by Annie Knox, Utah News Dispatch
July 31, 2026

After Utah and six other states along the Colorado River failed to reach a deal on how to share its dwindling water supply, the federal government on Friday released its own 10-year outline. 

Colorado River Collaborative

This article is published through the Colorado River Collaborative, a solutions journalism initiative supported by the Janet Quinney Lawson Institute for Land, Water, and Air at Utah State University. See all of our stories about how Utahns are impacted by the Colorado River at greatsaltlakenews.org/coloradoriver

Under the proposal from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, the Lower Basin states of Arizona, California and Nevada would share in cuts of up to 3 million acre-feet per year. The framework doesn’t mandate cuts for Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming. 

Instead, it identifies a conservation goal for the Upper Basin — 200,000 acre-feet per year — about as much as Utah’s Deer Creek and East Canyon reservoirs together can hold. The plan would also allow for smaller annual releases from Lake Powell of down to 5 million acre-feet, compared to the current 6 million acre-feet, with new operating guidelines every two years. 

Utah’s chief Colorado River negotiator, Gene Shawcroft, praised the proposal on Friday, telling reporters it recognizes the reality of the water available, not just the demand. But he emphasized it provides a broad framework, with the details to follow in coming days. 

“I would just simply say, this is a bridge, not a destination,” Shawcroft said in a virtual news conference. “It certainly could be a bridge over troubled waters, but perhaps a bridge over no waters. We just aren’t quite sure.”

He and Amy Haas, executive director of the Colorado River Authority of Utah, were still reading through the 2,600 pages contained in the bureau’s environmental impact statement released Friday.  

Haas said the state will know more about what it’s contending with when it gets a copy of a two-year operations plan for 2027 and 2028 in coming days, though the exact timeline wasn’t clear.

The Colorado River provides water to 40 million people across the U.S. and Mexico, contributing 27% of Utah’s water supply. It’s shrinking because of drought, overuse and hotter temperatures linked to climate change.

This year’s record-high temperatures and lowest snowpack on record aren’t helping. Normally, Colorado River runoff is about 13 million acre-feet, Shawcroft said. Now it’s 3.5 million acre-feet. 

He told reporters: “We’re in a dire situation.” 

On Friday, Arizona’s Department of Water Resources called the proposal’s cuts for the Lower Basin “unacceptable,” saying such reductions would devastate Arizona’s water users and its economy.”

The agency described negotiations over many months as “an exercise in lowering expectations, particularly for a long-term, seven-state agreement on operating this vital river system.” 

The disagreement could find its way into a courtroom soon. Arizona and Utah have both taken steps this year to build up litigation funds. 

“For Utah, litigation is never our plan A,” Haas told reporters Friday. “Whether it’s a plan B, depending on the context of this document, that remains to be seen. But litigation is not going to get us anywhere on this river. It’s not going to get us more water.” 

At issue in the negotiations is who absorbs necessary cuts. Upper Basin states argue they use less water than Lower Basin states, don’t have huge reservoirs to store water in dry years, and lack legal authority to place significant restrictions on water users. 

The proposal out Friday is adaptable and allows the states to keep negotiating, said Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum.  

“This framework provides the flexibility to respond to changing hydrologic conditions while preserving the opportunity for the Basin States to continue working toward durable, consensus-based solutions,” Burgum said in a statement. 

Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, in a joint statement with his counterparts in the other upstream states, said they’re encouraged that incoming operating guidelines “will better reflect existing water supply, which must underpin any practicable plan going forward.” 

They went on to say that both the upper and lower divisions of the basin “are feeling the pain of severe drought. This is a reality that all states, and the federal government, will need to address practically, which is why a seven-state agreement will provide the best outcome for all water users in the Colorado River Basin.”

Water use is outpacing the river’s flows, and that overconsumption adds up. The combined amount of water in Lake Powell and Lake Mead is at its lowest point since before Glen Canyon Dam began to fill up in 1963, the bureau said in its Friday news release. 

If water levels dip to critical lows, as forecasts suggest they could by late this year, the nation’s two largest reservoirs could fail to produce power. If their depths continue to slide, they’ll fail to send water downstream. 

Conservation and recreation groups have called for an end to the gridlock, saying it’s dragging on in the background while hotter and drier conditions are driving up wildfire risks, air quality concerns and restrictions on the water supply. 

Utah News Dispatch is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Utah News Dispatch maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor McKenzie Romero for questions: info@utahnewsdispatch.com.

Click the link to read the article on the KJZZ website (Alex Hager). Here’s an excerpt:

July 16, 2026

Sara Porterfield, Colorado River program director with the conservation nonprofit Trout Unlimited, stood on a narrow, rocky river beach, about as close to Glen Canyon Dam as a boat can go.

“This is not a zero sum game,” she said. “Investing in watershed health is not an either-or. We need the system to be healthy from an ecological perspective in order for the rest of it to function.”

The river, Porterfield said, cannot deliver big volumes of clean water if it does not, at least partially, function like a normal, healthy river. For example, if the river’s upper reaches are dried out, they’ll be susceptible to wildfires and wetland degradation, which make it harder for them to hold on to water and release it slowly into the streams where humans have been able to reliably divert and collect it for generations.

“It’s not just plumbing, but it’s also not just water in a river,” Porterfield said as the dam’s hydroelectric generators emitted a whining hum in the background. “We’re not separate from the natural world, we’re part of it. When we recognize that, and we take help to take care of it, we get a lot further than when we’re just thinking about a plumbing system.”

Porterfield, who has a Ph.D. in Colorado River history, said calling the river a “plumbing system” is a useful way to think about one of its jobs, but not the whole picture. Environmental advocates say the river can be protected while still flowing through the dams and canals that keep the West wet for humans. Those protections can even be part of the wonky and rigid legal policies that dictate where water goes. John Berggren, a water policy manager at the conservation nonprofit Western Resource Advocates, had some recommendations for the next set of river-sharing rules. An important one, he said, is to get the river out of “crisis mode.”

[…]

“You can be much more proactive and thoughtful and careful and intentional about how you manage the river and include river health,” he said.

Another way to help protect the river’s ecosystems, creatures and flows, Berggren said, is by carefully timing the release of water from reservoirs. For example, policymakers can write flexible rules about where and when water is stored, so water that is flowing downstream to cities and farms can also help make life better for native fish. The water can be used to help the environment without being taken away from humans downstream.

“They’re going to move the water anyway,” he said. “Let’s do it in a way that actually benefits ecological conditions.”

Click the link to read the article on the Aspen Journalism website (Heather Sackett):

June 30, 2026

Western Slope lawmakers had harsh words for water managers at a state committee hearing last week, questioning whether Colorado has done enough to avoid a lawsuit with its downstream neighbors.

Colorado Sen. Dylan Roberts, a District 8 Democrat who represents several Western Slope counties, including Eagle, Grand, Garfield, Routt and Summit, asked Colorado’s lead negotiator, Becky Mitchell, whether the people of Colorado should have confidence that negotiations among the seven states that share the Colorado River have put the state in the best possible position. The states have been at an impasse for more than two years without a deal for future management as reservoirs continue to decline to record-low levels.

“My constituents just see fighting and intransigence,” Roberts said. “And it’s concerning to me, especially as a Western Slope lawmaker … that the strategy is just ‘Let’s hire more lawyers; we’re going to court no matter what.’ That doesn’t give me confidence, because I don’t think Colorado fares well when we go to court against Arizona and California and Nevada, throwing our fate to the nine justices on the U.S. Supreme Court.”

The remarks came at Thursday’s meeting of the state Water Resources and Agriculture Review Committee in Denver. Along with Mitchell, in the hot seat were state engineer Jason Ullmann and Amy Ostdiek, interstate section chief at the Colorado Water Conservation Board. The three are employees of the state Department of Natural Resources and have the backing of the Attorney General’s office in negotiations.

Roberts’ line of questioning seemed prompted by recent projections that show river flows dipping below a threshold that could trigger litigation. The Lower Basin states (Arizona, California and Nevada) believe that the Upper Basin states (Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming) are bound by the 1922 Colorado River Compact to deliver 82.5 million acre-feet of water over a 10-year rolling average. According to the Upper Colorado River Commission, the 10-year average will dip later this year to about 81.3 million acre-feet because of persistent drought. 

Some experts believe that this amounts to a “tripwire” that could trigger a lawsuit from the Lower Basin states (Arizona, in particular, has been openly preparing for litigation) that could result in mandatory cuts in water use for the Upper Basin. Upper Basin water managers don’t subscribe to this interpretation, saying their states are only required not to deplete the river’s flows by more than 75 million acre-feet over 10 years.

Mitchell was reluctant to share details of Colorado’s legal strategy in a public forum, but she answered “absolutely” that her team’s work was putting Colorado in the best position. She said cutting back prematurely just to satisfy the Lower Basin’s interpretation of the century-old agreement would be bad for the state.

“If we initiate curtailment now, that is worse for Coloradans,” Mitchell said. “I think that is an important thing to remember.”

Wracked by drought, climate change and a management crisis, the situation on the river has never been more dire. The current management guidelines expire this year, and in the absence of a seven-state deal to share shortages and operate the nation’s two largest reservoirs, Lake Powell and Lake Mead, the feds are poised to step in. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation plans to release a more detailed, short-term plan to manage the river for the next two years by mid-to-late summer.

