In response to last week’s dispatch on a potential new Colorado River sharing deal, Save The World’s Rivers! tweeted this compelling — but, for some, potentially opaque — tweet:
I say “opaque” because at first glance it might seem strange that a 50/50 split of the river’s waters between the Upper Basin and the Lower Basin would lead to ecological disaster. But it could, if, during a period of extremely low flow years, the 50% sent downstream was so low that it reduced daily flows through the Grand Canyon to a level that could not support fish or the ecology.
I’ve written about the faulty math of the Colorado River Compact many times here. Yet the assumptions of the river’s flow and the math are hardly the only, or largest, problems with the document. Most egregious was the exclusion of tribal nations from the original negotiations and the compact, itself, even though they collectively are entitled to a significant portion of the river’s waters. Under the compact, the tribal nations’ water rights must come out of the respective states’ allotments — that reduces tribes to subdivisions of the states, which they are not. They are sovereign nations and their water rights are negotiated with the federal government.
The other very big problem is that the compact never once considers the river, or the ecology that depends upon it. Instead, it apportions all of the water in the river and then some to “beneficial use,” which does not include environmental or even recreational uses. The compact also states that “the use of its waters for purposes of navigation shall be subservient to the uses of such waters for domestic, agricultural, and power purposes.” If we consider river-running and Lake Powell boating to be navigation, then the compact also deprioritizes those uses, i.e. recreation.
Because all of the Lower Basin’s water must flow through the Grand Canyon, the Lower Basin’s water rights serve as sort of de facto instream water rights through the canyon. In other words, the more water the Imperial Irrigation District and other Lower Basin users demand for irrigating alfalfa, the more water there is for fish and other critters in the Grand Canyon (including river runners). So, if the states were to strike a deal that might allow the Upper Basin to send only a trickle to the Lower Basin, it would also result in a mere trickle flowing through the Grand Canyon.
The thing is, the fish and even the river runners don’t really care much about the annual volume of water in the river, they care more about the daily streamflow. And that is currently regulated by a separate set of rules aside from the Colorado River Compact that were implemented in the 1990s.
But first, let’s go back in time to the years before there was a Glen Canyon Dam. Back then, the Colorado River through Glen Canyon, Marble Gorge, and the Grand Canyon was truly wild. Seasonal streamflow fluctuations were extreme, swinging from as low as 3,000 cubic feet per second in late summer, fall, and winter, to 80,000 cfs or more during spring runoff and late summer monsoonal floods. The water was often laden with orange-red sediment, and in the summer its temperature might reach 80° F or higher, giving it a viscous, dirty-bathwater feel. It may not have been great for swimming in, but the native fish reveled in it.
The completion of Glen Canyon Dam in 1963 changed all of that. Annual flows were evened out to build up storage in Lake Powell while also meeting Colorado River Compact obligations. Seasonal fluctuations were also no more, and the silt-free, murky green water emanating from the dam was a near-constant 46° F. Daily fluctuations of streamflow, however, could be erratic and downright manic, depending on the power grid’s need for more juice.
Before there was a Glen Canyon Dam, the Colorado River ran wild and free, often topping out at Lees Ferry at or above 100,000 cubic feet per second, which is ginormous. After the dam was completed, managers withheld flows to fill up the reservoir. Then, in 1983, they withheld too much water, and a massive spring runoff threatened the dam itself, forcing managers to release nearly 100,000 cfs once again and providing a wild ride for Grand Canyon river runners. After the 1996 operations plan was implemented, occasional high-flow releases occurred to help move sediment through the Grand Canyon in an effort to benefit the riparian ecology and build new beaches. But they still pale in comparison with pre-dam high flows. Data source: USGS.
During the first few decades after the dam was completed, the hydropower plant operators had ample leeway to “follow the load” by modulating the flow of water through the turbines. This occasionally caused huge fluctuations in the flow of water through the Grand Canyon. On one July day in 1989, for example, about 3,471 cfs was running through the dam at 5 a.m., a meagre flow by the Colorado’s standards. By 3 p.m., it had jumped to 29,000 cfs—the maximum flow through the turbines—to generate juice to the burgeoning number of air-conditioners on the Southwest power grid. This must have wreaked havoc on river runners in the Grand Canyon, who might have tied up their boats during high flow, only to find them beached out several hours later (or vice versa, depending on how far downriver they were). It probably wasn’t so good for the fish, either.
In the early ‘80s, dam operators wanted to maximize the potential for following the load by also installing turbines in the river outlets so they could generate even more power by releasing more water, which likely would have exacerbated daily fluctuations. The proposal was shot down following intense opposition, and sparked an effort to develop a more river-friendly plan for managing the dam.
Congress passed the Grand Canyon Protection Act in 1992, and in 1996 Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt signed off on the Glen Canyon Dam Operations plan, selecting the “Modified Low Fluctuating Flow” alternative — a compromise between environmental and power-generating interests — and creating an adaptive management working group. The annual releases would remain the same (8.2 million acre-feet), but it imposed minimum and maximum release rates and maximum fluctuation rates, along with adding in occasional high-flow events meant to simulate pre-dam seasonal fluctuations. This limited Glen Canyon Dam’s flexibility as a hydroelectric plant, but it was far better for the downstream river and its users.
A profile of the Colorado River with potential future dam and reservoir sites. From the 1916 USGS paper “Colorado River and its utilization,” by E.C. La Rue.
Yet in the ensuing three decades, power-generation has often taken precedent over downstream ecological health, and the Grand Canyon’s riparian environment remains imperiled. (As long as we’re talking about ironies: A portion of revenues from Glen Canyon Dam’s power sales fund endangered fish recovery efforts.)
Whether a new deal to share the Colorado River becomes an ecological disaster would seem to depend less on the annual volume released from Glen Canyon Dam than it does on the daily and seasonal operations of the dam. And I would add this to the above tweet: It would be the second ecological disaster for the Grand Canyon; the first was the construction of Glen Canyon Dam, itself.
The back of Glen Canyon Dam circa 1964, not long after the reservoir had begun filling up. Here the water level is above dead pool, meaning water can be released via the river outlets, but it is below minimum power pool, so water cannot yet enter the penstocks to generate electricity. Bureau of Reclamation photo.
As long as we’re talking streamflows … here’s a hydrograph of the Animas River in Durango for the last year (July 17, 2024-July 17, 2025) and for the same time period during the previous year. You can see that spring runoff this year was lower, and less drawn-out than in 2024, and that the current streamflow is about 25% lower than it was on this date last year. Hopefully the monsoon will arrive soon and boost flows, at least for a bit.
🤯 Trump Ticker 😱
While everyone is going bananas over the Trump/Jeff Epstein brouhaha, the Trump administration is putting its fossil fuel fetish on garish display. This includes:
Yesterday the Interior Department said it would subject proposed solar and wind developments on public lands to elevated scrutiny in an effort to end “preferential treatment for unreliable, subsidy-dependent wind and solar energy.” Meanwhile these guys have been eliminating environmental reviews for and public input on oil and gas and mining projects. So who’s getting preferential treatment now?
Meanwhile, the Environmental Protection Agency is trying to block the state of Colorado from pushing dirty coal plants to close as part of its effort to reduce air pollution and, well, comply with EPA air quality regulations. CPR’s Sam Brasch has the story, and reports that Colorado’s not about to take this one lying down.
And, the EPA continues to defy its name by extending the deadline for compliance with regulations for managing coal combustion waste, or CCW. Coal combustion waste is the solid stuff left over from coal burning, like ash, clinkers, and scrubber sludge, and it contains copious quantities of nasty stuff like mercury, arsenic, boron, cobalt, radium, and selenium. This is an enormous waste stream, and is piled up outside coal plants and in coal mines all over the West. Check out this map from Earthjustice to see where the coal waste depositories are near you!
And finally, U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright, in an Economist column, wrote that climate change is “not an existential crisis,” merely a pesky little “by-product of progress.” He said he was willing to take the “modest negative trade-off” of climate change—along, presumably, with the heat waves, wildfires, and devastating floods—”for this legacy of human advancement.” It’s almost as if they like pollution! It would be funny if it weren’t so tragic.
😀 Good News Corner 😎
Colorado has new wolf pups! Yes, Colorado Parks and Wildlife has confirmed three new wolf families have joined the Copper Creek Pack with new pups, though they have not released the number of pups in each family. This is good news, indeed.
“Like so many Coloradans, I’m thrilled to hear of new wolf families and puppy paws on the ground,” said Alli Henderson, southern Rockies director at the Center for Biological Diversity, in a written statement. “The howl of wolves rising once more in this iconic landscape signals real progress toward restoring balance in Colorado’s wild places.”
For more background and history on wolves, check out my essay from a little while back on wolves, wildness, and hope. But you’ll have to sign up as a paid subscriber to read it, since the archives are behind the paywall!
I’m a little slow getting to this one, thanks mostly to being consumed by the whole public land sale brouhaha, but better late than never.
After years of bickering, wrangling, fighting, and digging in their heels, representatives of the seven Colorado River Basin states may have finally agreed on a “revolutionary” way to split up the river’s waters: They’re going to base it on how much water is actually in the river at any given time.
So, apparently, in this world, “revolutionary” is a synonym for the most common sense, obvious, and, really, necessary way to do things.
More specifically, the Upper Basin would release a percentage of the rolling three-year average of the“natural flow”* at Lee Ferry from Glen Canyon Dam, making it available to the Lower Basin. That’s opposed to the current model, where the Upper Basin is required to release at least 75 million acre-feet every ten years (or 7.5 MAF per year on average)**
Let’s pause for a moment and use an analogy to reflect on how short-sighted and dumb that original approach was. [ed. emphasis mine] Say someone has a potato farm and they die, leaving the farm to their two children, Upper and Lower, who must determine how to divide the farm and its yield between them. They look back at their parent’s ledgers, and determine that the farm has produced at least 15 tons of potatoes annually during the previous few years.
So they agree to divide it in half, with 7.5 tons going to each of them each year. But Upper will actually live on the farm, and has the keys to the lock on the gate, so they add into their Potato Farm Compact a clause that requires Upper to not prevent Lower from taking 75 tons of potatoes from the farm during every 10 year period.
This works out fine as long as the farm produces 15 tons per year. But what happens if you signed the Compact during an abnormally productive period, and the long-term average yield was far lower than 15 tons? Or what happens as the soil becomes less fertile and the irrigation water becomes more scarce and production drops far below 15 tons per year? Under the agreement, Upper still has to allow Lower to take 7.5 tons annually, leaving Upper with far less, maybe even nothing during a string of bad years. Obviously, this is untenable. And, just as obviously, it would have made far more sense for Upper and Lower to simply divide each year’s harvest in half and each take 50% of whatever the total might be. Just as obviously, that would have been the smartest way to divide up the Colorado River in the first place. Of course, a river is not a potato crop.
To determine how much potatoes you have, you just put them on a scale. Determining the “natural flow” of the Colorado River is far more difficult, and requires inputting:
data from 29 upstream streamflow gauges/gages;
historic outflow and pool elevations from 12 main-stem and 12 off-stream reservoirs;
upstream consumptive uses and losses.
While that doesn’t sound so complicated, gathering all of these inputs — reservoir evaporation, for example, or the exact amount consumed by agriculture — can require separate calculations and guesswork of their own.
Note that the would-be signatory’s of this deal haven’t agreed on what the “fixed percentage” would be, and that there still would be an unspecified “lower limit” to the annual release from Lake Powell. Those could both be sticking points in finalizing this plan. Source: Arizona Reconsultation Committee June meeting.
But the states wouldn’t be coming up with this from scratch. The Bureau of Reclamation already calculates the river’s natural flow at Lees Ferry along with Lake Powell’s unregulated inflow. As you can see from the graph below, the river has not consistently delivered 15 million acre-feet per year, forcing the Upper Basin to deplete their savings account (Lake Powell) in order to meet its Colorado River Compact obligations.
This shows the estimated natural flow of the river — or what it would deliver without any upstream dams, diversions, or human-related consumptive use — at Lees Ferry, several miles downstream from Glen Canyon Dam. The natural flow is calculated using upstream streamflow gages, consumptive use, and calculated reservoir evaporation. Source: Bureau of Reclamation.
If the supply driven concept is implemented, it will base Glen Canyon Dam releases on a fixed percentage of the previous three-year moving average. For example, the average of water years 2022, 2023, and 2024 was 13 million acre-feet. If the Upper Basin and Lower Basin were to each take 50%, then the Glen Canyon release this year would be 6.5 million acre-feet (plus something for Mexico, presumably, although this isn’t clear. I highly doubt the Lower Basin will settle for just 50%, given that it has far more people, more agriculture, and is just thirstier, overall, but let’s go with that figure since it’s what’s in the Colorado River Compact, sort of.
The Lower Basin states use far less water now than they did a decade or so ago, thanks in part to forced cuts and in part to general conservation measures. The increase between 2023 and 2024 is probably due to the fact that 2023 was an unusually wet year in most of the Colorado River Basin, meaning farmers and other irrigators needed less water. Source: Colorado River Accounting and Water Usage Report, Lower Basin, Bureau of Reclamation.
That would actually work: The Lower Basin states’ consumptive use last calendar year was about 5.8 million acre-feet, so they’d have enough to use, and a little on top for evaporation from reservoirs (which is not included in the Lower Basin’s accounting). It would leave the Upper Basin enough for consumption and some extra for reservoir storage.
But if you go with the previous three years (‘20,’21,’22), you end up with an average of just 9 million acre-feet, 50% of which would be a measly 4.5 million acre-feet, forcing downstream users — namely the Central Arizona Project, since their rights are junior to California’s — to take deep cuts. And it would leave the Upper Basin just enough to meet their needs, meaning they’d have to draw down Lake Powell or other reservoirs to fulfill their obligations.
Another tricky scenario would be if three decent water years were followed by an extremely dry year. Releases from Lake Powell could significantly exceed inflows, which might deplete the reservoir enough to bring it down to minimum power pool, which is no bueno.
While this may be the closest the states have come to reaching some sort of consensus on how to run the River beyond 2026, it seems as if there is still many sticky details to work out. How are they going to agree on a fixed percentage? What will the minimum release be? And how will that fly with the Upper Basin during years such as 2002, when the natural flow at Lees Ferry was a mere 5.8 million acre-feet? Time’s running out.
Now for some more data for your pondering pleasure:
The Upper Basin states use far less water than the Lower Basin, but the Lower Basin has generally been reducing overall use, while the Upper Basin has remained steady or even increased consumption, with Colorado overtaking Arizona in 2023. Note: The Arizona figure only includes the Lower Basin. Arizona also consumes about 13,000 acre-feet of Upper Basin water each year, down significantly from pre-2019, when up to 40,000 acre-feet was withdrawn from Lake Powell for steam generation and cooling at the now shuttered Navajo Generating Station. Source: Bureau of Reclamation.
The Imperial Irrigation District in southern California remains the River’s largest single water user, and one of the most senior water rights holders, using most of the water for alfalfa and various food crops. However, it has cut its consumption considerably over the years, in part thanks to state and federal programs that pay farmers not to irrigate. It’s not clear how long these programs and the payments can last, however. Nevada is included on this list because nearly all of the state’s Colorado River allocation is drawn from Lake Mead and goes to the greater Las Vegas area. Also note that it is only number 8 on this list. Source: Bureau of Reclamation.
Agriculture has been and remains the biggest single user of Colorado River water, by far. Of that amount, alfalfa and other hay crops take up the lion’s share.
This passage, from David Starr Jordan’s Fish Commission Bulletin 1889: Report of Explorations in Colorado and Utah During the Summer of 1889, remains relevant today:
Uggh. Fire season is getting ugly. The Dragon Bravo Fire blew up and burned the historic Grand Canyon Lodge on the North Rim. The Deer Creek Fire, burning near Old La Sal, Utah, just west of the Colorado state line, has grown to almost 12,000 acres and exhibited some erratic behavior (see video above). Just northeast of there, the Wright Draw and Turner Gulch fires have forced the closure of Hwy. 141 and numerous evacuations in the Unaweep Canyon area outside Gateway (the community of Gateway is not yet threatened). The South Rim Fire at the Black Canyon of the Gunnison is now at 4,000 acres. The Laguna Fire west of Abiquiu Reservoir in New Mexico has reached 15,200 acres. And the air in the West is basically full of smoke.
Here’s hoping for rain and lots of it, sans lightning, please.
📸 Parting Shot 🎞️
This one’s from “A notice of the ancient ruins of southwestern Colorado, examined during the summer of 1875,” by W.H. Holmes. The text is the beginning of the description of the sketch.
The latest Bureau of Reclamation 24-month studies show a clear risk of Lake Powell dropping below minimum power pool in late 2026, with Lake Mead dropping to elevation 1,025 by the summer of 2027. This should be hair on fire stuff.
The “clear risk” here is based on Reclamation’s monthly “minimum probable” model runs – what happens if we have bad snowpacks next year, and the year after? These are probabilistic estimates, not predictions. But the whole point of Reclamation doing this is so that we can be prepared. We need a robust public discussion about what our plan is if we end up on this fork in the hydrologic road.
The warning signs are clearly there in Jack’s analyses. Frustrated by the delay in the traditional metrics we use for measuring and monitoring the Colorado River, Jack’s been doing routine updates on reservoir storage contents. The traditional metrics we use – the Upper Basin Consumptive Uses and Losses Reports, the Lower Basin Decree Accounting Reports, the Natural Flow Database – have significant lags. The reservoir data is there in real time, integrating how much the climate system provides and how much humans use. The data here are all public. Jack’s value add is to sum them up and slice and dice the resulting data structures.
The somewhat arcane but incredibly useful framework he’s been using his his recent analyses is the period of accumulation, when reservoirs rise as river flows exceed human uses above them and extractions below them, following by the period of decline, when we’re drawing down the reservoirs. This is a tool, or a way of thinking, that we could use in real time to adjust our behavior, noting bad reservoir conditions and reducing our use. This is not something our water allocation framework is well suited to do.
The Negotiations
For more than a year, those involved in the delicate interstate negotiations over future Colorado River water allocation rules have repeatedly asked that we give them space to have the hard conversations they need to have in private. The results, or lack thereof, have done nothing to earn our trust.
The potential path forward.
When Arizona’s Tom Buschatzke moved the up-until-then super secret “supply driven” allocation concept into public view a month ago, it seemed like a good sign along two dimensions. First, the idea of basing the amount of water delivered from Upper Basin to Lower Basin past Lee Ferry on actual hydrology, on a percentage of how much water the climate is actually providing, seemed like an eminently reasonable approach. Second, Buschatzke was talking about this in public.
Folks from the Upper Basin followed suit, and a round of positive press followed.
But as this shifts from the brief sunshine of public statements back to the closed door negotiations, any glimmer appears dim indeed.
The problems were already visible in that brief, glorious bit of sunshine of public discussion last month.
There are two critical questions that need to be settled to make this work. The obvious one is the number – what percentage of the three year natural flow are we talking about shepherding down past Lee Ferry? The second is more subtle: What happens if the Lee Ferry flow falls short of that number?
Speaking to the Arizona Reconsultation Committee, Buschatzke was clear that whatever percentage number they settled on would be an Upper Basin “delivery obligation” at Lee Ferry. Becky Mitchell, speaking on behalf of Colorado, (but effectively as the de-facto Upper Basin voice, the role the other Upper Basin states seem to have for all practical purposes ceded to her) said (per Heather Sackett’s excellent reporting) it was in no way to be considered a delivery obligation.
When I suggested in a blog post that Upper Basin states might need to curtail water users in order to ensure the agreed-upon-percentage (whatever that is) is met, I got an angry call informing me that the Upper Basin was considering no such thing.
What this makes clear is that the same disagreement over the irreducibly ambiguous legal question in Article III of the Colorado River Compact – does the Upper Basin have a Lee Ferry delivery obligation or not? – is simply being shifted to a new modeling framework.
Never mind the equally intractable question of what the Lee Ferry don’t-call-it-a-delivery-obligation percentage might be. I don’t know anything more than gossip, but the gossip suggests the attempt to settle on a number, or even a range of numbers that Reclamation might model as part of its NEPA analysis, also is not going well.
If I was talking to Alex Hager today, I would no longer describe a glimmer of hope.
The Failure Mode
One of the most useful questions I learned to ask as a reporter covering water involved drilling down to the question of what happens when scarcity finally bites. What is the failure mode? Who actually doesn’t get water? How does that work? [ed. emphasis mine]
The combination of Jack’s analysis and Reclamation’s latest 24-month study suggests that we need to be asking that question in the near term. When Powell approaches minimum power pool, and Mead drops below 1030, whose water use will be curtailed to protect the system? If your answer involves a defense of why your own water supply should not be reduced, you’re doing this wrong. Everyone needs to be realistic about their risk of a legal outcome different from their agency lawyer’s position. But we also need to recognize moral obligations here, to find ways to share in this shrinking river. How are we going to come together, as a community, to respond?
The longer term argument also needs to begin to take this form.
Let us imagine going to the Supreme Court to settle the question of whether the Upper Basin does or does not have a legal delivery obligation under Article III of the Colorado River Compact to deliver 75 million or 82.5 million acre feet per year past Lee Ferry. If you lose that litigation, what is the failure mode? Who actually doesn’t get water? If your groupthink has convinced you that this is not a meaningful question, that you’re sure to win, and the other basin is the one that needs to be thinking about failure modes, you need a second opinion, to get out of your groupthink bubble.
Whatever “bring it on” enthusiasm for litigation you’re hearing from your groupthinkers needs to be tempered by an honest discussion about what happens to your communities’ water supplies if you lose.
I’ll also make a modest pitch here for a need to recognize moral obligations, to find ways to share this shrinking river.
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
Click the link to read the article on the BBC website (Will Grant). Here’s an excerpt:
July 13, 2025
After the thirtieth consecutive month without rain, the townsfolk of San Francisco de Conchos in the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua gather to plead for divine intervention. On the shores of Lake Toronto, the reservoir behind the state’s most important dam – called La Boquilla, a priest leads local farmers on horseback and their families in prayer, the stony ground beneath their feet once part of the lakebed before the waters receded to today’s critically low levels…
“We’re currently at 26.52 metres below the high-water mark, less than 14% of its capacity.” — Rafael Betance, who has voluntarily monitored La Boquilla for the state water authority for 35 years
Now, a long-running dispute with Texas over the scarce resource is threatening to turn ugly. Under the terms of a 1944 water-sharing agreement, Mexico must send 430 million cubic metres of water per year from the Rio Grande to the US. The water is sent via a system of tributary channels into shared dams owned and operated by the International Boundary and Water Commission (IBWC), which oversees and regulates water-sharing between the two neighbours. In return, the US sends its own much larger allocation (nearly 1.85 billion cubic metres a year) from the Colorado River to supply the Mexican border cities of Tijuana and Mexicali. Mexico is in arrears and has failed to keep up with its water deliveries for much of the 21st Century…
Many in northern Mexico believe the 1944 water-sharing treaty is no longer fit for purpose. Mr Ramirez thinks it may have been adequate for conditions eight decades ago, but it has failed to adapt with the times or properly account for population growth or the ravages of climate change.
A houseboat docks on the mudflats near Wahweap Marina during the summer of 2021, when reservoir levels dropped perilously low. Jonathan P. Thompson photo
If Lake Powell is like a big thermometer gauging the hydrologic health of the Upper Colorado River Basin, then it’s running a high fever.
In one case, the fever analogy is a bit too literal: The National Park Service has detected high concentrations of cyanotoxins in the reservoir around the mouth of Antelope Canyon, and is warning folks to limit their exposure to the water. Warm water is one of the drivers of cyanotoxin growth.
The surface level peaked out on June 19 at 3,562 feet above sea level, with about 7.8 million acre-feet of storage (or about one-third of its capacity). That means the big, white “bathtub” ring on the sandstone cliffs has grown by about 27 feet in the past year, re-revealing some landforms and rendering some boat ramps unusable. Levels will continue to drop throughout the summer.
This is because more water is leaving the reservoir via downstream releases and evaporation than is flowing into it. Reservoir inflows during June were a mere 883,000 acre feet, or about 41% of the median inflows. That’s far lower than the last two years and is only marginally higher than in 2002, 2018, and 2021, some of the worst years on record. And with the water year three-fourths of the way done, only 4.2 million acre-feet has flowed from the Colorado River and its upstream tributaries into the reservoir, setting the stage for a water year total of just about 5.5 million acre-feet — or 2 million acre-feet less than the minimum release from Glen Canyon Dam.
The only good news is that temperatures at the reservoir mostly have been in the 80s or 90s for the past several weeks, which is about normal for this time of year. Oh, and another sorta-kinda silver lining: As the reservoir levels drop, the surface area decreases, reducing the rate of evaporation. Yay?
Inflow volumes at Lake Powell have been pretty skimpy this water year, with June of 2025 delivering just 41% of the median flows for that month. 1983 was the biggest water year on record since Glen Canyon Dam was completed in 1963, and 2002 was the lowest inflows.
Meanwhile, many of the Colorado River’s users continue under the illusion that the Colorado River Compact and the Law of the River will trump nature and the reality of diminishing flows.
Take the Imperial Valley in southern California. The Imperial Irrigation District is the single largest water user on the river, consuming some 2.3 million acre-feet during the 2024 calendar year to grow various food crops and a lot of alfalfa. That’s about seven times more Colorado River water than all of southern Nevada’s casinos, hotels, golf courses, and homes consume.
Bales of alfalfa in the Imperial Irrigation District of southern Calfornia, grown with Colorado River water. Photo by Brian Richter
But it’s also about 200,000 acre-feet less than the irrigation district consumed in 2013. That’s in part because some farmers are being paid to not irrigate or to irrigate less, often meaning they must fallow their fields, at least temporarily. And some of those farmers have chosen to lease their land — about 13,000 acres — to solar companies for utility-scale energy installations, allowing them to continue to make money off the land without further depleting the Colorado River.
Thanks to Dustin Mulvaney for tipping us off to this resolution on Bluesky.
That irks the Imperial Irrigation District’s board, which recently passed a resolution“opposing the continued expansion of utility-scale solar projects on active or historically farmed agricultural land” in the district. “Our identity and economy in the Imperial Valley are rooted in agriculture,” said IID Board Chairwoman Gina Dockstader, in a written statement. “Solar energy has a role in our region’s future, but it cannot come at the cost of our farmland, food supply, or the families who depend on agriculture. This resolution is about protecting our way of life.”
The resolution doesn’t carry any legal weight, but the IID has a lot of influence, and could easily push the county to ban or heavily restrict solar installations on farmland as dozens of other counties across the nation have done.
Granted, taking land out of agriculture and irrigation has consequences. It can become a weed-choked, dust-spawning expanse. In the Imperial Valley, irrigation runoff feeds the Salton Sea. And, of course, you lose food production and farmworker jobs.
Nevertheless, the resolution seems somewhat short-sighted. It is based on the assumption that the IID will be able to flex its senior water rights in perpetuity, and never have to give up significant amounts of irrigation. It robs farmers of their private property rights, their ability to diversify their income sources, and an opportunity to conserve increasingly scarce water.
And, if the solar installations aren’t built there, they are likely to end up on public land in desert tortoise and other wildlife habitat that could require the removal of hundreds or even thousands of Joshua trees. Worse, it might result in new natural gas or even coal plants to meet the burgeoning demand for power driven by the proliferation of energy- and water-intensive data centers.
And on that note, there’s Kanab, in south central Utah. I’ve driven through Kanab many a time, but usually I just roll on through, finding more of interest in Ordervilleor Fredonia or even Colorado City and Hildale. I mean, Orderville does have “Ho-Made Pies,” or so the sign declares, and was founded as a bastion of the United Order, the tenets of which were communalism, cooperation, and equal distribution of wealth.
Kanab, meanwhile, was notable to me only as the home of former Utah state representative Mike Noel, who was a Wise Use/Sagebrush Rebel leader of the early 2000s, and I wasn’t going to stop in for a cup of coffee — er, a soda — with the guy. So I failed to notice that the little community was not only growing, but sprawling into the surrounding red-rock desert in the form of upscale resorts and housing communities and even a brand new town. A friend sent me this video, which enthusiastically offers details:
There is, for example, Catori Canyon “a premium housing development & luxury gated community” that “redefines modern indoor-outdoor living.” Prices start at $450,000 — for a bare lot. It also predictably has a pickleball court, which is what I think they mean when they say it “isn’t just home — it’s a lifestyle.” I call that real estate propaganda.
