Who must give up Colorado River water? As conservation talks start, tensions rise

LAS VEGAS — The seven states that share the Colorado River’s water celebrated some conservation wins at their annual meeting here this week but quickly began sparring over who will bear the brunt of future pain that they agree a drying climate will dole out.

Talk of cutbacks has long focused on the three states collectively known as the Lower Basin — Arizona, California and Nevada — and on Wednesday, representatives of California water districts and tribes signed federally funded deals to leave more water in the river’s largest reservoir over the next two years.

On Thursday, interstate rivalries re-emerged as officials from the Upper Basin made clear they expect the Lower Basin to cut back much further before coming after their water. Farmers and other users in the headwaters states of Wyoming, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico already go without in dry years because they don’t have a giant storage pool like the Southwest’s Lake Mead to augment nature.

The region needs a plan to keep Lake Powell and Lake Mead from collapsing to the point where they can’t produce power or, in the worst case, even pass water downstream. The dams were not constructed with bypass tunnels at their bases, but have mid-dam turbine intakes and bypasses.

The states dodged disaster this year after a wet winter, unlike most in this century, raised water levels at Lake Mead and Lake Powell, leaving each about one-third full. Arizona, California and Nevada still need a consensus plan that will pay users to forego some of their water, but they will likely have to give more when new shortage-sharing rules are negotiated to govern the river beginning in 2026.

Upper Basin 'can't accept' a plan that puts people at risk

The upper and lower basins split just downstream of Lake Powell's Glen Canyon Dam, at Lees Ferry in Arizona, though Lake Powell's storage is primarily used to ensure the Upper Basin has enough water to fulfill its yearly obligations to the Lower Basin.

The Upper Basin states use roughly half as much, and less in years when mountain streams dry up, and concerns over that disparity surfaced Thursday.

“We can’t accept something that continues to drain the system, that puts 40 million people at risk," Colorado’s river commissioner, Becky Mitchell, told her interstate colleagues at the annual Colorado River Water Users Association conference.

During a discussion of the upcoming negotiations, Mitchell agreed that Colorado and its Upper Basin neighbors will work to solve the growing crisis, but said the downstream states have the biggest obligation to live within their means and protect reservoir storage.

Colorado farmers already suffer water cutoffs, even if they have water rights that predate the compact, because “Mother Nature” gives them no choice, she said.

Those farmers aren’t getting paid in federal dollars to leave water in the system, as some California and Arizona agencies are. The upcoming negotiations must recognize and account for the hardship they already face, Mitchell said.

“The one person that you cannot negotiate with is Mother Nature. She will win every time. She’s been telling us what to do,” Mitchell said. “I want an agreement that lessens the pain for all of us, not just some of us.”

A new century of water: As the Colorado River is stretched thin by drought, can the 100-year-old rules that divide it still work?

A basin-wide problem that requires basin-wide solutions

Lower Basin officials, including Arizona Water Resources Director Tom Buschatzke, said their states will “own” what they call the river’s and Lake Mead’s structural deficit, meaning they will accept deepening cuts as they become necessary to keep water flowing past Hoover Dam.

But they can’t afford to cut enough to save the shrinking river without help from every corner of the watershed, he said.

“This is a basin-wide problem that’s going to require basin-wide solutions,” said J.B. Hamby, who chairs the Colorado River Board of California.

He meant the entire river basin, not just the three down-river states. The century-old Colorado River Compact designated those three as the Lower Basin and awarded what was then thought to be about half of the river’s flow.

As it turns out, the 7.5 million acre-feet of water that the Lower Basin uses, not counting evaporation, is now considerably more than half of what the river naturally delivers. The Upper Basin has only developed enough uses to take about 4.5 million acre-feet. Each acre-foot is about 326,000 gallons, or enough to support a few households for a year, though most of the water goes to farms.

Other Upper Basin water officials said their constituents already face cutoffs in many years, and that the need to send enough water downstream to cover Lower Basin demand leaves their states unable to fully develop.

Utah farmers faced shortages this year, after the big snows of last winter, Utah’s Colorado River commissioner, Gene Shawcroft, said.

“Even though we have an incredible (2022-2023 winter) snowpack, we’re still way behind where we need to be, and this year doesn’t look much better,” Shawcroft said.

New Mexico’s river commissioner, Estevan López, said the Lower Basin’s willingness to tame its water deficit is welcome, and he acknowledged that all states must help in some way.

“It’s going to be a shared responsibility,” he said. “Nobody’s going to be left out.”