State Rep. Julie McCluskie, a District 13 Democrat, said communities in her district have been living with the incredible angst, anxiety and pain of no snow and low reservoirs. 

“The frustration I hear in my community is that we have missed multiple deadlines; they are becoming a funny joke,” McCluskie said. “There is such a fear about the lengthy litigation process, the fear of an outcome that is far worse for Colorado than a compromise that we have some control over.”

Conservation conversation is the ‘bare minimum’

Lawmakers also had strong words for state officials regarding conservation, saying legislators must be involved in the creation of any program. 

Colorado has dabbled with pilot conservation programs in the past, but traditional programs that pay farmers and ranchers to temporarily cut back on water use remain controversial. This is especially true on the Western Slope, which has long been the target for these types of programs, and where some worry that they could harm rural communities if not done carefully. After two years of exploring how the state could set up a temporary, voluntary and compensated conservation program, officials shelved the idea in favor of focusing on drought-resilience initiatives.

“Other states out of the seven have very clear and actionable roles for their general assemblies, their legislatures,” McCluskie said. “We have less so, and yet the stakes are so high. So I beg of you, decision-makers, that it is essential that we be a part of those next steps.”

Ostdiek said that any program would need to start slow and make sure it incorporates input from people throughout the state.

“I think that we can continue to assess as we go what we might need from you all, and what a program like that might look like,” Ostdiek said. “I think what we can certainly commit to is continuing this dialogue and continuing the discussion about what we might need to make this a success.”

In 2023, Colorado lawmakers tried to force stakeholders to come up with recommendations on conservation programs by creating a statewide task force, which met 10 times over six months. But the group failed to find a consensus, with some saying it was “premature” to create a conservation program.

As part of a post-2026 framework, the Upper Basin states plan to create a “contribution” pool in Lake Powell, which could be used to help stabilize the system, keeping water levels above critical thresholds to protect hydropower at Glen Canyon Dam and acting as an insurance pool against forced cutbacks. In a May 22 letter to federal officials, the Upper Basin states said they have a goal of saving 100,000 acre-feet by the end of water year 2028, but only if sufficient federal funding is available and hydrologic conditions allow.

Three Upper Basin states have different methods for contributing to this pool: Utah has its own demand management program; Wyoming lawmakers passed a law this year allowing for a conservation program; and New Mexico plans to release water from Navajo Reservoir. 

But precisely how — and how much — Colorado would contribute to this pool is unclear. The state’s share of the Upper Basin’s allocation is 51.75%, meaning Colorado could be on the hook for 51,750 acre-feet. 

And ensuring that saved water actually gets into a pool in Lake Powell remains part of the problem. Currently, conserved water that stays in the river can just be picked up by a downstream user, with no net gain to Lake Powell. Colorado officials say they do not have the authority to “shepherd” water past other water users to the state line unless it is specifically for compact compliance. [ed. emphasis mine]

Last year, some Delta County ranchers asked lawmakers to take up the issue and pass a law that would address this issue, allowing water users to conserve and get credit for contributing water to a Lake Powell pool. But legislators did not take up a bill in the 2026 session.

Colorado officials told lawmakers they were continuing to explore what a program might look like and whether legislation would be needed.

Roberts said conversations with the legislature should be the bare minimum if Colorado is going to have a conservation program. 

“If the department or any agency of the state were to pursue a conserved consumptive use program or demand management program that used state tax dollars to pay for it and did not go through the legislature in a formal process, I imagine that all of us on this panel and many of our colleagues would raise holy hell about the unilateral decision-making coming from Denver about programs impacting all parts of the state,” Roberts said. “So, please, let’s just cut that off at my recommendation. Let’s work together on this.”

Officials opened the hearing by highlighting the impacts of this year’s severe drought on Colorado’s farmers and ranchers, noting how even some of the most senior water users will experience shortages as streamflows dwindle. Orchards in the North Fork Valley and row crops in the Uncompahgre River Valley already have unprecedented shortages. 

In response to Roberts’ concerns about the failure to find a compromise among the seven states, Mitchell posed a high-stakes rhetorical question: “I would ask, ‘What else do you think we can give?’”

Click the link to read the article on the Water Education Foundation website (Matt Jenkins):

June 25, 2026

Western Water In-depth: A ‘wild idea’ to defuse the colorado river compact’s legal time bomb has been kept alive by seasoned observers who believe it could still save the river

For the past 20 years, the Colorado River has been operated under a set of guidelines negotiated between the seven states that depend on the river. Those guidelines expire this year, and after five years of grinding negotiations over a new agreement, the upstream states of Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico remain deadlocked against the downstream states of California, Arizona and Nevada.

Some 40 million people and 5.5 million acres of farmland depend on the river’s water. But after the states failed to meet two federal deadlines in three months, the river is in a moment of unprecedented crisis. A dire snowpack has left flows just 15 percent of normal, many farms without water and several cities scrambling to secure water supplies as they gird themselves for shortages.

That has set up a showdown over a legal time bomb that’s been ticking away at the heart of the Colorado River Compact since the river’s guiding document was signed more than 100 years ago. The Lower Basin states believe the Compact promised them a minimum delivery of water sent down the river from the Upper Basin. The Upper Basin states believe the Compact promised them a fixed amount of water that they could rely on to meet future growth. As the river’s flows have dwindled, those two supposed guarantees are proving to be irreconcilable.

Experts have seen the showdown coming for a long time, but climate change has accelerated the day of reckoning. In 2000, a drought sunk its teeth into the river and hasn’t let up. Dubbed the Millennium Drought, it is now recognized as one of the worst droughts on the river in more than 1,200 years — and may actually be the beginning of a long-term shift to a drier reality.

Despite near-endless negotiations to find a way to keep the river’s massive reservoir system from crashing — an effort that began over two decades ago — the drought may have finally pushed the Colorado River Compact to its limit. Now, the system is nearly empty and runoff from this winter’s snowpack, the source of any water that might offer even a small hope of relief, will be among the lowest since Glen Canyon Dam was built near the Arizona-Utah border, creating Lake Powell, more than 60 years ago. Flows in the river are perilously close to hitting the primary legal “tripwire” in the Compact. Once that’s crossed, the Lower Basin states would likely try to force the Upper Basin to deliver their water apportionment downstream — a prospect long considered unthinkable.

“All those negotiations helped push the day of reckoning back further, and helped delay the inevitable,” says Doug Kenney, who heads the University of Colorado’s Western Water Policy Program. “But at some point, you just have to acknowledge the fact that the numbers don’t add up and you’re going to have to deal with it. We’re at that point.”

Two obvious paths now lie ahead. One is a courtroom fight, either against the U.S. Secretary of the Interior or a challenge between two states under the terms of the Colorado River Compact, which would go directly before the Supreme Court. A high court case would be a doomsday scenario, a messy and protracted legal battle that, until now, the seven states desperately sought to avoid. The other potential path is a stopgap fix, a short-term interim plan negotiated between the states or imposed by the Interior secretary. That could, at least temporarily, forestall a trip to court, but it wouldn’t resolve the fundamental conflict.

For more than two decades, however, the possibility of a third path has stubbornly persisted in the background: A “grand bargain,” an idea first proposed in 2005 by Colorado’s negotiating team early in the effort to grapple with the worsening drought. The concept was an unorthodox bid to defuse the ticking time bomb — but it would require each basin to trade away its most cherished claim on the river.

‘A WILD IDEA’

Roughly 90 percent of the Colorado River’s flow originates as snowpack in the Rocky Mountains. One of the principal goals of the 1922 Compact, which is essentially a seven-state treaty, was to avoid future legal battles by creating an “equitable division and apportionment” of water between the Upper Basin states in the river’s headwaters and the faster-growing Lower Basin. The Compact apportioned 7.5 million acre-feet a year from the mainstem of the river to each basin. (An acre-foot is 325,851 gallons, enough to supply the average annual needs of roughly 3 households, depending on their location and climate.)

The Compact also contains a requirement that the headwaters states not deplete the flow of the river below 75 million acre-feet, plus another roughly 7.5 million acre-feet (half of the apportionment earmarked for Mexico), on a 10-year running average. Those provisions were intended to provide surety to the downstream Lower Basin states that they would receive their 7.5 million-acre-foot annual apportionment and that the basins would share equally in the Mexican obligation. If the 10-year running average requirement is violated, the Lower Basin states could — at least in theory — initiate a Compact “call” against the Upper Basin in an attempt to force the headwaters states to deliver more water downstream.

For roughly 80 years after the Compact was signed, the prospect of a Compact call was purely theoretical. Then the Millennium Drought set in. By 2005, the two flagship reservoirs on the Colorado River — Lakes Mead and Powell — were half empty.

The drought was pushing the river’s flows closer to a Compact violation trigger, making the risk of a call by the Lower Basin a growing probability. The Lower Basin, particularly Arizona, was insisting on guaranteed releases of water from Lake Powell. And because Colorado has the biggest share of the river within the Upper Basin and uses a greater portion of its apportionment than the other upstream states, it is most at risk. It began searching for a way to slip out of the legal noose of a Compact call.

