‘We stand on the brink of system failure’: Feds up pressure for states to reach deal on the future of the #ColoradoRiver — The Salt Lake Tribune #COriver #aridification

Click the link to read the article on The Salt Lake Tribune website (Leia Larsen). Here’s an excerpt:

June 26, 2025

The clock is ticking for seven states to figure out how they’ll share dwindling water in the Colorado River for the foreseeable future. In a meeting at the Utah State Capitol Thursday [June 26. 2025], the river’s four Upper Basin state commissioners further embraced the idea of a “divorce” with their Lower Basin neighbors — an idea also floated at a meeting in eastern Utah last week, as reported by Fox 13.

“Today we stand on the brink of system failure,” said Becky Mitchell, the commissioner for Colorado. “We also stand on the precipice of a major decision point.”

…negotiations between the four Upper Basin states, which includes Utah, Colorado, Wyoming and New Mexico, have been in a standstill with the remaining three Lower Basin states for more than a year. The Interior Department’s acting assistant secretary for water and science, Scott Cameron, has met with leadership in the seven states that use Colorado River water since April, working to broker a deal.

Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2024. Credit: Brad Udall

“We all have to live in the physical world as it is,” he said, “not as we might hope it will be.”

On Thursday, Cameron presented water managers with a deadline. The Interior Department plans to release a draft environmental impact statement evaluating different alternatives for the river’s future in December, which will then open to public comment. The department will make its final decision on how to proceed by June of 2026.

“The goal is to essentially parachute in a seven-state deal as the preferred alternative,” Cameron said.

For that to work, the states will need to reach an agreement by Nov. 11. By Feb. 14, they’ll need to hand over the details of their plan. Whatever the states decide on, Cameron reminded commissioners, will likely take an act of Congress and new policy adopted by most of the affected states’ legislatures…

The idea of framing the future relationship of the river users as a “divorce” was first pitched by the Lower Basin states, Mitchell said. Under that proposal, the Upper Basin states would release water from Lake Powell based on the average natural flow measured at Lee’s Ferry, a point just downstream of the reservoir and upstream of both Grand Canyon National Park and Lake Mead.

“If done correctly,” Mitchell said, “it should provide the opportunity for the Upper and Lower basins to manage themselves, with the only real point of agreement being the Powell release.”

A jarring pothole — Allen Best (BigPivots.com)

Josh Shipley. Credi: Allen Best/Big Pivots

Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):

July 3, 2025

Josh Shipley rides a Harley and drives a Jeep. He says ending federal tax credits for solar may upend his business.

Josh Shipley rides a Harley in his spare time and likes to take his family on off-road Jeep trips and has hunted across North America.

On Wednesday morning, Shipley had to fight tears as he talked about the impact on his business, Alternative Power Enterprises, and the families of the employees of the earthquake-inducing bill now being debated in Congress.

“Removing these tax credits at the end of the year is going to be extremely detrimental,” he said on a press call orchestrated by the staff of U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper. “We actually don’t believe we’re going to be able to stay in business.”

The business is based in Ridgway, one of two smaller solar installation companies there. It has eight employees, and they have five spouses and seven children. They do work from Paonia to Silverton.

“It’s not just eight people that are going to be affected by this,” he said. The business, he explained, has been around for 30 years, and in recent years it has been able to start helping low-income families to get solar.

“I think in the last three years, 120 families in our area have benefited,” he said. “If I can’t survive, the other parts of this business are going away. I can’t be there to help those individuals.”

Shipley said he bought the business in 2020 with the assumption that federal tax credits would be phased out, but not until 2032.

The bill, he said, is a tragedy for U.S. energy policy.

“Republicans are always talking about independence and being — sorry, I’m getting a little emotional — getting and being dominant in our industries. This is how we become energy dominant. It’s not just wind. It’s not just solar. It’s not just natural gas plants. It’s not just nuclear power plants.

“It takes every single one of these technologies for us to create that — excuse me — and to keep these families — I’m sorry, excuse me — but it will take all of these forms of energy to create that dominance,” he said. This bill’s going to kill that. There are no if’s, and’s, or but’s about it. Small businesses will go out of business because of it. There will not be the workforce that is going to be required to create that energy dominance later, when they’ve realized what they’ve done.”

Hickenlooper, who had arrived late the night before from Washington D.C., touched on several provisions of what he called the “cruel, reckless bill” that the Senate had passed on Sunday morning.

“This was a vote that would strip 17 million Americans, including many, many children, of their health care, push more than 300 rural hospitals to close, gut investments in affordable clean energy,” he said “It would expand our national debt at a level that we have never imagined before, and all this just to accommodate these lavish tax cuts for wealthy Americans, most of whom aren’t asking for the tax cuts. It is a form of madness, fiscal madness, and I think it’s cruel.”

U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper called the bill passed by his fellow senators “cruel.” Credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots

Later, he explained that the bill would gut the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. “It was a major step towards addressing climate change, and now it’s been it’s like running into a brick wall,” he said.

“We’re going to lose over a million jobs in this country. I mean, these are careers, hundreds of billions of dollars of lost GDP, lost wages. We’re going to see the cost of electricity go up. We’re going to kill new renewable energy that prevents blackouts just when we’re in the process of trying to accommodate AI. We need more energy. We’ve got over 8,000 solar jobs just in Colorado.”

Speaking later, KC Becker described the bill as triggering an all-hands-on-deck moment for the solar industry in Colorado. In April, she became the executive director of the Colorado Solar and Storage Association.

“People are nervous from the smallest companies to the largest companies. It’s been a whirlwind,” she said. “The bill was expected to get better in the Senate. It actually got worse in the Senate because of the excise tax (on solar and wind production, now discarded).”

Right now, many solar providers are working hard, because they have inventories of panels. But the demand, if this bill gets passed as new constructed, will cause demand to drop off a cliff after Dec. 31.

The big question in Colorado — and part of the national dialogue — is whether any of Colorado’s representatives in Congress who are Republicans will buck the marching orders of President Donald Trump. Rep. Gabe Evans and Jeff Hurd, both freshman and both Republican, voted for the bill after saying nice things about renewable energy.

Fort Lupton-based Evans was barely elected last November from the Eighth District north of Denver, his first run at Congress. Grand Junction-based Hurd has a more comfortable position in the Third District, which covers much of the Western Slope plus much of southern Colorado.

Also speaking on the webcast press conference were the four Democrats who are members of Colorado’s delegation in the House of Representatives, Gov. Jared Polis, and various individuals from health care providers, most from more rural parts of Colorado.

The take-away message was that this bill will dramatically hurt poorer people who are unable to afford health care without governmental assistance. That, however, can also be true in urban areas.

U.S. Rep. Brittany Pettersen was momentarily reduced to fighting tears when she talked about the giant erosion of programs to help low-income people. “When I think about my mom who works a low-wage job, without access to medical care,” said Pettersen, who then choked up. For her, this was politics, but the bill was also deeply personal.

Getches-Wilkinson Center Well Represented at #CrestedButte Public Policy Forum — Douglas Kenney #ColoradoRiver #COriver #aridification

Click the link to read the release on the Getches-Wilkinson Center website (Douglas Kenney):

July 2, 2025

On the evening of June 24, the GWC’s Doug Kenney joined Becky Mitchell, Colorado’s lead negotiator on Colorado River matters, at the Crested Butte Public Policy Forum for a conversation about current and future Colorado River issues. Well over 100 people packed the Center for the Arts for the public event that in previous years has featured speakers as varied as Ted Turner, Sandra Day O’Connor, and the GWC’s Senior Fellow Anne Castle.

The primary focus of discussion was how “big river” issues—that is, the changing rules determining how Colorado River supplies are shared amongst the seven states—impact the availability of water on Colorado’s West Slope. This required a review of the three numbers in the basin that increasingly are out of step: the amount of water entering the system each year through snowmelt and rain; the amount of water consumed by water users throughout the basin; and the amount of consumptive use that has been promised to water users in the Colorado River Compact and other laws. This mismatch of supplies, demands and allocations is not a new problem, but is of particular urgency now as Lakes Powell and Mead are two-thirds empty, the EIS process for new determining new reservoir operations is well underway, and the current year runoff is shaping up as one of the worst in decades.

The conversation was led by Julie Nania, an icon in Crested Butte for her work with High Country Conservation Advocates in protecting Mt. Emmons—the so-called “Red Lady”—from development into a molybdenum mine, as well as her service on the Board of Directors of the Upper Gunnison Water Conservancy District and as Executive Director and Faculty Chair of the Coldharbour Institute based at Western Colorado University. Julie began her career at Colorado Law (class of 2011), which included a post-graduate fellowship with the GWC from 2013-2014 working on tribal water rights. Julie stands as a great example of the GWC’s ongoing influence in protecting the resources and places that we all value.

The Colorado Water Conservation Board grants hearing over Shoshone Power Plant water rights deal — Shannon Mullane (Fresh Water News) #ColoradoRiver #COriver #aridification

Water runs down a spillway at the Shoshone hydro plant in Glenwood Canyon. Rockfalls, fires and mudslides in recent years have caused frequent shutdowns of plant operations. Credit: Heather Sackett/Aspen Journalism

Click the link to read the article on the Water Education Colorado website (Shannon Mullane):

July 3, 2025

{The Colorado Water Conservation Board] unanimously agreed Tuesday to hear out Front Range water operators’ concerns about a Western Slope plan to purchase historic Colorado River water rights.

The Colorado River Water Conservation District, which represents 15 Western Slope counties, negotiated a $99 million deal to purchase water rights tied to the century-old Shoshone Power Plant, owned by a subsidiary of Xcel Energy.

The River District and the Front Range groups — Aurora Water, Denver Water, Colorado Springs Utilities and Northern Water — all want to maintain the historical flows past Shoshone to provide predictable water supplies long into the future. They mainly disagree about the amount of water involved. Front Range providers say, if the number is too high, it could hamper their ability to provide water to millions of people.

In June, the Front Range water managers asked the Colorado Water Conservation Board to hold a hearing to air concerns. That hearing will be held during the board’s meeting, Sept. 16-18.

“We look forward to the hearing, and we appreciate the effort and the time that you and the staff have put into this effort,” Andy Mueller, the River District’s general manager, said during the board meeting Tuesday. “[We] look forward to finishing this in September.”

The decision Tuesday also opened up a seven-day period, ending July 9, for others to ask to join the September hearing. The board will share updates with the public on its website.

The hearing is part of a larger [CWCB Instream and water court] process to decide whether Shoshone Power Plant’s water rights can become an environmental water right, called an instream flow right. These rights aim to keep water in rivers to help aquatic ecosystems.

Photo: 1950 “Public Service Dam” (Shoshone Dam) in Colorado River near Glenwood Springs Colorado.

In this case, the environmental water right would focus on a 2.4-mile stretch between Shoshone’s intake dam, which takes water out of the Colorado River, and the end of its penstocks, which return all of Shoshone’s water to the river. The power plant is tucked into Glenwood Canyon along Interstate 70 a few miles east of Glenwood Springs.

At times, the power plant sucks nearly all of the Colorado River’s flow — depending on the amount of water in the river above the dam — through its turbines before returning it to the river channel. When this happens, the 2.4-mile stretch immediately below the dam is reduced to a narrow channel of water.

The environmental flow right would allow water managers to keep more water in that stretch of the river to help fish and other aquatic species. If approved, it would be the largest, most influential instream flow right in the state’s portfolio. The Colorado water board has until Sept. 18 to make its decision.

The Colorado River District wants to purchase the water rights as part of a larger plan to permanently shore up water supplies for Western Slope communities, which have long worried that Shoshone’s flows could change if Xcel decided to shut down the power plant or sell the water rights.

The district has a purchase agreement with Xcel Energy to buy the rights and lease the water back to Xcel to generate electricity. One of the terms of the deal is getting the instream flow use approved by the state.

The Front Range water providers and water managers want to prevent any changes to Shoshone’s water rights from harming their water supplies.

Shoshone’s water rights are like the bottom blocks in a game of Jenga: change to the rights could cause ripple effects statewide, in part, because of their age, location and amount of water.

Shoshone’s oldest water right can impact up to 10,600 other upstream water rights because of the plant’s geographic location, according to the Colorado Division of Water Resources. Those junior water users include Front Range water managers, like Denver Water and Northern Water, that send water to millions of people.

Colorado transmountain diversions via the State Engineer’s office

They are also tied to numerous, carefully negotiated agreements that dictate how water flows across both western and eastern Colorado.

The Front Range water operators want to resolve their concerns about the historical flows through Shoshone during the instream flow approval process this summer.

The Colorado River District says their questions can be resolved during the subsequent water court proceedings, where opposing parties will have another opportunity to voice their concerns and make sure their water supplies aren’t negatively impacted.

“We are deeply concerned that the Front Range entities requesting this contested hearing are asking the CWCB to encroach on the jurisdiction of water court,” the district said in a prepared statement Tuesday.

More by Shannon Mullane

More Coyote Gulch Shoshone water right coverage here.

Front Range concerns over purchase of Colorado River rights on Western Slope to get hearing: #ColoradoRiver District wants to buy Shoshone Power Plant rights to protect water flows — The #Denver Post #COriver #aridification

Shoshone Falls hydroelectric generation station via USGenWeb

Click the link to read the article on The Denver Post website. (Elise Schmelzer). Here’s an excerpt:

July 2, 2025

Four major Front Range water providers — Denver Water, Aurora Water, Colorado Springs Utilities and Northern Water — will present their concerns about the purchase of the Shoshone Power Plant water rights by the Colorado River District during a hearing in September before the Colorado Water Conservation Board. The board during a special meeting Tuesday decided to hold the hearing to hash out the urban utilities’ concerns about how much water should be allocated to the right. The board must decide by September whether to approve the new use of the water right proposed by the district…The Colorado River District, a taxpayer-funded agency that works to protect Western Slope water, in 2023 announced a $99 million deal to buy the water rights from Xcel Energy, which owns the power plant. The purchase — a decades-long effort by the district — will ensure that water will continue to flow west past the plant tucked into Glenwood Canyon and downstream to the towns, farms and others who rely on the Colorado River even if the century-old power plant were decommissioned.

Each of the Front Range utilities have said they do not oppose the purchase itself. They do, however, question the river district’s calculations of how much water has been used historically under the rights. Under Colorado water law, that number will determine how much water must flow through the plant in the future. The district’s calculations are too high, the four utilities argue, and would leave them with less water from the Colorado River for their own uses. The river district has repeatedly said it plans to maintain the status quo and will not use more water than has been used in the past. Disputes about the amount of water historically used under a water right should be settled in water court, the district’s general manager Andy Mueller said Tuesday in a statement.

“We are deeply concerned that the Front Range entities requesting this contested hearing are asking the CWCB to encroach on the jurisdiction of water court,” Mueller said. “… We believe maintaining public trust relies on following the right path and avoiding political intrusion.”

More Coyote Gulch coverage of the Shoshone plant.

Front Range water providers request state hearing to air concerns about Western Slope water rights deal — Shannon Mullane (Fresh Water News) #ColoradoRiver #COriver #aridification

Shoshone Hydroelectric Plant back in the days before I-70 via Aspen Journalism

Click the link to read the article on the Water Education website (Shannon Mullane):

July 26, 2025

Four major Front Range water agencies have requested a state hearing to fully air their objections to a Western Slope plan to purchase historic, coveted Colorado River water rights.

The Colorado River Water Conservation District, which represents 15 Western Slope counties, is leading the effort to purchase the $99 million water rights tied to the century-old Shoshone Power Plant, owned by a subsidiary of Xcel Energy. The district wants to buy the rights to protect historical water resources for Western Slope communities long into the future.

Aurora Water, Denver Water, Colorado Springs Utilities and Northern Water also want to maintain the historical flows past Shoshone which provides stability for their water supplies. They just disagree over the numbers, namely how much water is included in the deal. If the number is too high, it could throw a wrench in their water systems.

The state’s water board, the Colorado Water Conservation Board, will decide during a special meeting Tuesday whether to grant the hearing requests.

“If, as the River District asserts, the status quo will be maintained, this acquisition can be a win-win for both the Front Range and the West Slope,” wrote Marshall Brown, general manager of Aurora Water in a letter on June 9. “However … we have significant concerns.”

The Colorado River District already has passed a few hurdles in its years long effort to purchase the powerful water rights for Shoshone, located just east of Glenwood Springs.

It has a purchase agreement with Xcel Energy. A diverse array of Western Slope cities, agricultural groups, the Colorado legislature and others have promised millions of dollars toward the asking price.

The federal government awarded $40 million, but that funding remains tied up in President Donald Trump’s policy to cut spending from big Biden-era funding packages.

Democratic and Republican Congressional representatives from Colorado have spoken in support of the purchase. U.S. Rep. Jeff Hurd, a Republican from Grand Junction, asked Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum to release the funds in a committee meeting this month.

120 days to decide

The district is moving on with its next step: working with the state to use the water rights to help protect the environment. This is where the concerns over historical flows come in.

The River District wants Shoshone’s rights to be used to keep water in the Colorado River near the power plant in Glenwood Canyon to benefit aquatic ecosystems when the power plant isn’t generating electricity.

The additional environmental use would secure the flow of water past the power plant, even if the plant goes out of commission — maintaining the status quo flows permanently. That water could otherwise be used further upstream.

The Colorado Water Conservation Board, faces a September deadline to decide whether to approve this new environmental use, called an instream flow right.

If approved, the instream flow right would be one of the largest, most influential environmental water rights in state history in large part because of their seniority in the state’s water system.

The board launched its 120-day decision-making process May 21, triggering a 20-day window for people to submit notices that they planned to contest the proceedings and request a hearing.

Front Range outlines concerns

The four Front Range water managers were the only entities to submit notices within that 20-day window.

They want to recalculate how much water has been used at Shoshone in past decades before the matter goes to water court, where opposing parties will have another opportunity to voice their concerns and make sure their water supplies aren’t negatively impacted.

Collectively, the four agencies help deliver water to over 3 million people along the Front Range cities and northeastern plains.

In its letter, Aurora Water said the river district’s estimate could overstate historic use by up to 300,000 acre-feet. One acre-foot roughly equals the annual water use of two to three households. The utility did not respond in time for publication.

Northern Water is concerned about its ability to fill Green Mountain Reservoir in Summit County, which depends in part on downstream water rights, like Shoshone’s. The reservoir delivers water to the Western Slope, including to a 15-mile stretch of the Colorado River that provides vital habitat for endangered and threatened fish.

Colorado Springs Utilities’ letter said a too-high estimate could cut into the amount of water the provider can divert from the Blue River and the Homestake Water Project, which directs water from the Western Slope to the Eastern Slope.

Denver Water cited similar concerns, saying the proposal, as is, will change the “status quo” in ways that would harm the utility’s ability to provide water to over 1.5 million people during severe or prolonged drought.

Colorado Springs and Denver Water declined to comment further, referring to their written letters.

If the Colorado Water Conservation Board approves the hearing request, people will have until July 9 to ask to join the hearing process, said Rob Viehl, chief of the Stream and Lake Protection Section at the Colorado Water Conservation Board. The board will share updates with the public on its website and decide the date of the hearing during its meeting Tuesday.

More by Shannon Mullane

Shoshone hydroelectric generation plant Glenwood Canyon via the Colorado River District

‘A glimmer of hope’ emerges from long-stuck #ColoradoRiver negotiations — Alex Hager (KUNC.org) #COriver #aridification

Click the link to read the article on the KUNC website (Alex Hager):

June 23, 2025

This story is part of ongoing coverage of the Colorado River, produced by KUNC and supported by the Walton Family Foundation.

There’s a break in the clouds that have hovered over Colorado River negotiations for more than a year. State water leaders appear to be coalescing behind a new proposal for sharing the river after talks were stuck in a deadlock for more than a year.

The river is used by nearly 40 million people across seven states and Mexico, but it’s shrinking due to climate change. As a result, state leaders need to rein in demand. For months, they were mired in a standoff about how to interpret a century-old legal agreement. The new proposal is completely different.

Instead of those states leaning on old rules that don’t account for climate change, they’re proposing a new system that divides the river based on how much water is in it today.

“We finally have an approach that at least allows a glimmer of hope that the laying down of arms is possible,” said John Fleck, a writer and water policy researcher at the University of New Mexico.

The long, tense negotiations have mostly been stuck on one issue: How much water should the Upper Basin states — Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, and New Mexico — send downstream from their largest reservoir, Lake Powell?

The new plan says the amount should be based on a three-year rolling average of the “natural flows” in the river — basically, how much water would flow through it if human dams and diversion weren’t in the way.

States would still have to negotiate the exact percentage of those “natural flows” that would go downstream to the Lower Basin states of California, Arizona and Nevada. Picking that number will likely be difficult, but the fact that states are willing to base it on current climate conditions represents a major philosophical shift in how the river is divided.

