It’s time for an agreement in the Colorado River Basin, Colorado water and climate experts say.
Colorado River officials are at odds over how to store and release water in the basin’s reservoirs when the current rules lapse in 2026. Publicly, state negotiators stick close to their original, competing proposals, released early in 2024. Colorado experts watching the process understand the difficulty — it’s painful to talk about cutting water use — but time is of the essence.
Jennifer Pitt, the National Audubon Society’s Colorado River program director, paddles a kayak through a restoration site. (Source: Jesus Salazar, Raise the River)
“I have no idea what’s going to get them to agreement,” said Jennifer Pitt, the Colorado River program director for the National Audubon Society. “To me, the biggest pressure seems like time is running out.”
But there seems to be a lack of trust between the state negotiators, said Jennifer Gimbel, senior water policy scholar at the Colorado Water Center at Colorado State University.
“Not only is there this lack of trust, but there almost seems to be this effort to promote your own proposals by denigrating other proposals,” Gimbel said. “That frustrated me to no end. It’s like they have these political rallies.” [ed. emphasis mine]
If states are going to propose a united plan, then they need to do it by the end of 2025, preferably sooner, experts said.
“We continue to stand firmly behind the Upper Division States’ Alternative, which performs best according to Reclamation’s own modeling and directly meets the purpose and need of this federal action,” Colorado’s negotiating team said in a prepared statement Tuesday.
The basin is also about to see new leadership at the federal level. Colorado water experts are waiting to know who President Donald Trump will appoint to key positions, like the commissioner of Reclamation and the assistant secretary for water and science.
“They’re in a really tough spot. I would understand that,” said John Berggren with the environmental group Western Resource Advocates. “I hope they’re continuing to negotiate and have productive conversations, and I hope they’re open to some more creative options.”
Planning for the extremes
So what options are they considering? In the absence of a seven-state agreement on how to manage the basin’s water supply, the Bureau of Reclamation outlined five possible plans in November:
No action: Included as a formality and shows the risk of doing nothing
Federal authorities: Includes maximum Lower Basin cuts of 3.5 million acre-feet in extremely dry years
Federal authorities hybrid: Includes maximum cuts of 3.5 million acre-feet in the Lower Basin and conserving up to 200,000 acre-feet in the Upper Basin
Cooperative conservation: Includes maximum cuts of 4 million acre-feet in the Lower Basin and conserving up to 200,000 acre-feet in the Upper Basin
Basin hybrid: Includes maximum cuts of 2.1 million acre-feet in the Lower Basin and conserving up to 100,000 acre-feet in the Upper Basin
Colorado experts want to make sure the federal planning process is broad enough to include the worst possible conditions.
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’s flows are about 20% lower now than in the 20th century, said Brad Udall, senior water and climate research scientist at the Colorado Water Center at Colorado State University. That’s a drop from about 15.2 million acre-feet per year to about 12.4 million acre-feet, he said.
That’s not enough for the 15 million acre-feet allotted to the seven U.S. states, much less the additional water owed to Mexico and tribal nations.
Udall wants to make sure officials are planning for scenarios in which the river’s flow drops by an additional 10%, or down to 11 million acre-feet.
“The question is … who takes the pain? Is it all Lower Basin? Is Upper Basin sharing that?” he said.
One new detail for the Colorado experts who reviewed the report was the duration of the next management plan: Reclamation wants it to last for at least 20 years after 2026. It is unlikely to be a short-term, interim plan to give negotiators more time to reach a unified agreement.
The revised proposal submitted by the Upper Basin states — Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming — also highlighted conserving up to 200,000 acre-feet of water (depending on river conditions), which seemed to move the states closer to alignment with Reclamation, experts said…
The Upper Basin’s revised proposal, and the federal options, include different “pools” in Lake Powell on the Utah-Arizona border, which would function like savings accounts and could store water conserved by Upper Basin states. Colorado water experts are keeping a close eye on how these accounts might work.
“Putting water in Powell is a good thing, but nobody in the Upper Basin wants to send water to protect Powell that ultimately just runs downstream,” said Steve Wolff, general manager of the Southwestern Water Conservation District based in Durango.
The experts wanted to know more about how conservation pools would function; how federal authorities in the basin might expand; which reservoirs will be included in the plan; what the impacts to the Grand Canyon would be under the different plans; and ultimately, what plan will stabilize the system.
They’ll have to wait to find out: The bureau is expected to release a deeper analysis of how each alternative could impact water management in different conditions later this year.
The Bureau of Reclamation’s final selection will likely mix and match elements of the different alternatives, said Carly Jerla, senior water resource program manager with the Bureau of Reclamation in a December presentation in Las Vegas.
“It’s a shame we don’t have a combined Upper Basin and Lower Basin plan right now,” Udall said. “Once Reclamation does its modeling, we’ll learn a lot. But we need a combined plan.”
At the confluence of Canyon Creek and the Colorado River. Photo credit: Friends of Canyon Creek
Click the link to read the article on The Denver Post website (Elise Schmelzer). Here’s an excerpt:
The pilot program has paid water users — mostly farmers and ranchers — in the four states in the Colorado River’s Upper Basin to voluntarily use less river water than their water rights allow. Farmers from Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah could choose not to irrigate some of their land or to grow a crop that uses less water. Over the last two years, the Upper Colorado River Commission has spent $44.6 million to conserve 101,441 acre-feet of water, enough water to supply more than 200,000 households with a year’s worth of water. But federal lawmakers late last year failed to pass a bill that would reauthorize the System Conservation Pilot Program, or SCPP. That lapse has forced the program’s managers to cancel plans to begin accepting applications early this month for 2025 projects and has jeopardized the effort’s near-term future. Congressional leaders from Colorado and other states in the drought-stricken river basin on Tuesday filed legislation that would restart the System Conservation Pilot Program. The bill — the Colorado River Basin System Conservation Extension Act — is sponsored by lawmakers from both political parties who represent Colorado, Wyoming and Utah…
President Donald Trump, on the first day of his new administration, issued an executive order freezing spending from the Inflation Reduction Act. That law was part of billions of dollars of investments by former President Joe Biden’s administration into clean energy and climate change-related projects, including $125 million for the SCPP. While more than $80 million remains allocated for the SCPP, the program cannot continue until Congress reauthorizes it and the administration allows Inflation Reduction Act spending again.
Chris Bowers (right) surveys a site where nonfunctional turf is being replaced on the University of Northern Colorado campus on January 15, 2025. The landscaping change will bring water use on that patch of campus down from about 3 million gallons each year to 1 million. Photo credit: Alex Hager/KUNC
Click the link to read the article on the KUNC website (Alex Hager):
January 23, 2025
This story is part of ongoing coverage of water in the West, produced by KUNC in Colorado and supported by the Walton Family Foundation. KUNC is solely responsible for its editorial coverage.
Way before spring, when the trees are leafless skeletons and the grass is dry and beige, the people in charge of helping plants blossom at the University of Northern Colorado were hard at work. Chris Bowers, the school’s energy and sustainability manager walked through the churned-up dirt of a construction site near the campus commons building. Sparse and brown on a chilly January day, he laid out a vision for the space’s future in warmer months.
“There will be people hanging out and studying and eating lunch and using a space that was not used at all before,” Bowers said.
This site is an experiment in reshaping the unused grassy expanses that sprawl across campus. For decades, the area was a patch of green grass that fell into the category of “nonfunctional turf” – a term water experts use to describe grass that serves no purpose besides aesthetics.
Now, as part of a statewide effort to save water, Colorado’s government is trying to convince people and institutions to rip out their thirsty grass lawns and replace them with native plants and more functional space. It comes amid an urgent need to cut down on water use, but there are limits to the amount of water that can be saved.
With the help of a state grant and money from the nonprofit Western Resource Advocates, UNC’s patch of grass — which long served no purpose besides looking pretty — will be replaced with a patio, spots for hammocks and native prairie grasses.
“This is the first step in what we hope is a push forward in this becoming more of a standard across campus,” Bowers said.
While UNC is only replacing grass in a relatively small area for now, the water savings are fairly substantial. That area will see its water use go down from about three million gallons each year to about one million. UNC officials said the native plants in that area may actually demand more water than is currently used during their first three years of growth but will need less in the long term. Some years, they said, those plants might require no irrigation water and grow using only water that falls from the sky.
The project is part of a program from the Colorado Water Conservation Board, the state’s top water management agency. It gave grants to fifty different water-saving projects, the majority of which are on the Front Range.
A car drives by a turf replacement project at the University of Northern Colorado on January 15, 2025. Proponents of the work hope its location near a busy road, will help raise awareness about water-saving landscaping. Photo credit: Alex Hager/KUNC
As Colorado – and more broadly, the arid Southwest – struggles with drought and long-term drying due to climate change, policymakers are under pressure to cut back on water use. Colorado’s turf replacement program is borne out of that reality, but it may only be able to make a minuscule dent in the state’s overall water use.
The overwhelming majority of the state’s water — between 80-90% — is used for agriculture. Only 7% of the state’s water is used by cities and towns, and only 2.7% of the state’s water is used outdoors in cities and towns. So any efforts to cut down on lawn watering will only be working within that tiny slice of the state’s overall water portfolio.
A 2024 report from the CWCB estimated how much water could reasonably be saved through turf replacement programs. After taking out water used for trees and shrubs, and functional turf like sports fields or city parks — which experts say are worth watering — state officials think they can save .004% of the state’s total water use.
The CWCB requested $1.4 million in its 2025 budget to run a more complete analysis of land cover across Colorado and get a more accurate appraisal of how much nonfunctional turf there is across the state.
Jenna Battson, the agency’s outdoor water conservation coordinator, said programs to replace nonfunctional turf are still worthwhile, especially as a way to give people a visible reminder of ways to cut back on water use.
“They think, ‘Oh, I can do this and save water,’ and then it might cascade and allow them to start thinking about other ways that they can reduce their water use,” she said. “Which I think will have a broader impact than just the water savings on its face.”
Battson said a turf replacement project like UNC’s, on a college campus near a busy road, might have an added impact because of what she called “the neighbor effect.”
“If you’re doing more really public spaces that are highly visible,” Battson said.” That impact can also spread because people are seeing it.”
Larger projects like the one on UNC’s campus will certainly deliver water savings, but what actually happens to that saved water is another question entirely. In cities across the arid West, conserving municipal water rarely means more water is left in the rivers that supply them.
Around Colorado and the Southwest, some cities have instituted conservation measures to help facilitate further growth. In Colorado Springs, for example, a regime of grass replacement and lawn watering restrictions has allowed the city to grow by about 40% while bringing average per capita water use down by nearly 40%, and total water deliveries down by about 25%.
Those kinds of savings are especially important in Greeley, where population growth has exploded in recent years. Between 2022 and 2023, Greeley grew by 3.1%, far and away the largest rate of growth among Colorado’s 15 largest cities.
Lindsay Rogers, policy manager for municipal conservation at Western Resource Advocates, says those water savings are still valuable.
“It’s very possible that the savings from the UNC project are not going to end up back in the Poudre River,” she said. “But there’s still a huge benefit to using those savings to support new growth, as opposed to relying on new supplies.”
Western Resource Advocates helped pay for the UNC project. The group also receives funding from the Walton Family Foundation, which supports KUNC’s Colorado River coverage.
Clinton Meagher nails artificial turf into the ground at a Henderson, Nevada home on June 15, 2021. Aggressive water conservation measures have helped the Las Vegas area bring its water use down while adding population. Photo credit: Luke Runyon/KUNC
Turf replacement programs have been switched into hyperspeed in the cities that need it most. While the practice is still gaining traction in Colorado, fast-growing cities elsewhere in the Colorado River basin have leaned hard into it.
In Las Vegas, which has a relatively small allocation of water from the Colorado River, the city has grown by about 750,000 people since 2002 and managed to bring down its use of Colorado River water by 26%. Those kinds of savings are partially thanks to a turf removal program going back more than two decades, but also a uniquely aggressive enforcement strategy in which a team of investigators drives around issuing fines for water waste.
While similar efforts are unlikely in Colorado anytime soon, policymakers are pushing ahead to cut back on nonfunctional grass to save more water in cities.
The Colorado Water Conservation Board is still taking proposals for more water conservation projects like the one at UNC. It recently picked seven projects that are close to getting approved. Battson said there’s already high demand for the next round of funding, which is about $470,000.
Starting January 1, 2026, a new statewide law will go into effect prohibiting local governments from allowing new nonfunctional turf to be planted.
Yampa River near Deer Lodge Park. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Premiered Jan 22, 2025
Discover the magic of the Yampa, the last wild river in the Colorado River Basin, and learn how to build a movement to protect a wild river near you. Step 1: Be proactive… Since 2012, OARS has joined forces with American Rivers and Friends of the Yampa, to host an annual Yampa River Awareness Project (YRAP) river trip. This initiative invites key decision-makers, stakeholders, and activists on a transformative rafting journey along the free-flowing Yampa River, offering them the chance to experience firsthand what could be lost if the river is threatened by a major dam, diversion, or dewatering project. Filmed during the 2024 YRAP trip, A Guide to Fighting for Wild Rivers illustrates how immersing people in a river’s beauty and sharing its ecological significance fosters deep, personal connections that inspire long-term conservation. Each trip builds a growing network of passionate river defenders, united by a shared commitment to preserving the Yampa for future generations. Explore Yampa River rafting trips: https://bit.ly/49DoNCA The step-by-step conservation model shared in the film takes a cue from early river crusaders like David Brower, Bus Hatch, and Martin Litton, whose advocacy efforts helped achieve several major conservation wins for western rivers, galvanized by people’s love of a place.
In December 2007 the Secretary of the Interior adopted coordinated operating guidelines for operation of Glen Canyon Dam and Hoover Dam for an interim period that expires in 2026.To address long-term Colorado River operations after the expiration of these guidelines, the United States Department of the Interior initiated a National Environmental Policy Act process on June 16, 2023, to develop and adopt successor domestic guidelines and agreements for the operation of Glen Canyon Dam and Hoover Dam to take effect in mid-2026, before the current operational framework expires. On November 20, 2024, the Bureau of Reclamation published the range of alternatives planned for analysis in the draft environmental impact statement and committed to providing additional information in a subsequent report. This report describes these alternatives and the process for developing them in more detail.
The alternatives were developed over the past year and incorporate considerable input received from the Colorado River Basin States, Colorado River Basin Tribes, conservation organizations, other federal agencies, and other stakeholders during that time. Throughout 2024, the Bureau of Reclamation worked extensively with these key partners to integrate their input into the range of alternatives. The alternatives identified in this report provide a reasonable and broad range of Colorado River operations that capture an appropriate range of potential environmental impacts from implementing new operational guidelines post-2026.
The five alternatives described in detail in this report are:
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
No Action Alternative – Included as a requirement of the National Environmental Policy Act, the No Action Alternative assumes Colorado River operations would revert to annual determinations announced through the Annual Operating Plan for Colorado River Reservoirs process and be based on operating guidance in place prior to the adoption of the 2007 Colorado River Interim Guidelines for Lower Basin Shortages and Coordinated Operations for Lake Powell and Lake Mead.
Federal Authorities Alternative – This alternative is designed to achieve protection of critical infrastructure within the Department of the Interior’s and Bureau of Reclamation’s current statutory authorities and absent new stakeholder agreements.
Federal Authorities Hybrid Alternative – This alternative is based on proposals and concepts from Tribes, federal agencies, and other stakeholders and is designed to achieve protection of critical infrastructure while benefitting key resources through an approach to distributing storage between Lake Powell and Lake Mead that enhances the reservoirs’ ability to support the Colorado River Basin.
Receding waters at Lone Rock in Lake Powell illustrate the impacts of megadrought. Hydroelectric generation will be endangered if the lake continues to shrink. Credit: Colorado State University
Cooperative Conservation Alternative – This alternative is informed by a proposal submitted by a consortium of conservation organizations with the goal of stabilizing system storage, integrating stewardship and mitigation strategies of Lake Powell and Lake Mead, maintaining opportunities for binational cooperative measures, incentivizing water conservation, and designing flexible water management strategies.
Hoover Dam with Lake Mead in the background December 3, 2024.
Basin Hybrid Alternative – This alternative reflects components of the proposals and concepts submitted by the Upper Division States, Lower Division States, and Colorado River Basin Tribes that could provide a basis for coordinated operations and may facilitate greater agreement across the Basin.
Releasing the Bureau of Reclamation’s intended approach to the alternatives in advance of publishing the draft environmental impact statement enhances transparency and public understanding of this important National Environmental Policy Act process and provides greater opportunities for collaboration. Information submitted following the November 20, 2024, publication of the range of alternatives has not been considered in this report. Following the publication of this report, the Bureau of Reclamation will continue its efforts working with Colorado River Basin partners and stakeholders and will analyze information submitted after November 20, 2024. The Bureau of Reclamation will also prepare the environmental impact analysis for the draft environmental impact statement.
Colorado River “Beginnings”. Photo: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism
The Burr Trail as it approaches the western boundary of Capitol Reef National Park. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
Click the link to read the article on the Land Desk website (Jonathan P. Thompson):
January 17, 2024
🤯 Crazytown Chronicle 🤡
You really can’t make this stuff up: The Garfield County board of commissioners really wants to name a highway in their midst after President-elect Donald Trump. They will consider two options at their Jan. 27 meeting, with the first one being to change the “Burr Trail Scenic Backway” to the “Donald J. Trump Presidential Burr Trail Backway.”
Oy frigging vey.
The Burr Trail, which runs from Boulder, Utah, through Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, the Waterpocket Fold, and Capitol Reef National Park, ending up just outside Ticaboo, started out as a livestock trail in the 1880s and is named after rancher John Atlantic Burr. It is now not only a spectacularly scenic drive, but also one of the most controversial roads in the West.
Portions of the trail became a road in 1948, when the Atomic Energy Commission bulldozed the switchbacks through the Waterpocket Fold to provide motorized access to uranium mining claims. According to a National Park Service history, the road was widely used by uranium miners throughout the ‘50s and into the ‘60s. In 1967 the federal government funded improvements to the route as part of a project to provide road access to the new Bullfrog Marina on Lake Powell (which started filling up in 1963)
The Silver Bullet on the Burr Trail just above the switchbacks in Capitol Reef National Park. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
Ever since, Garfield County has wanted to continue to improve the road and, ultimately, pave its entire 66 miles, thinking it would attract a more conventional, bigger-spending brand of tourists than the dirtbag backpackers that frequented the region in the 70s and 80s. The county was in tough shape economically, largely because market forces were crushing the uranium mining industry and small-scale ranching, and so it was looking to fill the void with tourism. In 1983, Wayne County Commissioner and paving advocate H. Dell LeFevre told the New York Times:
Coyote Gulch’s VW Bus South Park 1973.
Environmental groups and the National Park Service, however, have pushed back, saying paving the gravel, washboarded route would encroach on federal lands and increase access — and impacts — to the backcountry. Conservationists launched lawsuits countering county claims that it owns the road and should control how it’s maintained.
The Burr Trail thus became yet another symbol in the long-running culture war over roads, federal land management, and an arcane federal mining law statute known as RS-2477.
In 1987, as an environmental lawsuit seeking to block blacktopping made its way through the courts, someone poured sugar into the fuel tanks of Garfield County bulldozers being used to work on the Trail, a la the Monkey Wrench Gang. A local uranium miner and founding member of what would become the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance was charged with the crime but acquitted.
Shortly thereafter, a district judge ruled against the environmentalists and allowed the BLM to greenlight Garfield County’s bid to blacktop the section of road from Boulder to the western boundary of Capitol Reef National Park.
That didn’t end the battle, however. Garfield County has continued its crusade to pave the remainder of the route, and the Burr Trail has been featured in many a court case. In 1996, the National Park Service dragged the county to court after its crews bulldozed a hill to fix a blind corner. And in 2019, Trump’s Bureau of Land Management permitted it to chip-seal a seven-mile section on the other side of Capitol Reef NP; the county carried out the work before environmentalists had a chance to challenge it. A judge ultimately let the asphalt remain.2
The Burr Trail, in other words, is almost as polarizing as a certain president-elect, which could be one reason a rural Utah county wants to rename the backroad after a Manhattan real estate baron and reality TV show host who has never set foot in that part of the world and sure as hell couldn’t tell a juniper from a piñon tree even if a giant coyote whacked him over his orange head with it.
But Garfield County Commissioner Leland Pollack says he wants to rename the route to show his appreciation for Trump’s first-term policies, including shrinking Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, telling KSL: “This is just a sign of appreciation. This guy right here was good to Garfield County and he was good to all of the Western public land counties.” Sure, Leland.
The Grand Staircase-Escalante Partners opposes the renaming, even going so far as to refuse to utter the proposed new name in its press release. The statement notes:
🌵 Public Lands 🌲
In its waning days, the Biden administration has been quite active on the public lands front. In a future post I’ll get into Biden’s environmental legacy, but for now here’s a quick rundown of some of the administration’s latter-day moves:
Biden’s designation of the Chuckwalla National Monument in southern California adds another link to what is now being called the Moab to Mojave Conservation Corridor, a strip of protected lands that follows the Colorado River from southeastern Utah to the Mojave Desert. Prior to Chuckwalla, Biden bolstered the corridor by restoring Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears national monuments and by establishing the Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni and Avi Kwa Ame national monuments.
Source: National Parks Conservation Association
The administration finalized the management plans for both Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears national monuments. I’m not going to give a full rundown on the plans here, because they are so similar to the draft plans, which I detailed in earlier dispatches (GSENM & Bears Ears). There are a few modifications, however. Perhaps most significant is that a ban on recreational shooting throughout Bears Ears was scaled back to apply only to campgrounds, developed recreation sites, rock writing sites, and structural cultural sites. Meanwhile, both plans, especially Bears Ears, take an overly laissez faire approach to livestock grazing, perpetuating impacts on ecological and cultural resources.
The federal Bureau of Land Management terminated Utah’s right of way for a proposed four-lane highway across the Red Cliffs Conservation Area outside St. George. The state and Washington County have been trying for years to build the road in order to “accommodate” the area’s breakneck growth. In 2020, the Trump administration finally issued a right of way, but conservationists sued and forced the BLM to reconsider. In December, the agency sided with the conservationists, revoking the right of way and suggesting St. George expand the existing Red Hills Parkway rather than build a new road through desert tortoise habitat.
The Interior Department launched the process of banning new mining claims and mineral leases on about 270,000 acres of federal land (plus an additional 40,000 acres of private land the feds hope to acquire) near Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge in Nevada. Conservationists had been looking to get added protections on the area after lithium mining and geothermal energy companies began eyeing it.
***
Republican lawmakers have launched their latest bid to diminish a president’s power to protect landscapes and cultural resources. This week, Rep. Celeste Maloy, of Utah (and who happens to be Ammon Bundy’s cousin), and Rep. Mark Amodei, of Nevada, introduced the Ending Presidential Overreach on Public Lands Act, which would gut the 1906 Antiquities Act and end a president’s power to establish national monuments. I doubt this will make it very far, since national monuments and parks are pretty damned popular, and Grand Canyon, Zion, Arches, and many other national parks were first established as national monuments under the Antiquities Act.
***
On that note, the Senate held hearings on Trump’s nominee for Interior Secretary, Doug Burgum. Burgum is the former governor of North Dakota, which, by the way, is not considered a public lands state. So it’s a bit bizarre that he’s even being considered for this position — except he is big on fossil fuels and is clearly on board with Trump’s “drill, baby, drill-energy dominance” approach. In the clips I saw, Burgum displayed a lack of knowledge on the public lands he will probably soon oversee. For example, he talked about timber harvesting on public lands, when most public-land logging occurs on U.S. Forest Service land, which is overseen by the Agriculture Department, not Interior. Then he responded to a question about the aforementioned Antiquities Act, saying: “The 1905 Antiquities Act … it’s original intention was to protect … antiquities … areas like Indiana Jones type archaeological protections.” Uhhh… that would be the 1906 act, buddy. And what the hell are Indiana Jones type archaeological protections? Do we really want an Interior Secretary who gleans his knowledge from the movies? Oy.
During his confirmation hearing this AM, @dougburgum.bsky.social said the Antiquities Act was meant only for "Indiana Jones-type archeological protections."Does he know his hero Teddy Roosevelt used the AA to protect 800,000 acres in and around the Grand Canyon?
Energy Fuels — the owner of the White Mesa uranium mill and the Pinyon Plain mine — is perhaps the most active of all the uranium companies making a lot of noise about exploration and reopening long-idled facilities. They are also the most vocal, telling reporters that current safety and environmental standards and regulations and enforcement are far better than during the Cold War era when the industry ravaged lives and the landscape.
As if to prove the point, the federal Mine Safety & Health Administration recently issued 16 citations to Energy Fuels and its contractors working on the company’s La Sal Mines Complex in southeastern Utah. Violations related to radon concentration and radon monitoring requirements, worker training, personal protection equipment use, and explosive material storage.
Sarah Fields, of Uranium Watch, says she’s “never seen this many violations of this nature at an operating uranium mine from a single inspection.”
One of the contractors, Three Steps Resources, is run by Kyle Kimmerle, holder of numerous mining claims throughout southern Utah and a party to Utah’s lawsuit seeking to revoke Bears Ears National Monument.
1 LeFevre would become an outspoken opponent of Bill Clinton’s 1996 designation of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. Interestingly, many opponents of that and the Bears Ears designation worried that they would increase industrial-scale tourism.
2 Garfield County also wants to pave a portion, at least, of the Hole-in-the-Rock road, which also crosses a section of GSENM near Escalante. Conservationists are also pushing back.
Rio Grande, looking south near Cole Park. The Alamosa Riverfront Project is among several that received funding last week under the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. Credit: The Citizen
Conservationists focused on the Rio Grande Basin signal it as an initial win in a battle for federal dollars to address the impacts of drought and the need for a sustainable water supply.
They’ve seen how the federal government has kicked into gear to address the same issues on the Colorado River Basin, and have wondered why the Rio Grande Basin largely has been ignored.
Until now.
The U.S. Department of Interior and Bureau of Reclamation announced last week in the final days of the Biden Administration a $24.97 million award to support water conservation and habitat restoration efforts in the headwaters of the Rio Grande.
It’s a drop in the bucket compared to the billions that have been awarded to projects on the Colorado River, but it’s a start.
“Today’s announcement provides a critical down payment that will make the headwaters of the Rio Grande better prepared to handle the ongoing impacts of drought, while supporting state and local efforts to sustainably manage water supplies for future generations,” said Alexander Funk, Director of Water Resources, Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership.
The money came through the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and was among the final announcements by the Biden Administration of funding awarded through the federal legislation.
The significance of that is nobody in the agriculture, conservation, and water world knows if the incoming Trump Administration will carry on with the Inflation Reduction Act, or if that particular federal legislation and the $369 billion approved by Congress falls to the wayside.
“We’re shocked we got anything,” said Amber Pacheco of the Rio Grande Water Conservation District and member of the Rio Grande Basin Roundtable. She described a rush at the end to send to the Bureau of Reclamation “shovel-ready” projects that could earn IRA funding.
“It was a ‘quick overnight, send some projects that we can fund,’” said Pacheco.
Rio Grande and Pecos River basins. Map credit: By Kmusser – Own work, Elevation data from SRTM, drainage basin from GTOPO [1], U.S. stream from the National Atlas [2], all other features from Vector Map., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11218868
Out of the award comes funding for a variety of projects in the San Luis Valley as well projects for the middle Rio Grande in New Mexico. Overall, $18 million will go toward Rio Grande Basin projects in Colorado and $7 million for Rio Grande restoration efforts in New Mexico.
The San Luis Valley and Conejos Water Conservancy Districts, the Rio Grande Water Conservation District and the Rio Grande National Forest in southern Colorado are among the eight recipients selected under one cooperative agreement to receive $24.9 million for several drought resiliency activities in the Upper Rio Grande Basin, the Bureau of Reclamation said in announcing the money.
For the Valley, those projects will include the Alamosa Riverfront Restoration project; Rio Grande Reservoir Low Flow Valve; Pine River Weminuche Pass Ditch Turnback Structure; Lower Conejos River Restoration Project; Platoro Reservoir Restoration and Wildfire Risk Mitigation Project – Phase 1; Saguache Creek Multi-benefit Restoration at Upper Crossing Station; and Rio Grande Confluence Restoration Project, among others.
