My friend Joe’s son and the Orr kids at the top of the Crack in the Wall trail to Coyote Gulch with Stevens Arch in the Background. Photo credit: Joe Ruffert
Kevin Fedarko was the keynote speaker at the symposium and he is as inspirational a speaker as you could ask for. It doesn’t hurt that the landscape that he spoke about is the Grand Canyon. He urged the attendees to, “Take your children out into these landscapes so that they can learn to love them.” He is advocating for the protection of the Grand Canyon in particular but really he is advocating for the protection all public lands.
Kevin Fedarko and Coyote Gulch at the Rio Grande State of the Basin Symposium hosted by the Salazar Rio Grande del Norte Center at Adams State University in Alamosa March 29, 2024.
What an inspirational talk from Kevin. I know what he is saying when he speaks about the time after dinner on the trail where the sunset lights up the canyon in different hues and where, he and Pete McBride, his partner on the Grand Canyon through hike, could hear the Colorado River hundreds of feet below them, continuing its work cutting and molding the rocks, because the silence in that landscape is so complete. He and I share the allure of the Colorado Plateau. Kevin was introduced to it through Collin Flectcher’s book The Man Who Walked Through Time, after he received a dog-eared copy from his father. They lived in Pittsburgh in a landscape that was industrialized but the book enabled Kevin to imagine places that were unspoiled.
My introduction to the Colorado Plateau came from an article in Outside magazine that included a panoramic photo of the Escalante River taken from the ledges above the river. Readers in the know can put 2 and 2 together from the name of this blog — Coyote Gulch — my homage to the canyons tributary to Glen Canyon and Lake Foul.
Stevens Arch viewed from Coyote Gulch. Photo via Joe Ruffert
Kevin’s keynote came at the end of the day on March 29th after a jam-packed schedule.
Early in the day Ken Salazar spoke about the future of the San Luis Valley saying, “Where is the sustainability of the valley going to come from.” Without agriculture this place would wither and die.” He is right, American Rivers and other organizations introduced a paper, The Economic Value of Water Resources in the San Luis Valley which was a response to yet another plan to export water out of the valley to the Front Range. (Currently on hold as Renewable Water Resources does not have a willing buyer. Thank you Colorado water law.)
Claire Sheridan informed attendees that their report sought to quantify all the economic benefits from each drop of water in the valley. “When you buy a bottle of water you know exactly what it costs. But what is the value of having the Sandhill cranes come here every year?”
Sandhill Cranes Dancing. Photo by: Arrow Myers courtesy Monte Vista Crane Festival
Russ Schumacher detailed the current state of the climate (snowpack at 63%) and folks from the Division of Water Resources expounded on the current state of aquifer recovery and obligations under the Rio Grande Compact.
The session about the Colorado Airborne Snow Measurement Program was fascinating. Nathan Coombs talked about the combination of SNOTEL, manual snow courses, Lidar, radar, and machine learning used to articulate a more complete picture of snowpack. “You can’t have enough tools in your toolbox,” he said.
Coombs detailed the difficulty of meeting the obligations under the Rio Grande Compact with insufficient knowledge of snowpack and therefore runoff volumes. Inaccurate information can lead to operational decisions that overestimate those volumes and then require severe curtailments in July and August just when farmers are finishing their crops. “When you make an error the correction is what kills you,” he said.
If you are going to learn about agriculture in the valley it is informative to understand the advances in soil health knowledge and the current state of adoption. That was the theme of the session “Building Healthy Soils”. John Rizza’s enthusiasm for the subject was obvious and had me thinking about what I can do for my city landscape.
Amber Pacheco described how the Rio Grande Basin Roundtable and other organizations reach out to as many folks in the valley as possible. Inclusivity is the engine driving collaboration.
In December 2023, the Colorado River District and Xcel Energy agreed on a deal for the district to buy Xcel’s historic water rights associated with the Shoshone hydroelectric power plant in Glenwood Canyon for $99 million. The Bureau of Reclamation was supposed to pitch in $40 million toward that purchase, but the money is stalled by the Trump administration’s pause on federal spending. Jeff Hurd, the 3rd Congressional District representative, penned a letter to Interior Department Secretary Doug Burgum urging the department to fully fund the Bureau of Reclamation’s $40 million award. Photo credit: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism
With the fate of a federal grant funding toward Shoshone Water Rights up in the air, western Colorado congressman Jeff Hurd is throwing his political weight behind the grant’s preservation…In January, the Biden Administration included $40 million through the Inflation Reduction Act to go toward the Colorado River District’s efforts to acquire the nearly $100 million Shoshone Water Rights from Xcel. However, Hurd said during a recent phone town hall that he believed the Trump administration had frozen the grant. The Grand Junction Republican representing Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District in the U.S. House penned a letter to Interior Department Secretary Doug Burgum on March 18 urging the department to fully fund the Bureau of Reclamation’s $40 million award.
“For more than a century, the senior water rights associated with the Shoshone Hydropower Plant in Glenwood Canyon have played a pivotal role in sustaining reliable flows in the Upper Colorado River,” Hurd wrote. “These flows are essential to the health and vitality of our region, enabling everything from high-value crop production and oil and gas production to recreational tourism and rural municipal water supplies.”
Hurd wrote about the project’s economic benefits, citing BBC Research and Consulting data that concluded that preserving Shoshone’s flows would provide a net present value of as much as $609 million.
“These benefits include stabilizing flows during periods of drought, supporting continued water development and power production through the Upper Colorado River Endangered Fish Recovery Program, and maintaining water quality that supports salt-sensitive crops and drinking water infrastructure,” Hurd wrote.
Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2024. Credit: Brad Udall
Click the link to read the article on the InkStain website (Eric Kuhn):
March 19, 2025
The Bureau of Reclamation released its March 24-Month study last Friday and just like last month, the forecast is for big trouble in the Colorado River Basin. Under the “Most Probable” scenario, the ten-year cumulative flow at Lee Ferry will drop below 82.5 million acre-feet (the “tripwire”) by the end of Water Year 2027. If this happens, the odds are high that the Lower Division states will trigger what they referred to in their February 13, 2025, letter to Secretary Burgum as a “compact call.” The nuance, however, is that the Colorado River Compact has no specific provision for a compact call. Under the compact, a call is just another word for interstate litigation.
Although the letter is now over a month old, it just recently received attention from two of the region’s most respected water reporters, Ian James of the Los Angeles Times, and Tony Davis of the Tucson Daily Star. In his piece, (link: Three states urge Trump administration to fix Colorado River dam – Los Angeles Times: ) James pointed out that in their letter, the Lower Division states used the term “compact call” 23 times. The term “river call” is commonly used in prior appropriation states that actively administer water rights. For example, the Shoshone Hydroelectric Power Plant, located on the Colorado River a few miles upriver from Glenwood Springs, has a senior water right for 1250 cfs with a priority date of 1902. When the flow at the plant’s diversion dam drops below 1250 cfs, its owner places a “call” on the river. Under Colorado law the Division Engineer, an employee of the Colorado State Engineer, then shuts off sufficient upstream junior uses to bring the flow back to 1250 cfs. A “Shoshone call” is almost an annual occurrence.
The Colorado River Compact places two specific flow obligations on the Upper Division states at Lee Ferry. Article III (d) requires these states to not cause the ten-year cumulative flow to be depleted below seventy-five million acre-feet. Additionally, under Article III (c), if there is not sufficient surplus water available, then each basin is responsible for one-half of the deficiency (the difference the annual treaty delivery and the available surplus water). Assuming there is no surplus water and the 1944 Treaty delivery to Mexico is 1.5 maf per year, the Upper Division states would have to deliver to Lee Ferry, an additional 750,000 af per year.
Thus, using the Shoshone analogy, the Lower Division states claim they have a 1922 Compact water right for up to 82.5 maf every ten years. Note, we say “up to” because in the last few years, pursuant to Minute 323, annual deliveries to Mexico have been slightly less than 1.5 maf. For many reasons, the Upper Division states do not agree that their 1922 Compact obligation is 82.5 maf every ten years, see: “On the Colorado River, there are no Simple Disputes,” (link: On the Colorado River, there are no Simple Disputes – jfleck at inkstain: ).
If (or more likely when) the ten-year flow at Lee Ferry were to drop below ~ 82.5 maf, and there is no consensus agreement among the basin states in place, it is clear that the Lower Division will then attempt to place a compact call on the Upper Division states (and perhaps legally challenge the Secretary’s operation of Lake Powell) to increase deliveries at Lee Ferry. Where the Shoshone Plant analogy breaks down is what happens once a call is placed. Colorado law directs the State Engineer/Division Engineer how to administer a Shoshone call, but intentionally, there is no equivalent of the Colorado State Engineer in the Colorado River Compact. The Colorado River Compact negotiators debated and rejected a compact commission with enforcement powers. Arizona’s Winfield Norviel suggested such a commission, but led by Colorado’s Delph Carpenter, it was rejected. Carpenter abhorred the idea of creating what he referred to as a “super agency.”
Except for Article V which provides for the Directors of the Reclamation Service and USGS to cooperate, on an ex-officio basis, with the basin State Engineers to collect and publish data on Colorado River flows and uses, the 1922 Compact provides no role for the federal government. The Secretary of the Interior is not even mentioned. Instead, the compact negotiators provided two mechanisms for resolving disputes and enforcing the provisions of the compact. Article VI is a dispute resolution provision which has never been used. The somewhat cumbersome provision provides that when a dispute arises, upon the request of one governor, the resolution process can be triggered. If this happens, each state governor then appoints a commissioner to formally negotiate a resolution with the other states. If the commissioners reach an agreement, it must be ratified by the affected state legislatures, most likely all seven. If a resolution is reached under Article VI, the compact does not require it to be approved by Congress.
The second mechanism is litigation. Article IX states: “Nothing in this compact shall be construed to limit or prevent any State from instituting or maintaining any action or proceeding, legal or equitable, for the protection of any right under this compact or the enforcement of any of its provisions.” Thus, if Lee Ferry ten-year flows drop below 82.5 maf, the compact vehicle to implement a “compact call” is for one or more of the Lower Division states to initiate litigation under Article IX and convince the U.S. Supreme Court, or its appointed Special Master, that the Upper Division states are not complying with the compact.
Assuming no agreement among the states to avoid compact litigation, a compact call scenario might occur as follows: The ten-year flow at Lee Ferry is forecast to drop below 82.5 maf tripwire (it might be a little less if corrected for actual deliveries to Mexico). The Lower Division then states demand that the Secretary increase releases from Lake Powell or, alternatively, the UCRC implement a curtailment to bring the flow up to 82.5 maf by the end of the water year. Via the UCRC, the Upper Division states respond that they are in full compliance with the 1922 Compact and insist that the Secretary not increase releases from Lake Powell. Lacking a consensus agreement among the states, the Secretary makes no change to the prescribed annual release forcing the Lower Division states to initiate litigation. Assuming the Supreme Court accepts the case, it would now be up to the court or its Special Master to decide if the Upper Division states are in compliance with the compact. If they are not, a remedy could be the imposition of a compact call by ordering the UCRC to implement a curtailment pursuant to the 1948 Upper Basin Compact. How long might litigation take? It could be decades, or the Lower Division states might succeed with a request for immediate relief. No one knows.
While the 1922 Compact does not give the Secretary of the Interior any special power or authority, under subsequent federal legislation and the 1963 decision in Arizona v. California the Secretary has considerable power and authority. For example, under Section 602 of the 1968 Colorado River Basin Project Act, Congress directed the Secretary to promulgate criteria for the coordinated long-range operation of the federal reservoirs. It also set priorities for the annual release of water from Lake Powell. The first priority is “releases to supply one-half the deficiency described in Article III (c) of the Colorado River Compact, if any such deficiency exists and is chargeable to the States of the Upper Division.”
The legislation, however, is silent on who or what entity decides if any such deficiency exists and is chargeable to the States of the Upper Division. According to Tony Davis (link: Arizona water officials, others blast feds for not protecting dam – Our Community Now), a spokesman for the Arizona Department of Water Resources suggested that the Secretary has this responsibility. But even if the Secretary does ultimately decide how much water must be released from Lake Powell to satisfy the obligation of the Upper Division states to Mexico under the 1922 Compact, if the Lower Division states believe the Upper Division states are violating the 1922 Compact, it could result in litigation. In fact, a decision by the Secretary to interpret the compact could be the trigger for litigation. After the Secretary signed the 1970 Long-range Operating Criteria which set a minimum objective release of 8.23 maf per year from Glen Canyon Dam, the Upper Division states seriously considered litigation. They decided against it because they concluded they could not show any actual injury. The impact of climate change on the flow of the river has now fundamentally changed that dynamic.
The Lower Division State’s letter was directed to Secretary Burgum, but it is a message to the entire basin. The March 24-Month study confirms what we already know. The basin has two basic choices: litigation or a basin-wide agreement implementing fundamental change. Let’s hope it’s the latter.
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
Click the link to read the article on the Utah State University website (Jack Schmidt, John Fleck, Kathryn Sorensen, Eric Kuhn, Katherine Tara):
March 21, 2025
In Short:
Since the onset of the Millenium Drought 25 years ago, water agencies in the Colorado River Basin have been challenged by the overwhelming, yet essential, tasks of balancing total water use with a reduced supply and recovering some of the reservoir storage lost since the last time the system was relatively full in summer 1999. By monitoring long-term changes in basin-wide reservoir storage, we can readily judge the success of these efforts.
In mid-March 2025, total storage in 46 reservoirs tracked by Reclamation was the third lowest in the 21st century for this time of year. The total amount of storage was the same as it was in late July 2021 when water managers described the situation as “serious” and declared a shortage in Lower Basin water supply. Between late July 2021 and mid-March 2023, water storage further plunged to an unprecedented low, but the exceptional runoff of 2023 provided modest recovery. However, basin storage in mid-March was 2.79 million acre feet, or 9%, less than the summer 2023 peak. In mid-March, 33% of the basin’s storage was in Lake Mead, 29% was in Lake Powell, 29% in 42 federal and non-federal reservoirs upstream from Lake Powell, and 9% in Lake Mohave and Lake Havasu. Water has been accumulating in Flaming Gorge Reservoir since early February and throughout the winter in a few smaller Upper Basin facilities but has been withdrawn from other large federal Upper Basin facilities and from Lake Powell. Lake Mead has been going down since late February. It is likely to be that total basin reservoir storage will decline until the beginning of the 2025 snowmelt runoff season and will only modestly recover, because inflow this year is forecast to be below average and less than in 2024.
System conservation and Assigned Water development by the Lower Division states and Mexico have prevented storage in Lake Mead from being even lower than what it is today. However, recent Reclamation projections indicate that consumptive use in the Lower Basin in 2025 will be larger than in 2024, suggesting that basin reservoir storage at this time next year will be even less than it is today. Projections of Upper Basin consumptive use are not available at this time. The continued decline and lack of recovery of water in reservoir storage conveys the clear message that our efforts to balance use with supply and to recover storage have not succeeded. The Colorado River water crisis endures.
In Detail:
On 15 March, active storage in 46 reservoirs in the Colorado River watershed that are tracked by Reclamation in the Bureau’s Hydrodatabase[1] was 26.9 million af (acre feet), the same amount as on 21 July 2021 (Fig. 1). That amount was the third lowest total basin storage on 15 March of any year of the 21st century[2] and is approximately 45% of the total stored in these reservoirs the last time the basin’s reservoirs were relatively full in late July 1999[3]. On 15 March, 33% of the basin’s storage was in Lake Mead, 29% in Lake Powell, 29% in 42 reservoirs upstream from Lake Powell, and 9% in Lake Mohave and Lake Havasu[4]. These data remind us of the challenge in providing a secure and reliable water supply to the Southwest, southern California, and northwestern Mexico.
Figure 1. Graph showing total reservoir storage in 46 reservoirs reported by Reclamation in its Hydrodatabase (blue line), as well as the contents of Lake Mead and Lake Powell (orange line), 42 reservoirs upstream from Lake Powell (green line), and in Lake Mohave and Lake Havasu (red line). Data are between 1 January 1999 and 15 March 2025. Total basin reservoir storage today is the same as in late July 2021. Credit: Center for Colorado River Studies
It is instructive to remember how today’s small amount of reservoir storage was viewed when it occurred in summer 2021. On 27 July 2021, The New York Times posted the headline, “Two of America’s largest reservoirs reach record lows amid lasting drought.” That story led with these words, “The water level in Lake Powell has dropped to the lowest level since the U.S. government started filling the enormous reservoir on the Colorado River in the 1960s — another sign of the ravages of the Western drought.”[5] In the article, Wayne Pullan, Reclamation’s Upper Colorado Basin Regional Director, said, “This is a serious situation,” and Brad Udall said, “I’m struggling to come up with words to describe what we’re seeing here.” In mid-August 2021, Interior formally announced a water shortage in Lake Mead, triggering cuts on water deliveries, especially to Arizona farmers.
But today, there is less discussion about whether this small amount of reservoir storage represents a crisis. In part that may be because the season of snowmelt is ahead of us rather than behind us, as was the case in late July 2021. We hope that inflow this coming spring will recover some storage, but, this winter’s snowpack is merely average[6], and the basin’s soils are very dry. The Bureau of Reclamation’s “most probable” forecast of unregulated inflow to Lake Powell in 2025 is only 6.77 million af[7], 70% of the 30-year average and less than in 2024. Additionally, there may be little sense of concern, because we survived these conditions between July 2021 and March 2023. In fact, total basin storage plunged to only 21.3 million af in mid-March 2023. Perhaps, we are distracted by the engineering, legal, and political intricacies of the negotiations concerning post-2026 consumptive use and the seeming dysfunction of those negotiations. Perhaps, we are resigned to low reservoir storage as the new normal. Perhaps, we are the frog in the pot of water whose temperature is gradually rising, and we do not realize the water is about to boil.
Although significant strides have been made to conserve water, further reductions in water use throughout the basin are necessary, should we experience a succession of very dry years such as occurred between 2002 and 2004 and between 2020 and 2022. The post-2026 negotiations primarily have focused on strategies to reduce basin consumptive uses to match the 21st century’s declining supply, but today’s small amount of storage reminds us that it is critically important to also develop policies to recover reservoir storage to ensure security and reliability of the system.
To date, it has been exceptionally hard to recover storage. Despite the Lower Colorado River Basin System Conservation and Efficiency Program, the Upper Basin System Conservation Pilot Program, the Drought Response Operations Plan, Assigned Water development programs and large expenditures to reduce consumptive use using the Inflation Reduction Act, the Basin’s water managers have made no progress in rebuilding storage except that provided by the unusually large inflows of 2023. Between mid-July 2023 and mid-April 2024 (immediately prior to the onset of spring snowmelt inflows), the basin’s reservoirs were only drawn down by 2.2 million af, the smallest drawdown of total basin storage of the last 15 years[8]. However, the winter 2023/2024 snowpack yielded below average inflow to Lake Powell, and the basin only gained 2.5 million af of storage (Fig. 2). As of 15 March, the 46 reservoirs of the basin have been drawn down by 3.1 million af since the peak storage of those reservoirs in mid-July 2024. During the remainder of March and part of April, reservoir drawdown will continue to deplete storage originally accumulated in 2023.
Figure 2. Graph showing reservoir storage in different parts of the Colorado River basin between 1 January 2021 and 15 March 2025, summarizing periods of increase and decrease in total storage. Lake Mead, Lake Powell, and the 42 reservoirs upstream from Lake Powell each store approximately 30% of basin’s total storage. Credit: Center for Colorado River Studies
Low storage in Lake Mead persists despite 3.94 million af of water savings by the Lower Colorado River Basin System Conservation and Efficiency Program since 2006 (Fig. 3) and despite approximately 3.7 million af of Assigned Water development. Although additional savings are needed in 2025, the prospects of significant savings are not encouraging. Water users in the Lower Basin and Reclamation measure actual use and forecast trends in real time, and we anticipate 6.5 million af of main stem consumptive use by the three Lower Basin states. Commendably, this is less than the states’ nominal 7.5 million af/yr allocation under the Supreme Court defined allocation. Arizona is expected to take the largest share of those cuts, with projected main stem use of 2.1 million af, 74% of its nominal allocation. Nevada is projected to use 68% of its 300,000 af allocation, and California is projected to take 96% of its 4.4 million af allocation.[9] However, the Lower Basin’s projected 6.5 million af use is more than last year’s 6 million af of use. It is unclear the extent to which use in 2025 might fluctuate based on the available of federal funding to compensate water users for their conservation efforts, given the uncertainty enveloping federal policies under the new administration. We have no comparable set of numbers that allow evaluation of anticipated Upper Basin use and actual savings of wet water. [ed. emphasis mine]
Figure 3. Graph showing water conserved in Lake Mead resulting from the Lower Colorado River Basin System Conservation and Efficiency Program and conservation efforts in Mexico. Credit: Center for Colorado River Studies
Deficit spending is likely to continue between now and mid-April and will primarily be from Lake Mead and Lake Powell, because the total storage in the 42 reservoirs upstream from Lake Powell is no longer being depleted[10]. The basin-wide spatial pattern of reservoir operations in late winter and early spring 2025 has been storage of water in small upstream reservoirs and continued withdrawal of water from some CRSP facilities including Lake Powell, and recently from Lake Mead. Draw down continues at Granby (the primary storage facility of the trans-basin Colorado-Big Thompson Project), Blue Mesa, Navajo, Fontenelle, and several smaller reservoirs[11]. These Upper Basin depletions have been somewhat offset by small amounts of accumulation at other reservoirs[12]. Flaming Gorge Reservoir, the largest facility upstream from Lake Powell, was at its lowest at the very end of January and increased 41,100 af of storage in February and the first half of March. In contrast, the total contents of Lake Powell and Lake Mead continue to be drawn down. Lake Powell was at its highest on 1 January 2025, has lost 803,000 af of storage since that time, and will probably continue to decline for another month, based on projections by Reclamation[13]. Lake Mead increased in storage after 1 January, peaked in late February, and subsequently lost 74,000 af. Last year, storage in Lake Mead continued to be lost until early August, and the same pattern is likely this year. The total loss of storage in Lake Powell and Lake Mead between 1 January and 15 March was 476,000 af. The rate of loss from the Mead-Powell system for the next few weeks will be determined by the balance between inflows to Lake Powell and releases from Lake Mead.
[2] Total active storage in the same 46 reservoirs on 15 March 2025 was less than on the same date in 2022 (23.5 million af) and in 2023 (21.3 million af).
[3] On 21 July 1999, total active storage in the same 46 reservoirs was 59.5 million af.
[4] Lake Mead stored 9.01 million af, Lake Powell stored 7.85 million af, the 42 reservoirs upstream from Lake Powell stored 7.74 million af, and 2.30 million af were in Lake Mohave and Lake Havasu on 15 March.
[5] On 27 July 2021, active storage in Lake Powell was 7.90 million af, approximately the same as today.
[6] On 20 March 2025, snow water equivalent (SWE) in the Upper Colorado Region was 97% of median with 18 days remaining until the annual peak SWE typically occurs.
[8] This comparison is for the reservoir drawdown between the mid-summer peak and the following spring’s minimum storage prior to the next year’s runoff. The smallest draw down of total basin reservoir storage in the recent 15 years was between 13 July 2023 and 17 April 2024 (2.15 million af). The second smallest drawdown was 2.61 million af between 6 July 2014 and 4 May 2015. Drawdown was 2.56 million af between 4 August 2011 and 30 April 2012 and was 2.82 million af between 28 July 2019 and 29 April 2020.
[10] Maximum draw down of these Upper Basin reservoirs was 1.49 million af on 26 February 2025.
[11] Net drawdown exceeding 1,000 af between early January and mid-March occurred at Granby (69,600 af), Williams Fork (6,570 af), Dillon (4,520 af), Green Mountain (8,940 af), Ruedi (5,310 af), Taylor Park (1,790 af), Blue Mesa (17,200 af), Fontenelle (54,100 af), Upper Stillwater (1,230 af), and Navajo (28,400 af) Reservoirs.
[12] Reservoirs accumulating more than 1,000 af storage between January and mid-March were Willow Creek (1,300 af), Rifle Gap (2,600 af), Vega (1,400 af), Crawford (1,750 af), Big Sandy (1,670 af), Eden (1,150 af), Meeks Cabin (2,290 af), Red Fleet (1,030 af), Steinaker (2,910 af), Strawberry (7,050 maf), Starvation (15,200 af), Moon Lake (3,180 af), Scofield (4,950 af), and Vallecito (6,060 af) Reservoirs.
Westwide SNOTEL basin-filled map March 20, 2025 via the NRCS.
Click the link to read the article on The Denver Post website (Elise Schmelzer). Here’s an excerpt:
March 20, 2025
Snowpack across the entire Upper Colorado River Basin sits at 95% of median as the winter draws to a close, according to a report released this week by the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center. But only about 4.5 million acre-feet of water are expected to flow into Lake Powell as snow melts across the Upper Basin — 70% of the median amount recorded between 1991 and 2020. That means there is little hope that spring runoff into the crucial river that makes modern life possible across the Southwest will significantly raise water levels in the region’s two major reservoirs: Lake Powell and Lake Mead…
March 1, 2025 seasonal water supply forecast summary. Map | List
Below-normal runoff is becoming a norm that must be dealt with, Miller said. Research shows that warmer temperatures, drier soils that suck up water and more variable precipitation — all fueled by climate change — have significantly reduced runoff in the Colorado River Basin. Those are among factors that contribute to the discrepancy between normal snowpack and below-normal inflow to Lake Powell, Miller said.
“As a basin, we’re having to face the fact that there is more demand for water than the river can provide,” he said.
Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2024. Credit: Brad Udall
Fort Morgan has never fully owned its water supplies. The small farm town on the Eastern Plains has always leased its water from whomever had some to spare.
But with the late February settlement of a lawsuit that will allow construction of the $2 billion Northern Integrated Supply Project, or NISP, to move forward, Fort Morgan’s 10,564 residents will rest easier, knowing that for the first time, they will own the water that flows from their taps, according to City Manager Brent Nation.
“It has been our intention all along to own our water,” Nation said. “With this settlement, we can finally move forward. It’s a good thing for us.”
Fifteen water districts and cities in northern Colorado have banded together to build the massive project, which will take water from the Cache la Poudre River and create two dams and reservoirs and a sprawling pipeline system.
Participants include Fort Collins-Loveland Water District, Erie, Fort Morgan, Left Hand Water District, Central Weld County Water District, Windsor, Frederick, Lafayette, Morgan County Quality Water District, Firestone, Dacono, Evans, Fort Lupton, Severance and Eaton.
The Northern Integrated Supply Project, currently estimated at $2 billion, would create two new reservoirs and a system of pipelines to capture more drinking water for 15 community water suppliers. Credit: Northern Water
When completed, sometime after 2030, according to Northern Water, which is NISP’s sponsor, it will deliver 40,000 acre-feet of water annually to some 80,000 families. One acre-foot equals nearly 326,000 gallons, enough to serve two to four urban households each year.
But before then, and for years to come, the settlement will begin reshaping and restoring the Poudre.
Why the fuss?
Concern over the river has been rising for years.
According to Save the Poudre, nearly 400,000 acre-feet of water flow out of Poudre Canyon, but some 300,000 acre-feet are taken out by farmers and others almost immediately, leaving the river shallow, stressed and over heated as it flows more than 100 miles to its confluence with the South Platte River east of Greeley.