“This new approach gets beyond the obsessively arcane discussions about various interpretations of laws written 100 years ago, with people hoping that their lawyers’ arguments can mean they get more water,” Fleck said. “It says, ‘Look, we all have to share this river. We have to do some math about how much water it really has.’”

Nevada’s John Entsminger, Arizona’s Tom Buschatzke, and California’s JB Hamby sit on a panel of state water leaders at the Colorado River Water Users Association annual conference in Las Vegas on December 5, 2024. Arizona’s Tom Buschatzke (center) brought details of a Colorado River plan to the public, and said it “allows for a fair division of what Mother Nature provides to us. Alex Hager/KUNC

Details of the plan first emerged in a meeting of the Arizona Reconsultation Committee, where the state’s water leaders gather to discuss Arizona’s position in multistate talks. Tom Buschatzke, director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources, described the plan as “innovative.”

“I was very pessimistic that we were on a path towards litigation,” he said. “I’m more optimistic now that we can avoid that path if we can make this work.”

Buschatzke emphasized that the proposal is in its early stages. The concept is now heading to the Bureau of Reclamation, the federal water agency which manages dams and reservoirs in the West. Employees there will run models to figure out exactly how much water would flow between the two basins.

State and federal leaders are in a crunch to finalize new water sharing rules before a 2026 deadline, when the current rules expire.

“It is still just a concept,” Buschatzke said. “We haven’t agreed to anything at this point, but we agreed to test it.”

Colorado, which often speaks on behalf of all four Upper Basin states, appears cautiously supportive of the plan.

“Colorado remains committed to developing supply-driven, sustainable operations of Lake Powell and Lake Mead,” Becky Mitchell, Colorado’s top water negotiator, wrote to KUNC in a statement. “The natural flow approach is one way to achieve this, if it is done right.”

Colorado and its allies initially dug in their heels on a very specific interpretation of the 1922 Colorado River compact, arguing that they shouldn’t have to take new cutbacks to their water supplies since they feel the impacts of climate change-fueled shortages more than their downstream neighbors.

“There is no doubt that Arizona views things differently than the Upper Division States, and a successful framework will set aside our differing views and focus instead on the health and sustainability of the Colorado River System for all who depend upon it,” Mitchell wrote.

New #ColoradoRiver plan spreads the pain, shares water based on reality of shrinking flows — AZCentral.com #COriver #aridification

Click the link to read the article on the AZCentral website (Brandon Loomis). Here’s an excerpt:

June 18, 2025

Key Points

Arizona officials present details of a new proposal to share future shortages on the Colorado River.

The “supply-driven” solution would base allocations on the river’s actual flows, not on storage in the reservoirs.

Upper Basin states say the plan has problems, but Gov. Katie Hobbs insisted Arizona will defend its river allocation and demand other states take cuts.

Negotiators for the seven states arguing over diminished Colorado River water are discussing an option they hope will end their deadlock, one that Arizona officials say would focus less on who gets what and more on what the river can realistically provide. They’re calling it the “supply-driven” solution, Arizona Water Resources Director Tom Buschatzke said, and it links the required water deliveries out of Glen Canyon Dam to what might naturally be flowing downstream at Lees Ferry if the dam weren’t there. The Rocky Mountain states upstream from there would have to let that amount pass, and the Southwestern states would have to live within its limits. It’s intended as a fair way of adapting — and shrinking — the region’s use of a river whose flow was once thought to exceed 15 million acre-feet of water a year but, in the last 25 years, has averaged 12.4 million…

Jennifer Pitt and Brad Udall at the Getches-Wilkinson Center/Water and Tribes Initiative conference June 5, 2025. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots

A Colorado State University climate scientist recently projected that the region’s warming trajectory could drop the flow to 10 million by the end of this century — a plunge of about a third of the water that the first state negotiators agreed to divvy up with the 1922 Colorado River Compact…

So far, agreement about what’s fair has appeared distant. The Lower Basin states of Arizona, California and Nevada have the bulk of the region’s population and farm production, and have fully developed and then started to cut back on the half of the river’s flow that the compact awarded them. The Upper Basin states of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming have not fully developed their share of the water — a share that no longer fully exists. They have balked at cutting their existing uses to meet the compact’s requirement that they send at least half of the river’s flow of a century ago now that a changing climate has exposed the folly of the compact’s numbers. The supply-driven model would generally mandate a flow past Lees Ferry to the Southwestern states equal to a rolling three-year average of the natural flow that the mountain snowmelt provides, Buschatzke said. There would be upper and lower bounds on that number, to account for needs such as protecting reservoir levels that are safe for Glen Canyon and Hoover dam operations. Those bounds are as yet unidentified.

Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0

Once a Showcase of American Optimism and Engineering, Hoover Dam Faces New Power Generation Declines: #LakeMead is shrinking, threatening a big drop in electricity from the #ColoradoRiver basin’s biggest dam — Brett Walton (circleofblue.org) #COriver #aridification

Water level of Lake Mead behind the Hoover Dam July 2023. Photo credit: Reclamation

Click the link to read the article on the Circle of Blue website (Brett Walton):

June 23, 2025

The long-term drying of the American Southwest poses a gathering and measurable threat to hydropower generation in the Colorado River basin.

Should Lake Mead, the reservoir formed by Hoover Dam, continue to shrink, a substantial drop in the dam’s hydropower output is on the horizon.

The diminished state of the lake and the potential severe drop in electricity supply illustrate the consequences of a warming climate for the region. Built in the throes of the Great Depression, Hoover was the signature project of a country displaying its grit and engineering prowess to tame the West’s mightiest rivers to irrigate farmland and build cities. Today the dam is an aging asset buffeted by hydrological change and generating half the power that it did just a generation ago.

According to the Bureau of Reclamation, the federal agency that manages the basin’s large dams, if Lake Mead falls another 20 feet, Hoover Dam’s capacity to generate electricity would be slashed by 70 percent from its current level.

If there is a reason not to be especially alarmed it’s this: Hoover is just a small piece of the region’s electric power infrastructure. Federal dams along the Colorado River account for just over 4 percent of Arizona’s generating capacity, for instance.

Still, the cheap electricity is a lifeline for tribes and small rural electric providers. And the dam’s ability to be quickly turned on and off helps regulate the peaks and troughs of electricity demand. Curtailing this source of inexpensive electricity would raise the cost of power in the region while also challenging the integration of renewable energy into the electric grid.

A hydropower shortfall will be “bad news for us,” said Ed Gerak, executive director of the Irrigation and Electrical Districts Association of Arizona, which represents power providers that receive federal hydropower from Colorado River dams.

Lake Mead now sits at an elevation of 1,055 feet. The break point for hydropower is 1,035 feet. At that level, 12 older turbines at Hoover that are not designed for low reservoir levels would be shut down, Reclamation said. Five newer turbines installed a decade ago would continue to generate power.

The threat is real, especially as this year’s runoff forecast for the basin continues to worsen. Every month, Reclamation updates its projection of reservoir levels over the next two years. The June update shows a 10 percent chance that Lake Mead breaches 1,035 feet in spring 2027.

In a worst-case scenario, the breach would happen at the end of 2026, just when current operating rules for Lake Mead and Lake Powell expire. The modeling indicates a similar chance that Lake Powell drops low enough in 2027 that Glen Canyon Dam, another key hydropower asset in the basin, stops producing electricity.

The probability that Lake Mead drops that far is small and laden with uncertainties about weather and water use. But it is large enough that Hoover’s power customers are signaling their concern.

Reclamation, for its part, acknowledges the problem at Hoover and is evaluating its options. The agency estimates that replacing the 12 turbines would cost $156 million.

“Reclamation is assessing the cost-benefit analysis of replacing some of the older style turbines and the timeline for installation,” the agency wrote in a statement to Circle of Blue. “Ordering new turbines is a lengthy process as they have to be designed, model tested, built and ultimately installed.”

The dozen older turbines are not designed to operate at low reservoir levels. Dams like Hoover, which was completed in 1936, function based on the principle of hydraulic head, which is the difference in elevation between the top of the reservoir and the intake pipes for the dam’s powerhouse. When the hydraulic head drops, so does the water pressure. That can trigger the formation of air bubbles in the water, which can gouge and damage the turbines in a process called cavitation.

The five turbines that would not be shut down are low-head units that can accommodate lower reservoir levels. Installed a decade ago at a cost of $42 million in response to a previous rapid decline in Lake Mead, they can operate down to 950 feet. (One of those five turbines is currently offline, and Reclamation does not have an estimate for when it will resume operating.)

Hoover Dam, at the center of the photo, forms Lake Mead, which is currently just 31 percent full. Photo © J. Carl Ganter/Circle of Blue

Hoover is already hobbled by low water. Power generation in 2023 was roughly half the output of 2000, the last year that Lake Mead was effectively full.

When Lake Mead is full, Hoover has a generating capacity of 2,080 megawatts, equivalent to a large coal-fired or nuclear power plant. Today its capacity is 1,304 MW. If the dozen older turbines go offline, it will drop again, to 382 MW.

These declines in hydropower generation have been felt by the customers who buy Hoover Dam’s electricity, Gerak said. In a shortfall, they have to buy market-rate electricity. Depending on the season and power demand, market rates can be considerably more expensive.

Eric Witkoski is the executive director of the Colorado River Commission of Nevada, which manages the state’s allocation of Hoover’s power. Witkoski said that rural electric companies in his state have a higher share of their electricity coming from the dams and would be most affected by a shortfall.

The value of Hoover’s electricity is measured not just in raw megawatts and dollars. It is a flexible power source that can be ramped up and down to match the region’s daily and seasonal rhythms. Energy use rises in summer afternoons when air conditioning units are blasting and electricity-consuming household chores are at hand. It falls at night when cooler air prevails and washing machines are silent.

“The beauty of hydropower is that it’s great for helping to stabilize and regulate the grid,” Gerak said.

IEDA and other interest groups are pursuing a number of fixes. They are encouraging Reclamation and its parent agency the Interior Department to use federal infrastructure funds to install new low-head turbines or to request appropriations from Congress.

They are writing their congressional representatives in support of the Help Hoover Dam Act, a bill that would unlock some $50 million in ratepayer funds that had been set aside for pension benefits for federal employees. The trade groups claim that Congress funds the pension benefits through other means and that the funds could be spent on dam upgrades if Reclamation was given the authority to do so.

They also want to set up an organization modeled after the National Parks Foundation that can accept donations for dam operations and maintenance, including the visitor center, which is supported by power sales.

These fixes will take time. But as Lake Mead declines, the urgency to achieve them will intensify.

Ted Cooke tapped to run Bureau of Reclamation amid pivotal #ColoradoRiver talks — Alex Hager (KUNC.org) #COriver #aridification

The Central Arizona Project canal carries water through Phoenix in 2019. The project’s former general manager, Ted Cooke, was recently nominated to run the top federal agency for the Colorado River. Those who have worked with Cooke described him as a qualified expert. Ted Wood/The Water Desk

Click the link to read the article on the KUNC website (Alex Hager):

June 17, 2025

This story is part of ongoing coverage of the Colorado River, produced by KUNC and supported by the Walton Family Foundation.

President Donald Trump has tapped longtime water manager Ted Cooke to be the next commissioner of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. The nomination, submitted Mondayto the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, attempts to fill a pivotal role at the top federal agency for Western rivers, reservoirs and dams.

If confirmed, Cooke will become the main federal official overseeing Colorado River matters. His nomination comes at a tense time for the river. The seven states that use its water appear deadlocked in closed-door negotiations about sharing the shrinking water supply in the future.

Cooke will likely try to push those state negotiators toward agreement about who should feel the pain of water cutbacks and when. If they can’t reach a deal ahead of a 2026 deadline, the federal government can step in and make those decisions itself.

Cooke has spent most of his lengthy career with the Central Arizona Project, which brings Colorado River water to the Phoenix area. He first joined the agency in 2003, according to his LinkedIn page. He climbed the ranks and served as CAP’s general manager from 2015 to 2023.

Ted Cooke and Tom Buschatzke: Photo credit: Arizona Department of Water Resources

Water experts across the Colorado River basin, including some who have worked with him in the past, told KUNC they regard Cooke as a qualified technical expert. Sharon Megdal, whose tenure on CAP’s board of directors overlapped with Cooke’s time as general manager, said she had “great admiration” for Cooke.

“He’s thorough, he’s deliberative, he looks for solutions, and boy, we need to find solutions right now,” said Megdal, who now directs the Water Resources Research Center at the University of Arizona. “My observation of seeing him in action in tough situations shows that he’ll keep working until a resolution is reached or a solution is achieved, and I think that’s what we need now.”

John Entsminger, Nevada’s top water negotiator, called Cooke’s appointment a “great choice,” and cited his work in shaping the 2019 Drought Contingency Plan. If confirmed, Cooke will likely be in the same negotiating rooms as Entsminger.

“There are times when [the Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner] has to level pretty realistic threats at everybody,” Entsminger said. There’s also times when they have to be the mediator… I think Ted has both of those skills. I’ve seen him be pretty pointed, and I’ve seen him drive compromise.”

The seven states working on the next set of rules for managing the Colorado River are currently split into two caucuses – the Upper Basin states of Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico and the Lower Basin states of California, Arizona and Nevada.

The appointment of Cooke, a longtime Arizonan, could upset some on the other side of that divide. The Central Arizona Project, his former employer, is generally among the first entities to lose water under any plan for cutbacks.

Eric Kuhn is the former general manager of the Colorado River District. The taxpayer-funded agency was founded to keep water flowing to the cities and farms of Western Colorado. He said Cooke is qualified, but added “the nomination of someone from Arizona is interesting at a time when the Lower Division and the Upper Division states are far off.”

“I assume that he would recuse himself from decisions that could affect the CAP – which is just about any decision in the basin,” Kuhn wrote to KUNC. “None the less, his nomination is a plus for Arizona and the Lower Division States.”

Negotiators from Colorado and New Mexico declined to comment, and negotiators from Wyoming and Utah did not get back to KUNC in time for publication. Chuck Cullom, executive director of the Upper Colorado River Commission and a former colleague of Cooke’s, also declined to comment.

The #ColoradoRiver “psst psst” scheme emerges into public view: the “Supply Driven” concept — John Fleck (InkStain.net) #COriver #aridification #GWCWTI2025

Click the link to read the article on the InkStain website (John Fleck):

June 18, 2025

Arizona yesterday finally moved the super-secret idea at the heart of current Colorado River negotiations out of the shadows.

The idea is deceptively simple: base Lake Powell releases on a percentage of the three-year rolling average of the Colorado River’s estimated “natural flow” at Lee Ferry. Allocate water based not on a century-old hydrologic mistake, but rather based on what the river actually has to offer. It presents an attractive alternative to the increasingly baroque and unproductive shitshow that had taken over interstate negotiations.

It has the great virtue of each basin getting out of the other basin’s business – one clean, simple number. But establishing the right percentage remains the hard part. Make the percentage too high and the Upper Basin will have to cut users with pre-Compact water rights. Make the percentage too low and Lake Powell fills up while Central Arizona goes dry.

But some of the early modeling suggests that there may be a sweet spot where a combination of Lower Basin cuts along the lines of what the Lower Basin has already been willing to offer, combined with modest Upper Basin system conservation programs, might thread a needle that could allow the crafting of a compromise. This is very good news if the negotiators and the folks back home who have been egging them on can seize this opportunity to set aside parochial smallness and think at the basin scale.

The possibility of a new approach was hinted at a CU Boulder’s Colorado River conference two weeks ago (I spent most of the conference hidden away watching and listening on Zoom through a covid haze, so it might have just been a fever dream, but I thought I heard the hints), and I’m told was a topic of some of the hallway conversations. But Tom Buschatzke’s reveal at yesterday’s meeting of the Arizona Reconsultation Committee (the closest thing we have to the much-needed C-SPAN for the Colorado River Basin) was the first public discussion of the hush-hush stuff that shouldn’t be quite so hush-hush given, y’know, 40 million of us stakeholders.

The full slide deck from the ~~Colorado River C-SPAN~~ Arizona Reconsultation Committee is useful. Reclamation’s Dan Bunk, for example, shared a slide slowing the latest “min probable” forecast (hilarious typo – “min problem” now corrected) showing the system tanking – dropping below minimum power pool at Powell – in winter 2026. The min probable forecast has been a useful guide lately, frankly, and the latest version is horrifying. (On any other day this would be the lead, and probably deserves its own post, but I try not to work on Wednesdays.)

We don’t have a lot of time here.

Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=65868008

Why #ClimateChange must be part of the #ColoradoRiver conversation — Allen Best (BigPivots.com) #COriver #aridification #GWCWTI2025

Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):

June 12, 2025

Brad Udall also makes the case that stakeholders in the basin can work together to solve this “really sticky, difficult issue”

Brad Udall was on a panel on June 5 at the annual Colorado River conference hosted by the Getches-Wilkinson Center at the University of Colorado-Boulder’s School of Law.

In his brief slot on the panel, Udall was first a cheerleader for Colorado River problem solving but reminding listeners that climate change was the elephant in the room, as several speakers later in the conference acknowledged.

Following are his remarks, lightly edited:

Given the policy expertise on this panel, I’m going to constrain my remarks to what’s going on in the climate space. I want to make the following two points and end with a heartfelt plea.

Within this basin, we can and have worked together to deal with a really sticky, difficult issue like climate change, to inform decision-making given the right partners, including the federal government at the table. Point two is our current climate trajectory is beyond awful, and that makes our challenge even worse.

So let me get to point one. We can, in fact, work together on a really difficult issue. In late 2006 Terry Fulp (then regional director of the Lower Colorado Basin Region for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation), pulled together six different sciences to consider how a changing climate would impact runoff, to inform the 2007 Interim Guidelines EIS. That effort became Appendix U.

Interestingly, it was the first time climate science was incorporated into a major EIS. It was not particularly controversial, and it was done during a Republican administration. It set the stage for future (Bureau of) Reclamation climate change efforts, efforts that have continued to this day.

But put an asterisk next to that.

The next year (2008), the Water Utility Climate Alliance was formed by eight major national water providers, and four of those were actually in our basin: the San Diego County Water Authority, Denver Water, Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, and Southern Nevada Water Authority.

Members have led the way in figuring out how to adapt to climate change, including hiring certain staff to deal with this. And a hat tip for this to both Jim (Lochhead, former CEO of Denver Water) and Bill Hasencamp (Colorado River resources manager for Metropolitan).

Let me mention Reclamation again, because in 2009 Mike Connor, as a congressional staffer, wrote the SECURE Water Act, which made Reclamation perform a series of continuing climate change studies that are important to this day.

The lesson here is that when faced with such a daunting and unknown challenge, we actually can come together to discover scientific truths, but we need both federal and basic leadership to make this happen. Unfortunately, right now, one leg of this is seriously threatened, hence my asterisk.

My second point is about our awful moment, our global climate change trajectory. Hold on to your seats, because I’m going to make you uncomfortable. The world is on track for 3 degrees Celsius warming by 2100. This far exceeds anything agreed to by the 2015 Paris Climate Accords. And frankly, terrifies scientists. Three Celsius is a projected average global warming, but over land, that’s 5 Celsius. Converted into Fahrenheit, it’s nine Fahrenheit. Imagine every day, 9 Fahrenheit warmer. Highs, 9 Fahrenheit warmer. Lows, 9 Fahrenheit warmer. That’s a world unlike anything we currently know, and it’s going to challenge us all on every front.

And what’s worse about this, and not particularly appreciated, is that to get to 3 Celsius, we need large global greenhouse emissions to continue through this century to 2100. So, it will continue to warm significantly beyond 2100. Nine Fahrenheit is not where we end up. It’s kind of where we start.

This 3 Celsius outcome has been has been obvious for at least five years, as climate policy progress has stalled and even gone backwards. You know, post-Paris in 2015 there were all kinds of great net-zero by 2050 pledges by government and industry, including the fossil fuel industry.

But since then, the fossil fuel industry is trying to have it both ways. They love to tout these goals while at the same time talking to the shareholders about how they’re going to expand production in ways that are completely incompatible with 2 Celsius. And there are about 25 large, mostly national oil companies that are living this lie. Each one thinks they’re going to be the last one standing, selling a product that’s fundamentally incompatible with a stable climate. [ed. emphasis mine]

If you think we’ve got plenty of time to solve this, like 75 years, normally, I’d agree with you. But think about what’s happened over the past 35 years. Emissions have gone up 60% and continue to rise. With these bad actors and with banks willing to finance this and governments willing to subsidize it, what we’re witnessing is a monumental failure of both capitalism and governance.

Now, if this weren’t all bad enough for you, we now have an anti-knowledge president and his vile enablers systematically attacking all forms of knowledge using illegal and unconstitutional tactics. Nowhere has this been more true than in this climate science space, where they’re going after anything and everything that has the word climate on it, every federal agency.

I’ll mention three here in our basin that are really critical: NOAA, the USGS and Reclamation. All of that climate work is in the sights of these vile enablers and the administration. Hence that nasty asterisk again. This administration aims to stop all work at preventing future greenhouse gas emissions as well as our ability to adapt to coming changes.