“This announcement shows that when Colorado and New Mexico work together, big things can help that benefit fish and wildlife, support local economies, and tackle some of the region’s most pressing water challenges,” said Funk.
“The Rio Grande is the underpinning that supports the economic and ecological health of the region. This funding allows conservation partners to critically address and relieve the challenges this habitat and community have experienced from long-term drought and sustainability insecurity,” said Tracy Stephens, senior specialist for riparian connectivity at The National Wildlife Federation. “We applaud the Bureau of Reclamation’s investment and recognition of the importance of riparian health and habitat connectivity. This funding is an important step forward in a collective effort to achieve well-connected and functional riparian corridors to protect the wellbeing of people, plants, and wildlife in the Upper Rio Grande.”
Screen shot from the Vimeo film, “Rio Grande Headwaters Restoration Project: Five Ditches,” https://vimeo.com/364411112
These hay bales stand ready to be collected on a ranch outside of Carbondale in July 2024. A program that pays irrigators in the Upper Colorado River Basin to cut back is facing uncertainty in 2025 because of Congressional delays. Credit: Heather Sackett/Aspen Journalism
A federally funded water conservation program in the Upper Colorado River Basin is facing uncertainty for 2025 after the bill to authorize funding for it stalled in Congress late last year.
On Friday, Upper Colorado River Commission Executive Director Chuck Cullom said the commission planned to communicate to participants in the 2024 System Conservation Pilot Program that the UCRC is not accepting applications at this time for a 2025 program. Officials will let people know later this month if and when the application process will open for 2025.
According to a post on the UCRC’s website, which has since been removed, applications were potentially going to be available Jan. 9, with a now-cancelled informational webinar scheduled for Jan. 10.
Officials are holding out hope that the program can still get federal authorization in time for water users — mostly farmers and ranchers — in Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming to conserve water during the upcoming growing season.
“The commission recognizes that SCPP has been an important and useful tool for the Upper Basin to understand the opportunities and issues that conservation programs represent,” Cullom said. “We are hopeful we will have that tool available in 2025 and again in 2026.”
The System Conservation Pilot Program, which pays water users who volunteer to cut back, was restarted in 2023 as part of the Upper Basin’s 5-Point Plan, designed to protect critical infrastructure from plummeting reservoir levels. Over two years, the program spent about $45 million to save about 101,000 acre-feet of water. Funding for SCPP comes from $125 million allocated through the Inflation Reduction Act.
The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s authorization to spend this money expired in December and now must be renewed if the program is to continue.
Anthony Rivera-Rodriguez, a press secretary with the office of U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper, D-Colo., said lawmakers plan to introduce a new bill for funding authorization in the next couple of weeks. He said funding for Western drought programs has not been controversial and has received bipartisan support. The authorization didn’t pass in December, he said, because lawmakers simply ran out of time before the end of the session. The Colorado Sun reported last month that the Senate passed the Colorado River Basin System Conservation Extension Act, but the House of Representatives “left it on the chopping block as lawmakers raced to pass legislation to avoid a government shutdown.”
“We are trying to get this authorized as soon as we possibly can,” Rivera-Rodriguez said.
SCPP has been dogged by controversy since it was rebooted in 2023. The program originally took place from 2015 to 2018.
SCPP has been criticized for a lack of transparency in the 2023 program, not measuring and tracking how much of the conserved water eventually makes it to Lake Powell, and for its potential negative impacts, in general, to the agricultural communities of the Western Slope and, in particular, to an irrigation company in the Grand Valley. In response to the second criticism, officials are working on how Upper Basin states could “get credit” for conserved water through a memorandum of understanding with the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation.
Delta County farmer Paul Kehmeier kneels by gated pipes in his family’s alfalfa field. Kehmeier participated in the 2024 System Conservation Pilot Program and said he would again in 2025 if funding is reauthorized by Congress. Credit: Natalie Keltner-McNeil/Aspen Journalism
Whether reauthorization will come quickly enough for Upper Basin agricultural producers to participate in the upcoming irrigation season remains to be seen. Short notice and a hasty rollout of SCPP for the 2023 growing season meant low participation numbers for that year, with just 66 water-saving projects and about 38,000 acre-feet conserved across the four Upper Basin states. The number of projects in 2024 jumped to 109, with about 64,000 acre-feet conserved.
A last-minute reprieve for the program wouldn’t be a problem for one Delta County rancher who participated in SCPP in 2024. Paul Kehmeier enrolled 58 acres of his ranch in the program last year and said he plans to participate again if the program is extended.
“There are two reasons that I’m planning to participate,” Kehmeier said. “One is that the money is very good, and second is that I don’t think we in the Upper Basin can stick our heads in the sand on all this big river stuff. … My irrigation season starts April 1, so anytime up until the last day of March, if I had a chance to participate, I would jump at the chance.”
The reauthorization of System Conservation comes at a pivotal moment for water users on the Colorado River. Negotiations between the Upper Basin states and the Lower Basin states (California, Arizona, Nevada) on how shortages will be shared after 2026 have ground to a halt. Lower Basin water managers say all seven states that use the Colorado River must share cuts under the driest conditions, while Upper Basin officials maintain they already take cuts in dry years because they are squeezed by climate change and can’t rely on the massive storage buckets of Lake Powell and Lake Mead for their water supply. Upper Basin leaders also maintain that they 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, while the Lower Basin regularly uses its full allotment.
But there has been a recognition in recent months by some Upper Basin officials that their states will have to participate in some kind of future conservation program — SCPP or otherwise — on a river whose flows have declined over the past two decades due to drought and climate change.
“As we get more familiar with this, maybe that can be ramped up to 100,000, 200,000 (acre-feet), I don’t know,” Esteban Lopez, the UCRC commissioner from New Mexico, told attendees at the December Colorado River Water Users Association Conference in Las Vegas. “Maybe we can get there, maybe we can’t. But the point is: We will conserve and we will commit to conserve what we can conserve when there’s water available and put it in an account in Lake Powell.”
Rancher Andy Rice picks a handful of plants from one of his pastures in southern Utah on Aug. 21, 2024. His ranch is part of a state program aimed at conserving water that helps cover the cost of modernizing irrigation equipment. David Condos/KUER
Click the link to read the article on the KUNC website (Dave Condos):
January 3, 2025
This story is part of ongoing coverage of the Colorado River, produced by KUER in Utah, distributed by KUNC in Colorado, and supported by the Walton Family Foundation. It was also produced as part of the Colorado River Collaborative. KSL TV photographer Mark Wetzel contributed to this story.
Southern Utah is not your typical farm country. At a glance, there appears to be more red rock than green fields.
To make a go of it, farms often huddle around the precious few rivers that snake across the sun-baked landscape. That’s the case for rancher Andy Rice, who raises hundreds of hungry goats and sheep in the town of Boulder — population 227 — just outside Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.
In a bright green meadow packed with more than a dozen types of grasses, clovers and flowers, Rice reached down to pluck a makeshift bouquet. He has intentionally planted diverse species here over the years to improve the ranch’s sustainability.
“Isn’t that beautiful?,” he said, holding up a handful of flora. “On top of everything else that’s cool about it, it’s just really pretty.”
But this is still the dry Southwest. The edges of his lush pasture give way to a rugged sandstone ridge. So this grazing smorgasbord is dependent upon irrigation.
The ranch draws water from Boulder Creek, which flows to nearby Lake Powell, the nation’s second-largest reservoir and a pivotal piece of the Colorado River system. Between drought, climate change and competition for that river, however, Rice knows the West faces a precarious future.
“We will have less water. Forever,” Rice said. “We have to accept that and … it’s up to us to be more efficient.”
That’s why he applied for funding from Utah’s Agricultural Water Optimization Program, a $276 million push to help farmers and ranchers modernize their irrigation systems.
Andy Rice holds one of the nozzles on a center pivot sprinkler system his ranch was able to install thanks to state money, on Aug. 21, 2024. Utah’s Agricultural Water Optimization Program has put millions of dollars into helping farmers and ranchers modernize their irrigation systems since 2019. David Condos/KUER
Agriculture uses between 70-80% of the Colorado River’s water, so a lot of ideas about saving the shrinking river rely on getting farmers and ranchers to cut back. The Utah program — which covers half the cost of buying new, more efficient gear — provides a case study that other Western states might look to as they search for solutions. However, it’s not yet clear how big of a dent these types of efforts can make when it comes to saving water on a basin-wide scale.
Rice stood next to the automated center pivot sprinkler system the program helped buy and grabbed one of the dozens of spray nozzles that dangle a few feet above the ground. Compared to the efficiency of the equipment it replaced, he said, the difference is night and day.
“This farm alone has saved millions of gallons of water. We’re using millions less. And we are one tiny farm in one tiny region,” Rice said.
That’s the idea behind the Utah program. If state money lowers the financial barrier for producers to modernize, the water savings might add up to help Utah get more out of the little moisture it has.
Rice is just one example of the state’s approved projects — 551 of them since the initiative began in 2019, said Program Manager Hannah Freeze. The Utah Legislature has set aside $276 million for the effort. As of late 2024, $108 million of that has been assigned to projects. A majority of the money is benefitting the Great Salt Lake, however. Only $23 million has been approved for 112 projects in Utah’s portion of the Colorado River Basin so far.
It’s a good start, Freeze said, but a drop in the bucket compared to what it might take.
“If we were going to make a real dent or reach the majority of the farmers that we have, it’s more like a $2 billion number,” she said.
That would require more time, too — probably around three decades, Freeze said.
Growing the program that much wouldn’t be easy. Some producers are hesitant to change farming practices. For others, equipment cost remains a barrier even with the subsidy.
Many also don’t know that government incentives like the optimization program exist. A 2023 survey of irrigators across the Colorado River Basin by the Western Landowners Alliance and the University of Wyoming found a “stark lack of awareness” about state and federal funding meant to help them conserve water.
Eventually, farmers won’t have much of a choice, noted Freeze.
“There’s going to be water reductions that have to take place,” she said. “So if we can come in first and say, ‘Let us help you get this improved irrigation system,’ then our farmers can stay in business.”
Sprinklers spray water across farm fields in southern Utah on Aug. 22, 2024. Some research has suggested that improving irrigation efficiency ultimately depletes more water from local watersheds. David Condos/KUER
The Utah program offers a glimpse of what a state-funded program to help producers make that transition can look like.
Some science, however, contradicts the idea that installing new, more efficient irrigation systems automatically means saving water in the Colorado River.
New Mexico State University professor Frank Ward and his colleagues found in their research that applying less water is not the same thing as consuming less water.
Higher irrigation efficiency means a larger percentage of the applied water makes it to the roots of the plants, which is good for crop yields. But even if that lets a farmer decrease the total amount of water they apply to a field, it often increases the amount of water depleted from the local watershed.
Ultimately, he said upgrading sprinkler systems typically means less of the water applied as irrigation soaks into groundwater and returns to nearby rivers as run-off, disrupting the local water cycle.
“Drip irrigation and center pivot are good things to do.They promote the goal of lower food prices, higher food production and farm income,” Ward said. “Just don’t call it investments in water conservation.”
To truly assess if a program like Utah’s is saving water for the Colorado River Basin, he said, you’d need to also calculate how much of the water applied to crops is lost to evapotranspiration, a measurement of the water that evaporates and is released into the air from plants.
In Ward’s view, there are more effective ways a state could spend its money to conserve water in agriculture. Government funds could pay farmers to switch to less thirsty crops or water their fields less than what the crops need for optimal growth. Another option would be to pay growers to temporarily leave some land empty or switch sprinkler-fed farmland to a rain-fed ranching pasture.
A lot of these alternatives might not improve the agricultural economy, Ward said, but that’s a trade-off states need to consider if their ultimate goal is to save water.
Andy Rice explains how the irrigation system updates at his southern Utah ranch have changed the way he uses water on Aug. 21, 2024. David Condos/KUER
When it comes to the Utah optimization program, the results remain a bit hazy.
The state is just beginning to quantify how much water it saves, so comprehensive data isn’t available yet. A legislative audit in 2023 criticized the program for not collecting detailed reports on the impact of its projects.
Early examples like Andy Rice’s ranch, however, point to the potential role that irrigation modernization efforts could play across the West.
All told, Rice said the upgrades to the field with a new sprinkler represent a quarter of a million dollars. For family farms that buy irrigation equipment with the same money they use to keep the business afloat or buy their kids’ shoes, he said it can be hard to justify those costs.
If states across the Colorado River Basin help make it easier for farmers to take that leap, however, he believes that could have far-reaching impacts.
“If hundreds of farms can save millions of gallons of water, I mean, we can fix it,” Rice said. “And do I feel like we have a responsibility to do that? Yeah, hell yeah.”
Bureau of Reclamation commissioner Camille Calimlim Touton (left) smiles at JB Hamby of the Imperial Irrigation District at a conference in Las Vegas on December 4, 2024. The federal government has sent hundreds of millions of dollars to the Southern California farming district to incentivize farmers to use less water. Photo credit: Alex Hager/KUNC
Click the link to read the article on the KUNC website (Alex Hager):
December 14, 2024
Where the farm fields meet the desert in Southern California’s Imperial Valley, farmer John Hawk looks out over a sea of green.
“It really is an emerald gem that we have,” he said. “With the water, we can do miracles.”
The Imperial Irrigation District uses more water from the Colorado River than any other single entity – farm district, city, or otherwise – from Wyoming to Mexico. As climate change shrinks the river’s supplies, its biggest users are facing increasing pressure to cut back on their demand.
“Do we need to conserve? Absolutely,” Hawk told KUNC in 2023. “We need to conserve, but we need to be paid for the conservation.”
Last year, the federal government took Imperial’s farmers up on that suggestion. Over the course of three years, it agreed to send more than $500 million to the district to use less water and leave it in Lake Mead, the nation’s largest reservoir. That money comes from the Biden Administration’s Inflation Reduction Act.
Water leaders in the West and Washington D.C. alike have lauded the effort as a pivotal way to boost the reservoir, which has dropped to all-time low levels in recent years. Similar spending has saved water on farms and tribal land across the region. It has also made city utilities more efficient. But now, on the cusp of Donald Trump’s return to the White House, those who use the river’s water are worried that funding could disappear.
“All these programs cost money,” said Gina Dockstader, a fourth-generation farmer who sits on the Imperial Irrigation District board of directors. “All this investment, all this infrastructure costs money, and without these additional funds, these farmers can’t afford to put it in by themselves.”
John Hawk, a farmer in California’s Imperial Valley, walks across an irrigation canal on June 20, 2023. “We need to conserve, but we need to be paid for the conservation,” he said. Photo credit: Alex Hager/KUNC
The federal government needs to keep water in Lake Mead and the nation’s second-largest reservoir, Lake Powell. Without conservation, water levels could drop low enough to cause the shutoff of massive hydropower generators. Even lower water levels could make it impossible to send water from big reservoirs to the Colorado River on the other side of the dams that hold them back.
When the Biden Administration set aside $4 billion of the Inflation Reduction Act for Colorado River work, it lifted some weight off the shoulders of anxious water managers, who could use it to incentivize water conservation and stave off catastrophe at those reservoirs.
Those measures also bought time for negotiators working on new, long-term rules for sharing the river’s water. Nevada’s top water negotiator, John Entsminger, called the federal spending a “once-in-a-generation windfall.”
On the campaign trail, then-candidate Donald Trump said he would claw back unspent funds from the Inflation Reduction Act. That could jeopardize the expensive programs that have brought a wave of temporary peace and certainty for the Colorado River basin.
“It would be really disappointing if that went away,” said Hannah Holm with the conservation group American Rivers. “People are pretty pessimistic.”
American Rivers receives funding from the Walton Family Foundation, which also supports KUNC’s Colorado River coverage.
Holm said the need for water conservation, and funding to make it possible, will only get more important in the future. Climate change is expected to keep shrinking the amount of water in the river and necessitate more cutbacks to the region’s water use.
“If that funding doesn’t materialize,” she said, “We just won’t be as able to adapt as well to the conditions we already have, let alone the conditions that are coming our way.”
The Biden Administration’s infrastructure funding reached a wide variety of water-related projects. Holm cited forest restoration work that helps decrease the likelihood of forest fires, which can add dirt, ash, and harmful debris to rivers that supply drinking water.
A pipe carries treated wastewater out of a water recycling demonstration facility in Carson, California on May 26, 2022. Cities are modernizing their water treatment systems to make them more efficient, often with the help of federal funding. Alex Hager: KUNC
City facilities that treat water for drinking were also on the long list of entities that received federal funding under the Biden Administration.
In the Los Angeles area, for example, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California is spending massive amounts of money on equipment that will help steel its network against future water shortages. That agency is spending more than $3 billion on a water recycling facility, where it will safely turn sewage back into drinking water instead of cleaning it to a lower standard and releasing it into the ocean.
“In the long run, it’s going to be vital for us,” said Deven Upadhyay, Metropolitan’s interim general manager. “In the short run, it looks to be pretty expensive compared to the other resources we have. So the federal dollars really do help.”
Meanwhile, as farms and cities tighten the screws on their water use, the negotiators shaping the big-picture future of the Colorado River are stuck at an impasse. The seven states that use its water are split into two camps, divided by deep ideological differences about who should cut back on their water use going forward.
State water officials are projecting optimism that Trump’s second term will not shake up their talks, citing a historical precedent of stability within federal water agencies that is mostly unaffected by turnover in the White House.
Holm said the future they are negotiating, though, will look different if there is less federal money to ease the pain of water reductions.
“In order to be able to make less water do more,” she said, “We need to be able to manage it a lot more precisely. That takes investment in science, in infrastructure, in monitoring, in figuring out different ways of moving water around. And none of that happens by itself.”
City facilities that treat water for drinking were also on the long list of entities that received federal funding under the Biden Administration.
In the Los Angeles area, for example, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California is spending massive amounts of money on equipment that will help steel its network against future water shortages. That agency is spending more than $3 billion on a water recycling facility, where it will safely turn sewage back into drinking water instead of cleaning it to a lower standard and releasing it into the ocean.
“In the long run, it’s going to be vital for us,” said Deven Upadhyay, Metropolitan’s interim general manager. “In the short run, it looks to be pretty expensive compared to the other resources we have. So the federal dollars really do help.”
Meanwhile, as farms and cities tighten the screws on their water use, the negotiators shaping the big-picture future of the Colorado River are stuck at an impasse. The seven states that use its water are split into two camps, divided by deep ideological differences about who should cut back on their water use going forward.
State water officials are projecting optimism that Trump’s second term will not shake up their talks, citing a historical precedent of stability within federal water agencies that is mostly unaffected by turnover in the White House.
Holm said the future they are negotiating, though, will look different if there is less federal money to ease the pain of water reductions.
“In order to be able to make less water do more,” she said, “We need to be able to manage it a lot more precisely. That takes investment in science, in infrastructure, in monitoring, in figuring out different ways of moving water around. And none of that happens by itself.”
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.
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 InkStain website (John Fleck):
November 15, 2024
I put up a slide for my University of New Mexico water resources graduate students during class yesterday afternoon with two pictures – the emerging canyons at the upper end of Lake Powell, and a smallmouth bass.
When Lake Powell gets low, we get a) the remarkable emergence of Cataract Canyon, and b) warm water invasive smallmouth bass sneaking through Glen Canyon Dam’s outlets, headed downstream to dine on the endangered humpback chub. My University of New Mexico colleagues and collaborators Benjamin Jones and Bob Berrens famously dubbed these “green-vs-green” tradeoffs:
Managing for one – keeping Lake Powell high to keep smallmouth bass out of the Grand Canyon – inevitably conflicts with the other – keeping Lake Powell low to protect the emerging environmental values of Cataract Canyon.
In a new white paper out today, my colleagues Jack Schmidt, Eric Kuhn, and I argue for the creation of a process to better incorporate and manage the multiplicity of values along the Cataract Canyon/Lake Powell/Glen Canyon/Grand Canyon/Lake Mead stretch of the Colorado River as we develop new post-2026 river operating guidelines. We recognize that keeping water flowing to taps and headgates across the Colorado River Basin is the primary motivation behind the new operating guidelines being developed by the Bureau of Reclamation. We argue that, as the community is writing those rules, we have an opportunity to incorporate a broader set of community values.
In particular, we argue that more creative water accounting methods would allow water to be either held upstream in Lake Powell for later delivery, or send downstream early to Lake Mead, in order to better take into account what Benjamin and Bob called the “multiple dimensions of societal value.”
The white paper elaborates on our formal proposal submitted in March to Reclamation as part of the agency’s Post-2026 decision process.
We can all agree that we literally can’t survive without water. The real controversy arises from how we should manage this precious resource.
Ultimately, it comes down to working together. That’s why the theme of the 2024 Water in the West Symposium was “Building Bridges: Collaborative Water Action.” The Nov. 14 event at the Colorado State University Spur campus in Denver brought together more than 150 stakeholders representing everything from the state and federal government to academia and tribal nations.
“We often overlook acres of common ground to focus on less significant differences,” CSU Chancellor Tony Frank said in his opening remarks. “I think with water and in conversations like this one … offer us a path toward unity.”
And during a day filled with panels discussing diverse topics, ranging from agriculture to state water planning and finance, one common theme rang through: progress through collaboration isn’t always easy, but it is possible.
Here are some of the key takeaways.
Teams should create spaces for listening and dissent
Keynote speaker Michaela Kerrissey, an assistant professor of management at the T.H. Chan School of Public Health, focuses much of her research on helping teams solve difficult problems.
“Part of it is about not getting stuck in the problem but figuring out what the solution is,” Kerrissey said.
Finding solutions to problems is a good common goal, and having this sense of purpose is a good anchor to a strong team, Kerrissey said. Another key? Creating a space where everyone feels empowered to speak up – including those who might disagree with the overall consensus.
“The idea behind this is that likely in all of our organizations and all of our teams, great ideas get left behind because the culture doesn’t come with a space to come forward, be heard, and be taken seriously,” she said.
Kerrissey was the first speaker of the day. Martin Carcasson, the founder and director of the CSU Center for Public Deliberation, was the last, and he too focused his remarks on how allowing for disagreement can ultimately lead to better results.
“For divergent thinking, we need to get beyond the usual suspects and status quo and hear all the voices,” he said.
That’s easier said than done. And in an at-times polarized world, his hope is that we create more spaces that allow this to happen.
“We have so many organizations that are designed to divide us, we need organizations that are designed to bring us together,” Carcasson said.
Solving grand problems requires empathy
Meagan Schipanski, an associate professor in the Department of Soil and Crop Sciences at CSU, said science is really good at defining problems. Solving them requires more of a human touch.
“As a biophysical scientist, I’ve become increasingly convinced that we need to lead with the humans, the stories, the contexts in all these situations,” she said.
Center pivot sprinklers in the Arikaree River basin to irrigate corn. Each sprinkler is supplied by deep wells drilled into the High Plains (Ogallala) aquifer.
She pointed to her efforts to engage with stakeholders working to preserve the Ogallala Aquifer, and the varying motivations and struggles of everyone involved.
Sunset September 10, 2024 in the San Luis Valley. Photo credit: Alamosa Citizen
Heather Dutton, the district manager for the San Luis Valley Water Conservation District, shared similar lessons from her efforts engaging with farmers and ranchers.
“We realized the environmental community and farmers have a lot in common – we rely on the river as one of the key economic drivers of our region, we rely on it for happiness,” she said. “The thread of realizing we all have so much in common has enabled us to have robust and collaborative projects to think about all the different uses and benefits.”
South of Hesperus August 2019 Sleeping Ute Mountain in the distance. Photo credit: Allen Best/The Mountain Town News
Manuel Heart, the chairman of the Ute Mountain Ute tribe in southwestern Colorado, also shared the importance of getting to know the people involved in different sides of a problem.
“I’m hoping to bring education to each of you, education about who we are as a native people, as a Ute Mountain tribe, and to have the respect to be able to speak freely and bring the challenges we face, and also gain trust and partnership,” he said. “You have to feel those feelings of not just one ethnic group, but other ethnic groups.
“You need that empathy to feel what is going on.”
Building strong relationships requires trust and a common goal
Nobody will be able to solve the water crisis alone. That’s why the Water in the West Symposium featured panelists representing everything from state-level water conservation groups to NGOs to private companies.
All of them shared stories about how they’ve worked together to solve problems in their region, and a common thread from all of these successes? Trust.
Autumn view of the wetlands and cottonwood groves in the Yampa River basin at Carpenter Ranch, located west of Steamboat Springs, Colorado. Photo courtesy of The Nature Conservancy
“I think that uncertainty leads to misinformation, and all the sudden it’s us against them, and you have disagreements between downstream water users versus upstream ones, and everything in between,” said John Ford, the water projects manager for agriculture at the Nature Conservancy Arizona. “When you can get people together and be really clear, you can mitigate some of the risk and distrust. That’s when collaborations happen.”
Russ Sands, the section chief for water supply planning at the Colorado Water Conservation Board, said it’s clear that something needs to be done – it’s just a matter of rallying people around that common goal.
West Fork Fire June 20, 2013 photo the Pike Hot Shots Wildfire Today
“We know water has a massive impact on the hazards in this state … the cycle of drought, more things catching on fire … it has devastating consequences, and that really stacks up on our impact and need for action,” he said. “We need to move to a place where we’re talking and need to take care of each other and work together.”
Jocelyn Hittle at CSU Spur Water in the West November 2024. Photo credit: CSU Spur
There’s a lot of room for hope
Working together isn’t always easy, but it is possible – and that lesson applies to so much more than water.
“We really liked the idea of bringing people together to talk about collaboration, to showcase what’s happening on the ground,” said Jocelyn Hittle, the associate vice president for CSU Spur. “Deliberation is what makes our American democracy experiment very strong, and very alive, and very dynamic.”
Carcasson, who speaks to groups across Northern Colorado about how to have collaborative conversations, said he was encouraged by hearing panels throughout the day and realizing that there was already a strong dialogue surrounding Water in the West.
As a representative for Colorado Water Trust, I often get asked if our purpose is to buy and dry up agricultural water rights and land. My response to that is Colorado Water Trust is a small but highly productive nonprofit organization with a seven-person team and a $1 million core budget. We are much too small to go around purchasing water rights. But what we can do is lease water and build relationships. Being able to consider the use of temporary solutions with our over fifty project partners every year makes our work possible and puts millions of gallons of water back in rivers today.
Also in response to that question, I provide an explanation of how the majority of our projects are temporary and voluntary solutions which aim to safeguard farmers and ranchers’ water rights and provide flexibility and economic incentive. We do sometimes have permanent projects that change water rights from irrigation to environmental flow when desired by the project partners, or permanent water sharing agreements with agriculture where we may use the water rights in the fall for environmental flow instead of irrigation. But, generally, our projects are temporary and always voluntary. I explain that we make the process of working with us an ongoing conversation and relationship – not a forever done deal. And hopefully, if I have managed to keep their attention and explain it well, they are pleased to hear about the customized and supportive approach that Colorado Water Trust takes to working with agriculture.
We have several temporary arrangements in partnership with agricultural producers today. A simple explanation of how these projects work is that they typically operate in any five years of a ten-year period after we sign an agreement (per Colorado legislation). Then in winter of each year, we follow the snow-pack to predict what the flow levels will likely be at the farm or ranch’s local stream. Depending on projections, we start our conversation early in the year to determine whether extra water will be needed in the stream and if the farmer or rancher would be open to foregoing using their water for part or all of the upcoming growing season. If so, we offer reimbursement for the water at fair market value. In some cases, we offer an additional incentive bonus for running the project and/or reimbursement for any crop loss due to halted irrigation. In either case, having this conversation early in the year allows the farmer or rancher to plan their year accordingly.
Throughout this process, Colorado Water Trust staff ensures that the water is protected in this new, temporary use against abandonment or a reduction in value through the state’s use-it-or-lose-it water administration policy. And to the extent possible, we also work to ensure that the water is protected against other diverters taking it out as it flows downstream. All of this results in us being able to restore water to their local river, often transforming a small drying stream into a cool flowing waterway. This can rescue and protect stranded fish and restore surrounding ecosystems. It’s a powerful, ongoing partnership.
