BOULDER, Colo.—The federal government will impose a 10-year operating framework for managing water use in the Colorado River Basin by the end of this summer if the seven states that rely on the river cannot come to an agreement before then, said Scott Cameron, acting commissioner for the Bureau of Reclamation, at a water conference Thursday.
The announcement comes in the midst of the worst water year ever recorded on the Colorado River and after
years of tense and largely fruitless negotiations between water managers in the states that rely on the declining waterway. The states have missed November and February deadlines to reach an agreement, and the current guidelines outlining drought mitigation efforts for the Colorado River Basin expire at the end of September, so new guidelines must be in place by Oct. 1.
State and tribal leaders, however, said the federal government’s proposal, which would be reevaluated every two years, will only lead to more uncertainty as it will require constant negotiations between the states over how to share the river, and could go against what some see as the guiding laws regulating the river.
In mid-summer, Cameron said, the Bureau of Reclamation will release the final Environmental Impact Statement, which will detail the federal government’s preferred plan for managing the river after 2026. The bureau will issue a final decision on the framework a short time later.
“The preferred alternative provides a 10-year framework,” he said. That option first surfaced publicly during a
Colorado River meeting in Arizona last month. “We would love to have a 20-year deal or a 30-year deal, but frankly, we haven’t even been able to get seven states to agree on what a two-year deal would look like, so we’re using a 10-year framework that the department would use to issue operational guidelines at two-year intervals, given the highly unusual hydrological situation in the basin.”
Negotiations are deadlocked between the states in the two halves of the Colorado River Basin—the upper basin consisting of Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico, and the lower basin of Arizona, California and Nevada. Consultation with the 30 tribes in the basin, and with Mexico, where the river ends, are also ongoing. Meanwhile, flows on the Colorado River, which supplies water to 40 million people across the states and Mexico, and irrigation for over 5 million acres of cropland, have declined by about a third over the past century, with demand outpacing supply, leading the region’s reservoirs to drop to historic lows.
Recent studies have found
another dry winter could leave lakes Mead and Powell, the two largest reservoirs on the river and in the nation, nearly dry. This fall, for example, water levels could fall so low at Lake Powell that Glen Canyon Dam can no longer generate hydropower.
At those levels, water can only bypass the dam via four lower outlets. But studies from the Bureau of Reclamation have shown that sustained use of those pipes can damage the dam. And if water levels drop much lower than those four final outlets, the lake could reach “dead pool,” with the dam unable to release water downstream.
The federal government’s framework will be reevaluated every two years, Cameron said, to ensure the region can respond to the hydrology.
“Oh, by the way, if peace breaks out and we have a seven-state agreement on something a year and a half from now, or four and a half years from now, we’re happy to take that agreement and have it supplant this 10-year framework,” he said.
Becky Mitchell, Colorado’s negotiator, said negotiating every two years under the federal government’s framework will be incredibly challenging.
All she could think about when hearing the plan, Michell said, is how communities will be able to fund and plan projects if there is constant negotiation and no certainty on the river’s future. She worries, too, that with every year negotiations continue, the upper and lower basins will become more entrenched in their competing legal theories, which will likely lead to lengthy litigation between the states, federal government and water users. Litigation, she said, does not provide water or certainty.
“The lawyers will get rich,” Mitchell said, but “we still have to figure out how to work with a river that is producing less than we planned.”
John Entsminger, Southern Nevada Water Authority’s general manager and that state’s lead negotiator, said he agreed with Mitchell: a new plan every two years “is not a good plan.”
With negotiations deadlocked, he was less opposed to litigation, but recognized the lawsuits would be lengthy and, if they happen, the river will need management guidelines while they are ongoing.
The basin is managed by “the Law of the River,” consisting of a century of complicated compacts and legal agreements.
“If the seven states can’t agree on what the Law of the River is, then I don’t know if it’s the federal courts, I don’t know if its Congress, I don’t know who it is, but a different set of humans is going to make decisions than the seven governor representatives,” he said.
Carlos de la Parra, who served as an advisor during previous water talks between the U.S. and Mexico, said the current situation for Mexico is akin to being invited to someone’s house for a meal but dinner isn’t ready because the family who invited you is too busy fighting. U.S. tribes that depend on the Colorado River are also sovereign nations, but so far have been allowed limited engagement in the current negotiations.
“There can be no real or durable solution without the full and active engagement of tribal nations who account for over 25 percent of the adjudicated water in this basin,” said Amelia Flores, chairwoman of the Colorado River Indian Tribes, who have one of the most senior water rights on the river.
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Tribal nations continue to be marginalized and left out of negotiations over the river’s future, she said, and not consulting them is a threat to their sovereignty and very existence.
“A living Colorado River with a functioning ecosystem is as important as the air we breathe,” Flores said.
Gila River Indian Community Gov. Stephen Roe Lewis said his tribe is very concerned with the proposed framework, and that it will fight in the courts to protect its water rights and the lower basin if needed.
This year is on track to be the worst water year on record for the Colorado River, but the basin has long been in decline. At Lees Ferry, the Northern Arizona dividing line between the upper and lower basins, where water deliveries to the three downstream states are measured, 20th century flows averaged just over 15 million acre feet a year. (One acre foot is enough water for two to three homes, or around 326,000 gallons). The 21st century has seen flows of around 12 million acre feet and the last seven years have seen an average of 10.2 million acre feet.
On the ground, the effects are real. With tears in his eyes, Donald Whyte, a member of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, stood up at the conference Friday after Mitchell mentioned his tribe was receiving just 8 percent of its water allocation this year. Two hundred years ago, his people lived at the headwaters of the tributaries to the Colorado River in the southern Rocky Mountains, where much of the basin’s water originates. Now, the reservation sits in the arid Four Corners region.
“I wonder, how did we go from the headwaters of all these streams to where on my reservation I have no continuous water source traveling across my land?” he asked.
The cause of declining water flows is the emission of greenhouse gases, said Brad Udall, a senior water and climate researcher at Colorado State University’s Colorado Water Center.
“Climate change has had really big impacts around the planet, but oftentimes these are one-offs,” Udall told the crowd of water lawyers, academics and tribal and state leaders at the conference Thursday. “These are big floods. They’re big hurricanes, and people rebuild, maybe change building codes.
“This is a completely different situation, and I think it’s unique around the planet, in that we are going to get to redo, like it or not, 100 years of law and policy around how we manage a critical resource.”
As long as greenhouse gases are emitted, he said, humanity will continue to make the problem on the Colorado River worse, with
studies showing the direct correlation between emissions, ocean weather patterns and snowfall in the basin. In the meantime, Udall likens the river to a beverage with too many drinkers, and the only solution he sees is removing some of the big straws sucking up its water.
The federal government’s solution to that, Cameron said, is “bribery.” Reclamation has put $100 million on the table for the Upper Basin to conserve water, and another $354 million for the Lower Basin.
And to raise the level at Lake Powell this year, the federal government is releasing somewhere between 600,000 and 1 million acre feet of water from Flaming Gorge Reservoir, upstream in Wyoming, and limiting the releases from Lake Powell to Lake Mead.
“I think we have succeeded in making everyone unhappy and everyone mad, which maybe means we’re doing the right thing,” Cameron said.
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