Coloradans’ share of the Colorado River will not change under the federal government’s new operating plans for the critical waterway for at least the next two years.
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The U.S. Department of the Interior on Friday published a highly anticipated plan for the Colorado River that will guide how the basin’s two major reservoirs will operate and how the shrinking river’s water will be allocated across the southwest for the next two years.
While Colorado and the other Upper Basin states — New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming — will face no mandatory cuts, the Lower Basin states of Arizona, California and Nevada will see their collective supply cut by 1.25 million acre-feet in each of the next two years. An acre-foot of water is enough water for two families’ annual needs.
During negotiations, leaders from the Lower Basin states offered to reduce their consumption, and the federal plan implements cuts of similar size. While the federal government has the authority to mandate cuts in the Lower Basin, it does not have similar power over the Upper Basin states, which sit above the river’s two major reservoirs, Lake Powell and Lake Mead.
The decision Friday is the culmination of years of negotiations, studies, public comment periods and modeling. Negotiators from the seven Colorado River basin states first set out to craft a plan to manage the critical waterway for decades. But the negotiators couldn’t agree on a plan, forcing the federal government to implement its own rules for the river.
Instead of a long-term operating plan as in the past, federal authorities created a 10-year framework that requires renegotiating the operating plans every two years, within parameters they set. The two-year plans will determine how much water is released from the river’s two major reservoirs and how deep cuts to water supplies will be for the three states downstream of those water storage banks.
If the states can find consensus on a longer-term plan, it can be substituted in at any point in the coming decade.
“We are grateful for the seven basin states, the 30 basin tribes, Mexico and many other basin stakeholders who have provided the feedback and voluntary arrangements necessary for the development of the 2027-2028 Operating Guidelines,” Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum said in a statement Friday. “Forty million people, millions of acres of farmland and ranchland, industries that power the American West, and some of our nation’s fastest-growing metropolitan areas depend on the Colorado River.”
In Colorado — where the river begins its snaking route toward the Gulf of California — the water is used for Western Slope agriculture as well as municipal water supplies across the state, including much of the Front Range. The Colorado River is also an engine for recreation in the state and provides critical habitat for wildlife, including endangered species.
The Department of the Interior on Friday also finalized the 10-year framework, which was first announced earlier this summer. The finalized document, called a record of decision, formally ends a planning process that began in 2022 to replace previous operating plans that expire this year.
“Today’s Record of Decision and two-year guidelines give the Colorado River some badly needed near-term certainty at a moment of extraordinary risk,” California’s top Colorado River negotiator, JB Hamby, said in a statement Friday.
The new plans come as the Colorado River system hovers on the brink of collapse. Long-term drought across the basin has dramatically sapped the river’s flow, while continued overuse of the basin’s stored water has depleted its two major reservoirs.
Lake Powell and Lake Mead sit at record lows not seen since the nation’s two largest reservoirs began filling decades ago. On Wednesday, .
Already this spring, water managers scrambled to send more water from upstream Flaming Gorge Reservoir to Lake Powell to keep its dam’s hydropower turbines running when the winter’s snowpack in the river’s headwaters yielded paltry streamflows. The reservoir could fall so low in early 2027 that water can no longer safely pass through the turbines’ intake tubes, a level called “power pool,” Bureau of Reclamation projections show.
The depleted reservoirs leave little margin for error in their operations this water year, which begins Oct. 1. Lake Powell will begin the water year very near power pool.
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In the near-term, federal officials’ plans focus on keeping water levels at Lake Powell from falling below that level and building a buffer above it.
The two-year plan includes the possibility that water may be sent to Powell from smaller federally managed reservoirs in the Upper Basin, including Colorado’s Blue Mesa Reservoir.
The 10-year federal framework allows for cuts in the Lower Basin up to 3 million acre-feet a year, if needed in future two-year plans. That level of cuts has prompted threats of litigation from officials in Arizona, which would bear the brunt of those reductions. Such a lawsuit would likely end up at the U.S. Supreme Court, which would embroil the basin in years of uncertainty during the legal process.
Arizona’s top Colorado River negotiator, in a letter to federal officials, opposed the 10-year framework, the depth of possible cuts and the lack of mandatory cuts in the Upper Basin.
“Arizona does not accept a framework that gives the federal government the discretion to select from a wide range of alternatives — including catastrophic cuts to the Lower Basin — every two years for the next decade,” Tom Buschatzke wrote in the Aug. 10 letter, first reported by the Arizona Republic.
While the plan for the next two years has been finalized, water managers across the basin will continue to negotiate operating guidelines for the next two-year period — or a more long-term strategy that all seven basin states agree upon.
Negotiations have stalled for years in part because the basin states cannot agree on who should bear the brunt of the water-use cuts made necessary by a shrinking river. Upper Basin states have said that they have never used their full legal allotment from the river and, because they are upstream of Lake Powell and Lake Mead, already take cuts every year depending on the amount of water in the river. Lower Basin states have demanded that Upper Basin states share in the pain.
At a Colorado water conference on Thursday, Colorado’s top negotiator Becky Mitchell reiterated her position that water rights owners in the Upper Basin states face cuts every year depending on the amount of water available. Powerful senior water rights that predate the 1922 Colorado River Compact are facing curtailment this year, she noted.
Colorado and the other Upper Basin states will continue working on a program that will pay water users to use less water and store that saved water for dry years, said Amy Ostdiek, chief of the interstate, federal and information section at the Colorado Water Conservation Board, while speaking at the same conference.
That water will then be available to send downstream in dry years and count toward the amount of water the Upper Basin sends to the Lower Basin, as required by the 1922 compact.
“We’re going to be part of the solution … but we can’t provide water certainty for our neighbors downstream that we ourselves don’t have,” she said.
Mitchell said she is still willing to negotiate a deal with the other basin states.
“I think we have to be honest with ourselves: Are we willing to get to a bad deal?” she said. “I am not.”
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