PHOENIX — Sitting in the city offices overlooking sunbaked, downtown Phoenix, water manager Max Wilson listed off the city’s preparations for a future with less Colorado River water.
“We are currently bringing on an incredible amount of additional water resources,” Wilson said.
The sprawling, fast-growing Phoenix metro area is on the front lines of potential water cuts brought on by a stubborn drought gripping the West. By January 2027, painful cuts could hit the 50-year-old Central Arizona Project, which transports about 60% of Arizona’s Colorado River supply across the desert through a 336-miles open canal system.
This year, water officials like Wilson are stuck planning for potential water cuts — without knowing what the cuts might be — as they wait for state and federal officials to decide how to manage the basin’s key reservoirs starting in 2026. Those officials blew past a Nov. 11 deadline to share the gist of a joint agreement, leaving basin communities mired in uncertainty.
“We’re doing quite a bit of scenario planning right now, trying just to game out what the range of possibilities could be,” Wilson, water resources management advisor for the city of Phoenix, said. “Because we don’t know what the outcomes are, we’re developing many plans, but not perfecting any one of them.”
Phoenix isn’t the only Western city in need of new water supplies. Denver is removing thirsty grass and building reservoirs to prepare for a drier future in the Colorado River Basin.
The two cities are divided by geography and water politics. Basin states have snarked, jabbed and pushed for competing visions during tense negotiations over how to manage the basin’s key reservoirs starting in 2026. The states have been divided along basin lines: the Upper Colorado River Basin — Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming — and the Lower Basin, including Arizona, California and Nevada.
The sun sets over the Phoenix Metro Area April 22, 2025. (Shannon Mullane, The Colorado Sun)Phoenix and Denver are located far from the main stem of the Colorado River. Both rely on hundreds of miles of canals and pipelines to carry Colorado River water to millions of people living in large metro areas.
Water officials in both cities also said they know water shortages are a real, looming problem, although it will affect them in different ways.
“Shortages on the Colorado River could affect every water user and everyone’s water rights,” Denver Water said in a written statement. “That’s why we need storage to take advantage of wet years and be better prepared for drier ones.”
City water managers need to know how to plan, officials said. They want to know more about how the water supply for 40 million people, a multibillion-dollar agriculture industry, ecosystems and more will be managed after 2026.
City water managers, along with hundreds of basin water watchers, could get some answers to their questions about the post-2026 negotiations this week when federal, tribal and state officials speak at the largest Colorado River conference of the year, the Colorado River Water Users Association conference in Las Vegas.
Two cities with uncertain water futures
Denver and Phoenix are vulnerable to the shrinking flows in the Colorado River, but Phoenix is on the front lines of potential cuts.
The city of Phoenix, just one part of the sprawling Phoenix metro area, gets 40% of its supply from the Colorado River through the Central Arizona Project, which was authorized in 1968 and made its first water delivery in 1993.
The project has junior, or more recent, water rights in a basin where older rights get to use the water first when the water runs low. And under some proposals for post-2026 reservoir operations, Arizona could face up to 760,000 acre-feet of water cuts, or more, in the basin’s driest years.
The Central Arizona Project canal runs through the Phoenix Metro Area, north of downtown Phoenix April 22, 2025. The water project uses 336 miles of canals to carry Colorado River water to the metro area. (Shannon Mullane, The Colorado Sun)One acre-foot roughly equals the annual water use of two to four households.
“What it means at a core level, for many Valley cities and for Phoenix, is that we will need to rely on backup supplies to a much larger extent than we currently do today,” Wilson said.
By and large, Denver’s water portfolio is less vulnerable than the Central Arizona Project.
Denver Water is Colorado’s largest and oldest water provider and serves 1.5 million Front Range residents. It uses mountain reservoirs, tunnels, ditches and canals to draw from tributaries of the Colorado River on the Western Slope. This Colorado River Basin water makes up about half of its water supply.
