The Interior Department must force seven bickering states to agree on drastic water cuts — after the driest winter in decades.
By Jake Bittle & Rebecca Egan McCarthy, Grist
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The Colorado River currently supports 40 million people and $1.4 trillion in annual economic activity in seven U.S. states and Mexico — but it was never intended to be stretched so thin.
A century-old legal framework promises those users more water than there is to go around. The river’s flow has shrunk by about 20 percent over the last century as climate change has made the West more arid. As water has vanished, states have clashed over how to divide up what remains. The core dispute is between the sparsely inhabited mountainous states of the “Upper Basin,” where hay farmers and a few major cities like Denver draw water from the river and its tributaries, and the far more populous “Lower Basin,” which diverts water to support most of the nation’s winter vegetable farmers as well as megacities like Los Angeles and Phoenix.
Now, as the region weathers its driest winter in recent history, a reckoning has arrived. By the end of September, the seven states need to agree on a new set of rules that will determine how to divvy up the river’s flow during dry years.
Since the river’s reservoirs almost collapsed in 2022, however, the state’s lead negotiators have been arguing in boardrooms and on Zoom calls with little to show for it. They missed a negotiation deadline in November and another one in February, with each state publishing catty press releases blaming the other side for a breakdown in talks: Colorado’s representative said that the Upper Basin was “being asked to solve a problem we didn’t create with water we don’t have,” while Arizona’s said that the Lower Basin had “offered numerous, good-faith compromises” and that “virtually all of them have been rejected.”
Meanwhile, a nearly snow-free winter is pushing reservoirs toward record lows. The river could grow so dry this year that its massive Lake Powell reservoir will stop producing hydropower.
Without a deal, the Trump administration will need to get involved. So far, Trump’s Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has shown little willingness to impose the river’s first-ever unilateral water delivery cuts, which could bring the river into balance. But time is running out. The administration has said that, in the absence of a seven-state deal, it will distribute water on a strict “priority” basis, meaning those who have earlier historical claims to the river would be spared cuts. That would mean cutting off almost all water to the junior rightsholders in the Phoenix metro area — with staggering consequences for the region’s massive economy. That said, any federal intervention would almost certainly only be the first salvo in a legal war that would likely reach the Supreme Court.
What happens after that is a mystery to all involved.
The Biden administration confronted an earlier version of this crisis in 2022, when water levels in Lake Powell and Lake Mead, the Lower Basin’s other major reservoir, dropped to historic lows. The feds tried to broker an emergency deal between the Lower Basin states to keep the reservoirs from bottoming out. The combatants were California, the river’s largest user, and Arizona, which had junior rights to the river and stood to bear the brunt of the pain.
Biden’s Interior Department escaped a total collapse of the system in part thanks to a deus ex machina: Snowpack in early 2023 was sufficient to refill Lake Mead and Lake Powell to decent levels, and then-Senator Kyrsten Sinema secured billions of dollars in drought relief money that compensated California farmers for forgoing their water and leaving some fields unplanted.
The terms of debate are very different this time. Now, the seven states need to cut their way through the present drought and agree on rules for sharing the river over the next two decades, when no one knows how much water will be available. Arizona and California are united in arguing that the Upper Basin states of Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, and New Mexico need to commit to permanent reductions in their entitlement. The latter have rejected that argument at every opportunity, leading to a bitter breakdown in the talks.
Brad Udall, a senior water and climate research scientist at Colorado State University’s Colorado Water Center, said the disagreement boils down to what counts as a cut in water delivery.
“The disagreement really centers around whether the Upper Basin is willing to contribute to reductions in use,” he said, “and the Upper Basin says, ‘Hey, we already contribute,’ through what are known as ‘hydrologic shortages.’”
These “hydrologic shortages” have become the third rail of the debate. The argument goes like this: The Upper Basin’s water comes from the natural flow of rain and snowmelt, which travel down the river’s tributaries on the way to Lake Powell. The farmers and cities who use this water siphon it out of the tributaries before it ever makes it to a major reservoir. When less snow arrives, there’s less water in the rivers, so the farmers and cities end up using less by default.
That’s very different from the Lower Basin, where the three states and Mexico take water from the central “bank” in Lake Mead. These states reduce their withdrawals during dry years according to a strict schedule of cuts — which they’re able to do because they can easily measure their exact usage. The negotiators for these states have strenuously argued that a long-term solution to the river’s problems must involve the Upper Basin agreeing to mandatory usage reductions during dry years, rather than operating on the long-held assumption that they’re already automatically taking cuts just because less snowmelt happens to come their way.
“We have offered to do more,” said Tom Buschatzke, Arizona’s top water official, in a statement following the collapse of the seven-state talks. “But we simply cannot take on the task of saving this precious river system on our own.”
The Upper Basin states insist that they already contribute by taking involuntary cuts during dry years. They want the Lower Basin to increase its projected cuts in order to resolve the river’s perennial deficit. Most experts believe this argument is disingenuous, or, as Udall says, “a little deceitful.” Studies show that the Upper Basin is using around 4.5 million acre-feet of water annually, a number that doesn’t change all that much from year to year even during dry spells. (An acre-foot of water is around 326,000 gallons, or enough to supply about three households for a year.)
But Upper Basin representatives don’t see it that way. Steve Pope, the manager of the irrigation district that serves the Uncompahgre Valley in Colorado, says farmers in the valley have already struggled with water scarcity over the past few decades. He says growers take a huge financial hit when they get less water than they expect.
