Colorado River Water Deal Deadline Between Western States

from Rachel BeckerCalMatters

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The clock is ticking until Tuesday’s federal deadline for California and six other western states to hammer out the broad strokes of a deal to split supplies from the dried-up Colorado River.

Officials with the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, the Interior Department’s federal river stewards, have threatened to impose their own plan if states can’t agree on how to manage the river after 2026, when the current river rule expires.

Dire predictions that another dry year could see major reservoirs in the basin drop to alarmingly low levels have increased the urgency and the tension.

But, after two years of tense negotiationsstates remain at an impasse. Those in the river’s lower basin — California, Arizona, and Nevada — collide with Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and New Mexico upstream. It is a major point of contention how much each pool should reduce their use of the overflowing river as climate change further reduces supplies.

“We’ve been in a holding mode and we have to land this plane by Tuesday,” JB Hamby, California’s chief negotiator as chairman of the California Colorado River Board, told CalMatters.

California’s dependence on the Colorado River raises the stakes. The state takes more than half from the power generated at Hoover Dam on Lake Mead, and more water from the main stem than any other in the basin. Half a million acres of alfalfa, winter vegetables and other crops in the Imperial Valley rely on the Colorado River, which also supplies urban Southern California through the Metropolitan Water District.

But so was California relatively impenetrable to scarcity on the river, with the rights of senior guides long considered impregnable. Now the questions hanging over the final days of the negotiations are – how real is the threat of missing the deadline? And what exactly would the consequences be for California?

Short deadlines on the Colorado River

For decades, federal officials have threatened to intervene if states in the Colorado River basin fail to reach an agreement. The threat — and the inevitable lawsuits that water suppliers fear will follow — have motivated the big deals that now govern the river’s operations.

Actual federal intervention is far less common – although the US government has intervened in the past, on a smaller scale.

In the early 2000s, Southern California was forced to stop using excess water from the Colorado River when other states began demanding their fair share. The Home Department set a deadline of December 31, 2002 California water agencies to strike a deal to shed excess water or face immediate cuts.

The Imperial Irrigation District—far away the largest user of water from the Colorado River in California – refused. So the Secretary of the Interior cut California’s supplies, leading to legal battles and ten months later, deal.

But the deadlines and threats seem to have lost their teeth in recent years as states in the Colorado River Basin fizzled deadline after deadlinewith little federal response.

Last week, Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs urged the Trump administration to be more assertive. “As we approach critical deadlines, we need the Trump administration to step in, show leadership and get a deal done,” she said in remarks prepared for a water conference.

Elizabeth Kobeleprofessor of political science at the University of Nevada, Reno, said negotiations may have become too contentious for deadlines to matter. She attributed it to the breakdown of relations between the countries of the basin devastatingly dry river conditions raise the stakes.

“We have less water and that causes more problems with the waves,” Kobele said. “Cut a smaller pie for more people.”

Strike against storage

The Veterans Day deadline is not the deadline; it’s an interim milestone as federal officials race to hammer out a plan before then the current rule expires.

Scott Cameron, now the acting head of the Bureau of Reclamation, told a conference in June that in the absence of a deal, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum is ready to take over as leader. His position gives him power to declare the river deficient and call for cuts in the lower basin.

But the Trump administration declined to specify exactly what it might do. “At this stage, all parties must remain focused on the difficult but necessary work required to reach a seven-nation agreement,” an unidentified interior ministry spokesman said in an emailed statement.

If there’s still no plan by the end of 2026, the rulebook could revert to one from the 1970s, according to an analysis by Arizona State University’s Kyl Center for Water Policy.

That worries Bill Hasenkamp of the Metropolitan Water District because it would interfere with Metropolitan’s ability to continue storing water in Lake Mead in the Colorado River Basin, the nation’s largest reservoir, during dry periods.

The water giant imports water from Northern California and the Colorado River to supply 19 million people in six Southern California counties.

Currently, Hasenkamp, ​​Metropolitan’s manager of Colorado River resources, says the district has dumped about 1.5 million acre-feet of water into the reservoir over the past 20 years. That’s enough to power 4.5 million households for a year.

Metropolitan saves water from the Colorado River in Lake Mead when water from Northern California reservoirs is plentiful, and draws from those supplies when the state’s supply dries up. But under rules dating back to the 1970s, providers will no longer be able to add water to that savings account. Metropolitan will have to use its bank stores for the next ten years or risk losing the water.

Hasencamp estimates that stored water could disappear more quickly if California faces larger cuts.

“Under a new regime, the feds — if things get dry enough — could lay us off,” Hasenkamp said. “We can access that storage, but we might need it to make up for the cuts in the river that could come to us. So it’s a very undesirable situation.”

After all, experts agree that the most undesirable situations and the greatest risks for the countries of the basin, it will probably come from nature itself.

The Colorado River is in the grip of a megadrought; Brad Udallsenior scientist for water and climate research at the Colorado Water Institute, Colorado State University, called the August forecasts for Lake Powell and Mead reservoirs “beyond terrible.”

Udall said recent reservoir forecasts remain dire. One scenario has “both Powell and Mead entering uncharted territory by (the end of) Water Year 2026,” Udall said in an email.

“This is the new reality,” Cameron, the acting head of Reclamation, said at a meeting in Arizona this summer. “There are real risks for both downstream and upstream states if we don’t collectively do something different from what we’ve done in the past.”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.