In September 2005, the seven states’ top negotiators met in Albuquerque, New Mexico. During a lunch break, Colorado’s team made its pitch. The state’s negotiators proposed that the Lower Basin waive its right to force a downstream delivery through a Compact call. In exchange, the Upper Basin states would limit their water use to less than what’s strictly apportioned in the Compact, thereby reducing potential demand in the headwaters of Colorado and Wyoming that supply nearly the entirety of the river’s flow.

The offer was essentially a simplification and reframing of a dizzying array of technical disagreements over various provisions of the Compact — an attempt to throw spaghetti at the wall to see if it would stick.

“My recollection was that it was a pretty spontaneous proposal,” says Jim Lochhead, who had previously been Colorado’s top negotiator and in 2005 was continuing to serve as a legal advisor on the state’s team. “We weren’t making any progress, and it was pitched as, ‘If you really want to cut through all of this and get to the bottom, here’s a wild idea.’”

The proposal sparked discussion among all the parties at the negotiating table but also raised difficult issues.

“It was a great concept on paper,” says Pat Mulroy, who was the head of the Southern Nevada Water Authority and Nevada’s principal negotiator at the time. “Whether it was politically doable or not is a whole other ball game.”

In large part, that’s because a grand bargain would have forced both basins to give up assurances in the Compact that they consider sacrosanct.

“I’m not sure the Upper Basin would ever have agreed to limiting their ability to fully develop their 7.5. It’s like giving up your birthright — I’m not sure they could have sold that at home,” says Mulroy. Conversely, she says, “giving up that call provision is really the only weapon the Lower Basin has.”

And, indeed, following its spontaneous birth in Albuquerque, the proposal ran into stiff political headwinds back home in Colorado, where it failed to get then-governor Bill Owens’ blessing.

“I wasn’t directly representing the state of Colorado at that time; I was representing Colorado water users,” Lochhead says. “And when I brought the idea back to the state, it pretty quickly got shot down: ‘No, we can’t agree to anything that would not keep the dream alive of 7.5 million acre-feet being developed in the Upper Basin.’”

The prospect of a grand bargain itself faded from discussion. And yet, in ways that aren’t often acknowledged, it continued to shape the broad contours of the negotiations that unfolded over the next two decades.

The quest to escape the noose of a Compact call has remained central to Colorado’s bargaining position.

“The concept of a waiver of a Compact call is alive and well,” says Anne Castle, a former assistant Interior secretary who is now a senior fellow at the University of Colorado. “The quid pro quo for that waiver has taken different forms.”

To a large extent, the details of the various offers the Lower Basin has made in exchange for a possible waiver — which have sometimes been characterized within the negotiations as “mini grand bargains” — have never become public. What is clear is that the two basins have consistently failed to cut a deal.

Instead, the seven states adopted a more incremental approach, negotiating a series of drought-protection agreements based on smaller, more politically palatable deals. While that’s been a safer path for everyone politically, it has brought other kinds of risk.

“It just added layer upon layer of Gorilla Glue and Band-Aids that’s made it much more complicated to try to unwind or develop new agreements,” Lochhead says, “and has obviously proven to be inadequate in protecting the system.”

A SECOND LIFE

While the concept of a grand bargain led a short life at the negotiating table, it has gone on to live a remarkable second life. The idea was picked up and revived by a loose-knit group of seasoned observers of Colorado River issues who, for years, have called for more durable alternatives to the patchwork of ideas [ed. “The Law of the River”] in play among negotiators.

Eric Kuhn was a member of Colorado’s negotiating team when the grand bargain was proposed in 2005. At the time, he was the general manager of the Colorado River Water Conservation District based in Glenwood Springs and he has written thoughtfully and voluminously about the river’s problems. After his retirement in 2018, he partnered with John Fleck, a former journalist who is now author-in-residence at the University of New Mexico’s Utton Center, to write Science Be Dammed: How Ignoring Inconvenient Science Drained the Colorado River.

Kuhn and Fleck concluded the book by observing that “there is not enough water in the Colorado River for all the lawyers to be right,” and suggested the grand bargain as a way to avoid the courtroom.

“The basic idea of a grand bargain is, in lieu of litigation, we’re going to agree to something that both sides want,” says Kuhn.

He and Fleck weren’t the only ones who pushed for more serious consideration of the idea. Doug Kenney at the University of Colorado also has championed the concept. In 2012, he enlisted Kevin Wheeler, a widely respected engineer and fellow at Oxford University, to undertake modeling analysis of the kinds of trade-offs a grand bargain might require.

In 2021, Wheeler — together with a group of collaborators including Kuhn, climate scientist Brad Udall and Jack Schmidt, the director of Utah State’s Center for Colorado River Studies — published a white paper called “Alternative Management Paradigms for the Future of the Colorado and Green Rivers.” It was a comprehensive assessment of more ambitious strategies for weathering the drought and climate change than had emerged from now-perpetual negotiations between the states.

“New approaches that are responsive to significantly drier climate conditions and changing patterns of consumptive uses may require bolder policy initiatives that exceed the incremental approach of modern management,” the group wrote. “It is critical to explore alternative water management strategies that may extend beyond the framework of the Law of the River as presently interpreted.”

The following year, the team published a paper in the journal Science titled “What Will it Take to Stabilize the Colorado River?” And, it turned out, stabilizing the system would take something that looked a lot like a grand bargain.

Assuming the drought persists as it has since 2000, Wheeler and his partners identified two scenarios that would stabilize the river, both of which assumed the Lower Basin had waived its ability to make a Compact call. In one, the Lower Basin would need to decrease its water use by about 2 million acre-feet a year when Lake Mead and Lake Powell reach low levels. That would assure it of about 78 percent of its apportionment — an amount roughly in line with cuts it has already committed to taking. In exchange, the Upper Basin would have to cap its water use at 4 million acre-feet. But that’s only slightly more than half of its 7.5 million-acre-foot Compact apportionment, and roughly 300,000 acre-feet less than what it currently uses.

The second scenario — call it the “near-parity scenario” for simplicity — more equally distributed the Upper and Lower Basins’ relative cuts in apportionment. In it, the Upper Basin would cap its use at 4.5 million acre-feet, leaving it with 60 percent of its Compact apportionment. The Lower Basin would be able to use about 67 percent of its Compact apportionment when reservoirs are low, just slightly more percentage-wise than the Upper Basin. But it would have to cut its uses by 3 million acre-feet below its apportionment.

That would stabilize the system — or at least go a long way toward doing so — while largely meeting existing water demands in both basins. The Upper Basin currently uses about 4.3 million acre-feet per year. The Lower Basin, after ramping up an aggressive water conservation effort since 2007, has driven its annual use down to about 6 million acre-feet per year, and has signaled that it could likely reduce demand further.

But it would leave practically no leeway for future growth, at least without reshaping the socioeconomic landscape across the entire Basin. In particular, any future urban growth could come only by shifting significant amounts of water from farms to cities.

HARD MATH

Today, there is a simple, hard reality on the Colorado River: The available water supply is already maxed out. Water use throughout the basin needs to be reduced by roughly 25 percent just to make the numbers work now — to say nothing of the future, which is likely to be significantly drier.

In Colorado, that has raised hard questions about fairness, the “equitable division and apportionment” provision of the Compact, and the assurance the state thought it had that its water would be there to develop when it’s finally ready.

“Everyone agrees that there should be an equitable division of water, and the word ‘equity’ is one that everyone will rally around,” says Kenney. “But does equitable mean equal? That’s the crux of the issue.”

Over the past several years, Colorado’s attorney general, Phil Weiser, has been building his office’s staff of water lawyers. This January, Weiser, who is currently running for governor, appeared before a joint hearing of the state legislature’s judiciary committees.

“If we can’t get a deal — and I’m committed to not getting a bad deal just to get a deal — we’ll be in litigation. We’re ready for it,” he said. “If and when we can get a reasonable deal based in reality, I’m for it. But if we can’t, then we will be falling back on our rights under (the) 1922 Compact.”

Because of the peculiarities of the water-rights hierarchy in the Lower Basin, Arizona is arguably most at risk there. In March, that state — whose governor, Katie Hobbs, is running for re-election — retained the high-powered law firm Sullivan & Cromwell to represent it in potential Colorado River litigation. At the time, a spokesman for the governor said, “it’s critical that Arizona be prepared to defend ourselves in court if an agreement cannot be reached or the Law of the River is violated.”

“It is very difficult for a political figure — and they’re all political figures, even if they’re not elected — to agree to reduce the water use of their constituents and keep their career alive,” says Anne Castle. “They have to be able to tell their constituents, ‘I’m fighting for your water. I’m doing everything I can to keep your water secure, and it’s the other guy’s fault.’ The political incentives are directly at odds with the kind of compromise that’s needed in this type of hydrologic situation.”

Following the breakdown in negotiations between the Colorado River states, the federal government has announced its intention to step in. In May, the Bureau of Reclamation, on behalf of the Department of the Interior, revealed that it is preparing the first of what could be a series of five two-year interim plans for the river.

The final details are expected to be released this summer. But the federal government has indicated that the Interior secretary could cut water deliveries to the Lower Basin states by up to 3 million acre-feet — 40 percent of their Compact apportionment. During a briefing for Arizona water users in May, Brenda Burman, the head of the Central Arizona Project, presented modeling analysis of the proposed reductions and noted that, given the diminished releases from Lake Powell, the Upper Basin is “in a definite breach of the Compact by Sept. 30 of 2026.”

