The federal government has issued new rules for sharing water from the Colorado River. The guidelines set up a strategy for managing water for the next decade, and details about the size of cutbacks for water users are expected soon. The announcement comes after years of failed negotiations between the seven states that use the river's water.
Climate change, drought and steady demand have sapped the river, which supplies nearly 40 million people across seven states. Its water flows to big cities like Phoenix, Denver and Los Angeles, as well as a massive agriculture industry that sends fresh produce to grocery shelves across the nation.
Water policy experts had been calling for a long-term management plan that would significantly reduce demand for water and ease the need for the kind of frequent, short-term fixes that have been used to manage the river over the past few years.
The plan announced today does not provide a long-term solution.
Instead, it brings policy negotiators together every two years to reassess water management strategies and make tweaks according to river conditions. The new plan sets a ten-year framework for that series of checkins, but still allows water managers to make short-term plans. Policy experts told KJZZ earlier this year that such an approach is less than ideal, but may provide some flexibility as policymakers navigate a rocky future under climate change.
Arizona, California and Nevada will likely feel the brunt of the cutbacks. Federal officials have not formally announced the size of water cutbacks, but those three states are expected to take reductions of 1.25 million acre-feet each year in 2027 and 2028.
An acre-foot is roughly the amount of water it would take to cover a football field with one foot of water. The Arizona Department of Water resources says one acre-foot is roughly a year's supply of water for three homes in the Phoenix area.
Earlier drafts of the federal rules showed massive cuts to the Central Arizona Project, which local leaders called "devastating." Since the drafts were released, the three Lower Basin states submitted a counterproposal, volunteering significant water reductions to avoid harsher, mandatory cuts that would have been imposed by the federal government.
The federal plan announced today sets wide "sideboards," for river operations, establishing a wide minimum and maximum for the amount of water that could be cut going forward. Maximum cuts — up to 3 million acre-feet a year — would be harsh for Central Arizona. The state's top water agency has already called them "unacceptable" and said they would "devastate Arizona's water users and its economy."
Arizona officials say they are hopeful that the federal government will adopt their counterproposal, which still includes cuts to the state's water use.
Those cuts are expected to result in significant reductions to the Central Arizona Project.
The Central Arizona Project is a 336-mile canal system that carries Colorado River water across the desert to the Phoenix and Tucson areas. Many cities in the Phoenix metro rely heavily on its water. City utilities have known for years that some form of cuts were likely coming this summer, and most municipal water agencies have robust plans to soften the impact of the reductions announced today.
Despite accounting for a large portion of the new water cutbacks, cities make up a relatively small percentage of total water use. About 70% percent of the river is used for agriculture. Its water also flows to 30 federally-recognized indigenous tribes and supports countless ecosystems for rare and endangered wildlife.
The new rules are an effort to rein in demand and prevent the nation's two largest reservoirs — Lake Powell and Lake Mead — from dropping to catastrophically low levels. The water storage system dipped to record low levels in recent weeks. Further drops could mean the shutdown of hydropower production inside the dams that hold them back. Some experts fear that dropping water levels could make it impossible to send water from Lake Powell through Glen Canyon Dam and into the river on the other side.
Today's announcement from the Interior Department is a document called a Final Environmental Impact Statement. Any time the government makes major changes to the way it manages the river, it must issue such a document to comply with the National Environmental Policy Act, outlining how those changes will affect everything from infrastructure to wildlife. The new rules are not yet final, but will become official when the federal government issues a Record of Decision.
Actual changes to the amount of water released from reservoirs, as outlined in the Record of Decision, will go into effect on October 1.
The rules announced today come after years of tense negotiations between the seven states that use the Colorado River. Those states are split into two camps: the Upper Basin states of Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico, and the Lower Basin states of Arizona, California and Nevada. The federal government prefers that states come to a consensus agreement about how to cut back on water, but the states failed to do so. A group of policymakers, led by seven governor-appointed negotiators and their lawyers, fought in closed-door meetings about which states should feel the pain of cutbacks.
Arizona and its allies in the Lower Basin volunteered to make significant mandatory cutbacks. The four upstream states did not. Lacking seven-state agreement, the federal government pressed forward with its own plans, an effort to keep dams operating normally and tamp down the threat of major lawsuits.
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