Many water rights owners have been skeptical of the environmental community’s perceived intentions of buying and drying up agriculture and there, historically, has been a great deal of mistrust in these types of agreements for that reason. But, it is worth noting that in recent years, we have seen a major increase in interest in these kinds of projects. Folks we never thought would be interested in working with us when I started at Colorado Water Trust 7 ½ years ago have been reaching out to talk and ask questions this past year. It’s amazing. And to top that, we are turning these projects around much faster than ever before. Negotiations and relationship building used to take several years – our first project with agriculture back in the early 2000’s took a decade to implement. Now, at times, we can turn these around within months. I attribute this success to our increased visibility and growing reputation (people are just more comfortable working with us), our project partners touting our collective success in working together throughout their communities, and our Program Team’s expertise in customizing the right solutions for differing operations. This year, our temporary agricultural water sharing projects will restore roughly 850 milliongallons of water to Colorado’s rivers and streams. These projects can dramatically help maintain a healthy ecosystem – it’s important work and can save critical habitat and a generation of fish.
“Colorado Water Trust is doing something that benefits rural communities while creating flexibility within the legal system. Instead of looking at our water rights as something we can only keep or sell, Colorado Water Trust is helping us see them as another tool to make the water system sustainable. With their help, senior water rights can support rivers during low flows and be consumed on the ranch at other times while putting some money away in the bank, too.” – Marsha Daughenbaugh Rancher at Rocking C Bar Ranch in Steamboat Springs and Colorado Water Trust Board Member
Three generations at Rocking C Bar Ranch in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. Photo credit: Colorado Water Trust
All this to say – there is immense benefit to temporary agricultural water sharing projects. They foster an incredible amount of relationship building and help break down barriers between conservation and agriculture. This bridging of the divide between environmental nonprofits and farms and ranches cannot be underestimated. Of the water that gets diverted from Colorado’s rivers, eighty percent of it goes to farms and ranches. They are crucial partners in environmental restoration work. We also need agriculture to thrive in order to protect our local economies and access to local food, and because farmers and ranchers are some of the best stewards of our land and water because of the invaluable pulse that they keep on the health of our local ecosystems. We need each other.
Our temporary and voluntary solutions are significantly impactful. It may be difficult to understand why these solutions are important and lasting when they are not permanent. I encourage people to think outside the box and recognize the power of these kinds of temporary solutions. Not only do they prevent harmful buy and dry schemes by offering meaningful, collaborative, and flexible options to irrigators, but they are also the effective solutions that work within our current water law system. Our prior appropriation system can be complex, rigid, and difficult to navigate. But these temporary agreements between conservation and agriculture work within that system.
Consider these benefits to temporary water sharing projects with agriculture:
Lasting, collaborative relationships forged between river restoration agencies and agriculture. These temporary arrangements allow water rights owners to test the waters of environmental partnerships before committing to something more long-term.
Helping our local agricultural economies to endure through tumultuous climate changes and providing them the opportunity to do so in a way that can also benefit their local rivers.
A perpetual opportunity to impact some of our smaller streams and rivers in rural areas that can be hard to gain access to but are just as important to our overall environmental health in Colorado.
Preventing buy and dry of agriculture and the permanent acquisition of land and water by developers by supporting farms and ranches with flexible, voluntary, and economically beneficial solutions.
Guiding future legislation by showcasing how effective temporary solutions can be to encourage permanent state policies that support these kinds of agreements and offer increased flexibility for all parties.
As is often said about Colorado Water Trust – we are a do-tank, not a think-tank. We get a lot done within our current water law system. We have restored well over 24 billion gallons of water to Colorado’s rivers and streams throughout the last 23 years. We have built up our reputation among the agricultural community and are getting projects on the ground faster than ever before in ways that benefit both our farms, ranches, AND our rivers. We believe strongly in the lasting impacts of these relationships and projects. Because, with the threat of climate change upon us and a decreasing water supply, there has never been a more important time to build permanent bridges for the benefit of our people and our environment.
Lake Powell has been about a quarter-full. The snowpack looks strong now, but it’s anybody’s guess whether there will be enough runoff come April and May to substantially augment the reservoir. May 2022 photo/Allen Best
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
October 24, 2024
Colorado River Basin states have scaled back their demands on the river. But agreement about solutions proportionate to the challenge remains distant as the 2025 deadline nears.
The story so far: Andy Mueller, the manager of the Colorado River District, the lead water policy body for 15 counties on the Western Slope of Colorado, used his organization’s annual seminar this year to call for the state to begin planning for potential curtailments of diversions. The river has delivered far less water in the 21st century than was assumed by delegates of the seven basin states when they drew up the Colorado River Compact in 1922. Might higher flows resume? Very unlikely, given what we know about climate change. See Part Iof the series and Part II.
“Having a state plan for compact curtailment has been on the table for what seems like forever, likely 2005 to 2007,” said Ken Neubecker. Now semi-retired, he has been carefully watching Colorado River affairs for several decades and has represented several organizations at different times.
Why hasn’t Colorado moved forward with this planning? When I called him to glean his insights, Neubecker shared that he believes it’s because such planning encounters a legal and political minefield.
“It’s not as simple as pre-1922 rights are protected and post-1922 rights are going to be subject to curtailment based on the existing prior appropriation system.”
Denver Water’s Moffat Tunnel diversion from the Fraser River to Boulder Creek. Most of water diverted to Colorado’s Front Range cities from Western Slope rivers and creeks have legal rights junior to the Colorado River compact. Photo/Allen Best
Front Range municipal water providers and many of Colorado’s agriculture diversions are post-1922 compact. And so are some agricultural rights on the Western Slope.
“I think everybody thinks that well, we’re on the slow-moving train and the cliff is getting closer but it’s not close enough – and there are other things that we can do to slow the train down.”
Taylor Hawes, Colorado River Program director for the Nature Conservancy via Water Education Colorado.
Taylor Hawes, who has been monitoring Colorado River affairs for 27 years, now on behalf of The Nature Conservancy, suspects that Colorado doesn’t want to show its legal hand or even admit the potential need to curtail water use in Colorado. She contends that planning will ultimately provide far more value.
“The first rule you learn in working with water is that users want certainty. Planning is something we do in every aspect of our lives, and planning is typically considered smart. It need not be scary,” she told Big Pivots. “We have all learned to plan for the worst and hope for the best.”
Colorado can start by creating a task force or some other extension of the state engineer’s office to begin exploring the mechanisms and pathways that will deliver the certainty.
“We don’t have to have all the answers now,” Hawes said. “And just because you start the process for exploring the mechanism to administer compact compliance rules doesn’t mean you implement them. It will give people an understanding of what to expect, how the state is thinking about it.”
Rio Grande near Monte Vista. Meeting Colorado’s commitments that are specified in the compact governing the Rio Grande requires constant juggling of diversions. Photo/Allen Best
Compacts have forced Colorado to curtail diversions in three other river basins: the Arkansas, Republican and Rio Grande. The Rio Grande offers a graphic example of curtailment of water use as necessary to meet compact obligations on a week-by-week basis.
The Republican River case is a more drawn-out process with a longer timeline and a 2030 deadline. In both places, farmers are being paid to remove their land from irrigation. The Colorado General Assembly this year awarded $30 million each to the two basins to bolster funding for compensation.
A study commissioned by the Nature Conservancy that involved interviews with water managers and others in those river basins had this takeaway message: “the longer (that) actions are delayed to address compact compliance, the less ability local water users have to tailor compliance-related measures to local conditions and needs and reduce their adverse impacts.”
In the Arkansas Basin, Colorado had to pay $30 million and water available to irrigators was reduced by one third.
“That’s the first lesson in how not to do compact compliance: do not wait to be sued because (then you lose) the flexibility to do stuff the right way,” said one unidentified water manager along the Arkansas River.
Neubecker points to another basin, the South Platte. Even in 1967, Colorado legislation recognized a connection between water drawn from wells along the river and flows within the river. The 2002 drought forced the issue, causing Hal Simpson, then the state engineer, to curtail well pumping, creating much anguish.
Ken Neubecker via LinkedIn
Creating a curtailment plan won’t be easy, Neubecker warns. “It could easily take 10 years. ’Look how long it took to create the Colorado Water Plan. It took a couple years and then we had an update five years later. And that was easy compared to this.”
All available evidence suggests the Colorado River Basin states are nowhere near agreement.
In August, Tom Wilmoth provided a perspective from Arizona in a guest opinion published by The Hill under the title of “Time is running out to solve the Colorado River crisis.” As an attorney he has worked for both the Arizona water agency and the Bureau of Reclamation before helping form a law firm in 2008.
“It has taken 24 years for the problem to crystalize, but less than 24 months remain to develop a solution,” he wrote. “Yet there appears to be little urgency in today’s discussion among the Colorado River Basin’s key players.”
Wilmoth said ”Deferring hard conversations today increases the risk of litigation later.” He, like all others, sees a reasonable chance it would end up before the Supreme Court – with the risk of the justices appointing a special master to adjudicate the conflict. “Its recent tendency has been to appoint individuals lacking in subject matter expertise, a troubling prospect given the complex issues at play.”
The area around Yuma, Ariz., and California’s Imperial Valley provide roughly 95% of the vegetables available at grocery stores in the United States during winter months. February 2017 photo/Allen Best
Monitoring the conversations from Southwest Colorado, Rod Proffitt sees Mueller trying to prepare people in the River District for the challenges ahead.
“I think he has tried to scare people. He is trying to get them prepared to make some sacrifices, and limiting growth is a sacrifice.”
A semi-retired water attorney, Proffitt is also a director of Big Pivots, a 501-c-3 non-profit.
Make no mistake, says Proffitt, more cuts in use must be made – and they need to be shared, both in the lower basin and in the upper basin. What those cuts need to be, he isn’t sure. Nor do they necessarily need to be the same.
For example, he can imagine cuts that are triggered by lowering reservoir levels. At a certain point, lower basins must reduce their use by X amount and upper basin states by Y amount.
The federal government has mostly offered carrots to the states to reduce consumption, a recognition of the river’s average 12.4 million acre-feet flows, far short of the flows assumed by the compact. It also has sticks, particularly regarding lower-basin use, but has mostly avoided using its authority. Instead, the lower-basin has reduced use voluntarily, if aided by the federal subsidies.
The Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act, have yielded a river of money for projects in the West that broadly seek to improve resiliency in the face of drought and climate change. The seeds have been planted in many places. For example, a recent round of funding produced up to $233 million for the Gila River Indian Community in Arizona for water conservation efforts.
The federal government has also offered incentives to reduce consumption in the upper basin. The System Conservation Pilot Program ran from 2015 to 2018. The 2024 program was funded with $30 million through the Inflation Reduction Act and had hopes for conserving about 66,400 acre-feet.
The federal government, through the Bureau of Reclamation, has clear authority to declared water shortages in the lower basin. It has warned that three million acre-feet less water must be used. The lower-basin argues that the upper basin should share in some of this burden.
Grand Junction has a maze of irrigation canals but the municipal water utility gets water from a creek that flows from the Grand Mesa. Some diversions in Colordo are pre-compact, but many others occurred after 1922. This is a scene from Grand Junction. Photo/Allen Best
Should the federal government get out the stick?
“Nobody wants to apply vinegar this close to the November election,” said James Eklund when we talked in late September about the stalemate on the river.
Eklund has had a long association with the Colorado River. His own family homesteaded on the Western Slope near Colbran in the 1880s and the ranch is still in the family. He lives in Denver, though, and was an assistant attorney in the state attorney general’s office in 2009, when I wrote my first story. He later directed the Colorado Water Conservation Board, the lead agency for state policy.
For the last few years Eklund has been on his own, more or less, a water attorney now working for Sherman and Howard, a leading Denver firm, while trying to represent clients with diverse agriculture water rights.
“Litigation is a failure,” he said when I asked him about Mueller’s remarks in Grand Junction. He contends the upper basin must come to the table with more ideas about how to solve the structural imbalance between supplies and demands than it has so far. And this, he said, will involves some pain.
Creating compact curtailment will involve rule-making, though, and that will take time and effort. Echoing Denver Water’s position, he says it will divert Colorado from the more important and immediate work of helping negotiate solutions.
Eklund suspects an ulterior motive of the River District: to get the state to play its cards on what curtailment could look like so that it can begin jockeying for position.
On the other hand, he believes cutbacks should be premised on two bedrock principles: voluntary and compensated. But Eklund also says that if the situation becomes desperate enough, water will continue to find its way to cities. “The Front Range is not going to bend its knee to alfalfa plants. It’s not going to do it.”
And then, Colorado’s Constitution allows municipalities to take water. It requires compensation.
The Bureau of Reclamation has said the same thing in the lower basin. Las Vegas and other cities will not be allowed to dry up.
The Bureau of Reclamation has said that Las Vegas and other cities will not be cut off from water in the Colordo River. . Photo/Allen Best
But what if compact curtailment means making the hard decision about who doesn’t get water and does not get compensated – people like the farmers near Fort Morgan who, in 2002, had to cease pumping water?
Neubecker characterizes the position of Colorado as one of conflict avoidance. Look at where it got Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minster, in his negotiations with Hitler.
What Colorado must do is prepare for the worst-case scenario. “It’s a doomsday plan,” Neubecker says of compact curtailment. “Make the plan, involve all the people who are going to be effected by the plan, and put it on the shelf – but not too far back on the shelf, just in case you need it”
For now, water levels in the two big reservoirs are holding more or less steady.
Another winter like 2002 could trigger renewed clanging of alarm bells.
John Fleck at Morelos Dam, at start of pulse flow, used 4/4/14 as my new twitter avatar
In New Mexico, Fleck, the author, who also monitors Colorado River matters at his Inkstain blog, rejects the metaphor of the Titanic or the idea that conflict is inevitable. In 2002, California was still using 5.1 million acre-feet from the Colorado River, both for agriculture and to supply the metropolitan areas of Southern California. This was well above the state’s apportionment of 4.4 million acre-feet. “The rhetoric was that it will be a disaster to California’s economy” to return to the allocated flows.
California eventually did cut back and it has done just fine. “Everybody would prefer not to do the adaptation, but they have done it just fine. We see that over and over again in community responses to drought in the Western United States,” he said.
Lake Powell currently has filled to 40% of capacity, a marked improvement from February 2023, when the reservoir had fallen to 22% of capacity. Mead is at 36% of capacity. The situation is not as tense as it was two years ago. That could change in the blink of another hot, dry runoff like that in 2002.
Figure 2. Graph showing reservoir storage between 1 January 2023 and 15 October 2024, highlighting the amount of reservoir recovery during each snowmelt season and the amount of reservoir drawdown during intervening periods. Credit: Jack Schmidt/Center for Colorado River Studies
Click the link to read the article on the High Country News website (Natalia Mesa):
October 11, 2024
Every July, the western sandpiper, a dun-colored, long-beaked bird, leaves the shores of Alaska and migrates south. It may fly as far as the coast of Peru, where it spends several months before making the return trip. Western sandpipers travel along the Pacific Flyway, a strip of land that stretches along the Western coast of the Americas, from the Arctic down to Patagonia. The wetlands of California’s Central Valley offer sandpipers and thousands of other species a crucial place to rest and feed along the way. In September, at the peak of the southward migration season, tens of millions of birds stop there.
But intensive farming and development have destroyed 95% of the Central Valley’s wetlands, and as the wetlands have disappeared, the number of migrating birds has plummeted. Shorebirds like the western sandpiper, which dwell in seashores and estuaries, are particularly imperiled, declining by more than 33% since 1970.
In 2014, in the middle of a particularly punishing drought in California, a network of conservation organizations called the Migratory Bird Conservation Partnership tried a new strategy to help migrating birds: paying rice farmers to create “pop-up” habitat. The program, which is called BirdReturns and was initially funded by The Nature Conservancy, has since created tens of thousands of acres of temporary wetlands each year.
Map showing the global routes of migratory birds. Credit: John Lodewijk van Genderen via Reseachgate.net
Rice farmers in the Central Valley flood their fields when the growing season ends, generally around November, and keep them flooded until February to help the leftover vegetation decompose. They plant their crop after the fields dry out in late spring. The program pays rice farmers in the birds’ flight path to flood their fields a bit earlier in the fall and leave them flooded later in the spring. This creates habitat when the migratory birds need it the most, as they fly southward in the late summer and early fall and pass through again on their way north in the spring.
Daniel Karp, a researcher at UC Davis who studies conservation in working landscapes and is not involved in BirdReturns, sees the program as a rare conservation win. Most of the time, small farms that grow many different crops, plant hedgerows and pollinator-friendly flowers are the best way to conserve biodiversity in human-dominated landscapes. But although rice farmers grow only one crop, their large fields are an exception. While it’s far from a complete solution, “it’s this weird rare circumstance where you have a large industrial-scale intensive agricultural system that can simultaneously support wildlife,” Karp said.
BirdReturns started with just 10,000 acres in the Sacramento Valley. In 2021, it expanded to the San Joaquin Valley Delta. The program now has a network of regional partners who lead their own reverse auction programs, such as the similar Bid4Birds, piloted by the California Ricelands Waterbird Foundation.
Map of the Sacramento River drainage basin. The historically connected Goose Lake drainage basin is shown in orange. Made using USGS National Map and NASA SRTM data. By Shannon1 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=79326436
Over the last nine years, BirdReturns has created 120,000 acres of bird habitat. Though it’s a far cry from the 4 million acres of wetlands present before colonial settlement, studies have shown that shorebird density is 2 to 3.5 times greater in pop-up wetlands than in other rice fields. And BirdReturns is fine-tuning its approach based on data, feedback from farmers, and ongoing research: A study published in early September analyzing nearly 9,000 field observations over five years gave scientists more information about the factors that create good shorebird habitat. For example, more shorebirds tend to visit fields where the water is shallow, especially if they’re flooded consistently, for months at a time as well as year after year.
BirdReturns also has the flexibility to adapt as conditions change from year to year. During droughts, for example, the program prioritizes places that birds have visited in the past. In wetter years, it might scale back. “The findings of your results are applied right away to on-the-ground actions,” said Greg Golet, senior scientist for The Nature Conservancy, who is involved in the program.
Challenges remain, though. The migration and agriculture cycles are not fully synchronized, making it difficult for rice farmers to flood their land early enough to create habitat for shorebirds, especially the long-distance migrants that might appear as early as July. BirdReturns has recently tackled other strategies, partnering with tomato farmers, who grow crops a bit earlier in the year and thus can flood their fields earlier.
And there’s still the question of how this practice can continue sustainably, especially as climate change-fueled drought makes water increasingly scarce, Karp said. In drought years, it’s costly to pay farmers to keep their lands flooded, if they have any water to spare at all. There’s no simple solution or easy answers, but for now, BirdReturns and similar programs are coming up with “creative solutions,” Karp said. “We thought we could rely on protected areas to conserve habitat globally, and we now know that’s not enough, and we need to complement that with a suite of different conservation strategies,” said Natalia Ocampo-Peñuela, a conservation ecologist at University of California, Santa Cruz, who is not involved with BirdReturns. While market-based solutions shouldn’t be the only answer, she said, they are “a piece of the puzzle.”
Beer bottles are washed on a conveyor belt in a microbrewery. Less water used in the cleaning process is one way factories are trying to increase water savings. Photo by AETB
Denver-based Leprino Foods Company generates some of its own water. In fact, the company holds a water right for water developed at its Greeley manufacturing facility.
“We actually are contributing more water to the river than we take in from our municipal source,” says Erik Nielsen, associate general counsel at Leprino Foods, which is the world’s largest producer of mozzarella cheese and a global producer of whey protein and other dairy ingredients.
Leprino has been a net contributor to Colorado watersheds since at least 2017. In 2020, the company was granted a water right associated with the quantity of water that it conveys to the Poudre River after deducting the amount of water that it takes in from municipal sources.
Milk is about 87% water. The process of evaporating or concentrating milk products produces condensate of whey water. Leprino recovers this water and stores it on-site in silos, often reusing it multiple times. Later, it is cleaned to stream quality standards and discharged. This, in addition to other water efficiency and recovery projects, generates about 600 acre-feet per year, or enough water to supply around 1,000 homes for a year. Leprino licenses most of this byproduct water to the City of Greeley for municipal uses, says Nielsen.
These water-saving processes not only reduce the company’s environmental footprint but are also critical to Leprino’s manufacturing future in Colorado.
“It seems like you shouldn’t be doing business in Colorado if you’re not thinking really deeply about water,” says Nielsen. “You’ve probably heard the saying, you never think about the value of water until the well runs dry.”
Water is required for cooling, heating, washing, diluting and other processes at nearly 6,000 manufacturing facilities in Colorado. As historic droughts threaten water availability across the state, consumers increasingly demand water-smart practices, and inflation continues to squeeze the private sector, many manufacturers are shifting their approach to water use and conservation.
“Manufacturers are increasingly becoming good stewards of water,” says JC Ye, corporate business director of water reuse at Veolia, a global water services company. “Many have a strong incentive to implement water stewardship practices and invest in improving the reliability of water supply. In most industrial processes, disruption of water availability has an immediate, acute impact on manufacturing operations.”
But water is highly contextual. Every river and stream has a unique ecosystem and different needs depending on the season. Solutions to protect and restore these resources are just as complex. Companies are taking a variety of approaches to water stewardship, from investing millions in local conservation work to making small but impactful infrastructure upgrades.
The original Coors brewery was built in Golden specifically for Clear Creek’s remarkable water quality. The company has a history of conducting projects aimed at protecting this water, which ends up in its product. As a founding member of the Clear Creek Watershed Foundation, the Molson Coors Beverage Company has helped to clean up some of the estimated 1,600 orphaned mines in the watershed, which threaten water quality by overflowing and discharging heavy metals and mine drainage into the river.
These days, water stewardship is about both public perception and product quality: Consumer-facing brands like Coors know that they face a reputational risk if they don’t invest in water-use reduction and watershed protection.
“[People] need to have confidence that we are serious about our water use, that we’re serious about protecting the watershed,” says Ben Moline, director of water resources and environmental policy for Molson Coors Beverage Company.
The entire state of Colorado has experienced severe to extreme drought on and off for more than two decades. The public is watching water use more closely as resource scarcity becomes a more serious concern. Recently, some communities have pushed back against water consumption for manufacturing.
BlueTriton — the owner of major U.S. bottled water brands, including Poland Spring — has been embroiled in legal battles with water boards, environmentalists, and other activists across the country for years. The company pumps water from Colorado’s Upper Arkansas River Basin, a semi-arid region particularly impacted by historic drought. In July 2021, about 20 community members protested outside of the Chaffee County Courthouse, opposing the renewal of a permit that allows BlueTriton to export 65 million gallons of water per year. After negotiating more than $1.25 million in community contributions from BlueTriton, county commissioners approved the permit the following month.
Veolia found in a 2023 study that fewer than 30% of surveyed companies had set water conservation goals, with water lagging behind carbon and waste as the environmental priority for companies. But Ye notes a recent shift in the way companies approach sustainability. Water scarcity concerns, public pressure, reputational risk, and cost-saving opportunities are leading to the proliferation of water initiatives across the private sector.
Michael Kiparsky, founding director of the Wheeler Water Institute at the University of California Berkeley School of Law, sees this as an opportunity: “Can we use transparency coupled with some degree of public awareness of water as a resource to put pressure on corporate entities to do something that might not be strictly in their economic interest otherwise?”
Small changes, big impact
The Coors brewery in Golden uses an estimated 2.7 billion gallons of water from Clear Creek each year: about 782 million gallons for its products, and 2 billion gallons for brewing processes, including production and malting. Of those 2 billion gallons of process water, 95% is cleaned and returned to Clear Creek.
This is representative of manufacturers at large: According to the Colorado Water Plan, industrial users account for only 3% of Colorado’s total annual water consumption, or water that is permanently removed from its source.
“We are diversion heavy, but depletion light,” says Moline, noting that Molson Coors is actively working to bring its water consumption rate even lower, while continuing to work with the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE) to ensure wastewater discharged back to Clear Creek after treatment meets permit requirements.
Molson Coors treats wastewater from its operations as well as much of the City of Golden’s wastewater. The company entered into a consent order with CDPHE earlier this year to address permit exceedences for total suspended solids, metals, oil and grease, and whole effluent toxicity in its discharge water. Even before the consent order, the brewery began upgrading its wastewater treatment plant in preparation for meeting tightening water quality limits. Water treatment improvements are big changes with big impact, but small infrastructure changes also lead to big results — for example, fermentation tank design.
A few times per month, depending on the type of beer, the brewing team empties each fermentation tank through a valve on its side, leaving a small amount of beer just below the valve’s opening. The team clears the excess beer and thoroughly cleans the floor of the tank to prepare for the next batch, using water and a squeegee multiple times over. Across more than 100 fermentation tanks of varying sizes, which produce approximately 9.7 million barrels of beer per year, a portion of beer is lost in the cleaning process.
Molson Coors Beverage Company is updating its fermentation tanks to a new, vertical design with a cone-shaped bottom, through which a valve completely empties the beer directly below the tank. Now, the brewery can produce the same number of barrels for less, because beer — and water — isn’t left on the tank floor. This means less water used for malting, heating and cooling beer that ultimately doesn’t make it to consumers, and less water used in the cleaning process.
The upgrades are a part of Molson Coors Beverage Company’s G150 project, in honor of the 150-year anniversary of the Coors brewery’s inception. The company has invested “several hundred million dollars” in the project, which is expected to save 80 million gallons of water annually after its completion by the end of 2024. Moline says that upgrading its fermentation tanks is contributing a large part of these water savings.
Other food and beverage manufacturers are updating infrastructure to save water: Swire Coca-Cola, which produces, sells, and distributes Coca-Cola and other beverages in 13 states across the American West, says that it installed a new filtration and recovery system at its Denver plant to reduce water usage by about 20%. And Bellvue-based Morning Fresh Dairy, a fifth-generation dairy farm that produces the nationally popular Noosa Yogurt brand, installed an automated clean-in-place system to clean the interior of food and beverage process pipes, reducing water consumption by 30%.
Corporate mandates
PepsiCo, Amazon, Google and Facebook have all committed to being water-positive, or replenishing more water than they use from natural systems, by 2030. In addition to water-efficiency projects, much of this work is done through cross-sector partnerships, which have provided critical support to local water stewardship efforts.
“Corporate support has been very important to our ability to staff project work and, even more so, to purchase water for streamflow restoration,” says Kate Ryan, executive director of the Colorado Water Trust.
For example, the tech giant Intel relies on the Colorado River and the Rio Grande to supply water downstream to its Arizona and New Mexico manufacturing facilities. The company has partnered with the Colorado Water Trust and Trout Unlimited on multiple projects to support the Colorado River watershed. Intel reports that 120% of the water it used across the U.S. in 2023 was either returned to the source or restored through investment in water stewardship projects.
The Colorado Water Trust has received more than $421,000 in corporate funding from companies like Intel, Coca-Cola, MCBC, Seltzer, and Niagara Cares, a philanthropic arm of Niagara Water, since 2019. This money, in addition to foundation funding, individual contributions, and water donations, has enabled the organization to lease well over 10,000 acre-feet of water, which would typically cost $400,000 to $2,500,000, depending on the water right, says Ryan. The projects improved flows on the 15-Mile Reach of the Colorado River — a critical stretch of river for endangered fish species near Grand Junction, Colorado — as well as on the Yampa River and tributaries to the Fraser River.
And while BlueTriton has received pushback from community members on its water use, the company has partnered with Colorado Parks and Wildlife to dedicate a conservation easement to preserve 122 acres of wildlife habitat and protect groundwater resources along the Arkansas River.
“These sustainability programs work well, and Western rivers would benefit from more of them,” says Ryan. “The amount of water they have made possible for streamflow restoration in recent years is significant.”
But experts agree that the pathway to meet water-positive goals, or even water-neutral goals, is not straightforward.
Context is key
A Colorado Water Trust project benefits the Little Cimarron River using a senior water right that keeps productive land irrigated in a split-season arrangement, where water is applied to fields in the first part of the season, then left in the river during later summer months when fish need it most. The trust also partners with corporations, such as Coca Cola, to secure funding for water conservation work. Courtesy Colorado Water Trust
“Being ‘water neutral’ in an honest way requires a great amount of thought and engagement with people who have direct interest or represent the interest of the communities and environment that might be affected,” says Kiparsky.
