Cynthia Campbell can walk four blocks north and be in the middle of a long water canal that carries Colorado River water to Phoenix. When she turns on her faucet, the water that comes out is almost exclusively from the river.
And as a long-time water expert, she can’t stop thinking about the possibility outlined in a new federal report that, someday, that water might not come.
“It’s a very real thing from my perspective,” said Campbell, director of policy innovation for the Arizona Water Innovation Institute at Arizona State University.
As Colorado River rules near expiration, the federal government published Jan. 9 a long-anticipated menu of options for how to replace them and manage the overstressed river basin going forward. The draft report takes five management plans and plugs in different climate forecasts — from optimistically wet to grimly, extraordinarily dry — to try to stabilize the water supply for 40 million people, including much of Colorado.
But only one of the possible management plans shows what the Bureau of Reclamation currently has the legal authority to do without approval from the seven basin states, according to the report. And the state negotiators have been at an impasse for nearly two years.
That option, called the basic coordination alternative, calls for moderate water cuts in the driest years and would only work for the short term, according to the 1,600-page draft report, called an environmental impact statement, or EIS.
“I think they recognize that if they run the basic coordination alternative, and we have bad hydrology — which we’re expecting to have right in the current winter, much less going forward — the system will crash,” Campbell said. “I don’t think they think they could pull it off for very long without that happening.”
The current operating rules for the Colorado River Basin’s key reservoirs, lakes Mead and Powell, expire this year. By August, water managers will start assessing reservoir storage levels and river forecasts to figure out how to plan for next winter and summer.
The top negotiators for each state, including Colorado, were “sequestered” in Salt Lake City this week to hash out their differences, experts said. The states’ next deadline to submit a joint proposal — after missing several — is Feb. 14. (The state declined to comment on the federal report.)
The goal is to protect the basin’s system of reservoirs, canals, irrigation systems and more, which are the foundation of the drinking water supplies, local economies, critical environments and industries, like the basin’s multibillion-dollar agricultural industry, experts said.
A “crash” would mean huge dams at lakes Mead and Powell would no longer generate hydropower or release any water at all. It could spell chaos for economies across the West, Campbell said.
That outcome was not out of the realm of possibilities explored in Reclamation’s report, she said.
“The EIS report was very clear that there are hydrologies — which are not fantasy-based hydrologies — there are critically dry hydrologies where no alternative saves the system 100% of the time,” Campbell said.
What does “basic coordination” do in Colorado?
The basic coordination alternative, one of the five federal management options, represents what Reclamation has the authority to put into action Oct. 1 without a joint state proposal.
It’s almost a hypothetical, paper exercise, said Bill Hasencamp, manager of Colorado River resources for the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California.
When asked if it was a sustainable option for the immense reservoirs, he simply said:
“No, of course not.”
In Phoenix, Campbell said, “definitely not that one.”
The alternative mainly outlines how water would be managed at two reservoirs: Lake Powell and Lake Mead.
Current water levels
Powell, on the Utah-Arizona border, catches water flowing in from the Upper Basin states — Colorado, New Mexico, Wyoming and Utah. At Powell, Glen Canyon Dam releases water downstream to Lake Mead on the Arizona-Nevada border, where Hoover Dam releases water for the large populations and industries in the Lower Basin states — Arizona, Nevada and California.
How much water does Colorado get from the Colorado River?
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Under the basic coordination alternative, the amount of water released through Powell would range from 7 million to 9.5 million acre-feet. That’s similar to operations over the past two decades — during which water levels in the reservoir drained to historic lows and sparked a crisis in the basin.
One acre-foot roughly equals the annual water use of two to four households. Colorado used almost 2 million acre-feet of Colorado River water each year, on average, from 2021 to 2025.
The alternative “will certainly give the Upper Basin states heartburn when you consider it through the lens of Lake Powell,” said Kyle Roerink, executive director of Great Basin Water Network. The group works on Colorado River issues with both Upper and Lower Basin states.
