Band-Aid, not a cure: federal Colorado River plan leaves states guessing every two years

Dire water conditions, missed deadlines and uncertainty on the Colorado River are complicating critical water decisions in California.

No single state, water agency or federal official has shown the power, or the will, to break the deadlock among Colorado River basin states over how to share the dwindling supplies. 

Years of fraught negotiations have failed to yield consensus even as major reservoir storage plummets to record lows — ratcheting up the tensions, and the stakes, for the states’ negotiators.

Now, key agreements for managing the river are expiring at the end of this year. These include agreements reached in 2007 that lasted nearly two decades, which took fewer than three years to craft.

This round of talks has already taken longer — and, so far, produced nothing so durable.

The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, the federal steward for the river under the Department of the Interior, last week released a 10-year framework that establishes rough parameters for managing the river, but imposes no specific long-term plan. 

The federal provisions include cuts of up to 40% to the shared supply of California, Arizona and Nevada in the lower basin. They also allow releases from Lake Powell, which collects flows from the upper basin, to dip low enough they risk violating a legally required threshold for water deliveries to downstream states. 

These dramatic cuts are an upper limit for future operations: The federal government plans to roll out more detailed management plans every two years if the states continue their impasse.

The agency will release the first of those plans any day, imposing cuts in the downstream states of California, Arizona and Nevada — an estimated 10% cut to California’s supply through 2028, or roughly 440,000 acre-feet a year.

No mandatory cuts are expected in the upper basin states of Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico, according to those involved in negotiations. The Los Angeles Times first reported the split.  

It reflects the limits of federal power and political will: The Interior Department can force cuts in the lower basin, but has no comparable authority to impose cuts in the upper basin states — the limits of which the Congressional Research Service said are the subject of “ongoing debate.”

This isn’t the long-term plan that California’s water suppliers were hoping for.

Building anything to store, move or make more water typically takes decades and billions of dollars. Without longer-term certainty about how states will share the river’s water supply among 40 million people, millions of acres of agriculture, and two states in Mexico — cities and irrigation providers are struggling to plan how to close the gaps. 

“A cut is never fun, but you can deal with it. But not if you say, ‘Well, we have a cut here, and then maybe a cut in two years, and maybe another cut in two more years,’” said Bill Hasencamp, Metropolitan Water District’s manager of Colorado River resources. 

“We need to plan for our future. And this deal does not let us do that.” 

The future of Southern California’s water 

In California, where the availability of water is never certain, nature-defying engineering keeps dry parts of the state flush with water even when little falls from the sky. 

Much of that engineering converges around one Southern California supplier: the Metropolitan Water District. The giant wholesaler imports water from Northern California and the Colorado River to supply cities and other retailers serving 19 million people across six counties. 

Metropolitan’s imports are so central to the region that when its Northern California supplies dropped to a trickle during the most recent drought, 6 million Southern Californians faced unprecedented water restrictions in 2022. 

Southern California isn’t facing such serious shortfalls again yet. But uncertainty over the Colorado River compounds the risks the next drought will bring. 

“There’s a good chance it’ll be as bad as it’s been, and there’s a reasonable chance that it’ll be worse,” said Hasencamp’s colleague, Keith Nobriga, whose job as an operations manager at Metropolitan is helping the district prepare for the future amid climate change. 

The uncertainty also throws a wrench in Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration’s water machinations to the north. Metropolitan’s board will play an outsized role in deciding the fates of Sites Reservoir and the Delta tunnel because of the district’s water needs and spending power.

Both multibillion-dollar projects, decades in the making, aim to send more of Northern California’s water south. Metropolitan is also planning a large-scale water recycling and reuse program, called Pure Water Southern California, with the Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts.  

Metropolitan has already committed hundreds of millions of dollars to the Delta tunnel’s planning costs and about $31 million for Sites. The board hasn’t committed to receiving water or contributing to construction for either yet, though board votes on whether to approve the tunnel and recycled water project could come as soon as next year. 

Subtracting one part of the equation,such as the Colorado River, could change the calculus for the others. But Metropolitan has to know how much water it stands to lose, and for how long. 

