Click the link to read the article on the Alamosa Citizen website:

February 15, 2026

The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation has released a February 24-month study showing inflow to Lake Powell declining by 1.5 million acre-feet since January as the federal agency highlights the worsening hydrologic conditions across the Colorado River Basin.

The study of the most probable forecast for the Colorado River under current conditions was released on Friday, just as the seven compact states remained at a stalemate and failed to meet a Feb. 14 deadline for agreement on how to reduce their own usage of water to save the river.

U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum announced on Saturday, Feb. 14, that the federal government is moving forward with finalizing operating guidelines for the Colorado River reservoirs by Oct. 1. His announcement adds pressure to Colorado and the other compact states to find compromise or face guidelines forced onto them by the federal government. 

“While the seven Basin States have not reached full consensus on an operating framework, the Department cannot delay action,” the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation said in its announcement that the federal government was moving forward.

The lack of agreement among the compact states and the idea of federal intervention raises the prospect of litigation that would be drawn out and ultimately end with the U.S. Supreme Court. The current Rio Grande Compact dispute between Texas and New Mexico that has taken 12 years to reach a proposed settlement, now filed with the U.S. Supreme Court, gives an indication to the slow-evolving nature of U.S. water law.

“I am disappointed that the seven Basin States could not reach a consensus agreement on the future management of the Colorado River by the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Feb. 14 deadline,” said Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser, who added that Colorado is prepared for litigation to protect Colorado’s rights and interests.

“Colorado will continue to work with our fellow Upper Division States to provide comments on the federal government’s draft environmental impact statement, which sets forth a range of possible solutions. The Upper Division States will have to cut back their usage of water from the Colorado River — by 40 percent or more — in the face of an historic drought,” he said.

U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper said the low snowpack this winter is adding an exclamation point to the dire conditions of the Colorado River Basin. “If we don’t address this problem together — head-on and fast — our communities, farms, and economies will suffer,” Hickenlooper said.

“The best path forward is the one we take together. Litigation won’t solve the problem of this long-term aridification. No one knows for sure how the courts could decide and the math will only get worse.”

BLM’s February 24-month study shows a loss of 1.5 million acre-feet is equivalent to approximately 50 feet in elevation in Lake Powell.

“The basin’s poor hydrologic outlook highlights the necessity for collaboration as the Basin States, in collaboration with Reclamation, work on developing the next set of operating guidelines for the Colorado River system,” said Acting BLM Commissioner Scott Cameron. “Available tools will be utilized and coordination with partners will be essential this year to manage the reservoirs and protect infrastructure.”

The water year inflow is now estimated at just 52 percent of average, and as a result, the February 24-Month Study projects, for the first time, that Lake Powell could decline (based on most probable projections) to:

“The basin’s poor hydrologic outlook highlights the necessity for collaboration as the Basin States, in collaboration with Reclamation, work on developing the next set of operating guidelines for the Colorado River system,” said Acting BLM Commissioner Scott Cameron. “Available tools will be utilized and coordination with partners will be essential this year to manage the reservoirs and protect infrastructure.”

The water year inflow is now estimated at just 52 percent of average, and as a result, the February 24-Month Study projects, for the first time, that Lake Powell could decline (based on most probable projections) to:

3,490 ft – minimum power pool in December 2026; below this level Glen Canyon Dam’s ability to release water is reduced and it can no longer produce hydropower.

3,476 ft – in March 2027; the lowest elevation on record since filling further constraining the ability to release water from Glen Canyon Dam.

Colorado River managers estimate that around 4 million acre-feet of cuts are needed to bring the basin back into balance – an amount equal to more than a quarter of the Colorado River’s annual average flow.

“There needs to be unbelievably harsh, unprecedented cuts,” Brad Udall, a senior water and climate research scientist at the Colorado Water Center, told The Guardian media outlet.

 “Mother Nature is not going to bail us out,” Udall said.

Flows in the Colorado River are down 20 percent over the last century and precipitation has shrunk by about 7 percent with rising temperatures as aridification takes hold across the southwest. 

“The chickens are coming home to roost,” Udall said. “Climate models have underestimated how much warming we are going to get, and humans are not stepping up.”

Jack Schmidt, director of the Center for Colorado River Studies at Utah State University, likened the negotiations among the seven compact states to the final scene in “Thelma and Louise.” “Seven people have their hands on the steering wheel driving toward the edge of a cliff — and no one is working the brakes,” he reportedly said.

Click the link to read the article on the High Country News website (Wade Graham):

February 11, 2026

Floyd Dominy, the commissioner of the federal Bureau of Reclamation in the 1960s, was largely responsible for the construction of Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado River. In 1963, when the dam was completed, he could not have foreseen the climate situation we find ourselves in today, with declining snowpack, record-high temperatures and alarmingly low water levels in Lake Powell, year after year. But he and his engineers could have, and should have, foreseen that the way they designed the dam would leave little room to maneuver should a water-supply crisis ever impact the river and its watershed.

Indeed, a state of crisis has been building on the Colorado for decades, even as the parties that claim its water argue over how to divide its rapidly diminishing flows. Lately, things have entered a new and perilous phase. Last Nov. 11 was a long-awaited deadline: Either the states involved — California, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, Colorado and Wyoming — would have to agree on a new management plan, or else the federal government would impose its own, something none of the parties would welcome. Meanwhile, the 30 tribes that also hold claims to the river have historically been and continue to be excluded from these negotiations. 

That deadline came and went, and instead of acting, the government punted, this time to Feb. 14. Nobody was surprised: Unmet deadlines and empty ultimatums have been business as usual on the river for years. Decades of falling reservoir levels and clear warnings from scientists about global warming and drought have prompted much hand-wringing and some temporary conservation measures, but little in the way of permanent change in how water is used in the Colorado River Basin.

For decades, the seven Basin states have used more water than the river delivers by drawing their entitlements from surpluses banked in reservoirs during the wet 1980s and ’90s, chiefly in Lake Mead and Lake Powell. Never mind that those entitlements were based on an over-estimate of river flows in 1922, when the Colorado River Compact was established, rendering the “paper” water of the entitlements essentially a fiction, not to mention a source of continual conflict. That savings account has now been drained: Mead and Powell are each below 30% full, and the trend is steadily downward. Global warming has only accelerated the decline: So far this century, the river’s flow has fallen 20% from its long-term annual averages, and scientists forecast more of the same as the climate continues to heat up.

Meanwhile, the physical infrastructure that enables Colorado River water management is on the verge of its own real and potentially catastrophic crisis — and yet Reclamation has barely acknowledged this, with the exception of an oblique reference in an unposted technical memorandum from 2024. The falling reservoir levels reveal another, deeper set of problems inside Glen Canyon Dam, which holds back the Colorado and Lake Powell. The 710-foot-tall dam was designed for a Goldilocks world in which water levels would never be too high or too low, despite the well-known fact that the Colorado is by far the most variable river in North America, prone to prodigious floods and extended droughts. But the Bureau, bursting with Cold War confidence — or hubris — chose to downplay the threat. In the record-breaking El Niño winter of 1983, the Bureau almost lost the dam to overtopping, due to both its mismanagement and its design, because the dam lacks sufficient spillway capacity for big floods. Only sheets of plywood installed across its top and cooler temperatures that slowed the melting of that year’s snowpack saved Glen Canyon Dam.

Today, the dam is threatened not by too much water but too little. In March 2023, the water level of Lake Powell dropped to within 30 feet of the minimum required for power generation, known as “minimum power pool.” At 3,490 feet above sea level, minimum power pool is 20 feet above the generators’ actual intakes, or penstocks, but the dam’s eight turbines must be shut down at minimum power pool to avoid cavitation — when air is sucked down like a whirlpool into the penstocks, forming explosive bubbles which can cause massive failure inside the dam.

Even more worrisome is what would happen next. At minimum power pool, the penstocks would have to be closed, and the only remaining way to pass water through the dam is the river outlet works, or ROWs: two intakes in the rear face of the dam leading to four 96-inch-diameter steel pipes with a combined maximum discharge capacity of 15,000 cubic feet per second. However, the ROWs, also known as bypass tubes, have a serious design flaw: They are unsafe to use for extended intervals, and start to erode when the reservoir is low.

In 2023, when the ROWs were used to conduct a high-flow release into the Grand Canyon at low-reservoir levels, there was, in fact, damaging cavitation, and the Bureau has warned that there would likely be more in the event of their extended use. In practice, safe releases downstream may only be a fraction of their claimed capacity — and if the tubes begin to experience cavitation, flows may need to be cut off entirely. Such a scenario would compromise the dam’s legal downstream delivery requirements, or, to put it bluntly, its ability to deliver enough water to the 25 million people downstream who rely on it — as well as the billions of dollars’ worth of agriculture involved. This means that Lake Powell — and with it, the entire Colorado River system — is perilously close to operational failure.

If reservoir levels drop to the ROWs’ elevation of 3,370 feet above sea level, Lake Powell would reach “dead pool,” where water would pass through the dam only when the river’s flow exceeded the amount of water lost to evaporation from the reservoir. No other intakes nor spillways exist below the ROWs. There is no “drain plug.” Yet there is more dam — 240 feet more before the bottom of the reservoir, effectively the old riverbed. This not-insignificant impoundment — about 1.7 million acre-feet of water — would be trapped, stagnant and heating in the sun, prone to algal blooms and deadly anoxia. The lake would rise and fall wildly, as much as 100 feet in a season, because of the martini-glass shape of Lake Powell’s vertical cross section.

Insufficient or no flows through Glen Canyon Dam would be a disaster of unprecedented magnitude, affecting vast population centers and some of the biggest economies in the world, not to mention ecosystems that depend on the river all the way to the Gulf of California in Mexico. The Lower Basin states of California, Arizona and Nevada warned as much in a recent letter to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, saying that Reclamation’s failure to mention the dam’s plumbing problems in its current environmental impact statement for post-2026 operations is against federal law. The letter reads: “Addressing the infrastructure limitations may be the one long-term measure that would best achieve operation and management improvements to the Glen Canyon Dam.”

