Click the link to read the article on The Land Desk website (Jonathan P. Thompson):

August 25, 2026

THE NEWS: The U.S. Interior Department on Friday handed down the operating guidelines for the Colorado River for the next two years, while also finalizing the 10-year decision framework that will guide these plans. And on Monday, Nevada filed a lawsuit challenging both the framework and operating plan, saying that potential shortages required by the plan could cause “cause devastating environmental, socioeconomic, and health and human safety impacts to southern Nevada and its citizens.”

THE CONTEXT: Interior, i.e. the Bureau of Reclamation, did two things. The first was to hand down a record of decision on the framework that will guide operating plans for the next decade, which I wrote about here, so I’ll skip the details this time.

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Feds release Colorado River plan, and no one’s very happy about it — Jonathan P. Thompson

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They also released a more specific plan for the 2027 and 2028 operating years. In the new plan, the feds affirm their commitment to “defending” minimum power pool in Lake Powell, or a reservoir surface elevation of 3,490 feet. When the water falls below this level, water can no longer be released via the penstocks and hydropower turbines, so it must all go through the lower river outlet works, which weren’t designed for sustained use.

Notably, Reclamation plans to do this by “initially seeking to maintain a minimum elevation of 3,510 feet. This provides an operational buffer and provides additional flexibility in recognition of the operational risks associated with sustained operations below elevation 3,490 feet … .”

The current elevation is 3,518 feet, meaning it could reach that upper buffer zone of 3,510 feet in October if current levels of decline continue.

To prevent it from falling any further, Reclamation would cut back releases from Glen Canyon Dam, which in turn would cut flows through the Grand Canyon and into Lake Mead, which would pull down Mead’s levels and trigger mandatory cuts for the Lower Basin users. Under the new operating plan so far, these cuts aren’t as onerous as many feared, and actually match up with what the Lower Basin had proposed to do voluntarily. The deets:

• The Lower Basin would receive 6.25 million acre-feet from the Colorado River, or 1.25 MAF below the Colorado River Compact’s allotment of 7.5 MAF.
• Arizona would receive 2.04 MAF; California 3.96 MAF; and Nevada 250,000 AF.
• This means Arizona would take a 760,000 AF cut; Nevada a 50,000 AF cut; and California a 440,000 AF cut.

Arizona takes the largest cut by percentage and volume because the Central Arizona Project, which delivers most of the state’s Colorado River water, has junior water rights to other big users on the river.

But if reservoir levels continue to drop, then Reclamation could impose further cuts on the Lower Basin, potentially slashing Nevada’s water deliveries by as much as 213,556 acre-feet, or about 71% of its total entitlement of 300,000 acre-feet. This would be truly disastrous for the Las Vegas metro area, which relies on the Colorado River for about 90% of its water. And it’s not like there are a bunch of alfalfa fields the city could “buy and dry” for the water rights.

The Southern Nevada Water Authority has managed to cut overall water consumptionover the last three decades, even as the population has soared, through system-wide efficiencies, incentives, tearing up ornamental grass, water recycling, and extra fees for water gluttons. Las Vegas still has room to conserve, but as Western water scholar John Fleck put it, there “is an absurdity to a plan that would require Las Vegas to cut 71%. That’s existential.”

Even more astonishing than the fact that the federal government is considering virtually drying up one of the Southwest’s major metropolises is their justification for doing so: To protect Glen Canyon Dam and keep it producing hydropower, even at greatly diminished levels, and — though it’s not stated — to keep lake-based recreation somewhat viable.

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Glen Canyon Dam hydropower: What’s it good for? — Jonathan P. Thompson

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You have to remember that when the feds vow to defend the 3,500-foot level at Lake Powell, and when they refuse to even consider re-engineering Glen Canyon Dam to allow for releases at lower levels, either by rebuilding the outlet tubes or tunneling a bypass around the dam, they are also saying they are going to trap more than 4 million acre-feet of water behind the dam that could otherwise flow downstream into the Grand Canyon and Lake Mead. That’s enough water to fill Nevada’s entire allotment for more than 13 years that, instead, will be sitting in the reservoir and slowly evaporating. 

