mandatory cuts beyond the 1.5 million acre-feet promised by the Lower Basin.
“My cuts under the 1.5 million-acre-foot proposal and anything more that’s going to happen will be mandatory,” Buschatzke said. “My water users will not have any choice, and we need that parity from the Upper Basin.”
The Upper Basin’s position is that their water users already experience forced cuts in dry years because the water simply isn’t there and that any conservation must be voluntary. Under the law of prior appropriation, older water rights get first use of the river and junior water users are often cut off to satisfy those senior rights. This means that some Upper Basin water users don’t have all the water they need in dry years.
“For many water users across the Upper Basin, this has led to a death of 1,000 cuts over the last 20 years,” said Colorado’s representative, Becky Mitchell. “Many water users have had to make heartbreaking decisions. They are on the front lines.”
Upper Basin officials don’t believe they have the legal authority to enforce mandatory cuts on their water users. And Colorado officials have said they would need legislators to pass a law letting them move conserved water to the state line.
“I think the only way we get there is we can do it voluntarily within our states,” said New Mexico’s representative, Estevan Lopez. “We don’t even have the statutory framework to make it mandatory at this point.”
A second area of disagreement surrounds releases from Upper Basin reservoirs Flaming Gorge, Navajo and Blue Mesa. These reservoirs are operated by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and are part of the Colorado River Storage Project (CRSP), known as the Upper Initial Units. In 2021, with reservoir levels falling, the Bureau of Reclamation made emergency releases of 181,000 acre-feet from the three reservoirs to protect critical elevations in Lake Powell.
This unilateral action by the bureau did not sit well with Upper Basin water managers, and the timing of the releases in late summer cut short the recreation season on Blue Mesa.
“Water in the Upper Initial Units is, at best, a one-time mandate, and we need to be very judicious about how that water is used and when it’s used,” said Utah’s representative, Gene Shawcroft.
The crux of the disagreement between the Upper and Lower basins involves an impossible dilemma: Who is more deserving of a dwindling resource — the fast-growing Lower Basin, which is home to some of the biggest cities and industries, and some of the most productive farmland in the country, or the slower-growing Upper Basin, which has never used its entire allocation yet bears the brunt of the impacts of climate change?
Federal involvement?
A question looming over this week’s conference was: Will the federal government step in? There seem to have been no real consequences to the states for missing the feds’ Nov. 11 deadline. Bureau of Reclamation officials said Wednesday they have been meeting regularly with state representatives and have said in the past that if there is no deal from the states, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum would exercise his responsibility as water master.
Interior’s new assistant secretary for water and science, Andrea Travnicek, gave the keynote address to conference attendees Wednesday. She said everyone needs to know sooner than later whether the seven states will meet a Feb. 14 deadline and that the time for grandstanding and rhetoric has passed.
“So what I’m asking again today is to give your commissioners room to negotiate and room to compromise, and if you can’t do that, send us representatives that have the authority to best serve your interests but are willing to break through the barriers to get to a consensus deal,” Travnicek said.
Bureau of Reclamation officials said they are moving forward with a draft environmental impact statement for future reservoir operations, which they plan to release around the end of the year. It will be broad enough to plug in a seven-state agreement — if there is one.
Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs has urged federal intervention to get a deal, and Buschatzke on Thursday revealed that Burgum had summoned all seven state representatives and their governors to Washington, D.C., for a meeting Dec. 8.
“I think that was true leadership to try to help move things forward,” Buschatzke said.
But the meeting did not happen because some governors could not make that date. Buschatzke said they might try to meet in January. In a Q&A session with media after the panel, Upper Basin officials said they were open to a meeting, but they had questions.
“I think moving forward, we need to know the purpose and what are the ultimate goals (of a meeting),” Mitchell said. “Like we said up there, all of us are committed to a solution.”
Nevada’s Entsminger had the last word at this year’s conference. He said that when he went into the post-2026 negotiating process, he advocated for a robust, durable, multi-decade deal to give certainty to the basin. He said he no longer believes that is possible with the time left and the dismal hydrology that the basin is facing.
“I think the best possible outcome at this juncture is probably a five-year operating plan to keep us out of court,” Entsminger said.
He said a short-term deal needs to address five things: a Powell-to-Mead release plan; an understanding of how the CRSP reservoirs will be operated; Upper Basin actions; Lower Basin actions; and the rules for storing water in conservation pools in both reservoirs.
“Which one of those five elements are you willing to die on the hill for? Because none of them are worth it,” he said. “None of them are worth driving the car into the ditch. We’re all in the same rowboat. The first one to fire a shot puts a hole in the boat and sinks it.”