To date, however, the Bureau has made no formal response.

One thing is clear: Glen Canyon Dam will need to be modified to meet its legal and operational requirements. In the process, the health of the ecosystems in Glen Canyon, above the dam, and in Grand Canyon, below it, must be considered. The best way to avoid operational failure and the economic and ecological disasters that would follow is to re-engineer the dam to allow the river to run through it or around it at river level, transporting its natural sediment load into the Grand Canyon.

As it happens, Floyd Dominy himself provided us with a simple and elegant plan for how to do it. In 1997, the former commissioner sketched on a cocktail napkin how new bypass tunnels could be drilled through the soft sandstone around the dam and outfitted with waterproof valves to control the flow of water and sediment. What it prescribes is treating the patient — the Colorado River, now on life support — with open-heart surgery, a full bypass. Dominy’s napkin, which he signed and gave to my colleague Richard Ingebretsen, the founder of Glen Canyon Institute, is effectively a blueprint for a healthier future for the Colorado River and the people and ecosystems that depend on it.

But the window for action to avoid dead pool is dauntingly narrow and closing fast, especially given the time that would likely be required for the government to study, design and implement a fix. The Trump administration’s gutting of federal agency expertise and capacity adds yet more urgency to the issue. Whatever may or may not get decided on Feb. 14, the feds and the basin states need to look beyond the water wars and start building a lasting, sustainable future on the Colorado River.

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.

Click the link to read the article on the KUNC website (Scott Franz):

February 2, 2026

This story is part of ongoing coverage of the Colorado River, produced by KUNC in Colorado and supported by the Walton Family Foundation. KUNC is solely responsible for its editorial coverage.

Governors and negotiators from the seven Colorado River basin states met behind closed doors for about two hours in Washington on Friday [January 30, 2026] to talk with Interior Secretary Doug Burgum about the dwindling waterway’s future.

After they left the meeting, governors were quick to issue statements praising the gathering as ‘productive’ and ‘meaningful,’ but no deal among the states was announced by Monday afternoon.

“There is still a lot of work ahead to get to an agreement, but everyone wants an agreement, and we’ll work together to create a pathway forward,” New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham said in a statement.

Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs said she was “encouraged to hear Upper Basin governors express a willingness to turn water conservation programs into firm commitments of water savings.”

Upriver in Colorado, Gov. Jared Polis said in a statement he “defended our mighty Colorado River.”

“I always fight to defend our water, whether it’s at the Department of Interior, Congress, or the courtroom,” he said.

Utah Gov. Spencer Cox said he left the meeting “hopeful that we’ll avoid the path of litigation.”

“No one wins going down that path,” he said in a statement.

And Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon issued perhaps the most optimistic statement of the group.

“I am wholeheartedly encouraged by our conversation and believe there is a definitive path” toward a deal, he said.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom missed the meeting, but his natural resources secretary, Wade Crowfoot, was in the room.

Crowfoot said in a statement afterward that he was “cautiously optimistic that an agreement is possible, and we’re working hard to make it happen.”

Negotiators from the lower and upper basins entered the meeting at a yearslong impasse over how water restrictions should be managed during dry years.

They now have less than two weeks until a federal Feb. 14 deadline to reach an agreement.

Pressure to reach a deal is building.

Forecasts for the water supply from the Colorado River continue to grow worse as snowpack lags far behind normal across the West.

And negotiators from the basins have said there are “sticking points” that remain in the negotiations in recent weeks that even marathon talks have failed to resolve.

“Some in the lower basin wanted some sort of guaranteed supply, irrespective of hydrologic conditions,” Becky Mitchell, Colorado’s top negotiator, told KUNC last week on the eve of the DC summit. “And I think asking people to guarantee something that cannot be guaranteed is a recipe that cannot get to success.”

California’s negotiator, J.B. Hamby, said during a recent speech that “continued back and forth between the basins haven’t really been moving the ball forward.”

He welcomed potential federal intervention to help strike a deal.

“The administrations…have this important role in sometimes knocking heads together, sometimes encouraging consensus, and having diplomatic discussions between the states to be able to move conversations forward,” he said.

From email from Brian McNeece:

January 27, 2026

Colorado River negotiations have bogged down, but dozens of experts at the Bureau of Reclamation (BOR) have been streaming right along. On Jan. 14, the BOR released its draft Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), which is bureaucratese for a report on options for the negotiators after the current rules expire this year.

It’s a bit complicated. The report includes a modeling of 1,200 possible future scenarios for the entire Colorado River system and runs 1,600 pages. Just the Executive Summary is 66 pages. The theme of this massive undertaking is deep uncertainty. In fact, that is the name of the modeling process: Decision Making Under Deep Uncertainty.

What’s uncertain? Well, in a word: the weather. And not just the weather, but also population growth and water use patterns. Most scientists agree that climate change includes aridification, or a general drying of the Colorado River basin, but it’s impossible to quantify reliably. Thus the 1,200 futures.

This massive report took two and a half years to compile with the help of around 150 people with expertise in everything from hydrology to chemical engineering to wildlife management to socioeconomics to anthropology to law. Browsing through it, I marveled at the depth of analysis and the advanced computational and mathematical tools brought to bear on a question, which at the end of the river, is a political one. I thought, does anyone understand all of it? But when I looked at the top of the list of preparers, I realized that yes, someone does.

And that is Carly Jerla. She’s the Senior Water Resources Program Manager for the Bureau of Reclamation. Ms. Jerla was hired by the BOR in 2005 as a graduate student at the University of Colorado’s Center for Advanced Decision Support for Water and Environmental Systems. She is trained in civil and environmental engineering and public policy. Twenty years on, she’s the boss of this effort.

I’ve watched Ms. Jerla in action at several of the recent Colorado River Water Users Association (CRWUA) conferences in Las Vegas. A petite woman, Carly has a disarmingly low, warm voice. Speaking to a crowd of 1,700 people, she talks as if she’s having an over-the-fence conversation with a neighbor. But as the overlays of data stacked up on her slides, I could sense her losing the audience. It was just too much.

We saw a draft of the current report in 2024. Since then, it has grown massively, but the same dilemma exists and can actually be summed up simply. In re-writing the rules for how the water of the river gets divvied up, they need to decide what triggers shortage conditions, how much cuts each contractor must take under those conditions, and where shortages are measured. In the past, Lake Mead and Lake Powell had separate conditions, and the reservoirs above Lake Powell were not in play. Ms. Jerla’s report emphasizes that the entire system should be considered in the rules, not just the two giant reservoirs.

There are currently five major alternatives being proposed. This first one, called the No-Action Alternative, is also the no-go alternative, since it returns us to the world prior to the 2007 guidelines for shortages. The No-Action Alternative would drain the reservoirs. So negotiators must choose one of the other four alternatives. All of them make heavy cuts, either based on prior appropriation (i.e. the Law of the River) or pro rata (i.e. proportional cuts for everyone).

Is there a Goldilocks alternative among the other four? One that splits the difference between the historical, asymmetrical Law of the River and the fairness in a pro rata plan? No, there isn’t. That’s why we’re stuck.

There’s one future scenario that is completely omitted from the alternatives. Colorado’s negotiator Becky Mitchell has repeatedly called for the Upper Basin states to get MORE water. She points out that the Colorado River Compact of 1922 allocated the Upper Basin the same amount allocated to the Lower Basin states — 7.5 million acre feet. But that’s 3 million more acre-feet than the Upper Basin has ever drawn from the system. 

None of the five alternatives, and apparently not one of Carly Jerla’s 1,200 possible futures, includes that premise. So if the Upper Basin negotiators are staking their claim on the river to include more water for them, they are way off the mark. Their next best hope is to take no cuts, but that option won’t float in the Lower Basin.

Trying to make a decision under Deep Uncertainty is tough, tough work. Carly Jerla and her team have laid out the buffet for the representatives from the states along the Colorado River. Time to pick from the menu. 

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

February 2, 2026

Snowpack realities must be recognized by all seven Colorado River Basin states, says Becky Mitchell, Colorado’s chief negotiator

Becky Mitchell was particularly busy during the last week of January. On Wednesday, Jan. 28, she opened the annual Colorado Water Congress conference with a 1,100-word speech (the prepared remarks are below) that reiterated Colorado’s position in the stalemated Colorado River discussions.

Lower-basin states, said Mitchell, Colorado’s chief negotiator in Colorado River affairs, must fully come to terms with the changed realities on the Colorado River. “This means releases from Lake Powell must reflect actual inflows, not political pressure,” she said. “If reductions aren’t real, reservoirs won’t recover.”

The next day, Mitchell was in Washington D.C. along with Colorado Gov. Jared Polis and the governors of five of the six other basin states. California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who cited pre-existing family commitments, was the only governor absent.

The New York Times on Saturday reported that the governors achieved “no breakthrough — and whether they made progress was unclear.” Mitchell was quoted in that story saying upper basin states “cannot and will not impose mandatory reductions on our water rights holders to send water downstream.”

In other words, as she had said Colorado water users must live with the hydrologic realities, including this one of almost no snow. Colorado does not have the giant reservoirs of Powell and Mead upstream.

Others, including Eric Kuhn, the former general manager of the Glenwood Springs-based Colorado River Water Conservation District, have urged a new model based on proportionate cutbacks, not absolute numbers. See: “Dancing With Deadpool on the Colorado River,” Big Pivots. Dec. 12, 2025.

That is how the four upper-basin states among themselves apportioned their share of the river flows in their 1948 compact. The 1922 compact used absolute numbers, i.e. 7.5 million acre-feet for each basin.

The Colorado River Compact of 1922 among the seven basin states uses some language that can be interpreted very differently about delivery obligations. That is a long, involved story — that may eventually be decided by the Supreme Court.

The Arizona Daily Star, however, reported a nuance of possible importance in statements made by Mitchell and Polis afterward. Mitchell emphasized “voluntary” conservation in the upper basin, while Polis said Colorado remained “committed to working collaboratively to find solutions that protect water for our state, while supporting the vitality of the Colorado River and everyone who depends on it.”