Nevada’s lawsuit — which is against the federal government, not the Upper Basin states — alleges that the feds’ plan violates the Law of the River. It slams the plan for not explicitly calling for releasing more water from Upper Basin reservoirs to prop up Powell, does not require Upper Basin states to make any cuts, and fails to consider a long-term alternative or engineered solution alternative to address Glen Canyon’s infrastructure limitations. The plan also does not account for its potential impacts on hydropower production at Hoover Dam, which drops off steeply as reservoir levels decline (meaning that preserving power output at Glen Canyon could lead to a net reduction in combined output from the two dams).

Save the Colorado, a river advocacy group, came out in support of Nevada’s lawsuit in a written statement. “Las Vegas has one of the best water conservation programs in the entire U.S.,” said Gary Wockner, the group’s executive director. “Penalizing Las Vegas for water use is like penalizing an obese person who lost a lot of weight taking GLP1s.”

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A Colorado River glossary and primer — Jonathan P. Thompson

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🌵 Public Lands 🌲

Rough Times at the national parks these days. In Bryce Canyon, a sudden thunderstorm left visitors stranded on trails and requiring rescue, with two of them transported to a hospital for hypothermia. It also unleashed some serious flash flooding. In Zion National Park, a rockslide narrowly missed a shuttle bus and forced the closure of a portion of the Zion Canyon Scenic Drive. And in Canyonlands, officials were searching for a missing individual in Horseshoe Canyon, a remote area north of the park’s Maze district. Temperatures in the area were in the 90s. In Death Valley, a French tourist died after his car got stuck in the mud on a remote road in 116° F heat.

The video below shows flooding near Tropic, Utah, downstream from Bryce Canyon National Park. Source: Garfield County Sheriff.

In May, I wrote about how climate change and aridification and a shrinking Lake Powell were coming for the Bullfrog Marina, on the northwest side of the reservoir. The water was simply getting too low for the marina to remain viable, so they were planning on moving it across the reservoir to Halls Crossing Marina. 

At the time, it was not yet clear how lower water levels and the marina’s removal might affect visitation to the remote area. Now preliminary numbers are in:

• 67,277: Total recreation visitors to the Bullfrog District of Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, January through July 2025
• 44,206: Total recreation visitors to the Bullfrog District, January through July 2026.

That’s a decrease of over 23,000 visits, or a 34% drop. Even more dramatic is the drop in overnight stays in July, from over 47,000 in 2025 to just 17,000 in 2026. Then did folks make the long drive over to Halls Crossing, instead? It appears that some of them may have once the marina was moved, but overall this year visitation is also down on the northeast side of the reservoir.

• 18,023: Total recreation visitors to the Halls Crossing District of Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, January through July 2025. 
• 15,099: Total recreation visitors to the Halls Crossing District, January through July 2026.

That’s a decrease of 2,944 visits, or a 19% drop. This may not all be related directly to the dropping lake levels. Horseshoe Bend, which is in Glen Canyon National Recreation Area but downstream from the reservoir, has also seen a significant drop off in visitors this spring and summer. In a future dispatch I’ll take a closer look at tourism numbers in general to get a better sense of how widespread the declines are.

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Climate change comes for a Lake Powell marina — Jonathan P. Thompson

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And now for the images showing Bullfrog with the marina, and without. The first image is from August 2024, when the reservoir’s surface elevation was at about 3,580 feet. The marina was still there, and the boat ramps still made it all the way to the water. The second image is from August 2026, with a surface level of just over 3,518 feet. Look closely and you’ll see the marina is gone, and the ramps are high and dry.

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

August 25, 2026

You may remember my mention in early February of a research paper from scientists at the United Nation University Institute of Water, Environment and Health, titled Global Water Bankruptcy: Living Beyond our Hydrological Means in the Post-Crisis Era. The report begins:

‘Amid chronic groundwater depletion, water overallocation, land and soil degradation, deforestation, and pollution, all compounded by global heating, a UN report today declared the dawn of an era of global water bankruptcy, inviting world leaders to facilitate honest, science-based adaptation to a new reality.’

Our Colorado River made their list of exemplary global ‘hot spots’ for bankruptcy, with the observation that ‘the Colorado River and its reservoirs have become symbols of over-promised water.’