In 2023, the nonprofit Ceres published a benchmark analysis of 72 companies from four water-intensive industries — apparel, beverage, food, and high-tech — and found that only 35% consider contextual factors such as local watershed conditions, regulatory dynamics, and community water needs when assessing water use risks. Only 14% consider contextual factors when assessing water quality risks.
“[We] found that while many companies are setting goals aimed at using less water, most are not setting strong targets to reduce water pollution,” says Kirsten James, senior program director for water at Ceres. “We also noted a lack of commitment around protecting freshwater ecosystems and clean water supplies for communities.”
Where and when water is replenished makes a significant difference for water systems. Simply measuring the amount of water a company uses and returns to its source each year, for example, does not account for when that water was used or returned. If most water is pumped during the summer and returned during the winter, these activities could still be disruptive to wildlife, ecosystems, and overall river flow rates.
“Unlike in sustainability efforts involving carbon offsets, there is no single atmosphere to improve. Every river has different needs at different times of the year,” says Ryan.
Implementation of corporate water goals requires detailed reporting and independent validation to ensure the efforts are sustaining or restoring and not damaging ecosystems.
“It’s a simple concept, becoming water neutral, but putting it in practice is not simple,” says Kiparsky. “A lot of the implications are going to rely on analysis by third parties that are experts in understanding water impact.”
This year, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) began requiring most public companies to disclose climate-related information, including water-related financial risks, so investors can consider how companies are managing climate risks when making investment decisions. James says this is an important step that will help raise the bar with U.S. companies on water-related disclosures.
“As water risk continues to escalate, investors and companies need full transparency to be able to manage and adapt to these threats,” says James.
Last year in this space, we asked “Whatever happened to the September swoon?” as we noted the fact that Septembers — once the month for a gentle, luscious cooldown as we eased into autumn — have become August 2.0.
Story update for 2024: September was hot. Again. Breaking-records hot for Denver, in fact.
Chris Bianchi, a meteorologist at 9News, included this list of hottest Septembers in recent years in a tweet on X.
National Weather Service data shows September’s average temperature (across both the daytime and nighttime) for Denver was 70 degrees. That beats the old record of 69.4 degrees set back in 2015, not even 10 years ago.
Experts suggest the rising average temperatures are a key indicator for climate change in Colorado, as the trend seems to have solidified. Four of the last six Septembers have been the four hottest on record.
These hot Septembers are creating ripples for the environment and for water managers.
“The hot September trend is concerning. It means less natural streamflow in the rivers that provide Denver Water’s supply as more water is lost to evaporation and taken up by thirstier plants,” said Nathan Elder, Denver Water’s manager of supply.
That’s also affecting Denver Water’s collection system. Natural streamflow in September has fallen below the system’s long-term average every year since 2014.
Hot Septembers also mean Denver Water customers are using more water on their landscaping during the month. Since 2017, customers’ outdoor usage during September has been roughly 20% higher compared to September usage between 2000 and 2016.
So, what do we do about it? It’s another reason we make water conservation and efficiency a high priority for the 1.5 million people we serve.
Oct. 1 marked the end of summer watering rules, so first and foremost it’s time to dial back on the watering and let your lawn and plants prepare for winter dormancy.
Denver Water’s annual summer watering rules ended Oct. 1, meaning it’s time to dial it back on the watering to allow your lawn and landscapes to ease into winter dormancy. Photo credit: Denver Water.
Better yet, start to think about long-term landscape changes that would reduce your need for higher summer watering. Purchasing a Garden In A Box kit through Resource Central is one great avenue to explore.
Small steps are a perfect way to start, too. There’s no need to tear out all your grass or make giant changes all at once. Taking it slow and learning as you go works too.
A powerful sprinkler capable of pumping more than 2,500 gallons of water per minute irrigates a farm field in the San Luis Valley June 6, 2019. Credit: Jerd Smith via Water Education Colorado
You’ve heard the news: Farmers and ranchers use roughly 80% of the water in Colorado and much of the American West.
So doesn’t it make sense that if growers and producers could just cut a bit of that, say 10%, we could wipe out all our water shortages? We probably couldn’t water our lawns with wild abandon, but still, wouldn’t that simple move let everyone relax on these high-stress water issues?
Not exactly. To do so would require drying up thousands of acres of productive irrigated lands, causing major disruptions to rural farm economies and the agriculture industry, while wiping out vast swaths of open space and habitat that rely on the industry’s sprawling, intricate irrigation ditches, experts said.
Take a look at the numbers in Colorado. The state produces more than 13.5 million acre-feet of water every year, but only about 40% of that stays here, according to the Colorado Water Plan. The rest flows downhill to satisfy the needs of other states across the country.
Of the 5.34 million acre-feet that is used here at home, 4.84 million is used by ranchers and farmers to grow cows, lamb, pigs, corn, peaches, onions, alfalfa and a rich list of other items that produce the food we eat here in Colorado, the U.S. and internationally.
All told, the agriculture industry is one of the largest in the state, and includes 36,000 farms employing 195,000 people, according to the Colorado Department of Agriculture, and generates $47 billion annually in economic activity.
But here is the hard part. Thanks to crumbling infrastructure, chronic drought and climate-driven reductions in streamflows, the industry is already facing annual water shortages of hundreds of thousands of acre-feet. That number could soar as stream flows continue to shrink and populations continue to grow, according to the water plan.
An acre-foot equals enough water to serve two to four urban households, or a half acre of corn.
“Already, statewide there are irrigated crop producers who don’t receive water in some years,” said Daniel Mooney, a Colorado State University agricultural economist.
“If we had to cut another 10%, those people who are already at the margins would be impacted. I would say we can’t afford to do that.”
Out in the fields, just as cities are trying to cut water use inside and out, ranchers and growers are trying to cut back as well because they don’t have as much as they once did.
That too is challenging, according to Greg Peterson, executive director of the Colorado Agricultural Water Alliance.
These hay bales stand ready to be collected on a ranch outside of Carbondale. Upper Colorado River Basin officials are working on a memorandum of understanding with the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation so water saved as part of conservation programs can be tracked and stored in Lake Powell. Credit: Heather Sackett/Aspen Journalism
Despite years of work, the transition from farming and ranching in water-rich Colorado, to water-short Colorado is still evolving.
Peterson cites one crop experiment, where a new type of grass, or forage, was grown to replace alfalfa, a water guzzler.
Twenty farmers in the pilot program switched crops, saving an acre-foot of water per acre of land. Initially, they got $200 a ton for the new grass crop. Today, that same crop is selling for $90 a ton.
“We flooded the market,” Peterson said. “So now we need to look at hiring a marketer to find new markets. Changing what they grow might be the easiest thing to do.”
Finding funding to create new lines of production and new markets is also needed, Peterson said.
In the quest to help farmers stretch existing water supplies, the state and the federal government have spent millions of dollars helping pay for lining irrigation ditches and piping water underground, among other things. But that doesn’t create new water.
Delta County farmer Paul Kehmeier stands atop a diversion structure that was built as part of a project to improve irrigation infrastructure completed between 2014 and 2019. Kehmeier served as manager for the ditch-improvement project, which was 90% funded by the Bureau of Reclamation and serves 10 Delta County farms with water diverted from Surface Creek, a tributary of the Gunnison River. Lining and piping ditches, the primary methods used to prevent salt and selenium from leaching into the water supply, are critical to the protection of endangered fish in the Gunnison and Colorado river basins. Photo credit: Natalie Keltner-McNeil/Aspen Journalism
Colorado has lost roughly 32% of irrigated lands since 1997, according to the National Agricultural Statistics Service. New state policies designed to make it easier and more lucrative to share water between agricultural producers and cities through long-term, temporary leases, rather than having the water permanently removed, have done little to slow the loss of irrigated agriculture, according to Jim Yahn, manager of the North Sterling Irrigation Company in the northeastern corner of the state.
Such deals often require a trip to Colorado’s special water courts, where the legal right to use the water must be changed from agricultural to industrial or municipal use.
“We can recoup money from leasing,” Yahn said. “But it’s whether you want to take the step. It’s scary because when you go into water court, you never know how a judge might rule.”
Yahn was referring to the amount of water associated with water rights. If growers haven’t tracked their water use annually and lack adequate records, a judge could determine that there is less water associated with that water right than originally believed.
Perry Cabot, a Grand Junction-based agricultural research scientist, has been studying farm water use for decades, testing new ways to help growers stretch water supplies and examining leasing programs that pay growers well and slake the thirst of city dwellers and industry.
Leasing water almost always means drying up land, even if only on a temporary basis. Alfalfa, Cabot said, is one of the few crops that tolerates fallowing well, but it has to be done carefully.
“It is not unrealistic to expect a 10% reduction in use (in a growing season). But that means less hay,” he said.
Milkweed, sweet peas, and a plethora of other flora billow from Farmer’s Ditch in the North Fork Valley of western Colorado. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
But then what do cows eat in the winter, Cabot asked. “They are not going to go to Florida. So then do you sell them and buy them back next year (when you have the water to grow hay again). No.”
Agriculture experts say the simplest and most destructive way to cut agricultural water use enough to make up for looming shortages would be to continue drying up large swaths of farm and ranch lands that are already struggling.
“Is it possible? Yes.” irrigator Jim Yahn said. “But is that more important than growing food and supporting local economies? And it’s not just food. What about the open spaces and habitat that our irrigation systems create?”
Sept. 20, at a Grand Junction water conference sponsored by the Colorado River District, Bob Sakata was handing out T-shirts that say “Without the farmer you would be hungry, naked and sober.” Sakata is agricultural water policy adviser to the Colorado Department of Agriculture.
He’s been thinking about ways to keep farmers whole even as water supplies shrink, including paying farmers for the benefits their open spaces and lush habitats provide all Coloradans.
And he warned against taking the cost of agricultural water cuts lightly. “We’ve lost 1 million irrigated acres in this state,” he said. “That is scary.”
More by Jerd Smith. Jerd Smith is editor of Fresh Water News. She can be reached at 720-398-6474, via email at jerd@wateredco.org or @jerd_smith.
Milkweed, sweet peas, and a plethora of other flora billow from Farmer’s Ditch in the North Fork Valley of western Colorado. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
The Colorado West Land Trust is looking to play a larger, more focused role in helping address the water challenges that face western Colorado. The nonprofit has developed a water protection plan that aims to help strengthen agricultural water supplies, preserve important wildlife habitat and enhance watershed health. Rob Bleiberg, the land trust’s executive director, said water is such a significant issue facing western Colorado that the organization needs to think creatively and try new things to help respond.
“This plan represents our goal of viewing water in a more systematic, comprehensive way, and increasing action that we are taking on the ground to benefit our community now and into the future,” he said.
The land trust, which operates in Mesa County and several other area counties, has worked for decades in cooperation with landowners to protect land from development through conservation easements. Bleiberg said that with ongoing drought, water scarcity problems and impacts on agricultural production and wildlife habitat in the region, the land trust felt an urgency to take a fresh look at water and not just think about what the land trust does on individual farms and ranches, but look at entire systems. He said one aspect of the plan involves looking at what opportunities exist for protecting some of the most important irrigated farmland locally in terms of the seniority of water rights, quality of soils, and economic production that is occurring and its importance to local communities. The land trust is looking at tools beyond conservation easements that it might employ. One that Bleiberg said it is already pursuing on a pilot basis and ideally wants to scale up involves buying irrigated farmland and then selling it with restrictions in place to ensure that it isn’t subdivided and developed and the water isn’t permanently separated from the land. Bleiberg said retiring farmers in western Colorado who don’t have heirs wanting to farm but want to see their land remain available for agriculture don’t have a lot of options. The land trust wants to work with such farmers, pay them a fair price for their land, implement conservation measures on the farms and then sell them, ideally to young farmers, he said.
Homes line the foothills outside Colorado Springs on Sept. 11, 2024. The city has doubled down on water conservation to make its recent spike in population growth possible. (Luke Runyon/The Water Desk)
When researcher Brian Richter set out to take a close look at how big cities in the Western U.S. were adapting to water scarcity, he already knew the story’s basic contours.
Previous studies showed the trend clearly for some large utilities. As a megadrought has baked the Southwest since 2000, the region’s biggest cities have reined in their use to keep pace with the declining supply.
But it had been years since someone took a more region-wide look at who was conserving and how much. Richter, a lecturer at the University of Virginia, and president of his own independent research firm, Sustainable Waters, was up to the task.
After gathering data for 28 large and medium-size water utilities dependent on the Colorado River, Richter and his team were able to see the more modern trend lines in sharp detail. The results surprised him. It wasn’t just that cities like Denver, Los Angeles, Tucson and Las Vegas were using less. They were doing it while growing rapidly.
His 2023 study found that collectively the region’s cities had grown by 25% from 2000 to 2020, while their water use dropped by 18%. Per person use rates declined even more sharply, falling by 30%.
“We thought that was nothing short of miraculous, to be honest,” Richter said. “It’s quite a water conservation success story.”
Richter had heard the region’s growth anxieties before. As homes spring up, highways widen and new schools open, conversations about rising populations in the arid West eventually find their way to water. Those new residents mean more green lawns and household faucets, forcing cities to scramble to meet the new demand, or so the thinking goes.
It’s easy to understand why the notion that more people beget more water use jumps to people’s minds, Richter said. All of the on-the-ground impacts of growth are highly visible.
“What you can’t see so easily are the numbers, the water numbers behind that growth,” Richter said. “We felt it was really important to start getting those numbers out there, and to start revealing the fact that it’s not necessarily true any longer, that as a city’s population grows its water use has to increase at the same time.”
Now, as pressure from climate change mounts, the region faces a critical question: Can urban areas keep pace with their past successes in water conservation, or is there a floor to just how much water savings can be wrung from Southwestern cities?
The Colorado Springs skyline rises above Fountain Creek on Sept. 11, 2024. For the past couple decades the city has experienced rapid population growth while ratcheting down its demand for water. (Luke Runyon/The Water Desk)
Using less in Colorado Springs
Until 2002, Colorado Springs was using water like there’s no tomorrow. As the city grew, so did its water demand, hand-in-hand.
“There was a lot of inefficiency out there, a lot of inefficient fixtures, a lot of landscape irrigation, primarily of turf grass,” said Scott Winter, Colorado Springs Utilities water conservation project manager. “A lot of it was, frankly, egregious.”
A punishing drought in 2002 provided a shock to the system. While reservoirs declined, the people in charge of Colorado Springs started to realize that unchecked water use would eventually lead to serious shortages. Mandatory restrictions on use at the city level ran from 2002 to 2005.
“I don’t think people thought of the water system, the water supply, as being constrained in any way until we hit 2002 and then our perspective changed on the scarcity of water and how reliable our supply was,” Winter said.
Conservation is now seen as a reliable way to live within their means, he said.
Scott Winter, Colorado Springs Utilities water conservation project manager, points out a turf grass conversion project on Sept. 11, 2024. The utility offers incentives to encourage homeowners and commercial businesses to swap lawns for native grasses. (Luke Runyon/The Water Desk)
Colorado Springs has taken a gradual approach. First came the rate changes. Residents who irrigated more paid more per gallon. Then came the incentives to swap out indoor plumbing fixtures, such as replacing a toilet that uses 5 gallons per flush with a new model that uses less than 1.
The city has also begun to embrace the loss of its lawns. It ramped up its lawn replacement program, in which thirsty yards are replaced with native grasses, like blue grama or buffalo grass, which use 60%-80% less water. The utility offers 50 cents per square foot of lawn converted.
Since Colorado Springs started those conversions in 2013, the city has swapped in native grass on about 3.1 million square feet, or about 72 acres, mostly on commercial properties like shopping centers, churches and business parks. In 2020 a permanent shift to only allow for three days per week of outside watering on existing grass went into effect as well.
Blue grama grows alongside a Colorado Springs parkway on Sept. 11, 2024. Concerns over dwindling water supplies have sped up the city’s conversions of turf grass to blue grama and other native species. (Luke Runyon/The Water Desk)
All of the focus on conservation is paying off, Winter said. From 2000 to 2023, Colorado Springs has grown by about 40%, while also recording a 39% reduction in average per capita water use and about a 25% drop in total water deliveries. The city’s water use is now about equal to what it was in the late 1980s, despite the rapid growth, he said.
Mandatory conservation measures have started taking hold in some parts of the Colorado River Basin, like a nonfunctional turf ban in Las Vegas, for example. But Winter said the cultural and political contours of Colorado Springs mean water managers have to get creative, relying more on voluntary incentives than strict mandates that could rile its conservative voter base.
When the city decided to overhaul its building code a few years ago, the process brought up the usual tensions over growth. One code change ruffled feathers. A restriction on new developments limited turf to 25% of the total landscape.
“Individual freedom is a core value here,” said Nancy Henjum, a Colorado Springs city council member. Henjum summarized the early complaints of some fellow council members: “What do you mean I wouldn’t be able to have Kentucky bluegrass in my whole yard?”
But after lengthy discussions, plus field trips to the infrastructure that brings Colorado River basin water over the mountains to Colorado Springs, lightbulbs went off for the city council members about the scarce nature of their supply, she said. As of June 2023, the turf restriction is now officially part of the city’s landscape code.
“It was ultimately fascinating to watch people who are policymakers kind of push back initially, and then little by little over time recognize this is the right thing to do,” Henjum said.
A sign indicates where to find low water use plants in Colorado Springs Utilities demonstration garden on Sept. 11, 2024. A punishing drought in 2002 reframed the way the community saw its reliance on the shrinking Colorado River. (Luke Runyon/The Water Desk)
Conserving the way out
While city leaders are proud of the water conservation success they’ve had over the past two decades, they say that was the easy part. In Colorado Springs, another 40% reduction in use over the next few decades will be tough, if not impossible, Winter said.
“Used to be that we could put a conservation program out there and anyone could participate. Almost everyone was inefficient, and so you could just broadcast a program out there and it worked,” he said. “It’s getting harder, it’s getting more expensive. We’re having to get a lot more strategic and targeted in our approach.”
The same is true just to the north, in Aurora. The city grew by 40% from 2000 to 2020, while lowering both its total water use and per-person use, according to Richter’s study.
“We are the first city (in Colorado) to pass a turf ban,” said Alex Davis, assistant general manager for Aurora Water. “Fifty percent of our use is outdoor water use in the summer, and we’re trying to ratchet that down.”
A path winds through the Colorado Springs Utilities demonstration garden on Sept. 11, 2024. Because of gradual water conservation measures the city has been able to add thousands of new residents while using less water from the Colorado River basin. (Luke Runyon/The Water Desk)
But Davis isn’t convinced a city like Aurora, with its steep population curve, can rely solely on conservation to make its way toward a stable water future.
“When we look at our demand projections going forward, we have a gap that we need to fill, right?” she said. “We have a projected need that we can’t meet today for what we expect the population to be in 2060, and so we have to acquire more water resources and do more supply projects in order to meet that gap.”
A big portion of that gap is being driven by climate change, Davis said. Longer, hotter dry spells mean the uncertainty about future water supplies is greater than it was 20 years ago. Her team uses models to game out what kinds of policies the city might need to make it through extreme droughts.
Under those severe scenarios, Aurora’s plans indicate it would first cut down on outdoor watering, then eliminate it all together. That would leave just indoor, household use, but Davis said, “there are projections where we don’t have enough water to meet household use only in these very severe projected scenarios.”
John Fleck, a University of New Mexico water policy professor, said this is the challenging future facing many of the West’s municipal water leaders. Even so, he cautioned against too much hand-wringing over population growth and urban water use. There’s still a lot of slack in the system and a lot more savings to be had, he said.
Because so much water is used outdoors, Western cities face a fundamental question: As the region warms and dries, how much green space are they willing to part with to close the gap between supply and demand? It’ll be a tough call, but not an impossible one, Fleck said.
“When you think deeply about it, it would be weird for people, for communities, not to take the necessary steps to ensure their future existence, right?” he said.
“If you’re facing the choice of getting rid of some swimming pools and lawns, or abandoning your city, it’s a no-brainer. People are going to use less water. And that’s what we see happen over and over again.”
This story is part of a series on water myths and misconceptions, produced by KUNC, The Colorado Sun, Aspen Journalism, Fresh Water News and The Water Desk at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Mrs. Gulch’s landscape September 12, 2024. Blue Gramma in the far left corner of the photo.
The Department of the Interior today marked major progress for the short and long-term health of the Colorado River System. In Santa Fe, New Mexico, Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Camille Calimlim Touton joined leaders from the Imperial Irrigation District (California), Bard Water District (California), Metropolitan Water District (California) and Gila River Indian Community (Arizona) to sign five water conservation agreements that will leverage funding from President Biden’s Investing in America agenda to help advance water conservation across the West.
Short-term agreements with the Imperial Irrigation District, Bard Water District and Metropolitan Water District are expected to conserve over 717,000 acre-feet of water by 2026. The agreements with the Gila River Indian Community are the first long-term agreements to be signed and have the potential to create system conservation of over 73,000 acre-feet within the next 10 years.
“The Biden-Harris administration is committed to making western communities more resilient to the impacts of climate change,” said Secretary Deb Haaland. “With transformational resources provided through President Biden’s Investing in America agenda, the Interior Department is collaborating with states, Tribes and partners to make smart investments to strengthen the stability and sustainability of the Colorado River System to support the families, farmers and ecosystems that rely on this vital basin.”
“We are proud to announce these agreements that will support the long-term health of the Colorado River System by shoring up elevations,” said Reclamation Commissioner Camille Calimlim Touton. “The agreements with the Imperial Irrigation District and the Bard Water District in partnership with the Metropolitan Water District will contribute a significant amount of system conservation through 2026 and the new agreements with the Gila River Indian Community are the beginning of our long-term investments that will improve the sustainability of our river for generations to come.”
The lifeblood of the American West, the Colorado River Basin provides water for more than 40 million people and fuels hydropower resources in seven U.S. states. It is a crucial resource for 30 Tribal Nations and two states in Mexico and supports 5.5 million acres of agriculture and agricultural communities across the West, in addition to important ecosystems and endangered species. It is currently experiencing the longest and worst drought on record, driven by hotter temperatures under climate change. The Biden-Harris administration is leading a comprehensive effort to make Western communities more resilient to climate change and address the ongoing megadrought across the region, by harnessing the full resources of President Biden’s historic Investing in America agenda.
Short Term Conservation Agreements
Conservation agreements signed today with the Imperial Irrigation District and Bard Water District in partnership with the Metropolitan Water District signify the final short-term agreements signed under “Bucket 1” of the Lower Basin System Conservation and Efficiency Program with funding from the Inflation Reduction Act. The agreement with the Imperial Irrigation District is the largest from the Bucket 1 effort, expected to provide up to 700,000 acre-feet of system conservation water to Lake Mead between 2024-2026 with a total investment of approximately $589.2 million. The agreement with the Bard Water District in partnership with the Metropolitan Water District conserves up to 17,100 acre-feet of water during the same time period at a cost of about $6.8 million. This water will remain in Lake Mead in an effort to benefit the Colorado River System and its users.
Reclamation has now executed 25 agreements that are projected to conserve more than 2.28 million acre-feet of water. The agreements are part of the three million acre-feet of system conservation commitments made by the Lower Basin states.
Long Term Conservation Agreements
An initial $700 million investment from the Inflation Reduction Act was announced in June to support long-term conservation in the system. Today’s agreements with the Gila River Indian Community represent the first agreements signed under this investment. The agreements invest approximately $107 million into three projects with the potential to create system conservation of over 73,000 acre-feet within the next 10 years. Reclamation is also working with Southern Nevada Water Authority, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, Coachella Valley Water District, City of Tucson, San Diego County Water Authority, Town of Gilbert, Salt River Valley Water Users’ Association & Salt River Project Agricultural Improvement and Power District and City of Phoenix in the Lower Colorado Basin to negotiate water conservation contracts for up to 10 additional proposed projects.
Overall, the funding for long-term water conservation initiatives in the Lower Basin is expected to save more than 1 million-acre-feet of water, putting the Colorado River Basin on a path to a more resilient and sustainable water future.
Historic Investments to Address the Drought Crisis
President Biden’s Investing in America agenda represents the largest investment in climate resilience in the nation’s history and is providing much-needed resources to enhance the resilience of the West to drought and climate change, including to protect the short- and long-term sustainability of the Colorado River System. Through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, Reclamation is investing $8.3 billion over five years for water infrastructure projects, including water purification and reuse, water storage and conveyance, desalination and dam safety. The Inflation Reduction Act is investing an additional $4.6 billion to address the historic drought.
To date, the Department has announced the following investments for Colorado River Basin states, which will yield hundreds of thousands of acre-feet of water savings each year once these projects are complete:
Aging Infrastructure: More than $1.02 billion for infrastructure repairs on water delivery systems in the Colorado River Basin states from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which will preserve ability to deliver water and power benefits to over 40 million people every year in the Colorado River Basin.
Water Storage and Conveyance: More than $648 million in new water storage and conveyance investments in Colorado River Basin states, which will grow the supply of new water or enhance benefits from existing reservoirs within the Basin states.
Water Recycling: $505 million for 26 water recycling projects in the Colorado Basin that are expected to increase annual water capacity by hundreds of thousands of acre-feet annually
Water Conservation: More than $416 million in WaterSMART grants in Colorado River Basin States, which will conserve tens of thousands of acre-feet of water and make Basin water supplies more resilient.
Milkweed, sweet peas, and a plethora of other flora billow from Farmer’s Ditch in the North Fork Valley of western Colorado. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
Note to readers: Sorry this piece is late. I injured my hand in a way that makes typing a bit difficult and that has slowed me down a bit. And to non-paid subscribers: Sorry for the paywall and all, but we gotta pay the bills — and give the paid folks their premium content! If you’re interested, consider knocking down that paywall and accessing all the archives by becoming a paid subscriber!
This spring, I had the pleasure to sit on a panel on water in the West with Paolo Bacigalupi and Heather Hansman, two writers I’ve long admired. During the question & answer period, a local woman lamented the fact that some ditches were being piped or lined with concrete, because it would dry out the wetlands and ecosystems that had come to rely on the leaky laterals and ditches. And she was angry because the point, as she understood it, was to save water only to send it downstream to California. Her beloved valley, it seemed, was being dried out to fill up LA pools, which just seems wrong.
Jonathan P. Thompson, Paolo Bacigalupi, and Heather Hansman on a writer’s panel in Paonia in April, 2024.
I’ve thought about this a lot in the months since, because I think it gets down to the big, conceptual tug-of-war that’s happening around the Colorado River. There’s one battle between the different users of the river’s water. And then there’s another in which the values different communities hold are clashing with the “law of the river” and the overwhelming math that is driving the need to make massive changes.
The following meditation on this clash was catalyzed by a slide a friend sent me from a Family Farm Alliance presentation at the Colorado Water Congress’s summer meeting. It accused me — via a piece I wrote for High Country News — of “demonizing” alfalfa.
Well, Family Farm Alliance, this is my response to you:
VALUES
The woman at the panel was referring to the North Fork Valley in western Colorado, a place with an extensive network of open canals, laterals, and ditches that irrigate peach, apple, and pear orchards, small vineyards, organic farms, and alfalfa fields. A handful of center-pivot sprinkler systems reveal themselves in the geometric perfection of their dependent fields, but most of the farms rely on older methods to bring water to the crops, namely by flooding the field or directing water down dirt rows where they soak into the plants’ roots.
Most of the canals and ditches are unlined and uncovered, and have been that way since they were built over a century ago. Many of them leak, some prolifically, their fugitive water blanketing the beige-gray earth with grass and nourishing cottonwoods, feral apricot and plum trees, sunflowers, willows, cosmos, reeds, sweet peas, milkweed, and cattails — along with a host of fauna that depend on those plants.
The intentional and accidental irrigation combine to form an irregular, pastoral patchwork of relative lushness amid the arid landscape of the kind that can be found in northern New Mexico, where a network of acequias irrigate long, rock-lined fields, or McElmo Canyon, where voluptuous pink sandstone rises up from a sea of emerald alfalfa. These places, where the cultivated and feral and wild collide, evoke the Provence of Jean Giono’s novels.