An Arizona source told the Daily Star’s Tony Davis that some Upper Basin governors appeared open to possible mandatory, as opposed to voluntary, conservation measures. “I think the other Upper Basin states expressed a willingness to put water on the table in a way that Colorado has not,” said the source, who asked for anonymity to protect continued participation in interstate river discussions.

But again, Colorado insists that it already has mandatory cutbacks — the ones imposed by Mother Nature. Using the prior appropriation doctrine to sort out priorities, Colorado restricts uses even in the more water-plentiful years. This year, the most “junior users” will most definitely not get water.

Amy Ostdiek, the Colorado Water Conservation Board’s chief for interstate, federal, and water information, made that point in remarks at the Water Congress the day after Mitchell’s speech.

“These reductions in the upper basin are mandatory. They’re uncompensated. They’re the job of each state engineer’s office to go out and shut off water rights holders when that water isn’t available. And what that means in practice is that many years you have pre-compact water rights dating back to the 1800s getting shut off.”

The complications of mandatory reduction of water uses also came up in a session with state legislators at the Water Congress.

Ken Neubecker, a long-time Colorado River observer affiliated with environmental groups, said mandatory cuts to Colorado River water use would require an amendment to Colorado’s state constitution and likely those of other upper-basin states.

Colorado’s constitution has been amended repeatedly since 1876, when Colorado achieved statehood, but the provision setting forth prior appropriation has not been touched.

“I don’t think you will get an amendment that will give the state any kind of authority to enact mandatory cutbacks beyond existing administrative cutbacks,” said Neubecker. “That’s just not in the cards.”

The upper-basin states also differ fundamentally with lower-basin states in that the lower basin states have just a few giant diversions, such as the Central Arizona Project and the Imperial Valley. The headwaters states have thousands of legal diverters. That also makes application of mandatory diversions more difficult.

These facts would together make mandatory costs a legal and logistical nightmare to administer.

The states have a deadline imposed by the federal government, as operator of the dams, to agree how to share a shrinking river.

Later this year, Mother Nature may impose an even harsher deadline if current thin snowpack continues to prevail. The statewide snowpack was 58% of average as of late January when the Water Congress conference was getting underway.

One barometer, if imperfect, of the snowpack is the snowpack on Vail Mountain. On Jan. 15, the Vail Daily’s John LaConte reported that the Snotel measuring site at the ski area showed the worst snowpack reading in 44 years of measurements.

The opening of Vail’s Back Bowls also testifies to dryness of the Colorado River headwaters. As recently as 2012, a notoriously dry year, that south-facing ski terrain was not opened until Jan. 19, according to David Williams of the Vail Daily. On Jan. 26, he reported another foot of snow was necessary to open it.

In June 2023, Polis appointed Mitchellto her current position, as Colorado’s first full-time commissioner to the Upper Colorado River Commission. She had previously overseen the Colorado Water Conservation Board.

“Mitchell will now navigate the deep challenges of the Colorado River in this upgraded position, supported by an interdisciplinary team within the Department of Natural Resources and support from the Colorado Attorney General’s Office,” said the announcement.

“The next few years are going to be incredibly intense as we shift the way that the seven basin states cooperate and operate Lakes Powell and Mead,” Mitchell said in that 2023 announcement. “Climate change coupled with Lower Basin overuse have changed the dynamic on the Colorado River and we have no choice but to do things differently than we have before.”

Becky Mitchell’s prepared remarks

Click the link to read the article on the Summit Daily website (Ali Longwell). Here’s an excerpt:

January 27, 2026

As Colorado continues to negotiate with the seven Colorado River basin states on the post-2026 operations of Lake Powell and Lake Mead, the state’s attorney general and lead negotiator are ready for a legal battle if the states continue to clash.

“If it comes to a fight, we will be ready,” said Becky Mitchell, the Colorado River commissioner, who represents the state on the Upper Colorado River Commission, at the Jan. 23 SMART Act hearing for the Colorado Department of Natural Resources, where the agency provided its annual update on priorities and programs to lawmakers. 

After two years of back and forth, Colorado River basin states remain deadlocked, unable to agree on the guidelines for how Lake Powell and Lake Mead should operate beyond 2026. The operations of these two critical reservoirs have widespread implications for the approximately 40 million people, seven states, two counties and 30 tribal nations that rely on the river…In Colorado, the Colorado River and its tributaries provide water to around 60% of the state’s population. 

“We developed priorities that continue to serve as my north star as we negotiate these post-2026 operational guidelines,” Mitchell said. “The most important of these priorities is to protect Colorado water users. This means that our already struggling water users and reservoirs cannot be used to solve the problem of overuse in the lower basin.” 

[…]

Despite disagreements over how the reservoirs should operate in an uncertain future, reaching a consensus between the seven Colorado River basin states remains the objective for all involved, but time is ticking.  The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation — which manages Lake Powell and Lake Mead — has given the states until Feb. 14 to reach an agreement before the federal agency steps in and makes the decision itself.  Mitchell told lawmakers that she was still “optimistic” about reaching a consensus by the deadline, adding that she will “sit in the room with the full intent to negotiate,” as long as there are “willing parties.” 

“Folks should start worrying when I’m no longer in the room,” she said. “I will, 100%, be focused on a deal until there’s not a deal to be had.”

by Caitlin Sievers, Arizona Mirror
January 30, 2026

With the deadline to reach a water usage agreement looming, leaders from the seven Colorado River Basin states expressed cautious optimism that their “historic” meeting in Washington, D.C., will spur the compromise needed to reach a consensus.

U.S. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum called the meeting at the request of Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs, after the states blew past a Nov. 11 deadline to reach an agreement. The new Feb. 14 deadline was set by the Bureau of Reclamation, which manages water in the West under the Interior Department. 

Arizona stands to see the largest cuts if the states can’t reach an agreement, because its Central Arizona Project is one of the newest users of the river water, making it legally one of the first to be cut.

The Colorado River is a vital source of drinking water for 40 million people in the seven basin states, Mexico and 30 Native American tribes, and provides water for farming operations and hydroelectricity. 

One of the biggest disagreements between the Lower Basin states — Arizona, Nevada and California — and Upper Basin states — Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming — is over which faction should have to cut back on their water use, and by how much.

“This is one of the toughest challenges facing the West, but the Department remains hopeful that, by working together, the seven basin governors can help deliver a durable path forward,” Burgum, the former governor of North Dakota, said in a statement. “Looking at this as a former governor, the responsibility each of them carries to meet the needs of their constituents cannot be understated, and we are committed to partnering with them to reach consensus.”

The meeting in the nation’s capital lasted more than two hours, Christian Slater, a spokesman for Hobbs, told the Arizona Mirror. The governors of all of the basin states attended the meeting, except for Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, who had a prior family commitment and sent California Natural Resources Secretary Wade Crowfoot in his place. 

“It’s actually a pretty historic meeting, and I don’t use those words lightly,” John Entsminger,  Nevada’s Colorado River negotiator, said. “I’ve been working on the river for more than 25 years, and I’ve never seen that many governors and a cabinet secretary in one room talking about the importance of the Colorado River.”

In a post on X Friday afternoon, Hobbs described the meeting as meaningful and productive. 

“I was encouraged to hear Upper Basin governors express a willingness to turn water conservation programs into firm commitments of water savings,” Hobbs wrote. “Arizona has been and will continue to be at the table offering solutions to the long-term protection of the river so long as every state recognizes our shared responsibility.”

Reaching a water usage agreement is vital to the basin states because the Colorado River’s water supply has been in decline for around 25 years due to a persistent drought spurred on by climate change. The decline is expected to continue into the future. 

Water levels in the two major reservoirs on the river, Lake Mead and Lake Powell, have also been in decline for the last quarter century. 

“One thing is certain: We’ll have less water moving forward, not more,” New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham said in a statement. “So, we need to figure this out. There is still a lot of work ahead to get to an agreement, but everyone wants an agreement, and we’ll work together to create a pathway forward.”

Lower Basin states want all seven states to share mandatory water cuts during dry years under the new guidelines. But the Upper Basin, which is not subject to mandatory cuts under the current guidelines, argue that they already use much less water than downstream states and should not face additional cuts during shortages.

State negotiators for both the Upper and Lower Basin have said they would prefer a seven-state agreement over alternative river management options proposed by the federal government.

Tom Buschatzke, director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources, told reporters last week that the Grand Canyon State does not like the options proposed by the federal government as they place almost the entire burden for cuts on Lower Basin states. 

The Colorado River Compact dates back to 1922, when the seven states made their initial agreement, allocating 7.5 million acre-feet of water each year to be shared by the Upper Basin states and another 7.5 million to be used among the Lower Basin states. 

In 2025, for the fifth year in a row, the federal government imposed water allocation cuts on the Colorado River  due to the ongoing drought and Arizona’s cut amounts to a loss of 512,000 acre-feet of water for the year. 

“Today’s discussion was productive and reflected the seriousness this moment requires,” Colorado Gov. Jared Polis said in a statement. “Since 2022, Colorado and the Upper Basin states have shown up to the negotiating table ready to have hard conversations. We have offered sacrifices to ensure the long-term viability of the Colorado River and we remain committed to working collaboratively to find solutions that protect water for our state, while supporting the vitality of the Colorado River and everyone who depends on it.” 

Complicating matters this year is scant snowpack in the Rocky Mountains. Small snowpack means very little runoff, the source for almost all of Colorado’s water. 

The Lower Basin states have undertaken significant conservation efforts for Colorado River water since 2014 and have reduced their consumption from 7.4 million acre-feet in 2015 to just over 6 million in 2024.

The Upper Basin states have increased their usage in the past five years, from 3.9 million acre-feet in 2021 to 4.4 million in 2024. 

Buschatzke, who attended the meeting in D.C. on Friday alongside Hobbs, has remained insistent that it’s time for the Upper Basin states to do their part. Hobbs’ statement indicated that the states had made some progress toward that. 

