Federal water managers on Friday announced a 10-year plan to manage the critical Colorado River that opens the door to unprecedented water supply cuts to three states and will require near-constant negotiation between water users in the river basin.
Read more Regulators propose overhaul to law governing how banks lend to low-and-middle income communities
The report made public Friday is the culmination of years of intense and divisive negotiations to replace the 2007 operating guidelines, which governed the river for the last two decades 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 water supplies for the three Lower Basin states downstream of the reservoirs: Arizona, California and Nevada. Officials from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation described the potential reductions as “large and unprecedented,” but said even the most drastic cuts might not be enough in critically dry years to stabilize the basin’s two declining reservoirs.
The maximum cuts, if enacted, could devastate the region, officials from one Lower Basin state said.
Federal officials in their announcement said the framework 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 two-year 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.”
Reclamation’s plan does not prescribe a static plan for managing the river. 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.
Sen. Michael Bennet, a Democrat from Colorado, said in a statement that the two-year operating plans are the “bare minimum” needed to administer the river. He called for continued negotiations for a long-term consensus plan for the states.
In dry years or when reservoir levels fall critically low, those two-year operational plans can include cuts to water supplies in the Lower Basin states of up to 3 million acre-feet, the framework states.
Cuts of that size are “unacceptable,” according to leaders from Arizona, which would likely take the deepest cuts.
Read more Victor Marx picks fellow Marine as running mate on GOP ticket in Colorado governor’s race
“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.
Scientific studies have shown that the warmer temperatures and drier soils caused by climate change are shrinking the river’s flow. Winters with significantly less mountain snow will become more common, sapping the source of the vast majority of the river’s water.
Neither the Bureau of Reclamation’s news release nor the 80-page executive summary of the report mention climate change. But federal authorities noted that more than two decades of drought and the expectation of continued aridification and lower river flows have complicated planning in the river basin.
“Developing new guidelines is difficult in this complex Basin, where critically low storage in Lake Powell and Lake Mead, significant hydrologic variability, and the anticipation of drier future conditions amplify the central tradeoff: balancing the potentially profound impacts of water-delivery reductions with the need to maintain reservoir storage,” the report’s executive summary states.
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.
In 2025, the average flow calculated over the prior 20 years equaled 12.7 million acre-feet, Reclamation data shows. But even that number hides the reality of recent dry years. The five-year average amounts to only 10.9 million acre-feet. Last year’s flow measured at 8.5 million acre-feet and this year’s is expected to be even lower.
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 framework based on the report as well as a more specific operational plan for the next two years.
This is a developing story that will be updated.
Get more Colorado news by signing up for our daily Your Morning Dozen email newsletter.
Read more FBI, Boulder police release new age-progression images of suspect in 1983 murder of Sid Wells
