Lacking agreement from the seven Colorado River states, federal managers of the critical waterway are planning to implement a framework for its future that will require a renegotiation every two years as the basin faces unprecedented water supply uncertainty.
Scott Cameron, the , outlined the concept Thursday afternoon at an hosted by the University of Colorado Boulder. It was the first time federal leaders had publicly discussed their final management scheme for the river.
The plan to renegotiate every two years will give the river’s leaders flexibility to adapt to shifting water supplies, he said.
For more than two years, negotiators for the seven basin states have failed to agree on how the river should be managed and shared for the coming decades, as drought and overuse shrink water supplies. Without a state consensus, Reclamation officials will implement their own plan — though all parties agree that a seven-state plan is the ideal outcome for the basin.
“I wish I could tell you that we have a solution,” Cameron told the crowd in Boulder, which included several of the state negotiators. “As you are very painfully aware, we do not have a solution, at least at this point.”
Federal officials have proposed several potential plans that they thought the states would accept, but those have been rejected each time, Cameron said. Federal officials have repeatedly met with the state negotiators to hammer out a deal, including a meeting in Washington, D.C., between Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and six of the seven governors of the basin states.
But the states — Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming, Arizona, California and Nevada — thus far have not agreed on a long-term plan for the river.
Or, as Cameron noted, even a two-year plan.
Hopes for a plan that would last for decades have been dashed, though Cameron said federal leaders would accept a seven-state plan at any time in the coming years. Bureau of Reclamation leaders plan to publish their plan for the next two years by midsummer so that it can be finalized before the Oct. 1 start of the next water year.
“It’s not like we can just keep talking indefinitely,” Cameron said, later noting that 40 million people across the basin are looking to river managers to find a way forward.
Reclamation’s 10-year framework will require nearly continuous negotiations between the seven states — a prospect that at least two of the negotiators from different sides of the basin are not thrilled about.
“The constant renegotiation every two years is difficult to fathom,” Colorado’s negotiator,, said Friday morning at the same conference in Boulder.
Constant flux creates uncertainty and makes it difficult to plan funding for basin projects.
John Entsminger, , echoed her sentiment, stating that the two-year framework was “not the best plan.”
A seven-state plan is still possible, Mitchell said, and would eliminate the potential for litigation over the federal plan that could destabilize the region for years.
“We’ve kicked the can down the road long enough,” she said. “There’s a lot of cans, there’s a lot of lobbyists, there’s a lot of theories. And if we don’t solve this, there are going to be a lot of high-paid lawyers.”
Litigation would be grinding and last decades, handing the future of the river to judges or Congress, Entsminger said.
“Marching into the Supreme Court is an abdication of our responsibility,” he said.
The uncertainty over management plans comes as the river system comes closer to crashing than at any time in modern history.
As of Tuesday, Lake Powell was 24% full and Lake Mead sat at 29% full, .
A new water supply forecast released this week estimated that the amount of water that will reach Lake Powell during the spring runoff season, between April and July, will be 15% of the average recorded between 1991 and 2020.
That’s the lowest level on record, according to .
To keep water levels from falling below the intakes for hydropower plant, federal officials last month downstream to Lake Powell over the next year from Flaming Gorge Reservoir in Wyoming and Utah.
But upstream reservoirs do not hold enough water to solve the basin’s shortage, Cameron said.
“It’s not like you can send a million acres down, year after year after year,” he said. “These are stopgap measures that we’re trying to use in our critical — hopefully short-term — situation.”