According to the settlement agreement, the $100 million will pay to move water diversion points farther downstream, leaving more water in the river as it flows east, rather than taking the water out higher up and reducing its flows.
Water-sharing arrangements between cities and farmers will be written to enhance recreation and stream improvements. New fish and boat passages will be installed around existing dams on the river. A new network to track the health of the river, its temperature and water quality, will also be added…
New dams and reservoirs must go through extensive permitting and environmental reviews to win approval from federal and state regulators. It took NISP about 15 years to win its final permit. That permit already includes requirements that will help the river, according to Northern spokesperson Jeff Stahla.
Under the federal permit, for instance, one-third of the total water delivered by the project must be delivered at specific volumes to boost stream flows in the winter and in the summer to aid fish and cool water temperatures, Stahla said.
Help delivered through the new settlement will come in addition to the federal and state requirements.
“It’s going to make a significant difference to the Poudre,” Northern Water General Manager Brad Wind said.
The settlement has also taken a lot of the heat out of the rooms where water planners and environmentalists…fought for more than a decade…
Dan Luecke is a well-known hydrologist and environmentalist who led the successful fight to stop Two Forks dam southwest of Denver in the 1980s. That too was a long, tortured battle, which largely ended when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, with backing from the White House, rejected the proposal in 1990. There was no financial settlement then, Luecke said. But the $100 million Poudre agreement, though not as large as others in the American West, such as the $450 million Klamath River settlement, is noteworthy.
“$100 million is a pretty substantial number. It’s impressive in my mind,” Luecke said. “And the complexity of it, that they have to pump water in these reservoirs and use long pipelines to get the water back out to the urban areas. … It’s monumental.” (Luecke is a board member of Water Education Colorado, which founded Fresh Water News.)
The Fort Collins-Loveland Water District, which serves parts of both cities, is the largest participant in the NISP project, and will pay hundreds of millions of dollars for its share of the project and the settlement. And that’s OK with Stephen Smith, a member of the district’s board.
The Fort Collins-Loveland Water District, which serves parts of both cities, is the largest participant in the NISP project, and will pay hundreds of millions of dollars for its share of the project and the settlement. And that’s OK with Stephen Smith, a member of the district’s board.
“I feel comfortable with that,” Smith said, adding that he was speaking as a private individual, not a board member. “This money is going to go into the Poudre. If the money were going to buy off Save The Poudre, that would be a negative to me, but to have this six-member committee and to have an opportunity to put $100 million into the river, I consider that to be outstanding, I couldn’t be happier.”
Early March is usually when I emerge from my wintry water nerd slumber and begin tracking the rise in my beloved hometown river, Albuquerque’s Rio Grande.
Yesterday morning the core family unit packed sandwiches and went down to the Rio Bravo Bridge, on Albuquerque’s south side. It’s a favorite spot because of the graffiti – the engineers built a lot of canvas for the artists to work with.
Bridge, with art. Photo credit: John Fleck/Inkstain.net
The county crews had recently painted over the graffiti on the bridge abutments, which always means a fun new canvas and a bunch of new art.
The river’s low – at around the 10th percentile on the dry side at the Central Avenue gage, the nearest measurement point upstream of here. I dashed off Tuesday’s post in a hurry because news, but what’s about to happen deserves more attention.
One of the deep/fierce discussion underway I’m having with some smart colleagues is the question of how much our community values a flowing river. One of the reasons we’re arguing, umm, I mean discussing, is that evidence about public attitudes is thin.
We’re about to have a Rio Grande through Albuquerque substantially drier than we’ve seen since the early 1980s. Before that time, summer drying was common because of community water management choices: larger supplies were diverted into irrigation ditches, leaving the Rio Grande to go dry. The river essentially dried through Albuquerque in eight out of ten years during the 1970s. That began shifting in the 1980s because of wetter climate, but more importantly because of water management choices that reflected a shift in community values.
Rio Grande Silvery Minnow via Wikipedia
Beginning in the 1990s, the federal Endangered Species Act became the water policy driver, keeping water in the river’s main channel to keep the Rio Grande silvery minnow alive. “This little fish, that human efforts keep alive,” my Utton Center colleague Rin Tara has written, “is a powerhouse for dictating river flows in the Middle Rio Grande.”
For those who care about the Rio Grande (you wouldn’t have read this far if that didn’t include you), the whole paper is worth a read. It is the first time anyone has pulled together in a single narrative the history of the role of the silvery minnow in the last three decades of water management on New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande. Rin’s legal scholarship also sheds new light on the way the Endangered Species act functions in practice in a situation like ours – an effort to keep a species alive in a river far removed from the ecosystem in which the species evolved. This disconnect is at the heart of the challenge posted by the ESA in the third decade of the 21st century. As I said, terrific new paper.
Given the current context – a river at risk of drying in 2025 – the challenge to community values around the Rio Grande is something I’ll be watching closely. Here’s Rin (“2028 BiOp” is a new minnow management plan now in development – read the whole paper, Rin explains):
Rio Grande, March 12, 2025. Photo credit: John Fleck/InkStain.net
Big Dog
I rode back out to the river for this morning’s bike ride.(I am trying to ride and picnic more and work less, with mixed results.) The ride took me through downtown and across what used to be swampland to the Rio Grande. What we think of today as “the river,” the narrow channel snaking through the valley between levees, is a tiny fraction of what the Rio Grande used to be before we decided to build a city here. Even as I acknowledge the loss of the expansive wetlands that used to spread across the valley floor, I also love my city. Both of those things can be true, as is often the case with the most interesting moral tensions.
I stopped at one of my favorite river views to snap a picture for a friend I’d been texting with who loves the Rio Grande, but has moved to a city on a different (also beloved!) river.
It’s just above Central Avenue/Route 66. There’s a bike trail bridge over the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District’s Central Avenue Wasteway, and when there’s water you feel like you’re out in the river. The wasteway delivers water from the irrigation system back to the main river channel, and when I was riding by this morning it was flowing at ~40 cubic feet per second. It’s a popular fishing spot, for both humans and cormorants, though I saw neither this morning taking advantage of the flows.
The journalist in me can’t resist small talk in a place like that. A woman was walking by with a big, beefy, happy dog. I asked if it was OK to pet, and did, though she had to restrain the friendly animal from jumping up on me with his wet, muddy paws. They’d walked down from their neighborhood just up the valley, so the pooch could play in the river. One of the weird things about low flow is that it actually makes the river more accessible for picnics and dog play. As it drops, you’ll see people out on the sandbars.
Until, of course, there’s no water left for frolicking. I assume there were silvery minnows out there in the channel. They cannot know what is coming, nor, frankly, can we.
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
Here in New Mexico, our growing season has lengthened since the 1970s, even as stream flows have decreased. Fire season starts earlier, lasts longer, and in some years, ignites the forests into record-breaking blazes, like the gargantuan Hermits Peak-Calf Canyon and Black fires in 2022.
If you look at the last century in New Mexico, stretches of higher temperatures have lengthened; heat waves are hotter and nights, consistently warmer.
Rising heat and expanding aridity harm ecosystems and wildlife and hotter days are dangerous for anyone outside, especially people without housing or access to cool spaces. Extreme heat even interacts with certain medications people need for their physical and mental health.
It should be no surprise that we’re facing another crackly-dry spring, summer, and fall. Fans watching the March 2 Oscars on Albuquerque TV saw flashing red-flag fire warnings. The next day, high winds and dust storms blasted the state; near Deming, a haboob of fast-moving dust shut down highways.
West Drought Monitor map March 11, 2025.
As of early March, 92 percent of New Mexico was experiencing drought, with almost 30 percent of the state in severe to extreme drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.
Arizona is in even worse shape: 100 percent of the state is in drought, with 87 percent in severe to exceptional drought. And the interior West’s three-month outlook is for warm, dry conditions — especially in Arizona and New Mexico.
Here in New Mexico, the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District—which supplies water for farms—is warning runoff season will be short and river flows, low. The district’s leaders are urging farmers to plan for extended periods between irrigation deliveries and say that without summertime monsoons, they will not meet everyone’s needs this year.
During the 1900s—including during the infamous 1950s drought and earlier in this century—armers could often still expect full water allocations in a dry year.
Now, when farmers don’t receive water—and the Rio Grande dries for long stretches—it’s not only because there isn’t enough snow melting off the mountains. It’s also because consistently dry soils suck up any moisture, making both forests and croplands thirstier.
Not only that, but decades of persistent drought and warming temperatures have desiccated reservoirs along the Rio Grande and its tributary, the Chama River.
On the Chama River, Heron Reservoir is 14 percent full; its neighbors, El Vado and Abiquiu, are at 14 percent and 51 percent respectively. Further down the watershed, on the Rio Grande in southern New Mexico, Elephant Butte Reservoir is only 13 percent full, and its neighbor, Caballo, nine percent full.
In New Mexico, some water users, including the irrigation district, rely on water piped from the Colorado River watershed into the Chama and then the Rio Grande. This year, most of that supplemental water won’t be there.
The view upstream on both watersheds is also troubling, especially in Arizona, New Mexico and southern Utah where the snowpack is “below to well-below median.” Last month, the Colorado River’s two largest reservoirs, Lake Powell and Lake Mead, were 34 percent full, the lowest they’d been in early February for the last 30 years of records.
I’m alarmed by many things happening right now, including the disappearance of climate data from federal websites and the gutting of federal workforces and budgets. We need wildland firefighters, scientists, and the staffers who kept our parks and public lands functioning.
But as a reporter who has covered climate change and its impacts in my state for more than two decades, I take the long view along with a local view.
We have known for decades that the planet is steadily warming and that the impacts of climate change would intensify. And we must resist focusing solely on the current chaos of the federal government. [ed. emphasis mine]
Laura Paskus. Photo credit: Writers on the Range
There’s never been a better time to become immersed in local politics or organizing, and to hold state and local leaders accountable for action on climate.
We can collaborate on local solutions and work together to better deal with the crises we face. Really, we have no choice.
Laura Paskus is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about Western issues She is longtime reporter based in Albuquerque and the author of At the Precipice: New Mexico’s Changing Climate and Water Bodies.
Audubon Rockies is committed to advocating for smart, science-driven, and collaborative water policies that sustain healthy rivers and resilient ecosystems—because protecting water means protecting the birds, communities, and economies that depend on it. As the 2025 legislative session unfolds, water remains a foundational topic. By collaborating with both Republicans and Democrats, we have successfully driven meaningful change over the years.
Key decisions at the Colorado State Capitol shape how we manage this vital resource in the face of climate change-influenced supplies and changing demands. From securing funding for water conservation efforts to advancing nature-based solutions and ensuring equitable water management, this year’s legislative discussions will have ripple effects across our landscapes, wildlife, and people. Stay tuned as we break down the important areas of water legislation work moving through the State Capitol this session.
Funding for Water
Colorado’s budget plays a critical role in protecting and sustaining our water resources, yet ongoing fiscal challenges, a deficit of more than one-billion dollars, and federal funding fluctuations put pressure on funding water, habitat conservation, and more. Colorado is facing a budget crisis due to a combination of factors, including declining tax revenues, rising costs, and constitutional constraints like the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights (TABOR), which limits the state’s ability to generate and allocate funds. Increased demands on essential services such as education, healthcare, transportation, and water infrastructure, coupled with inflation and economic uncertainty, have strained available resources. As demands on our water supply grow and climate change intensifies pressures on our rivers, wetlands, and watersheds, it is essential to advocate for sustainable financial solutions that support Colorado’s long-term resilience. Audubon is working to ensure that state water funding remains strong and dedicated to conservation, restoration, and resilience-building efforts.
Healthy mountain meadows and wetlands are characteristic of healthy headwater systems and provide a variety of ecosystem services, or benefits that humans, wildlife, rivers and surrounding ecosystems rely on. The complex of wetlands and connected floodplains found in intact headwater systems can slow runoff and attenuate flood flows, creating better downstream conditions, trapping sediment to improve downstream water quality, and allowing groundwater recharge. These systems can also serve as a fire break and refuge during wildfire, can sequester carbon in the floodplain, and provide essential habitat for wildlife. Graphic by Restoration Design Group, courtesy of American Rivers
Wetlands Rulemaking
In 2025, Audubon Rockies remains actively engaged in the HB24-1379 rulemaking process. In collaboration with state agencies and conservation partners, Audubon is advocating for science-based policies to ensure that permitting prioritizes avoiding and minimizing impacts to vital ephemeral streams and wetlands, and that any key ecological functions lost due to permitted activities in these waters are compensated for through restoration activities. These objectives align with the legislative intent of HB24-1379 and are vital to protecting the fragile wetland ecosystems birds rely on. By providing expert input, supporting transparent decision-making, and championing nature-based solutions, Audubon works to secure strong, practicable, lasting protections for freshwater habitats and the birds and communities that depend on them.
Protecting Land and Rivers
Audubon works closely with the State of Colorado to ensure that public lands and healthy watersheds are protected and sustainably managed for both people and wildlife through federal administration changes. Through outreach, collaboration, and on-the-ground conservation efforts, Audubon supports management and policies that enhance watershed resilience, improve habitat connectivity, and safeguard the vital water resources that flow through our public lands.
As Colorado River negotiations continue, Audubon remains committed to supporting collaborative, science-based solutions that balance the needs of people, wildlife, and ecosystems. With increasing pressures from drought, climate change, and growing water demands, finding equitable and lasting agreements among basin states is critical. Audubon advocates for water management strategies across the Colorado River basin that prioritize healthy ecosystems and sustainable water use while ensuring that birds and communities reliant on the Colorado River have a secure future. By working with policymakers, water leaders, and conservation partners, Audubon advocates for consensus-based solutions that promote the river’s ecological integrity and support a sustainable water future for all.
An artist’s rendering shows what Glade Reservoir, a key component of the Northern Integrated Supply Project would look like after construction. The project is going ahead after Northern Water agreed to settle a lawsuit by Save the Poudre for $100 million.
Click the link to read the article on the KUNC website (Alex Hager):
March 5, 2025
This story is part of ongoing coverage of water in the West, produced by KUNC in Colorado and supported by the Walton Family Foundation. KUNC is solely responsible for its editorial coverage.
A massive new reservoir project in Northern Colorado is closer to reality after its architects settled a lawsuit with an environmental group seeking to block construction. The Northern Integrated Supply Project, or NISP, will go ahead sooner than expected after a lawsuit settlement. Northern Water will pay $100 million into a trust after Save the Poudre, a nonprofit, agreed to drop its lawsuit. That money will fund river improvement projects.
The controversial water project, which will cost around $2 billion to build, has been tied up in planning and permitting for more than two decades. Advocates for the new reservoirs say it’s an important way to make sure fast-growing communities in Larimer and Weld counties have enough water for new homes and residents. Opponents worry it will take water out of a Cache la Poudre River that is already taxed by diversions for cities and farms.
…the settlement money will go into a new “Poudre River Improvement Fund.”
[…]
The fund can be used for “ecological, habitat, and recreational improvements,” including the potential creation of a “Poudre River Water Trail” from Gateway Park in Poudre Canyon to Eastman Park in Windsor. The fund will be managed by a six-person committee, three of whom will be appointed by Save the Poudre, and three by the NISP enterprise…
Proponents of the Northern Integrated Supply Project say it will help fast-growing communities along the northern Front Range keep pace with the volume of new residents. (From Northern Water project pages)
NISP would supply 15 different water providers along the northern Front Range through two reservoirs and a system of pipelines and pumps. Northern Water, the agency that would build and operate NISP, projects that it will provide water to nearly 500,000 people by 2050.
Water from the system would flow to a diverse group of towns and cities north of Denver. Small, fast-growing towns such as Erie and Windsor stand to receive some of the largest water allocations from NISP. The list also includes the Fort Collins Loveland Water District, the Left Hand Water District, which is just north of Boulder, and Fort Morgan on the eastern plains.
“These are communities that have identified the need for housing as something that will increase the quality of life,” said Jeff Stahla, a spokesman for Northern Water. “So this is an important time for us as residents to realize that we can help to solve some of the problems and some of the the challenges that we’re seeing out there on the horizon as more people choose to live here.”
Stahla said construction is expected to take off in 2026, with some pipes being laid in the summer and fall of this year. If Save the Poudre’s lawsuit was still in place, he said, construction would have begun in “2027 or even beyond.” Glade Reservoir, the centerpiece of NISP’s water storage system, would flood a valley northwest of Fort Collins that is currently home to a stretch of U.S. Highway 287 connecting Fort Collins and Laramie, Wyo. That section of road would be rebuilt further East.
Kids play in the Poudre River Whitewater Park near downtown Fort Collins on Oct. 20, 2023. The Cache la Poudre is often referred to as a “working river” because it carries a large volume of water from manmade reservoirs to cities and farms far from its banks. Photo credit: Alex Hager/KUNC
Stahla said Northern Water’s permit includes requirements to mitigate environmental impacts caused by the new reservoirs. He alluded to the fact that the river is already connected to a number of large reservoirs and its water is piped and pumped far away from its original course.
“The Poudre River has really been a working river for 150 years now,” he said. “What NISP is planning to do certainly is not the only impacts to the river that have been occurring or will occur.”
…Stahla…suggested work on diversion structures, which redirect the river’s water towards farms and water treatment plants. Stahla suggested they could be modernized… and moved further downstream to allow more water to flow through certain sections of the river.
The South Platte River Basin is shaded in yellow. Source: Tom Cech, One World One Water Center, Metropolitan State University of Denver.
Congress ended a program that offered $8.3 million, mostly to ranchers, to conserve water in 2023. Wyoming wants it renewed.
Wyoming’s federal delegation has filed legislation to restore millions of dollars to pay state irrigators in the Colorado River Basin for conserving water.
Bills filed in the U.S. Senate and House would restore the System Conservation Pilot Program that Congress ended in December.The program contracted to pay $8.3 million in 2023 to 21 entities in Wyoming,
The conservation effort aims to supply more water to downstream states without harming Wyoming water users. Headwater upper-basin states of Wyoming, Colorado, Utah and New Mexico favor voluntary paid-for conservation over uncompensated reductions proposed by California, Nevada and Arizona.
The seven Colorado River Compact states propose competing programs to share dwindling flows in a river system that supports some 40 million people in the southwest and Mexico.
It’s uncertain whether the bills might enable the conservation program this year, according to members of the Upper Colorado River Commission who met Tuesday.
“With that uncertainty,” said Wyoming State Engineer Brandon Gebhart, “the four of us as [upper-basin] commissioners haven’t had sufficient time to figure out what a program would be.”
He made his remarks to fellow commissioners Becky Mitchell, Gene Shawcroft and Estevan Lopez representing Colorado, Utah and New Mexico respectively.
The federal representative on the commission, Anne Castle, resigned on Jan. 28 as requested by the Trump administration, according to her resignation letter obtained by journalist John Fleck. She stated she was worried that the administration’s policies are creating “a more disordered and chaotic Colorado River system.”
Bills moving
The pilot program contracted with 21 entities to conserve 15,571 acre feet of “consumptive use” in 2023, according to the latest report posted on the commission’s website published in June 2024. Eighteen of the contracts offered ranchers up to $611 an acre foot for water left in the stream.
(A report on the 2024 program has not been posted on the commission’s website, but could be available this summer if the previous publication schedule is followed.)
The four states and federal government had hoped to continue the program in 2025, but it expired in December when the U.S. House failed to reauthorize it.
“Last year, the Commission was hopeful that the SCPP would be reauthorized and could be used as a potential tool,” Mitchell, the chair of the Upper Colorado group said at the meeting. “However, that federal package that we saw [at] the end of last year did not include much in the way of natural resources legislation.”
Maps of ranch land along South Piney Creek show how low flows in 2022 resulted in curtailment of irrigation compared to the flush water year of 2023. The images were presented to the Upper Colorado River Basin Commission in February 2025. (Screengrab/UCRBC)
Although bills to resurrect the program have been filed, “the future of SCPP legislation remains unclear, as does federal funding,” she said. In 2023, the multi-state program administered by the Bureau of Reclamation received $125 million through the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act.
The Colorado River Basin System Conservation Extension Act would extend the program through 2026, at which time stopgap rules governing drought allocations expire. U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper, a Colorado Democrat, sponsored the Senate version with U.S. Sens. John Barrasso and Cynthia Lummis, Wyoming Republicans. U.S. Rep. Harriet Hageman, also a Republican, has offered a version in the U.S. House.
“Our bipartisan legislation extends these important programs to help address drought issues across our states.” Barrasso said in a statement. Lummis called the program “forward-thinking.”
Hageman said the pilot program to pay ranchers allows irrigators and water managers a chance to explore alternatives to “severe water regulation during droughts.”
Both bills have begun to advance in their respective chambers.
Yampa River Basin via Wikimedia.
Piney creeks, Little Snake River
The 2023 program saw significant contracts awarded in the Little Snake River drainage in Carbon County and also around Big Piney in Sublette County.
The largest single contract was for $2.6 million in the Little Snake. Irrigators along North, Middle and South Piney creeks collectively signed up for $3.4 million.
By the end of the 2023 summer, a consultant estimated the program conserved 8,477 acre feet of water or about 55% of the 15,507 acre-foot contracted goal for Wyoming, according to calculations made from the 2023 Upper Basin report.
In the Piney creeks area, the program saved about 55% of the stated goal, in the Little Snake about 42%.
“In all cases, the participant completed the required conservation activities,” the 2023 report states. “Variation in average estimated [conserved consumptive use] and actual [conserved consumptive use] is to be expected” due to annual variations in temperature and precipitation, the report said.
In theory, the water that ranchers — plus one municipal and one industrial entity — did not use would flow on to Lake Powell. That would help prevent lower basin states from demanding their share — allowed under laws, compacts and agreements — and forcing reductions in upper basin usage.
Myriad factors complicate that concept, however, including whether conserved water actually makes it to the reservoir, how and whether upper basin states are credited for conserved water, what toll evaporation takes and more.
Green River Basin
What’s not complicated is the impact of diminishing river flows to the economy of Wyoming’s Green River and Little Snake River basins and Cheyenne, which uses Colorado River Basin water diverted across the Continental Divide.
“Hydraulic shortages, the increased variability and the changed timing of the available water supply increases the uncertainty to all of our water-use sectors,” Gebhart told fellow commission. “If our farmers and ranchers are forced to reduce or eliminate the herd size because they don’t have the water to grow the food, it can take many years to recover and regrow these herds.”
There are larger implications, he said.
“These shortages also impact the fish, wildlife, wetlands, the riparian areas, and that has an impact on our tourism [and] recreation sectors,” Gephart said. “Not only do [lower flows] negatively impact our economy, but they impact our culture, and it impacts the relationships that have evolved and exist between all of our water use sectors. This can create conflict.”
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
Hoover Dam from the U.S.-93 bridge over the Colorado River December 3, 2024.
Click the link to read the article on the AZCentral website (Brandon Loomis):
February 27, 2025
Key Points
Congress and the Biden administration committed $4 billion to Western drought relief, including money for users who agree to leave water in Lake Mead.
The money is apparently caught in a freeze of federal funds ordered by President Donald Trump, though questions remain without a Reclamation commissioner.
Lawmakers and Arizona’s top water official fear that without the funding, the Colorado River could be pushed deeper into drought, leading to more cutbacks in Arizona.
Facing a dwindling supply that provoked emergency actions to keep the river flowing past Hoover Dam, Congress directed $4 billion to Western drought relief, most of it aimed at shoring up Colorado River water storage. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation signed deals with irrigators, tribes and other rights holders to forgo deliveries and save 1.5 million acre-feet of water over three years through 2025, with some extensions beyond this year. A second round of funds, which members of Congress say is also frozen, is intended to make long-term efficiency improvements, such as lining canals to stop losses when water is delivered to farms. Without the water or the agreements, some officials fear the ongoing negotiations among the seven river states could fall apart…
Officials with the Bureau of Reclamation did not respond to requests for comment or to confirm the freeze or how long it is intended to last. The administration has frozen various congressionally appropriated funds as cost-cutting aide Elon Musk’s team searches for fraud and savings. The president has not yet appointed a commissioner for the Reclamation Bureau, which manages the dams on the Colorado…
Projections for likely reservoir storage by the end of next year put Mead dangerously close to 1,050 feet above sea level, or the trigger that would cause Arizona to lose another 80,000 acre-feet, Arizona Water Resources Director Tom Buschatzke said this week…Failure to save water with the contractual deals that Reclamation made for 2025 could tip the region into that next shortage tier, he said, because the projections already assume that the water will have been saved.
“I have advocated strongly to my Arizona (congressional) delegation — the entire delegation — that that money in both the upper and lower basins that was committed needs to be spent,” Buschatzke said. “Those projects are critical to stabilizing the system as we continue to work toward a post-2026 world.”
The Biden administration inked three-year deals with about two dozen water users, including the cities of Phoenix, Tucson, Scottsdale and others, at a rate of $400 per acre-foot. California’s Imperial Irrigation District got a sweeter deal, at $777 for a one-year contract in 2023, but also has among the river’s safest rights against reductions when reservoir levels fall. Most of the water users who signed on were in Arizona, though the biggest deal, a four-year pact to leave 351,000 acre-feet in Mead, was with the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California and Paloverde Irrigation District of California. Arizona’s largest deal was with the Gila River Indian Community, for 341,000 acre-feet, according to a chart provided by Stanton’s staff. The contracts in the Lower Basin states — those downstream of Glen Canyon Dam — totaled nearly $664 million…A second batch of federal conservation funds, also reportedly frozen, is intended to make lasting water savings by, for instance, putting $87 million toward an advanced water purification plant in Tucson that will enable 56,000 acre-feet to stay in Lake Mead over a decade. A $107 million investment in the Gila River Indian Community, south of Phoenix, is projected to save 73,000 acre-feet over 10 years.
Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2024. Credit: Brad Udall
A high desert thunderstorm lights up the sky behind Glen Canyon Dam — Photo USBR
Click the link to read the article on the KNAU website (Melissa Sevigny). Here’s an excerpt:
February 24, 2025
This week’s scheduled meeting of a group focused on the management of Glen Canyon Dam was canceled by the Trump administration. It’s one of many scientific conferences and federal meetings that have been canceled or indefinitely postponed. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation says the meeting will be rescheduled to ensure new Department of the Interior and Reclamation leadership are “fully briefed” on the Glen Canyon Dam Adaptive Management Work Group. The group advises the Secretary of the Interior on how best to manage Glen Canyon Dam in keeping with the 1992 Grand Canyon Protection Act. Matt Rice of American Rivers says that involves balancing the needs of water and hydropower users with cultural, environmental, and recreational values.
“And this group is the forum to balance and make management decisions based on all those values, to protect those values. So massively important.”
[…]
The canceled meeting comes amid a funding freeze that has stalled Colorado River conservation projects and amid layoffs at the U.S. Geological Survey, National Park Service and other federal agencies.
Outlet flow at Cochiti Dam in 2002. By U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Douglas Bailey – U.S. Army Corp of Engineers Digital Visual Library[1]Image description pageDigital Visual Library home page, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1813624
I got a text message yesterday afternoon about this, which is nuts:
Accidentally dumping 8,000 cubic feet per second into a river channel that hasn’t seen that much water since 1985 is a big deal. The gage data suggests the river level rose four feet basically instantaneously.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the stuff the federal government does in water management in the United States that we used to be able to take for granted, like, for example safely operate the dams.