Denver and other Colorado cities are also dealing with the prospect of shortages. Statewide, cities, towns and industries could face a supply gap of up to 740,000 acre-feet in the driest years statewide, according to the 2023 Colorado Water Plan.
Water managers in both cities say they have built diverse water portfolios to ensure they can deliver water. Denver draws part of its supply from the South Platte River Basin, a separate basin on the east side of the Continental Divide.
Phoenix also draws water from the Salt and Verde rivers and groundwater sources. Every 10 years certain Arizona communities called active management areas, including Phoenix and Tucson, have to prove they have enough water for the next 100 years.
“We hear all the time that Phoenix shouldn’t exist,” Wilson said. “It’s not a question of whether cities like Phoenix can or should exist. It’s a question of, are we going to make the choices we need to make to help the community be what it wants to be?”
But even with all that planning, if the state and federal officials agree to water cuts in the post-2026 negotiations, Phoenix and other Central Arizona Project customers could have to start cutting back as soon as January 2027, Wilson said.
For Phoenix, the city staff will need to know about any water cuts before October, when they typically begin submitting water orders to the Central Arizona Project saying how much water the city needs and where.
“We just really urge everybody to do what it takes, to have the humility to come and make the type of deal, that would be necessary to bring that 2 million to 4 million acre-feet demand reduction needed to stabilize the basin,” Wilson said, referring to a federal call in 2022 for all seven basin states to cut back.
ISO: innovative water supply ideas
In both cities, water managers are certain they can continue providing reliable, clean water even as growth continues and the climate changes. It’s just likely to be more expensive, officials said.
City utilities are building reservoirs, like Gross Reservoir in Colorado and potentially a new dam on the Verde River in Arizona. They’re pushing conservation programs and efficient household water fixtures. In Denver, per capita use is down 36% since 2000, Denver Water said.
Colorado lawmakers and utilities are working to swap thirsty grass with more water-efficient turf in places where the grass is rarely used, like road medians. In Phoenix, visitors can see a shift in development over time as they travel from the grassy areas of downtown Phoenix — representative of the 1970s — north to newer suburbs from the 1990s and 2000s where properties feature desert landscaping.
“I really think there’s a misconception here that some caricature Phoenician is just like out on their lawn, spraying water into the ether, right?” Wilson said. “And it’s just not the case.”
Front Range cities that have tapped into groundwater — water stored between rocks and sediment below ground — are starting to store water underground to replenish depleted aquifers.
Phoenix and other Arizona communities have stored Colorado River water for decades, particularly after the state shifted away from nonrenewable groundwater to renewable surface water in 1980.
FROM LEFT: Water flows through pipes and pumps during treatment April 25, 2025, at the Scottsdale Water Campus, which houses an advanced water treatment facility. During advanced water treatment, wastewater goes through several rounds of intensive filtration before reaching drinking water standards. (Shannon Mullane, The Colorado Sun)
FROM TOP: Water flows through pipes and pumps during treatment April 25, 2025, at the Scottsdale Water Campus, which houses an advanced water treatment facility. During advanced water treatment, wastewater goes through several rounds of intensive filtration before reaching drinking water standards. (Shannon Mullane, The Colorado Sun)
One key strategy for Arizona is an intensive treatment process that turns wastewater into clean, drinking water, called advanced water treatment or direct potable reuse. Colorado adopted regulations to allow this type of water reuse in 2023.
Scottsdale, part of the Phoenix metro area, operates Arizona’s first permanent advanced water treatment facility. Phoenix plans to bring one advanced water treatment plant online for demonstrations in 2027 and for water deliveries by 2028. It has two other facilities in the works, and together, the three plants could deliver up to 77 million gallons of purified water per day, or about 30% of Phoenix’s total water needs.
“We’re really confident here in Phoenix that we can be not just a sustainable desert city, but a sustainable city,” Wilson said. “One of the most sustainable cities in the world.”
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