And 95% of what I can say on this panel about this is not suitable for this room, but let’s call it what it is: it’s insanity what they’re doing.

There are also recent, strong signs that climate warming is speeding up. So 2023 and 2024 were 1.5 Celsius above a pre-Industrial average. And there, those two years have a trend line that’s twice what we’re used to seeing, and it has climate scientists flummoxed about the reasons behind it.

So why talk about global climate issues in a conference about the Colorado River? Well, it should be obvious. There is no way this makes for a better world in which we live, a better world in which the Colorado River flows, and if you live in that world, tell me how to join in la-la land, because I’d love to be there.

I’m now convinced that we need to plan for the worst possible climate future, and that’s somewhere around 10 million acre-feet runoff. But what it also means is taking a hard look at every existing agreement in the river. It either breaks them or substantially modifies them.

Let me get to my plea. These facts should be a call to action to everybody. Not only are we in a really deep climate hole, we’re continuing to dig. Absolutely the last thing we need is the federal government undercutting our efforts to meet the water supply challenges in this basin. There’s a term called the pessimism aversion trap. I’m going to urge you not to fall on that. And it’s the tendency to look the other way when confronted with dark realities. We still control our destiny, even if the solutions seem daunting.

So I’m going to ask for two things. One, obviously, fight back against all these harmful cutbacks to all aspects of our national climate effort, including the abandonment of science and scientists. Our federal allies are critical partners in this fight, and lasting damage has been done.

Second, some of you think that your job description doesn’t include worrying about reducing greenhouse gas emissions or what might happen at 2100 or beyond. I disagree. I plead with you to get serious about figuring out how to reduce the emissions of your organization and even your own personal emissions. I agree that individual actions aren’t going to solve this, but they send a really strong signal to everyone around us.

Finally, I need to apologize to and beg forgiveness our next speaker who deserves to follow someone far nicer than I am.

The #ColoradoRiver Conclave — John Fleck (InkStain.net) #COriver #aridification #GWCWTI2025

The Colorado River from the Navajo Bridge. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

Click the link to read the article on the Inkstain.net website (John Fleck):

June 5, 2025

Fascinating observation from Jim Lochhead this morning at the Getches-Wilkinson Center Colorado River Conference about the nature of the current negotiations and the role of the federal government. It came during a panel moderated by Anne Castle focused on what we learned from the expiring 2007 river management guidelines, which are the subject of intense renegotiation among the seven basin states.

From the perspective of the panel’s charge – what have we learned since the 2007 agreements – the way I phrased that, the the way the current process is going, should seem weird to us: “intense negotiation among the seven basin states.”

According to Lochhead, a Coloradan who was in the room for the ’07 negotiations, the current cloistered seven-state process is very different from what happened leading up to the ’07 agreement. In 2007, Lochhead explained, the states weren’t the decision maker, the federal government was the decision maker, playing a much more active role as facilitator compared to the current process, which has deferred to the states to come up with a deal.

This is not going well. At least I think it’s not going well. Who knows? Lochhead likened it to the selection of a pope, as we all await the puff of smoke. “The current process seems to me to be like the conclave.”

In my gossip network, I’ve heard good things about the current role being played by Scott Cameron, the Trump Administration’s point person on this stuff. We will hear from him tomorrow. I look forward to that.

Other stuff from the morning sessions

Weirdly, after driving all the way to Colorado for the meeting, I spent the morning in my hotel room on Zoom – a bit under the weather, not feeling up to the social battery drain of all those people, saving energy for tomorrow when I’m moderating the closing panel. But what I lost in social capital construction and maintenance, I made up for in being able to focus on the talks. Among them.

Brad Udall, our modern-day E.C. LaRue, was pretty frank about the climate change trajectory, arguing that we need to prepare for a 10 million acre foot river. For those not steeped in the numbers, that’s not very much water. The current climate trajectory, Brad said, is “beyond awful.”

Gov. Stephen Roe Lewis from the Gila River Indian Community argued that enduring solutions to the Colorado River’s problems will require federal financial help.

A couple of useful nuggets from my Bill Hasencamp of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. One: Bill talked about a really interesting analysis his team has done of the Intentionally Created Surplus Program, which concludes that there is a lot more water in the reservoirs right now, including in Lake Powell, than would otherwise be the case. They’ve briefed me on their analysis and shared the report with me, I just haven’t had the time to write about it yet, it’s super interesting.

Bill also talked about the weird state of the current state negotiations. One on one, people say they’re interested in compromise, in finding an agreement. In the negotiating room, they stick to hard line positions. This circles back nicely to Lochhead’s point that last time around, this was a federal process, not a state-run process.

Anne Castle made an incredibly important point about the challenges face by the state’s negotiators. They are sent into the room to advocate for their state’s water supplies. They need permission from their constituents to compromise, to be able and willing to give up some water in order in the interests of the good of the basin.

That’s on all of us.

#ColoradoRiver Basin Reservoir Storage: where do we stand? — Jack Schmidt and John Fleck (InkStain.net) #COriver #aridification

Colorado River Basin reservoir storage. Credit: InkStain.net

Click the link to read the article on the InkStain.net website (Jack Schmidt and John Fleck):

June 1, 2025

We now begin June, when the Colorado River’s two largest reservoirs, Lake Mead and Lake Powell, should be swelling with melting snow for use later this year and beyond, but that is not happening. Although Lake Powell is our reservoir and Lake Mead is theirs (or vice versa), the two reservoirs are effectively one very large facility located downstream from Upper Basin consumptive users and upstream from Lower Basin users. At least 60% of the total storage in 46 reservoirs tracked by Reclamation is in Lake Powell and Lake Mead. The total contents of the two reservoirs have been steadily declining since early July 2024 and continued to decline through at least 31 May 2025. Never in the past 15 years has the decline in total storage of Powell and Mead extended so late into spring. Current reservoir storage data are showing us, in real time, an ominous pattern familiar from past dry years: upstream use of water before it has a chance to get to Lake Powell combined with releases from Lake Mead to users further downstream is outpacing the melting snowpack’s ability to replenish the two reservoirs.

While the normal tools we use for measuring and managing use of Colorado River water – the Consumptive Uses and Losses Reports and the Lower Basin decree accounting reports – lag by weeks or even years, reservoir storage, which is the net difference between stream flow into reservoirs and what is released downstream or is lost to evaporation, provides the closest thing we have to an accurate, real-time measure of the Colorado River basin’s water budget. Right now, we are not doing well.

The duration of time this year during which total storage in Lake Powell and Lake Mead has declined is unprecedented in the past 15 years. In a typical year, the steady decrease in the combined contents of Powell and Mead that begins the preceding summer ends in early May when Rocky Mountain snowmelt becomes significant. However, inflows to Lake Powell this year have yet to exceed releases from Lake Mead , and the total contents continue to decline, suggesting that this year’s recovery in storage will be minimal.

Data from other years also suggests that reservoir recovery this year will be relatively small. This year, total unregulated inflow to Lake Powell is predicted to be 55% of normal. Based on past trends, net increase in total reservoir storage of the 46 reservoirs tracked by Reclamation will be ~1.2 million acre feet (af). By July, we are likely to resume draw down the basin’s reservoirs until the 2026 snowmelt season begins.

Presently, storage in the watershed’s reservoirs is comparable to conditions in late summer and fall 2021 when water managers expressed significant concern. The very wet conditions of 2023 averted a major crisis, but the system remains depleted. In 2024, total basin reservoir storage climbed by 2.5 million af, but subsequent drawdown of those reservoirs was 3.6 million af during the following 10 months. Although the net difference between reservoir gain and subsequent drawdown of 1.1 million af might be considered “balanced” in the context of the last 15 years, there is no question that we have begun to mine the bounty of 2023, and we are likely to continue to do so until at least spring 2026 unless we greatly reduce consumptive uses.

For too long, we have hoped that big wet years will occur with sufficient frequency to avert true crisis, but there have been too few of those wet years during the 21st century. Only three of the last 15 years have been sufficiently wet to result in a significant increase in reservoir storage given the magnitude of the basin’s consumptive uses. We can’t continue with a water management policy that hopes for another wet year. The basin’s water managers have no choice but to further reduce consumptive uses to sustainably manage the dwindling water supply.

In response to a previously posted mini-white paper on reservoir storage, a supportive friend commented, “Nobody cares.” Another friend said, “I don’t see how we can get agreement about recovering storage. Let’s hope for more wet years.” We should care, and we need to try harder.

These mini-white papers seek to demonstrate that reservoir storage data, analyzed in aggregate, provide timely and accurate data relevant to understanding the reliability and security of the Colorado River’s water supply. These data are more precise, accurate, and timely than estimates of natural runoff, reservoir inflow, consumptive uses, or evaporation. Reservoir storage data provided by Reclamation are a significant contribution to transparency in water management. However, these data are under-utilized and under-analyzed and are typically reported without long-term context. We can do better.

These data can be used to develop an excellent correlation between April-July unregulated inflow to Lake Powell, forecast by the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center, and anticipated increase in basin-wide storage. Such an analysis strongly indicates that the 2025 snowmelt runoff will yield only a small increase in basin storage and necessitate greater reductions in consumptive use so as to better position the basin’s water users should next year also be dry.

Click here for our full report.

“The time for action is now”: Pressure mounts for #ColoradoRiver operating deal — Shannon Mullane (Fresh Water News) #COriver #aridification #GWCWTI2025

In May 2022, a couple paused at once had been the bottom of the boat put-in ramp in Antelope Canyon to lok down on the receding waters of Lake Powell. The reservoir at that point was 22% full. Photo/Allen Best

Click the link to read the article on the Water Education Colorado website (Shannon Mullane):

June 11, 2025

Almost 300 water wonks converged on Boulder Thursday [June 3, 2025] for two days of sobering conversations about the river’s future punctuated by frustration, pleas for creative solutions and references to everything from the musician Lizzo to the kids movie “Frozen.”

The Colorado River Basin is in dire straits: The water supply for 40 million people has been dwindling, and climatologists say the climate future is bleak. State officials have spent months mired in thorny negotiations over things like how to split painful water cuts in the driest conditions — with scant progress to report publicly. The lack of progress and insight into the talks had some conference-goers feeling frustrated. Concerned. Uncertain.

High-ranking federal officials joined the Boulder event to reassert the federal government’s frequent role in talks over the Colorado River’s future: The parent ready to stop the car if the kids can’t stop fighting.

In the event that the states can’t agree on how to manage the river’s reservoirs and water supply in a timely fashion, Department of Interior Secretary Doug Burgum is ready to wield his federal authority over reservoirs, water contracts and more in the basin.

“He’s not looking forward to that, but in the absence of a seven-state agreement, he will do it,” Scott Cameron, the Department of the Interior’s acting assistant secretary for water and science, said Friday at the 45th annual Conference on the Colorado River at the University of Colorado’s Getches-Wilkinson Center.

The basin’s task is to submit a joint management proposal to the federal government for analysis. For months, however, they’ve been stuck working on separate ideas for how to manage the river.

Upper Basin states — Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming — are on one side, and Lower Basin states — Arizona, California and Nevada — on the other. The 30 tribal nations in the basin are advocating for their individual needs, as is Mexico.

Notably, the top state negotiators, except California’s, skipped the Boulder conference this year, unlike in the past.

The Interior Department will analyze a joint basin proposal as part of a larger process to select draft alternatives and then settle on a final plan.

The final plan could determine everything from how key reservoirs store and release water to who takes cuts in dry years and how environments, like the Grand Canyon, will be impacted for years to come. It will impact water supplies for cities, like Denver, Phoenix and Los Angeles, ecosystems, a multibillion-dollar agricultural industry, hydroelectric power and more.

“The time for action is now,” Cameron told the gathering in a speech. “We do not have a lot of time to waste, people.”

Mounting challenges and a bleak climate future

The Bureau of Reclamation plans to release a draft outlining management options by the end of 2025 with a final plan in place by early summer 2026, Cameron said.

But the negotiating challenges are significant. State officials face the political problem of bringing home a deal that includes water cuts. Policymakers distrust each other. Anxious water users are nixing ideas before they have time to grow into policy solutions.

L. to R. Chris Winter, Colby Pelligrino, Chuck Cullom June 4, 2025 during the “Turning Hindsight into Foresight: The Colorado River at a Crossroads” the annual Getches Wilikinson Center/Water & Tribes Initiative shindig in Boulder.

We have to let people develop their ideas, said Colby Pellegrino with the Southern Nevada Water Authority and part of the Nevada negotiating team.

“We’ve done a really crappy job of that. Everyone in this room,” she said. “We need to do more to support the compromise.”

The basin states are already running behind schedule: In March, Upper Basin officials said the basin states had until May to submit their joint management proposal for federal analysis. But May passed, and nothing happened.

It’s like watching the Catholic Church’s secluded conclave to select the next pope, Jim Lochhead, former CEO of Denver Water and state negotiator, said.

“The smoke is all black right now,” he said. “I’m not hearing of any major breakthroughs.”

That’s not for lack of effort: The states are meeting twice a month, and they’re at the negotiating table together.

“We know that we get the best solutions when the states work together,” Colorado’s top negotiator Becky Mitchell said in a prepared statement. (She wasn’t at the conference.) “I am focused on building a broad consensus to address the risks facing the Basin States.”

One of those risks is a changing climate: The basin, along with the rest of the planet, is facing a “beyond awful” climate future, said Brad Udall, senior research scientist at Colorado State University.

The world is on track to warm by 9 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100, and continue warming from there. It’s a future with even less water to share among the U.S., Mexico and 30 tribal nations — and an outcome that, frankly, terrifies scientists, Udall said.

“That’s a world unlike anything we currently know, and it’s going to challenge us all on every front,” Udall told the gathering.

Searching for a unicorn

While some conference-goers were frustrated, speakers took the opportunity to pull lessons from past interstate negotiations and share their ideas for how to break the deadlock.

Tribal leaders called for continued and increased tribal involvement in the Colorado River talks.

“Honestly, I think if our state representatives are going to sit silent, then we have 30 tribal nations that are ready to take over and make a decision and save our river,” said Lorelei Cloud, a member of the Southern Ute Indian Tribe bordered by Colorado and chair of the Colorado Water Conservation Board. “We’ve been doing it since time immemorial.”

Some suggested solutions, like bringing in an external facilitator. Former negotiator and federal official Mike Connor said the states need to seize every olive branch and set aside personal agendas or political legacies. (This is where speakers turned to the “Frozen” mantra: “Let it go.”)

Jennifer Pitt of the National Audubon Society said building personal connections has been the key to progress in the past. Many people pushed for states to find creative solutions, like desalting seawater — a very expensive solution with a relatively small benefit (the equivalent of Lizzo’s tiny, Valentino purse, one water expert said).

“People are trying to turn this thing upside down and sideways to find a unicorn,” Chuck Cullom, executive director of the Upper Colorado River Commission, said.

Concerns abounded. Lochhead said the basin had a once-in-a-generation influx of federal funding — and blew it. Reclamation’s staff has been cut, something that Cameron said he was working to address. With shrinking water supplies, the basin’s communities are feeling the impacts of dry conditions more immediately than in the past.

Western Slope water leader Andy Mueller pushed for more information and faster action to help Colorado communities have more time to adapt and come up with water conservation plans.

“I think failure of our negotiators would be to fail to recognize that our hydrology could be just as bad as Brad Udall is predicting, or worse,” Mueller said.

More by Shannon Mullane

Why experts say this year’s spring runoff isn’t boosting #LakePowell — The Salt Lake Tribune #ColoradoRiver #COriver #aridification

Click the link to read the article on The Salt Lake Tribune website (Anastasia Hufham). Here’s an excerpt:

June 5, 2025

In May, hydrologists forecasted that spring runoff into Lake Powell would be the lowest in years. A month later, the projections have only gotten worse. The Colorado Basin River Forecast Center reported on June 1 that the amount of water expected to flow into Lake Powell between April and July this year will be 45% of average. “Average,” in forecasting, refers to the average runoff between 1991 and 2020. The June forecast follows a consistent decline since the start of winter. Hydrologists said in December that Lake Powell’s runoff would be 92% of average. In January, the forecast dropped to 81%, then to 67% in February. The prediction pushed up to 70% in March, but fell to 55% in May, before dropping to 45% in June.

Jack Schmidt, a watershed sciences professor at Utah State University and director of the Center for Colorado River Studies, and John Fleck, a water professor at the University of New Mexico, released a study about the state of the Colorado River’s largest reservoirs on June 1. They wrote that instead of increasing with spring runoff flows, the amount of water in Lake Powell and Lake Mead has decreased through the end of May.

“Never in the past 15 years has the decline in total storage of Powell and Mead extended so late into spring,” the study reads.

That decline is the result of chronic overuse, Schmidt and Fleck write, which is “outpacing the melting snowpack’s ability to replenish the two reservoirs.”

A deal in sight? #ColoradoRiver talks are moving again, officials say — AZCentral.com #COriver #aridification #GWCWTI2025

Colorado River “Beginnings”. Photo: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism

Click the link to read the article on the AZCentral.com website (Austin Corona). Here’s an excerpt:

June 7, 2025

Key Points (AI assisted summary)

After months of little progress and public battles, negotiators from the seven Colorado River states may have regained their footing toward a shortage-sharing agreement.

Officials say the Trump administration has engaged in the work to complete an agreement, spurring the states to resume talks. Without a deal, the federal government would impose its own plan.

An official said a new agreement could require changes in the bedrock laws that govern the river, suggesting that even the “Law of the River,” a 100-year old management framework, could face scrutiny.

Metaphors about divorce and grief defined an emotional presentation about the Colorado River in Boulder, Colorado, on June 6. Those metaphors, however, did not represent strife or disaster in stalled water negotiations, but apparent progress and the willingness to let go of past ideas and move toward compromise.

“We’ve heard about the stages of grief … about denial and anger and the need to be at bargaining,” said Chuck Cullom, executive director of the Upper Colorado River Commission. “Well, I believe the basin states are there.”

Officials involved in tense negotiations over how to manage shortages on the Colorado River suggested that months of harsh talk and stalemates have ended and negotiators are exploring new options…Federal officials indicated that even parts of the “Law of the River,” a 100-year-old legal framework that governs Colorado River allocations, could change as a result of the negotiations.

“We’re trying to pivot to something else and be creative, and we have good engagement on that right now,” said Colby Pellegrino, deputy general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority…While most of the negotiators from the seven Colorado River basin states did not attend the conference at the University of Colorado in Boulder, the speakers who did attend were cautiously optimistic about their chances at making a deal.

With #ColoradoRiver negotiators in a ‘conclave,’ other experts are on the outside looking in — Alex Hager (KUNC.org) #COriver #aridification #GWCWTI2025

Bill Hasencamp with the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California speaks at the University of Colorado, Boulder on June 5, 2025. More than 300 Colorado River experts attended, but the region’s top water policymakers skipped the event. Alex Hager/KUNC

Click the link to read the article on the KUNC website (Alex Hager):

June 6, 2025

This story is part of ongoing coverage of the Colorado River, produced by KUNC in Colorado and supported by the Walton Family Foundation. KUNC is solely responsible for its editorial coverage.

Closed-door negotiations about the future of the Colorado River are at a standstill. The news of the day is that there’s barely any news. So, when more than 300 water experts got together for an annual conference this week, they had little to do besides wring their hands, listen for crumbs of news, and talk about how they would do things differently if they were on the inside of those negotiations.

“The current process to me kind of feels like the conclave,” said Jim Lochhead, who formerly served as Colorado’s top water negotiator.

Top policymakers caused a stir when they decided to skip the meeting at the University of Colorado, Boulder, withdrawing further into the shadows as tense talks about sharing water appear to be making little progress. The people excluded from those meetings — scientists, academics, tribal leaders, environmental advocates and others with a stake in the river — have been left waiting like the masses gathered in St. Peter’s Square.

“We’re waiting for the black smoke or the white smoke to come out of the seven-state negotiating room,” said Lochhead, who once served as CEO of Denver Water and now works as an independent consultant.

On the other side of this Colorado River “conclave,” seven state-appointed negotiators are trying to come up with a new set of rules for sharing water after 2026. They’re under pressure to cut back on demand for water because the river’s supply is shrinking due to climate change. Until they emerge with a new set of rules, farmers, cities and everyone else will be wondering if they will feel the sting of those cuts.

Across the Colorado River basin, those who depend on the river’s water are making preparations however they can. Cities are spending big on technology that will help stretch out their water supplies if they’re given less in the future. Tribes are trying to get a more formal role in river negotiations, so future water-sharing policies don’t leave them behind like so many in the past.

Efforts like those have been underway for years now. But in Boulder, as top state negotiators keep their heels firmly planted in incompatible policy positions and an unpredictable federal government has yet to appoint a top official to oversee Colorado River matters, everyone else was left to marinate in the anxiety that will linger until a new set of rules is formed.