Owing to some quirks of river history, the secretary debatably has less authority in the Upper Basin, and so Reclamation has proposed no cuts there. But as climate change continues to eat away at snowpack and river flows, the Upper Basin states will likely be forced to cut back their uses anyway. Regardless of what the Compact says the Upper Basin gets, the water simply won’t be there.

And so now the seven states are facing a situation eerily similar to those in the near-parity scenario Wheeler and his colleagues laid out in their Science paper four years ago — but without a bargain.

COMING FULL CIRCLE?

In many ways, the prospects have never been worse for something like a grand bargain. Yet the fundamental problems the grand bargain was intended to solve have only grown sharper in the 20 years since it was first proposed.

“The grand bargain has gotten a bad name,” Kuhn says. “But if these issues aren’t resolved through a grand bargain, they’re going to be resolved through litigation.” In 2007, he says, the river’s reservoirs still had ample water to work with. “With empty reservoirs, you cannot finesse these issues.”

Litigation could come as soon as August, when Reclamation will likely release a record of decision for its proposed new operating plan. Legal action could take one of several paths. The one with the highest stakes would be direct enforcement of the Compact, likely in the form of a Compact call brought by Arizona and the other Lower Basin states against the Upper Basin states. Because the Compact is essentially a treaty between multiple states, that would go directly before the Supreme Court. But such cases are often grindingly long: Arizona’s 1952 lawsuit against California over Colorado River rights took a dozen years to resolve. A case in the Supreme Court could put the river in protracted litigation during a time of profound crisis.

Other, more limited challenges are possible, most likely against the Bureau of Reclamation or the secretary of the Interior for failure to comply with the Compact or violating environmental laws. But they, too, are not without risk.

“I have a hard time believing you could keep litigation contained, once that genie’s out of the bottle,” says Kenney. “I just have to believe that inevitably blows up into a full-fledged interstate litigation and it bumping right up to the Supreme Court.”

As the odds rise of a legal challenge to the Compact that could ultimately wind up before the highest court in the land, the fundamental tension the grand bargain was intended to resolve will likely be front and center before the justices. And, paradoxically, that could force the states themselves to finally make the really tough sacrifices they’ve been trying to avoid.

“I think that a road to a grand bargain runs through litigation,” says Kuhn.

That’s because in past interstate fights over shared rivers, the Supreme Court has typically appointed a water-law expert known as a special master to referee such cases. The most recent example is the dispute between Texas, New Mexico and Colorado over the Rio Grande. In that case, Kuhn notes, “the special master said, ‘You don’t want me or the court to decide this; get in a room and negotiate it.’ The special master kept the pressure on the states to negotiate.”

This May, the Supreme Court approved a settlement between those three states. Still, even that resolution only came a full 13 years after the case was initially filed, and it involves relatively small reductions in overall water use.

On the Colorado River, both water and time are in far shorter supply.

Western Water, our flagship publication by Foundation journalists, is available online. Check out our latest articles. Reach writer Matt Jenkins at mjenkins@watereducation.org.

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Click the link to read the article on the Aspen Journalism website (Heather Sackett):

June 5, 2026

Federal officials announced on Thursday that they plan on using a shorter-term framework for future Colorado River management so they can be more responsive to changing conditions and reservoir levels.

Acting Commissioner of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation Scott Cameron said at an annual conference on water policy that the agency will be using a 10-year framework, issuing new operational guidelines every two years. In the absence of a seven-state deal for sharing shortages and managing reservoirs, river management now falls to the federal government — an outcome nearly everyone had hoped to avoid.

“We would love to have a 20-year deal or a 30-year deal but, frankly, we haven’t even been able to get the seven states to agree on what a two-year deal would look like,” Cameron said. “Given the highly unusual hydrological situation in the basin … we think it makes sense to take a second look at decision making every couple of years.”

As part of the required process under the National Environmental Policy Act, Cameron said Reclamation will release a final Environmental Impact Statement with its “preferred alternative,” in mid-to-late summer. It will lay out a more detailed 10-year operations plan for the nation’s two largest reservoirs, Lake Powell and Lake Mead, and will include short-term operational guidelines for 2027 and 2028. He said the plan provides a stable, transparent and adaptable framework for river management.

“We want to pay more attention to what’s actually happening in the river and what’s happening in terms of the elevation of the reservoirs,” Cameron said. “We want to manage conservatively during low inflow periods and hopefully be able to transition to recovery as conditions improve across the basin to keep the system stable and resilient.”

Cameron left the door open for a return to future management by the states and added that if they eventually come to an agreement, it could supplant the federal plan.

Cameron’s update came at the Colorado Law Conference on Natural Resources at the University of Colorado Boulder, hosted by the Getches-Wilkinson Center and the Water & Tribes Initiative. Water managers from around the basin gathered at the Wolf Law School in the midst of one of the worst droughts on record that threatens the water supply for about 40 million people in the American Southwest. Record hot temperatures and one of the worst snowpacks since measuring began resulted in streamflows that peaked much lower than normal and, in some reaches, a month early. Reclamation’s most recent projections put spring runoff into Lake Powell at just 800,000 acre-feet, which would be 13% percent of normal and the lowest on record.

On top of the abysmal hydrologic conditions, the basin is also in the midst of a management crisis. The Upper Basin states (Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming) and Lower Basin states (California, Arizona and Nevada) after two years of negotiating have failed to reach a consensus on how they will share future cuts and have blown past deadlines to come up with a plan. The current guidelines, which have determined shortages and releases since 2007, expire at the end of the year. But for all intents and purposes, water managers need a new plan in place by the start of the new water year on Oct. 1.

Some of the problem still centers around the 1922 Colorado River Compact, which allocated half of the river’s flows (7.5 million acre-feet a year) to each basin. But this framework no longer applies under 21st century conditions, which has seen flows decline by 20% due to climate change. Despite indications a year ago that the states were moving to a supply-driven model based on each year’s snowpack and available water — rather than a fixed allocation of water — a new management framework the states can agree on has remained out of reach.

Beyond the band-aid

The feds’ operating plan for the first two years may be based on a proposal submitted by the Lower Basin states in early May, in which they propose to cut another 700,000 acre-feet of water per year through 2028, on top of the 1.5 million acre-feet they had already promised. California and Arizona will each take another 300,000 acre-feet of cuts and Nevada will take a cut of 100,000 acre-feet. The proposal does not include any mandatory conservation from the Upper Basin.

Federal officials responded in a May 28 letter with adjustments to make the proposal feasible, including the requirement that the Lower Basin states help pay for the 700,000 acre-feet of conservation. In the past, conservation programs have depended heavily on federal funding.

Becky Mitchell, who represents Colorado in the negotiations among the states, said during a Friday panel that the feds’ plan was a starting point but raises some concerns. Constantly renegotiating an operating plan every two years would be hard to fathom, she said.

“How do we fund and finance if we’re constantly renegotiating?” Mitchell said. “And how do we create the certainty that the 40 million people deserve?”

The feds have already stepped in this spring to prevent the worst consequences of the exceptionally dry winter and keep water levels at Lake Powell from falling below the threshold for making hydropower at Glen Canyon Dam. They are releasing up to 1 million acre-feet from Flaming Gorge Reservoir to prop up Powell and holding back Powell releases by about 1.5 million acre-feet. Cameron conceded, however, that these are temporary, stop-gap measures meant to address a critical situation.

“I think we succeeded in making everybody unhappy and everybody mad, which maybe means we’re doing the right thing in terms of Lake Powell,” Cameron said.

The Upper Basin states, including Colorado, are exploring ways to contribute water to a pool in Lake Powell as a means of maintaining higher water levels and an insurance policy against drastic cuts. But officials have not budged from their position that the Upper Basin is limited in what it can do and that cutting Lower Basin overuse is the primary solution to the Colorado River crisis.

Brad Udall, a water and climate scientist at Colorado State University whose presentation kicked off the conference, asked water managers not to waste this unique opportunity to redo 100 years of law and policy around how to manage a critical resource. And he directed a plea at the Upper Basin, saying that they, too, are part of the problem.  

“We need everybody with a shoulder to this wheel,” Udall said. “We understand that the Upper Basin is different. We understand that they don’t have (large upstream) reservoirs and that every year people suffer. But we need you to help. Please help us.”

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

June 1, 2026

I’ve been on a “Colorado River sabbatical” of late, but I took a peek last week at Reclamation’s latest 24-month study. Holy moly things have gotten bad since the last time I looked!

Those not on sabbatical already know all of this, but to keep Lake Powell above a surface elevation of 3,500 feet, Reclamation is:

• increasing releases out of Flaming Gorge on the Wyoming-Utah border
• dropping releases out of Lake Powell to 6 million acre feet this year

Even with those two “hail Mary” moves, Lake Mead is projected in the “most probable” scenario to drop to elevation 1,020 by summer 2027. Under the “minimum probable” forecast, Mead drops all the way to elevation 1,008 in 2027.

We are on the brink, as a group of my colleagues explains in a new analysis out this morning (Monday June 1, 2026), of a system crash:

That’s from the latest report from the team of Castle-Schmidt-Kuhn-Sorensen-Tara, the Traveling Wilburys of the Colorado River. I’ve been on “sabbatical”, so I didn’t work on this one with my friends. (The joke is that I’m busy catching up on old movies, which is at least partly true, did you know Billy Wilder made, like, 50 movies?)