You’ve seen the word ‘crisis’ used frequently this year in the countless morbid articles about the Colorado River. But the UNU Institute director Kaveh Madani argued that we are now ‘post-crisis’: the term ‘crisis’ implies a deviation from the normal, a disruption to be dealt with in order to get back to normal, but there is now, Madani says, no going back to what passed for ‘normal’ in the last century. [ed. emphasis mine]

The study indicates that we have drained too many aquifers, resulting in subsidence that destroys the aquifers for the rest of the geological age; we have lost high-storage wetlands to gullying and lowered water tables; we have spread too much surface water out to dry under an atmosphere heating up incrementally with every additional gallon of fossil fuel we burn; desertification spreads in our wake; et cetera, et cetera. As a result:

The report makes the case for a fundamental shift in the global water agenda—from repeatedly reacting to emergencies to “bankruptcy management.” That means confronting overshoot with transparent water accounting, enforceable limits, and protection of the water-related natural capital that produces and stores water—aquifers, wetlands, soils, rivers, and glaciers—while ensuring transitions are explicitly equity-oriented and protect vulnerable communities and livelihoods.

There is in this research paper the kind of lovely naivete that one finds in most of the analyses of Big Issues today (climate change, systemic racism, corporate personhood versus people, etc.); there is an underlying conviction that when the facts are all laid out, we will rationally accept that, yes, we are indeed in a bankrupt situation. And so we will all sit down together, like rational beings would, and work out ways to resolve the ‘reality deficit’ between what has been promised and what can be delivered.

This ignores the fact that, when we are first confronted with evidence of something so big in its threat to our way of life, that its correction might require creating a whole new way of life, our first response is to say, ‘this can’t be so.’ There has to be a mistake. And a long winding road leads on, into and through a morass of denial, anger, blames cast, responsibilities denied, hopeful negotiations and underlying despair – the whole medieval pilgrim’s Slough of Despond that must be negotiated before we might actually sit down together and work out some way of resolving the ‘reality deficit.’

There is, however, a kind of honesty in coming around to realizing – and acknowledging – that a system might be bankrupt. Bankruptcy is not necessarily the end song of what has become bankrupt, although it can be (Chapter 7 bankruptcy).  It can instead be a time of operational or financial reorganization, aa time for acknowledging circumstances, conditions and misconceptions not originally taken into account that, accounted for, might enable a measure of eventual recovery and even success.

The seven Colorado River Basin states, still stuck in the zomboid Colorado River Compact, are not there yet, but the Bureau of Reclamation might be getting there. On the viable assumption that the seven states will not come up with a last-minute plan before the end of September and expiration of the Interim and Interim Interim Guidelines, they are preparing to institute a temporary plan that will maintain functionality in the river storage and delivery system, with (they hope) no embarrassing ‘dead pool’ episodes – which basically means getting and keeping as much water as possible in the two big reservoirs, Mead and Powell, and that can only happen at considerable cost to users below the big reservoirs.

The Bureau plan will not be carved in stone for forever like the Colorado River Compact; the Bureau will basically be planning operations for two-year periods, through the coming decade; every two years, the parties of interest will reconvene to review and revise the operating plan as circumstances require. This ‘adaptive’ approach makes sense in a bankruptcy situation in which the future is mostly unknown. [ed. emphasis mine]

The plan really has no surprises for anyone who remembers the 2022 bolt of reality that caused Bureau Commissioner Camille Touton to tell the water leaders in the seven states to immediately plan to voluntarily cut 2-4 million acre-feet (maf) of water use – basically a quarter of river use at that time – or the Interior Department would do it for them. That – in the centennial year of the Compact – is probably a good marker for the Bureau’s acknowledgement that we were beyond crisis, and slipping into bankruptcy.

That 2022 siren call was met by the Lower Basin states agreeing to finally take the Lower Basin system losses (evaporation, etc.) and their half of the Mexican obligation out of their river-use shares rather than out of Mead storage until the 2027 water year – provided they would be paid to do so. The absence of ‘surplus flows’ to take care of those losses – ~1.25 maf – from the coming online of the Central Arizona Project was a principal source of the draining of the big reservoirs, the so-called ‘structural deficit,’ 30 maf of storage gifted to the Lower Basin.

