Click the link to read the article on the KJZZ website (Alex Hager). Here’s an excerpt:
November 2, 2026
The Arizona Department of Water Resources filed a motion to intervene in Nevada’s lawsuit against the federal government. The Central Arizona Project — which operates a 336-mile canal system that carries Colorado River Water to the Phoenix and Tucson areas — did the same less than two weeks later. The legal moves represent an escalation in a contentious, yearslong saga over how to respond to increasingly dry conditions along a river that supplies nearly 40 million people across seven Western states…Nevada’s original lawsuit chiefly argues one thing. It says the Interior Department needs to go back and redo its plans for cutting back water use in three Colorado River states — Arizona, California and Nevada, collectively known as the Lower Basin…With states at an impasse, the federal government reluctantly came up with its own plan. The Interior Department decided that the Lower Basin would have to cut back, but did not force any new cutbacks on the Upper Basin. The plan gives Interior the option to cut Colorado River supplies for Arizona, California and Nevada by up to 40% per year, with Arizona being the hardest hit. Those states were quick to call that plan unfair. Now, they’re going further and arguing that it was illegal…
The lawsuit argues that federal authorities are legally obligated to consider the impact of new water management plans while drawing up required environmental paperwork. A plan that slashes so much water for millions of people and major industries, it explains, has not done enough to consider the harm of those cutbacks. Arizona’s top water official, Tom Buschatzke, said the new river plan would “devastate” Arizona’s economy, and “ignores basic elements of the law of the river” to do so…Those agencies, alongside Nevada, are asking Interior to come up with a new cutback plan that considers that harm and spreads water cuts more evenly across the region…That ask for a redo is only part of the reason Arizona joined Nevada’s lawsuit. Between the lines of the filing, the state is making a bigger point. The Lower Basin is in this mess, the state explains, because its upstream neighbors are violating the foundational laws that have governed the river since 1922. If that doesn’t change, Arizona has the ammunition it needs to take an Upper Basin state, or states, to the Supreme Court sometime soon. It is using this lawsuit to put those ideas in writing…Now, some water officials say the conditions are right to bring that bigger lawsuit. Arizona could sue a state or states in the Upper Basin for failing to deliver a legally-mandated amount of water downstream. CAP officials say the upstream states have already fallen below that amount…
It’s impossible to predict exactly how long a case over the 1922 Colorado River Compact would take to work its way through the legal process, but other water disputes can provide some hints. In Texas v. New Mexico and Colorado, a dispute over water from the Rio Grande spent 13 years in court before it was finally settled in early 2026. In 1985, Kansas sued Colorado for taking too much water from the Arkansas River. That case wasn’t resolved until 2009, more than two decades after it began. A Colorado River case would be highly complex, considering the river’s connection to seven states, 30 federally recognized Native American tribes and the country of Mexico. Because of that, Eklund said, it could take even longer than two decades, a perilously long time given the record-setting low levels at the nation’s largest reservoirs.