Even a wet year, my friends conclude, would only provide a short reprieve from the need to significantly reduce consumptive use.

Building on a similar analysis done last September (I was a co-author on that one), the authors attempt to overcome one of the shortcomings of the traditional Colorado River accounting systems, which is to treat any water above “dead pool” as usable storage. This is not the case, with clear do-not-cross lines in the reservoirs that are maintained for technical reasons well above the bottom, defined by my colleagues as…

One of the reasons for my “sabbatical” is, frankly, an agonized frustration with the abject failure of Colorado River governance at the basin scale, and a desire to turn my attention to the local level, which is where the problem solving responsibility seems to rest right now. Each community needs to be having a serious conversation right now about the specifics of its Colorado River water supply, and how it intends to go about using less. Blaming other people for using too much isn’t particularly useful at this point, we seem to have chosen to hand that set of questions (the rule-based part of “who is entitled to how much”) over to the courts, and who knows what that process holds. We know the answer for everyone is “use less water”, and each community needs to be getting on with that conversation.

The full report is here.

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

May 26, 2026

Dissonance exists between life-close-to-normal policies regarding urban water use and the growing crisis on the river

Casually surveying the urban landscapes in much of Colorado’s Front Range, you’d never know that the Colorado River — the source for roughly half the water of the cities — has deteriorated to its most pitiful shape of perhaps the last century.

Oh, yes, some utilities — notably Denver Water and Aurora Water, which together serve 1.9 million residents — have imposed rigorous stage-one drought watering restrictions. Outdoor irrigation is allowed twice per week and never during the heat of day. Other water utilities that tap Colorado River water, however, have asked only for voluntary cutbacks, if any at all.

Jeff Lukas, a water consultant with several decades invested in climate change work, says this seeming aloofness of some cities will not persist indefinitely. That is certainly true if the record heat and abnormal dryness of the past winter continues into 2027. They may have no choice.

“I think Front Range cities will be asked, whether nicely or not, to reduce their Colorado River diversions,” said Lukas in a May 11 webinar. “The mechanism for that is unclear, but I think it’s going to happen.”

Water rights of the Front Range cities — and many of those on the Western Slope, too — are junior to the Colorado River Compact. It was negotiated in 1922, making diversions more recent than that junior.

Problems in the basin were becoming apparent in the 1990s. The warming climate in this century has provoked changes. By all accounts, they have not been enough.

Lukas, as a dendrochronologist at the Institute of Alpine and Arctic Research in Boulder 20 years ago, was teasing out evidence from tree rings to understand the climates of the Colorado River Basin during the last 1,200 years.

Later, as a scientist with the Western Water Assessment, Lukas co-authored (with Liz Peyton) a 2020 report called Colorado River Basin Climate and Hydrology: State of the Science. That 500-page report integrated more than 800peer-reviewed studies to help water managers understand physical processes, climate risks, and forecasting tools across the basin.

In 2024, with the state climatologist, Russ Schumacher, and several others, Lukas turned out the 100-page volume called “Climate Change in Colorado.”

Based in Lafayette, Lukas now works as a consultant. At Lukas Climate Research and Consulting, he specializes in the overlapping areas of climate hazards, water resources, and ecosystems.

Lukas, in a presentation he titled “Running dry on the Colorado River: The roots of the crisis & its implications for the Front Range,” explained the big picture and Colorado’s Front Range part in it.

Defined by the Continental Divide, Colorado has an inverse relationship between its eastern and western slopes. About 90% of the state’s residents live to the east, nearly all at the foot of the Rocky Mountains, whereas 80% of the state’s precipitation originates on the west side, in the headwaters of the Colorado River and its tributaries.

Colorado itself provides 50% to 60% of the water in the entire Colorado River, depending upon the year. This year has been a terrible year everywhere in the basin, Colorado included.

Lukas explained that “islands of moisture” provide nearly all the water in this 244,000-square-mile basin. The high mountains constitute these islands. Some places deliver more than others. Buffalo Pass, near Steamboat, famously has had prodigious volumes of snow. This snow, when melted, can produce 50 inches of water.

It takes 20 inches or more of precipitation in these mountain islands to produce meaningful runoff. Even then, it doesn’t all end up in the Colorado River. In Colorado and the three upper-basin states, he said, 16% of the rain and snow that falls becomes water in the Colorado River. In the hotter lower basin, the figure is 3%.

“The atmosphere takes back most of what it giveth, even in the wetter upper basin,” he said.

Evaporation and transpiration are the pickpockets of this water. Heat produces evaporation, and we’ve had plenty of that this year.

Temperatures during November through April were the warmest on record in Colorado for that span of months. March heat was exceptional. This produced runoff in the rivers that in most cases may surpass that of May or June, the traditional times for peak runoff. Peak runoff has been trending earlier by several weeks during the last few decades, but this was a leap of about two months.

Runoff for April through July — a time that normally accounts for 70% to 80% of annual streamflows — this year will likely deliver no better than 20% to 40%. In its May report, the Bureau of Reclamation said April flows into Lake Powell were 40% of the average during the last 30 years and it expects flows in May to sink to 9% of that average.

Can it get any worse? Count on it, said Lukas.

“We should expect not every year to look like 2026 from here on out, but more years in the future will look like 2026. And somewhere down the pipe, not as far in the future as we would like, there will be a year worse than 2026 for the Colorado River.”

This is so very different from what was assumed by the delegates from the seven basin states who gathered in 1922 in Santa Fe to apportion the Colorado River.

The role of reservoirs

Taking the big, long-term view, Lukas pointed out that the overall story of the Colorado River is one of modifications needed to suit human uses. “It’s all about smoothing out the natural variability in the availability of water over space and over time.”

Reservoirs are the primary means by which humans have been able to “smooth out the natural variability.”

The Colorado River Basin has 60 million acre-feet of storage. That’s four times the annual flow. Five-sixths of the storage capacity is found in the desert in two vessels: lakes Mead and Powell. The headwaters have many reservoirs but they are relatively small. The total storage capacity is 2,000 times more than the volume of Dillon Reservoir.

Since 2000, stored water in those two big buckets, Mead and Powell, has declined from 49 million acre-feet to 16 million acre-feet as of May. Of that, 9 million lies at elevations below the lowest outlets. These are called dead pools.

Those delegates in 1922 who crafted the Colorado River Compact, the legal document that provided the basis for nearly all these dams and aqueducts subsequently built, assumed annual flows of 17 million to 18 million acre-feet. They were overly optimistic. The 20^th century average was 15.2 million acre-feet.

Now comes the 21^st century, and the average at Lee Ferry has dipped to 12.2 million acre-feet. This has implications for the Front Range cities but also farms. If Colorado must reduce its diversions to accord with the compact, those rights dated before 1922 will be exempt from reductions. The giant transmountain diversions have come more recently, as have many of the diversions for towns and cities on the Western Slope.

Accumulating evidence fingers human-caused climate change with large amounts of responsibility for declined flows. Lukas said his rule of thumb is that the role of greenhouse gases overall are responsible for two-thirds of lower flows.

As for the mechanics of this shift, rising heat is one important “knob,” said Lukas. As the atmosphere warms, it reduces “runoff efficiency” even more, sending water into the atmosphere instead of into streams and then rivers. Accumulating evidence fingers human-caused climate change with responsibility for most and possibly all of increased temperatures.

Precipitation has declined about 5% since 2000, with a larger reduction in spring, an important time of year to get moisture. Here, the link to the warming climate is less clear. “It seems increasingly likely that climate change is changing the dynamics of storm tracks and the persistence of, say, high-pressure systems over the interior West,” said Lukas. “That is, at least in part, responsible for why we’ve had less precipitation since 2000.”

The Colorado River, though, had problems even before the warming climate began throwing sharp elbows in water volumes. The reservoirs of the Colorado River Basin were 92% full in 1999, a wet decade overall. Even then, however, the Colorado River had ceased to reach the Pacific Ocean. There were too many straws inserted.

Less than 12% of the river’s flow goes to urbanized and industrial uses. Lukas pointed out that cities have become more efficient in their use of water. The rule of thumb for Denver and other Western cities is that one acre-feet of water meets the needs of a three households on an annual basis. That compares with two households a few decades ago.

Mining of fossil fuels and minerals uses a small amount. Evaporation from reservoirs and rivers and other “system losses” accounts for about 15%.

That takes us to agriculture. It uses 75% of the river’s water in the Colorado River for irrigation on 5 million acres. Some of that land lies outside the basin itself. That includes the South Platte and Arkansas River valleys of eastern Colorado.

Over half of that water — about 9 million acre-feet — gets used to grow feed for livestock, mainly alfalfa and pasture grass.

Might cities want to cut deals with farmers to “share” the water? This discussion has been underway for at least 15 to 20 years. Some pilot projects in Colorado and elsewhere have been launched to see what this might look like. A strong proponent has been James Eklund, a water attorney in Denver. Others question how this is done and, for that matter, whether we want to do it. But certainly, water for urban uses has higher monetary value than growing hay to feed cattle.

Why the restraint of cities?

As for the Front Range cities, the big question is whether they are planning for a river that produces even less than it does now.