Looking to the past

With little information about the future, the talks in Boulder mainly focused on lessons from history.

Some of those lessons were relatively recent. For example, Lochhead pointed to talks ahead of a 2007 plan that saw more than seven people in the negotiating room, including federal government representatives who were able to push the states towards consensus. He said today’s negotiations would benefit from a similar approach.

Other lessons were more than a century old. Tribal leaders advocated for the presence of Indigenous interests in today’s talks. Were they included in previous discussions, said Lorelei Cloud, things might be different today.

September 21, 1923, 9:00 a.m. — Colorado River at Lees Ferry. From right bank on line with Klohr’s house and gage house. Old “Dugway” or inclined gage shows to left of gage house. Gage height 11.05′, discharge 27,000 cfs. Lens 16, time =1/25, camera supported. Photo by G.C. Stevens of the USGS. The Colorado River flows past a measuring device at Lee’s Ferry in Arizona on Sept. 21, 1923. Speakers at a recent conference on the Colorado River drew lessons from history to inform the next chapter of water management in the region.. Source: 1921-1937 Surface Water Records File, Colorado R. @ Lees Ferry, Laguna Niguel Federal Records Center, Accession No. 57-78-0006, Box 2 of 2 , Location No. MB053635.

“The past century has really shown that the exclusion of tribal voices has really led to this crisis that we’re dealing with now in the basin,” said Cloud, a member of the Southern Ute Tribe and the recently appointed chair of the Colorado Water Conservation Board. “If we had just honored tribal sovereignty from years back, even from the beginning, we probably would have had serious offers that provided solutions to what we’re dealing with now. We wouldn’t be sitting here talking about hindsight to foresight.”

Patty Limerick, a historian and author whose work focuses on the American West, also brought lessons from more than a century ago when she told the story of a man named E.C. LaRue.

LaRue was a federal engineer who studied the river in the early 1920s. He urged his higher-ups to be conservative in their estimates about the amount of water in the Colorado River. They largely ignored LaRue, instead signing legal agreements that promised more water than the river, in most years, is able to provide.

If policymakers had listened to LaRue more than a hundred years ago, some say, those who rely on the Colorado River today would not be in such a crisis.

Limerick finished describing LaRue’s tale and posed a question to the room.

“Is there a latter-day counterpart to E.C. LaRue to whom we should be paying attention?” she asked. “Is that person among us?”

Another speaker suggested that counterpart might be climate scientist Brad Udall. When he spoke shortly thereafter, his outlook was grim.

‘Beyond awful’ forecasts

Udall and other scientists have provided a rare, uncomfortable dose of certainty to Colorado River talks: The planet is getting warmer, the Colorado River is losing water, and cutbacks to water demand are unavoidably necessary.

He told the audience to “hold on to [their] seats” before describing the climate forecast as “beyond awful.”

While his predictions are rarely rosy, Udall struck a more pessimistic tone than previous years, calling out fossil fuel companies and an “anti-knowledge president and his vile enablers” for attacking science and efforts to gird the nation against the harms of climate change, including water shortages.

“Not only are we in a really deep climate hole,” he said, “We’re continuing to dig and absolutely the last thing we need is the federal government undercutting our efforts to meet the water supply challenges in this basin.”

What the feds said

Those in attendance looking for crumbs of information about negotiations from state leaders were left empty-handed. But one federal representative, perhaps surprisingly, dropped a few tiny ones.

The federal government has stayed relatively tight-lipped on Colorado River matters since Donald Trump returned to the White House. In the administration’s early days, it paused funding for water conservation and infrastructure projects. It has yet to appoint a new commissioner for the Bureau of Reclamation, the agency which manages dams and reservoirs across the West.

Scott Cameron, the Interior Department’s acting Assistant Secretary for Water and Science, speaks at a conference in Boulder, Colorado on June 6, 2025. He said federal officials are working closely with state negotiators to shape the next chapter of Colorado River management. Alex Hager/KUNC

With that role unfilled, the administration’s highest-ranking official focused on Colorado River matters is Scott Cameron, a longtime federal official who currently serves as the Department of the Interior’s acting Assistant Secretary for Water and Science.

Cameron said he’s been meeting with state negotiators roughly “every other week for the last eight weeks” after his boss, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, said he wanted the department’s leadership to be “personally, intensely, and constantly” involved in discussions with the seven states. Cameron did, however, say he did not believe the states needed an external moderator to help break their deadlock.

“My impression is they really want a deal, they really want to find a path forward to working together, and I’m convinced that they’re all sincere in that regard,” he said.

Cameron also said he was “constantly” asking Reclamation’s senior leadership to bolster the agency’s staff on Colorado River matters as a way to “mitigate any unintended consequences of national level initiatives to reduce overall federal spending.”

Federal judge permits completion of #Denver Water dam work, citing safety concerns: Senior Judge Christine Arguello backed off of her prior rhetoric and acknowledged safety reasons for permitting the dam’s construction to proceed — #Colorado Politics

Workers from Denver Water and contractor Kiewit Barnard stand in front of Gross Dam in May 2024 to mark the start of the dam raise process. Photo credit: Denver Water.

Click the link to read the article on the Colorado Politics website (Michael Karik). Here’s an excerpt:

Although she stood by her prior determination that the project permit was unlawful, a federal judge last week decided construction on a major Denver Water infrastructure project should continue for safety reasons…Earlier this spring, U.S. District Court Senior Judge Christine M. Arguello found that, as a result of federal law violations, the expansion of Gross Reservoir and Dam should cease permanently and any further construction on the ongoing project would stop temporarily. The pause on construction, Arguello explained, would give her time to hear from engineers and determine what work would need to occur to make the dam safe…

However, on May 29, Arguello retreated from her prior bellicose tone.

“There is a risk of environmental injury and loss of human life if dam construction is halted for another two years while Denver Water re-designs the structure of the dam,” she wrote in her latest order. “Furthermore, the evidence shows that enjoining dam construction would harm Denver Water and the general public by requiring Denver Water to lay off much of its specialized workforce (which also harms those workers), as well as interfere with Denver Water’s contracts with contractors supplying materials and labor for the Project, which in turn, would significantly increase the costs.”

“Turning hindsight into foresight: The #ColoradoRiver at a crossroads — Getches Wilkinson Center and the Water and Tribes Initiative Day 2 #COriver #aridification

L. to R. Chris Winter, Colby Pelligrino, Chuck Cullom.

I was at the Getches-Wilkinson Center & Water and Tribes Initiative shindig this week live-posting on BlueSky (Click the “Latest” tab). The question of whether the negotiators from the seven states were being candid about their proceedings came up. Colby Pelligrino described her frustration with folks jumping all over every proposal as unfair or damaging to their rights. They can’t make any progress towards building a solution if every proposal is prevented from going forward. Chuck Cullom let everyone know that the data the negotiators are working with is available.

Also, Eric Kuhn, maintained that since the Colorado River Compact was written for a river that doesn’t exist any longer parts need to be reworked. He emphasized living with the river we have.

#Arizona Department of Water Resources Director, Tom Buschatzke, Briefs University of Arizona Water Resources Research Center Conference on #ColoradoRiver Negotiations #COriver #aridification

Click the link to read the article on the AWDR website:

June 5, 2025

In his much-anticipated keynote speech at the conclusion of this year’s Water Resources Research Center’s Annual Conference at the University of Arizona, ADWR Director Tom Buschatzke laid out the vast complexities of managing the Colorado River system.

With a deep sigh, he acknowledged that managing the vital river system “is a huge burden” for those mere mortals charged with that task.

Atlas bearing the weight of the current Post-2026 negotiations. Credit: ADWR

The Director included in his presentation to the conference audience an image he often uses when describing the on-going negotiations over new guidelines for river management: a depiction of the mythical Greek god Atlas holding up the world.

Buschatzke told the WRRC attendees that “one thing that Atlas had going for him that we don’t have is that Atlas was a god, and we are not gods, so it is a huge burden for us to try to deal with this river.”

Divided into Upper and Lower Basins, comprised of seven U.S. states, the Colorado River system is operated by the Bureau of Reclamation under the terms of agreements that are scheduled to run out at the end of 2026. For well over a year, representatives of those seven states have been locked into often-intense negotiations over what the new operating guidelines should look like. Director Buschatzke is Arizona’s representative to those negotiations.

The Director described Lower Basin conservation efforts in recent years. Among those efforts, the Lower Basin and the Republic of Mexico having combined to reduce consumptive use of river water by 20 percent since 2000. He also noted that Lower Basin states and Mexico have left enough water in Lake Mead, especially since 2014, to raise surface levels by more than 100 feet.

“Without this, we’d be in a heap of trouble,” he said. “We’ve shown that we can take proactive measures and we’ve been successful in doing it.”

That 100 feet of elevation in Lake Mead, he said, represents a little over 8 million acre-feet of conserved water.

“And Arizona itself has done 4.6 million acre-feet of that 8 million,” said Director Buschatzke.

The Director emphasized his primary message as it relates to the river-management negotiations: Everyone who benefits from the river needs to contribute to conservation efforts on the river. His Upper Basin counterparts have rejected proposals to share any Colorado River water conservation efforts, he noted.

In a luncheon address preceding the Director’s keynote, Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs observed the importance of cooperation and collaboration in reaching agreement.

“Collaboration is the foundation of water policy and management discussions in which Arizona is on the cutting edge,” Governor Hobbs told conference attendees.

Collaboration proved a key element in two of the most important water-rights settlements in recent Arizona history.

Under Governor Hobbs, the State in 2024 concluded two tribal water settlements including four Native American tribes – settlements that concluded Arizona’s involvement in water-rights negotiations that in some cases had lasted decades.

Created by Imgur user Fejetlenfej , a geographer and GIS analyst with a ‘lifelong passion for beautiful maps.’ It highlights the massive expanse of river basins across the country – in particular, those which feed the Mississippi River, in pink.

Also, Eric Kuhn, maintained that since the Colorado River Compact was written for a river that doesn’t exist any longer parts need to be reworked. He emphasized living with the river we have.

Chuck Cullom let everyone know that the data the negotiators are working with is available.

Gross Reservoir dam construction can resume, but federal judge says key environmental permits must be redone — Jerd Smith (Fresh Water News) #BoulderCreek #SouthPlatteRiver #ColoradoRiver #COriver #aridification

Roller-compacted concrete will be placed on top of the existing dam to raise it to a new height of 471 feet. A total of 118 new steps will make up the new dam. Image credit: Denver Water.

Click the link to read the article on the Water Education Colorado website (Jerd Smith):

June 5, 2025

Afederal judge will allow Denver Water to continue work on a $531 million project to raise a dam in Boulder County, dealing a blow to environmentalists who had hoped to stop the construction.

However, Senior U.S. District Judge Christine Arguello in her ruling May 29 prohibited Denver Water from filling Gross Reservoir until federal environmental permits can be rewritten by the Army Corps of Engineers.

“There is no evidence that there would be additional environmental injury resulting from completion of the dam construction. In fact, the opposite is true,” Arguello wrote. “There is a risk of environmental injury and loss of human life if dam construction is halted for another two years while Denver Water redesigns the structure of the dam and gets that re-design approved by” the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

FERC is involved because of the hydroelectric plant at the base of the dam.

Denver Water’s general counsel, Jessica Brody, said Friday her agency was pleased the judge recognized the safety issues in leaving the dam half-built.

“We’re relieved that the judge understood and appreciated the safety issues. We are relieved as well that she understood the impact to Denver Water’s customers,” Brody said.

The construction is expected to be completed this year, she said. In the meantime, she said, her agency will move forward in asking a federal appeals panel to rule on whether key environmental permits need to be rewritten, as Arguello has ordered.

If the permits are redone, it could mean that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will determine that the metro Denver water provider, which serves 1.5 million people, needs less water from the Fraser River to fill an expanded Gross Reservoir than the original permit authorized.

The judge initially shut the project down April 3, saying that the Army Corps and Denver Water had violated the federal Clean Water Act and the National Environmental Policy Act when the Gross Reservoir expansion permits were issued in 2017.

Save The Colorado, one of the plaintiffs in the case, said Friday morning that it will defend the portion of the Thursday ruling that could prevent or reduce additional diversions from the Fraser River, a key tributary in the Upper Colorado River system.

“Importantly,” said Save The Colorado’s Gary Wockner, “her original 86-page ruling still stands … so they can’t cut trees and they can’t put water in it until it is all resolved.”

Denver Water is helping ensure its future water security with the Gross Reservoir Expansion Project. When the project is complete, it will nearly triple the Boulder County reservoir’s capacity to 119,000 acre-feet. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM

How the case progressed

In her April 3 ruling, Arguello said Denver Water had acted recklessly in proceeding with construction in 2022, knowing that important legal questions were being challenged by Save The Colorado, the Sierra Club and others.

The massive construction project to raise the dam 131 feet and triple the capacity of Gross Reservoir has sparked fierce opposition in Boulder County and prompted several legal challenges from Save The Colorado, a group that advocates on behalf of rivers. Though its early lawsuits failed, the group in 2022 won an appeal that put the legal battle back in play. Despite months of settlement talks, no agreement was reached.

Denver Water first moved to raise Gross Dam more than 20 years ago when the water provider began designing the expansion and seeking the necessary federal and state permits. Denver Water has said raising the dam and increasing capacity of the reservoir is necessary to ensure it has enough water throughout its delivery system and to help with future water supplies as climate change continues to reduce streamflows.

After years of engineering, environmental studies and federal and state analyses, Denver received a permit from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and construction began in 2022.

Arguello’s April 3 ruling said, in part, that the Army Corps should have considered whether ongoing climate change and drought would leave the Colorado River and Western Slope waterways too depleted to safely allow transfer of Denver Water’s rights into a larger Gross Reservoir for Front Range water users.

At the same time, she ordered a permanent injunction prohibiting enlargement of the reservoir, including tree removal and water diversion, and impacts to wildlife.

Almost immediately, Denver Water filed for temporary relief from the order, saying, in part, that it would be unsafe to stop work as the incomplete concrete walls towered above Gross Reservoir.

Arguello granted that request, too, allowing Denver to continue work on the dam considered necessary for safety.

More by Jerd Smith

New study shows huge groundwater losses along #ColoradoRiver — Alex Hager (KUNC.com) #COriver #aridification

The sun shines on homes in Phoenix, Arizona on October 19, 2024. A significant portion of the Colorado River basin’s groundwater losses came from Arizona, but the new study says those losses might have been worse without state regulations. Experts are now calling for more regulations around groundwater pumping to stem further depletion. Alex Hager/KUNC

Click the link to read the article on the KUNC website (Alex Hager):

June 2, 2025

This story is part of ongoing coverage of water in the West, produced by KUNC in Colorado and supported by the Walton Family Foundation. KUNC is solely responsible for its editorial coverage.

The Colorado River basin has lost huge volumes of groundwater over the past two decades according to a new report from researchers at Arizona State University.Researchers used data from NASA satellites to map the rapidly-depleting resource.

The region, which includes seven Western states, has lost 27.8 million acre-feet of groundwater since 2003. That’s roughly the volume of Lake Mead, the nation’s largest reservoir.

The findings add a layer of complication for the already-stressed Colorado River. As demand for its water outpaces supply, more users may be turning to groundwater instead, which is often less regulated than water from above-ground rivers and streams.

The majority of water conservation work throughout the Colorado River basin has been focused on cutbacks to surface water use. Some river experts say the focus should be broader.

Brian Richter analyzes water policy and science as president of Sustainable Waters. He was not an author of the study but says its findings show the need for a “holistic perspective” on water management from the region’s leaders.

“It suggests that we have to become more aggressive and more urgent in our reduction of our overall consumption of water,” he said.

Creating a balance of water that’s taken from aquifers and water that replenishes aquifers is an important aspect of making sure water will be available when it’s needed. Image from “Getting down to facts: A Visual Guide to Water in the Pinal Active Management Area,” courtesy of Ashley Hullinger and the University of Arizona Water Resources Research Center

The study found that groundwater losses in the Colorado River basin were 2.4 times greater than the amount of water lost from the surfaces of Lake Powell, Lake Mead, and a number of other smaller reservoirs that store Colorado River water. The study highlights agriculture’s outsized water use in the Colorado River basin, and said that industry could suffer some of the greatest consequences if the region keeps sapping limited water supplies.

Most of the losses happened in the river’s Lower Basin states of Arizona, California and Nevada. The study says Arizona’s “Active Management Areas,” which the state set up to regulate groundwater withdrawal, may have helped slow depletion.

Kathleen Ferris, an architect of Arizona’s groundwater laws, said much more work is needed to protect groundwater.

“We are not on track,” said Ferris, who was not involved in the study. “We are way behind the eight ball, and I’m really sad that nothing seems to get done. We should have been thinking about this issue 25 years ago.”

Ferris is now a senior research fellow at Arizona State University’s Kyl Center for Water Policy.

As experts call for more robust groundwater management policies, Richter said this study presents a small silver lining: scientists are producing better data than ever before, giving policymakers a better sense of the region’s water problems.

“From a public policy standpoint, this is bad news,” he said. “This tells us that it’s worse than we thought, because now we understand what’s going on underground as well. From a science perspective, this kind of study is good news, because it says that we are now much more capable of accurately describing a water problem like what we’re experiencing in the Colorado River system.”

#ColoradoRiver states still have no unified long-term management plan and ‘are just about out of time,’ experts warn: Current operation guidelines for the Colorado River expire at end of 2026 — The #Denver Post #COriver #aridification

Photo credit: Jonathan P. Thompson/The Land Desk

Click the link to read the article on The Denver Post website (Elise Schmelzer). Here’s an excerpt:

May 31, 2025

Concerningly low amounts of water are flowing from Rocky Mountain snowpack this spring, a summer of drought looms across swaths of the West, and the negotiators tasked with devising a sustainable long-term water plan for the 40 million people who rely on the Colorado River are running out of time. Commissioners from the seven states in the Colorado River Basin — Colorado, New Mexico, Wyoming, Utah, Arizona, California and Nevada — must create a plan that will govern how those states divvy up the river’s water after the current guidelines expire at the end of 2026. As the river shrinks due to drought and climate change, the negotiators must decide who will take less water — and they need to do so in the next few months.

“The way the law of the river is set up, this is a decision that takes the seven states, and there are so many stakeholders and users who depend on that,” said Jennifer Pitt, Colorado River program director at the National Audubon Society. “We are really at their mercy and we are just about out of time.”

The negotiators, who met in Las Vegas this week, have repeatedly said they are committed to finding a consensus solution, but have not yet done so and have already blown past previous deadlines set by federal authorities more than a year ago. JB Hamby, California’s negotiator, said in an interview that the states have been meeting several times a month since December, when tensions between the states burst into public view during a conference. Both the frequency and the tenor of the meetings have since improved, he said.

Those who depend on the river are already dealing with uncertainty: this season’s mountain snowpack is expected to deliver about half the median amount of water to the system’s two major reservoirs, which are already two-thirds empty. Years of drought not balanced by decreases in water consumption have drained Lake Mead and Lake Powell, and aridification fueled by climate change is expected to continue to reduce the flow of the river that makes modern life possible across the Southwest. The Colorado River irrigates more than 5 million acres of farmland — including water supplies for much of the nation’s winter vegetables — and comprises large portions of many Western cities’ water portfolio, said Brad Udall, senior water and climate research scholar at Colorado State University’s Colorado Water Institute.

Sharing risk on the #ColoradoRiver: A clause in the 1922 compact remains a sticking point in tense negotiations between the upper and lower basins. Who bears the risk if the hydrology fails to deliver? — Allen Best (BigPivots.com) #COriver #aridification

The Blue River flows through Silverthorne on May 22 on its way to the Colorado River. Photo/Allen Best

Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):

May 29, 2025

Even-steven. That was the intent of delegates from the seven basin states in 1922 when they met near Santa Fe to forge a compact governing the Colorado River.

But what exactly did they agree upon? That has become a sticking point in 2025 as states have squared off about rules governing the river in the drought-afflicted and climate-changed 21st century. The negotiations between the states, according to many accounts, have been fraught with tensions. Becky Mitchell, Colorado’s lead negotiator, delivered a peek into that dispute at a forum on May 22 in Silverthorne along the headwaters of the river.

The Colorado River Compact was a quid pro quo. California, in particular, but also Arizona, was ready to see the highs and lows of the rivers smoothed out. They, as well as Nevada, wanted a giant reservoir in Boulder Canyon near the small town of Las Vegas, which then had a population of 2,300. Those Southwestern states couldn’t do it alone, though. They needed the federal government to build the dam later called Hoover. For that, they needed the support of Colorado and the three other upper-basin states.

Colorado, represented by Delph Carpenter, and the three other headwaters states realized that they had best reach a compromise, as they would more slowly develop the rivers. If the doctrine of prior appropriation that they had all adopted within their own states prevailed on the Colorado River, the water would be gone by the time they found need for it.

