Colorado water experts push for agreement on managing the Colorado River’s future

It’s time for an agreement in the Colorado River Basin, Colorado water and climate experts say.

Colorado River officials are at odds over how to store and release water in the basin’s reservoirs when the current rules lapse in 2026. Publicly, state negotiators stick close to their original, competing proposals, released early in 2024. Colorado experts watching the process understand the difficulty — it’s painful to talk about cutting water use — but time is of the essence. 

“I have no idea what’s going to get them to agreement,” said Jennifer Pitt, the Colorado River program director for the National Audubon Society. “To me, the biggest pressure seems like time is running out.”

But there seems to be a lack of trust between the state negotiators, said Jennifer Gimbel, senior water policy scholar at the Colorado Water Center at Colorado State University.

“Not only is there this lack of trust, but there almost seems to be this effort to promote your own proposals by denigrating other proposals,” Gimbel said. “That frustrated me to no end. It’s like they have these political rallies.”

If states are going to propose a united plan, then they need to do it by the end of 2025, preferably sooner, experts said.

Two new reports offer glimpses into how officials envision the river’s future: a revised proposal from four states, including Colorado, submitted Dec. 30, and a new, in-depth report on the Bureau of Reclamation’s strategies, released Jan. 17.

“We continue to stand firmly behind the Upper Division States’ Alternative, which performs best according to Reclamation’s own modeling and directly meets the purpose and need of this federal action,” Colorado’s negotiating team said in a prepared statement Tuesday.

The basin is also about to see new leadership at the federal level. Colorado water experts are waiting to know who President Donald Trump will appoint to key positions, like the commissioner of Reclamation and the assistant secretary for water and science.

“They’re in a really tough spot. I would understand that,” said John Berggren with the environmental group Western Resource Advocates. “I hope they’re continuing to negotiate and have productive conversations, and I hope they’re open to some more creative options.”

Planning for the extremes

So what options are they considering? In the absence of a seven-state agreement on how to manage the basin’s water supply, the Bureau of Reclamation outlined five possible plans in November: 

• No action: Included as a formality and shows the risk of doing nothing
• Federal authorities: Includes maximum Lower Basin cuts of 3.5 million acre-feet in extremely dry years
• Federal authorities hybrid: Includes maximum cuts of 3.5 million acre-feet in the Lower Basin and conserving up to 200,000 acre-feet in the Upper Basin
• Cooperative conservation: Includes maximum cuts of 4 million acre-feet in the Lower Basin and conserving up to 200,000 acre-feet in the Upper Basin
• Basin hybrid: Includes maximum cuts of 2.1 million acre-feet in the Lower Basin and conserving up to 100,000 acre-feet in the Upper Basin

Colorado experts want to make sure the federal planning process is broad enough to include the  worst possible conditions. 

The Colorado River Basin’s flows are about 20% lower now than in the 20th century, said Brad Udall, senior water and climate research scientist at the Colorado Water Center at Colorado State University. That’s a drop from about 15.2 million acre-feet per year to about 12.4 million acre-feet, he said.

That’s not enough for the 15 million acre-feet allotted to the seven U.S. states, much less the additional water owed to Mexico and tribal nations.

Udall wants to make sure officials are planning for scenarios in which the river’s flow drops by an additional 10%, or down to 11 million acre-feet.

“The question is … who takes the pain? Is it all Lower Basin? Is Upper Basin sharing that?” he said.

Main takeaways and lingering questions

The Bureau of Reclamation’s options include more than just how to cut back on water use, as explained in detail in the new alternatives report, released Jan. 17.

One new detail for the Colorado experts who reviewed the report was the duration of the next management plan: The bureau wants it to last for at least 20 years after 2026. It is unlikely to be a short-term, interim plan to give negotiators more time to reach a unified agreement.

The revised proposal submitted by the Upper Basin states — Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming — also highlighted conserving up to 200,000 acre-feet of water (depending river conditions), which seemed to move the states closer to alignment with Reclamation, experts said.

An acre-foot of water is enough to cover an area of land about the size of a football field with water a foot deep, or to serve two families of four or five people for a year.

The Upper Basin’s revised proposal, and the federal options, include different “pools” in Lake Powell on the Utah-Arizona border, which would function like savings accounts and could store water conserved by Upper Basin states. Colorado water experts are keeping a close eye on how these accounts might work.

“Putting water in Powell is a good thing, but nobody in the Upper Basin wants to send water to protect Powell that ultimately just runs downstream,” said Steve Wolff, general manager of the Southwestern Water Conservation District based in Durango. 

The experts wanted to know more about how conservation pools would function; how federal authorities in the basin might expand; which reservoirs will be included in the plan; what the impacts to the Grand Canyon would be under the different plans; and ultimately, what plan will stabilize the system. 

They’ll have to wait to find out: The bureau is expected to release a deeper analysis of how each alternative could impact water management in different conditions later this year.

The Bureau of Reclamation’s final selection will likely mix and match elements of the different alternatives, said Carly Jerla, senior water resource program manager with the Bureau of Reclamation in a December presentation in Las Vegas.

“It’s a shame we don’t have a combined Upper Basin and Lower Basin plan right now,” Udall said. “Once Reclamation does its modeling, we’ll learn a lot. But we need a combined plan.”