Click the link to read the article on the Colorado Politics website (Marianne Goodland). Here’s an excerpt:
September 11, 2025
With a critical Nov. 11 deadline fast approaching, negotiators from the seven Colorado River basin states remain at odds over how to manage a river that serves 40 million people — and which, experts long agree, is overallocated. Negotiations are moving so slowly that some basin leaders are questioning whether that agreement will happen before the deadline or whether the Bureau of Reclamation, which still doesn’t have a permanent commissioner, will have to step in. Negotiations over the “divorce,” as some are calling it, or a “conscious uncoupling,” which is how Colorado negotiator Becky Mitchell describes it, began over the year-long stalemate between the upper and lower basin states. And then came the bureau’s 24-month study of hydrology, adding a wrinkle that nobody wanted.
The deadline for implementing the post-2026 operating guidelines agreement is Oct. 1, 2026, although the bureau wants everything ready to go by June 2026. The hydrology report pointed out a near-crisis level at Lake Powell by next year, just as negotiators are trying to come up with a long-term deal that will guide the river’s operations into the future…Current operating guidelines that were put into place in 2007 will expire next year. However, it has become a much more challenging job to manage the river over the past two decades. This river supplies water for agriculture and supports 40 million people across seven states. Experts said that’s due to a 25-year drought that has reduced the river’s historic flow by millions of acre-feet of water per year.
