Officials warn of a bleak Colorado River future as deadline nears

The Colorado River is a vital source of drinking water for 40 million people in the seven states, Mexico and 30 Native American tribes, and it provides water for farming operations and hydroelectricity. 

The Lower Basin states — Arizona, Nevada and California — and the Upper Basin states — Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming — have been attempting to negotiate an updated water usage agreement for more than two years. So far, they’ve been unsuccessful. 

Because of the negotiating impasse, the federal government has devised a plan to replace the agreement that expires at the end of the year. It will impose drastic cuts on the Lower Basin states, and Arizona will feel the brunt of those cuts with a cut to its river water of  up to 77%.

Arizona faces an outsized burden when it comes to reductions because the Central Arizona Project, a series of canals that supplies Colorado River water to the metropolitan Phoenix and Tucson areas, is one of the newest users of the river water, making it legally one of the first to be cut. 

The major sticking point in the negotiations is the Upper Basin states’ refusal to commit to any mandatory cuts, while the Lower Basin states already take cuts in dry years. 

Becky Mitchell, Colorado’s water commissioner, said that her state already deals with mandatory cuts, they’re just from Mother Nature, not the U.S. government. The Colorado River is fed by melting snowpack in the Rocky Mountains, which is at a record low this year. 

“What I can’t promise is to deliver water when it’s not there,” Mitchell said. “Nobody can.”

She characterized the Lower Basin states’ argument that the Upper Basin wasn’t taking mandatory cuts as a “major flaw,” since the Upper Basin uses anywhere between three to five millions acre-feet per year, based on what’s available. 

An acre-foot of water is enough to cover an acre of land to a depth of one foot, or about 325,851 gallons. That’s enough to provide three homes in Arizona a year of water, on average.

Mitchell said the cuts from Mother Nature are “far more fierce than the federal government will ever be,” putting farmers on the western slope of the Rockies at risk of going out of business. 

And while those in the Upper Basin balk at the swimming pools and golf courses in the middle of the desert that are prevalent in urban centers of Arizona and Nevada, municipalities account for only about 25% of the Lower Basin’s water use. 

Agriculture accounts for the other 75%. Andrea Travnik, assistant secretary for water and science at the U.S. Department of Interior, dodged a question from PBS about whether the federal government would contemplate putting restrictions on water use for farming, which would be incredibly politically unpopular. 

Travnik said that the federal government has already worked with the states to raise water levels in Lake Mead through conservation efforts, and will continue to push for conservation, in addition to other solutions like desalination — which is extremely expensive — and water reuse. 

But Brad Udall, a water and climate scientist at Colorado State University, said that if the 1,500 farmers that depend on Colorado River water for their crops are pitted against the 5 million people in metropolitan Phoenix and the 18 million people in the greater Los Angeles area, the winner will be obvious. 

Udall thinks the states need to ditch the outdated 1922 Colorado River Compact, which allocated 7.5 million acre-feet for each basin, and was based on a faulty model that assumed the river system could supply 15 million acre-feet annually. While use agreements have been updated numerous times since then, the allocations to each basin remain the same. 

The region is in the midst of a 20-year mega drought that is wreaking havoc on the river. Since 2000, flows in the Colorado River have decreased by 20%. And since, 2020 flows are down 35%. 

After negotiations with the Upper Basin were unfruitful earlier this year, the Lower Basin states in May offered their own proposal to reduce their shared usage by 1.25 million acre-feet annually in 2027 and 2028, with about a 30% cut for Arizona. 

This proposal was aimed at helping to stabilize water levels in Lake Powell and Lake Mead, the system’s two key reservoirs, whose water levels fell this month to their lowest point since 1957. 

Udall described both reservoirs as just above deadpool, the point at which water drops too low to flow past a dam by gravity. 

“Deadpool is a point where you lose control of the reservoir,” he said. “Mother Nature controls what happens. It controls what comes in. It controls what you send out the bottom.”

Reaching deadpool would turn those reservoirs into nothing more than concrete basins where water evaporates, Udall said. 

“It’s kind of hard to overstate the consequences of losing those water bank accounts for the states that rely on it in the Lower Basin,” he said. 

While Mitchell said that the Upper Basin couldn’t guarantee its 7.5 million acre-feet delivery of water to the Lower Basin, it would attempt to prevent the reservoirs from reaching deadpool. 

Tom Buschatzke, director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources, said that the basins could come to an agreement today, if the Upper Basin would agree to take a 2% mandatory cut of its annual available water supply, or about 100,000 acre-feet in a year with 5 million acre feet available. 

Mitchell did not say she would agree to those cuts, saying that the Upper Basin states are already managing their water responsibly. 

But Arizona and the other Lower Basin states have undertaken significant conservation efforts for Colorado River water since 2014 and have reduced their consumption from 7.4 million acre-feet in 2015 to just over 6 million in 2024, adding 165 feet of water to Lake Mead. 

All of the water officials who participated in the PBS special said they would prefer to hammer out a compromise instead of going to court, but that they were committed to protecting their water rights. 

In March, Arizona retained the high-powered law firm Sullivan & Cromwell to represent the state in possible litigation among the Colorado River Basin states and the federal government. 

Kathryn Sorensen, director of research at the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University, said that while the fight for Colorado River water has become “existential” because of overallocation, Arizonans shouldn’t panic yet. 

Even if the Central Arizona Project goes dry, she said, Phoenix still has banked groundwater and the Salt and Verde rivers to fall back on. Sorensen said she doesn’t expect municipal water shortages, but she does predict higher water bills. 

The Trump administration’s draft “preferred alternative” plan for the river, released last month, could reduce the Lower Basin’s allocation by 3 million acre-feet per year, slashing Arizona’s water supply from the river by more than 75%. But there’s still a possibility that the federal government could implement the Lower Basin’s proposal for smaller cuts instead. 

The federal government’s new river usage rules, which are still being negotiated, will be released later this year. 

Udall said that the U.S. is totally failing to address the overall cause of the river’s decline. 

“There’s a whole bunch of scientific studies that suggest that this is very much human-caused,” Udall said. “It’s due to our greenhouse gas emissions and the warming of the earth right now.”

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