And Ventana Resort, which is on state trust lands and is described by the Utah Trust Lands Administration as an “ambitious project that includes townhomes, affordable housing, nightly rentals, single-family homes, and even a hotel.” The Kane County Water Conservancy District, headed by the aforementioned Mike Noel, had hoped to build a golf course on the land, but pickleball — yes, the development has courts — and four swimming pools won out, apparently. The townhomes are expected to begin at $650,000, according to the Southern Utah News.
The new town? It was originally just a huge subdivision called Willow Preserve Estates, which received county approval (after the county had denied its proposed public infrastructure district). But apparently the developers weren’t content with the limits of the subdivision approval, so they petitioned the state to incorporate their own municipality called Willow, which would allow them to approve their own PID with higher housing density. Kane County commissioners are miffed. If the state approves the municipality, it will include 1,200 to 1,400 home sites along with commercial areas on a big parcel of land east of Kanab and just south of Hwy 89.
That’s a lot of homes; Kanab has about 2,000 households, and that doesn’t count Catori Canyon or Ventana Resorts, let alone Willow. And, if you’re like me, you’re wondering where these folks — along with the other developments with their swimming pools and lawns — are going to get their water.
It appears the answer is: wells. Kanab currently supplies its 5,000 residents with several groundwater wells and springs. Willow will likely get its water from Kane County Water Conservancy District’s Johnson Canyon system, which is also fed primarily by groundwater. Which is to say, they aren’t taking it directly out of the Colorado River system, but they are taking it indirectly from the system, since groundwater and surface water is all connected. Plus, aquifers all over the Colorado River Basin are being depleted by over-pumping. Pulling more out of them is not sustainable.
But that’s not all. Kanab is also about to be home to two new ultra-exclusive resorts in a similar vein as Amangiri, the posh place frequented by the Kardashians and located just outside the (past and possibly present) polygamist community of Big Water, Arizona.
Canyon Country, my friends, is rapidly being gentrified.
Kaia, by Outdoor Citizen, bills itself as a “new ultra-luxury RURAL EB-5 investment opportunity.” That is, if you’d like to migrate to America, just fork out a million or so bucks for one of the 40 planned residences in Johnson Canyon outside Kanab and, voila!, you have permanent U.S. residency. In Europe they call that a “golden passport.” The project’s developer is FirstPathway Partners, whose sole purpose is to facilitate these EB-5 visas.
Kaia, by Outdoor Citizen, bills itself as a “new ultra-luxury RURAL EB-5 investment opportunity.” That is, if you’d like to migrate to America, just fork out a million or so bucks for one of the 40 planned residences in Johnson Canyon outside Kanab and, voila!, you have permanent U.S. residency. In Europe they call that a “golden passport.” The project’s developer is FirstPathway Partners, whose sole purpose is to facilitate these EB-5 visas.
Kaia’s website says the development …
Yeah, the BLM land might be protected for now. But a warning to the rich folks that might want to invest: Utah politicians are leading the charge to turn that lovely “Greenbelt” of public land over to housing developers. So instead of those fetching red rocks, you might one day have a view of a subdivision out your giant front window. And if Sen. Mike Lee and his ilk can’t sell the public land straight out, the Trump administration might just fast-track a uranium or coal mine, AI-crunching data center, or oil and gas development in that greenbelt just a few hundred meters from your luxury home.
Late light on Glen Canyon rock formations. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
Mapping the Grand Canyon. In this photo we have Claude Birdseye (right) – expedition leader and Chief Topographic Engineer of the USGS, and Roland Burchard (left) – expedition topographer. Photo credit: USGS
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
June 30, 2025
Becky Mitchell and Doug Kenney had much to say at Crested Butte. Just as important may have been what they did not say.
The apple cart of the Colorado River has been upset for 25 years, and Doug Kenney and Becky Michell were on stage June 24 at the Crested Butte Public Policy Forum to talk about the bruised apples.
There’s broad understanding that what worked in the past won’t work in the future. As to what will work — ah, well, that has yet to be resolved. “So far, we haven’t really been able to pull the demands down as quickly as supplies have been going down,” said Mitchell.
Adding tension to the conversation is another so-so or worse spring runoff in the river. Despite a decent snow year in northern Colorado, yet another early, warm and mostly drier-than-usual spring has produced an anemic projected runoff of a little over 9 million acre-feet. Average runoff into Lake Powell has been 12 million in recent years. The compact governing the river between the three lower-basin states and the four upper basin states assumed at least 20.
Douglas Kenney. Photo credit: University of Colorado Boulder
Kenney directs the Western Water Policy Program at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Getches-Wilkinson Center. The program puts on a conference each June that is considered one of several must-attend events for those drawn to the unceasing drama about Colorado’s namesake river.
The river and its tributaries provide water for farms almost to Kansas and Nebraska and, on the west side, to 23 million people crowded along the Pacific Ocean in southern California.
In Crested Butte, Kenney said that unlike other people in Colorado River discussions, whether they represent environmental or agriculture organizations, he enjoys a rare freedom. “I tell people sometimes, I don’t have a dog in the fight, and by that, I just mean I don’t have to represent an interest.”
Then he added: “That’s not entirely true.” He went on to confess that when he sees the Colorado River “sometimes it gives me goosebumps. And I’m not a goosebumps sort of guy.”
Colorado’s Becky Mitchell had a hearty laugh at the 2024 Getches-Wilkinson Center’s Colorado River conference. Photo/Getches-Wilkinson Center
Mitchell shared that she was a “solid B student” who had grown up in Hawaii before arriving in Colorado to pick up two degrees at the Colorado School of Mines. She worked primarily as a consulting engineer before becoming the director of the Colorado Water Conservation Board. In 2024, Gov. Jared Polis named her to a new position in Colorado government: the state’s negotiator on Colorado River issues. Unlike others in such roles, she’s not a lawyer.
“Often I think of everything as a math problem,” she said. “And a lot of what you see with the Colorado River is a math problem. It’s kind of simple math, almost like just addition and subtraction, not even algebra or multiplication.”
The two provided a high-level, yet sometimes detailed overview of the Colorado River during their hour on stage. However, students of the Colorado River, especially about the dramas, might have wanted another hour and the opportunity to ask additional questions.
For example, what do they make of the so-called “natural flow proposal” that was first formally discussed at a public meeting earlier that day in Arizona. As reported by the Las Vegas Review-Journal, this would base the release of water from Lake Powell on a three-year average of the “natural flows” of the river.
In their comments at Crested Butte, Mitchell and Kenney both broadly identified the need for the river to be shared in ways aligned with what Mother Nature is delivering, not a century-old compact.
Later, at a different meeting, Mitchell had this to say: “What we know today is that for any approach to work, it must be supply driven, perform well under both dry and varying hydrologies, and adapt to uncertain future conditions fundamental to this ‘divorce,’ or how we call it in Colorado, the conscious uncoupling.’”
Others might have asked Mitchell about the tensions behind the closed-door sessions — and the things that Kenney mentioned she could not really talk about in a public forum.
Or about the amount of water used to grow hay, including alfalfa, and other fodder crops for livestock. A 2020 study published in Nature Sustainability found that 55% of the water in the Colorado River Basin altogether goes to crops to feed primarily cattle. In the upper basin, it’s much higher.
Mitchell and Kenney did talk about Mead and Powell, the two big reservoirs in the basin, as all Colorado River conversations must.
“Those are the two biggest reservoirs in the United States, and they happen to fall on a river that’s not even one of the top 20 biggest rivers in the U.S. in terms of volume,” observed Kenney. The reservoirs were close to full 25 years ago. Now, they’re two thirds empty. “Optimists would say one-third full,” he said.
If you have more water going out than you have coming in, he explained, you have a mass balance problem. “That’s happening 8 out of 10 years. More water leaves than is coming into the reservoirs under guidelines adopted in 2007. Those interim guidelines govern operations, including how much water is released from the reservoirs and when.
“When we talk about Big River issues right now, the Big River issue is getting the system into balance and bringing back the sustainability of the system,” Kenney explained.
Management of the reservoirs was premised on meeting demand. To be more precise, demands of the lower-basin states. Until relatively recently, the lower-basin states were taking an average 10 million acre-feet even if the river delivered only 5 to 10 million acre-feet for the entire basin. Having two big reservoirs upstream allowed them to ignore the winters of scant snow in the headwaters and the rising spring temperatures that spiked evaporation and transpiration.
The first big shock was in 2002, when the river delivered only 3.8 million acre-feet. That was bad, very bad. But the reservoirs still had a lot of water. And there had been bad snow years before. In 1934, for example, the river delivered only 3.9 million acre-feet. And in 1977, a cold but uncommonly snowless winter, it had delivered 4.8 million acre-feet.
By May 2022, Lake Powell had dropped to the lowest levels since the 1960s, when it began filling after construction of Glen Canyon Dam. Photo/Allen Best
A big snow year did not soon follow 2002, so the states, guided by the Bureau of Reclamation, came up with a sort-of short-term set of solutions called the 2007 Interim Guidelines. Those guidelines remain in effect but are to be replaced with new guidelines. That’s a way of saying how the river is to be managed and, more precisely, who gets what and when. They’re called the post-2026 guidelines.
As were the 2007 guidelines, these will be interim, because the hydrology of the Colorado River Basin is not static. It is changing, with some concern that the river, already slimmed down from its 20th century average, will continue to shrink. The Colorado River Compact that was devised in 1922 to apportion the river’s waters assumed somewhere around 20 million acre-feet. This century the average has been 12.5 million acre-feet.
“The math problem is becoming worse,” said Kenney.
It will likely worsen. Some scientists have projected a further decline in decades ahead, conceivably to an average 10 million acre-feet or less.
How to shrink demands to correspond with the shrinking river?
Mitchell offered some thin optimism. Demands have ceased to rise. They have actually declined. The lower-basin states have reduced their take from the river to 7.5 million acre-feet.
That’s what the compact apportioned. But again, the compact from 1922 was flawed. It assumed more water than the river has delivered. Because of the two big reservoirs in the deserts of Utah and Arizona, the lower-basin states have been able to get their 7.5 million acre-feet (and more, until relatively recently). Arizona and California take way more than half of the river’s harvest. And because the upper-basin states were not taking their full allocation, they could get away with it without causing harm.
The 21st century combined with the aridification caused by rising temperatures have forced the issue. Even so, the reckoning has come slowly. The lower basin states did not reduce demand to stay within the compact until forced to by a declared shortage in August 2021.
While the decision was not a surprise to veteran Colorado River watchers, it vaulted the Colorado River troubles high into the national consciousness. The story ran on the front page of the New York Times: “In a First, U.S. Declares Shortage on the Colorado River, Forcing Water Cuts.” Arizona farms took the brunt of this declaration, but as the Times noted, wider reductions loomed as climate change continues to affect flows into the river.
The upper-basin states have been averaging 4.4 to 4.5 million acre-feet, far less than the 7.5 million acre-feet apportionment in the compact. How much they take depends upon how much it snows and rains.
“We have highs and lows because of hydrology. That can shift a lot. A really good example is from 2021 to 2022. Our use was 4.9 (million acre-feet), and then it went down to 3.9 the following year. That wasn’t because we’re amazing people.”
It was, Mitchell explained at Crested Butte, as she does in all of her talks, because the upper basin is limited by what Mother Nature actually delivers. The upper basin has no big dams upstream to serve as an aqua bank account. It has to moderate demand based on what kind of snow — and rain — year occurs.
Some 92% of all the water in the Colorado River originates in the upper basin states, including the Yampa River, seen here emerging from Cross Mountain Canyon in northwest Colorado. Photo/Allen Best
When there’s insufficient water, the state engineer in Colorado and his district engineers cut off water users, mostly ranchers irrigating grasses.
The compact struck among the four-upper basin states in 1948 used a more common-sense approach for how to allocate the 7.5 million acre-feet in the 1922 compact. It allocated the water among the four states based on proportions. Colorado gets a little more than half — and uses most of it. Wyoming has never come close to developing its share. Regardless, the rule of percentages makes sense for an uncertain hydrology.
“We realized real quickly that Mother Nature reigned supreme,” said Mitchell. I would be in big trouble if I said the lower basin should do the same. I think they should, but they’re not there yet.”
Mitchell used an analogy to describe the difficult transition for the lower basin. It is much harder to take candy from a baby after they have it,” she said.
“It’s going to be hard for them, and my heart goes out to them. But we have an example up here of how it works. Seniors work with juniors,” she explained, using the shorthand for senior and junior water uses under the prior appropriation system governing water use in Colorado and most Western states. Ag works with environment interests, utilities with agriculture, and so on. They cut deals in advance of water-short years.
“We have examples of how to make it work. You have a budget. You have to work within it. That’s the deal. And sometimes that budget might fluctuate.”
“We’ve not lost all of our junior water-right holders in Colorado because of one bad year or two bad years or three bad years, in a row, because we figure out how to make it work. And what we are saying to the lower basin is figure out where the deals are to be made.
And she drew upon her childhood for another dynamic.
“What my mom always said is, you can have anything you want, but you can’t have everything you want.”
Translated to the lower basins, that means “you can’t have chip factories and the largest agriculture in the world and golf courses and pools and Scottsdale and whatever. You can have the capability to have a strong economy, a sustainable system. You just can’t have it all.”
The federal government, through the Bureau of Reclamation, an agency housed within the Department of Interior, built the dams. Reclamation manages the dams. As Mitchell said, they turn the spigots. The onus is on the states to create a solution, an agreement of how to share the shrinking river, but the federal government could step in, if forced to. Mitchell said the feds don’t want to.
“They really want a consensus deal with the seven states,” she said. That’s a hard thing, because there’s no way to do this without change. The math is the math. The facts are the facts. There’s not the 50 million acre-feet in these reservoirs that there were when these (2007) guidelines started. And so the consensus is harder.”
Mitchell said she wouldn’t disparage those who created the now obviously flawed 2007 guidelines. Climatologists had suggested only a 3% probability of the runoff that has happened since then would come to pass.
“What we’re trying to create through this federal process is something that can handle all the hydrologies. How do we all suffer when the river is suffering? How do we all benefit when the river is flush? And what does benefit look like? That’s different in the upper basin than in the lower basin.”
The federal government in this case has been nudging the states toward agreement.
“They’re trying to say, ‘You know, you might be able to open up different project funding if you guys can get to a deal.’ We know we need a deal. I’m not going to promise you that we’re going to get there, but it is a goal. And (the federal agencies) are part of that goal. They don’t want to make the hard decisions of cutting people off. They are the water masters in the lower basin. They can turn the valves, and that’s their role.”
Added Kenney: “Typically the states are happiest when the federal government is silent, (but) sometimes it’s helpful to have a federal government that is throwing out some ultimatums and some deadlines and some threats.”
In the last six months, the federal involvement in the negotiations has grown, and it might grow yet. But a big part of the process — as Mitchell had said — is that the states need to be coming up with their wish list for Congress for consideration next spring.
“So there is a federal role,” Kenney summarized. “It evolves based on how the states are doing. But the tradition is you want the feds to stay away until it’s time for someone to write the check.”
MItchell had the last word. She again pointed to the meager runoff from this year’s upper-basin rivers, source of 92% of the river’s water. Runoff is projected at a little more than 5 million acre-feet into Powell, which is to release 7.48 million acre-feet to the lower basin.
Again, it’s a match problem. And it could get worse.
“If next year looks anything like this year, or even as a 12 million acre-foot river, actions absolutely have to be taken., and those actions are going to be greater than anybody has put on the table voluntary.”
Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2024. Credit: Brad Udall
The clock is ticking for seven states to figure out how they’ll share dwindling water in the Colorado River for the foreseeable future. In a meeting at the Utah State Capitol Thursday [June 26. 2025], the river’s four Upper Basin state commissioners further embraced the idea of a “divorce” with their Lower Basin neighbors — an idea also floated at a meeting in eastern Utah last week, as reported by Fox 13.
“Today we stand on the brink of system failure,” said Becky Mitchell, the commissioner for Colorado. “We also stand on the precipice of a major decision point.”
…negotiations between the four Upper Basin states, which includes Utah, Colorado, Wyoming and New Mexico, have been in a standstill with the remaining three Lower Basin states for more than a year. The Interior Department’s acting assistant secretary for water and science, Scott Cameron, has met with leadership in the seven states that use Colorado River water since April, working to broker a deal.
Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2024. Credit: Brad Udall
“We all have to live in the physical world as it is,” he said, “not as we might hope it will be.”
On Thursday, Cameron presented water managers with a deadline. The Interior Department plans to release a draft environmental impact statement evaluating different alternatives for the river’s future in December, which will then open to public comment. The department will make its final decision on how to proceed by June of 2026.
“The goal is to essentially parachute in a seven-state deal as the preferred alternative,” Cameron said.
For that to work, the states will need to reach an agreement by Nov. 11. By Feb. 14, they’ll need to hand over the details of their plan. Whatever the states decide on, Cameron reminded commissioners, will likely take an act of Congress and new policy adopted by most of the affected states’ legislatures…
The idea of framing the future relationship of the river users as a “divorce” was first pitched by the Lower Basin states, Mitchell said. Under that proposal, the Upper Basin states would release water from Lake Powell based on the average natural flow measured at Lee’s Ferry, a point just downstream of the reservoir and upstream of both Grand Canyon National Park and Lake Mead.
“If done correctly,” Mitchell said, “it should provide the opportunity for the Upper and Lower basins to manage themselves, with the only real point of agreement being the Powell release.”
On the evening of June 24, the GWC’s Doug Kenney joined Becky Mitchell, Colorado’s lead negotiator on Colorado River matters, at the Crested Butte Public Policy Forum for a conversation about current and future Colorado River issues. Well over 100 people packed the Center for the Arts for the public event that in previous years has featured speakers as varied as Ted Turner, Sandra Day O’Connor, and the GWC’s Senior Fellow Anne Castle.
The primary focus of discussion was how “big river” issues—that is, the changing rules determining how Colorado River supplies are shared amongst the seven states—impact the availability of water on Colorado’s West Slope. This required a review of the three numbers in the basin that increasingly are out of step: the amount of water entering the system each year through snowmelt and rain; the amount of water consumed by water users throughout the basin; and the amount of consumptive use that has been promised to water users in the Colorado River Compact and other laws. This mismatch of supplies, demands and allocations is not a new problem, but is of particular urgency now as Lakes Powell and Mead are two-thirds empty, the EIS process for new determining new reservoir operations is well underway, and the current year runoff is shaping up as one of the worst in decades.
The conversation was led by Julie Nania, an icon in Crested Butte for her work with High Country Conservation Advocates in protecting Mt. Emmons—the so-called “Red Lady”—from development into a molybdenum mine, as well as her service on the Board of Directors of the Upper Gunnison Water Conservancy District and as Executive Director and Faculty Chair of the Coldharbour Institute based at Western Colorado University. Julie began her career at Colorado Law (class of 2011), which included a post-graduate fellowship with the GWC from 2013-2014 working on tribal water rights. Julie stands as a great example of the GWC’s ongoing influence in protecting the resources and places that we all value.
Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2024. Credit: Brad Udall
Click the link to read the article on the KUNC website (Alex Hager):
June 23, 2025
This story is part of ongoing coverage of the Colorado River, produced by KUNC and supported by the Walton Family Foundation.
There’s a break in the clouds that have hovered over Colorado River negotiations for more than a year. State water leaders appear to be coalescing behind a new proposal for sharing the river after talks were stuck in a deadlock for more than a year.
The river is used by nearly 40 million people across seven states and Mexico, but it’s shrinking due to climate change. As a result, state leaders need to rein in demand. For months, they were mired in a standoff about how to interpret a century-old legal agreement. The new proposal is completely different.
Instead of those states leaning on old rules that don’t account for climate change, they’re proposing a new system that divides the river based on how much water is in it today.
“We finally have an approach that at least allows a glimmer of hope that the laying down of arms is possible,” said John Fleck, a writer and water policy researcher at the University of New Mexico.
The long, tense negotiations have mostly been stuck on one issue: How much water should the Upper Basin states — Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, and New Mexico — send downstream from their largest reservoir, Lake Powell?
The new plan says the amount should be based on a three-year rolling average of the “natural flows” in the river — basically, how much water would flow through it if human dams and diversion weren’t in the way.
States would still have to negotiate the exact percentage of those “natural flows” that would go downstream to the Lower Basin states of California, Arizona and Nevada. Picking that number will likely be difficult, but the fact that states are willing to base it on current climate conditions represents a major philosophical shift in how the river is divided.
“This new approach gets beyond the obsessively arcane discussions about various interpretations of laws written 100 years ago, with people hoping that their lawyers’ arguments can mean they get more water,” Fleck said. “It says, ‘Look, we all have to share this river. We have to do some math about how much water it really has.’”
Nevada’s John Entsminger, Arizona’s Tom Buschatzke, and California’s JB Hamby sit on a panel of state water leaders at the Colorado River Water Users Association annual conference in Las Vegas on December 5, 2024. Arizona’s Tom Buschatzke (center) brought details of a Colorado River plan to the public, and said it “allows for a fair division of what Mother Nature provides to us. Alex Hager/KUNC
Details of the plan first emerged in a meeting of the Arizona Reconsultation Committee, where the state’s water leaders gather to discuss Arizona’s position in multistate talks. Tom Buschatzke, director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources, described the plan as “innovative.”
“I was very pessimistic that we were on a path towards litigation,” he said. “I’m more optimistic now that we can avoid that path if we can make this work.”
Buschatzke emphasized that the proposal is in its early stages. The concept is now heading to the Bureau of Reclamation, the federal water agency which manages dams and reservoirs in the West. Employees there will run models to figure out exactly how much water would flow between the two basins.
State and federal leaders are in a crunch to finalize new water sharing rules before a 2026 deadline, when the current rules expire.
“It is still just a concept,” Buschatzke said. “We haven’t agreed to anything at this point, but we agreed to test it.”
Colorado, which often speaks on behalf of all four Upper Basin states, appears cautiously supportive of the plan.
“Colorado remains committed to developing supply-driven, sustainable operations of Lake Powell and Lake Mead,” Becky Mitchell, Colorado’s top water negotiator, wrote to KUNC in a statement. “The natural flow approach is one way to achieve this, if it is done right.”
Colorado and its allies initially dug in their heels on a very specific interpretation of the 1922 Colorado River compact, arguing that they shouldn’t have to take new cutbacks to their water supplies since they feel the impacts of climate change-fueled shortages more than their downstream neighbors.
“There is no doubt that Arizona views things differently than the Upper Division States, and a successful framework will set aside our differing views and focus instead on the health and sustainability of the Colorado River System for all who depend upon it,” Mitchell wrote.
Click the link to read the article on the AZCentral website (Brandon Loomis). Here’s an excerpt:
June 18, 2025
Key Points
Arizona officials present details of a new proposal to share future shortages on the Colorado River.
The “supply-driven” solution would base allocations on the river’s actual flows, not on storage in the reservoirs.
Upper Basin states say the plan has problems, but Gov. Katie Hobbs insisted Arizona will defend its river allocation and demand other states take cuts.
Negotiators for the seven states arguing over diminished Colorado River water are discussing an option they hope will end their deadlock, one that Arizona officials say would focus less on who gets what and more on what the river can realistically provide. They’re calling it the “supply-driven” solution, Arizona Water Resources Director Tom Buschatzke said, and it links the required water deliveries out of Glen Canyon Dam to what might naturally be flowing downstream at Lees Ferry if the dam weren’t there. The Rocky Mountain states upstream from there would have to let that amount pass, and the Southwestern states would have to live within its limits. It’s intended as a fair way of adapting — and shrinking — the region’s use of a river whose flow was once thought to exceed 15 million acre-feet of water a year but, in the last 25 years, has averaged 12.4 million…
Jennifer Pitt and Brad Udall at the Getches-Wilkinson Center/Water and Tribes Initiative conference June 5, 2025. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2024. Credit: Brad Udall
So far, agreement about what’s fair has appeared distant. The Lower Basin states of Arizona, California and Nevada have the bulk of the region’s population and farm production, and have fully developed and then started to cut back on the half of the river’s flow that the compact awarded them. The Upper Basin states of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming have not fully developed their share of the water — a share that no longer fully exists. They have balked at cutting their existing uses to meet the compact’s requirement that they send at least half of the river’s flow of a century ago now that a changing climate has exposed the folly of the compact’s numbers. The supply-driven model would generally mandate a flow past Lees Ferry to the Southwestern states equal to a rolling three-year average of the natural flow that the mountain snowmelt provides, Buschatzke said. There would be upper and lower bounds on that number, to account for needs such as protecting reservoir levels that are safe for Glen Canyon and Hoover dam operations. Those bounds are as yet unidentified.
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
The long-term drying of the American Southwest poses a gathering and measurable threat to hydropower generation in the Colorado River basin.
Should Lake Mead, the reservoir formed by Hoover Dam, continue to shrink, a substantial drop in the dam’s hydropower output is on the horizon.
The diminished state of the lake and the potential severe drop in electricity supply illustrate the consequences of a warming climate for the region. Built in the throes of the Great Depression, Hoover was the signature project of a country displaying its grit and engineering prowess to tame the West’s mightiest rivers to irrigate farmland and build cities. Today the dam is an aging asset buffeted by hydrological change and generating half the power that it did just a generation ago.
According to the Bureau of Reclamation, the federal agency that manages the basin’s large dams, if Lake Mead falls another 20 feet, Hoover Dam’s capacity to generate electricity would be slashed by 70 percent from its current level.
If there is a reason not to be especially alarmed it’s this: Hoover is just a small piece of the region’s electric power infrastructure. Federal dams along the Colorado River account for just over 4 percent of Arizona’s generating capacity, for instance.
Still, the cheap electricity is a lifeline for tribes and small rural electric providers. And the dam’s ability to be quickly turned on and off helps regulate the peaks and troughs of electricity demand. Curtailing this source of inexpensive electricity would raise the cost of power in the region while also challenging the integration of renewable energy into the electric grid.
A hydropower shortfall will be “bad news for us,” said Ed Gerak, executive director of the Irrigation and Electrical Districts Association of Arizona, which represents power providers that receive federal hydropower from Colorado River dams.
Lake Mead now sits at an elevation of 1,055 feet. The break point for hydropower is 1,035 feet. At that level, 12 older turbines at Hoover that are not designed for low reservoir levels would be shut down, Reclamation said. Five newer turbines installed a decade ago would continue to generate power.
The threat is real, especially as this year’s runoff forecast for the basin continues to worsen. Every month, Reclamation updates its projection of reservoir levels over the next two years. The June update shows a 10 percent chance that Lake Mead breaches 1,035 feet in spring 2027.
In a worst-case scenario, the breach would happen at the end of 2026, just when current operating rules for Lake Mead and Lake Powell expire. The modeling indicates a similar chance that Lake Powell drops low enough in 2027 that Glen Canyon Dam, another key hydropower asset in the basin, stops producing electricity.
The probability that Lake Mead drops that far is small and laden with uncertainties about weather and water use. But it is large enough that Hoover’s power customers are signaling their concern.
Reclamation, for its part, acknowledges the problem at Hoover and is evaluating its options. The agency estimates that replacing the 12 turbines would cost $156 million.
“Reclamation is assessing the cost-benefit analysis of replacing some of the older style turbines and the timeline for installation,” the agency wrote in a statement to Circle of Blue. “Ordering new turbines is a lengthy process as they have to be designed, model tested, built and ultimately installed.”
The dozen older turbines are not designed to operate at low reservoir levels. Dams like Hoover, which was completed in 1936, function based on the principle of hydraulic head, which is the difference in elevation between the top of the reservoir and the intake pipes for the dam’s powerhouse. When the hydraulic head drops, so does the water pressure. That can trigger the formation of air bubbles in the water, which can gouge and damage the turbines in a process called cavitation.
The five turbines that would not be shut down are low-head units that can accommodate lower reservoir levels. Installed a decade ago at a cost of $42 million in response to a previous rapid decline in Lake Mead, they can operate down to 950 feet. (One of those five turbines is currently offline, and Reclamation does not have an estimate for when it will resume operating.)
Hoover is already hobbled by low water. Power generation in 2023 was roughly half the output of 2000, the last year that Lake Mead was effectively full.
When Lake Mead is full, Hoover has a generating capacity of 2,080 megawatts, equivalent to a large coal-fired or nuclear power plant. Today its capacity is 1,304 MW. If the dozen older turbines go offline, it will drop again, to 382 MW.
These declines in hydropower generation have been felt by the customers who buy Hoover Dam’s electricity, Gerak said. In a shortfall, they have to buy market-rate electricity. Depending on the season and power demand, market rates can be considerably more expensive.
