This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.
Water users in the American Southwest confronted on Friday the strong possibility that cities and farms in the region must reduce Colorado River use by hundreds of billions of gallons after the Trump administration released a new management plan for the coming decade.
The document, published by the federal Bureau of Reclamation, outlines a 10-year management approach that could adjust to changing hydrological conditions that affect the river’s flow, with operations updatable every two years. The agency proposed cuts in water allotments originally suggested by Arizona, California and Nevada, which make up the river’s Lower Basin. Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming, the region’s Upper Basin, could make voluntary conservation measures.
Interim guidelines and drought contingency plans agreed upon by the basin states in 2007 and 2019 are set to expire in 2027 and negotiations for a new agreement due this year have stalled, with the states missing repeated deadlines to come to a consensus.
But the Bureau of Reclamation operates much of the river’s infrastructure, including the Hoover and Glen Canyon dams, which form Lake Mead and Lake Powell, the nation’s two largest reservoirs. A federal record of decision finalizing operations on the river for the next two years will follow the final environmental impact statement Reclamation released Friday.
“This plan strikes a balance between flexibility and predictability for the Colorado River system that is vital to the 40 million people who rely on it given unprecedented hydrologic conditions and the potential for considerable impacts on water users,” said Andrea Travnicek, Interior’s assistant secretary for water and science, in a statement accompanying the plan’s release. “It also allows a new flexibility to respond to changing conditions and potential consensus.”
The agency is considering releases from Lake Powell, the reservoir near the border of Utah and Arizona that delineates the upper and lower basins, ranging from 5 million to 12 million acre feet to the downstream states (one acre foot can supply about two to four households for a year). The Lower Basin, including Mexico, could take steep cuts in their water allocations, potentially losing 1.5 million acre feet in both 2027 and 2028.
Under such a scenario, Arizona would lose 760,000 acre feet of its allotment from the river, California 440,000 acre feet and Nevada 50,000, following a proposal submitted by the Lower Basin.
But beyond 2028, Lower Basin cuts could reach up to 3 million acre feet.
The Arizona Department of Water Resources called that figure “unacceptable” in a statement published online. “Such reductions would devastate Arizona’s water users and its economy,” the agency said.
Reclamation appears to be seeking voluntary Upper Basin reductions of up to 200,000 acre feet, and discussed moving water from federally managed dams in the basin downstream, as hydrology allowed.
“The proposal responds to a fundamental reality: the Colorado River no longer reliably produces enough water to support all the uses and expectations built around it,” said JB Hamby, California’s Colorado River Commissioner, in a statement. “That challenge is shared across the Basin, and addressing it requires specific, measurable reductions in water use by every state.”
A spokesperson for the Colorado Department of Natural Resources said the state is “analyzing” the document.
Upper Basin governors said in a statement that they were “encouraged that new operating guidelines will better reflect existing water supply, which must underpin any practicable plan going forward.”
The Colorado River is perhaps the most climate-stressed waterway in the U.S. It provides water to between 35 and 40 million people across seven Western states, 30 tribes and two Mexican states as it wends its way through the Southwest, home to some of the country’s most arid and drought-stricken landscapes. Millions of Westerners also rely on the electricity the Hoover and Glen Canyon dams generate.
The 1922 compact between the river’s users assumed roughly 17.5 million acre feet of water was available to the two basins and Mexico, but the historical average of its natural flow has only been roughly 14.7 million acre feet. That number plummeted to an average of 11.2 million acre feet between 2020 and 2024, according to provisional data from Reclamation.
In that same time period, the agency calculated average use and evaporative loss across the basin at just over 13 million acre feet.
“The operational ranges that Reclamation put forward, they’re the right things that we need to be doing in order to fix the supply and demand imbalance,” said John Berggren, regional policy manager at Western Resource Advocates. “But it is just a range, and what they actually do over the next two years or within any given year, that will matter if they’re actually gonna be able to bring the system back into balance.”
Berggren hopes the short-term certainty this plan provides can unstick negotiations between the states.
“I hope [the basin commissioners] don’t just keep doing what they’ve been doing for the last two or three years, ’cause that clearly hasn’t worked,” he said. “I hope they try and take this opportunity to change things up. Let’s try something new and hopefully get to a seven-state agreement.”
Reclamation’s final environmental impact statement was initially supposed to codify the management plan the basin states have yet to agree on. Though deadlines for those negotiations have come and gone, Reclamation is still holding the door open for a deal, which is widely regarded as the most productive path to a durable long-term operating agreement for the river.
“Let’s try something new and hopefully get to a seven-state agreement.”
Negotiations are stalled over whether cuts should be mandatory across the entire basin. After overdrawing from the river for decades, the Lower Basin now uses less water than it is apportioned, according to federal accounting; it wants to see future cuts shared across the seven states. The Upper Basin, which has never used the full amount of water it is legally entitled to, has fiercely contested demands for it to make mandatory cuts, offering voluntary conservation measures instead. The states that make up that basin contend that variable environmental conditions, such as this year’s record-low snowpack, already limit how much water they use.
Even with some idea of federal management options in place, the absence of a seven-state agreement further increases the prospect of states dependent on the Colorado River suing one another in cases that would be adjudicated by the Supreme Court.
Still, proposing to manage the river in a way that is adaptive to hydrological conditions is “the kind of agreement that we are going to need to really think about long-term how do we live in this basin with much less water moving forward,” said Celene Hawkins, Colorado River program director at The Nature Conservancy.
Hawkins hopes this spurs a seven state agreement “so that, ultimately, we can do really good work for communities and for the river itself.”
A map being shown around El Paso County by suburban water agencies traces the path of the Loop, a complex $134 million pipeline and pumping project that would allow northern and eastern communities in the county to reuse aquifer water returning to Fountain Creek, and pipe along water rights they have bought up on the southern side of the county. (Provided by Woodmoor Water and Sanitation District)
On Monday evening [August 3, 2026], the Monument town council voted unanimously to begin exiting the multidistrict authority. The Loop is left with just two water district members of the original four after the decision…Proposed in 2022, the Loop would divert water flowing down Fountain Creek, pumping it northward and east around Colorado Springs to districts along the way. Billed as a way to break the reliance of communities on the nonreplenishing groundwater of the Denver Basin, the Loop was first estimated to cost between $160 and $190 million to construct…Town staff recommended the action after hearing that Donala Water & Sanitation District, one of the remaining partners, would also be voting to remove itself from the agreement soon…Cherokee Metro District pulled out of the project in 2024. Interim General Manager Kevin Brown previously told The Gazette the district had to divert resources to remove forever chemicals in its supply before a compliance deadline. Instead of the Loop, Cherokee was going to focus its efforts on securing access to water rights in the Upper Black Squirrel Creek Basin.
Water stored in Colorado’s Denver Basin aquifers, which extend from Greeley to Colorado Springs, and from Golden to the Eastern Plains near Limon, does not naturally recharge from rain and snow and is therefore carefully regulated. Courtesy U.S. Geological Survey.
Lake Powell and Wahweap Marina back in August 2021, when the surface level was at about 3,549 feet. It’s now at 3,522 feet, just above the all-time low reached in April 2022. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
The feds stepped in after the seven Colorado River states failed to agree on a new plan to replace the 2007 Interim Guidelines and the 2019 Drought Contingency Plans, both of which expire at the end of September. The states will continue to negotiate, and a seven-state consensus deal would take precedence over the federal plan.
Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2025. Note the tiny points on the annual data so that you can flyspeck the individual years. Credit: Brad Udall
Those plans were aimed at bringing overall demand back into balance with supply, which is not easy given that a warmer and drier climate is continually diminishing the already over-allocated river. While the document appears to have been completely scrubbed of any references to “climate change” or “global warming,” it does obliquely acknowledge that the cause of the current woes is a heating planet with passages like this one: “Imbalance between water supply and demand will be exacerbated by increasingly likely low-runoff conditions: The Basin is experiencing increased aridity due to climate variability, and long-term drought and low-runoff conditions are expected in the future.”
The natural flow flow at Lees Ferry, which is a calculation of what the Colorado River’s flow would be without any upstream dams, diversions, or human consumption. Land Desk graph using Bureau of Reclamation data.
While the supply-demand balance is the central objective, a secondary one is to “protect critical elevations” at Lake Powell, which is to say they will take significant measures to keep the surface level from dropping below 3,500 feet, which provides a 10-foot buffer above minimum power pool. This not only preserves hydropower output, but it also avoids relying on the river outlet works for sustained releases. Meanwhile, the feds didn’t even consider proposals to drain Lake Powell or to build bypass tunnels around Glen Canyon Dam to allow for low-level water releases. [ed. Note that the USBR EIS is constrained by the “Law of the River”, the suite of agreements and legislation that details what the agency can do to operate the river.]
I should be posting articles here about the huge news Friday. But it wasn’t huge, it was boring and predictable. So is all the coverage. So are most of the people, the same people who get quoted over and over and over. Nothing but conventional wisdom, no ideas. Not a quotable… pic.twitter.com/A00bYHYhJH
Sorry, Ed. I’d like to help, but there’s not a whole lot of interesting things to say about this!
The release was met with much pomp and circumstance, along with a lot of hand-wringing and teeth-gnashing, though it didn’t contain any major surprises or changes from the draft EIS released earlier this year. The big takeaway, or at least the most talked-about one, is that the Upper Basin states will not be subjected to mandatory water use cuts, though they are being asked to cut about 200,000 acre-feet annually on a voluntary basis. The Lower Basin states, meanwhile, will be required to cut their consumption, perhaps by as much as 3.6 million acre-feet per year, depending on reservoir levels. That’s nearly half of those states’ Colorado River Compact allotment.
The cuts would be distributed based on water right priority, which would hit Arizona the hardest. That’s not because Arizona’s rights are junior to everyone else’s, but because their biggest straw — the Central Arizona Project — has junior rights, which the state accepted in exchange for federal funds to help build the thing and to help power its energy-sucking pumps.
Lower Basin leaders are, generally, livid. Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs said the feds’ plan “still contains unacceptable options that include the federal government forcing Arizona to take the majority of draconian water cutbacks.” Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo said the plan “seeks to impose unrealistic reductions on Nevada and our water users … {that} could have devastating economic and environmental impacts … .”
The response from the Upper Basin has been a more measured and mixed, but is predominantly one of relief at being spared mandatory cuts. But any celebration is tempered by the fact that nature is forcing its own cuts in the Upper Basin; irrigation canals are shutting down all over the place, long before the growing season is over, and some irrigators have received only a fraction of their usual allotment this year. Plus, the plan leaves open the possibility of draining Upper Basin reservoirs such as Flaming Gorge, Blue Mesa, and Navajo to buoy levels at Lake Powell. That will affect recreation and leave less water for irrigators and other users in the Upper Basin.
Meanwhile, advocacy groups are generally unhappy about the plan’s short-term approach, its focus on saving dams rather than the river, its willful ignorance of climate science, and its failure to force cuts on all river users. Even more dismaying is the fact that it doesn’t even cap Upper Basin consumption at current levels, implicitly allowing new diversions and water projects that would throw supply and demand further out of balance. “The Colorado River needs consequential and systemic change that confronts the ecological, political, and legal chaos caused by climate change and Glen Canyon Dam, but Reclamation’s plan is just ‘lather, rinse, repeat’ of past failed policies,” said Gary Wockner, of Save The Colorado, in a written statement.
This sentiment reveals a sort of paradox on the Colorado River: All of the water that flows to the Lower Basin and the industrial-scale alfalfa farms in the Imperial Valley also runs through the Grand Canyon, keeping that ecosystem healthier. Meanwhile, any water that the Upper Basin consumes or that is held back in Lake Powell to protect the dam’s integrity is water that doesn’t flow through the canyon.
There’s no indication that the Trump administration is punishing the Lower Basin states, however. It’s far simpler logistically to distribute and enforce mandatory consumption cuts in the Lower Basin because there are fewer diversion points, each of which is far larger than in the Upper Basin. Also, the 1928 Boulder Canyon Project Act made the Interior Secretary the “water master” on the Lower Colorado River, giving the feds greater authority to order shortages.
One question that remains unanswered is how reduced releases from Glen Canyon Dam would play out in the context of the Colorado River Compact, which dictates that the Upper Basin “not cause the flow of the river at Lee Ferry to be depleted below an aggregate of 75 million acre-feet” for any 10-year period. There’s a high likelihood that the 10-year aggregate flow will drop below 75 maf in the next year, giving Arizona possible grounds to sue and putting the interpretation of the clause into the hands of the Supreme Court.
Here are a few more details from the final EIS:
Glen Canyon Dam annual releases, which will be determined on Oct. 1, will range from 6 maf to 12 maf. This could drop as low as 5 maf if necessary to defend the “de facto deadpool” Lake Powell surface level of 3,500 feet. That would reduce flows in the Grand Canyon to below 7,000 cubic feet per second, and cause Lake Mead to drop further.
The maximum shortages/cuts for the Lower Basin would be 3.6 maf distributed as such:
Arizona: 1.96 maf
California: .9 maf
Nevada .21 maf
Estimated shortage impacts by water user type under various shortage conditions:
Acreage range of Indian Trust lands in the Lower Basin that would be fallowed under various shortage conditions:
AZ: 6,535 to 67,375 CA: 0 NV: 0
An alarming quote about how junior water rights holders are going to face shortages no matter what: Under the preferred alternative, “… for all Arizona, California, and Nevada junior entitlements (AZ CAP NIA-A and NIA-B; AZ CAP Indian, M&I, and 4(I); CA P4; and NV P8 priority groups) there are no potential futures in which >80% of normal domestic water delivery occurs.”
Lower Basin Tribal water users with present perfected rights would receive at least 80% of normal water deliveries in at least 90% of years across 2027-2039.
Glen Canyon Institute Executive Director Eric Balken observing the Cathedral. Photo credit: Glen Canyon Institute
During 75% of years under preferred alternative, Lake Powell’s level would be below 3,550 feet during at least 90% of months, meaning Cathedral in the Desert would be visible and accessible.
The EIS’s authors summed up the challenges with all of this — and the perils that may lie ahead — in one paragraph, writing:
Aurora Water doesn’t much care which two days in a week you water your lawn, amid this historic drought.
But if your irrigation system starts up on a third day in the same week, the water world equivalent of a Flock camera is watching. The “smart” meters on every Aurora property automatically sense a spike in water use, and alert Aurora Water to confirm the violation and send out a warning or fine.
With updates at 15-minute intervals, the meters also detect irrigation watering during hot daytime hours when that’s against the rules.
The water surveillance, which Aurora Water officials acknowledge many of their customers might not realize exists, is one key to Colorado’s third-largest city so far achieving its water-saving goals in a year with record-low snowpack and abysmal streamflows into mountain reservoirs. Aurora says its 400,000 residents are using 27% less lawn water than in 2025, and managed a 9% cut from combined indoor and outdoor use.
Maintaining or even improving those savings is crucial as Aurora Water’s reservoir system sits at 49% full at a time when it should be above 80%.
Denver Water, meanwhile, has seen only about a 5% cut of water use compared with its previous five-year average among 1.5 million city and suburban customers. When Denver Water enacted twice-a-week watering restrictions in the spring, it set a target of a 20% cut from five-year average use.
Denver’s customers are doing better when using Aurora’s comparison with 2025 only, Denver officials said.
“Versus 2025, total water use is currently down about 7% and outdoor use is down about 16%,” said Travis Thompson, Denver Water communications manager.
The state’s largest water agency says it is encouraged by other statistics showing customers are using 21% less lawn water than they would have expected in the run of 95- to 100-degree days the Front Range experienced in July. In a summer that sits in the top 1% hottest and driest on record, the agency says, that’s a laudable savings mark.
One difference: Aurora Water spent millions of dollars in capital getting smart meters on every customer tap, while Denver Water chose to spend more of its capital speeding up replacement of aging, dangerous lead water delivery lines. Denver’s enforcement of drought restrictions to date has relied on thousands of neighbor complaints about properties watering more than twice a week, during restricted daytime hours or other violations.
“We have a far bigger tool than they have for being able to detect when people are using water irrigation water when they’re not supposed to,” said Shonnie Cline, Aurora Water’s deputy director of water internal and external relations.
Watchdog groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union in the past have raised questions about privacy invasions from smart home devices, including electric and water meters monitored by utilities. Especially by combining information from multiple meters, hackers or other bad actors could watch patterns and learn when people are home or away, are cooking, taking showers or other personal habits.
Cline said a better analogy than a controversial Flock camera is to see a smart water meter as a personal fitness tracker. “It gives you data and you are able to identify patterns that can improve your overall health if you make changes,” Cline said.
Aurora points out the smart meters for every customer work both ways, as a protection from leaks and potential property damage. Customers are able to log on and track their own use at the same time the city sees it, and could recognize a home leak while away on vacation, for example. During droughts, the meters will be one key to helping maintain reservoir storage for the benefit of the whole community, Cline said.
“There is a definite footprint that goes along with the data that indicates irrigation is taking place,” Cline said. “We have that pretty locked in where we can see when somebody’s irrigating, and so that’s why it’s interesting, because even when we send a warning, people are like, ‘But I didn’t!’ And then we’ll show them the data, and they’re like, ‘OK, I can’t argue with you, right?’ “
Denver Water, while enjoying higher water storage rates at its mountain reservoirs that have seen better snowpack, is not satisfied with customer savings rates and is now shifting somewhat from “education” to “enforcement” mode.
Denver had sent out nearly 3,600 warning letters but only five fines by the beginning of August. Fines will ramp up now that customers know what the rules are and Denver Water knows more about where the problem customers are, officials said.
Aurora Water, by contrast, has issued 234 fines after sending out more than 2,500 warning letters, including 10 of the highest $2,000 fines to businesses and large irrigation consumers. Only three customers were issued a second fine at the $250 residential level, Aurora Water said, and none had been issued a third fine. Aurora’s fines total more than $70,000.
Now that Denver Water has weeks of data on actual water use during drought restrictions, the agency can focus its communications on suburban areas with bigger lawns that haven’t cut back, said Greg Fisher, the utility’s manager of demand planning. Some of those suburban customers have no idea it’s Denver Water that collects their mountain runoff and delivers it to their local water utilities.
With only 5,000 advanced meters installed for 250,000 taps, Fisher said, word of mouth enforcement confirmed by onsite visits from Denver Water employees will continue to be the standard for warnings and fines.
“We continue to rely on, and I think it’s a pretty inventive idea, of letting our customers report water waste violations,” he said. “Even with the water people out on the street, we can’t be everywhere. So giving our customers the ability to report has been pretty powerful and I think effective for us.”
Denver Water officials do not anticipate asking their board this season to approve the next drought stage that would take lawn watering down to one day a week and add other restrictions. Denver Water would have to change its rate structure again to charge more for lawn watering that does occur to make up for loss of revenue from restrictions.
Plus, the utility thinks it’s a longer-term challenge to convince customers to change habits and stay “on board” with drought restrictions in the middle of what could be a multiyear crisis, Fisher said.
“We have a long game,” Fisher said. “This thing’s going to last a minimum of 12 more months, in my opinion, save for some sort of record-breaking snowfall this winter. So we’re in it for the long haul. I think we need to continue to up the message as we see conditions change. But at the same time, we really need to support our customers and have them stick with us for that extended period.”
People are capable of change, Denver Water officials said. The last drought this severe for Front Range customers was 2002.
“Our customers are using 100 million gallons less per day this year than they did in 2002, which is just stunning,” Fisher said. “And that translates to being actually 14% higher in our reservoir storage now than we were in 2002, because of our customers’ efficiency efforts over the last quarter century. We’re feeling really good about that. And that’s with significantly more population … 200 to 250,000 more people.”
Valley cities have spent years preparing for Colorado River shortages and say they are prepared to keep water flowing even under major federal cutbacks. Photo credit: Ted Wood/The Water Desk
Click the link to read the article on the KJZZ website (Alex Hager):
August 4, 2026
Colorado River shortages are no surprise. Climate change and drought have been steadily cutting into water supplies for about 26 years. Various plans to rein in demand have emerged throughout that time, and new cutbacks have been in the works for more than a year. The amount of water that each Valley city gets from the Colorado River varies significantly from city to city, but the majority receive at least some. Some cities are more prepared than others to weather today’s drier conditions, but most have at least some plan to deal with new Colorado River reductions. The Interior Department set the table for new cuts on Friday [July 31, 2026], laying out the framework of a plan that would allow the federal government to cut the Colorado River supply for Arizona, California and Nevada by up to 40%…A second announcement, which may come in the next few days, will deliver specifics about the size of cuts to the Phoenix area in 2027 and 2028.
Regardless of their scale, city leaders say they will be able to keep taps running.Like any good investor, most utility managers have focused on diversifying their portfolios. Essentially, the more different sources of water that flow to a city, the more it can tolerate cuts to one of those sources. In the Valley, that primarily means getting water from underground aquifers and the Salt River. Underground stores of water, pulled up by a system of wells, are carefully managed under state law and can give cities a backup in times of shortage on the surface. In some cases, water agencies have been taking excess water from the Colorado River for years and adding it to the underground stash, with the idea that it could be retrieved in times like these…In July, the Arizona Water Banking Authority announced that it will use its stored waterto make utilities whole in the event of cutbacks to their supplies from the Colorado River…Older, larger cities also tend to have more money for the kind of expensive engineering that can help diversify a water portfolio. For example, Phoenix is building a massive, high-tech water treatment plant that can safely recycle sewage back into purified drinking water. Major cities around the West are betting big on the technology to help withstand drought and climate change in the long term. Phoenix aims to send water from the $350 million facility into city pipes in early 2029. Cities that use water from the Salt River system are contributing to a multibillion-dollar expansion of Bartlett Dam, which holds back Bartlett Lake. In recent years, after particularly snowy winters, the river has provided more water than the reservoir can hold. A larger dam, cities say, would help them capture, store and use more water from the Salt River system in the future. For cities that lack diverse water portfolios and the kind of money needed for massive engineering projects, there’s a way for them to benefit from the cities that do. In April, as Colorado River cuts were becoming imminent, the city of Phoenix announced a new water transfer program called the “Secure Water Arizona Program”, or SWAP. Details are still emerging about how it would work, but it promises to connect cities that have water to cities that need water…Other water transfers, both in Arizona and across state lines, may be a big part of the long-term plan for cities and towns in the Valley. For example, farms may find it lucrative to sell some of their supplies to fast-growing cities in the metro that are willing to pay top dollar. Native American tribes, which often hold large, powerful legal rights to access the Colorado River, may also be willing to sell. A $5 billion settlement deal is currently in the works to give three Arizona tribes more access to their Colorado River water. If it passes, they could also gain the ability to lease their water to cities far from their reservations. Desalination, a high-tech process that can turn salty ocean water into pure, drinkable fresh water, has long been a tempting proposition for water-short cities. High costs and major logistical challenges mean that Arizona is unlikely to build its own desalination plant anytime soon, but a transfer program could allow it to benefit from an already-operational desalination facility. The Central Arizona Project and a handful of other water agencies around the region are exploring a deal to exchange water rights with a desalination facility in Carlsbad, California.
The attackers did not try to infiltrate the computers that utility offices use. Instead, they tried to seize control of small computers in equipment like pumps and valves that deliver drinking water to millions of people.
The utilities countered the attacks by shutting down the control computers and sending personnel out into the field to operate equipment manually. Utility officials have said that water remained safe to drink.
How can someone from far away seize control of a water system and possibly shut off the flow or taint the water?
Controlling the water machinery
There are about 152,000 public drinking water systems in the United States, according to the federal government. A municipality gets its water from lakes, reservoirs, rivers or underground aquifers.
Pumps move water through pipes to a treatment plant that filters and disinfects it. More pumps push the treated water into storage tanks, then through distribution pipes to homes and businesses. The entire system can span many square miles.
Small computers control numerous pumps and other equipment involved in moving and treating drinking water, from source to consumer. Taloma et al, CC BY
The hackers accessed small computers called programmable logic controllers at the water systems that operate all sorts of industrial equipment. The programmable logic controllers read sensors that measure conditions such as water pressure, water chemistry, tank levels and equipment status, and automatically operate pumps, valves and alarms. A household thermostat is a useful comparison: It reads the temperature and tells the heating or cooling system what to do.
The programmable logic controllers also transmit operational data to a utility’s central computer system. Workers use dashboards to monitor the information and send commands back to the controllers. The two-way communications can travel through wired networks, over radio or cellular links, or through internet connections.
Many utilities operate with small staffs, so remote connections allow an employee to monitor a distant pump or tank, receive an alarm after hours or let a vendor diagnose equipment without traveling to every site.
Controllers that use the internet may access it directly, or go through protective firewalls, secure gateways or virtual private networks. Direct access is more vulnerable because there are fewer defensive barriers. A hacker can find a controller by scanning the internet and finding its Internet Protocol, or IP, address, then try a weak or stolen password or exploit a known security flaw.
To reach a controller through a secure gateway or encrypted service, a hacker would have to steal remote-access credentials, or break into the gateway or private network, or get control of an operator’s workstation. The hacker could then use that foothold to reach the controller.
Attempted access can also be part of an intruder’s longer-term strategy to collect information, test defenses or establish entry for a later date. https://www.youtube.com/embed/tqi0eRN_244?wmode=transparent&start=0 A cybersecurity consultant explains how hackers gain access to the small computers that control industrial and utility equipment like those used in drinking water systems.
How an attack works
Attacks on industrial control systems often follow a familiar sequence. Infiltration often begins with a quiet search for access. Attackers scan internet addresses for controllers, dashboards and outside companies that provide remote access services, looking for targets that are linked directly to the internet.
Next, the attacker looks for a default or stolen password to log in, an unpatched vulnerability or a misconfigured remote-access service. Sophisticated malware is not always necessary: In 2023, U.S. officials reported that Iranian-linked hackers targeted internet-connected Unitronics programmable logic controllers used by water utilities. Some utilities were still using the manufacturer’s default password, according to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
Finally, the attacker exploits the access they have gained. This could mean changing a password, issuing commands or attempting to alter the controller’s software. Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology note that an intruder could replace legitimate control instructions with malicious commands. An attacker could also sneak into an office computer through phishing, then access the controller network.
Industrial equipment in service for decades is extremely vulnerable because it may not support modern security features, and utilities may delay updates because they want to avoid interrupting operations.
Reports thus far indicate that hackers accessed the Minnesota water systems through controllers that communicate over the internet directly. A July 30 FBI and Environmental Protection Agency advisory stated that attackers remotely accessed Rockwell Automation MicroLogix programmable logic controllers that were connected directly to the internet, and changed their IP addresses and passwords.
Defensive moves that utilities can take
The most immediate step that utilities can take to protect themselves is to remove controllers and human dashboards from direct connection to the internet. Following the Minnesota attacks, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency urged water utilities to place this equipment behind properly configured firewalls and other safeguards.
When remote access is necessary, utilities should route communications through a secure gateway or VPN, require multiple levels of authentication, and limit how much access each user has. Utilities should change default passwords, disable unused remote-access services and install vendor-approved updates to connected equipment.
In their guidance on internet-exposed dashboards, the cybersecurity agency also recommends separating operational networks from email and other business systems. This measure makes it harder for attackers to move between the two systems.
Finally, utilities should back up controller programs, log remote-access activity and practice restoring systems and operating manually.
A matter of resources
Rural water utilities with limited resources are a significant vulnerability in the United States’ critical infrastructure.
A group of volunteer cybersecurity experts is providing guidance to water utilities, but their reach is limited. Smaller utilities may need government funding or shared cybersecurity services to be able to defend themselves.
Colorado could impose new fees on data centers and renewable energy companies, tax sod grass, or fund a special trust to raise the $20 billion it needs over the next 30 years to ensure it has enough water, as climate change saps streams and shrinks snowpack.
That’s according to a new report issued by a special task force created by Colorado lawmakers last year. Most of the measures the report examined would require action by lawmakers and potentially voters.
Until now, the state has relied largely on severance taxes collected on oil and gas, mining and coal production to help fund water projects, including shoring up old pipelines and dams, funding water-saving initiatives and buying new supplies.
But those severance tax revenues vary dramatically from year to year and are often diverted by lawmakers to help cope with budget shortfalls. That is a problem that needs to be solved, according to state Sen. Dylan Roberts, a Democrat from Frisco who co-sponsored the legislation creating the task force.
“This report makes clear that Colorado needs a long-term strategy for funding water infrastructure that doesn’t depend almost exclusively on the ups and downs of severance tax revenue,” Roberts said.
Task force members were charged with finding permanent, stable sources of funding that can’t be tapped for other purposes by lawmakers.
“If we could just maintain the funding we have, that would be a start,” said Jim Yahn, a water policy veteran and Logan County commissioner appointed to the task force by Gov. Jared Polis.
The report, produced by the Colorado Water Center at Colorado State University, said the state would likely need several mechanisms to generate the revenue needed, and it cited the success of a 2019 sports betting initiative approved by voters that has generated millions of dollars in tax revenues annually for water projects.
Still, it said, “The gap between the identified need and available funding is a current challenge visible in oversubscribed grant and loan programs, aging infrastructure, and the growing difficulty local governments face in accessing capital for large projects.”
The report cites programs by New Mexico and Wyoming that protect severance tax revenues by placing them in special trust funds that cannot be tapped for other purposes.
Karen Schlatter, director of the Colorado Water Center who led work on the report, said she is hopeful the findings will provide lawmakers with a set of options they can use in combination to stabilize water funding in the future.
Roberts said it was likely that lawmakers would work on new legislation next year to begin to address long-term funding solutions.