This was the foundation for Article III of the Colorado River Compact. It apportions 7.5 million acre-feet in perpetuity for the exclusive beneficial consumption by each of the two basins. On top of this 15 million acre-feet, they knew there would be water lost to evaporation, now calculated at 1.5 million acre-feet annually, plus some sort of delivery obligation to Mexico, which later turned out to be 1.5 million acre-feet.

In Santa Fe, delegates had assumed bounteous flows in the river, as had occurred in the years prior to their meeting. And so, embracing that short-term view of history, they believed the river would deliver 20 million acre-feet.

Source: Colorado River Water Conservation Board.

It has not done so routinely. Even when there was lots of water, during the 1990s and even before, as Eric Kuhn and John Fleck explained in their 2019 book, “Science be Dammed,” troubles ahead could be discerned. And by 1993, when the Central Arizona Project began hoisting water to Phoenix and Tucson, the river ceased absolutely to reach the ocean.

Then came the 21st century drought. Those framing the compact understood drought as a temporary affliction, not the multi-decade phenomenon now perplexing the states in the Colorado River Basin.

Nor did they contemplate a warming, drying climate called aridification. Similar to drought in effects, it is rooted in accumulating atmospheric gases. Unlike drought, it has little to no chance of breaking.

Now, faced with creating new rules governing the sharing of this river, delegates from the seven states are at odds in various ways, but perhaps none so much as in their interpretation of compact’s Article D. It says that the upper-division states “will not cause the flow of the river at Lee Ferry to be depleted below an aggregate of 75,000,000 acre-feet for any period of ten consecutive years.”

The lower division states have so far received 75 million acre-feet over every revolving 10-year period. The upper-basin states have not fully developed their apportionment, although Colorado has come close. In the last 25 years, the upper-basin states have been using 3.5 million to 4.5 million acre-feet. The lower-basin states that a decade ago were still using 10 million acre-feet have cut back their use to 7.5 million acre-feet.

**In May 2022, water levels at Glen Canyon Dam were dropping so rapidly as to make relevant discussions about potential loss of hydroelectricity**. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots

Lake Powell serves as a water bank for the upper basin states. The storage in 2022 had declined to 22%, although a good snow winter in 2022-23 restored levels somewhat. Today, the two reservoirs are at a combined 34% of full.

“That means 66% empty,” said Mitchell at the forum along the Blue River in Silverthorne at a “state of the river” forum organized by the Colorado River Water Conservation District.

Mitchell, an engineer by training, has a large on-stage presence. She’s spunky, not one to mince words, sometimes straying into the colloquial. This outspokenness is more evident when she speaks exclusively to a home-town crowd. Silverthorne certainly counted as one.

Shared risk is at the heart of the dispute. Colorado and other upper-basin states want the lower-basin states to accept that the river will not always satisfy all needs.

“How do we handle drought? We know how to do that in the upper basin, and most of the people in this room know that you get less,” said Mitchell, Colorado’s representative on the Upper Colorado River Commission. “That hasn’t been the case in the lower basin.”

The two basins differ in three fundamental ways. One is the pace of development. The lower basin developed quickly. The upper basin still has not used its full allocation. From the upper-basin perspective, that does not mean that the lower-basins states should expect something beyond a 50-50 split.

“The main thing that we got from the compact was the principle of equity and the ability to develop at our own pace,” said Mitchell. “We shouldn’t be punished because we didn’t develop to a certain number. The conversation now, she added, is “what does equity look like right now?”

Another difference is that the upper basin has thousands of individual users. Sure, there are a few big ones, like Denver Water and the other Front Range transmountain water diverters who collectively draw 400,000 to 450,000 acre-feet annually across the Continental Divide. The lower basin has just a handful of diverters, and the diversions are massive.

Also different — as alluded to by Mitchell — is that the lower basin has the big reservoirs lying upstream. The largest is Mead, with a capacity of almost 29 million acre-feet, followed closely by Powell at a little more than 25 million acre-feet. Mead was created expressly to meet needs of irrigators and cities in the desert southwest.

Powell was created essentially to ensure that the upper-basin states could meet their delivery obligations. Mitchell shared a telling statistic: More water has been released from Powell in 8 of the last 10 years than has arrived into it.

Upper-basin states must live within that hydrologic reality, said Mitchell. If it’s a particularly bad snow year in the upper basin, the farms and ranches with junior water rights and even the cities can get shorted. The lower basin states? Not a problem. They always get their water — at least so far. But the two big reservoirs have together lost 50 million acre-feet of stored water.

“We’re negotiating how to move forward in a way different place than we were negotiating 20 years ago,” said Mitchell.

Upper-basin states have managed to deliver the 75 million acre-feet across 10 years that the compact specifies, but what exactly is the obligation? That has long been a gray area.

At a forum two days before Mitchell spoke in Colorado, her counterpart in Arizona, Tom Buschatzke, reiterated at a conference in Tucson that they see the compact spelling out a clear obligation of upper-basin states to deliver 75 million acre-feet plus one-half of the water obligated to Mexico.

What if the water isn’t there? That’s the crux of this dispute as the upper and lower basin states negotiate in advance of a September deadline set by the Bureau of Reclamation.

Denver Water sends diversions from the Ffaser River and other headwater tributaries through the Moffat Tunnel at Winter Park. *Photo/Allen Best*

In theory, if the situation were dire enough, Colorado could stop all its post-1922 diversions to allow the water to flow downstream. But is that what those gathered in Santa Fe in the shortening days of November 1922 had in mind?

Will lawsuits toss this into the court system for resolution? That process might take decades and, if it ended up at the Supreme Court, it might not yield a nuanced outcome. Mitchell didn’t address that directly, although she did say everybody on the river wants to avoid litigation.

The situation described by Mitchell and other upper-basin proponents is perhaps analogous to a divorce settlement. The settlement may call for a 50-50 split of all earnings between the partners, but what if one becomes destitute and has no money to pool?

Upper-basin states do have reservoirs to help buffer them from short-term droughts. Altogether, however, they don’t come close to matching the capacity of Powell.

Again, from the perspective of upper-basin states, California and Nevada have a sense of entitlement. Not that the upper basin states are angelic, said Mitchell. It’s because they have no choice.

“I say we use three to four million acre-feet less than our apportionment. It varies. You know why? Because hydrology varies. And so we respond to hydrology. It’s all based on snowpack and it’s all gravity. Most of it is gravity dependent. We don’t have those two big reservoirs above us like the lower basin does. We don’t have those reservoirs to equal out the flows or allow us to overuse. We have to live with variable hydrology, and we take cuts every single year.”

Upper-basin states want a willingness in this settlement for agreement that focuses on the water supply, not the demand. “Common sense would tell you, maybe Mother Nature should drive how we operate the system.” That, she said, is the bedrock principle of the proposal from the upper division.

With plentiful snowfall, greater releases from Powell might be possible, said Mitchell, and in times of extreme duress, water from Flaming Gore and perhaps the Blue Mesa and Navajo too. She said there might be room for greater conservation measures in the upper basin states.

But there must be “real work happening down in the lower basin,” she said.

The audience in Silverthorne was comprised of many “rookies” to the water world. Some who might have attended, those more knowledgeable about the negotiations, would have wanted more: What are the deal breakers; what are the red lines, what are the issues they intend to kick down the road?

As the session in Silverthorne neared its end, time remained for one last question, and I asked it:

“I have to wonder about who we have in the White House right now, and how the President might alter the negotiations on the Colorado River. Any thoughts you might be willing to share?

“No!” she barked back without hesitation. “Allen, you know better than that.”

I laughed heartily, and so did many others.

Given what we’ve seen since January, though, I must continue to wonder.

Postscript: Before her remarks in Silverthorne, Becky Mitchell offered the opportunity for an in-depth interview with Big Pivots sometime later in June. I intend to take up that offer.

Delph Carpenter’s original map showing a reservoir at Glen Canyon and one at Black Canyon via Greg Hobbs

Southern Ute tribal member elected to chair the #Colorado Water Conservation Board in historic first — Shannon Mullane (Fresh Water News)

Lorelei Cloud, Vice-chair of the Southern Ute Tribal Council, and Southwest Colorado’s representative of the Colorado Water Conservation Board, which addresses most water issues in Colorado. Photo via Sibley’s Rivers

Click the link to read the article on the Water Education Colorado website (Shannon Mullane):

May 29, 2025

The Colorado Water Conservation Board, Colorado’s top water policy agency, has a new leader: Southern Ute tribal member Lorelei Cloud.

The 15-member board sets water policy within the state, funds water projects statewide and works on issues related to watershed protection, stream restoration, flood mitigation and drought planning. On May 21, board members elected Cloud to serve a one-year term as chair, making her the first Indigenous person to hold the position since the board was formed in 1937.

Cloud said her new role gives Indigenous people a long-sought seat at the table where water decisions are made.

“This is history,” Cloud said during the meeting. “What a moment. What a great moment for the state of Colorado.”

In 2023, Gov. Jared Polis appointed Cloud for a three-year term, making her the first known tribal member to hold a seat on the board. Cloud also served as the board’s vice chair for a year starting in May 2024.

Part of the Colorado Water Conservation Board’s purpose is to protect Colorado’s water interests in dealings with other states, like the water sharing agreements among seven states in the Colorado River Basin.

Cloud’s appointment to the board and elevation to board chair come at a time when tensions are high over water in the West.

She represents the San Miguel-Dolores-San Juan basin in southwestern Colorado, which is part of the larger Colorado River Basin, a key water source for about 40 million people across the West.

The Colorado River Basin’s water supply has been strained by over two decades of prolonged drought, rising temperatures and an unyielding demand for water.

The rules that govern how water is stored and released from the basin’s reservoirs are set to expire in 2026, leaving officials with the difficult task of negotiating a new set of management rules that will last for years to come.

The seven basin states have been at odds over how water should be managed in the basin’s driest possible conditions. Tribal officials have been working to ensure their priorities are considered in the high-stakes negotiations.

“This moment isn’t just about me or about the Indigenous people — it’s about all of the people in this room,” Cloud said, adding that the board is “making decisions that aren’t just about today. It’s about our future.”

Decision-makers in the Colorado River Basin have a history of excluding tribal nations that dates back to the 1922 Colorado River Compact.

The compact laid the foundation for how water is shared between the Upper Basin — Colorado, New Mexico, Wyoming and Utah — and the Lower Basin — Arizona, California and Nevada. The agreement includes one line about tribal water, and tribal nations were not involved in the negotiations.

Native America in the Colorado River Basin. Credit: USBR

Tribal water is a key issue in the basin: The 30 basin tribes have recognized rights to over 25% of the Colorado River’s average flow.

Cloud said her new role is “part of the reconciliation that we’ve all been waiting for as Indigenous people.”

“Having an Indigenous person in a position that makes water management decisions — it’s a seat at the table that we’ve been wanting for such a long time, and it’s finally here,” Cloud said. “It’s a joyous moment.”

Cloud has twice served as vice chairman of the Southern Ute Tribal Council. She has also held leadership positions in The Nature Conservancy Colorado, the Indigenous Women’s Leadership Network, the Ten Tribes Partnership, and the Water and Tribes Initiative.

As board chair, Cloud will run the meetings, ensure fair voting and represent the board as spokesperson when needed. She will continue to represent the southwestern basin, which reaches 10 counties and includes cities like Cortez, Durango and Telluride.

The Southern Ute Indian Tribe and the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe — the two federally recognized tribes with reservation land in Colorado — are also located in the southwestern basin.

“I’ve been lucky to witness Chair Cloud’s rise as a leader in the Colorado water community,” said Dan Gibbs, Department of Natural Resources executive director. “No one is more deserving or better positioned to chair the CWCB in this critical moment.”

More by Shannon Mullane

The May USBR #ColoradoRiver 24-Month Study Confirms What We Feared — Erick Kuhn and John Fleck (InkStain.net) #COriver #aridification

Click the link to read the article on the InkStain website (John Fleck):

May 26, 2025

The Bureau of Reclamation has released its May 24-Month Study. It confirms that 2025 will be another very dry year and the consequences will be significant. Under the minimum probable forecast, active storage in Lake Powell will fall to an elevation of 3530’ (5.8 maf), only about 9 feet higher than the February 2023 low of 3521’ (5.3maf). Just as alarming, under the “most probable” scenario, 2027 is projected to be another year for a 7.48 maf release from Glen Canyon Dam. This means that the ten-year flows at Lee Ferry are projected to fall well below the 82.0 maf tripwire – the point at which the basin states’ disagreement over interpreting the Colorado River Compact’s Lee Ferry delivery/non-depletion requirement could trigger interstate litigation.

The May 1st “most probable” forecast for unregulated April to July inflow to Lake Powell was 3.5 maf, down from an April 1 st forecast of 4.3 maf. Since May 1st. However, the runoff forecast has continued to decline, down another ~400kaf as we write this (May 26, 2025). No one should be surprised if we end up with an actual inflow closer to the May 1st “minimum probable” forecast of 2.6 maf.

Even with continued crop fallowing programs, storage in Lake Mead also continues to decline, dropping to an elevation of 1047’ at the end of Water Year 2026 under the “most Probable” forecast and to elevation 1041’ under the “minimum probable” forecast.

Lower Basin use continues to run well below long term averages, with this year’s consumptive use by Arizona, California, and Nevada forecast at 6.3maf, well below the legal paper water allocation of 7.5maf. Yet Mead keeps dropping. The latest analysis of total reservoir storage from our colleague and collaborator Jack Schmidt (here’s Jack and colleagues from March, with an update expected later this week) clearly shows that we are once again failing to rebuild reservoir storage. We’re draining the system.

Of course, the 2007 Interim Guidelines expire after 2026, so we do not know what the rules will be for Glen Canyon Dam releases in Water Year 2027. Lacking any better information, the Bureau of Reclamation has assumed a continuation of the 2007 Interim Guidelines rules. Another approach would be for the Bureau of Reclamation to assume that absent an agreement among the states, the Secretary of the Interior could return to an annual release of 8.23 maf from Glen Canyon as set by the 1970 Long-range Operating Criteria. And curiously, under the “minimum probable” scenario, assuming a continuation of the 2007 Interim Guidelines, the projected 2027 annual release at Glen Canyon Dam reverts to 8.23 maf. Under a quirk in the 2007 Interim Guidelines, if the December 31, 2026, projected elevation of Lake Powell is below 3525’ and the projected elevation of Lake Mead is below 1075,’ the release reverts to 8.23 maf. This was referred to as the “sacrifice Lake Powell to save Lake Mead” strategy (seriously!).

Unless the 2025-26 winter is very wet or the Basin States can find consensus, the choices facing the Basin are stark: sacrifice Lake Powell for Lake Mead and perhaps keep ten-year Lee Ferry flows above the tripwire (no guarantee) or reduce annual releases from Glen Canyon Dam to maintain a balanced but small amount of storage in both reservoirs, which risks pushing cumulative 10-year flows past Lee Ferry across the tripwire.

Dillon Reservoir is expected to fill around the Fourth of July this year and could potentially support up to 2 weeks of raft-able flows on the #BlueRiver — Summit Daily #ColoradoRiver #COriver #aridification

Grays and Torreys, Dillon Reservoir May 2017. Photo credit Greg Hobbs.

Click the link to read the article on the Summit Daily website (Ryan Spencer). Here’s an excerpt:

May 25, 2025

Both the Dillon Reservoir and the Green Mountain Reservoir are expected to reach capacity this summer, Colorado Division of Water Resources division engineer James Heath said at the State of the River in Silverthorne on Thursday, May 22…An about-normal snowpack in Summit County this winter means both reservoirs are expected to “fill and potentially spill,” Heath said. While the snowpack levels were close to normal, the runoff has been slightly below normal because the county went into last winter with dry soils, he said…

The snowpack in the Colorado River Headwaters Basin peaked April 7, about a week earlier than normal, Heath said. At 89% of the 30-year-median…The Blue River Basin [peaked] April 8, at 108% of the 30-year-median, Heath said…

.Dillon Reservoir should reach an elevation of 9,012 feet by June 18, allowing both the Dillon and Frisco marinas to be fully operational by that time. Outflows…should exceed 500 cubic feet per second — the level ideal for rafting the Blue River — around the third week in June and continue until around the Fourth of July weekend, he said.

Green Mountain Reservoir. Photo credit: Colorado Parks & Wildlife

Feds won’t flood the #GrandCanyon this spring. What that will mean for the #ColoradoRiver — AZCentral.com #COriver #aridification

Glen Canyon Dam during high flow experimental release about a decade ago. These occasional releases are just about the only time the river outlet works (where water is gushing out above) operate. Photo credit: Jonathan P. Thompson/The Land Desk

Click the link to read the article on the AZCentral webiste (Brandon Loomis). Here’s an excerpt:

May 23, 2025

Story Summary

Federal officials have confirmed that they will not flood the Grand Canyon this spring, citing ongoing work on Glen Canyon Dam and in the Colorado River downstream.

Colorado River advocates say failing to flood the Canyon will hurt efforts to restore beaches and preserve the environment below Glen Canyon Dam.

Some river advocates say the government’s decision may run afoul of the Grand Canyon Protection Act, which requires the feds to preserve ecological and recreational aspects of the Canyon.

Federal officials have rejected a plan to release floodwaters from Lake Powell to restore Grand Canyon beaches this spring, frustrating river advocates who question the government’s commitment to protecting the canyon’s environment…With repeated decisions not to open the floodgates even when the sand is available, some are questioning whether the Glen Canyon Dam Adaptive Management Program is preserving Grand Canyon’s ecology and recreation as required under the Grand Canyon Protection Act of 1992…

“We are failing,” said Ben Reeder, a Utah-based river guide who represents the Grand Canyon River Guides on a technical work group that considers management options for the Reclamation Bureau.

Reclamation officials said in April that they would recommend that new Interior Secretary Doug Burgum not authorize the flood because a National Park Service contractor was excavating in a slough downstream of the dam to disrupt its use as a spawning bed by non-native fish, including smallmouth bass. Work on relining the bypass tubes to protect their steel pipes also interfered…The floods cost perhaps $1 million or $2 million in lost hydroelectric production, according to Leslie James, who represents mostly rural and tribal power consumers in the program as executive director of the Colorado River Energy Distributors Association. Last year, when there was no major flood but the dam managers regularly pulsed cold water through the bypass tubes to keep the river inhospitable to bass spawning, the agency said the cost in lost power production was $19 million. The losses deplete a fund that pays for dam maintenance and environmental programs, James noted, and drawing more from that fund this year could cause delays in maintenance.

Front Range cities step up opposition to $99M #ColoradoRiver water rights purchase — (Shannon Mullane) #COriver #aridification

This historical photo shows the penstocks of the Shoshone power plant above the Colorado River. A coalition led by the Colorado River District is seeking to purchase the water rights associated with the plant. Credit: Library of Congress photo

Click the link to read the article on the Water Education Colorado website (Shannon Mullane):

May 22, 2025

Denver, Aurora, Colorado Springs and Northern Water voiced opposition Wednesday to the Western Slope’s proposal to spend $99 million to buy historic water rights on the Colorado River.

The Colorado River Water Conservation District has been working for years to buy the water rights tied to Shoshone Power Plant, a small, easy-to-miss hydropower plant off Interstate 70 east of Glenwood Springs. The highly coveted water rights are some of the largest and oldest on the Colorado River in Colorado.

The Front Range providers are concerned that any change to the water rights could impact water supplies for millions of people in cities, farmers, industrial users and more. The Front Range providers publicly voiced their concerns, some for the first time, at a meeting of the Colorado Water Conservation Board, a state water policy agency.

The proposed purchase taps into a decades-old water conflict in Colorado: Most of the state’s water flows west of the Continental Divide; most of the population lives to the east; and water users are left to battle over how to share it.

“If this proposal were to go forward as presented in the application, it could harm our ability to provide water for essential use during severe or prolonged drought. I think it’s important for the board to understand that,” Jessica Brody, an attorney for Denver Water, told the 15-member board Wednesday.

Denver Water, the oldest and largest water provider in Colorado, delivers water to 1.5 million residents in the Denver area.

The Colorado River District, which represents 15 Colorado counties west of the Continental Divide, wants to keep the status quo permanently to support river-dependent Western Slope economies without harming other water users, district officials said.

The overstressed and drought-plagued river is a vital water source for about 40 million people across the West and northern Mexico.

“That right is so important to keeping the Colorado River alive,” Andy Mueller, Colorado River District general manager, said during the meeting’s public comment period. “This is a right that will save this river from now into eternity … and that’s why this is so important.”

Over 70 people, nearly twice the usual audience, attended the four-hour Shoshone discussion Wednesday, which involved 561 pages of documents, over 20 speakers and a public comment period.

The Western Slope aims to make history

The water rights in question, owned by Public Service Company of Colorado, a subsidiary of Xcel, are some of the most powerful on the Colorado River in Colorado.

Using the rights, the utility can take water out of the river, send it through hydropower turbines, and spit it back into the river about 2.4 miles downstream.