These are artificial landscapes, colonial ones, even, created by damming rivers and diverting their waters away from the fish and aquatic life in the streams and throwing off the natural balance of things. They rely heavily on inefficiencies in the system, from leaky laterals and ditches to flood-irrigation runoff. But they are, to my eye, lovely nonetheless, and contrast favorably with the more efficient farming areas, where high-tech irrigation systems deliver every drop of water to the linearly planted crops in laser-leveled fields.
Agricultural productivity has grown 20% in the 21st century. Organic corn in Colorado’s North Fork Valley. Photo credit: Allen Best
And yet, because of math and water laws and compacts and the need to devote every drop of the shrinking Colorado River to “beneficial uses,” the character of these landscapes is likely doomed. It won’t happen next month or even next year, but over time. Nor will the lands be dried up altogether: In places like the North Fork the ditches — at least the ones with senior water rights — will continue to deliver water to the fields.
But more and more, those old leaky ditches will be upgraded, lined with concrete or other impermeable materials, or even put into pipes so that all of the water goes to those who hold the rights to that water, not to evaporation or the accidental ecosystems that have sprung up along the ditches’ banks. The farmers, too, may be forced or incentivized to become more efficient, replacing the flood irrigation with sprinklers or drip lines. Some will be paid to not irrigate at all. Most of the open ditches like the ones my cousins and I held stick-boat races in on my grandparents’ Animas Valley farm will be gone, along with the runoff of the kind that spilled from their corn and alfalfa fields to fill the cattail- and willow-tangled slough down below.
It is this loss that the woman in Paonia is mourning. It is heartbreaking. And it’s something I think about every time I write about the Colorado River and the looming crisis it and the communities and industries that rely on it face in the not-so-distant future.
If the crisis could only be solved — and the needed cuts in consumption made — based on our values alone, things would certainly be a lot easier. There would likely be fairly wide agreement that we should fallow the golf courses and drain the swimming pools before drying up the leaky-ditch wetlands and leaving the red-winged blackbird homeless. Farmers might join me in calling for tearing out thirsty turf lawns from Denver to San Diego, implementing progressive water rates to stem gluttony, and putting hard limits on household water use — if it meant keeping the sprinklers flowing to food crops, including alfalfa and other forage. After all, I value cheese and ice cream and green-chile burgers over the Sultan of Brunei or Miriam Adelson, who guzzled 12 million and 10 million gallons of water, respectively, last year to keep their Las Vegas estates green.
Ah, and yes, if all of this could be solved by prioritizing cuts based on values, alone, the Family Farm Alliance would have no reason to accuse me of “demonizing” alfalfa and other livestock forage crops (though I imagine the golf groupies would get me for vilifying them). But, alas, it’s just not that simple. Why? Because even the most lofty values are trumped by the cold, hard math.
MATH
The pertinent numbers in the equation include:
16.5 million acre-feet: Total human-related consumptive use of Colorado River water in 2020. This means all of the water that was withdrawn from the river and not put back into it, including reservoir evaporation. It does not include the 2.8 million acre-feet consumed via riparian and wetland evapotranspiration, nor does it include the 1.7 million acre-feet of water use from the Gila River, a tributary to the Colorado.
14.5 million acre-feet: The Colorado River’s median “natural flow” at the Lee Ferry stream gage, which is the official dividing line between the Upper Basin and Lower Basin, from 1906 through 2023. This is used as a measure of how much water is in the Colorado River, since downstream tributaries are relatively insignificant.
12.4 million acre-feet: The Colorado River’s average natural flow at Lee Ferry from 2000 through 2023.
This leaves us a few options for the big math problem that needs solving:
The optimistic equation (assumes the last 20 years was an anomaly and the river will go back to its old-normal flow soon, i.e. the median for 1906-2023):
14.5 million – 16.5 million = 2 million acre-feet deficit
The new-normal equation (assumes the next few decades will look like the most recent couple of decades — which is to say a megadrought) :
12.4 million – 16.5 million = 4.1 million acre-feet deficit
The pessimistic (realistic?) equation (assumes human-caused climate change will continue to deplete the river):
10.4 million – 16.5 million = 6.1 million acre-feet deficit
Estimated natural flow of the Colorado River at Lee’s Ferry (the dividing line between the Upper Basin and the Lower Basin). The natural flow is basically the total amount of water the river delivers each year, or the volume that would pass by Lee’s Ferry if there were no upstream diversions. Source: USBR.
Which is to say … we’re screwed no matter how you juggle the numbers! Sorry, that’s not very solution-oriented is it? No matter how you cut it, though, the Colorado River budget is running a massive deficit and has been for a while. That’s why Lake Powell, the Upper Basin’s savings account, has been shrinking and now is less than 40% full — even after a couple of decent winters. A couple of consecutive new-normal winters could bring the reservoir down below minimum power pool, shutting down the hydropower turbines and potentially setting the scene for a mega plumbing disaster.
While it’s highly unlikely that the Colorado River’s flows will increase enough to fill Lakes Powell and Mead to capacity anytime soon, it’s not impossible. During the extraordinarily wet and snowy four years between 1983 and 1986, nearly 80 million acre-feet of water ran into Lake Powell — which should be enough to fill both reservoirs and still deliver adequate flows downstream. If it happens, great! It would be foolish and potentially catastrophic to bet on a repeat, however.
That means the users of the river must erase the deficit by cutting anywhere from 2 million to 6 million acre-feet of consumption annually. The big question, and one that the basins and their member states have been debating, is: Where will those cuts come from? I’m not going to get into the many layers of these negotiations here, as that’s not the purpose of this essay, which is a bit of a thought experiment. Suffice it to say it’s complicated, and made more so by glaring errors and injustices committed when the Colorado River Compact was originally crafted.
Let’s say we’re going to make these cuts based on values. Obviously everyone has different values, so we’ll just go with those expressed at the Q&A session I lead this piece with, which can be summed up as prioritizing rural farmland, food crops, and the artificial wetlands that can be found in the North Fork Valley over urban lawns, golf courses, and billionaires’ estates.
Where better to begin than Las Vegas? Let’s pull up some water user data and, holy cow! Look at those numbers. The Vegas resorts and the rich sure know how to use water:
The Venetian and Mandalay Bay resorts each use more than 500 million gallons of water per year. Meanwhile the top residential water users are mostly billionaires: 99 Spanish Gate Dr. — which goes through 12 million gallons per year — was owned by the Sultan of Brunei until tech-giant Jeff Berns purchased the 37,500 sf mansion for $25 million. Other top water gluttons include Miriam Adelson — a top Trump donor — and UFC CEO Dana White. The average Las Vegas household uses about 120,000 gallons per year, though newer, more efficient homes use far less.
When folks start throwing $25 million around for an unfinished house is when you know it’s time for a wealth tax. And when they use 100 times as much water as the average home, it’s also time for a new, progressive water rate structure, that incentivizes conservation and punishes gluttony. Las Vegas already has something like this, but the rates in the upper tiers are too low to be meaningful; they need to be so high that this kind of profligacy will sting even a billionaire’s pocketbook. Hell, better yet, why not just fallow these properties and xeriscape them?
When the numbers are added up, you’ve got:
227,243,000 gallons Top 100 Las Vegas residential water users’ combined consumption in 2023.
3,774,780,000 gallons Top 10 Las Vegas non-residential water users’ combined consumption in 2023.
Wow, so by shutting down just these folks, we could save 4 billion gallons of water, or … 12,275 acre-feet? Oh, that’s not as much as it seemed.
So how about we go to other cities and tear out turf, mandate low-flow appliances, ban lawn watering and swimming pools. I mean, if you could get Scottsdale and St. George residents to cut back to Tucson or Los Angeles per capita water levels, you’d make some more huge cuts.
If Scottsdale’s per-capita consumption were cut to Tucson’s levels it would save about 42 million gallons per year.
You could save millions of gallons through that effort, which is great. The problem is, this problem requires bigger thinking — you’ve got to make multiple cuts in the tens of billions of gallons range for it to make a significant difference. Once again, math, the ultimate buzz killer, raises its ugly head. See, as noble as all of these efforts might be, there just isn’t enough overall water use in the urban sector to come up with all the necessary cuts. You could drain the pools, dry up the lawns, seal up the Bellaggio fountains — hell, even shut off the massive pumps that convey water from Lake Mead to the Las Vegas metro area altogether — and you would still need to come up with at least another 1.6 million acre-feet of cuts. Entirely cutting off all of the Basin’s cities and industrial applications wouldn’t even get you to 4 million acre-feet of cuts. But boy, it sure would be interesting to watch — from afar.
To conclude Part I, some charts that drive the point home:
Irrigated agriculture gulps up about 10.1 million acre-feet per year, accounting for about 52% of the total consumptive use on the Colorado River. Meanwhile the municipal, commercial, industrial sector only uses 3.5 million acre-feet, meaning if you cut off all of the water to every Southwestern city, you still might have a water deficit in the Colorado River Basin. Source: New water accounting reveals why the Colorado River no longer reaches the sea, by Brian Richter et al
The chart on the left shows consumptive use within the Colorado River watershed only, where irrigated agriculture uses about 50% of the water. By contrast, Colorado River water sent over the Continental Divide to Colorado’s Front Range and New Mexico’s Rio Grande watershed is mostly used by cities, with about one-third going to agriculture.
About 59% of the non-exported Lower Basin consumptive use goes to irrigated agriculture. Exports follow the same pattern as in the Upper Basin, with most of the water going to urban use.
SOURCES: New water accounting reveals why the Colorado River no longer reaches the sea, by Brian Richter et al.; Decoupling Urban Water Use from Population Growth in the Colorado River Basin, by Brian Richter; Bureau of Reclamation, Las Vegas Valley Water District, Southern Nevada Water Authority, Zillow.
Currently, Colorado’s hunters and anglers have perhaps a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to protect a wide swath of public lands habitat in southwest Colorado’s Dolores River Canyons region. In April, we joined hunters, anglers, rafters, business owners, and many others from across the state and region in supporting a proposed Dolores River Canyons National Monument…The Dolores River faces threats from industrial scale mining, habitat fragmentation, and unmanaged recreation. Protecting intact habitat for mule deer, elk, and desert bighorn sheep, particularly winter range and movement corridors, is essential for retaining quality sporting opportunities. Now is the time for action. A national monument designation will help everyone better manage the change that is already occurring while also protecting public lands habitat and ensuring future generations of hunters, anglers, and many others experience the area as we have. For additional information see Sportsmen for the Dolores.
Jasper Reservoir, in the Indian Peaks Wilderness Area in Western Boulder County, has been sold under a set of covenants will ensure it waters are available to Middle Boulder Creek during the fall, when it is driest. Courtesy: The Colorado Water Trust
Ten years ago, an anonymous benefactor approached the Colorado Water Trust intent on providing it with an interesting gift: a reservoir high in the forests of the Indian Peaks Wilderness Area in western Boulder County.
The 23-year-old nonprofit was thrilled, understanding that the ultimate sale of the gift would insure its financial future, and making sure its mission to keep water in rivers continues.
The trust set to work immediately looking for a buyer who would agree to some very tough restrictions: permanent public access for fishing, hunting and camping, keeping the tiny reservoir full during the summer, and releasing the water down through Barker Reservoir in Nederland into Middle Boulder Creek during the fall, when the 37-mile stream segment is driest. Equally important is a conservation easement that prohibits any development of the water and land around the reservoir.
“The covenants are quite strict,” said Kate Ryan, the trust’s executive director. “We’ve taken away the development potential of the reservoir, so we had to have the right person come along.”
The trust’s day job is to connect private water-right owners with threatened streams, helping set up financing and the legal agreements necessary to ensure the water can be transferred to the state, where it becomes part of the state’s environmental program leaving water in streams that would otherwise be diverted.
Jasper Reservoir/Boulder Creek. Credit: Colorado Water Trust
If that sounds like a tall order, it often is. And finding a buyer for this reservoir would prove equally daunting. It turns out there aren’t a lot of people interested in buying covenant-restricted reservoirs, even in a water-short state such as Colorado.
But in August, the trust and Boulder County’s Tiefel family finalized the deal.
“The trust wanted a partner to help manage the reservoir and run the water down Boulder Creek,” said Doug Tiefel, a real estate developer whose family farms in eastern Boulder County and also has a small reservoir of its own. The family uses its reservoir to irrigate its operations and it leases any excess water to other growers in the area when water is available.
Tiefel said the Jasper Reservoir deal fit his family’s water needs, and their environmental ethic.
“For the ecosystem it is critical to keep more water in the river in late summer and early fall, and that’s why we forged this partnership agreement,” Tiefel said.
Prior to the sale, the reservoir’s water was often leased to other entities, such as the City of Boulder, which would in turn lease it to growers east of town. But the reservoir was managed differently every year. Under the Tiefel’s management plan, the water will flow more consistently, providing Middle Boulder Creek more certainty than it has had in the past, and a continuing supply of water for growers, Tiefel said.
Kim Hutton, the City of Boulder’s senior water resources manager, said the sale is a step forward for the entire Boulder Creek watershed, especially as climate change continues to reduce stream flows.
“The benefit of this sale is to release water when stream flow is low, and that is complementary to what we’re doing,” said Hutton, referring to the city’s efforts to keep water in the creek system.
Ryan hopes the deal will be the first of many in Colorado in which permanent protective easements can be placed on water. She said she’s also grateful for the financial security it provides the nonprofit.
“The revenue gives us the certainty for years to come that we will be able to add water back into Colorado’s rivers and streams,” she said.
The U.S. Forest Service has finalized a land exchange with Mt. Emmons Mining Company located in Gunnison and Saguache counties.
Under the agreement, finalized on Aug. 29, the Forest Service exchanged 539 acres of federal land located adjacent to the Keystone Mine for 625 acres of land owned by Mt. Emmons Mining Company located within the Grand Mesa, Uncompahgre and Gunnison National Forests and Rio Grande National Forest.
Iron Fen. Photo credit from report “A Preliminary Evaluation of Seasonal Water Levels Necessary to Sustain Mount Emmons Fen: Grand Mesa, Uncompahgre and Gunnison National Forests,” David J. Cooper, Ph.D, December 2003.
The land exchange allows the Forest Service to improve wildlife habitat and recreation opportunities by reducing private inholdings and creating more contiguous public land. The parcels acquired by the Forest Service include riparian and wet meadow habitats, which are vital to various bird and aquatic species.
Additional benefits of the land exchange include an established Conservation Easement and Mineral Extinguishment Agreement, prohibiting mining and allowing for non-motorized recreation in the future. It allows Mt. Emmons Mining Company to address mining remediation efforts, including water quality and facilitated the transfer of ownership and administration of the Kebler Winter Trailhead to Gunnison County.
“We are pleased to see this momentous exchange finalized,” said Dayle Funka, Gunnison district ranger. “This project was truly a collaborative effort with local non-profits, private landowners and local and federal governments working to benefit future generations. We encountered obstacles throughout the process but found ways to move forward in the spirit of collaboration. As a result of many people’s dedication and perseverance, this land exchange will enhance public access and enable future non-motorized recreational opportunities. I commend the Mt. Emmons Mining Company for their commitment to mining remediation efforts and water quality, while honoring the values of the community.”
Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
Click the link to read the article on the Land Desk website (Jonathan P. Thompson):
September 6, 2024
🌵 Public Lands 🌲
The Bureau of Land Management released the final environmental impact statement and management plan for Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument last month and I’ve been making my way through it (it’s a voluminous document, to put it mildly). A few things have really struck me:
Crafting a management plan for a 1.8-million-acre landscape that includes deserts, canyons, forests, riparian areas, and much more is a monumental undertaking. There are so many factors to consider, such a diversity of ecosystems to steward, and many competing interests to account for. This one is impressive for its thoroughness and for all of the science and information it contains about the current state of the land.
As is almost always the case with these sorts of things, the preferred alternative is a compromise, offering a lower level of protection than the more purely preservation-oriented alternative. Nonetheless it strives for conservation and is leaps and bounds stronger than the existing Trump-era plan, which will remain in effect if the new plan is not implemented. I took a look at the draft plan and the “preferred” alternative C a year ago, which was the second-most restrictive of the lot. After receiving a boatload of input, the BLM went with a new approach — Alternative E — which is a modified version of Alt. C, and is more restrictive in some cases, less in others.
The preferred alternative would: “Establish a management approach in collaboration with Tribal Nations that ensures continued Tribal Nation stewardship of GSENM resources.”
The plan’s light-handed approach to livestock graving provides yet more evidence that national monument designations pose virtually no threat to ranching, public lands grazing, and the “way of life” they foster. So next time a Utah politician or wannabe sagebrush rebel whines about how the BLM or the Biden administration or national monuments are destroying ranching, show them this plan — and remind them they’re still paying just $1.35 per month for a cow and its calf to roam around public land and chomp up about 1,000 pounds of the taxpayers’ forage.
Now for some of the key elements of the plan (with maps from the preferred Alternative E):
The monument has four management areas: Front Country, Passage, Outback, and Primitive.
The monument includes 559,600 acres of lands with wilderness characteristics (i.e. lack of roads or development, “untrammeled,” etc.), but that aren’t designated wilderness areas. Alternative E would manage 329,400 acres of those lands for the protection of those characteristics, making them de facto wilderness areas; 224,100 acres would be managed to “minimize impacts”; and 6,100 acres would be managed for other compatible uses. That’s compared to the status quo, which allows for other uses on all of those lands.
Hundreds of miles of roads, from paved highways to dirt two-tracks, are webbed throughout the national monument. Most have been claimed by the county as RS-2477 routes (which, if upheld by courts, would give the county control over them), and most remain open to motorized travel. Currently about 1,500 acres of the monument are completely closed to OHV travel, and OHV use is limited to designated routes on 1.86 million acres. Under the new plan, 1.25 million acres would be closed to OHVs, with OHVs still allowed only on designated routes on about 620,000 acres.
Currently, about 2.1 million acres in the national monument planning area (which extends beyond the boundaries) are available to grazing, un-permitted allotments can be reinstated, and suspended Animal Unit Months, or AUMs, can be reactivated. The new plan would put just 128,300 acres off-limits to grazing — a deep compromise, given that Alternative D would have halted grazing on 1.2 million acres — and will allow cattle, but not sheep and goats, to chomp their way across 1.7 million acres.
There are currently 76 grazing allotments in the monument, 14 of which are partially or completely unavailable to grazing, and 10 of which are vacant and available but are not currently permitted. The existing plan allows those to be re-permitted; the new plan would not.
There are currently 105,452 animal unit months (a cow-calf pair grazing for one month), or AUMs, available in the planning area (76,207 active and 29,245 suspended). The 2020 plan directed the agency to reinstate the suspended AUMs, but it has not done so yet. Of the 76,207 active AUMs, operators only used (or were billed for) about 42,377 AUMs on average between 1996-2020. That suggests it’s the livestock operators themselves, not the land managers or monument protections, that are limiting grazing. There likely will still be a lot of bovines munching on native grasses and trampling the fragile cryptobiotic soils for years to come.
The new plan would allocate 104,980 AUMs. But, when people voluntarily relinquish a grazing permit or lease, the number of allocated AUMs would automatically decrease by that same amount, which theoretically would phase out grazing over time.
The agency estimates the cattle will emit a total of 4,584 metric tons of methane annually under the preferred plan.
And you know those folks screaming and yelling that national monuments will destroy local “heritage” and livelihoods and all of that? Some are well-intentioned but misinformed. Others are intentionally spewing disinformation in order to advance an ideological, sometimes corporate-driven, agenda. The Center for Western Priorities calls the latter the National Monuments Disinformation Brigade, and they just issued a report on these folks. Give it a read. Regular Land Desk readers will see some familiar names.
Speaking of land management plans and giving the livestock industry everything it wants, the BLM’s Rock Springs field office also recently released its final resource management plan for about 3.6 million acres of public land in the southern part of the state, including the Red Desert. The draft plan was unexpectedly strong on the conservation side of things, and I held it up as proof that the BLM was shedding its Bureau of Livestock and Mining label (okay, maybe not the livestock part).
A lot of Wyoming right-wingers weren’t so pleased with it, though, with one wing-nut claiming it would affect more people than “the Civil War, Pearl Harbor, and 9/11 combined.” Except there aren’t even that many people in all of Wyoming!
Anyway, rather than sticking to its guns, the BLM went back to the drawing board and did what federal agencies often do, compromised (and bent over backwards to please the noisy minority — and industry). The new plan, in my opinion, overcorrects and leaves 99.95% of the area open to grazing; designates areas of critical environmental concern on some 700,000 fewer acres than the draft plan; opens far more land to coal and trona mining, oil and gas drilling, oil shale extraction, and new mining claims. The new proposed plan also opens up more land than the draft to wind, solar, and geothermal development.
I chopped up the BLM’s chart and pasted it back together to allow for a quick comparison between last year’s draft proposal, and this year’s final preferred alternative plan.
⛈️ Wacky Weather Watch⚡️
Welp, Phoenix went and did it again by setting all sorts of records for armageddon-like heat. For example, it is now on the 107th consecutive day on which maximum temperatures reached 100° F or higher; the previous record was 76 days in a row back in 1993. The mercury has reached 110° on 55 days, matching the record set … last year. The average monthly temperature has exceeded the 1990-2020 normal during six of the last eight months, and this climatological summer (June-August) was the hottest on record. All of that’s crazy, disturbing, and scary — yet not all that surprising, given that we’re clearly in the grips of human-caused climate warming. What is surprising is that when some kind-hearted Phoenician put a cooler full of bottled water in his driveway to offer free relief to passersby, his homeowners association went after him for violating some obscure rule. HOAs, hmmmph!
🦫 Wildlife Watch 🦅
Someone shot a critically endangered California condor this spring near McPhee Reservoir in southwestern Colorado and wildlife officials want your help finding the shooter. Thanks to a tracking device, the dead condor was found and recovered in March within 24 hours of being shot between the small community of Lewis and the reservoir. It is illegal to kill the majestic birds. Folks with information are asked to call Colorado Operation Game Thief (OGT) Hotline: 1-877-COLO-OGT (1-877-265-6648); email game.thief@state.co.us; or report it online at Submit a Tip.
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Sad news from Silverton, too: A mama bear died after a sheriff’s deputy shot it with a beanbag — that was supposed to be nonfatal — in an attempt to shoo the bruin away from people (who were gathered around gawking at her and her two cubs). The Durango Heraldreports the San Juan County Sheriff’s department is looking into allegations that someone harassed one of the cubs.
😀 Good News Corner 😎
And, finally, some kind of cool news: The Ute Mountain Ute Tribe’s farm in southwestern Colorado has finished integrating a hydropower system into its irrigation network that will harness excess water pressure from pivot-sprinkler pipes. It’s not a huge system, but it demonstrates one way to generate clean energy with minimal impact. Now let’s hope there continues to be enough water running through those pipes.
The paperwork officially putting a close to the Red Lady mining fight on Mt. Emmons was filed the morning of Thursday, August 29, ending a battle that has lasted almost five decades. The documents finalized a so-called Mineral Extinguishment agreement, conservation easements on Mt. Emmons, and a major land exchange agreement between the Mount Emmons Mining Company (MEMC), a subsidiary of global mining giant Freeport McMoRan, and the US Forest Service were all signed, sealed and delivered Thursday…Groups, organizations and government entities including the High Country Conservation Advocates, the town of Crested Butte, the Crested Butte Land Trust, the Red Lady Coalition, Gunnison County, the state of Colorado, US senator Michael Bennet and others, all played a role in the outcome. And so did the mining company that made the collaborative decision to work with the local community to basically walk away from its mining rights and focus on reclamation and maintaining water quality on the site that sits in the town’s watershed. The MEMC water treatment plant is on Red Lady and treats water from the old Keystone mine.
“This victory is an incredible testament to the staying power of the greater Gunnison Valley community. To say that not many mine fights end in a collaborative solution eliminating the potential to mine is an understatement,” said Julie Nania, Red Lady Program Director for HCCA.
Less than 12 hours after the Biden Administration and the Imperial Irrigation District approved an unprecedented deal to conserve 700,000 acre feet of Colorado River water through 2026, the flow of river water to the rural valley three hours south of Los Angeles slowed. District personnel moved out before sunrise to install more than 1,600 locks on gates to canals supplying hundreds of farm fields, cutting off water deliveries for up to 60 days this year. The process will be repeated over the next two summers.
In exchange, the powerful agency and farmers who volunteer to not receive the water and hold off on growing hay in hot summer months will be paid nearly $700 million in federal funds — by far the largest of numerous agreements struck with water agencies and tribes to prop up the overused, drought-ravaged river and its reservoirs. For irrigation district officials, the agreement, which will conserve a huge amount of water, about as much as the state of Nevada uses annually, caps years of arduous negotiations and multiple federal reviews…
But the way the deal was finalized and its potential impacts on the also rapidly dwindling Salton Sea and local public health angered numerous environmental justice and policy groups. They said the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and the powerful water agency rushed through cursory approvals and ignored much of their lengthy comments, including ideas on how to monitor and reduce air quality and wildlife impacts that they say will occur from holding back such a huge amount of water.
The irrigation district board on Sunday hastily scheduled a special meeting for Monday night to approve the agreement, before reclamation staff had even released their final determination that cutting so much agricultural runoff into the sea would have “no significant environmental impacts.” Five hours before the meeting on Monday afternoon, the feds released their final determination and posted 150 pages of responses to the lenghty comments submitted by more than half a dozen groups and several individuals who have studied the Salton Sea for decades, including a major annual transfer of water to suburban San Diego that is rapidly depleting the water body, California’s largest.
In an email headed “IID’s quickie action,” Joan Taylor, chairperson of the Sierra Club’s California/Nevada Desert Committee wrote, “It’s commendable that IID recognized a responsibility to cut down on water use to help protect the water supply for the West, but what they’re doing is akin to doubling the water transfer to San Diego. We know that already has profound impacts. So this is a very big deal … and will suddenly increase dusty lakebed exposure around the Salton Sea by 13,000 acres.”
These hay bales stand ready to be collected on a ranch outside of Carbondale. Upper Colorado River Basin officials are working on a memorandum of understanding with the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation so water saved as part of conservation programs can be tracked and stored in Lake Powell. Credit: Heather Sackett/Aspen Journalism
Colorado River water managers are moving forward with a plan to track and get credit for conserved water.
The Upper Colorado River Commission on Monday voted unanimously to move ahead with the creation of a memorandum of understanding with the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation that would provide accounting and credit to the Upper Basin states (Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming) for water saved through conservation programs. It would also identify qualifying criteria for water conservation projects. A draft of the MOU is expected by the end of September.
The states and the bureau would conduct this provisional accounting of water saved in Lake Powell and other Upper Basin reservoirs through 2026.
“The provisional accounting is exactly that,” said UCRC Executive Director Chuck Cullom. “It is not an operational guide for Reclamation; it is a means for folks to understand how much water would be available in that account upon the implementation of a formal agreement or credit program.”
Credit for the stored water could be formalized in one of two ways: as part of the post-2026 guidelines for reservoir operations, which the seven Colorado River basin states are in the midst of negotiating, or by implementing the demand management storage agreement, which was part of the 2019 Drought Contingency Plan.
For the past two years, some Upper Basin water users have been participating in a federally funded program known as the System Conservation Pilot Program, where they are paid to voluntarily use less water. The program is projected to save about 101,000 acre-feet of water at a cost of $45 million.
Despite one of the stated intentions of SCPP being to protect critical reservoir levels, the program does not track the conserved water to see how much of it ultimately ended up in Lake Powell. This lack of accounting has been one of the criticisms of the program, with some water users saying water conserved in the Upper Basin was simply being sent downstream to enable what they say is overuse by the Lower Basin states (Arizona, California and Nevada). The MOU would be a step toward remedying that.
“If we’re reducing demand and using taxpayer money to do it, then we have to make sure that it’s meaningful,” said Anne Castle, UCRC chair and the body’s federal representative. “It needs to provide benefit to the states that created that conserved water. That’s particularly important right now when the basin states are in difficult discussions about how to allocate the reductions in use that we all know are needed in the future.”
Upper Basin states are interested in “getting credit” for stored water because it could protect them in the event of a compact call. As the effects of demand, drought and climate change push the Upper Basin closer to not being able to deliver the required amount of water to the Lower Basin under the terms of the 1922 Colorado River Compact, water managers have been grappling with the idea of an insurance pool in Lake Powell. From 2019 to 2022, the state of Colorado explored the contentious concept of demand management, which would pay water users to temporarily cut back and store the conserved water in Lake Powell. Water could be released from this pool instead of shutting off cities and irrigators.