We all love to complain about the federal government’s water management work, but the complaints are based on narrow questions and presume a broad societal consensus that there’s a bunch of stuff the federal government can be reliably counted on to do while we argue over details. Reclamation and the Corps are gonna operate the dams, for example. The details we argue about are at important margins, but they’re at the margins, based on the presumption that the basic stuff will get done.
Like, for example, spending the money that Congress approved to help us manage shortages in the Colorado River Basin. Which money has now been yanked out from under us by the autocrats who think they know better, as Alex Hager reported yesterday.
I have no idea what happened at Cochiti Dam yesterday, whether the person who made the “procedural error” was new because the old timer who knows how to run the dam took the early buyout and bailed. But I do know that is exactly the “what if” scenario I was gonna lay out in a blog post that’s been percolating in my head about this question of how we in the West go forward in water management when the federal government suddenly becomes an unreliable partner.
I am not saying this because complaining about the stunningly arrogant idiots crashing through the federal government right now is great clickbait. I’m tired of all the angry clickbait, frankly, which is why I hadn’t written the blog post until today.
My point here is a serious question, not a rhetorical one: What would it mean for us in Western water management if the federal government becomes an unreliable partner? What must we do to prepare? What does that even look like?
New Mexico Lakes, Rivers and Water Resources via Geology.com.
The deadline for the U.S. Department of Interior to determine the post-2026 future of Lake Powell and Lake Mead — and the entire Colorado River basin — is now six months away. As precarious negotiations continue between the Upper and Lower Basin stakeholders, the new presidential administration has also cast concerns on the future of the critical water system.
“Honestly, I’ve seen nothing out of the administration that suggests that they even know there is a Colorado River,” said Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet during a press call on Thursday, Feb. 13. “I had a daily conversation with somebody at least, probably three times a day, in my office with somebody on the Colorado River, and we’ve seen nothing so far.”
[…]
On Thursday, Feb. 20, Colorado water officials provided state lawmakers in the House Agriculture, Water and Natural Resources Committee with a high-level update on the negotiations, which will set the basin’s future operating regime…In November, the Bureau of Reclamation released a document with five management options for the river’s post-2026 future. [Becky] Mitchell said that the Upper Basin states submitted an alternative that offers a more sustainable supply-driven approach to management, rather than allowing downstream demand to dictate releases. These states have also agreed to consider conservation efforts and strategic releases, she said…While elements of the Upper Basin’s proposal — and what was proposed by Lower Basin states— have been incorporated into the Bureau of Reclamation’s alternatives, negotiations are attempting to strike a balance…
“I’m hopeful that the change in administration won’t cause a significant change in policy direction on Colorado River issues. It hasn’t in the past, and I’m hopeful that it won’t now,” [Anne] Castle said. “But I’m less optimistic about that than I was a month ago. I still think that’s the case, but now I’m not sure.”
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
The Colorado River District’s State of the River meetings are a spring tradition in Western Colorado, bringing communities together to discuss the most pressing water issues facing our region. These free public events provide valuable insights into river forecasts, local water projects, and key challenges impacting West Slope water users.
Eleven meetings are planned across the Western Slope; see the list below. These events offer an opportunity to hear directly from water experts and better understand the factors shaping the future of our rivers. A complimentary light dinner will be provided, and all events include a Q&A session to address your questions and concerns.
While each program is tailored to reflect local water priorities, key topics at all events will include:
River flow forecasts
Updates on the Colorado River system
Local water projects and priorities
Current challenges facing Western Colorado water users
Shoshone Water Rights Preservation Project updates
If there are specific local issues or projects you would like to see highlighted, please include that information in your registration.
Registration is required, but attendance and dinner are free. We encourage all community members—whether deeply involved in water issues or just beginning to engage—to join us and participate in this important conversation.
Secure your spot today and be part of shaping the future of water in Western Colorado.
Click each event below to register!
Agendas will be posted for each meeting once they are finalized.
A person looks out over the Colorado River near Page, Arizona on November 2, 2022. The seven states that use its water are caught in a standoff about how to share the shrinking supply. They say they want to avoid a court battle, but some states are quietly preparing for that outcome. Alex Hager/KUNC
Click the link to read the article on the KUNC website (Alex Hager):
February 19, 2025
This story is part of ongoing coverage of water in the West, produced by KUNC in Colorado and supported by the Walton Family Foundation. KUNC is solely responsible for its editorial coverage.
When it comes to the Colorado River, a court battle between the states that use its water is sometimes referred to as “the nuclear option.” But now, as those states are locked in disagreement about how to share its water, they are tiptoeing closer toward litigation.
State leaders insist they want to avoid a trip to the Supreme Court, but some are quietly preparing for that outcome.
The Colorado River supplies water to about 40 million people from Wyoming to Mexico. Climate change is shrinking its supplies. The cities and farms that use it are under pressure to rein in demand accordingly.
Water managers from the seven states that use the Colorado River are caught in a standoff about who exactly should use less water, and they appear to have made little progress ahead of a 2026 deadline for new rules about how to share.
In January, Arizona’s government made headlines when a proposed state budget included up to $3 million for litigation related to the Colorado River.
“It’s really a backstop in case we don’t come to a collaborative agreement,” said Tom Buschatzke, Arizona’s top water negotiator.
Buschatzke described the litigation fund as a contingency plan and said state leaders were focused on collaborating.
“I think each state honestly does not want to be in a courtroom rolling the dice regarding how a judge might rule,” he said.
Nevada’s John Entsminger, Arizona’s Tom Buschatzke, and California’s JB Hamby sit on a panel of state water leaders at the Colorado River Water Users Association annual conference in Las Vegas on December 5, 2024. State leaders say they want to avoid litigation, but they are quietly preparing for that outcome. Alex Hager/KUNC
For all of their differences, the two sides of the current Colorado River dispute seem to agree on one central issue: they want to keep their debate out of the Supreme Court. That appears to be the case in the Lower Basin states of Arizona, California and Nevada, as well as the states on the other side of the disagreement — the Upper Basin states of Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico.
“We are the ones who should really shape the outcome here,” said Amy Haas, executive director of the Colorado River Authority of Utah. “We’re the experts. We’re the water managers. We understand the system. Why would we want to relinquish that control and that responsibility?”
She said Utah would prefer to spend its money on avoiding a court battle rather than preparing for one.
“I think it would be folly for us to pursue a litigated outcome here,” Haas said.
An overwhelming majority of Colorado River policymakers — including Arizona’s — say they’d prefer to work amongst themselves instead of getting the federal government involved. Why, then, would Arizona make a show of its proposed litigation fund?
Some onlookers say it’s a negotiation tactic.
“This is definitely a posturing issue,” said Gage Hart Zobell, a Utah-based water lawyer with the firm Dorsey & Whitney. “I think a lot of what we see is the Lower Basin is trying to make it very clear they are willing and open to litigate this issue because they think they have the higher hand.”
Buschatzke outright denied that the litigation fund was a form of posturing, but Hart Zobell said there’s a financial reality that suggests Arizona’s move is a form of saber-rattling.
“In the event litigation does go forward,” he said. “You don’t have to build a litigation fund to come up with $5 million. Any state budget can come up with $1 million, $2 million, $3 million to fight this.”
Hart Zobell pointed to a recent Supreme Court case that helps give some clues as to how the Colorado River debate might get settled if it heads there. The 2024 case “Texas v. New Mexico” brought tensions over another Southwestern river, the Rio Grande, to the high court. The case gave the federal government more leverage in talks about managing that river’s water.
“Under the new Supreme Court precedent, if we get into a lawsuit, they have a right to intervene,” Hart Zobell said. “Once they’re in, we’re not just having Upper and Lower Basin discussing. We’ve got a third party that we’ve got to settle with.”
So Arizona’s litigation fund, Hart Zobell said, it may be a way to remind other states of the consequences if they don’t come to an agreement amongst themselves.
“I think that looming specter is really going to push the states a lot more to finding some negotiated settlement,” he said. “Because if the federal government does intervene, I don’t think any state is going to get what it wants.”
Rows of alfalfa grow in Imperial Valley, California on June 20, 2023. Agriculture uses the majority of the river’s water, and is often at the center of conversations about how to bring down demand on the Colorado River. Alex Hager/KUNC
Arizona’s Buschatzke said that other states, such as New Mexico, Wyoming, and Colorado were also preparing money for Colorado River litigation.
KUNC reached out to each of the seven states that use the Colorado River. Arizona was the only one that indicated it had a specific pool of money for Colorado River work.
A spokeswoman for Colorado’s negotiating team pointed to a “long-standing litigation fund” that could be used for the Colorado River, and a division of the Colorado Attorney General’s office that has been focused specifically on the Colorado River since 2006.
New Mexico and Wyoming’s top water offices declined to comment for this story. The Upper Colorado River Commission, a group that brings together water leaders from Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Wyoming said that it was not preparing a litigation fund.
Native America in the Colorado River Basin. Credit: USBR
The Colorado River basin is also home to 30 federally recognized Native American tribes. Although Indigenous people in the Southwest have been using Colorado River water longer than any other group in the region, they have largely been excluded from discussions about how the river is shared. Tribes that use the river control about a quarter of its flow, but most lack the money and infrastructure to use their full allotments.
Jay Weiner, water counsel for the Quechan Indian Tribe of the Fort Yuma Indian Reservation, said that is likely to add another layer to any legal battle over water.
“There is no version of this that you do not have tribes seeking to intervene in this litigation,” he said. “Or potentially seeking to bring their own claims as part of whatever food fight that the states end up in the Supreme Court over.”
Whether the states settle their differences amongst themselves or in court, they will be forced to reckon with a water supply that has been significantly reshaped by climate change. More than two decades of dry conditions have forced the states into tough conversations about using less water across the farms and cities of the arid West.
“It is very, very hard to ask people to agree to sign up to make hypothetical future sacrifices of bone-cutting magnitude,” Weiner said.
Some state leaders have indicated that the threat of litigation might actually help them make those sacrifices. At a 2023 conference about water law, Nevada’s top water negotiator John Entsminger said the “federal anvil” hanging over the basin states was key to finding agreement during other contentious water-sharing talks over the past two decades.
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
One of the editors of a new international agricultural journal recently invited me to write a guest essay about the impacts of climate change and water scarcity on irrigated farmland, which produces nearly 40% of global food supplies. My essay was published last week in Discover Agriculture.
The invitation to write this essay came as a surprise, a challenge, and an opportunity.
It was a surprise because I am by no means an expert on irrigation. Yes, I’ve been fortunate to have worked with very knowledgeable agricultural experts in recent years in publishing a series of papers on agricultural water use (see below), but the motivation behind those papers has been environmental conservation, not farming or food security per se.
Hence, the invitation was a challenge. I needed to learn a lot very fast if I was going to offer a credible account of the state of irrigated farming from a global perspective.
I accepted this challenge because it provided an opportunity to take stock of the food security risk posed by climate change and water scarcity, and to make the case that global food supplies, farmer livelihoods and farm viability, urban drinking water supplies, and the vitality of freshwater ecosystems are all tightly intertwined. In at least two-thirds of the water-stressed basins (rivers, lakes, aquifers) around the globe, you cannot make progress on any of these issues without addressing the use of water in agriculture because irrigated agriculture accounts for nearly 90% of all water consumed on our planet.
LEVEL OF WATER STRESS OF ALL SECTORS BY MAJOR BASIN, 2018. Source: FAO and UN-Water, 2021, modified to comply with UN, 2021.
The picture I paint in my essay is not pretty. Three-quarters of irrigated farmland suffers from water shortages. One-third of all water use is unsustainable, meaning we are consuming water supplies faster than they are being replenished, resulting in depletion of water stored in reservoirs and aquifers. Climate change is rapidly increasing water risks because of the impact of global warming on water availability. Water scarcity is measurably impacting our food supply, farmer livelihoods, and the economic viability of many farms around the globe.
Our unsustainable overuse of water is also impacting cities that depend on the same water sources as farmers. If water sources are heavily drawn down by irrigation diversions or groundwater pumping, there is less water to support vibrant urban communities and economies.
When the flow of rivers is depleted by diversions to farms and cities, it has a devastating impact on freshwater biodiversity and ecosystem services. Global populations of freshwater animals have declined by 85% over the past half-century, and water depletion is a leading cause.
In closing my essay I struggled mightily to offer hope for the future. As some of my colleagues have said about my usual glass-half-full mentality, “how can you be optimistic when there is so much evidence to the contrary?” The good news is that we have all the know-how and technology we need to feed a growing global population while also sustaining healthy rivers and lakes and wetlands. But the massive challenge is that we desperately lack the leadership, will power, and water governance to bring our knowledge to fruition, and to bring our water use back into balance with nature’s replenishment of our water sources.
It’s often said that people rise to a challenge when their back is against a wall. We’re there now, my friends.
For those interested in other recent work I’ve done with amazing colleagues on water and agriculture:
Richter, B.D., K.F. Fowler, G. Lamsal, C.L. Lant, W.J. Ripple, and R.R. Rushforth (2025). Reducing irrigation of livestock feed is essential to saving Great Salt Lake. Environmental Challenges,18. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envc.2024.101065
Richter, B.D., G. Lamsal, L.Marston, S. Dhakal, L. Singh Sangha, R.R. Rushforth,D. Wei, B.L. Ruddell, K.F. Davis, A. Hernandez-Cruz, S. Sandoval-Solis, and J.C. Schmidt (2024). New water accounting reveals why the Colorado River no longer reaches the sea. Communications Earth & Environment 5, 134. https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-024-01291-0
Richter, B.D., E. Prunes, N. Liu, P. Caldwell, D. Wei, K.F. Davis, S. Sandoval-Solis, G.R. Herrera, R.S. Rodriguez, Y. Ao, G. Lamsal, M. Amaya, N. Shahbol. (2023) Opportunities for Restoring Environmental Flows in the Rio Grande–Rio Bravo Basin Spanning the US–Mexico Border. Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management 150(2) https://doi.org/10.1061/JWRMD5.WRENG-6278
Richter, B.D., Y. Ao, G. Lamsal, D. Wei, M. Amaya, L. Marston & Davis, K.F. (2023) Alleviating water scarcity by optimizing crop mixes. Nature Water. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44221-023-00155-
Richter, B.D., D. Bartak, P. Caldwell, K.F. Davis, P. Debaere, A. Y. Hoekstra, T. Li, L. Marston, R. McManamay, M.M. Mekonnen, B. Ruddell, R.R. Rushforth, and T.J. Troy. 2020. Water scarcity and fish imperilment driven by beef production. Nature Sustainability, https://doi.org/10.1038/S41893-020-0483-
Richter, B.D., J.D. Brown, R. DiBenedetto, A. Gorsky, E. Keenan, C. Madray, M. Morris, D. Rowell, and S. Ryu. 2017. Opportunities for saving and reallocating agricultural water to alleviate scarcity. Water Policy, https://doi.org/10.2166/wp.2017.143
Colorado River “Beginnings”. Photo: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism
NOTE: This is post 30,076 here on WordPress. Whew! I missed the turnover to 30,000 but here’s that post.
Click the link to read the article on the AZCentral.com website (Brandon Loomis). Here’s an excerpt:
February 19. 2025
Negotiators for the states haggling over future cuts to their use of Colorado River water say they’re committed to reaching consensus, though time and snow are running short. The seven states are effectively under a deadline to reach a deal by summer or face whatever water-use restrictions the federal government or courts may impose after the existing shortage guidelines expire next year. Meantime, a slow start to winter precipitation has dialed up the stakes, possibly leading to painful new cuts by the end of next year.
The Upper Colorado River Commission, representing Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming, met virtually on Tuesday and heard projections from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation suggesting that current trends indicate the natural flow into Lake Powell this year will be about 71% of the 30-year average, accounting for near-normal snowpack atop soils that were parched heading into winter. It’s not a great outlook for a reservoir that’s currently 35% full and that holds the key to providing water to the Lower Basin.
“It looks like hydrology is calling us to action,” Colorado’s river commissioner, Becky Mitchell, told colleagues…
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
The rift flows out of a math problem that a previous generation of negotiators set up in 1922. The Colorado River Compact and a suite of subsequent deals tied to it envisioned a river spilling 16 million acre-feet of water in a typical year. The Lower Basin, below Lake Powell, would get 7.5 million acre-feet, and so would the Upper Basin, with some left over for Mexico. But the river today, after decades of drought and warming, sometimes provides only about 12 million acre-feet.
Upper Basin States vs. Lower Basin circa 1925 via CSU Water Resources Archives
Here’s the release from the St. Vrain and Left Hand Water District (Jenny McCarty):
February 21, 2025
LONGMONT – Funding approved by Longmont’s voters in 2024 is enabling the St. Vrain and Left Hand Water Conservancy District to leverage grants and other sources to provide $1.7 million this year to community partners working to address the most imminent water and watershed issues today. The funds will help mitigate wildfire risks, improve farm irrigation, save water by reducing non-functional turf grass, and enhance stream flows to benefit the environment.
In 2025, the District is partnering with and funding the Boulder Valley and Longmont Conservation Districts, Crocker Ditch, HFR Enterprises, Holland Ditch Company, Hover Park Home Owners Association (“HOA”), Town of Lyons, and The Watershed Center. 2025 marks the fourth year the District offered funding through their Partner Funding Program. Including $352,000 earmarked for 2025, the District has awarded 25 partners a total of $1.2 million, leveraging those dollars for more than $6.1 million since January 2022 (369%) toward improvements in water management within the St. Vrain watershed.
The St. Vrain Forest Health Partnership (“SVFHP”) includes 100+ partners including fire districts, agencies, towns and community members working to increase fire resilience to benefit communities, the forests and water quality. A portion of the District’s $352,000 will go to support the SVFHP’s outreach and education efforts. “We couldn’t accomplish this work without the District’s support and funding and are grateful to our community who voted for the ballot initiative,” said Yana Sorokin, Executive Director of The Watershed Center.
The Boulder Valley and Longmont Conservation Districts (“BVLCD”) are working alongside the SVFHP to develop forest management plans on private properties and conduct forest treatments to reduce risk of catastrophic wildfires. “These funds will help to reduce wildfire risk to life, property, and important surface waters within District boundaries,” explained Rob Walker, Director of BVLCD.
Boulder County Ditch and Reservoir map. Credit: The St. Vrain and Lefthand Water Conservancy District
The District is also partnering with Crocker Ditch, HFR Enterprises, and Holland Ditch Company to help improve local aging agriculture infrastructure and vegetation encroachment to support its future function.
Andy Pelster, Agriculture and Water Stewardship Sr. Manager for City of Boulder, which has ownership in Crocker Ditch, stated, “District funds will help improve water delivery efficiency and tracking.” Danna Ortiz, a representative of HFR Enterprises added, “This project gives us hope that the Knoth Reservoir may once again function, providing water for our ag neighbors and wildlife.” Larry Scripter, Vice President of the Holland Ditch Company said, “We wouldn’t be able to keep going with this work without the District’s financial support.”
Hover Park HOA is leading one of the first District-supported turf replacement projects in Longmont this year. In addition to funding support from other local agencies, Hover Park HOA is working to “replace over 8,200 square feet of thirsty turf grass with water-wise plants that support pollinators, look beautiful, and will create a more usable space for our community,” says Barbara Hau, resident representative for the HOA.
The Town of Lyons is using District funding to complete a preliminary analysis for managing stream flows on the St. Vrain Creek through Lyons for environmental benefit. Tracy Sanders, Lyons Flood Recovery Lead, said the District’s funds might “help determine whether environmental flows can improve creek conditions for temperature, and ultimately fish health.”
“These partnerships continue the District’s strong history of collaboration,” said Sean Cronin, Executive Director of the St. Vrain and Left Hand Water Conservancy District. “Each project advances our goals the voters approved: to protect water quality, maintain healthy rivers and creeks, support local food production, and protect forests that are critical to our water supply,” he added.
About the St. Vrain and Left Hand Water Conservancy District
The St. Vrain and Left Hand Water Conservancy District (“District” and “SVLHWCD”), created in 1971, is your trusted local government working to safeguard water resources for all. The District’s work is founded in the Water Plan five pillars: protect water quality and drinking water sources, safeguard and conserve water supplies, grow local food, store water for dry years, and maintain healthy rivers and creeks. Aligned with the Water Plan, the District is pleased to promote local partner water protection and management strategies through the Partner Funding Program.
As a local government, non-profit agency formed at the request of our community under state laws, the District serves Longmont and the surrounding land area and basin that drains into both the St. Vrain and Left Hand Creeks. Learn more at http://www.svlh.gov.
If you have any questions about the District’s Partner Funding Program, please contact Watershed Program Manager at: jenny.mccarty@svlh.gov or 303.772.4060.
February snowstorms brought some relief to parched landscapes in the Colorado River Basin, but the river’s reservoirs are less than half full heading into a spring runoff season that is expected to be lower than normal, according to a briefing this week at the Upper Colorado River Commission.
The dry conditions underline water concerns in the drought-strapped river basin and come as high-stakes negotiations over new, post-2026 operating rules continue. If similar conditions occurred under any of the options for the new operating rules, it would mean deep cuts for Lower Basin states, which include Arizona, California and Nevada, officials said during the commission’s meeting Feb. 18.
It was a “stark” report, said Rebecca Mitchell, Colorado’s representative on the commission and the state’s lead negotiator on Colorado River issues.
“We have to acknowledge that cuts [in water use] are probable, possible and likely,” she said. “I want to reiterate: We are committed to working with the Lower Basin states toward that seven-state consensus.”
The Colorado River’s system of reservoirs store water to ensure critical supplies reach 40 million people across seven states, 30 tribal nations, and parts of Mexico.
As of Monday, the water stored in all of the basin’s reservoirs was 42% of the total capacity, according to a presentation during the commission meeting when the latest reservoir conditions were discussed.
Lake Powell, an immense reservoir on the Utah-Arizona border, was 35% full. And Blue Mesa, a federal reservoir and the largest reservoir in Colorado, was 62% full.
Westwide SNOTEL basin-filled map February 20, 2025 via the NRCS.
The reservoir levels will rise once the mountain snowpack melts in the spring. But the spring runoff forecast is low for all of the federal reservoirs in the Upper Basin, which includes Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming. The runoff into Lake Powell is forecast to be 67% of average for April through July.
These conditions can change as more snow falls on the region, but the two-week outlook shows a return to dry conditions, according to the commission presentation.
In Colorado, the February snowstorms also helped boost the snowpack to 94% of the 30-year norm. The state’s snowpack typically peaks in early April.
“The snow brought us some positivity. I still like to remind folks, when we see Lake Powell at 35% full, that means it’s 65% empty,” Mitchell said. “That’s troubling.”
If any of those alternatives governed water in the basin right now, then the three Lower Basin states would need to cut their use by 1.8 million to 2.8 million acre-feet based on the conditions in February, said Chuck Cullom, the commission’s executive director. In the worst possible scenarios, the cuts would deepen to between 2.1 million and 3.2 million acre-feet.
How such cuts would play out among the four Upper Basin states, like Colorado, is less clear. Some options include cutting use by 200,000 acre-feet.
Each of the basins has the legal right to use about 7.5 million acre-feet of water per year. One acre-foot roughly equals the annual water use of two to three homes.
The post-2026 operating plans are not final, and negotiators from the seven basin states are still at odds over how cuts should be made in the river’s worst years.
Graphic credit: The Colorado River water crisis its origin and future Jock Schmidt, Eric Kuhn, Charles Yackulic.
Lower Basin officials have said everyone needs to cut back in dry years, and voluntary conservation does not provide enough certainty.
Upper Basin officials say their states should not have to make mandatory water cuts but could do voluntary conservation. The Lower Basin is using more than its legal share and should cut its water use first, Upper Basin officials have said.
“The opportunities for conservation and other activities in the Upper Basin is limited by water supply,” Cullom said. “You can’t conserve water that isn’t available.”
“Everyone is suffering”
Upper Basin water users already experience water shortages every year — and this must be acknowledged in how the river is managed in the future, officials said during this week’s meeting.
According to the commission’s analysis, water users in the Upper Basin end up using about 1.3 million acre-feet less than their full supply each year, based on data from 1991 to 2023.
The full supply is the maximum amount of water used. Across all four states, this maximum use typically totals about 5.18 million acre-feet per year. The commission says shortages happen when water users must use less than their normal maximum supply.
The Upper Basin hasn’t developed its full 7.5 million-acre–foot share because of the uncertain water supply, officials said.
Scott Hummer, former water commissioner for District 58 in the Yampa River basin, checks out a recently installed Parshall flume on an irrigation ditch in this August 2020 photo. Compliance with measuring device requirements has been moving more slowly than state engineers would like. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
To cut water use, ditch riders tell water users to shut their headgates, which control how much water runs from one river, stream or ditch to another. Farmers get two cuttings of hay instead of three, which reduces their profits. Ranchers, facing higher hay prices or hay production challenges, might end up raising smaller cattle herds, impacting beef and dairy production, officials said.
The impacts keep going from there: People hire fewer ranch hands. Cities tighten their summer watering restrictions. Local recreation economies take a hit — as do ecosystems that are overstressed by higher temperatures and drought.
Tensions rise between community members who need water for different reasons and are trying to share an uncertain supply, said Commissioner Brandon Gebhart of Wyoming.
“And trying to do that without completely destroying one or the other,” he said. “Oftentimes, this means that everyone is suffering.”
Well, with the fate of constitution democracy in the courts where we know the mills grind slowly (as opposed to the grinders who break things quickly); and with the money frozen for farmers doing well by doing good in water conservation; and neither white smoke nor black smoke arising from the chimneys of the enclaves trying to envision the next decade or so for the Colorado River – I’ll take a break from my wonkish efforts to think outside the box, to remember a friend and mentor, and friend of the River, who thought outside the box often in the last half of the 20th century.
The cantankerous Colorado River water community recently lost a valued member, L. Richard Bratton, a water attorney in the Upper Gunnison River Basin from 1958 till his death January 28.
Dick Bratton’s scope of influence went beyond the Upper Gunnison mountain valleys, however; he was a creative thinker who never met anyone he could not talk to – or listen to, or work with. A born “connector,” he became an active player in events on the cusp of major changes in the development of water in the entire Upper Basin of the Colorado River.
Born in 1932 and raised in Salida, Dick Bratton came to Gunnison to attend Western State College, then went to the University of Colorado Law School. While at school in Gunnison, he had met Ed Dutcher, a somewhat legendary West Slope water attorney. Shortly after Bratton completed law school, Dutcher invited him to join his firm in 1958.
Aspinall Unit dams
Bratton joined Dutcher’s firm that year – and in 1959, the Colorado River Storage Project (CRSP) came to the Upper Gunnison River Valley in a big way, with Congressional approval of funding for CRSP’s Curencanti Project (Blue Mesa, Morrow Point and Crystal Dams, now renamed the Wayne Aspinall Unit), and he found himself plunged into all of the ongoing and emerging challenges faced by small communities with agrarian roots in an urbanizing and industrializing world.
The first challenge was Theodore Roosevelt’s conservation vision. The “Father of American Conservation” had a different view of conservation than most of us have today; to him and his philosopher sidekick Gifford Pinchot, conservation meant first the orderly development of resources otherwise wasted – like the Colorado River pouring itself into the sea in a two-month uncontrolled and mostly unused flood of snowmelt. And when it came to what should be developed and by and for whom, their rule was “the greatest good for the greatest number,” with “for the longest time” sometimes remembered, sometimes not.