In 2024, Andy Mueller, the general manager of the Colorado River Water Conservation District, suggested the need to start planning for a river that may deliver less than 10 million acre-feet in coming decades. Some thought then that the state engineer, Jason Ullman, needed to start sorting through this matter of junior vs. senior rights. Jim Lochhead, a former water attorney on the Western Slope and later CEO of Denver Water, pushed back, saying it was premature given the huge amount of work that would be required. See: “Heading for the Colorado River Cliff,” Big Pivots, Oct. 20, 2024.

At the Zoom session on May 11, I asked Lukas about the modest watering restrictions by Front Range water providers. He had previously described mixed signals from the water utilities. If 2027 is dry again, expect more uniformity around drought restrictions. “But it’s pretty weird right now,” he said.

With the attention to the Colorado River in the news media, it seemed like a perfect opportunity for the water utilities to mount more aggressive campaigns. Any idea why they had not, I wondered.

The utilities, he said, are reluctant to deliver regulations that produce discomfort around outdoor water-use restrictions. They don’t want to do this unless absolutely necessary.

Part of this is because of experiences during the covid epidemic. A lesson to public servants during that time made them more reluctant to push the public to do things they don’t want to do. “You only want to exercise that authority, that public legal authority, sparingly and only when it’s clear that is what is really necessary.”

Revenue was another consideration. Water infrastructure is expensive, and the money to pay for it comes from charges for water use. By imposing limits, you reduce revenue and hence must charge more for water. The conundrum is that reducing use doesn’t necessarily mean you pay less. In some cases, less water may require more infrastructure. This is a hard message to convey.

“What you’re seeing is a dissonance between the circumstances and what’s happening, at least this year,” he said.

Or at least right now. We have had rainy weather in May. Some meteorologists think we may end up with healthy rainfall this summer. If instead the summer is like the winter, very hot and dry, I expect the utilities might pick up their game.

Jeff Lukas presented in a session called Zoom at Noon. You can see the hour-long presentation here. The passcode is %ACg9*XU

Click the link to read the article on the Sibley’s Rivers website (George Sibley):

May 26, 2026

This is the cover of a new book I’ve just published, Storm in My Head, a collection of poetry written over the 60 years I’ve been living in the headwaters of the Colorado River, since 1966. My 60-year celebration. Those of you who prefer your literature in sprints and strolls over the marathon essays I impose on you might enjoy this book. I’m in the process of getting it distributed, and it may eventually be in a bookstore near you or on Amazon; but for the time being, if you are interested, an email to me, george@gard-sibley.org, will initiate a response on how to get a little money to me (10 bucks plus shipping) to get an inscribed copy wending its way to you.

End of advertisement – back to the river….

Romancing the River – Elephants in the River

The Colorado River situation is moving toward replacing the existing ‘Interim Guidelines’ for managing the river system with a new set of interim guidelines for managing the river system. This new set is devised mostly by the Bureau of Reclamation, which is growing a little desperate to avoid the embarrassment of having its river system cause the flow of the river to stop – ‘dead pool’ – behind one or another of its big dams, in a river management system built for a considerably larger Colorado River – now as mythic a river as the biblical four that flowed out of the Garden of Eden.

All this makes me think I’ll briefly abandon my historical update of Frederick Dellenbaugh’s Romance of the Colorado River, and try to sort through what has been happening recently in the present, most of which we’ve been reading or hearing about in the media.

Reports on the river’s flow after the Weirdest Winter Ever (at least in recorded time) have just gotten worse and worse; now the anticipated inflow to Powell Reservoir is 13 percent of the thirty-year average, from tributary runoffs that peaked as much as two months earlier than the usual early June. The Bureau of Reclamation’s 24-month projection indicates that, if last year’s releases from Powell were replicated this year, they might have to stop generating power by late summer to protect the power turbines – which in effect declares the remaining quarter of the reservoir’s potential storage ‘dead pool,’ since the only other way past Glen Canyon Dam is through four outflow tubes of questionable viability that the Bureau would like to use as little as possible.

The Bureau will address this with two emergency measures: first, by bringing a large quantity of stored water down the Green River from Flaming Gorge Reservoir, and second, by cutting releases from Powell Reservoir by close to two million acre-feet (maf) – which in turn will leave Mead Reservoir lower and diminish its power generation. This is an emergency plan that can nowise be considered long-range planning.

The Lower Basin states in turn have bumped up their willingness to take more shortages for the next couple years by roughly doubling shortages they have already agreed to accept – if the feds will pay them something for not using water that is not there. Their earlier cuts were basically just enough to finally start taking out of their individual allotments the system losses (mostly evaporation) they have been dismissing, with Bureau cooperation, as being met through ‘surplus flows’ that effectively disappeared when the Central Arizona Project came online in the 1990s.

The four Upper Basin states have responded by suggested that it might be time to bring in a facilitator or mediator to conduct the seven-state negotiations on future management planning. This launched an episode of fussing between the Lower and Upper Basins as to who first had that idea, with the other basin objecting to it. But no one seems to be totally opposed to the idea at this point, and it might happen. 

But basically it all seems to be in reaction to an ‘emergency’ water year, with no advance on more long-range planning – and there is no reason to believe that this year in just a one-shot emergency like the 1977 water year. It is just the most extreme year in an extreme period – the past quarter century – that is probably the shape of the future in the Colorado River region, and there are no more Flaming Gorge reservoirs to draw down for the next emergency year….

It’s probably important to remember a distinction: there is a river, the Colorado River, and we have overlaid on that river a management systemfor managing the river’s water for its human uses, a system whose parts either store water or distribute stored water to users. But we do not directly ‘manage’ the river itself, which runs according larger ‘operators’ – to global climate factors that we can inadvertently change but do not directly control, to what is happening to precipitation that falls in the river’s watersheds, and to how much what lives on the land (including us) interacts with the flow both on and below the land surface.

That last point – the water ‘on and below the land surface’ – strikes me as very important but largely ignored in the stalemated negotiations. You remember the metaphor of ‘the elephant in the room’: a big thing that everyone in the room is trying to ignore because to acknowledge it is to open a can of worms? (Sorry, mixing metaphors here.)

Well, we have ‘elephants in the river’ – or rather maybe in the ‘box’ containing the sacred Law of the River, through which we try to manage to the river. That’s the box that we’re all supposed to be ‘thinking outside of.’ Beginning to work ‘outside the box’ on anything will open a can of worms, but… are we going to have any choice, further down the road when it will be even harder if the elephants in the river continue to be ignored?

Trying to think in an integrated way of the water under the land as well as that on the land is one of our elephants in the river. We need to keep in mind the distribution of the freshwater all land-based life depends on (basically a solar-distilled three percent of the ocean’s water). In our times more than half of the freshwater on the planet is ‘banked’ in mountain glaciers and the ice sheets of the polar regions and Greenland – although this fraction is gradually diminishing under the changing climate. Of the remaining 35-40 percent, most of it is groundwater – water that soaks into the land, nurturing nearly all of the plant life that is the foundational food, fuel and housing supply for the animal kingdom (including us). This leaves only a small fraction of the water on the surface – lakes, wetlands, streams and rivers – and this is also a diminishing fraction, as the warming climate increases sublimation and evaporation from all waters exposed to the sun’s increasing power.

Yet that is also the fraction of freshwater over which nearly all the human squabbling is happening. For a long time, until the last century-plus, that was all the water that most of the animal kingdom could access, but now we have – and use, not wisely – pumps that make the groundwater accessible too.

We also know that most of that small fraction of surface water is pretty intimately connected to the groundwater. A river is not just a drain for water that failed to soak into the ground; as a river runs through its low-elevation course in a watershed, it constantly interacts with the groundwater, gaining water when the land is wet and the ground is full of water, and giving water to the land, as gravity permits, when the land is dry.

This knowledge ought to drive us toward thinking of groundwater and surface water as a single water source – not just our awareness that pumping the land dry will also diminish the river, but also our awareness that irrigating the chronically dry lands from the streams and rivers not only grows more plants and animal foods that the dry land could – but some of that irrigation water also sinks below the root zone to recharge the groundwater. The city of Gunnison, where I live, bought a ranch adjacent to the city because the city leaders knew enough about alluvial water to know that their groundwater supply (several relatively shallow wells) depended on keeping that ranch under irrigation from the river — water mostly cleaned by the ground it passes through.

But back to the Colorado River, the fraction of the water that does not soak into the land is a larger fraction than you would find in gentler lands primarily because most of the water falls on mountains in winter as snow, which melts in a relatively short time period as the weather warms, too fast for all of it to sink into land that is often too steep or too rocky for absorbing it anyway. But even in that ‘runoff period,’ scientists are learning that a lot of the water in the stream in the ‘spring flood’ season is groundwater flowing in from saturated lands.

Despite knowing all this, however, we persist in fighting over the fraction of freshwater that flows in the river’s watersheds through the year in the Colorado River region (natural basin plus out-of-basin extensions), and pay little in a basin-wide way to the use and abuse of groundwater. Only Colorado – to the best of my knowledge – has tried statewide to legally integrate the use of surface waters and groundwater: since 1969 all groundwater users had to acquire water rights, in the same priority system with surface water users. And – before there was easy access to computers and spreadsheets – all groundwater uses going back almost a century were also integrated into that priority system, a massive ‘can of worms’ to negotiate.