Eric Witkoski is the executive director of the Colorado River Commission of Nevada, which manages the state’s allocation of Hoover’s power. Witkoski said that rural electric companies in his state have a higher share of their electricity coming from the dams and would be most affected by a shortfall.
The value of Hoover’s electricity is measured not just in raw megawatts and dollars. It is a flexible power source that can be ramped up and down to match the region’s daily and seasonal rhythms. Energy use rises in summer afternoons when air conditioning units are blasting and electricity-consuming household chores are at hand. It falls at night when cooler air prevails and washing machines are silent.
“The beauty of hydropower is that it’s great for helping to stabilize and regulate the grid,” Gerak said.
IEDA and other interest groups are pursuing a number of fixes. They are encouraging Reclamation and its parent agency the Interior Department to use federal infrastructure funds to install new low-head turbines or to request appropriations from Congress.
They are writing their congressional representatives in support of the Help Hoover Dam Act, a bill that would unlock some $50 million in ratepayer funds that had been set aside for pension benefits for federal employees. The trade groups claim that Congress funds the pension benefits through other means and that the funds could be spent on dam upgrades if Reclamation was given the authority to do so.
They also want to set up an organization modeled after the National Parks Foundation that can accept donations for dam operations and maintenance, including the visitor center, which is supported by power sales.
These fixes will take time. But as Lake Mead declines, the urgency to achieve them will intensify.
The Central Arizona Project canal carries water through Phoenix in 2019. The project’s former general manager, Ted Cooke, was recently nominated to run the top federal agency for the Colorado River. Those who have worked with Cooke described him as a qualified expert. Ted Wood/The Water Desk
Click the link to read the article on the KUNC website (Alex Hager):
June 17, 2025
This story is part of ongoing coverage of the Colorado River, produced by KUNC and supported by the Walton Family Foundation.
President Donald Trump has tapped longtime water manager Ted Cooke to be the next commissioner of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. The nomination, submitted Mondayto the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, attempts to fill a pivotal role at the top federal agency for Western rivers, reservoirs and dams.
If confirmed, Cooke will become the main federal official overseeing Colorado River matters. His nomination comes at a tense time for the river. The seven states that use its water appear deadlocked in closed-door negotiations about sharing the shrinking water supply in the future.
Cooke will likely try to push those state negotiators toward agreement about who should feel the pain of water cutbacks and when. If they can’t reach a deal ahead of a 2026 deadline, the federal government can step in and make those decisions itself.
Cooke has spent most of his lengthy career with the Central Arizona Project, which brings Colorado River water to the Phoenix area. He first joined the agency in 2003, according to his LinkedIn page. He climbed the ranks and served as CAP’s general manager from 2015 to 2023.
Ted Cooke and Tom Buschatzke: Photo credit: Arizona Department of Water Resources
Water experts across the Colorado River basin, including some who have worked with him in the past, told KUNC they regard Cooke as a qualified technical expert. Sharon Megdal, whose tenure on CAP’s board of directors overlapped with Cooke’s time as general manager, said she had “great admiration” for Cooke.
“He’s thorough, he’s deliberative, he looks for solutions, and boy, we need to find solutions right now,” said Megdal, who now directs the Water Resources Research Center at the University of Arizona. “My observation of seeing him in action in tough situations shows that he’ll keep working until a resolution is reached or a solution is achieved, and I think that’s what we need now.”
John Entsminger, Nevada’s top water negotiator, called Cooke’s appointment a “great choice,” and cited his work in shaping the 2019 Drought Contingency Plan. If confirmed, Cooke will likely be in the same negotiating rooms as Entsminger.
“There are times when [the Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner] has to level pretty realistic threats at everybody,” Entsminger said. There’s also times when they have to be the mediator… I think Ted has both of those skills. I’ve seen him be pretty pointed, and I’ve seen him drive compromise.”
The seven states working on the next set of rules for managing the Colorado River are currently split into two caucuses – the Upper Basin states of Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico and the Lower Basin states of California, Arizona and Nevada.
The appointment of Cooke, a longtime Arizonan, could upset some on the other side of that divide. The Central Arizona Project, his former employer, is generally among the first entities to lose water under any plan for cutbacks.
Eric Kuhn is the former general manager of the Colorado River District. The taxpayer-funded agency was founded to keep water flowing to the cities and farms of Western Colorado. He said Cooke is qualified, but added “the nomination of someone from Arizona is interesting at a time when the Lower Division and the Upper Division states are far off.”
“I assume that he would recuse himself from decisions that could affect the CAP – which is just about any decision in the basin,” Kuhn wrote to KUNC. “None the less, his nomination is a plus for Arizona and the Lower Division States.”
Negotiators from Colorado and New Mexico declined to comment, and negotiators from Wyoming and Utah did not get back to KUNC in time for publication. Chuck Cullom, executive director of the Upper Colorado River Commission and a former colleague of Cooke’s, also declined to comment.
Click the link to read the article on the InkStain website (John Fleck):
June 18, 2025
Arizona yesterday finally moved the super-secret idea at the heart of current Colorado River negotiations out of the shadows.
The idea is deceptively simple: base Lake Powell releases on a percentage of the three-year rolling average of the Colorado River’s estimated “natural flow” at Lee Ferry. Allocate water based not on a century-old hydrologic mistake, but rather based on what the river actually has to offer. It presents an attractive alternative to the increasingly baroque and unproductive shitshow that had taken over interstate negotiations.
It has the great virtue of each basin getting out of the other basin’s business – one clean, simple number. But establishing the right percentage remains the hard part. Make the percentage too high and the Upper Basin will have to cut users with pre-Compact water rights. Make the percentage too low and Lake Powell fills up while Central Arizona goes dry.
But some of the early modeling suggests that there may be a sweet spot where a combination of Lower Basin cuts along the lines of what the Lower Basin has already been willing to offer, combined with modest Upper Basin system conservation programs, might thread a needle that could allow the crafting of a compromise. This is very good news if the negotiators and the folks back home who have been egging them on can seize this opportunity to set aside parochial smallness and think at the basin scale.
The possibility of a new approach was hinted at a CU Boulder’s Colorado River conference two weeks ago (I spent most of the conference hidden away watching and listening on Zoom through a covid haze, so it might have just been a fever dream, but I thought I heard the hints), and I’m told was a topic of some of the hallway conversations. But Tom Buschatzke’s reveal at yesterday’s meeting of the Arizona Reconsultation Committee (the closest thing we have to the much-needed C-SPAN for the Colorado River Basin) was the first public discussion of the hush-hush stuff that shouldn’t be quite so hush-hush given, y’know, 40 million of us stakeholders.
The full slide deck from the Colorado River C-SPAN Arizona Reconsultation Committee is useful. Reclamation’s Dan Bunk, for example, shared a slide slowing the latest “min probable” forecast (hilarious typo – “min problem” now corrected) showing the system tanking – dropping below minimum power pool at Powell – in winter 2026. The min probable forecast has been a useful guide lately, frankly, and the latest version is horrifying. (On any other day this would be the lead, and probably deserves its own post, but I try not to work on Wednesdays.)
In his brief slot on the panel, Udall was first a cheerleader for Colorado River problem solving but reminding listeners that climate change was the elephant in the room, as several speakers later in the conference acknowledged.
Following are his remarks, lightly edited:
Given the policy expertise on this panel, I’m going to constrain my remarks to what’s going on in the climate space. I want to make the following two points and end with a heartfelt plea.
Within this basin, we can and have worked together to deal with a really sticky, difficult issue like climate change, to inform decision-making given the right partners, including the federal government at the table. Point two is our current climate trajectory is beyond awful, and that makes our challenge even worse.
So let me get to point one. We can, in fact, work together on a really difficult issue. In late 2006 Terry Fulp (then regional director of the Lower Colorado Basin Region for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation), pulled together six different sciences to consider how a changing climate would impact runoff, to inform the 2007 Interim Guidelines EIS. That effort became Appendix U.
Interestingly, it was the first time climate science was incorporated into a major EIS. It was not particularly controversial, and it was done during a Republican administration. It set the stage for future (Bureau of) Reclamation climate change efforts, efforts that have continued to this day.
But put an asterisk next to that.
The next year (2008), the Water Utility Climate Alliance was formed by eight major national water providers, and four of those were actually in our basin: the San Diego County Water Authority, Denver Water, Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, and Southern Nevada Water Authority.
Members have led the way in figuring out how to adapt to climate change, including hiring certain staff to deal with this. And a hat tip for this to both Jim (Lochhead, former CEO of Denver Water) and Bill Hasencamp (Colorado River resources manager for Metropolitan).
Let me mention Reclamation again, because in 2009 Mike Connor, as a congressional staffer, wrote the SECURE Water Act, which made Reclamation perform a series of continuing climate change studies that are important to this day.
The lesson here is that when faced with such a daunting and unknown challenge, we actually can come together to discover scientific truths, but we need both federal and basic leadership to make this happen. Unfortunately, right now, one leg of this is seriously threatened, hence my asterisk.
My second point is about our awful moment, our global climate change trajectory. Hold on to your seats, because I’m going to make you uncomfortable. The world is on track for 3 degrees Celsius warming by 2100. This far exceeds anything agreed to by the 2015 Paris Climate Accords. And frankly, terrifies scientists. Three Celsius is a projected average global warming, but over land, that’s 5 Celsius. Converted into Fahrenheit, it’s nine Fahrenheit. Imagine every day, 9 Fahrenheit warmer. Highs, 9 Fahrenheit warmer. Lows, 9 Fahrenheit warmer. That’s a world unlike anything we currently know, and it’s going to challenge us all on every front.
And what’s worse about this, and not particularly appreciated, is that to get to 3 Celsius, we need large global greenhouse emissions to continue through this century to 2100. So, it will continue to warm significantly beyond 2100. Nine Fahrenheit is not where we end up. It’s kind of where we start.
This 3 Celsius outcome has been has been obvious for at least five years, as climate policy progress has stalled and even gone backwards. You know, post-Paris in 2015 there were all kinds of great net-zero by 2050 pledges by government and industry, including the fossil fuel industry.
But since then, the fossil fuel industry is trying to have it both ways. They love to tout these goals while at the same time talking to the shareholders about how they’re going to expand production in ways that are completely incompatible with 2 Celsius. And there are about 25 large, mostly national oil companies that are living this lie. Each one thinks they’re going to be the last one standing, selling a product that’s fundamentally incompatible with a stable climate. [ed. emphasis mine]
If you think we’ve got plenty of time to solve this, like 75 years, normally, I’d agree with you. But think about what’s happened over the past 35 years. Emissions have gone up 60% and continue to rise. With these bad actors and with banks willing to finance this and governments willing to subsidize it, what we’re witnessing is a monumental failure of both capitalism and governance.
Now, if this weren’t all bad enough for you, we now have an anti-knowledge president and his vile enablers systematically attacking all forms of knowledge using illegal and unconstitutional tactics. Nowhere has this been more true than in this climate science space, where they’re going after anything and everything that has the word climate on it, every federal agency.
I’ll mention three here in our basin that are really critical: NOAA, the USGS and Reclamation. All of that climate work is in the sights of these vile enablers and the administration. Hence that nasty asterisk again. This administration aims to stop all work at preventing future greenhouse gas emissions as well as our ability to adapt to coming changes.
And 95% of what I can say on this panel about this is not suitable for this room, but let’s call it what it is: it’s insanity what they’re doing.
There are also recent, strong signs that climate warming is speeding up. So 2023 and 2024 were 1.5 Celsius above a pre-Industrial average. And there, those two years have a trend line that’s twice what we’re used to seeing, and it has climate scientists flummoxed about the reasons behind it.
So why talk about global climate issues in a conference about the Colorado River? Well, it should be obvious. There is no way this makes for a better world in which we live, a better world in which the Colorado River flows, and if you live in that world, tell me how to join in la-la land, because I’d love to be there.
I’m now convinced that we need to plan for the worst possible climate future, and that’s somewhere around 10 million acre-feet runoff. But what it also means is taking a hard look at every existing agreement in the river. It either breaks them or substantially modifies them.
Let me get to my plea. These facts should be a call to action to everybody. Not only are we in a really deep climate hole, we’re continuing to dig. Absolutely the last thing we need is the federal government undercutting our efforts to meet the water supply challenges in this basin. There’s a term called the pessimism aversion trap. I’m going to urge you not to fall on that. And it’s the tendency to look the other way when confronted with dark realities. We still control our destiny, even if the solutions seem daunting.
So I’m going to ask for two things. One, obviously, fight back against all these harmful cutbacks to all aspects of our national climate effort, including the abandonment of science and scientists. Our federal allies are critical partners in this fight, and lasting damage has been done.
Second, some of you think that your job description doesn’t include worrying about reducing greenhouse gas emissions or what might happen at 2100 or beyond. I disagree. I plead with you to get serious about figuring out how to reduce the emissions of your organization and even your own personal emissions. I agree that individual actions aren’t going to solve this, but they send a really strong signal to everyone around us.
Finally, I need to apologize to and beg forgiveness our next speaker who deserves to follow someone far nicer than I am.
Fascinating observation from Jim Lochhead this morning at the Getches-Wilkinson Center Colorado River Conference about the nature of the current negotiations and the role of the federal government. It came during a panel moderated by Anne Castle focused on what we learned from the expiring 2007 river management guidelines, which are the subject of intense renegotiation among the seven basin states.
From the perspective of the panel’s charge – what have we learned since the 2007 agreements – the way I phrased that, the the way the current process is going, should seem weird to us: “intense negotiation among the seven basin states.”
According to Lochhead, a Coloradan who was in the room for the ’07 negotiations, the current cloistered seven-state process is very different from what happened leading up to the ’07 agreement. In 2007, Lochhead explained, the states weren’t the decision maker, the federal government was the decision maker, playing a much more active role as facilitator compared to the current process, which has deferred to the states to come up with a deal.
This is not going well. At least I think it’s not going well. Who knows? Lochhead likened it to the selection of a pope, as we all await the puff of smoke. “The current process seems to me to be like the conclave.”
In my gossip network, I’ve heard good things about the current role being played by Scott Cameron, the Trump Administration’s point person on this stuff. We will hear from him tomorrow. I look forward to that.
Other stuff from the morning sessions
Weirdly, after driving all the way to Colorado for the meeting, I spent the morning in my hotel room on Zoom – a bit under the weather, not feeling up to the social battery drain of all those people, saving energy for tomorrow when I’m moderating the closing panel. But what I lost in social capital construction and maintenance, I made up for in being able to focus on the talks. Among them.
Brad Udall, our modern-day E.C. LaRue, was pretty frank about the climate change trajectory, arguing that we need to prepare for a 10 million acre foot river. For those not steeped in the numbers, that’s not very much water. The current climate trajectory, Brad said, is “beyond awful.”
Gov. Stephen Roe Lewis from the Gila River Indian Community argued that enduring solutions to the Colorado River’s problems will require federal financial help.
A couple of useful nuggets from my Bill Hasencamp of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. One: Bill talked about a really interesting analysis his team has done of the Intentionally Created Surplus Program, which concludes that there is a lot more water in the reservoirs right now, including in Lake Powell, than would otherwise be the case. They’ve briefed me on their analysis and shared the report with me, I just haven’t had the time to write about it yet, it’s super interesting.
Bill also talked about the weird state of the current state negotiations. One on one, people say they’re interested in compromise, in finding an agreement. In the negotiating room, they stick to hard line positions. This circles back nicely to Lochhead’s point that last time around, this was a federal process, not a state-run process.
Anne Castle made an incredibly important point about the challenges face by the state’s negotiators. They are sent into the room to advocate for their state’s water supplies. They need permission from their constituents to compromise, to be able and willing to give up some water in order in the interests of the good of the basin.
In May 2022, a couple paused at once had been the bottom of the boat put-in ramp in Antelope Canyon to lok down on the receding waters of Lake Powell. The reservoir at that point was 22% full. Photo/Allen Best
Almost 300 water wonks converged on Boulder Thursday [June 3, 2025] for two days of sobering conversations about the river’s future punctuated by frustration, pleas for creative solutions and references to everything from the musician Lizzo to the kids movie “Frozen.”
Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2024. Credit: Brad Udall
The Colorado River Basin is in dire straits: The water supply for 40 million people has been dwindling, and climatologists say the climate future is bleak. State officials have spent months mired in thorny negotiations over things like how to split painful water cuts in the driest conditions — with scant progress to report publicly. The lack of progress and insight into the talks had some conference-goers feeling frustrated. Concerned. Uncertain.
High-ranking federal officials joined the Boulder event to reassert the federal government’s frequent role in talks over the Colorado River’s future: The parent ready to stop the car if the kids can’t stop fighting.
In the event that the states can’t agree on how to manage the river’s reservoirs and water supply in a timely fashion, Department of Interior Secretary Doug Burgum is ready to wield his federal authority over reservoirs, water contracts and more in the basin.
“He’s not looking forward to that, but in the absence of a seven-state agreement, he will do it,” Scott Cameron, the Department of the Interior’s acting assistant secretary for water and science, said Friday at the 45th annual Conference on the Colorado River at the University of Colorado’s Getches-Wilkinson Center.
The basin’s task is to submit a joint management proposal to the federal government for analysis. For months, however, they’ve been stuck working on separate ideas for how to manage the river.
Upper Basin states — Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming — are on one side, and Lower Basin states — Arizona, California and Nevada — on the other. The 30 tribal nations in the basin are advocating for their individual needs, as is Mexico.
Notably, the top state negotiators, except California’s, skipped the Boulder conference this year, unlike in the past.
The Interior Department will analyze a joint basin proposal as part of a larger process to select draft alternatives and then settle on a final plan.
The final plan could determine everything from how key reservoirs store and release water to who takes cuts in dry years and how environments, like the Grand Canyon, will be impacted for years to come. It will impact water supplies for cities, like Denver, Phoenix and Los Angeles, ecosystems, a multibillion-dollar agricultural industry, hydroelectric power and more.
“The time for action is now,” Cameron told the gathering in a speech. “We do not have a lot of time to waste, people.”
Mounting challenges and a bleak climate future
The Bureau of Reclamation plans to release a draft outlining management options by the end of 2025 with a final plan in place by early summer 2026, Cameron said.
But the negotiating challenges are significant. State officials face the political problem of bringing home a deal that includes water cuts. Policymakers distrust each other. Anxious water users are nixing ideas before they have time to grow into policy solutions.
L. to R. Chris Winter, Colby Pelligrino, Chuck Cullom June 4, 2025 during the “Turning Hindsight into Foresight: The Colorado River at a Crossroads” the annual Getches Wilikinson Center/Water & Tribes Initiative shindig in Boulder.
We have to let people develop their ideas, said Colby Pellegrino with the Southern Nevada Water Authority and part of the Nevada negotiating team.
“We’ve done a really crappy job of that. Everyone in this room,” she said. “We need to do more to support the compromise.”
The basin states are already running behind schedule: In March, Upper Basin officials said the basin states had until May to submit their joint management proposal for federal analysis. But May passed, and nothing happened.
It’s like watching the Catholic Church’s secluded conclave to select the next pope, Jim Lochhead, former CEO of Denver Water and state negotiator, said.
“The smoke is all black right now,” he said. “I’m not hearing of any major breakthroughs.”
That’s not for lack of effort: The states are meeting twice a month, and they’re at the negotiating table together.
“We know that we get the best solutions when the states work together,” Colorado’s top negotiator Becky Mitchell said in a prepared statement. (She wasn’t at the conference.) “I am focused on building a broad consensus to address the risks facing the Basin States.”
One of those risks is a changing climate: The basin, along with the rest of the planet, is facing a “beyond awful” climate future, said Brad Udall, senior research scientist at Colorado State University.
The world is on track to warm by 9 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100, and continue warming from there. It’s a future with even less water to share among the U.S., Mexico and 30 tribal nations — and an outcome that, frankly, terrifies scientists, Udall said.
“That’s a world unlike anything we currently know, and it’s going to challenge us all on every front,” Udall told the gathering.
Searching for a unicorn
While some conference-goers were frustrated, speakers took the opportunity to pull lessons from past interstate negotiations and share their ideas for how to break the deadlock.
Tribal leaders called for continued and increased tribal involvement in the Colorado River talks.
“Honestly, I think if our state representatives are going to sit silent, then we have 30 tribal nations that are ready to take over and make a decision and save our river,” said Lorelei Cloud, a member of the Southern Ute Indian Tribe bordered by Colorado and chair of the Colorado Water Conservation Board. “We’ve been doing it since time immemorial.”
Some suggested solutions, like bringing in an external facilitator. Former negotiator and federal official Mike Connor said the states need to seize every olive branch and set aside personal agendas or political legacies. (This is where speakers turned to the “Frozen” mantra: “Let it go.”)
Jennifer Pitt of the National Audubon Society said building personal connections has been the key to progress in the past. Many people pushed for states to find creative solutions, like desalting seawater — a very expensive solution with a relatively small benefit (the equivalent of Lizzo’s tiny, Valentino purse, one water expert said).
“People are trying to turn this thing upside down and sideways to find a unicorn,” Chuck Cullom, executive director of the Upper Colorado River Commission, said.
Concerns abounded. Lochhead said the basin had a once-in-a-generation influx of federal funding — and blew it. Reclamation’s staff has been cut, something that Cameron said he was working to address. With shrinking water supplies, the basin’s communities are feeling the impacts of dry conditions more immediately than in the past.
Western Slope water leader Andy Mueller pushed for more information and faster action to help Colorado communities have more time to adapt and come up with water conservation plans.
“I think failure of our negotiators would be to fail to recognize that our hydrology could be just as bad as Brad Udall is predicting, or worse,” Mueller said.
Colorado River “Beginnings”. Photo: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism
Click the link to read the article on the AZCentral.com website (Austin Corona). Here’s an excerpt:
June 7, 2025
Key Points (AI assisted summary)
After months of little progress and public battles, negotiators from the seven Colorado River states may have regained their footing toward a shortage-sharing agreement.
Officials say the Trump administration has engaged in the work to complete an agreement, spurring the states to resume talks. Without a deal, the federal government would impose its own plan.
An official said a new agreement could require changes in the bedrock laws that govern the river, suggesting that even the “Law of the River,” a 100-year old management framework, could face scrutiny.
Metaphors about divorce and grief defined an emotional presentation about the Colorado River in Boulder, Colorado, on June 6. Those metaphors, however, did not represent strife or disaster in stalled water negotiations, but apparent progress and the willingness to let go of past ideas and move toward compromise.
“We’ve heard about the stages of grief … about denial and anger and the need to be at bargaining,” said Chuck Cullom, executive director of the Upper Colorado River Commission. “Well, I believe the basin states are there.”
Officials involved in tense negotiations over how to manage shortages on the Colorado River suggested that months of harsh talk and stalemates have ended and negotiators are exploring new options…Federal officials indicated that even parts of the “Law of the River,” a 100-year-old legal framework that governs Colorado River allocations, could change as a result of the negotiations.
“We’re trying to pivot to something else and be creative, and we have good engagement on that right now,” said Colby Pellegrino, deputy general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority…While most of the negotiators from the seven Colorado River basin states did not attend the conference at the University of Colorado in Boulder, the speakers who did attend were cautiously optimistic about their chances at making a deal.
Bill Hasencamp with the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California speaks at the University of Colorado, Boulder on June 5, 2025. More than 300 Colorado River experts attended, but the region’s top water policymakers skipped the event. Alex Hager/KUNC
Click the link to read the article on the KUNC website (Alex Hager):
June 6, 2025
This story is part of ongoing coverage of the Colorado River, produced by KUNC in Colorado and supported by the Walton Family Foundation. KUNC is solely responsible for its editorial coverage.
Closed-door negotiations about the future of the Colorado River are at a standstill. The news of the day is that there’s barely any news. So, when more than 300 water experts got together for an annual conference this week, they had little to do besides wring their hands, listen for crumbs of news, and talk about how they would do things differently if they were on the inside of those negotiations.
“The current process to me kind of feels like the conclave,” said Jim Lochhead, who formerly served as Colorado’s top water negotiator.
Top policymakers caused a stir when they decided to skip the meeting at the University of Colorado, Boulder, withdrawing further into the shadows as tense talks about sharing water appear to be making little progress. The people excluded from those meetings — scientists, academics, tribal leaders, environmental advocates and others with a stake in the river — have been left waiting like the masses gathered in St. Peter’s Square.
“We’re waiting for the black smoke or the white smoke to come out of the seven-state negotiating room,” said Lochhead, who once served as CEO of Denver Water and now works as an independent consultant.
On the other side of this Colorado River “conclave,” seven state-appointed negotiators are trying to come up with a new set of rules for sharing water after 2026. They’re under pressure to cut back on demand for water because the river’s supply is shrinking due to climate change. Until they emerge with a new set of rules, farmers, cities and everyone else will be wondering if they will feel the sting of those cuts.
Across the Colorado River basin, those who depend on the river’s water are making preparations however they can. Cities are spending big on technology that will help stretch out their water supplies if they’re given less in the future. Tribes are trying to get a more formal role in river negotiations, so future water-sharing policies don’t leave them behind like so many in the past.
Efforts like those have been underway for years now. But in Boulder, as top state negotiators keep their heels firmly planted in incompatible policy positions and an unpredictable federal government has yet to appoint a top official to oversee Colorado River matters, everyone else was left to marinate in the anxiety that will linger until a new set of rules is formed.
Looking to the past
With little information about the future, the talks in Boulder mainly focused on lessons from history.
Some of those lessons were relatively recent. For example, Lochhead pointed to talks ahead of a 2007 plan that saw more than seven people in the negotiating room, including federal government representatives who were able to push the states towards consensus. He said today’s negotiations would benefit from a similar approach.
Other lessons were more than a century old. Tribal leaders advocated for the presence of Indigenous interests in today’s talks. Were they included in previous discussions, said Lorelei Cloud, things might be different today.
September 21, 1923, 9:00 a.m. — Colorado River at Lees Ferry. From right bank on line with Klohr’s house and gage house. Old “Dugway” or inclined gage shows to left of gage house. Gage height 11.05′, discharge 27,000 cfs. Lens 16, time =1/25, camera supported. Photo by G.C. Stevens of the USGS. The Colorado River flows past a measuring device at Lee’s Ferry in Arizona on Sept. 21, 1923. Speakers at a recent conference on the Colorado River drew lessons from history to inform the next chapter of water management in the region.. Source: 1921-1937 Surface Water Records File, Colorado R. @ Lees Ferry, Laguna Niguel Federal Records Center, Accession No. 57-78-0006, Box 2 of 2 , Location No. MB053635.
“The past century has really shown that the exclusion of tribal voices has really led to this crisis that we’re dealing with now in the basin,” said Cloud, a member of the Southern Ute Tribe and the recently appointed chair of the Colorado Water Conservation Board. “If we had just honored tribal sovereignty from years back, even from the beginning, we probably would have had serious offers that provided solutions to what we’re dealing with now. We wouldn’t be sitting here talking about hindsight to foresight.”
Patty Limerick, a historian and author whose work focuses on the American West, also brought lessons from more than a century ago when she told the story of a man named E.C. LaRue.
LaRue was a federal engineer who studied the river in the early 1920s. He urged his higher-ups to be conservative in their estimates about the amount of water in the Colorado River. They largely ignored LaRue, instead signing legal agreements that promised more water than the river, in most years, is able to provide.
If policymakers had listened to LaRue more than a hundred years ago, some say, those who rely on the Colorado River today would not be in such a crisis.
Limerick finished describing LaRue’s tale and posed a question to the room.
“Is there a latter-day counterpart to E.C. LaRue to whom we should be paying attention?” she asked. “Is that person among us?”
Another speaker suggested that counterpart might be climate scientist Brad Udall. When he spoke shortly thereafter, his outlook was grim.
Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2024. Credit: Brad Udall
‘Beyond awful’ forecasts
Udall and other scientists have provided a rare, uncomfortable dose of certainty to Colorado River talks: The planet is getting warmer, the Colorado River is losing water, and cutbacks to water demand are unavoidably necessary.
He told the audience to “hold on to [their] seats” before describing the climate forecast as “beyond awful.”
While his predictions are rarely rosy, Udall struck a more pessimistic tone than previous years, calling out fossil fuel companies and an “anti-knowledge president and his vile enablers” for attacking science and efforts to gird the nation against the harms of climate change, including water shortages.
“Not only are we in a really deep climate hole,” he said, “We’re continuing to dig and absolutely the last thing we need is the federal government undercutting our efforts to meet the water supply challenges in this basin.”