In the Upper Gunnison, the Bureau of Reclamation had chosen the Curecanti Reservoir site not to benefit the small ranches and farms of the Upper Gunnison valleys, in accord with their original Rooseveltian mission. It was chosen because it was a great site for a major reservoir in a regional water development for four states that were paranoid over their obligation to make sure a set amount of water passed on to the three more populous states below the Colorado River canyons. The greatest good for the greatest number.
The Curecanti Reservoir as originally proposed, however, would have backed 2.5 million acre-feet (maf) of water almost up to the city limits of Gunnison, with the shallow end exposing major mudflats every summer as the reservoir was drawn down, and the prevailing westerlies would have turned Gunnison into a dust bowl. Bratton’s partner and mentor Ed Dutcher had invested much of his career into opposing this local sacrifice for the greatest good for the greatest number – not just standard NIMBYism; the community was fighting for its life, and also for the life of two small towns that would be inundated along with 30 miles of legendary fishing stream, 23 small river resorts, and 6,000 acres of ranchland.
After much noisy negotiation with the Bureau of Reclamation for Dutcher and his “Committee of 39,” the Bureau dropped the reservoir size to just under one million acre-feet, saving Gunnison from the dust inundation, but still losing the two smaller towns and their economic activities – and the great fishing.
Being sensitive to the cost the project was imposing on the ranchers and farmers that the Bureau was actually created to serve, however, an “Upper Gunnison River Project” with seveeral small reservoirs was included as a future participating project in the CRSP Act, to be paid for partially by the revenues from the hydroelectric plant on the three largest CRSP dams: Glen Canyon, Flaming Gorge and the Curecanti Unit.
So one of Bratton’s first jobs in Gunnison was helping talk the people of the valley into taxing themselves a little to create an Upper Gunnison River Water Conservancy District under state law, both to help the Bureau lobby for project funding in Washington, and to nudge and harass the Bureau into getting project planning and execution done. Creating the Conservancy was accomplished in an election in 1959, a busy year for Dutcher and Bratton.
In 1961 Dutcher was appointed to a judgeship, and Bratton took over the law firm. That same year, the Bureau opened an office in Gunnison, and began the preliminary work for the Curecanti Project – clearing the land of trees, relocating roads, and buying out all of the human occupants, an unpleasant and depressing process in the valley. The “greatest good for the greatest number” rule, applied in many areas other than conservation, has nothing in the formula for the “lesser numbers” – probably one source of our current urban-rural troubles.
As construction proceeded on the Curecanti dams, though, a “big pivot” in the way the entire nation perceived the American West was becoming unignorable. The Bureau of Reclamation had depended on the willingness of the American people to continue investing in the “reclaiming” of arid lands to create more of the iconic “family farms” and to otherwise further the development of raw resources to feed the people and industries of an increasingly urbanized and industrialized economy. But the increasingly urbanized, industrialized – and after the Second War, increasingly mobilized – American people were enjoying a rising standard of living that included more time for recreation – paid vacations! – and “their” western public lands were increasingly perceived not as a resource hinterland, but as a vacation paradise, to be kept as pure and pristine as possible with millions of people trampling through.
On Bratton’s home front, the Crested Butte Ski Resort also opened in 1961 upvalley, forcing the beginning of a transition in the Upper Gunnison’s self-perception as part of the mining, farming and ranching “working west,” as opposed to a service sector serving visitors to the great western playground. “Conservation” was swinging from the Rooseveltian orderly development of otherwise “wasted” resources toward conservation as careful guarding of the West’s resources, including preservation of its residual wild magnificence, Wallace Stegner’s “society to match its scenery.”
Bratton himself was the son of a “working west” family, with a couple generations before him in Colorado engaged in mining and mining-related economic activities. But like the political creator of the Colorado River Storage Project, West Slope Congressman Wayne Aspinall, Bratton could see where things were going, and worked to make the transition at home as non-disruptive as possible for the “Old West” yielding to the “New West.” (Aspinall’s CRSP Act included provisions for recreational facilities around the major dam sites – but also provisions for a number of “Old West” valley-scale projects that could not meet cost-benefit analyses on their own without assistance from hydropower revenues.)
The Taylor River, jewel of the Gunnison River basin. Photo: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism
The creative quality of Bratton’s work in that transition is probably best shown in the story of the resurrection of the Taylor River. The Taylor River collected runoff from some of the highest and snowiest peaks of the Continental Divide and came down to the Gunnison River through 25 miles of canyons – a beautiful mountain river with a reputation among “anglers” (don’t even say “bait”) as a world-class fishery, even in the early 20th century.
But in the 1930s, the Bureau put a dam at the head of the canyons to store late-season water for farmers in the Uncompaghre River valley, more than a hundred miles downriver at the receiving end of the Gunnison Tunnel, the Bureau’s first big transbasin water project. That project to make life better for distant farmers effectively killed the Taylor and its aquatic life as a river, reversing its natural wet and dry cycles and turning it into an irrigation canal that ran at the will of the Bureau. This was a great loss to the people of the Upper Gunnison, who knew that the best time for fishing was after work anyway. The loss of the Taylor was their first lesson in what the greater good for a greater number meant for the lesser number.
And the Curecanti Project was their second lesson, inundating another twenty-some miles of world-class fishery, along with two small towns and a fishing-resort community that made decent livings from the river. But the Upper Gunnison farmers and ranchers held out hope that, once the Curecanti Unit was in place to play its role in the larger world of Colorado River Basin policy and politics, the Bureau would at least fulfill its promise and begin work on the Upper Gunnison River Project to give them a little help with late-season water.
But just in the decade-and-a-half from the difficult passage of the CRSP Act in 1956 to the completion of the Curecanti Project, public support for expensive irrigation projects to develop western lands basically dried up, replaced by active opposition to anything disturbing the natural beauty and magnificence of The West. It became obvious to the Upper Gunnison Conservancy board and Bratton – attorney on retainer to the board for its first 40 years – that there would be no federal funds for an Upper Gunnison River Project.
But Bratton – a convener and collaborator who managed to maintain good working relationships even with opponents – started to play on the Bureau’s guilt at not being able to fulfill their promise to the people of the Upper Gunnison. He found a willing collaborator in Bob Jennings, a Bureau manager in the West Slope office. Together, they devised a plan whereby the Bureau would let the Uncompaghre Valley Water Users Association store their Taylor Reservoir water in the Blue Mesa Reservoir – at least a day closer to where the water would be used. Then the water could be moved from the Taylor Reservoir down to Blue Mesa from in a schedule more in tune with the natural flow of a river. Maybe the Bureau could not create small upstream reservoirs for the “Old West” agrarian economy, but it could facilitate the resurrection of a beautiful river for the “New West” economy taking shape (and Old West workers who liked to fish).
This was accomplished with a 1975 agreement among the Uncompahgre Valley farmers, the Colorado River Water Conservation District, the Upper Gunnison River Water Conservancy, and the Bureau. The Bureau would manage the “new” river, but with input from the other three parties – input that begins each spring with a meeting of an Upper Gunnison River “Local Users Group”: representatives from Taylor River irrigators, whitewater recreation businesses, Taylor Reservoir flatwater businesses, anglers, and riparian residents. This group sits down with projections for the summer runoff, and compile suggestions for the Bureau on the operation of the Taylor River that will meet all their needs more or less (and being sure to get the Uncompahgre farmers’ water down to Blue Mesa storage in a timely way). The Bureau and other parties can override their recommendations, but seldom need to. And the Taylor is a beautiful mountain river again – “unnatural” only in being democratically operated by all of its Old West and New West users.
Bratton did not stop there. He led the Upper Gunnison River Water Conservancy District through the process of filing for rights on a secondfill of the Taylor Reservoir. Taylor Park above the reservoir gathers on average half again the 110,000 af needed for the Uncompahgre users first fill. Any water collected in a second fill would be left in the river, for wildlife and other environmental benefits downriver – a right consistent with Colorado’s 1973 instream flow law, to sustain the aquatic and riparian environment “to a reasonable degree.” This water right, inconceivable before the 1970s and NEPA awarenesss, was granted in 1990 – just in time to help thwart a proposal for a transmountain diversion to the Front Range from the adjacent Union Park.
Even then, Bratton was not yet done playing on Bureau guilt for imposing the Curecanti Unit on the Upper Gunnison with no compensatory project for the local water users – even though the Upper Gunnison community generates a lot of economic activity from the Curecanti National Recreation Area around Blue Mesa Reservoir. Early in the 21st century, Bratton wanted to develop some ranchland he owned adjacent to the City of Gunnison, with a tributary of the Gunnison River running through it. This development was not received by local residents with any great enthusiasm.
But Bratton remembered a ‘handshake agreement’ with the Bureau from the Curecanti construction era, that the Bureau would replace the great sport fishery the reservoir would inundate with some good public access fishing streams elsewhere in the basin. So rather than developing a standard golf-course-rimmed-with-expensive-homes development, Bratton reminded the Bureau of its promise, and sold it the stream corridor through his land for public access, to be managed by Colorado Parks and Wildlife.
Bratton was also deeply committed to his alma mater, Western State College (now Western Colorado University). In 1975 – obviously a busy year in his life – he orchestrated the creation of the Western State College Foundation, with bequests from former Colorado Governor Dan Thornton and his wife Jessie, valley ranchers; the Foundation continues as an important support for program development at the University.
The following year, 1976, he collaborated with Western history professor Duane Vandenbusche on a water education course. The next year, 1977, that evolved into the “Western Water Workshop,” to which Bratton invited an incredible lineup of speakers, including – in the same room – longtime West Slope Congressman Wayne Aspinall, Denver Water’s longtime chief counsel and bitter West Slope adversary Glenn Saunders, Assistant Bureau of Reclamation Director Cliff Barrett, former Governor John Vanderhoof, and a number of other luminaries of the “water buffalo era.” Your author was privileged to sneak into those summer sessions – one of the most memorable of which was Bureau man Cliff Barrett trying to suss out the implications of President Carter’s recently released “hit list,” a list of water projects, including a number of CRSP projects, that did not meet a new cost-benefit analysis – essentially the official end of the era of federally-funded western water development.
The Western Water Workshop continued for forty years; a place where East Slope and West Slope, Old West and New West participants could gather for a couple days of off-the-record escape from the physical and cultural heat of the cities in the summer. I sserved as director of the Workshop for six year after the turn of the century until I retired from Western, and I found Dick Bratton to still be a great resource and idea person. At that time he had been appointed by President G. W. Bush to be the federal representative on the Upper Colorado River Commission. He once took pains to save my Water Workshop job when I had inadvertently offended one of the old “water buffalo” with a couple invitees to a session; Bratton reminded his old friend that the Workshop promised “the presentation of all reasonable points of view.”
The reader may feel this article is more a history lesson than the remembrance of a man. (A full obituary can be found in the Feburary 6 Gunnison Country Times – www.gunnisontimes.com) But it is my feeling that some people cannot be understood outside of the history they are part of, and Dick Bratton was such a person. Like his friend Wayne Aspinall, he tried to help Colorado’s West Slope (and the larger intermountain West) negotiate the difficult, inevitable, and ongoing transition from the “Old West working economy” to the “New West amenity economy.” His heart may have been more with the former, but he became at home with the latter because, basically, he was at home in the world, whatever it was, and enjoying working with whomever he encountered there. And he was a fisherman as well as the son of a miner.
More than a year after an environmental group sued to stop a $2 billion northern Colorado water project, whispers of a settlement are being heard as the case winds its way through U.S. District Court in Denver.
Last January, Save The Poudre sued to block the Northern Integrated Supply Project, a two-reservoir development designed to serve tens of thousands of people in northern Colorado. The suit alleged that the Army Corps of Engineers had not adequately weighed the environmental impacts and less harmful ecological alternatives to the project…
Colorado-Big Thompson Project map. Courtesy of Northern Water.
Northern Water, which operates the federally owned Colorado-Big Thompson Project for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, is overseeing the permitting and construction of NISP. The agency also declined to comment on any potential settlement. Northern Water serves more than 1 million Front Range residents and hundreds of growers in the South Platte River Basin.
“We’re still moving forward with what we need to do on the litigation,” Northern spokesman Jeff Stahla said.
Northern Water’s board discussed the litigation in a confidential executive session last week at a study retreat and it is scheduled to discuss it in another private executive session Feb. 13 at its formal board meeting, according to the agenda.
Sources told Fresh Water News and The Colorado Sun that those discussions are related to the potential multimillion-dollar settlement.
Key developments this past year
In October, a federal judge delivered a favorable ruling to Wockner’s Save the Colorado on a case involving Denver Water’s Gross Reservoir expansion project. Now [envisonmental groups] are seeking an injunction to force Denver Water to stop construction of the dam, which began in 2022.
Workers from Denver Water and contractor Kiewit Barnard stand in front of Gross Dam in May to mark the start of the dam raise process. Photo credit: Denver Water.
Raising the Boulder County dam by 131 feet will allow Denver Water to capture more water from the headwaters of the Upper Colorado River on the Western Slope. In its ruling, the federal court said the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had failed to consider the impact of climate change on the flows in the Colorado River.
What impact that ruling may have on the NISP case isn’t clear, but [the environmental group that sued Denver Water] said they believe it will give his organization more leverage to push for changes in NISP.
In addition, the City of Fort Collins has dropped its formal opposition to NISP. And Stahla said Northern has continued to push forward with key parts of the development, including the design work needed to relocate a 7-mile stretch of U.S. 287 northwest of Fort Collins.
Fort Collins Mayor Jeni Arndt said the city changed its stance because most of its environmental concerns had been met through the 21-year federal permitting process.
“The EPA had signed off, and the Corps of Engineers had signed off,” she said. “It was obvious that this was not going to be another Two Forks,” referring to a massive dam proposed in the 1970s by Denver Water on the South Platte River near Deckers. It was rejected by the EPA due to environmental concerns.
Arndt said the city also planned to use a later review process, known as a 1041 review, to address other environmental concerns that might arise.
If NISP is ultimately built, and most believe it will be, it will provide water for 15 fast-growing communities and water districts along the Interstate 25 corridor, including the Fort Collins-Loveland Water District, Fort Morgan, Lafayette and Windsor.
The largest participant in the giant project is the Fort Collins-Loveland District. Board member Stephen Smith said he believes NISP will move forward one way or another and that it is critical to serving the water-short region.
“NISP is going to get built and it will provide water to Fort Collins by 2033,” he said.
The Northern Integrated Supply Project, currently estimated at $2 billion, would create two new reservoirs and a system of pipelines to capture more drinking water for 15 community water suppliers. An environmental group is now suing the Army Corps of Engineers over a key permit for Northern Water’s proposal. (Save the Poudre lawsuit, from Northern Water project pages)
Elk Creek Marina at Blue Mesa Reservoir on the Gunnison River was temporarily closed so the docks could be moved out into deeper water in 2021 after federal officials made emergency releases from the reservoir to prop up a declining Lake Powell. Upper Colorado River Basin officials are requesting monthly drought-monitoring meetings with the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation in hopes of avoiding future last-minute emergency releases. Credit: Heather Sackett/Aspen Journalism
Water managers are preparing for another potentially lackluster runoff this year in the Colorado River Basin.
At a meeting Tuesday, water managers from the Upper Colorado River Commission agreed to write a letter to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation asking for a monthly meeting to monitor drought conditions. Officials from the four Upper Basin states (Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming) are hoping to avoid a repeat of 2021 when emergency reservoir releases caught them off guard.
“We want to be as prepared as possible since hydrology has flipped pretty quickly in previous years,” said UCRC Executive Director Chuck Cullom. “We think it’s prudent to collectively review the forecast and the water supply so that we aren’t caught in the situation we were in in 2021.”
Pine River Marina at Navajo Reservoir. Photo credit: Reclamation
From July through October of that year, Reclamation made emergency releases from three Upper Basin reservoirs: 20,000 acre-feet from Navajo, on the San Juan River; 125,000 acre-feet from Flaming Gorge, on the Green River; and 36,000 acre-feet from Blue Mesa, on the Gunnison River. The goal was to boost water levels at Lake Powell, which had fallen to a critical elevation, and ensure that Glen Canyon Dam could still produce hydroelectric power.
View below Flaming Gorge Dam from the Green River, eastern Utah. Photo credit: USGS
Guidelines for Upper Basin reservoir releases are laid out in the Drought Response Operations Agreement, which was signed in 2019 by the Upper Basin states and the federal government. The three reservoirs are part of the Colorado River Storage Project, and the federal government can authorize emergency releases from them without permission from the states or local entities.
But Colorado water managers were not happy about the timing or lack of notice from the bureau when the emergency releases happened in 2021. Drawing down Blue Mesa, Colorado’s largest reservoir, during the height of the summer boating season forced marinas to close early for the year and was a blow to the state’s outdoor recreation economy.
“It’s February, and we are seeing hydrology that could potentially impact reservoir operations,” Cullom said. “Let’s plan for it rather than reacting over a weeklong period. We’re trying to preempt some of the concerns and criticisms of reservoir operations in 2021.”
Water year 2021 was historically bad, with an Upper Basin snowpack that was near normal at 93% of average but translated to only 36% of average runoff into Lake Powell, the second-worst runoff on record. One of the culprits was exceptionally thirsty soils, which soaked up snowmelt before runoff made it to streams, due to 2020’s hot and dry summer and fall.
Credit: Laurine Lassalle/Aspen Journalism
Officials said current conditions could be setting the basin up for another year like 2021. Alex Pivarnik, a supervisor with the bureau’s Upper Colorado Operations Office, presented the latest data to commissioners Tuesday.
“Coming into the winter, soil-moisture conditions were pretty much dry throughout most of the basin,” Pivarnik said. “And January was a really bad month for us in the basin. … Coming into February, it was kind of a make-or-break for us.”
February’s “most probable” modeling projection for spring runoff into Lake Powell is 67% of average. The February forecast for total Powell inflow for water year 2025 is 71% of average.
Those numbers, taking into account snowpack conditions up until Feb. 5, were down from January’s most probable runoff forecast, which put Lake Powell’s spring inflow at 81% of average and total Powell inflow for water year 2025 at 82% of average.
After a storm cycle that brought snow to mountain ranges throughout the Upper Basin over Presidents Day weekend, snowpack for the Upper Basin stood at 94% of median as of Wednesday. In 2021, Upper Basin-wide snowpack on Feb. 19 was 89%.
“While the snow brought us some positivity, I still like to remind folks when we see Lake Powell at 35% full, that means it’s 65% empty and that’s troubling,” said Becky Mitchell, Colorado’s representative to the UCRC. “I want to note that we’ve been slightly optimistic because of the snow, but it still does not look as good as we’d like.”
Mitchell acted as chair of Tuesday’s UCRC meeting after former chair and federal representative Anne Castle was asked to resign by Trump administration officials last month. A new federal representative to the UCRC has not yet been appointed.
Snowpack for the Upper Colorado River Basin, water years 2021 vs. 2025
This chart shows how much snowpack has been measured at various SNOTEL stations located in the Upper Colorado River Basin.
Snowpack for the Upper Colorado River Basin, water years 2021 vs. 2025 This chart shows how much snowpack has been measured at various SNOTEL stations located in the Upper Colorado River Basin. Chart: Laurine Lassalle – Aspen JournalismSource: SNOTEL Get the dataCreated with Datawrapper
This is a critical time for Colorado River management as the Upper Basin states are in talks with the Lower Basin states (California, Arizona, Nevada) about how the nation’s two largest reservoirs, Lake Powell and Lake Mead, will be operated and cuts will be shared after 2026 when the current guidelines expire. Overuse, drought and climate change have driven reservoir levels to their lowest points ever in recent years.
Cullom gave an overview of the timeline needed to implement a new plan for post-2026 operations. The seven basin states need to reach agreement on a plan by early summer; the bureau would issue a final environmental impact statement by the spring of 2026 and a record of decision by August 2026. New guidelines would take effect in water year 2027, which begins Oct. 1, 2026.
Negotiations with the Lower Basin states, which ground to a halt at the end of 2024, have resumed, and Upper Basin commissioners said they are hopeful that they will reach a consensus. Failure to do so would mean river management decisions would be imposed by the federal government, which is something that state representatives want to avoid.
“A consensus is the best option out there for everyone, and I’m hopeful that we’ll get there,” Mitchell said, adding that “the highest level of certainty that we will have as seven basin states is if we can determine our own future. … I want to reiterate that we are committed to work with the Lower Basin states toward that seven-state consensus.”
Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2024. Credit: Brad Udall
…lackluster January precipitation led snowpack to decline in those states. Last month, snow levels above Lake Powell were 94% of average. As of Feb. 6, snowpack fell to 83% of normal above Lake Powell…At the start of January, hydrologists predicted that spring runoff into Lake Powell between April and July would be 81% of average. Forecasters now expect runoff into the second largest reservoir in the U.S. to be just 67% of normal…The Upper Basin’s snow season is 65% complete as of Feb. 1. But the next month could bring relief, forecasters said. Lake Powell water levels have rebounded more than 40 feet since hitting a record low in 2023. The reservoir currently sits at roughly 34% full, or 3,566 feet above sea level.
Westwide SNOTE basin-filled map February 13, 2025 via the NRCS.
Questions about weed management and water plans along with critical public comment were enough to postpone a vote on a biodynamic farm and agritourism destination at a Garfield County Planning Commission meeting last week. The commission voted to continue the discussion and a vote for the planned unit development application for Nutrient Farm to a March 12 hearing, giving the applicant time to work with county staff to whittle down the initial 53 conditions of approval. Nutrient Holdings LLC got its first meeting in front of the commission on Jan. 29 after completing submission in 2023. They’re seeking a PUD zoning change for a 1,136-acre property in unincorporated Garfield County between Glenwood Springs and New Castle…Plans for the property include two farm areas (one for hay/livestock, one for fruits/vegetables/herbs), three residential areas, a residential/solar energy area, a recreational/entertainment area and a commercial/industrial area. About 608 acres of the property are slated for “private open space,” which would be closed to the public and undeveloped with a private trail…
Nutrient Farm plans to reactivate the Vulcan Ditch, which neighbors contend has not been active for decades and the landscape couldn’t handle. The applicant contends they have decreed rights to do so; the matter is in water court. Over two hours of public comment pushed the meeting past 10 p.m., without anyone speaking in explicit support of the proposal — though many said they supported the spirit of the application, which intends to divert water from Canyon Creek, a Colorado River tributary on the opposite side of the river and Interstate 70 from the Nutrient Farm property…
“The reuse of the long abandoned Vulcan Ditch threatens to ruin Canyon Creek and will … negatively affect the ranches and the wildlife and habitat that depend on a healthy Canyon Creek water flow,” said Michael Goscha, a Canyon Creek resident. “I’m disappointed that a proposed development focus on improving the environment has such a substantial fatal flaw.”
The Trumpster Rebellion – is it organized enough to call it a ‘Revolution’? – is making itself felt in the Colorado River Basin at this point by the hold being put on all federal funding from the two big infrastructure-related acts of the Biden administration. This included funding for the Upper Basin’s System Conservation Pilot Program, to pay farmers to leave some of their decreed water to flow down (it was hoped) to Powell Reservoirs; I believe it also included some of the money being used in the Lower Basin to pay farmers to leave a three million acre-feet of decreed water in Mead Reservoir for Water Years 2024-26. This is nothing ‘personal’ against Colorado River management; it is just collateral damage caught up in the president’s general vendetta against any achievement by the Biden administration.
We’ll see how all of this shakes out in the next few weeks, I guess, or months or years, as the legality or constitutionality of all this is worked out. On the cosmic justice level – Water Year 2025? The forecasters are saying, again, don’t get your hopes too high. But hope, that ‘thing with feathers,’ flies above that; surely we’re ripe for snow now after the longest, coldest, driest December and January in recent memory….
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
Meanwhile, back in the bigger, longer picture…. In the last post, trying to heist myself up at least onto the edge of the ‘Compact Box’ – the box outside of which I think we all need to try to think, if only as a creative exercise – I raised the question: might it not be possible now to do what the seven Compact commissioners really wanted to do in 1922, when they gathered in Washington the last week of January, with U.S. Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover?
Remember – they had come together to try to free themselves from an interstate appropriation competition over use of the waters of the Colorado River, by effecting what their Compact preamble called an ‘equitable division and apportionment of the use of the waters … to promote interstate comity (and) remove causes of present and future controversies.’
This was not strictly a ‘peace-making’ gathering; they knew they had to come to some kind of an agreement among themselves about the use of the river’s waters before the U.S. Congress would consider funding to ‘secure the expeditious agricultural and industrial development of the Colorado River Basin’ – the last goal listed in the Compact preamble, but it was probably first in their minds. Only the federal government had the resources and the authority to build the big structures necessary to store and deliver the interstate river’s water to the states, really unleashing development of the water, at least half of which was still being ‘wasted’ to the ocean in the annual spring floods of snowmelt.
So they spent the first three days of their Washington meetings in an ultimately frustrating attempt to calculate an ‘equitable’ seven-way division of the use of the waters, to avoid a seven-way appropriation horse-race between fast-growing states like California, already at the first turn, while slower-growing states like Wyoming were still trying to get out of the starting gate.
They were stymied in that effort – almost to the point of abandoning the idea of a compact. In the manner of early 20th-century Americans, enough water for all the optimistic future visions they all brought from their home states tallied well beyond even the Bureau of Reclamation’s overly optimistic guesstimates for the flow of the river – then in its ‘pluvial’ period of high flows, peaking even as the commissioners were working in 1922.
Only Chairman Hoover’s leadership skills – and his desire (an engineer by training) to see the big structures built – kept them from abandoning the idea of a compact in January. But he wasn’t able to get them back together for serious work until November 1922, when they convened for a do-it-or-drop-it retreat at a resort near Santa Fe to consider a new idea hatched between Hoover and Colorado Commissioner and water lawyer Delph Carpenter.
Map credit: AGU
In 18 transcribed meetings over 11 days, and who knows how many pre-meeting breakfast caucuses and post-meeting saloon and suite connivances, they assembled the Colorado River Compact that divided the Basin into a four-state Upper Basin above the river’s major canyons and a three-state Lower Basin below the canyons, each of which would get half of the river’s mainstem water to further divvy up in their own good time.
A hundred years later, we can see that this did very little, even at that time, ‘to promote interstate comity (and) remove causes of present and future controversies’ – Arizona would not even ratify it at the time, and it took several years for the other six states to ratify it since the mathematics of only 7.5 maf precluded some of their grand visions. And it didn’t take long for the Upper Basin states to realize that their 7.5 million acre-feet ‘half’ of the diminishing post-pluvial river was probably not there – yet the Compact committed them to making sure the Lower Basin got its ‘half.’ To halve, and have naught.
The U.S. Congress, on the other hand, was generally eager to see the river developed as part of the ongoing national drive to see the nation’s lands settled by farmers and unsettled by miners – metal miners, fuel miners, tree miners, grass miners – developing the nation’s resources, and in 1928 passed the Boulder Canyon Act that set in motion construction on Hoover Dam, the Imperial Weir Dam, and the All-American Canal – a trifecta that was completed during the Great Depression years, and by the eve of the Second World War, was turning Southern California into an economic powerhouse of wartime industry.