(A side note on this: The Upper Basin states, since a 1970 Law-of-the-River agreement, have been regularly sending downstream their 750,000 acre-feet for the Mexican obligation and absorbing as part of their whatever’s-left-over share of the river the ~400,000 acre-feet of Upper Basin system losses. The four states have never asked for or been paid for doing that.)

But that 1.25 maf of voluntary shortages was only a large fraction of the 2-4 maf of cuts the Bureau said needed to happen. So the Bureau’s original 2027-28 plan announcement in late July included cuts of up to 40 percent for the states below Mead Reservoir (Arizona, California and Nevada) – roughly equivalent to the 2022 request for 2-4 maf in cuts. The three downriver states countered that with an offer to permanently do the same 1.25 maf cut (with payment) for 2027-28 they were doing for 2025-26, with intimations of lawsuits if the Bureau pushed too far beyond that.

Arizona has led the countercharge from the states below Mead Reservoir – being the state with the most to lose, since the junior status of the Central Arizona Project means it would be practically shut down by 40 percent cuts in usage.

A letter to the Interior Department from Tom Buschatzky, Arizona’s Director of Water Resources, castigated the Bureau plan for making no mention of the Colorado River Compact and the Law of the River (LOTR). The letter insisted that Article III(c) and (d) of the Compact be executed to the letter as stated in the LOTR 1970 agreement: that a minimum of 8.23 maf be released from Powell Reservoir every year – the Compact commitment of 7.5 maf per year on average passing Lee Ferry, plus the Upper Basin’s share of the Mexican obligation (750,000 af/year).

In their August 21 announcement of the more detailed plan for 2027-28, the Bureau backed down from the 40 percent number, and now wants a 20 percent reduction in use for the two years – more in line with the Lower Basin’s willingness to continue taking care of its own system losses and Mexican share, but requiring some additional cuts – and avoided discussion of the Compact issue raised. It will, however, probably be pushing for more cuts in the 2028 discussions for the 2029-30 plan renewal; the Bureau still feels that it needs at least 3 maf in permanent cuts to begin any hope of turning the current near-bankruptcy around, and bringing demand in line with at least current supply.

The Bureau would also like the seven states to be reviewing, revising and executing the two-year plans consensually by 2036, rather than imposing it on them. But Arizona, according to the Buschatzky letter, wants a ‘longer, more comprehensive’ plan from the states, consistent with the LOTR, and ‘does not accept a framework that gives the federal government the discretion to select from a wide range of alternatives—including catastrophic cuts to the Lower Basin—every two years for the next decade.’

‘Bankruptcy management’ would seem to argue that the Colorado River Compact should be on the table along with everything else – including the nonexistence of the 18 maf river for which the Compact was written. A detailed analysis of the current situation by the ‘River Elders’ – the Kuhn-Schmidt-Castle group – suggested that ‘Basin water users must focus on solutions to the fundamental, wet-water math problem, rather than legal arguments over paper water.’ [ed. emphasis mine]

Nonetheless, Buschatzke’s letter states that ‘Arizona reserves the right to seek the resolution of its Compact rights in an appropriate judicial forum.’ The states are not yet willing to acknowledge the bankruptcy of the Compact – a Humpty-Dumpty that not all the patches and bandaids of the Law of the River can put back together for an ever-shrinking 21^st century Colorado River.

That, more or less, is where the river system’s future sits as of August 21. There will – thanks to the Bureau – be a plan for moving carefully into the future, a two-year step at  time. A big question is how hard the Bureau will begin to push for the 3-4 maf in permanent cuts by users necessary to stop the march into real dead-pool bankruptcy of the system – leading to another big question: whether the Compact nostalgitarians will push the system into dead-pool bankruptcy by suing the Bureau/Interior Department over paper water, tying things up in court for another several years.

Ah, the lovely Slough of Despond. There with Henry: ‘All day the sun has shone on the surface of some savage swamp, where the single spruce stands hung with usnea lichens, and small hawks circulate above, and the chickadee lisps among the evergreens, and the partridge and rabbit skulk beneath; but now a more dismal and fitting day dawns, and a different race of creatures awakes to express the meaning of Nature there….’ Bankruptcy, the Apocalypse – only the end for those who fail to see that something else is always struggling for a chance to be born; don’t put a period where God (or Nature) would put a comma (Gracie Allen). As Henry also observed, ‘The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake….’