What the feds said
Those in attendance looking for crumbs of information about negotiations from state leaders were left empty-handed. But one federal representative, perhaps surprisingly, dropped a few tiny ones.
The federal government has stayed relatively tight-lipped on Colorado River matters since Donald Trump returned to the White House. In the administration’s early days, it paused funding for water conservation and infrastructure projects. It has yet to appoint a new commissioner for the Bureau of Reclamation, the agency which manages dams and reservoirs across the West.
Scott Cameron, the Interior Department’s acting Assistant Secretary for Water and Science, speaks at a conference in Boulder, Colorado on June 6, 2025. He said federal officials are working closely with state negotiators to shape the next chapter of Colorado River management. Alex Hager/KUNC
With that role unfilled, the administration’s highest-ranking official focused on Colorado River matters is Scott Cameron, a longtime federal official who currently serves as the Department of the Interior’s acting Assistant Secretary for Water and Science.
Cameron said he’s been meeting with state negotiators roughly “every other week for the last eight weeks” after his boss, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, said he wanted the department’s leadership to be “personally, intensely, and constantly” involved in discussions with the seven states. Cameron did, however, say he did not believe the states needed an external moderator to help break their deadlock.
“My impression is they really want a deal, they really want to find a path forward to working together, and I’m convinced that they’re all sincere in that regard,” he said.
Cameron also said he was “constantly” asking Reclamation’s senior leadership to bolster the agency’s staff on Colorado River matters as a way to “mitigate any unintended consequences of national level initiatives to reduce overall federal spending.”
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
Workers from Denver Water and contractor Kiewit Barnard stand in front of Gross Dam in May 2024 to mark the start of the dam raise process. Photo credit: Denver Water.
Click the link to read the article on the Colorado Politics website (Michael Karik). Here’s an excerpt:
Although she stood by her prior determination that the project permit was unlawful, a federal judge last week decided construction on a major Denver Water infrastructure project should continue for safety reasons…Earlier this spring, U.S. District Court Senior Judge Christine M. Arguello found that, as a result of federal law violations, the expansion of Gross Reservoir and Dam should cease permanently and any further construction on the ongoing project would stop temporarily. The pause on construction, Arguello explained, would give her time to hear from engineers and determine what work would need to occur to make the dam safe…
However, on May 29, Arguello retreated from her prior bellicose tone.
“There is a risk of environmental injury and loss of human life if dam construction is halted for another two years while Denver Water re-designs the structure of the dam,” she wrote in her latest order. “Furthermore, the evidence shows that enjoining dam construction would harm Denver Water and the general public by requiring Denver Water to lay off much of its specialized workforce (which also harms those workers), as well as interfere with Denver Water’s contracts with contractors supplying materials and labor for the Project, which in turn, would significantly increase the costs.”
L. to R. Chris Winter, Colby Pelligrino, Chuck Cullom.
I was at the Getches-Wilkinson Center & Water and Tribes Initiative shindig this week live-posting on BlueSky (Click the “Latest” tab). The question of whether the negotiators from the seven states were being candid about their proceedings came up. Colby Pelligrino described her frustration with folks jumping all over every proposal as unfair or damaging to their rights. They can’t make any progress towards building a solution if every proposal is prevented from going forward. Chuck Cullom let everyone know that the data the negotiators are working with is available.
Also, Eric Kuhn, maintained that since the Colorado River Compact was written for a river that doesn’t exist any longer parts need to be reworked. He emphasized living with the river we have.
With a deep sigh, he acknowledged that managing the vital river system “is a huge burden” for those mere mortals charged with that task.
Atlas bearing the weight of the current Post-2026 negotiations. Credit: ADWR
The Director included in his presentation to the conference audience an image he often uses when describing the on-going negotiations over new guidelines for river management: a depiction of the mythical Greek god Atlas holding up the world.
Buschatzke told the WRRC attendees that “one thing that Atlas had going for him that we don’t have is that Atlas was a god, and we are not gods, so it is a huge burden for us to try to deal with this river.”
Divided into Upper and Lower Basins, comprised of seven U.S. states, the Colorado River system is operated by the Bureau of Reclamation under the terms of agreements that are scheduled to run out at the end of 2026. For well over a year, representatives of those seven states have been locked into often-intense negotiations over what the new operating guidelines should look like. Director Buschatzke is Arizona’s representative to those negotiations.
Image credit: ADWR
The Director described Lower Basin conservation efforts in recent years. Among those efforts, the Lower Basin and the Republic of Mexico having combined to reduce consumptive use of river water by 20 percent since 2000. He also noted that Lower Basin states and Mexico have left enough water in Lake Mead, especially since 2014, to raise surface levels by more than 100 feet.
“Without this, we’d be in a heap of trouble,” he said. “We’ve shown that we can take proactive measures and we’ve been successful in doing it.”
That 100 feet of elevation in Lake Mead, he said, represents a little over 8 million acre-feet of conserved water.
“And Arizona itself has done 4.6 million acre-feet of that 8 million,” said Director Buschatzke.
The Director emphasized his primary message as it relates to the river-management negotiations: Everyone who benefits from the river needs to contribute to conservation efforts on the river. His Upper Basin counterparts have rejected proposals to share any Colorado River water conservation efforts, he noted.
Image credit: ADWR
In a luncheon address preceding the Director’s keynote, Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs observed the importance of cooperation and collaboration in reaching agreement.
“Collaboration is the foundation of water policy and management discussions in which Arizona is on the cutting edge,” Governor Hobbs told conference attendees.
Collaboration proved a key element in two of the most important water-rights settlements in recent Arizona history.
Under Governor Hobbs, the State in 2024 concluded two tribal water settlements including four Native American tribes – settlements that concluded Arizona’s involvement in water-rights negotiations that in some cases had lasted decades.
Created by Imgur user Fejetlenfej , a geographer and GIS analyst with a ‘lifelong passion for beautiful maps.’ It highlights the massive expanse of river basins across the country – in particular, those which feed the Mississippi River, in pink.
L. to R. Chris Winter, Colby Pelligrino, Chuck Cullom.
I was at the Getches-Wilkinson Center & Water and Tribes Initiative shindig this week live-posting on BlueSky (Click the “Latest” tab). The question of whether the negotiators from the seven states were being candid about their proceedings came up. Colby Pelligrino described her frustration with folks jumping all over every proposal as unfair or damaging to their rights. They can’t make any progress towards building a solution if every proposal is prevented from going forward.
Also, Eric Kuhn, maintained that since the Colorado River Compact was written for a river that doesn’t exist any longer parts need to be reworked. He emphasized living with the river we have.
Chuck Cullom let everyone know that the data the negotiators are working with is available.
Click the link to read the article on The Denver Post website (Elise Schmelzer). Here’s an excerpt:
May 31, 2025
Concerningly low amounts of water are flowing from Rocky Mountain snowpack this spring, a summer of drought looms across swaths of the West, and the negotiators tasked with devising a sustainable long-term water plan for the 40 million people who rely on the Colorado River are running out of time. Commissioners from the seven states in the Colorado River Basin — Colorado, New Mexico, Wyoming, Utah, Arizona, California and Nevada — must create a plan that will govern how those states divvy up the river’s water after the current guidelines expire at the end of 2026. As the river shrinks due to drought and climate change, the negotiators must decide who will take less water — and they need to do so in the next few months.
“The way the law of the river is set up, this is a decision that takes the seven states, and there are so many stakeholders and users who depend on that,” said Jennifer Pitt, Colorado River program director at the National Audubon Society. “We are really at their mercy and we are just about out of time.”
Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2024. Credit: Brad Udall
Those who depend on the river are already dealing with uncertainty: this season’s mountain snowpack is expected to deliver about half the median amount of water to the system’s two major reservoirs, which are already two-thirds empty. Years of drought not balanced by decreases in water consumption have drained Lake Mead and Lake Powell, and aridification fueled by climate change is expected to continue to reduce the flow of the river that makes modern life possible across the Southwest. The Colorado River irrigates more than 5 million acres of farmland — including water supplies for much of the nation’s winter vegetables — and comprises large portions of many Western cities’ water portfolio, said Brad Udall, senior water and climate research scholar at Colorado State University’s Colorado Water Institute.
On its surface, floating solar appears to conserve water while generating carbon-free electricity. River managers are cautious, but some say the West can’t afford to wait.
GILA RIVER INDIAN RESERVATION, Ariz.—About 33 miles south of Phoenix, Interstate 10 bisects a line of solar panels traversing the desert like an iridescent snake. The solar farm’s shape follows the path of a canal, with panels serving as awnings to shade the gently flowing water from the unforgiving heat and wind of the Sonoran Desert.
The panels began generating power last November for the Akimel O’otham and Pee Posh tribes—known together as the Gila River Indian Community, or GRIC—on their reservation in south-central Arizona, and they are the first of their kind in the U.S. The community is studying the effects of these panels on the water in the canal, hopeful that they will protect a precious resource from the desert’s unflinching sun and wind.
In September, GRIC is planning to break ground on another experimental effort to conserve water while generating electricity: floating solar. Between its canal canopies and the new project that would float photovoltaic panels on a reservoir it is building, GRIC hopes to one day power all of its canal and irrigation operations with solar electricity, transforming itself into one of the most innovative and closely-watched water users in the West in the process.
The community’s investments come at a critical time for the Colorado River, which supplies water to about 40 million people across seven Western states, Mexico and 30 tribes, including GRIC. Annual consumption from the river regularly exceeds its supply, and a decades-long drought, fueled in part by climate change, continues to leave water levels at Lake Powell and Lake Mead dangerously low.
Covering water with solar panels is not a new idea. But for some it represents an elegant mitigation of water shortages in the West. Doing so could reduce evaporation, generate more carbon-free electricity and require dams to run less frequently to produce power.
But, so far, the technology has not been included in the ongoing Colorado River negotiations between the Upper Basin states of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming, the Lower Basin states of Arizona, California and Nevada, tribes and Mexico. All are expected to eventually agree on cuts to the system’s water allocations to maintain the river’s ability to provide water and electricity for residents and farms, and keep its ecosystem alive.
“People in the U.S. don’t know about [floating solar] yet,” said Scott Young, a former policy analyst in the Nevada state legislature’s counsel bureau. “They’re not willing to look at it and try and factor it” into the negotiations.
Several Western water managers Inside Climate News contacted for this story said they were open to learning more about floating solar—Colorado has even studied the technology through pilot projects. But, outside of GRIC’s project, none knew of any plans to deploy floating solar anywhere in the basin. Some listed costly and unusual construction methods and potentially modest water savings as the primary obstacles to floating solar maturing in the U.S.
A Tantalizing Technology With Tradeoffs
A winery in Napa County, California, deployed the first floating solar panels in the U.S. on an irrigation pond in 2007. The country was still years away from passing federal legislation to combat the climate crisis, and the technology matured here haltingly. As recently as 2022, according to a Bloomberg analysis, most of the world’s 13 gigawatts of floating solar capacity had been built in Asia.
Unlike many Asian countries, the U.S. has an abundance of undeveloped land where solar could be constructed, said Prateek Joshi, a research engineer at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) who has studied floating solar, among other forms of energy. “Even though [floating solar] may play a smaller role, I think it’s a critical role in just diversifying our energy mix and also reducing the burden of land use,” he said.
This February, NREL published a study that found floating solar on the reservoirs behind federally owned dams could provide enough electricity to power 100 million U.S. homes annually, but only if all the developable space on each reservoir were used.
Lake Powell could host almost 15 gigawatts of floating solar using about 23 percent of its surface area, and Lake Mead could generate over 17 gigawatts of power on 28 percent of its surface. Such large-scale development is “probably not going to be the case,” Joshi said, but even if a project used only a fraction of the developable area, “there’s a lot of power you could get from a relatively small percentage of these Colorado Basin reservoirs.”
The study did not measure how much water evaporation floating solar would prevent, but previous NREL research has shown that photovoltaic panels—sometimes called “floatovoltaics” when they are deployed on reservoirs—could also save water by changing the way hydropower is deployed.
Some of a dam’s energy could come from solar panels floating on its reservoir to prevent water from being released solely to generate electricity. As late as December, when a typical Western dam would be running low, lakes with floating solar could still have enough water to produce hydropower, reducing reliance on more expensive backup energy from gas-fired power plants.
Joshi has spoken with developers and water managers about floating solar before, and said there is “an eagerness to get this [technology] going.” The technology, however, is not flawless.
Hoover Dam with Lake Mead in the background December 3, 2024.
Paddling Powell. Photo by Jonathan P. Thompson.
Solar arrays can be around 20 percent more expensive to install on water than land, largely because of the added cost of buoys that keep the panels afloat, according to a 2021 NREL report. The water’s cooling effect can boost panel efficiency, but floating solar panels may produce slightly less energy than a similarly sized array on land because they can’t be tilted as directly toward the sun as land-based panels.
And while the panels likely reduce water loss from reservoirs, they may also increase a water body’s emissions of greenhouse gases, which in turn warm the climate and increase evaporation. This January, researchers at Cornell University found that floating solar covering more than 70 percent of a pond’s surface area increased the water’s CO2 and methane emissions. These kinds of impacts “should be considered not only for the waterbody in which [floating solar] is deployed but also in the broader context of trade-offs of shifting energy production from land to water,” the study’s authors wrote.
“Any energy technology has its tradeoffs,” Joshi said, and in the case of floating solar, some of its benefits—reduced evaporation and land use—may not be easy to express in dollars and cents.
Silver Buckshot
There is perhaps no bigger champion for floating solar in the West than Scott Young. Before he retired in 2016, he spent much of his 18 years working for the Nevada Legislature researching the effects of proposed legislation, especially in the energy sector.
On an overcast, blustery May day in southwest Wyoming near his home, Young said that in the past two years he has promoted the technology to Colorado River negotiators, members of Congress, environmental groups and other water managers from the seven basin states, all of whom he has implored to consider the virtues of floating solar arrays on Lake Powell and Lake Mead.
Young grew up in the San Francisco Bay area, about 40 miles, he estimated, from the pioneering floating solar panels in Napa. He stressed that he does not have any ties to industry; he is just a concerned Westerner who wants to diversify the region’s energy mix and save as much water as possible.
But so far, when he has been able to get someone’s attention, Young said his pitch has been met with tepid interest. “Usually the response is: ‘Eh, that’s kind of interesting,’” said Young, dressed in a black jacket, a maroon button-down shirt and a matching ball cap that framed his round, open face. “But there’s no follow-up.”
The Bureau of Reclamation “has not received any formal proposals for floating solar on its reservoirs,” said an agency spokesperson, who added that the bureau has been monitoring the technology.
In a 2021 paper published with NREL, Reclamation estimated that floating solar on its reservoirs could generate approximately 1.5 terawatts of electricity, enough to power about 100 million homes. But, in addition to potentially interfering with recreation, aquatic life and water safety, floating solar’s effect on evaporation proved difficult to model broadly.
So many environmental factors determine how water is lost or consumed in a reservoir—solar intensity, wind, humidity, lake circulation, water depth and temperature—that the study’s authors concluded Reclamation “should be wary of contractors’ claims of evaporation savings” without site-specific studies. Those same factors affect the panels’ efficiency, and in turn, how much hydropower would need to be generated from the reservoir they cover.
The report also showed the Colorado River was ripe with floating solar potential—more than any other basin in the West. That’s particularly true in the Upper Basin, where Young has been heartened by Colorado’s approach to the technology.
In 2023, the state passed a law requiring several agencies to study the use of floating solar. Last December, the Colorado Water Conservation Board published its findings, and estimated that the state could save up to 407,000 acre feet of water by deploying floating solar on certain reservoirs. An acre foot covers one acre with a foot of water, or 325,851 gallons, just about three year’s worth of water for a family of four.
When Young saw the Colorado study quantifying savings from floating solar, he felt hopeful. “407,000 acre feet from one state,” he said. “I was hoping that would catch people’s attention.”
Saving that much water would require using over 100,000 acres of surface water, said Cole Bedford, the Colorado Water Conservation Board’s chief operating officer, in an email. “On some of these reservoirs a [floating solar] system would diminish the recreational value such that it would not be appropriate,” he said. “On others, recreation, power generation, and water savings could be balanced.”
Colorado is not planning to develop another project in the wake of this study, and Bedford said that the technology is not a silver bullet solution for Colorado River negotiations.
“While floating solar is one tool in the toolkit for water conservation, the only true solution to the challenges facing the Colorado River Basin is a shift to supply-driven, sustainable uses and operations,” he said.
Denver Water’s sustainability operations include generating energy from solar power panels installed on the roof of its Administration Building, parking garage and over its visitor’s parking lot at its Operations Complex near downtown. Photo credit: Denver Water.
Some of the West’s largest and driest cities, like Phoenix and Denver, ferry Colorado River water to residents hundreds of miles away from the basin using a web of infrastructure that must reliably operate in unforgiving terrain. Like their counterparts at the state level, water managers in these cities have heard floatovoltaics floated before, but they say the technology is currently too immature and costly to be deployed in the U.S.
Lake Pleasant, which holds some of the Central Arizona Project’s Colorado River Water, is also a popular recreation space, complicating its floating solar potential. Credit: Jake Bolster/Inside Climate News
In Arizona, the Central Arizona Project (CAP) delivers much of the Colorado River water used by Phoenix, Tucson, tribes and other southern Arizona communities with a 336-mile canal running through the desert, and Lake Pleasant, the company’s 811,784-acre-foot reservoir.
Though CAP is following GRIC’s deployment of solar over canals, it has no immediate plans to build solar over its canal, or Lake Pleasant, according to Darrin Francom, CAP’s assistant general manager for operations, power, engineering and maintenance, in part because the city of Peoria technically owns the surface water.
Covering the whole canal with solar to save the 4,000 acre feet that evaporates from it could be prohibitively expensive for CAP. “The dollar cost per that acre foot [saved] is going to be in the tens of, you know, maybe even hundreds of thousands of dollars,” Francom said, mainly due to working with novel equipment and construction methods. “Ultimately,” he continued, “those costs are going to be borne by our ratepayers,” which gives CAP reason to pursue other lower-cost ways to save water, like conservation programs, or to seek new sources.
An intake tower moves water into and out of the dam at Lake Pleasant. Credit: Jake Bolster/Inside Climate News
The increased costs associated with building solar panels on water instead of on land has made such projects unpalatable to Denver Water, Colorado’s largest water utility, which moves water out of the Colorado River Basin and through the Rocky Mountains to customers on the Front Range. “Floating solar doesn’t pencil out for us for many reasons,” said Todd Hartman, a company spokesperson. “Were we to add more solar resources—which we are considering—we have abundant land-based options.”
GRIC spent about $5.6 million, financed with Inflation Reduction Act grants, to construct 3,000 feet of solar over a canal, according to David DeJong, project director for the community’s irrigation district.
Young is aware there is no single solution to the problems plaguing the Colorado River Basin, and he knows floating solar is not a perfect technology. Instead, he thinks of it as a “silver buckshot,” he said, borrowing a term from John Entsminger, general manager for the Southern Nevada Water Authority—a technology that can be deployed alongside a constellation of behavioral changes to help keep the Colorado River alive.
Given the duration and intensity of the drought in the West and the growing demand for water and clean energy, Young believes the U.S. needs to act now to embed this technology into the fabric of Western water management going forward.
As drought in the West intensifies, “I think more lawmakers are going to look at this,” he said. “If you can save water in two ways—why not?”
If all goes according to plan, GRIC’s West Side Reservoir will be finished and ready to store Colorado River water by the end of July. The community wants to cover just under 60 percent of the lake’s surface area with floating solar.
“Do we know for a fact that this is going to be 100 percent effective and foolproof? No,” said DeJong, GRIC’s project director for its irrigation district. “But we’re not going to know until we try.”
The Gila River Indian Community spent about $5.6 million, with the help of Inflation Reduction Act grants, to cover a canal with solar. Credit Jake Bolster/Inside Climate News
GRIC’s panels will have a few things going for them that projects on lakes Mead or Powell probably wouldn’t. West Side Reservoir will not be open to recreation, limiting the panels’ impacts on people. And the community already has the funds—Inflation Reduction Act grants and some of its own money—to pay for the project.
But GRIC’s solar ambitions may be threatened by the hostile posture toward solar and wind energy from the White House and congressional Republicans, and the project is vulnerable to an increasingly volatile economy. Since retaking office, President Donald Trump, aided by billionaire Elon Musk, has made deep cuts inrenewableenergy grants at the Environmental Protection Agency. It is unclear whether or to what extent the Bureau of Reclamation has slashed its grant programs.
“Under President Donald J. Trump’s leadership, the Department is working to cut bureaucratic waste and ensure taxpayer dollars are spent efficiently,” said a spokesperson for the Department of the Interior, which oversees Reclamation. “This includes ensuring Bureau of Reclamation projects that use funds from the Infrastructure Investments and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act align with administration priorities. Projects are being individually assessed by period of performance, criticality, and other criteria. Projects have been approved for obligation under this process so that critical work can continue.”
And Trump’s tariffs could cause costs to balloon beyond the community’s budget, which could either reduce the size of the array or cause delays in soliciting proposals, DeJong said.
While the community will study the panels over canals to understand the water’s effects on solar panel efficiency, it won’t do similar research on the panels on West Side Reservoir, though DeJong said they have been in touch with NREL about studying them. The enterprise will be part of the system that may one day offset all the electrical demand and carbon footprint of GRIC’s irrigation system.
“The community, they love these types of innovative projects. I love these innovative projects,” said GRIC Governor Stephen Roe Lewis, standing in front of the canals in April. Lewis had his dark hair pulled back in a long ponytail and wore a blue button down that matched the color of the sky.
“I know for a fact this is inspiring a whole new generation of water protectors—those that want to come back and they want to go into this cutting-edge technology,” he said. “I couldn’t be more proud of our team for getting this done.”
DeJong feels plenty of other water managers across the West could learn from what is happening at GRIC. In fact, the West Side Reservoir was intentionally constructed near Interstate 10 so that people driving by on the highway could one day see the floating solar the community intends to build there, DeJong said.
“It could be a paradigm shift in the Western United States,” he said. “We recognize all of the projects we’re doing are pilot projects. None of them are large scale. But it’s the beginning.”
The Blue River flows through Silverthorne on May 22 on its way to the Colorado River. Photo/Allen Best
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
May 29, 2025
Even-steven. That was the intent of delegates from the seven basin states in 1922 when they met near Santa Fe to forge a compact governing the Colorado River.
But what exactly did they agree upon? That has become a sticking point in 2025 as states have squared off about rules governing the river in the drought-afflicted and climate-changed 21st century. The negotiations between the states, according to many accounts, have been fraught with tensions. Becky Mitchell, Colorado’s lead negotiator, delivered a peek into that dispute at a forum on May 22 in Silverthorne along the headwaters of the river.
The Colorado River Compact was a quid pro quo. California, in particular, but also Arizona, was ready to see the highs and lows of the rivers smoothed out. They, as well as Nevada, wanted a giant reservoir in Boulder Canyon near the small town of Las Vegas, which then had a population of 2,300. Those Southwestern states couldn’t do it alone, though. They needed the federal government to build the dam later called Hoover. For that, they needed the support of Colorado and the three other upper-basin states.
Colorado, represented by Delph Carpenter, and the three other headwaters states realized that they had best reach a compromise, as they would more slowly develop the rivers. If the doctrine of prior appropriation that they had all adopted within their own states prevailed on the Colorado River, the water would be gone by the time they found need for it.
This was the foundation for Article III of the Colorado River Compact. It apportions 7.5 million acre-feet in perpetuity for the exclusive beneficial consumption by each of the two basins. On top of this 15 million acre-feet, they knew there would be water lost to evaporation, now calculated at 1.5 million acre-feet annually, plus some sort of delivery obligation to Mexico, which later turned out to be 1.5 million acre-feet.
In Santa Fe, delegates had assumed bounteous flows in the river, as had occurred in the years prior to their meeting. And so, embracing that short-term view of history, they believed the river would deliver 20 million acre-feet.
Source: Colorado River Water Conservation Board.
It has not done so routinely. Even when there was lots of water, during the 1990s and even before, as Eric Kuhn and John Fleck explained in their 2019 book, “Science be Dammed,” troubles ahead could be discerned. And by 1993, when the Central Arizona Project began hoisting water to Phoenix and Tucson, the river ceased absolutely to reach the ocean.
Then came the 21st century drought. Those framing the compact understood drought as a temporary affliction, not the multi-decade phenomenon now perplexing the states in the Colorado River Basin.
Nor did they contemplate a warming, drying climate called aridification. Similar to drought in effects, it is rooted in accumulating atmospheric gases. Unlike drought, it has little to no chance of breaking.
Now, faced with creating new rules governing the sharing of this river, delegates from the seven states are at odds in various ways, but perhaps none so much as in their interpretation of compact’s Article D. It says that the upper-division states “will not cause the flow of the river at Lee Ferry to be depleted below an aggregate of 75,000,000 acre-feet for any period of ten consecutive years.”
The lower division states have so far received 75 million acre-feet over every revolving 10-year period. The upper-basin states have not fully developed their apportionment, although Colorado has come close. In the last 25 years, the upper-basin states have been using 3.5 million to 4.5 million acre-feet. The lower-basin states that a decade ago were still using 10 million acre-feet have cut back their use to 7.5 million acre-feet.
In May 2022, water levels at Glen Canyon Dam were dropping so rapidly as to make relevant discussions about potential loss of hydroelectricity. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Lake Powell serves as a water bank for the upper basin states. The storage in 2022 had declined to 22%, although a good snow winter in 2022-23 restored levels somewhat. Today, the two reservoirs are at a combined 34% of full.
“That means 66% empty,” said Mitchell at the forum along the Blue River in Silverthorne at a “state of the river” forum organized by the Colorado River Water Conservation District.
Mitchell, an engineer by training, has a large on-stage presence. She’s spunky, not one to mince words, sometimes straying into the colloquial. This outspokenness is more evident when she speaks exclusively to a home-town crowd. Silverthorne certainly counted as one.
Shared risk is at the heart of the dispute. Colorado and other upper-basin states want the lower-basin states to accept that the river will not always satisfy all needs.
“How do we handle drought? We know how to do that in the upper basin, and most of the people in this room know that you get less,” said Mitchell, Colorado’s representative on the Upper Colorado River Commission. “That hasn’t been the case in the lower basin.”
The two basins differ in three fundamental ways. One is the pace of development. The lower basin developed quickly. The upper basin still has not used its full allocation. From the upper-basin perspective, that does not mean that the lower-basins states should expect something beyond a 50-50 split.
“The main thing that we got from the compact was the principle of equity and the ability to develop at our own pace,” said Mitchell. “We shouldn’t be punished because we didn’t develop to a certain number. The conversation now, she added, is “what does equity look like right now?”
Another difference is that the upper basin has thousands of individual users. Sure, there are a few big ones, like Denver Water and the other Front Range transmountain water diverters who collectively draw 400,000 to 450,000 acre-feet annually across the Continental Divide. The lower basin has just a handful of diverters, and the diversions are massive.
Also different — as alluded to by Mitchell — is that the lower basin has the big reservoirs lying upstream. The largest is Mead, with a capacity of almost 29 million acre-feet, followed closely by Powell at a little more than 25 million acre-feet. Mead was created expressly to meet needs of irrigators and cities in the desert southwest.
Source: Colorado River Water Conservation Board.
Powell was created essentially to ensure that the upper-basin states could meet their delivery obligations. Mitchell shared a telling statistic: More water has been released from Powell in 8 of the last 10 years than has arrived into it.
Upper-basin states must live within that hydrologic reality, said Mitchell. If it’s a particularly bad snow year in the upper basin, the farms and ranches with junior water rights and even the cities can get shorted. The lower basin states? Not a problem. They always get their water — at least so far. But the two big reservoirs have together lost 50 million acre-feet of stored water.
“We’re negotiating how to move forward in a way different place than we were negotiating 20 years ago,” said Mitchell.
Upper-basin states have managed to deliver the 75 million acre-feet across 10 years that the compact specifies, but what exactly is the obligation? That has long been a gray area.
At a forum two days before Mitchell spoke in Colorado, her counterpart in Arizona, Tom Buschatzke, reiterated at a conference in Tucson that they see the compact spelling out a clear obligation of upper-basin states to deliver 75 million acre-feet plus one-half of the water obligated to Mexico.
What if the water isn’t there? That’s the crux of this dispute as the upper and lower basin states negotiate in advance of a September deadline set by the Bureau of Reclamation.