The Boulder Canyon Act also set the allotments for each of the Lower Basin states: 4.4 maf for California, 2.8 maf for Arizona, and 300 kaf for Nevada (most of whose development was on the Sierra side of the state, very little along its short Colorado River border). Arizona immediately sued California over those allotments, and the two states were in and out of court over that until Supreme Court decisions in 1963-64 affirmed the Compact numbers for the use of water in the river’s mainstream, but granted Arizona, and the Lower Basin states in general, full use of tributaries entering below Lee Ferry, the Upper-Lower division point, outside of mainstem accounting for the water everyone hoped would go past Lee Ferry.
Receding waters at Lone Rock in Lake Powell illustrate the impacts of megadrought. Hydroelectric generation will be endangered if the lake continues to shrink. Credit: Colorado State University
The Lower Basin – abetted by the Bureau – persisted in believing that there was enough water in the river so that they could continue to write off their system losses and their half of the Mexico obligation to ‘surplus water.’ They maintained this fiction until, the early 2020s, it became obvious that they were just depleting the reservoirs. They appear to be willing now to accept that their substantial system losses have to be taken out of their share, although agreement persists in how that should happen.
The Compact obligation means that the Upper Basin states were already absorbing their losses – along with absorbing the full brunt of nature’s variability while the Lower Basin got its water regardless of Upper Basin problems. The river itself had gone from its pluvial glory of the first quarter of the century into what was its most serious dry spell until the present one; and the worst fears of the Upper Basin water managers were confirmed: there would probably only occasionally be 7.5 maf of water for them after they passed the Compact obligation on to the Lower Basin.
After World War II, the Upper Basin knew it was their turn for some development work; but first they had to create their own compact for dividing their share of the water – whatever it was. The did this between 1946 and 1948, but they did not even bother to do a four-way division in acre-feet of their alleged 7.5 maf. Instead they did percentages of whatever water they would get after meeting the Compact obligation. Still hoping, like the Lower Basin, that there would be enough ‘surplus’ – above and beyond the 15.0 maf Compact division – to handle the Mexican allotment of 1.5 maf negotiated during WW II. There’s a complex story there too, but not today.
Graphic via Holly McClelland/High Country News.
The percentages they created for their individual shares were: 51.75% for Colorado (providing 60-70% of the river’s water), 23% for Utah, 13% for Wyoming, and 11.25% for New Mexico. Their completion of the Upper Colorado River Compact in 1948 allowed the Bureau of Reclamation and its advocates in Congress – led by Wayne Aspinall from Colorado’s West Slope – to begin the process of passing the Colorado River Storage Project. This was no longer a slam dunk for the Bureau, due to a shift in the urbanizing industrialized public, from regarding the West as raw resources, to thinking of it as a source of vacation wonder and outdoor recreation. This in turn shifted the romantic vision of the river from pedal-to-the-metal development to… environmental awareness. As America got wheels and gauranteed vacations and took to the roads, Theodore Roosevelt’s brand of conservation – respectful use without waste – shifted toward preservation of natural aesthetics. But the residual momentum of development eventually got the CRSP Act passed in 1956, and several large projects and a host of small irrigation project eventually got built. At which point, by the early1970s, not only were nearly all of the good dam sites occupied by a dam, but the Bureau began to worry that much more reservoir development would reach the point where evaporation losses were prohibitive.
By the turn of the 21st century, Justice Greg Hobbs of the Colorado Supreme Court could say publicly: ‘We have developed the resource; now we have to learn how to share it.’ Some of the readers here will remember Greg Hobbs – a poet/philosopher as well as a fine water lawyer. In this context, a poet who tried to imagine the peace the river and its users need.
Do you get the sense that, by now, a century after the Compact, with everyone in agreement that the river is not only committed but probably over-committed – we might be able to finally do the seven-way division of the waters the Compact commissioners originally wanted to do? With all seven states reluctantly, grudgingly, accepting the fact that a) the water they’ve been getting in recent years is as much water as they will ever be getting – and that b) the river flows will almost certainly be gradually declining over the rest of the century, since we are doing next to nothing to address the problem causing the decline.
How do we share this?
We can set it up in a table, with numbers taken from Bureau records. I know there will be disagreements over the rough calculations herein, but they will be modest differences that should not undermine the validity of the attempt – which is an attempt to say, peace, brothers, there’s nothing left to fight over; the fight is all shadow-boxing with ourselves from here on out…. Here is the table, explained below. Click on the table to get an enlargable version:
The first two columns are pretty sef-explanatory – the states in each Basin, and the authority setting their allotment for consumptive use of the Colorado River.
Third column: The allotment of the river’s water decreed to each state by the Colorado River Compact. With the river guessstimated to be running almost 18 maf/year, it was assumed that surplus flows above the allotted 15 maf would be sufficient to cover Mexico’s share and system losses (evaporation, riparian growth, et cetera).
Fourth column: The average real allotment each state got for the run of the post-Compact 20th century, minus a share of the system losses proportionate to their calculated allotment. The average flow of the river for that period ws 14.6 maf. The Lower Basin got its full Compact allotment, thanks to Article 11(d) of the Compact, while the Upper Basin calculated its ever-varying allotments in percentages of what was left after the Lower Basin obligation was discharged.
Fifth column: The measured (with some guesstimating) actual consumptive use of the river by each state and Basin circa 2020 (before the Panic of 2022).
Sixth column: The percent of theirreal allotment (Column 4) that each state actually used. Column 5 quantities divided by Column 4 quantities. We see that Colorado and Utah in the Upper Basin and all the states in the Lower Basin have used more than their allotments when system losses are factored in, while Wyoming is well below its allotment (a situation that may be changed by current discussions concerning the Little Snake River). But for this rough analysis, those numbers are what we will use fior projecting forward.
Seventh column: The percent of the total 14.6maf ‘20th-century’ river that each state was using consumptively. Given the diminishing flows of the river, a fair and just system for allotments for the post-2026 era would be these percentages for all states and Mexico. The sharing-out of a diminishing river should not, would not in a moral society, be done through appropriation seniority; if anything, the seniors who have been using the river longest should maybe bear the larger responsibility. The Upper Basin alone does not ‘cause the flow to be depleted’; every user, and the society in general all cause that depletion; justice decrees that the resulting pain should be shared by all, proportionate to the their use. (Greg Hobbs might not agree – wish he were here to ask.)
Eighth column: What these percentages would mean when applied to the 12.6 maf average flow of the river since 2000. Read’em and groan.
Final note, on the First People water rights: Thanks to the McCarran Amendment, those must be dealt with – and are being dealt with – at the state (and in some cases interstate) level, some through court decrees, but most of them through negotiated settlements (unfortunately requiring the approval of our dysfunctional Congress). The Upper Colorado River Commission recently committed to making sure this happens for Upper Basin nations.
And that is enough for this post, wouldn’t you say? I expect to hear a few cries of outrage that we should try to face reality in a fair and just manner.
This hayfield near Rifle is irrigated with water from a tributary of the Colorado River. The future of Colorado River management is almost guaranteed to include a conservation program for the Upper Basin. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
After years of studying and experimenting with pilot programs, the future of Colorado River management will almost certainly include a permanent water conservation program for the Upper Basin states.
Upper Basin officials have submitted refinements to their March 2024 plan for how water should be released from Lake Powell and Lake Mead, and how shortages should be shared after the current guidelines expire in 2026. In it, they offer up the potential for up to 200,000 acre-feet per year of water conservation.
“The kind of conservation activities, I think the exact contours of that and how that would work, all that is yet to be determined,” said Amy Ostdiek, chief of the interstate, federal and water information section of the Colorado Water Conservation Board. “But conservation activities across the Upper Division states, in one way or another, I think, will likely continue.”
The proposal by the Upper Basin states (Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming) now includes two water-savings accounts in Lake Powell. One is a Lake Powell Conservation Account that will store up to 200,000 acre-feet per year from conservation and from quantified and settled but unused tribal water. The second, a Lake Powell Protection Account, would store water released from upstream reservoirs — Flaming Gorge, Navajo and Blue Mesa — when Lake Powell drops below 3,535 feet in elevation.
These pools would be part of what the Upper Basin is calling “parallel activities,” and details would be hammered out in agreements separate from the new reservoir operation guidelines, which the seven Colorado River basin states are negotiating. Conservation is based on each year’s hydrology, with more water saved in wet years.
For the past several years, Upper Basin officials have pushed back on the notion that their states should contribute to cutbacks in water use since their water users already suffer shortages in dry years and the four states have never used their entire allocation of the river, while the Lower Basin (California, Arizona and Nevada) overuses its share. At the same time, however, the Upper Basin has been exploring programs that would pay water users to cut back. These programs include the System Conservation Pilot Program and the state of Colorado’s study of a demand management program.
In March, each basin submitted to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation competing proposals for future river management, with the Lower Basin calling for cuts to be shared by the Upper Basin under the most critical conditions. For months, each basin dug in their heels, saying their alternative was best. The result was a stalemate when talks ground to a halt by the end of the year.
According to state officials, representatives of the seven basin states have recently resumed talks.
“I’m happy to report that the seven states are continuing discussions,” Becky Mitchell, a commissioner to the Upper Colorado River Commission and who represents Colorado in talks among the seven states, said at the Colorado Water Congress annual convention Thursday in Aurora. “We are working hard to identify potential areas of consensus.”
Colorado River expert and author Eric Kuhn said the Upper Basin’s proposal for the two water savings pools in Lake Powell is a sign of optimism.
“I kind of see it as a change in tone and putting something on the table that is closer to the Lower Basin’s proposal,” Kuhn said. “That seems like fairly significant progress to me.”
The watchwords for these types of conservation programs have always been “temporary, voluntary and compensated.” But in the face of a hotter, drier future with less water to go around, officials are acknowledging the inevitability of a more permanent Upper Basin water-conservation program.
“I think it’s almost guaranteed,” said Amy Haas, executive director of the Colorado River Authority of Utah.
Navajo Bridge spans the Colorado River downstream from Lake Powell near Lee Ferry, the dividing line between the upper and lower basin. Upper Basin officials have proposed up to 200,000 acre-feet of water conservation a year in Lake Powell. Photo credit: Aspen Journalism
Western Slope concerns remain
Paying water users to cut back is not a new concept in the Upper Basin.
In 2023, using federal money from the Inflation Reduction Act, the Upper Basin states rebooted the System Conservation Pilot Program, which first took place from 2015 to 2018. Over two years, the program saved 101,000 acre-feet of water at a cost of $45 million. SCPP has been criticized for a lack of transparency, for not tracking conserved water to Lake Powell and the high cost.
And although all water-use sectors — including agriculture, cities and industry — were invited to participate, in practice all the participating water users in the state of Colorado were Western Slope irrigators.
This disproportionate participation by one area of the state and the potential harm it could cause to rural agricultural communities has long been something the Glenwood Springs-based Colorado River Water Conservation District has warned against. The district, which leads in the protection, conservation, use and development of water across 15 Western Slope counties, had sought to play a role in setting criteria and approving applications for the SCPP. But in the end, the Upper Colorado River Commission had the sole authority for deciding who could participate.
Now that the Upper Basin seems poised for more permanent and robust conservation, the River District is reasserting the need for rules that protect the Western Slope.
“Our state and the three other Upper Basin states have put it on the table as a negotiating chip,” River District General Manager Andy Mueller said at the district’s regular board meeting Jan. 21. “We will see some form of program come out of this. The question is: When it gets operated inside of our state, can we influence how it gets operated? Can we create a situation where we avoid every drop of that water coming out of the West Slope?”
The River District board on Jan. 21 authorized writing a letter to state officials and Colorado’s congressional delegation about creating a conservation program that avoids disproportionate impacts to Western Slope water users. One of the River District’s fears is that Front Range cities — which have junior water rights from the Colorado River and have deep pockets — in a version of “buy and dry” could pay for water conservation in Western Slope agriculture and store the water in Lake Powell to protect themselves from future mandatory cutbacks.
“That’s not something we would be supportive of,” Mueller said. “That’s the kind of guidelines we want to see come out of the state for conditions on participating in a program.”
Lake Powell is seen in a November 2019 aerial photo from the nonprofit EcoFlight. The Upper Basin states are proposing two pools of stored water in Lake Powell: A Lake Powell protection account and a Lake Powell conservation account. Credit: EcoFlight
Utah demand management
The future of SCPP in 2025 is unclear, with federal funding authorization pending. But the state of Utah is not waiting for a basinwide program to materialize. With a $4 million appropriation, the state is funding a two-year demand-management pilot program, which will pay irrigators to take water off their fields, switch to more efficient irrigation methods or release downstream water stored in reservoirs. Haas said the program has received 26 applications for 2025.
A main goal of Utah’s conservation program is to track and account for the saved water in Lake Powell, something the SCPP has failed to do in its first years. The Upper Colorado River Commission recently penned an agreement with Reclamation that will allow Upper Basin water users to account for water saved through conservation programs in Lake Powell.
“Utah really believes that in order to put teeth on our commitments in the Upper Basin post-2026, we’ve got to be undertaking these conservation activities,” Haas said. “I think that’s why we are headed in this direction, and we are leading among the four Upper Division states in terms of piloting our own demand-management program.”
The state of Colorado did a two-year study of its own potential demand-management program beginning in 2019, but the state has since shelved that work.
Federal water managers also seem to be gravitating toward conservation in the Upper Basin. On Jan. 17, the Bureau of Reclamation released a report on five potential alternatives for reservoir operations and shortage sharing. Three of the four “action” alternatives include the provision for storing up to 200,000 acre-feet of water annually in Lake Powell. (The analysis also includes a “no-action” alternative as a formality, which is required by the National Environmental Policy Act.)
Even though the Upper Basin states will commit to some amount of future water conservation, officials say exactly how much will vary by year.
“That number is going to be driven by hydrology,” Ostdiek said. “We also know in the Upper Basin, our ability to store water in that type of account will probably be greater in wetter years. … It’s not an assumption that we would be able to do 200,000 acre-feet in every year.”
Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2024. Credit: Brad Udall
A bill advanced Tuesday by the Arizona House Committee on Natural Resources, Energy and Water aims to allocate $1 million to defend the Grand Canyon State’s water rights as part of the ongoing battle over the Colorado River. The bill, known as House Bill 2103, seeks to set aside the funds to support litigation in the event that negotiations among the seven states dependent on the river break down. Arizona is preparing for the possibility of legal action if the ongoing discussions fail to resolve water allocation disputes. The bill passed with unanimous support from the committee, though Democrats indicated they will propose an amendment to increase the allocation to $3 million, in line with Governor Katie Hobbs‘ proposed budget…
At the center of the debate are two factions: the Upper Basin states—Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming—and the Lower Basin states, which include Arizona, California and Nevada…But as the clock ticks down toward 2026, when potential cuts could be enforced by the federal government, tensions are mounting over the distribution of the river’s limited water supply…Arizona’s position is clear: it wants to be able to fight its corner if necessary and needs funds to do it. The request for funds to potentially fight a legal battle was first proposed in September 2024 by Tom Buschatzke, the director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources.
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
It’s time for an agreement in the Colorado River Basin, Colorado water and climate experts say.
Colorado River officials are at odds over how to store and release water in the basin’s reservoirs when the current rules lapse in 2026. Publicly, state negotiators stick close to their original, competing proposals, released early in 2024. Colorado experts watching the process understand the difficulty — it’s painful to talk about cutting water use — but time is of the essence.
Jennifer Pitt, the National Audubon Society’s Colorado River program director, paddles a kayak through a restoration site. (Source: Jesus Salazar, Raise the River)
“I have no idea what’s going to get them to agreement,” said Jennifer Pitt, the Colorado River program director for the National Audubon Society. “To me, the biggest pressure seems like time is running out.”
But there seems to be a lack of trust between the state negotiators, said Jennifer Gimbel, senior water policy scholar at the Colorado Water Center at Colorado State University.
“Not only is there this lack of trust, but there almost seems to be this effort to promote your own proposals by denigrating other proposals,” Gimbel said. “That frustrated me to no end. It’s like they have these political rallies.” [ed. emphasis mine]
If states are going to propose a united plan, then they need to do it by the end of 2025, preferably sooner, experts said.
“We continue to stand firmly behind the Upper Division States’ Alternative, which performs best according to Reclamation’s own modeling and directly meets the purpose and need of this federal action,” Colorado’s negotiating team said in a prepared statement Tuesday.
The basin is also about to see new leadership at the federal level. Colorado water experts are waiting to know who President Donald Trump will appoint to key positions, like the commissioner of Reclamation and the assistant secretary for water and science.
“They’re in a really tough spot. I would understand that,” said John Berggren with the environmental group Western Resource Advocates. “I hope they’re continuing to negotiate and have productive conversations, and I hope they’re open to some more creative options.”
Planning for the extremes
So what options are they considering? In the absence of a seven-state agreement on how to manage the basin’s water supply, the Bureau of Reclamation outlined five possible plans in November:
No action: Included as a formality and shows the risk of doing nothing
Federal authorities: Includes maximum Lower Basin cuts of 3.5 million acre-feet in extremely dry years
Federal authorities hybrid: Includes maximum cuts of 3.5 million acre-feet in the Lower Basin and conserving up to 200,000 acre-feet in the Upper Basin
Cooperative conservation: Includes maximum cuts of 4 million acre-feet in the Lower Basin and conserving up to 200,000 acre-feet in the Upper Basin
Basin hybrid: Includes maximum cuts of 2.1 million acre-feet in the Lower Basin and conserving up to 100,000 acre-feet in the Upper Basin
Colorado experts want to make sure the federal planning process is broad enough to include the worst possible conditions.
Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2024. Credit: Brad Udall
The Colorado River Basin’s flows are about 20% lower now than in the 20th century, said Brad Udall, senior water and climate research scientist at the Colorado Water Center at Colorado State University. That’s a drop from about 15.2 million acre-feet per year to about 12.4 million acre-feet, he said.
That’s not enough for the 15 million acre-feet allotted to the seven U.S. states, much less the additional water owed to Mexico and tribal nations.
Udall wants to make sure officials are planning for scenarios in which the river’s flow drops by an additional 10%, or down to 11 million acre-feet.
“The question is … who takes the pain? Is it all Lower Basin? Is Upper Basin sharing that?” he said.
One new detail for the Colorado experts who reviewed the report was the duration of the next management plan: Reclamation wants it to last for at least 20 years after 2026. It is unlikely to be a short-term, interim plan to give negotiators more time to reach a unified agreement.
The revised proposal submitted by the Upper Basin states — Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming — also highlighted conserving up to 200,000 acre-feet of water (depending on river conditions), which seemed to move the states closer to alignment with Reclamation, experts said…
The Upper Basin’s revised proposal, and the federal options, include different “pools” in Lake Powell on the Utah-Arizona border, which would function like savings accounts and could store water conserved by Upper Basin states. Colorado water experts are keeping a close eye on how these accounts might work.
“Putting water in Powell is a good thing, but nobody in the Upper Basin wants to send water to protect Powell that ultimately just runs downstream,” said Steve Wolff, general manager of the Southwestern Water Conservation District based in Durango.
The experts wanted to know more about how conservation pools would function; how federal authorities in the basin might expand; which reservoirs will be included in the plan; what the impacts to the Grand Canyon would be under the different plans; and ultimately, what plan will stabilize the system.
They’ll have to wait to find out: The bureau is expected to release a deeper analysis of how each alternative could impact water management in different conditions later this year.
The Bureau of Reclamation’s final selection will likely mix and match elements of the different alternatives, said Carly Jerla, senior water resource program manager with the Bureau of Reclamation in a December presentation in Las Vegas.
“It’s a shame we don’t have a combined Upper Basin and Lower Basin plan right now,” Udall said. “Once Reclamation does its modeling, we’ll learn a lot. But we need a combined plan.”
Lee Ferry, the dividing line between the upper and lower basin states of the Colorado River Basin. Photo credit: Allen Best
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
January 28, 2025
It’s part of a theme. Does Colorado need to start planning for potential Colorado River curtailments?
Snow in southwestern Colorado has been scarce this winter. Archuleta County recently had a grass fire. A store manager at Terry’s Ace Hardware in Pagosa Springs tells me half as many snowblowers have been sold this winter despite new state rebates knocking 30% off the price of electric models.
Near Durango, snowplows normally used at a subdivision located at 8,000 feet remain unused. At Chapman Hill, the in-town ski area, all snow remains artificial, and it’s not enough to cover all the slopes. A little natural snow would help, but none is in the forecast.
Snow may yet arrive. Examining data collected on Wolf Creek Pass since 1936, the Pagosa Sun’s Josh Kurz found several winters that procrastinated until February. Even when snow arrived, though, the winter-end totals were far below average.
All this suggests another subpar runoff in the San Juan and Animas rivers. They contribute to Lake Powell, one of two big water bank accounts on the Colorado River. When I visited the reservoir in May 2022, water levels were dropping rapidly. The manager of Glen Canyon Dam pointed to a ledge below us that had been underwater since the mid-1960s. It had emerged only a few weeks before my visit.
That ledge at Powell was covered again after an above-average runoff in 2023. The reservoir has recovered to 35% of capacity.
A ledge that had been used in the construction of Glen Canyon Dam emerged in spring 2022 after about 50 years of being underwater. Photo May 2022/Allen Best
Will reservoir levels stay that high? Probably not, and that is a significant problem. Delegates who wrangled the Colorado River Compact in a lodge near Santa Fe in 1922 understood drought, at least somewhat. They did not contemplate the global warming now underway.
In apportioning the river flows, they also assumed an average 17.5 million acre-feet at Lee Ferry, the dividing line between the upper and lower basins. It’s a few miles downstream from Glen Canyon Dam and upstream from the Grand Canyon. Even during the 20th century the river was rarely that generous. This century it has become stingy, with average annual flows of 12.5 million acre-feet. Some worry that continued warming during coming decades may further cause declines to 9.5 million acre-feet.
Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2024. Credit: Brad Udall
Colorado State University’s Brad Udall and other scientists contend half of declining flows should be understood as resulting from warming temperatures. A 2024 study predicts droughts with the severity that formerly occurred once in 1,000 years will by mid-century become 1-in-60 year events.
How will the seven basin states share this diminished river? Viewpoints differ so dramatically that delegates from the upper- and lower-basin states loathed sharing space during an annual meeting in Las Vegas as had been their custom. Legal saber-rattling abounds. A critical issue is an ambiguous clause in the compact about releases of water downstream to Arizona and hence Nevada and California.
Colorado transmountain diversions via the State Engineer’s office
Might Colorado need to curtail its diversions from the Colorado River? That would be painful. Roughly half the water for cities along the Front Range, where 88% of Coloradans live, comes from the Colorado River and its tributaries. Transmountain diversions augment agriculture water in the South Platte and Arkansas River valleys. The vast majority of those water rights were adjudicated after the compact of 1922 and hence would be vulnerable to curtailment. Many water districts on the Western Slope also have water rights junior to the compact.
In Grand Junction last September, Andy Mueller, the general manager of the Colorado River Water Conservation District, the primary water policy agency for 15 of Western Slope counties, made the case that Colorado should plan for compact curtailments — just in case. The district had earlier sent a letter to Jason Ullmann, the state water engineer, asking him to please get moving with compact curtailment rules.
Eric Kuhn, Mueller’s predecessor at the district, who is now semi-retired, made the case for compact curtailment planning in the Spring 2024 issue of Colorado Environmental Law Review. Kuhn’s piece runs 15,000 words, all of them necessary to sort through the tangled complexities. Central is the compact clause that specifies the upper basin states must not cause the flow at Lee Ferry, just below today’s Glen Canyon Dam, to be depleted below an aggregate of 75 million acre-feet on a rolling 10-years basis.
That threshold has not yet been met — yet. Kuhn describes a “recipe for disaster” if it is. He foresees those with agriculture rights on the Western Slope being called upon to surrender rights. He and Mueller argue for precautionary planning. That planning “could be contentious,” Kuhn concedes, but the “advantages of being prepared for the consequences of a compact curtailment outweigh the concern.”
Last October, after Mueller’s remarks in Grand Junction, I solicited statements from Colorado state government. The Polis administration said it would be premature to plan compact curtailment. The two largest single transmountain diverters of Colorado River Water, Denver Water and Northern Water, concurred.
Front Range cities, including Berthoud, above, are highly reliant upon water imported from the Colorado River and its tributaries. December 2023 photo/Allen Best
Recently, I talked with Jim Lochhead. For 25 years he represented Colorado and its water users in interstate Colorado River matters. He ran the state’s Department of Natural Resources for four years in the 1990s and, ending in 2023, wrapped up 13 years as chief executive of Denver Water. Lochhead, who stressed that he spoke only for himself, similarly sees compact curtailment planning as premature.
“It just doesn’t make sense to go through that political brain damage until we really have to,” he said. “Hopefully we won’t have to, because (the upper and lower basins) will come up with a solution.”
Lochhead does believe that a negotiated solution remains possible, despite the surly words of recent years…
“We need to figure out ways to negotiate an essentially shared sacrifice for how we’re going to manage the system, so it can be sustainable into the future,” he said. This, he says, will take cooperation that so far has been absent, at least in public, and it will also take money.
Instead, we’ll have to slog along. The runoff in the Colorado River currently is predicted to be 81% of average. It fits with a theme. Unlike the children of Lake Wobegone, most runoffs in the 21st century have been below average.
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
Click the link to read the article on the InkStain.net website (Eric Kuhn, John Fleck, and Jack Schmidt):
January 22, 2025
On January 16th, the Bureau of Reclamation released the January 2025 24-Month Study. Based on the January 1st runoff forecast into Lake Powell, the projected “most probable” annual release from Glen Canyon Dam for Water Year 2026 is now 7.48 maf. This needs to be taken as a significant caution sign because it shows that we are on a clear trajectory to hit what Colorado’s Jim Lochhead first called the 1922 Compact’s first “tripwire” (82.5 maf/10-year) as early as 2027. Given the current stalemate between the Upper and Lower Division States over how the reservoir system should be operated, it means the potential for basin-wide litigation is now in the “Red Zone.”
The January 24-Month study is the first in each water year to be based on a published forecast from the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center’s runoff model – the first to be based on actual snowpack. The January 1st runoff forecast for unregulated April-July inflow to Lake Powell was 5.15 maf (about 81% of average). This results in a projected 12/31/2025 elevation of Lake Powell of less than 3575’ making the annual release for Water Year 2026 7.48 maf. Of course, the forecast will change as the winter progresses. In fact, the January mid-month forecast dropped by 300,000 acre-feet to 4.85 maf. At this point in the winter our confidence in the “most probable” forecast is low and in recent years, the track record has been to overstate future runoff suggesting that the we should pay equal attention to the “minimum probable” forecast. (See Wang et al, Evaluating the Accuracy of Reclamation’s 24-Month Study Lake Powell Projections.) Also remember that the actual decision on the WY 2026 release is not made until the Spring runoff is over and the August 24-Month study is released.
Lee/Lee’s/Lees Ferry on the Colorado River. Photo by John Fleck
A 7.48 maf release from Glen Canyon Dam bodes trouble for the basin because it takes us very close to the tripwire. Simply put, the tripwire is the ten-year flow at Lee Ferry at which the Lower Division States can claim the Upper Division States are in violation of the 1922 Compact. Under the compact, the Upper Division States have two specific flow obligations at Lee Ferry: (1) to not cause the ten-year flow to be depleted below 75 maf every ten consecutive years, and (2) to deliver one half of the annual delivery to Mexico under the 1944 Treaty if the “surplus” is not sufficient. If there is no surplus and the delivery to Mexico is 1.5 maf/year, the Upper Division’s share is 750,000 af/year, resulting in a total ten-year delivery obligation of 82.5 maf. Since under Minute 323, Mexico shares in mainstem shortages, recent annual deliveries have been less than 1.5 maf. To keep the math simple, let’s call the current obligation (with no surplus) 82.0 maf. With a 7.48 maf release in WY 2026, the ten-year flow for 2017-2026 will be about 82.8 maf.