Water for the river: To keep the Colorado River's heart beating, people step in to do what nature once did

The 'new Mother Nature' won't take it easy on the river

The dispute over how much the mountain states must give could complicate attempts to reach consensus on a new management regime in the next two years. The old shortage-sharing deal the states negotiated and the U.S. Interior Department approved in 2007 expires in 2026, and everyone agrees its existing terms are not adequate to keep the river from drying, possibly to the point where it can’t flow to users downstream of Lake Mead. That would include nearly everyone who uses river water in Arizona, including metro Phoenix.

Arizona has so far borne the brunt of the 2007 rules, a point Buschatzke emphasized by noting that those rules led to his state giving up 592,000 acre-feet of its 2.8 million acre-foot share this year.

Arizona took those cuts before California faced any mandatory cuts, because the state previously had to accept a lower priority to secure congressional approval for the Central Arizona Project Canal that delivers river water to Phoenix and Tucson.

River water still flows to those cities and their suburbs, but the cuts eliminated a share for use by farmers in Pinal County, causing them to plant some 40% less and shift to groundwater pumping.

The federally compensated deals that Hamby and other California water managers inked and celebrated with U.S. Bureau of Reclamation officials on Wednesday are expected to keep up to 1.6 million acre-feet in Lake Mead over the next two years.

Arizona water users, led by the Gila River Indian Community, have likewise struck temporary conservation deals, helping the Lower Basin collectively save 3 million acre-feet through 2025. It’s enough to forestall a disaster at the dams during that time, federal dam managers say, but more will be needed unless the region’s drying trend reverses unexpectedly.

After hearing his Upper Basin colleagues recite how “Mother Nature” does to them what mandated cuts out of Lake Mead do to the Lower Basin, Buschatzke name-dropped a 1970 classic rock song and said climate change will impose more hardship on all of the region’s water users.

“It’s the new Mother Nature taking over, to channel my inner Guess Who.”

Sign up for AZ Climate: The Republic's weekly climate and environment newsletter delivers stories like this to your inbox every Tuesday.

No silver bullet, only 'silver buckshot'

“Obviously, tensions are seeping through,” Southern Nevada Water Authority General Manager John Entsminger said. “That’s good. It should be tense. These are serious things and these are serious people.”

Entsminger was involved in negotiating the 2007 rules. He said they’ve proven inadequate, and that history will likely again judge him and the other negotiators as having agreed to something inadequate after 2026. Without a consensus that at least improves the river’s chances, he said the states will face a “roll of the dice” in court.

Instead, he urged every person who lives in the region to look for solutions. Asking Upper Basin states to help doesn’t have to mean disaster for their economies, he said. It can mean a smattering of small steps, such as removing ornamental grass where no one plays or walks on it, or asking business partners to fund water efficiency.

For instance, he said, the organizers of a recent Formula 1 car race in Las Vegas paid for a more efficient MGM Grand casino cooling system that more than offset the water they used to spray the street racing course.

“There is no silver bullet,” Entsminger said. “There is silver buckshot.”

Buschatzke said he remained in his job this year, transitioning from work for a Republican Arizona governor who appointed him in 2015 to a Democratic governor who reappointed him in January, because he wants to strike a deal — not file a lawsuit.

After the dialog, Buschatzke told The Arizona Republic that the tension on stage generally reflected the state of talks between the states, though they have a year or so to make progress before the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation proposes possible options. He said he and his Lower Basin counterparts acknowledge the Upper Basin’s yearly hydrological challenges. The southwestern states are ready to cut more, but will still need help, he said.

“Again, we’re going to own the structural deficit,” Buschatzke said.

Mitchell told The Republic that Coloradans already are pitching in, planting more drought-tolerant crops and adapting developments to be more efficient. The river’s salvation must come primarily from taming Lower Basin withdrawals from the reservoirs, she said.

“They keep calling it a structural deficit,” she said. “Call it whatever you want. It’s overuse.”

Brandon Loomis covers environmental and climate issues for The Arizona Republic and azcentral.com. Reach him at brandon.loomis@arizonarepublic.com.

Environmental coverage on azcentral.com and in The Arizona Republic is supported by a grant from the Nina Mason Pulliam Charitable Trust. Sign up for AZ Climate, our weekly environment newsletter, and follow The Republic environmental reporting team at environment.azcentral.com and @azcenvironment on Facebook and Instagram.

You can support environmental journalism in Arizona by subscribing to azcentral.com today.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: More Colorado River water cuts are coming, but for whom? Talks begin