Click the link to read the article on The Denver Post website (Elise Schmelzer). Here’s an excerpt:
January 15, 2026
Absent a crucial but elusive consensus among the seven Colorado River states, federal authorities are forging ahead with their own ideas on how to divvy up painful water cuts as climate change diminishes flows in the critical river. The Bureau of Reclamation last week made public a 1,600-page behemoth of a document outlining five potential plans for managing the river after current regulations expire at the end of this year. The agency did not identify which proposal it favors, in hopes that the seven states in the river basin will soon come to a consensus that incorporates parts of the five plans. But time is running out. The states — Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, New Mexico, California, Arizona and Nevada — already blew past a Nov. 11 deadline set by federal authorities to announce the concepts of such a plan. They now have until Feb. 14 to present a detailed proposal for the future of the river that makes modern life possible for 40 million people across the Southwest. They were set to meet this week in Salt Lake City to continue negotiations. Federal authorities must finalize a plan by Oct. 1…
“The Department of the Interior is moving forward with this process to ensure environmental compliance is in place so operations can continue without interruption when the current guidelines expire,” Andrea Travnicek, the assistant secretary for water and science at the Department of the Interior, said in a news release announcing the document. “The river and the 40 million people who depend on it cannot wait. In the face of an ongoing severe drought, inaction is not an option.”
A 45-day public comment period opens Friday on the proposed plans for managing the river system, contained in a document called a draft environmental impact statement. The current operating guidelines expire at the end of 2026, but authorities need a replacement plan in place prior to the Oct. 1 start to the 2027 water year. The water year follows the water cycle, beginning as winter snowpack starts to accumulate and ending Sept. 30, as irrigation seasons end and water supplies typically reach their lowest levels…
Already, Lake Mead — on the Arizona-Nevada border — and Lake Powell are only 33% and 26% full, respectively. Projections from the Bureau of Reclamation show that, in a worst-case scenario, Powell’s waters could fall below the level required to run the dam’s power turbines by October and remain below the minimum power pool until June 2027. Experts monitoring the yearslong effort to draft new operating guidelines said any plan implemented by Reclamation must consider the reality of a river with far less water than assumed when the original river management agreements were signed more than a century ago.