One right is old, dating back to 1905, which means it can cut off water to younger — or junior — upstream water users to ensure it gets its share of the river in times of shortage. Some of those junior water rights are owned by Denver Water, Aurora, Colorado Springs Utilities and Northern Water.

The rights are also tied to numerous, carefully negotiated agreements that dictate how water flows across both western and eastern Colorado.

Bicycling the Colorado National Monument, Grand Valley in the distance via Colorado.com

Over time, Western Slope communities have come to rely on Shoshone’s rights to pull water to their area to benefit farmers, ranchers, river companies, communities and more.

The Colorado River District wants to buy the rights to ensure that westward flow of water will continue even if Xcel shuts down Shoshone (which the utility has said, repeatedly, it has no plans to do).

They’ve gathered millions of dollars from a broad coalition of communities, irrigators and other water users. The state of Colorado plans to give $20 million to help fund the effort.

The federal government might give $40 million, but that funding was tied up in President Donald Trump’s policy to cut spending from big Biden-era spending packages. It was unclear Thursday if the awarded funds will come through, the district said.

Supporters sent over 50 letters to the Colorado Water Conservation Board before Wednesday’s meeting.

“I wanted to just convey the excitement that the river district and our 30 partners have, here on the West Slope, to really do something that is available once in a generation,” Mueller said.

The Front Range water providers all said they, too, wanted to maintain those status quo flows. They just don’t want to see any changes to the timing, amount or location of where they get their supplies.

Under the district’s proposal, the state would be able to use Shoshone’s senior water rights to keep water in the Colorado River for ecosystem health when the power plant isn’t in use.

The Colorado Water Conservation Board is tasked with deciding whether it will accept the district’s proposal for an environmental use. The meeting Wednesday triggered a 120-day decision making process.

“Any change to the rights will have impacts both intended and unintended, and it is important for the board to understand those impacts to avoid harm to existing water users,” Brody said.

The water provider plans to contest the Colorado River District’s plan within that 120-day period.

How much water is at stake?

The Front Range providers voiced another concern: The River District’s proposal could be inflating Shoshone’s past water use.

Water rights come with upper limits on how much water can be used. It’s a key part of how water is managed in Colorado: Setting a limit ensures one person isn’t using too much water to the detriment of other users.

For those who have a stake in Shoshone’s water rights — which includes much of Colorado — it’s a number to fight over.

The River District did an initial historical analysis, which calculated that Shoshone used 844,644 acre-feet on average per year between 1975 and 2003. One acre-foot of water supplies two to three households for a year.

Denver Water said the analysis ignored the last 20 years of Shoshone operations. Colorado Springs, Northern Water and Aurora questioned the district’s math. Northern was the first provider to do so publicly in August.

“We think the instream flow is expanded from its original historic use by up to 36%,” said Alex Davis, Aurora Water’s assistant general manager of water supply and demand.

She requested the board do its own study of Shoshone’s historical water use instead of accepting the River District’s analysis — which would mean the state agency would side with one side of the state, the Western Slope, against the other, Davis said.

The River District emphasized that its analysis was preliminary. The final analysis will be decided during a multiyear water court process, which is the next step if the state decides to accept the instream flow application.

Water court can be contentious and costly, Davis said.

“This could be incredibly divisive if we have to battle it out in water court, and we don’t want to do that,” Davis said.

More by Shannon Mullane

Aspinall Unit Spring operations update

From email from Reclamation (Eric Knight):

May 21, 2025

The May 1st forecast for the April – July unregulated inflow volume to Blue Mesa Reservoir is 460,000 acre-feet. This is 72% of the 30 year average. Snowpack in the Upper Gunnison Basin peaked at 93% of normal. Blue Mesa Reservoir current content is 527,000 acre-feet which is 64% of full. Current elevation is 7483.4 ft. Maximum content at Blue Mesa Reservoir is 828,00 acre-feet at an elevation of 7519.4 ft.

Based on the May forecasts, the Black Canyon Water Right and Aspinall Unit ROD peak flow targets are listed below:

Black Canyon Water Right

The peak flow target is equal to 2,360 cfs for a duration of 24 hours.

The shoulder flow target is 300 cfs, for the period between May 1 and July 25.

Aspinall Unit Operations ROD

The year type is currently classified as Moderately Dry.

The peak flow target is 4,585 cfs for a duration of 1 day (based on a May 15 forecast of 430 Kaf)

There are no half bankfull duration or peak duration targets.

Pursuant to the Aspinall Unit Operations ROD, releases from the Aspinall Unit will be made in an attempt to match the peak flow of the North Fork of the Gunnison River to maximize the potential of meeting the desired peak at the Whitewater gage, while simultaneously meeting the Black Canyon Water Right peak flow amount. The latest forecast for flows on the North Fork of the Gunnison River shows a period of high and near peak flows beginning on May 29th.

Therefore ramp up for the spring peak operation will begin on Saturday, May 24th, with the intent of timing releases with this potential higher flow period on the North Fork of the Gunnison River. Releases from Crystal Dam will be ramped up according to the guidelines specified in the EIS, with 2 release changes per day, until Crystal begins to spill. The release schedule for Crystal Dam is:

Crystal Dam will be at full powerplant and bypass release on May 28th and Crystal Reservoir will likely begin spilling by the next day. The peak release from Crystal Dam should be reached on May 29th and the peak flow on the Gunnison River at Whitewater should be reached on May 30th.

The current projection for spring peak operations shows flows in the Gunnison River through the Black Canyon peaking around 3700 cfs in order to achieve the desired peak flow at Whitewater. Actual flows will be dependent on the downstream contribution of the North Fork of the Gunnison River and other tributaries. Lower tributary flows could lead to higher releases from the Aspinall Unit and vice versa. Once the peak target has been reached, details of the ramp down operation will be released.

Black Canyon July 2020. Photo credit: Cari Bischoff

Spring #snowpack: Slightly better than advertised, weak statewide figures obscure more nuanced scenario for Denver Water as we enter runoff season — Todd Hartman (News on Tap)

Click the link to read the article on the Denver Water website (Todd Hartman):

May 16, 2025

News headlines this spring offered a bleak picture of Colorado’s snowpack heading into the spring runoff season. But, as always with headlines, it is best to also read the story that follows.

Because the story for Denver Water isn’t quite so dour.

Snowpack woes hit Colorado’s southern half hard. For Denver Water, positioned farther north, the water supply looks better.

First, let’s do the numbers.

Denver Water had a weak showing in the South Platte River Basin, with peak snowpack hitting just 84% of normal and — most unhelpful of all — peaking on April 6, 19 days earlier than typical.

The news was far better in the Colorado River Basin (north of the South Platte River Basin), which accounts for the other half of Denver Water’s supply. There, peak snowpack clocked in at 109% on April 25, right on the mark for a typical peak date.

“Overall, not great, but not terrible either,” summed up Nathan Elder, water supply manager for the utility.

The best news for Denver Water: The utility is starting the runoff and reservoir-filling season with existing storage levels about 2% above average.

That’s a credit to its customers’ efforts to conserve water and translates into a good chance that Denver Water will be able to fill its storage reservoirs that help 1.5 million people get through the summer hot season.

But “fill” doesn’t mean “spill.” That is, there won’t be excess water to spill into rivers in what can make for dramatic visuals and provide an extra boost to river flows.

“We hope to fill our reservoirs right to the brim, but that’s where it stops,” Elder said.

Denver Water’s planners are concerned about a hot-and-dry trend taking hold in May, and emphasize the need for residents to adhere to the utility’s annual summer watering rules that allow irrigation only in the evening and morning hours (between 6 p.m. and 10 a.m.) and limit irrigation to no more than three days a week — preferably just one or two days when springtime temperatures are lower.

And watch the skies. When we do get a good rainstorm, turn your sprinkler dial to “off” for a few days.

The generally poor snowpack and early runoff in much of the state, including in the South Platte River Basin, also stokes concerns for a rough fire season, as 9News meteorologist Chris Bianchi pointed out in a May 13, 2025, story:

“This year’s snowpack levels resemble those recorded in 2018, 2012, 2002 and 1992. All of which were marked by intense wildfire activity. Three out of those four years saw large-scale fires, raising concerns that 2025 could follow a similar trajectory unless weather patterns shift dramatically.”

And, on a too-long-didn’t-read basis, here’s Bianchi’s tweet that summed up the story:

Denver Water’s watershed experts agree that conditions could increase wildfire risk.

“The risk of wildfire is relatively low when there is snow on the ground. When snowpack melts rapidly, vegetation can dry out quickly and become susceptible to wildfire ignitions,” said Madelene McDonald, a watershed scientist and wildfire specialist for Denver Water.

Though McDonald notes that experts anticipate “average” wildfire behavior in Colorado in 2025, that still means thousands of fires that could collectively affect more than 100,000 acres in the state.

“It’s important to stay vigilant and prepared to experience wildfire under any snowpack conditions or fire outlook scenarios,” she said.

An April pivot

The current outlook is a pivot from what had been looking like a normal year for snowpack as recently as April 1, Elder said.

“For Denver Water, April is typically a month where we build snow,” he said.

But that didn’t happen this year, and by mid-May the snowpack had shriveled to half its typical percentage.

The tepid spring in the South Platte River Basin also highlights the importance of Denver Water’s Gross Reservoir Expansion Project, which recently has been slowed in federal court. (Read Denver Water’s recent statement on a May 6 court hearing.)

That project will expand the reservoir and add roughly 80,000 acre-feet of water storage capacity in the utility’s north system, which gathers snowmelt from the Upper Colorado River Basin. That additional water storage will provide a buffer to protect the utility’s customers from the effects of years when the snowpack is weaker, like this year, in Denver Water’s separate and unconnected south system.

“Our system is robust but suffers from significant imbalance,” Elder said.

“We rely too heavily on our south system, on the South Platte, which accounts for 90% of our storage,” he said. “Increasing storage to the north will give Denver Water far more flexibility to handle these weaker snowpack years on the South Platte.”

And years marked by a weaker snowpack in the South Platte River Basin have become more common.

In four of the last five years, the South Platte snowpack above Denver Water’s collection system has peaked below normal. And in that fifth year — last year — it barely cleared the “normal” bar at 101%. All of which amplifies the need for the Gross Reservoir Expansion Project.

Raising Gross Dam, seen here on April 8, 2025, will nearly triple the water storage capacity of the reservoir behind it. The project has been in the permitting and review process for 23 years. Photo credit: Denver Water.

Now, as June approaches, water managers will turn their focus to runoff levels, temperatures and fire potential. And come summer, they will once again — as always — hope for a big dose of monsoonal moisture.

Those big rainstorms not only deliver a boost to rivers and reservoirs but prompt attentive customers to turn off their irrigation system and let their grass and plants drink up nature’s soaking bounty.

Remember, the less you pour, the more your water utility can store.

And it’s never a bad time to consider transforming your landscape, or even parts of it.

Denver Water has a new guide to help: the DIY Landscape Transformation Guide, and it includes ways to eradicate grass in the areas where you want to remodel your landscape with native plants and other changes.

Denver Water relies on a network of reservoirs to collect and store water. The large collection area provides flexibility for collecting water as some areas receive different amounts of precipitation throughout the year. Image credit: Denver Water.

#ColoradoRiver District to host ‘State of the River’ presentation in #Silverthorne: The event will cover several topics including updates on the #BlueRiver in Summit County and regional water conservation efforts — Summit Daily #COriver #aridification

Map of the Blue River drainage basin in Colorado, USA. Made using USGS data. By Shannon1 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=69327693

Click the link to read the article on the Summit Daily website. Here’s an excerpt:

May 15, 2025

The Colorado River District will hold one of its 11 “State of the River” events in Silverthorne on Thursday, May 22. The event, held in partnership with the Blue River Watershed Group, will be held at the Silverthorne Pavilion from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m., according to the Colorado River District’s website…

Presentations will cover topics including current river conditions and seasonal forecasts, updates on the Colorado River system, local water projects affecting the Blue River in Summit County, updates on the Shoshone River water rights efforts, conservation efforts in the region and updates on recent legislative efforts. Registration is required. To register for the “State of the River” event visit ColoradoRiverDistrict.org/state-of-the-river-meetings-2025

As time grows short for a #ColoradoRiver deal, President Trump is set to fill vacant water post — AZCentral.com #COriver #aridification

Click the link to read the article on the AZCentral.com website (Austin Corona). Here’s an excerpt:

May 15, 2025

Key Points

With no settlement yet on how to manage shortages on the Colorado River, the Trump administration is preparing to fill its last vacant Western water post, commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation.

The seven states who draw water from the Colorado have struggled for years to agree on a plan to deal with shortfalls. The divisions remain among the states on the upper river and lower river.

Arizona’s top water negotiator says the Trump administration seems more willing to talk about different approaches to shortage sharing, but issues about who should take the largest cuts remain

The Trump administration is preparing to announce its pick to head the Bureau of Reclamation, a crucial position in deciding the future of the Colorado River, a White House spokesperson told The Arizona Republic. The move would effectively complete the new federal team overseeing strained negotiations over one of Arizona’s largest water sources. The new commissioner will take charge amid tense negotiations among the seven states that use the Colorado River, which has strained under multi-decade drought and high water demand…

Experts worry that this year’s poor river flows could trigger lawsuits over foundational river-management laws as soon as 2027. States only have months to reach a deal, and negotiators have not shown signs of progress.

Tom Buschatzke, director of the state Department of Water Resources and Arizona’s Colorado River negotiator, has said the Trump administration is already more “engaged in a much more meaningful way” on the Colorado River than former President Joe Biden’s team and has responded to some of Arizona’s long-unanswered requests in the negotiating process. Trump officials could give Arizona and the other Lower Basin states of California and Nevada a new opportunity to convince federal regulators that those states should not have to take all the cuts on the river. Biden negotiators would not call for cuts in the Upper Basin, while Buschatzke said the new administration may be more open to finding a “collaborative” solution. Even so, Upper Basin states — Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico — have continued arguing that they cannot be forced to cut their water use if climate change and drought are the causes of low flows in the river, meaning any attempts to cut their use could lead to a lawsuit. A case could drag on for years, while water levels in the reservoirs continue to drop.

#ColoradoRiver bigwigs make ‘disturbing’ retreat from the public eye amid tense talks — Alex Hager (KUNC.org)

Six of the seven state representatives who will shape the next chapter of Colorado River rules speak on a panel at the University of Colorado, Boulder on Jun. 6, 2024. The same group is opting not to speak at this year’s conference. Alex Hager/KUNC

Click the link to read the article on the KUNC website (Alex Hager):

May 11, 2025

This story is part of ongoing coverage of the Colorado River, produced by KUNC in Colorado and supported by the Walton Family Foundation. KUNC is solely responsible for its editorial coverage.

As tense negotiations about the future of the Colorado River are stuck at a standstill, the people in charge are retreating further into the shadows.

A group of negotiators – one from each of the seven states that use Colorado River water – will not be speaking at a major water law conference in June. Those representatives have appeared together on a panel at the conference for the last few years, and rarely appear together in public otherwise.

“The unwillingness to answer the public’s questions suggests that negotiations aren’t going well,” said John Fleck, who teaches water policy at the University of New Mexico. “I think it misses an important obligation in democratic governance of a river that serves 40 million people.”

The event, the Getches-Wilkinson Conference at the University of Colorado, Boulder, is typically one of two times each year that the negotiators appear together in public. In recent iterations of the same conference, they all spoke on one panel. Occasionally, a state representative has fallen ill or sent a deputy in their stead.

They seemed starkly divided at the other annual appearance, too. In December, they opted to split into two separate panels at the Colorado River Water Users Association conference in Las Vegas.

Water policymakers from (left to right) Utah, New Mexico, Colorado and Wyoming speak on a panel at the Colorado River Water Users Association conference in Las Vegas on December 5, 2024. The two rival factions of states chose to appear on two separate panels then, and have opted to avoid speaking entirely in June. Alex Hager/KUNC

People with knowledge of the situation confirmed to KUNC that state leaders told conference organizers they did not want to speak publicly. There is currently no seven-state panel on the published conference agenda.

JB Hamby, California’s top water negotiator, said he would attend the conference but not speak, and he was “100%” sure the other top officials wouldn’t be speaking. Representatives from Arizona, Colorado and New Mexico confirmed their states’ Colorado River negotiators would not be speaking.

Unlike many government processes, Colorado River policymakers work in a space that does not involve a mandate for public access. Their meetings are often held behind closed doors, are not listed publicly and do not yield minutes or records that can be viewed by the public.

“You need to listen to and have spaces to discuss with the people who are going to be impacted by your decisions,” Fleck said. “That’s not happening now, and that’s really disturbing.”

Those water policymakers are stuck in a standoff about how to use less water from the shrinking Colorado River. Negotiators seem to agree with the broad concept that the farms, businesses and 40 million people of the Colorado River basin need to cut back on water use as the river gets smaller due to climate change. They don’t, however, agree on who should cut back.

Talks so far have largely stayed divided along a decades-old fault line. On one side is the Upper Basin – which consists of Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico. The other side, the Lower Basin, is made up of California, Arizona and Nevada.

The Lower Basin has volunteered relatively modest cuts in proposals for how to manage the river after the current rules expire in 2026. The Upper Basin has not volunteered any cuts, insisting that its states are already forced to use less water due to climate change and a longstanding legal requirement to send a fixed amount of water to those Lower Basin states.

“I am fully focused on the negotiations for post-2026 operations of Lake Powell and Lake Mead,” Becky Mitchell, Colorado’s top negotiator, wrote in an email to KUNC. “As the Getches-Wilkinson conference drew nearer, it was unclear where we would be in that process, and I wanted to be cognizant of the sensitivity of the work. Time is of the essence, and these critical negotiations have my full attention at this time.”

The states have dug their heels in on those positions for months now, and their willingness to talk about the status of their closed-door attempts to break the deadlock has only gone down over time.

Reporters’ requests to state water authorities that once yielded interviews with top policymakers are now often met with written statements that tend to be short on detail.

Glen Canyon Dam holds back the waters of Lake Powell near Page, Arizona on Sunday, Feb. 2, 2025. Lake Powell, has approached dangerously low levels in recent years as policymakers have struggled to come up with a long-term management plan for the water it stores. Photo credit: Spenser Heaps/Utah News Dispatch

“I have a lot of respect for the people who are doing these negotiations,” Fleck said. “They’re trying to solve really hard problems, and I respect the idea that they need some space to do that, but not showing up in public at all is granting them more space than I’m willing to grant them.”

Joanna Allhands, an opinion writer at the Arizona Republic who has written about the Colorado River’s “bankruptcy of leadership,” said more transparency from water policymakers “would be smart as a matter of self preservation.”

“Whatever the decision is made,” she said, “Whatever alternative gets chosen, if people feel like they’ve been left out, guess where we’re headed? We’re going to the Supreme Court.”

Colorado River negotiators have said that they want to avoid taking this issue to the Supreme Court, but have made little recent progress to steer talks away from that outcome.

The forecast for #LakePowell keeps getting worse: The lackluster #runoff prediction comes as over half of #Utah’s counties are suffering from #drought — The Salt Lake Tribune #ColoradoRiver #COriver #aridification

Click the link to read the article on The Salt Lake Tribune website (Anastasia Hufham). Here’s an excerpt:

May 9. 2025

This year’s predicted spring runoff into Lake Powell has decreased yet again as the impacts of a dry winter begin to show. Hydrologists at the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center said Wednesday that the amount of water flowing into Lake Powell between April and July this year is expected to be 55% of average. “Average,” in forecasting, refers to the average runoff between 1991 and 2020. That prediction follows a decline in forecasted flows since the start of winter…In terms of actual water, 55% of the average runoff translates to about 3.5 million acre-feet of water making it into Lake Powell…That’s lower than the runoff in 2022, which was a little over 3.7 million acre-feet, but better than 2021’s 1.85 million acre-feet. Spring runoff in 2023 and 2024 were well above what is forecasted this year. The snowpack above Lake Powell, which is the second-largest reservoir in the U.S., has already begun to melt. At the start of April, the snowpack was 89% of the 1991-2020 median. As of May 1, it has shrunk to 71% of the median.

Westwide SNOTEL May 16, 2025 via the NRCS.

Governor Katie Hobbs says #Arizona will defend its #ColoradoRiver water, wants other states to accept cuts — AZCentral.com #COriver #aridification

Click the link to read the article on the AZCentral.com website (Branson Loomis). Here’s an excerpt:

May 13, 2025

Key Points

Arizona has “real skin in the game” as negotiations continue over shares of a smaller Colorado River, Gov. Katie Hobbs said. Now she wants other states to step up.

The seven Colorado River states are trying to reach a shortage-sharing agreement this year, but are also looking to the new Trump administration to see if there are alternatives.

Arizona officials say other parts of the state, such as Yuma, may have to take cuts. Tribes say they expect the state to honor settlements.