The consequences of picking the wrong path could leave Southern California thirsty during the next drought, on one hand, or unnecessarily increase water rates, on the other. 

Nobriga compares his job to insurance planning. The costs of nudging these water projects along, he says, are like paying an insurance premium. 

“We’ll keep these projects alive. We’ll keep looking down the road,” he said. “And if it gets to a point where we really think these droughts are imminent, then we’ll … construct and pay the big money for one or several of these projects. And we don’t know which ones yet.”

Agriculture in limbo

California uses the largest share of the Colorado River’s water among the states. And the Imperial Irrigation District uses the largest share of that to supply half a million acres of alfalfa, grasses, winter vegetables and other crops in the southeast corner of the state.  

As climate change and a megadrought plunged the Colorado River into its driest decades in over a century, the Biden administration struck a deal with the Imperial Irrigation District, trading more than half a billion federal dollars for short-term water conservation.

Growers cut irrigation to their alfalfa and other forage crops for weeks at a time, and the district conserved enough water to add more than 12 feet to Lake Mead on the Colorado River, according to Tina Shields, water manager for the irrigation district.

Now, those conservation programs are coming to the end of their funding and regulatory lifetimes. Starting new ones would require new plans and approvals to address the environmental impact of reduced irrigation runoff that feeds the Salton Sea. 

Seeking those permits and environmental approvals “needs to be done on a longer term, not on a two-year term,” Shields said. “Because it’ll take us at least a year to negotiate, probably longer, the environmental actions necessary to move forward.” 

In the meantime, negotiations are ongoing with other California water users about how they’ll share the coming cuts, including who is going to pay for it, Shields said. The district has not yet committed to anything. 

“The district’s perspective is: We’ve done a lot. We’re doing a lot. It’s challenging to do more,” she said. 

Art of the deal

Though the U.S. Department of the Interior has not yet released its plan for the river’s next two years, those involved in negotiations expect that it will call for reductions and conservation in California, Arizona and Nevada similar to what the states proposed in May. 

The three lower-basin states then must agree among themselves and with the federal government on how to implement it. After that, individual water suppliers in California will seek approvals from their boards for their share of the cuts.

Jay Weiner, an attorney representing the Fort Yuma Quechan Indian Tribe, whose reservation lies on both sides of the Colorado River, compared the plan to a Band-Aid, not a long-term path to sustainability.  

“To a large extent,” Weiner said, “it leaves us at the mercy of this coming winter.”

The Trump administration relied on the states reaching consensus rather than imposing terms — an approach that so far hasn’t broken the deadlock. 

Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs called for the federal government to step in and broker a deal. But federal leverage looks different in the upper and lower basins. Lower basin stakeholders say there are other strings the federal government could pull upstream, such as forcing water out of reservoirs, but isn’t. And cloistered negotiations and hardline positions among negotiators have driven an impasse. 

Arizona negotiator Tom Buschatzke publicly lambasted the upper basin in The Denver Post for failing to propose “One. Single. Gallon.” of mandatory, verifiable reductions. Colorado negotiator Becky Mitchell wrote in The Colorado Sun that had the lower basin states lived within their means, “the reservoirs would not be in crisis today.”

Elizabeth Koebele, a political science professor at the University of Nevada, Reno said that negotiations have been most productive when participants had strong working relationships. Without clear federal leadership, she said, the same conflicts keep resurfacing. 

The fraying relationships, she said, could stem from turnover. But years of constant crisis have also worn people down. “We have been governing in crisis for a long time, and so every time we meet at the table, there’s this big problem to solve,” she said. “The house is on fire.” 

While the lower basin may sue the upper over deliveries that dip below a legally required threshold, both sides would risk the uncertain outcomes of litigation. 

“In essence, this federal action has 40 million people living from paycheck to paycheck on water supply,” said Mark Gold, an environmental scientist and board member of the Metropolitan Water District. 

That paycheck comes due again in two years with the same states, and the same asymmetry of power, still in place. Until then, the interior secretary can still force deeper cuts on the lower basin. No one, right now, is willing to force the upper basin to do the same.