Click the link to read the article on the Aspen Public Radio website (Caroline Llanes). Here’s an excerpt:
November 12, 2025
There’s still no plan for how the seven states that use water from the Colorado River will allocate the scarce resource after 2026. Tuesday, November 11, marked a deadline set by the federal government for the states to share a framework for new operating guidelines—another deadline that’s come and gone with no agreement. The river’s supply has drastically decreased since the original Colorado River Compactwas signed in 1922, due to climate change and overallocation of water. In 2007, the states agreed to interim operating guidelines, but those expire in 2026. Because Lake Powell and Lake Mead, the basin’s two biggest reservoirs, are federal projects managed by federal agencies, those agencies will need to do an environmental review and public comment period, as required by law. The federal government needs input from the states in a timely fashion to complete the review and public comment process, in order to have new rules in place by October 2026. On Tuesday night, the seven states, along with the Department of Interior and Bureau of Reclamation, issued a statement on the negotiations…
“A supply-based proposal is the only way to move forward,” [Becky Mitchell] told attendees at the Colorado River District’s Across Divides conference on October 3. “We all have to be responding to supply.”
That means that the new guidelines should be based on actual streamflows, rather than demand from water users.
“We need to set aside building an operations plan that meets the needs as they are currently,” she said. “We need to let go of that dream and be able to figure out how to respond, and I think that’s been a bit of a struggle.”
