After months of stalemate, glimmers of hope have emerged for consensus on a new plan to manage the shrinking Colorado River.
Negotiators from the seven river basin states said in a series of meetings in recent weeks that they were discussing a plan rooted in a concept that breaks from decades of management practice. Rather than basing water releases on reservoir levels, it would base the amount released from the system’s two major reservoirs on the amount of water flowing in the river. The new concept would be more responsive as river flows become more variable.
The comments signal a break in months of stalemate between the Upper Basin states — Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Wyoming — and the three Lower Basin states: California, Nevada and Arizona. The states’ representatives are wrestling with a seemingly simple question: How should the river’s water be allocated as long-term drought and higher temperatures fueled by climate change decimate the amount of water available?
The Upper Basin states have argued that they have already borne the brunt of lower river flows. That’s because they rely on snowmelt and precipitation, since they are upstream of the system’s two major reservoirs, Lakes Powell and Mead.
The Lower Basin states — which sit below the reservoirs and rely on releases from them for their water supplies — have said they have already made major reductions in water use and that the Upper Basin states must also agree to cuts.
The new concept for managing the river reflects an attempt to account for the reality of the shrinking river and will, if adopted, adjust releases from the reservoirs based on the amount of water in the river.
“This is a very new thing,” Arizona’s negotiator, Tom Buschatzke, said of the idea at a June 17 meeting of the Arizona Reconsultation Committee. “It is focused on what the river provides and looking at ways to share that volume.”
The Colorado River system — relied upon by 40 million people — stands on the brink of system failure, Colorado’s negotiator, Becky Mitchell, said at a June 26 meeting of the Upper Colorado River Commission.
“We also stand on the precipice of a major decision point — an opportunity point,” she said. “We have the responsibility and opportunity to do better if we collectively choose to do so.”
After years of talks, the states face a federal deadline to submit a plan early next year, with other decisions due sooner. Current rules dictating how the river is managed expire at the end of 2026.
What does the new concept look like?
The conceptual framework dictates that releases from Lakes Powell and Mead would be a percentage of a rolling three-year average of the river’s natural flow.
That’s a huge shift from previous management plans that called for releasing set quantities of water based on reservoir levels.
Using a percentage instead of a fixed volume would acknowledge that the amount of water in the river has shrunk significantly since 1922, when the states struck the original agreement over how to share the flows.
“The quantification of hydrologic shortage is incredibly important,” Mitchell said. “No amount of lawyering is going to fix the math problem … we must live with the river we have, not the river we want.”
What do people think of it?
“I think it has a lot of promise,” Anne Castle, a former assistant secretary for water and science at the U.S. Interior Department and a former chair of the Upper Colorado River Commission, said of the emerging concept.
“I think it responds directly to the hydrological situation that we’re in, where supply is shrinking and it’s also very volatile,” she said in an interview. “If you base allocations on a percentage of recent hydrology, I think that gets you closer to actually solving the problem of having a big gap in supply and demand in the Colorado River system.”
But the devil’s in the details, she warned.
The states, if they adopt the plan, will have to decide how to calculate the river’s natural flow — which is the amount of water that would be in the river without any human intervention. That number will serve as the base from which the percentage is derived.
Then they’ll have to decide exactly what that percentage should be.
Negotiators will also have to determine how to enforce the agreement if the Upper Basin is obligated to ensure a percentage of the river reaches the reservoirs but fails to do so, Castle said.
Jared Patterson, with Trek Las Vegas, guides a kayak tour group along the waters of the Colorado River near Willow Beach, Arizona, on June 28, 2024. (Photo by RJ Sangosti/The Denver Post)How long do states have to hammer out details?
Federal officials, for the first time last week, publicly announced a hard deadline for the negotiations.
The states need to tell the federal government by Nov. 11 if there will be a deal, said Scott Cameron, the acting assistant secretary for water and science at the Department of the Interior. Then the states would have until Feb. 14 to submit a detailed plan.
In the meantime, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation will continue the monthslong process of analyzing other potential management plans, as required by the National Environmental Policy Act. Federal officials plan to analyze such a wide range of options that any plan submitted by the states would fit in that range, Cameron said last month at a conference in Boulder.
The bureau is on track to release a draft of that analysis by the end of the year — and a final plan by summer 2026, he said.
Even as negotiations have faltered at times, and tensions between the states have flared into the public eye, negotiators from the states have repeatedly pledged their commitment to finding a deal.
“We are dedicated to a consensus agreement,” Commissioner Estevan Lopez of New Mexico said. “Anything else is likely to lead to litigation … and that leads to years and years of uncertainty, and none of us will win in that context.”
How’s the river looking this year, anyway?
Not good.
The amount of water expected to flow into Lake Powell this year is 54% of the average from 1991 to 2020, according to the National Weather Service’s Colorado Basin River Forecast Center.
“This is one of the five driest years over the past 50 or 60 years,” Daniel Bunk, the office chief for the Bureau of Reclamation’s Boulder Canyon Operations Office, said at last month’s Arizona Reconsultation Committee meeting.
The most recent modeling by the Bureau of Reclamation shows that, in the worst-case scenario, Lake Powell’s water level could drop below the minimum power pool level by December 2026. If that were to happen, water would no longer be able to flow through Glen Canyon Dam’s hydroelectric infrastructure, which delivers power to seven states — including Colorado.
The most likely scenario isn’t good, either. If conditions continue as expected, the reservoir will not add any water to its supplies in the next year, and water levels are expected to decline over the next two years.
That’s especially troubling, since both Lake Mead and Lake Powell are only a third full now.
“Overall, we know we have a very significant gap between supply and demand, and we’ve been getting away with using more than nature’s supplies,” Castle said. “But the reservoirs are going down very quickly — especially this year. You can’t overspend your income on a permanent basis.”
Get more Colorado news by signing up for our Mile High Roundup email newsletter.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( A conceptual breakthrough has emerged for the Colorado River’s future. Here’s what it looks like. )
Also on site :