If the states can’t reach an agreement and are forced to take one of the federal government’s proposals, it will likely lead to litigation — something that the states agree they would prefer to avoid. 

“We all have to keep working together,” Entsminger said. “We have to find a compromise, and we have to find a way that the states stay in control of this process and don’t turn it over to the courts.”

Last year, Arizona put a total of $3 million to its Colorado River legal defense fund, and Gov. Katie Hobbs’ proposed budget for this year would put another $1 million toward that fund. 

Entsminger said that he thinks the meeting improved the chances of the states meeting  the Feb. 14 deadline. 

“Whether we have a final deal on February 14 or not, we’re still going to have to keep working,” he said. “That’s not to say I don’t think we’ll meet the deadline, but I do think we keep working until we have a deal, regardless of what day in the future that occurs.”

Jeniffer Solis of the Nevada Current contributed to this report.

Click the link to read the article on the KUNC website (Scott Franz):

January 29, 2026

This story is part of ongoing coverage of the Colorado River, produced by KUNC in Colorado and supported by the Walton Family Foundation. KUNC is solely responsible for its editorial coverage.

Governors in the Colorado River basin and their negotiators are meeting with Interior Secretary Doug Burgum in Washington on Friday to try and break a yearslong impasse among states over how to share the dwindling waterway.

On the eve of the high-stakes summit, negotiators from both the upper and lower river basins are not sounding confident they can reach an agreement before a fast-approaching Feb. 14 deadline.

“It depends on the day that you ask me,” Colorado’s negotiator, Becky Mitchell, said Tuesday when asked by KUNC News if she thinks the states are heading toward a court battle. “But I will tell you the level of commitment that we have, both within Colorado and the upper basin, is strong to try to find some way to make a deal. There’s some things that we can’t give on.”

Negotiators are currently working against the backdrop of record low-snowpack across much of the West and worsening forecasts for the Colorado River’s water supply. 

Mitchell said negotiators are continuing to talk at least twice each week.

But leaders from the upper and lower basin states say they still have sticking points.

They continue to differ on how water cuts should be handled and how releases from Lake Powell should be managed during dry years.

“Some in the lower basin wanted some sort of guaranteed supply, irrespective of hydrologic conditions,” Mitchell said. “And I think asking people to guarantee something that cannot be guaranteed is a recipe that cannot get to success.”

The lower basin states of California, Arizona and Nevada are proposing to cut 1.5 million acre feet of their water use. They’re also asking for water restrictions to be mandatory and shared among all seven states. 

Negotiators from the different basins spoke at public events on Wednesday to set the stage for the summit in Washington.

“It’s tough to say I’m looking forward to it, because that would be a lie,” Mitchell told a large crowd Wednesday at a water conference in Aurora.

Her speech was fiery at times.

“Operations must be supply based, not demand based, not entitlement justified, and not built on a hope that the next big year will save us,” she said. “That harm will be irreversible, because the Colorado River is not too big to fail.”

As Mitchell was addressing the water conference in a hotel ballroom, California’s water negotiator, J.B. Hamby, was talking to roughly 600 people on a webinar about his take on the state of negotiations.

He largely focused on his desire to still find a compromise among the seven states in the river basin.

“It’s better to be able to work something out across the negotiating table, to do something that makes sense and protects our users and people and agriculture in our state, and as a result of that, getting a seven-state agreement that protects those interests,” he said.

Hamby said the federal government is “leaning in” and becoming more involved in the negotiations by offering potential options.

Hamby called the feds’ ideas helpful.

“Continued back and forth between the basins haven’t really been moving the ball forward,” he said. “The administrations…have this important role in sometimes knocking heads together, sometimes encouraging consensus, and having diplomatic discussions between the states to be able to move conversations forward.”

He pointed to Herbert Hoover’s role in 1922 as then Commerce Secretary to broker a deal among states in the river basin over how to share water. 

“It’s going to take everyone chipping in and making the necessary (water) reductions to balance the supply with the demand we have moving forward,” Hamby said.

Click the link to read the report on the Center for Colorado River Studies website (Kathryn Sorensen¹, Sarah Porter², Anne Castle³, John Fleck⁴, Eric Kuhn⁵, Jack Schmidt⁶, Katherine Tara⁷). Here’s the executive summary and recommendations:

January 2026

As Colorado River supplies and demands reach razor-thin margins, new tools to provide adaptive capacity will play a critical role in sustaining communities across the West. We must reduce our consumption of water, while finding ways to cushion the impact. One of the most innovative tools for doing this, developed over the last two decades, is “Assigned Water” – giving users the ability to store conserved water earmarked for their own future use.

Originally developed as “Intentionally Created Surplus” in the 2007 Colorado River Interim Guidelines, Assigned Water has been revised and expanded through U.S.-Mexico Treaty Minutes and as part of the 2019 Drought Contingency Plan. While conceptually simple and demonstrably valuable – a savings bank for conserved water – it is crucial to get the policy tools right as Colorado River management rules evolve.

For agencies granted access to the tool, Assigned Water provides important adaptive capacity to prepare for and manage shortfalls on a volatile river with shrinking supplies. But nearly two decades of operational experience also have exposed unintended consequences. With Assigned Water likely to play a critical role in basin management going forward – including its potential expansion to the Upper Colorado River Basin – it is important to review the strengths of the existing program, and essential lessons learned, to guide the development of river management policies after the current operating rules expire at the end of 2026.

HOW ASSIGNED WATER WORKS

Assigned Water allows some users to either conserve water that would have been used, import some categories of tributary water to the mainstem, or to fund system improvements to conserve water that would otherwise have been lost to inefficiencies. This water is then earmarked for the creating agencies’ use, sitting outside of the priority system through which the rest of the Colorado River’s water is allocated. Agencies can pay users to take out their lawns, or fallow farm fields, banking the saved water for future use. By planning ahead, water agencies secure a reliability hedge against shortages as the river shrinks.

But at a time when overall water supplies are declining, Assigned Water creates a category of “private water,” available only to specific users, while remaining water allocated to all users under the existing priority system continues to shrink.

Assigned Water created a tool to overcome the “use it or lose it” problem that left little incentive for water agencies to conserve. Its usefulness and subsequent expansion have led to the existence of 3.5 million acre feet now are stored in Lake Mead, representing the bulk of the available water currently in the reservoir.

UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES

Delaying Shortage Actions

By keeping Lake Mead levels higher than they otherwise would have been, Assigned Water delayed formal shortage declarations in the Lower Colorado River Basin. While this was an intended benefit, it has had the practical effect of putting off water use reductions to the detriment of reservoir storage.

Subsidizing Evaporation

Although current rules apply some reductions to Assigned Water accounts, they often fail to fully account for actual evaporation. This results in a subsidy for Assigned Water holders at the expense of water available to everyone else.

Crowding Out

Assigned Water creates incentives for agencies to focus their conservation efforts primarily on programs that benefit their own users, potentially at the expense of the kind of broader efforts that will ultimately be needed to bring Colorado River Basin use into balance with physical supply. We must remember that Assigned Water does not permanently reduce the use of a quantity of water; instead it stores it for later, simply deferring that use to the future.

Inequitable Access

Assigned Water is currently available only to a select group of major Colorado River water agencies, depriving other users of the program’s benefits.

KEY RECOMMENDATIONS

Operational Neutrality

Assigned Water should not be included in the reservoir levels used to make shortage declaration and determine reservoir operations.

System Assessment

Agencies granted access to Assigned Water should pay a “system assessment” for the privilege. This mechanism would credit their earmarked storage account for a portion of the conserved water while converting the remainder to “System Water,” helping to rebuild storage and meet broad Basin needs.

Evaporation Assessment

Accounting for evaporation should use the best available science, to avoid subsidizing Assigned Water accounts at the expense of the rest of the Basin’s water users.

Expand Access

A wider range of users should be given the opportunity to participate in and benefit from Assigned Water tools.

ADDRESSING THE COLORADO RIVER BASIN’S TRAGEDY OF THE COMMONS

For more than a century of development, Colorado River governance has lived under a tension between individual communities’ desires to use more water and the collective need to balance basin-scale supply and use for the benefit of the region as a whole. Incentives favoring individual communities at the expense of the collective good have brought us to the edge of the current crisis.

Going forward, Assigned Water can provide a crucial management tool, but the policies we use to implement it must find the balance between individual benefit and collective good.

GLOSSARY OF KEY TERMS

• Priority Water: Water diverted within the U.S. generally under the prior appropriation system of water allocation.
• Mexican Water: Water that flows past the international border into Mexico pursuant to the 1944 U.S.-Mexico treaty
• Assigned Water: Water resulting from water use reduction programs that is stored in Colorado River Basin reservoirs earmarked for the specific use of the users who created it, outside the normal priority system. Assigned water functions as a sort of private water savings account for those agencies granted the privilege of using the tools.
• System Water: System Water: The collective term for all water in the reservoirs, including Priority, Mexican, and Assigned Water.
• Intentionally Created Surplus: The term used for the Assigned Water initially created under the 2007 Colorado River Interim Guidelines, which became the prototype for similar programs that followed.
• System Conservation: Programs that fund reductions of water use to benefit the
• Colorado River Basin as a whole by creating System Water for rebuilding reservoir storage or general use under the priority system rather than being allocated to the accounts of specific users.

APPENDIX OF ALL RECOMMENDATIONS

NEUTRALITY

• In any newly developed operational guidelines for Lake Powell and Lake Mead, volumes of Assigned Water created after 2026 should be invisible for purposes of determining shortage conditions.
• Other than for flood control releases, volumes of Assigned Water created after 2026 should be invisible for purposes of determining surplus in Lake Mead.
• Volumes of Assigned Water in Lake Mead and Lake Powell created after 2026 should spill before all other water, a condition that also functions as a de-facto limit on total accumulation of Assigned Water.
• In any newly developed operational guidelines for Lake Powell and Lake Mead, volumes of Assigned Water created after 2026 and held in Lake Mead or Lake Powell should be invisible for purposes of calculating annual releases from Lake Powell.