Denver Water sends diversions from the Ffaser River and other headwater tributaries through the Moffat Tunnel at Winter Park. Photo/Allen Best
In theory, if the situation were dire enough, Colorado could stop all its post-1922 diversions to allow the water to flow downstream. But is that what those gathered in Santa Fe in the shortening days of November 1922 had in mind?
Will lawsuits toss this into the court system for resolution? That process might take decades and, if it ended up at the Supreme Court, it might not yield a nuanced outcome. Mitchell didn’t address that directly, although she did say everybody on the river wants to avoid litigation.
The situation described by Mitchell and other upper-basin proponents is perhaps analogous to a divorce settlement. The settlement may call for a 50-50 split of all earnings between the partners, but what if one becomes destitute and has no money to pool?
Upper-basin states do have reservoirs to help buffer them from short-term droughts. Altogether, however, they don’t come close to matching the capacity of Powell.
Again, from the perspective of upper-basin states, California and Nevada have a sense of entitlement. Not that the upper basin states are angelic, said Mitchell. It’s because they have no choice.
“I say we use three to four million acre-feet less than our apportionment. It varies. You know why? Because hydrology varies. And so we respond to hydrology. It’s all based on snowpack and it’s all gravity. Most of it is gravity dependent. We don’t have those two big reservoirs above us like the lower basin does. We don’t have those reservoirs to equal out the flows or allow us to overuse. We have to live with variable hydrology, and we take cuts every single year.”
Upper-basin states want a willingness in this settlement for agreement that focuses on the water supply, not the demand. “Common sense would tell you, maybe Mother Nature should drive how we operate the system.” That, she said, is the bedrock principle of the proposal from the upper division.
With plentiful snowfall, greater releases from Powell might be possible, said Mitchell, and in times of extreme duress, water from Flaming Gore and perhaps the Blue Mesa and Navajo too. She said there might be room for greater conservation measures in the upper basin states.
But there must be “real work happening down in the lower basin,” she said.
The audience in Silverthorne was comprised of many “rookies” to the water world. Some who might have attended, those more knowledgeable about the negotiations, would have wanted more: What are the deal breakers; what are the red lines, what are the issues they intend to kick down the road?
As the session in Silverthorne neared its end, time remained for one last question, and I asked it:
“I have to wonder about who we have in the White House right now, and how the President might alter the negotiations on the Colorado River. Any thoughts you might be willing to share?
“No!” she barked back without hesitation. “Allen, you know better than that.”
I laughed heartily, and so did many others.
Given what we’ve seen since January, though, I must continue to wonder.
Postscript: Before her remarks in Silverthorne, Becky Mitchell offered the opportunity for an in-depth interview with Big Pivots sometime later in June. I intend to take up that offer.
Delph Carpenter’s original map showing a reservoir at Glen Canyon and one at Black Canyon via Greg Hobbs
Lorelei Cloud, Vice-chair of the Southern Ute Tribal Council, and Southwest Colorado’s representative of the Colorado Water Conservation Board, which addresses most water issues in Colorado. Photo via Sibley’s Rivers
The Colorado Water Conservation Board, Colorado’s top water policy agency, has a new leader: Southern Ute tribal member Lorelei Cloud.
The 15-member board sets water policy within the state, funds water projects statewide and works on issues related to watershed protection, stream restoration, flood mitigation and drought planning. On May 21, board members elected Cloud to serve a one-year term as chair, making her the first Indigenous person to hold the position since the board was formed in 1937.
Cloud said her new role gives Indigenous people a long-sought seat at the table where water decisions are made.
“This is history,” Cloud said during the meeting. “What a moment. What a great moment for the state of Colorado.”
In 2023, Gov. Jared Polis appointed Cloud for a three-year term, making her the first known tribal member to hold a seat on the board. Cloud also served as the board’s vice chair for a year starting in May 2024.
Part of the Colorado Water Conservation Board’s purpose is to protect Colorado’s water interests in dealings with other states, like the water sharing agreements among seven states in the Colorado River Basin.
She represents the San Miguel-Dolores-San Juan basin in southwestern Colorado, which is part of the larger Colorado River Basin, a key water source for about 40 million people across the West.
The Colorado River Basin’s water supply has been strained by over two decades of prolonged drought, rising temperatures and an unyielding demand for water.
The rules that govern how water is stored and released from the basin’s reservoirs are set to expire in 2026, leaving officials with the difficult task of negotiating a new set of management rules that will last for years to come.
The seven basin states have been at odds over how water should be managed in the basin’s driest possible conditions. Tribal officials have been working to ensure their priorities are considered in the high-stakes negotiations.
“This moment isn’t just about me or about the Indigenous people — it’s about all of the people in this room,” Cloud said, adding that the board is “making decisions that aren’t just about today. It’s about our future.”
Decision-makers in the Colorado River Basin have a history of excluding tribal nations that dates back to the 1922 Colorado River Compact.
The compact laid the foundation for how water is shared between the Upper Basin — Colorado, New Mexico, Wyoming and Utah — and the Lower Basin — Arizona, California and Nevada. The agreement includes one line about tribal water, and tribal nations were not involved in the negotiations.
Native America in the Colorado River Basin. Credit: USBR
Tribal water is a key issue in the basin: The 30 basin tribes have recognized rights to over 25% of the Colorado River’s average flow.
Cloud said her new role is “part of the reconciliation that we’ve all been waiting for as Indigenous people.”
“Having an Indigenous person in a position that makes water management decisions — it’s a seat at the table that we’ve been wanting for such a long time, and it’s finally here,” Cloud said. “It’s a joyous moment.”
Cloud has twice served as vice chairman of the Southern Ute Tribal Council. She has also held leadership positions in The Nature Conservancy Colorado, the Indigenous Women’s Leadership Network, the Ten Tribes Partnership, and the Water and Tribes Initiative.
As board chair, Cloud will run the meetings, ensure fair voting and represent the board as spokesperson when needed. She will continue to represent the southwestern basin, which reaches 10 counties and includes cities like Cortez, Durango and Telluride.
The Southern Ute Indian Tribe and the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe — the two federally recognized tribes with reservation land in Colorado — are also located in the southwestern basin.
“I’ve been lucky to witness Chair Cloud’s rise as a leader in the Colorado water community,” said Dan Gibbs, Department of Natural Resources executive director. “No one is more deserving or better positioned to chair the CWCB in this critical moment.”
Click the link to read the article on the InkStain website (John Fleck):
May 26, 2025
The Bureau of Reclamation has released its May 24-Month Study. It confirms that 2025 will be another very dry year and the consequences will be significant. Under the minimum probable forecast, active storage in Lake Powell will fall to an elevation of 3530’ (5.8 maf), only about 9 feet higher than the February 2023 low of 3521’ (5.3maf). Just as alarming, under the “most probable” scenario, 2027 is projected to be another year for a 7.48 maf release from Glen Canyon Dam. This means that the ten-year flows at Lee Ferry are projected to fall well below the 82.0 maf tripwire – the point at which the basin states’ disagreement over interpreting the Colorado River Compact’s Lee Ferry delivery/non-depletion requirement could trigger interstate litigation.
The May 1st “most probable” forecast for unregulated April to July inflow to Lake Powell was 3.5 maf, down from an April 1 st forecast of 4.3 maf. Since May 1st. However, the runoff forecast has continued to decline, down another ~400kaf as we write this (May 26, 2025). No one should be surprised if we end up with an actual inflow closer to the May 1st “minimum probable” forecast of 2.6 maf.
Even with continued crop fallowing programs, storage in Lake Mead also continues to decline, dropping to an elevation of 1047’ at the end of Water Year 2026 under the “most Probable” forecast and to elevation 1041’ under the “minimum probable” forecast.
cloudy forecast, part II
Lower Basin use continues to run well below long term averages, with this year’s consumptive use by Arizona, California, and Nevada forecast at 6.3maf, well below the legal paper water allocation of 7.5maf. Yet Mead keeps dropping. The latest analysis of total reservoir storage from our colleague and collaborator Jack Schmidt (here’s Jack and colleagues from March, with an update expected later this week) clearly shows that we are once again failing to rebuild reservoir storage. We’re draining the system.
Of course, the 2007 Interim Guidelines expire after 2026, so we do not know what the rules will be for Glen Canyon Dam releases in Water Year 2027. Lacking any better information, the Bureau of Reclamation has assumed a continuation of the 2007 Interim Guidelines rules. Another approach would be for the Bureau of Reclamation to assume that absent an agreement among the states, the Secretary of the Interior could return to an annual release of 8.23 maf from Glen Canyon as set by the 1970 Long-range Operating Criteria. And curiously, under the “minimum probable” scenario, assuming a continuation of the 2007 Interim Guidelines, the projected 2027 annual release at Glen Canyon Dam reverts to 8.23 maf. Under a quirk in the 2007 Interim Guidelines, if the December 31, 2026, projected elevation of Lake Powell is below 3525’ and the projected elevation of Lake Mead is below 1075,’ the release reverts to 8.23 maf. This was referred to as the “sacrifice Lake Powell to save Lake Mead” strategy (seriously!).
Unless the 2025-26 winter is very wet or the Basin States can find consensus, the choices facing the Basin are stark: sacrifice Lake Powell for Lake Mead and perhaps keep ten-year Lee Ferry flows above the tripwire (no guarantee) or reduce annual releases from Glen Canyon Dam to maintain a balanced but small amount of storage in both reservoirs, which risks pushing cumulative 10-year flows past Lee Ferry across the tripwire.
The Colorado River from the Navajo Bridge. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
Click the link to read the article on the AZCentral.com website (Austin Corona). Here’s an excerpt:
May 15, 2025
Key Points
With no settlement yet on how to manage shortages on the Colorado River, the Trump administration is preparing to fill its last vacant Western water post, commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation.
The seven states who draw water from the Colorado have struggled for years to agree on a plan to deal with shortfalls. The divisions remain among the states on the upper river and lower river.
Arizona’s top water negotiator says the Trump administration seems more willing to talk about different approaches to shortage sharing, but issues about who should take the largest cuts remain
The Trump administration is preparing to announce its pick to head the Bureau of Reclamation, a crucial position in deciding the future of the Colorado River, a White House spokesperson told The Arizona Republic. The move would effectively complete the new federal team overseeing strained negotiations over one of Arizona’s largest water sources. The new commissioner will take charge amid tense negotiations among the seven states that use the Colorado River, which has strained under multi-decade drought and high water demand…
Experts worry that this year’s poor river flows could trigger lawsuits over foundational river-management laws as soon as 2027. States only have months to reach a deal, and negotiators have not shown signs of progress.
Tom Buschatzke, director of the state Department of Water Resources and Arizona’s Colorado River negotiator, has said the Trump administration is already more “engaged in a much more meaningful way” on the Colorado River than former President Joe Biden’s team and has responded to some of Arizona’s long-unanswered requests in the negotiating process. Trump officials could give Arizona and the other Lower Basin states of California and Nevada a new opportunity to convince federal regulators that those states should not have to take all the cuts on the river. Biden negotiators would not call for cuts in the Upper Basin, while Buschatzke said the new administration may be more open to finding a “collaborative” solution. Even so, Upper Basin states — Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico — have continued arguing that they cannot be forced to cut their water use if climate change and drought are the causes of low flows in the river, meaning any attempts to cut their use could lead to a lawsuit. A case could drag on for years, while water levels in the reservoirs continue to drop.
Six of the seven state representatives who will shape the next chapter of Colorado River rules speak on a panel at the University of Colorado, Boulder on Jun. 6, 2024. The same group is opting not to speak at this year’s conference. Alex Hager/KUNC
Click the link to read the article on the KUNC website (Alex Hager):
May 11, 2025
This story is part of ongoing coverage of the Colorado River, produced by KUNC in Colorado and supported by the Walton Family Foundation. KUNC is solely responsible for its editorial coverage.
As tense negotiations about the future of the Colorado River are stuck at a standstill, the people in charge are retreating further into the shadows.
A group of negotiators – one from each of the seven states that use Colorado River water – will not be speaking at a major water law conference in June. Those representatives have appeared together on a panel at the conference for the last few years, and rarely appear together in public otherwise.
“The unwillingness to answer the public’s questions suggests that negotiations aren’t going well,” said John Fleck, who teaches water policy at the University of New Mexico. “I think it misses an important obligation in democratic governance of a river that serves 40 million people.”
The event, the Getches-Wilkinson Conference at the University of Colorado, Boulder, is typically one of two times each year that the negotiators appear together in public. In recent iterations of the same conference, they all spoke on one panel. Occasionally, a state representative has fallen ill or sent a deputy in their stead.
They seemed starkly divided at the other annual appearance, too. In December, they opted to split into two separate panels at the Colorado River Water Users Association conference in Las Vegas.
Water policymakers from (left to right) Utah, New Mexico, Colorado and Wyoming speak on a panel at the Colorado River Water Users Association conference in Las Vegas on December 5, 2024. The two rival factions of states chose to appear on two separate panels then, and have opted to avoid speaking entirely in June. Alex Hager/KUNC
People with knowledge of the situation confirmed to KUNC that state leaders told conference organizers they did not want to speak publicly. There is currently no seven-state panel on the published conference agenda.
JB Hamby, California’s top water negotiator, said he would attend the conference but not speak, and he was “100%” sure the other top officials wouldn’t be speaking. Representatives from Arizona, Colorado and New Mexico confirmed their states’ Colorado River negotiators would not be speaking.
Unlike many government processes, Colorado River policymakers work in a space that does not involve a mandate for public access. Their meetings are often held behind closed doors, are not listed publicly and do not yield minutes or records that can be viewed by the public.
“You need to listen to and have spaces to discuss with the people who are going to be impacted by your decisions,” Fleck said. “That’s not happening now, and that’s really disturbing.”
Those water policymakers are stuck in a standoff about how to use less water from the shrinking Colorado River. Negotiators seem to agree with the broad concept that the farms, businesses and 40 million people of the Colorado River basin need to cut back on water use as the river gets smaller due to climate change. They don’t, however, agree on who should cut back.
Talks so far have largely stayed divided along a decades-old fault line. On one side is the Upper Basin – which consists of Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico. The other side, the Lower Basin, is made up of California, Arizona and Nevada.
The Lower Basin has volunteered relatively modest cuts in proposals for how to manage the river after the current rules expire in 2026. The Upper Basin has not volunteered any cuts, insisting that its states are already forced to use less water due to climate change and a longstanding legal requirement to send a fixed amount of water to those Lower Basin states.
“I am fully focused on the negotiations for post-2026 operations of Lake Powell and Lake Mead,” Becky Mitchell, Colorado’s top negotiator, wrote in an email to KUNC. “As the Getches-Wilkinson conference drew nearer, it was unclear where we would be in that process, and I wanted to be cognizant of the sensitivity of the work. Time is of the essence, and these critical negotiations have my full attention at this time.”
The states have dug their heels in on those positions for months now, and their willingness to talk about the status of their closed-door attempts to break the deadlock has only gone down over time.
Reporters’ requests to state water authorities that once yielded interviews with top policymakers are now often met with written statements that tend to be short on detail.
Glen Canyon Dam holds back the waters of Lake Powell near Page, Arizona on Sunday, Feb. 2, 2025. Lake Powell, has approached dangerously low levels in recent years as policymakers have struggled to come up with a long-term management plan for the water it stores. Photo credit: Spenser Heaps/Utah News Dispatch
“I have a lot of respect for the people who are doing these negotiations,” Fleck said. “They’re trying to solve really hard problems, and I respect the idea that they need some space to do that, but not showing up in public at all is granting them more space than I’m willing to grant them.”
Joanna Allhands, an opinion writer at the Arizona Republic who has written about the Colorado River’s “bankruptcy of leadership,” said more transparency from water policymakers “would be smart as a matter of self preservation.”
“Whatever the decision is made,” she said, “Whatever alternative gets chosen, if people feel like they’ve been left out, guess where we’re headed? We’re going to the Supreme Court.”
Colorado River negotiators have said that they want to avoid taking this issue to the Supreme Court, but have made little recent progress to steer talks away from that outcome.
Colorado River “Beginnings”. Photo: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism
Homestake Creek is a tributary of the Eagle River. CREDIT: BRENT GARDNER-SMITH/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Click the link to read the article on the Vail Daily website (Zoe Goldstein). Here’s an excerpt:
May 8, 2025
Every year brings different water conditions in Eagle County. With climate change, the promise of full rivers in the summer may become even less certain. To prepare for future drought years, the Eagle River Water and Sanitation District and Upper Eagle Regional Water Authority have a new water shortage response plan.
“The goal of this plan is to provide water security, to ensure that we can provide our core services,” said Justin Hildreth, the district’s water resources engineer, when presenting the plan to the district board for approval on April 10. Among the core services included in the list are safe drinking water and water for structure fire suppression…According to the plan, “a water shortage occurs when the (district/authority) lacks the physical or legal water supplies needed” to provide their services and maintain required streamflow levels. This can happen when there are extended calls from older water rights, (like the Shoshone water rights on the Colorado River), when stream flows are low for long periods and when local reservoirs (Eagle Park Reservoir and the Black Lakes) have low supply. The district and authority boards approved the plan during their April 10 meetings after learning about the plan during Feb. 27 work sessions…
One of the best early predictors of a drought scenario is if the snow water equivalent measure has not reached an average of 15 inches across the Vail, Fremont Pass and Copper SNOTEL stations by April 1. “That directly relates to Eagle Park Reservoir, that relates to the flows in Gore Creek and the flows in the Eagle River,” Hildreth said. This year, the average was just shy of 16 inches across the three stations on April 1.
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
Click the link to read the article on the AZCentral.com website (Branson Loomis). Here’s an excerpt:
May 13, 2025
Key Points
Arizona has “real skin in the game” as negotiations continue over shares of a smaller Colorado River, Gov. Katie Hobbs said. Now she wants other states to step up.
The seven Colorado River states are trying to reach a shortage-sharing agreement this year, but are also looking to the new Trump administration to see if there are alternatives.
Arizona officials say other parts of the state, such as Yuma, may have to take cuts. Tribes say they expect the state to honor settlements.
Arizona is doing its part and taking its hits to conserve the Colorado River, Gov. Katie Hobbs said, and it’s time for upstream states to do the same. The governor assembled a roundtable of water users and officials on May 13 to present what she called a unified front among the state’s interests in defending Arizona’s share of the Colorado River as time runs short for reaching a deal with other states that use the water. So far, states upstream from Arizona have not offered cutbacks beyond the limits that a paltry snowpack naturally extracts from their farmers.
“It’s been more than a little frustrating,” Hobbs said. “We’ve come to the table with real solutions, with real proposals. We have real skin in the game,” she said, including billions of dollars in water infrastructure upgrades and in conservation agreements that keep water in the river’s reservoirs. “The upper states need to be willing to take their share as well.”
[…]
So far, the Rocky Mountain states known collectively as the Upper Basin have declined to specify new cuts they might take, because they say they already suffer the consequences of a reduced snowpack that shortchanges their farmers every year. The federal government has paid some Lower Basin farmers and others to cut back on their demands from Lake Mead’s storage bank, and the four Upper Basin states of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming argue that their year-in, year-out hardship is unrewarded and largely invisible to water users in the Southwest.
Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2024. Credit: Brad Udall
Dusk falls on Lake Powell near Bullfrog Marina on July 15, 2024. A new letter from water policy experts gives negotiators some recommendations on how to sustainably manage the Colorado River in the future. Alex Hager/KUNC
Click the link to read the article on the KUNC website (Alex Hager):
May 3, 2025
This story is part of ongoing coverage of the Colorado River, produced by KUNC in Colorado and supported by the Walton Family Foundation. KUNC is solely responsible for its editorial coverage.
The seven states that use the Colorado River are deadlocked about how to share it in the future. The current rules for dividing its shrinking supplies expire in 2026. State leaders are under pressure to propose a new sharing agreement urgently, so they can finish environmental paperwork before that deadline.
Right now, they don’t appear close to an agreement, so a group of prominent Colorado River experts co-signed a letter outlining seven things they want to see in the next set of rules.
The letter gives a clear, concise list of recommendations for ways to keep taps flowing while protecting tribes and the environment. Whether the states will listen is another matter entirely.
‘Shared pain’
The letter, written by a group of academics and retired policymakers, makes no bones about it: states need to find a collective solution to their collective problem. And some of them might not be happy.
State leaders have been reluctant to volunteer cutbacks, and have largely stayed divided along a decades-old fault line. On one side, the Upper Basin – which consists of Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico. The other side, the Lower Basin, is made up of California, Arizona and Nevada.
The recent letter is interesting in part because it’s co-authored by people from both sides of the Colorado River debate. Eric Kuhn led an agency that defends Western Colorado’s water. Kathryn Sorensen led Phoenix’s water department.
The letter was also written by Anne Castle, who has worked in federal water policy positions, and Jack Schmidt, a water researcher at Utah State University. Co-authors John Fleck and Katherine Tara research water policy at the University of New Mexico.
The authors write that states need to engage in some level of “shared pain,” meaning cutbacks to the amount of water that flows to farms, homes, and businesses.
“‘Shared’,” the letter writes, “Does not mean equal, either in amount, triggers, or duration.”
Water from the Colorado River flows through the East Highline Canal on its way to farms in the Imperial Valley on June 20, 2023. The Colorado River’s single largest user has taken federal money through incentive programs to cut back on water use. Alex Hager/KUNC
The Lower Basin states have already proposed relatively modest cutbacks, and the Upper Basin seems to be digging in its heels on the idea that they should not have to give up any water at all.
This letter pushes back on that stance.
“There’s lots of wonderful legal arguments about why it shouldn’t be me that needs to use less water,” Anne Castle, one of the letter’s authors, told KUNC. “But in order to have a viable and politically viable agreement, everybody has to do a share.”
Other recommendations
In addition to calling for states to put their heads together, the authors also warned against leaning too hard on federal checks as a way to conserve water. Money from the federal government has been a key part of avoiding catastrophe on the Colorado River in recent years. Hundreds of millions of dollars have gone to big water users, often farmers, as an incentive to use less water.
Those funds have come under threat during President Donald Trump’s second term. The letter says new rules for the Colorado River “cannot assume that federal taxpayers will reimburse Western water users over the long term to forgo the use of water that does not exist.”
The letter goes on to advocate for groups that can sometimes be an afterthought in Western water policy. It essentially re-ups an earlier call from a group of tribes in the Colorado River basin, which are asking for a bigger seat at the table after more than a century of exclusion. It also pushes for new rules to be more flexible, which would make it easier to protect river ecosystems. That mirrors similar comments from a group of nonprofits.
The shortest and final recommendation in the letter says that any new Colorado River rules have to make sure there’s enough water to keep people safe and healthy.
“There must be absolute protection of domestic water deliveries for public health and safety,” it reads.
In short, it’s asking to make sure that a worst-case-scenario doesn’t see drinking water reserves go dry, while agriculture and other industries keep their faucets flowing.
“I don’t think that would happen,” Castle said. “I think the market would intervene and take care of this situation.”
The reaction
KUNC reached out to top water negotiators in Arizona and Colorado for this story. Their answers fell in line with oft-repeated talking points from each basin.
A spokesman for the Arizona Department of Water Resources wrote that its director, Tom Buschatzke, “agreed with the authors that ‘every state and sector of the economy must contribute to the solution to this imbalance.’”
Water policymakers from (left to right) Utah, New Mexico, Colorado and Wyoming speak on a panel at the Colorado River Water Users Association conference in Las Vegas on December 5, 2024. The Upper Basin states have been reluctant to volunteer cutbacks ahead of the next set of river-sharing rules. Alex Hager/KUNC
Colorado’s top water official, Becky Mitchell, wrote that the recommendations overlooked climate change’s impact on Upper Basin water supplies, and that states already take “mandatory and uncompensated” cuts.
“Colorado water users do not enjoy a guaranteed delivery of the full amount of their water rights each year,” she wrote.
Jennifer Gimbel, Colorado’s former top water official, did not contribute to the letter and also took issue with the suggestion that both basins could afford to make cutbacks.
“Are the authors of the paper thinking that federal law should be enacted to override state law?” Gimbel wrote to KUNC in an email. “Are they thinking that users in the Upper Basin, who they say should not rely on federal compensation, should just give up their livelihoods voluntarily or be compensated by the state legislatures? I don’t know because they don’t say.”
Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2024. Credit: Brad Udall
Click the link to read the article on the InkStain website (John Fleck):
April 25, 2025
A group* of my Colorado River collaborators has put together what we hope can be a useful set of foundational principles as the basin states and federal leadership search for a path toward a negotiated agreement for post-2026 Colorado River management. They’re based on a number of key premises:
The Colorado River Compact will remain the foundation of the river’s management, but we have to find a way past the deep disagreement between Upper and Lower basin states on what the Compact actually says.
Colorado River Basin tribes must be essential partners in crafting the next set of guidelines, including through compensation for foregone water use.
Shared pain is essential. The path toward a sustainable river system requires everyone to contribute to the solution to the problem of the river we all share.
Click the link to read the article on the KVNF website (Brody Wilson):
April 29, 2025
The Colorado River is the lifeblood of the American Southwest. Forty million people depend on it — not just here in Colorado, but in cities like Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles.
Here on the Western Slope, we don’t always feel directly connected to the Colorado River. After all, we live in the Gunnison Basin — a different watershed, right?
Not quite. The Gunnison River contributes about 17% of the Colorado River’s total annual flow. So any decision made about the Colorado River’s future directly affects us — how much water we can use, when, and for what purpose. For decades, the river has been in a slow-moving crisis. Climate change, explosive population growth, and overallocation have pushed the system to the brink. In 2022, the river’s two main reservoirs — Lake Powell and Lake Mead — reached such low levels that hydropower turbines at Glen Canyon Dam were nearly shut down and dam operators were near “dead-pool” where water would no longer be able to pass through the dam. But today, nearly three years later, the system isn’t bouncing back. Andy Mueller, General Manager of the Colorado River District, has a blunt message: the Colorado River is carrying less water than it used to, and if we don’t change course, the future of agriculture, recreation, and the our way of life across the Western Slope could be at risk.
“The average temperature in March has gone up 4.2 degrees Fahrenheit,” Mueller told the crowd in Ridgway. “And for every 1 degree of warming, streamflow drops by 3 to 5 percent. We’re looking at a 20% decline right here in the Uncompahgre Valley over the last 125 years.”
These trends are part of a long-term warming and drying pattern. Less snow is falling, and what does fall melts earlier. That means less water reaches our rivers — and more of it is lost to evaporation or absorbed by plants growing in longer, hotter seasons.
In 1922, Federal and State representatives met for the Colorado River Compact Commission in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Among the attendees were Arthur P. Davis, Director of Reclamation Service, and Herbert Hoover, who at the time, was the Secretary of Commerce. Photo taken November 24, 1922. USBR photo.
To understand what’s happening now, you have to go back to 1922. That’s when the seven states in the Colorado River Basin signed a compact to divide the river’s water. Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming became the “Upper Basin.” California, Arizona, and Nevada formed the “Lower Basin.” Each side was promised 7.5 million acre-feet of water per year. But there was a problem: the river wasn’t carrying that much water — and certainly doesn’t now. For decades, this over-allocation was masked by big reservoirs like Lake Powell and Lake Mead. But as the drought continues, those buffers have disappeared. In 2007, the states and federal government adopted a temporary fix: interim guidelines to manage the system during dry years. Those guidelines are set to expire in 2026. New rules must be negotiated now — and the clock is ticking.
“There’s a lot of confusion out there,” Mueller said. “People talk about renegotiating the Compact — but that’s not what’s happening. The Compact isn’t being touched. What’s being negotiated are the guidelines for how Powell and Mead are operated — especially in times of shortage.”
Click the link to read the paper on the InkStain.net website (Kathryn Sorensen, Sarah Porter, Eric Kuhn, and Cynthia Campbell). Here’s an excerpt:
April 18, 2025
Conserving water now in reservoir savings banks, as a hedge against future risks associated with drought and declining flows, has emerged as one of the central tools for managing the Colorado River. The Lower Basin “Intentionally Created Surplus” program, created in the 2007 Interim Guidelines, has shown the idea’s promise and given the basin nearly two decades to learn the strengths and weaknesses of the approach. With tweaks to allow similar efforts in the Upper Basin and other modifications based on what we have learned about the current ICS approach, such “Floating Pools” are one of the key tools being considered as negotiators try to thread the needle of a seven-state agreement for post-2026 Colorado River management. Done properly, they have the potential to finesse the states’ disagreement over the terms of the 1922 Colorado River Compact in a way that could avoid potentially disruptive litigation. But getting the details right will be crucial to the development of an enduring bargain that can help the basin avoid the risk of interstate litigation.