Next post, I want to go back to the ‘desert river’ concept to think a little outside the (Compact) box.

Click the link to read the release on the ADWR website:

August 21, 2026

After more than three years of difficult negotiations over post-2026 Colorado River Operations guidelines, Arizona and the Lower Basin states have created a level of stability for the Colorado River system with the adoption of the 2027-2028 operating guidelines in the Record of Decision. While the framework for years 3-10 continues to be of concern, we applaud the Department of the Interior for clarifying the decision-making process for operations beyond 2028.  That outcome allows for continued negotiations for years 3-10 while preserving our ability to protect Arizona’s legal rights to Colorado River water. 

We will continue to work with our partners in Arizona, the Lower Basin and Interior, to finalize the agreements necessary to implement the Lower Basin Plan. With the Record of Decision, the 2027-2028 Operating Guidelines and the supporting agreements in place, we can focus on a longer-term, equitable, basin-wide outcome that includes shared sacrifices along with our Upper Basin partners in an effort to avoid protracted litigation. The actions in the Lower Basin in recent decades to protect the system have demonstrated how much we can accomplish when we all join together as part of the solution. – Tom Buschatzke, Director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources

Click the link to read the article on the Las Vegas Review Journal website (Alan Halaly). Here’s an excerpt:

August 24, 2026

Nevada officials filed a federal lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s order for cuts in water use Monday, marking a major escalation of tensions between the seven states that share the Colorado River. The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court of Nevada, asserts that the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s operating plan unlawfully authorizes the federal government to reduce the state’s allocation of the river by up to 71 percent annually sometime over the next 10 years. Such a cut would slash the state’s share of 300,000 acre-feet down to 86,444 acre-feet. Nevada’s use, after cashing in water recycling credits with its state-of-the-art system, came in at 198,000 acre-feet last year.

“There are four states upstream of us that are facing zero mandatory reductions,” said John Entsminger, general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, in a Monday interview. “That is not going to balance the system. This is a system-wide problem. It requires system-wide solutions.”

Lawyers for the Colorado River Commission of Nevada, the water authority and the state as a whole requested an injunction to halt implementation until federal documents can reflect the toll water cuts would have on Southern Nevada’s $180 billion economy.

“This shortfall will cause devastating environmental, socioeconomic, and health and human safety impacts to southern Nevada and its citizens,” attorneys wrote. “Federal Defendants failed to consider such impacts in any meaningful way.”

While 2027 and 2028 will see allocation cuts that the Lower Basin states of Nevada, California and Arizona have already agreed to, the years 2029 to 2036 could bring much harsher reductions. Entsminger said he felt it was important for Nevada to have its own representation on the issue, but he added he would be surprised if California and Arizona don’t sign on to the lawsuit, considering officials remain aligned in their positions. No mandatory cuts will be imposed on the Upper Basin states of Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Wyoming. Entsminger submitted a letter to all six Colorado River basin states Monday, saying the state’s decision to sue wasn’t made lightly but that “hiding from reasonable legal interpretations in order to defer hard political decisions helps no one over the long term and further endangers our shared resource.”

Sarah Porter, Arizona State University

In August 2026 the nation’s two largest reservoirs, Lake Mead and Lake Powell, both on the Colorado River, hit their lowest levels since they first began to be filled in 1936 and 1963, respectively.

The federal government and the seven Colorado River basin states – Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming – have been unable to reach an agreement about who should reduce water usage by how much to avoid catastrophic declines in lake levels.

And the existing plans and commitments, including a federal outline announced in late July 2026, don’t get close to achieving what’s needed to keep the river flowing. Here’s a look at the key issues making an agreement so hard to reach.

Big cuts are needed

To stabilize the Colorado River system, seven states and Mexico need to reduce annual consumption of Colorado River water by at least 3 million acre-feet (980 million gallons), and probably more like 4 million acre-feet (1.3 trillion gallons), each year.

The Lower Basin states – Arizona, California and Nevada – have been using less water, even as their populations have grown.

They have proposed to further reduce water use in 2027 and 2028, and Mexico has, too. Those decreases, coming only from the Lower Basin states, would be the biggest-ever reductions of Colorado River water use, but they would amount to only about 3.7 million acre-feet over two years, about half what is likely needed.