That’s something Yahn, who is the past manager of North Sterling and Prewitt reservoirs in northeastern Colorado, would like to see as well.
“A long time ago the state did something right by creating the revolving loan fund,” Yahn said, referring to a loan pool run by the Colorado Water Conservation Board that water districts can borrow from and whose loan interest payments help finance subsequent loans for other water districts.
“We got loans for our spillways and diversion structures and now we are paying it back in a steady stream that other people can use. But when you sweep it out, we don’t have it,” he said, referring to cash diversions by lawmakers. “The next step would be finding some legislators that would be willing to keep the money where it is. If we could get the ball rolling on that, that would be the next step I would like to see.”
Lake Powell and Glen Canyon Dam. Photo credit: Western Resource Advocates
Click the link to read the article on the Colorado Politics website (Marianne Goodland). Here’s an excerpt:
July 31, 2026
Calling it a balanced approach that offers flexibility and predictability, the plan released by the U.S. Department of the Interior cuts the allocation of Arizona, California and Nevada, while sparing Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Wyoming for now…Under the plan, the Lower Basin states could face collective cuts up to 3 million acre-feet through 2036, “subject to hydrology,” according to a news release by the Department of the Interior. That’s enough water to serve more than 25 million people a year. The plan would also allow annual releases between 5 and 12 million acre-feet from Lake Powell, the basin’s second-largest reservoir. Under the 10-year federal framework, water management decisions will be made every two years…
Assistant Secretary for Water and Science Andrea Travnicek said in a statement Friday that the plan, known as a final environmental impact statement, “strikes a balance between flexibility and predictability for the Colorado River system that is vital to the 40 million people who rely on it, given unprecedented hydrologic conditions and the potential for considerable impacts on water users.”
Between 2020 and 2024, the average consumptive use in the Colorado River Basin was 13.1 million acre-feet. That is broken down by:
Upper Basin: 3.8 million acre-feet (29%)
Lower Basin: 6.5 million acre-feet (49%)
Mexico use: 1.4 million acre-feet (11%)
Evaporation: 1.4 million acre-feet (11%)
At the time the 1922 compact was signed, the seven states had a combined population of about six million — roughly the size of Colorado’s population today…
She said last month that she “has no idea what that process would look like, constantly negotiating every two years.”
“The basin is experiencing increased aridity due to climate variability, and long-term drought and low-runoff conditions are expected in the future,” wrote the Bureau of Reclamation in the summary. “These conditions will exacerbate the now widely recognized imbalance between water supply and demand in the basin. Robust and flexible guidelines are needed to manage the Colorado River system and its resources under a broad range of potential future hydrologic conditions.”
[…]
The two reservoirs are currently governed by guidelines established in 2007 that are set to expire this year, and many agree the plan has failed to protect the Colorado River system…The final proposal does not provide specifics for how water will be distributed across the basin, with the Bureau of Reclamation describing it as a “framework” that identifies key triggers and ranges for developing future operating guidelines at Lake Powell and Lake Mead. It sets up a plan to negotiate 2-year operating plans for the reservoirs through 2036…The final statement provides a range of alternatives, including the Bureau of Reclamation’s “preferred” option. Each alternative sets guidelines for how it will reduce or increase annual consumptive water use allocations from Lake Mead to the Lower Basin states; store and deliver water saved through conservation efforts; manage and deliver surplus water; manage activities and make cuts above Lake Powell; and more.
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
After Utah and six other states along the Colorado River failed to reach a deal on how to share its dwindling water supply, the federal government on Friday released its own 10-year outline.
Colorado River Collaborative
This article is published through the Colorado River Collaborative, a solutions journalism initiative supported by the Janet Quinney Lawson Institute for Land, Water, and Air at Utah State University. See all of our stories about how Utahns are impacted by the Colorado River atgreatsaltlakenews.org/coloradoriver
Under the proposal from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, the Lower Basin states of Arizona, California and Nevada would share in cuts of up to 3 million acre-feet per year. The framework doesn’t mandate cuts for Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming.
Instead, it identifies a conservation goal for the Upper Basin — 200,000 acre-feet per year — about as much as Utah’s Deer Creek and East Canyon reservoirs together can hold. The plan would also allow for smaller annual releases from Lake Powell of down to 5 million acre-feet, compared to the current 6 million acre-feet, with new operating guidelines every two years.
Utah’s chief Colorado River negotiator, Gene Shawcroft, praised the proposal on Friday, telling reporters it recognizes the reality of the water available, not just the demand. But he emphasized it provides a broad framework, with the details to follow in coming days.
“I would just simply say, this is a bridge, not a destination,” Shawcroft said in a virtual news conference. “It certainly could be a bridge over troubled waters, but perhaps a bridge over no waters. We just aren’t quite sure.”
He and Amy Haas, executive director of the Colorado River Authority of Utah, were still reading through the 2,600 pages contained in the bureau’s environmental impact statement released Friday.
Haas said the state will know more about what it’s contending with when it gets a copy of a two-year operations plan for 2027 and 2028 in coming days, though the exact timeline wasn’t clear.
The Colorado River is pictured where if flows near Hite, just beyond the upper reaches of Lake Powell, on Friday, Sept. 19, 2025. (Photo by Spenser Heaps for Utah News Dispatch)
The Colorado River provides water to 40 million people across the U.S. and Mexico, contributing 27% of Utah’s water supply. It’s shrinking because of drought, overuse and hotter temperatures linked to climate change.
This year’s record-high temperatures and lowest snowpack on record aren’t helping. Normally, Colorado River runoff is about 13 million acre-feet, Shawcroft said. Now it’s 3.5 million acre-feet.
He told reporters: “We’re in a dire situation.”
On Friday, Arizona’s Department of Water Resources called the proposal’s cuts for the Lower Basin “unacceptable,” saying such reductions would devastate Arizona’s water users and its economy.”
The agency described negotiations over many months as “an exercise in lowering expectations, particularly for a long-term, seven-state agreement on operating this vital river system.”
The disagreement could find its way into a courtroom soon. Arizona and Utah have both taken steps this year to build up litigation funds.
“For Utah, litigation is never our plan A,” Haas told reporters Friday. “Whether it’s a plan B, depending on the context of this document, that remains to be seen. But litigation is not going to get us anywhere on this river. It’s not going to get us more water.”
At issue in the negotiations is who absorbs necessary cuts. Upper Basin states argue they use less water than Lower Basin states, don’t have huge reservoirs to store water in dry years, and lack legal authority to place significant restrictions on water users.
Lake Powell and the Wahweap Marina are pictured near Page, Arizona on Sunday, Feb. 2, 2025. (Photo by Spenser Heaps for Utah News Dispatch)
The proposal out Friday is adaptable and allows the states to keep negotiating, said Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum.
“This framework provides the flexibility to respond to changing hydrologic conditions while preserving the opportunity for the Basin States to continue working toward durable, consensus-based solutions,” Burgum said in a statement.
Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, in a joint statement with his counterparts in the other upstream states, said they’re encouraged that incoming operating guidelines “will better reflect existing water supply, which must underpin any practicable plan going forward.”
They went on to say that both the upper and lower divisions of the basin “are feeling the pain of severe drought. This is a reality that all states, and the federal government, will need to address practically, which is why a seven-state agreement will provide the best outcome for all water users in the Colorado River Basin.”
Water use is outpacing the river’s flows, and that overconsumption adds up. The combined amount of water in Lake Powell and Lake Mead is at its lowest point since before Glen Canyon Dam began to fill up in 1963, the bureau said in its Friday news release.
If water levels dip to critical lows, as forecasts suggest they could by late this year, the nation’s two largest reservoirs could fail to produce power. If their depths continue to slide, they’ll fail to send water downstream.
Conservation and recreation groups have called for an end to the gridlock, saying it’s dragging on in the background while hotter and drier conditions are driving up wildfire risks, air quality concerns and restrictions on the water supply.
Utah News Dispatch is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Utah News Dispatch maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor McKenzie Romero for questions: info@utahnewsdispatch.com.
The Colorado River Basin spans seven U.S. states and part of Mexico. Lake Powell, upstream from the Grand Canyon, and Lake Mead, near Las Vegas, are the two principal reservoirs in the Colorado River water-supply system. (Bureau of Reclamation)
The federal government on Friday formalized a set of guidelines for managing water use in the Colorado River Basin over the next decade, if Colorado and six other Western states can’t come to an agreement on how to deal with declining flows caused in large part by climate change.
“The Department has a responsibility to ensure the Colorado River system remains reliable and resilient for the millions of Americans, communities and industries that depend on it,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said in a press release. “This framework provides the flexibility to respond to changing hydrologic conditions while preserving the opportunity for the Basin States to continue working toward durable, consensus-based solutions.”
Under the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s “preferred alternative” for the management of the river’s reservoir system, outlined in a extensive environmental impact statement, the burden of the most severe cuts would continue to fall on the Lower Basin states of Arizona, California and Nevada, which could face mandatory cuts of up to 3 million acre-feet of water. The Upper Basin states of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming would face only voluntary conservation targets totaling 200,000 acre-feet.
All seven states were parties to the Colorado River Compact, a 1922 agreement governing the use of water from the vital Western watershed. Today, the Colorado River provides water to an area inhabited by 40 million people across the Southwest, though agricultural uses account for the vast majority of consumption.
Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2025. Note the tiny points on the annual data so that you can flyspeck the individual years. Credit: Brad Udall
Since 2000, a megadrought caused largely by global warming — the region’s worst dry spell in at least 1,200 years — has stressed water supplies across the basin and pushed the Colorado River Compact to a breaking point. The last set of federal guidelines to address shortages, issued nearly 20 years ago, will expire Jan. 1, and the seven Colorado River Compact states failed to reach a new agreement before a federally imposed deadline in February.
The combined amount of water stored in Lake Powell and Lake Mead, the Colorado River system’s two key reservoirs, fell this month to its lowest level since May 1957 — before Lake Powell, created by the Glen Canyon Dam, had even begun to fill.
Without a major turnaround in hydrologic conditions in the near future, water levels in Lake Powell are expected to fall by next spring to below “minimum power pool,” at which point the Glen Canyon Dam’s hydroelectric turbines would be unable to operate.
Negotiations over a comprehensive new agreement have led to an increasingly bitter dispute between the Upper Basin states — led by Colorado, the river’s headwaters state and by far the Upper Basin’s largest water user — and the Lower Basin states, especially Arizona, which has borne the brunt of the cuts imposed in recent years. Arizona is widely expected to launch a high-stakes legal challenge as soon as this summer, alleging Colorado and other Upper Basin states are failing to meet an obligation under the original Colorado River Compact to allow enough water to flow downstream.
Colorado Gov. Jared Polis issued a joint statement Friday with the governors of the other three Upper Basin states, saying that “both the Upper and Lower divisions of the basin are feeling the pain of severe drought,” and that they were “committed to continued good-faith discussions with our counterparts.”
“Many hours of meetings and negotiations took place between the Colorado River Basin states and these discussions will continue,” the statement said. “Today’s framework does not represent a final solution, but enables the River to be managed in the short-term while the seven states and (the Interior Department) continue to negotiate a consensus solution.”
In the absence of a new agreement among the states, the Bureau of Reclamation says it will continue to update its new guidelines every two years until 2036.
Andrea Travnicek, the Interior Department’s assistant secretary for water and science, said the plan “strikes a balance between flexibility and predictability … given unprecedented hydrologic conditions and the potential for considerable impacts on water users.”
In a statement, Democratic U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado said he was “disappointed” by the failure to reach a new long-term agreement among the seven Colorado River Compact states.
“While a two-year operating plan is the bare minimum needed to operate the river, a long-term, consensus agreement that recognizes real hydrologic conditions is the only durable solution to bring certainty to the Colorado River,” Bennet said.
Colorado Newsline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Colorado Newsline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Quentin Young for questions: info@coloradonewsline.com.
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
You know the Colorado River crisis is serious when the Trump administration is willing to use hundreds of millions of dollars from President Biden’s climate law to help to solve it.
As of Wednesday night, federal officials had yet to release their plan for mandatory water cutbacks along the Colorado — a crucial water source for tens of millions of people and millions of acres of farmland across the American West. But with a plan expected later this week, details were starting to trickle out.
The L.A. Times’ Ian James reported that Trump’s Interior Department would accept a proposal submitted by California, Arizona and Nevada — the Lower Basin states — to slash their water use by 12%, 31% and 28%, respectively, through 2028. They’ll receive $350 million from Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act to support water conservation.
The Upper Basin states — Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Wyoming — will get $100 million in conservation funding. But unlike their downstream neighbors, they won’t face mandatory water cuts. However much water they end up saving, that will be good enough.
It’s always possible the plan will change. I’m eager to see the final details.
While we wait, let’s hear from one of the West’s most thoughtful and well-informed Colorado River chroniclers.
That would be Zak Podmore, author of “Life After Dead Pool: Lake Powell’s Last Days and the Rebirth of the Colorado River.” Earlier this week, he and I talked for an hour and took audience questions on Zoom; it was a great time. Thank you to everyone who joined us. Paid subscribers to Climate-Colored Goggles can scroll up to watch the full video.
Here are five lessons that stood out to me from our conversation — all of which are relevant to the high-stakes conflict playing out among the states.
1. We’re not doomed. Earth is resilient
My favorite thing about “Life After Dead Pool” is its hopeful message.
Most headlines about the Colorado River these days are gloomy. For instance, the last time Lake Mead and Lake Powell held as little water as they do right now was 1956 — before Lake Powell existed, meaning all the water was in Mead. Powell is currently 23% full; Mead is 27% full. These are the largest reservoirs in the United States.
A river returns. Almost 50 miles of the San Juan, once inundated by Powell Reservoir, are flowing free. Photo credit: Morgan Sjogren
But Podmore’s book flips the script, offering a firsthand look the amazing ecological recovery taking place as Lake Powell shrinks.
In and around the reservoir, which was flooded by Glen Canyon Dam more than 60 years ago, native vegetation is returning much faster than scientists thought possible — especially in narrow side canyons inundated by Powell. Exploring these remote, newly accessible places inspired Podmore to write his book.
“Instead of hearing the story that I grew up hearing — which was that Glen Canyon Dam had all these negative environmental consequences, it drowned this beautiful place — I was hearing these conversations from these researchers who were talking about the landscape that was coming back, and how excited they were about the way the ecology was recovering, and the way the endangered fish were expanding their habitat,” Podmore said.
“Instead of a story about being too late, it was a story about realizing that I was right on time, as we all are, to see the rebirth of Glen Canyon,” he added.
The Colorado River flows through Glen Canyon in 1958, before the dam was built. (Photo via Wikimedia Commons)
2. Those who don’t learn from history…
Podmore starts the book by imagining what Indigenous life might have been like in and around Glen Canyon nearly 1,000 years ago — when the region had a far larger population than it does today.
He wanted to show that the Colorado River Basin’s human history began long before white settlement — and that even environmentalists have often ignored the watershed’s Indigenous past.
“I was definitely indoctrinated into the mainstream environmental school of thought as I was growing up,” he said. “I had a copy of the really famous book about Glen Canyon called, ‘The Place No One Knew,’ which was published by the Sierra Club in the ’60s and talked about how nobody cared enough about Glen Canyon to protect it. And then I realized later on that [the] title was very offensive, and [in fact] there were people who knew Glen Canyon very well and lived there for thousands of years, and who were displaced as the waters of Lake Powell started to fill, in the case of many Navajo families.”
Podmore’s opening scene describes a 10,000-gallon stone water tank built by Ancestral Pueblo farmers, the ruins of which were eventually buried by Lake Powell. The tank’s key feature: a drain at the bottom, so that irrigation could continue no matter how low water levels got.
Diagram showing critical reservoir levels at Glen Canyon Dam and Lake Powell. Land Desk diagram with data from the Bureau of Reclamation.
Lake Powell doesn’t have a drain at the bottom. It could certainly use one.
3. The Upper Basin states aren’t doing enough
If Powell’s water levels sink much lower, water won’t be able to pass through the dam’s hydropower turbines, which generate cheap electricity for communities across the West. That wouldn’t be a “dead pool” situation; water could still flow downstream to the Grand Canyon and Lake Mead through bypass tubes lower in the dam. But the bypass tubes are surprisingly frail and could break with sustained use.
Translation: We are frighteningly close to “de facto dead pool.” That’s why the Trump administration is ordering everyone to use less water.
Well, not everyone. California, Arizona and Nevada are willing to cut back dramatically, and federal officials seem happy to make them do it. The Upper Basin states — the ones upstream of Lake Powell — say they shouldn’t have to commit to mandatory reductions, in part because they already consume a lot less.
[ed. It is not possible to measure or marshall water to Lake Powell (lack of infrastructure, gaining and losing reaches, priority, no way to color water in the river). Inflows are calculated values, or the height of the column at the dam. The Upper Basin consumes a lot less than their allocation under the compact, so yes, much less than the Lower Basin. Here’s an AI recap of inflows to Lake Powell.]
In a New York Times opinion piece earlier this year, I argued that the Upper Basin states need to do more. Podmore agreed.
“It’s a tricky situation, because the Lower Basin has always used more water, and that’s a convenient argument for the Upper Basin,” he said. “But also, there’s more people in the Lower Basin. And the most productive agricultural land that’s irrigated with Colorado River water is located in the Lower Basin.”
“Even with the cuts that the Lower Basin has offered, we still have a long way to go to balance the water budget,” he added. “Everyone needs to pitch in.”
Farmland in California’s Imperial Valley, irrigated with Colorado River water. (Photo by Sammy Roth)
4. Alfalfa isn’t (always) the enemy
Farmers are often vilified for sucking up copious amounts of water — and with good reason. Irrigated agriculture consumes more than half the water in the Colorado River Basin, with alfalfa and other cattle feed accounting for a stunning 32% of overall water use. (This is one of several good reasons to eat fewer hamburgers.)
The Colorado River’s largest water user, by far, is California’s Imperial Valley, where farmers grow vegetables, alfalfa and other crops. There’s no sustainable future for the American West that doesn’t involve Imperial using less water.
But easy as it is to hate on Imperial, Podmore pointed out that when the Lower Basin uses water, that water stays in the river for a long time, supporting healthy ecosystems along the way. And because Imperial is very far downstream, water flowing to alfalfa farmers there carries huge environmental benefits.
“The way that water gets from the Rocky Mountains to the Imperial Valley — or to Los Angeles or Las Vegas or Phoenix — is through the Grand Canyon. It’s through Glen Canyon. It’s through Canyonlands National Park,” Podmore said. “It’s through all these important and beautiful places.”
“If the Lower Basin agrees to a bunch of cuts — if L.A. builds tons of desalination plants — that would in theory be good, because you have to divert less water from the river,” he added. But at the same time, “that means less water in the river.”
Colorado River “Beginnings”. Photo: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism
The Bureau of Reclamation has released the Final Environmental Impact Statement, which designates a preferred course of action for future management of Lake Powell and Lake Mead. The preferred alternative establishes an adaptive decision framework to be used to develop operating guidelines designed to ensure reliable operations in the Colorado River Basin while maintaining the flexibility to respond to changing conditions over a 10-year period through 2036. The framework also preserves the opportunity for the Basin to continue working towards consensus agreements, and if successful, be incorporated into future operations.
The framework will be used to develop operating guidelines for operations at Lake Powell and Lake Mead that can be adjusted for shorter and longer term periods.
“The Department has a responsibility to ensure the Colorado River system remains reliable and resilient for the millions of Americans, communities and industries that depend on it,” saidSecretary of the Interior Doug Burgum. “This framework provides the flexibility to respond to changing hydrologic conditions while preserving the opportunity for the Basin States to continue working toward durable, consensus-based solutions.”
The framework establishes the operational principles, sideboards—key thresholds and ranges for operational elements—and a process that will govern development and issuance of operating guidelines through 2036. Operational sideboards were chosen to ensure that the Department would have flexibility and environmental compliance to operate the system in a way that is responsive to actual hydrologic conditions and allows for the incorporation of Basin-wide innovative water management solutions. The sideboards, which are analyzed in the Final EIS, provide for annual releases from Lake Powell between 5.0 maf and 12.0 maf, Lower Basin shortages of up to 3.0 maf, the ability to store up to 8.0 maf and 3.0 maf of conserved water in Lake Powell and Lake Mead for future use, respectively, and the opportunity for voluntary Upper Basin conservation up to 200 kaf, subject to hydrology.
The Department would issue operating guidelines, within these sideboards, at anticipated 2-year periods, unless consensus-based agreements provide for a longer duration. It also establishes a structure under which operating guidelines will be developed, reviewed and periodically updated. This approach provides certainty regarding a decision process over the next 10 years while preserving the flexibility to adapt to changing conditions.
“This plan strikes a balance between flexibility and predictability for the Colorado River system that is vital to the 40 million people who rely on it given unprecedented hydrologic conditions and the potential for considerable impacts on water users,” saidAssistant Secretary for Water and Science Andrea Travnicek. “It also allows a new flexibility to respond to changing conditions and potential consensus.”
The Colorado River provides water for more than 40 million people and fuels hydropower resources in seven states. It serves as a vital resource for 30 tribes and two Mexican states, sustaining 5.5 million acres of farmland and agricultural communities throughout the West, while also supporting critical ecosystems and protecting endangered species.
Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2025. Note the tiny points on the annual data so that you can flyspeck the individual years. Credit: Brad Udall
Drought conditions over the past 25 years, combined with expectations of continued dry conditions, have made development of future operating guidelines for the Colorado River particularly challenging. The combined contents of Lake Powell and Lake Mead have not been this low since before Glen Canyon Dam began filling in 1963, and since 2000 water use has exceeded total system inflow in most years. The Colorado River Compact apportioned 7.5 million acre-feet to both the Upper and Lower Basins based on the estimated pre-compact average inflow (1906-1921) of approximately 18 million acre-feet. However, inflows from 2000 to 2024 have only averaged 12.9 million acre-feet and the unregulated inflow into Lake Powell this year as of July is estimated to be only 3.5 maf.
Between 2020 and 2024, the average consumptive use in the Colorado River Basin was 13.1 million acre-feet. That is broken down by:
Upper Basin Use: 3.8 million acre-feet (29%).
Lower Basin Use: 6.5 million acre-feet (49%).
Mexico Use: 1.4 million acre-feet (11%).
Evaporation: 1.4 million acre-feet (11%).
This Final EIS is the culmination of a NEPA process that was initiated in June 2023. Over this three-year period Reclamation engaged extensively with Basin stakeholders and that input is reflected in the alternatives analyzed in the Final EIS and the Preferred Alternative.
Reclamation received more than 18,000 comments, including 785 unique submissions from the public, tribes, states, federal agencies and others after releasing the draft EIS in January 2026. Reclamation evaluated substantive comments and updated the final EIS, with public input helping to shape the preferred alternative.
The Final EIS is available on Reclamation’s website.
The final EIS addresses only domestic river operations. A separate binational process addressing water deliveries to Mexico is nearing completion and the Department is committed to continued collaboration with Mexico. The Department will conduct all necessary and appropriate discussions regarding post-2026 operations and implementation of the 1944 Water Treaty with Mexico through the International Boundary and Water Commission in consultation with the Department of State.
Click the link to access the EIS on the Reclamation website. Here’s the abstract:
July 31, 2026
The Secretary of the Department of the Interior, acting through the Bureau of Reclamation, proposes the adoption of new guidelines and coordinated management strategies to address Lake Powell and Lake Mead through their full operating range to take effect when the current agreements expire in 2026. Management strategies will primarily focus on the operation of Glen Canyon Dam and Hoover Dam, but may include actions upstream and downstream of these facilities to protect critical reservoir elevations.
This Final EIS has been prepared to inform the Secretary’s timely adoption of a new set of guidelines that would be sufficiently robust and provide improved predictability to all water users and managers in the Colorado River Basin. This Final EIS has been prepared pursuant to the National Environmental Policy Act to address the formulation and evaluation of specific interim criteria and to identify the potential environmental impacts of implementing such criteria.
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
To bolster the Colorado River’s flow downvalley through historic drought, water authorities will be increasing the flow out of the Ruedi Reservoir through August. That water will flow into the Fryingpan River…Water will then flow into the Roaring Fork River, then down the Western Slope, where populations in Grand Valley are in “dire need,” he said…
Green Mountain Reservoir (back in the day) is owned by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and located in Summit County north of Silverthorne along the Blue River. Photo credit: Denver Water.
Traditionally, the Western Slope relies heavily on the Green Mountain Reservoir — about 17 miles south of Kremmling — to sustain a steady Colorado River flow. But due to the state’s dry, warm winter, that reservoir struggled to fill over the spring. The administrators of Green Mountain Reservoir found that low water levels and fast releases were exacerbating a slow-moving landslide on its banks, so they limited how much water could be released out of the reservoir to half a foot a day…
Tim Miller, a hydrologist with the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation that manages the levels at Ruedi Reservoir, said the reservoir played a similar supplemental role in 2002, when Colorado saw another historic drought. This year’s use of the reservoir is about 10 days ahead of then, he said.
L to R: Allen Best, Alan Salazar, Siri Roman, Pat Mulroy during the panel discussion “Liquid Courage” at the Museum of Nature & Science, July 21, 2026. Photo credit: Big Pivots
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
July 27, 2026
“We know climate change is real. We know we’re living it, but no one expected it to move this quickly.”
As moderator at last week’s water forum held at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, I posed the question to our three panelists about this hot and dry summer after last winter’s exceptional warmth and dearth of snow.
“From where you sit now, is this any different from what we’ve been through before?”
Pat Mulroy, a senior fellow at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas’ Boyd School of Law and the former longtime general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, is an advocate for extensively rethinking how the Colorado River is managed. (Image: University of Nevada, Las Vegas’ Boyd School of Law)
Pat Mulroy was quick to answer. She calls herself a “recovering CEO.” For 23 years she oversaw the Southern Nevada Water Authority‘s operations in Las Vegas and its suburbs. Early in her watch, the population of Clark County, where Las Vegas is located, exceeded the population of Manhattan. It now has a population of 2.5 million people.
The metro area there gets 90% of its water from the Colorado River via tunnels into three levels of Lake Mead. The newest — one she championed, despite a cost of $1 billion — comes up from underneath the reservoir. Even when Hoover Dam backs up too little water to be released downstream, Las Vegas will have access to water.
“I always love coming to Denver, now that I no longer come to Denver as the protagonist from the evil lower basin,” she said.
Footnote here: Many who had never heard Mulroy speak before were astonished at her liveliness.
“This summer is different only because the cumulative effect of all the summers that went before has come home to roost,” she continued.
“All the cushion we have (had) is gone. I mean, it’s one thing to have 2002 when you had a bad winter and Lake Powell started going down rapidly, but Lake Mead still had (water to an elevation of) over 1,200 feet. We’re now seeing the very real possibility that Lake Mead is going to go to 900 feet by next year. That would be 10 feet above deadpool.”
Deadpool is the water level that is so low that water can no longer be released from a dam. The level at which electricity can no longer be produced is higher.
Mulroy went on to say that while the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California is taking steps to “replenish” Mead — by taking less water than allotted — the problem continues to worsen. That indicates the depth of this problem.
“It’s never ending, and the rate of change is so much faster than any of us expected,” added Mulroy. ” We know climate change is real. We know we’re living it, but no one expected it to move this quickly.”
Siri Roman via her Facebook page.
Siri Roman was next. She manages the Vail-based Eagle River Water and Sanitation District. “I think that 2002 changed water in Colorado, and 2026 is going to change it completely again. A lot of our planning and assumptions are being challenged this year,” she said.
“I mean, it was 80 degrees for two weeks in March. Watching our very little snowpack — the lowest snowpack we had on record — nearly melt out in March was quite alarming to us.”
Eagle River Water and Sanitation District has several small reservoirs. Among them is the reservoir at Vail Pass, another near Camp Hale, and a third near Minturn.
“They weren’t able to fill because the stream flows were so low. There are a lot of things we rely on that we’re not going to be able to rely on moving forward. How do we get creative, looking at demand and other solutions about how to prepare for a drier year?” Roman continued.
“Statistically, they always say you won’t get two years like this in a row. I don’t think we can say that anymore. We can’t rely on the statistics because we’re seeing such abnormal patterns.” [ed. emphasis mine]
Denver Board of Water Commissioners/Courtesy photo.
Alan Salazar, the third panelist, is CEO of Denver Water. The water agency delivers water to about 25% of the 6 million Coloradans. “We use just 2% of the state’s water, and that has been pretty steady going back through the 1970s. That didn’t happen by accident, because we took measures. My predecessor and Denver water employees in the last 20 years use water more efficiently and with conservation in mind.”
Salazar had high-level positions as policy advisor to several elected officials, mostly in Colorado. One of them was the former U.S. Sen. Mark Udall, an advocate of protecting natural resources and an early advocate of public awareness around climate change. He recalled what his boss had told him: “Alan, no matter how many laws we pass, no matter how many regulations we implement, Mother Nature bats last. And boy, is she batting.”
As compared to 2002, he said, this year is more extreme. “We had a heat dome that made the spring more difficult, and it’s partly why the response from our customers has lagged, because even though there are water restrictions, the extremes in temperatures have put greater pressure on water use. So, it’s quite a bit different.”
These remarks were delivered early in the 90-minute sessions devoted to water and urban uses in Colorado and somewhat beyond.
