Six of the seven states in the Colorado River basin have come up with a joint proposal on how to meet the federal government’s unprecedented need to reduce water use as more than two decades of drought in the West have left critical reservoirs at dangerously low levels.
But California, the biggest water user, hasn’t joined them — a dispute over how to protect the dwindling water supply that serves 40 million people will continue in the coming months. The Interior Department asked states to contribute plans by Tuesday on how to voluntarily reduce water use by 2 to 4 million acre-feet — or one-third of the river’s annual average flow.
“It’s certainly not going mainstream,” said Jeffrey Kittlinger, former general manager of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, the water supplier at the center of the talks. “It’s very difficult now.”
The proposal by six states — Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming — seeks to protect major reservoirs in Lake Powell and Lake Mead from falling below critical levels, such as when dams can’t do it anymore. At a hydroelectric or “dead pool”, the water is effectively blocked from flowing out of these lakes. Before the above-average snowpack in recent weeks, the Bureau of Reclamation projected that Lake Powell could reach such levels this winter.
Due to the droughts of the last two decades and especially in recent years, the flow of the river has decreased, but the regions continue to consume more from the river as it was established a century ago.
The proposal would set new cuts for southwestern states from major reservoirs — Arizona, Nevada and California — as well as Mexico, which has treaty rights to parts of the river. The proposal would result in a reduction of about 2 million acre-feet — the low end of the federal government’s request — and the biggest water users would be California and Arizona. As reservoir levels continue to decline, the document suggests California, which has 4.4 million acre-feet of water rights, will need to cut more than 1 million acre-feet.
California has proposed to reduce only 400,000 acre feet. An acre-foot is 326,000 gallons, or enough to cover an acre in water one foot deep. In a statement to The Associated Press, California’s Colorado River Board chairman, JB Hamby, said the state will “focus on practical solutions that can be implemented now to protect water levels in the reservoir without conflict and litigation” and provide the supply. His own plan.
The other six states submitted their case in a letter to the opposition office on Monday.
“Over the last twenty-plus years, we realize that there is far less water than has been flowing into the Colorado River system, and we are running out of storage to deplete.” State representatives added that they will continue to work with the federal government and others “to reach a consensus on how best to share the burden of maintaining a system that benefits all of us.”
“This modeling proposal is a key step in the ongoing dialogue among the seven basin states as we continue to seek collaborative solutions to stabilize the Colorado River system,” Arizona Department of Water Resources Director Tom Buschatke said in a statement.
Restoration is in the process of an environmental review of how Glen Canyon and Hoover Dams will perform during low-water conditions. By summer, the process is expected to allow the federal government’s legal authority to make unilateral cuts to states’ water allocations.
One of the central tensions in these complex negotiations is how to balance reductions in agricultural regions with those in cities, including major population centers. Agriculture uses about 80 percent of the river’s water and tends to have high rights, some of which date back to the 19th century. The way this “priority system” works, Phoenix residents lose water before Yuma vegetable farmers. Alfalfa growers in southern California’s Imperial and Coquela valleys keep their water from people in parts of Los Angeles.
Kittlinger, along with many other water experts and officials, say reductions of this size and weight should be shared rather than cut as high-level cuts.
“You cannot follow the priority system. That would be a disaster. That means: we put all the cuts on the core economy. This simply cannot be realized,” he said.
But officials with long-standing water rights in these agricultural districts are unwilling to give them up without a fight — or compensation that meets their needs.
Alex Cardenas, president of the Imperial Irrigation District’s board of directors, pointed out that water rights among farmers in the California area near the Mexican border predate the establishment of the Bureau of Reclamation, which manages the river system. His water district uses 2.6 million acre-feet of water annually to irrigate more than 400,000 acres of farmland for alfalfa, grasses and other crops.
“We stand behind a priority system on the river, and we understand that there are painful cuts that people have to make. But we won’t be like a sudden reservoir of uncontrolled, unsustainable urbanization, Cárdenas said. We will not destroy our local economies so that they can continue to grow their urban economies.
As negotiations progressed in recent months, the Imperial Irrigation District proposed reducing its use by 250,000 acre feet — or about 10 percent. The Biden administration paved the way for that provision by pledging $250 million for environmental projects to address dust-plagued shorelines around the Salton Sea, California’s largest lake, which is fed by agricultural runoff from the Imperial Valley.
Cardenas said the prospect of a 10 percent cut from the region’s $5 billion agricultural economy would cause serious economic pain to a community already suffering from high unemployment. But relative to other states — even those cuts may not be enough.
Negotiators got a little help from nature to start the year. Rain and snow storms in California in January raised reservoir levels in the state and blanketed the Sierra Nevada mountains in a blanket of snow. Snow cover in the Rocky Mountains, a major drainage source that feeds the Colorado River system, is higher than normal, but not as much as in California.
But the abundant rains have been a double-edged sword, posing a political challenge to negotiators trying to agree on drastic reductions, analysts following the talks said.
Michael J., a senior researcher at the Pacific Institute and an expert on the Colorado River. “If severe drought conditions continue, it will be easier for them to sell more reductions,” Cohen said. But there’s this public perception that there seems to be flooding, why do we need to take extra measures when there’s been so much water in all these recent storms.
The past two years have seen a healthy amount of winter snowpack in the Rockies, with less water flowing into Lake Powell than normal, as dry land from warmer weather takes up more water before it reaches the reservoir. The water level at Lake Powell has dropped about a foot this year and is currently at 33 feet, where Glen Canyon Dam can no longer generate power.
“There is a drought problem. But there’s a problem with the rules on that,” Cohen said. The rules governing the system are not permanent.