After months of pressing western states to come to their own agreement, the Trump administration told their leaders it’s drawing up a 10-year plan for dealing with water shortages on the Colorado River.
The river is a major water source for Southern California and much of the Southwest, but its largest reservoirs, Lake Mead and Lake Powell, are severely depleted, and their levels continue to drop.
News of the federal government’s preliminary plan surfaced Wednesday during a meeting in Phoenix. Tom Buschatzke, director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources, said federal officials informed state water managers they are developing a 10-year “framework” with specific rules requiring water reductions that would be reassessed every two years.
So far, negotiators for California, Arizona and Nevada have offered to use roughly 1.6 million acre-feet less annually over the next two years. But Buschatzke said the Trump administration’s plan would allow for mandatory cutbacks of up to 3 million acre-feet per year in the three states — as much as 40% of their combined allotments.
That’s nearly as much as all the water that flowed from 19 million people’s taps across Southern California last year.
Buschatzke called such large mandatory cuts a sobering possibility for Arizona.
The offer from California, Arizona and Nevada this month was a water-saving proposal for the next two years. It would help the low levels of Lake Mead, the country’s largest reservoir.
Buschatzke said the idea is that the proposal can govern water sharing for 2027 and 2028. After that, there would be new rounds of negotiations to readjust cuts every two years.
The river provides for about 35 million people and 5 million acres of farmland, from the Rocky Mountains to northern Mexico.
Farms use about three-fourths of the water drawn from the river, much of it to grow alfalfa and other kinds of hay to feed cattle. Over the last three years, the states have turned to voluntary water cutbacks and federal payments to farmers who agree to leave fields dry part of the year.
In January, the Trump administration released a draft outline of several options for dealing with the deepening water shortages.
One of the four alternatives was just “basic coordination,” which the federal report said could be done absent an agreement among the states. Others included different ways of apportioning water cuts, with plans blandly titled “enhanced coordination,” “maximum operational flexibility” or “supply driven.”
At the time, Scott Cameron, the Bureau of Reclamation’s acting commissioner, urged state officials to negotiate an agreement by mid-February, calling for a “consensus-based approach.”
But that deadline passed, and the leaders of seven states failed to reach a deal. The states’ representatives have deadlocked in negotiations on how to cut water use, with the disagreements pitting three downstream states — California, Arizona and Nevada — against the upstream states of Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico. The four upper states have called for a mediator to try to break the impasse.
California’s lead negotiator welcomed the federal government’s plan to intervene.
“I think it is a smart approach,” JB Hamby said, “to both having longer-term planning and adapting to variable hydrology on a more regular basis.”
He said this approach seems better than making assumptions to set long-term rules and “being locked into them for decades.”
The water was originally divided among the states under a 1922 agreement called the Colorado River Compact, which overpromised what the river could provide.
For decades, so much water has been taken out that the river seldom meets the sea. Its delta in Mexico, once a vast oasis of wetlands and forests, has mostly dried up, leaving only scattered wetlands in a sandy river channel that runs through farmland.
Since 2000, the Colorado has shrunk dramatically as climate change has intensified dry conditions in the Rocky Mountains.
Lake Mead, the nation’s largest reservoir, is now just 30% full. And upstream along the Utah-Arizona border, Lake Powell, the second-largest reservoir, is at 24% of capacity.
To hold off the risk of Lake Powell reaching critically low levels that would render Glen Canyon Dam unable to generate hydropower, the Trump administration has begun taking emergency measures, releasing extra water from another reservoir upstream to raise the lake level.
An extremely warm and dry winter has added to the crisis. There is so little snow in the Rocky Mountains that the runoff reaching Lake Powell this spring and summer is forecast to be just 13% of average, the lowest on record.
In the arcane language of federal environmental review, Peter Soeth, a spokesperson for the Bureau of Reclamation, said the agency has “identified preliminary elements of a preferred alternative” in its review of options and has “initiated consultations” with states, tribes and Mexico.
“Given the risk and uncertainty,” Soeth said, the approach is “designed to provide stability while allowing flexibility” to incorporate any additional recommendations the states agree on.
The Bureau of Reclamation has said it will announce its decision sometime in the summer.