Under this plan, Lake Powell falls below 3,500 feet, a key elevation necessary to generate hydropower, in 75% of the roughly 1,200 projections analyzed by the feds.
Reclamation says it could call upon upstream reservoirs like Blue Mesa, Colorado’s largest reservoir, to release water to avoid extremely low water levels in Powell — but most of the action would take place in the Lower Basin.
It does not include any mandatory conservation in Colorado or other Upper Basin states, but more on that later.
Cuts in the Lower Basin
If Lake Mead drained too low, the Lower Basin would have to cut back on its water use. Cuts would start when the lake’s elevation fell below 1,160 feet above sea level. Below 1,110 feet, the cuts would total 1.48 million acre-feet.
Mead’s water elevation as of December 1,062 feet, and federal forecasts showed it could fall lower before October.
That amount is less than what the three impacted states suggested in their own proposal in March 2024, and less than cuts of up to 4 million acre-feet in three other federal alternatives.
Under the basic coordination alternative, Nevada and Mexico would reduce their use by nearly 6% and nearly 17%, respectively, of the 1.48 million.
California would not take any cuts — unless Mother Nature shrank the river’s flow to dire levels, Hasencamp said. The Metropolitan Water District, which helps supply water to 19 million people, would get hit first in California by water supply cuts.
Arizona would take on 77% of that shortage, and the Central Arizona Project — the long canal down the street from Campbell’s house — would be hit first. Its water use would likely have to drop from 1.5 million acre-feet to about 400,000, Campbell said.
“It’s a very extreme level of shortage,” she said.
And it’s still insufficient to solve the Colorado River Basin’s long-term water supply problem, experts said.
“My initial analysis … is it doesn’t really keep the system out of the really scary situations,” said John Berggren, regional policy manager with the environmental advocacy group, Western Resource Advocates. “I’m just concerned it doesn’t do enough.”
There are four intake towers on the lake side of the dam that let water into the penstocks. Penstocks are giant pipes that the water flows through — the ones at Hoover Dam are 30 feet wide and can carry enough water to fill 900 bathtubs in only one second. (David Krause, The Colorado Sun)The risk of lawsuits
Reclamation’s plans in the draft environmental impact statement must either stay within its existing authority under water law or get approval from states or Congress to take new actions. Seeking state-level consensus has been the norm in the basin for decades.
Without that agreement, the Colorado River Basin faces the prospect of drawn-out lawsuits, which would create uncertainty for decades, cost millions of dollars, and take control over the basin’s future out of local hands.
But without state consensus, the federal government does not have the authority to do more to protect the Colorado River.
Reclamation would not be able to impose greater shortages during the basin’s driest years.
Under the basic coordination alternative, it wouldn’t be able to launch new conservation measures — like requirements for Upper Basin states, including Colorado, to conserve water in dry years, the report said.
It would also not be able to pursue some of the more innovative ideas in its other management options, like creating a “conservation pool” of water, flexible water leases between the subbasins, or more proportional water cuts.
“Even if there isn’t a seven-state agreement, I think it’s incumbent upon everybody in the Upper Basin to be thinking about conservation,” said Steve Wolff, general manager of the Southwestern Water Conservation District based in Durango. “How do we conserve water for the betterment of everything and everybody? That’s important.”
For now, none of the federal alternatives seem popular in any state, and the possibility of litigation is high, Wolff and other experts said.
“I am still very hopeful that there’s going to be a seven-state agreement that will move forward,” Wolff said.
If Powell’s releases are low, say 7 million acre-feet, and shortages are mostly aimed at the Central Arizona Project, then the risk of litigation is very real, Campbell said.
“I don’t want to unleash the dogs of war. That’s not my intention — I’m not the person who makes threats about litigation,” she said. “I’m just saying, from an objective standpoint, I think the risk of litigation if that happens is not small.”
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