Unless more water is conserved, the reservoirs that have stored surplus water over the decades could shrink to the point that only the water that naturally flows into the river each year would be released downstream. That’s a condition called “run of river,” which could result in drastic cuts to the Lower Basin’s water supply.

If the winter of 2026-27 is like the winter the West had in 2025-26, the river and reservoirs will likely be at that point by mid-2027. A really good winter with lots of snow might push the timing out a year or two, but it won’t solve the problem: People are using a lot more water from the reservoirs than nature is replenishing each year with rainfall and snowfall.

Why is there so little water?

Water was first divided among the Upper and Lower Basins in 1922, using an overoptimistic estimate of how much water there would be. In the past quarter century, low snowpack and reductions in the amount of snow that converts to surface water have meant that flows can’t keep up with demand.

The other key problem is evaporation. These massive reservoirs are in a hot, dry region. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that annual evaporation is about 1.5 million acre-feet. That’s about 10% of what the seven states expect to be able to use each year – and about half of the overall cuts in water use that would be needed to keep the river flowing.

Even if sufficient water were released from Lake Powell to Lake Mead to cover the Lower Basin’s and Mexico’s apportionments, Lake Mead would continue to decline because of evaporation.

What would deep cuts mean for people?

Farmers and ranchers in the Upper Basin have had less water available in 2026 because the winter was extraordinarily dry.

But if water levels at Lake Powell and Lake Mead fall too low to allow dam managers to release stored water, the effects would be on the Lower Basin.

Entities that receive water from the Central Arizona Project have junior priority in the Lower Basin. Central Arizona cities have years’ worth of groundwater they could access – not a forever supply, but enough to use for some years while they work on developing new water supplies.

If cuts go deeper, tribal and nontribal agriculture along the main stem would arguably take the hardest hit. They may have higher-priority rights, but if there’s no water they’re still in trouble. And there isn’t an alternative water supply for agriculture along the river’s main route.

Across the nation, people would notice higher costs and limited availability of some produce, especially in the winter. At times of year when those crops can’t grow in colder parts of the country, Yuma County, Arizona, and Imperial County, California, are key suppliers of vegetables. Other products would be affected too, including Desert durum wheat, a high-gluten wheat that is preferred for pasta.

What would those cuts mean for electricity?

The federal Bureau of Reclamation has made clear its commitment to continuing hydropower production by keeping reservoir elevations above the minimum level needed to generate electricity.

As a result, the reservoirs will likely not reach the point called “deadpool,” at which no water can move through the dam. But they may reach levels at which no water beyond what’s required to generate power – or what arrives as rain or snow – would flow downstream.

What are the states’ positions?

The Lower Basin states have said they would reduce water use by 1.6 million acre-feet a year, effectively handling the reduction due to evaporation. But the Lower Basin has remained insistent on the Upper Basin states’ sharing in additional conservation measures.

The Upper Basin states say they’re already using much less water than they are apportioned under the Colorado River Compact and that the shortfall is due to overuse in the Lower Basin.

Without a negotiated way forward, there are two potential legal fights on the horizon, which could happen at the same time.

One is a Supreme Court fight over how to interpret the Colorado River Compact. It tends to take about a decade to resolve interstate water-sharing fights in the Supreme Court. If that happens, the region will face years of uncertainty regarding the amount of water available to different users.

At the same time, negotiators, tribes and others in the Lower Basin have made clear that they don’t agree with the approach to the crisis the Bureau of Reclamation announced in late July 2026. The specifics of how that plan will be carried out have not yet been released, but Arizona and Nevada have already threatened to sue.

What’s required to achieve the water-use cuts that are needed?

Agriculture uses somewhere between 70% and 75% of the water in the Colorado system.

The reductions needed to protect the system can’t be achieved by getting people in Phoenix and other cities to turn the water off when they brush their teeth. Even if people ripped out all the grass that’s watered with Colorado River water, it wouldn’t save enough.

Ideally, farmers would be encouraged – and even paid – to permanently stop irrigating some land. My colleague Kathryn Sorensen and I have called for people to start talking about how to permanently eliminate some agricultural water demand across the entire Colorado River basin. The scope of the problem is too large: There’s no other way to balance the system.