Context
Negotiations over post-2026 operating rules for Lakes Powell and Mead are a proxy battle over whether the 1922 Compact acts as a limitation on yet-to-be used water in the Upper Division States or as a cut to existing water uses in the Lower Division States. Much of the conflict focuses on Article III(d) of the Colorado Compact, which states, “The states of the Upper Division will not cause the flow of the river at Lee Ferry to be depleted below an aggregate of 75,000,000 acre-feet for any period of ten consecutive years. . .”
The Upper Division States have a fundamentally different interpretation of their Compact obligations at Lee Ferry than the Lower Division States. Clearly, the best-case scenario for the Lower Division States, especially in Central Arizona, is a court decision that confirms the Upper Division States have a compact obligation to not deplete the flow of the river below 75 million acre-feet every ten years plus ½ of the annual delivery to Mexico under the 1944 Treaty, approximately 82 million acre-feet every ten years. This outcome would mostly stabilize the water supply available to the Lower Division States and likely limit consumptive uses in the Upper Division States to about the same or a little less water than they are currently using, approximately 4 million acre-feet per year. If the high court rules instead that the Upper Division States have a non-depletion obligation, and that consumptive uses in the Upper Division States are not the “cause” of inadequate flows needed to deliver 8.23 million acre-feet to the Lower Division States and Mexico, the result in a declining river system is a cut, potentially even to zero, for water delivered via the Central Arizona Project (CAP) into the Sun Corridor from Phoenix to Tucson and potential cuts to water-right holders in Western Arizona, Southern California and Nevada who are next on the chopping block.
Distilled to its core, here is the question before us: in a declining river system and in the absence of an agreement among the Divisions, does the operation of Article III(d) of the Compact result in a limitation on future new uses in the Upper Division States or an elimination to existing ones in the Lower Division States?
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2024. Credit: Brad Udall
It’s easy to take for granted the accounting innovations in the Colorado River governance regime’s 2007 guidelines, which have governed river management and the upstream-downstream relationships between the upper and lower basins. “Intentionally Created Surplus” (ICS) is now part of the lexicon, and the idea behind it shows enough promise that it’s at the heart of the current negotiations over the post-’07 guidelines management of the river.
But we need to be careful about the lessons that we learn, and the details of how we implement the successor to ICS. How should the successor to ICS related to action levels for reservoir management? How do we ensure that water in ICS-like accounting pools is really conserved water, part of a sincere effort to reduce basin consumptive use?
Those questions are at the heart of the argument in Floating Pools & Grand Bargains, a new white paper by Kathryn Sorensen from Arizona State University and a group of colleagues, including Eric Kuhn:
The fickle “children of the Pacific Ocean,” El Niño and La Niña, have again dealt the Gunnison River Basin a bad hand. A weak La Niña winter sent the storm-bearing jet streams over the northwestern United States and southern Canada, leaving the Southwest, and southern half of Colorado, relatively dry for 2025, according to Bob Hurford, Colorado’s Division 4 (Gunnison Basin) Engineer. Hurford visited Gunnison on April 17 for an annual “State of the River” program, along with Andy Mueller, general manager of the Colorado River Water Conservation District, known as the “River District,” the program’s sponsor. Sonja Chavez, manager of the Upper Gunnison River Water Conservancy District, and Jesse Kruthaupt, Gunnison agent for Trout Unlimited’s Colorado Restoration Program spoke on the state of the Upper Gunnison River.
Hurford led with a discussion of what is unfolding locally in water year 2025 (Oct. 1, 2024 through Sept. 30, 2025). The Upper Gunnison Basin’s April 1 snowpack (usually at or near the maximum depth for the winter) contains only 59% of the 30-year average water content. It is projected at this point to yield through July about 540,000 acre-feet of runoff or less for the river — probably not enough to fill Blue Mesa Reservoir after downstream water rights are filled. An acre-foot of water is the amount it would take to cover the playing area of a football field to the depth of one foot. As the changing climate warms the planet, March is becoming the “new April.” This year’s snowpack peaked in mid-March. With the big melt usually beginning sooner nowadays, spring-like weather is causing trees and other plants to also begin “drinking” sooner…Increasing evaporation and plant transpiration also come with the changing climate. According to Mueller, for every additional degree Fahrenheit in the ambient temperatures, another 3-5% of water on the surface and in plants disappears as water vapor. These are changes to be anticipated for as long as we continue to warm the planet’s climate. Hurford concluded his presentation with a chart indicating that the decade beginning with 2020 is on track at this point to be the driest decade on record, including the droughts of the 1930s and 2000s.
The agreements propping up Lake Mead and Lake Powell expire in 2026, and negotiations for new agreements have stalled.
The Trump administration’s lack of clear direction and delay in appointing a Reclamation commissioner are exacerbating the crisis.
Arizona will face significant water cuts, potentially deeper than any previous shortages. It needs time to process them.
Many of us have seen this train wreck coming for years, the slow buildup of chronic overuse, coupled with a river that no longer produces as much water as it used to, that is draining Lake Mead and Lake Powell, the nation’s two largest water savings accounts. And if things don’t change soon, 40 million people who rely on this river are about to suddenly realize that decisionmakers squandered every dollar spent on buying time to fix this fundamental problem…The mismatch between supply and demand began emerging around 2000, and by 2007, the feds had created the first set of shortage guidelines, hoping those mandatory cuts would be enough to stave off crisis. But we now know that they weren’t nearly enough to reduce the drag on the lakes. Deeper cuts were made. Billions of dollars were set aside to pay people to temporarily not use water. And we’ve stabilized Lake Mead and Lake Powell, for now.
But those rules and agreements expire at the end of 2026…The Trump administration hasn’t said anything about those alternatives. And after dropping an executive order to nix a longstanding review process, it’s unclear how the feds will evaluate or collect public input, presuming that said alternatives are still on the table…It’s telling that while state negotiators continue to meet (and make no real progress), no one from the Bureau of Reclamation — the federal agency tasked with operating Lake Mead and Lake Powell — has attended those negotiation sessions since the Trump administration took office. In fact, Reclamation still doesn’t even have a commissioner. The administration has been dragging its feet on getting the leadership in place to finally break this logjam…Now is not the time to be hands-off. The Trump administration must prioritize naming a Reclamation director who can offer firm, clear and fair direction — and who isn’t afraid to bust a few heads if state negotiators refuse to budge.
Colorado River “Beginnings”. Photo: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism
The Shoshone hydro plant in Glenwood Canyon. The River District has made a deal with Xcel Energy to buy the water rights associated with the plant to keep water flowing on the Western Slope. Credit: Heather Sackett/Aspen Journalism
Pitkin County on Wednesday joined 29 other Western Slope counties, cities and towns, irrigation districts and water providers in financially backing a plan to buy a critical Colorado River water right.
Pitkin County commissioners unanimously approved a resolution supporting the Shoshone Permanency Project and pledging $1 million toward the campaign to keep the water rights associated with the Shoshone hydropower plant in Glenwood Canyon on the Western Slope. Pitkin County’s Healthy Rivers Board recommended the $1 million contribution from its fund at its regular meeting April 17.
The Colorado River Water Conservation District plans to purchase the water rights from Xcel Energy for nearly $100 million. The water rights are some of the biggest and oldest non-consumptive water rights on the mainstem of the Colorado River, and ensure water keeps flowing west to the benefit of downstream cities, farms, recreation and the environment.
“From our perspective we view this as an opportunity to really create and enhance a partnership that should be incredibly functional in the future,” River District General Manager Andy Mueller told commissioners on Wednesday. “We’re committed to working with you to keep the upper Roaring Fork healthy and figuring out creating solutions to bring water into the watershed at the right times of year.”
About 40% of the headwaters of the Roaring Fork River is diverted across the Continental Divide for use in the Arkansas River basin. It’s long been Pitkin County’s goal to mitigate the effects this has on the health of the Roaring Fork.
In exchange for support of the Shoshone project, Pitkin County will be able to use some water from Grizzly Reservoir, owned by the city of Aspen and the River District, to boost flows in the upper Roaring Fork River.
“One of the most productive things to come out of this, in addition to the benefits you’ve already discussed with the Shoshone project itself … is going to be that the River District has agreed that Pitkin County can now have a voice in working with Aspen and the River District on that Grizzly water,” said Jennifer DiLalla, an attorney with Moses, Wittemyer, Harrison and Woodruff. DiLalla is the county’s outside counsel who works on water issues. “That is one of the only sources of water available upstream of you. It’s not going to be there all that often, but when it is, it’s a really great benefit for the upper Fork.”
The $1 million pledge may help the county and the River District repair their rocky relationship after years of being at odds over certain water issues. Pitkin County didn’t initially support the Shoshone campaign because of the complex interaction of the water rights with another big set of downstream irrigation water rights in the Grand Valley known as the Cameo call.
“We’ve come a long way because it used to be not too long ago that we were just going to oppose this, period,” said Pitkin County Commissioner and River District representative Francie Jacober. “I would say that we are on the road to a new era of cooperation with the River District.”
Pitkin County’s concern was that with Shoshone under new ownership — and the proposed addition of an instream flow use for the water along with hydropower — the call for the water through Glenwood Canyon might delay or reduce the need for the Cameo call. Aspenites like to see the Cameo call come on because it forces the Twin Lakes diversion to shut off, which means more water flowing down the Roaring Fork, typically during a time of year in late summer and early fall when streamflows are running low and river health is suffering.
North Star Nature Preserve on the Roaring Fork River just upstream of Aspen experienced high water in June of 2023. Pitkin County is supporting the River District’s campaign to buy the Shoshone water rights in exchange for help boosting flows in the upper Roaring Fork. Credit: Heather Sackett/Aspen Journalism
Some of the mistrust between the two local governments can be traced to water rights owned by the River District that would have kept alive huge reservoirs on the Crystal River near Redstone. The district eventually abandoned those rights, but not without first being challenged in water court by Pitkin County. Pitkin County also opposed the widely supported River District 2020 tax increase — ballot measure 7a — which funds water projects across the district’s 15-county area.
To secure the Shoshone water rights — which comprise a 1902 right for 1,250 cubic feet per second and another from 1929 for 158 cfs — the River District must add an instream flow use to the water rights in addition to their current use for hydropower. That requires working with the Colorado Water Conservation Board, which is the only entity in the state allowed to hold instream flow rights which preserve the environment, as well as getting a new water court decree to allow the change in use.
Despite the support and $1 million pledge, Pitkin County still may oppose the change case in water court. The county hired Golden-based engineering firm Martin and Wood Water Consultants to do an analysis of the Shoshone and Cameo call interaction to see if the Roaring Fork could be harmed. According to Tara Meininger, an engineer with Martin and Wood, there could potentially be an annual impact of 26 acre-feet on average to the upper Roaring Fork.
But a final report is still not complete, said Pitkin County Attorney Richard Neiley, which is why the county reserved the right to oppose the River District in water court.
“It’s an important goal to make sure that change does not result in injury to the Roaring Fork forever,” Neiley said. “We haven’t given anything away with respect to being able to argue or oppose the change case on that basis.”
With Pitkin County’s $1 million contribution, the River District has now raised $57 million from local and regional partners. In addition, the project was awarded $40 million in the final days of the Biden administration, but that funding has since been frozen, though River District officials are hopeful that the federal funding will still be realized.
The River District plans to present an agreement on the instream flow water rights to the Colorado Water Conservation Board at its regular meeting in May.
“We’re about to enter into a process with the Colorado Water Conservation Board where your support will be essential to a successful experience there and then on into water court,” Mueller told commissioners. “So we just want to say thank you very much.”
Colorado transmountain diversions via the State Engineer’s office
U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper, D-Colo. stopped in Glenwood Springs on the bank of the Colorado River on April 15 for a roundtable with Western Slope water users. Many who spoke were promised federal funding for projects to address environmental and drought issues, which has now been frozen by the Trump administration. Credit: Heather Sackett/Aspen Journalism
During a tour of the Western Slope last week, U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper, D-Colo., said he was frustrated with the pace of negotiations that could determine how the Colorado River is shared in the future and that the Upper Basin states may be pushing back too hard.
A deal should have been reached last summer, he said.
“Colorado should have a right to keep the water that we have been using the way we’ve been using it, and I don’t think we should compromise that,” Hickenlooper said. “But there are a lot of things we could do to give a little to be part of the solution to the Lower Basin and get to a collaborative solution. Again, I’m frustrated by our lack of progress.”
The remarks came during a Q&A with reporters April 15 after a roundtable in Glenwood Springs with Western Slope water managers, many of whom spoke about their projects that were promised funding through the Inflation Reduction Act, which was earmarked for environmental and drought issues. That funding has since been frozen by the Trump administration.
Hickenlooper added that Colorado River management decisions should not be coming from Washington and that the only path forward is an agreement among the seven states that comprise the two basins. Hickenlooper has supported conservation efforts in the Upper Basin (Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming), including the System Conservation Pilot Program, which paid water users to cut back in 2023 and 2024.
The seven states that use water from the Colorado River – Arizona, California and Nevada comprise the Lower Basin – have just over a month left to agree on how the nation’s two largest reservoirs would be operated and cuts shared in the future before the federal government may decide for them.
“It’s our understanding from Reclamation that they are going to start the impacts analysis in early June, so they are seeking a consensus alternative by the end of May,” said Chuck Cullom, executive director of the Upper Colorado River Commission.
The current guidelines for the management of the Colorado River expire at the end of 2026, and new ones need to be in place by that August, when reservoir operations for the next water year are set. That means the clock is ticking on the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) process that will develop and adopt new guidelines. Without an agreement between the basins, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation will move forward with its own management plan.
“[Reclamation] is targeting a record of decision in the summer of 2026 so that it is implementable on Oct. 1, 2026, when the next new water year starts,” Cullom said.
From left, J.B. Hamby, chair of the Colorado River Board of California, Tom Buschatzke, Arizona Department of Water Resources; Becky Mitchell, Colorado representative to the Upper Colorado River Commission. From left, Colorado River negotiator for California JB Hamby, Arizona’s Tom Buschatzke and Colorado’s Becky Mitchell. Water managers from all seven Colorado River Basin states have just over a month left to reach a consensus on how the river will be shared in the future.Credit: Tom Yulsman/The Water Desk
Although water managers say coming to an agreement that all seven states can live with is better than the federal government imposing its own rules, the Upper Basin and the Lower Basin remain divided. Talks ground to a halt at the end of last year, but they have since resumed, according to Colorado officials.
Lead negotiator for Colorado Becky Mitchell said in a written statement that Colorado is focused on working with the basin states towards a consensus approach for the post-2026 operations of Lake Powell and Lake Mead that would fit within Reclamation’s timeline for the NEPA process.
“The basin states share common goals: we want to avoid litigation, and we want a sustainable solution for reservoir operations,” Mitchell said. “In light of these goals, I see the basin states working towards sustainable, supply-driven operations of Lakes Powell and Mead that are resilient across a range of hydrologic conditions experienced in the basin.”
In March 2024, each basin submitted competing proposals to federal officials. In January, the bureau released an alternatives analysis, which outlined five potential paths forward. It did not include either basin’s proposal as an option and instead looked at a “basin hybrid” option, with elements from each basin’s proposal.
A major sticking point that has not yet been resolved is that Lower Basin water managers say the Upper Basin states must share cuts under the driest conditions. Upper Basin officials maintain they already suffer annual shortages of about 1.3 million acre-feet because they are squeezed by climate change and shouldn’t have to share additional cuts because their states have never used the entire 7.5 million-acre-foot apportionment given to them by the Colorado River Compact. Upper Basin officials, however, have offered to voluntarily conserve up to 200,000 acre-feet of water a year.
“A lot of the difference in the two proposals is that the Lower Basin seems much more comfortable running the system at a lower volume of water in the reservoirs, and we view that as leading to crisis management,” Andy Mueller, general manager of the Glenwood Springs-based Colorado River Water Conservation District, said at the district’s regular board meeting April 15. “So if you keep the system in a constant state of crisis, then it’s one emergency after another, which should feel familiar to anybody who’s been following the Colorado River for the last 20 years, because that’s what has been happening.”
This 2023 diagram shows the tubes through which Lake Powell’s fish can pass through to the section of the Colorado River that flows through the Grand Canyon. Credit: USGS and Reclamation 2023
Of the five potential options in the bureau’s analysis, the “federal authorities” alternative may be the most likely way forward if a consensus between the two basins is not reached. That alternative includes up to 3.5 million acre-feet of cuts in the Lower Basin, no Upper Basin conservation and a focus on upstream reservoir releases to keep Lake Powell full enough to make hydropower at Glen Canyon Dam.
“We have to remember that creating your own solution for the consensus is always better than allowing somebody else to create it for you, so we are hopeful that will happen,” Mueller said.
Adding to the urgency of finding agreement on future river operations is a rapidly diminishing snowpack and spring-runoff forecast that could once again drive reservoirs to crisis levels. Hot and dry conditions have pushed snowpack across the Upper Basin down to 74% of average — a 27% loss in the past two weeks. Conditions may be beginning to resemble 2021 and 2022, when Lake Powell fell to its lowest point ever, threatening the ability to make hydropower and triggering emergency upstream reservoir releases and calls from federal officials for 2 million to 4 million acre-feet in conservation from the states.
“It’s the opposite of good,” Cullom said of this year’s runoff forecast. “Now through the first week of May, either we’ll get some replenishment or the snowpack will collapse. My money’s on collapsing, unfortunately, similar to 2021.”
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
Colorado River officials are debating six options for how to manage the overstressed river after 2026 with the goal of reaching a seven-state agreement by May. Under this year’s ultra dry water conditions, all of the proposed plans would call for mandatory cuts in the three Lower Basin states with reductions ranging from 1.3 million to 3.2 million acre-feet. The basin’s legal share of the river is 7.5 million acre-feet, although estimates say its actual use is higher.
Under most of the different management options, Colorado and its sister states in the Upper Basin would be asked to voluntarily conserve up to 500,000 acre-feet of water. One acre-foot roughly equals the annual water use of two to three households.
In Arizona, the state that would be hardest-hit, cities, farms and tribes are already making alternative plans, Tom Buschatzke, Arizona’s Colorado River negotiator, said.
“The impacts are going to be meaningful,” Buschatzke, who is also director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources, said. “They are going to have some pain attached to them.”
It’s been a tough water year for parts of Colorado and the Colorado River Basin. In Colorado, the snowpack on the Western Slope — where the Colorado River starts — ended up with a below average peak this winter.
Across the basin, more than 20 major reservoirs and tributaries can expect a lower-than-usual water supply between April and July, according to the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center.
Lake Powell, one of the immense reservoirs that provides storage for millions of water users in the basin, will likely receive less than 70% of its normal inflows from the Upper Basin region of Colorado, New Mexico, Wyoming and Utah.
It’s the kind of water year that starts to worry officials about late-summer irrigation supplies and wildfire risks, according to fire officials, irrigators and water providers.
With this year’s conditions, Colorado River states would be conserving or cutting back on their water use under any of the six plans dominating current planning discussions: two competing proposals from basin states — one from the Upper Basin and one from the Lower Basin — and four options from the federal government.
The fifth federal option, called the “no action” alternative, is theoretical and a required part of the federal planning process. It would not sustainably manage the river, officials say.
The final management plan won’t be decided until later this year or early in 2026.
Colorado snowpack basin-filled map April 20, 2025 via the NRCS.
How would the Upper Basin manage the river?
If the Upper Basin’s proposal were being used to manage the river basin, the Lower Basin states would be reducing their use by 1.5 million acre-feet this year.
The proposal calculates cuts by taking a snapshot every Oct. 1 of the water level at Lake Powell and the amount of water stored in Lake Powell and Lake Mead. This year, Powell’s surface was 3,577 feet above sea level and the combined storage in both reservoirs was 17.8 million acre-feet on Oct. 1, about 36% of their combined capacity, according to Colorado’s Colorado River team.
Colorado and the other Upper Basin states would take more voluntary action, like conserving water or releasing water from reservoirs further upstream if needed.
Sticking to voluntary conservation would be a win for the Upper Basin, where officials have said they should not be required to cut their use because their water supply is already unpredictable and limited by each year’s precipitation.
The Upper Basin, located upstream of the basin’s biggest reservoirs, lakes Mead and Powell, relies on smaller reservoirs to try to pace the flow of water from year to year. The Lower Basin depends on the vast storage in lakes Powell and Mead to pace its water supply, which offers more predictability over a longer time span.
What would cuts look like under the Lower Basin’s plan?
Arizona, California, Nevada and Mexico would also cut their use by a total of 1.5 million acre-feet this year if their own proposal were to manage the river basin.
Arizona would cut its use by 760,000 acre-feet; California, by 440,000; and Nevada, 50,000. Lower Basin officials estimated Mexico would have to cut its use by 250,000 acre-feet, but those reductions are being decided in separate negotiations between Mexico and the U.S.
The Upper Basin would not be required to cut its use at all this year under the Lower Basin proposal, Buschatzke said. (If the basin’s water supply was even worse, the Upper Basin would be required to share in the water cuts instead of voluntarily conserving.)
In Arizona, one water project, the Central Arizona Project, would take the brunt of the hit, Buschatzke said.
Central Arizona Project map via Mountain Town News
The 336-mile water delivery system serves cities, like Phoenix and Tucson, and several tribes, including one of the project’s largest users, the Gila River Indian Community.
Other cities and farms along the Colorado River, like Bullhead City, Lake Havasu City, Kingman and the Cibola Valley Irrigation District, could also take a hit. That’s dependent on how Arizona decides to distribute cuts inside the state, Buschatzke said.
“We will be able to continue to live sustainably within the CAP service area, but it’s going to cost more money,” he said.
It will mean that creative things, like treating wastewater so it can be used to drink, will have to be developed and deployed, which also means significant infrastructure costs of hundreds of millions of dollars, Buschatzke said.
The state will face tough decisions about how to use water, like choosing between restoring ecosystems along rivers or diverting that water to support other uses.
“We’ve been talking about these things for many, many years, but it’s coming to the fore now where some policy decisions are going to have to be made,” Buschatzke said.
What would water cuts look like under the federal plans?
The Lower Basin states are ready to face 1.5 million acre-feet in cuts, but some of the federal plans would call for cuts up to 3.2 million acre-feet in a year like 2025, according to an analysis by the Upper Colorado River Commission.
The commission used a federal study of reservoir levels and projected inflows from February to gauge the minimum, maximum and probable water cuts in the Lower Basin. The Lower Basin’s outlook hasn’t changed much since February, Chuck Cullom, the commission’s executive director, said in early April.
Under water sharing agreements, California can use 4.4 million acre-feet of Colorado River water; Arizona, 2.8 million acre-feet; and Nevada 300,000 acre-feet.
For Colorado and other Upper Basin states, cuts will not be mandatory under the federal plans. Instead, the states would commit to other actions, like voluntary conservation.
There’s not enough detail at this point in the negotiations to say exactly how much the Upper Basin would try to conserve based on this winter’s water conditions, Cullom said.
Under a former water conservation pilot project — the System Conservation Pilot Program — the Upper Basin has been able to cut its use by a maximum of 37,800 acre-feet. That was in 2023, a very wet year with a much higher snowpack across the Western Slope than in 2025.
“What we’ve observed is that there’s greater participation in voluntary programs when there’s more water in the system. So that’s what the modeling reflects,” Cullom said. “The commitment is that we would develop conservation programs. They’re voluntary, so they would be targets to achieve, not requirements.”
Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2024. Credit: Brad Udall
Lake Powell at Wahweap Marina as seen in December 2021. Dwindling streamflows and falling reservoir levels have made it more likely that what some experts call a Colorado River Compact “tripwire” will be hit in 2027. Credit: Heather Sackett/Aspen Journalism
Time is ticking for states that share the shrinking Colorado River to negotiate a new set of governing rules. One major sticking point, which has the potential to thrust the parties into a protracted legal battle, hinges on differing interpretations of a few sentences in a century-old agreement.
In a recent letter, the river’s Lower Basin states – California, Nevada and Arizona – asked federal officials to analyze the effects of a hypothetical legal concept known as a “compact call.”
The problem? The 1922 Colorado River Compact says nothing about a compact call. And although the phrase often looms like a threat over Colorado River discussions, there is no agreed-upon definition of the term, what would trigger a compact call nor how one would play out. In fact, the Upper Basin states – Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming – don’t believe the laws governing the river even contemplate it.
The February letter comes as water managers from all seven Colorado River Basin states are in the midst of deciding how Lake Powell and Lake Mead will be operated and cuts will be shared after 2026 when the current guidelines expire. In March 2024, each basin submitted competing proposals to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. In January, federal officials with the outgoing Biden administration released their analysis of five different potential ways forward and did not include either basin’s proposal, but a “basin hybrid” that incorporated elements from both.
In essence, the Lower Basin states have identified a potential opening with the Trump administration, and asked new leaders at the Interior Department to adopt the Lower Basin’s view on some of the most contentious and disagreed-about parts of Colorado River management.
“I believe that under the law, the compact requires delivery of 7.5 million acre-feet of water on a 10-year rolling average, plus one-half of the Mexico Treaty obligation to the Lower Basin,” said Tom Buschatzke, director of Arizona’s Department of Water Resources. “So we want to see Reclamation, as our request indicated, incorporate that outcome into the modeling for any alternative to look at. That includes how reductions in the Upper Basin states might have to occur.”
Members of the Colorado River Commission, in Santa Fe in 1922, after signing the Colorado River Compact. From left, W. S. Norviel (Arizona), Delph E. Carpenter (Colorado), Herbert Hoover (Secretary of Commerce and Chairman of Commission), R. E. Caldwell (Utah), Clarence C. Stetson (Executive Secretary of Commission), Stephen B. Davis, Jr. (New Mexico), Frank C. Emerson (Wyoming), W. F. McClure (California), and James G. Scrugham (Nevada)
CREDIT: COLORADO STATE UNIVERSITY WATER RESOURCES ARCHIVE via Aspen Journalism
Over a century ago, the compact split the river’s water evenly, with half (7.5 million acre-feet a year) going to the Upper Basin and half to the Lower Basin. Another 1.5 million acre-feet a year was later allocated to Mexico.
The crux of the dispute comes from how the Upper Basin states and the Lower Basin states each interpret a key phrase in the compact: “The States of the Upper Division will not cause the flow of the river at Lee Ferry to be depleted below an aggregate of 75,000,000 acre-feet for any period of ten consecutive years…”
To the Upper Basin states, “will not cause” means that their use won’t be the reason the Lower Basin doesn’t get its allocation. They see it as a “non-depletion” obligation.
According to Colorado officials, they’re not delivering water downstream, but rather they’re not causing the flows to be depleted.
“What this means is that if the flows were to drop below 75 million acre-feet over a ten-year period, there would be an inquiry into what caused that to occur,” Michael Elizabeth Sakas, Colorado River communications specialist with the Colorado Water Conservation Board said in a written response to questions from Aspen Journalism.
On the other hand, the Lower Basin states say they’re owed the water, with the Upper Basin states required to send the 75 million acre-feet over 10 years, plus half of the Mexico Treaty obligation (which works out to 82.5 million acre-feet every 10 years) downstream to the Lower Basin.
Compact “tripwire” threatens to complicate
Colorado River expert Eric Kuhn says that the latest report from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation is a major caution sign for the basin. An anemic snowpack this past winter could be setting the basin on the road to a compact call (as defined by the Lower Basin). The most recent federal forecast predicts that in 2027, the 10-year cumulative flow at Lee Ferry could drop below 82.5 million acre-feet, a threshold Kuhn calls the first “tripwire” for a compact call.
“If flows were to go below 82.5 million, then that’s the first time, in theory, the lower division states could point to the Upper Basin and say, ‘You’re not complying with your compact obligations,’” Kuhn said. “This is not going to sneak up on us. I think most of the modeling shows that it’s almost inevitable we will drop below 82.5 in the next three or four years.”
But Upper Basin officials disagree. In their interpretation, this tripwire doesn’t exist. A compact call is a concept recognized only by the Lower Basin.
They also point out that calls for water apply to situations where there is a senior rights holder and a junior rights holder. Under the prior appropriation system, the oldest water rights get first use of the river, and senior rights can force junior rights to stop using water so seniors can get the full amount they are entitled to. But Upper Basin officials say there is no priority between the two basins; they are on equal standing. [ed. emphasis mine]
That may be true, but the three Lower Basin states are also home to the basin’s biggest water users and cities, with more political power than the sparsely populated Upper Basin states.
