The following is the opinion and analysis of the writer:
Rusty Childress
The deadlines have passed, the water keeps dropping, and the seven states that depend on the Colorado River still have no deal. Years of closed-door sessions and expensive modeling produced zero headway. Everyone protected their political comfort zones. No one protected the river.
The river is answering to aridification. The basin is hotter and drier, the supply is smaller, and this is not a drought cycle. It is a smaller river. Arizona built a desert empire on a short slice of unusually wet data and locked it into law as if it were permanent.
Here is the part no one wants to say plainly. On paper, the system divides 16.5 million acre-feet between the states, tribes and Mexico, and once evaporation and system losses are counted, total obligations push closer to 17 to 18 million acre-feet a year. The river in the 21st century averages more like 12 to 13 million. In extreme years it has fallen below 10 and once dropped near 6. That 4- to 5-million-acre-foot gap is the structural deficit. In dry years it widens dramatically.
Lake Powell and Lake Mead were designed as buffers against drought and year-to-year swings in snowpack. They were never meant to compensate for a permanent shortfall.
Powell has dropped 32 feet in a year and is now hovering near minimum power pool at 3,490 feet. If it hits that mark, Glen Canyon Dam stops producing hydropower and loses its ability to reliably move water downstream to Arizona. Inflow this water year is just 52% of average, meaning the reservoir is being asked to deliver more than nature provides. Under the Bureau of Reclamationβs probable minimum scenario, Powell could reach that threshold by December.
The consequences are already here. Pinal County farmers are watching fields go dry while cities drill and pump groundwater as if it were an infinite backup plan. Across Arizona and the Basin, groundwater has become the silent pressure valve for surface water failure. It is not sustainable. In rural Arizona, declines are measurable and accelerating. If Colorado River cuts deepen, groundwater overdraft becomes the next crisis, a double hit on top of the first.
The old idea of guaranteed Colorado River allocations is evaporating along with the reservoirs. What remains is paper water, numbers in contracts that shrink when elevations fall. Yet developers keep building as if the structural deficit does not exist. Keep doing that, and we will bankrupt the river.
Without agreement, the federal government moves forward on its own. When states fail, Washington writes the rules. Arizonaβs leverage shrinks. Litigation may follow, but federal control arrives first. Delay is no longer affordable.
Operations must become supply-based, not driven by 1922 entitlements. Releases from Lake Powell must track actual inflows, not growth policy. With cavitation risks and dead-pool thresholds, the river is governed by math, not negotiation. Arizona must align demand with supply. If we use more than the river provides, everyone loses.
Arizona does not need a sweet deal. It needs sustainability. Stop approving massive subdivisions, water-intensive data centers, and industrial-scale alfalfa as if the tap is endless. Growth that exceeds supply is not ambition. It is willful blindness.
Arizona was built on boldness. We carved canals into the dust and built an economy where none should exist. That ambition is a genuine strength. But untethered from hydrology, it becomes self-deception. The Law of the River no longer matches the river itself. The rules were built not just on abundance but on overconfidence and denial, the assumption that shortages were temporary, that someone else would take the hit, that peak flows were permanent supply.
Arizona has a choice: live within the river we have, or chase a ghost. Negotiations failed. The bill is due. The math is in charge. The river does not care. History does.
