No deal on Colorado River as Western states fail to reach agreement by feds’ Nov. 11 deadline

Water managers from the seven states that share the Colorado River have blown a deadline given to them by the federal government to come up with a rough plan on how the drought-stricken river will be shared in the future.

The Upper Basin (Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming) still cannot find agreement with the Lower Basin (California, Arizona and Nevada) about how the nation’s two largest reservoirs — Lake Powell and Lake Mead — will be operated and how cuts will be shared in dry years.

In June, Scott Cameron, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s acting assistant secretary for water and science, said federal officials would need to know the broad outlines of a plan from the states by Nov. 11. Despite frequent meetings in recent months, negotiators were unable to hammer out a deal by Tuesday, leaving future management for the water supply for 40 million people in the Southwest cloaked in uncertainty. 

Instead, the states, the Interior Department and the federal Bureau of Reclamation released a short joint statement Tuesday afternoon, noting that serious and ongoing challenges face the Colorado River.

“While more work needs to be done, collective progress has been made that warrants continued efforts to define and approve details for a finalized agreement,” the statement reads. “Through continued cooperation and coordinated action, there is a shared commitment to ensuring the long-term sustainability and resilience of the Colorado River system.” 

Environmental groups disappointed

The failure to come up with a plan by the deadline has sparked criticism from the basin’s environmental groups. 

“I’m really disappointed with how yesterday played out; the states did not have anything to meet the Nov. 11 deadline,” said John Berggren, a regional policy manager with Western Resource Advocates. “The fact that they didn’t have a basic framework for how to manage the system after 2026 is really unfortunate, and I think they missed a good chance to put forward something that we can all consider and examine as a basin.” 

Representatives from the seven states have been in talks for two years about how to manage the river after the current guidelines expire. After a long standoff without much progress throughout 2024, state representatives in June offered a glimmer of hope for a way forward, floating a concept for sharing the river based on natural flows at Lee Ferry, the dividing line between the Upper and Lower basins, instead of water demand. But that hope evaporated like water off Lake Mead, with negotiators reportedly deadlocked again by the end of the summer.  

A statement from environmental groups Great Basin Water Network and Living Rivers called the Nov. 11 deadline arbitrary and ineffectual, and said the inaction symbolizes the overall dysfunction on the river and in government. They chastised the states and federal government for the lack of transparency and lack of public participation surrounding negotiations.

“The states don’t deserve the kid-glove treatment any longer,” Kyle Roerink, executive director of the Great Basin Water Network, said in a prepared statement. “They have a behavioral problem as much as they do a hydrology problem. Any entity that wants to increase use is unfit to manage our most precious resource.”

A group of influential environmental organizations, including American Rivers, National Audubon Society, Environmental Defense Fund, The Nature Conservancy, Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, Trout Unlimited and Western Resource Advocates, released a joint statement Wednesday saying that they were deeply disappointed the states did not find consensus and that federal leadership will be essential. 

The statement called for solutions that ground management decisions in the best available science, expand conservation programs, modernize infrastructure and ensure that Native American tribes — which have underutilized rights to a large share of the river’s water — play a meaningful role in shaping the river’s future.

“We understand the extraordinary complexity of this challenge and the difficult tradeoffs the states are working hard to navigate — but the river isn’t going to wait for process or for politics,” the statement said. “Drought, intensified by increasingly extreme conditions, is reshaping the basin, and the window to secure the river’s future and move beyond crisis-driven policymaking is closing fast.”

Since the turn of the century, the Colorado River basin has been locked in the grip of a megadrought. Climate change has robbed Western rivers of their flows, with the basin seeing a 20% decline from the 20th-century average, according to scientists. Those factors, as well as unrelenting water demands, have pushed Lake Powell and Lake Mead to record-low levels in recent years and thrown river management into crisis mode. 

The current negotiations between the seven states are aimed at replacing the 2007 Interim Guidelines, which lay out how the reservoirs will be operated and shortages shared, and which expire at the end of 2026. New guidelines would need to be in place by the beginning of the next water year, Oct. 1, 2026, leaving little time to complete the required National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) review process.

The 2007 guidelines set annual Powell and Mead releases based on reservoir levels and do not go far enough to prevent them from being drawn down during consecutive dry years. In 2022, Lake Powell flirted with falling below a critical elevation to make hydropower, and may be headed there again next year if conditions don’t improve.

Sticking points

Over the past few months, the positions of two of the states — Colorado and Arizona — have emerged as one of the main sources of disagreement. Water from the Colorado River has fueled the exponential growth in recent decades of Arizona’s cities, which are the economic and political powerhouse of the state, along with some of the most productive farmland in the basin. But Arizona’s reliance on the junior water rights of the Central Arizona Project means it is first on the chopping block for cuts. 

Arizona representatives have said that the deepest cuts should be shared basinwide, including by the Upper Basin. Gov. Katie Hobbs and other state lawmakers said in a Nov. 11 letter to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum that Arizona’s Colorado River allocation is important to the nation’s growth and independence and that Colorado River reliability is a matter of national security. The letter highlighted how the state plays a critical role in manufacturing semiconductors and information-technology products. 

“With such high stakes for Arizona and the nation, we find it alarming that the Upper Basin states have repeatedly refused to implement any volume of binding, verifiable water supply reductions,” the letter reads. “This extreme negotiating posture — four of the seven basin states refusing to participate in any sharing of water shortages — has led to a fundamental impasse that is preventing the successful development of a seven-state consensus plan for the management of the Colorado River.”

The Lower Basin has committed to a 1.5 million acre-foot reduction, which accounts for evaporation and transit losses.

Water managers from Colorado — which is the de facto leader of the Upper Basin with a 51.75% share of the water allocated to the four Upper Basin states — have pushed back on the notion that their states should contribute to cutbacks in water use since their water users already suffer shortages in dry years and the four states have never used their entire allocation of the river, while the Lower Basin overuses its share. Colorado representative Becky Mitchell has repeatedly said that any cuts the state makes must be voluntary, not mandatory.

However, the Upper Basin states have been experimenting for years with conservation programs that pay water users to cut back, most recently in 2023 and 2024 with the federally funded System Conservation Pilot Program. In a proposal submitted in March 2024, the Upper Basin states offered up a potential conservation pool in Lake Powell of up to 200,000 acre-feet a year, and most water users accept that some type of future conservation program for the Upper Basin is inevitable. 

What happens now?

Federal officials had previously set a second deadline of Feb. 14, 2026, for the states to present details of a plan. They have repeatedly said that if the seven states fail to come up with an agreement, Reclamation will exercise its authority to protect critical reservoir levels. That could include releases from upstream reservoirs to prop up Powell and Mead, including releasing water from Colorado’s Blue Mesa Reservoir on the Gunnison River. 

Reclamation is moving forward with its NEPA process and said in early October that it plans to have a draft environmental impact statement by the end of the year. Representatives from the bureau were not available for comment on Wednesday due to the government shutdown. Cameron has said that the alternatives analyzed in the environmental impact statement will be broad enough that they would capture any seven-state agreement, which they could then plug in as the preferred alternative — assuming the states come up with something.

“The basin states remain committed to collaboration grounded in the best available science and respect for all Colorado River water users,” Mitchell said in a prepared statement. “We are taking a meaningful step toward long-term sustainability and demonstrating a shared determination to find supply-driven solutions.”

Aspen Journalism is a nonprofit, investigative news organization covering water, environment, social justice and more. Visit Aspenjournalism.org.

Heather Sackett is the managing editor at Aspen Journalism and the editor and reporter on the Water Desk.