Keep in mind that the obligation of the Upper Division States to Mexico under the 1922 Compact has been a disputed issue since the Treaty was signed in 1944. The Lower Division believes there is no current surplus, thus the obligation is one half of the Treaty delivery. The Upper Division believes that since the Lower Basin is currently overusing its 1922 Compact apportionment, this overuse is surplus, and thus, must be delivered to Mexico. Following this thread, if the overuse is greater than 1.5 maf/year, the Upper Division would have no obligation to Mexico.
With an 82.8 maf ten-year flow at the end of Water Year 2026, the Upper Division States are still slightly above the tripwire with a cushion of about 800,000 af. The problem is what happens in the next one to three years. From 2015-2019 annual the annual Glen Canyon Dam releases were 9.0 maf/year. Note, the annual release from Glen Canyon Dam and the flow at Lee Ferry are not quite the same, the Paria River and leakage around the dam contribute another 100,000 -150,000 af/year to the flow at Lee Ferry (bonus flows). Because of the way the ten-year math works, at the end of WY 2027, the Lee Ferry flow for WY 2017 (~9.2 maf) will drop out and be replaced by the 2027 Lee Ferry flow, thus, to keep the ten-year flow greater than 82.0 maf, the 2027 flow will have to be at least 8.4 maf. AND, there are two more 9.0 maf releases in the pipeline, WYs2018 and 2019! That means that when those drop out of the sequence, the risk of the basin stumbling across the tripwire into litigation grows.
To stay above 82.0 maf, the total deliveries at Lee Ferry for the three-year period of 2027-2029, the annual release from Glen Canyon Dam will have to average about 8.8 maf/year (factoring in the bonus flows). Since 2012, the average unregulated inflow to Lake Powell is about 8.2 maf/year. After deducting 500,000 af/year of gross evaporation from the reservoir, the “net-of-evaporation” annual inflow is only about 7.7 maf/year. Going back to 2000, the net inflow is about 7.9 maf/year. Thus, to avoid going below the 82.0 maf tripwire, it will take either above average (post-2000) hydrology or continuing to draw down Lake Powell levels. If the hydrology is a bit drier than the post-2000 (or post-2012) levels, maintaining at least 82.0 maf/10-year may require drawing Lake Powell below minimum power. As Lake Powell levels approach minimum power, we approach environmental and power generation tripwires.
The fact that we’re on track for another year of below-average inflows to Lake Powell, another 7.48 maf/year annual release from Glen Canyon Dam, and on a trajectory to drop below a 1922 Compact tripwire adds another level of urgency for the basin states to break their current impasse over the how the system will be operated post-2026. The chances of Lee Ferry flows dropping below the 82 maf tripwire are high. The Colorado River Basin needs to be fully prepared before this occurs. With every 24-Month study, the basin’s litigation clock is getting closer and closer to that midnight hour.
Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2024. Credit: Brad Udall
The Colorado River flows through the Shoshone diversion structure on Jan. 29, 2024. A group trying to purchase Shoshone’s water was set to receive $40 million from the federal government. Their efforts, along with dozens of other projects across the West, will have to wait. Photo credit: Alex Hager/KUNC
Click the link to read the article on the KUNC.org website (Alex Hager):
January 27, 2024
This story is part of ongoing coverage of the Colorado River, produced by KUNC and supported by the Walton Family Foundation.
Payments to help Western states respond to drought are on pause after an order from President Donald Trump. A pool of $388.3 million from the Inflation Reduction Act had already been allocated to fund water conservation projects by the Biden administration, and its future now hangs in the balance.
The Colorado River supplies water for about 40 million people from Wyoming to Mexico, but its stretched thin. Climate change is cutting into supplies, and the cities and farms that depend on it are struggling to cut back on demand. Federal funding has been a pivotal part of Western states’ response to that reality, with billions of dollars from the Biden administration helping pay for a wide variety of programs – incentivizing farmers to use less water on their crops, improving wildlife habitat and much more.
This latest tranche of money was originally destined for projects in Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, New Mexico, and four different Native American tribes. A specific list of projects the Biden Administration wanted to fund was released in the waning days of its time in the White House. Days later, shortly after his inauguration, President Trump signed an executive order calling for the government to “immediately pause disbursement of funds appropriated under the Inflation Reduction Act.”
Those awaiting the federal funds hope that the pause is only temporary.
Steve Wolff, general manager of the Southwestern Water Conservation District in Durango, Colorado, is awaiting news on the fate of $25.6 million originally designated for his group to improve habitats in wetlands and streams.
“I just hope that both Democrats and Republicans across the West recognize the importance of this funding and what it does for local communities,” Wolff said. “And that they will be able to push the right political buttons in D.C. to make this money get distributed as it was presented by the Bureau of Reclamation.”
Officials with the Bureau of Reclamation, the federal agency which manages dams and reservoirs across the West, did not respond to KUNC’s request for comment.
A moose walks alongside the Green River in Sublette County, Wyoming on March 27, 2024. A project to improve riparian habitat along the Green River is among those awaiting details on $388.3 million in federal grants. Photo credit: Alex Hager/KUNC
The list of projects awaiting funding is long. Colorado alone accounts for 16 different projects, all of which are awaiting at least half a million dollars. Money was also allocated to ten projects in Utah, five in Wyoming, two in New Mexico, six on tribal land and three that span state lines.
Utah’s Division of Wildlife Resources would receive up to $37.2 million for five different projects. A spokeswoman for that agency told KUNC that its experts “seem confident” that the projects will still be funded, and the agency understands the federal pause on Inflation Reduction Act funding to be more focused on energy-related programs.
Shoshone Hydroelectric Plant back in the days before I-70 via Aspen Journalism
The single largest grant in the funding pool is for the Shoshone Water Rights Preservation Project in Colorado. The Colorado River District is in the midst of a yearslong push to buy water currently used by a hydroelectric plant and make sure it keeps flowing to Western Colorado. The plan would quell long-held anxieties that a fast-growing city in the Denver area could buy the water instead. The agency has been slowly pooling money from local governments towards its $99 million goal, but this federal grant of up to $40 million represents the biggest chunk of money it would put toward the purchase.
Alex Funk, a water policy expert at the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, said the government typically has a lengthy review process for grants like these, and the Biden Administration reviewed and announced them extraordinarily quickly.
“We’re certainly anticipating a thoughtful review of some of these awards,” Funk said. “But we’re hoping that that momentum continues.”
Some of Funk’s work receives funding from the Walton Family Foundation, which also supports KUNC’s Colorado River coverage.
While Trump’s team has given relatively few indications about how it will deal with Colorado River matters, Interior Secretary nominee Doug Burgum spoke about them briefly during a Senate confirmation hearing. Funk called those comments “largely encouraging,” especially when it comes to the tense negotiations about water sharing between states that use the Colorado River.
“[Burgum] certainly signaled that he wanted his agency to be supportive of ongoing dialog and collaboration to keep that process on track,” Funk said.
Shortly after Trump won the 2024 election, top water negotiators said they did not expect the new president to shake up their talks, and said federal water policymakers have typically been technocrats, shielded from partisan turnover in Washington, D.C.
In December, a number of water policy experts expressed concern about the future of federal funding after the Biden Administration supplied Colorado River users with a “once-in-a-generation windfall.”
Dillon Reservoir is Denver Water’s largest reservoir. It sends water to the Front Range via the 23-mile-long Roberts Tunnel under the Continental Divide. Photo credit: Denver Water.
On Friday, in the last hours of the Biden administration, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation announced it would spend $388.3 million for environmental projects in Colorado and three other Colorado River Basin states.
Now that funding is in limbo.
The money was set to come from a Biden-era law, the Inflation Reduction Act. On Monday, President Donald Trump ordered federal agencies to halt spending money under the act. Lawmakers were still trying to understand whether the freeze applied to the entire Inflation Reduction Act or portions of it as of Wednesday afternoon.
Shoshone Falls hydroelectric generation station via USGenWeb
The new executive order focused on energy spending but also raised questions about funding for environmental projects in the Colorado River Basin, including $40 million for western Colorado’s effort to buy powerful water rights tied to Shoshone Power Plant on the Colorado River and 16 other projects in Colorado.
Past regulations have been burdensome and impeded the development of the country’s energy resources, according to the executive order.
“It is thus in the national interest to unleash America’s affordable and reliable energy and natural resources,” the order said. “This will restore American prosperity — including for those men and women who have been forgotten by our economy in recent years.”
Where spending is stalled, federal agencies will have 90 days to review their funding processes to make sure they align with the Trump administration’s policies.
The proposed projects focus on improving habitats, ecological stability and resilience against drought in the Colorado River Basin, where prolonged drought and overuse have cast uncertainty over the future water supply for 40 million people. Reclamation also awarded $100 million for Colorado River environmental projects in Arizona, California and Nevada.
Coloradans were promised up to about $135 million from the Inflation Reduction Act as part of the Upper Basin Environmental Drought Mitigation Program. It’s one of many buckets that have distributed money from the act to Colorado.
This map shows the 15-mile reach of the Colorado River near Grand Junction, home to four species of endangered fish. Map credit: CWCB
With the funding, people around the state hope to upgrade infrastructure to help protect 15 miles of key habitat near Grand Junction for endangered species on the Colorado River. They want to improve aquatic habitats along rivers in Grand County, where low flows threaten fish and aquatic life, and restore ancient, water- and carbon-storing fens.
“It wasn’t surprising, but we still need to wait to see how it gets interpreted, and what it’s going to apply to or not apply to,” said Steve Wolff, general manager of the Southwestern Water Conservation District. The district joined with local partners to apply for funding for 17 projects in southwestern Colorado and was awarded $25.6 million.
“We would all be very disappointed if any of this money was removed,” Wolff said. “These funds are really bipartisan and are meant to get put on the ground and do good work.”
One of those projects aims to restore ancient fens along Highway 550, known as the Million Dollar Highway, between Silverton and Ouray in southwestern Colorado.
These fens, between 6,000 and 14,000 years old, naturally store carbon and slow runoff from the mountains, helping to maintain flows into the summer when water runs low and demand outpaces supply. Drought, a history of mining, and human impacts in the area have degraded the fen ecosystems over time, said Jake Kurzweil, a hydrologist with Mountain Studies Institute in southwestern Colorado.
The project managers want to hire locally to help the rural economy. And the work would help restore river ecosystems where they begin — at their headwaters — if the funding actually comes through.
“Until there’s a contract in place, we won’t be including it in our budgets,” Kurzweil said. “We’re optimistically hopeful, but not counting our chickens before they hatch.”
Southern Ute Indian Tribe’s Pine River Environment Drought Mitigation Project: Up to $16.7 million: The funding would improve the health of the Pine River watershed, fish passage, deteriorating infrastructure, and water quality while addressing drought impacts.
Shoshone Hydroelectric Plant back in the days before I-70 via Aspen Journalism
Shoshone Water Rights Preservation Project: Up to $40 million: The funding would go toward the $99 million purchase of the Shoshone Power Plant’s water rights by the Colorado River Water Conservation District. The district says it will protect future water supplies for ecosystems, farms, ranches, communities and recreational businesses.
The Dolores River shows us what’s at stake in the fight to protect the American West — Conservation Colorado
Addressing Drought Mitigation in Southwestern Colorado: Up to $25.6 million: The funding would support 17 projects in the Dolores and San Juan river basins in southwestern Colorado. The projects aim to restore ecosystems and enhance biodiversity and water resources while supporting local communities and endangered species.
Tomichi Creek, a tributary of the Gunnison River, runs through the Peterson Ranch property. The Colorado Water Conservation Board holds an instream flow water right for 18 cfs on the creek in this stretch.
CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Grand Mesa and Upper Gunnison Watershed Resiliency and Aquatic Connectivity Project: Up to $24.3 million: The funding would restore watersheds to combat drought impacts to water quality and habitat in western Colorado.
Orchard Mesa circa 1911
Orchard Mesa Irrigation District Conveyance Upgrades for 15-Mile Reach Flow Enhancement: Up to $10.5 million: The funding would convert open canals into pressurized pipelines, improving water delivery efficiency and reducing environmental stressors. This upgrade aims to support endangered fish species by enhancing streamflow in a critical stretch of the Colorado River.
A man fishes along Blue River. The federal government Dec. 19, 2023, announced a $1.8 million grant for a habitat restoration on a section of the Blue River. Blue River Watershed Group/Courtesy photo
Enhancing Aquatic Habitat in Colorado River Headwaters: Up to $7 million: The funding would restore stream habitats along the Fraser, Blue and Colorado rivers in Grand County through channel shaping and bank stabilization.
Coyote Gulch on the Yampa River Core Trail August 24, 2022.
Yampa River/Walton Creek Confluence Restoration Project: Up to $5 million: The funding would restore river and floodplain habitat around Steamboat Springs.
Yellow-billed cuckoos have nearly been extirpated from the western U.S. Photo courtesy Rocky Mountain Bird Observatory.
Drought Resiliency on Western Colorado Conserved Lands: Up to $4.6 million: The funding would help improve wetlands, floodplains, erosion control structures and habitat for at-risk species like the yellow-billed cuckoo and Gunnison sage-grouse.
The Colorado River, which feeds into Lake Powell, begins its 1,450-mile journey in Rocky Mountain National Park near Grand Lake, Colorado. Denver Water gets half of its water from tributaries that feed into the Colorado River. Some of these tributaries include the Fraser River in Grand County and the Blue River in Summit County. Photo credit: Denver Water
Upper Colorado Basin Aquatic Organism Passage Program: Up to $4.2 million: The funding would restore stream habitat in Grand County to improve biodiversity, habitats, fish passage and drought resilience.
Palisade peach orchard
Conversion of Wastewater Lagoons into Wetlands: Up to $3 million: The funding would turn outdated sewer lagoons into wetlands to improve biodiversity and habitat for migratory waterfowl and endangered fish species in Palisade.
Fruita Reservoir Dam Removal: Up to $2.8 million: The funding would remove a dam on Piñon Mesa to restore wetlands, habitat and biodiversity.
Beaver dam analog. Photo: Juliet Grable
Monitoring and Quantifying the Effectiveness of Beaver Dam Analogs on Drought Influenced Streams in the Upper Colorado River Basin: Up to $1.9 million: The funding would restore degraded headwater meadows by implementing structures that mimic the natural functions of beaver dams.
Uncompahgre River Valley looking south
Uncompahgre Tailwater Rehabilitation Project: Up to $1.8 million: The funding would stabilize stream banks, restore aging infrastructure and improve the river habitat to help with ecological health and recreational opportunities.
Photo credit: Town of Gypsum
Eagle River Habitat Improvement, Gypsum Ponds State Wildlife Area: Up to $1.5 million: The funding would improve fish habitat and water quality along the Eagle River in Eagle County.
Bicycling the Colorado National Monument, Grand Valley in the distance via Colorado.com
Orchard Mesa and Grand Valley Metering Efficiency Project: Up to $1.5 million: The funding would improve water management in the Grand Valley through the installation of advanced metering technology and real-time remote monitoring systems.
Biologists say federal target numbers are too low to ensure recovery of the Gunnison sage-grouse, which is listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. The bird’s largest population is in the Gunnison basin. Photo credit: Colorado Parks and Wildlife.
Habitat Restoration in the Gunnison Basin: Up to $750,000: The funding would use low-tech restoration structures to restore habitat for the endangered Gunnison sage-grouse in the Gunnison River Basin.
Toxic-algae blooms appeared in Steamboat Lake summer of 2020. The lake shut down for two weeks after harmful levels of a toxin produced by the blue-green algae were found in the water. As climate change continues, toxic blooms and summer shutdowns of lakes are predicted to become more common. Photo credit: Julie Arington/Aspen Journalism
Cyanobacteria Monitoring and Treatment for Drought-driven Blooms in a High Elevation, Upper Colorado Reservoir to save Ecosystem Function: Up to $518,000: The funding would use real-time water quality monitoring tools and targeted treatments to combat algal blooms and restore aquatic health at Williams Fork Reservoir.
Since the late 1980’s, this waterfall formed from interactions among Lake Powell reservoir levels and sedimentation that redirected the San Juan River over a 20-foot high sandstone ledge [Dominy Formation]. Until recently, little was known about its effect on two endangered fishes. Between 2015-2017, more than 1,000 razorback sucker and dozens of Colorado pikeminnow were detected downstream of the waterfall. Credit: Bureau of Reclamation
From email from Reclamation (Western Colorado Area Office):
Releases are made for the authorized purposes of the Navajo Unit, and to attempt to maintain a target base flow through the endangered fish critical habitat reach of the San Juan River (Farmington to Lake Powell). The San Juan River Basin Recovery Implementation Program recommends a target base flow of between 500 cfs and 1,000 cfs through the critical habitat area. The target base flow is calculated as the weekly average of gaged flows throughout the critical habitat area from Farmington to Lake Powell.
In December 2007 the Secretary of the Interior adopted coordinated operating guidelines for operation of Glen Canyon Dam and Hoover Dam for an interim period that expires in 2026.To address long-term Colorado River operations after the expiration of these guidelines, the United States Department of the Interior initiated a National Environmental Policy Act process on June 16, 2023, to develop and adopt successor domestic guidelines and agreements for the operation of Glen Canyon Dam and Hoover Dam to take effect in mid-2026, before the current operational framework expires. On November 20, 2024, the Bureau of Reclamation published the range of alternatives planned for analysis in the draft environmental impact statement and committed to providing additional information in a subsequent report. This report describes these alternatives and the process for developing them in more detail.
The alternatives were developed over the past year and incorporate considerable input received from the Colorado River Basin States, Colorado River Basin Tribes, conservation organizations, other federal agencies, and other stakeholders during that time. Throughout 2024, the Bureau of Reclamation worked extensively with these key partners to integrate their input into the range of alternatives. The alternatives identified in this report provide a reasonable and broad range of Colorado River operations that capture an appropriate range of potential environmental impacts from implementing new operational guidelines post-2026.
The five alternatives described in detail in this report are:
Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2024. Credit: Brad Udall
No Action Alternative – Included as a requirement of the National Environmental Policy Act, the No Action Alternative assumes Colorado River operations would revert to annual determinations announced through the Annual Operating Plan for Colorado River Reservoirs process and be based on operating guidance in place prior to the adoption of the 2007 Colorado River Interim Guidelines for Lower Basin Shortages and Coordinated Operations for Lake Powell and Lake Mead.
Federal Authorities Alternative – This alternative is designed to achieve protection of critical infrastructure within the Department of the Interior’s and Bureau of Reclamation’s current statutory authorities and absent new stakeholder agreements.
Federal Authorities Hybrid Alternative – This alternative is based on proposals and concepts from Tribes, federal agencies, and other stakeholders and is designed to achieve protection of critical infrastructure while benefitting key resources through an approach to distributing storage between Lake Powell and Lake Mead that enhances the reservoirs’ ability to support the Colorado River Basin.
Receding waters at Lone Rock in Lake Powell illustrate the impacts of megadrought. Hydroelectric generation will be endangered if the lake continues to shrink. Credit: Colorado State University
Cooperative Conservation Alternative – This alternative is informed by a proposal submitted by a consortium of conservation organizations with the goal of stabilizing system storage, integrating stewardship and mitigation strategies of Lake Powell and Lake Mead, maintaining opportunities for binational cooperative measures, incentivizing water conservation, and designing flexible water management strategies.
Hoover Dam with Lake Mead in the background December 3, 2024.
Basin Hybrid Alternative – This alternative reflects components of the proposals and concepts submitted by the Upper Division States, Lower Division States, and Colorado River Basin Tribes that could provide a basis for coordinated operations and may facilitate greater agreement across the Basin.
Releasing the Bureau of Reclamation’s intended approach to the alternatives in advance of publishing the draft environmental impact statement enhances transparency and public understanding of this important National Environmental Policy Act process and provides greater opportunities for collaboration. Information submitted following the November 20, 2024, publication of the range of alternatives has not been considered in this report. Following the publication of this report, the Bureau of Reclamation will continue its efforts working with Colorado River Basin partners and stakeholders and will analyze information submitted after November 20, 2024. The Bureau of Reclamation will also prepare the environmental impact analysis for the draft environmental impact statement.
Colorado River “Beginnings”. Photo: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism
View of Shoshone Hydroelectric Plant construction in Glenwood Canyon (Garfield County) Colorado; shows the Colorado River, the dam, sheds, a footbridge, and the workmen’s camp. Creator: McClure, Louis Charles, 1867-1957. Credit: Denver Public Library Digital Collections
January 17, 2025—The Bureau of Reclamation announced this week nearly $177 million in funding for water projects in the Upper Rio Grande and Upper Colorado River basins in Colorado. These funds—awarded from Bucket 2 Environmental Drought Mitigation (B2E) and Inflation Reduction Act programs—will help Colorado better address the impacts to our water supplies and aquatic ecosystems from a hotter, drier future. The Colorado Water Conservation Board (CWCB) shares the excitement of all the organizations receiving funding—the awards are a testament to their hard work. The CWCB is proud to have supported several of the awardees with matching funds and technical assistance while developing their applications.
“We are thrilled to see this funding go towards these critical projects in Colorado. We are particularly proud to have played a role in assisting these projects in securing funding through CWCB’s grant programs including our Federal Technical Assistance Grant Program, Projects Bill Grants Program and Wildfire Ready Watershed Grants Program,” said Lauren Ris, CWCB Director. “By building upon the capacity of our local partners, we provide resources and guidance to navigate complex federal funding processes.”
The funded projects span a diverse range of initiatives that deliver impactful outcomes for Colorado communities. CWCB funding supported applications for:
Upper Rio Grande Basin Drought Resiliency Activities: CWCB provided a $195,000 Local Capacity Grant to the Rio Grande Headwaters Restoration Foundation, which helped secure a $24.9 million IRA award through the Bureau of Reclamation’s “Other Basins” Program. These projects are essential to addressing the long-term drought and water security in the basin.
Addressing Drought Mitigation in Southwest Colorado: CWCB provided a $156,706 Local Capacity Grant to the San Juan Resource Conservation and Development Council (in partnership with Southwestern Water Conservation District) which helped secure up to $25.6 million in B2E funding to enhance drought resilience and habitat restoration efforts in southwest Colorado.
Orchard Mesa Irrigation District Conveyance Upgrades for 15-Mile Reach Flow Enhancement: CWCB provided a $73,250 Local Capacity Grant to Farmers Conservation Alliance (in partnership with Orchard Mesa Irrigation District) which helped secure up to $10.5 million in B2E funding to modernize irrigation systems and improve water efficiency.
Shoshone Water Rights Preservation Project: CWCB provided a $20 million Projects Bill Grant to the Colorado River Water Conservation District which helped secure up to $40 million in B2E funding to acquire the Shoshone water right.
Drought Resiliency on Western Colorado Conserved Lands: CWCB provided a $434,130 Local Capacity Grant to the Colorado River Water Conservation District (in partnership with Shavano Conservation District) which helped secure up to $4.6 million in B2E funding to address drought challenges in western Colorado.
Forest Resiliency in the Headwaters of the Colorado: CWCB provided a $93,850 Wildfire Ready Watersheds Grant to Grand County which supported the development of the “Grand County Wildfire Ready Action Plan,” which helped secure up to $32.6 million in multistate B2E funding for wildfire mitigation efforts.
CWCB is committed to continuing to be a partner of communities statewide so that they are best positioned to secure federal funding and implement lasting solutions for Colorado water challenges. The 2024 Federal Technical Assistance Grant cycle is completed, and more information about 2025 applications will be announced this Spring.
WASHINGTON — The Bureau of Reclamation today announced initial selections under the Upper Colorado River Basin Environmental Program for a $388.3 million investment from President Biden’s Investing in America agenda to improve wildlife and aquatic habitats, ecological stability and resilience against drought. The funding supports 42 projects in Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming, as well as Tribal initiatives that will provide environmental benefits or the restoration of ecosystem and natural habitats. To view a full list of projects, visit Reclamation’s website. Individualized criteria for some projects are included in the descriptions at the link.
Additionally, Reclamation announced approximately $100 Million funding opportunity for the companion program in the Lower Basin, which seeks to fund projects that provide environmental benefits in Arizona, Nevada, and California.
“These historic environmental investments will restore and improve natural resources supporting the long-term sustainability of the Colorado River Basin, which includes nine National Parks across the seven states and is an essential habitat for more than a dozen endangered species,” Commissioner Camille Calimlim Touton said. “As we continue to develop the drought resiliency of the basin through investments in water conservation and efficiency projects, we can’t forget that a sustainable basin can only exist if there is a healthy environment.”
This is the first round of projects funded from the Upper Basin Environmental Drought Mitigation Program through the Inflation Reduction Act. More announcements are expected in the coming months, including projects from the most recent Upper Basin environmental announcement, which closed Jan. 10, 2025. Reclamation will begin negotiations with successful applicants to ensure funding conditions are met before funding is obligated. Funding for the Shoshone Water Rights Preservation Project will not be obligated until the Colorado water court enters a final decree; in addition, the agreement will contain provisions requiring Reclamation’s written consent for any water right changes. The conditions precedent set by the State of Colorado for their funding of the Shoshone Water Rights Preservation Project must also be met prior to the obligation of federal funds. Funding for the Pine River Environment Drought Mitigation Project is subject to negotiation concerning operation, maintenance and replacement costs and other appropriate considerations.
Reclamation’s new funding opportunity for proposed ecosystem restoration or improvements projects in the Lower Colorado River Basin is also funded by the Inflation Reduction Act, and will consider projects that provide environmental benefits, or ecosystem and habitat restoration projects that address issues directly caused by drought in the Lower Colorado Basin Region under Phase 3 of the Lower Colorado River Basin System Conservation and Efficiency Program. Reclamation expects to announce projects by spring 2025 and award approximately $100 million for planning, design, construction, and/or implementation of projects. Project and applicant eligibility information is available on the Bureau of Reclamation website.
The Biden-Harris administration has led a comprehensive effort to make Western communities more resilient to climate change and address the ongoing megadrought across the region by harnessing the full resources of President Biden’s historic Investing in America agenda. As climate change has accelerated over the past two decades, the Colorado River Basin experienced the driest period in over one thousand years. Together, the Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law provide the largest investment in climate resilience in our nation’s history, including $15.4 billion for Western water across federal agencies to enhance the West’s resilience to drought and deliver unprecedented resources to protect the Colorado River System for all whose lives and livelihoods depend on it. This includes $5.35 billion for over 577 projects in the Colorado River Basin states.
Projects in Colorado
Shoshone Water Rights Preservation Project: Up to approximately $40m
Funding is provided to permanently protect the Shoshone Water Rights in the Upper Colorado River Basin to ensure a reliable water supply for ecosystem, agricultural, municipal, and recreational uses. Key components include maintaining the historical flow regime, eliminating risks of abandonment due to plant decommissioning, and facilitating instream flow use by the Colorado Water Conservation Board. Funds will not be obligated or expended until a final Colorado water court decree is entered confirming water rights and the agreement will contain provisions requiring written consent of Reclamation on any water right changes. The conditions precedent set by the State of Colorado for their funding of the Shoshone Water Rights Preservation Project must also be met prior to the obligation of federal funds.