There is urgency to figure out how the Upper Basin states can track, measure and get credit for conserved water because there will soon be more opportunities for water conservation programs. This fall, the Bureau of Reclamation plans to announce funding for what officials are calling “Bucket 2 Water Conservation” projects. These are projects that would achieve verifiable, multiyear reductions in use or demand for water supplies.
The Colorado River near the state line in western Colorado. Representatives from the seven basin states that use the river are negotiating how future cuts will be shared in dry years. Credit: Heather Sackett/Aspen Journalism
Seven-state negotiations
Commissioners also gave an update on those difficult discussions with the seven basin states on how the river will be managed after 2026. Representatives from the UCRC, as well as from California, Nevada and Arizona, are in the midst of figuring out how the nation’s two largest reservoirs will be operated after 2026 and which water users will be cut by how much in dry years.
In their proposal to the Bureau of Reclamation, the Lower Basin states demanded that the Upper Basin share in future cuts when reservoir levels dip. But Upper Basin commissioners stood by the counterproposal they offered in March, called the Upper Basin Alternative, which does not include mandatory cuts for Upper Basin water users.
“The upper division states continue to stand behind the alternative that we submitted and know that it provides a reasonable alternative for sustainable operations of Lake Powell and Lake Mead,” said Colorado Commissioner Becky Mitchell.
Although the Upper Basin’s proposal does not commit to sharing in cuts when reservoir levels fall, it does offer “parallel activities,” which would include voluntary, temporary and compensated reductions in use (as the SCPP does), which are separate from the post-2026 guidelines process.
“We’re moving forward with our parallel actions like we have committed to do,” said Utah Commissioner Gene Shawcroft. “I think that’s significant.”
Although the Upper Basin and Lower Basin states have competing proposals, Upper Basin commissioners said Monday they are still committed to finding a consensus with their Lower Basin counterparts.
Colorado River “Beginnings”. Photo: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism
Click the link to read the article on the InkStain website (Kathryn Sorensen, Sarah Porter and John Fleck):
August 16, 2024
Colorado River Basin governance is increasingly struggling with a deep question in water management: When we reduce our use of water, who gets the savings?
If I install more efficient irrigation equipment, should I get credit for the saved water to expand my acreage, or save the water in an upstream reservoir as a hedge against next year’s drought? If I tear out lawns, can I use the saved water to help build the next subdivision, or save the water in an upstream reservoir as a hedge against that next year of drought?
Or should the savings contribute, not to my own resilience and well-being, but to the resilience and the well-being of the system as a whole by simply reducing overall water use?
In a deeply insightful 2013 book, British scholar Bruce Lankford bestowed the unfortunately wonky name of “the paracommons” to this question, and it dogs water policy management around the world.
This issue has been lurking in Colorado River management for a long time. Should we create legal structures that allow users to bank the savings for their own use later? Or should the reductions benefit the health of the system as a whole? There are advantages and disadvantages to both approaches, and we need to design new rules for managing the Colorado River with our eyes open on this question.
Assigned Water
In a new paper, we explore the implications of the two paths for the management of a post-2026 Colorado River.
One is to incentivize conservation by giving water users the chance to bank saved water for later use. Known most commonly as Intentionally Created Surplus (ICS), and more broadly in a series of increasingly creative implementations as “Assigned Water,” this creates short term savings.
The other involves permanent reductions – “System Water.” Water use is reduced for the benefit of the Colorado River as a whole.
In more than a decade of experimentation with these policy tools, we have seen the results. Investment in Assigned Water, attractive to water managers because of the allure of getting their water back, has crowded out investment in the more durable System Water reductions that will be needed to bring the Colorado River into balance.
As we develop new operating rules for the river, we need to be mindful of the differences involved.
Assigned Water does not solve the problem of overallocation because when it is deployed we are borrowing against our own bank. Enduring solutions on the river can only be found by addressing overallocation.
Assigned Water creates critically important operational flexibility; it allows its owner to either forgo water deliveries in one year—or pay someone else to—and take delivery of that water during another potentially desperate time.
Assigned Water is generally insulated from shortage, forfeiture and abandonment.
Protection from shortage and forfeiture has value; Assigned Water creates individual resiliencefor its owner. Because of this, the availability of Assigned Water appears to crowd out investment in collective resilience in the form of System Water.
In conversations about post-2026 operations negotiators are contemplating extending, enlarging and/or enhancing Assigned Water and/or creating an operationally neutral form called Top Water. In any form, Assigned Water lives outside of the existing priority system. In this regard, the conversation involves the reallocation of water in Lakes Powell and Mead.
Critics of the West’s priority system of water delivery can rejoice—nearly 40% of the water in Mead in 2023 was Assigned Water, meaning that Assigned Water is replacing priority to a significant degree. But is the priority system like capitalism in that it has its warts but the alternatives are far worse? As the expansion of the rights of municipal water providers, irrigation districts, foreign nations and tribes to own even more and different kinds of Assigned Water is contemplated for a post-2026 world, consideration should also be given to how these changes may also inure to the benefit of environmental non-governmental organizations, hedge funds and water speculators. Those who share John Wesley Powell’s fears will understand the implications because the expansion of Assigned Water in Lakes Powell and Mead may bring about the ultimate divorce of priority-based water rights from arid lands in the Colorado River Basin.
There are important elements of transparency and fairness at play. The large, powerful players on the River received Assigned Water through negotiations not available to others—meaning, there was no open bidding process or invitation to smaller entities to acquire this valuable water. Apparently, there still isn’t. Thought ought to be given to those other stakeholders—smaller cities, farmers, tribes and others—who have made investments and built economies based on the priority system. Imagine a restaurant that operates on a first-come-first-serve basis and a hungry patron who waits patiently in line for the doors to open only to be told that the rules changed while he was waiting and all of the reservations have been claimed through a process from which he was excluded.
It is helpful to continue to deploy a tool as flexible and alluring as Assigned Water, particularly in the form of operationally neutral Top Storage, so there’s no need to throw the baby out with the bath water. A reasonable path forward may be to allow the creation of Top Storage with appropriate guardrails while including a 50% cut for System Water. Post 2026, Assigned Water will be so valuable that entities likely will be willing to take a big haircut to get it, and such a required contribution solves the problem of developing enduring funding for System Water to a significant degree. Maybe ultimately environmental non-governmental organizations, hedge funds and water speculators get a piece, but if so, it will be at the price of protecting and respecting the priority system upon which so many depend.
Receding waters at Lone Rock in Lake Powell illustrate the impacts of megadrought. Hydroelectric generation will be endangered if the lake continues to shrink. Credit: Colorado State University
Colorado River officials in four states, including Colorado, are negotiating a new agreement with the federal government to conserve water and get credit to protect against possible cutbacks in the future.
Water conservation is a big issue in the Colorado River Basin, where prolonged drought, a changing climate, and overuse have strained the water supply for 40 million people. Currently, water conserved on a farm simply reenters streams and can be used by anyone downstream. The negotiations aim to set up a program to track, count and store that water so it can benefit the four Upper Basin states — Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming.
Coloradans have asked for a conservation credit program, and this is a way of addressing that feedback, said Commissioner Becky Mitchell, Colorado’s representative on the Upper Colorado River Commission.
“One of the things that I heard primarily was that we need to be getting credit for the work that we are doing, and we need to be getting credit for it now,” Mitchell said Monday during the commission’s meeting.
Farmers, ranchers and other water users are already being paid to cut back their use of Colorado River water. Last year, taxpayers paid farmers and ranchers $16 million to cut their water use through the System Conservation Pilot Program.
The program led to water savings, but it did not require tracking and storing the water. Theoretically, water conserved in the Upper Basin could simply flow downstream to be used on farms, ranches and cities in the Lower Basin, according to critics of the program.
After years of debating and studying possible water credit programs, the commission ramped up its efforts to set up a program in July.
The commission hasn’t explicitly defined how credits will be used yet beyond saying they will benefit Upper Basin states. One possible use is to save up the credits and use them to fulfill the Upper Basin’s interstate water sharing obligations if river conditions worsen drastically and trigger mandatory cuts in the Upper Basin.
Commissioners and officials from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which manages the basin’s vital storage reservoirs, aim to draft a conservation-for-credit agreement by the end of September.
It will identify general criteria for projects that could potentially conserve water for credit, like where conservation is taking place, who can participate, how the program would be regulated and how they plan to calculate conserved water.
If the commissioners approve the draft agreement, they will also have the option to move forward with accepting project proposals. The goal is to have applications in by October and to launch conservation projects in 2025, said Chuck Cullom, the commission’s executive director.
Establishing a conservation-for-credit program won’t be simple.
Building a long-term program to track and store conserved water raises questions about equity, funding, economic impacts and whether the idea is feasible at all.
The devil is in the details, said Andy Mueller, general manager of the Colorado River Water Conservation District, a public water planning and policy agency that spans over half the Western Slope (which is part of the Colorado River Basin).
Andy Mueller, the general manager of the Colorado River District, speaking at the district’s annual seminar on the Colorado RIver, on Sept. 14, 2018 in Grand Junction. Muller expressed concerns about how the state of Colorado might deal with falling water levels in Lake Powell and Lake Mead. Photo credit: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism
He wants to make sure a future program will not disproportionately impact one region, like the Western Slope. Farmers and ranchers in western Colorado have made nearly all of the water cuts through the conservation pilot program, even though communities across the state use Colorado River water.
“It’s a complex accounting world, and it takes time,” he said Monday after tuning into the virtual commission meeting along with about 100 other participants. “We do think they’re moving in the right direction.”
The potential program also has to coordinate with a set of high-stakes negotiations among all seven Colorado River states to decide the rules for storing, releasing and cutting back on water in the river’s main reservoirs, like Lake Powell and Lake Mead. These new rules won’t go into effect until after 2026.
Any credits gained before the end of 2026 will be counted but won’t be able to be used by the Upper Basin until after that process is complete, Cullom said.
The Upper Basin promised to conserve water in a proposal outlining how the four states envision future Colorado River management. Setting up a new conservation program shows the entire basin that the Upper Basin is taking action to cut back on water use, the state commissioners said.
The Department of the Interior today announced a nearly $105 million investment as part of the President’s Investing in America agenda for 67 water conservation and efficiency projects that will enhance drought resilience across the nation. The investment comes from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and annual appropriations.
President Biden’s Investing in America agenda represents the largest investment in climate resilience in the nation’s history and provides much-needed resources to enhance Western communities’ resilience to drought and the effects of climate change. Through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the Bureau of Reclamation is investing a total of $8.3 billion over five years for water infrastructure projects, including rural water, water storage, conservation and conveyance, nature-based solutions, dam safety, water purification and reuse, and desalination. Since the President signed the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law in November 2021, Reclamation has announced $4.2 billion for 575 projects to date.
“Access to clean, reliable water is essential for feeding families, growing crops, sustaining wildlife, and powering agricultural businesses,” said Acting Deputy Secretary Laura Daniel-Davis. “Enabled by the President’s Investing in America agenda, the Biden-Harris administration is bringing historic resources to bear to ensure the stability and sustainability of the Colorado River Basin in the wake of severe drought and to safeguard communities across the West, by strengthening climate resilience and facilitating water conservation.”
“As we work to counter the impacts of drought and climate change, we must embrace opportunities to increase water and energy efficiency wherever possible,” said Reclamation Commissioner Camille Calimlim Touton. “The President’s Investing in America agenda provides the resources to expand these conservation efforts that include canal lining, meter installation, conservation incentives, and gate automation.”
Reclamation anticipates that the projects, located in Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, Texas, Utah and Wyoming, will save more than 111,000 acre-feet of water annually. That’s enough water to supply approximately 447,000 people for a year. This builds upon $140 million announced for water and energy efficiency projects last year. The complete list of projects can be found on Reclamation’s website.
Four states in the drought-stricken Colorado River Basin, including Colorado, want credit for conserving water, but water users and officials have big questions about how to make it happen.
Last year, taxpayers paid farmers and ranchers $16 million to cut their water use in the Colorado River Basin, but the water saved on one farm simply reentered streams, where it could be used by anyone downstream. For years, officials in Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming have been considering ways to get credit for that conserved water — to track it, store it in a reservoir, and save it to help the states in the future. Representatives from the four states voted in June to develop a proposal exploring the idea by mid-August.
But building a long-term program to track and store conserved water raises questions about equity, funding, economic impacts and whether the idea is feasible at all.
People are concerned about the bigger picture, said Andy Mueller, general manager of the Colorado River District in Colorado.
“If we’re going to conserve water up here, and if the federal government is going to pay for that conservation with taxpayer dollars, it seems to us that storing it and using it for important public purposes makes sense, rather than sending it downstream to just encourage continued consumption of water [by downstream states],” Mueller said.
Cutting back on water use is a big topic of conversation in the Colorado River Basin, which supplies water to 40 million people and is enduring warmer temperatures and a two-decade megadrought.
Officials from each of the seven states in the basin are weighing who might have to cut their use and how to manage the basin’s reservoirs in high-stakes negotiations over the river’s future after the current rules expire in 2026.
The Upper Basin’s alternative, summed up. Source: Upper Colorado River Commission.
The Upper Basin released a proposal in March that outlined its plan to manage the river after 2026 as part of these negotiations. That proposal includes a commitment to pursue voluntary, temporary and compensated conservation programs.
The June vote of the Upper Colorado River Commission aimed to take that commitment one step forward. The state and federal representatives on the commission want to design a conservation-for-credit program in advance so it’s set up and ready to go if needed.
The commission’s plan could help inform the states’ negotiations, said Amy Ostdiek, who is part of Colorado’s negotiating team and works on interstate water issues for the state’s top water policy agency, the Colorado Water Conservation Board.
“We’ve heard this from water users a lot. … If we’re going to continue doing conservation-type activities, can we explore ways to quote-unquote get credit for it?” Ostdiek said. “It’s worth exploring. … There’s a lot we’d need to work out before we get there.”
Grays and Torreys, Dillon Reservoir May 2017. Photo credit Greg Hobbs.
Big questions from water users
Officials and water users have been kicking around the idea of tracking and storing conserved water for credit for years, and the commission’s August proposal will be the latest iteration of those discussions.
One heavily debated program, called demand management, offered a path toward storing conserved water in a reservoir to help Upper Basin states. But Colorado hit pause on analyzing the idea in 2022 as other Upper Basin states slogged through intense feasibility studies.
Taxpayers paid $16 million in 2023 to conserve water through another program, the System Conservation Pilot Program. Because the program does not track conserved water, there is no certainty where it ends up.
“It inherently just flows downstream and continues to be used by the Lower Basin,” Mueller said. “It really doesn’t do anything other than feed the continued use of the water, rather than encourage conservation of the water.”
The commission’s proposal will try to answer key questions for a program that tracks and stores conserved water, said Chuck Cullom, executive director of the Upper Colorado River Commission. But how will water managers track the actual water down streams, through reservoirs and across state lines? What is a “conservation credit” and how can it be earned? What role would location play?
Mueller of the Colorado River District said the location of the projects ties into big potential equity issues.
Most of Colorado’s participants in the system conservation pilot program so far have been farmers and ranchers on the Western Slope, he said. They helped conserve water by fallowing fields and switching to crops that used less water. But if a farmer stops production, or fallows acres of land to conserve water, it can cut jobs on the farm and spending in the community.
A paid conservation program has to be designed to incentivize participation from all regions of Colorado where Colorado River is used, which includes Front Range cities from Fort Collins down to Colorado Springs and beyond, Mueller said.
Joe Bernal, a rancher in Loma who is participating in the System Conservation Pilot Program, said his concern was how a conservation-for-credit program would be administered.
“Would they work with ditch companies, or would they go with individuals? How much would they offer?” he said. “Would they … help ditch companies and communities protect the viability of agriculture?”
Other water users want to know which reservoirs would store conserved water for credit.
Storing conserved water closer to a river’s source — in high-elevation Upper Basin reservoirs rather than farther downstream — would give the four states more say in when, how much and from where water is released.
Plus, local water users want to conserve water in good years and save it in a nearby reservoir to provide a cushion during the next dry year, said Ken Curtis, general manager of the Dolores Water Conservancy District.
Mcphee Reservoir
Farmers and ranchers in his district are already doing just that: This year, they volunteered to be paid to save water through the system conservation program, and they’re storing it in the nearby McPhee Reservoir to boost carryover water supplies for next year, Curtis said.
The commission’s proposal also aims to define the requirements conservation projects would have to meet to qualify and how years of past water use would come into play.
How to factor in past water use is important to two tribes in Colorado, the Ute Mountain Ute and Southern Ute Indian tribes, said Peter Ortego, general counsel for the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe.
Both tribes have water in a southwestern reservoir that they plan to put to use in the future, but haven’t used yet. Their water does not qualify for use in current paid conservation programs, which raises the question of whether it could qualify for a newer, reimagined conservation-for-credit program, Ortego said.
A program to help the Upper Basin
As officials try to tackle big questions, one thing is clear: Upper Basin water watchers do not want to conserve water if it will just flow downstream to support current use in the Lower Basin.
Congress is currently considering a bill to extend the system conservation pilot program, which does not track where conserved water goes. Meanwhile, officials are dusting off years of analyses about the demand management program, which expires in 2026.
The demand management program created an “account” for up to 500,000 acre-feet of conserved water in Lake Powell. One acre-foot roughly equals the annual use of two to three households.
It’s been frustrating to know the demand management account exists in Lake Powell and to see water being conserved through the system conservation pilot program, or SCPP, that just flows through the reservoir, said James Eklund, a former Colorado water official who helped forge the program and owns a ranch in the pilot program.
“All it needed was to be tagged as DM (demand management) water instead of SCPP water — and it would be water we’d have in our account as Upper Basin states. And we’d be able to point to that water in negotiations,” Eklund said.
But that program is very prescriptive, Ostdiek said.
The account could be used for one purpose: fulfilling the Upper Basin’s interstate water sharing obligations outlined in the 1922 Colorado River Compact, even if river conditions worsen drastically and trigger mandatory cuts in the Upper Basin. The shorthand for this worst-case scenario is a “compact call” or “compact compliance.”
The commission’s upcoming proposal could explore more general uses for credits, including or beyond compact compliance, Ostdiek said.
“I think we need to do some more exploring on what the concept of credit actually means to individual states,” she said, “and think about what the goals would be of that type of approach.”
The Salton Sea (pictured above ) straddles the Imperial and Coachella valleys and has long been a sticking point in Colorado River deals. But the federal government recently committed up to $250 million for restoration efforts at the sea. (Source: Water Education Foundation)
Click the link to read the release on the Reclamation website (Mike Boyles):
Jun 28, 2024
BOULDER CITY, Nev. – The Bureau of Reclamation is seeking public comments on a draft environmental assessment analyzing potential impacts of a System Conservation Implementation Agreement between Reclamation and the Imperial Irrigation District. The agreement, administered through the Lower Colorado River Basin System Conservation and Efficiency Program and funded in part by the Inflation Reduction Act, supports voluntary system conservation to protect Colorado River reservoir storage volumes amid persistent drought conditions driven by climate change.
As analyzed in the draft environmental assessment, the Imperial Irrigation District has proposed to conserve a volume up to a maximum of 300,000 acre-feet of Colorado River water each year from 2024 through 2026 which will remain in Lake Mead to benefit the Colorado River System and its users.
The draft environmental assessment considers potential impacts from actions taken to implement water conservation, thereby reducing water diversions from the Colorado River at Imperial Dam.
Comments should be directed to Reclamation via email to prj-lcr-nepa@usbr.gov or to the mailing address below.
Bureau of Reclamation, Lower Colorado Regional Office Attn: Resource Management Office Chief (LC-2000) P.O. Box 61470 Boulder City, NV 89006
Mailed comments on this notice must be postmarked by July 27, 2024. In your response, please refer to the above public notice title and date. Should no response be received by the above expiration date, a “no comment” response will be assumed.
Leslie Hagenstein stands in front of the New Fork River on Mar. 27, 2024. Through the federally-funded System Conservation Pilot Program, she was able to make 13 times more than she would have by leasing her fields out to grow hay. CREDIT: ALEX HAGER/KUNC
Click the link to read the article on the Aspen Journalism website (Heather Sackett and Alex Hager):
May 30, 2024
This story was reported and produced collaboratively with Northern Colorado-based public radio station KUNC, as a part of KUNC’s ongoing coverage of the Colorado River supported by the Walton Family Foundation. Additional editing resources and other support for this story came from The Water Desk, an independent initiative of the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center for Environmental Journalism.
Upper Basin conservation program dogged with concerns over cost and efficacy
Wyoming native Leslie Hagenstein lives on the ranch where she grew up and remembers her grandmother and father delivering milk in glass bottles from the family’s Mount Airy Dairy.
The cottonwood-lined property, at the foot of the Wind River Mountains south of Pinedale, is not only home to Hagenstein, her older sister and their dogs, but to bald eagles and moose. But this summer, for the second year in a row, water from Pine Creek will not turn 600 acres of grass and alfalfa a lush green.
On a blustery day in late March, Hagenstein stood in her fields, now brown and weed-choked, and explained why she cried after she chose to participate in a program that pays ranchers in the Upper Colorado River basin to leave their water in the river.
“You have these very lush grasses, and you have a canal or a ditch that’s full of this beautiful clear, gorgeous water that comes out of these beautiful mountains. It’s nirvana,” Hagenstein said. “And then last year, it looks like Armageddon. I mean, it’s nothing, it’s very sad, there’s just no growth at all. There’s no green.”
Wyoming rancher Leslie Hagenstein’s fields were brown and weed-choked after she didn’t water them in 2023. She made 13 times more by participating in a conservation program that pays her to leave her water in the river than she could have leasing her fields out to grow hay.
CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
The Colorado River basin has endured decades of drier-than-normal conditions, and steady demand. That imbalance is draining its largest reservoirs, and making it nearly impossible for them to recover, putting the region’s water security in jeopardy. Reining in demand throughout the vast western watershed has become a drumbeat among policymakers at both the state and federal level. Hagenstein’s ranch is an example of what that intentional reduction in water use looks like.
“New plot using the nClimGrid data, which is a better source than PRISM for long-term trends. Of course, the combined reservoir contents increase from last year, but the increase is less than 2011 and looks puny compared to the ‘hole’ in the reservoirs. The blue Loess lines subtly change. Last year those lines ended pointing downwards. This year they end flat-ish. 2023 temps were still above the 20th century average, although close. Another interesting aspect is that the 20C Mean and 21C Mean lines on the individual plots really don’t change much. Finally, the 2023 Natural Flows are almost exactly equal to 2019. (17.678 maf vs 17.672 maf). For all the hoopla about how this was record-setting year, the fact is that this year was significantly less than 2011 (20.159 maf) and no different than 2019” — Brad Udall
In Sublette County, Hagenstein said it’s rare for people to make a living solely on raising livestock and growing hay anymore. In addition to ranching, she worked as a nurse practitioner for more than 40 years before retiring. And when she looked at her bank accounts, she realized she needed a better way to meet expenses if she was going to keep the ranch afloat in the future. Hagenstein said it was a no-brainer. She signed up for the System Conservation Pilot Program (SCPP) in 2023. Through the federally funded program, she was able to make 13 times more than she would have by leasing it out to grow hay.
Since its inception as a mass experiment in water use reduction, the program has divided farmers and ranchers. Concerns over the high cost, the limited water savings, the difficulty in measuring and tracking conserved water, and the potential damage to local agricultural economies still linger. But without fully overhauling the West’s water rights system, few tools exist to get farmers and ranchers — the Colorado River’s majority users — to conserve voluntarily.
“I’m a Wyoming native,” Hagenstein said. “I don’t want to push our water downstream. I don’t want to disregard it. But I also have to survive in this landscape. And to survive in this landscape, you have to get creative.”
A ditch runs dry through Leslie Hagenstein’s fields near Pinedale, Wyo. on Mar. 27, 2024. She signed up for a program that pays her to pause irrigation on her land in order to save Colorado River water. Some experts say the System Conservation Pilot Program, or SCPP, is costly and may not be the most effective way to save Colorado River water.
CREDIT: ALEX HAGER/KUNC
SCPP participation doubles in 2024
Driven by overuse, drought and climate change, water levels in Lake Powell fell to their lowest point ever in 2022. The nation’s second-largest reservoir provided a stark visual indicator of the Colorado River’s supply-demand imbalance. Those falling levels also threatened the ability to produce hydroelectric power and prompted officials from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation to call on states for an unprecedented level of water conservation. The agency gave the seven states that use the Colorado River a tight deadline to save an additional 2 million to 4 million acre-feet of water. (An acre-foot is the amount of water needed to fill 1 acre of land to a height of 1 foot. One acre-foot generally provides enough water for one to two households for a year.)
States gave the federal government no plans to save that much water in one fell swoop, instead proposing a patchwork of smaller conservation measures aimed at boosting the reservoirs and avoiding infrastructural damage.
The Upper Colorado River Commission (UCRC), an agency that brings together water leaders from Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico, offered up the “5-Point Plan,” one arm of which was restarting the SCPP.
In 2023, after the federal government announced it would spend $4 billion from the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) on Colorado River programs, the Upper Colorado River Commission decided to reboot the SCPP, which was first tested from 2015 to 2018. The program pays eligible water users in the four Upper Basin states to leave their fields dry for the irrigation season and let that water flow downstream.
But a hasty rollout to the SCPP in 2023 meant low participation numbers. Only 64 water-saving projects were approved, and about 38,000 acre-feet of water was conserved across the four states, which cost nearly $16 million. Water users complained about not having enough time to plan for the upcoming growing season and said an initial lowball offer from the UCRC of $150 per acre-foot was insulting and came with a complicated haggling process to get a higher payment. UCRC officials said the short notice and challenges with getting the word out about the program contributed to low participation numbers in 2023.
A University of Wyoming study surveyed the region’s growers about water conservation between November 2022 and March 2023. Eighty-eight percent of respondents in the Upper Basin were not even aware that the SCPP existed.
UCRC commissioners voted to run the program again in 2024, but said this time that projects should focus on local drought resiliency on a longer-term basis. UCRC officials tweaked the program based on lessons learned in 2023, and the 2024 program had nearly double the participation, with 109 projects and nearly 64,000 acre-feet of water expected to be conserved.
“I view the doubling of interest and participation from one year to the next as a significant success,” said UCRC Executive Director Chuck Cullom.
What happens to conserved water?
Despite one of its stated intentions — protecting critical reservoir levels — water being left in streams by SCPP-participating irrigators is not tracked to Lake Powell, the storage bucket for the Upper Basin.
In total, across 2023 and 2024, the program spent $45 million to save a little more than 1% of the Colorado River water allocated to Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico.
Although engineers have calculated how much water is saved by individual projects, known as conserved consumptive use, officials are not measuring how much of that conserved water ends up in Lake Powell. And the laws that govern water rights allow downstream users to simply take the water that an upstream user participating in the SCPP leaves in the river, potentially canceling out the attempt at banking that water.
These types of temporary, voluntary and compensated conservation programs aren’t new to the Upper Basin. In addition to the pilot program from 2015 to 2018, the state of Colorado undertook a two-year study of the idea of a demand management program by convening nine workgroups to examine the issue.
System conservation and demand management, while conceptually the same, have one big difference: A demand management program would track the water so that downstream users don’t grab it and create a special pool to store the conserved water in Lake Powell. With system conservation, the water simply becomes part of the Colorado River system, with no certainty about where it ends up.
This lack of accounting for the water has some asking whether the SCPP is accomplishing what it set out to do and whether it is worth the high cost to taxpayers.
Even if all the roughly 64,000 acre-feet from the SCPP in 2024 makes it to Lake Powell, it’s still a drop in the bucket for the reservoir; last year, 13.4 million acre-feet flowed into Lake Powell. The reservoir currently holds about 8.2 million acre-feet and has a capacity of about 25 million acre-feet.
“I still haven’t really seen evidence of total water savings or anything like that,” said Elizabeth Koebele, a professor of political science and director of the graduate program of hydrologic sciences at the University of Nevada, Reno. Koebele wrote her doctoral dissertation on the first iteration of the SCPP. “As far as getting water to reservoirs, I’m not sure that we’ve seen a lot of success from the System Conservation Pilot Program so far.”
