BOULDER, Colo.—The federal government will impose a 10-year operating framework for managing water use in the Colorado River Basin by the end of this summer if the seven states that rely on the river cannot come to an agreement before then, said Scott Cameron, acting commissioner for the Bureau of Reclamation, at a water conference Thursday.
The announcement comes in the midst of the worst water year ever recorded on the Colorado River and after years of tense and largely fruitless negotiation s between water managers in the states that rely on the declining waterway. The states have missed November and February deadlines to reach an agreement, and the current guidelines outlining drought mitigation efforts for the Colorado River Basin expire at the end of September, so new guidelines must be in place by Oct. 1.
State and tribal leaders, however, said the federal government’s proposal, which would be reevaluated every two years, will only lead to more uncertainty as it will require constant negotiations between the states over how to share the river, and could go against what some see as the guiding laws regulating the river.
In mid-summer, Cameron said, the Bureau of Reclamation will release the final Environmental Impact Statement, which will detail the federal government’s preferred plan for managing the river after 2026. The bureau will issue a final decision on the framework a short time later.
“The preferred alternative provides a 10-year framework,” he said. That option first surfaced publicly during a Colorado River meeting in Arizona last month. “We would love to have a 20-year deal or a 30-year deal, but frankly, we haven’t even been able to get seven states to agree on what a two-year deal would look like, so we’re using a 10-year framework that the department would use to issue operational guidelines at two-year intervals, given the highly unusual hydrological situation in the basin.”
Negotiations are deadlocked between the states in the two halves of the Colorado River Basin—the upper basin consisting of Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico, and the lower basin of Arizona, California and Nevada. Consultation with the 30 tribes in the basin, and with Mexico, where the river ends, are also ongoing. Meanwhile, flows on the Colorado River, which supplies water to 40 million people across the states and Mexico, and irrigation for over 5 million acres of cropland, have declined by about a third over the past century, with demand outpacing supply, leading the region’s reservoirs to drop to historic lows.
Recent studies have found another dry winter could leave lakes Mead and Powell, the two largest reservoirs on the river and in the nation, nearly dry. This fall, for example, water levels could fall so low at Lake Powell that Glen Canyon Dam can no longer generate hydropower.
At those levels, water can only bypass the dam via four lower outlets. But studies from the Bureau of Reclamation have shown that sustained use of those pipes can damage the dam. And if water levels drop much lower than those four final outlets, the lake could reach “dead pool,” with the dam unable to release water downstream.
The federal government’s framework will be reevaluated every two years, Cameron said, to ensure the region can respond to the hydrology.
“Oh, by the way, if peace breaks out and we have a seven-state agreement on something a year and a half from now, or four and a half years from now, we’re happy to take that agreement and have it supplant this 10-year framework,” he said.
After record-low snowpack across the Colorado River Basin, water levels remain low at Lake Powell on April 30, near Page, Ariz. Credit: RJ Sangosti/MediaNews Group/The Denver Post via Getty Images
Becky Mitchell, Colorado’s negotiator, said negotiating every two years under the federal government’s framework will be incredibly challenging.
All she could think about when hearing the plan, Michell said, is how communities will be able to fund and plan projects if there is constant negotiation and no certainty on the river’s future. She worries, too, that with every year negotiations continue, the upper and lower basins will become more entrenched in their competing legal theories, which will likely lead to lengthy litigation between the states, federal government and water users. Litigation, she said, does not provide water or certainty.
“The lawyers will get rich,” Mitchell said, but “we still have to figure out how to work with a river that is producing less than we planned.”
John Entsminger, Southern Nevada Water Authority’s general manager and that state’s lead negotiator, said he agreed with Mitchell: a new plan every two years “is not a good plan.”
With negotiations deadlocked, he was less opposed to litigation, but recognized the lawsuits would be lengthy and, if they happen, the river will need management guidelines while they are ongoing.
The basin is managed by “the Law of the River,” consisting of a century of…
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