Addressing Drought Mitigation in Southwest Colorado: Up to approximately $25.6m
Funding is provided for restoring ecosystems and improving river and connection of waterways in southwestern Colorado. It involves a collaborative effort to enhance biodiversity and water resources while supporting local communities and endangered species.
Grand Mesa and Upper Gunnison Watershed Resiliency and Aquatic Connectivity Project: Up to approximately $24.3m
Funding is provided to implement watershed restoration actions to combat drought effects in western Colorado. Through a variety of strategies, it enhances water quality, habitat resilience, and connectivity for aquatic species.
Orchard Mesa Irrigation District Conveyance Upgrades for 15-Mile Reach Flow Enhancement: Up to approximately $10.5m
Funding is provided to convert open canals into pressurized pipelines, improving water delivery efficiency and reducing environmental stressors. This upgrade supports the recovery of endangered fish species by enhancing streamflow in the critical 15-mile reach of the Colorado River.
Enhancing Aquatic Habitat in Colorado River Headwaters: Up to approximately $7m
Funding is provided to restore stream habitats along the Fraser, Blue and Colorado rivers in Grand County, enhancing aquatic ecosystems through channel shaping and bank stabilization through collaboration with key conservation partners.
Yampa River/Walton Creek Confluence Restoration Project: Up to approximately $5m
Funding is provided to restore river and wetland ecosystems in Steamboat Springs through restoration of river and floodplain habitat and the rehabilitation of riparian and wetland area thereby enhancing ecological health and promoting biodiversity. It addresses drought impacts by improving water quality, habitat complexity, and community resilience.
Drought Resiliency on Western Colorado Conserved Lands: Up to approximately $4.6m
Funding is provided to implement various ecological restoration strategies, including the restoration of wetlands, reconnection of floodplains, the installation of erosion control structures to reduce sediment transport and enhance water quality, while promoting habitat restoration for at-risk species like the yellow-billed cuckoo and Gunnison sage-grouse.
Upper Colorado Basin Aquatic Organism Passage Program: Up to approximately $4.2m
Funding is provided to restore stream habitat in Grand County, promoting biodiversity and resilience against drought conditions while enhancing habitat connectivity and improving fish passage for native species, particularly Colorado River cutthroat trout.
Conversion of Wastewater Lagoons into Wetlands: Up to approximately $3m
Funding is provided to transform outdated sewer lagoons into wetlands, enhancing biodiversity and providing habitat for migratory waterfowl and endangered fish species in the town of [Palisade]. Once completed, the wetlands will improve water quality and increase native plant diversity, recharging groundwater and supporting up to 75% of commercially harvested fish.
Fruita Reservoir Dam Removal: Up to approximately $2.8m
Funding is provided to remove a dam on Pinon Mesa, restoring wetlands and enhancing biodiversity and wildlife habitat while ensuring ecological resilience through water pooling, pipeline removal and comprehensive habitat restoration efforts.
Monitoring and Quantifying the Effectiveness of Beaver Dam Analogs on Drought Influenced Streams in the Upper Colorado River Basin: Up to approximately $1.9m
Funding is provided to restore degraded headwater meadows by implementing structures that mimic the natural functions of beaver dams. These interventions enhance ecosystem resilience, improve water retention, and support native species.
Uncompahgre Tailwater Rehabilitation Project: Up to $1.8m
Funding is provided to address habitat degradation, enhancing ecological health and recreational opportunities through rehabilitation of river habitat, restoration aging structures, and implementation of bank stabilization techniques.
Eagle River Habitat Improvement, Gypsum Ponds State Wildlife Area: Up to approximately $1.5m
Funding is provided to enhance Eagle River in Eagle County, improving fish habitat and increasing resilience to low flows and drought while supporting local ecosystems and enhancing water quality.
Orchard Mesa and Grand Valley Metering Efficiency Project: Up to approximately $1.5m
Funding is provided to enhance water management in the Grand Valley through the installation of advanced metering technology and SCADA systems. This project addresses drought conditions by improving water use efficiency and supporting local aquatic ecosystems.
Habitat Restoration in the Gunnison Basin: Up to approximately $750k
Funding is provided to restore stream habitats in the Gunnison Basin, implementing low-tech restoration structures to enhance ecosystem resilience and support habitat for the endangered Gunnison Sage-Grouse.
Cyanobacteria Monitoring and Treatment for Drought-driven Blooms in a High Elevation, Upper Colorado Reservoir to save Ecosystem Function: Up to approximately $518k
Funding is provided to restore aquatic health at Williams Fork reservoir by deploying real-time water quality monitoring tools and implementing targeted hydrogen peroxide treatments to combat algal blooms. It enhances water quality management to protect ecosystems and support community recreational activities.
These hay bales stand ready to be collected on a ranch outside of Carbondale in July 2024. A program that pays irrigators in the Upper Colorado River Basin to cut back is facing uncertainty in 2025 because of Congressional delays. Credit: Heather Sackett/Aspen Journalism
A federally funded water conservation program in the Upper Colorado River Basin is facing uncertainty for 2025 after the bill to authorize funding for it stalled in Congress late last year.
On Friday, Upper Colorado River Commission Executive Director Chuck Cullom said the commission planned to communicate to participants in the 2024 System Conservation Pilot Program that the UCRC is not accepting applications at this time for a 2025 program. Officials will let people know later this month if and when the application process will open for 2025.
According to a post on the UCRC’s website, which has since been removed, applications were potentially going to be available Jan. 9, with a now-cancelled informational webinar scheduled for Jan. 10.
Officials are holding out hope that the program can still get federal authorization in time for water users — mostly farmers and ranchers — in Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming to conserve water during the upcoming growing season.
“The commission recognizes that SCPP has been an important and useful tool for the Upper Basin to understand the opportunities and issues that conservation programs represent,” Cullom said. “We are hopeful we will have that tool available in 2025 and again in 2026.”
The System Conservation Pilot Program, which pays water users who volunteer to cut back, was restarted in 2023 as part of the Upper Basin’s 5-Point Plan, designed to protect critical infrastructure from plummeting reservoir levels. Over two years, the program spent about $45 million to save about 101,000 acre-feet of water. Funding for SCPP comes from $125 million allocated through the Inflation Reduction Act.
The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s authorization to spend this money expired in December and now must be renewed if the program is to continue.
Anthony Rivera-Rodriguez, a press secretary with the office of U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper, D-Colo., said lawmakers plan to introduce a new bill for funding authorization in the next couple of weeks. He said funding for Western drought programs has not been controversial and has received bipartisan support. The authorization didn’t pass in December, he said, because lawmakers simply ran out of time before the end of the session. The Colorado Sun reported last month that the Senate passed the Colorado River Basin System Conservation Extension Act, but the House of Representatives “left it on the chopping block as lawmakers raced to pass legislation to avoid a government shutdown.”
“We are trying to get this authorized as soon as we possibly can,” Rivera-Rodriguez said.
SCPP has been dogged by controversy since it was rebooted in 2023. The program originally took place from 2015 to 2018.
SCPP has been criticized for a lack of transparency in the 2023 program, not measuring and tracking how much of the conserved water eventually makes it to Lake Powell, and for its potential negative impacts, in general, to the agricultural communities of the Western Slope and, in particular, to an irrigation company in the Grand Valley. In response to the second criticism, officials are working on how Upper Basin states could “get credit” for conserved water through a memorandum of understanding with the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation.
Delta County farmer Paul Kehmeier kneels by gated pipes in his family’s alfalfa field. Kehmeier participated in the 2024 System Conservation Pilot Program and said he would again in 2025 if funding is reauthorized by Congress. Credit: Natalie Keltner-McNeil/Aspen Journalism
Whether reauthorization will come quickly enough for Upper Basin agricultural producers to participate in the upcoming irrigation season remains to be seen. Short notice and a hasty rollout of SCPP for the 2023 growing season meant low participation numbers for that year, with just 66 water-saving projects and about 38,000 acre-feet conserved across the four Upper Basin states. The number of projects in 2024 jumped to 109, with about 64,000 acre-feet conserved.
A last-minute reprieve for the program wouldn’t be a problem for one Delta County rancher who participated in SCPP in 2024. Paul Kehmeier enrolled 58 acres of his ranch in the program last year and said he plans to participate again if the program is extended.
“There are two reasons that I’m planning to participate,” Kehmeier said. “One is that the money is very good, and second is that I don’t think we in the Upper Basin can stick our heads in the sand on all this big river stuff. … My irrigation season starts April 1, so anytime up until the last day of March, if I had a chance to participate, I would jump at the chance.”
The reauthorization of System Conservation comes at a pivotal moment for water users on the Colorado River. Negotiations between the Upper Basin states and the Lower Basin states (California, Arizona, Nevada) on how shortages will be shared after 2026 have ground to a halt. Lower Basin water managers say all seven states that use the Colorado River must share cuts under the driest conditions, while Upper Basin officials maintain they already take cuts in dry years because they are squeezed by climate change and can’t rely on the massive storage buckets of Lake Powell and Lake Mead for their water supply. Upper Basin leaders also maintain that they shouldn’t have to share additional cuts because their states have never used the entire 7.5 million-acre-foot apportionment given to them by the Colorado River Compact, while the Lower Basin regularly uses its full allotment.
But there has been a recognition in recent months by some Upper Basin officials that their states will have to participate in some kind of future conservation program — SCPP or otherwise — on a river whose flows have declined over the past two decades due to drought and climate change.
“As we get more familiar with this, maybe that can be ramped up to 100,000, 200,000 (acre-feet), I don’t know,” Esteban Lopez, the UCRC commissioner from New Mexico, told attendees at the December Colorado River Water Users Association Conference in Las Vegas. “Maybe we can get there, maybe we can’t. But the point is: We will conserve and we will commit to conserve what we can conserve when there’s water available and put it in an account in Lake Powell.”
A Reclamation map, released January 10, 2025, of the upper basin showed snowpack levels — more specifically, snow water equivalent (SWE) levels — at 93% of normal for this time of year.
Click the link to read the article on the 8NewsNow.com website (Greg Haas). Here’s an excerpt:
January 10, 2025
An early season forecast indicates Lake Powell will get only about 81% of its normal water flow because of dry conditions around much of the Upper Colorado River Basin. Officials emphasized that forecasts this early can be inaccurate, and they represent the “most probable” conditions identified by the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center (CBRFC), part of the National Weather Service. The forecast was based on data collected up until Jan. 1. Lake Powell, the nation’s second-largest reservoir, is currently 37% full, according to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation…
The Lake Powell forecast is a summary of the hydrologic conditions throughout the entire Upper Colorado River Basin,” Cody Moser, a hydrologist with CBRFC said. “Lake Powell forecasting 5,150 KAF — or thousand-acre-feet — which is 81% of the 1991 through 2020 normal.” Graphics showed the normal flow at 6,300 KAF.
The CBRFC briefing on Friday estimated the flow into Lake Powell would be below normal levels, despite good conditions in two regions that are crucial to the Colorado River’s water supply — the Colorado Headwaters and the Gunnison region.
Attendees of the Colorado River Water Users Association watch negotiators Estevan López of New Mexico and Becky Mitchell of Colorado speak on a panel Thursday, December 5, 2024, at the Paris Hotel and Casino. The Upper and Lower basin states are at an impasse about how cuts will be shared and reservoirs operated after 2026. CREDIT: LUKE RUNYON/THE WATER DESK
Click the link to read the article on the InkStain.net website (Jack Schmidt and Eric Kuhn):
January 9, 2024
The press coverage of the December 2024 Colorado River Water Users Association (CRWUA) meeting mostly focused on the ongoing stalemate between representatives of the Upper and Lower Division States over their competing proposals for how the Colorado River Systems’ big reservoirs will be operated after the 2007 Interim Guidelines terminate in 2026. The headlines included words such as “turbulent”, “bitter”, “bluster”, and “spar”. Indeed, there was tension in the air, and the potential for interstate litigation was a topic of much discussion both on the formal agenda and in the hallways where, traditionally, progress is often made between competing interests.
While the press focus on the tension and divisiveness was unavoidable, I believe that there were good reasons for some guarded optimism.
For the ongoing effort to renegotiate the post-2026 operating guidelines, a consortium of seven environmental NGOs has also made a detailed proposal. Their proposal is referred to as the “Cooperative Conservation” proposal. One of the four action alternatives that Reclamation will analyze, Alternative #3, is patterned after the NGO submittal. At CRWUA, John Berggren of Western Resource Advocates, who along with Jennifer Pitt and others prepared the proposal, made a presentation on the proposal. Like the other submitted proposals, the cooperative conservation alternative proposes sophisticated operational rules for Lakes Mead and Powell based on combined system storage and actual hydrology. Where the Cooperative Conservation proposal breaks new ground is the concept of a Conservation Reserve Pool, and this idea could lead the basin toward a practical on-the-ground solution. Indeed, the Gila River Indian Community introduced at CRWUA a similar concept in the form of a Federal Protection Pool made up of stored water in both Lake Powell and Lake Mead. These proposals, taken separately, together, or in some combined and moderated form, might serve as a catalyst for compromise.
As proposed, both the Conservation Reserve Pool and the Federal Protection Pool would be filled with water conserved by reductions in consumptive use and perhaps augmentation from programs in both basins and this water could be stored anywhere in the system. This water would be “operationally neutral” and thus invisible to the underlying system management operating rules. From an accounting perspective, this Pool would “float” above other water in the reservoirs. Floating Pools operate separately from and above the prior appropriation system of water allocation on the Lower River and are invisible to the rules that dictate annual releases from Glen Canyon Dam. Thus, these proposals impart important operational flexibility. In many ways, Floating Pools split the baby—they incentivize innovative conservation measures that allow participants to find value they would not have been able to realize under the prior appropriation system—yet they insulate the prior appropriation system and thus are more protective of higher-priority water users than operationally non-neutral ICS. It’s a stretch to say there is something here for everyone, but there may be enough to kick-start otherwise stalled conversations.
In their proposal, the Lower Division States have offered to take up to 1.5 maf/year of mainstem shortages. Where the two basins remain deadlocked is what happens in those years when shortages exceed the amount the Lower Division States are willing to accept. The Lower Division States have proposed that the two basins share the additional required shortages up to a maximum shortage of 3.9 maf/year. The Upper Division States have said, “No, because we already suffer large hydrologic shortages in dry years, and we have not used our full compact entitlement; the Lower Division should cover all of the shortages.” In their presentation, however, the Upper Division Commissioners (UCRC members) left the door open for continuing discussions between the two divisions. In his remarks, New Mexico Commissioner Estevan Lopez stated that under what he referred to as “parallel activities”, the Upper Division States might be willing to discuss conserving “100,000, maybe 200,000 acre-feet per year.”
Water in Floating Pools could be used for a variety of purposes including environmental management, fostering binational programs, and supplementing scheduled water deliveries. During his CRWUA presentation, John Berggren mentioned an obvious use for this pool. Water stored in the Pool by conserved consumptive use programs in the Upper Division States could be used as an Upper Division contribution during years when mainstem shortages to the Lower Division States exceed a negotiated amount. Of course, the Lower Basin is unlikely to accept Upper Basin creation of Floating Pools made up of water for which there is no current consumptive use. This water is already “system water” and is now being used by existing Lower Basin water agency. Thus, it would be necessary to develop a program to account for and certify savings in the Upper Basin. Further, the thorny problem of shepherding (legally protecting the conserved water so that it ends up in system storage) needs to be overcome. For a perspective on this issue, see Heather Sacket. Undeveloped Tribal water is a controversial sticking-point in this regard, with strong feelings and strong arguments on all sides.
If the Upper Division States were to conserve 200,000 acre-feet per year for five years and deposit that saved water in a conservation reserve “Floating Pool”, something like 900,000 acre-feet could be available for shortage sharing (after accounting for reservoir evaporation). (We use 900,000 af as an example only, how much water the Upper Division States would have to contribute and maintain in a Floating Pool would have to be negotiated between the two divisions.) In their presentation, the Lower Division principals pointed out that had their proposal been in place beginning in 2007, there has yet to be a year when shortage sharing would have been required. Note, this conclusion is very sensitive to “initial conditions.” In 2007, total storage in Lake Mead and Lake Powell was about 8 maf more than it is today. If the 21st century hydrology continues, shortages greater than 1.5 maf/year are likely to occur.
Carefully crafted with appropriate guardrails, Floating Pool concepts can be a catalyst for compromise between the two divisions that give both parties something they need.
How do Floating Pool alternatives fit with the Schmidt, Kuhn, Fleck management approach? Based on our conversations with the authors of the cooperative conservation proposal, we believe the two approaches agree — that our management proposal fits on top of and complements their proposal quite well. In my presentation at CRWUA, I emphasized that, like future hydrology, there is great uncertainty in the future needs of the river’s ecosystem and society’s values. It’s almost a certainty that in the future, prescribed annual releases from Glen Canyon Dam will cause an unacceptable and unanticipated outcome to some river or reservoir resource. When that happens, our flexible management approach and accounting system keeps the basins “whole.”
Is using the concept of Floating Pools as a catalyst to break the stalemate between the two basins without warts? – of course not. There are important considerations regarding the use of undeveloped water—Tribal or otherwise, and the devil is in the details when it comes to developing appropriate guardrails for annual and total accumulation in such a Pool, the number and type of participants, annual debits, and other important qualifications. Even conserving 100,000 acre-feet per year in the Upper Division States, with acceptable verification, could be a stretch, especially if there is less federal money in the future, as there almost certainly will be. Finally, it might put off addressing fundamental problems with the law of the river until the new post-2026 operating rules again expire. When they do, the 1922 Compact and 1944 Treaty with Mexico will still be in place, and these agreements collectively allocate 17.5 maf/year of consumptive use on a river that is only producing 13-13.5 maf/year of water at the international boundary (and runoff continues to decline). What the Floating Pool concept might accomplish is to significantly reduce the temptation and threat of unpredictable interstate litigation, keep the basin’s stakeholders talking to each other, and give us time to move toward more foundational change in how the river is managed.
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
Graphic credit: The Colorado River water crisis its origin and future Jock Schmidt, Eric Kuhn, Charles Yackulic.
January 7, 2025
Belated season’s greetings, dear readers! The season being the long dark days as our turning planet slowly tilts our part of the planet again toward the star we circle – moving us into a new year-cycle that will probably again be ‘one of the ten warmest years in recorded climate history’ – if not ‘the warmest’ again.
But we are officially no longer going to be concerned about that, right? The voters have spoken, with the usual one-percent victory taken by the winner to be a landslide mandate. And what the voters decided, by that one-percent margin, is that we, as a nation, the Untied States of America, shall officially cease to believe that we are changing the climate; we’ve given ourselves license to linger in the denial and anger stages – denial that it is happening, and anger at anyone who wants to blame us for that which we can now officially refuse to believe is happening.
And we will not just lie back leisurely, relaxing in our denial, doing nothing about what we believe is not happening. No, we are going to try to break all previous production records of those fossil fuels that we can now officially refuse to believe are changing the climate – yes, even coal too, to shovel into the industrial juggernaut, which will grow as all those factories that moved overseas will sheepishly return home, once the tariffs are working their magic in bending the rest of the world to our will…. We are promised this will be the official national Reality According To Trump (RATT).
Meanwhile, however, back along the Colorado River, it is a little harder to make the RATT logic compute. The sequence of successively warmer years has had an undeniable, measurable, negative impact on our usable water supply: something like a 5-7 percent loss of surface water for every degree of rise in the annual average temperatures. It’s not necessarily that there’s less water; it’s just that more of the water is shifting into the uncontrollable vapor state rather than the manageable liquid state we earthlings need. The bottom line is a measurably diminishing supply, over the past several decades, of the surface water on which 35 million city dwellers and the irrigators of five million acres of desert land depend to some degree.
Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2024. Credit: Brad Udall
Where are we right now with the management planning process for the river? In mid-November 2024, the Bureau of Reclamation issued five mix-and-match alternatives for managing the Colorado River in the future – meaning the decade or so beyond the 2026 expiration of the 2007 Interim Guidelines (and the 2019 Interim Interim Guidelines, and the 2023 Interim Interim Interim Guidelines).
These alternatives are the Bureau’s effort to break the stalemate in the stalled negotiations between the four states of the Upper Colorado River Basin and the three states of the Lower Colorado River Basin. Large cuts in use will be necessary to keep the storage and distribution systems operational, and each Basin wants the other Basin to take a larger share of those cuts proscribed by ‘the river we have, not the river we dream for,’ as Colorado’s chief negotiator Becky Mitchell put it. (See the graphic at the beginning.)
The Bureau’s five alternatives, for which they plan to do the required Environmental Impact analysis this year, all focus primarily on managing the two main reservoirs, Mead and Powell, although other reservoirs in the system may by used to bolster storage in the two big ones. The five alternatives run a gamut from the NEPA mandatory ‘No Action’ alternative (continue business as usual), through two varying levels of federal management if the states are unable to reach a working agreement, to an alternative based primarily on a plan submitted by conservation groups, to a final alternative that is mostly pieced together from the conflicting plans proposed by the two basins, assuming the two basins can find the necessary compromises to make the two plans into one plan that might work.
Native America in the Colorado River Basin. Credit: USBR
All alternatives except the one by conservationists (#4) include notice that ‘there would be explicit accounting of unused/undeveloped quantified Tribal water.’ This means that the settled or decreed water rights of the First Peoples would finally be acknowledged in the river accounting, noting where and by whom their undeveloped water was being used – the first step, as one tribal member observed, in eventually either getting the water back for their own use, or getting paid by others for the continued use of their water. The First People are getting closer to being at the table. (It is worth noting that the Gila River Indian Community, south of Phoenix, is the first user organization to sign a post-2026 contract with the Bureau to leave some of its water in Mead Reservoir, water that will be conserved through projects to be funded with infrastructure money, if that survives the RATT.)
That is the broad overview; if you wish for more specifics, you can find more detailed descriptions of all five alternatives here, but there is probably no real need for us citizens to get down in the weeds of detail just yet, since we are just passive participants at that level anyway.
Instead, I want to encourage us to think on the larger level of considering alternatives not part of the Bureau’s five choices. Why not? There is, after all, a large minority of us who do not drink the small majority’s RATT kool-aid. For those of you who fit that description, my season’s greeting to you are two quotations I encountered recently that kind of rang my bell:
The first is a poet calling for poets to ‘give us imagination of peace, to oust the intense, familiar imagination of disaster.’ ‘Peace’ is given the negative-space definition of ‘not only the absence of war’: something more, or other, than mere truce. The ‘familiar imagination of disaster,’ on the other hand, is a major element of the RATT: a nation overrun by immigrant murderers, inflation out of control, an economy gone to hell, cities awash in crime, et cetera – that’s the virulent and violent imaginings that became the principal election strategy of the Repugnicans (as distinguished from the real but very timid Republicans). They call it ‘flooding the zone with shit,’ so much imagining of fictitious disaster that one wave of lies cannot be seriously addressed and challenged before the next wave rolls over us. This was a successful campaign strategy, with the naive cooperation of the national media serving as their trumpet: when the fact meets the RATT, print the RATT – reserving the last couple paragraphs for quotes citing the facts that contradict the RATT, thus it’s fair and balanced!
But when we come to our river – how are the poets to ‘imagine the peace’? And the call for poets does not necessarily preclude the hydrologists, politicians, water managers and others who manage ‘the river we have.’ Just to say, for example, as Becky Mitchell said, ‘We need to plan for the river we have, not the river we dream for,’ moves the discourse into the poet’s realm of analogy and metaphor, not denying but augmenting the scientist’s world of evidential causation and consequence, en route to testable hypotheses.
The second quote, however, by the author of 1984 – the book describing the fully devolved RATT worldview that we are flirting with now – cautions us that ‘the imagination, like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity.’ Is that same as saying the realm of the imagination lies in ‘thinking outside the box’? Like we keep saying we need to be doing?
Well, moving forward with that assumption – Orwell seems to be suggesting that the imagination can’t kick into gear if we are, consciously or unconsciously, holding it ‘in captivity’ inside some box of dominant conventional weltanschauung – ‘world view’ in translation, ideology, or just ‘our way of doing things.’ But the word is so much more heavily evocative in German of the mass and weight of the box, the height of the sidewalls that discouraging climbing up to look over and beyond…. Orwell was aware of the flywheel power of the boxes a society builds around itself – and the extent to which that power depends on the unquestioning, often only semi-conscious, acceptance of those who dwell within the box as ‘the way it is and that’s it.’ Even if ‘the way it is’ is not that great.
That would suggest that unleashing our imagination to such tasks as the ‘imagination of peace,’ even just regional peace along a modest and shrinking desert river, has to begin by becoming aware of the box that we need to be trying to think outside of.
What I think we have in the Colorado River region are at least two nested boxes. Whenever we hear someone intone, ‘The foundation of the Law of the River is the Colorado River Compact,’ or, ‘The Colorado River Compact cannot be (tinkered with, changed to fit reality, or discarded as irrelevant),’ we can assume that their imagination is held captive in the Colorado River Compact Box. When Becky Mitchell says, ‘We have to plan for the river we have, not the river we dream for,’ she has at least hiked herself up onto the edge of the Compact Box – a Compact that was written for a mythic river half-again larger than the river we have now. She might even be looking beyond the Compact for resolution (although she can probably not say that out loud yet).
Prior appropriation example via Oregon.gov
If we hike ourselves up onto the edge of Compact Box, we will find ourselves looking at a larger and more intimidating box: the Prior Appropriation Box. This, not the Compact, is clearly the ‘foundation’ of all law regarding the use of the river: first come, first served, and seniority rules. All seven of the Colorado River states had embraced the Appropriation Doctrine as the foundation of their water law by the early 20th century. (New Mexico and Arizona did not become states until 1912.)
But those of us captive in the Compact Box tend to forget that the Compact Commission came together in 1922 to try to override the appropriation doctrine at the interstate level, among the seven states. California was growing so fast, with Arizona not far behind, that the high desert and mountain states above the river’s canyon region – growing much more slowly due to the erratic ebb and flow of the mining industry – feared there would be no unappropriated water left when they hit their stride. And none of the states really wanted a seven-state horserace of helter-skelter ‘defensive appropriation’ to avoid being left high and dry.
The water managers in the states also knew that the only way to ‘civilize’ the Colorado River was to control and store the annual spring flood of mountain snowmelt, for release as needed throughout the rest of the year. And because it was an interstate river, and because the cost of big mainstream structures was beyond their means, they knew the federal government, through its Bureau of Reclamation, would have to take a lead role in that regional development. But what they did not want was for the feds to take over all the development and operation of ‘their’ river’s water.
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
So the Compact Commission assembled in January of 1922 to develop an interstate compact that would ‘provide for the equitable division and apportionment of the use of the waters of the Colorado River System’ – a seven-way division of the waters to give each state the right to use, in its own good time, the water needed to develop its land and resources. When a state was ready to use it, their share of the river’s water would be there for them, protected from prior appropriation by other faster-growing states.
That was the vision anyway: the ‘Compact Box’ nested in the ‘Prior Appropriation Box’ was to be an interstate refuge from the prior appropriation doctrine. ‘First come, first served’ could by the law within the states – but only up to the quantity allotted for each state.