Arizona is doing its part and taking its hits to conserve the Colorado River, Gov. Katie Hobbs said, and it’s time for upstream states to do the same. The governor assembled a roundtable of water users and officials on May 13 to present what she called a unified front among the state’s interests in defending Arizona’s share of the Colorado River as time runs short for reaching a deal with other states that use the water. So far, states upstream from Arizona have not offered cutbacks beyond the limits that a paltry snowpack naturally extracts from their farmers.

“It’s been more than a little frustrating,” Hobbs said. “We’ve come to the table with real solutions, with real proposals. We have real skin in the game,” she said, including billions of dollars in water infrastructure upgrades and in conservation agreements that keep water in the river’s reservoirs. “The upper states need to be willing to take their share as well.”

[…]

So far, the Rocky Mountain states known collectively as the Upper Basin have declined to specify new cuts they might take, because they say they already suffer the consequences of a reduced snowpack that shortchanges their farmers every year. The federal government has paid some Lower Basin farmers and others to cut back on their demands from Lake Mead’s storage bank, and the four Upper Basin states of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming argue that their year-in, year-out hardship is unrewarded and largely invisible to water users in the Southwest.

Update on Gross Reservoir Expansion Project following May 6, 2025, testimony: Denver Water provides statement on the risk presented by delaying construction — News on Tap

Storm pattern over Colorado September 2013 — Graphic/NWS via USA Today

Click the link to read the release on the Denver Water website:

May 8, 2025

Following a day of testimony on May 6, Denver Water has been asked by U.S. District Court Judge Christine Arguello to provide the court with the utility’s final summary highlighting its position following the witness testimony and exhibits. There isn’t a specific timetable set for this yet.

The focus of the hearing was for the judge to determine if construction can safely stop while Denver Water moves forward on an additional permitting review as the court ruled on April 3. Here is Denver Water’s statement on the risk presented by delaying construction:

Denver Water has already started the appeal process with the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals. As part of this, the project has been allowed to continue (under a temporary stay) while legal proceedings are underway.

Regional Pool Allocation Set at  23,000 Acre-feet; Sealed Bids Due 2 p.m. Thursday, May 22, 2025 — Northern Water

Aerial view of Lake Estes and Olympus Dam looking west. Photo credit Northern Water.

From email from Northern Water (Jeff Stahla):

May 9, 2025

The Northern Water Board of Directors allocated 23,000 acre-feet of Regional Pool Program (RPP) water during its May 8, 2025, Board meeting. RPP water is available for lease by eligible Northern Colorado water users, with sealed bids due 2 p.m. May 22, 2025. Bid prices per-acre-foot must be greater than or equal to $33.80, a floor price the Board selected based on the 2025 agricultural assessment rate. Late bids will not be considered.

The allocation will be available to bidders from two subpools of 11,500 acre-feet each; one that delivers water from Horsetooth Reservoir, and a second that delivers to water users south of Horsetooth Reservoir, including the Big Thompson River, St Vrain Creek and Boulder Creek.

The following forms are required to submit a bid: 

Pre-Approval Form – To confirm eligibility, interested bidders must email or mail the Pre-Approval Form to Northern Water. A new Pre-Approval Form is required each year.   

Carrier Consent Form – If the RPP water will be delivered by a carrier, such as a ditch or reservoir company, bidders and their carriers must complete the Carrier Consent Form or provide a signed agreement stating that the carrier will deliver the RPP water to the bidder. This form must also be emailed or mailed to Northern Water.  

Bid Form – Sealed bids will be accepted at Northern Water’s headquarters through a “self-serve” process. Bidders will sign in at a kiosk in the Building A lobby at Northern Water, 220 Water Ave., Berthoud, and print a bid label for their sealed bid envelope. The label will identify the bidder name, date and time stamp, and bid number. Bidders are then asked to secure the label to the bid envelope and place it in the drop box. Sealed bids may also be mailed to Northern Water, but bids must be received before the deadline.  

Sealed bids are due by 2 p.m. Thursday, May 22, at Northern Water’s headquarters, 220 Water Ave., Berthoud, CO 80513. As described above, sealed bids can be mailed or hand delivered; email and fax bid forms will not be accepted. RPP leases within each subpool will be awarded based on highest bids per acre-foot. Sealed bids will be opened at 2:10 p.m. Thursday, May 22, in the Grand Lake Conference Room of Building A at Northern Water.

Questions regarding the Regional Pool Program and bid submittal can be emailed to regionalpool@northernwater.org or by calling Sarah Smith at 970-622-2295 or Water Scheduling at 970-292-2500.

Designer of #Colorado’s Gross Dam expansion warns of possible flooding if judge halts project — Jerd Smith (Fresh Water News) #ColoradoRiver #SouthPlatteRiver

Click the link to read the article on the Water Education Colorado website (Jerd Smith):

May 8, 2025

Adam engineer who designed a major expansion of Gross Reservoir Dam in Boulder County told a federal judge Tuesday that the raising of the dam, facing a potential halt due to an April federal court ruling, needs to proceed to protect public safety.

Mike Rogers, the civil engineer who designed the $531 million expansion of the dam, said bad weather could create flood conditions that would lead to a catastrophic failure similar to what occurred with the Oroville Dam failure in California in 2017.

But Stephen Rigbey, a Canadian dam safety expert testifying for Save The Colorado, said any issues with putting the construction project on hold, even in its partially-complete state, could be addressed, and that the risk of a catastrophic failure was “negligible.”

Rogers’ and Rigbey’s testimony Tuesday came during a federal hearing in Denver, after which U.S. District Court Judge Christine Arguello will determine whether to allow construction to move forward on the Denver Water project or whether the construction will be paused until new federal reviews she has ordered are completed and legal questions are answered.

But at the end of Tuesday’s hearing, Arguello said the parties to the case had not provided enough information for her to make a decision and ordered them to submit more data later this month.

The massive construction project has raised fierce opposition in Boulder County and prompted several legal challenges from Save The Colorado, a group that advocates on behalf of rivers. Though its early lawsuits failed, in 2022 the river defenders won an appeal that put the legal battle back in play. Despite months of settlement talks, no agreement was reached.

Denver Water’s entire collection system. Image credit: Denver Water.

Boulder County Commissioner Ashley Stolzmann was unmoved by Rogers’ testimony, saying she hopes the judge halts the work to prevent further environmental damage in Boulder County and to protect the Fraser River, a tributary to the Upper Colorado River. The Fraser has served as the source of water for Gross Reservoir since the 1950s, when it was built.

“It’s incredibly disappointing that Denver has chosen to move forward,” Stolzmann said. “With climate change, it really is a time for different entities to work together to repair the climate. I want to see Denver seek alternative solutions.”

Denver Water first moved to raise Gross Dam more than 20 years ago when the water provider began designing the expansion and seeking the necessary federal and state permits. Denver Water has said raising the dam and expanding the reservoir is necessary to ensure it has enough water throughout its delivery system and to help with future water supplies as climate change continues to reduce streamflows.

The Gross Reservoir Expansion Project involves raising the height of the existing dam by 131 feet. The dam will be built out and will have “steps” made of roller-compacted concrete to reach the new height. Image credit: Denver Water

After years of engineering, environmental studies and federal and state analyses, Denver received a permit from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and construction began in 2022. It has involved taking apart a portion of the original dam and raising its height by 131 feet to nearly triple the reservoir’s storage capacity to 119,000 acre-feet from 42,000 acre-feet.

The case took center stage again April 3, when Judge Arguello put a temporary halt to construction of the higher dam, at Save The Colorado’s request.

In that high-profile ruling, Arguello said, in part, that the Army Corps should have considered whether ongoing climate change and drought would leave the Colorado River and Western Slope waterways too depleted to safely allow transfer of Denver Water’s rights into a larger Gross Reservoir for Front Range water users.

At the same time, she ordered a permanent injunction prohibiting enlargement of the reservoir, including tree removal and water diversion, and impacts to wildlife.

Almost immediately, Denver Water filed for temporary relief from the order, saying, in part, that it would be unsafe to stop work as the incomplete concrete walls towered above Gross Reservoir.

Arguello granted that request, too, allowing Denver to continue work on the dam considered necessary for safety.

Denver Water has also filed an appeal with the U.S. 10th Circuit Court of appeals, seeking to permanently protect its right to continue building the dam. The appeals court is expected to wait for the lower court to rule, before considering Denver Water’s request.

More by Jerd Smith

A dry winter on the #ColoradoRiver has big reservoirs on track for trouble — Alex Hager (KUNC) #COriver #aridification

Skiers descend Arapahoe Basin Ski Area in Colorado on May 4, 2025. Snowpack across the mountains that supply the Colorado River is far below normal for this time of year. Forecasts call for 55% of average runoff into Lake Powell, the nation’s second-largest reservoir. Alex Hager/KUNC

Click the link to read the article on the KUNC website (Alex Hager):

May 8, 2025

This story is part of ongoing coverage of the Colorado River, produced by KUNC and supported by the Walton Family Foundation. KUNC is solely responsible for its editorial coverage.

If you took a look at a map of Rocky Mountain snow right now you would see a lot of red.

The mountains that feed the Colorado River with snowmelt are strikingly dry, with many ranges holding less than 50% of their average snow for this time of year. The low totals could spell trouble for the nation’s largest reservoirs, but those dry conditions don’t seem to be ringing alarm bells for Colorado River policymakers.

Inflows to Lake Powell, the nation’s second largest reservoir, are expected to be 55% of average this year, according to federal data released this week. If forecasts hold true, 2025 would see the third-lowest amount of water added to Lake Powell in the past decade.

Westwide SNOTEL basin-filled map May 8, 2025 via the NRCS.

“It’s looking like a pretty poor water supply and spring runoff season,” said Cody Moser, a hydrologist with the Colorado River Basin Forecast Center.

If Lake Powell drops too low, the reservoir would lose the ability to generate hydropower for about five million people across seven states. Much lower, and it could lose the ability to pass enough water downstream, where tens of millions of people depend on it.

Eric Balken, who watches Lake Powell closely as director of the nonprofit Glen Canyon Institute, said this year’s snow data is concerning, but it isn’t driving the same level of concern from policymakers and media outlets that emerged in previous dry years.

Balken said that may be happening for two reasons.

First, it’s because negative outcomes might not be felt immediately. Lake Powell is unlikely to drop low enough to lose hydropower capabilities this summer, but the dry spring is making that more likely to happen in 2026.

Second, it’s because water managers simply have bigger fish to fry.

The federal offices that manage Western water are in disarray amid layoffs and restructuring since Donald Trump returned to the White House. The Bureau of Reclamation, the top federal agency for Colorado River dams and reservoirs, is without a permanent commissioner.

All the while, state and federal policymakers are spending most of their time and attention on drawing up new water-sharing rules. The current rules expire in 2026. Talks between states have reached a standstill, and negotiators say they’re working toward a compromise.

“That chaos within the agencies, the broader negotiations happening on the Colorado River, all of these other factors, I think, are sort of drowning out the severity of the drought situation right now,” said Balken.

Glen Canyon Dam creates water storage on the Colorado River in Lake Powell. Low water levels in Lake Powell could jeopardize the dam’s ability to produce hydropower or pass water downstream. Credit: U.S. Bureau of Reclamation

This year got off to a strong start for mountain snow, but took a dip during a dry spell that lasted from December through February. Snowmelt from Colorado accounts for about two-thirds of the water in Lake Powell. A portion of Western Colorado saw less than 15% of normal precipitation from December through April.

Scientists say these low snow years are the result of climate change, which is causing less snow to fall, and more of it to be soaked up by dry, thirsty soil before it has a chance to reach rivers and reservoirs. That has left the Colorado River in a dry trend going back more than two decades.

Balken said the climate reality is here to stay, and should spur the region’s leaders to rein in demand accordingly.

“Just because we’ve gotten used to it doesn’t mean that it’s not a problem,” he said. “We have to stay laser focused on what’s happening on the Colorado River, because there are some very big problems that need to be addressed.”

It snowed again, but to what effect? — Allen Best (BigPivots.com) #snowpack #runoff #drought #aridification

Yampa River May 3, 2025. Yampa River on Saturday evening was flowing strongly through Steamboat Springs, but the snowpack in the the Yampa-White drainage area of northwest Colorado was still less than two-thirds of average. Photo credit: Allen Best

Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):

May 6, 2025

Colorado’s southern mountains had another miserable snowpack. This is not good for the Colorado or Rio Grande rivers. It fits in with a theme.

Louis Meyer awoke on Monday morning at his farm about 10 miles north of Durango to see Engineer and Red mountains wearing fresh blankets of snow. The two mountains had been scantily clad for much of the winter.

The spring snow was welcome news, he said, but unlikely to change the story of southwest Colorado. Runoff will be abysmal.

A resident of southwest Colorado for about eight years, Meyer has conferred with others with deeper local knowledge. Right now, it appears that those farmers and ranchers who might normally expect to get three or four cuttings of hay will get no more than two. And in La Plata County, they will be lucky to get one cutting of hay.

Snow contributing water to the Animas, San Juan and other rivers of southwestern Colorado have only 28% of median of snow-water equivalent, according to maps released on Monday by the Natural Resources Conservation Service, a federal agency.

East of Wolf Creek Pass, in the upper Rio Grande drainage, numbers were worse yet, 21% of median. Last week, before the fresh snow, they had been even less.

Water managers in the San Luis Valley warned in a May 1 posting on Facebook that they expect early runoff, low rivers flows, and a short boating season. Heather Dutton, manager of the San Luis Valley Water Conservancy District, said there had been high hopes several times of 16- to 18-inch snow dumps, even 36 inches. “It just never materialized for us.”

Snowpack in Colorado’s southern mountains always has been uneven. Some years are better, other years worse. But a trend has emerged of earlier springs and less moisture in the San Juan Mountains and Sangre de Cristo Range of Colorado, and this year’s snowpack and weather fits in with it.

Russ Schumacher, the Colorado state climatologist, and associates at the Colorado Climate Center have analyzed data from the Snotel stations in Colorado going back to at least 1979. Their studies have focused on the volumes of peak snow-water equivalent in the snow and the dates of those readings.

Snotel stands for SNOwpack TELemetry, an automated system.

“In Colorado’s northern mountains, trends over the last 45 years are fairly modest overall, with some mixed signals,” he wrote in in an April 14 posting at Colorado Climate Center.

Many stations in the San Juans and Sangre de Cristo mountains showed levels below the 10^th percentile of records, he said.

“But in the southern mountains, the data make a very clear statement: snowpack is declining, and the peak is happening earlier. At many of the stations in the San Juan and Sangre de Cristo mountains, the peak snow-water-equivalent has declined by 3% to 5% per decade, and the peak has shifted two to four weeks earlier.”

The 1980s were unusually wet, which makes the recent declines look even worse. Contributing to the declines have been dust-on-snow events and the rising temperatures.

During the 21st century, Colorado has had just one year of below-average annual temperatures when compared to the 1971-2000 average, according to a study commissioned by the state government. Seven of the top 10 hottest years on record have occurred since 2010.

Colorado’s northern mountains looked somewhat below average as of early April. But unseasonably warm temperatures caused the snowpack to sag as the month went on.

“It was clear by early April that it was going to be a bad year in southern Colorado,” Schumacher wrote to Big Pivots in an e -mail on April 29. “But with very little snow and a lot of sunshine in the last couple weeks, snowpack in the northern mountains has started declining early as well.”

The Natural Resources Conservation Service Snotel readings on Monday morning showed improvement after an overnight snowfall but remained far below average.

Snow was notably absent in Colorado’s southern mountains this winter. It started out OK, then got warm and dry. By late January, the odds were for a very poor runoff.

A Snotel station near Wolf Creek Pass had the second lowest peak snow-water equivalent since the station was established in 1979. The lowest reading was in 2002. This was even less than in 2018, a year plagued by wildfires in southern Colorado.

At his farm along the Animas River, Meyer first noticed a problem in February. The well that taps water for domestic purposes went dry. The water table had dropped 35 feet. He persuaded others on the ditch to begin diverting water from the Animas River through the ditch. This caused the groundwater level to rise. It worked, although he was out of water for a week to 10 days.

Meyer is relatively new to southwest Colorado but not to Colorado water issues. An engineer by training, he operated a Glenwood Springs-based water consulting business for 35 years before he retired. He then bought ranch property in southwest Colorado near the community of Mancos. After a drought in 2021, he resolved to get a property with better access to water.

The property north of Durango is where the San Juan Mountains begin to pinch the Animas River Valley. The farm he and his children tend has plentiful orchards: peaches, apples, and pears. They also grow cherries and plums along with raspberries, strawberries and blackberries.

Family members also like to raft, but on Sunday found too little water to do so.

At his office in Cortez, Ken Curtis, director of the Dolores Water Conservancy District, has been monitoring the snowpack numbers. In late April they suggested a runoff of 30% of average. Because his district owns more senior water rights, the farmers of alfalfa, pinto beans and other crops in his district will probably do better than that might suggest.

“It’s been a weird year,” he said. “We are definitely going to have a shortage.”

The good news he reported was the relative absence of dust-on-snow, a phenomenon that warms the snow more rapidly and causes faster melting.

This was the eighth or ninth year out of the last 15 that the runoff from the winter snowpack has been on the low side.

Cortez lies amid the remains of the Ancestral Pueblo, known colloquially as the Anasazi. Because of a multi-decade drought about 1200, they abandoned their cliff dwellings and took up homes along the Rio Grande to the east.

West Drought Monitor map April 29, 2025.

At least part of this drought is something different, the result of rising temperatures created by accumulating greenhouse gases. The process is called aridification, and scientists since about 2017 have conducted studies that convincingly demonstrate that it is responsible for roughly half of declined flows. Drought may go away, but human-caused aridification will not any time soon.

The Colorado River during the last 25 years has yielded significantly less water than the 20^th century average — and even less than delegates from the seven basin states assumed when they drew up the Colorado River Compact in 1922.

The states, divided into the upper and lower basins, have been trying to come to grips with the new realities of the 21^st century for most of the century. Results have been uneven.

First California and then Arizona gulped waters from the river with giant diversion projects. Colorado but especially other basin states were slower to put straws into the river and they have also been smaller straws.

Who should cut back given the clear evidence for need? At his farm near Durango, Meyer thinks that Colorado must recognize it needs to cut back somewhat in line with what Arizona and California have agreed to do.

Runoff into Lake Powell during March 2as 61% of average. The reservoir is 31.4% full, far better than in 2022, when capacity dipped to below 23% of capacity. Runoff in the last couple of years has been at least okay. This year’s runoff will be a stern reminder that new agreements must be hammered out.

On April 25, water journalist and author John Fleck and four collaborators – including Anne Castle and Eric Kuhn of Colorado – issued a short paper that outlined what they said are the seven essential pillars for post-2026 management of the Colorado River. The first calls for enforceable reductions in water use in both the Upper and Lower Basin.

The compact assumed far more water than occurred in the 20^th century, but that faulty assumption was tolerable until the 1990s, when the Central Arizona Project withdrawals began. Then came the drought and aridification of the 21^st century. The river that delivered 14.5 million acre-feet (unlike the 20 million acre-feet that was assumed) was in trouble.

Colorado, to a small extent, but Wyoming and Utah especially, had not been using the amount of water that was assumed by the compacts. California and Arizona had been – and then some.

In recent years, California and Arizona have cut back their use of the Colorado River dramatically. The argument made by Castle and Kuhn as well as the others is that there must be shared pain in reduced wager use. That runs counter to the official stance of Colorado and other basin states that it’s a lower-basin problem.

“Shared pain is also critical to inducing the various states not to litigate over the interpretation of the 1922 Compact,” they wrote. “Shared does not mean equal, either in amount, triggers or duration,” they added.

They also say that reductions in water use cannot be predicated on federal compensation, as was important in enabling Arizona and California to reduce their flows during the last few years.

Kuhn was the long-time general manager of the Colorado River Water Conservation District in Glenwood Springs, and Castle, an attorney who specialized in water, was undersecretary for Water and Science in the Interior Department during the Obama administration. She is now with the Getches-Wilkinson Center at the University of Colorado Law School.

Notice of Upper Gunnison River Water Conservancy District Board and Lake San Cristobal Water Activity Enterprise Meetings on Tuesday, May 20, 2025 in Lake City, Colorado #GunnisonRiver

Map of the Gunnison River drainage basin in Colorado, USA. Made using public domain USGS data. By Shannon1 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=69257550

From email from the Upper Gunnison River Water Conservancy District (Sue Uerling):

Please see the attached notice for the May Upper Gunnison River Water Conservancy District and Lake San Cristobal Water Activity Enterprise Meetings in Lake City, Colorado on Tuesday, May 20^th, 2025 with lunch beginning at noon. If you would like to join the meeting via Zoom, please use the following link to pre-register for the meeting:

https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZIpfuiprT8uHNakChm1C21AdG737XbK7MUu

Questions? Please contact the District at (970)641-6065

The #ColoradoRiver needs some ‘shared pain’ to break a deadlock, water experts say — Alex Hager (KUNC.org) #COriver #aridification

Dusk falls on Lake Powell near Bullfrog Marina on July 15, 2024. A new letter from water policy experts gives negotiators some recommendations on how to sustainably manage the Colorado River in the future. Alex Hager/KUNC

Click the link to read the article on the KUNC website (Alex Hager):

May 3, 2025

This story is part of ongoing coverage of the Colorado River, produced by KUNC in Colorado and supported by the Walton Family Foundation. KUNC is solely responsible for its editorial coverage.

