Colorado will not face water supply cuts as part of federal Colorado River plan

DENVER — Coloradans’ share of the Colorado River will not change under the federal government’s new operating plans for at least the next two years.

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 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 an operating plan, it can be substituted in at any point in the coming decade.

“We are grateful for the Seven Basin States, the thirty 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.”

The Department of Interior on Friday also finalized the 10-year framework, which was first announced earlier this summer.

“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 sits 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, Lake Mead was 27% full and Lake Powell was at 21% of its capacity.

Already this spring, water managers scrambled to send more water 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, 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 at or very near the lowest level that the Bureau of Reclamation needs to keep Glen Canyon Dam’s hydropower plant running.

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, 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.

“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.”

_____