I think it’s going to require federal leadership. In the 1930s a national effort set out to improve farming efficiency all around the nation, but especially in the South and West. Under the Bankhead-Jones Act of 1937, the federal government bought millions of acres of marginal farmland to take it out of production.

Farming is important, but not every acre of farmland should stay in production. If it’s a choice between making sure some water goes to cities or keeping every possible acre of farmland irrigated, we have to be able to discuss both options.

Sarah Porter, Director of the Kyl Center for Water Policy, ASU Morrison Institute for Public Policy, Arizona State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Click the link to read the article on the Pagosa Springs Sun website (Josh Pike). Here’s an excerpt:

August 12, 2026

Tensions about water management are high on the Colorado River, even as water levels in reservoirs like Lake Mead drop to record lows and the west faces severe drought conditions…On July 31, the federal Bureau of Reclamation released a final environmental impact statement which outlines a potential framework for management of the river between 2027 and 2036. This framework would include mandatory water use cuts of up to a combined 3 million acre-feet per year for the lower basin states of California, Nevada and Arizona while seeking 200,000 acre feet in voluntary reductions from the upper basin states of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming. The impact statement and the associated National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) decision-making process still leave an opportunity for the states on the Colorado River to reach their own agreement about future water use…

Colorado is introducing a new near-term water contribution program designed to take advantage of federal funding to encourage voluntary, compensated reductions in Colorado River water use. At a webinar on Aug. 6, Amy Ostdiek, section chief for the Colorado Water Conservation Board (CWCB) interstate, federal and water information section, explained that this program is one of several parallel activities that the state is undertaking alongside the ongoing NEPA process. She explained that the Bureau of Reclamation has announced that $100 million in funding will be available to support the upper basin states in establishing water contribution programs that will provide “water that but for these actions would not be there” to the Colorado River. She noted that funding would likely support about two years of a program, based on previous project costs, and that, to participate and claim the funds, Colorado would need to act now to begin establishing a program. Ostdiek stated that establishing such a program would honor commitments the state has made in negotiations to making voluntary water use reductions and would show that “Colorado is committed to being part of the solution.”

Click the link to read the article on the High Country News website (Jake Bolster):

August 4, 2026

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.

Water users in the American Southwest confronted on Friday the strong possibility that cities and farms in the region must reduce Colorado River use by hundreds of billions of gallons after the Trump administration released a new management plan for the coming decade.

The document, published by the federal Bureau of Reclamation, outlines a 10-year management approach that could adjust to changing hydrological conditions that affect the river’s flow, with operations updatable every two years. The agency proposed cuts in water allotments originally suggested by Arizona, California and Nevada, which make up the river’s Lower Basin. Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming, the region’s Upper Basin, could make voluntary conservation measures.

Interim guidelines and drought contingency plans agreed upon by the basin states in 2007 and 2019 are set to expire in 2027 and negotiations for a new agreement due this year have stalled, with the states missing repeated deadlines to come to a consensus.

But the Bureau of Reclamation operates much of the river’s infrastructure, including the Hoover and Glen Canyon dams, which form Lake Mead and Lake Powell, the nation’s two largest reservoirs. A federal record of decision finalizing operations on the river for the next two years will follow the final environmental impact statement Reclamation released Friday. 

“This plan strikes a balance between flexibility and predictability for the Colorado River system that is vital to the 40 million people who rely on it given unprecedented hydrologic conditions and the potential for considerable impacts on water users,” said Andrea Travnicek, Interior’s assistant secretary for water and science, in a statement accompanying the plan’s release. “It also allows a new flexibility to respond to changing conditions and potential consensus.”

The agency is considering releases from Lake Powell, the reservoir near the border of Utah and Arizona that delineates the upper and lower basins, ranging from 5 million to 12 million acre feet to the downstream states (one acre foot can supply about two to four households for a year). The Lower Basin, including Mexico, could take steep cuts in their water allocations, potentially losing 1.5 million acre feet in both 2027 and 2028.

Under such a scenario, Arizona would lose 760,000 acre feet of its allotment from the river, California 440,000 acre feet and Nevada 50,000, following a proposal submitted by the Lower Basin.

But beyond 2028, Lower Basin cuts could reach up to 3 million acre feet.