The museum’s Institute for Science and Policy will hold another session on Aug. 27 in its two-part Liquid Courage series. This next session will have four panelists:
Robert Sakata, a farmer from Brighton and now a senior adviser at the Colorado Department of Agriculture;
Anne Castle, a former Interior Department undersecretary for water in the Obama administration now affiliated with the Getches-Wilkinson Center at the University of Colorado Law School;
Nathan Coombs, a San Luis Valley farmer and a member of the Colorado Water Conservation Board; and
Sarah Jones, co-founder of Rye Resurgence and co-owner of Jones Farm Organics near Hooper, in the San Luis Valley.
A few miles north of Mt. Sopris, down another dirt road that leads to the Roaring Fork River, Wenning stopped his car at a small brick building near the riverbank: The Roaring Fork Well House. Nearby are three wells that draw from the Roaring Fork River, providing another source of municipal water. After the call on the Crystal in 2018, Carbondale water managers decided to reduce the town’s reliance on Nettle Creek by leaning more heavily on the Roaring Fork River, where the town also has water rights. Carbondale currently has installed three wells — each of which produces roughly the same amount of water as the Nettle Creek plant (around 300 gallons per minute). But, the town has permits for seven more wells. Shifting Carbondale’s focus to the Roaring Fork River makes sense, said Wenning. Since the Roaring Fork is a bigger river, it’s less affected by a low-snow year. The wells are also 40 feet deep, allowing them to access groundwater…
The Roaring Fork Treatment Plant lies at the edge of the Carbondale Nature Park. Inside the barn-like building, a loud whirring sound echoes through the cavernous interior. The town recently installed new cartridge filter technology at the plant, expanding its capacity to treat water from 0.5 million gallons to 1.4 million gallons per day. According to Wenning, the town plans to expand the plant’s capacity further to treat up to 2.3 million gallons per day from the Roaring Fork River alone — more than enough to meet Carbondale’s peak summer demand, even when some of the water treatment equipment needs repair or servicing…
Beyond the shift to a more resilient water source, water experts see more opportunity to boost capacity through conservation. Maggie McHugh, an engineer with Roaring Fork Engineering, helps communities in the Roaring Fork Valley adapt to climate change.
“We can’t put any more water into the system, but we can take less out,” she said. “That will be the ultimate goal, especially in years like this.”
Farmer Randy Friend grows corn in the Olathe area. He left the debris from last year’s crop on the ground as a form of mulch to try to retain moisture in this exceptionally dry year. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Fourth-generation Olathe farmer Randy Friend stopped his pickup truck next to a row of corn whose green leaves were limp and curling, with a gray tinge. Friend’s corn was stressed as the valley endured a July heat wave with temperatures nudging close to 100 degrees.
“I hate to see it looking like that with our water situation,” Friend said.
Next was a field of onions, a thirsty crop with a long growing season. The furrows between the dark-green sprouts were still damp, an indication the field was just irrigated that morning.
“Onions are our most expensive crop to grow and the most reward on a good year,” Friend said. “But they can also bankrupt you because they take so much more water.”
Friend farms corn, onions and forage crops for livestock as part of the Uncompahgre Valley Water Users Association, a vast expanse of farmland that extends from just south of Montrose to Delta, on Colorado’s Western Slope. Water from the Gunnison and Uncompahgre rivers, along with miles of tunnels, canals and ditches, transforms about 76,000 acres of high desert into lush green fields of corn, pinto beans, onions and alfalfa.
But this year, Uncompahgre Valley farmers are making tough decisions and developing new tools as they try to adapt to one of the hottest, driest years on record in the Upper Colorado River basin. Many are leaving fields dry, culling their cattle herds, switching to crops that use less water and relying on crop insurance payouts as the association faces a 50% cut to its irrigation water supply.
“I’ve been farming 30 years now, and this is by far the most extreme, biggest cut of water that I’ve ever had to deal with,” Friend said.
Some producers in the Uncompahgre Valley Water Users association have left some fields unplanted due to drought. The association has only about half its normal water supply this year. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
The Uncompahgre water users get about half of their water supply from Taylor Park Reservoir, at the headwaters of the Gunnison River, via the Gunnison Tunnel, a six-mile-long aqueduct that can bring up to about 1,175 cubic feet per second to the valley. The other half comes from the Uncompahgre River, a much smaller river basin that saw an abysmal end-of-season snowpack with just 14% of median April 1. That means the association has only about half its normal water supply for irrigation season.
“We’re limping along right now, but it’s going to be a challenging year,” said association manager Steve Pope. “We got to get our producers through Labor Day; we’re going to need the water then. It’s just a physical supply issue; the water just wasn’t there.”
With its water cut by half, many producers in the Uncompahgre Valley have chosen to irrigate only some of their fields, leaving others unplanted for the season. The district’s northwest area, which is where much of the valley’s row crops are grown, has been the hardest hit. Pope estimates those farmers are fallowing between 30% and 60% of their ground. Driving around the district revealed many fields that were brown and dry.
“There’s just a tremendous amount of land out there that’s just barren, and there’s nothing you can do about it,” he said.
This field in the Uncompahgre Valley Water Users Association district has been fallowed this season due to a lack of water. The state of Colorado announced Wednesday that it will set up a conservation program using federal dollars, which means more fields on the Western Slope could soon look like this. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Friend, an association board member, said he is fallowing about one-fourth of the land he farms and using about 30% to 40% of his acres to grow forage crops that use less water, such as sorghum-Sudangrass. But switching to drought-resistant plants is a strategy that doesn’t work for every grower. Friend also owns a feedlot so he can mix these drought-tolerant crops with higher-quality feed to make it work. Although some growers on the Western Slope are experimenting with alternative forage crops, such crops have yet to be grown on a large scale. Water-intensive alfalfa, with its high protein content, remains dominant.
Daris Jutten, a fifth-generation rancher in Ouray and Montrose counties, said the lack of water has prompted him to cut his herd back to the fewest cows he has ever had on his ranch. He has also left some of his alfalfa fields fallow.
West Drought Monitor map July 30, 2002.
West Drought Monitor map July 31, 2012.
West Drought Monitor July 31. 2018
West Drought Monitor map July 21, 2026.
“I’ve seen it bad before, but I’ve never seen it this bad,” Jutten said. “2002 was bad. 2018, 2012 were all bad. But they don’t even come close to what this thing is.”
The Uncompahgre River in Olathe was nearly dried up in July due to agricultural diversions and drought. The Uncompahgre Valley Water Users Association is the biggest agricultural water user in the Upper Colorado River Basin. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Colorado’s new conservation program adds pressure to cut water use
This year’s lack of water and a management crisis have brought the Colorado River system to the brink of collapse.
As the nation’s two largest reservoirs, Lake Powell and Lake Mead, plummet to new lows, water managers are taking emergency steps to keep Lake Powell levels high enough to produce hydropower at Glen Canyon Dam. At the same time, federal officials are crafting a plan for how the seven states that share the Colorado River will share shortages and how the reservoirs will be operated for the next two years.
Colorado’s new conservation program adds pressure to cut water use
This year’s lack of water and a management crisis have brought the Colorado River system to the brink of collapse.
As the nation’s two largest reservoirs, Lake Powell and Lake Mead, plummet to new lows, water managers are taking emergency steps to keep Lake Powell levels high enough to produce hydropower at Glen Canyon Dam. At the same time, federal officials are crafting a plan for how the seven states that share the Colorado River will share shortages and how the reservoirs will be operated for the next two years.
Upper Basin water managers have focused on the fact that their farmers and ranchers are affected first by a warming climate and are already experiencing shortages because the water simply isn’t there. The Upper Basin states (Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming) suffer because there aren’t major reservoirs from which they can draw in dry years the way that the Lower Basin states (Arizona, California and Nevada) do. Both basins are increasingly expected to reduce consumption because supplies are shrinking and the Colorado River system as a whole must be managed within these new limits.
Onions are one of the water-intensive row crops grown in the Uncompahgre Valley. Farmers in the region are adapting to drought by fallowing fields and planting crops that use less water. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
On July 15, state officials announced the creation of a “near-term contribution program” that will pay water users to voluntarily cut back in 2027 and 2028, using $100 million in promised funding from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. The Upper Basin states have a goal of saving 100,000 acre-feet by the end of September 2028, which marks the end of water year 2028. The saved water will need to have a home in Upper Basin storage buckets — Lake Powell, Navajo, Blue Mesa or Flaming Gorge reservoirs — but precisely how it will be used and how it will fit into broader Colorado River management are still unknown.
The program has been a long time coming, and the concept is not new to Colorado. Officials said they are incorporating the lessons learned from previous demand-management studies beginning in 2019, stakeholder input and recent pilot programs.
As the biggest agricultural user in the Upper Basin, the Uncompahgre Valley — drought-stricken as it is — is ideally located for these types of programs and is considered one of the lowest-hanging fruits when it comes to finding places to save water.
When Colorado’s contribution program is implemented next year, the association will be ready. Knowing that a program was inevitable, Western Slope water managers have been proactive, developing a data-mapping tool that can help the association adapt to drought.
UVWUA Manager Steve Pope stands at the spot where water from the South Canal dumps water from the Gunnison River into the Uncompahgre River. It’s then diverted to the west side of the valley where it irrigates fields and row crops. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Mapping tool helps plan conservation
With 550 miles of interconnected canals and laterals snaking through the valley, downstream irrigators often depend on reusing the water that runs off an upstream neighbor’s fields, and leaving a field dry could have unintended downstream consequences.
Developed by the Colorado River Water Conservation District and The Freshwater Trust, the tool can pinpoint where the greatest opportunities for water savings are, as well as how to avoid the worst consequences of fallowing ground. It can show what happens when efficiency improvements are made to the association’s century-old infrastructure and can show which ditches should be lined to provide the most bang for the buck to reduce seepage loss.
“From our perspective, it’s a great management tool because it allows us to track water through our system,” Pope said. “Let’s say there’s [a conservation] program, well, what would be the best farms to go to a deficit irrigation or fallow that would create the most (water savings), and you can target that.”
The tool is aimed at helping producers adapt to drought and can show which projects would result in the most water savings. Although the River District does not endorse a large-scale conservation program, it has long recognized that one was inevitable and has sought to mitigate the worst impacts to rural agricultural communities.
The intent of the tool is to help create a program that can maximize economic and environmental benefits as well as water conservation, said Raquel Flinker, director of interstate and regional water resources with the River District.
“It was always to provide data and analytics that would make whatever entity [is] creating a program design it in a way that seemed the most sensible,” Flinker said.
Some Uncompahgre Valley producers have participated in experimental programs that pay them to cut their water use, including the federally funded System Conservation Pilot Program, which took place in 2023 and 2024. Friend and a few others in the association enrolled in 2024 and were paid to reduce their water use. The association’s board has allowed their members to participate in conservation programs, but they remain somewhat controversial. An irrigation district in the Western Slope’s other big agricultural area, the Grand Valley, does not allow its members to participate.
Pope said instead of programs that pay farmers not to irrigate, he would rather see federal money pay for more efficiency upgrades to water-delivery systems such as lining ditches and improving headgates. The recently announced state program is meant to include a broad range of water-saving actions, but pilot conservation programs in the Upper Basin have always defaulted to paying irrigators to temporarily stop using water.
“The problem I see with it is if somebody enrolls and they sign off the year before, and then we don’t get any water and they are 50% fallowed anyway, did the program really generate any water?” Pope said. “It’s very difficult to measure the benefits of these types of programs when you have such an unreliable supply to begin with.”
Pope brings up an inherent contradiction about Upper Basin conservation: How can agricultural water users cut back when they already don’t have enough in drought years like this?
Despite the 100,000-acre-foot goal for the Upper Basin, Colorado leaders have long said they can’t commit to saving a specific amount of water. They said that figure can be reached only if sufficient federal funding is available and hydrologic conditions allow. And for now, the program remains short-term, while the effects of a warmer and drier climate appear likely to continue for the long-term.
“If this is the new normal, it’s going to get way more difficult,” Friend said. “If we have another winter like this last one, a lot of people are pretty worried about it.”
REMINDER: There’s just [2 days] left to comment on the Trump administration’s proposal to rescind ban on new oil and gas leases and mining claims within a 10-mile radius of Chaco Culture National Historical Park. The BLM is accepting public comment until July 29 on three alternatives: 1. keeping the ban in place; 2. shrinking the 10-mile buffer zone to just five miles; 3. eliminating the ban altogether. To comment, click on this link and then click on the “Participate Now” button at the top of the page.
🐓 Regulatory Capture Chronicles 🦊
Wall at the Twin Angel site, a Chacoan outlier that lies along the Great North Road. Note the oil and gas facility in the background. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
President Donald Trump’s proclamations virtually eliminating Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears national monuments this month listed several arguments purportedly justifying the shrinkage. One of those was that national monument protections aren’t necessary, because the land and antiquities in question are already protected by various federal laws. The same argument is used to justify revoking the mining-claim and mineral-leasing ban around Chaco Culture National Historical Park.
There is some truth in this: There is a suite of federal laws, from the Federal Land Policy and Management Act to the Endangered Species Act, that are intended to protect environmental and cultural resources on all federal land, whether it’s in a national monument or not. But those laws aren’t always adequate, and now the administration is actually working to weaken Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act, which would be key to protecting the cultural sites in the former national monuments and the Chaco “buffer zone.”
When a mining or drilling company proposes a project on a mining claim or mineral lease on public land, the National Historic Preservation Act requires the jurisdictional agency to determine whether the proposed development might affect historic properties. If so, it triggers Section 106 of the law, which requires the agency to consult with tribal nations or other potential stakeholders, to identify potentially affected properties, and to work to avoid, minimize, or mitigate adverse effects on those properties.
Section 106, commonly referred to as “identify and avoid,” requires oil companies or other developers to conduct a cultural inventory of all land in the path of development. If the surveyors happen upon a “significant” site, the well pad, road, or pipeline must be relocated. This can prevent direct impacts to larger sites; you’re not likely to see a Chacoan great house bulldozed for a well pad, for example. But archaeological surveys can miss more subtle cultural features such as stone shrines, Chacoan “road” segments, or ancient cornfields. And the agencies aren’t likely to let a cultural landscape get in the way of the drill rigs or their “multiple use” mandate. Section 106 has not prevented gasfield roads from cutting across Chaco’s Great North Road in several places, nor has it kept several oil and gas wells from being drilled within a half mile of Pierre’s Site, a Chaco outlier within the 10-mile buffer zone.
Ruth Van Dyke, a professor of anthropology at Binghamton University cataloged the impacts of oil and gas development on the sound- and view-scapes at Pierre’s. “I found that, despite the due diligence agencies have exercised to protect the ground footprint of Pierre’s, there have been significant impacts,” she wrote. Twelve pumpjacks are visible from the Acropolis, and it’s likely that . When I visited a few years back, the whir-pop-pop-whir of the machines was irritatingly audible, affirming Van Dyke’s observation: “Rather than a sacred landscape and part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the Pierre’s community had the feeling of an industrial park.” (While many people have pointed out that there’s scant recoverable oil within the buffer zone, there is plenty of natural gas, which could be targeted if and when commodity prices increase).
Given the inadequacies of Section 106 now, it has stunned historic preservation advocates to learn that the Trump administration’s Advisory Council on Historic Preservation is proposing to weaken the law even further by giving the agencies more power, while taking input away from the public and other stakeholders, including tribal nations.
That last clause is especially important when it comes to the lands cut out of the two Utah national monuments and the Chaco “buffer zone,” if it were to be rescinded as the administration proposes. We have seen that this for this administration, the quixotic quest for “energy dominance” outweighs nearly every other consideration, at least when it comes to public lands. That means that if the changes to Section 106 go through, we can no longer rely on that law to even partially protect the vast, numerous, and cultural sites and landscapes within Bears Ears, Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, and the Greater Chacoan Landscape. It makes the mineral withdrawals more important than ever.
Several years back, when writing about the Greater Chacoan Landscape, I spoke with Theresa Pasqual, former director of Acoma Pueblo’s Historic Preservation Office, about Chaco, the landscape, and how federal laws weren’t enough. I’ll leave you with a sagacious quote from her:
⛈️ Wacky Weather Watch⚡️
It’s feeling downright apocalyptic lately. We’ve had crippling drought, hellish temperatures, locust plagues, cataclysmic fires,pestilence, and all that was just prelude to an especially sporadic and violent monsoon, so far, which helped some firefighting efforts, but also unleashed flash flooding in Arizona, Utah, and Colorado.
The most severe flooding generally occurred on burn scars left by this season’s wildfires, but the intensity of the downpours also wreaked havoc in unburned areas, including Telluride and, most tragically, outside Bicknell, Utah, where a family of five was killed by a flash flood.
Here’s a rundown of some of the most notable flooding:
In Telluride, a downpour kicked off flash floods and debris flows that shut down the Tomboy Road (it remained closed as of Monday morning), temporarily closed Hwy 145, and inundated the Telluride Middle/High School, where three to four feet of mud and water blasted and oozed into the Palm Theatre.
The Cottonwood Fire burned through more than 97,000 acres in southwestern Utah before being mostly contained. Over the past several days, it has been the recipient of heavy rainfall, which have turned area streams, including the Beaver River, into raging, slate-gray-colored, debris-clogged torrents. The flooding closed down I-15 for a period of time, and forced the evacuation of parts of Beaver City. I should make some crack here about semiaquatic rodents that build dams, but I will refrain.
A cloudburst let loose on a year-old burn scar near the Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park, spurring major debris flows that covered roads with rocky detritus and forced the evacuation of about 20 people from a campground.
I-70 in western Colorado was shut down when water and mud washed onto the highway between New Castle and, appropriately, Silt, on Monday evening.
Flash flooding in the Prescott Valley in central Arizona was big enough to turn at least one large shipping container into, well, a ship floating down the road. The Prescott area remained under a flood watch on Tuesday and Tuesday night, while the Phoenix area was facing an extreme heat watch later this week.
Any amount of moisture is welcome on the drought-desiccated earth, but if the videos of raging rivers in what usually are nearly dry arroyos give you the idea that the water woes are alleviated, think again. So far these cloudbursts are just that: Short, intense, and isolated bursts of precipitation that get arroyos and debris flows running, but only cause quick spikes in nearby river streamflows. Yes, that’s better than nothing, but no, it’s not going to halt Lake Powell’s precipitous decline.
All of those Telluride-area storms, for example, only pushed the San Miguel River near Placerville to about 160 cubic feet per second for a few hours. That’s about double what it had been running at, but just over half of the median flow for this time of year.
We’re also seeing a lot of precipitation inequality. While Telluride and the surrounding mountains were hammered, locales to the southwest of there remained relatively dry. The Dolores River gage at Slick Rock (downstream from the burn area) remained at a steady and unblinking zero cfs, although just a little ways downstream the gage at Bedrock registered 100 cfs, which is pretty good for the Lower Dolores in July.
Still, this does appear to be only the beginning of the monsoon. If the past is any indication, then the storms are likely to become more frequent and more widespread, and hopefully a little less intense, in the coming weeks.
Meanwhile, in the Northwest, lightning has sparked dozens of blazes that are growing together into massive complexes. The Hay Creek Complex in Gilliam, Wasco, and Sherman counties in Oregon is up to 92,000 acres and the Rowe Creek Complex to the south of there is at about 143,000 acres with 0% containment as of Monday night. Further east, the Powder River Fire in Baker County near the Idaho border was up to 20,500 acres.
Razorback sucker. Credit: The Land Desk
🦫 Wildlife Watch 🦅
The Trump administration’s U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service last week quietly downgraded Environmental Species Protections for the razorback sucker, a fish native only to the Colorado River Basin, from endangered to threatened.
“This remarkable fish is very abundant in the river channels of the Colorado Basin,” wrote David Starr Jordan in his 1889 report on the fish of Colorado and Utah. “It reaches a weight of 8 to 10 pounds and is largely used for food.” The razorback sucker, or Xyrauchen cypho, once thrived in the mid- and lower-elevation portions of the Colorado River and its tributaries. But human activities such as dumping mine waste into streams, irrigation diversions, dams, and stocking of non-native fish that prey on the sucker’s eggs and young diminished the population of razorback sucker and other native fish.
So in 1991, the USFWS listed the fish as endangered under the ESA, bringing it extra protections and resources toward its recovery. A propagation and stocking effort helped bring the population back, and fish stocked in the Colorado and Green Rivers have been found to be reproducing, according to Colorado River Endangered Fish Recovery Program. As a result, the USFWS determined that the species is “not currently in danger of extinction throughout all or a significant portion of its range,” and in 2021 proposed “downlisting” it to “threatened” status. That action was finalized last week.
Advocates understandably question the timing of the move. One of the main threats to the sucker is low streamflows, and we’re seeing some of the lowest streamflows on record throughout the Colorado River Basin right now, and climate change is likely to make them worse. The non-native fish that prey on the sucker tend to thrive in warmer water, also a result of climate change (Colorado wildlife officials have enacted voluntary fishing closures on several rivers in the state due to high water temperatures).
“The razorback sucker’s outlook is no better today than when the fish was originally protected under the Endangered Species Act in 1991, so this move makes no sense,” said Taylor McKinnon, Southwest director at the Center for Biological Diversity, in a written statement. “It’s still in danger of extinction throughout its range, which should preclude this downlisting.”
If you happen to be anywhere near Mancos, Colorado, from mid-August to the end of September, I urge you to visit the Sundog Gallery to see the “Portal” exhibit, featuring oil paintings by the late Stanton Englehart. I consider Englehart to be thepainter of the Four Corners Country — no one captures the light, and darkness, of the Great Sage Plain, the mesas, the canyons, and even the waters of Lake Powell quite like Englehart did.
The show opens Aug. 14 with a reception from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. at the Sundog Gallery on Grand Avenue in downtown Mancos and runs until Sept. 30.
Denver Water’s Gross Reservoir Expansion Project reached a milestone in June as workers completed major construction on raising the dam.
On June 3, 2026, workers placed the final load of roller-compacted concrete on the top of the dam, bringing Gross Dam to a height of 470 feet. Roller-compacted concrete is the type of concrete put in place to raise, thicken and lengthen the dam over the past three years.
The project is designed to nearly triple the capacity of Gross Reservoir, increase Denver Water’s reservoir storage capacity by 11%, and provide balance, resiliency and flexibility to the utility’s water collection system.
Additional work to complete the dam will take place over the next year, including adding one more foot of conventional, protective concrete to the top of the dam, which will bring it to its final height of 471 feet above the valley floor below.
At this point, dam is taller and also has a new shape.
“We have fundamentally changed how this dam works. The old Gross Dam was a gravity dam that held back the water by its sheer weight. We’ve now transformed this into an arch dam which holds the water back by its weight and also transfers the loads laterally like a Roman arch. This is the first time that we know that this dam transformation has ever been done in the world.”
Gross Dam on June 2, 2026, on the final day of roller-compacted concrete placement work. Photo credit: Denver Water.
In the video above, you can see new images of the dam and hear from Jeff Martin, Denver Water’s program manager for the project.
“We’re excited and proud of this accomplishment,” Martin said.
“Hundreds of people helped us reach this milestone, which will provide a secure water future to Denver and the surrounding communities.”
Roller-compacted concrete will be placed on top of the existing dam to raise it to a new height of 471 feet. A total of 118 new steps will make up the new dam. Image credit: Denver Water.
The different sides each presented closing arguments, but it was the reflections of Division 3 Water Court Judge Michael Gonzales that had the courtroom thinking as he brought to a close the water trial dealing with the Subdistrict 1 Fourth Amended Plan of Water Management.
At times it was a bruising trial Gonzales noted Thursday in his closing remarks, as he encouraged all the parties to move on and to not let the four-week trial wear on them and their own personal relationships.
“We all know that there’s no way this court can fashion an order or an opinion that’s going to satisfy everybody. It’s just not going to happen,” the judge said. “I mean, it can’t because we know that we have mutually exclusive and competing interests. We know that this petition when it was created recognized that, but we still said ‘cooperation’ and all those nice things. And in reality, I think we all knew at some point that was going to come to a head. And I think we’re there, but that doesn’t mean we still don’t move forward.”
San Luis Valley Groundwater
This was the big water trial because it dealt with a plan to recover the unconfined aquifer of the Upper Rio Grande Basin, Gonzales noted. He pointed to testimony of Mosca-area farmer Lyle Nissen as one he enjoyed the most.
“I just loved his testimony. Someone who’s made some recognition, someone who’s made some changes, someone who didn’t come in here and complain and just said, ‘This is how it is. I recognize it and I move forward.’ And that was great to hear,” Gonzales said.
He also referenced a term he learned during the course of the trial, “deep percolation,” and used it to provide further insight into his thinking.
“I sat in my back yard and I watched the rain come down,” he said of the week’s weather. “I watched puddles form and I thought about my second favorite term from this trial, ‘deep percolation’ and I said, ‘Aha.’ And then I came back 10 minutes later and that puddle was completely gone. I said, ‘Wow.’
“I also sat there and I thought about the testimony I think was from this current state engineer when he said that we need rainstorms of biblical proportion to get us where we need to be, and that hit home. And no matter how wonderful that rain was, there needs to be things that happen.”
The state Division of Water Resources and the Rio Grande Water Conservation District are asking Gonzales to reject the protestors’ arguments and approve the plan. Without it, they argued, the unconfined aquifer won’t recover and broad groundwater well curtailment in the subdistrict becomes inevitable.
The cornerstone of the new plan is the “one-for-one” feature, which limits groundwater pumping to the amount of natural surface water that flows into the subdistrict over a five-year running average. The intent is to put more water into the unconfined aquifer system than is taken out and one-for-one pumping guarantees that, according to the state and subdistrict.
Gonzales noted “the monstrosity of an equation” within the Fourth Amended Plan when he was quizzing Rio Grande Water Conservation District attorney Pete Ampe during his closing remarks.
The one-for-one pumping feature, the equation to determine success, and a new “depletion fee” that sets the value of water in the subdistrict at $500 per acre-foot were all argued over, discussed and debated throughout the month-long trial.
Attorney Mirko Kruse, representing his family’s farming interest, and attorney Andy Jones, representing L Cross Ranch, want Gonzales to refer the plan back to the subdistrict for adjustments they’re requesting but are otherwise good with the plan.
Two other protesting groups, Northeast Water Users Association and Sustainable Water Augmentation Group, want the plan tossed entirely on grounds it isn’t legal; they asked Gonzales to order the subdistrict to only make changes to the existing third plan of water management.
Gonzales told all the attorneys to address Rule 8.7 of the state groundwater rules governing the Upper Rio Grande Basin. That rule determines how “proportional responsibility for maintaining a sustainable water supply is divided among all the well users within the Response Area.”
It gets to one of the key arguments made by SWAG and its belief that groundwater irrigators like their clients are being illegally targeted and asked to share a disproportionate share of the burden in the unconfined aquifer recovery efforts.
Gonzales provided a timeline that leads to this Thanksgiving for when all the case documents and filings will be completed and he can begin his deliberations.
“I guess if there’s one message that we all need to take to heart is that we need to change the things we’ve been doing,” Gonzales said in completing his comments. “We can’t continue down the path we’ve been because if we think that’s the only way we can go, we’re dooming our children, our children’s children. And I don’t want to be a part of that time.”
As of July 12, Blue Mesa Reservoir near Gunnison sat only 32% full at 266,000 acre feet of storage water — about 35,000 acre feet less than the historic minimum for that date, down 35%…Severe drought conditions at the reservoir have resulted in critically low storage levels, a limitation on water allocation to the Uncompahgre Valley and its agricultural water users, limited flows for releasing endangered fish species, decreased recreational opportunities on the water that go hand-in-hand with a downturn in the regional recreational economy, and uncertainty over power generation and water usage in the near future. Colorado River District spokeswoman Lindsay DeFrates called it a “crisis”, as the reservoir and the Wayne N. Aspinall Unit — which stores water and generates hydroelectric power through the reservoir as well as the Morrow Point and Crystal Reservoir dams — is one of the upper units that feeds the crucial Lake Powell downstream.
“Everyone’s looking downstream at Lake Powell while we have this happening in our backyard right now,” DeFrates said…
Black Canyon July 2020. Photo credit: Cari Bischoff
When he was the Division 4 assistant engineer for the Colorado Division of Water Resources (DWR), Jason Ullmann would have never entertained the notion that the Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park’s portion of the river could ever dry up. Now, as the DWR director and Colorado state engineer, he said it’s unlikely to happen this year or next — but it’s “not an impossibility.”
“The actual inflow from April to July this year was the lowest on record. Barring a change in the climate conditions that produce this monsoon everybody’s waiting for, it doesn’t seem like we’re going to have a significant increase in inflow. We’re going to have one of the lowest inflow seasons — if not the lowest — on record at Blue Mesa,” Ullmann said. “Blue Mesa started the year approximately 20 feet below the normal level it would start the year on. The water levels are very low and will continue to drop.”
Colorado River District Senior Water Resources Engineer Caleb Foy compared 2026 to some of the region’s driest years — 1977, 2002, 2012 and 2018 — and said 2026 “takes the gold medal in terms of poor hydrological conditions”, impacting water storage at Blue Mesa Reservoir which, in turn, has multiple impacts downstream…
Foy noted that the reservoir’s storage could drop below the power pool level, which is the minimum amount of water needed to produce hydropower from the dam. According to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s June 2026 24-month study, this drop could happen as soon as February 2027. According to other forecasts, this drop could happen as soon as the end of this summer if the region sees no monsoon conditions and current operations aren’t modified to preserve storage at the reservoir…A reduction in downstream flow would negatively affect downstream diversions, Colorado River flow, the Black Canyon of the Gunnison, and endangered fish species in both the Gunnison and Colorado rivers. The BOR has worked with Fish and Wildlife to temporarily reduce flow targets while trying to minimize negative impacts to endangered fish species. Ullmann said the minimal target flow for the Endangered Fish Recovery Rights is, in a typical year, no lower than 750 cubic feet per second. This year, the target is at 750 cfs — and last week, the flow was as low as 700 cfs. This has been alarming enough to spark conversations between the state and the BOR.
