Seeking security in scarcity: Officials emphasize need for action as Colorado River faces dwindling water supply

Water availability on Colorado’s Western Slope is under increasing pressure and uncertainty from climate change, population growth, and ongoing negotiations.

“We’re seeing a shrinking resource, and one trend that is likely to continue to accelerate whether we have more precipitation or not … is the warming temperatures are going to drive less water available for human use,” said Andy Mueller, general manager of the Colorado River District. “The question is: Can we as a society come together and plan for that? We haven’t done a great job of doing that so far, but perhaps we can.”

He posed this question to a room full of water managers, agricultural producers, and elected officials in Grand Junction on Friday, Sept. 20, for the Colorado River District’s annual water seminar. This year’s seminar encouraged attendees to “meet the moment” and to find clarity, solutions, and opportunities amid water insecurity in the West. 

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“We are at a crossroads in so many ways in this country, and the decisions that we make today impact not just us but all the future generations who depend on this river and every river,” said Republic Rep. Marc Catlin, who represents Delta, Dolores, Gunnison, Hinsdale, Montezuma, Montrose, Ouray, and San Miguel counties, as he opened the seminar. “We are facing a multi-generational problem. We need multi-generational solutions.”

As the event kicked off, attendees were asked to share the biggest challenge facing water management in their community. Words like “drought,” “scarcity,” “lack,” “quantity,” “politics,” “knowledge,” “climate change,” and “agreement” dominated the responses from attendees. 

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Throughout the day, these topics and more would work their way into discussions around the unpredictability of Colorado’s future climate, the heavily scrutinized post-2026 operations of the Upper Colorado River Basin reservoirs, the river district’s push to preserve and purchase the Shoshone water rights, and the impact water scarcity and curtailment have on Western Slope agricultural producers. 

The State of the River

The challenges facing the Colorado River Basin these days follow a long history of attempts to manage and divide the natural resource among the seven states, two Mexican states, and 30 Native American tribes that share the resource.

During the seminar, many references were made to the basin’s history, offering ways to learn and grow from the mistakes of the past.

“The law of the river started technically in 1922 with the Colorado River Compact,” Mueller said in his State of the River address.

He described the three-page document — as well as the process of creating it and the hydrologic assumptions underlying it — as “flawed” and “faulty.”

As a result, the decades that followed have been filled with disputes, droughts, wet times, new development, and significant additions to the law of the river, he added. This has included court decrees, agreements, federal legislation, operational guidelines, and more.

Many of these historic attempts to govern the water set the basin and water users up for failure, including the Colorado River Basin Projects Act. Passed by the federal government in 1968, it authorized and funded several projects within the basin, including initiating the coordinated operation of Lake Powell and Lake Mead.

It was also “a federal piece of legislation that recognized that we were building ourselves out of the natural supply in the river 56 years ago,” Mueller said.

“They knew that, they passed the act, they built the profits, and we’ve all lived with it ever since,” he added.

Similar debates and discussions are resurfacing today as negotiations around Colorado River operations post-2026 continue. These negotiations seek to update agreements made in 2007 by the seven states in the Colorado River Basin. At that time, these states created interim operational guidelines for Lake Powell and Lake Mead as well as for lower basin shortages.

“It’s really complex, and it has huge impacts on not just Western Colorado, not just the entire state of Colorado, but the entire basin,” Mueller said. “Forty million people, 30 Native American tribes, and two countries all depend on how those guidelines get worked out, so we have a lot of pressure going on.”

The impact of water shortages on Colorado’s Western Slope

With an uncertain water future, Coloradans will face the impacts of these negotiations. However, few understand the challenges of water scarcity and uncertainty more than agricultural producers on the Western Slope, many of which have dealt with it for generations. 

In a panel on how curtailment — whether the legal, natural, or self-imposed restriction of water — impacts producers, Robert Sakata, a farmer and the Colorado Department of Agriculture water policy advisor, shared that over the last 25 years, Colorado has seen a reduction in the amount of irrigated acres by over a million acres. (This is based on self-reported census data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.)

“That’s pretty scary,” he said. “That’s really reflecting the challenges that we’re facing, not only with climate change but with the increased demands on water because of population growth.”

The threat of this is high for communities like Republican Sen. Cleave Simpson’s in the Rio Grande River Basin and others on the Western Slope where agriculture is embedded in their way of life. 

“Our whole economy, culture, and communities are built around irrigated agriculture,” he said.

In Montrose, where Catlin resides, the next generation is stepping back as a result of the mounting challenges — including preparing for water shortages — and pressure on producers.

“It really carves away at the backbone of these communities,” he said.

Simpson also serves as the general manager of the Rio Grand Water Conservation District, where producers have dealt with permanent water cutbacks since 1968 when a legal curtailment was put on the basin.

Learning from past actions that resulted in this ruling, he said there is a greater appreciation for the entirety and complexity of the water system as well as for taking advantage of opportunities that exist.

“If the next 20 years look like the last 20 years and we don’t take some pro-active approaches and do things about irrigation efficiencies and maybe different crops — I mean, Mother Nature is going to dictate this — we can easily lose 100,000 irrigated acres in my basin,” he said. “Don’t bury your head in the sand. Be thoughtful, and think about it, and engage with the community and think about different paths forward.”

Working together

With these negotiations underway in the basin, conflict is likely unless stakeholders begin working together, planning, and learning from past mistakes and challenges.

“We are going to have conflict unless we can reach a collaborative consensus agreement with the Lower Basin states about how and what the future looks like,” Mueller said.

This collaboration includes bringing more voices to the table, particularly those left out of historic water negotiations.

Lorelai Cloud, vice chairman of the Southern Ute Indian Tribal Council and director for the Colorado Water Conservation Board, said the 30 Native American tribes in the Colorado River Basin are 100 years behind on the conversations after being left out of the initial compact negotiations and many of the subsequent discussions.

“One of the key issues as we move forward in the negotiations of the Colorado River Basin is how tribes have a formal seat in the negotiations,” Cloud said. “How do we change that mythology and get tribes to be included in those conversations, so that it’s not just a struggle that we’re dealing with now, but it’s something that’s normalized for our future generations?”

With uncertainty surrounding future water rights and availability, the Colorado River District is urging state and elected officials to proactively adopt compact curtailment rules.

“We would ask you to help the state have the right funds, have the right personnel, and get moving with our compact curtailment rules — not as a sign of weakness in the interstate negotiations at all but as a sign that we’re smart, we’re helping our water users and our communities plan for our future,” Mueller said, speaking to the electeds in the audience.

Without such rules, Western Colorado will face even more unknowns.

“What we end up with is economic uncertainty. We end up with cultural uncertainty. We end up with literally the divide between East and West just becoming exacerbated and really ugly,” he said. “And so how do we prevent that? Let’s get the rules of the playing field.”

As a whole, it’s a situation that calls for everyone to “plan for the worst, hope for the best,” he said.

“The best way forward for all of us in the entire state is collaboration. It’s cooperation,” he added. “If we get together and work together, we can find solutions that benefit everybody.”