“We don’t know what we’re going to get,” said Pope. “These [farmers], it’s tough for them. They’ve got a lot of money invested in certain types of crops, so they just have to fallow ground.” Given that uncertainty, Pope says the idea of the district taking mandatory cuts is “ridiculous.”
Trump’s Interior Department suggested in January that it can only regulate the operations of the two main reservoirs, and that it has no authority to order Upper Basin farmers like Pope not to farm.
“[The federal government] is very timid about going out on a limb at all for things that might set a precedent,” said Ted Cooke, the former manager of the Central Arizona Project, the canal that brings Colorado River water to the state’s population centers. “This timidity really limits their effectiveness.” (Cooke was nominated by President Donald Trump to lead the Bureau of Reclamation last year, but his nomination was withdrawn over what he believes were politically-motivated concerns that he might be biased against the Upper Basin in adjudicating the river.)
If Secretary Burgum sticks to his position that he can’t resolve the debate between the Upper Basin and the Lower Basin, his only option for avoiding a collapse at Lake Powell will be to roll out unilateral cuts on the Lower Basin. This would likely trigger litigation between Arizona and the federal government. But if Burgum changed course and imposed unilateral cuts on the Upper Basin, a state such as Colorado would likely sue the feds instead. And even if Burgum did nothing at all, it’s likely that the Lower Basin would sue the Upper Basin. Inflows to Lake Powell may fall so low by the end of the year that the Upper Basin will be in default of its obligations under the 1922 river compact, which requires that the river’s flow be split half and half between the basins. This would allow Arizona to demand makeup water from its northern neighbors.
Though litigation seems inevitable without a seven-state deal, no water user actually wants to go to court. Once water divisions are in the hands of a judge, no state can be sure that its interests will be protected.
“The idea that your state is going to come out a winner — and you’re confident of that — makes no sense,” said John Berggren, regional policy manager at the nonprofit Western Resource Advocates.
“What it does is it puts your water users at extreme risk.”
Even if Burgum plays it safe and only imposes cuts on the Lower Basin, these cuts will force him to choose between California’s priority rights and Arizona’s arguably greater need. The Interior Department has already suggested it would feel bound to direct most of the pain to Arizona. The department said in January that “absent new agreements” it would distribute cuts according to legal priority, which would take away more than 1 million acre-feet of water from Phoenix and its suburbs. That would likely lead developers to abandon potential subdivisions, force farmers to rip up their fields, and could cause a resumption in the depletion of Phoenix’s fragile groundwater aquifer.
Arizona state leaders have already threatened litigation over this possibility, and a political advocacy group has begun airing local television ads that criticize the Interior Department’s priority plan. Plus, even this draconian cut wouldn’t necessarily prevent a collapse of the river, because it would cap the total amount of cuts at around 1.5 million acre-feet spread across Arizona, California, and Nevada. The federal government’s own modeling found that this plan would only have a 25 percent chance of avoiding a hydropower shutdown at Lake Powell, and around a 58 percent chance of avoiding a similar “minimum power pool” at Lake Mead.
Not everyone thinks the seven-state deal is a dead letter. John Entsminger, the lead negotiator for Nevada, expressed optimism about at least a short-term deal as recently as the end of January. Last summer, the states rallied around the idea of measuring the river based on its “natural flow,” dividing up the three-year average of the river’s recent water volume as opposed to a static estimate of its theoretical contents. This plan has the benefit of being responsive to climate change, which has already contributed to a 20 percent decline in the Colorado River’s annual flow over the past century.
“We would not be over-promising water, which has led us in past years to draw down our reservoir storage,” explained Elizabeth Koebele, a professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, who studies the river. “People get promises and they hold on to them very strongly, even if the water is not there.”
Despite Trump’s declarations that climate change is a “hoax,” his Interior Department has given strong consideration to this climate-informed “maximum operational flexibility” plan. It modeled a version of the plan in January, but said it didn’t have the authority to implement it without agreement from all seven states. The plan would see all states reduce water usage even during average years, as opposed to only in dry years under the current system. It would parcel out cuts more evenly between Arizona and California. It would also include some contributions from the Upper Basin — in one potential breakdown, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming would reduce their usage by around 250,000 acre-feet when the Lower Basin had cut usage by more than 2 million.
Although the coming year is likely to be chaotic, many of the basin’s biggest water users have been preparing for this era of permanent cuts for some time. Arizona has already announced its intention to start investing in coastal desalination plants in coordination with California and Mexico, which would free up more river water. The state has also stepped up its spending on water reuse projects. Las Vegas has paid residents to rip out their grass lawns. Utah has established a voluntary conservation program that pays farmers not to farm.
But the long-term solution will likely involve a bigger reshuffling of water in order to forestall an economic crisis in the Phoenix metroplex. Arizona may look to California for salvation: The large urban water district that serves Los Angeles, the farming district in the Imperial Valley, and the winter vegetable farming district around Yuma all hold rights to more water than they need, and they might be willing to deal some of their water to central Arizona, albeit at a high price. There are also two tribes in Arizona, the Colorado River Indian Tribes and the Gila River Indian Community, who each hold about half a million acre-feet of water.
Even with all this rejiggering, cities like Phoenix will end up having to pay much more for water, said Cooke. The rush on water supplies will force difficult cuts in water usage for farms, lawns, swimming pools, and unbuilt homes.
“We’re going to have less water and what we do have is going to be a lot more expensive, and that happens right now, in the next twelve months,” he said. “Even with all of these political and contractual disagreements, the surface water is just not there anymore.”
This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/politics/colorado-river-deal-trump-burgum/.
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