From email from Brian McNeece:
January 27, 2026
Colorado River negotiations have bogged down, but dozens of experts at the Bureau of Reclamation (BOR) have been streaming right along. On Jan. 14, the BOR released its draft Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), which is bureaucratese for a report on options for the negotiators after the current rules expire this year.
It’s a bit complicated. The report includes a modeling of 1,200 possible future scenarios for the entire Colorado River system and runs 1,600 pages. Just the Executive Summary is 66 pages. The theme of this massive undertaking is deep uncertainty. In fact, that is the name of the modeling process: Decision Making Under Deep Uncertainty.
What’s uncertain? Well, in a word: the weather. And not just the weather, but also population growth and water use patterns. Most scientists agree that climate change includes aridification, or a general drying of the Colorado River basin, but it’s impossible to quantify reliably. Thus the 1,200 futures.
This massive report took two and a half years to compile with the help of around 150 people with expertise in everything from hydrology to chemical engineering to wildlife management to socioeconomics to anthropology to law. Browsing through it, I marveled at the depth of analysis and the advanced computational and mathematical tools brought to bear on a question, which at the end of the river, is a political one. I thought, does anyone understand all of it? But when I looked at the top of the list of preparers, I realized that yes, someone does.
And that is Carly Jerla. She’s the Senior Water Resources Program Manager for the Bureau of Reclamation. Ms. Jerla was hired by the BOR in 2005 as a graduate student at the University of Colorado’s Center for Advanced Decision Support for Water and Environmental Systems. She is trained in civil and environmental engineering and public policy. Twenty years on, she’s the boss of this effort.
I’ve watched Ms. Jerla in action at several of the recent Colorado River Water Users Association (CRWUA) conferences in Las Vegas. A petite woman, Carly has a disarmingly low, warm voice. Speaking to a crowd of 1,700 people, she talks as if she’s having an over-the-fence conversation with a neighbor. But as the overlays of data stacked up on her slides, I could sense her losing the audience. It was just too much.
We saw a draft of the current report in 2024. Since then, it has grown massively, but the same dilemma exists and can actually be summed up simply. In re-writing the rules for how the water of the river gets divvied up, they need to decide what triggers shortage conditions, how much cuts each contractor must take under those conditions, and where shortages are measured. In the past, Lake Mead and Lake Powell had separate conditions, and the reservoirs above Lake Powell were not in play. Ms. Jerla’s report emphasizes that the entire system should be considered in the rules, not just the two giant reservoirs.
There are currently five major alternatives being proposed. This first one, called the No-Action Alternative, is also the no-go alternative, since it returns us to the world prior to the 2007 guidelines for shortages. The No-Action Alternative would drain the reservoirs. So negotiators must choose one of the other four alternatives. All of them make heavy cuts, either based on prior appropriation (i.e. the Law of the River) or pro rata (i.e. proportional cuts for everyone).
Is there a Goldilocks alternative among the other four? One that splits the difference between the historical, asymmetrical Law of the River and the fairness in a pro rata plan? No, there isn’t. That’s why we’re stuck.
There’s one future scenario that is completely omitted from the alternatives. Colorado’s negotiator Becky Mitchell has repeatedly called for the Upper Basin states to get MORE water. She points out that the Colorado River Compact of 1922 allocated the Upper Basin the same amount allocated to the Lower Basin states — 7.5 million acre feet. But that’s 3 million more acre-feet than the Upper Basin has ever drawn from the system.
None of the five alternatives, and apparently not one of Carly Jerla’s 1,200 possible futures, includes that premise. So if the Upper Basin negotiators are staking their claim on the river to include more water for them, they are way off the mark. Their next best hope is to take no cuts, but that option won’t float in the Lower Basin.
Trying to make a decision under Deep Uncertainty is tough, tough work. Carly Jerla and her team have laid out the buffet for the representatives from the states along the Colorado River. Time to pick from the menu.