What’s been happening in Colorado for 35 years then is the beginning of the intelligent management of an integrated surface-and-groundwater supply – apparently far too intelligent for the Trumpish agri-industrialists of the two largest Colorado River water users, Southern California and Arizona. Arizona was forced to develop a groundwater management plan (1970) for the areas of Arizona that would be served by the federal Central Arizona Project, in order to get Congress to pass the project; but the rest of the state has been pumping groundwater at prodigious rates, with surface subsidence as evidence of collapsing emptied aquifers that are lost forever. Most of California’s groundwater overpumping is up in the Central Valley, not ‘served’ by the Colorado River, but as Colorado River flows inexorably diminish in a warming world, there will be growing temptations to pump in the Imperial and Coachella Valleys.

I have not found figures for the amount of unregulated groundwater ‘mining’ that goes on in the Colorado river region, but the number and volume of aquifers that have collapsed and been lost due to water-mining would probably go a long way toward filling Mead and Powell Reservoirs. And if you pause for a second and think about it, storing water underground is probably better than storing it in open reservoirs under a desert sun.

That is not the only elephant in the Colorado River – and most of them lead back, one way or another to the Colorado River Compact. The ‘temporary’ two-basin division that has clearly become toxic. Acknowledgement that the compact commission’s original goal of a seven-state division is not just possible now, but has been realized, to everyone’s discontent, making the two-basin division nothing but a battleground. Acceptance of the fact that the diminished river will continue to diminish so long as we continue to put greenhouse gases into the atmosphere faster than the planet can absorb them. Acknowledgment of the fact that as the planet warms, surface storage in big desert reservoirs is a bad idea that will get worse. Acceptance of the fact that the reconvening of a compact commission is overdue, to formalize the seven-state division and its appropriative consequences. And maybe the biggest worm-can of all: are some reasonable, even moral, limits on the appropriation doctrine possible?

We’ll look at some of these other elephants in future posts here – which I think is where the ‘romance of the Colorado River’ is today. I also think we will never have a workable resolution to our current river-system problems until we take on the elephants and bump our own consciousness of water in the arid regions up a notch from the naive ‘conquest of the desert.’

Click the link to read the article on the KVNF website (Brody Wilson). Here’s an excerpt:

May 19, 2026

A special mid-year West Slope Water Summit brought together water managers and community leaders to address a dire water year. Projected inflows into Lake Powell are expected to be well below half of normal — and negotiations over the river’s future remain unresolved.

A special mid-year West Slope Water Summit convened this week in Montrose — called early because the situation couldn’t wait until November. Montrose County Commissioner Sue Hansen organized the gathering after attending the Colorado River District’s State of the River address. She told attendees it was time to step up the urgency.

“This year is the first year that I am not optimistic,” Hansen said. “This is unprecedented and perhaps sobering for all of us.”

[…]

“The Lower Basin has put out, maybe you guys have heard of this, bridge proposal a couple weeks ago that in my opinion is a joke,” she said.

Her frustration centers on the math. The proposal calls for reducing water use by 3 million acre-feet over two years. But Flinker says that’s nowhere near enough — the river needs cuts of at least that much every single year. At the heart of the standoff is a hard reality. There is currently much less water in the river than we have been using, and no one anticipates that changing any time soon.

As Flinker puts it, “Well, I can speak for myself and you probably have the same opinion. Who wants to reduce their water usage? Right? No one. And the Lower Basin has used over 10 million, close to 11 million, acre-feet out of this river every year, much above their allocation. They don’t want to use less – especially when it’s not a little less – it’s like half, right?”

Click the link to read the article on the Aspen Journalism website (Heather Sackett):

May 12, 2026

An environmental organization is floating a concept that could help the Colorado River system during extremely dry years like this one and keep the nation’s two largest reservoirs above critical thresholds.

Boulder-based Western Resource Advocates has released a concept paper that explores the idea of a flexible pool of water that can be moved wherever it’s needed most among the basin’s biggest reservoirs.

Water users in the Lower Basin states — California, Arizona and Nevada — currently have about 3.2 million acre-feet stored in Lake Mead through voluntary conservation and efficiency measures. Water users bank water in this pool, known as the Intentionally Created Surplus, and can take this water back out again to use under certain circumstances.

The paper’s authors — John Berggren, a regional policy manager with Western Resource Advocates, and Kevin Wheeler, principal and engineer with Water Balance Consulting — used the ICS pool as an example to explore how the idea would work. They say that if the ICS pool could be moved from Lake Mead to Lake Powell, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation could have a buffer to more easily protect Glen Canyon Dam infrastructure, minimize the need for large releases from upstream reservoirs and reduce the risk of litigation among the seven basin states that share the Colorado River. 

“If you took a million or two million acre-feet out of Mead in the form of a conservation pool and moved it to Powell, then you could protect Powell without having to do all the DROA and the 6e releases,” Berggren said. “This is a perfect year where we would like to have the flexibility to move this water wherever it’s needed most, in this case in Powell.”

Berggren is referring to the actions that the federal government is taking this year: releasing up to 1 million acre-feet from Flaming Gorge Reservoir to prop up Powell, as well as reducing releases down to just 6 million acre-feet from Powell instead of the originally expected 7.48 million acre-feet. Projections from Reclamation show the reservoir falling below 3,500 feet by this summer if these actions aren’t taken, jeopardizing the ability to make hydropower at Glen Canyon Dam.

This is a pivotal moment for the Colorado River Basin’s 40 million water users, with a historically bad snowpack and streamflows pushing reservoir levels to new lows and management into crisis mode. The seven states that share the river have not been able to reach an agreement for how reservoirs will be operated and shortages will be shared after the current framework expires this year. The feds are poised to step in with their own management rules, but the actions they are allowed to legally take may not go far enough to keep the system from crashing.

An invisible pool

Berggren’s paper lays out a surplus pool that would be flexible and “operationally neutral,” and would be separate from the rest of the stored water in both reservoirs. That means it wouldn’t count toward calculations of how much water is in Lake Powell or Lake Mead for the purpose of determining how water shortages would be shared. 

There isn’t a way to physically move water upstream, but according to WRA, water could be transferred between reservoirs through adjustments to dam releases and careful accounting. A pool could be “moved” from Mead to Powell by holding back water in Powell. It could be moved back to Mead by increasing releases from Powell.

The concept paper does not advocate for taking such actions this year, presenting them as a potential strategy to be used under a new river management framework that is being hashed out between the states that share the river and the federal government.

“There are a lot of concerns about operational neutrality, but we’re trying to show that it’s actually not that scary and can provide benefit with less risk than the current options,” Berggren said.

Reservoir levels in Mead currently determine how deep cuts to the Lower Basin states are; as Mead is drawn down, it triggers deeper cuts. Some water experts have said the ICS pool allows Lower Basin water users to game the system. By leaving their water in the ICS pool, it keeps reservoir levels artificially high and lets water users avoid taking deeper cuts. If the ICS pool had remained separate from the rest of Lake Mead, shortage triggers and mandatory conservation would have happened earlier. 

Making this pool “operationally neutral,” or invisible to reservoir operations, fixes this issue.

In a proposal submitted to the federal government May 1, the Lower Basin states expressed support for this concept, but they did not lay out a plan to implement it. 

“The goal is to achieve operational neutrality of ICS,” the submittal reads. “The Lower Division States will continue to determine when and how to convert ICS to operational neutrality at higher elevations in Lake Mead.” 

They also said the long-term goal is to create an operationally neutral common pool of new water savings to be strategically deployed at low elevations to help delay and offset additional reductions to the Lower Basin. 

Some experts say there are concerns and unanswered questions about these types of pools. The dividing line where water delivery is measured from the Upper Basin (Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming) to the Lower Basin is Lee Ferry, just downstream of Lake Powell. Water measured at this location determines whether the Upper Basin remains in compliance with the 1922 Colorado River Compact. Moving water between reservoirs would have to deal with this issue.

“You would just have to agree on the rules of when is it considered a delivery at Lee Ferry and when isn’t it a delivery at Lee Ferry,” said Colorado River expert and author Eric Kuhn.

Another problem is that removing the ICS pool from reservoir accounting would leave a 3.2-million-acre-foot hole in Lake Mead that would need to be filled. 

“It’s hard to get there because there isn’t a way to make ICS operationally neutral unless you impose the shortages that would occur if the ICS weren’t there,” said Kathryn Sorensen, director of research and professor of practice at the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University. “I don’t know how else you can do it. You have to pay the piper.”

Lower Basin proposal

Last week, the Lower Basin states submitted a proposal to Reclamation to operate the reservoirs through 2028 that includes more conservation. This short-term deal could provide a temporary fix while states continue to hammer out a long-term strategy to share the river. 

The Lower Basin states are proposing to cut another 700,000 acre-feet of water per year through 2028, on top of the 1.5 million acre-feet they had already promised. California and Arizona will each take another 300,000 acre-feet of cuts and Nevada will take a cut of 100,000 acre-feet. The proposal does not include any mandatory conservation from the Upper Basin. 

“It was a monumental undertaking in a very short time frame to come up with all of this,” said JB Hamby, California’s lead negotiator. “We need a bridge to the future, and we welcome and look forward to an opportunity for a full seven-state deal where all states are part of the solution.”