This field in the Uncompahgre Valley Water Users Association district has been fallowed this season (2026) due to a lack of water. The state of Colorado announced Wednesday that it will set up a conservation program using federal dollars, which means more fields on the Western Slope could soon look like this. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
In the culmination of a process that has been years in the making, Colorado officials Wednesday announced the creation of a state-run water conservation program.
In what officials are calling a “near-term contribution program,” the Upper Basin states (Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming) will pay water users to voluntarily cut back in 2027 and 2028, using $100 million in promised funding from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. Colorado will now join Utah and Wyoming in setting up a conservation program within their respective states.
The noteworthy, long-expected announcement came at the regular July meeting of the Colorado Water Conservation Board, where board members considered the criteria for the program. A draft list says the program must, among other criteria, avoid negative community impacts; encourage contributions from across the state and water-use sectors; incentivize environmental benefits; encourage tribal participation; and build local drought resiliency. The board is scheduled to finalize the program criteria at its September meeting.
These types of conservation programs have traditionally targeted agricultural water users, often seen as the low-hanging fruit for water savings because they use the majority of Colorado River water. But officials are hoping this program will have participation across all water-use sectors, including municipal and industrial.
“I love that it is called a contribution program because that kind of imagines broader participation and engagement,” said board member Taylor Hawes. “So I think that is good. I think the more flexibility we can have, the better in a program like this.”
But details were scant on exactly how much water Colorado will contribute to the program and how the saved water would be used. And although some experts have begun calling for permanent reductions in water use, it remains — for now — a temporary, short-term program.
“We cannot guarantee a certain amount of water will be conserved in a given year because we don’t know how much water our water users are going to get,” said Amy Ostdiek, interstate section chief at the CWCB. “We have been clear that we just can’t do that.”
In a May letter to federal officials, the Upper Colorado River Commission said it has a goal of saving 100,000 acre-feet by the end of September 2028, which marks the end of water year 2028, but only if sufficient federal funding is available and hydrologic conditions allow. Colorado’s share of the Upper Basin’s allocation is 51.75%, meaning Colorado could be on the hook for 51,750 acre-feet over the next two years.
But Ostdiek said they are not at this time discussing a specific target that Colorado or the Upper Basin would have to contribute in exchange for the $100 million from the Bureau of Reclamation.
“We have felt confident that we can generate up to 100,000 acre-feet by 2028,” Ostdiek said in a Q&A session with the media after her presentation to the CWCB. “But really, what we’re going to be focused on is getting robust participation.”
It’s also unclear exactly how the saved water will be used. Officials said it’s not meant for use by the Lower Basin (California, Arizona and Nevada); it will be for the benefit of the Upper Basin. The water will need to have a home in Upper Basin storage buckets — Lake Powell, Navajo, Blue Mesa or Flaming Gorge reservoirs — but how it will fit into broader reservoir operations is unknown. [ed. emphasis mine]
“I think that is going to be the subject of ongoing discussion, exactly how this water is used and characterized,” Ostdiek said. “I think what we know is that it needs to be credited to or subject to the discretion of the Upper Division states in some way.”
Missouri Heights resident Cassie Cerise pets her dog Dinah on her ranch outside of Carbondale in summer 2023. Cerise enrolled the field behind her in the Upper Colorado River Commission’s System Conservation Program, getting paid to not irrigate it. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Conservation concept is not new
These types of programs that pay water users to cut back are not new to Colorado, and officials said they are incorporating the lessons learned from previous demand-management studies beginning in 2019, stakeholder input and pilot programs. The state participated in the 2023 and 2024 System Conservation Pilot Program, as well as an earlier version that ran from 2015 to 2018.
But conservation programs remain controversial. The Grand Valley Water Users Association, one of the largest irrigation districts on the mainstem of the Colorado River, did not allow its members to participate in SCPP for fear of negative impacts to other water users in the district.
All of the projects enrolled in SCPP involved agricultural water users on the Western Slope, a potentially risky situation, according to the Colorado River Water Conservation District. The Glenwood Springs-based agency, which represents 15 counties across the Western Slope, had tried to influence the creation of criteria for participation in SCPP to avoid negative impacts to rural agricultural communities.
Ultimately, only the Upper Colorado River Commission determined who got to participate in SCPP. Now, it seems state officials are taking to heart the River District’s recommendations. River District General Counsel Peter Fleming thanked Ostdiek for including some of the criteria that the district had set forth in its principles about how to create a conservation program.
Fleming encouraged the board members to adopt variable pricing to account for the difference in the value of relatively cheap water on the Western Slope versus more-expensive water on the Front Range. Pueblo Water had wanted to participate in SCPP, but the $509 per acre-foot offered in 2024 to Colorado participants was too far below market value.
“You can see the variable economic values of the water assigned there and the need to have variable pricing in order to encourage widespread participation,” Fleming said.
The River District’s position is that the entire burden of a conservation program shouldn’t be borne by the Western Slope, but must also be shouldered by Front Range water providers, who collectively deplete the Colorado River basin by about 500,000 acre-feet a year.
He added that a program should also have a strong element of local control.
“The River District obviously would like to stay involved in this process,” he said.
The creation of a conservation program for Colorado comes at a critical time for the basin, which remains locked in the grip of a historic drought, with combined storage in Lake Powell and Lake Mead at an all-time low since the reservoirs began filling. Although the Upper Basin has argued that it has never used its entire allocation granted by the 1922 Colorado River Compact (and therefore shouldn’t have to cut back), in the face of dwindling flows and calls for conservation from its downstream neighbors, the four states can no longer avoid reducing their water demand.
The Colorado River basin is also in the midst of a management crisis, with the seven states that share the river still unable to find agreement on a new framework after more than two years of failed negotiations. The current guidelines for how shortages are shared and how reservoirs are operated expire this year, and the feds are poised to step in with their own management plan, expected later this month.
The Upper Basin would need separate parallel agreements with Reclamation alongside the federal management plan to account for and get credit for water saved through the contribution program.
In her presentation, Ostdiek gave a preview of Reclamation’s expected plan, which could allow for a pool in Lake Powell to store up to 3 million acre-feet conserved by Upper Basin states. But board chair Barbara Vasquez worried about overestimating the amount of water that could be contributed given the recent historically dry conditions. Farmers and ranchers across Colorado are now experiencing the fallout from the worst snowpack on record in the form of shortages and fallowed fields.
“So prior programs, we spent a lot of money for very little water conserved. I worry that next year may be even worse than this year, and it’s not willingness, but ability,” Vasquez said. Given the water that’s available, she said, “that might disappoint expectations on the part of the negotiators at the table for the Colorado River.”
Aspen Journalism is a nonprofit, investigative news organization covering water, environment, social justice and more. Visit aspenjournalism.org.
Colorado River “Beginnings”. Photo: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism
On July 13th, the Colorado River District, in partnership with the Colorado Water Trust and the Yampa River Fund, began releasing water from Elkhead Reservoir to mitigate the impacts of extreme drought and critically low streamflows in the Yampa River Valley. Beginning with a release of 10 cubic feet per second, the releases are part of the Yampa River Reservoir Release Program, a 2,000-acre-foot pool first established in 2021 with funding from the Colorado River District’s Community Funding Partnership. The program is designed to reduce drought-related pressure on agricultural producers while supporting river health and aquatic habitat.
“While we’re experiencing exceptionally difficult drought conditions, the story of 2026 is neighbors and water users working together. No single reservoir, organization or water user can solve this alone,” said Hunter Causey, Chief Engineer for the Colorado River District. “By coordinating releases, operations and water use across the basin, we can stretch a limited supply further and provide meaningful benefits for agricultural producers, local communities and the river.”
Below-average snowfall and persistent summer drought have reduced streamflows and increased water temperatures throughout the Yampa River Basin. Releases through the Yampa River Reservoir Release Program are intended to support agricultural water users, help delay or prevent a call on the river during periods of critically low flow, and benefit designated critical habitat for four endangered fish species. Releases are expected to increase in the coming weeks and continue through July.
“The Colorado Water Trust is an environmental nonprofit, and our work is keeping water in rivers,” said Blake Mamich, Programs Director for the Colorado Water Trust. “In a drought this deep, that same mission means showing up for agriculture. Coordinating closely with the River District and the Division of Water Resources, we can time these releases so a single pool of water helps irrigators extend a tough season and keeps water in Yampa for habitat and fish.”
“This is a difficult year for producers throughout the Yampa Valley, and we wanted to be part of a practical solution that helps the broader community,” said Yampa Basin rancher Matt Boeddeker of Lily Park Land & Cattle. “Water users across Colorado are making hard choices and working together to stretch limited supplies, and like them, we hope to help our neighbors complete critical irrigation and reduce the immediate impacts of drought.”
The Yampa River is primarily supplied by snowmelt from the Flat Tops and Gore Range and flows through agricultural areas of northwest Colorado before joining the Green River in Dinosaur National Monument. During dry years, coordinated releases from Stagecoach and Elkhead reservoirs supplement streamflows for agricultural water users, river habitat and endangered fish. The Colorado River District and its partners will continue to monitor streamflow, water temperature, irrigation demand, and habitat needs, and will adjust releases as conditions warrant.
Click the link to read the article on The Denver Post website (Elise Schmelzer). Here’s an excerpt:
July 15, 2026
Even in the driest of years — like this one — powerful Western Slope water rights on the mainstem of the Colorado River draw water downstream, making boating on the state’s major water artery possible.
“For mainstem floating, we should still have pretty darn good flows for the rest of the season for as long as people want to be boating,” said Sam Calahan, a water resources specialist for the Colorado River District. The taxpayer-funded agency is based in Glenwood Springs and works to protect Western Slope water…
On Wednesday, Browns Canyon — a popular section of the Arkansas River near Buena Vista — was flowing at the lowest level in 55 years of data and at 16% of its median flow for that date. Clear Creek near Idaho Springs was flowing at 61 cubic feet per second on Wednesday, also a record low for the date in 72 years of data. The median flow for the date is 347 cfs, or more than five times as much water…But flows on much of the Colorado River were high enough for rafts and kayaks this week. Flows on a popular section near Kremmling were near normal, as were water levels farther downstream in Glenwood Canyon. Two major factors keep water flowing down the Colorado River during drought: large senior water rights owned by farmers in Mesa County’s Grand Valley and the water rights connected to the Shoshone Power Plant, a hydroelectric facility in Glenwood Canyon owned by Xcel Energy. Irrigators and power plant operators can call water to their facilities from upstream reservoirs, like Green Mountain Reservoir, which is on the Blue River — a tributary of the Colorado River — north of Silverthorne. This year, the irrigators began calling down water on July 1, boosting flows in the Colorado River.
Colorado Division 3 Water Court Judge Michael Gonzales said from the bench Friday that he wants to hear from former State Engineer Kevin Rein and without his testimony it will be “very hard for this court” and its decision on whether to allow the Fourth Amended Plan of Water Management in Subdistrict 1 to go into effect.
And that’s how Week 3 of the most important water trial in the past 25 years affecting the Upper Rio Grande Basin ended in Alamosa water court – the judge telling the state Division of Water Resources as it defends the plan that he would like to hear from the state engineer who approved the plan.
“Without hearing from Mr. Rein, it’s a concern,” Gonzales said.
Earlier during Friday’s afternoon session, he cautioned attorneys on their tone and their questioning of witnesses in a week when emotions inside the courtroom ran high.
“Let’s everybody cool their jets,” the judge said before he added an extra 10 minutes to the afternoon courtroom break.
The week opened with State Engineer Jason Ullman telling Gonzales that without the Fourth Amended Plan in action, Subdistrict 1 faces widespread curtailment since it will not meet the “sustainable” level of the unconfined aquifer by 2031 when the current plan of water management expires.
In 2018 Rein first alerted the Rio Grande Water Conservation District that broad curtailment could be on the table given the lack of progress in restoring the unconfined aquifer. It was then the subdistrict began working on a fourth amendment to its water management plan, which was ultimately adopted by the Subdistrict 1 board and then the Rio Grande Water Conservation District before Rein gave his sign off.
Ullman, who succeeded Rein as state engineer, told the court as he wrapped up his testimony that in his view the Fourth Amended Plan of Water Management, which features a one-for-one pumping mechanism, is the “most reasonable I can think of that would be likely to cause the aquifer to increase in level.”
The one-for-one features means the subdistrict would offset its groundwater withdrawals by returning an acre-foot of water for every acre-foot pumped during the irrigation season. The new plan also contains an overpumping fee of $500 per acre-foot which groundwater irrigators would pay if they cannot offset their groundwater withdrawals with their own surface water or surface water credits.
“Like I said, I understand that that decision has consequences, but there’s pretty significant consequences to doing something. And at some point as the policy decision makers, we have to make a decision to do something to meet these goals the General Assembly has set out. And I feel like that’s what we’ve done here. The consequences of doing nothing are much more drastic and draconian than the consequences of this plan,” Ullman told the court.
It was Rein’s review and sign off on the Fourth Amended Plan that has come under scrutiny by opponents to the plan. Rein retired at the end of 2023 after approving the plan and conducted this exit interview with Alamosa Citizen. During the conversation for an episode of The Valley Pod, he was reluctant to dive into the details of the plan because it was headed to water court and Judge Gonzales for a legal review.
“Without saying too much about that and the groundwater management plan for the subdistrict, from my perspective as a state engineer, there’s one critical aspect of that for both cases and that is the sustainability of the unconfined aquifer. As we know, that’s a difficult component of groundwater management in the Valley because we have a statutorily required sustainability objective. And that has found its way into the rules and into the groundwater management plan for the subdistrict,” he said at the time.
He added that under the existing plan of water management for Subdistrict 1, “it’s going to be very difficult to meet that sustainability objective … And I know that the subdistrict has worked hard toward an alternative in this current plan that I approved and is before the court, and the way that plays out is going to be so important to the irrigators in the Valley.”
Ken Knox, a former employee of state Division of Water Resources who at one point served as acting state engineer for approximately 18 months, criticized Rein during his testimony Friday for not conducting a thorough review and that the plan in sections was “devoid of necessary information” to approve the plan by the state engineer.
Rein’s review was a “dramatic step backwards for professionalism of agency standards,” Knox told the court. He was the final expert witness for the Northeast Water Users Association and Sustainable Water Augmentation Group, who are asking Gonzales to throw the plan out on legal grounds.
Rein’s review was a “dramatic step backwards for professionalism of agency standards,” Knox told the court. He was the final expert witness for the Northeast Water Users Association and Sustainable Water Augmentation Group, who are asking Gonzales to throw the plan out on legal grounds.
The farmers opposing the plan are trying to thread a few legal arguments to persuade Judge Gonzales to reject the plan. Their contention is the Northeast Water Users Association and Sustainable Water Augmentation Group are being asked to bear a disproportionate share of the burden in the aquifer recovery efforts because they are groundwater irrigators. They contend Rein didn’t conduct a full legal review of the sustainability and proportionality rules contained in state statutes governing recovery of the unconfined aquifer and the $500 fee makes the plan beyond the economic means of all the irrigators who hold water rights in the subdistrict.
“My land would have no value,” groundwater farmer Asier Artaechevarria testified, acknowledging that his operations rely 100 percent on groundwater withdrawals.
Ernie Myers, another farmer opposing the plan and who served on the Subdistrict 1 board for a several years, said it was after 2002, when the Upper Rio Grande Basin first experienced historic low flows from a lack of snow runoff, that he first began to feel targeted as a groundwater irrigator and had the feeling that surface water farmers were trying to put him out of business.
“I was pumping their water. I had no right to pump their water. I had a few farmers telling me, ‘I’m third, fourth generation. You’re a newcomer. You came in ’73 with your father. You have no right to do what you’re doing,’” Myers testified.
“And were there actually people saying that they intended to put you out of business?” a SWAG attorney asked.
“Yes, yes,” testified Myers.
Myers was the first to testify on behalf of SWAG and the Northeast Water Users Association. Knox was their final witness, and it was after his testimony that Gonzales made his interest in Rein testifying known.
“Common sense means a great deal to me,” the judge said.
Common sense tells the judge he should hear from the person who approved the plan he’s being asked to give legal approval to.
The trial resumes Monday with the L Cross Ranch, another legal opponent to the plan, making its arguments before Gonzales.
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
This week, rain returned to Pagosa Country, bringing some relief from the dry heat that dominated June and early July and heralding the start of the summer monsoon season. Weather modeling by the National Integrated Drought Information Center (NIDIS) suggests that the summer monsoon season is likely to bring average or above average precipitation to the region — a bounty compared to the approximately 25 to 50 percent of average precipitation Archuleta County received in last month. The National Weather Service Climate Prediction Center forecasts that drought conditions in the area will improve by Sept. 30, although it suggests that current severe and extreme drought levels calculated by the U.S. Drought Monitor will persist through July.
The Pagosa Area Water & Sanitation District is currently in drought stage two, which includes a number of restrictions on outdoor irrigation, as well as additional fees for high water use. In stage two, irrigation is allowed only between 9 p.m. and 9 a.m. every other weekday, with even-numbered addresses able to irrigate on even-numbered days and odd-numbered addresses on odd-numbered days. Weekend irrigation is prohibited. However, drip irrigation and hand watering edible or ornamental gardens is allowed at all times. Residential water use above 4,000 gallons per month is subject to a two times rate multiplier. PAWSD District Manager Andrew Connor explained that, while the rains associated with the monsoons might eventually impact the district’s drought restrictions, changes would require a large amount of rain and would not be immediate. In the summer, the drought stage is primarily driven by the water level in Hatcher Reservoir, flows in the San Juan River and the date…
PAWSD District Engineer Justin Ramsey explained that the district’s drought management plan focuses on irrigation since it composes a large portion of the district’s water use in the summer and because losing green lawn grass or other plants has a smaller impact on people’s lives than restrictions on showering, dish washing or other indoor water uses…The drought stages in the district’s drought management plan align with this goal, imposing progressively tightening restrictions on when irrigation can occur while placing no restrictions on indoor water use except increasing fees for high water consumption. However, for all but the most severe drought stage, these restrictions only cover irrigation done with sprinklers and other automated devices, with the use of drip irrigation devices and hand watering allowed at all times…Manual and drip irrigation encourage people to be more conscious about how they use water by involving them more deeply in the process and requiring more hands-on time, he added. Another way to increase the water available for gardens and landscaping without paying more fees is to reduce water waste in your home, Connor and Ramsey highlighted.
Looking down at the Colorado River, Lees Ferry, and the Paria River. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
Click the link to read the article on the KJZZ website (Alex Hager). Here’s an excerpt:
July 16, 2026
Sara Porterfield, Colorado River program director with the conservation nonprofit Trout Unlimited, stood on a narrow, rocky river beach, about as close to Glen Canyon Dam as a boat can go.
“This is not a zero sum game,” she said. “Investing in watershed health is not an either-or. We need the system to be healthy from an ecological perspective in order for the rest of it to function.”
The river, Porterfield said, cannot deliver big volumes of clean water if it does not, at least partially, function like a normal, healthy river. For example, if the river’s upper reaches are dried out, they’ll be susceptible to wildfires and wetland degradation, which make it harder for them to hold on to water and release it slowly into the streams where humans have been able to reliably divert and collect it for generations.
“It’s not just plumbing, but it’s also not just water in a river,” Porterfield said as the dam’s hydroelectric generators emitted a whining hum in the background. “We’re not separate from the natural world, we’re part of it. When we recognize that, and we take help to take care of it, we get a lot further than when we’re just thinking about a plumbing system.”
Glen Canyon downstream from Glen Canyon Dam. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Porterfield, who has a Ph.D. in Colorado River history, said calling the river a “plumbing system” is a useful way to think about one of its jobs, but not the whole picture. Environmental advocates say the river can be protected while still flowing through the dams and canals that keep the West wet for humans. Those protections can even be part of the wonky and rigid legal policies that dictate where water goes. John Berggren, a water policy manager at the conservation nonprofit Western Resource Advocates, had some recommendations for the next set of river-sharing rules. An important one, he said, is to get the river out of “crisis mode.”
[…]
“You can be much more proactive and thoughtful and careful and intentional about how you manage the river and include river health,” he said.
Another way to help protect the river’s ecosystems, creatures and flows, Berggren said, is by carefully timing the release of water from reservoirs. For example, policymakers can write flexible rules about where and when water is stored, so water that is flowing downstream to cities and farms can also help make life better for native fish. The water can be used to help the environment without being taken away from humans downstream.
“They’re going to move the water anyway,” he said. “Let’s do it in a way that actually benefits ecological conditions.”
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
Rumors of data centers have local government agencies in the San Luis Valley preparing for the inevitable – an application for a data center.
Costilla County and the town of South Fork are the latest local governments to place moratoriums on artificial intelligence data centers. Though no applications or projects are being proposed, local governments want to give themselves time to create land use codes to address data centers.
A packed room and a packed Zoom at the Costilla County Planning Commission meeting Wednesday morning saw tensions high as the public continues to express opposition to data centers. The commission approved a year-long moratorium. The moratorium will now go to county commissioners for approval.
The town of South Fork’s planning and zoning board is poised to do the same thing during a public hearing Wednesday night’s planning and zoning commission meeting as the town does not have specific zoning regulations that address data centers. The board will use the public hearing for feedback as members begin their work over the next year to devise specific codes.
At Wednesday morning’s Costilla County meeting, planning commissioner Joseph Quintana dispelled rumors and reassured the public that a data center application has not been submitted to the county and that “nobody’s approved anything.”
He said that when the planning commission was first formed the commission came up with a mission plan with a set of goals that were aimed at protecting the environment and the way of life.
“A data center is the antithesis, the complete opposite of what we would want in this community,” he said.
He went on to say, “Our job here is to follow that mission that was established 30 years ago with public comment. So I just want to make sure everybody understands, nobody’s approved a data center that I’m aware of. Nobody’s even applied for a data center here. There’s nobody that’s asked to build one or tried to get a permit or anything like that.”
In June, the Costilla County Commissioners asked the planning commission to address data centers “and get ahead before a problem develops,” Quintana said.
Commissioner Frank Vigil said they wanted the year to create a “thoughtful” ordinance that “reflects the feelings of the general public.”
“Our code doesn’t even have the two words ‘data center’ in it anywhere at all,” said county attorney Carle Turnetzer-Decker. “We were just concerned, I think, the board of county commissioners and the commission here, that if someone did approach us we have absolutely no way to handle it, restrict it, regulate it, do any of that.”
South Fork made a public statement on Tuesday that said, “To dispel rumors that are circulating within the community. The Town instituted a moratorium on Data Centers within the Town of South Fork last month which will last one year. The Town has not had any companies approach the town about data centers. We are simply trying to get ahead of any that may approach the Town. Obviously, there are concerns with them and rest assured your Board of Trustees share your concerns. Please come share your thoughts so we know how best to represent the community in making policy on this.”
Saguache County was the first local government in the Valley to place a moratorium on data centers while it figures out how its land use codes would address any data center application.
Earlier in June, the Rio Grande Basin Roundtable heard from Lindsay Rogers of Western Resources Advocates, who noted how rural markets are becoming targets for data center applications because of the assumption of “less red tape.”
Western Resources Advocates, Rogers said, has a particular interest working in the San Luis Valley as part of a grant process for local policy decision-making around large water users.
“One concern that we have which we’ve seen playing out in other states in our region, is that developers may target rural communities where they feel there may be less red tape to developing these data centers. Our communities may not have the time or resources needed to ensure the proposal fits within their own goals and their own resource availability. So we think it’s really important to think about these policy options proactively before developers come to town instead of responding to them once they’ve arrived.”
Solar panels San Luis Valley. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Richard Hubler, planning director for Alamosa County, said at the roundtable, “There’s a very real possibility, as we move forward, that because of our fiber networks here and our broadband capacity, our cheap land and what may end up being a glut of solar production that we could be a target in the Valley for somebody who says, ‘Hey, there’s more power than the Valley could use there.
“I could take a circle next to that 600 megawatt project and use the other 400 megawatts they may have.’ And we don’t know how to handle that now as a county or as a Valley. I think that this is timely because we really do want to get ahead of it before we have to deal with an application.”
In May, SLV Rural Electric Cooperative CEO Eric Eriksen said the Valley has underutilized energy capacity and that “rural data centers” are the “most relevant for us.” Rural data centers are described as smaller, more efficient facilities that are often housed within buildings no larger than small commercial buildings and operate anywhere from 50 kilowatts up to 50 megawatts.
These centers commonly use air-cooling or closed-loop refrigeration instead of consuming water.
In May, SLV Rural Electric Cooperative CEO Eric Eriksen said the Valley has underutilized energy capacity and that “rural data centers” are the “most relevant for us.” Rural data centers are described as smaller, more efficient facilities that are often housed within buildings no larger than small commercial buildings and operate anywhere from 50 kilowatts up to 50 megawatts.
These centers commonly use air-cooling or closed-loop refrigeration instead of consuming water.
In SLVREC’s position, the agriculture’s energy demand is declining and that company sees “the underutilized capacity” as an opportunity “to serve five, 10, 20, 50 megawatts or more of rural data centers.”
According to SLVREC, there are seven long-haul fiber routes into and out of the Valley, “with terabytes of unused capacity that is ideal for data centers.”
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
Black Canyon National Park July 2020. Photo credit: Claire Codling/The Department of Interior
From email from Reclamation (Andrew Limbach):
July 14, 2026
Aspinall Unit Operations Update – Release scheduled change to 1,390 cfs on Wednesday, July 15th.
On Wednesday, July 15th, the adjusted scheduled releases from Crystal Dam will decrease to 1,390 cfs from 1,465 cfs.
Gunnison River flows in the Black Canyon/Gunnison Gorge will decrease to 360 cfs.
On Thursday, July 16th, the adjusted scheduled releases from Crystal Dam will decrease to 1,315 cfs from 1,390 cfs.
Gunnison River flows in the Black Canyon/Gunnison Gorge will decrease to 290 cfs.
Reclamation will continue to monitor flows in the Gunnison River, and on Friday, July 17th, the scheduled releases from Crystal Dam may decrease to 1,265 cfs from 1,315 cfs.
Gunnison River flows in the Black Canyon/Gunnison Gorge would decrease to 250 cfs. An additional notification will be sent out confirming any change after Wednesday.
In response to the extreme drought conditions, the BOR has collaborated with US Fish and Wildlife and the National Park Service to reduce the target flows to 500 cfs at Whitewater and 200 cfs through the Black Canyon of the Gunnison until further notice. These releases are made for the authorized purposes of the Aspinall Unit, and to attempt to maintain a target base flow through the endangered fish critical habitat reach of the Gunnison while preserving critical storage in Blue Mesa Reservoir.
Contact Andrew Limbach (alimbach@usbr.gov or 970-248-0644) for more information regarding Aspinall operations or the Operation Group meeting.
Attorney: ‘In order to evaluate the current state of the aquifer in context, you would need to know how much the aquifer holds, wouldn’t you?’
Engineer: ‘I don’t believe so’
How much water is in the storage area of the unconfined aquifer? That was a question SWAG attorney Brad Grasmick posed to state Division 3 Water Engineer Craig Cotten and left the Alamosa water court hanging on at the conclusion of Wednesday’s day in water court.
In his first full day of cross examining Cotten, Grasmick covered a variety of territory from surface water credits to the one-to-one pumping feature of the new plan to Cotten’s responsibility to administer the plan. At times he got so deep into the proverbial weeds in grilling Cotten that Gonzales spoke of his own frustration in trying to follow along.
“You’re losing me on focus,” Gonzales told Grasmick as he called for a lunch break.
The question Grasmick posed at the end of his nearly six hours of cross examination offered a unique exchange. Grasmick started by saying he hasn’t seen a figure on how much water the unconfined storage area can hold. It’s been well-established in the testimony of Cotten and HRS hydrologist Matt Seitz that the unconfined aquifer functions as an underground reservoir and was built up initially through early subirrigation practices and then canal diversions.
Storage readings of the unconfined aquifer that go back to 1976 show it responsive to strong spring runoff seasons but now transitioning through the process of aridification to the San Luis Valley floor as it adapts to 25 years of drought and the lack of consistent snow melt.
“Nor have I seen how much water is presently in storage in the unconfined aquifer. Do you agree with that?” Grasmick asked.
Cotten: “Well, we have the Davis Engineering service change in storage, so we know the change in storage from 1976. The total amount of water in storage at the present time, I’m not aware of that number.”
Grasmick: “OK. In order to evaluate the current state of the aquifer in context, you would need to know how much the aquifer holds, wouldn’t you?”
Cotten: “I don’t believe so.”
Grasmick: “Well, and you would also need to know how much is in the aquifer in order to evaluate this decline in context, correct?”
Cotten: “No, I don’t believe so.”
Grasmick: “Well, as an example, if there was a one million acre-foot decline in storage, that’s very different if the reservoir holds one and a half million acre-feet than if it holds say four million acre-feet, isn’t it?”
Cotten: “There again, I don’t believe so if you’re shooting for an actual storage amount, change in storage amount as your goal.”
In the Fourth Amended Plan of Water Management under consideration, Subdistrict 1 is charged with recovering the unconfined aquifer to a “sustainable” level of negative-200,000 to negative-400,000 acre-feet of water storage.