EVAPORATION

• Reclamation should establish evaporation coefficients applicable to calculation of evaporation caused by storage of Assigned Water. These evaporation coefficients should be based on on-going monitoring and best available science and appropriately funded. Evaporation coefficients should be reassessed every five years, especially in light of a changing climate.
• Future volumes of Assigned Water in any reservoir should be assessed a realistic and conservatively high annual evaporative loss based on these coefficients and on the amount of Assigned Water in storage.
• Future deliveries of Assigned Water should be assessed transit losses where appropriate. Transit losses should also be estimated based on best available science, updated by monitoring and scientific studies, and revised every five years.
• Future volumes of Assigned Water in any reservoir should proportionately share the evaporative (and transit) losses that occur due to Mexican Water delivery obligations (other than for Mexican Assigned Water, which should bear its own losses) and should be assessed a realistic and conservatively high annual evaporative loss based on these coefficients and due to Mexican Water delivery obligations. The evaporative assessment should reflect the proportionate share of Assigned Water and Priority Water in storage.
• Evaporative losses should be assessed under all conditions, including shortage.

SHORTAGES AND DELIVERIES

• Deliveries of Assigned Water should be restricted if necessary to protect critical dam infrastructure.
• Alternative: The federal government should compel the sale of Assigned Water for immediate conversion to System Water during years in which reservoirs are at critically low levels.

PARTICIPATION

• In years in which System Water storage in Lake Powell and Lake Mead is deemed to be inadequate, any Assigned Water developed or acquired by the federal government in those years should immediately be converted to System Water. Use for other purposes should be allowed only in conditions in which System Water storage is adequate.
• Dedication of federally-controlled Assigned Water for purposes other than conversion to System Water should occur through a robust and transparent public process.
• Because they are among those most exposed to involuntary shortage, CAWCD subcontractors that rely on deliveries of Colorado River water to surface water treatment plants should be allowed to create, own and acquire Assigned Water.
• Entities without an entitlement to Colorado River water should not be allowed to own Assigned Water.
• The Secretary’s approval should be required for all agreements for creation, transfer, or sale of Assigned Water.
• Any Colorado River entitlement holder, with the concurrence of the Secretary, should be allowed to participate in transactions in any state to develop, own or use Assigned Water created from projects in the U.S. (So long as adequate protections are afforded Priority Water and there is agreement between the states regarding accounting for Assigned Water deliveries under the Compact).
• To avoid profiteering, the Assigned Water held by any given Colorado River entitlement-holder should be proportional to its Colorado River entitlement. The annual accumulation and balance of Assigned Water for a single entity in any reservoir should be limited to some (relatively small) multiple of its annual entitlement to Colorado River water.
• To ameliorate concerns about permanent water transfers between states, agreements to create Assigned Water from consumptive-use reductions in one state for delivery in another state should be structured such that there is reasonable means for entities within the state in which the reduction in consumptive-use derives to make use of that water within the state in the future. One means to do so would be to allow agreements to create Assigned Water from consumptive-use reductions in one state for delivery in another state only if the agreements expire after five years and do not include a provision for automatic renewal. Existing Assigned Water storage could continue beyond expiration.
• To ameliorate controversies associated with the transfer of agricultural water for municipal use, agreements to create Assigned Water from consumptive-use reductions in agriculture should include a requirement that the funder of the Assigned Water pay a tax assessed per acre-foot paid to the county or counties from which the consumptive-use reductions derive. The tax could derive from the value of the agricultural economy. Waivers could apply if the Assigned Water creation program creates a net increase in economic value in an agricultural area (e.g., crop switching or crop insurance).

ASSIGNED WATER CREATED THROUGH SYSTEM EFFICIENCIES

• The federal government should fund efficiency projects for creation of System Water up until the amount of water that results from such projects sufficiently ameliorates the impacts of the annual, national obligation to Mexico to Priority Water users.
  • Thereafter, the creation of Assigned Water via efficiency projects in the U.S. should only be allowed if a) System Water storage in Lake Powell and Lake Mead is deemed to be adequate or b) the efficiency project benefits System Water over Assigned Water on a ratio of 90/10 over the ensuing five years.
• To the extent participation is offered, participation in efficiency projects in the U.S. in exchange for Assigned Water should be awarded based on an allocation method determined through an open and transparent process (e.g. highest bidder) and should be subject to any limitations on participation, total Assigned Water annual accumulation and balance for that entity.
• The federal government should hold the right of first refusal to purchase any Mexican Assigned Water up for sale and to fully fund any conservation projects in Mexico that can become Assigned Water during years in which System Water stores are deemed to be inadequate for the sole purpose of converting it to System Water.
• Mexican treaty obligations increase the risk of shortage in the Lower Division and increase the risk of a Compact call. Those in the Lower Division with lowest priority contracts and subcontracts and those in the Upper Division most at risk of curtailment due to a Compact call should be given the second right of refusal up to an amount that equals projected involuntary cuts to Priority Water for each entity over the next two years.
• Thereafter, purchase of Mexican Assigned Water should be awarded to domestic entity with the highest bid and should be subject to any limitations on participation, total Assigned Water annual accumulation and balance for that entity.

MEASUREMENT AND BASELINES

• An audit independent of Reclamation should be conducted on the existing Assigned Water program in the Lower Division and Mexico. The goals of the audit should be:
  • to examine claimed savings for accuracy,
  • to assemble a list of lessons learned on measurement and accounting from twenty years of program administration and
  • to assemble a list of qualifying activities for reduction of consumptive use, alongside recommended terms and conditions, that can form the foundation of future agreements.
• The audit should be made available to the public with and opportunity to review and comment.
• Assigned Water in any reservoir should only be allowed under a program that accurately measures Assigned Water creation, shepherding, storage and deliveries.
• Owners of Assigned Water should be assessed an annual fee to fund robust measurement and enforcement programs.
• Assigned Water created through water savings should derive from a baseline of historic consumptive use, not entitlement or filed water right claims.

FORBEARANCE/SHEPHERDING

• Forbearance/shepherding should be based on qualifying activities, not participants. In other words, withholding of forbearance/shepherding should not be a veto used to exclude participants that would otherwise qualify for development of Assigned Water.
• The means of creating Assigned Water that meet the threshold for agreements to forbear/shepherd should be decided ahead of time. Allowing additional qualifying activities down the road increases flexibility but also potentially undermines trust in Assigned Water programs between participants and more importantly among non-participants who rely solely on the prior appropriation system.

TRANSPARENCY

• Reclamation should compile a centralized, searchable, easily accessible library of all agreements and documents associated with Assigned Water programs.
• Reclamation should develop a new Assigned Water annual report that clearly shows ownership of the several different types of Assigned Water, the status of funding agreements and the flow of dollars, transactions involving Assigned Water, Assigned Water creation by creation category, method and partner, relevant shepherding arrangements, assessments, evaporative losses, deliveries and ending balances and other relevant details.
• Graphs and charts of reservoir elevations should clearly delineate Assigned Water by ownership and method of creation.

PROGRAM LENGTH

• The ability to create or purchase Assigned Water under a given Assigned Water program should expire 20 years after program initiation, a duration long enough for bond financing of capital projects. The ability to store Assigned Water should expire no more than 5 years after expiration of the program under which it was created.

LOANS AND CONVERSIONS

• Loans against Assigned Water balances should not be allowed where default diminishes the amount of System Water in storage.
• Conversion of existing Assigned Water into another form of Assigned Water governed by different rules should only be allowed after a robust and transparent public process.
• Loans between Assigned Water owners for Assigned Water should be allowed in future programs.
• With proper guardrails, loans from Assigned Water owners to Priority Water users should be allowed, including across state lines.
• With proper guardrails, loans and/or conversions from Assigned Water to the Priority Water pool should be mandatory when Priority Water stores are deemed to be seriously inadequate.

ADDRESSING THE TRAGEDY OF THE COMMONS

• Future creation of Assigned Water should be assessed a percentage deduction that becomes System Water at the time of creation to help rebuild System Water in reservoirs.
  • The assessment should be determined based on a sliding scale; a 30% assessment should apply in water years in which System Water stores are deemed to be inadequate. The assessment should then decrease incrementally to 10% as total storage increases.
• Alternative: Colorado River entitlement holders must agree to take shortages above and beyond shortage levels described in the 2007 Guidelines before being allowed to create Assigned Water.
  • The amount of shortage should equal 30% of the proposed deposit in years in which System Water stores are deemed to be inadequate. The shortage should then decrease incrementally to 10% as total storage increases.
• During years in which System Water stores are deemed to be inadequate the federal government should hold the right of first refusal to purchase any Assigned Water offered up by willing sellers for the sole purpose of converting it to System Water.

ASSIGNED WATER OPPORTUNITIES IN THE UPPER DIVISION

• Where possible while still maintaining neutrality to Priority Water, and assuming agreement between the states on how to account for Assigned Water deliveries between the Divisions under the Compact, the amount of Assigned Water stored in different reservoirs should be adjusted to optimize for hydropower, environmental and recreational benefits.
• Assigned Water created in the Upper Division must be properly shepherded into the relevant downstream reservoir and assessed appropriate transit losses.

¹ Director of Research, Kyl Center for Water Policy, former Director, Phoenix Water Services

² Director, Kyl Center for Water Policy

³ Senior Fellow, Getches-Wilkinson Center, University of Colorado Law School, former US Commissioner, Upper Colorado River Commission, former Assistant Secretary for Water and Science, US Dept. of the Interior

⁴ Writer in Residence, Utton Transboundary Resources Center, University of New Mexico

⁵ Retired General Manager, Colorado River Water Conservation District

⁶ Director, Center for Colorado River Studies, Utah State University, former Chief, Grand Canyon Monitoring and Research Center

⁷ Staff Attorney, Utton Transboundary Resources Center, University of New Mexico

Click the link to read the article on the Central Arizona Project website (DeEtte Person):

January 26, 2026

Reclamation has released a Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS), a required step in the process to develop new operating guidelines for Colorado River operations by the end of the year when the current operating guidelines expire. It comes amid two-plus years of ongoing meetings and negotiations led by Reclamation working with the seven Colorado River Basin states, the Colorado River Basin tribes and other stakeholders.

