States Fail to Reach Deal on Colorado River Water Use Cuts

The seven states that make up the Colorado River basin failed to reach an agreement this week on a plan to reduce their consumption of the river’s water by up to a third of its annual average flow—a plan the US Interior Dept. told them to submit by Jan. 31 to avoid cuts that will be imposed by the federal government.

According to a report in the Washington Post, six of the seven states—Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming—agreed to a framework to reduce water usage by 2M acre-feet, the minimum the Interior Dept. says is needed to avoid a “doomsday” scenario in which 25M people in the Southwest are unable to get water from the drought-stricken system.

At Tuesday’s deadline, the group of six states submitted their plan, which requires the largest water users in the system—California and Arizona—to make the lion’s share of the cuts. In a letter to the Interior Department, they said they’re willing to negotiate directly with the federal government to finalize their plan.

The Golden State, which relies on the river to irrigate its huge agricultural industry as well as meet the water needs of millions of people, would be required under the plan to trim more than 1M acre-feet of water from the 4.4M acre-feet that California currently gets annually under existing water rights.

California submitted its own plan on Tuesday, which aims for a similar total reduction but would implement the cuts in incremental steps, starting with a reduction of 400K acre-feet. The timing of further water-use reductions would be directly tied to the water levels at the nation’s two largest reservoirs: Lake Powell and Lake Mead.

Plunging water levels at the reservoirs at Lake Powell and Lake Mead—afflicted by what is being called a “1,500-year” drought, as well as steadily rising water usage in the Southwest—are approaching the point where the lakes will become “dead pools” in which water is unable to flow out. If that threshold is reached, the Hoover and Glen Canyon dams will have to be shut down—cutting off the delivery of water in the Southwest.

(The Interior Department initially estimated the doomsday threshold would be reached by this summer, but a brief “reprieve”—measured in weeks, not months—may have been provided by the series of storms that battered California last month, dumping several feet of snow in the mountains that feed CA reservoirs.)

Colorado River expert John Fleck, a professor at the University of New Mexico, in a blog post this week called California’s proposal, which would delay cuts until the water level at Hoover Dam is much closer to the “doomsday” threshold, “a gamble.”

“California’s cuts don’t kick in until later—essentially a gamble on good hydrology once again helping us avoid conflict by letting us use more water in the short term,” Fleck said, in his post.

The urgent need to cut Colorado River water usage also is pitting the growing cities of the Southwest against farming regions that use 80% of the river’s water—and have water rights granting them access to it that go back to the 19^th century.

The century-old “priority” system established by these water rights currently mandates that residents of cities including Phoenix and Los Angeles will face water-use reductions before vegetable farmers in Southern California or Yuma.

Farmers have threatened to mount a legal fight to maintain the priority system if any plan the government imposes to reduce Colorado River water usage overturns it.