The seven states that use the Colorado River are deadlocked about how to share it in the future. The current rules for dividing its shrinking supplies expire in 2026. State leaders are under pressure to propose a new sharing agreement urgently, so they can finish environmental paperwork before that deadline.

Right now, they don’t appear close to an agreement, so a group of prominent Colorado River experts co-signed a letter outlining seven things they want to see in the next set of rules.

The letter gives a clear, concise list of recommendations for ways to keep taps flowing while protecting tribes and the environment. Whether the states will listen is another matter entirely.

‘Shared pain’

The letter, written by a group of academics and retired policymakers, makes no bones about it: states need to find a collective solution to their collective problem. And some of them might not be happy.

State leaders have been reluctant to volunteer cutbacks, and have largely stayed divided along a decades-old fault line. On one side, the Upper Basin – which consists of Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico. The other side, the Lower Basin, is made up of California, Arizona and Nevada.

The recent letter is interesting in part because it’s co-authored by people from both sides of the Colorado River debate. Eric Kuhn led an agency that defends Western Colorado’s water. Kathryn Sorensen led Phoenix’s water department.

The letter was also written by Anne Castle, who has worked in federal water policy positions, and Jack Schmidt, a water researcher at Utah State University. Co-authors John Fleck and Katherine Tara research water policy at the University of New Mexico.

The authors write that states need to engage in some level of “shared pain,” meaning cutbacks to the amount of water that flows to farms, homes, and businesses.

“‘Shared’,” the letter writes, “Does not mean equal, either in amount, triggers, or duration.”

Water from the Colorado River flows through the East Highline Canal on its way to farms in the Imperial Valley on June 20, 2023. The Colorado River’s single largest user has taken federal money through incentive programs to cut back on water use. Alex Hager/KUNC

The Lower Basin states have already proposed relatively modest cutbacks, and the Upper Basin seems to be digging in its heels on the idea that they should not have to give up any water at all.

This letter pushes back on that stance.

“There’s lots of wonderful legal arguments about why it shouldn’t be me that needs to use less water,” Anne Castle, one of the letter’s authors, told KUNC. “But in order to have a viable and politically viable agreement, everybody has to do a share.”

Other recommendations

In addition to calling for states to put their heads together, the authors also warned against leaning too hard on federal checks as a way to conserve water. Money from the federal government has been a key part of avoiding catastrophe on the Colorado River in recent years. Hundreds of millions of dollars have gone to big water users, often farmers, as an incentive to use less water.

Those funds have come under threat during President Donald Trump’s second term. The letter says new rules for the Colorado River “cannot assume that federal taxpayers will reimburse Western water users over the long term to forgo the use of water that does not exist.”

The letter goes on to advocate for groups that can sometimes be an afterthought in Western water policy. It essentially re-ups an earlier call from a group of tribes in the Colorado River basin, which are asking for a bigger seat at the table after more than a century of exclusion. It also pushes for new rules to be more flexible, which would make it easier to protect river ecosystems. That mirrors similar comments from a group of nonprofits.

The shortest and final recommendation in the letter says that any new Colorado River rules have to make sure there’s enough water to keep people safe and healthy.

“There must be absolute protection of domestic water deliveries for public health and safety,” it reads.

In short, it’s asking to make sure that a worst-case-scenario doesn’t see drinking water reserves go dry, while agriculture and other industries keep their faucets flowing.

“I don’t think that would happen,” Castle said. “I think the market would intervene and take care of this situation.”

The reaction

KUNC reached out to top water negotiators in Arizona and Colorado for this story. Their answers fell in line with oft-repeated talking points from each basin.

A spokesman for the Arizona Department of Water Resources wrote that its director, Tom Buschatzke, “agreed with the authors that ‘every state and sector of the economy must contribute to the solution to this imbalance.’”

Colorado’s top water official, Becky Mitchell, wrote that the recommendations overlooked climate change’s impact on Upper Basin water supplies, and that states already take “mandatory and uncompensated” cuts.

“Colorado water users do not enjoy a guaranteed delivery of the full amount of their water rights each year,” she wrote.

Jennifer Gimbel, Colorado’s former top water official, did not contribute to the letter and also took issue with the suggestion that both basins could afford to make cutbacks.

“Are the authors of the paper thinking that federal law should be enacted to override state law?” Gimbel wrote to KUNC in an email. “Are they thinking that users in the Upper Basin, who they say should not rely on federal compensation, should just give up their livelihoods voluntarily or be compensated by the state legislatures? I don’t know because they don’t say.”

A modest #ColoradoRiver proposal — John Fleck (InkStain.net) #COriver #aridification

Click the link to read the article on the InkStain website (John Fleck):

April 25, 2025

A group* of my Colorado River collaborators has put together what we hope can be a useful set of foundational principles as the basin states and federal leadership search for a path toward a negotiated agreement for post-2026 Colorado River management. They’re based on a number of key premises:

The Colorado River Compact will remain the foundation of the river’s management, but we have to find a way past the deep disagreement between Upper and Lower basin states on what the Compact actually says.

Colorado River Basin tribes must be essential partners in crafting the next set of guidelines, including through compensation for foregone water use.

Shared pain is essential. The path toward a sustainable river system requires everyone to contribute to the solution to the problem of the river we all share.

There’s more. I encourage you to read the whole thing. (It’s short!)

* In alphabetical order: Anne Castle, John Fleck, Eric Kuhn, Jack Schmidt, Kathryn Sorensen, Katherine Tara.

Local Motion: Protecting and Conserving West Slope Water — KVNF #GunnisonRiver #UncompahgreRiver #ColoradoRiver #COriver #aridification

Click the link to read the article on the KVNF website (Brody Wilson):

April 29, 2025

The Colorado River is the lifeblood of the American Southwest. Forty million people depend on it — not just here in Colorado, but in cities like Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles.

Here on the Western Slope, we don’t always feel directly connected to the Colorado River. After all, we live in the Gunnison Basin — a different watershed, right?

Not quite. The Gunnison River contributes about 17% of the Colorado River’s total annual flow. So any decision made about the Colorado River’s future directly affects us — how much water we can use, when, and for what purpose. For decades, the river has been in a slow-moving crisis. Climate change, explosive population growth, and overallocation have pushed the system to the brink. In 2022, the river’s two main reservoirs — Lake Powell and Lake Mead — reached such low levels that hydropower turbines at Glen Canyon Dam were nearly shut down and dam operators were near “dead-pool” where water would no longer be able to pass through the dam. But today, nearly three years later, the system isn’t bouncing back. Andy Mueller, General Manager of the Colorado River District, has a blunt message: the Colorado River is carrying less water than it used to, and if we don’t change course, the future of agriculture, recreation, and the our way of life across the Western Slope could be at risk.

“The average temperature in March has gone up 4.2 degrees Fahrenheit,” Mueller told the crowd in Ridgway. “And for every 1 degree of warming, streamflow drops by 3 to 5 percent. We’re looking at a 20% decline right here in the Uncompahgre Valley over the last 125 years.”

These trends are part of a long-term warming and drying pattern. Less snow is falling, and what does fall melts earlier. That means less water reaches our rivers — and more of it is lost to evaporation or absorbed by plants growing in longer, hotter seasons.

In 1922, Federal and State representatives met for the Colorado River Compact Commission in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Among the attendees were Arthur P. Davis, Director of Reclamation Service, and Herbert Hoover, who at the time, was the Secretary of Commerce. Photo taken November 24, 1922. USBR photo.

To understand what’s happening now, you have to go back to 1922. That’s when the seven states in the Colorado River Basin signed a compact to divide the river’s water. Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming became the “Upper Basin.” California, Arizona, and Nevada formed the “Lower Basin.” Each side was promised 7.5 million acre-feet of water per year. But there was a problem: the river wasn’t carrying that much water — and certainly doesn’t now. For decades, this over-allocation was masked by big reservoirs like Lake Powell and Lake Mead. But as the drought continues, those buffers have disappeared. In 2007, the states and federal government adopted a temporary fix: interim guidelines to manage the system during dry years. Those guidelines are set to expire in 2026. New rules must be negotiated now — and the clock is ticking.

“There’s a lot of confusion out there,” Mueller said. “People talk about renegotiating the Compact — but that’s not what’s happening. The Compact isn’t being touched. What’s being negotiated are the guidelines for how Powell and Mead are operated — especially in times of shortage.”

Enduring Solutions on the #ColoradoRiver Part II: Floating Pools and GrandBargains — Kathryn Sorensen, Sarah Porter, Eric Kuhn, and Cynthia Campbell (Kyl Center for Water Policy) #COriver #aridification

Click the link to read the paper on the InkStain.net website (Kathryn Sorensen, Sarah Porter, Eric Kuhn, and Cynthia Campbell). Here’s an excerpt:

April 18, 2025

Conserving water now in reservoir savings banks, as a hedge against future risks associated with drought and declining flows, has emerged as one of the central tools for managing the Colorado River. The Lower Basin “Intentionally Created Surplus” program, created in the 2007 Interim Guidelines, has shown the idea’s promise and given the basin nearly two decades to learn the strengths and weaknesses of the approach. With tweaks to allow similar efforts in the Upper Basin and other modifications based on what we have learned about the current ICS approach, such “Floating Pools” are one of the key tools being considered as negotiators try to thread the needle of a seven-state agreement for post-2026 Colorado River management. Done properly, they have the potential to finesse the states’ disagreement over the terms of the 1922 Colorado River Compact in a way that could avoid potentially disruptive litigation. But getting the details right will be crucial to the development of an enduring bargain that can help the basin avoid the risk of interstate litigation.

Context

Negotiations over post-2026 operating rules for Lakes Powell and Mead are a proxy battle over whether the 1922 Compact acts as a limitation on yet-to-be used water in the Upper Division States or as a cut to existing water uses in the Lower Division States. Much of the conflict focuses on Article III(d) of the Colorado Compact, which states, “The states of the Upper Division will not cause the flow of the river at Lee Ferry to be depleted below an aggregate of 75,000,000 acre-feet for any period of ten consecutive years. . .”

The Upper Division States have a fundamentally different interpretation of their Compact obligations at Lee Ferry than the Lower Division States. Clearly, the best-case scenario for the Lower Division States, especially in Central Arizona, is a court decision that confirms the Upper Division States have a compact obligation to not deplete the flow of the river below 75 million acre-feet every ten years plus ½ of the annual delivery to Mexico under the 1944 Treaty, approximately 82 million acre-feet every ten years. This outcome would mostly stabilize the water supply available to the Lower Division States and likely limit consumptive uses in the Upper Division States to about the same or a little less water than they are currently using, approximately 4 million acre-feet per year. If the high court rules instead that the Upper Division States have a non-depletion obligation, and that consumptive uses in the Upper Division States are not the “cause” of inadequate flows needed to deliver 8.23 million acre-feet to the Lower Division States and Mexico, the result in a declining river system is a cut, potentially even to zero, for water delivered via the Central Arizona Project (CAP) into the Sun Corridor from Phoenix to Tucson and potential cuts to water-right holders in Western Arizona, Southern California and Nevada who are next on the chopping block.

Distilled to its core, here is the question before us: in a declining river system and in the absence of an agreement among the Divisions, does the operation of Article III(d) of the Compact result in a limitation on future new uses in the Upper Division States or an elimination to existing ones in the Lower Division States?

Federal hearing in Denver Tuesday, May 6, 2025, on Gross Dam expansion case — Jerd Smith (Fresh Water News) #ColoradoRiver #COriver #SouthPlatteRiver #aridification

The construction site at the bottom of Gross Dam with equipment used to place concrete and build the new steps. Photo credit: Denver Water.

Click the link to read the article on the Water Education Colorado website (Jerd Smith):

May 1, 2025

As Save the Colorado and Denver Water prepare to face off in a federal courtroom Tuesday, water officials across the state are watching the Gross Dam expansion case closely for its environmental impact and its affect on water projects across the West.

Kirk Klancke, a long-time Grand County environmentalist and president of the Colorado River Headwaters Chapter of Trout Unlimited, said a decision that shuts down the $531 million water project, could also shut down 12 years of work on the Fraser River and its tributaries.

Denver Water is one of 18 partners who signed the Colorado River Cooperative Agreement in 2013, ushering in a new era of cooperation between the utility and West Slope stakeholders, all with the vested interest in protecting watersheds in the Colorado River Basin. As part of that agreement, a process called “Learning by Doing” was created, which has helped the utility stay better connected on river conditions in Grand County. The partnership is a collection of East and West Slope water stakeholders who help identify and find solutions to water issues in Grand County. “Denver Water has been part of Grand County for over 100 years, and we understand the impact our diversions have on the rivers and streams,” said Rachel Badger, environmental planning manager at Denver Water. “Our goal is to manage our water resources as efficiently as possible and be good stewards of the water — and Learning By Doing helps us do that.”

Here’s why: Denver Water owns much of the Fraser with water rights dating back more than 100 years. And it is that water that has historically been piped through the Moffat Tunnel near Rollinsville to fill the existing Gross Reservoir. The new water for the expanded reservoir will come largely from that river as well.

After what’s known as the 2013 Colorado River Cooperative Agreement was signed, Denver Water agreed to conduct extensive restoration work on the river in exchange for being able to raise Gross Dam and bring more water from the Fraser River over to the Front Range.

Klancke said the heavily diverted, scenic waterway would suffer if the deal falls apart. “To dissolve that partnership will be the death of the Fraser River,” he said.

Under the terms of the Colorado River Cooperative Agreement, the work on the Fraser River can only be finalized if the Gross Dam expansion proceeds.

On the upside though, Klancke said, if a new environmental settlement were reached, it could mean more money and more work to restore South Boulder Creek on the other side of the Continental Divide. The creek carries that Fraser River water from the reservoir to Denver Water’s northern storage system.

“I would love to see Denver put a whole bunch of money into South Boulder Creek,” Klancke said.

Gary Wockner, the head of Save The Colorado, disputes the notion that the case could harm environmental work already underway in Grand County.

“We are not causing environmental damage,” he said. “If Denver Water chooses to stop, that’s their choice. That’s on their shoulders. Not ours.”

For its part, Denver says it hopes to continue the Grand County work, but that the terms of the Fraser River agreement are all based on the successful completion of the Gross Dam expansion.

The agency also says it has already set aside $30 million to help offset any environmental harm caused by the massive construction project, including providing 5,000 acre-feet of water to improve streamflows along a 17-mile stretch of South Boulder Creek. An acre-foot of water equals nearly 326,000 gallons, enough water to serve two to four urban households for one year.

Denver Water first moved to raise Gross Dam more than 20 years ago when it began designing the expansion and seeking the necessary federal and state permits.

After years of engineering, studies and federal and state analyses, construction began in 2022. It has involved taking apart a portion of the original dam, built in the 1950s, and raising its height by 131 feet to nearly triple the reservoir’s storage capacity to 119,000 acre-feet from 42,000 acre-feet.

Save The Colorado has launched several unsuccessful challenges to the project, but in 2022 it won an appeal that put the legal battle back in play. Despite months of settlement talks, no agreement was reached.

Then the case took center stage again April 3, when Senior U.S. District Court Judge Christine Arguello put a temporary halt to construction of the higher dam, at Save The Colorado’s request.

Almost immediately, Denver Water filed for temporary relief from the order, saying, in part, that it would be unsafe to stop work as the incomplete concrete walls towered above Gross Reservoir.

Arguello granted that request, too, allowing Denver to continue working on the dam.

Gross Dam case spurred $100 million settlement in a different lawsuit

What happens next is anyone’s guess. Jennifer Gimbel, a water policy scholar at Colorado State University who also serves on Northern Water’s board of directors, said the case has already had an impact on a $2 billion water project to deliver water to residents of fast-growing northern Colorado. The Northern Integrated Supply Project, as it is known, also faced a legal challenge from Save The Colorado, and ultimately the water agency opted to settle the case for $100 million. The cash will help restore the Cache la Poudre River with new diversion agreements and improved streamflows, among other benefits.

Gimbel said the Gross Reservoir case was a key factor in that settlement. “Because of Denver’s troubles with Save the Colorado, Northern Water decided to resolve their lawsuit because they were worried about their own permit getting stale and because as you delay construction costs increase.”

The Gross Dam case is also noteworthy because it has stopped a major construction project already underway and may significantly change it. Judge Arguello has ordered the U.S. Corps of Engineers, the major permitting agency, to redo its original permitting work.

Denver Water General Manager Alan Salazar has said his agency would take the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, if they lose in the lower courts.

As both sides prepare for Tuesday’s hearing, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals panel has said it will wait to see what information emerges from the Tuesday hearing before it rules on Denver Water’s appeal before the 10th Circuit, according to Denver Water General Counsel Jessica Brody. That action seeks to permanently protect what Denver believes is its right to raise Gross Dam.

Denver Water has also raised national security concerns in the case because Save The Colorado has asked and been granted the right to review construction documents on the dam project, documents that would normally be kept from public view.

In response, the judge has told participants to expect the court to be closed periodically during the hearing to address those security concerns.

More by Jerd Smith

The confluence of the Fraser River and the Colorado River near Granby, Colorado. By Jeffrey Beall – Own work, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=50012193

Why does the #ColoradoRiver seem to vanish at a certain point in Glenwood Canyon? — #Colorado Public Radio

The Shoshone hydro plant in Glenwood Canyon, captured here in June 2018, uses water diverted from the Colorado River to make power, and it controls a key water right on the Western Slope. Photo credit: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism

Click the link to read the article on the Colorado Public Radio website (Tom Hesse). Here’s an excerpt:

April 28, 2025

James Heath, division engineer for the Colorado River Basin for the Colorado Division of Water Resources, says [Avi] Stopper most likely witnessed a roughly two-mile stretch where up to 1,400 cubic feet per second of water takes the scenic route through Xcel Energy’s Shoshone Hydro Electric Generating Plant. If that diversion is happening during high-water months like May, passersby would probably miss it entirely. But in the dead of winter, when river flows can be below 1,000 CFS, the difference can be seen by drivers heading east.

“At certain times of the year, the power plant can divert every single drop of water that’s in the Colorado River and other times a year the stream flow is significant and it’s hardly noticeable what the power plant’s actually diverting off the stream system,” Heath said.

The water rights are considered “nonconsumptive,” which means there’s no water lost in the process. That’s also why the river disappeared and reappeared a short time later on Avi’s drive. Water leaves the river at a diversion dam near the Hanging Lake Tunnel and then reenters the river at the Shoshone plant. Heath said it’s about a 2-mile stretch and there’s little entering the stream during that period.

“There’s a little bit of gate leakage there at the diversion dam. There are a couple small minor tributaries that come in between the diversion dam and the returns from the powerhouse, but it’s a small trickle at times during the year,” Heath said.

#NewCastle, #Parachute, #DeBeque pitch in on effort to buy Shoshone water rights — The #GrandJunction Daily Sentinel

View of Shoshone Hydroelectric Plant construction in Glenwood Canyon (Garfield County) Colorado; shows the Colorado River, the dam, sheds, a footbridge, and the workmen’s camp. Creator: McClure, Louis Charles, 1867-1957. Credit: Denver Public Library Digital Collections

Click the link to read the article on the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel website (Dennis Webb). Here’s an excerpt:

April 27, 2025

The town of New Castle has agreed to contribute $100,000 to the Western Slope’s efforts to buy the historic Shoshone hydroelectric power plant water rights, while the towns of Parachute and De Beque also have agreed to kick in smaller amounts…Parachute will be contributing $25,000 and De Beque, $5,000. The De Beque Plateau Valley Soil Conservation District also is kicking in $5,000…Combined, more than 30 Western Slope local governments, water entities and regional partners have committed over $17 million toward the $99 million purchase. The river district and state of Colorado also have committed $20 million apiece, and the federal Bureau of Reclamation committed $40 million in the final days of the Biden administration. That funding has been frozen by the Trump administration but the river district remains hopeful of eventually receiving it.

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Josh Shipley rides a Harley and drives a Jeep. He says ending federal tax credits for solar may upend his business.

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120 days to decide

Front Range outlines concerns

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Brad Udall also makes the case that stakeholders in the basin can work together to solve this “really sticky, difficult issue”

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Other stuff from the morning sessions

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Mounting challenges and a bleak climate future

Searching for a unicorn

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Looking to the past

‘Beyond awful’ forecasts

What the feds said

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How the case progressed

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The Western Slope aims to make history

How much water is at stake?

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