The DEIS lays out five alternatives for how the Colorado River might be managed after 2026. These include one “no action” alternative required by law, three alternatives that would require agreements among the basin states, and one “no deal” alternative which may be imposed if there is no agreement among the states.

The DEIS places all the risk of a dwindling Colorado River on the Lower Basin, and all the alternatives proposed are harmful to Arizona.

The “no deal” alternative in particular piles virtually all the mandated cuts on the State of Arizona and Central Arizona Project. The DEIS ignores the obligations of the Upper Basin states to deliver water under the Colorado River Compact and the federal government to release water from the Colorado River Storage Project dams.

The “no deal” alternative would result in a crushing blow to Central Arizona’s water supply, including tribal water supplies. Millions of Arizona residents would be negatively affected – including those in the fifth largest city in the United States, as would several of the nation’s key industries, including manufacturing, microchips and national defense.

Our economy is integrated regionally and nationally, which means if Arizona is suffering, neighboring businesses and our national defense are too.

In contrast, the “no deal” alternative imposes no federal cuts to the Upper Basin and allows the Upper Basin to increase water use in the future.

Implementation of any of the DEIS alternatives would likely force Arizona to seek legal options. [ed. emphasis mine]

The basin states and the Bureau of Reclamation can do better than any of these alternatives with a negotiated agreement. As history has shown, the Colorado River has worked best when all basin states agree on how it is managed.

We remain committed to working with the basin states and Reclamation so long as the path is toward recognizing the shared risks and responsibilities for the river and fairly sharing reductions to protect vital infrastructure that benefits the entire Colorado River Basin.

Here’s what CAWCD’s Board members have to say about the DEIS:

“Each alternative put forward places the risk of a dwindling Colorado River on the Lower Basin – none of them are good for Arizona and certainly not for Central Arizona Project. In the Lower Basin, we’ve demonstrated that we can accept that the River has less water now and likely in the future. But we cannot bear the shortage alone. The Upper Basin shows no willingness to conserve and in fact demands more water, yet these alternatives do nothing to deny their greed. That’s not acceptable to CAP whose millions of water users and billions in industrial investments will bear the brunt of these devastating alternatives.”  – Terry Goddard, CAWCD Board President

“The alternatives laid out for post-2026 Colorado River operations are potentially disastrous for millions of Arizonans – including the residents of the fifth largest city in the United States. Further, these alternatives all negatively impact several of the nation’s key industries, including manufacturing, microchips and national defense. This means harm not just to Arizona, but to the entire country.”  – Alexandra Arboleda, CAWCD Board Vice President

“Arizonans have been smart water stewards, conserving water for decades in our desert environment. What’s more, we’ve worked with our Lower Basin partners to protect Lake Mead, by voluntarily conserving water beyond the mandatory reductions Arizona has taken for the past several years. We’ve done our part and it’s so disappointing to see alternatives that make Arizona bear the burden for all Colorado River users.”   – Karen Cesare, CAWCD Board Secretary

“Pinal County has already shouldered the brunt of the Colorado River reductions Arizona has been taking for the past several years. And this has had a monumental negative impact on our agricultural community. We’ve already felt a great deal of pain and these alternatives would be rubbing salt in the wound and would continue to devastate Arizona.”  – Stephen Miller, CAWCD Board Member, Pinal County

“CAP delivers more tribal water than any other entity in the United States. The alternatives proposed for post-2026 Colorado River operations would have a damaging effect on those deliveries, which are part of settlement agreements with the federal government. The negative effects of these alternatives impact all of CAP’s water users – cities, industries and tribes.”  – Justin Manuel, CAWCD Board Member, Pima County and member of Tohono O’Odham Nation

Click the link to read the article on the KUNC website (Scott Franz):

January 25, 2026

This story is part of ongoing coverage of the Colorado River, produced by KUNC in Colorado and supported by the Walton Family Foundation. KUNC is solely responsible for its editorial coverage.

It’s crunch time for negotiators from seven western states trying to strike a deal before Feb. 14 on how to share the dwindling Colorado River.

But four days of talks in a Salt Lake City conference room earlier this month did not appear to have sparked a breakthrough.

“We got tired of each other,” Utah’s negotiator, Gene Shawcroft, said Tuesday at a public board meeting, days after the meeting ended. “And two of the days, we made some progress, but one day we went backwards almost as much progress as we made in two and a half days.”

The states in the lower and upper basins remain at an impasse over how cuts to water use should be handled during times of drought.

In another sign that talks remain stalled, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum reportedly invited governors from the seven states in the river basin to attend a meeting in Washington on Jan. 30. 

A spokesperson for Colorado Gov. Jared Polis confirmed the meeting invitation to KUNC and said in a statement that Polis “hopes to attend this meeting if it works for the other Governors.”

Meanwhile, the Interior Department recently released a playbook of options for how to manage the river in the future.

John Berggren, a water policy expert at Western Resource Advocates, said many of the scenarios on the table can only be taken if all the states in the basin agree to them.

“The fact that the states don’t have a seven state agreement right now means that we can’t consider some of these really good, new, innovative tools that are in some of the alternatives,” he said Tuesday. And so that’s pretty frustrating.”

What could management of the vital waterway look like after the current rules expire in August?

Berggren, who got his Ph.D. at the University of Colorado focusing on sustainable water management in the Colorado River Basin, helped KUNC’s water desk summarize the five options on the table from the feds.

He said an eventual deal might incorporate pieces from several of the alternatives.

Basic coordination

This is the only path the feds say they currently have the legal power to take if the seven states fail to reach an agreement.

Berggren said this option would likely ‘normalize’ 1.48 million acre feet of water shortages each year in the lower basin states.

“And this would just basically say every year, that’s a given,” Berggren said.

Upper basin states, including Colorado, would not be forced to contribute more water in dry years.

Berggren said this option “does not do enough.”

“There’s many years where the system crashes,” he said.

A crash means Lake Powell and Lake Mead reach deadpool, a scenario where they’re so critically low that hydroelectricity stops and water stops flowing through their dams.

Millions of water users in the west could see impacts.

Enhanced coordination

Berggren calls this plan ‘a little more innovative.’

Highlights include the power to use conservation pools that encourage and incentivize states and water users to find ways to save water.

That could mean the feds paying states to conserve water. Lower basin states could also put water they save in Lake Mead to stay there until they need it.

“It’s water security, because if we can save water today, we’ll put it into storage and we can withdraw it later when we need it,” Berggren said.

This option also includes contributions from the upper basin states each year that would gradually increase over time.

The Interior Department writes this option “seeks to protect critical infrastructure while benefitting key resources (such as environmental, hydropower, and recreation) through an approach to distributing storage between Lake Powell and Lake Mead that enhances the reservoirs’ abilities to support the Basin.”

No action

This plan might sound like the path with the least impact, but that’s far from the case.

This path would revert the operating procedures at Powell and Mead to what they were almost 20 years ago.

“It basically says Reclamation will shoot to release 8.23 million acre feet of water from Powell, and that’s kind of it,” Berggren said. “Not a lot of authority for lower basin shortages, not a lot of authority to modify your reservoir operations to try and prevent the worst from happening. No action very clearly crashes the system quickly, and no one wants it.”

According to the Interior Department, “there would be no new mechanisms to proactively conserve and store water in Lake Powell or Lake Mead.”

This option was legally required to be included in the feds report on operating scenarios.

Maximum flexibility 

This proposal was developed by a group of seven conservation groups.

Interior said this alternative is “designed to help stabilize system storage, incentive proactive water conservation, and extend the benefits of conservation and operational flexibility to a wide range of resources.”

It’s also designed to give dam operators more flexibility to respond to the impacts of climate change.

Berggren said this option allows water users to conserve water and store it in reservoirs.

It would also change the way water releases are handled.

A “climate response indicator” would be introduced to help decide how much water should be released from Lake Powell.

“If the last three years have been really dry or exceptionally dry, then you adjust your Lake Powell releases,” he said.

Berggren and his environmental group, Western Resource Advocates, had a hand in developing this alternative along with the six other organizations.

All seven of the organizations that crafted the river management proposal have received funding from the Walton Family Foundation, which also supports KUNC’s Colorado River coverage.

Supply driven alternative

“All this does is say that what you release from Lake Powell down to Lake Mead is based on some percentage of the preceding three years,” Berggren said. “You look at the past three years, and you take some percentage of that, and that’s what you release from Glen Canyon Dam, and that’s basically it.”

He said the plan, which incorporates ideas from the states themselves, was nicknamed “the amicable divorce of the basins.”

“Because it was basically the upper basin will do its thing with Lake Powell and its upper basin reservoirs,” he said. “And then whatever gets released, lower basin deals with that, deals with Lake Mead, deals with lower basin shortages.”

Shortages in the lower basin could be up to 2.1 million acre feet a year in this scenario, according to the Interior Department.

Public comment is being accepted on all five alternatives through early March.

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

January 20, 2026

After last week’s somewhat wonky dispatch on the Colorado River, a couple of readers asked about some of the terminology used. That, along with the fact that the deadline for an agreement on how to operate the river’s plumbing is fast approaching, prompted me to put together a bit of a glossary/primer on the Colorado River to give a little more context to related news, which is likely to come fast and furious over the next several weeks. 

If I miss anything, or if you have other questions, please let me know and I’ll try to answer them soon. Also, I’ll be doing a host of data-driven, Colorado River-related dispatches in coming weeks to go over some of last year’s statistics on water consumption, water pricing, alfalfa production and exports, and so forth.