The Arizona Department of Water Resources called that figure “unacceptable” in a statement published online. “Such reductions would devastate Arizona’s water users and its economy,” the agency said. 

Reclamation appears to be seeking voluntary Upper Basin reductions of up to 200,000 acre feet, and discussed moving water from federally managed dams in the basin downstream, as hydrology allowed.

“The proposal responds to a fundamental reality: the Colorado River no longer reliably produces enough water to support all the uses and expectations built around it,” said JB Hamby, California’s Colorado River Commissioner, in a statement. “That challenge is shared across the Basin, and addressing it requires specific, measurable reductions in water use by every state.”

A spokesperson for the Colorado Department of Natural Resources said the state is “analyzing” the document.

Upper Basin governors said in a statement that they were “encouraged that new operating guidelines will better reflect existing water supply, which must underpin any practicable plan going forward.”

The Colorado River is perhaps the most climate-stressed waterway in the U.S. It provides water to between 35 and 40 million people across seven Western states, 30 tribes and two Mexican states as it wends its way through the Southwest, home to some of the country’s most arid and drought-stricken landscapes. Millions of Westerners also rely on the electricity the Hoover and Glen Canyon dams generate. 

The 1922 compact between the river’s users assumed roughly 17.5 million acre feet of water was available to the two basins and Mexico, but the historical average of its natural flow has only been roughly 14.7 million acre feet. That number plummeted to an average of 11.2 million acre feet between 2020 and 2024, according to provisional data from Reclamation. 

In that same time period, the agency calculated average use and evaporative loss across the basin at just over 13 million acre feet.

“The operational ranges that Reclamation put forward, they’re the right things that we need to be doing in order to fix the supply and demand imbalance,” said John Berggren, regional policy manager at Western Resource Advocates. “But it is just a range, and what they actually do over the next two years or within any given year, that will matter if they’re actually gonna be able to bring the system back into balance.”

Berggren hopes the short-term certainty this plan provides can unstick negotiations between the states.

“I hope [the basin commissioners] don’t just keep doing what they’ve been doing for the last two or three years, ’cause that clearly hasn’t worked,” he said. “I hope they try and take this opportunity to change things up. Let’s try something new and hopefully get to a seven-state agreement.”

Reclamation’s final environmental impact statement was initially supposed to codify the management plan the basin states have yet to agree on. Though deadlines for those negotiations have come and gone, Reclamation is still holding the door open for a deal, which is widely regarded as the most productive path to a durable long-term operating agreement for the river. 

“Let’s try something new and hopefully get to a seven-state agreement.”

Negotiations are stalled over whether cuts should be mandatory across the entire basin. After overdrawing from the river for decades, the Lower Basin now uses less water than it is apportioned, according to federal accounting; it wants to see future cuts shared across the seven states. The Upper Basin, which has never used the full amount of water it is legally entitled to, has fiercely contested demands for it to make mandatory cuts, offering voluntary conservation measures instead. The states that make up that basin contend that variable environmental conditions, such as this year’s record-low snowpack, already limit how much water they use.

Even with some idea of federal management options in place, the absence of a seven-state  agreement further increases the prospect of states dependent on the Colorado River suing one another in cases that would be adjudicated by the Supreme Court.

Still, proposing to manage the river in a way that is adaptive to hydrological conditions is “the kind of agreement that we are going to need to really think about long-term how do we live in this basin with much less water moving forward,” said Celene Hawkins, Colorado River program director at The Nature Conservancy. 

Hawkins hopes this spurs a seven state agreement “so that, ultimately, we can do really good work for communities and for the river itself.”

We welcome reader letters. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.

by Annie Knox, Utah News Dispatch
July 31, 2026

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

Colorado River Collaborative

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

July 16, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

[…]

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

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

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

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

June 30, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conservation conversation is the ‘bare minimum’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

June 25, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘A WILD IDEA’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A SECOND LIFE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HARD MATH

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

COMING FULL CIRCLE?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

June 5, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beyond the band-aid

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

June 1, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The full report is here.

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

May 26, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The role of reservoirs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why the restraint of cities?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

May 26, 2026

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

End of advertisement – back to the river….

Romancing the River – Elephants in the River

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

May 19, 2026

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

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

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

[…]

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

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

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

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

May 12, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An invisible pool

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lower Basin proposal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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