Grasmick continued his questioning: “So you disagree that contextual analysis of data is necessary to ensure that it’s not misinterpreted?”
Cotten: “I don’t agree that we need to know the total storage or the actual storage right now in developing this plan.”
The exchange continued for about another three minutes before Grasmick began to shift to another subject and Gonzales intervened.
“I apologize. I think it’s been a long day, so I think it’s probably a good place to stop,” the judge said.
The water trial on the Subdistrict 1 Fourth Amended Plan of Water Management resumes Thursday [July 9. 2026].
Click the link to read the article on the Nature Sustainability website (Jennifer Skerker, Christian Klassert, Baptiste Francois, Aniket Verma, Casey Brown & Sarah Fletcher). Here’s the abstract:
July 8, 2026
Climate change intensifies water stress globally, necessitating expensive infrastructure interventions to maintain reliable supply. To fund infrastructure, utilities often raise rates, increasing water bills for low-income households. The resulting affordability impacts depend on utility costs and interactions between rate design, financing, climate and household demands. Here we develop a city-scale modelling framework to estimate climate change impacts on water affordability, integrating climate, utility adaptation decisions and demand. In Santa Cruz, California, we find that climate change alone could double water bills by mid-century, leaving an additional 7–16% of Santa Cruz households with unaffordable water. Our results suggest that climate change may lead to greater water affordability challenges than previously estimated in hotspots where supply is vulnerable to climate change. This highlights the need for policy intervention and financing to ensure climate adaptation does not compromise affordability. The magnitude of climate-related affordability challenges depends on local context, requiring city-scale assessments.
The Roaring Fork River in Aspen on July 8. Pitkin County Commissioners gave initial approval to buying more shares of Twin Lakes water to boost low flows on the Fork. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Against the recommendation of an advisory board, Pitkin County commissioners on Wednesday gave preliminary approval to buy more water to boost flows in the often-depleted Roaring Fork River.
Commissioners approved on first reading a resolution and ordinance to spend $442,500 to buy 4.68 shares from the Twin Lakes Reservoir & Canal Co., which is about 3.5 acre-feet of water, according to a staff memo. The deal is in addition to the $6.5 million Pitkin County already agreed to spend earlier this year for about 71 acre-feet from Twin Lakes and another ditch company.
Twin Lakes collection system
The water is currently taken across the Continental Divide to the Arkansas River basin to be used by entities on the Front Range. The deal would allow the water to be released out of Grizzly Reservoir to Lincoln Creek and could help boost the Roaring Fork through Aspen and upstream, which suffers from low flows in dry years.
“I think it’s really critical that we purchase water rights when we can, and this is an opportunity that we can, and we should,” District 1 Commissioner Patti Clapper said.
Pitkin County has long had a goal of increasing the amount of water in the Roaring Fork, a river that has about 40% of its headwaters diverted to the eastern side of the state through the Independence Pass Transmountain Diversion System to be used by Colorado Springs, Pueblo and Aurora. These diversions can often contribute to the depletion of the Roaring Fork through Aspen, and purchasing Twin Lakes water represents a rare opportunity to return water to the Western Slope.
Commissioner Greg Poschman said he supports acquiring the water shares.
“I think it’s great that we are doing this,” he said. “I know it’s expensive; there are some raised eyebrows about that, but I think this is something we have to do.”
Poschman added that he was concerned that the Healthy Rivers board members recommended against buying more water and said he would like to fully understand their reasons. County staff said they were trying to schedule a joint meeting with the Board of County Commissioners and the Healthy Rivers board in August.
Members of the county’s Healthy Rivers board, which advises the BOCC, are concerned that the water will have a small impact on river health but a big impact on the program’s budget. The board held a special meeting June 25 to consider acquiring the shares and approved a motion saying the water yield would potentially be only 1 additional cubic feet per second for two days.
“Additionally, the deleterious effects of the purchase price on the long-term fund balance of the Healthy Rivers Fund will reduce the Healthy Rivers Program’s ability to support programs to address other ballot measure mandates, including water quality, ecological health, recreation opportunities, wildlife and riparian habitat, and promoting water conservation,” the motion reads.
The motion goes on to say that in the future, the county should implement a framework for evaluating the true value of water shares to the Roaring Fork.
At Wednesday’s meeting, County Budget Director Connie Baker told the BOCC that the Healthy Rivers board will have to trim or reallocate about $500,000 from next year’s budget to account for the combined impact of this year’s two water purchases.
Healthy Rivers board member Ned Andrews said he is against the purchase, citing the impact that it will have on the program’s budget.
“None of the analysis or details that would justify such a purchase or a strategy going forward has been done,” Andrews told Aspen Journalism. “I think before you commit essentially a quarter of your budget for the next 15 years, you’d want to have an analysis that shows you what could be accomplished. My gut feeling is that it wouldn’t really accomplish much.”
Andrews also opposed the earlier, larger water share purchase, although the rest of the Healthy Rivers board was supportive.
At their regular June meeting, Healthy Rivers board members went through the budget line by line and considered where they could trim, although those cuts have not yet been finalized.
Spending big bucks in an effort to rescue rivers is not new for Pitkin County, which has spent at least $3.5 million on the Roaring Fork River Park in Basalt, including a water court battle to secure the water right for recreation, several redesigns of problematic waves, and improvements to the riverbank and boat launch.
Grizzly Reservoir, a forebay that collects water to send through the Twin Lakes Tunnel to the Front Range, sits in the middle of the Lincoln Creek watershed and connects water users on both sides of the Continental Divide. Pitkin County commissioners gave initial approval to a deal that would allow more water to be released from Grizzly for the benefit of the Roaring Fork. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Bond for original purchase approved
The BOCC at Wednesday’s meeting also approved issuing a bond for the original purchase of Twin Lakes shares. That deal cost the county $6.5 million, although only 45 of those acre-feet represent Western Slope water that is currently diverted to the Front Range. The county plans to sell or trade the other 26 acre-feet, which is owned by the Fountain Mutual Ditch Co. in El Paso County and decreed for use on the east side of the divide.
The 45 acre-feet of water can be released down the Roaring Fork during the irrigation season when flows are low, and it must be used by a downstream water user on the Colorado River before the town of DeBeque. Instream flow for the benefit of the environment is not a decreed use of the water.
This year, according to Colorado Water Resources Division 5 Engineer Tyler Benton, at least some of Pitkin County’s Twin Lakes water was released as part of the Colorado River Water Conservation District’s emergency substitute water supply plan, which the district enacted in response to this year’s historic drought. Benton said he expects the River District to provide a full accounting of how much Pitkin County water has been released Friday.
Grizzly Reservoir is currently drained for dam maintenance, which may have affected how much water could be released under the River District’s plan.
At a time when drought impacts are being acutely felt across the state and climate change continues to rob rivers of their flows, for some, the unique opportunity to put water back into a depleted stream is worth the cost.
“This is expensive water, but it’s the only water you can get up at the headwaters of the Roaring Fork,” said Pitkin County Deputy Attorney Anne Marie McPhee. “So that scarcity makes it more valuable.”
The issue is scheduled for a public hearing and second reading July 22.
A man fills his water tank at a well a few miles from the Hopi village of Mishongnovi, on the tribe’s northern Arizona reservation.
Click the link to read the article on the Pro-Publica website (Mark Olalde and Alex Hager):
June 29, 2026
ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week. This story was co-published with KJZZ News-Phoenix.
Reporting Highlights
Certainty on the River: Tribes have negotiated a settlement to resolve the largest outstanding claim to the Colorado River, while providing billions of dollars for water infrastructure.
Upper Hand: Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming — the Upper Basin states — are resisting the deal because it allows the Navajo and Hopi to lease water outside their reservations.
Unfulfilled Promise: It has been 118 years since the Supreme Court ruled that the federal government owes tribes water, but many are still fighting to resolve their rights.
These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story.
A deal to bring Colorado River water to Native American communities in northern Arizona, where a third of homes lack running water, is being blocked by neighboring states, caught up in a broader battle over how to divide the dwindling river.
The largest tribal water rights settlement in U.S. history — the product of decades of negotiations to secure water for the Navajo Nation, Hopi Tribe and San Juan Southern Paiute Tribe — was on the verge of being realized before Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming stepped in to oppose it being codified by Congress.
Those four states, known collectively as the Upper Basin, are at a stalemate with the Lower Basin states of Arizona, California and Nevada over new rules governing how they share the Colorado River, a key water source for nearly 40 million people. Congress and the White House, under both Democratic and Republican leadership, have declined to approve the settlement until all parties reach an agreement.
For 83-year-old Marilyn Tewa, the stalemate means her family will continue to go without running water. Tewa serves on the Hopi Tribal Council, where her duties include working on the water rights agreement, but her village of Mishongnovi, on the tribe’s northern Arizona reservation, lacks indoor plumbing.
Every other day, she loads 5-gallon buckets into her pickup and drives 5 miles to a windmill originally built for livestock that draws untreated water from underground.
“That’s what keeps us alive,” Tewa said, tapping the spigot on a May afternoon.
Back home, Tewa bustled about her kitchen while her daughter kneaded dough for dinner. There’s no faucet in the kitchen, which is decorated with a framed American flag and a painting of a katsina, a figure with spiritual significance in Hopi culture. Instead, the family stores water in large plastic containers. Because of the lack of indoor plumbing, the Tewa family and its neighbors use portable toilets that stand among the houses.
If passed into law, the Northeastern Arizona Indian Water Rights Settlement Actwould resolve the largest outstanding claim on the Colorado River while providing about $5 billion in federal funding to build infrastructure to transport the water across the reservations. The legislation would also go beyond water rights, creating a reservation for the San Juan Southern Paiute. The tribe’s effort to secure a permanent homeland was added to the settlement due to their difficulty getting it through Congress independently.
“That’s my prayer,” Tewa said, “that we get this settlement through for all three tribes.”
Marilyn Tewamain sits in her chair inside her home Saturday afternoon. Photo credit: Sharon Chischilly
The tribes need pipes, pumps and treatment plants to use the water secured through the settlement. To defray the cost beyond the federal government’s expected contribution, the Navajo and Hopi plan to lease some of their water rights, almost certainly to growing towns around Phoenix. The towns would pay to use the tribes’ water for a set number of years.
While the Lower Basin states support the settlement, the Upper Basin states have latched onto this provision in particular as they stand in the way of the settlement.
The Colorado River’s upper and lower basins don’t precisely follow state borders. Some states have portions in both sections, and the line dividing the two basins cuts across northeastern Arizona and directly through the Navajo reservation. If water moves across that line, they argue, the rules governing the river give them veto power over the settlement. (It’s an open legal question whether approval from all seven states is necessary.)
The Upper Basin states fear that, in the future, water they currently control might be leased on an open market. They view any monetary transaction that moves water downstream as setting a precedent that could allow the highest bidder — possibly thirsty cities with money such as Los Angeles, Phoenix and Las Vegas — to buy vast quantities of their water.
In an effort to assuage that concern and close the deal, the Navajo and Hopi made major concessions over the volume of water and length of time they could lease. The tribes also offered to leave some of their water in one of the river’s drought-depleted reservoirs to help keep water levels high enough that it could continue flowing downstream. But the Upper Basin has not wavered in its opposition.
Tewa’s family travels 5 miles each way to haul water in 5-gallon plastic buckets from a well initially drilled for livestock. Photo credit: Sharon Chischilly
ProPublica and KJZZ News-Phoenix reached out to the governor, senators and lead negotiator from every Upper Basin state for comment. Utah’s and Wyoming’s lead negotiators deferred to the letter they co-signed. A spokesperson for New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham said in a statement that the tribes addressed most of the state’s concerns but that questions remain as to whether the water that the tribes would lease to Arizona cities could be counted as part of what the Upper Basin states are legally required to send to the Lower Basin. “New Mexico remains committed to finding a workable solution,” the spokesperson said.
A spokesperson for Colorado Gov. Jared Polis also said the state is “committed to finding a path forward” and pointed to the letter that Becky Mitchell, the state’s lead river negotiator, submitted to Congress. Mitchell wrote that the settlement’s leasing provisions violate laws governing the river and that the state was concerned about what the sale of water across the basin would mean for “the security and certainty” of Colorado’s share of the river.
Heather Tanana is an assistant professor at the University of Denver’s law school, where she focuses on federal Indian law. She is also a citizen of the Navajo Nation and said the Upper Basin is “trying to hide behind” how the river has traditionally been managed rather than find a way to give the tribes access to a resource that is rightfully theirs and one that they need to survive.
“It’s a fundamental human rights issue,” she said.
While negotiations drag on, the three tribes continue waiting for water they say will help them to build more housing, grow sustainable economies, better protect public health and preserve cultural practices.
The Hopi believe their ancestors return as clouds to bring the rain that nourishes their corn, but drought is wracking the region. An overreliance on groundwater has dried up springs that have been used for ceremonies and agriculture for centuries. When the settlement brings more water to the reservation, Tewa said, aquifers will have a chance to recharge, restoring the springs.
“I’m speaking on behalf of my children, my grandchildren and their children that haven’t come yet,” she said. “I hope, in the future, that they will have water.”
The village of Mishongnovi, which Tewa represents on the Hopi Tribal Council, sits atop a rocky mesa. Photo credit: Sharon Chischilly
Tewa washes her hands with untreated water she hauled from a well. Photo credit: Sharon Chischilly
Fighting for Water Since Elvis Was on TV
That the settlement even reached Congress seemed like a small miracle to those involved.
If the tribes were to use every drop to which they are entitled, the system of sharing the river that supports more than $1 trillion in annual economic output would collapse.
“Everybody’s getting free Navajo, Hopi and San Juan Southern Paiute water right now. The seven basin states are all benefiting in the absence of a settlement,” said Ethel Branch, a former Navajo attorney general who was involved in the negotiations, adding that the water had been “stolen for over a century.”
In 1908, the Supreme Court ruled that, if the federal government confined tribes to reservations, then it owed them enough water to sustain an agrarian economy on that land. But securing that promised water, referred to as “Winters rights,”has proven arduous.
Tribes were excluded from the compacts that apportioned the river. The Navajo in particular were barred from joining a seminal case quantifying other users’ rights, and members of the tribe themselves rejected a proposed settlement in 2012 when they viewed the deal as unfair. So the tribe went back to the Supreme Court, asking that the justices force the federal government to quickly settle the claims. The Navajo once again lost, with the court’s majority deciding that their treaty with the U.S. didn’t require the government to take any “affirmative steps” to deliver the water it owed the tribe.
“At each turn, they have received the same answer: ‘Try again,’” Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote of the Navajo in his dissent. “When this routine first began in earnest, Elvis was still making his rounds on The Ed Sullivan Show.”
Arizona politicians and tribal leaders have since concluded that they needed to combine all three tribes’ claims to finally settle their rights.
That was no simple feat. The Navajo and Hopi have long had a contentious relationship. Underlining their thorny partnership, leaders of various tribes around the region have accused Navajo, the largest tribal nation in the U.S., of flexing their political strength to the detriment of other tribes.
About a third of homes on the Navajo Nation lack the pipes and other infrastructure necessary to deliver running water, including near Page, Arizona, close to a large reservoir on the Colorado River. Photo credit: Sharon Chischilly
But Navajo and Hopi struck a deal, and Arizona moved off its bargaining position. Now in lockstep, the settlement’s supporters turned to Congress, only to hit more roadblocks: The House of Representatives balked at the spiraling price tag to fund the deals; presidential administrations were unwilling to expend political capital on such settlements; and more than a dozen settlements are in the works, clogging the system. (No settlement has been enacted since 2022.)
“Partisanship has gone to a new low in this country, and Indian water settlements have gotten swept up into that,” said Pam Williams, who spent about two decades as director of the Secretary’s Indian Water Rights Office in the Department of the Interior before she retired last year.
In November 2024, as President Donald Trump prepared for his return to the White House, the tribes believed they had an opening to get their settlement through Congress while President Joe Biden was still in office.
Navajo leadership had supported the Democratic presidential ticket and feared the incoming administration would be vindictive toward them.
Every basin state’s lead negotiator, tribes’ staff and a federal representative descended upon the Arizona Department of Water Resources’ offices in Phoenix for what several attendees described as a “Hail Mary.” At the meeting, the Navajo offered a major compromise: limiting how much water they could lease and for how long they could lease it.
But the Upper Basin states showed up with a list of grievances, multiple attendees told ProPublica and KJZZ News-Phoenix, and weren’t interested in negotiating over the Navajo leasing concessions.
“It’s difficult for the Upper Basin to wrap their heads around this settlement,” said Tom Buschatzke, Arizona’s Colorado River lead.
Navajo President Buu Nygren says the fact that his tribe’s reservation straddles the upper and lower divisions of the Colorado River Basin should not be held against the tribe as it negotiates for water. Photo credit: Sharon Chischilly
In March 2026, leaders from the tribes traveled to Washington for a Senate hearing where they made an impassioned plea for Congress to pass a version of the bill that now included the concessions they had offered in the Hail Mary meeting. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, the Alaska Republican who ran the hearing, expressed support for the settlement but worried its $5 billion price tag was too high, a concern echoed by an Interior Department official who testified. (The tribes and department are currently negotiating to shrink that cost.)
All four Upper Basin states submitted comments opposing the settlement. Their main concerns were about the ability to lease across the basin and whether the water for the settlement would be counted against the upper or lower division of the river.
Leasing would last only as long as it’s needed to pay for infrastructure to distribute their newly acquired water, said Navajo President Buu Nygren. It would not set a precedent, he said, because no other tribe straddles both basins.
“We shouldn’t be punished for being in two basins,” Nygren said, “because other tribal nations, other settlements have been able to lease water.”
A construction crew installs pipes at the new LeChee Water Treatment Plant near Lake Powell, along the Arizona-Utah border. Photo credit: Sharon Chischilly
The former Navajo Generating Station’s intakes, which drew water from Lake Powell to cool the coal power plant, sit unused, awaiting funding from the stalled settlement. Photo credit: Sharon Chischilly
“How Precious Water Is to Us”
During the decades that the tribes fought to access their water, they helped quench the thirst of growing cities in the Colorado River Basin.
A water intake plant on Navajo land drew from Lake Powell to cool the nearby Navajo Generating Station. The coal plant powered pumps for the Central Arizona Project, the 336-mile series of canals that sends Colorado River water to Phoenix and Tucson.
The power station shut down in 2019, and the intake plant was handed over to the Navajo for the iiná bá-paa tuwaqat’si pipeline, which means “for life” in Diné and “water is life” in Hopi, to deliver water to the three tribes. But for now, the massive pumps remain mothballed, the building sitting musty and dark like a tomb, and the pipeline remains an engineering schematic, waiting for funding from the stalled settlement.
The irony is not lost on tribal leaders, they told ProPublica and KJZZ News-Phoenix: After helping deliver water beyond their lands, they are now blocked from using that same water and infrastructure to sustain their communities. The insult is compounded, they said, by the fact that water use is drastically lower on reservations.
“It’s not about green-grass lawns or golf courses or swimming pools,” said Crystalyne Curley, speaker of the Navajo Nation Council. “It’s just basically turning on the faucet and getting water to boil eggs for your children or turning on a faucet to wipe and clean the table or washing your hands after butchering a sheep.”
San Juan Southern Paiute Vice President Johnny Lehi Jr. is fighting for the settlement because it would finally ratify a treaty with the Navajo that would create a reservation for his tribe. Photo credit: Sharon Chischilly
For the San Juan Southern Paiute, the settlement is also about having a permanent homeland. They have no reservation but struck a deal with Navajo in 2000 to transfer some of its land. Since the tribes already reached an agreement, it’s an uncontroversial proposition. But, without political clout to get Congress to take it up, the land transfer was pulled into the water settlement.
“During the COVID era, it took a lot of the tribal elders, and there are only a handful that saw the treaty signed and are really wanting to see this before their time is up,” said San Juan Southern Paiute Vice President Johnny Lehi Jr., whose father signed the 2000 agreement. Finally securing a reservation, he said, means the ability to build housing and develop an economy for a tribe that currently rents its government building.
Nearby, on the Hopi reservation, Councilmember Marilyn Fredericks grabbed a pair of hiking poles, donned a hat with a roadrunner pin on it and set out from her village on a recent spring afternoon. To stay fit as she grows older, she walks up and down the hand-carved steps of a terraced garden that used to produce food for her community.
Seven natural springs once fed the garden, but only two still flow. Ponds that stored their excess sit dry, stains on the rock now just a memory of the water. It’s been six years since there was enough to plant.
The settlement would fund a pipeline that would be “our umbilical cord,” Fredericks said. Future generations of Hopi have a right to clean, reliable water, she said. “This is evidence of how precious water is to us.”
Native America in the Colorado River Basin. Credit: USBR
The Colorado State Engineer’s office opened its defense this week of Subdistrict 1’s approved Fourth Amended Plan of Water Management with a history lesson on the origins of the San Luis Valley and the development of irrigated agriculture over the past 174 years when the first water right was issued to the San Luis People’s Ditch.
Featured in the state engineer’s defense was testimony by Matt Seitz of HRS Water Consultants, who took the state Division 3 Water Court through ancient history and into the era of early irrigation and storage practices of farmers in the Valley.
“Yeah, so we covered 25 million years pretty quickly, see how long the rest of it takes here,” he said from the witness stand Tuesday. Seitz stayed on the witness stand for the better part of the week, working to bolster to the state engineer’s defense of the Fourth Amended Plan of Water Management and then under cross-examination from a Sustainable Water Augmentation Group attorney, who worked to show faults in Seitz’ testimony and undermine the case of the state engineer in the eyes of Division 3 Water Court judge Michael Gonzales.
It is Gonzales who will decide this case. He will take in all the testimony around the various takes on the Fourth Amended Plan of Water Management to rule on whether the plan will be implemented.
Plan of Water Management Equation
The subdistrict itself is charged with recovering the shallow unconfined aquifer of the Upper Rio Grande Basin and its Fourth Amended Plan of Water Management is the latest attempt to do so. The complexity of the basin’s hydrology has been an early theme.
“I think there’s been a lot of great research over the years,” Seitz said in speaking to the state’s modeling of groundwater in the Upper Rio Grande Basin and other studies on the Valley’s hydrology. “So I think we’ve made some good progress, but there’s a lot of complexity. Again, I’ve been saying that word a lot, but there certainly is and I think we’re on our way, but it’s never going to be fully understood.”
Week 1 of the trial ended with Craig Cotten taking the witness stand. He is witness number three for the state engineer’s defense of the plan, following Cleave Simpson, the general manager of the Rio Grande Water Conservation District who was the lead witness, and then Seitz, the hydrologist consultant who endured four days on the witness stand.
“Wonderful way to start the Fourth of July weekend,” quipped Gonzales as Cotten, the state water division engineer for the San Luis Valley area, stepped into the witness box at 1:50 p.m. on Thursday. He spent the initial two hours testifying to his background and his credentials before Gonzales broke for the Fourth of July weekend.
Cotten is the enforcer of the state’s groundwater management rules in the San Luis Valley. His testimony will reignite the trial when it resumes on Monday for week two of the water trial.
Map of the Rio Grande watershed. Graphic credit: WikiMedia
Maybell Irrigation District’s headgate on the Yampa River, September 2022. Photo credit: Heather Sackett/Aspen Journalism
Click the link to read the article on The Denver Post website (Noelle Phillips). Here’s an excerpt:
June 18, 2026
For the 18 ranchers who rely on the Maybell Irrigation District’s canal to funnel water to their fields, the 127-year-old headgate that diverted flow from the Yampa River meant a two-hour round trip through a rocky canyon whenever they needed water. The rusted structure was barely hanging on, and its operation was time-consuming for the busy ranchers, who had to lug special tools on all-terrain vehicles and on foot to open or close the mechanism. But it seemed impossible for the tiny district to find the $6.8 million needed to replace the headgate and the rocky diversion dam that pushed water into the canal. Then legalized sports betting came along, and, with it, millions of dollars for Colorado water projects. The tiny irrigation district, in Moffat County in the far northwest corner of the state, soon became the poster child for how gambling money is benefiting Colorado’s waterways. The district received a $750,000 grant from the Colorado Water Conservation Board, which doles out money from sports betting tax revenue, said Diana Lane, sustainable food and water program director for The Nature Conservancy in Colorado, which helped the district land the grant. That led to a matching grant from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s WaterSMART program. With those two grants in hand, other organizations jumped on board, and money poured in, she said. In 2024, the Maybell Irrigation District installed a new headgate that can be opened or closed via cellphone. If a rancher is cutting hay and doesn’t need to irrigate, he can close the gates to match the amount of water he actually needs at that moment, Lane said. And the diversion structure no longer uses boulders to control the water flow. Instead, it’s a modern structure that is the right height for water control. The project also benefited four fish species, including the threatened humpback chub, and it made river navigation easier for boaters, helping the region’s outdoor recreation economy.
“That $750,000 was really the ball that got it all rolling, that showed people, ‘Oh, this is going somewhere,’” Lane said of that initial state grant.
Since sports betting became legal in May 2020, the state has collected more than $154 million in taxes, and the Colorado Water Conservation Board has funneled $140 million to various projects that preserve and conserve Colorado’s precious water. Supporters say the gambling money is a godsend for ranchers, fishermen, paddlers and others who want to protect the state’s water and those who depend on it for their livelihoods. Critics, however, say legalized sports betting has come at a cost — fueling an addiction crisis that the state was unprepared for and is underfunding.
Click the link to read the article on the Pagosa Springs Sun website (Clayton Chaney). Here’s an excerpt:
July 1, 2026
The Archuleta County Board of Health (BoH) held a special meeting on June 15 to consider approval of Regulation 43, pertaining to on-site wastewater treatment system (OWTS), also known as septic systems…
According to the regulation attached to the meeting agenda, “The purpose of these Regulations is to establish the minimum standards for the location, design, construction, performance, installation, alteration, and use of OWTS with a design capacity equal to or less than 2,000 gallons per day within the Jurisdiction.”
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It also states that the regulations apply to all OWTS in the unincorporated areas of the county and over all municipal corporations within the territorial limits of Archuleta County.
Furthermore, it explains that an “OWTS permit must not be issued to any person when the subject property is located within a municipality or special district that provides public sewer service, except where such sewer service to the property is not feasible according to the determination of the municipality or special district, or the permit is otherwise authorized by the municipality or special district.”
The document explains that Archuleta County Water Quality Department “may enter upon a private property at reasonable times and upon reasonable notice for the purpose of determining whether or not an operating OWTS is functioning in compliance with the OWTS Act and applicable regulations adopted pursuant thereto and the terms and conditions of any permit issued and to inspect and conduct tests in evaluating any permit application.”
Map of the San Juan River, a tributary of the Colorado River, in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah, USA. Made using USGS National Map data. By Shannon1 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=47456307
Green Mountain Reservoir is owned by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and located in Summit County north of Silverthorne along the Blue River. Photo credit: Denver Water.
Historic water shortages are drying out the scenic mountains that lie at the heart of Colorado’s tourist economy, prompting the state to issue emergency orders earlier this month allowing water to be shifted to the towns and ranches most likely to run dry.
The Colorado River District, which represents 15 Western Slope counties, is running the emergency response effort and with financial support from the Colorado Water Conservation Board has anted up nearly $1 million to make sure even towns that can’t afford it, will have access to drinking water should it be needed.
To make the plan work, the river district opted not to lease portions of the water it normally holds in two high country reservoirs, Ruedi in the Roaring Fork Basin and Wolford Mountain, near Kremmling, on a first-come, first-served basis, as it normally does. Instead, the water is being doled out based on community need, with people and food production getting the water first, according to Andy Mueller, manager of the river district.
“We had a number of requests to lease that water out, but a lot of it would have gone to wealthy gentlemen rancher … but it wouldn’t have been for the common good,” he said.
Under Colorado law, water can only be diverted, stored and used for a designated purpose, such as city drinking water, farm irrigation, environmental streamflows, and industrial uses. Water rights are also tied to seasons, with some available only in the winter or summer.
But this spring, the river district, seeking more flexibility than the laws typically allow, went to Colorado State Engineer Jason Ullmann and asked for emergency authorization to use its water supplies differently. The state agreed, giving the district until the end of August to conduct emergency releases.
At the same time, large agricultural water users in the Grand Valley agreed to cut their water use in an effort to lessen strain on the Colorado River, and protect some of the small towns and ranchers who would have been cut off otherwise.
At issue is a special pool of water that lies within Green Mountain Reservoir, near Heeney, known as the historic users pool, or the HUP. The water is meant as a backup source that allows towns to pump wells and divert from streams even when their water rights are not in priority on the giant mainstem of the Colorado River.
But this year, because of the drought, Green Mountain’s HUP isn’t projected to fill, something that hasn’t occurred since the 1960s when the pool was created to protect mountain water users who had junior water rights, according to Ullmann. The emergency order means that even without the backup from Green Mountain, these communities and ranches will be unlikely to have their water supplies cut off.
The Eagle River Water and Sanitation District, which serves Vail and other small towns in Eagle County, has water in the HUP.
Working in the shadow of a nearly snowless winter, the Eagle River District moved early to enact watering restrictions, limiting outdoor use to just two days a week back in April, after March saw temperatures soar to 80 degrees and the patchy snow cover evaporate months earlier than normal.
“The writing was on the wall,” said Siri Roman, CEO of the Eagle River Water and Sanitation District. “This is a benefit of being in the headwaters and being a resort,” she said referring to the headwaters of the Colorado River. “Our whole community is so connected to snowpack and snow-water equivalencies and what that means. By February we knew there wasn’t enough snow to change the picture for us. We wanted to get to the decision-makers early and say the red lights are flashing. We need to prepare for a water shortage this summer.”