Colorado River Basin: A 250,000 square-mile watershed that includes southwestern Wyoming, western Colorado, southern and eastern Utah, southern Nevada, western New Mexico, Arizona, and eastern California. For administrative purposes, it has been split into the Lower Basin (CA, AZ, NV) and the Upper Basin (CO, WY, UT, NM), with the dividing line at Lees Ferry.

Law of the River: This isn’t an actual law, but rather a collection of agreements, compacts, treaties, laws, and Supreme Court decisions that serve as a framework for governing the Colorado River.

Doctrine of Prior Appropriation, aka First In Time, First in Right: This is the basis for most Western water law, which says that the first entity to put a set amount of water on a stream to beneficial use at a specific place has the highest or most senior priority of water rights. If a senior rights holder is not receiving their full appropriation due to drought or overuse, they can make a “call” on the river, forcing upstream, junior rights holders to stop diverting water from the stream or its tributaries.

Acre-foot (AF): Amount of water that would cover one acre one foot deep. 1 acre-foot = 325,851 gallons. MAF = million acre-feet.

Consumptive Use: The amount of water diverted from a stream minus the amount returned to it. For example, last year Nevada pulled about 443,000 acre-feet of water from the Colorado River, mostly via pumping plants in Lake Mead. But it returned about 244,000 acre-feet of treated wastewater to the reservoir via Las Vegas Wash, leaving it with a total consumptive use of about 198,000 acre-feet for the year. Evaporation and transpiration (or uptake by and evaporation from plants) are considered consumptive uses. Agriculture is the largest consumptive user in both the Upper and Lower basins.

Colorado River Compact: In 1922, representatives from the seven Colorado River states entered into a compact aimed at ending interstate conflict and litigation to clear the way for developing dams and diversions on the river. The compact gives each basin exclusive beneficial consumptive use of 7.5 million acre-feet of water per year, but also mandates that the Upper Basin “not cause the flow of the river at Lee Ferry to be depleted below an aggregate of 75 million acre-feet” for any 10-year period. A 1944 treaty reserved an additional 1.5 million acre-feet to Mexico, which would be covered by surplus or borne equally by the two basins.

• The Upper Basin divided its 7.5 MAF by percentage: 51.75% to Colorado; 11.25%to New Mexico; 23% to Utah; 14% to Wyoming (plus an additional 50,000 acre-feet for the portion of Arizona in the Upper Basin).
• The Lower Basin allotted 4.4 MAF to California; 2.8 MAF to Arizona; .3 MAF to Nevada.
• 20 million acre-feet: Presumed total annual natural flow of the river upon which the compact was based and which was considered “more than sufficient to water all lands now being irrigated and all lands which can be economically developed for forty years to come.”
• 17.3 million acre-feet: The actual annual flow recorded by the he U.S. Geological Survey during the nine years leading up to the compact’s ratification, with yearly flows ranging from 9.9 million acre-feet to 26.1 million acre-feet. That was during an unusually wet period.
• 14.3 million acre-feet: Median annual natural flows at Lees Ferry from 1907 to 2025.
• 8.5 million acre-feet: Estimated natural flow at Lees Ferry in 2025.
• 2 million to 4 million acre-feet: Estimated amount of consumptive use that must be reduced to bring the Colorado River supply and demand into balance.

Natural Flow at Lees Ferry: This is a calculated estimate of the amount of water that would flow past Lees Ferry if there were no upstream dams, diversions, or human consumptive use. This estimate would guide the supply driven option for dividing up the river. The USBR describes the method for determining it as such:

• Provisional Natural Flow at Lees Ferry = observed annual flow at Lees Ferry + average Upper Basin consumptive use for the last 5 published years +/- net change in mainstream storage +/- net change in off-mainstem storage +/- net change bank storage + mainstem reservoir evaporation.

Winters v. the United States: 1908 Supreme Court ruling establishing that when the federal government “reserved” land for a tribal nation, it also reserved rights to water. And the appropriation date for those water rights would be the date the reservation was established, whether or not the tribe put the water to “beneficial use” at that time. Winters did not quantify the amount of water tribes were entitled to, except that it should be “sufficient … for irrigation purposes.”

• By rights, this would give the 30 tribal nations within the watershed the most senior rights to most if not all of the water in the Colorado River. Five lower Colorado River tribes currently have quantified and settled rights to about 900,000 acre-feet, while Upper Basin tribes have settled and quantified about 1.1 million acre-feet. But other tribes have yet to settle or quantify their rights, so they remain in a sort of limbo.
• In many cases, the tribal nations lack the infrastructure for putting their water rights to use, meaning they end up relying on federal infrastructure — and on the respective appropriation dates for the infrastructure. An example: The Ute Mountain Ute tribe has 1868 water rights on the Dolores River in southwestern Colorado. But they actually receive their water via the Dolores Project, which only has 1968 rights — which are junior to most of the white farmers on the river. That means during very low water years, the tribe can lose most of its water.

Eugene C. LaRue: One of the early 20th century’s foremost authorities on the Colorado River, who warned the Colorado Compact signatories that their negotiations were based on overestimates of the river’s supply. In 1916, he wrote: “Evidently, the flow of the Colorado River and its tributaries is not sufficient to irrigate all the irrigable lands lying within the basin.” LaRue also warned against building Hoover Dam because evaporation would further deplete water supplies and suggested banning trans-basin diversions, or exporting water from the Colorado River watershed to other parts of the seven basin states. The signatories heard LaRue but clearly didn’t heed his warning, even though he repeated it many times prior to the compact’s signing. (He eventually resigned in protest.)

Minimum Power Pool: Surface elevation of Lake Powell or Lake Mead below which hydroelectric production is no longer possible because it is lower than the dam’s penstocks. This is especially critical at Lake Powell because if water can’t be released through the penstocks and turbines, it must go through lower river outlets, which are not equipped for long-term releases and could be damaged by constant use. Also, the electricity from the dam is critical to Southwestern power grids, and sales of it raise revenue for endangered native fish recovery programs.

Deadpool: Surface elevation of Lake Powell or Lake Mead below which no water can be released from the dam. So in Lake Powell, this means the water would drop below the river outlets, which could happen if the reservoir is drawn down to the river outlet level, and then reservoir seepage and evaporation exceeds inflows (which could happen late in a hot, dry summer).

Run of the River: This is the term for when releases from a dam are equal to reservoir inflows minus evaporation and seepage at any given time. In other words, if inflows were 20,000 cfs, releases would be slightly lower, and the dam wouldn’t hold any water back (or release any storage). Glen Canyon dam operators could use this method to keep Lake Powell from dropping below minimum power pool.

Transbasin Diversion: Moving water from one watershed to another, within the same state, e.g. from the Colorado River’s headwaters to the state’s populous Front Range, or from the Navajo River (a tributary of the San Juan, which is a tributary of the Colorado) to the Chama River (a tributary of the Rio Grande).

Central Arizona Project: The 366-mile canal and pumping system that delivers Colorado River water to the Phoenix and Tucson areas. The project’s water rights have a 1968 appropriation date, making them junior to California users such as the Imperial Irrigation District. That has meant that Arizona must reduce consumption prior to California. 

Imperial Irrigation District: A major agricultural area in southern California and the Colorado River’s largest single water user.

Western water: Where values, math, and the “Law of the River” collide, Part I — Jonathan P. Thompson

Western water: Where values, math, and the “Law of the River” collide, Part II — Jonathan P. Thompson

Click the link to read the article on the Summit Daily News website (Ali Longwell). Here’s an excerpt:

January 17, 2026

While the four Upper Basin states in the compact — Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming — rely predominantly on snowpack for water supply, the Lower Basin states — Arizona, California, and Nevada — rely on releases from Lake Powell and Lake Mead..It’s not the compact, but the 2007 operational guidelines for Lake Powell and Lake Mead that are being renegotiated as they are set to expire this year. A decision must be made prior to Oct. 1, 2026, according to the Bureau…The federal government, seven states and 30 tribal nations all agree the best path forward is for a consensus between the upper and lower basins. However, with the looming deadline and unresolved disagreements about the future of the river, the Department of the Interior and its subagency, the Bureau of Reclamation, are forging ahead.  

​​”The Department of the Interior is moving forward with this process to ensure environmental compliance is in place so operations can continue without interruption when the current guidelines expire,” said Andrea Travnicek, the assistant secretary of water and science for the Bureau of Reclamation, in a news release announcing the agency’s latest draft options. “In the face of an ongoing severe drought, inaction is not an option.” 

One of the main disagreements throughout negotiations has been who should be making cuts to water use. The Lower Basin states have advocated for basin-wide water use reductions. The Upper Basin states, however, have pushed back on the idea, claiming they already face natural water shortages driven primarily by the ups and downs of snowpack…The draft Environmental Impact Statement released by the Bureau of Reclamation last week offers five options — including a required “no action” alternative and four others — that represent a broad range of operating strategies. The draft’s publication initiates a 45-day public comment period ending on March 2, 2026.  In a statement, Scott Cameron, acting lead of the Bureau of Reclamation, said that the federal agency has purposefully not identified a preferred alternative, “given the importance of a consensus-based approach to operations for the stability of the system.”  The expectation is that whatever agreement is reached incorporates elements of all five options offered by the Bureau of Reclamation, Cameron added. 

The five options identified are: 

• No Action 
• Basic Coordination
• Enhanced Coordination 
• Maximum Operational Flexibility 
• Supply Driven 

Each option offers differing methods for how the Bureau of Reclamation will operate Lake Powell and Lake Mead, particularly under low reservoir conditions; allocate, reduce or increase annual allocations for consumptive use of water from Lake Mead to the lower basin states; store and deliver water that has been saved through conservation efforts; manage and deliver surplus water; manage activities above Lake Powell; and more. 

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

January 9, 2026

The Bureau of Reclamation today released a draft Environmental Impact Statement evaluating a range of operational alternatives for managing of Colorado River reservoirs after 2026, when the current operating agreements expire. The draft EIS evaluates a broad range of potential operating strategies. It does not designate a preferred alternative, ensuring flexibility for a potential collective agreement. 