And the program has been expensive. For the 2024 iteration of the program, UCRC officials offered a fixed price per acre-foot that applicants could take or leave — no haggling this time. Colorado, Utah and Wyoming paid agricultural water users about $500 an acre-foot; the Navajo Agricultural Products Industry, New Mexico’s sole participant in 2023 and 2024, received $300 an acre-foot. Projects that involved municipal or industrial water use were compensated on a case-by-case basis, and those that involved leaving water in reservoirs were paid $150 an acre-foot. The majority of projects in both years involved taking water off fields for the whole season or part of the season, known as fallowing.
The UCRC doled out nearly $29 million in payments to water users in 2024. The program paid about $45 million to participants in 2023 and 2024 combined. Some participants are using these payments to upgrade their irrigation systems, Cullom said, which helps maintain the vitality of local agriculture.
But even with this amount of money spent, Koebele said it may still not cover the costs to participants for things such as long term impacts to soil health that come with taking water off fields for a season or two. After the infusion of IRA money runs out, it’s unclear how such a program would be funded in the future.
“I also worry that we don’t have an endless supply of money to compensate users for conservation in the basin,” Koebele said. “And perhaps we need to be thinking about — rather than doing temporary conservation — investments in longer-term conservation beyond what we’re already doing.”
The New Fork River runs past Leslie Hagenstein’s property south of Pinedale, Wyoming. A program in the Upper Colorado River basin is paying farmers and ranchers like Hagenstein to conserve water. Photo credit: Heather Sackett/Aspen Journalism
Western Slope water managers critical of SCPP
Some groups have concerns with the SCPP beyond its issues with accounting for how much water ends up in Lake Powell.
The Glenwood Springs-based Colorado River Water Conservation District represents 15 counties on Colorado’s Western Slope. Their mission is to protect, conserve, use and develop the water within its boundaries, which has often meant fighting Front Range entities that want to take more from the headwaters of the Colorado River in the form of transmountain diversions. Sometimes, that means voicing concerns about conservation programs that it thinks have the potential to harm Western Slope water users.
River District officials have been vocal critics of the SCPP, pointing out the ways that it could, if not done carefully, harm certain water users and rural agricultural communities. Because of the way water left in the stream by participants in the SCPP can be picked up by the next water user in line, some of which are Front Range cities, at least two of the projects this year could result in less — not more — water in the Colorado River, according to comments that the River District submitted to the state of Colorado. (One of these projects dropped out in 2024.)
“Without significant improvements, it would be hard for the River District to support additional expenditures on system conservation,” said Peter Fleming, the district’s general counsel.
The River District had also wanted a say in the SCPP process in 2023, going as far as creating their own checklist for deciding project approval, but UCRC officials said the commission had sole authority to approve projects.
Water users from all sectors — including agriculture, cities and industry — are allowed to participate in the program, but, in practice, all of the 2023 and 2024 projects in Colorado involve Western Slope agricultural water users. That’s partly because the price that the SCPP offered was less than the market value of water on the Front Range.
“If you’re simply basing it on a set dollar value per acre-foot, you’re going to result in disproportionate impacts to areas of the state where the economic value of water is not as high as others,” Fleming said. “You’re going to end up with all the water coming from the Western Slope. … You shouldn’t create sacrificial lambs.”
This alfalfa field near Carbondale is irrigated with water from the Crystal River. All of the projects in a conservation program that pays water users in the Upper Colorado River basin to cut back involve Western Slope agriculture.
CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Upper Basin facing increased pressure
The Upper Basin’s conservation program is playing out against the backdrop of watershedwide negotiations with the Lower Basin states (California, Arizona and Nevada) about how to share the river after the current guidelines governing river operations expire in 2026.
After failing to come to an agreement, the Upper and Lower basins submitted competing proposals to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. Lower Basin officials committed to a baseline of 1.5 million acre-feet in cuts, plus more when conditions warrant. They also called for the Upper Basin to share in those additional cuts when reservoirs dip below a certain level.
Upper Basin officials have balked at the notion that their water users should share in any cuts, saying they already suffer shortages in dry years. The source of the problem, they say, is overuse by the Lower Basin.
Plus, without ever having violated the 1922 Colorado River Compact by using more than the 7.5 million acre-feet allotted to them, they say there’s no way to enforce mandatory cuts on the Upper Basin.
But under increased pressure from the Lower Basin, and facing a drier future as climate change continues to rob the Colorado River of flows, Upper Basin water managers have made one small concession. In their proposal, they have offered to continue “parallel activities” like the SCPP, but said these programs will be separate from any post-2026 agreement with the Lower Basin. The congressional authorization for the SCPP expires at the end of 2024, and it’s unclear whether water managers will implement a program in 2025 or beyond.
Inherent in the Upper Basin’s stance is a contradiction: Why maintain that both the source of the problem and responsibility for a solution rest with the Lower Basin, but then agree to do the SCPP or a conservation program like it?
“I think that they’re basically saying that the Lower Basin needs to get their act together before we actually really need to come to the table in a realistic way,” said Drew Bennett, a University of Wyoming professor of private-lands stewardship. “I think they feel like, ‘We don’t actually really need to do anything.’ That the SCPP is actually above and beyond what they need to be doing. Is that reality? I don’t know. But I think that’s sort of the message they’re trying to send in negotiations.”
Docks and buoys, once floating atop dozens of feet of water, sit stranded on the sand at Lake Powell’s Bullfrog Marina on April 9, 2023. Record-low levels at the reservoir helped spur water officials to reboot the System Conservation Pilot Program.
CREDIT: ALEX HAGER/KUNC
Grower attitudes key to program success
Some experts say the program’s real value is not getting water into depleted reservoirs. It is testing out a potential tool to help farmers and ranchers adapt to a future with less water. They frame it as an experiment that provides crucial information and lessons on how an Upper Basin conservation program could be scaled up. It also continues to ease water users into the concept of using less should a more permanent water conservation program come to pass.
“This program kind of, I think, helps grease the skids for that process that gets people comfortable for how it operates,” said Alex Funk, who worked for the Colorado Water Conservation Board in 2019 and helped to guide the state’s demand management study with regard to agricultural impacts. “Just seeing the doubling of the amount of acre-feet conserved under the second year and then the interest shows that, yeah, I think there could be some longevity to the program. … I think one has to be optimistic because I don’t see how the Upper Basin navigates a post-2026 future without such a program.”
Funk now works as senior counsel and director of water resources at the nonprofit Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership. The group receives funding from the Walton Family Foundation, which also funds a portion of Colorado River coverage from KUNC and The Water Desk.
Cullom, executive director of the agency that runs the SCPP, pushed back on the idea that it is intended to help correct the supply/demand imbalance on the river, which he said is the fault of the Lower Basin.
“The intent of the program is to develop new tools for the upper division water users to adapt to a drier future,” he said. “We’re trying to develop tools that benefit the local communities and producers and water users in the four upper division states through drought resiliency, new tools, the ability to explore crop switching and irrigation efficiencies.”
Of all the challenges in setting up a program such as this — funding, pricing, calculating water saved, getting the word out — the biggest may be the attitudes of water users themselves, some of whom have a deep-seated mistrust of the federal government. Like Hagenstein, all of the water users that Aspen Journalism and KUNC interviewed for this story said financial reasons were the biggest driver behind their participation in the SCPP.
Bennett’s research also explained some of the reasons why growers may be hesitant to enroll in conservation programs such as the SCPP. It found that farmers and ranchers trusted local organizations to administer conservation programs significantly more than state or federal ones.
If demand management strategies were deployed, 74% of survey respondents said they’d prefer to have a local agency manage the program, as opposed to a state or federal agency. Only about 14% of growers said there is a high level of trust between water users and water management agencies in their states. The same percentage said their state’s planning process was adequate for dealing with water supply issues.
These findings point to a stumbling block that the UCRC and other agencies must overcome if they hope to create a longer-term conservation program.
Hagenstein, the Wyoming rancher, has experienced those attitudes firsthand. She has been on the receiving end of insults and name-calling because of her participation in the SCPP.
But Hagenstein says the SCPP has allowed her to have money in her pocket to continue ranching long term.
“I didn’t anticipate it would be so beneficial,” she said. “It bought us time to stay in ranching is the long and the short of it. So, I’m most grateful for the abundance that the federal government offered us. … You know, some would call it a golden goose.”
The structural deficit refers to the consumption by Lower Basin states of more water than enters Lake Mead each year. The deficit, which includes losses from evaporation, is estimated at 1.2 million acre-feet a year. (Image: Central Arizona Project circa 2019)
Much attention is focused right now on rewriting Colorado River operating rules, to replace the soon-to-expire 2007 reservoir operating guidelines. But there is a growing frustration that the struggle to solve that relatively narrow problem “mass balance” problem (how much water, and where?) leaves out a range of incredibly important issues:
We are mindful that much of what CRRG has been advocating for is directly on the table in the various proposals now being considered for post-2026 river management:
But there are so many other important issues left untouched by the P26 process (sorry, yes, some of us have started shortening it to “P26”) that the list we came up with among CRRG members is too long to blockquote here in a blog post – click through to read the white paper, it’s not too long.
What we advocate for in the paper is that the other issues not be lost in our rush to solve the mass balance problem.
“New plot using the nClimGrid data, which is a better source than PRISM for long-term trends. Of course, the combined reservoir contents increase from last year, but the increase is less than 2011 and looks puny compared to the ‘hole’ in the reservoirs. The blue Loess lines subtly change. Last year those lines ended pointing downwards. This year they end flat-ish. 2023 temps were still above the 20th century average, although close. Another interesting aspect is that the 20C Mean and 21C Mean lines on the individual plots really don’t change much. Finally, the 2023 Natural Flows are almost exactly equal to 2019. (17.678 maf vs 17.672 maf). For all the hoopla about how this was record-setting year, the fact is that this year was significantly less than 2011 (20.159 maf) and no different than 2019” — Brad Udall
(CN) — Conservationists lost an appeal to the Ninth Circuit on Wednesday as they attempted to force the federal government to reconsider climate change studies in managing the Glen Canyon Dam and Colorado River.
Save the Colorado, Living River and the Center for Biological Diversity initially asked the U.S. Department of the Interior to consider emerging climate science and the severe potential of climate change in updating its management plan in 2016 for the Glen Canyon Dam on Lake Powell, which has a water level 3,564 feet above sea level. Experts say the dam will lose hydropower if the water level drops below 3,490 feet.
During the groups’ February appeal hearing, Chief U.S. Circuit Judge Mary Murguia and U.S. Circuit Judge Anthony Johnstone, both Joe Biden appointees, questioned whether the Interior’s absent response violated the National Environmental Policy Act itself and scrutinized the Interior’s historical water flow modeling.
However, neither of the judges’ skepticisms outweighed their conclusion that the Interior did not violate environmental law when developing its 20-year plan for managing water releases from the dam or the plan’s accompanying environmental analysis.
“Appellants contend that Interior impermissibly elevated hydroelectric power generation in its purpose and need statement. We disagree,” the panel wrote in the unpublished memorandum.
The Bureau of Reclamation and the National Park Service, two sub-agencies of the Interior, eventually developed and considered seven alternative plans to manage water releases from Lake Powell through the Glen Canyon Dam. But the agencies ignored alternative proposals that the conservationists say better account for future climate change.
The conservationists sued in 2019, four months after sending the Interior a letter detailing new research, which still hasn’t been answered. In December 2022, a federal judge sided with the Interior in a summary judgment finding the groups didn’t prove the federal agency hadn’t analyzed the effects of climate change.
U.S. Circuit Judge Michael Hawkins, a Bill Clinton appointee, joined Judges Murguia and Johnstone in denying the groups’ appeal.
The panel found that the Interior selected a management plan that adequately juggled its obligations under the Grand Canyon Protect Act of 1992 with other relevant regulations, such as the Colorado River Storage Project Act of 1956.
The judges explained how the groups’ proposals would have either reduced or eliminated hydropower generation at the dam or run afoul of the long-term management plan’s limited purpose: to create monthly, daily and hourly water release schedules.
And since the Interior’s plan controls the timing of water releases from the dam — not the volume of water it must release annually — the panel ruled that the Interior “reasonably focused its climate-change analysis on comparing the performance and effect of each of the seven alternatives under various climate change conditions, rather than providing a full-fledged assessment of water availability in the Colorado River Basin.”
By ignoring the groups’ demand for a supplemental environmental analysis, the panel decided, the Interior made a harmless error.
“Because there is no indication that the studies contain information ‘not already considered’ or that would ‘materially affect the substance of [Interior’s] decision’ regarding the timing of water releases from Glen Canyon Dam, no prejudice resulted from Interior’s failure to respond to appellants’ letter.”
In an email on Wednesday, Center co-founder Robin Silver acknowledged the loss while indicating that the organization’s fight against federally operated dams is far from over.
Silver wrote, “We lost. But operations of Glen Canyon Dam still need to be modified, whether it’s by prevention of the movement of exotic fish (mostly bass) through the dam, and the dam’s dysfunction owing to the river outlet works falling apart resulting in the increasing need to use the penstocks which will further increase movement of exotic fish thus jeopardizing downstream native fish further.”
“Stay tuned,” he added, “there will obviously be more litigation as BuRec continues to ignore River health to provide for subsidized power production.”
Utah News Dispatch is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Utah News Dispatch maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor McKenzie Romero for questions: info@utahnewsdispatch.com. Follow Utah News Dispatch on Facebook and Twitter.
Adult Yellow-billed Cuckoo. Photo: Andy Reago and Chrissy McClarren/Flickr (CC-BY-2.0)
Click the link to read the release on the Audubon website (Jennifer Pitt):
March 29, 2024
Audubon has joined partner conservation organizations to propose “Cooperative Conservation” as an alternative for the federal Bureau of Reclamation (Reclamation) to study as they consider how to manage the Colorado River after 2026, when current management rules expire. Reclamation has initiated a process expected to assess multiple alternatives before they establish new operational rules.
In recent weeks the Upper Basin (Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming) and Lower Basin (Arizona, California and Nevada) have each submitted proposals of their own. They appear to be in broad agreement that Colorado River water uses need to be reduced, not only because the Colorado River’s water is over-allocated, but also because climate change is shrinking the river. But alignment between the Upper Basin and Lower Basin ends there, with significant dispute over whose water uses should be reduced.
Cooperative Conservation has a different focus. It prioritizes stabilizing the Colorado River water supply, provides opportunities to make management more equitable, and creates mechanisms to improve environmental outcomes [ed. emphasis mine]:
Water supply reliability would be improved by consideration of recent trends as well as assessing the health of the entire system, departing from the current operations that have not kept up with changing conditions such that in 2022 federal managers were worried about the continued ability release water through the dams.
Ecosystem health would be addressed with stewardship and mitigation provisions. Today’s operations are based on a policy framework that has not prioritized Colorado River habitats, leaving many used by birds such as Yuma Ridgeway’s Rails and Yellow-billed cuckoos degraded and vulnerable.
Colorado River Delta habitats and flows have been restored in recent United – States Mexico agreements, and the opportunity for future binational agreements to extend and expand commitments to these resources would be preserved. Most of Colorado’s Delta was desiccated as the river was developed through the 20th century, and these agreements have developed a path towards restoring some of what was lost.
A Conservation Reserve program to incentivize water conservation, that improves on the current system of “Intentionally Created Surplus” by adding to the stability of water supplies, offering an opportunity for state and federal governments to forge an agreement with Colorado River Basin Tribes looking to realize greater benefits from their water rights, and create ecological benefits through flexible management that puts water where it is needed in the Colorado River.
These innovations could help the diversity of birds and wildlife and more than 35 million people who depend on the Colorado River. But Reclamation will not be able to move forward with them if the states cannot answer important questions about who should reduce water uses to bring demands into balance with supplies. Without consensus, Colorado River management could be headed to the courts, and opportunities for improved management will be lost. We remain optimistic that over the coming months the states will negotiate a solution, and urge them to recognize that reaching agreement on how to share water shortages is essential.
In the meantime, Audubon will be promoting Cooperative Conservation and all that it offers. Reclamation is expected to publish their analysis of Colorado River management alternatives by the end of 2024.
A Sublette Herd pronghorn sizes up an intruder in its habitat within the confines of Jonah Energy’s Normally Pressured Lance gas field in August 2023. (Mike Koshmrl/WyoFile)
A federal rule to put conservation on par with extractive industries will not be subject to the Congressional Review Act that could allow it to be easily overturned, a U.S. representative from New Mexico said Monday.
The Bureau of Land Management has drawn criticism from Wyoming’s governor, its D.C. delegation, industrial leaders and agricultural interests after finalizing the Public Lands Rule last week. But a coalition of conservationists defended the BLM in a press call Monday organized by the Conservation Lands Foundation and The Wilderness Society.
The rule will allow the BLM to consider “mitigation restoration leasing” equally with other uses like grazing, mining and oil and gas development.
The rule identifies conservation tools to keep natural landscapes intact and restore them where degraded, a move advocates say marks a shift from what the BLM has considered or ignored when setting frameworks for use of its 18.4 million acres in Wyoming.
Although Republican U.S. Sen. John Barrasso, a staunch advocate for the energy industry, has said he would use the Congressional Review Act to block the rule, U.S. Rep. Melanie Stansbury, a Democrat from New Mexico, said that’s not going to happen.
The review act, successfully employed by former U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney to block another BLM planning effort in 2017, is subject to time limits and deadlines that make its successful use improbable in this instance, Stansbury said. “This rule being finalized now should protect it from a rollback by Congress,” she said. “It should be fine in terms of making it ineligible for Congressional Review Act repeal.”
Wyoming native Jordan Schreiber, a lobbyist for The Wilderness Society, said she was “very confident” about defending the rule. “I’m not losing sleep over it,” she said of congressional discomfort.
A durable measure
To thwart the rule, Barrasso last year introduced a bill that targets the BLM initiative. Nine senators, including U.S. Sen. Cynthia Lummis, another Republican, joined as sponsors. The bill has not advanced.
Industrial users also have challenged the plan, as has Gov. Mark Gordon, who questioned the constitutionality of the BLM action. The Petroleum Association of Wyoming called it “a new, extra-legal, executive branch authority.” That suggests lawsuits will be filed.
BLM supporters said the rule will survive such legal challenges. “We are confident that the rule will prove durable over time and we intend to strongly defend the rule … in the courts,” said Michael Carroll, BLM campaign director with The Wilderness Society.
The Sand Dunes Wilderness Study Area encompasses 27,000 acres of BLM land in the Red Desert. There, people can hike, bird watch and hunt. (Bob Wick/BLM/FlickrCC)
New Mexico’s Stansbury also dismissed misinformation. “This is not a land grab,” she said, blaming Republicans for inaccurate spin.
“This is not an attempt by the federal government to take away activities on public lands,” including utilizing resources “that we use in everyday life,” Stansbury said. “This is really about modernizing the way that we do land management. It’s about putting conservation and cultural uses on par with extractive uses.”
Congress stated that the BLM “should not emphasize the greatest short-term economic element,” when outlining how to manage its 30% of Wyoming’s land and 245 million acres nationwide, said Chris Winter, a professor at the University of Colorado Law School. The U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals has said that “conservation to protect environmental balance” is one of the uses the BLM must weigh along with oil and gas development, grazing and so on, Winter said.
Lander resident Bailey Brennan, an attorney and farmer, said her 3-year-old daughter has been with her on three pronghorn hunts on public lands, all possible because of intact migration corridors. With the rule, restoration leases will allow the National Wildlife Federation she works for to help fight cheatgrass and restore riparian areas along those routes.
That type of work will ensure daughter Frances could have the same pronghorn hunting experience “when she is a grown-up with her children,” Brennan said.
Click the link to read the article on the Sky-Hi News website (Elliot Wenzler). Here’s an excerpt:
April 8, 2024
Conservationists point to graywater uses as a way to cut down on water consumption in the West
A bill that would allow graywater systems to be included in new homes throughout Colorado received rare unanimous approval from the Colorado House on Friday…The bipartisan House Bill 2024-1362 (Measures to Incentivize Graywater Use) is sponsored by Rep. Meghan Lukens, D-Steamboat Springs, and Rep. Marc Catlin, R-Montrose, Sen. Dylan Roberts, D-Frisco, and Sen. Cleave Simpson, R-Alamosa…Currently, local governments are permitted to opt into graywater programs. Under the bill, the whole state would be automatically allowed to include graywater systems in new constructions, but local governments could choose to opt their community out…
Since the state gave initial approval for local governments to opt into graywater programs in 2013, only six jurisdictions have chosen to do so including Pitkin County, Grand Junction, Denver, Castle Rock, Fort Collins, Broomfield and Golden. If approved by the Senate and signed by the governor, the bill would go into effect at the start of 2026.
Graywater is mentioned in the Colorado Water Plan as a possible tool for the state to meet current and future water needs. It notes there are challenges with the technology, including the effort of retrofitting existing buildings with the systems. It also includes a “general lack of interest on the part of local governments to enact local graywater ordinances,” a “lack of interest from developers” and “concerns that property owners could be resistant to operating and maintaining a graywater system within their residences” as challenges.
Stephen Roe Lewis, Governor of the Gila River Indian Community, speaks in Tucson, Ariz. on Mar. 13, 2024. The tribe has been a high-profile partner to federal and state water managers in recent years, but Lewis said it does not support the latest Lower Basin proposal for post-2026 Colorado River management. Credit: Alex Hager/KUNC
Click the link to read the article on the KUNC website (Alex Hager):
March 13, 2024
This story is part of ongoing coverage of the Colorado River, produced by KUNC in northern Colorado, and supported by the Walton Family Foundation.
The Gila River Indian Community says it does not support a three-state proposal for managing the Colorado River’s shrinking supply in the future. The community, which is located in Arizona, is instead working with the federal government to develop its own proposal for water sharing.
The tribe is among the most prominent of the 30 federally-recognized tribes that use the Colorado River. In recent years, it has signed high-profile deals with the federal government to receive big payments in exchange for water conservation. Those deals were celebrated by Arizona’s top water officials. But now, it is diverging from states in the river’s Lower Basin — Arizona, California and Nevada.
Stephen Roe Lewis, The Gila River Indian Community’s Governor, announced his tribe’s disapproval of the Lower Basin proposal at a water conference in Tucson, Ariz., while speaking to a room of policy experts and water scientists.
“This is not the time to be standing on the sidelines,” Lewis said. “We all have a responsibility to do what we can. And that’s why The Community can’t support the current Lower Colorado River approach as it stands now.”
The announcement adds a new wrinkle to an already-complicated process. Last week, the seven states that use the Colorado River unveiled competing plans for managing its water. The Lower Basin states revealed one, and the Upper Basin states – Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico – revealed another. The opposing plans represent stark ideological differences between the two groups of states, marking the latest disagreement between rival camps that have argued over water management for decades.
Lewis, who has positioned his tribe as an ally to the federal government in helping save water, outlined a few major sticking points that led Gila River to work on its own proposal.
Water enters an irrigation canal on the Gila River Indian Reservation on May 7, 2021. The Gila River Indian Community is among the most important tribal players in ongoing negotiations about using water from the Colorado River. Photo by Ted Wood/Water Desk
One issue, Lewis said, is that the Lower Basin’s proposal creates an “unfair burden” on the state of Arizona. Under the proposed plan, all seven states would have to cut back on demand for water if levels in the nation’s largest reservoirs — Lake Mead and Lake Powell — drop below a predetermined trigger in the future. Arizona would take the largest of those cutbacks.
Another, he said, is that the Lower Basin’s plan does not explain how it would mitigate the impact of those potential new water cutbacks. Lewis said he would like to see plans to identify new sources of water away from the Colorado River that could replace water lost to cutbacks, or financial compensation.
States are under pressure to agree on plans to manage the river before 2026, when the current guidelines for sharing its water expire. Both of last week’s plans came just ahead of a deadline from the Bureau of Reclamation, the federal agency which manages the West’s dams and reservoirs. The deadline was an effort to get the ball rolling on new river rules with enough time to implement them before a potential change in administration after the upcoming November election.
Reclamation officials said they expect to work with states over the spring and summer and reach a draft for post-2026 river management rules by the end of 2024.
Now, Lewis and his staff are working with Reclamation on what could potentially be a third competing proposal. He said he hopes a proposal will be released in “weeks,” rather than months.
“It’s potentially not just the Gila River, because this will affect other tribes as well,” Lewis said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if other tribes started to register their concerns as well.”
As states and the federal government draw closer to a new set of river management rules, some tribes have repeatedly expressed frustration about being excluded from negotiations. Tribal communities often lack reliable access to clean water due to aging infrastructure and a history of underinvestment, and many are calling for greater inclusion going forward.
Lewis said that was not the issue in this case, and that the Gila River Indian Community was included in talks.
“We were at the table,” Lewis said. “It’s just the proposal, the finished product as it is right now, doesn’t reflect our concerns.” [ed. emphasis mine]
North American Indian regional losses 1850 thru 1890.
Click the link to read the proposed guidelines on the Water for Colorado website. Here’s the introduction:
On behalf of our respective organizations, the undersigned conservation groups (Conservation Groups or Groups) submit the Cooperative Conservation Alternative (Cooperative Conservation) to contribute to the ongoing dialogue shaping the future of the Colorado River through the post-2026 NEPA process for developing Colorado River Guidelines and Strategies.
The Groups request the Bureau of Reclamation include Cooperative Conservation in its analysis of post-2026 Colorado River Guideline Operations and Strategies as a forward-looking, comprehensive approach for addressing the pressing and evolving challenges facing the Colorado River Basin, its ecosystems, and the diverse community of sovereigns and stakeholders who rely upon its resources.
Cooperative Conservation is designed to inform and enhance one or more alternatives for consideration in developing the post-2026 Colorado River Operations and Strategies Environmental Impact Statement (EIS). It emerges from a synthesis of lessons learned, a deep understanding of the Basin’s environmental dynamics, and a commitment to collaborative, equitable water management, and endeavors to introduce innovative strategies that balance the needs of human and natural systems under the shadow of climate change and increasing water scarcity. [ed. emphasis mine]
The urgency to redefine the framework for Colorado River operations cannot be overstated. The Bureau of Reclamation’s (Reclamation) notice of intent to prepare an EIS for the post-2026 Colorado River marks a critical step toward addressing the Basin’s future needs (“Notice of Intent To Prepare an Environmental Impact Statement for Post-2026 Colorado River Operational Guidelines and Strategies for Lake Powell and Lake Mead,” 88 Fed. Reg. 12345 (June 16, 2023)). The existing guidelines, while pioneering at the time of their inception, are now recognized as insufficient to navigate the complexities of prolonged drought, escalating impacts of climate change, and pressing needs of a diverse array of sovereigns and stakeholders. Cooperative Conservation is rooted in the recognition that the Colorado River Basin has entered an era of uncertainty, where traditional management approaches must be reevaluated in light of scientific advancements, changing hydrological patterns, and the imperative of sustainability.
“New plot using the nClimGrid data, which is a better source than PRISM for long-term trends. Of course, the combined reservoir contents increase from last year, but the increase is less than 2011 and looks puny compared to the ‘hole’ in the reservoirs. The blue Loess lines subtly change. Last year those lines ended pointing downwards. This year they end flat-ish. 2023 temps were still above the 20th century average, although close. Another interesting aspect is that the 20C Mean and 21C Mean lines on the individual plots really don’t change much. Finally, the 2023 Natural Flows are almost exactly equal to 2019. (17.678 maf vs 17.672 maf). For all the hoopla about how this was record-setting year, the fact is that this year was significantly less than 2011 (20.159 maf) and no different than 2019” — Brad Udall
The significance of this Alternative lies not only in its aim to expand consideration of ways to address the immediate challenges, but also in its vision for a resilient and adaptive future that honors the interdependence of all who share this vital river. By embracing a holistic perspective that integrates scientific insight, stakeholder inclusivity, and environmental stewardship, our alternative is a framework for optimizing every drop of the Colorado River to better ensure it can remain a life-sustaining resource for future generations.
