Federal water managers on Friday announced a 10-year plan to manage the critical Colorado River that will require near-constant negotiation between the seven states and other water users in the river basin.
The report made public Friday is the culmination of years of negotiations to replace the 2007 operating guidelines, which governed the river for the last 20 years and expire this year. The decision is the first time federal authorities have implemented such 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.
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.
Under the new federal plan, basin water managers will create specific operating guidelines every two years that determine exactly how much water will be released from the system’s two major reservoirs and how large water cuts will be.
The plan opens the door for major cuts to the three states downstream of the reservoirs. If the maximum cuts are enacted, the region could be devastated, officials from one state said.
Federal officials in their announcement said 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 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.”
The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s plan does not prescribe a static method of determining cuts. Instead, it requires the creation every two years of an operation plan that falls within certain parameters. Those parameters include how much water can be released from Lake Powell on the Arizona-Utah border, and how much water can be cut for users downstream of the massive reservoir.
Those two-year operational plans can include cuts to water supplies in the Lower Basin states — Arizona, California and Nevada — of up to 3 million acre-feet, the framework states. Leaders from Arizona said cuts of that size are “unacceptable.”
“Such reductions would devastate Arizona’s water users and its economy,” officials from the Arizona Department of Water Resources said Friday 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.
The management framework comes amid a crisis on the river decades in the making. The basin’s two major reservoirs — Lake Powell and Lake Mead — are at a record low due to drought and overuse. 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.
Two decades of drought and expected continued dry conditions have complicated planning in the river basin, federal authorities said in their announcement Friday. 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.
The report published Friday is the first in a series of documents expected in the near future. Before Oct. 1, reclamation officials will issue a final long-term management plan based on the report as well as an operational plan for the next two years.
This is a developing story that will be updated.