 Prolonged drought conditions over the past 25 years, combined with forecasts for continued dry conditions, have made development of future operating guidelines for the Colorado River particularly challenging. 

 “The Department of the Interior is moving forward with this process to ensure environmental compliance is in place so operations can continue without interruption when the current guidelines expire,” Assistant Secretary – Water and Science Andrea Travnicek said.  “The river and the 40 million people who depend on it cannot wait. In the face of an ongoing severe drought, inaction is not an option.” 

 The draft EIS evaluates a broad range of operational alternatives for post-2026 reservoir management informed through input and extensive collaborative engagement with stakeholders, including the seven basin states, tribes, conservation organizations, other federal agencies, other Basin water users, and the public. It includes the following alternatives that capture operational elements and potential environmental impacts:

• No Action 
• Basic Coordination 
• Enhanced Coordination 
• Maximum Operational Flexibility 
• Supply Driven 

The document will be published in the Federal Register on January 16, 2026, initiating a 45-day comment period that will end on March 2, 2026. The draft EIS and additional information on the alternatives are available on Reclamation’s website.  

 “Given the importance of a consensus-based approach to operations for the stability of the system, Reclamation has not yet identified a preferred alternative,” said Acting Commissioner Scott Cameron. “However, Reclamation anticipates that when an agreement is reached, it will incorporate elements or variations of these five alternatives and will be fully analyzed in the Final EIS enabling the sustainable and effective management of the Colorado River.” 

 The Colorado River provides water for more than 40 million people and fuels hydropower resources in seven states. It serves as a vital resource for 30 Tribal Nations and two Mexican states, sustaining 5.5 million acres of farmland and agricultural communities throughout the West, while also supporting critical ecosystems and protecting endangered species.  

 The Draft EIS addresses only domestic river operations. A separate binational process addressing water deliveries to Mexico is underway and the Department is committed to continued collaboration with the Republic of Mexico. The Department will conduct all necessary and appropriate discussions regarding post-2026 operations and implementation of the 1944 Water Treaty with Mexico through the International Boundary and Water Commission in consultation with the Department of State. 

 To provide certainty for communities, tribes, and water users, a decision regarding operations after 2026 will be made prior to October 1, 2026 – the start of the 2027 water year. 

Click the link to read the article on the InkStain.net website (Michael Cohen — Pacific Institute):

December 15, 2025

Key Takeaways

• The consensus-based effort to develop new rules to manage the Colorado River system hasn’t worked – it’s time for a new approach
• Federal leadership and the credible threat of managing reservoirs to protect the system is that new approach

Missing Deadlines

Way back at the end of the last century, at the annual Colorado River conference in Vegas, Marc Reisner repeated the Margaret Thatcher quote that consensus is the absence of leadership. On Veterans Day, the seven Colorado River basin states missed yet another deadline to reach consensus on a conceptual plan for managing the shrinking Colorado River after the current rules expire in 2026. Valentine’s Day marks the next holiday deadline, this time for a detailed plan, but multiple missed deadlines give no indication that the states will reach consensus then, either.

The basin states can’t agree on the substance of a new agreement. They also disagree on the process to get there. While Arizona has called for the federal government to break the negotiation logjam, Colorado opposes federal intervention and continues to call for consensus. Each basin-state negotiator acts to protect their state’s interests, often at the expense of the short and long-term resilience of the Colorado River system as a whole and the 35 million people who rely on it. The continued failure to negotiate a plan challenges the efforts of irrigators, cities, businesses, and river runners throughout the basin to plan for 2027 and beyond.

Meanwhile, river runoff and reservoir storage get lower and lower and snowpack lags well below average. This is not a zero-sum game, with winners and losers. The more appropriate metaphor here is a shrinking pie, with smaller and smaller pieces.

Leadership

The basin state negotiators have met for years behind closed doors, without success. It’s time for a new approach. Aggressive federal intervention and the credible threat of a federally-imposed Colorado River management plan would offer political cover – or a political imperative – for the negotiators. The credible threat of a federal plan would give the negotiators the space to compromise without having to do so unilaterally and then being accused of not protecting their state’s interests.

But federal leadership alone is not enough – it must be coupled with a plausible federal plan that compels the states to act and can meet the magnitude of the ongoing crisis. As the Department of the Interior announced in its 6/15/2023 press release, the purpose of and need for the post-2026 guidelines is “to develop future operating guidelines and strategies to protect the stability and sustainability of the Colorado River.” To date, the development of the post-2026 guidelines has prioritized routine operations of Glen Canyon and Hoover dams over the system as a whole, a focus inconsistent with the magnitude and urgency of the problem. Prioritizing routine dam operations and hydropower generation over water delivery and environmental protection elevates the tool over the task. Seeking to preserve routine operations of the dams while imposing draconian cuts on water users is not a path to resilience and precludes alternatives that would help stabilize the system.

The Plan

Instead, by early next year, the Secretary should announce that Interior will implement a federal plan incorporating the following elements:

1. Grant Tribal Nations the legal certainty and the ability to access, develop, or lease their water.
2. Make accessible (“recover”) the roughly 5.6 million acre-feet (MAF) of water stored in Lake Powell below the minimum power pool elevation and avoid the additional ~0.25 MAF of annual evaporative losses from Powell by storing such water in Lake Mead and using Powell as auxiliary storage.
3. As a condition precedent, the Lower Basin states agree not to place a “compact call” for the duration of the agreement.
4. Implement annual Lower Basin water use reductions for the following calendar year based on total system contents on August 1:
   • 75% – 60%: cuts to Lower Basin water uses increasing from 0 to 1.5 MAF<60% – 38%: static cut to Lower Basin water uses of 1.5 MAF<38% – 23%: increasing cuts to Lower Basin water uses of up to 3.0 MAF total
   • below 23% of total system contents – cut Lower Basin water uses to the minimum required to protect human health and safety and satisfy present perfected rights
5. If the Lower Basin states do not satisfy the condition precedent in #3 above, Reclamation limits Lower Basin deliveries to the minimum required to satisfy present perfected rights when total system contents are <75%.
6. Recover water stored in federal Upper Basin reservoirs unless the Upper Basin states reduce annual water use based on total system contents:
   • <34% – 23%: Assuming the first 0.25 MAF “reduction” would be contributed by the elimination of Powell’s evaporative losses and gains from Glen Canyon bank storage, reduce Upper Basin water uses up to 0.65 MAF
   • below 23% of total system contents – limit total Upper Basin water uses to 3.56 MAF (the minimum volume reported this century)
7. Expand the pool of parties eligible to create Intentionally Created Surplus (ICS) beyond existing Colorado River contractors, to include water agencies and other entities with agreements to use Colorado River water.
8. Eliminate the existing limits on the total quantity of Extraordinary Conservation ICS and DCP ICS that may be accumulated in ICS and DCP ICS accounts, while maintaining existing limits on delivery of such water.
9. Fully mitigate the on-stream and off-stream community and environmental impacts of the water use reductions identified above.
10. After a three-year phase-in period, condition Colorado River diversions on a clear “reasonable and beneficial use” standard predicated on existing best practices for water efficiency, including but not limited to the examples listed below (state(s) that already have such standards):

• Require removal of non-functional turf grass (California, Nevada)
• Incentivize landscape conversion and turf removal statewide (California, Colorado, Utah)
• Adopt stronger efficiency standards for plumbing and equipment (Colorado, California, and Nevada)
• Require urban utilities to report distribution system leakage, and to meet standards for reducing water losses (California)
• Require all new urban landscapes to be water-efficient (California)
• Require metering of landscape irrigation turnouts (Utah)
• Ensure that existing buildings are water-efficient when they are sold or leased (Los Angeles, San Diego)
• Require agricultural water deliveries to be metered and priced at least in part by volume (California)

Many of the elements listed above raise important questions about federal authorities, accounting and data challenges, the roles and obligations of state water officials to implement coordinated actions in-state, water access for disadvantaged communities, environmental compliance, and potential economic and social costs, among others. For each item listed, many details will need to be refined. Similarly, the plan’s duration will need to be determined. But as temperatures again climb into the high 40s in the Rockies near the Colorado River’s headwaters (in mid-December!), drying soils and reducing next year’s runoff, and the National Weather Service issues red flag fire warnings for Colorado’s Front Range, the need for bold action is clear.

The Dominy Bypass

Recovering water stored in Lake Powell will require the construction of new bypass tunnels around Glen Canyon Dam. Former Reclamation Commissioner Floyd Dominy sketched the design of such tunnels almost thirty years ago (see image). Such tunnels would enable the recovery of about 5.6 MAF of water stored below the minimum power pool elevation – more water than the Upper Basin states consume each year. Current operating rules and the scope of the current planning process effectively treat this massive volume of water as “dead storage” – a luxury the system can no longer afford. After Reclamation constructs the bypass tunnels, water recovery should be timed to maximize environmental and recreational benefits in the Grand Canyon.

Avoiding a Worse Outcome

Last year’s Colorado River conference featured a panel on the risks of litigation. Unfortunately, the continued failure to reach a deal, growing litigation funds, and the preference for repeating the same action that’s led to the continuing impasse suggest that some believe litigation could generate a better outcome (for them). Both sides have attorneys who assure their clients of victory. Yet, as Arizona learned in 1968, winning in the Supreme Court doesn’t ensure a better outcome and certainly won’t increase Colorado River flows. Placing faith in Congress could entangle this basin with challenges in other basins and other political considerations.

Running the River

Almost 160 years ago, John Wesley Powell – the reservoir’s namesake – demonstrated bold leadership, going where no (white) man had gone before. With leadership and a clear goal, he charted a route through the Colorado River’s iconic canyons. Now is the time for more bold leadership, a clear goal, and a plan to get there.

About the author

Since 1998, Michael Cohen’s work with the Pacific Institute has focused on water use in the Colorado River basin and delta region and the management and revitalization of the Salton Sea ecosystem. Michael received a B.A. in Government from Cornell University and has a Master’s degree in Geography, with a concentration in Resources and Environmental Quality, from San Diego State University.