Click the link to read the article on The Denver Post website (Elise Schmelzer). Here’s an excerpt:
December 6, 2024
Policymakers, academics, irrigators and water attorneys gathered in the Nevada desert this week to discuss the future of the highly contentious river that makes modern life possible for so many people across a vast swath of the American Southwest. The current guidelines that dictate how water is shared among the seven Colorado River basin states are set to expire at the end of 2026, and government leaders must create a new plan before then.
To do so, they must decide who will get less water — and when — as climate change shrinks the river’s flows.
“The tensions are extremely high this year,” said Tanya Trujillo, water policy advisor and deputy state engineer for New Mexico. “Of the 20 years I’ve been coming to this conference, this is the one with the least-good relations among the states.”
[…]
The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which operates Lakes Mead and Powell, must create a new operating plan for the reservoirs before current guidelines expire at the end of 2026. The bureau is halfway through the process, said Carly Jerla, senior program manager at the agency. The bureau must complete environmental analyses of potential operating guidelines, take public comment and make a final decision by August 2026, she said.
“We need to be moving, as a basin, a lot faster in this second half than we did in our first half” of the process, Jerla said…
Upper Basin negotiators believe their basin should be exempt from mandatory water-use cuts imposed by the federal government because water use in the basin is already restricted by the amount of precipitation. While the Lower Basin can use water stored in Mead and Powell in dry years, Upper Basin states do not have large upstream reservoirs and must instead rely on snowpack and rainfall. Historically, the Upper Basin has never been able to use its full allocation of water, negotiators from the basin said. Water users in Colorado have their water cut off every year because there is not enough, Mitchell said. The Lower Basin must acknowledge those losses and recognize that the Upper Basin has been living with the impacts of climate change for years, she said.