Eagle residents took conservation messages seriously
In Eagle, Tom Gosiorowski, the utilities manager, was standing in Brush Creek shooting videos for the town’s Facebook page, letting its 10,000 water customers know that the stream was the community’s only source of water and it wasn’t looking good. Eagle also relies on the HUP for some of its backup supplies.
“We are really wholly dependent on the streamflow and the water that is in the creek. It’s different from the big Front Range utilities” that have reservoirs, he said.
The district is limiting outdoor water use to two days a week and is sharply limiting the filling of hot tubs and swimming pools. Gosiorowski said he expects golf courses to be restricted as well as the summer wears on.
“We could get to a point where they can only irrigate tees and greens on the golf course,” he said. “We’ve never had to reduce use, but this is so extreme that I think there will be some.”
Gosiorowski said the town was still working on worst-case scenario planning for the end of summer, when streams are normally at their driest. “It’s hard to know exactly what’s going to happen. We’ve never experienced a drought to this degree in recorded history.”
Aspen has also enacted two-day-a-week watering and is prohibiting the filling of pools and hot tubs.
Grand Lake, another community that could be impacted by the shortages at Green Mountain, is not showing signs of strain yet, though officials there are concerned about lake levels.
Grand Lake, the deepest natural lake in Colorado, is linked to two other reservoirs, Shadow Mountain and Lake Granby. All three are part of Northern Water’s Colorado-Big Thompson Project. The C-BT delivers water from the Colorado River to 1 million customers and hundreds of farms on the northern Front Range.
Mike Cassio is a citizen activist who tracks Grand Lake’s health and works with a coalition of community groups and water agencies to help manage the system. Cassio said he’s worried about late summer water levels falling.
“We know Mother Nature controls everything,” Cassio said. If levels in Lake Granby and Shadow Mountain fall too low, water quality will suffer and that “will be the biggest issue.”
Kathy Chandler-Henry sits on the river district’s board and is a former Eagle County commissioner. She said the brown hillsides and dusty streambeds are unnerving.
“Before it was never a question,” she said. “There was always snowfall, there was always water. … Nothing like this year, when it was 80 degrees in March in Vail.”
Back in the 1980s, she said she participated in some regional planning efforts to help the Western Slope learn how to manage its growth. That there could be a winter without snow was unthinkable, if not downright funny.
“One planning consultant in the workshop asked folks what it would be like without snow,” she said. “And everyone just laughed.”
Despite this summer’s deep dry spell, water users say they are encouraged by recent light rains and cool weather. Just weeks ago, the HUP was projected to barely fill at all, but now the 66,000 acre-foot pool is rising again. It recently topped 33,000 acre-feet and is expected to move higher, providing some relief.
But Mueller, of the river district, said this summer is a dress rehearsal for what lies ahead as climate change and warmer temperatures continue to hamper mountain snows and spring stream levels.
“We are just beginning to grapple with the impacts of climate change. Science indicates that 30 years from now, this year may be on the wetter side.”
Last month, leaders from across Colorado’s Western Slope celebrated the release of $40 million in federal funding for the Shoshone Water Rights Preservation Project. At a time when Colorado is celebrating its 150th anniversary and our nation approaches its 250th birthday, this investment represents more than a funding milestone; it marks one of the most significant water preservation achievements our state has seen in generations. It also would not have happened without the determination of our congressional representative, Jeff Hurd, who made this project a priority and worked tirelessly to deliver results for the communities he serves. What Rep. Hurd understands is the same thing that has united more than 100 local, state, and federal elected officials and leaders in support of preserving these critical senior water rights: the future of the Western Slope is inseparable from the future of the Shoshone water rights. Protecting these rights protects the flows of the Colorado River, sustains our agricultural heritage, strengthens our recreation- and tourism-based economies, and helps preserve the rural communities that make this part of Colorado unique…
I believe that 150 years from now, our grandchildren’s grandchildren will look back on the Shoshone Water Rights project as a turning point. They will see a generation of leaders who understood what was at stake and chose to act. They will see communities that put aside differences, came together, and made a long-term investment in the future of the Colorado River. History will remember the Shoshone project as a major milestone in the stewardship of our most precious resources. From Western Slope ditch companies and water conservancy districts to local governments, state leaders, and members of Congress, countless individuals are still working together to turn this vision into reality. The lesson is an important one. On the Western Slope, progress happens when we pull in the same direction. It takes communities working in harness together to move mountains and sometimes to move water. And it takes elected leaders like Jeff Hurd who are willing to put their shoulders into that work. The Shoshone project demonstrates what is possible when rural Colorado speaks with one voice about protecting its water, its economy, and its future.
The main boat ramp at Wahweap Marina was unusable due to low water levels in Lake Powell in December 2021. Water levels are projected to soon fall even lower than this at the nation’s second-largest reservoir. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Western Slope lawmakers had harsh words for water managers at a state committee hearing last week, questioning whether Colorado has done enough to avoid a lawsuit with its downstream neighbors.
Colorado Sen. Dylan Roberts, a District 8 Democrat who represents several Western Slope counties, including Eagle, Grand, Garfield, Routt and Summit, asked Colorado’s lead negotiator, Becky Mitchell, whether the people of Colorado should have confidence that negotiations among the seven states that share the Colorado River have put the state in the best possible position. The states have been at an impasse for more than two years without a deal for future management as reservoirs continue to decline to record-low levels.
“My constituents just see fighting and intransigence,” Roberts said. “And it’s concerning to me, especially as a Western Slope lawmaker … that the strategy is just ‘Let’s hire more lawyers; we’re going to court no matter what.’ That doesn’t give me confidence, because I don’t think Colorado fares well when we go to court against Arizona and California and Nevada, throwing our fate to the nine justices on the U.S. Supreme Court.”
The remarks came at Thursday’s meeting of the state Water Resources and Agriculture Review Committee in Denver. Along with Mitchell, in the hot seat were state engineer Jason Ullmann and Amy Ostdiek, interstate section chief at the Colorado Water Conservation Board. The three are employees of the state Department of Natural Resources and have the backing of the Attorney General’s office in negotiations.
Roberts’ line of questioning seemed prompted by recent projections that show river flows dipping below a threshold that could trigger litigation. The Lower Basin states (Arizona, California and Nevada) believe that the Upper Basin states (Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming) are bound by the 1922 Colorado River Compact to deliver 82.5 million acre-feet of water over a 10-year rolling average. According to the Upper Colorado River Commission, the 10-year average will dip later this year to about 81.3 million acre-feet because of persistent drought.
Some experts believe that this amounts to a “tripwire” that could trigger a lawsuit from the Lower Basin states (Arizona, in particular, has been openly preparing for litigation) that could result in mandatory cuts in water use for the Upper Basin. Upper Basin water managers don’t subscribe to this interpretation, saying their states are only required not to deplete the river’s flows by more than 75 million acre-feet over 10 years.
Mitchell was reluctant to share details of Colorado’s legal strategy in a public forum, but she answered “absolutely” that her team’s work was putting Colorado in the best position. She said cutting back prematurely just to satisfy the Lower Basin’s interpretation of the century-old agreement would be bad for the state.
“If we initiate curtailment now, that is worse for Coloradans,” Mitchell said. “I think that is an important thing to remember.”
Wracked by drought, climate change and a management crisis, the situation on the river has never been more dire. The current management guidelines expire this year, and in the absence of a seven-state deal to share shortages and operate the nation’s two largest reservoirs, Lake Powell and Lake Mead, the feds are poised to step in. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation plans to release a more detailed, short-term plan to manage the river for the next two years by mid-to-late summer.
State Rep. Julie McCluskie, a District 13 Democrat, said communities in her district have been living with the incredible angst, anxiety and pain of no snow and low reservoirs.
“The frustration I hear in my community is that we have missed multiple deadlines; they are becoming a funny joke,” McCluskie said. “There is such a fear about the lengthy litigation process, the fear of an outcome that is far worse for Colorado than a compromise that we have some control over.”
Lake Powell is formed by Glen Canyon Dam. In a concept pitched by a conservation organization, a flexible pool of water could be moved between Upper Basin reservoirs to wherever it’s needed most. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Conservation conversation is the ‘bare minimum’
Lawmakers also had strong words for state officials regarding conservation, saying legislators must be involved in the creation of any program.
Colorado has dabbled with pilot conservation programs in the past, but traditional programs that pay farmers and ranchers to temporarily cut back on water use remain controversial. This is especially true on the Western Slope, which has long been the target for these types of programs, and where some worry that they could harm rural communities if not done carefully. After two years of exploring how the state could set up a temporary, voluntary and compensated conservation program, officials shelved the idea in favor of focusing on drought-resilience initiatives.
“Other states out of the seven have very clear and actionable roles for their general assemblies, their legislatures,” McCluskie said. “We have less so, and yet the stakes are so high. So I beg of you, decision-makers, that it is essential that we be a part of those next steps.”
Julie McCluskie. Photo credit: Colorado General Assembly
Ostdiek said that any program would need to start slow and make sure it incorporates input from people throughout the state.
“I think that we can continue to assess as we go what we might need from you all, and what a program like that might look like,” Ostdiek said. “I think what we can certainly commit to is continuing this dialogue and continuing the discussion about what we might need to make this a success.”
In 2023, Colorado lawmakers tried to force stakeholders to come up with recommendations on conservation programs by creating a statewide task force, which met 10 times over six months. But the group failed to find a consensus, with some saying it was “premature” to create a conservation program.
As part of a post-2026 framework, the Upper Basin states plan to create a “contribution” pool in Lake Powell, which could be used to help stabilize the system, keeping water levels above critical thresholds to protect hydropower at Glen Canyon Dam and acting as an insurance pool against forced cutbacks. In a May 22 letter to federal officials, the Upper Basin states said they have a goal of saving 100,000 acre-feet by the end of water year 2028, but only if sufficient federal funding is available and hydrologic conditions allow.
Three Upper Basin states have different methods for contributing to this pool: Utah has its own demand management program; Wyoming lawmakers passed a law this year allowing for a conservation program; and New Mexico plans to release water from Navajo Reservoir.
But precisely how — and how much — Colorado would contribute to this pool is unclear. The state’s share of the Upper Basin’s allocation is 51.75%, meaning Colorado could be on the hook for 51,750 acre-feet.
And ensuring that saved water actually gets into a pool in Lake Powell remains part of the problem. Currently, conserved water that stays in the river can just be picked up by a downstream user, with no net gain to Lake Powell. Colorado officials say they do not have the authority to “shepherd” water past other water users to the state line unless it is specifically for compact compliance. [ed. emphasis mine]
Last year, some Delta County ranchers asked lawmakers to take up the issue and pass a law that would address this issue, allowing water users to conserve and get credit for contributing water to a Lake Powell pool. But legislators did not take up a bill in the 2026 session.
Colorado officials told lawmakers they were continuing to explore what a program might look like and whether legislation would be needed.
Roberts said conversations with the legislature should be the bare minimum if Colorado is going to have a conservation program.
“If the department or any agency of the state were to pursue a conserved consumptive use program or demand management program that used state tax dollars to pay for it and did not go through the legislature in a formal process, I imagine that all of us on this panel and many of our colleagues would raise holy hell about the unilateral decision-making coming from Denver about programs impacting all parts of the state,” Roberts said. “So, please, let’s just cut that off at my recommendation. Let’s work together on this.”
Officials opened the hearing by highlighting the impacts of this year’s severe drought on Colorado’s farmers and ranchers, noting how even some of the most senior water users will experience shortages as streamflows dwindle. Orchards in the North Fork Valley and row crops in the Uncompahgre River Valley already have unprecedented shortages.
In response to Roberts’ concerns about the failure to find a compromise among the seven states, Mitchell posed a high-stakes rhetorical question: “I would ask, ‘What else do you think we can give?’”
The Colorado River Basin spans seven U.S. states and is divided into Upper and Lower Basins. Lake Powell, upstream from the Grand Canyon, and Lake Mead, near Las Vegas, are the two principal reservoirs in the Colorado River water-supply system. (Bureau of Reclamation)
While the Trump administration 2.0 has so far rexfrained from trying to shrink or eliminate national monuments, its non-executive-branch proxies just keep on trying.This week the 10th Circuit federal appeals court issued a decision keeping alive Utah’s lawsuit challenging Joe Biden’s 2021 re-establishment of Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears national monuments following Trump 1.0’s shrinkage of the same.
The state and Garfield and Kane counties filed one lawsuit in 2022, with the Blue Ribbon Coalition and other parties filing their own suit. In 2023, a federal court dismissed both lawsuits; that ruling was appealed.
This week’s decision confirmed the dismissal of the Blue Ribbon suit. But it also determined that presidential national monument designations under the Antiquities Act are subject to federal judicial review, and sent Utah’s case back to the district court.
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Photo credit: Jonathan P. Thompson/The Land Desk
The Bureau of Land Management is moving forward with three travel management plans in Utah that will determine which roads, trails, and areas of the respective field offices’ jurisdiction are open to motorized vehicles. Given that the stated aim is to bring the plans in line with Trump’s recent executive order rescinding restrictions on motorized vehicles on public lands, we can assume that the idea here is to expand motorized access to some remote areas. The plans include:
The Moab Field Office has released preliminary alternatives for the Dolores River Travel Management Plan on about 127,000 acres in Grand County, Utah, east of Moab and abutting the Colorado border. This would include roads along the Utah section of the Lower Dolores River, and on mesas and in canyons on either side of it. Maps of the alternatives can be found here. This one is not yet open to public comment.
The Kanab Field Office has released a draft environmental assessment for its Trail Canyon Travel Management Plan on nearly 330,000 acres in Kane County. It is open to public input.
And the Vernal Field Office has also released a draft review for the Dinosaur North Travel Management Plan. The public comment period is open.
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I typically stay away from electoral politics, especially the horse-race part of it and polls and such. But sometimes a particular contest or candidate can provide a lens on bigger trends or phenomena, and so are worth looking into.
The latest race that has caught my interest is the one to replace Sen. Cynthia Lummis, the Wyoming Republican who is retiring at the end of this term. Since it’s Wyoming in 2026, it’s safe to assume the winner will be a Republican (though this wasn’t always the case), meaning the primary is the contest that matters. The front-runner, I suppose, is Rep. Harriet Hageman, the Trump sycophant and MAGA extremist who unseated Liz Cheney back in 2022 after Cheney failed to show adequate fealty to Trump.
But it’s one of her challengers that I’m interested in: Sam Mead. Mead is a fifth-generation Wyoming rancher, comes from a long line of Republican Wyoming politicians, and is the nephew of former governor Matt Mead. Mead is young (36), charismatic, has strong conservative credentials on fiscal issues and gun-rights, and a background in engineering and business, having run a whiskey distillery in Kirby. But what really distinguishes him from his opponents is his willingness to speak out against some of Trump’s policies, and his priority on protecting public lands and keeping them in the public’s hands.
Mead, in other words, appears to be an old-school, pre-MAGA Western Republican. He reminds me a bit of Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon, back before extreme polarization pulled him more and more rightward and into MAGA land. Wyoming’s primary is on Aug. 18.
Meanwhile, Utah just held its primaries, with some surprising results. Utah State Senate President Stuart Adams, a Republican, was defeated by challenger Stephanie Hollist. Adams was a strong supporter of the controversial proposed Stratos Project data center complex on the north shore of the Great Salt Lake. Also, incumbent Rep. Celeste Maloy trounced challenger Phil Lyman in the GOP primary for the 3rd Congressional District, with about 70% of the vote.
While Maloy was endorsed by Trump, and has plenty of extreme views, Lyman is the more MAGA of the two. And Trump pardoned Lyman after his conviction for leading an OHV rally down Recapture Canyon in the southeastern part of the state. Political consultant Taylor Morgan told the Utah News Dispatch that Lyman’s resounding defeat showed that his “very angry, very conspiracy-based, populist, toxic form of Republicanism (is) frankly wearing very thin, especially here in Utah.” Let’s hope he’s right!
Pumpjack in the Aneth oil field. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
I wrote Tuesday about how the Trump administration is eviscerating Biden-era oil and gas rules aimed at reducing methane emissions and ensuring companies clean up their own messes rather than foisting them onto the taxpayers. Now the changes are open for public comment.
Here are a few of the changes Trump and co. are proposing:
Bring back pre-Biden reclamation bond rates, which amount to just over $2,000 per well, which is insane, since the cost to reclaim and plug a single well easily can exceed $100,000. These numbers incentivized petroleum companies to walk away, forsake the bond, and abandon the well, leaving the tab for the taxpayers.
Reduce the current $10 minimum per-acre bid for leasing public land to $2, restore noncompetitive leasing, and slash royalties and filing fees for oil and gas companies.
Implement a new fee for protesting leases. And they plan to cut the 90-day public input period to just 10 days. In other words, they’re trying to cut out the public from decisions regarding public lands.
Gut the waste prevention rule (they wanted to roll it back altogether, but chose to revise it instead because it wasn’t clear which rule would replace it) by removing limits on royalty-free flaring and killing requirements that companies develop leak detection and repair plans.
Trump’s changes to the waste prevention rule will turn back the regulatory clock to the days when oil and gas operations on federal and tribal land vented and flared an average of 44.2 billion cubic feet annually of methane, which is usually accompanied by nasty volatile organic compounds and other dangerous compounds. That’s as bad for the climate as burning around 9 million tons of coal. But it also amounts to lighting money — your money — on fire and throwing it away. That vented methane is basically the same stuff you pay for to run your furnace, or to generate much of the electricity running through the grid. And since operators don’t pay royalties on gas they throw away, that cost American taxpayers some $166 million in lost revenue over a decade.
The result of all of this (and more) will be to rob taxpayers and sacrifice public lands and the climate to subsidize the same energy corporations that are raking in obscene profits thanks to Trump’s disastrous war on Iran. The administration argues that their proposed changes will save petroleum corporations operating on federal lands $17 million annually in compliance costs.
That sounds like a lot of money, until you realize that high oil prices have driven corporation’s profits to absurd highs. During the first quarter of 2026 alone, ExxonMobil raked in $8.8 billion in underlying, adjusted profits. Somehow, I don’t think several million in compliance costs is going to deter them from drilling.
🐟 Colorado River Chronicles 💧
Many of the West’s streams have entered their summer low-flow phase, a period that falls between the end of snowmelt and the beginning of the monsoon, while irrigation diversions are in full-swing. One of the most dramatic cases of this is, perhaps, the Colorado River itself as it flows through Grand Junction. This morning, the river was running at just 366 cubic feet per second near Palisade, which as reader Dave Grossman pointed out is low enough to allow someone to walk across the sprawling river bed.
Some other notably low flows:
Animas River in Farmington, NM: 104 cfs.
Dolores River at Bedrock, CO: .76 cfs (effectively dry)
White River near Watson, UT: 76.4 cfs
Green River above Flaming Gorge: 551 cfs
Green River below Flaming Gorge: 1,590 cfs
San Juan River near Caracas, CO (above Navajo Reservoir): 85 cfs
Colorado River near Hite, UT: 4,300 cfs
This has reduced daily average inflows into Lake Powell to about 4,800 cfs and dropping. It would be much lower than that, except that flows are being bolstered by upstream reservoir releases. Either way, inflows are far less than Glen Canyon Dam releases, which are averaging about 8,500 cfs daily (approx. 6,500 cfs at night and 10,600 cfs during the day). This disparity, exacerbated by reservoir evaporation, is lowering Lake Powell’s surface level, which currently sits at about 3,526.75 feet. Without substantial upstream rain, it will likely drop to 3,520 feet by early August.
📖 Reading (and watching) Room 🧐
Matt Jenkins wrote an excellent overview for the Water Education Foundation of the potential “Grand Bargain” on the Colorado River, which would require both the Upper and Lower basins to give up some of their Colorado River Compact claims not only to keep the system from collapsing, but also to avoid litigation.
The piece lays out the fact that the Compact is not only outdated, but also internally conflicted, in that it apportions the Upper Basin 7.5 million acre-feet of water per year, while also obligating it to allow the same amount of water to flow to the Lower Basin annually. That’s just not possible these days, given that there’s far less than 15 MAF in the river.
Southeastern Utah is known mostly as a mining hotspot for uranium, copper, with lithium emerging more recently. But it also hosts a potash extraction industry, and at least one company is looking to expand the potash footprint. Sage Potash says it has secured permits from Utah and San Juan County to begin drilling at is Sage Plain Potash project.
While this is only exploratory drilling, it’s notable in that it’s not occurring in the Lisbon Valley or near existing potash sites near Moab. Rather it is on the Great Sage Plain southeast of Monticello, in the archaeologically rich zone north of Hovenweep National Monument.
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Prior to mining, snowmelt and rain seep into natural cracks and fractures, eventually emerging as a freshwater spring (usually). Graphic credit: Jonathan Thompson
Yet another reason to worry about spewing more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere via fossil fuel burning: It can exacerbate acid mine drainage, the phenomenon that leads to toxic heavy metal loading in streams and other waterways. That’s the conclusion of a peer-reviewed study published in Communications Earth & Environment this April.
Acid mine drainage occurs when a mine excavation exposes once-buried sulfide-bearing rocks such as iron pyrite (FeS2) to oxygen and water. The hydrogen, sulfide, and oxygen come together to form sulfuric acid (H2SO4). Thus, the water becomes acidic, or its pH drops. The acidity dissolves heavy metals and the water picks them up. As the pH level of the water drops below 4.8, acidophilic bacteria begin feeding off the metals, releasing more acid into the solution and causing metal loading to occur up to 1 million times faster than in water with higher pH. Metal loading is bad for fish and other aquatic life.
The study found that elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide levels enhance the acidophilic bacterial activity, which accelerates iron and sulfur oxidation, acid formation, and metal loading. Zinc and cadmium, both of which are harmful to aquatic life, are more sensitive than other metals to rising carbon dioxide levels. Zinc loading is especially problematic in the Upper Animas watershed in southwestern Colorado.
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Okay, I really don’t care that Anfield bought its first underground haul truck for its Velvet-Wood uranium mine in the Lisbon Valley of southeastern Utah. But I found this press release interesting for another tidbit: The haul truck was built by Young’s Machine Company, located in Monticello, Utah. I never knew Monticello had this sort of manufacturing industry. I gotta say, it’s kind of cool.
The Hoback River joins the Snake River following a landslide upstream on June 18, 2026. Robert Frodeman photo.
🚣🏽 Water Watch 🌊
Water Quality in the Greater Yellowstone
A Guest Post by Robert Frodeman
Four million people visit Teton County, Wyoming, each year. They come to hike, float, and ski, snap pictures under the elk antler arches, and to partake in the myths of the American West. As the sign at the top of Teton Pass says, “Welcome Stranger. Yonder is Jackson Hole, the Last of the Old West.” Visitors expect to find a pristine environment. They don’t expect water quality problems reminiscent of a developing nation.
Teton County has some of the best drinking water in the country. Or most of Teton County does: Hoback, in the southern part of the County, has a nitrate problem. Nitrate is a health risk — most acutely to infants under six months, in whom nitrate is converted to nitrite by gut bacteria, interfering with oxygen transport in the blood and causing methemoglobinemia (blue baby syndrome). Many of the water systems in Hoback are on their last legs: two weeks ago, I had no running water and then a boil order at my home.
Jackson is the town, Jackson Hole is the valley that runs north of town in front of the Tetons. (‘Hole’ was what mountain men called a valley.) If you drill 20,000 feet into the valley floor you will hit the same sandstone layer that sits on top of the Tetons. This implies that the Tetons have risen some 25,000 feet over the last 10 million years.
Of course, mountains come down as they go up: the Tetons have been shedding sediment across all that time, piling up thousands of feet of gravel on the valley floor. Still more gravel was brought by the glaciers that flowed down from the Yellowstone Plateau. The Snake River meanders in front of the Tetons, but much of the river passes unseen below the surface, forming what is known as the Snake River Aquifer.
In effect, Jackson and Jackson Hole sit on top of a huge bathtub filled with gravel and water. This provides an abundant source of high-quality water for the town. But the bathtub only extends so far. The southern rim of the tub comes up at Munger Mountain five miles south of town. This is where the Yellowstone glacier stopped, and where the Snake River Canyon begins, which runs for 30 miles to Alpine and the Mormon communities of Star Valley.
Hoback lies four miles south of Munger Mountain — beyond the reach of the aquifer. Local residents must drill for their water. Local wells reach 200 feet down to the Bear River Formation. The water isn’t ideal – it’s brackish and can have a distinct sulfur smell (as do some of the local hot springs). The groundwater is also contaminated from horse farms and pig farms and (mainly) septic tanks and leach fields. Septic tanks can leak, and there is not enough biotic activity at this elevation and latitude for leach fields to function well. The result is nitrate levels in our drinking water which sometimes exceed EPA daily maximums.
Hoback is distinctive not only because of its geology. The billionaires live elsewhere in the County. There are two trailer parks nearby. Historically, local politicians have directed their attention to the Town of Jackson, Wilson, and the ski resort of Teton Village. But this has changed in recent years. Carlin Gerard of the Teton Conservation District formed a Hoback Stakeholders Group in 2019 to highlight drinking water problems. Covid disrupted that effort, but then a local non-profit called Protect Our Water Jackson Hole brought its energy and resources to southern Teton County.
In 2023 Hoback residents formed a water and sewer district. The district has now raised $7 million from the County and the State to build a municipal drinking water system. Water will be drawn from the Snake River just above the confluence with the Hoback. Construction should begin this fall and be done in a year or two depending on the weather.
At first it will only serve 125 residents: the district was made small out of fear of opposition. Teton County is solid blue, but past attempts had failed because of Hoback’s history of Red State, don’t-tread-on-me politics. In any case, it turned out that the demographic transition had already occurred: when the election was held the vote was 36-0 in favor. And there are now plans to annex a new affordable housing development that Teton County hopes will help address the local housing shortage.
Of course, the new system will only isolate residents from the nitrate problem. The environment will remain polluted, and people outside the district will still be on wells. The district has begun to price out a wastewater system, which is liable to be quite expensive. But you’d hope for nothing less for the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem – and officials would hate to see an article in the New York Times about Teton County’s leaky septic systems.
Map of Greys River in Wyoming, United States. By Feydey – Nasa World Wind 1.3.5 public domain NLT Landsat 7 satellite photo, layered with PD vmap0 vector data. Image:Map_of_USA_highlighting_Wyoming.png was used for the smaller image., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1589723
Click the link to access the report (Jeff Lukas and Juli Vano). Here’s an excerpt:
As water utilities expand climate considerations across business functions and climate hazards—amid a rapidly growing landscape of climate model datasets—selecting data that are truly “fit for purpose” has become increasingly complex. To address this, the Water Utility Climate Alliance (WUCA) Climate Modeling Work Group sought to develop several case studies that would illuminate the factors behind the selection, processing, and application of climate model datasets in planning analyses.
The purpose of the case studies was not to identify general “best practices” or create formal guidance, which has been done elsewhere (here,1here,2 and here3). Rather, it was to capture the specific circumstances and priorities that drove each utility’s decisions—what climate data to use, in what ways, and for what analyses—providing practical, real-world examples for other utilities to learn from. The case studies were informed by interviews with key utility staff and consultants as well as supporting project documents.
Each of the four case studies follows a WUCA member utility through selecting and processing climate model data, establishing a data workflow, conducting project analyses, and applying the results to planning and decision-making. Three of the projects centered on future water supply and/or demand, and the fourth focused on infrastructure flood risk. Two projects were complete at the time of writing, and the other two were in their final phases. Each case study begins with a brief overview of the utility, followed by sections addressing:
Project context
Project methods, including data selection and processing
Results of the analyses
Use of results in decision support (intended and realized)
Lessons learned
Each case study also includes links to additional resources that describe the project, climate data, and workflow—such as utility reports and peer-reviewed studies—and a utility contact for further questions.
In all four projects, the workflows began with an ensemble of runs from 15 to 35 CMIP5 or CMIP6 climate models. From there, they followed quite different paths in processing those model runs to construct discrete climate and hydrology scenarios for the subsequent impact modeling (Table 1), illustrating that there is no one “right” approach to using climate models to effectively inform planning. Unsurprisingly, the results from all four projects showed the potential for greater climate-related stresses and risks to the utility in the decades ahead—more severe droughts, larger flood events, reduced water supply, and/or increased water demand.
Governor Clarence J. Morley signing Colorado River compact and South Platte River compact bills, Delph Carpenter standing center. Unidentified photographer. Date 1925. From the CSU Water Archives
Click the link to read the article on The Denver Post website (Elise Schmelzer). Here’s an excerpt:
June 29, 2026
The U.S. Supreme Court will weigh in on a legal battle over one of Colorado’s critical water sources as a neighboring state seeks to use more water from the South Platte River. The nation’s highest court on Monday announced it would hear the case, in which Nebraska officials claim Colorado water administrators are violating a century-old water compact by failing to send enough of the river’s water across the border. They also say Colorado officials are interfering in the neighboring state’s efforts to build a canal that would allow it to take more of the river’s water. Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser on Monday denied Nebraska officials’ allegations that the Centennial State was violating the 1923 South Platte River Compact.
“Colorado is complying with the South Platte River Compact and not interfering with Nebraska’s efforts to build the Perkins County Canal,” Weiser said in a statement. “Today’s court decision merely opens the door for Nebraska to bring its claims against Colorado. Nebraska’s burden to prove those claims is incredibly high and we will vigorously defend Colorado’s full entitlements under the compact.”