Navajo Bridge spans the Colorado River downstream from Lake Powell near Lee Ferry, the dividing line between the upper and lower basin. Some federal forecasts predict that in 2027, the flow at Lee Ferry could drop below a critical threshold that some experts call a “compact tripwire.”
River headed for “wildly uncharted territory”
So what would happen if and when the river shrinks enough to trigger the first compact tripwire?
In practice, a compact call could mean the Lower Basin states would sue the federal government to get them to send more water downstream from Lake Powell. (The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation is responsible for making releases from Lake Powell and Lake Mead.) The Lower Basin states could also demand that the Upper Basin states implement cuts to get more water into Lake Powell. But the Upper Basin states will almost certainly argue they are in compliance with the compact and don’t need to make cuts. The Supreme Court could then decide whether the Upper Basin states are in compliance with the compact.
“It’s wildly uncharted territory,” said Chuck Cullom, the executive director of the Upper Colorado River Commision. “It’s not a straightforward path to say: ‘We need you to release more water out of Glen Canyon Dam and curtail uses.’”
Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2024. Credit: Brad Udall
The Upper Basin’s argument hinges on what is causing the flows at Lee Ferry to drop. The four states say it’s not their fault, because they only use between 3.5 and 4.5 million acre-feet a year, far less than their allocation of 7.5 million acre-feet. The culprit, they say, is climate change, which according to scientists has contributed to a 20% decline in flows from the 20th century average. They have also shown that every 1 degree Celsius of warming results in a 9% reduction in flows.
With a fixed number for how the river is shared, and a slowly dwindling amount of water available, the Upper Basin has been bearing the brunt of the effects of climate change, a phenomenon that Kuhn calls the “Upper Basin squeeze.” But the climate change argument could open a can of worms.
“There are numerous other water compacts between states,” Kuhn said. “Are we reopening every one of those? It could mean that other states do not have to comply with their compact obligations.That would be a precedent decision that would affect every compact in the western United States.”
How would cuts work?
Water users on Colorado’s Western Slope are eager to know how cuts could play out and over the past few years they have asked state officials repeatedly for more clarity on this issue. One reason is because most of the big transmountain diversions that take water from the mountainous headwaters of the Colorado to Front Range cities date to after the 1922 compact, meaning they would likely be cut first. But as the population centers and economic engines of the state, it’s unlikely a plan to cut water use would include turning off the taps to Denver.
In a crisis situation where cuts are mandatory, the strict prior appropriation system would probably not hold.
“They’re going to have to make hard decisions, and they are going to primarily meet the human health and safety needs of people first,” Kuhn said. “It’s an open secret that the priority system works under normal conditions; it doesn’t work in emergencies.”
Western Slope water users also want to know the state’s plan for cuts, because some areas may be more at risk of forced cutbacks than others. The Yampa/White/Green River basin in the northwest corner of the state, for example, developed later than other places, with lots of more junior water rights. Would they be first on the chopping block?
“We believe that regardless of where things stand on the river, clarity can’t hurt water users,” said Peter Fleming, general counsel with the Colorado River Water Conservation District. “In the long run, clarity will help people to plan better.”
But state officials have been reluctant to provide clarity about how cuts could be implemented, saying now is not the time to plan for it and that the Upper Basin states have always been in compliance with the compact.
“Colorado is not at risk of any compact curtailment scenario in the near future,” Sakas said in a written response to Aspen Journalism. “For the last 20 years, the Upper Basin has been using half of what we are allowed to use under the 1922 Compact while our downstream neighbors use significantly more than their apportionment.”
Figuring out who would be the first to take cuts and tracking that water to the state line would not be an easy task, said Colorado River expert Jennifer Gimbel. Gimbel is the senior water policy scholar at the Colorado State University Water Center and is the former director of the Colorado Water Conservation Board.
“It would be a tremendous headache and a huge undertaking,” she said. “But I don’t know if that means we shouldn’t be doing it.”
The Colorado Division of Water Resources, in a first step, has been developing measurement rules and requiring measurement devices for water users across the Western Slope. According to state officials, the goal of this effort is to accurately measure diversions so that if necessary, Colorado sends downstream only the water that is required to maintain compact compliance and not a drop more.
From left, J.B. Hamby, chair of the Colorado River Board of California, Tom Buschatzke, Arizona Department of Water Resources; Becky Mitchell, Colorado representative to the Upper Colorado River Commission at the Colorado River Water Users Association Conference in 2023. Water managers from all seven Colorado River Basin states are in the midst of deciding how Lake Powell and Lake Mead will be operated and cuts will be shared after 2026Credit: Tom Yulsman/Water Desk, University of Colorado, Boulder
Trying to stay out of court
One thing most water managers agree on is that finding a seven-state consensus is better than the potentially protracted litigation possible under some kind of compact call scenario. Some are hoping for the best but preparing for the worst. The Arizona Department of Water Resources requested about $1 million last year for Colorado River litigation from the state budget. Buschatzke said the Upper Basin states might fare worse under a compact call than they would by adopting the Lower Basin proposal.
“Because there are a lot of moving parts, litigation — a compact call — is a possibility,” he said. “It’s not a possibility I want to see occur. But I’ll have to do what I have to do to protect the state of Arizona.”
If the states can come up with new guidelines that fairly share the river, the threat of a compact call, which has long hung over Colorado River management discussions, could evaporate like water from the surface of Lake Mead. Cullom said that in 2007 when the seven states implemented the soon-to-expire guidelines that are currently in place, they agreed that if the two basins made good on their commitments outlined in those guidelines, they would set aside the issue of compact compliance — at least until after 2026.
“If they can figure out a way to live within the means of the river in such a manner that both the Upper Basin and Lower Basin agree, hopefully addressing a compact call again won’t be needed because it’s been addressed,” Gimbel said.
This story was produced by Aspen Journalism, in partnership with The Water Desk at the University of Colorado’s Center for Environmental Journalism.
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2024. Credit: Brad Udall
Click the link to read the article on the InkStain website (Eric Kuhn):
March 19, 2025
The Bureau of Reclamation released its March 24-Month study last Friday and just like last month, the forecast is for big trouble in the Colorado River Basin. Under the “Most Probable” scenario, the ten-year cumulative flow at Lee Ferry will drop below 82.5 million acre-feet (the “tripwire”) by the end of Water Year 2027. If this happens, the odds are high that the Lower Division states will trigger what they referred to in their February 13, 2025, letter to Secretary Burgum as a “compact call.” The nuance, however, is that the Colorado River Compact has no specific provision for a compact call. Under the compact, a call is just another word for interstate litigation.
Although the letter is now over a month old, it just recently received attention from two of the region’s most respected water reporters, Ian James of the Los Angeles Times, and Tony Davis of the Tucson Daily Star. In his piece, (link: Three states urge Trump administration to fix Colorado River dam – Los Angeles Times: ) James pointed out that in their letter, the Lower Division states used the term “compact call” 23 times. The term “river call” is commonly used in prior appropriation states that actively administer water rights. For example, the Shoshone Hydroelectric Power Plant, located on the Colorado River a few miles upriver from Glenwood Springs, has a senior water right for 1250 cfs with a priority date of 1902. When the flow at the plant’s diversion dam drops below 1250 cfs, its owner places a “call” on the river. Under Colorado law the Division Engineer, an employee of the Colorado State Engineer, then shuts off sufficient upstream junior uses to bring the flow back to 1250 cfs. A “Shoshone call” is almost an annual occurrence.
The Colorado River Compact places two specific flow obligations on the Upper Division states at Lee Ferry. Article III (d) requires these states to not cause the ten-year cumulative flow to be depleted below seventy-five million acre-feet. Additionally, under Article III (c), if there is not sufficient surplus water available, then each basin is responsible for one-half of the deficiency (the difference the annual treaty delivery and the available surplus water). Assuming there is no surplus water and the 1944 Treaty delivery to Mexico is 1.5 maf per year, the Upper Division states would have to deliver to Lee Ferry, an additional 750,000 af per year.
Thus, using the Shoshone analogy, the Lower Division states claim they have a 1922 Compact water right for up to 82.5 maf every ten years. Note, we say “up to” because in the last few years, pursuant to Minute 323, annual deliveries to Mexico have been slightly less than 1.5 maf. For many reasons, the Upper Division states do not agree that their 1922 Compact obligation is 82.5 maf every ten years, see: “On the Colorado River, there are no Simple Disputes,” (link: On the Colorado River, there are no Simple Disputes – jfleck at inkstain: ).
If (or more likely when) the ten-year flow at Lee Ferry were to drop below ~ 82.5 maf, and there is no consensus agreement among the basin states in place, it is clear that the Lower Division will then attempt to place a compact call on the Upper Division states (and perhaps legally challenge the Secretary’s operation of Lake Powell) to increase deliveries at Lee Ferry. Where the Shoshone Plant analogy breaks down is what happens once a call is placed. Colorado law directs the State Engineer/Division Engineer how to administer a Shoshone call, but intentionally, there is no equivalent of the Colorado State Engineer in the Colorado River Compact. The Colorado River Compact negotiators debated and rejected a compact commission with enforcement powers. Arizona’s Winfield Norviel suggested such a commission, but led by Colorado’s Delph Carpenter, it was rejected. Carpenter abhorred the idea of creating what he referred to as a “super agency.”
Except for Article V which provides for the Directors of the Reclamation Service and USGS to cooperate, on an ex-officio basis, with the basin State Engineers to collect and publish data on Colorado River flows and uses, the 1922 Compact provides no role for the federal government. The Secretary of the Interior is not even mentioned. Instead, the compact negotiators provided two mechanisms for resolving disputes and enforcing the provisions of the compact. Article VI is a dispute resolution provision which has never been used. The somewhat cumbersome provision provides that when a dispute arises, upon the request of one governor, the resolution process can be triggered. If this happens, each state governor then appoints a commissioner to formally negotiate a resolution with the other states. If the commissioners reach an agreement, it must be ratified by the affected state legislatures, most likely all seven. If a resolution is reached under Article VI, the compact does not require it to be approved by Congress.
The second mechanism is litigation. Article IX states: “Nothing in this compact shall be construed to limit or prevent any State from instituting or maintaining any action or proceeding, legal or equitable, for the protection of any right under this compact or the enforcement of any of its provisions.” Thus, if Lee Ferry ten-year flows drop below 82.5 maf, the compact vehicle to implement a “compact call” is for one or more of the Lower Division states to initiate litigation under Article IX and convince the U.S. Supreme Court, or its appointed Special Master, that the Upper Division states are not complying with the compact.
Assuming no agreement among the states to avoid compact litigation, a compact call scenario might occur as follows: The ten-year flow at Lee Ferry is forecast to drop below 82.5 maf tripwire (it might be a little less if corrected for actual deliveries to Mexico). The Lower Division then states demand that the Secretary increase releases from Lake Powell or, alternatively, the UCRC implement a curtailment to bring the flow up to 82.5 maf by the end of the water year. Via the UCRC, the Upper Division states respond that they are in full compliance with the 1922 Compact and insist that the Secretary not increase releases from Lake Powell. Lacking a consensus agreement among the states, the Secretary makes no change to the prescribed annual release forcing the Lower Division states to initiate litigation. Assuming the Supreme Court accepts the case, it would now be up to the court or its Special Master to decide if the Upper Division states are in compliance with the compact. If they are not, a remedy could be the imposition of a compact call by ordering the UCRC to implement a curtailment pursuant to the 1948 Upper Basin Compact. How long might litigation take? It could be decades, or the Lower Division states might succeed with a request for immediate relief. No one knows.
While the 1922 Compact does not give the Secretary of the Interior any special power or authority, under subsequent federal legislation and the 1963 decision in Arizona v. California the Secretary has considerable power and authority. For example, under Section 602 of the 1968 Colorado River Basin Project Act, Congress directed the Secretary to promulgate criteria for the coordinated long-range operation of the federal reservoirs. It also set priorities for the annual release of water from Lake Powell. The first priority is “releases to supply one-half the deficiency described in Article III (c) of the Colorado River Compact, if any such deficiency exists and is chargeable to the States of the Upper Division.”
The legislation, however, is silent on who or what entity decides if any such deficiency exists and is chargeable to the States of the Upper Division. According to Tony Davis (link: Arizona water officials, others blast feds for not protecting dam – Our Community Now), a spokesman for the Arizona Department of Water Resources suggested that the Secretary has this responsibility. But even if the Secretary does ultimately decide how much water must be released from Lake Powell to satisfy the obligation of the Upper Division states to Mexico under the 1922 Compact, if the Lower Division states believe the Upper Division states are violating the 1922 Compact, it could result in litigation. In fact, a decision by the Secretary to interpret the compact could be the trigger for litigation. After the Secretary signed the 1970 Long-range Operating Criteria which set a minimum objective release of 8.23 maf per year from Glen Canyon Dam, the Upper Division states seriously considered litigation. They decided against it because they concluded they could not show any actual injury. The impact of climate change on the flow of the river has now fundamentally changed that dynamic.
The Lower Division State’s letter was directed to Secretary Burgum, but it is a message to the entire basin. The March 24-Month study confirms what we already know. The basin has two basic choices: litigation or a basin-wide agreement implementing fundamental change. Let’s hope it’s the latter.
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
Click the link to read the article on the Utah State University website (Jack Schmidt, John Fleck, Kathryn Sorensen, Eric Kuhn, Katherine Tara):
March 21, 2025
In Short:
Since the onset of the Millenium Drought 25 years ago, water agencies in the Colorado River Basin have been challenged by the overwhelming, yet essential, tasks of balancing total water use with a reduced supply and recovering some of the reservoir storage lost since the last time the system was relatively full in summer 1999. By monitoring long-term changes in basin-wide reservoir storage, we can readily judge the success of these efforts.
In mid-March 2025, total storage in 46 reservoirs tracked by Reclamation was the third lowest in the 21st century for this time of year. The total amount of storage was the same as it was in late July 2021 when water managers described the situation as “serious” and declared a shortage in Lower Basin water supply. Between late July 2021 and mid-March 2023, water storage further plunged to an unprecedented low, but the exceptional runoff of 2023 provided modest recovery. However, basin storage in mid-March was 2.79 million acre feet, or 9%, less than the summer 2023 peak. In mid-March, 33% of the basin’s storage was in Lake Mead, 29% was in Lake Powell, 29% in 42 federal and non-federal reservoirs upstream from Lake Powell, and 9% in Lake Mohave and Lake Havasu. Water has been accumulating in Flaming Gorge Reservoir since early February and throughout the winter in a few smaller Upper Basin facilities but has been withdrawn from other large federal Upper Basin facilities and from Lake Powell. Lake Mead has been going down since late February. It is likely to be that total basin reservoir storage will decline until the beginning of the 2025 snowmelt runoff season and will only modestly recover, because inflow this year is forecast to be below average and less than in 2024.
System conservation and Assigned Water development by the Lower Division states and Mexico have prevented storage in Lake Mead from being even lower than what it is today. However, recent Reclamation projections indicate that consumptive use in the Lower Basin in 2025 will be larger than in 2024, suggesting that basin reservoir storage at this time next year will be even less than it is today. Projections of Upper Basin consumptive use are not available at this time. The continued decline and lack of recovery of water in reservoir storage conveys the clear message that our efforts to balance use with supply and to recover storage have not succeeded. The Colorado River water crisis endures.
In Detail:
On 15 March, active storage in 46 reservoirs in the Colorado River watershed that are tracked by Reclamation in the Bureau’s Hydrodatabase[1] was 26.9 million af (acre feet), the same amount as on 21 July 2021 (Fig. 1). That amount was the third lowest total basin storage on 15 March of any year of the 21st century[2] and is approximately 45% of the total stored in these reservoirs the last time the basin’s reservoirs were relatively full in late July 1999[3]. On 15 March, 33% of the basin’s storage was in Lake Mead, 29% in Lake Powell, 29% in 42 reservoirs upstream from Lake Powell, and 9% in Lake Mohave and Lake Havasu[4]. These data remind us of the challenge in providing a secure and reliable water supply to the Southwest, southern California, and northwestern Mexico.
Figure 1. Graph showing total reservoir storage in 46 reservoirs reported by Reclamation in its Hydrodatabase (blue line), as well as the contents of Lake Mead and Lake Powell (orange line), 42 reservoirs upstream from Lake Powell (green line), and in Lake Mohave and Lake Havasu (red line). Data are between 1 January 1999 and 15 March 2025. Total basin reservoir storage today is the same as in late July 2021. Credit: Center for Colorado River Studies
It is instructive to remember how today’s small amount of reservoir storage was viewed when it occurred in summer 2021. On 27 July 2021, The New York Times posted the headline, “Two of America’s largest reservoirs reach record lows amid lasting drought.” That story led with these words, “The water level in Lake Powell has dropped to the lowest level since the U.S. government started filling the enormous reservoir on the Colorado River in the 1960s — another sign of the ravages of the Western drought.”[5] In the article, Wayne Pullan, Reclamation’s Upper Colorado Basin Regional Director, said, “This is a serious situation,” and Brad Udall said, “I’m struggling to come up with words to describe what we’re seeing here.” In mid-August 2021, Interior formally announced a water shortage in Lake Mead, triggering cuts on water deliveries, especially to Arizona farmers.
But today, there is less discussion about whether this small amount of reservoir storage represents a crisis. In part that may be because the season of snowmelt is ahead of us rather than behind us, as was the case in late July 2021. We hope that inflow this coming spring will recover some storage, but, this winter’s snowpack is merely average[6], and the basin’s soils are very dry. The Bureau of Reclamation’s “most probable” forecast of unregulated inflow to Lake Powell in 2025 is only 6.77 million af[7], 70% of the 30-year average and less than in 2024. Additionally, there may be little sense of concern, because we survived these conditions between July 2021 and March 2023. In fact, total basin storage plunged to only 21.3 million af in mid-March 2023. Perhaps, we are distracted by the engineering, legal, and political intricacies of the negotiations concerning post-2026 consumptive use and the seeming dysfunction of those negotiations. Perhaps, we are resigned to low reservoir storage as the new normal. Perhaps, we are the frog in the pot of water whose temperature is gradually rising, and we do not realize the water is about to boil.
Although significant strides have been made to conserve water, further reductions in water use throughout the basin are necessary, should we experience a succession of very dry years such as occurred between 2002 and 2004 and between 2020 and 2022. The post-2026 negotiations primarily have focused on strategies to reduce basin consumptive uses to match the 21st century’s declining supply, but today’s small amount of storage reminds us that it is critically important to also develop policies to recover reservoir storage to ensure security and reliability of the system.
To date, it has been exceptionally hard to recover storage. Despite the Lower Colorado River Basin System Conservation and Efficiency Program, the Upper Basin System Conservation Pilot Program, the Drought Response Operations Plan, Assigned Water development programs and large expenditures to reduce consumptive use using the Inflation Reduction Act, the Basin’s water managers have made no progress in rebuilding storage except that provided by the unusually large inflows of 2023. Between mid-July 2023 and mid-April 2024 (immediately prior to the onset of spring snowmelt inflows), the basin’s reservoirs were only drawn down by 2.2 million af, the smallest drawdown of total basin storage of the last 15 years[8]. However, the winter 2023/2024 snowpack yielded below average inflow to Lake Powell, and the basin only gained 2.5 million af of storage (Fig. 2). As of 15 March, the 46 reservoirs of the basin have been drawn down by 3.1 million af since the peak storage of those reservoirs in mid-July 2024. During the remainder of March and part of April, reservoir drawdown will continue to deplete storage originally accumulated in 2023.
Figure 2. Graph showing reservoir storage in different parts of the Colorado River basin between 1 January 2021 and 15 March 2025, summarizing periods of increase and decrease in total storage. Lake Mead, Lake Powell, and the 42 reservoirs upstream from Lake Powell each store approximately 30% of basin’s total storage. Credit: Center for Colorado River Studies
Low storage in Lake Mead persists despite 3.94 million af of water savings by the Lower Colorado River Basin System Conservation and Efficiency Program since 2006 (Fig. 3) and despite approximately 3.7 million af of Assigned Water development. Although additional savings are needed in 2025, the prospects of significant savings are not encouraging. Water users in the Lower Basin and Reclamation measure actual use and forecast trends in real time, and we anticipate 6.5 million af of main stem consumptive use by the three Lower Basin states. Commendably, this is less than the states’ nominal 7.5 million af/yr allocation under the Supreme Court defined allocation. Arizona is expected to take the largest share of those cuts, with projected main stem use of 2.1 million af, 74% of its nominal allocation. Nevada is projected to use 68% of its 300,000 af allocation, and California is projected to take 96% of its 4.4 million af allocation.[9] However, the Lower Basin’s projected 6.5 million af use is more than last year’s 6 million af of use. It is unclear the extent to which use in 2025 might fluctuate based on the available of federal funding to compensate water users for their conservation efforts, given the uncertainty enveloping federal policies under the new administration. We have no comparable set of numbers that allow evaluation of anticipated Upper Basin use and actual savings of wet water. [ed. emphasis mine]
Figure 3. Graph showing water conserved in Lake Mead resulting from the Lower Colorado River Basin System Conservation and Efficiency Program and conservation efforts in Mexico. Credit: Center for Colorado River Studies
Deficit spending is likely to continue between now and mid-April and will primarily be from Lake Mead and Lake Powell, because the total storage in the 42 reservoirs upstream from Lake Powell is no longer being depleted[10]. The basin-wide spatial pattern of reservoir operations in late winter and early spring 2025 has been storage of water in small upstream reservoirs and continued withdrawal of water from some CRSP facilities including Lake Powell, and recently from Lake Mead. Draw down continues at Granby (the primary storage facility of the trans-basin Colorado-Big Thompson Project), Blue Mesa, Navajo, Fontenelle, and several smaller reservoirs[11]. These Upper Basin depletions have been somewhat offset by small amounts of accumulation at other reservoirs[12]. Flaming Gorge Reservoir, the largest facility upstream from Lake Powell, was at its lowest at the very end of January and increased 41,100 af of storage in February and the first half of March. In contrast, the total contents of Lake Powell and Lake Mead continue to be drawn down. Lake Powell was at its highest on 1 January 2025, has lost 803,000 af of storage since that time, and will probably continue to decline for another month, based on projections by Reclamation[13]. Lake Mead increased in storage after 1 January, peaked in late February, and subsequently lost 74,000 af. Last year, storage in Lake Mead continued to be lost until early August, and the same pattern is likely this year. The total loss of storage in Lake Powell and Lake Mead between 1 January and 15 March was 476,000 af. The rate of loss from the Mead-Powell system for the next few weeks will be determined by the balance between inflows to Lake Powell and releases from Lake Mead.
[2] Total active storage in the same 46 reservoirs on 15 March 2025 was less than on the same date in 2022 (23.5 million af) and in 2023 (21.3 million af).
[3] On 21 July 1999, total active storage in the same 46 reservoirs was 59.5 million af.
[4] Lake Mead stored 9.01 million af, Lake Powell stored 7.85 million af, the 42 reservoirs upstream from Lake Powell stored 7.74 million af, and 2.30 million af were in Lake Mohave and Lake Havasu on 15 March.
[5] On 27 July 2021, active storage in Lake Powell was 7.90 million af, approximately the same as today.
[6] On 20 March 2025, snow water equivalent (SWE) in the Upper Colorado Region was 97% of median with 18 days remaining until the annual peak SWE typically occurs.
[8] This comparison is for the reservoir drawdown between the mid-summer peak and the following spring’s minimum storage prior to the next year’s runoff. The smallest draw down of total basin reservoir storage in the recent 15 years was between 13 July 2023 and 17 April 2024 (2.15 million af). The second smallest drawdown was 2.61 million af between 6 July 2014 and 4 May 2015. Drawdown was 2.56 million af between 4 August 2011 and 30 April 2012 and was 2.82 million af between 28 July 2019 and 29 April 2020.
[10] Maximum draw down of these Upper Basin reservoirs was 1.49 million af on 26 February 2025.
[11] Net drawdown exceeding 1,000 af between early January and mid-March occurred at Granby (69,600 af), Williams Fork (6,570 af), Dillon (4,520 af), Green Mountain (8,940 af), Ruedi (5,310 af), Taylor Park (1,790 af), Blue Mesa (17,200 af), Fontenelle (54,100 af), Upper Stillwater (1,230 af), and Navajo (28,400 af) Reservoirs.
[12] Reservoirs accumulating more than 1,000 af storage between January and mid-March were Willow Creek (1,300 af), Rifle Gap (2,600 af), Vega (1,400 af), Crawford (1,750 af), Big Sandy (1,670 af), Eden (1,150 af), Meeks Cabin (2,290 af), Red Fleet (1,030 af), Steinaker (2,910 af), Strawberry (7,050 maf), Starvation (15,200 af), Moon Lake (3,180 af), Scofield (4,950 af), and Vallecito (6,060 af) Reservoirs.
Talk Given to Business for Water Stewardship on March 10, 2025
In Colorado, we confront challenges as opportunities. As Wallace Stegner, the famed Western writer, once put it—it’s impossible to be pessimistic in the West; it’s the native land of hope. How we manage our water is a test of that ethos.
There are no two ways to put this: we face significant water scarcity challenges in Colorado and the West. That scarcity is driven, in part, by increasing demands as population booms. And it’s also driven by our changing climate, which is reducing snowpack, changing runoff patterns, increasing evaporation, and drying soils.
While we know that climate change significantly impacts Colorado’s water, its extent and exact impact is presently unknown. That uncertainty, coupled with the unpredictability in rainfall and snowpack, is destabilizing—making it difficult for farmers, ranchers, and even cities to know what to expect each year or how to plan for the future. Unfortunately, the variable weather patterns we are seeing are very likely to be our new normal, creating considerable pressure for us to create more adaptive and resilient systems for water management.
Increased uncertainty and unpredictability in water make planning more important than ever, with an imperative of developing new and innovative strategies for water management. It is no exaggeration to say that the future success of Colorado will depend, in considerable part, on our ability to adapt to scarcity and reduce the uncertainty and unpredictability that come with it. The best and most durable solutions will go beyond individual success and will collaborate with other interests to find win-win solutions.
I know this is important to Business for Water Stewardship, and I’m excited to talk with you about it today. I also want to speak about how our management of water must remain intertwined with respect for the rule of law, as the solutions we craft are only as good as the laws they are built upon and the institutions charged with implementing and upholding them.
I. Moving Toward a Resilient and Adaptive System of Water Management
Adapting to scarcity and creating more certainty will require us to develop innovative and collaborative strategies for water management. It will also require collective action. We cannot focus on individual successes and ignore the community in which these projects occur. I appreciate how you captured this point on your website:
We believe businesses have an opportunity—and a responsibility— to ensure that their operations and investments improve communities and ecosystems where they do business. And in water-stressed regions, that responsibility is deeply rooted in how we value, use, and protect water. That’s why we help businesses work collaboratively with community and policy stakeholders to advance solutions that ensure people, economies, and ecosystems have enough clean water to flourish.[1]
I couldn’t agree more. Each of us, whether as businesses or individuals, has a responsibility to ensure that, wherever we can, we work to improve communities and ecosystems where we live and work. Let me begin by focusing on a few projects that have done that. And I want to contrast those with projects that do not.
The Maybell Diversion Project is a wonderful example of a project that has multiple benefits. Updating and modernizing the Maybell Diversion Project improved efficiency for irrigation, increases resiliency to drought, and benefitted threatened and endangered species.[2]
Before the project was completed in 2024, irrigators from Maybell Irrigation District had to trudge two hours through steep, rugged sagebrush country to manually open and close the rusted and broken metal headgate.[3] It was an arduous, yet crucial task because Maybell is one of the largest irrigation diversions on the Yampa.[4]
The Nature Conservancy worked with numerous partners to help fund the $6.8M project. Funding partners include: the Bureau of Reclamation’s WaterSMART program; the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation; the Upper Colorado River Endangered Fish Recovery Program,[5] and the Colorado Water Conservation Board.[6]
Today, the opening and closing of the Maybell headgate can be controlled remotely and is determined by a combination of water user needs and available flows into the Maybell Ditch. The Maybell Irrigation District also coordinates with the Upper Colorado River Endangered Fish Recovery Program and the Division of Water Resources to guide water use in the Lower Yampa.[7]
As I said previously, this project promises mutual benefits. It allows continued irrigation of historical lands, which supports local farmers and the economy. At the same time, it also improves fish habitat and removes barriers to boat passage, supporting the environment and secondary economic benefits like river recreation.