The Lower Basin proposal also says that this year’s release from Flaming Gorge to prop up Powell should be as close to the maximum amount of Reclamation’s range of 1 million acre-feet as possible. The proposal also calls for increasing releases from Lake Powell if hydrology and projected reservoir levels improve.

“The intent under improved hydrology is to share the benefits of improved hydrology between both basins,” the proposal reads. 

Colorado’s negotiator, Becky Mitchell, said in a prepared statement that the Lower Basin’s proposal for water-use reductions is a good first step but they still call for too much water to be released out of Lake Powell and other Upper Basin reservoirs.

“The Lower Division States’ proposal would also drain the Upstream Initial Units with limited opportunities for recovery,” Mitchell’s statement reads. “Lake Powell should properly be viewed as a savings account for the Lower Basin: The Lower Basin’s own resiliency depends upon it. The entire Basin should support sustainable, supply-driven operations at Lake Powell that rebuild storage.”

Upper Basin officials have proposed a mediator to help move the needle on talks about future management to try to get to a seven-state deal.

Berggren said that although the concept of a flexible, floating pool doesn’t solve the basic supply-and-demand problem on the Colorado River, it’s still an important tool for future management. 

“There are a bunch of other things needed, including Lower Basin users and Upper Basin users using less water overall,” Berggren said. “This is just one component. But it helps provide some benefit in dry years like this one.”

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

May 14, 2026

Key Points

• The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation is now seeking a 10-year water-sharing plan for the Colorado River states, adjusting cutbacks every two years.
• A worst-case scenario being modeled could slash water shares for Arizona, California and Nevada by 40%.
• The Lower Basin states have proposed their own conservation plan, which could cover the first two years of the new federal framework.

Unable to get Colorado River states to hash out a new 20-year deal to share in worsening water shortages, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation has told them it’s now aiming for a 10-year plan with prescribed cutbacks to be reassessed every two years. Federal officials informed the seven states of their new preference late last week, and Arizona’s lead negotiator made it public on Wednesday, May 13, during a meeting of a committee representing the cities, tribes and other water users who meet to develop a unified state position.

The shift to what could effectively become five two-year plans carries both opportunities and risks for Arizona. On the one hand, state Water Resources Director Tom Buschatzke said, it means a proposal that the Lower Basin states — Arizona, California and Nevada — recently submitted to boost their conservation through 2028 could cover the first two-year term if federal officials agree. That would keep water moving through the Central Arizona Project Canal, an economic lifeline that is at risk under some other scenarios. On the other hand, a move to bite-size plans “has us in a room negotiating for the next 10 years,” Buschatzke said at a meeting of the Arizona Reconsultation Committee. “That’s not something that creates the certainty that we’ve heard some people desire.”

[…]

New rules are necessary because the shortage-sharing guidelines that covered the last 20 years expire this fall — and because the river keeps shrinking along with a paltry snowpack in the Rocky Mountains. A deepening shortage has increased the stakes, keeping a consensus deal out of reach…In pitching their new 10-year “framework,” federal officials also informed the states that they intend to at least model the potential effects of a 3 million acre-foot annual reduction to what the three Lower Basin states could pull from Lake Mead. That worst-case scenario would slash 40% from what the century-old Colorado River Compact promised those Lower Basin states, and it could dry up the CAP Canal. It’s nearly twice the reduction that those states offered in their recent proposal…A 10-year program with a broad menu of potential guidelines that update every two years allows flexibility to adapt to both the changing hydrology and the potential for a political breakthrough on a consensus deal, [Alex] Smith said.

Click the link to read the release on the Western Resource Advocates website (John Berggren):

May 4, 2026

A new concept paper from experts at Western Resource Advocates and Water Balance Consulting shows that flexible water conservation pools can help get the Colorado River through dry years like this one.

• The Colorado River’s two major reservoirs are approaching historic lows, threatening the infrastructure that delivers water and hydropower to communities across the West. The current tools to address the problem are limited.
• The guidelines for managing the river expire this year. There are several management alternatives being considered that incorporate new flexible conservation pools. 
• A new concept paper shows how these pools can protect the Colorado River Basin and minimize conflict in critically dry years.

Imagine that you’re about to overdraw your checking account. Would you transfer money from your savings to avoid overdraft fees? Cut back on your spending?

Water managers on the Colorado River are faced with a similar problem, and few people are happy with the options available.

The Colorado River Basin just experienced its warmest winter on record. Snow water equivalent, or the amount of water in snowpack, is on track to be one of the lowest on record. An unprecedented March heat wave quickly melted much of what little snow was available to feed the river. And the West is projected to continue getting hotter and drier in the coming years.

The Colorado River Basin isn’t dealing with a temporary water shortage, it’s bankrupt.

The river’s two major reservoirs — Lake Powell and Lake Mead — were constructed with a much bigger river in mind. Today, these reservoirs are approaching historic lows, threatening the infrastructure that delivers water and power to communities across the West. The Bureau of Reclamation forecasted that Lake Powell could drop below 3,500 feet, or the level needed to protect hydropower production, this summer if no actions were taken.

We are about to overdraw the account, resulting in significant consequences for the West.

Under current management guidelines, Reclamation only has two options to put more water in Lake Powell, and both come with drawbacks. The first is to release water from upstream reservoirs into Lake Powell. This is a stopgap measure — like drawing on your savings account to cover an unexpected expense. There are limits to how much water can be moved and how often. Upstream reservoirs must be allowed to refill after the water is transferred to Lake Powell.

The second option is to reduce Lake Powell releases. However, holding too much water in Lake Powell could trigger litigation from the Lower Basin states as soon as this fall, claiming that the Upper Basin is violating the Colorado River Compact.

Reclamation announced in late April that it will be using both options simultaneously keep water levels in Lake Powell from dropping below 3,500 feet. The agency plans to release between 660,000 and 1 million acre-feet of water from an upstream reservoir while reducing Lake Powell releases by 1.48 million acre-feet. While Reclamation is trying to protect the river with limited tools, the Basin states are not thrilled with the plan. The Upper Basin was quick to point out that increased releases from upstream reservoirs will have significant impacts on local economies and is not an action that can be taken year after year. Meanwhile, the Lower Basin says withholding additional water in Lake Powell could lead to the Upper Basin violating the Colorado River Compact.

The plan also might not work. It is expected to keep Lake Powell just above 3,500 feet — dangerously close to the hydropower intakes. This could potentially draw air into the intakes, damaging equipment and resulting in a complete loss of hydropower production.

The river’s current management guidelines are clearly no match for climate change. We are drawing down our savings in the hope of just barely making ends meet. It might not be enough, and it’s not something we can afford to do every year.

A NEW WAY FORWARD

The river is undergoing dramatic changes. What if we had a new management tool that allowed us to change with it?

WRA worked with Kevin Wheeler at Water Balance Consulting to find out.

We found that flexible water conservation pools can help maintain critical reservoir elevations and minimize the need to release large volumes of water from upstream reservoirs, while also not exasperating compact compliance issues.

We looked at the Intentionally Created Surplus (ICS) program — an existing water conservation program in the Lower Basin — to explore how this might work.

Currently, the ICS program allows water users in the Lower Basin to save water and store it in Lake Mead through actions like increasing irrigation efficiency or fallowing farmland. There is a little over 3 million acre-feet of ICS water currently being stored in Lake Mead.

This water has the potential to provide enormous benefit to Lake Powell as well, but there are institutional barriers to moving it. The water level in Lake Mead is currently used to determine how much water is released to the Lower Basin. Under the current guidelines, moving ICS water out of the reservoir would lower Lake Mead and impact Lower Basin shortages.

The key to solving this problem is creating a conservation pool that is “operationally neutral,” allowing saved water to be moved between reservoirs without impacting Lower Basin shortages or affecting compact compliance. This would allow ICS water to be stored in Lake Mead or Lake Powell — wherever it is needed to protect infrastructure and river health.

There is no infrastructure on the Colorado River to physically move water upstream; however, water can be transferred between reservoirs through adjustments to dam releases and careful accounting. For example, reservoir releases from Lake Powell could be physically reduced by 1 million acre-feet to “move” 1 million acre-feet of ICS water upstream from Lake Mead to Lake Powell. Releases from Lake Powell could later be increased by 1 million acre-feet to physically transfer the water downstream back to Lake Mead.

Because this water is operationally neutral, it would not be considered when calculating Lake Mead water levels and so moving it would not affect Lower Basin shortages. It also would not affect the 10-year Lee Ferry average. On paper, it would be as though there was no reduction in Lake Powell releases to “move” water upstream. This avoids exasperating compact compliance issues. This is in contrast to the operations Reclamation is undertaking this year, which will result in actual decreased Lake Powell releases, affect the 10-year Lee Ferry average, and bring compact implications as a result.

Our analysis shows that if a flexible conservation pool had been available this year, it could have significantly reduced the need to pull additional water from upstream reservoirs — helping to address concerns raised by the Upper Basin states. It also would have minimized compact compliance implications — helping to address issues raised by the Lower Basin.

The guidelines for managing the river expire this year, and there are several new management alternatives on the tablethat incorporate flexible conservation pools. Our analysis shows how these pools could work to protect the river and our communities in critically hot and dry years like this one.

Drawing down our savings isn’t going to work in the long term. We need sustainable solutions to ensure the infrastructure that delivers water and power to the West can function in dry years.

Download the concept paper.