Perkins County Canal Project Area. Credit: Nebraska Department of Natural Resources
Nebraska officials last year surprised Colorado leaders by taking their allegations to the Supreme Court. The two states had been meeting for months to discuss the proposed canal project. The Supreme Court asked the Office of the Solicitor General to weigh in on whether it should take the case. In May, the federal office — tasked with representing federal interests at the Supreme Court — argued that the court should decide Nebraska’s claim that Colorado is not sending enough water over the state border, but deny consideration of Nebraska’s other issues…Controversy over compact-obligated water deliveries between two states is a “quintessential” Supreme Court question, the brief states. The solicitor general’s office suggested appointing a special master — a subject-matter expert outside of the nine justices — to handle the issue. The solicitor general’s brief argues that the Supreme Court should not hear Nebraska’s arguments that Colorado is obstructing its efforts to build the Perkins County Canal because, the office said, Nebraska has not identified any actions by Colorado officials that have substantially interfered in the project. Other potential canal-related problems identified by Nebraska are hypothetical, the solicitor general said, as the state has just begun the permitting process and, therefore, is not ready for Supreme Court consideration. It’s unclear which issues the Supreme Court will consider as it hears the case. The order Monday allows Nebraska to file its complaint against Colorado.
The South Platte River Basin is shaded in yellow. Source: Tom Cech, One World One Water Center, Metropolitan State University of Denver.
The most significant water trial the San Luis Valley has ever seen opens this Monday morning in Courtroom A of the Alamosa County Judicial Center. At stake is the Fourth Amended Plan of Water Management for Subdistrict 1 of the Rio Grande Water Conservation District, which calls for a dramatic shift designed to match the amount of groundwater pumping to the amount of natural surface coming into the subdistrict.
Producers in Subdistrict 1 are under pressure to recover the unconfined aquifer of the Upper Rio Grande Basin, but so far the subdistrict has made little to no progress in creating a sustainable aquifer. The trial is scheduled for five weeks before Colorado Water Court Division 3 Judge Michael Gonzales.
The San Luis Valley’s highly-anticipated district water court case — the water trial of this century if you will — was originally scheduled to last five weeks beginning in January. It was pushed back six months to this summer due to the departure of a key witness in the fallout from a series of contentious October emails.
The Fourth Amended Plan of Water Management by Subdistrict 1 in the Rio Grande Water Conservation District has lived a precarious life without ever being implemented, going back to 2022 when it was originally crafted by subdistrict managers and January 2023 when it was adopted by Rio Grande Water Conservation District board.
Later came approval by the state engineer, and then after objections were filed against the new amended plan, Colorado Water Court Division 3 Judge Michael Gonzales set a trial date to commence on Jan. 5, 2026, and to last five weeks.
That is, until the week before Thanksgiving when Gonzales scrapped the January date in favor of June 29, 2026, some four years after the plan was first approved at the subdistrict level and the unconfined aquifer still in a historic decline. The judge did so after a series of emails sent by a key expert witness for the main objectors to the plan surfaced.
The effect is that a new plan to recover the Rio Grande’s unconfined aquifer, which has been approved at the local and state levels but still requires sign-off from district water court, remains in limbo.
Following filings by the Northeast Water Users Association and Sustainable Water Augmentation Group requesting a six-month continuance to the start of the trial, and the Rio Grande Water Conservation District and state Division of Water Resources objecting to the request, Gonzales ruled the two main objectors challenging the new aquifer recovery plan had good reason to ask for a six-month continuance after Taylor Adams, an environmental and water resources engineer for Hydros Consulting in Boulder, resigned from the case due to “personal and family circumstances.”
Adams was set to challenge the Subdistrict 1 water plan on a variety of engineering fronts until a series of emails he sent in October to State Engineer Jason Ullman and Senior Assistant Attorney General Preston Hartmann came to light. In one email, he tells Ullman, “Also, GFY.” In another, he emails that he is “no longer interested in anything other than publicly exploding the rampant corruption at DWR and the AG Office.”
And in an email sent Sunday, Oct. 19, to Attorney General Phil Weiser, Adams writes, “We haven’t met, but I understand that you’re running for governor of Colorado. You should know that if you continue this pursuit without addressing the persistent and laughable perjury that has been carried out in your name by Preston Hatman (sic) and Jason Ullman, you will be the subject of my attention throughout your campaign…”
The Rio Grande Water Conservation District asked Gonzales not to delay the water court proceedings due to the urgency to recover the unconfined aquifer and the lack of “credible evidence that demonstrates that Mr. Adams is unavailable. Rather, they now assert that he ‘should not be pressured into returning to the case at the risk of further harm to his mental health.’”
“In any event,” district water attorneys argued in their objection to a trial delay, “none of this changes the fact that the unconfined aquifer is still over 1.3 million acre-feet below the water levels measured in 1976, and more than 830,000 acre-feet below the water levels previously determined by this Court and the Colorado Supreme Court to be sustainable.”
State Engineer Jason Ullman, consultant Taylor Adams, Colorado Water Court Division 3 Judge Michael Gonzales
Subdistrict 1 is home to the San Luis Valley’s richest crops of potatoes, barley and alfalfa. Without recovery of the shallow aquifer, the state is threatening mass shut down of groundwater pumping wells and requires both a master plan and annual replacement plans to show recovery efforts.
The subdistrict’s proposed Fourth Plan of Water Management is its most drastic effort yet to meet the state’s orders. The new plan, crafted in 2022 and adopted by the Rio Grande Water Conservation District in January 2023, is designed to “match the amount of groundwater pumping to the amount of water coming into the subdistrict.”
It does this through a 1-to-1 augmentation, meaning for every acre-foot of water used, an acre-foot has to be returned to the unconfined aquifer through recharging ponds. The amended plan relies on covering any groundwater withdrawals with natural surface water or the purchase of surface water credits.
Farmers in the subdistrict have expressed support for the plan, which includes a $500 per acre-foot overpumping fee that farmers would pay if they exceed the amount of natural surface water tied to the property in their farming operations.
Objections are coming from farmers who do not have natural surface water coming into their property and around the steep fee for purchasing surface water credits from a neighboring operation to offset groundwater pumping irrigation. Both proponents and opponents of the plan say the $500 per acre-foot overpumping fee could put farmers who rely on groundwater pumping out of business.
The five-week water trial will sort through these issues in much more granular detail. Any new strategy to recover the Valley’s ailing aquifer will shift into 2027 at the soonest.
Becky Mitchell. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
June 25, 2026
In haggling with their down-river states about sharing the rapidly shrinking Colorado River, the headwater states have delivered a consistent message.
We don’t have two big reservoirs named Mead and Powell sitting upstream from us, they say. Mostly we must make do with what the sky delivers.
At the Upper Colorado River Commission meeting in Denver this week, the states reiterated this message, offering ample evidence from places like Emery, Utah, and Kemmerer, Wyo.
Lest anybody miss the message, Chuck Cullom, the director of the upper-basin commission, showed aerial images of farming areas in Colorado and the other upper-basin states. Far less green was evident in the Montrose area and on the Ute Mountain Ute Reservation during June than in 2024.
This exceptional year for drought and heat was described by several speakers in Denver as dire. “I want you all to recognize the significance and severity of the things we’re dealing with,” said the Utah representative, Gene Shawcroft. “Totally unprecedented.”
In western Colorado, a Meeker rancher used the same word to describe withered streams. “The situation here has gone from bad to dire.”
Upper-basin states have been in a tug-of-war for the last three years with lower-basin states about how to share this diminished river. As Becky Mitchell (above), Colorado’s representative, says repeatedly, we have a math problem. It’s impossible to continue releasing more water from reservoirs than flow into them. Upper-basin states, she says, “live within the means of the river.”
Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2025. Note the tiny points on the annual data so that you can flyspeck the individual years. Credit: Brad Udall
In crafting the Colorado River Compact in 1922, delegates assumed annual flows of roughly 17 to 18 million acre-feet annually at Lee Ferry, the legal division point separating the upper and lower basins. The 20th century delivered naturalized flows of 15.2 million on average.
In this century, flows have slackened even more. Since 2019 they have averaged 10.2 million acre-feet. This year less than 1 million acre-feet is expected to flow into Lake Powell other than releases from upstream reservoirs.
The compact pledged 7.5 million acre-feet to each of the two basins. The lower-basin states for many years over-used their allocation. Upper-basin states topped out at about 4.5 million acre-feet, using 3.5 million acre-feet in drier years.
Colorado and other basins states insist upon the right to use more water — if it’s there. Pre-compact rights of all Native American tribes have yet to be realized. All this creates a different math problem.
When the four upper basin states adopted their own compact in 1948, they wisely chose to use a percentage not an absolute number. That would make sense for the Colorado River Basin altogether — if the two basins could agree upon it. Tensions have elevated. Outwardly this marriage looks very rocky.
Might there be another way? Tanya Trujillo, New Mexico’s new representative, offered an intriguing statement at the Denver meeting.
“I think we need to think differently about some things,” she said. “In New Mexico, we’re going to be taking a fresh look at some of the issues that we are facing and really try to look for a collaborative process going forward.”
In time of crisis, she added, it’s important to “project calm, knowledgeable reassurance and try to be part of the solution, not part of the problem.”
For whom was that message intended? It was not clear. However, even in Colorado, some have suggested upper-basin states have overstated their case.
What cannot be contested is Mitchell’s assertion that demands cannot exceed supplies. This year, we’re robbing Peter to pay Paul. Water is being taken from Flaming Gorge and other federal upstream reservoirs to keep water in Powell. Blue Mesa Reservoir near Gunnison may have too little water to release any downstream, a condition called dead pool. The Bureau of Reclamation similarly sees that possibility for Navajo, the reservoir on the Colorado-New Mexico border.
The Bureau intends to release six million acre-feet from Powell for the lower-basin, leaving Powell 80% empty. The agency’s “most probable” projections see reservoir levels at Glen Canyon Dam early next year being too low to generate electricity.
In Grand Junction this week, people stood in the rain with sheer delight. It was a feel-good moment. But will El Niño save us from calamity? Maybe, but don’t bet on it. The warming climate seems to be rewriting the rules about how much water from the Pacific Ocean arrives on our mountains.
hat was the takeaway from a recent presentation by Brad Udall, a scientist scholar affiliated with Colorado State University. El Niños in the past have produced big water years. One was in 1983, the year that flood waters nearly broke Glen Canyon Dam. Often, though, an El Niño produces no more moisture than a La Niña.
“The real question” said Shawcroft, the Utah representative, “is what happens if next year looks like this?”
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
This field of alfalfa near Carbondale is grown with water from the Crystal River. Some Colorado River experts are advocating for a permanent reduction in the use of water by agriculture. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Some Colorado River experts are floating a concept to address the basin’s water woes that is both radical and mundane: permanently reducing the amount of water used by agriculture.
Many cities have already reduced their water use in recent decades while adding residents, proving that population growth doesn’t have to be tied to an increase in water use. A 2024 study by Colorado River scientists found that agriculture is responsible for about 74% of water used by people in the basin, meaning urban conservation alone cannot solve the crisis.
“I think we need to have permanent reductions in use on the table and agriculture will have to be part of that,” said Anne Castle, a Colorado River expert and a former federal representative to the Upper Colorado River Commission.
Castle was the lead author on a June 1 paper that urgently called on the entire basin to permanently decrease consumptive uses to avoid the worst impacts to reservoirs and water users. Castle and the paper’s other authors are Colorado River experts and academics, and are the brain trust of the basin sometimes referred to as the Traveling Wilburys, a joking reference to the rock music supergroup. But their message is anything but humorous.
The latest paper says another dry winter would deplete remaining storage and result in devastating consequences like run-of-the-river operations where the nation’s two largest reservoirs can only release downstream the same amount of water that flows into them. It’s the last stop before deadpool, when levels are too low to release water. The authors urge water managers to act immediately to reduce use and avoid a system crash.
But permanently cutting the amount of water that goes to agriculture remains a controversial topic, and water managers from both the Upper and Lower basins say drying up land is not a solution for their basin. Most conservation programs up until now either have been temporary or have allowed the saved water to be used elsewhere. Castle said the problem is especially difficult when people’s livelihoods are on the line.
“The folks who are vulnerable to those kinds of permanent reductions are understandably resistant,” Castle said. “But there’s not enough water. The river won’t allow us to use the same amount of water that we’ve been accustomed to using in the past.”
The seven states that share the Colorado River are under increasing pressure to cut water use as one of the worst droughts on record threatens the water supply for millions of people. On the heels of one of the hottest and driest winters since measuring began, spring flows into Lake Powell this year are projected to be the lowest on record.
Much of the $4 billion from the Inflation Reduction Act earmarked for drought mitigation has gone toward short-term conservation. Water users in the Lower Basin states (California, Arizona and Nevada) were paid to temporarily leave water in Lake Mead. And in the Upper Basin (Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming), the feds paid irrigators $45 million to leave fields dry during a two-year reboot of a pilot conservation program.
But in the midst of a climate change-fueled megadrought that has already robbed the river of at least 20% of its flows, experts say temporary measures no longer cut it. Water managers are reckoning with the reality that the river will probably never again deliver what was promised a century ago by the Colorado River Compact. The demand for water now far outstrips the dwindling supply.
“Are we going to continue to spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year and not have a permanent solution?” said author and Colorado River expert Eric Kuhn. “I think, at some point, it just makes economic sense to go ahead and say, ‘Let’s buy out the existing demand.’” [ed. emphasis mine]
These hay bales stand ready to be collected on a ranch outside of Carbondale. Credit: Heather Sackett/Aspen Journalism
Buying out demand
Against this backdrop, some in the academic community are advocating for the federal government to either set up a voluntary program to buy and retire lands that use a lot of water or pay landowners who agree to permanent restrictions on water use.
A paper released last year and authored by Kathryn Sorensen and Sarah Porter, who are Colorado River experts at the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State, lays out how this could be done. Eligible land would have to meet certain characteristics, including being in an area where the economic impacts of not using water are least painful and where impacted crops could be feasibly grown outside of the Colorado River basin, among others.
According to Porter, the federal government should be the entity that buys down demand. The large infrastructure projects funded by the feds in the 20th century are what created booming irrigated agriculture in the West to begin with. And the other entities in the basin that have the ability to buy agricultural water want to use it themselves, not keep it in the system.
“A reset in the Colorado River basin really is needed,” Porter said. “We have a lot of agriculture that’s really a legacy of how the United States was settled… . And now we’re grappling with overallocation and shortage and struggling to figure out a way to manage the Colorado River.”
The proposal is different from the much-derided “buy-and-dry” which usually involves an opportunistic transferring of water from agriculture to cities, not an overall reduction in water use. Still, the potential negative impacts to rural communities have to be considered.
“You have to have a provision for what happens to the land when you remove agriculture and what happens to the local economy when you remove agriculture,” Porter said.
And experts say there is a precedent for the type of federal buyouts that could help the drought-stricken river: the Bankhead-Jones Tenant Farm Act from 1937. This New Deal piece of legislation was a response to the Dust Bowl and allowed the federal government to buy and retire badly eroded or economically unproductive farmland.
The paper says a Colorado River program could start not with those that grow valuable vegetables in winter but, rather, with lands that use a lot of water but have low economic output. The paper says retired agricultural lands could be used for alternative purposes that support local economies such as recreational opportunities or low water-use industries.
Figuring out how to implement conservation programs without harming rural agricultural communities has been a main focus in recent years of the Colorado River Water Conservation District, which works to keep water on the Western Slope. River District General Manager Andy Mueller said that agriculture has a role to play in reducing water consumption, but that permanently retiring agricultural land is a misguided approach that will put the country in danger of not being able to feed itself. Programs should remain temporary, and focus on efficiency improvements and growing less-thirsty crops, he said.
“If it’s temporary, if it’s well-designed in a way that respects local communities, traditions and practices, is custom-built for each community in a way that really tries to do as little economic damage as possible — potentially even bringing some benefits to those farming families that participate — there are ways to do it,” Mueller said.
A tractor on a farm in California’s Imperial Irrigation District, the largest user of agricultural water in the Colorado River basin. A California representative says there is no interest in drying up ag land because it’s so extremely productive. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
On the fringe
Although certain academics and experts are talking about permanently drying up agricultural lands as a means of saving water, the concept remains on the fringe of Colorado River politics. It’s both the third rail and the elephant in the room.
“It’s going to pull away from the fringe really quickly when you’ve got to really justify continuing to pay on an annual basis forever,” Kuhn said. “We’re just trying to get the discussion out there, make it acceptable to have the discussion.”
On top of the abysmal hydrologic conditions, the basin is also in the midst of a management crisis. After two years of negotiating, the Upper Basin and Lower Basin states have failed to reach a consensus on how they will share future cuts and have blown past deadlines to come up with a plan. The responsibility for river management now falls to the federal government, which is scheduled to release this summer a short-term operating plan for Lake Powell and Lake Mead.
Part of what makes the problem so tricky is that water managers are still guided by the Colorado River Compact, a century-old agreement that splits the river’s flows evenly between the two basins. Upper Basin water managers still cling to the notion that because their states are already living within the 7.5 million acre-feet of water allotted to them annually, cutbacks are the responsibility of the Lower Basin, which they say uses more than its fair share.
Becky Mitchell, Colorado’s lead negotiator in talks among the seven states, said that permanent dry-up of agriculture in the Upper Basin isn’t necessary because the Upper Basin states already send more than 8 million acre-feet — more than legally required — of water downstream per year. Dry-up may be part of the overall solution, she said, but each state should take its own individual approach to making cuts.
“Those durable reductions are going to be required (for the Lower Basin) to first get in line with their apportionment, but then getting in line with the available supplies is a whole ’nother conversation,” Mitchell said.
California’s representative, JB Hamby, said permanent fallowing doesn’t have a place in reducing the state’s demand either. California is home to the biggest urban and agricultural water districts, as well as the largest allocation of Colorado River water of any of the seven states that share the river.
“In the case of California, there’s no real discussion or interest whatsoever in the retirement of ag lands,” Hamby said. “Land in Southern California that receives Colorado River water is so extremely productive. There is a year-round growing season where every single day of the year there are things being grown.”
Past water savings in Southern California have mostly come from efficiency improvements on farms and in delivery systems, and from deficit irrigation programs in which water is temporarily taken off fields for part of a season. In the absence of a seven-state deal, the Lower Basin states have offered up 700,000 acre-feet of cuts per year through 2028, which is on top of an initial 1.5 million acre-feet in cuts. Most estimates say the basin needs to cut water use by 2 million to 4 million acre-feet.
“There’s full agreement that water should be reduced,” he said. “There’s not agreement in how or where it should be reduced. So the Lower Basin is moving forward, doing our thing, making reductions.”
Cowgirls wrangle a calf at a Delta County ranch. Farming and ranching are an important part of the heritage of the American West, which makes permanently reducing water for agriculture a tricky issue. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Ultimately, discussions about permanently reducing the amount of water that goes to farmlands in the basin remain difficult, in part because agricultural water rights are some of the biggest, oldest and most politically powerful in the basin. But there is also an attachment to the American West’s farming and ranching heritage.
“We love agriculture; it’s part of our roots,” Porter said. “We don’t like to think about losing agricultural production. I think we are generally hesitant to have that conversation, and we really haven’t had it as a basin.”
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
Glen Canyon Dam and Lake Powell, one of the nation’s largest-capacity reservoirs whose operation has been a point of contention between the Upper and Lower Basins of the Colorado River. (Alexander Heilner, The Water Desk)
Western Water In-depth: A ‘wild idea’ to defuse the colorado river compact’s legal time bomb has been kept alive by seasoned observers who believe it could still save the river
For the past 20 years, the Colorado River has been operated under a set of guidelines negotiated between the seven states that depend on the river. Those guidelines expire this year, and after five years of grinding negotiations over a new agreement, the upstream states of Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico remain deadlocked against the downstream states of California, Arizona and Nevada.
Some 40 million people and 5.5 million acres of farmland depend on the river’s water. But after the states failed to meet two federal deadlines in three months, the river is in a moment of unprecedented crisis. A dire snowpack has left flows just 15 percent of normal, many farms without water and several cities scrambling to secure water supplies as they gird themselves for shortages.
That has set up a showdown over a legal time bomb that’s been ticking away at the heart of the Colorado River Compact since the river’s guiding document was signed more than 100 years ago. The Lower Basin states believe the Compact promised them a minimum delivery of water sent down the river from the Upper Basin. The Upper Basin states believe the Compact promised them a fixed amount of water that they could rely on to meet future growth. As the river’s flows have dwindled, those two supposed guarantees are proving to be irreconcilable.
Experts have seen the showdown coming for a long time, but climate change has accelerated the day of reckoning. In 2000, a drought sunk its teeth into the river and hasn’t let up. Dubbed the Millennium Drought, it is now recognized as one of the worst droughts on the river in more than 1,200 years — and may actually be the beginning of a long-term shift to a drier reality.
Despite near-endless negotiations to find a way to keep the river’s massive reservoir system from crashing — an effort that began over two decades ago — the drought may have finally pushed the Colorado River Compact to its limit. Now, the system is nearly empty and runoff from this winter’s snowpack, the source of any water that might offer even a small hope of relief, will be among the lowest since Glen Canyon Dam was built near the Arizona-Utah border, creating Lake Powell, more than 60 years ago. Flows in the river are perilously close to hitting the primary legal “tripwire” in the Compact. Once that’s crossed, the Lower Basin states would likely try to force the Upper Basin to deliver their water apportionment downstream — a prospect long considered unthinkable.
“All those negotiations helped push the day of reckoning back further, and helped delay the inevitable,” says Doug Kenney, who heads the University of Colorado’s Western Water Policy Program. “But at some point, you just have to acknowledge the fact that the numbers don’t add up and you’re going to have to deal with it. We’re at that point.”
Two obvious paths now lie ahead. One is a courtroom fight, either against the U.S. Secretary of the Interior or a challenge between two states under the terms of the Colorado River Compact, which would go directly before the Supreme Court. A high court case would be a doomsday scenario, a messy and protracted legal battle that, until now, the seven states desperately sought to avoid. The other potential path is a stopgap fix, a short-term interim plan negotiated between the states or imposed by the Interior secretary. That could, at least temporarily, forestall a trip to court, but it wouldn’t resolve the fundamental conflict.
For more than two decades, however, the possibility of a third path has stubbornly persisted in the background: A “grand bargain,” an idea first proposed in 2005 by Colorado’s negotiating team early in the effort to grapple with the worsening drought. The concept was an unorthodox bid to defuse the ticking time bomb — but it would require each basin to trade away its most cherished claim on the river.
‘A WILD IDEA’
Roughly 90 percent of the Colorado River’s flow originates as snowpack in the Rocky Mountains. One of the principal goals of the 1922 Compact, which is essentially a seven-state treaty, was to avoid future legal battles by creating an “equitable division and apportionment” of water between the Upper Basin states in the river’s headwaters and the faster-growing Lower Basin. The Compact apportioned 7.5 million acre-feet a year from the mainstem of the river to each basin. (An acre-foot is 325,851 gallons, enough to supply the average annual needs of roughly 3 households, depending on their location and climate.)
The Colorado River Basin spans seven U.S. states and is divided into Upper and Lower Basins. Lake Powell, upstream from the Grand Canyon, and Lake Mead, near Las Vegas, are the two principal reservoirs in the Colorado River water-supply system. (Bureau of Reclamation)
The Compact also contains a requirement that the headwaters states not deplete the flow of the river below 75 million acre-feet, plus another roughly 7.5 million acre-feet (half of the apportionment earmarked for Mexico), on a 10-year running average. Those provisions were intended to provide surety to the downstream Lower Basin states that they would receive their 7.5 million-acre-foot annual apportionment and that the basins would share equally in the Mexican obligation. If the 10-year running average requirement is violated, the Lower Basin states could — at least in theory — initiate a Compact “call” against the Upper Basin in an attempt to force the headwaters states to deliver more water downstream.
For roughly 80 years after the Compact was signed, the prospect of a Compact call was purely theoretical. Then the Millennium Drought set in. By 2005, the two flagship reservoirs on the Colorado River — Lakes Mead and Powell — were half empty.
The drought was pushing the river’s flows closer to a Compact violation trigger, making the risk of a call by the Lower Basin a growing probability. The Lower Basin, particularly Arizona, was insisting on guaranteed releases of water from Lake Powell. And because Colorado has the biggest share of the river within the Upper Basin and uses a greater portion of its apportionment than the other upstream states, it is most at risk. It began searching for a way to slip out of the legal noose of a Compact call.
In September 2005, the seven states’ top negotiators met in Albuquerque, New Mexico. During a lunch break, Colorado’s team made its pitch. The state’s negotiators proposed that the Lower Basin waive its right to force a downstream delivery through a Compact call. In exchange, the Upper Basin states would limit their water use to less than what’s strictly apportioned in the Compact, thereby reducing potential demand in the headwaters of Colorado and Wyoming that supply nearly the entirety of the river’s flow.
The offer was essentially a simplification and reframing of a dizzying array of technical disagreements over various provisions of the Compact — an attempt to throw spaghetti at the wall to see if it would stick.
Jim Lochhead, who had previously been Colorado’s top negotiator and in 2005 was serving as a legal advisor on the state’s team.
“My recollection was that it was a pretty spontaneous proposal,” says Jim Lochhead, who had previously been Colorado’s top negotiator and in 2005 was continuing to serve as a legal advisor on the state’s team. “We weren’t making any progress, and it was pitched as, ‘If you really want to cut through all of this and get to the bottom, here’s a wild idea.’”
The proposal sparked discussion among all the parties at the negotiating table but also raised difficult issues.
“It was a great concept on paper,” says Pat Mulroy, who was the head of the Southern Nevada Water Authority and Nevada’s principal negotiator at the time. “Whether it was politically doable or not is a whole other ball game.”
In large part, that’s because a grand bargain would have forced both basins to give up assurances in the Compact that they consider sacrosanct.
“I’m not sure the Upper Basin would ever have agreed to limiting their ability to fully develop their 7.5. It’s like giving up your birthright — I’m not sure they could have sold that at home,” says Mulroy. Conversely, she says, “giving up that call provision is really the only weapon the Lower Basin has.”
And, indeed, following its spontaneous birth in Albuquerque, the proposal ran into stiff political headwinds back home in Colorado, where it failed to get then-governor Bill Owens’ blessing.
“I wasn’t directly representing the state of Colorado at that time; I was representing Colorado water users,” Lochhead says. “And when I brought the idea back to the state, it pretty quickly got shot down: ‘No, we can’t agree to anything that would not keep the dream alive of 7.5 million acre-feet being developed in the Upper Basin.’”
The prospect of a grand bargain itself faded from discussion. And yet, in ways that aren’t often acknowledged, it continued to shape the broad contours of the negotiations that unfolded over the next two decades.
The quest to escape the noose of a Compact call has remained central to Colorado’s bargaining position.
“The concept of a waiver of a Compact call is alive and well,” says Anne Castle, a former assistant Interior secretary who is now a senior fellow at the University of Colorado. “The quid pro quo for that waiver has taken different forms.”
To a large extent, the details of the various offers the Lower Basin has made in exchange for a possible waiver — which have sometimes been characterized within the negotiations as “mini grand bargains” — have never become public. What is clear is that the two basins have consistently failed to cut a deal.
Instead, the seven states adopted a more incremental approach, negotiating a series of drought-protection agreements based on smaller, more politically palatable deals. While that’s been a safer path for everyone politically, it has brought other kinds of risk.
“It just added layer upon layer of Gorilla Glue and Band-Aids that’s made it much more complicated to try to unwind or develop new agreements,” Lochhead says, “and has obviously proven to be inadequate in protecting the system.”
A SECOND LIFE
While the concept of a grand bargain led a short life at the negotiating table, it has gone on to live a remarkable second life. The idea was picked up and revived by a loose-knit group of seasoned observers of Colorado River issues who, for years, have called for more durable alternatives to the patchwork of ideas [ed. “The Law of the River”] in play among negotiators.
Eric Kuhn was a member of Colorado’s negotiating team when the grand bargain was proposed in 2005. At the time, he was the general manager of the Colorado River Water Conservation District based in Glenwood Springs and he has written thoughtfully and voluminously about the river’s problems. After his retirement in 2018, he partnered with John Fleck, a former journalist who is now author-in-residence at the University of New Mexico’s Utton Center, to write Science Be Dammed: How Ignoring Inconvenient Science Drained the Colorado River.
Kuhn and Fleck concluded the book by observing that “there is not enough water in the Colorado River for all the lawyers to be right,” and suggested the grand bargain as a way to avoid the courtroom.
“The basic idea of a grand bargain is, in lieu of litigation, we’re going to agree to something that both sides want,” says Kuhn.
He and Fleck weren’t the only ones who pushed for more serious consideration of the idea. Doug Kenney at the University of Colorado also has championed the concept. In 2012, he enlisted Kevin Wheeler, a widely respected engineer and fellow at Oxford University, to undertake modeling analysis of the kinds of trade-offs a grand bargain might require.
Persistent drought has lowered Lake Powell’s water level and exposed land that was once submerged at Wahweap Marina, as seen in this 2022 photo. (Bureau of Reclamation)
In 2021, Wheeler — together with a group of collaborators including Kuhn, climate scientist Brad Udall and Jack Schmidt, the director of Utah State’s Center for Colorado River Studies — published a white paper called “Alternative Management Paradigms for the Future of the Colorado and Green Rivers.” It was a comprehensive assessment of more ambitious strategies for weathering the drought and climate change than had emerged from now-perpetual negotiations between the states.
