Click the link to read the article on the Deseret News website (Carter Williams). Here’s an excerpt:
November 12, 2025
Utah and the six other Colorado River states reached a tentative agreement to continue working together on a plan to share the river’s water, but failed to secure a consensus plan ahead of an important Tuesday deadline. Utah, Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Wyoming, all of which rely on the river for water, agreed to continue to meet until they have a “framework solution” by mid-February 2026, said Gene Shawcroft, chairman of the Colorado River Authority of Utah.
“We were able to have enough of a framework put together that the federal government agrees with us that the framework can be continued to be refined in order for us to have a deal by the middle of February,” he told reporters in a negotiations update briefing on Wednesday…
The basin states have had agreements in place on how Colorado River water has been allocated for over a century, and the post-2026 plan seeks to be the largest operational update since a 2007 plan to address how water is stored and pulled from Lake Powell and Lake Mead, the nation’s two largest reservoirs. Its users agree that prolonged drought and low reservoir conditions remain persistent challenges facing the river, but there’s still division on how to handle the discrepancy between water needs and what’s available in the system within one of the fastest-growing regions of the country. Lower Basin states have called for mandatory reductions during dry years. In a public letter to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum on Tuesday, Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs and other Arizona leaders called it “alarming” that Upper Basin states, including Utah, “have repeatedly refused to implement any volume of binding, verifiable water supply reductions.”
[…]
Upper Basin states don’t believe those types of cuts are necessary because they use less water than Lower Basin states, largely because of how water rights are allocated, favoring senior rights holders like California, Shawcroft said. These are the types of arguments still holding up a long-term deal.
“The major sticking point is there’s a whole lot less water in the system than we anticipated, or there’s historically been,” he said. “The question is, how do you divide a pie that’s significantly smaller than it has been, when everyone’s used to getting that big piece of the pie?”