As the Conservation Groups submit this Alternative, we are mindful of the collective effort required to steward the Colorado River through the challenges ahead. We look forward to engaging in a constructive dialogue with Reclamation, the Basin States and Tribes, and all interested stakeholders involved in this essential process, united by our shared commitment to the River that sustains us all.
Map credit: AGU
Native America in the Colorado River Basin. Credit: USBR
by Jonathan Thompson, High Country News March 28, 2024
This is an installment of the Landline, a monthly newsletter from High Country News about land, water, wildlife, climate and conservation in the Western United States. Sign up to get it in your inbox.
In 2018, Brian Richter, a hydrologist and water sustainability expert, hooked a camper trailer to the car, and he and his wife embarked on a road trip up the spine of the Rocky Mountains. It was one of the driest years in a two-decade-long regional megadrought, and the entire Southwest was parched. Wildfires raged from British Columbia to Colorado, while reservoir levels continued to plummet.
As Richter traveled through the West’s uplands, he saw all the expected signs of drought: Tinder-dry forests, diminished streamflows, stressed vegetation and a ubiquitous pall of smoke that irritated eyes and lungs and blotted out the view. But he also noticed something that struck him: Nearly every valley bottom was still relatively verdant, even lush, despite the desiccating conditions.
The reason, of course, was irrigation. A major part of the settler-colonial project has been a determined effort to harness the West’s rivers and streams to raise crops and support a growing population. This has not only succeeded, it has altered much of the landscape, establishing a stark dividing line between irrigated and non-irrigated lands. “It’s part of our aesthetic as Westerners,” Richter said.
While golf courses, turf and booming desert cities gulp up a lot of water, the lion’s share of the West’s water still goes to growing crops and turning rural valleys green. Richter got to wondering: Precisely where was all that water going, and how were the different uses affecting various ecosystems? So he set out with a team of researchers to deconstruct the drivers of Western water consumption.
Irrigated landscape in McElmo Canyon in the summertime. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
They found that 86% of the water consumed in the Western U.S. is used to irrigate crops. Everything else — from energy development to swimming pools to Las Vegas’ elaborate casino fountains — gets by on the remaining 14%. In the Colorado River Basin itself, things are marginally more balanced, with agriculture consuming about 79% of the water. Most of that, however, is used to grow food for cattle — alfalfa, hay and grass.
“We were quite surprised to see how large a proportion was going to cattle crops,” Richter told me in a Zoom interview earlier this month. The findings were published in Nature Sustainability in 2020. The article’s title — “Water Scarcity and Fish Imperilment Driven by Beef Production” — grabbed media attention and sparked many a news story that blamed the Colorado River’s demise on our appetite for cheeseburgers and steaks and the hay necessary to create them.
This spring, Richter and his team published an update of sorts, this time focusing entirely on the Colorado River. It’s the first-ever complete accounting of the system, encompassing water use from the Gila River, a tributary in New Mexico and Arizona, and all the consumptive uses[1] of the Colorado’s water, including reservoir evaporation and riparian and wetland evapotranspiration, as well as out-of-basin exports to places like Denver and the Rio Grande watershed, and water use in Mexico.
Sadly, this more complete tabulation exonerates neither bovines or beefeaters. Still, though the percentages going to cows and alfalfa farmers didn’t change significantly, it did provide more detail on those uses. Findings included:
Irrigated agriculture is by far the dominant consumer of Colorado River water, accounting for 52% of overall consumption (which includes reservoir evaporation and riparian and wetland evapotranspiration) and 74% of direct human consumption.
Cattle-feed crops (alfalfa and other hay) consume more Colorado River water than any other crop category, accounting for 32% of all water from the basin; 46% of direct water consumption; and 62% of all agricultural water consumed.
Cattle-feed crops consume 90% of all the agricultural irrigation water in the Upper Basin — three times more than is consumed by municipal, commercial and industrial uses combined.
19% of the water supports the natural environment through riparian and wetland vegetation evapotranspiration along river courses.
This accounting can help guide water managers in making the estimated 2-to-4 million acre-feet of cuts from the total annual consumption necessary to stabilize reservoir levels. Even larger reductions will be required to bring water consumption into balance with availability, as climate change-exacerbated drought and heating continues to further diminish the Colorado River. And yet, so far, the Upper Basin and Lower Basin states aren’t even close to agreeing on how those cuts should be made, or who should bear the burden.
Alfalfa and other cattle-feed crops consume 90% of all the agricultural irrigation water in the Colorado River’s Upper Basin.
The Lower Basin states — California, Nevada and Arizona — use far more water than the Upper Basin states. But when drought years shrink the Colorado River, the Upper Basin is forced to cut consumption under the 1922 Colorado River Compact. Therefore, the Upper Basin’s representatives argue, the Lower Basin should bear the burden of future cuts. The Lower Basin is willing to accept 1.5 million acre-feet of cuts, but beyond that, it wants its upstream counterparts to share the load. That amounts to an 814-billion-gallon gap between the competing proposals.
There’s a tendency to believe that rapidly growing desert cities — and ostentatiously profligate water-users, such as golf courses and lawns and swimming pools — ought to bear the burden of the cuts. But even if you cut off all the pumps in Lake Mead that serve Las Vegas, it wouldn’t make much of a difference. Southern Nevada’s consumptive Colorado River water use is about one-tenth of the Imperial Irrigation District’s in Southern California, where monumental amounts of water go to growing alfalfa and other food crops. And even as its population soars, Las Vegas is using less and less water, a phenomenon Richter terms “decoupling.”
“The only dial we have to work with is irrigated farming,” Richter said. His accounting would seem to offer an easy out: Just stop growing alfalfa and fallow the fields, or shift to less water-intensive crops. But it’s not quite that easy.
Cowgirls lasso calves so they can be branded and vaccinated at Harts Basin Ranch in April. The Delta County ranch, whose owners have been accused of water speculation, raises organic cattle.
CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Alfalfa is a paradoxical crop: It’s thirstier than other crops, yet also relatively drought-tolerant. It doesn’t need to be replanted every year, meaning that less tilling of the soil is required. It can be harvested by machine, so it doesn’t require a lot of increasingly hard-to-find human labor. And it’s always in demand: Though beef cattle numbers are on the decline in some Western states, the dairy industry is burgeoning — and alfalfa is important for dairy operations.
Rather than reducing alfalfa acreage or production, some Colorado River Basin farmers, especially in Utah and Arizona, have begun growing more since the megadrought began. The federal government has forked out millions of dollars to pay farmers to stop growing alfalfa, or at least to stop irrigating their fields. But that can only achieve a fraction of the needed cuts, and it is hardly sustainable over the long term. And, by reducing overall supply, it drives up prices for hay, incentivizing other farmers to switch to alfalfa rather than away from it.
Besides, shutting down farmers’ ditches and spigots would imperil those emerald ribbons of green that curl through the West’s dry rocky valleys. Agricultural irrigation greens up more than crops: The farm fields’ runoff and leaky canals also nurture willows and wetlands as well as the wildlife that depends on them.
It’s quite the quandary, and it’s hard to see a clear path to sustainability. What is clear is that massive changes are long overdue, and those changes will alter the Western landscape, perhaps returning it to something that resembles the days before industrial-scale irrigation began.
“It’s really intriguing to me to think about how the Western landscape is going to have to change,” Richter said. “What we’re talking about is not unlike the fossil fuel industry, especially coal, as it goes into decline. The ramifications for regional and local economies and the culture and social fabric of communities are even going to be greater, especially for agricultural communities.
“It’s going to be an interesting decade ahead,” he added. “And I sure wouldn’t want to be one of those negotiators on the Colorado River.”
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[1] Consumptive use is the amount of water withdrawn from the system and not returned to it. The Southern Nevada Water Authority, for example, withdraws about 450,000 acre-feet from Lake Mead annually — far more than the 300,000 acre-feet it’s entitled to under the Colorado River Compact. But it also returns more than 200,000 acre-feet in the form of treated effluent, giving it a consumptive use of 223,670 acre-feet in 2022.
This article first appeared on High Country News and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Click the link to read the article on the Vail Daily website (Scott Miller). Here’s an excerpt:
March 30, 2024
Lawns are nice. But they use a lot of water, can be expensive and often don’t make sense for many of us here in the high desert. The Beyond Lawn program wants to help. The program is a joint effort between the Eagle County Soil Conservation District, the local office of the Colorado State University Cooperative Extension Service and the Eagle River Coalition. The idea is to help residents responsibly replace their lawns with attractive, water-wise landscaping. Cooperative Extension will provide volunteers from the Master Gardener program to help put the right plants into the right soils. The Master Gardeners are also helping create demonstration gardens in Edwards, Eagle and Gypsum this spring.
The program will also offer turf conversion rebates to residents. Denyse Schrenker of the Cooperative Extension noted that the Eagle River Water & Sanitation District has had its own turf conversion program for a while now. The Beyond Lawn program will offer similar services to residents who aren’t customers of the water and sanitation district. To participate, residents can sign up for an evaluation through the Beyond Lawn website. Evaluations cost $100 and provide expert reports specific to a resident’s yard, including soil types and lists of plants that would work to replace turf grass in those yards…
Rose Sandell is the Eagle River Coalition’s Education and Outreach Coordinator. She said part of last year’s efforts included determining how to approach residents with what can be a big request.
“We’re trying to break down the scariness of it all … down to manageable pieces,” Sandell said. She said that a piece of a yard where it’s hard to keep grass growing could be a good place to start turf replacement.
“New plot using the nClimGrid data, which is a better source than PRISM for long-term trends. Of course, the combined reservoir contents increase from last year, but the increase is less than 2011 and looks puny compared to the ‘hole’ in the reservoirs. The blue Loess lines subtly change. Last year those lines ended pointing downwards. This year they end flat-ish. 2023 temps were still above the 20th century average, although close. Another interesting aspect is that the 20C Mean and 21C Mean lines on the individual plots really don’t change much. Finally, the 2023 Natural Flows are almost exactly equal to 2019. (17.678 maf vs 17.672 maf). For all the hoopla about how this was record-setting year, the fact is that this year was significantly less than 2011 (20.159 maf) and no different than 2019” — Brad Udall
On March 4, 2024, the Upper Division States of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming acting through the Upper Colorado River Commission (UCRC) directed implementation of the 2024 System Conservation Pilot Program (SCPP). The 2024 program focuses on projects that support: innovations in water conservation, local drought resiliency and better understanding related to a potential Demand Management program. The 2024 SCPP was developed based on input from water users, water management organizations, and previous SCPP participants. The Commission recommended 115 projects move forward for implementation. These projects will conserve approximately 70,000 acre-feet of Colorado River water across the four Upper Division States, and include participation from Tribal, agricultural, industrial and municipal water users. The SCPP program is funded by the Inflation Reduction Act and is a unique collaboration between the Bureau of Reclamation, the four Upper Division States acting through the UCRC, Upper Basin Tribes, water users, and other stakeholders. The conservation projects are expected to be implemented beginning in April 2024.
Anne Castle – “The SCPP is a tremendous example of federal – state – tribe – water user collaboration resulting in partnerships and water conservation that improve the Colorado River system. This program represents one of the tools in the Upper Basin toolbox that can be used to contribute to a more sustainable river system. Many thanks to the Reclamation, UCRC, Tribes, water users, and State staff for the ongoing efforts that allow us to take this important step together.”
Rebecca Mitchell – “System conservation is challenging, but we have learned a lot and have used our experiences to build a better program this year. Water users in Colorado are using the SCPP to explore and develop innovative ways to prepare for a drier future. I am hopeful that the lessons learned this year will provide new tools that will support Colorado water users in the future.”
Estevan Lopez – “The water conservation actions being implemented in the Upper Division States are significant, especially in light of the uncertainty our water users face every year due to hydrologic shortages. The partnerships and tools being developed through the SCPP will help us manage Colorado River operations as climate change impacts our future water supplies. Some SCPP projects will provide a unique opportunity to explore the feasibility of a potential Demand Manage program. ”
Gene Shawcroft – “Utah water users have stepped up once again in 2024 to support the Colorado River system through robust participation in the System Conservation Pilot Program (SCPP). Through this year’s SCPP projects, the Colorado River Authority of Utah looks forward to learning more about demand management feasibility and innovative water conservation strategies in our state. I am grateful to the UCRC staff and consultants, Authority staff and the Utah Division of Water Rights staff for standing-up this important effort.”
Brandon Gebhart –“Many Wyoming water users are developing new approaches and tools to sustain their operations in the face of a future with additional water supply uncertainty. They recognize SCPP as a tool to provide resources and information to help build innovative and creative solutions to adapt to that uncertain future. I applaud the work and collaboration between Wyoming water users and stakeholders, Wyoming SEO staff, Reclamation, and UCRC staff to improve the program for 2024.”
Today, Governor Polis and the Colorado Water Conservation Board (CWCB) announced the launch of the second year of Transformative Landscape Change (TLC) Challenge program, which challenges local communities to reimagine their public spaces and embrace waterwise landscaping. The effort, a partnership with the nonprofit Resource Central, is designed to convert water-intensive landscapes into climate-appropriate, low-water-use, and attractive spaces.
“Protecting our precious water resources is critical to ensuring a strong future for Colorado and our economic industries like agriculture and outdoor recreation. This challenge will help innovate, conserve water in our communities, and promote stewardship around the state,”said Governor Jared Polis.
“Water conservation continues to be an important and comparatively cost-effective tool for increasing state and local water security and resilience,” says Russ Sands, CWCB Water Supply Planning Section Chief. “The TLC Challenge will help communities replace up to 2,500 square feet of nonfunctional turf with the types of low-water landscape plants that better serve our communities in hopes that it can inspire larger turf replacement efforts.”
The CWCB and Resource Central worked on an earlier TLC Challenge with three communities across Colorado in 2023 to transform public spaces and inspire communities to install low-water plants instead of high-water-use turf. This round will expand the TLC Challenge and increase the number of projects accepted to increase the impact. Eligible entities include local governments and municipal water providers. The funding is not available to residential or commercial property owners.
The effort complements CWCB’s 2023 Turf Replacement Program efforts, which provided funding to 50 eligible entities in Colorado to reduce nonfunctional turf and increase sustainable landscapes.
Eyes across the state are on sustainable landscape development efforts like this. Governor Polis signed Senate Bill 24-005 on Friday, March 15, which limits the installation of nonfunctional turf on commercial, industrial, and institutional properties, state facilities, and spaces, including medians and parking lots.
“But the hard work of removing nonfunctional turf where it’s already been installed also needs to continue,” says Sands.
“Replacing turf with waterwise landscapes helps cities conserve water supplies, meet the vision of the Colorado Water Plan, and maximize the ecosystem benefits of our landscapes,” said Lauren Ris, CWCB Director.
The Colorado Water Plan projects up to 740,000 acre-feet of future municipal water needs per year.
“To reduce our water demands, Colorado needs a suite of conservation tools, including water conservation programs and water pricing structures that help shape what our cities look like and how we develop,” says CWCB expert Jenna Battson. “Having land use codes and ordinances that align with these efforts is critical because the last thing we want is for codes to reinforce installing the same types of high-water vegetation that we are paying to remove.”
Converting water-intensive landscapes to waterwise spaces allows everyone to be part of the solution. CWCB and Resource Central are working together through the TLC Challenge to help inspire responsible landscape development and increase engagement with water-saving practices.
Interested in applying for the TLC Challenge?
The competitive application window is open now and will close on June 1, 2024. Awardees will be evaluated based on the merits of their application. After selected recipients are notified, they will work with Resource Central to implement projects in the late summer of 2024 or early spring of 2025.
Eligible entities include local governments and municipal water providers. The funding is not available to residential or commercial property owners. Resource Central will work with the selected applicants to design the new space, remove and compost the turf, and provide customized Garden In A Box plants as well as irrigation and maintenance planning for the new landscape.
Applications that demonstrate potential water savings, public benefits that include equity, and educational components will be more competitive. By prioritizing project proposals that demonstrate strong community engagement strategies, well-defined goals, and measurable outcomes, CWCB and Resource Central can ensure the biggest impact with the funding. Communities without an existing turf replacement program will be prioritized to help increase local examples of landscape transformations; however, all eligible applicants are encouraged to apply.
Governor Jared Polis signs non-functional turf law. Photo credit: Allen Best
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
March 18, 2024
Bill signed into law on Friday makes thirsty imported grasses a no-no in new road medians and other public places that rarely see human feet. Native grasses OK.
The remarks in the office of Colorado Gov. Jared Polis on Friday afternoon were brief, befitting the bill that was soon to be signed into law, the state’s most aggressive effort yet to curb water allocated to urban landscaping.
“We want folks to be part of the solution around water and to reduce the water needs of their non-functional turf, ranging from Colorado-scaping and xeriscaping to lower-water solutions with different types of grasses that may require less water,” said Polis of SB24-005.
Taking the lectern, Sen. Dylan Roberts, a prime sponsor and a Democrat who represents much of northwestern Colorado, noted an irony. It had snowed hard the previous day along the northern Front Range, where about 75% of Coloradans live, and the snow was extremely wet, even for March.
“It’s funny, with all the snow right now, you might not think that we have to deal with a lot of water scarcity, but we do,” said Roberts, a Frisco resident.
“We know that in Colorado we face a historic drought and we need to put in place every single common-sense tool to save water that we can. And this is one of those.”
Colorado in 2022 began incentivizing removal of what is commonly called non-functional turf. The phrase means imported grass species with high water requirements that typically get almost no use. A legislative allocation of $2 million resulted in grants to about three-dozen communities across Colorado but especially in Front Range cities where 85% of the state’s residents live.
In September 2023, the Colorado Water Conservation Board awarded a $1.5 million grant to Boulder-based Resource Central. The nonprofit was formed in 1976 to encourage conservation. In 2023, it completed 604 lawn-replacement projects along the Front Range. Its marquee program, Garden In A Box, provides low-water plants and has partnerships with several dozen municipalities along the Front Range. The state grant will allow Resource Central to expand its programming to the Western Slope.
In October 2023 a year-round legislative water committee that is chaired by Roberts heard a proposal from Denver Water, Western Resource Advocates and others. That proposal was the basis for the new law.
Instead of incentives to change, the new law draws lines of restraint. Beginning in 2026, local governments can no longer allow the installation, planting or placement of non-functional turf, artificial turf, or invasive plant species. This applies to commercial, institutional, and industrial properties, but also common-interest community property. Read that as HOAs.
Also verboten will be planting of non-functional turf in street rights-of-way, parking lots, median or transportation corridors.
Non-functional turf planted with thirsty imported species will be banned from new road medians and other public and commercial places in Colordo that see few human feet beginning in 2026, a year earlier in projects of state government. Photo/Allen Best
The law applies to new or redeveloped state facilities beginning in 2025.
Imported species such as Kentucky bluegrass can use twice as much water as native grass. Native species such as buffalo and blue gamma or species hybridized for arid conditions will be allowed.
Several Colorado jurisdictions have gone further. Aurora and Castle Rock in 2022 both adopted limits to residential water use for landscaping. The state law does not touch water use at individual homes. The two municipalities both expect substantial population growth but have limited water portfolios for meeting new demand.
Other municipalities and water providers from Broomfield to Grand Junction have also adopted laws crowding out water-thirsty vegetation. Their motives vary but all are premised on Colorado’s tightening water supplies. Cities use only 7% of the state’s water, and roughly half of that goes to landscaping.
Yet developing new sources of water requires going farther afield, usually converting water from agriculture, and can become very expensive. Consider plans by Parker Water and Sanitation District and Castle Rock. They are planning a pipeline to the Sterling area in coming years with a new if smallish reservoir near Akron. In this case, the project has support from an irrigation district in the Sterling area, but all this new infrastructure comes at a great expense.
The bill faced no major opposition in the Legislature, although most House Republicans — nearly all from rural areas — voted against it.
During her time at the microphone, Rep. Karen McCormick, a Democrat from Longmont, emphasized the need to define what constitutes non-functional turf.
“Coming up with those terms of functional versus non-functional turf was really important so that the people of Colorado understand that the choices that we have in these spaces (can result in) beautiful, Western drought-tolerant grasses and bushes and flowers.” she said.
State Rep. Barbara McLachlan, a Democrat from Durango, emphasized cost savings as well as water savings. “If you’re not having a picnic on that little piece of turf or having a soccer game, you probably don’t need to be spending the water and money it takes to keep that alive.”
Sen. Cleave Simpson, a Republican from Alamosa who represents much of southwestern Colorado and the fourth prime sponsor, was not present for the bill-signing.
Rep. Karen McCormick of Longmont said that urban landscapes of great beauty can be created that need less water. Photo/Allen Best
Those present for the bill signing included Denver Water’s Alan Salazar, the chief executive, and Greg Fisher, the manager of demand planning.
A Denver Water staff member decades ago had invented the word “xeriscaping” but the agency had never put much muscle into curbing water use. After all, it had a flush water portfolio. The thinking as explained in Patty Limerick’s book about Denver Water, “A Ditch in Time,” was that if drought got bad enough, the agency could always squeeze residential use for water, as it did in the severe drought summer of 2002.
With new leadership and a worsening story in the Colorado River Basin, Denver had altered its thinking. The city – which provides water for about 1.6 million people, including many of the city’s suburbs – gets roughly half of its water from transmountain diversions. That statistic holds true for the Front Range altogether. Denver’s water rights are relatively senior, but they’re junior to the Colorado River Compact of 1922.
That compact assumed far more water in the river than occurred in most of the 20th century. Flows during the 21st century have diminished, at least in part due to intensifying heat. That heating – and drying – will very likely worsen in coming decades. While Colorado accurately claims that it has not used its full allocations under river compacts, there’s the underlying and shifting hydrology that argues against any certainty.
The city this year will partner with Resource Central, a first, to encourage transformation of front yards with high water demands into less-needy landscapes.
Lindsay Rogers, a water policy advisor for Western Resource Advocates, said the key work during the next couple of years will be to work with local jurisdictions to implement the new law.
“Not only that, they’ll need to figure out how they’re going to enforce their new landscaping standards. And if they do that well, this bill will be hugely impactful.”
She said this bill should be understood as being part of a “growing understanding that everyone needs to do their part to conserve. There are lots and lots of opportunities across the land-use development spectrum.”
At least some of those ideas can be found in a report by a state task force issued in late January. Polis had appointed the 21-member group a year before and gave it the job of examining what steps Colorado could take to reduce water devoted to urban landscaping.
After seven meetings, the task force issued a report in late January that concluded that “the time to rethink our landscapes is now.” It provided 10 recommendations.
Topping the recommendations was a statement in accord with the new law. The task force also called for continued support of turf replacement in existing development, promotion of irrigation efficiency and encouragement of pricing mechanism that steer decisions that promote water conservation.
Considering that it took well more than a century to install the existing urban landscapes, this shift will not be accomplished in a few short years. The climate could shift to produce more water for Colorado, but the warming atmosphere would almost certainly steal those gains.
In short, the water scarcity driving this new law is not going away.
See also this five-part series in 2023 published in collaboration with Aspen Journalism:
The two groups of Colorado River watershed states — the Upper Basin and the Lower Basin — have each come up with a respective preliminary plan for how to deal with a shrinking supply of water in the river and its tributaries. And, surprise surprise, they don’t agree: They both want the other team to take a bigger hit.
Way back in early 1900s, the question facing these seven states was how to divide up the waters of the Colorado River, first between the two basins, then between the states within each basin. The 1922 Colorado River Compact answered that question. Sort of. The Compact is flawed in many ways, including that the folks who signed onto it thought there was a bunch more water than actually flowed in the river — even back then.
I like to run this one again from time to time, just to remind folks how much the population of the West has grown over the last century. This is what the signers of the Colorado River Compact were dealing with as far as water users go — compared to some 40 million users now. Source: USGS.
Now there’s even less water and higher consumption. If the river users don’t make some major cuts and soon, the reservoirs will dry up and leave the Southwest’s cities, towns, and farms to fight over the diminishing scraps.
“We can no longer accept the status quo of the Colorado River operations,” said Becky Mitchell, Colorado’s representative on the Upper Colorado River Commission, in a press release. “If we want to protect the system and ensure certainty for the 40 million people who rely on this water source, then we need to address the existing imbalance between supply and demand.”
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
So now the question facing the states is similar to the one they asked 102 years ago, but with a twist: How should those deep cuts be divided up now that global heating is depleting the river’s flow?
It’s a tough question with no easy answers. And it’s all made more difficult by a lack of clarity regarding the definition of terms in the original Compact such as “beneficial consumptive use” and “surplus,” and how to measure those things. Where does use of tributaries that run into the Colorado below Lee Ferry, such as the Gila River, the Little Colorado, and the Virgin River fit into all of this?
The “natural flow” is the estimated amount of water that would flow past Lee Ferry (below Glen Canyon Dam) if there were no upstream dams, diversions, or withdrawals. The Colorado River Compact was based on the assumption that about 16 million acre-feet flowed past Lee Ferry per year (which is not unreasonable given the abnormally high flows between 1906 and the late 1920s). In fact, the 1906-1923 median is about 14.5 MAF (with an average of about 14.7 MAF). And the 1991-2023 average is 13.2 MAF. Yikes! Source: Bureau of Reclamation.
Until those definitions are agreed upon, we won’t really know whether the Lower Basin is using the amount of water allocated to it in the Compact (8.5 million acre-feet), or significantly more than that (10.1 million acre-feet). Until we know what “surplus” means, we won’t know who is responsible for ensuring Mexico gets its allocated share. So far there is no agreement on those definitions. (For a detailed and intelligent take on this, please see Eric Kuhn’s and John Fleck’s piece on Fleck’s Inkstain blog).
The good news is that the current proposals aren’t final; there is still time for the basins to negotiate. And the two basins’ representatives are inching closer to accord, finding harmony where it previously eluded them. The two alternatives agree:
That consumption cuts should be triggered not by forecasted water levels in Lake Mead, but by current hydrologic conditions throughout the entire system. However, they differ on how to measure those conditions.
And that the Lower Basin should include evaporation and seepage — totaling an estimated 1.3 million acre-feet per year — in its consumptive use, as the Upper Basin has always done. They plan to offset this loss by cutting consumption by 1.5 million acre-feet per year.
Total losses (evaporation and riparian ET) from Reach 1 through Reach 5. Credit: USBR
The main sticking point comes when reservoirs shrink to critically low levels:
Under the Upper Basin’s plan, as storage levels drop, they would release progressively less water from Lake Powell. So if water storage is 81% to 100% full, then they’d release 8.1 to 9 MAF from Glen Canyon Dam, giving the Lower Basin their full allocation. But if storage is less than 20% full, it would release just 6 MAF per year, giving the Lower Basin 2.5 MAF less than their allocation that year — presumably forcing them to cut that same amount of consumption. Whether and how much consumption the Upper Basin would have to cut under this scenario would depend on how much water is actually in the river. It’s important to note that the Upper Basin does not and has never used its full allocation of 7.5 MAF per year.
Under the Lower Basin’s plan, when the system is between 38% and 70% full, the Lower Basin would cut its consumption by 1.5 MAF per year. When system water levels drop below that, then the Lower Basin would continue its 1.5 MAF per year cuts, and the two basins would share any cuts above that up to a maximum of 3.9 MAF per year. So under the maximum cuts, the Lower Basin would reduce usage by 2.7 MAF while the Upper Basin would cut use by 1.2 MAF.
The Upper Basin’s alternative, summed up. Source: Upper Colorado River Commission.
The Lower Basin’s proposed framework for reductions. The Lower Basin would make all of the cuts (1.5 MAF per year) down to 38%, after which the two basins would evenly split any reductions beyond 1.5 MAF. Source: Lower Basin states.
Both basins’ alternatives mention and acknowledge that many tribal nations’ water rights remain unfulfilled, and yet say little about how the situation might be rectified. And each Basin says its respective plan is the most sustainable, is most likely to keep Hoover and Glen Canyon dams from being compromised, and complies with the Law of the River — or the set of treaties, compacts, and court cases that govern how the river is used.
Yet the sustainability or health of the Colorado River as an entity — a breathing, flowing, living being — is barely mentioned. Little thought is given to the ecosystems, cultures, and creatures the river sustains. I realize that’s not the point of this exercise. And yet, ultimately, it will be the River itself that lays down the law, not century-old compacts or legal precedents or antiquated water rights. Perhaps we ought to pay it a little more respect.