“New approaches that are responsive to significantly drier climate conditions and changing patterns of consumptive uses may require bolder policy initiatives that exceed the incremental approach of modern management,” the group wrote. “It is critical to explore alternative water management strategies that may extend beyond the framework of the Law of the River as presently interpreted.”
The following year, the team published a paper in the journal Science titled “What Will it Take to Stabilize the Colorado River?” And, it turned out, stabilizing the system would take something that looked a lot like a grand bargain.
Assuming the drought persists as it has since 2000, Wheeler and his partners identified two scenarios that would stabilize the river, both of which assumed the Lower Basin had waived its ability to make a Compact call. In one, the Lower Basin would need to decrease its water use by about 2 million acre-feet a year when Lake Mead and Lake Powell reach low levels. That would assure it of about 78 percent of its apportionment — an amount roughly in line with cuts it has already committed to taking. In exchange, the Upper Basin would have to cap its water use at 4 million acre-feet. But that’s only slightly more than half of its 7.5 million-acre-foot Compact apportionment, and roughly 300,000 acre-feet less than what it currently uses.
The second scenario — call it the “near-parity scenario” for simplicity — more equally distributed the Upper and Lower Basins’ relative cuts in apportionment. In it, the Upper Basin would cap its use at 4.5 million acre-feet, leaving it with 60 percent of its Compact apportionment. The Lower Basin would be able to use about 67 percent of its Compact apportionment when reservoirs are low, just slightly more percentage-wise than the Upper Basin. But it would have to cut its uses by 3 million acre-feet below its apportionment.
That would stabilize the system — or at least go a long way toward doing so — while largely meeting existing water demands in both basins. The Upper Basin currently uses about 4.3 million acre-feet per year. The Lower Basin, after ramping up an aggressive water conservation effort since 2007, has driven its annual use down to about 6 million acre-feet per year, and has signaled that it could likely reduce demand further.
But it would leave practically no leeway for future growth, at least without reshaping the socioeconomic landscape across the entire Basin. In particular, any future urban growth could come only by shifting significant amounts of water from farms to cities.
HARD MATH
Today, there is a simple, hard reality on the Colorado River: The available water supply is already maxed out. Water use throughout the basin needs to be reduced by roughly 25 percent just to make the numbers work now — to say nothing of the future, which is likely to be significantly drier.
In Colorado, that has raised hard questions about fairness, the “equitable division and apportionment” provision of the Compact, and the assurance the state thought it had that its water would be there to develop when it’s finally ready.
“Everyone agrees that there should be an equitable division of water, and the word ‘equity’ is one that everyone will rally around,” says Kenney. “But does equitable mean equal? That’s the crux of the issue.”
Over the past several years, Colorado’s attorney general, Phil Weiser, has been building his office’s staff of water lawyers. This January, Weiser, who is currently running for governor, appeared before a joint hearing of the state legislature’s judiciary committees.
“If we can’t get a deal — and I’m committed to not getting a bad deal just to get a deal — we’ll be in litigation. We’re ready for it,” he said. “If and when we can get a reasonable deal based in reality, I’m for it. But if we can’t, then we will be falling back on our rights under (the) 1922 Compact.”
Because of the peculiarities of the water-rights hierarchy in the Lower Basin, Arizona is arguably most at risk there. In March, that state — whose governor, Katie Hobbs, is running for re-election — retained the high-powered law firm Sullivan & Cromwell to represent it in potential Colorado River litigation. At the time, a spokesman for the governor said, “it’s critical that Arizona be prepared to defend ourselves in court if an agreement cannot be reached or the Law of the River is violated.”
Anne Castle, a veteran of Colorado River issues. Former U.S. Commissioner, Upper Colorado River Commission • Former Assistant Secretary for Water and Science, U.S. Department of the Interior. (Source: Water Education Foundation)
“It is very difficult for a political figure — and they’re all political figures, even if they’re not elected — to agree to reduce the water use of their constituents and keep their career alive,” says Anne Castle. “They have to be able to tell their constituents, ‘I’m fighting for your water. I’m doing everything I can to keep your water secure, and it’s the other guy’s fault.’ The political incentives are directly at odds with the kind of compromise that’s needed in this type of hydrologic situation.”
Following the breakdown in negotiations between the Colorado River states, the federal government has announced its intention to step in. In May, the Bureau of Reclamation, on behalf of the Department of the Interior, revealed that it is preparing the first of what could be a series of five two-year interim plans for the river.
The final details are expected to be released this summer. But the federal government has indicated that the Interior secretary could cut water deliveries to the Lower Basin states by up to 3 million acre-feet — 40 percent of their Compact apportionment. During a briefing for Arizona water users in May, Brenda Burman, the head of the Central Arizona Project, presented modeling analysis of the proposed reductions and noted that, given the diminished releases from Lake Powell, the Upper Basin is “in a definite breach of the Compact by Sept. 30 of 2026.”
Owing to some quirks of river history, the secretary debatably has less authority in the Upper Basin, and so Reclamation has proposed no cuts there. But as climate change continues to eat away at snowpack and river flows, the Upper Basin states will likely be forced to cut back their uses anyway. Regardless of what the Compact says the Upper Basin gets, the water simply won’t be there.
And so now the seven states are facing a situation eerily similar to those in the near-parity scenario Wheeler and his colleagues laid out in their Science paper four years ago — but without a bargain.
COMING FULL CIRCLE?
In many ways, the prospects have never been worse for something like a grand bargain. Yet the fundamental problems the grand bargain was intended to solve have only grown sharper in the 20 years since it was first proposed.
“The grand bargain has gotten a bad name,” Kuhn says. “But if these issues aren’t resolved through a grand bargain, they’re going to be resolved through litigation.” In 2007, he says, the river’s reservoirs still had ample water to work with. “With empty reservoirs, you cannot finesse these issues.”
Glen Canyon Dam creates water storage on the Colorado River in Lake Powell. Credit: U.S. Bureau of Reclamation
Litigation could come as soon as August, when Reclamation will likely release a record of decision for its proposed new operating plan. Legal action could take one of several paths. The one with the highest stakes would be direct enforcement of the Compact, likely in the form of a Compact call brought by Arizona and the other Lower Basin states against the Upper Basin states. Because the Compact is essentially a treaty between multiple states, that would go directly before the Supreme Court. But such cases are often grindingly long: Arizona’s 1952 lawsuit against California over Colorado River rights took a dozen years to resolve. A case in the Supreme Court could put the river in protracted litigation during a time of profound crisis.
Other, more limited challenges are possible, most likely against the Bureau of Reclamation or the secretary of the Interior for failure to comply with the Compact or violating environmental laws. But they, too, are not without risk.
“I have a hard time believing you could keep litigation contained, once that genie’s out of the bottle,” says Kenney. “I just have to believe that inevitably blows up into a full-fledged interstate litigation and it bumping right up to the Supreme Court.”
As the odds rise of a legal challenge to the Compact that could ultimately wind up before the highest court in the land, the fundamental tension the grand bargain was intended to resolve will likely be front and center before the justices. And, paradoxically, that could force the states themselves to finally make the really tough sacrifices they’ve been trying to avoid.
“I think that a road to a grand bargain runs through litigation,” says Kuhn.
That’s because in past interstate fights over shared rivers, the Supreme Court has typically appointed a water-law expert known as a special master to referee such cases. The most recent example is the dispute between Texas, New Mexico and Colorado over the Rio Grande. In that case, Kuhn notes, “the special master said, ‘You don’t want me or the court to decide this; get in a room and negotiate it.’ The special master kept the pressure on the states to negotiate.”
This May, the Supreme Court approved a settlement between those three states. Still, even that resolution only came a full 13 years after the case was initially filed, and it involves relatively small reductions in overall water use.
On the Colorado River, both water and time are in far shorter supply.
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Colorado River “Beginnings”. Photo: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism
Last post here, I suggested that at least some of the ongoing failure of the seven Colorado River states to reach agreement on a river management plan for even the next several years, let alone new century, stems from some ‘elephants in the river.’ You know – the big things that nobody wants to look at because they are so big. So big that some of the rules and guidelines we operate under were created to avoid having to address them.
The first ‘elephant in the river’ I discussed last time was the single-minded focus on the Colorado’s surface waters, and a failure to begin considering the whole integrated water supply, surface water and groundwater – of which the surface water is a relatively minor part, with users going to the groundwater in a haphazard way when the surface water is insufficient.
I did make an incorrect statement in that analysis, however. I said that Colorado was the first, and thus far only, state to begin integrating groundwater into its appropriation priority system statewide. (Arizona developed – by federal mandate – a Groundwater Management Plan circa 1970 for those specific parts of the state served by the Central Arizona Project.)
This is true about Colorado – but I was mistaken in implying that the all groundwater use was integrated into its appropriation system by 1969 legislation. Only alluvial groundwater is covered by that law – groundwater that is naturally integrated with surface water, either trickling into the surface streams when the groundwater table is high or drawing riparian water from the surface streams when the water table is low.
Not covered by the Colorado law are ‘non-tributary’ aquifers that have no natural interaction with the surface waters – aquifers like the Oglalla Aquifer in eastern Colorado, or the Denver Basin aquifer. Most of their water filters down from the alluvial groundwater, and only modern pumping technology makes that groundwater accessible to surface use. Most of these deep aquifers have accumulated their water slowly over geological periods of time, and even moderate use of their water dips quickly into ‘water-mining.’ Colorado law for such aquifers attempts to limit annual use to a hundredth of a presumed 100-year supply, but no one knows for sure how much water is really down there, or whether it will truly constitute a 100-year supply.
The standard response throughout much of the basin to shortages in surface water is to go to groundwater pumping; if ‘tributary’ (alluvial) groundwater is tapped, the pumping will gradually lower the water table – which in turn will begin to diminish the surface streams, which in turn will increase the pumping – et cetera, a vicious downward cycle. And the pumping of ‘non-tributary’ aquifers is largely unregulated in the basin.
At any rate – apologies for the error, and thanks to John McClow for pointing it out.
And on to another elephant in the room. Is it finally time to determine limits on the presumed universal applicability of the appropriation doctrine? To avoid being shot before I finish the paragraph, I will say immediately I am not suggesting doing away with the appropriation doctrine; it is a good enough last resort down on the ground where the appropriation doctrine started, for working out local problems of water use on a surface stream when neighborliness fails – that is, when old grumps and feuds preclude the ‘gentlemen’s agreement’ on sharing out what water is available, rather than shutting down the junior users with a ‘call’ so the seniors can get all their decreed water. After two or three generations, seniority can be acknowledged, but is too abstract to apply against your neighbors, if a plan for sharing blameless misfortune can be worked out.
The abstraction, however, becomes more applicable when it is distant water organizations calling out other water organizations upstream, or an earlier developed watershed placing a call on users in an adjacent more recently developed watershed. And when a stream is declared by the district engineer to be over-appropriated – not enough water to fill everyone’s decrees in a near-average year – it becomes even more abstract, a tool for enforcing a status quo, and nothing anywhere about what represents the best uses of the water.
There are, in other words, some areas in which the appropriation doctrine gets stretched beyond its elastic limits by emerging challenges of water use; any questions about ‘best and highest use’ have been essentially declared unanswerable as a matter of conflicting values, and it just seems easier to let seniority of use be the ultimate determinant of priorities.
A century ago, with California quintupling its population in the first two decades of the 20th century, the other six of the seven states in the Colorado River Basin (Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming) began to worry that California might put so much of the river’s water to use that there would not be enough unappropriated water for them to put to use when their time of growth came. They were all committed to versions of the appropriation doctrine within their states, but came to believe that reliance on the appropriation doctrine alone at the interstate level could cause more regional problems than it would resolve.
That concern was affirmed in 1922 when the U.S. Supreme Court resolved a conflict between Colorado and Wyoming over a Laramie River tributary that started in Colorado but was put to use first in Wyoming; the court declared that states who used the appropriation doctrine intrastate would also have to respect each other’s appropriations interstate. This made real the specter of slow-growing upstream states having to let all their Colorado River water go downstream to fill huge Arizona and California decrees.
So they assembled in 1922 to try to do something about that – a fundamental fact about the Colorado River Compact commission that we tend to forget: the original intent of the compact commissioners in 1922 was to develop an alternative to the appropriations doctrine at the interstate level. They came together with the intent of working out a seven-way division of the use of the river, based on possible future development, that would eliminate a horse-race of interstate appropriative competition. Six of the states convened the commission because they feared California, and California reluctantly participated because it knew the feds would never build the big control and storage dam they needed until all seven states were on board with it. That seven-way division trumping interstate appropriation was what the Compact Commissioners assembled to do –and spent a frustrating week early in 1922 trying to do.
They were unable to effect a seven-way split for a couple of reasons: for one thing they had no good measure of how much dependable water was in the river; estimates at the time ranged from 12 to 20 million acre-feet (maf). But for a second thing, the sum total of the water they each felt their state needed, based on rosy early-20th-century estimates, was closer to 24 maf – and nobody wanted to go home having backed down from their carefully imagined numbers.
Members of the Colorado River Commission, in Santa Fe in 1922, after signing the Colorado River Compact. From left, W. S. Norviel (Arizona), Delph E. Carpenter (Colorado), Herbert Hoover (Secretary of Commerce and Chairman of Commission), R. E. Caldwell (Utah), Clarence C. Stetson (Executive Secretary of Commission), Stephen B. Davis, Jr. (New Mexico), Frank C. Emerson (Wyoming), W. F. McClure (California), and James G. Scrugham (Nevada). CREDIT: COLORADO STATE UNIVERSITY WATER RESOURCES ARCHIVE via Aspen Journalism
What they did instead – in order to persuade Congress that there was general agreement – was to cobble together the Compact we are burdened with today; they created what Commission Chair Herbert Hoover called a ‘temporary equitable division’ of the seven states into Upper and Lower River Basins, until ‘ those men who may come after us, possessed of a far greater fund of information’ could do the ‘further division’ of the river among the states.
They also decided – as early 20th-century Americans would – to lean toward the more optimistic estimates of river flow, dividing ‘equally’ between the Basins only 15 maf of a river they presumed would continue running 16-20 maf – hence the 7.5 maf for each Basin written into the compact, to be further divided among the states of each Basin in their own good time. That left some water for Mexico, but they did nothing specific for the Indian tribes in the basins because national Indian policy at that time was ‘soft genocide’ – full assimilation (‘kill the Indian, save the man’), leaving tribal water a concern they thought would disappear.
This all made reasonable sense with a river running a quarter-century average of just under 18 maf – but then through the 1930s the river experienced a drought unsurpassed until the past quarter century. By the end of World War II, Colorado river water users had a ‘far greater fund of information’ about the river’s flow, which would have made it a good time to have ‘fixed’ the Compact – but the growing fund of information was all bad news that no one wanted to incorporate into a more realistic policy. So by default the ‘temporary equitable division,’ with its mythic 18 maf river, took on the permanence of something carried off a sacred mountain carved in stone.
And now – we are seeing it reduced to a sad irony. The states of the Lower Basin had their fears too, and wanted a clause in the Compact stating that, should the Upper Basin states have a wild spurt of growth, they should not ‘deplete the flow’ to the Lower Basin below an average of 7.5 maf a year. But now – when it looks like diminished flows throughout the basin might really drop the flow at the division point between basins below that average – the Lower Basin is threatening the Upper Basin with an Article III(d) ‘call,’ saying the upper states will have to cut their own uses enough to meet the lower states’ fantasy 7.5 maf. States that set out a century ago to create a compact that would transcend the appropriation doctrine at the interstate level are now trying to turn that ‘temporary equitable division’ into what amounts to a senior interstate water right.
There has to be a level, or category, of action in which the law of first-come first-served is transcended by other considerations. And can we not say, at this point a century later, that the original intention of the compact commission has been achieved de facto? No state will ever get the use of more water than it had (or believed it had) around the turn of the century because there is even less water now. For better or worse, the use of the river has been distributed among the states (including some of the tribes) and Mexico.
Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2025. Note the tiny points on the annual data so that you can flyspeck the individual years. Credit: Brad Udall
Whether this is an equitable division is arguable; the states of the Lower Basin have been using roughly two-thirds of the river’s water, the Upper Basin states around one third, rather than the 50-50 split explicit in the Compact (7.5 maf per Basin). But arguably that does reflect the relative productivity of Lower Basin agricultural use (by far the largest use) and also its millions of urbanites drawing on it for at least part of their municipal water. It was a huge step toward reality when the Lower Basin states finally agreed that they must absorb the Lower Basin’s system losses (mostly evapotranspiration) and their half of Mexico’s allotment out of their own shares of the river, rather than relying on a fictional surplus to cover it – a fiction that combined with drought to draw down both Powell and Mead Reservoirs to the dangerous level where they linger today.
Yampa River Basin via Wikimedia. Note the Little Snake River crossing the Colorado-Wyoming line.
The 1948 Upper Colorado River Compact was the first reality-based document in the ‘Law of River’ portfolio because its negotiators knew by then – that ‘greater fund of knowledge’ – that it was doubtful that there would always be 7.5 maf for their use, and actually accepted that as their reality. So the divided their ‘half’ of the river into percentages for each state of whatever was left for the upper states after the Lower Basin got it Boulder Canyon Project Act waters. After three-quarters of a century, the four states are not too far from those percentages in their development of around 4.5 maf; only Wyoming is significantly under its 13 percent; Utah is a little below its 23 percent; and Colorado is a little over its 51.75 percent. Given the geographic irrelevance of western state boundaries (the Little Snake River crosses the Colorado-Wyoming border half a dozen times), this was pretty good 1948 estimating.
The reality today is that all Colorado River water users in all seven basin states are using a finite and measurable resource that will probably continue to diminish for the foreseeable future as we continue to heat up the planet, and we need to come to an agreement on what that means for all users. [ed. emphasis mine]
It seems to me there are three ways to address that diminishing flow. One way is to continue to accept the divine sanctity of the Colorado River Compact, with the Upper Basin states forced by the Supremes (they ride for power, not for the law) to cut back their own uses to meet the 7.5 maf average delivery to the Lower Basin – basically the interstate nightmare (for the upper states) the Compact was meant to address. Call this the stubborn denial option.
A second way would be to accept the evolved eight-way division (seven states plus Mexico) of the use of the river’s water, which was what the seven states wanted to do in 1922, instead of the ‘temporary equitable’ compact they came up with. Percentages for each basin state could be set according to the amount each state was using at the end of the major river development era, say in Y2K (remember that?), when the 70-year average annual flow was ~14.5 maf (1930-2000). Those state percentages of the river’s consumptive use could be retained – but the actual volume of water for each state would gradually diminish as the combination of ‘dry drought’ and ‘heat drought’ continues to diminish the river. Given that losses attributable to climate warming are both everybody’s and nobody’s fault, the losses to each states would be proportionate to their percentage of the river’s consumptive use, with no falling back on seniority, as though it were just a squabble between users. Each state could then either stay with the appropriation doctrine intrastate with junior users bearing the loss, or equitably share out the loss proportionate to use. Call the latter the shared reality option.
Photo of Crowley County by Jennifer Goodland
A third way lies between stubborn denial and shared reality, and will probably prevail as the default American Way: let money work it out. Municipal and industrial users will continue to work out money-for-water deals with agricultural users, like San Diego and the Metropolitan Water District have done with the Palo Verde and Imperial Valley ag districts, with responsible districts using the money for systemic improvements that minimize the impact of lost water. This is by no means going to ‘dry up’ agriculture. With 75-85 percent of the river’s water being used by agriculture, a doubling of M&I use would only require transfer of 10-15 percent of ag water, although (money being blind to all but profitability) the transfers would probably cause some local tragedies like Crowley County in Colorado where too much water was bought out of a single small irrigation district by Front Range entrepreneurs.
The appropriation doctrine, with its strange ‘property right’ independent of the property for which it was granted, is quite compatible with the money option for resolving water distribution, once over-appropriation is achieved. The idea that water’s seniority in a certain use can be transferred to a totally different use along with the water strikes me as strange – shouldn’t a new use initiate a new right? It is also contradictory to the doctrine’s initial democratic-populist effort to prevent the dominance of big money in water distribution by limiting water rights to what one could put to use. But it does seem to be the American way that everything eventually comes down to money as the base determinant of value.
Enough for today. The elephants in the river. I obviously favor ‘ratifying’ the evolved split of the use of the river, and an equitable proportionate sharing among all states – and within all states – of the consequences of our cultural climate changes. But that will not fly among those who have steadfast faith (senior water right holders) in the appropriation doctrine as the answer to all problems.
The river? It abides, rises and falls with the water table in its surrounding groundwater, and it may occasionally disappear, but it won’t have died, it will just have gone underground until the water table rises again and the ground can’t hold all the water – if we figure out how to let that happen.
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 study (and check out the operating plans for the Colorado River system reservoirs) on the Bureau of Reclamation website:
June 15, 2026
The operation of Lake Powell and Lake Mead in the June 2026 24-Month Study is pursuant to the December 2007 Record of Decision on Colorado River Interim Guidelines for Lower Basin Shortages and the Coordinated Operations of Lake Powell and Lake Mead (Interim Guidelines),1 the Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement for Near-term Colorado River Operations Record of Decision (2024 Interim Guidelines SEIS ROD),2 and reflects the 2026 Annual Operating Plan (AOP). Pursuant to the Interim Guidelines, the August 2025 24-Month Study projections of the January 1, 2026, system storage and reservoir water surface elevations set the operational tier for the coordinated operation of Lake Powell and Lake Mead during 2026.
The August 2025 24-Month Study projected the January 1, 2026, Lake Powell elevation to be less than 3,575 feet and at or above 3,525 feet and the Lake Mead elevation to be at or above 1,025 feet. Consistent with Section 6.C.1 of the Interim Guidelines, and Section 6.E of the 2024 Interim Guidelines SEIS ROD, the operational tier for Lake Powell in water year (WY) 2026 is the Mid-Elevation Release Tier and the water year release volume from Lake Powell was originally projected to be 7.48 million acre-feet (maf). Further, given the hydrologic variability of the Colorado River System and potential for declining reservoir conditions, Section 6.E of the 2024 Interim Guidelines SEIS ROD allows for Lake Powell’s release in WY 2026 to be less than 7.48 maf. Consistent with Section 6.E of the 2024 Interim Guidelines SEIS ROD, Reclamation will consider all tools that are available during the interim period to avoid Lake Powell elevation declining below 3,500 feet.
To protect a target elevation at Lake Powell of 3,525 feet, adjustments to Glen Canyon Dam monthly volume releases for the months of December 2025 through April 2026 were implemented in the December 2025 24-Month Study, reducing the release volume for these months by 0.598 maf. As historically dry conditions persisted in WY 2026 and reservoir conditions were projected to decline below 3,500 feet at Lake Powell, the Department of the Interior implemented an action under Section 6.E of the 2024 Interim Guidelines SEIS ROD by reducing Lake Powell’s annual release from 7.48 maf to 6.00 maf in WY 2026.3 This action was taken in conjunction with the 2026 Drought Response Operations Plan which will release between approximately 660,000 acre-feet to 1.00 maf of additional water from Flaming Gorge reservoir to Lake Powell by April 2027.4 The May 2026 Most Probable 24-Month Study reflects a 1.00 maf Drought Response Operations release.
The August 2025 24-Month Study projected the January 1, 2026, Lake Mead elevation to be below 1,075 feet and above 1,050 feet. Consistent with Section 2.D.1 of the Interim Guidelines, a Shortage Condition consistent with Section 2.D.1.a will govern the operation of Lake Mead for calendar year (CY) 2026. In addition, Section III.B of Exhibit 1 to the Lower Basin Drought Contingency Plan (DCP) Agreement will also govern the operation of Lake Mead for CY 2026. Lower Basin projections for Lake Mead take into consideration additional conservation efforts under the DCP and the Lower Colorado River Basin Conservation and Efficiency Program (LC Conservation Program).
Current runoff projections into Lake Powell are provided by the National Weather Service’s Colorado Basin River Forecast Center. The observed unregulated inflow into Lake Powell for the month of May was 0.383 maf or 18% of the 30-year average from 1991 to 2020. The June 2026 unregulated inflow forecast for Lake Powell is 0.170 maf or 7% of the 30-year average. The 2026 April through July unregulated inflow forecast for Lake Powell is 0.950 maf or 15% of average. The WY 2026 unregulated inflow forecast for Lake Powell is 3.40 maf or 35% of average.
In this study, the CY 2026 diversion for Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (MWD) is projected to be 0.941 maf. The CY 2026 diversion for the Central Arizona Project (CAP) is projected to be 0.924 maf. Consumptive use for Nevada above Hoover (SNWP Use) is projected to be 0.188 maf for CY 2026.
Due to changing Lake Mead elevations, Hoover’s generator capacity is adjusted based on estimated effective capacity and plant availability. The estimated effective capacity is based on projected Lake Mead elevations. Unit capacity tests will be performed as the lake elevation changes. This study reflects these changes in the projections.
For questions on Upper Colorado River Basin (UCB) reservoir operations, please contact Alex Pivarnik, the UCB River Operations Group Supervisor, at apivarnik@usbr.gov. For questions on Lower Colorado River Basin (LCB) reservoir operations, please contact Noe Santos, the LCB River Operations Manager, at nsantos@usbr.gov.
Hoover, Davis, and Parker Dam historical gross energy figures come from Power, Operations, and Maintenance reports provided by the Lower Colorado Region’s Power Office, Bureau of Reclamation, Boulder City, Nevada. Questions regarding these historical energy numbers can be directed to Rebecca Rogers (rrogers@usbr.gov) or Kyra Cubi (kcubi@usbr.gov).
1 For modeling purposes, simulated years beyond 2026 assume a continuation of the 2007 Interim Guidelines including the 2024 Supplement to the 2007 Interim Guidelines (no additional SEIS conservation is assumed to occur after 2026), the 2019 Colorado River Basin Drought Contingency Plans, and Minute 323 including the Binational Water Scarcity Contingency Plan. With the exception of certain provisions related to Intentionally Created Surplus recovery and Upper Basin demand management, operations under these agreements are in effect through 2026. Reclamation initiated the process to develop operations for post-2026 in June 2023, and the modeling assumptions described here are subject to change.
Click the link to read the article on The Denver Post website (Elise Schmelzer). Here’s an excerpt:
June 21, 2026
The two major reservoirs on the Colorado River face dire outlooks that will likely spur federal officials to restrict the amount of water flowing downstream — and decrease hydropower generation — in the coming months, even after they ordered recent emergency measures. Projections released last week by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation show that if dry conditions persist, Lake Powell’s water level could dip below a threshold called “minimum power pool” as soon as February. That’s the level below which water can no longer flow through the reservoir’s hydropower turbines. Without intervention, the projections say, the lake will remain below the critical elevation for the foreseeable future.
Lake Powell key elevations. Credit: Reclamation
The threat of Powell hitting that threshold — 3,490 feet in elevation — has hovered above federal water managers for months as the reservoir has continued to drop to record-low levels. In April, U.S. Bureau of Reclamation leaders announced that they would send up to 1 million acre-feet of water from the upstream Flaming Gorge Reservoir to Powell and reduce the amount of water released from Powell to keep the reservoir’s level at 3,500 feet above sea level — which includes a small buffer Reclamation officials want to maintain to stay above the power pool level. Powell’s water levels continue to drop as Colorado River leaders deal with two crises: one climatological and one political. Long-term drought fueled by climate change has shrunk the Colorado River’s flows as federal officials and water leaders in the seven basin states — including Colorado, home to its headwaters — struggle to agree on longer-term plans for the river’s management. So far, they’ve failed to find agreement on how to divvy up the usage cuts necessary to adapt to lower flows that reduce the water supply for farmers and residents in a region that’s home to 40 million people.
The back of Glen Canyon Dam circa 1964, not long after the reservoir had begun filling up. Here the water level is above dead pool, meaning water can be released via the river outlets, but it is below minimum power pool, so water cannot yet enter the penstocks to generate electricity. Bureau of Reclamation photo. Annotations: Jonathan P. Thompson
When Lake Powell’s levels fall below minimum power pool, that means water can no longer flow through the intake tubes for Glen Canyon Dam‘s hydropower facility, which is the primary method for moving water downstream from the reservoir in southern Utah. Instead, water can move only through much smaller bypass tubes that, for years, have been considered unsafe for long-term use — though Reclamation officials now say they can be operated safely with continuous maintenance. The bureau’s most recent projections, released Tuesday, show that the emergency measures taken this spring will only be a stopgap, unless extremely wet weather returns…If Lake Powell falls below minimum power pool, the only way to release water downstream is through four 8-foot-diameter tubes called the river outlet works. For years, Bureau of Reclamation officials have said the tubes were not designed for long-term use at low water levels, and such use could cause structural damage to the dam. But officials now say there’s a way to safely use the river outlet works, if needed…Recent studies of the river outlet works have shown that managers can operate the backup tubes continuously in a safe way, said Katrina Grantz, the deputy regional director for Reclamation’s Upper Colorado Region, at a conference in Boulder earlier this month. But the outlets require frequent inspections and maintenance when used continuously, which means that one of the four conduits will routinely be offline. Over the course of a year, the maintenance rotation will result in an effective capacity of about three and a half outlets operating continuously, bureau spokesman Peter Soeth wrote in an email in response to follow-up questions from The Denver Post.
“The river outlet works were never designed to serve as the primary or long‑term release pathway,” Soeth said. “Relying on them continuously would reduce operational flexibility and, over extended periods, could introduce wear that requires more intensive maintenance.”
