AZ, NV Cry Foul as Feds Cut Colorado River Allocations
Nevada's Lake Mead is at 27 percent of capacity. Together with Lake Powell, Lake Mead supplies drinking and agrigultural water to much of Arizona, California and Nevada. (The Denver Post)
By Elise Schmelzer
Federal water managers on Friday announced a 10-year plan to manage the Colorado River that opens the door to unprecedented water supply cuts to three states and will require near-constant negotiation between water users in the river basin.
The report made public Friday is the culmination of years of intense and divisive negotiations to replace the 2007 operating guidelines, which governed the critical river for the last two decades and expire this year.
But unlike previous long-term operating guidelines, the report does not prescribe specific management rules. Instead, it sets parameters for specific operation plans that will be re-negotiated every two years. Those two-year plans will determine how much water will be released from the system’s two major reservoirs — Lake Powell and Lake Mead — and how large water cuts will be to users downstream of those reservoirs.
The decision marks the first time federal authorities have independently implemented a broad management plan on the waterway depended upon by 40 million people, 30 tribes and 5.5 million acres of farmland across the Southwest. The river is a critical water source across Colorado that provides water to Western Slope agriculture and communities as well as Front Range cities like Denver.
For a century, the seven basin states — Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, Wyoming, California, Nevada and Arizona — have successfully worked together to negotiate long-term plans for the river. But this time, the states failed to reach an agreement after three years of negotiation, forcing the federal government to step in.
Federal leaders repeatedly urged the states to find agreement on how to divvy up the shrinking river, but said they would implement their own plan as a last resort. State negotiators for years said they did not want to cede decision-making to the federal government, which could heighten the risk of litigation and mire the basin in legal proceedings and uncertainty.
Federal officials in their announcement said the framework balances water managers’ need for certainty so they can plan their operations with the flexibility needed to manage the river as drought and climate complicate predicting its flows. If the states can find consensus, those agreements can also be worked into the two-year planning process.
“The Department has a responsibility to ensure the Colorado River system remains reliable and resilient for the millions of Americans, communities and industries that depend on it,” Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum said Friday in a news release. “This framework provides the flexibility to respond to changing hydrologic conditions while preserving the opportunity for the Basin States to continue working toward durable, consensus-based solutions.”
Lower-basin states blast ‘unacceptable,’ ‘unrealistic’ cuts
The scale of potential cuts outlined in the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s plan has already raised hackles in at least two basin states.
The plan opens the door for major cuts to water supplies for the three Lower Basin states downstream of the reservoirs: Arizona, California and Nevada. Reclamation officials described the potential reductions as “large and unprecedented,” but said even the most drastic cuts might not be enough in critically dry years to stabilize the basin’s two declining reservoirs.
In dry years or when reservoir levels fall critically low, those two-year operational plans can include cuts to water supplies in the Lower Basin states of up to 3 million acre-feet, the framework states.
Cuts of that size are “unacceptable,” according to leaders from Arizona, which would likely take the deepest cuts.
“Such reductions would devastate Arizona’s water users and its economy,” officials from the Arizona Department of Water Resources said Friday in a statement.
Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo, too, said the proposed cuts were “unrealistic” and would cause devastating impacts to his state’s economy and environment.
“Nevada has put forward reasonable compromise proposals to the other states, and I will fight against any outcome that imposes unreasonable impacts to our communities and those living in them,” Lombardo said in a statement.
The document does not outline mandatory cuts to the Upper Basin states — Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico — but does contemplate voluntary water conservation goals.
Whether the Upper Basin states should agree to mandatory water cuts became a key sticking point in state negotiations.
Upper Basin negotiators said they should not have to take cuts because they’ve never used their full legal share and take cuts every year when snowpack does not deliver enough water to meet all users’ allotments. Lower Basin negotiators have argued that all states should bear the burden of a shrinking river and touted their own reduction in water consumption. They’ve pointed to plans in Upper Basin states to build more reservoirs as evidence the states will increase their consumption instead of reducing it.
Colorado’s lead negotiator, Becky Mitchell, said in a statement Friday that her office is reviewing the document, which is hundreds of pages long, but did not offer substantive analysis. Other Upper Basin leaders said they would provide more thorough analysis after the plan for the next two years is made public.
“Colorado remains committed to protecting our state’s significant rights and interests in the Colorado River and working collaboratively with the other Basin States, federal government, and Tribal Nations to adapt to supply-based operations,” she said.
In a joint statement, the governors of the four Upper Basin states — including Gov. Jared Polis — pledged to continue to pursue a seven-state agreement.
“Today’s framework does not represent a final solution, but enables the river to be managed in the short-term while the seven states and (the Department of the Interior) continue to negotiate a consensus solution,” the governors said in their statement.
Green vegetation lines Kanab Creek, adding a contrast of color to the desert landscape near Littlefield, Arizona. With a low snowpack this winter, many creeks and washes in the Colorado Basin are nearly dry. (The Denver Post)
Decades of drought, continued aridification
The management framework comes amid a crisis on the river decades in the making.
Lake Powell and Lake Mead are at a record low due to drought and overuse, prompting emergency releases earlier this summer from an upstream reservoir to prop up their levels. Nearly every year since 2000, water users below the reservoirs have consumed more water than flowed into the river system’s primary water storage banks.
On Thursday, Powell was 22 percent full and Mead was 27 percent full.
“Developing new guidelines is difficult in this complex Basin, where critically low storage in Lake Powell and Lake Mead, significant hydrologic variability, and the anticipation of drier future conditions amplify the central tradeoff: balancing the potentially profound impacts of water-delivery reductions with the need to maintain reservoir storage,” the report’s executive summary states.
When the basin states signed the 1922 Colorado River Compact — the bedrock agreement allocating the river’s water — they apportioned 7.5 million acre-feet for the three Lower Basin states and another 7.5 million acre-feet for the four Upper Basin states.
But since 2000, the river has produced far less than the 14 million acre-feet expected by the creators of the 1922 contract.
In 2025, the average flow calculated over the prior 20 years equaled 12.7 million acre-feet, Reclamation data shows. But even that number hides the reality of recent dry years. The five-year average amounts to only 10.9 million acre-feet. Last year’s flow measured at 8.5 million acre-feet and this year’s is expected to be even lower.
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