They failed to realize that vision, however, after several days of trying – mostly for reasons of vagueness about, first, the flow of the river itself, and second, their own over-optimistic estimates of their own futures. Only the persuasive power of the federal representative on the Commission, Herbert Hoover – an engineer by training who really wanted to see the big mainstream structures built – kept them on task until they patched together, ten months later, the two-basin division for the use of the river’s water.
That substitute division was immediately rejected by the State of Arizona, and is now clearly failing at its original intent to transcend the appropriation doctrine between states: California is applying the prior appropriation doctrine against the other states in the Lower River Basin (as Arizona knew they would eventually). And the Lower Basin is threatening ‘Compact calls’ against the Upper Basin states if they do not get their 75 million acre-feet over any ten-year period as defined in Article III(d) of the Compact, as though the division into two basins had given them a big ‘prior appropriation.’
The ‘Compact Box’ is basically just a ‘shadow box,’ a failed effort to do what was really a pretty good idea – an imagination of peace among the states. The question now is: would it be possible to revive that idea of an ‘equitable division’ among the seven states – as something that is already somewhat accomplished? That’s a thread we’ll pluck at next post.
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
Rio Grande Reservoir release. Photo credit: Rio Grande Basin Roundtable
Click the link to read the article on The Denver Post website (Elise Schmelzer). Here’s an excerpt:
January 5, 2025
The mighty and fabled Rio Grande dwindles to barely a trickle in the winter west of Creede, exposing nearly a mile of rocky riverbed to dry under the weak sun. This section of the river near its headwaters wasn’t supposed to be left dry in the winter, according to environmental groups. A rehabilitation project on the dam that creates the Rio Grande Reservoir was billed as an upgrade that would make the river healthier and improve recreation throughout the year. But even four years after the construction project concluded, those promises haven’t materialized. That’s because the dam’s new valves cannot safely release water during the winter, according to the Committee for a Healthy Rio Grande, a group formed to push for more water releases from the reservoir for fishing, rafting and environmental health. The irrigation district that operates the dam closes the valves from November through March. The lack of water in the winter kills off aquatic insects and vegetation — the base of the river ecosystem’s food cycle…
A solution may be in the works. After four years, the San Luis Valley Irrigation District — which owns and operates the reservoir — on Dec. 1 applied for state grant money to study how the dam’s valves could be modified to work in the winter, said Cole Bedford, the chief operating officer of the Colorado Water Conservation Board
“We are developing a solution that will safely provide low-flow releases during the winter,” San Luis Valley Irrigation District Superintendent Rob Phillips said in an emailed statement. “And, we look forward to continuing our work with those water users and organizations in the San Luis Valley who have a unique and valued history of working together to find constructive solutions.”
The issue is part of a larger challenge: How should Colorado balance the different uses of its water as climate change shrinks supplies and adds volatility to decades-old climate patterns?
Federal water officials are expected to provide further details in the coming weeks on four proposals for managing the dwindling Colorado River water supply. The current agreement among states expires next year…A pending analysis will detail the benefits and drawbacks of four different plans, said Carly Jerla, the senior program manager at the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. The analysis will not include any recommendations. The states must reach an agreement on how to allocate the available water by August 2026…
The proposed alternatives include: protecting infrastructure by monitoring how much river water is delivered and using existing agreements when demand overwhelms the supply; adding delivery and storage for Lake Powell and Lake Mead, along with “federal and non-federal storage” to boost system sustainability and flexibility; and a cooperative conservation approach aimed at managing and gauging water releases from Lake Powell amid “shared contributions to sustain system integrity. The fourth proposal would add delivery and storage for lakes Powell and Mead, encourage conservation and agreements for water use among customers and “afford the tribal and non-tribal entities the same ability to use these mechanisms.”
“The preferred alternative isn’t any single one of these alternatives,” Jerla said. “They were constructed to ensure that these concepts were grouped together to allow for the possibility to mix and match.”
[…]
Whatever management path the states agree on, a team of water officials has one concern: the annual set water releases at Glen Canyon Dam. Eric Kuhn, the retired general manager of the Colorado River Water Conservation District, partnered with other water leaders to author a letter to the Bureau of Reclamation asking it to stop the practice of determining water release quantities annually for Glen Canyon Dam in northern Arizona. They agree that water releases must continue. However, they don’t want a set release amount, stressing the flexibility helps with maintaining the ecosystem around the river, specifically the ecosystem around the Grand Canyon…The management approach Kuhn’s team prefers would create two pools: a Lower Basin pool in Lake Powell, the reservoir connected to Glen Canyon Dam; and an Upper Basin pool in Lake Mead, the reservoir connected to Hoover Dam. That would allow for changes in annual releases, if necessary, and offer flexibility, he said.
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
Dusk falls on Lake Powell near Bullfrog Marina on July 15, 2024. The fate of the nation’s two largest reservoirs is still undetermined after a year full of disagreement and uncertainty among the Colorado River’s top policymakers. Photo credit: Alex Hager/KUNC
Click the link to read the article on the KUNC website (Alex Hager):
December 26, 2024
This story is part of ongoing coverage of the Colorado River, produced by KUNC in Colorado and supported by the Walton Family Foundation. KUNC is solely responsible for its editorial coverage.
This year was a bumpy ride for the Colorado River.As 2024 comes to a close, we’re looking at the stories that defined the water supply for 40 million people. Deep divisions between policymakers set the stage for deep uncertainty from Wyoming to Mexico, and those who use Colorado River water are hoping for some more clarity in the years to come. But with an unpredictable new president heading to the White House, they may end up with more questions than answers.
Visit the linked stories below to learn how the year unfolded.
Early disagreement
The biggest headlines of the year came early on the calendar. In March, seven states that use the Colorado River laid bare the deep divisions between them. The rules for sharing its water expire in 2026, and state leaders are under pressure to agree on new guidelines.
Instead of agreeing, they split into two camps and released competing proposals for managing water. The river is shrinking due to climate change, and states need to rein in their demand. Who exactly should cut back on their water use, though, is at the heart of their disagreement.
Shortly after the two state proposals, a group of native tribes released their ownsuggestions for managing the river. A coalition of conservation groups did the same.
Paying for conservation
Discord between the negotiators shaping the river’s future highlighted the need for farm districts and cities to get their own houses in order. Agriculture uses between 70-80% of the river’s water, and much of the pressure to conserve the river falls on farms and ranches.
From the river’s single largest water user in Southern California to tiny family farms in rural Wyoming, the federal government experimented with programs that paid farmers to use less water.
In the Imperial Valley, about two hours inland from San Diego, the farm district inked a deal to take more than $500 million from the Inflation Reduction Act. In exchange, the area’s farmers would leave some water in the nation’s largest reservoir, Lake Mead.
A ditch runs dry through Leslie Hagenstein’s fields near Pinedale, Wyo. on Mar. 27, 2024. Through the federally-funded System Conservation Pilot Program, she was able to make 13 times more than she would have by leasing her fields out to grow hay. CREDIT: ALEX HAGER/KUNC
Meanwhile, a smaller program in the Colorado River’s Upper Basin states – Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico did something similar. It paid farmers and ranchers to cut back on water use, but some policy analysts say the program lacks a clear plan for the future.
Cities prepare for a drier future
Cities and suburbs, especially in the driest parts of the Colorado River Basin, are taking matters into their own hands. In an effort to buy some certainty against a future that might see their water allocations get smaller, municipal leaders in Arizona chipped away at multibillion-dollar engineering projects to stretch out their existing water supplies.
In the Phoenix area, cities large and small worked towards a dam expansion that would help them capture more snowmelt from mountains to the north. Some made progress on “water recycling” facilities that can clean up sewage and turn it back into drinking water. Similar efforts are underway in other states, too.
Canyons come back
The past few years have seen dramatically low water levels at the nation’s two largest reservoirs – Lake Mead and Lake Powell – which are both filled by the Colorado River. While that has caused concern for the water managers who want to keep taps and crop sprinklers flowing across the region, some environmental advocates are celebrating the return of habitats that had been submerged for decades.
Now that some portions of Lake Powell have been above water for more than 20 years, scientists are able to study the kind of plants and animals that are repopulating the once-underwater canyons. One study found that it’s mostly native vegetation coming back.
Mexico waits for more water
Uncertainty over the river’s future doesn’t stop at America’s border. In the Colorado River Delta, where the river once reached the sea, environmental groups have created islands of green in the middle of an otherwise barren, dusty landscape.
The Colorado River flows through El Chausse, a restoration site in northeastern Mexico, on October 26, 2024. Photo credit: Alex Hager/KUNC/Lighthawk
The future of those oases depends on negotiations between the U.S. and Mexico. In the past, they’ve designated water specifically for ecological restoration. Conservationists hope they’ll do the same again.
Looking into the past and the future
While this year’s tense negotiations generated frequent headlines about the river’s present, 2024 also provided an opportunity to see how today’s talks are influenced by the past.
A major point of contention between the rival groups of states hinged on the language of a 1922 legal agreement about sharing water. Three words written over a century ago are still shaping the nature of discussions over the river’s future.
Meanwhile, some people watching the negotiations are keeping up a steady drumbeat of calls for ambitious new engineering projects that would secure more water for the Colorado River’s future. The tantalizingly simple solution of piping water from the eastern U.S. to the West just won’t seem to go away, but water experts broadly agree that it’s impractical.
Frustration in the basin
In December, after state leaders had been entrenched in disagreement for months, many involved in Colorado River management grew frustrated. Some commentators voiced those feelings to KUNC ahead of the biggest annual occasion on the Colorado River calendar – a series of meetings in Las Vegas where the public can hear directly from top negotiators.
Water policymakers from (left to right) Utah, New Mexico, Colorado and Wyoming speak on a panel at the Colorado River Water Users Association conference in Las Vegas on December 5, 2024. State leaders are deeply divided on how to share the shrinking water supply, and made little progress to bridge that divide at the annual meetings. Photo credit: Alex Hager/KUNC
“I find it really frustrating to watch them just continue to bicker back and forth rather than coming up with any realistic solutions for the problems that we’re facing,” said Teal Lehto, an environmental activist who goes by WesternWaterGirl on social media.
A Las Vegas showdown
At those meetings in Las Vegas, states made little progress in their negotiations, still mostly sticking to the same points they unveiled in their march proposals. States shared stern words and talked of compromise, but struggled to find common ground.
Awaiting change in the White House
As the year comes to a close, Donald Trump’s return to the White House poses a big question mark for those with a stake in the Colorado River. State negotiators say they do not expect the administration change to shake up their talks, pointing to a pattern of previous presidents leaving water management work mostly to technical experts.
At the same time, some water users worry that Trump may cut spending for water-saving programs that have helped boost the nation’s largest reservoirs during the past few years. Without the federal spending that was set aside by the Inflation Reduction Act, water managers may be forced to come up with new water conservation strategies in 2025.
CPW biologists hopeful as genetically unique cutthroat trout rescued from 2016 wildfire are found to be reproducing in SE Region streams
COALDALE, Colo. – Eight years after wildfire and flashfloods threatened to wipe out a genetically unique cutthroat trout from tiny Hayden Creek, Colorado Parks and Wildlife biologists are finding hopeful signs that their efforts to save the fish are succeeding.
Recent surveys of creeks where CPW has reintroduced the unique trout found evidence they are surviving multiple years – a huge milestone in any wildlife restoration project. Even more important, CPW biologists are finding newly hatched Hayden Creek cutthroat (HCC), meaning they are naturally reproducing in some streams and thriving.
“This is very exciting news for these fish and for the agency, considering the odds they faced back in 2016,” said Paul Foutz, senior aquatic biologist for CPW’s Southeast Region.
In July 2016, as a wildfire raged on Hayden Pass south of Coaldale, a small army of CPW aquatic biologists, hatchery staff, and U.S. Forest Service personnel donned fire-resistant suits, strapped on heavy electro-shocking backpacks, carried oxygen bottles, nets and water tanks and headed behind fire lines to pull off a daring rescue of a rare cutthroat trout from the south fork of Hayden Creek.
The dramatic effort was undertaken because massive wildfires like the Hayden Creek Fire, which charred 16,754 acres that summer, often produce ash and debris that wash into creeks and rivers, ruining water quality, choking off aquatic life and destroying habitat.
That day in 2016, CPW biologists found and removed 194 of the rare HCC trout, before the team returned to safety outside the fire zone. And their worst fears about the creek quickly came true when runoff from later rains overwhelmed Hayden Creek with a thick, black sludge that ultimately poured into the Arkansas River, damaging fish and habitat for miles in that waterway.
After the fire, surveys of Hayden Creek found no fish remained.
The only known survivors were 158 of the rare fish rescued by CPW staff and placed in an isolation unit at the Roaring Judy Hatchery near Gunnison. The other 36 had been released in nearby Newlin Creek, in the Wet Mountains about 10 miles southwest of Florence, in hopes they would survive in the wild.
Almost immediately, CPW aquatic biologists began the urgent task of finding new homes out on the landscape for the Hayden Creek cutthroat. The staff at Roaring Judy planned to keep the survivors as a brood stock and spawn new generations each spring. But they couldn’t all live in the hatchery.
So similar sized creeks within the Arkansas River drainage were scouted. Biologists wanted creeks that were comparable in size and habitat characteristics offering year-round flow and that were remote enough to protect the prized HCC trout from human interference.
The first creek deemed suitable was Newlin, where 36 were released during the fire. In October 2017, a team of 20 aquatic biologists, other staff and volunteers from CPW and the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) fanned out across the five drainages that make up Newlin Creek, which twists and turns through thick brush and rock in the rugged foothills.
The biologists split into six teams and bushwhacked up and down six miles, give or take, of the remote upper reaches of Newlin Creek, following the creek’s main stem and four branches. They snaked along treacherous cliffs, through jumbles of huge boulders and under fallen trees between Locke and Stull mountains.
The teams hiked for hours as the sun turned the day into short-sleeve weather, taxing some of the crew clad in rubber wading outfits and lugging 30-pound electrofishing units on their backs.
Anywhere that trickles of water pooled enough to offer fish habitat, the CPW/USFS teams stopped and probed the pools with their electrofishing units in hopes of catching a few of the 36 fish that were released during the fire.
They repeated the process dozens of times as they thrashed through the brush, scrambled over rocks, under felled trees and past caves and piles of bones from predator kills. At the end of a 10-hour marathon fish survey, the results were clear: none of the 36 HCC trout had survived.
But that day of scouting convinced the CPW team that Newlin Creek could serve as the new home for HCC trout spawned at Roaring Judy.
Biologists began the painstaking task of reclaiming Newlin of any existing fish that might compete with the HCC trout. Only then could stocking begin.
The work climaxed Oct. 24, 2018, when 900 HCC trout, each about 2 inches long, were carried in bags by CPW staff up Newlin Creek and released.
The restoration effort eventually expanded to 13 other streams across the Arkansas Drainage. Spreading them across the region makes them less vulnerable to extinction due to an isolated catastrophic fire or flood event.
Since that first stocking in 2018, more than 8,000 HCC trout have been released in Newlin along a 1.5-mile stretch of water. After years of observing survival of the HCC trout in Newlin, CPW biologists documented evidence of natural reproduction in surveying the creek in 2024.
On July 20, 2016, a team of Colorado Parks and Wildlife aquatic biologists and staff assembled and enter an active fire zone during the Hayden Pass Wildlife to rescue genetically unique cutthroat trout from the south prong of Hayden Creek. Photo credit: Colorado Parks & Wildlife
In October 2018, CPW began stocking Hayden Creek cutthroat fingerlings, spawned in the Roaring Judy Hatchery near Gunnison, into Newlin Creek. Hatchery staff delivered the fingerlings, which were separated into bags and hauled up the creek by CPW staff and released. Photo credit: Colorado Parks & WildlifeDuring a July 20, 2016, rescue effort, CPW aquatic biologists carried electrofishing backpacks, nets, oxygen tanks and coolers to haul out any of the rare cutthroat, now called Hayden Creek cutthroat, before ash and debris from the fire overwhelmed the drainage. Photo credit: Colorado Parks & WildlifeA CPW aquatic biologist displays a Hayden Creek cutthroat trout in a net during a July 20, 2016, rescue of fish during the Hayden Pass Wildfire. Photo credit: Colorado Parks & WildlifeIn October 2018, CPW began stocking Hayden Creek cutthroat fingerlings, spawned in the Roaring Judy Hatchery near Gunnison, into Newlin Creek. Hatchery staff delivered the fingerlings, which were separated into bags and hauled up the creek by CPW staff and released. Photo credit: Colorado Parks & WildlifeCPW Wildlife Officer Justin Krall leads his mule Jenny with panniers full of rare Hayden Creek cutthroat trout to be stocked into Cottonwood Creek in a 2019 stocking event. Photo credit: Colorado Parks & WildlifeHayden Creek cutthroat trout fingerlings swim in the current of Cottonwood Creek in this 2019 photo. Photo credit: Colorado Parks & Wildlife
Republican River in Colorado January 2023 near the Nebraska border. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
December 23, 2024
10,000 acres in the basin have now been retired from irrigation. But Colorado must remove 15,000 more acres before 2030.
Colorado has achieved a milestone, retiring 10,000 acres from irrigation in the Republican River Basin of northeastern Colorado.
But a much larger, more difficult challenge lies ahead. The state must retire 25,000 acres before 2030 in order to comply with the compact with Nebraska and Kansas governing water in the basin.
The Colorado Division of Water Resources announced on Dec. 20 that Nebraska and Kansas agreed that Colorado has taken the necessary actions to retire the minimum 10,000 acres based on executed contracts and aerial data collected in the summer of 2024.
The compact between the three states was ratified in 1942. Then came the widespread adoption of high-capacity wells followed by center-pivot sprinklers that permitted exploitation of the Ogallala and other aquifers. The aquifers feed into various forks of the Republic River.
Flows in the river subsequently declined. Kansas and Nebraska complained, rolling out the legal sabers. That resulted in formation of the Republican River Water Conservation District in 2004 to address the over-drafting of the aquifer. A resolution between Colorado and its neighbors in 2016 gave Colorado a specific target. It must figure out how to eliminate irrigation from 25,000 acres in the South Fork of the Republican River by the end of 2029.
Wells in the Republican River Basin in Colorado.
Dick Wolfe, then the state water engineer, was asked in September of 2016 how this would be accomplished. He paused a moment, then pretended to have a scissors in his hands, as if a barber, saying “Bit here, a bit there.” And that is what has been happening.
Irrigators in the district contribute to the district on a per-acre basis. The money is used to induce irrigators to end their diversions via the wells.
State legislators in 2023 allocated $30 million to supplement the district’s self-generated funds to sweeten the pot. The Colorado Water Conservation Board earlier this year added another $6 million.
The map below shows the location of wells in the district. It mostly lies between Interstates 70 and 76.
Some parts of the aquifer, mostly in the southern parts, ceased to have sufficient water for pumping. At a meeting this year in Wray, directors of the conservation district were told that even in the better areas along the North Fork of the River, in the Yuma and Wray areas, water levels have been dropping a foot and a half a year.
There is some agreement among directors that stepped-up action must be taken in order to meet the 2029 deadline for retirement. They will take up that discussion at a February meeting.
Ute Mountain Ute Chairman Manuel Heart, Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren, and Gov. Stephen Roe Lewis of the Gila River Indian Community during a “Soverign-to-Soverign Nation” panel at the Colorado River Water Users Association conference. (Photo: Jeniffer Solis/Nevada Current)
Since 2021, a handful of Colorado River Basin tribes have significantly boosted water supply in Lake Mead through voluntary contributions, helping stabilize a crucial reservoir that 25 million people rely on.
The consequences of a two-decade drought in the west and a shrinking river have given tribes leverage in negotiations over how the river’s water is managed, and persuaded the federal government to pay tribes to conserve water while funding millions in additional infrastructure.
More conservation arrangements with tribes were reached last week, after tribes met with the Bureau of Reclamation during the annual Colorado River Water Users Association conference to extend water-saving agreements that will conserve another 43,000 acre feet of water in Lake Mead, or enough water to serve about 14,000 households for a year.
The San Carlos Apache Tribe in southeastern Arizona agreed to leave 30,000 acre feet in Lake Mead in exchange for $12 million from the federal government. The Fort Yuma Quechan Indian Tribe along the Arizona-California border also signed an agreement to conserve 13,000 acre feet of Lake Mead water for $5.2 million.
Those investments build on other historic water-saving agreements with Colorado River Basin tribes in recent years designed to boost water levels in Lake Mead.
Last year, the Gila River Indian Community in Arizona received $50 million from the Inflation Reduction Act in exchange for agreeing to leave 125,000 acre feet of water in Lake Mead, adding about two feet of water to the reservoir. The Gila River Indian Community committed to similar water savings this year and in 2025 for an additional $100 million in funding, conserving enough water to supply half a million homes.
In September, the Gila River Indian Community also received $107 million from the Inflation Reduction Act for three separate water conservation infrastructure projects, after agreeing to leave an additional 73,000 acre-feet of water in Lake Mead over the next decade.
During the annual Colorado River Water Users Association conference last week, the Bureau of Reclamation also announced an agreement with the Colorado River Indian Tribes to fund a $5 million study on constructing a new reservoir that could save up to 35,000 acre feet for the tribe, and help them develop their water rights.
Additionally, the Bureau of Reclamation announced $21.5 million in funding from the Inflation Reduction Act last week to help the White Mountain Apache Tribe in Arizona plan and design a rural water delivery system.
The Biden administration committed more than $6 billion to support water infrastructure in Tribal communities between the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act, but any future funding will likely depend on what President-elect Donald Trump chooses to do with unspent funds.
During the campaign Trump said he would claw back unspent IRA funding.
Looking to the lame duck
Tribal communities also hope Congress passes and the president signs into law substantial federal water project legislation before the new Congress is sworn in and Trump is inaugurated.
The $5 billion Northeastern Arizona Indian Water Rights Settlement Act that would secure water rights for the Navajo Nation, Hopi Tribe and San Juan Southern Paiute Tribe.
The federal legislation authorizes $5 billion to acquire, build, and maintain essential water development and delivery projects, including a $1.75 billion distribution pipeline. The three tribes would also be guaranteed access to over 56,000 acre-feet of Colorado River water and specific groundwater rights protections.
Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren emphasized the urgency of the Northeastern Arizona Indian Water Rights Settlement. Nygren said he hopes basin states will support and advocate for the settlement, which could boost its chances of passing before a new administration takes the White House next month.
However, some Colorado River Basin states have expressed concerns about the settlement and its impact on water use and future management, a fact Nygren acknowledged.
“I was hoping to come in today that we have some consensus, but there’s one underlying issue that we’re trying to resolve,” Nygren said.
Confluence of the Little Colorado River and Colorado River; Credit: EcoFlight
During a press event last week, New Mexico’s representative on Colorado River matters, Estevan Lopez, said the Upper Basin states are concerned the settlement would allow tribes to lease water from the Upper Basin to the Lower Basin.
“When you move water across the basin boundary, that has always required a seven state consensus,” Lopez said.
“We feel it’s imperative that we need to have an actual consensus among the states if that’s going to move forward,” Lopez said.
Lower Basin states — Nevada, Arizona, and California — and Upper Basin states — Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming — have been at odds for months over how to manage the river after current management rules expire in 2026.
Tribal leaders noted that water settlement bills have historically been passed during lame duck congressional sessions, meaning that if it does not pass now, the legislation will have to effectively restart the process anew in the next Congress.
Nygren said he is still hopeful Congress can pass the water settlement bill during the lame duck session, as either a stand-alone bill or as part of a larger package, and urged the seven basin states to support the settlement.
“We’ve got a Congress that’s willing, that’s excited. All we gotta do is come to consensus, and then we put it in Congress’s hands. It would be a great celebration to see President Biden sign off on that within the next couple of weeks,” Nygren said.
Gov. Stephen Roe Lewis of the Gila River Indian Community echoed Nygren’s optimism.
“I remain ever hopeful that we will be celebrating the first anniversary of the Northern Arizona settlement next year,” he said
Lewis added he is not pessimistic about the Trump administration if the settlement fails to come together before Biden steps down, noting that the Drought Contingency Plan in 2019, which stabilized the Colorado River through voluntary reductions and increased conservation, was authorized when Trump was president in 2019.
“I remain hopeful that [the Trump administration] will help us finish this journey that we’re on for those new guidelines. I’m also not worried about Congress stepping up and providing the new authority and funding that we may need to implement the kinds of ideas that we see are necessary,” Lewis said.
Colorado River “Beginnings”. Photo: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism
Click the link to read the article on The Salt Lake Tribune website (Brandon Gebhart, Estevan López, Becky Mitchell and Gene Shawcroft). Here’s an excerpt:
December 6, 2024
As representatives of the Upper Basin states of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming, we are committed to a fair, common sense, data-driven approach that balances the needs of all stakeholders. Our approach is to adapt Colorado River operations and uses to the annual available water supply using the best available science and tools while we continue to meet our responsibilities and commitments to our communities, our states and the Basin. We are planning for and will manage the river we have, not the river we want…More than 90% of the river comes from the annual snowpack, which occurs almost entirely in the Upper Basin. Warming temperatures are making river flows increasingly volatile and uncertain and have intensified since the Colorado River Compact was signed in 1922. Getting the next set of Colorado River operating rules right demands that we manage uses within the river we have.
Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2024. Credit: Brad Udall
Annual hydrologic variability forces the Upper Basin states to manage uses within the means of the river, which hinders our ability to develop our full compact apportionment. Each year, water managers across the Upper Basin shut off water users when flows are low, adapting uses to the available supply. This is painful to individual Upper Basin water users but is necessary to continue to manage our uses consistent with actual hydrology and the rights and obligations under the 1922 Compact.
As part of the negotiations to establish post-2026 operating rules, we have offered an Upper Division States Alternative, a common-sense, data-driven solution to the Colorado River’s challenges. Our proposal benefits the entire basin by aligning uses and operations with actual water supply and includes voluntary conservation in the Upper Basin. Reclamation has released a description of potential Colorado River water management alternatives to guide development of the post-2026 Colorado River operating rules. We believe the Upper Basin Alternative is within the range of options outlined by Reclamation…Climate change is already here in the Colorado River Basin. Adapting to actual hydrologic conditions, which the Upper Basin does every year out of necessity, can provide a model for equitable and sustainable river use across the entire system. With the current guidelines expiring in 2026, our shared responsibility must be to prioritize the Colorado River’s future by aligning water use with the available supply. It’s time to live within the means of the river we have.
Sessions at this year’s conference, themed “Piecing the Puzzles Together,” were designed to help fit together the various competing interests among Colorado River water users, including tribal, municipal, agricultural, conservation and environmental concerns, said Gene Shawcroft, president of the Colorado River Water Users Association. Climate change and explosive growth in the region have introduced new variability and instability that was not affecting the river when the 1922 Colorado River Compact was signed and require discussions to craft a solution…Water stakeholders across the basin have a responsibility to solve the puzzle for the people of the American West, Shawcroft said. There is also a responsibility to manage the river in an efficient way to ensure its future…
The 1922 Colorado River Compact is still enforced, but the operating guidelines are being negotiated, said Jennifer Pitt, the Colorado River program director at the National Audubon Society. The long-term guidelines, referred to as Post-2026 Operations, will revisit the 2007 Interim Guidelines and other operating agreements that expire in 2026, including drought contingency plans and Minute 323, which allows Mexico to continue to store water in Lake Mead, according to the association’s 2023 report.