In 2021, I spoke to the Colorado Water Congress about “The Imperative of Investing in Water Infrastructure.”[8] In that speech, I highlighted important water infrastructure projects around the state, including a plan to replace the aging Grand Valley Hydroelectric facility with a new more efficient plant capable of producing 1.5 times as much power. Like the Maybell Diversion Project, that plan brought multiple benefits. In addition to producing more clean electricity, their continued use of the water right will ensure that water flows into the 15-mile Reach, a critical stretch of river for four species of endangered fish. Many local irrigators will also benefit from increased diversions at an upstream diversion point supplying the plant.
In that speech, I also emphasized the importance of developing funding sources and investment opportunities in water infrastructure. I mentioned a few success stories, like Proposition DD, HB 21-1260, which provides $20 million in funding for implementation of the Colorado Water Plan, and HB 21-240, which provides $30 million for watershed restoration in response to wildfires, including funding for flood prevention and mitigation. But those are not enough. With continued growth on the horizon, our commitment to fund projects laid out in the Colorado Water Plan is imperative. That plan is the roadmap for investing in our future and fulfilling the Plan’s vision will take billions of dollars.
Photo credit: Rye Resurgence Project
B. Rye Resurgence Project
The Rye Resurgence Project in the San Luis Valley supports continued farming, while reducing water use, improving soil health, and helping the community flourish.
During this time of drought, it is critical that we find ways to use less water without sacrificing economic opportunities. This can help build resilience in the face of shrinking water supplies. Crops, like rye, can use far less water—up to 40%—than other similar crops like barley or oats.[9] This difference is huge in a region that is trying to conserve water in order to balance Rio Grande water use with supply. Data in 2024 shows the San Luis aquifer at its lowest recorded level in history.[10]
An important element of the Rye Resurgence Project is that it recognizes that switching to crops that require less water will only succeed if there is a market where farmers can sell those new crops at a profit. The project helps build a market for Colorado rye by investing significant effort and resources in marketing, branding materials, and personnel to develop relationships between the growers and the end users of rye such as brewers, distillers, millers, bakers, and consumers.[11] Building the market for San Luis Valley Resurgence Rye gives farmers an option to reduce their impact, earn a living wage, and support the local community. By keeping farmers farming, the future health of the community will be sustained.
II. Two Cautionary Tales to Avoid in the Future
The above two projects reflect effective strategies for managing water during this challenging time. There are, however, examples that have proven to be ineffective that are important to learn from. I will discuss two such cautionary case studies, highlighting some pitfalls of mismanaging water.
A. Alfalfa for Saudia Arabia
The growing of alfalfa in Arizona to ship to Saudi Arabia is perhaps the most glaring example of a project whose success comes at the expense of the community in which it occurs.[12] The short story of this project is that Saudi firms bought up 9 square miles of land in Arizona for irrigating and growing alfalfa grass.[13] The firms grew alfalfa in Arizona to export to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates because they had already drained their own aquifers.[14]
Alfalfa is an incredibly water-intensive crop. Growing it in a desert climate drastically impacts the surrounding communities. The Saudis were using the same amount of water to grow hay just for export as what a million people in the state use for water every year.[15] The Saudis invested a huge amount of water into the crop which they couldn’t grow at home because they don’t have the water. Essentially, this is exporting Arizona’s water.
By transporting the alfalfa overseas instead of selling it domestically, this also eliminated all future economic returns on that water. If that alfalfa stayed in Arizona, for example, it could have been sold to domestic cattle producers and benefited local communities and businesses. None of those domestic gains were achieved once the alfalfa left our shores.
Potential Water Delivery Routes. Since this water will be exported from the San Luis Valley, the water will be fully reusable. In addition to being a renewable water supply, this is an important component of the RWR water supply and delivery plan. Reuse allows first-use water to be used to extinction, which means that this water, after first use, can be reused multiple times. Graphic credit: Renewable Water Resources
B. Buy and Dry Schemes
In Colorado, we have seen before what is now labelled a “buy and dry” scheme. This scheme involves the sale of relatively all the water from a community, shipping it to a thirsty urban community and destroying a local agricultural economy. That is, in short, the tale of what happened in Crowley County.[16] As captured in Colorado’s Water Plan, it is an approach that we are committed to avoiding in the future.[17]
For an example of a buy and dry project now on the table, consider the case of the (improperly named) Renewable Water Resources. That project would buy out wells that are currently used to irrigate lands in the San Luis Valley and, rather than using that water for irrigation and farming, it would be piped to the front range for new suburban houses.[18] This has several direct and indirect negative economic impacts as well as cultural impacts on the San Luis Valley. This project makes one rural community suffer while a suburban community prospers.
In contrast to the Rye Resurgence Project, which invests in farmers to help them adapt to new markets, this project disregards farmers and eliminates the economic driver for their community. Proponents say the water is necessary to ensure other communities have enough water supply to secure their future. But we can’t let ourselves be tricked into believing that economic prosperity or managing our water resources is a zero-sum game.
Perkins County Canal Project Area. Credit: Nebraska Department of Natural Resources
C. Perkins County Canal
For another example of approaching our water management challenges as a zero-sum game, take the case of Nebraska’s proposed Perkins County Canal project. In a zero-sum game, there can be some winners, but at a high cost to others. In this case in particular, there will be many more losers and lots of wasted time and money. Rather than pursue such a costly path, we can find shared goals and interests and build solutions to help achieve those.
Under Nebraska’s plans, it will invest the time, money, and effort to build a canal to divert water in Colorado for use in Nebraska under the 1923 South Platte River Compact. If Nebraska does that, then Colorado water users will likely build countermeasures to offset impacts of the canal. Under this scenario, both Nebraska and Colorado would end up investing hundreds of millions of dollars, but almost all water users in each state would end up in a position that is no better than they were before Nebraska proposed the canal.
A better approach to the issue is one that recognizes that the agricultural economy and the communities it supports doesn’t observe state boundaries. The economy is regional. Farmers own land in both states. An individual farmer might buy supplies in Nebraska and farm in Colorado. And the reverse is likely true. Durable solutions need to benefit the region and not make the success contingent on the failure of the other. I will continue to do all I can to work towards such a solution.
See Article 7.
III. The Importance of the Rule of Law in Water Management
As we adapt to changing hydrology and look for flexible and collaborative solutions, it will also be important to stand firm on certain principles. Our success not only relies on our adaptability, but also on a solid foundation of laws that are consistently enforced with predictable results.
Colorado’s framework for managing water is based on state-level oversight and ultimate responsibility. This is bolstered by significant reliance on regional and local partnerships to facilitate solutions that are tailored to the water supply needs of local communities. The Colorado model prioritizes respect for and collaboration with regional bodies, such as water conservancy and conservation districts, with a norm of deferring to local expertise and solutions whenever possible. Nonetheless, the ultimate responsibility of managing Colorado’s water and ensuring compliance with compacts, laws, and regulations falls to the State. This is especially true when we talk about compliance with interstate water compacts.
Governor Clarence J. Morley signing Colorado River compact and South Platte River compact bills, Delph Carpenter standing center. Unidentified photographer. Date 1925. Print from Denver Post. From the CSU Water Archives
A. Interstate Compact Compliance
Compliance with Colorado’s nine interstate water compacts, two international treaties, and three equitable apportionment decrees is exclusively the responsibility of the State. This authority is established by the compact clause of the U.S Constitution that allows States, as sovereigns, to enter into agreements to apportion water between them to avoid conflicts over water.
Once ratified by Congress, interstate compacts become federal law. That does not mean, however, that the federal government controls state water resources. The power to control uses of water is an essential attribute of State sovereignty.[19] When states compact with each other to apportion the waters of interstate streams, those compacts also bind the federal government.[20] As we negotiate or litigate over our interstate compacts, I am dedicated to defending Colorado from federal overreach and protecting Colorado’s compact apportionments.
To the extent a state fails to comply with its interstate compact obligations, the State—and not individual water users, conservation or conservancy districts, or local governments—is held solely liable and responsible for complying or possibly paying damages out of the State’s General Fund.[21] In 2006, for example, the State was required to pay nearly $35 million in damages and legal costs to Kansas for violating the Arkansas River Compact.[22] When there is a challenge to State actions under the terms of these agreements, it is the State that is on the hook and local and regional entities are precluded from participating as parties to help defend the State in such litigation.[23] That is because interstate water disputes, reserved to the “original and exclusive jurisdiction” of the Supreme Court,[24] necessarily invoke States’ sovereignty, with each representing “the interests and rights of all of her people in a controversy with the other.”[25]
Elected officials in charge of managing Colorado’s water are accountable to taxpayers who, as noted above, will ultimately bear the cost of any failure to comply with interstate compacts. If the State manages water in a way in which constituents do not approve, they are able express their views directly to their elected officials or engage in the election process to have their voices heard. It is critical for the State to retain full authority to administer and distribute the waters of the State arising there to comply with interstate compacts as the sovereign with the exclusive authority to do so.
For a cautionary tale of how a state mismanaged its water consider what happened in Nebraska, when it faced an issue of how to manage its groundwater. In short, Nebraska delegated its regulatory authority over groundwater to local Natural Resource Districts instead of the state’s Department of Natural Resources.[26] Those local districts represented only the interests of their own water users, and they faced no direct liability for falling out of compact compliance. As a result, the districts failed to make the difficult policy and enforcement decisions necessary for Nebraska to comply with the compact, and Nebraska was forced to pay nearly $6 million in damages to Kansas after the U.S. Supreme Court found that Nebraska had violated the Republican River Compact.[27]
B. Developing Adaptable and Resilient Strategies for Colorado
Projects like the Maybell Diversion and Rye Resurgence are important to help individuals and communities adapt to variable water supplies. We will also need statewide strategies—and legal institutions—to allow those types of water users to occur while ensuring compliance with our interstate compact obligations. Together, we are well positioned to start a broader conversation on what adaptability and resilient strategies—and what legal tools—can help us achieve this critical goal.
Stakeholders have started to suggest different possible tools that can enable Colorado to better manage our water in an adaptive and resilient manner. One suggested strategy is to create a statewide conservation program that compensates people who forego use of their water rights, particularly at times of great demands on a particular system. The Rio Grande Conservation District is implementing such a system to protect its groundwater resources, for example.[28]
A second concept that some have suggested is to create a strategic reserve of water that Colorado could release to protect its water users from mandatory curtailments that might otherwise result from a shortage of water to downstream states. Under this model, the state would acquire and manage “slack capacity,” putting the state in position to navigate shortages and times when there is more demand for water than available.
Whatever strategies are ultimately developed, they are sure to be more successful if they can be built and tested before we need them. Given the pressures we are seeing on multiple fronts, the time to develop and test such ideas is now. As we know from lessons from other countries, the stakes are high and adopting an imperfect system can give rise to most unfortunate consequences.[29]
* * *
Our ability to adapt to the scarcity of water in Colorado and reduce uncertainty and unpredictability is critical to ensuring a promising future for our state. As I have explained, the best and most durable solutions will go beyond individual success and will collaborate with other interests to find win-win solutions like the Maybell Diversion and Rye Resurgence Projects. As we adapt to changing hydrology and look for flexible and collaborative solutions, it is also imperative to ground solutions in the rule of law and an admirable system. This is a formidable challenge, but one we can undoubtedly meet in the native land of hope.
[19] Tarrant Regional Water Dist. v. Herrmann, 569 U.S. 614, 631 (2013).
[20] Texas v. New Mexico, 602 U.S. 943, 962 (2024).
[21] Kansas v. Nebraska, 574 U.S. 445, 459 (2015) (finding local district boards bore no responsibility for complying with compact and assumed no share of the penalties Nebraska would pay for violations).
[22] Kansas v. Colorado, 533 U.S. 1, 20 (2001) (remanding the case to the Special Master for a determination of damages); Fifth and Final Report of Arthur L. Littleworth, Special Master, at 3, Kansas v. Colorado, No. 105 Orig., vol. II (Jan. 31, 2008).
[23] Texas v. New Mexico, 583 U.S. 913 (2017) (denying motions to intervene by local water districts in compact dispute between states).
[25] Wyoming v. Colorado, 286 U.S. 494, 508-09 (1932); New Jersey v. New York, 345 U.S. 369, 372 (1953); see also South Carolina v. North Carolina, 558 U.S. 256, 267 (1953) (“In its sovereign capacity, a State represents the interests of its citizens in an original action, the disposition of which binds the citizens.”); Nebraska v. Wyoming, 515 U.S. 1, 21 (1995) (“A State is presumed to speak in the best interests of [its] citizens. . . .”).
[26] Neb. Rev. Stat. Ann. § 46-702 (“The Legislature also finds that natural resources districts have the legal authority to regulate certain activities and, except as otherwise specifically provided by statute, as local entities are the preferred regulators of activities which may contribute to ground water depletion.”).
Westwide SNOTEL basin-filled map March 20, 2025 via the NRCS.
Click the link to read the article on The Denver Post website (Elise Schmelzer). Here’s an excerpt:
March 20, 2025
Snowpack across the entire Upper Colorado River Basin sits at 95% of median as the winter draws to a close, according to a report released this week by the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center. But only about 4.5 million acre-feet of water are expected to flow into Lake Powell as snow melts across the Upper Basin — 70% of the median amount recorded between 1991 and 2020. That means there is little hope that spring runoff into the crucial river that makes modern life possible across the Southwest will significantly raise water levels in the region’s two major reservoirs: Lake Powell and Lake Mead…
March 1, 2025 seasonal water supply forecast summary. Map | List
Below-normal runoff is becoming a norm that must be dealt with, Miller said. Research shows that warmer temperatures, drier soils that suck up water and more variable precipitation — all fueled by climate change — have significantly reduced runoff in the Colorado River Basin. Those are among factors that contribute to the discrepancy between normal snowpack and below-normal inflow to Lake Powell, Miller said.
“As a basin, we’re having to face the fact that there is more demand for water than the river can provide,” he said.
Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2024. Credit: Brad Udall
It just keeps getting weirder. Last week, the National Park Service finalized visitor numbers for 2024, finding that nearly 332 million people visited the nation’s national parks, monuments, recreation areas, and historic sites, a new record. Yet instead of trumpeting the burgeoning popularity of “America’s best idea,” the Trump administration urged NPS units and their employees to keep it quiet.
A March 5 communications guidance tells the staff that there will be “no external communications rollout for 2024 visitation data” and individual park units should not issue press releases or other “proactive communications, including social media posts.” They are also given a template to follow if any reporters ask questions.
I reckon this has something to do with the fact that even as visitor numbers — and their impacts — rise, the number of staff tasked with mitigating those impacts is decreasing. The service’s full-time equivalent staffing fell by 15% between 2010 and 2024, even as visitation numbers soared, and that was before DOGE’s mass-termination event, which reduced staffing by as much as another 5%.
The Utah parks the Land Desk regularly tracks did not record record numbers last year, though visitation was still high. Most parks hit all-time highs in 2019, then had a serious drop in 2020 (because the parks were closed during the first wave of COVID), before seeing a huge COVID bump in 2021. Since then things have mellowed out a bit, but Utah’s Mighty Five are still teeming with mighty crowds.
I reckon this has something to do with the fact that even as visitor numbers — and their impacts — rise, the number of staff tasked with mitigating those impacts is decreasing. The service’s full-time equivalent staffing fell by 15% between 2010 and 2024, even as visitation numbers soared, and that was before DOGE’s mass-termination event, which reduced staffing by as much as another 5%.
The Utah parks the Land Desk regularly tracks did not record record numbers last year, though visitation was still high. Most parks hit all-time highs in 2019, then had a serious drop in 2020 (because the parks were closed during the first wave of COVID), before seeing a huge COVID bump in 2021. Since then things have mellowed out a bit, but Utah’s Mighty Five are still teeming with mighty crowds.
Not that they’re going to listen to me, but I really think it’s time the Blue Ribbon Coalition acknowledged the impacts motorized vehicles have on the public lands and those who rely on them, and learn to compromise just a bit. Yes, the motorized vehicle lobby is once again suing the Bureau of Land Management over a travel plan, this time for the San Rafael Swell in Utah.
The BLM released its decision on the plan in December, following years of analysis and public input. The Environmental Impact Statement presented four alternatives, all of which favored motorized use over quiet recreation and environmental protection, albeit to differing degrees. In the end, the agency chose a plan that opened 1,355 miles of roads and trails to all motorized vehicles year-round, left 141 miles open with limits, and kept 665 miles of routes closed to OHVs.
It was a clear victory for the motorized crowd, and a disappointment to environmentalists. Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance attorney Laura Peterson criticized the BLM for once again prioritizing motorized recreation over natural and cultural resource protection, adding that the Swell should “be known for its spectacular views, cultural sites, and opportunities for solitude, not off-road vehicle damage.”
And yet, it was not SUWA that challenged the plan in court, but the Blue Ribbon Coalition, which filed a lawsuit this month spuriously claiming the plan represents a de facto wilderness expansion and denies access to historical sites and state land.
In fact, it doesn’t deny access to anything. Nor does it create a wilderness area or even a “buffer” zone around one. It merely prohibits motorized travel in a relatively small fraction of the planning area.
A little over a year ago I wrote about the BRC’s lawsuit challenging a similar compromise at the Labyrinth Canyon-Gemini Bridges area. The same thoughts apply to this latest move:
Headgate for the North Farmington Ditch. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
The snowpack in the Colorado River watershed typically peaks in early April, and the big melt begins. That date’s coming up, and snowpacks in the Southwest are still lagging way behind normal, almost ensuring that stream runoff will also be below normal this spring, and that could mean a dire year for some irrigators.
Down in Farmington, New Mexico, for example, the Farmers Irrigation District is already expecting to face water restrictions this year, according to a TriCity Recordreport.
The district fills its ditches with Animas River water, where the watershed’s snowpack levels are at about 72% of normal for this date, and are even weaker than in 2021, when many ditches were shut down altogether. Officials indicated that ditches might be put on a two-days-on, two-days-off schedule. One of the main canals, the Farmer’s Ditch, also feeds Farmington Lake, which is the city’s water supply, so if the ditch gets less water, so will the reservoir, forcing Farmington to pump directly from the Animas River. That uses a lot of electricity and lowers the river’s water levels further, taking it away from downstream ditches.
Lake Nighthorse and Durango March 2016 photo via Greg Hobbs.
Officials also said they could boost streamflows by calling for a release of Farmington’s water from Lake Nighthorse, near Durango. This has only happened on rare occasions: A test release in 2021 saw about 11% of the water lost to seepage and evaporation before it even reached the Animas River, and another 5% lost on its way to Farmington.
***
Glen Canyon Dam’s river outlet tubes in their full glory during a high-flow event. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
Meanwhile, things are getting even testier on the Colorado River, where the watersheds that feed Lake Powell also are recording a below normal snowpack. Representatives from the Lower Basin states (California, Arizona, and Nevada) sent what Great Basin Water Network called an “eye-opening” letter to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum. In it they bash the Biden administration’s proposed alternatives for operating Glen Canyon Dam, and asks Burgum to retract the plan and issue a new one that includes their proposals.
The back of Glen Canyon Dam circa 1964, not long after the reservoir had begun filling up. Here the water level is above dead pool, meaning water can be released via the river outlets, but it is below minimum power pool, so water cannot yet enter the penstocks to generate electricity. Bureau of Reclamation photo. Annotations: Jonathan P. Thompson
The big issue with the dam is that the river outlet tubes, which are below the penstocks (or the openings that send water through the hydropower-generating turbines) are structurally unsound, and therefore may not stand up to continuous use. This is a problem because if the lake level were to drop below the minimum power pool — or below the level at which water can be released via the penstocks — then it would leave only the river outlet tubes for downstream releases.
The Biden administration wanted to avoid this by doing everything possible to keep lake levels above the minimum power pool, including reducing downstream releases — even if it might violate the Colorado River Compact — so they can avoid having to rely on the lower river outlets. That means less water running into Lake Mead, which means less water for the Lower Basin states.
The Lower Basin wants the Bureau of Reclamation to try to maintain Lake Powell levels in other ways, such as reducing Upper Colorado River consumption or changing operations at upstream reservoirs, while also repairing the lower river outlets so they can be functional if needed. The letter’s authors state:
One can’t help feeling that the letter is seeking to play on the new administration’s animosity towards Biden in order to get the feds on the Lower Basin’s side of their long-running tussle with the Upper Basin.
You want the real deep dive into Glen Canyon Dam’s infrastructure problems? Then become a paid subscriber and break down the paywall on “The Challenge at Glen Canyon” and all of the rest of the Land Desk archives.
Challenge at Glen Canyon: What’s at stake in a shrinking Lake Powell — Jonathan P. Thompson:
This is just kinda cool and interesting: The San Juan Basin is well known for the fossil fuel extraction that happens there, but it’s also slightly less famous for the actual fossils uncovered from its shales and sandstones. The latest such find is a the most complete skeleton yet recovered of Mixodectes pungens, a large-for-its-time tree-climbing mammal that roamed these parts some 62 million years ago following the Cretaceous-Paleogene mass extinction.
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
Click the link to read the editorial on the Las Vegas Sun website. Here’s an excerpt:
February 28, 2025
The Colorado River is drying up, and now, thanks to President Donald Trump’s unprecedented freeze on federal funding, efforts to save it are drying up too. On his first day back in office, Trump signed an executive order halting the disbursement of funds from the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). Trump claimed the order was intended to attack far-left “Green New Deal” initiatives — an inexplicable claim given that almost no Green New Deal policies have ever been implemented at the federal level. In reality, the order gutted nearly all federal environmental initiatives and anything the president simply didn’t like or considered too “woke” — a term Trump has refused to define.
Among Trump’s victims was $4 billion earmarked to protect the flow of the Colorado River. Those funds were set aside to pay farmers to use less water, increase the efficiency of Western water usage and upgrade critical infrastructure and water capture technology. Now, with the West already parched by a historic megadrought, Trump’s freeze is making a dire situation even worse…The IRA funding was designed to prevent catastrophe. Much of the money was being used to pay farmers and Native American tribes to leave more water in the river, helping to stabilize reservoir levels while putting money in the pockets of rural Americans. In California’s Palo Verde Irrigation District alone, landowners received $40 million to cut back on water use. Without those funds, conservation efforts will grind to a halt. Farmers want to be part of the solution, but they can’t afford to reduce water use and thus reduce crop yield, or move to crops that aren’t as water intensive, without compensation. This freeze leaves them in limbo just as they plan for the next growing season.
The funding freeze also jeopardizes projects meant to support new water-sharing agreements. Arizona lawmakers spent the past 16 months securing $86 million in Bureau of Reclamation funding to build a recycled water plant in Tucson, Ariz., allowing the city to rely less on the Colorado River. But with federal funds in limbo, those plans, and others like them, may be dead in the water. According to Pima County Wastewater Reclamation, the Tucson project alone would have saved an estimated 56,000 acre-feet of Colorado River water over the next 10 years. That’s roughly equivalent to the combined annual water usage for 100,000 homes…Other projects that are now in jeopardy include local conservation projects designed to restore watershed habitat that helps store and filter water that flows to the river and to underground aquifers. These are projects that ensure clean and reliable long-term water supplies in the West…Here in Nevada, lawmakers have been working to retire overdrawn water rights, allowing groundwater to replenish — but those projects rely on federal funding. Similarly, in Arizona and California, farmers depend on federal funds to balance their water budgets. Without these programs, aquifers will continue to shrink, wells will go dry and agricultural output will decline even further. That means higher food prices nationwide and economic devastation for rural communities. If Trump refuses to be a president for all Americans, he should at least recognize that many of his own supporters are among those who stand to lose the most…
Beyond the immediate impact on water supplies, Trump’s funding freeze threatens delicate negotiations over the future of the Colorado River. The current Colorado River Compact expires in 2026. Seven states, 30 Native American tribes and representatives of both the U.S. and Mexican federal governments have spent years locked in tense negotiations over how to allocate the river’s dwindling supply.
At its Feb. 13 meeting, the Pagosa Area Water and Sanitation District (PAWSD) Board of Directors approved increases in rates and other fees for 2025. The increases include a 3 percent increase on water rates and fill station charges and a 10 percent increase on wastewater rates, with wastewater availability of service and wastewater hauler charges rising by 30 percent.
The monthly service charge for water increased from $32.38 to $33.35 with the volume charge per 1,000 gallons growing from $5.81 to $5.98 for 2,001 to 8,000 gallons of usage, from $11.63 to $11.98 for 8,001 to 20,000 gallons of usage and from $14.60 to $15.04 for more than 20,001 gallons of usage. Water fill station charges per 1,000 gallons rose from $12.55 to $12.93, and water availability of service fees increased from $14.73 to $15.17.
Monthly service charges for wastewater increased from $42.64 per equivalent unit (EU) to $46.90 per EU while the short-term rental monthly service charge rose from $59.70 to $65.66. Wastewater availability of service fees increased from $16.25 to $21.13 per month, and wastewater hauler charges per 100 gallons of waste rose from $17.26 to $22.44. Water and wastewater capital investment fees also increased by 3 percent, taking the water capital investment fee from $8,958 to $9,227 and the wastewater capital investment fee from $15,697 to $16,168…Although not noted by Burns, the fee changes also include an increase of water equity buy-in fees from $4,323 to $4,706 and a decrease in wastewater equity buy-in fees from $3,425 to $3,372.
Hoover Dam from the U.S.-93 bridge over the Colorado River December 3, 2024.
Click the link to read the article on the AZCentral website (Brandon Loomis):
February 27, 2025
Key Points
Congress and the Biden administration committed $4 billion to Western drought relief, including money for users who agree to leave water in Lake Mead.
The money is apparently caught in a freeze of federal funds ordered by President Donald Trump, though questions remain without a Reclamation commissioner.
Lawmakers and Arizona’s top water official fear that without the funding, the Colorado River could be pushed deeper into drought, leading to more cutbacks in Arizona.
Facing a dwindling supply that provoked emergency actions to keep the river flowing past Hoover Dam, Congress directed $4 billion to Western drought relief, most of it aimed at shoring up Colorado River water storage. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation signed deals with irrigators, tribes and other rights holders to forgo deliveries and save 1.5 million acre-feet of water over three years through 2025, with some extensions beyond this year. A second round of funds, which members of Congress say is also frozen, is intended to make long-term efficiency improvements, such as lining canals to stop losses when water is delivered to farms. Without the water or the agreements, some officials fear the ongoing negotiations among the seven river states could fall apart…
Officials with the Bureau of Reclamation did not respond to requests for comment or to confirm the freeze or how long it is intended to last. The administration has frozen various congressionally appropriated funds as cost-cutting aide Elon Musk’s team searches for fraud and savings. The president has not yet appointed a commissioner for the Reclamation Bureau, which manages the dams on the Colorado…
Projections for likely reservoir storage by the end of next year put Mead dangerously close to 1,050 feet above sea level, or the trigger that would cause Arizona to lose another 80,000 acre-feet, Arizona Water Resources Director Tom Buschatzke said this week…Failure to save water with the contractual deals that Reclamation made for 2025 could tip the region into that next shortage tier, he said, because the projections already assume that the water will have been saved.
“I have advocated strongly to my Arizona (congressional) delegation — the entire delegation — that that money in both the upper and lower basins that was committed needs to be spent,” Buschatzke said. “Those projects are critical to stabilizing the system as we continue to work toward a post-2026 world.”
The Biden administration inked three-year deals with about two dozen water users, including the cities of Phoenix, Tucson, Scottsdale and others, at a rate of $400 per acre-foot. California’s Imperial Irrigation District got a sweeter deal, at $777 for a one-year contract in 2023, but also has among the river’s safest rights against reductions when reservoir levels fall. Most of the water users who signed on were in Arizona, though the biggest deal, a four-year pact to leave 351,000 acre-feet in Mead, was with the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California and Paloverde Irrigation District of California. Arizona’s largest deal was with the Gila River Indian Community, for 341,000 acre-feet, according to a chart provided by Stanton’s staff. The contracts in the Lower Basin states — those downstream of Glen Canyon Dam — totaled nearly $664 million…A second batch of federal conservation funds, also reportedly frozen, is intended to make lasting water savings by, for instance, putting $87 million toward an advanced water purification plant in Tucson that will enable 56,000 acre-feet to stay in Lake Mead over a decade. A $107 million investment in the Gila River Indian Community, south of Phoenix, is projected to save 73,000 acre-feet over 10 years.
Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2024. Credit: Brad Udall
