Colorado River water-saving agreement unlikely by Tuesday deadline

As Arizona environmentalist Chris Kuzdas sees it, the Southwest is at “the moment where I think the big question is are we going to get real on the Colorado River?”

Right now, it appears the answer to that question will not come by Tuesday, when the seven river basin states face a federal deadline to produce a plan to make major cuts in their water use.

But after two months of negotiations among the states, several officials and water experts say they hope an acceptable plan can be produced in the coming months.

Tuesday’s deadline stems from a June 14 statement by Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Camille Touton calling for the basin states to reduce such use by 2 million to 4 million acre-feet a year. That’s 14% to 28% of the states’ current uses.

As of Friday, all indications were that the states had not reached such an agreement. Although several officials described the situation as “fluid” with discussions likely continuing up to the last minute, it appears the Upper and Lower Basin states remain far apart on what their relative cutbacks should be.

Just in the Lower Basin, which includes Arizona, California and Nevada, a wide range of estimates has been circulated by various parties of how much water individual states are willing to save.

“All those numbers that have been thrown out gives you an indication of how fluid the whole situation is,” said Doug MacEachern, an Arizona Department of Water Resources spokesman. “We’ve heard numbers all the way from zero to 900,000 acre-feet would be given from individual states. It’s a chaotic situation.”

From the conversations he’s had, “I get the sense the Upper Basin is just hunkering down, and this is a Lower Basin problem,” said Jeff Kightlinger, former general manager of Southern California’s Metropolitan Water District. “They’re saying, ‘We’re not even using what we’re allowed to.’ And the Lower Basin folks are looking at these numbers and saying, ‘We just can’t do this.’

“I think eventually a deal has to come together, and it probably will. I just don’t see it coming together in the remainder of this year. They may do a small piece of it and say that will do it right now,” he said.

More uncertain is when and how Touton and the Bureau of Reclamation will respond, assuming the states don’t reach agreement. While some experts doubt the bureau will take the political risk of imposing a solution in an election year, others think such action is likely due to its obligation to protect the entire river system.

For now, “I think Tuesday, she will encourage us to keep working, and work with us to develop a plan that does meet her goal,” said Bill Hasencamp, the Metropolitan district’s Colorado River program manager. “I think she will give us a little bit more time, recognizing that 60 days is pretty aggressive.”

If the bureau does impose solutions, many experts say that could trigger litigation that could delay a fix for the river’s chronic deficits in water supply for years. But if the bureau does nothing, that could sentence the river and Lakes Mead and Powell to continued declines even as the two big reservoirs already approach levels at which their dams’ turbines could no longer generate power.

Kuzdas, of the Environmental Defense Fund, said he’s thinking about these disputes and questions from the perspective of future generations. One reason is he expects to become a father in the fall, when he and his wife plan to welcome a foster daughter to their family.

“I ask myself, 20 years from now what will she think, when she looks back on 2022, about this moment,” said Kuzdas, a water program manager for the defense fund and a spokesman for the Arizona Water Coalition, representing five groups with 60,000 Arizona members.

“On the one hand, she could think there are laws and policies going back to the 1922 compact (that divided the river’s water rights), that largely excluded Indigenous people and excluded consideration of the river itself and the environment and they were kind of set up to fail from the beginning ... and they kind of stuck on that course, and the system crashed.

“Or will she look back 20 years from now on 2022, and is that the moment when they started making steps in different directions, beyond special entitlement, and got together and figure out, what do we need to do to ensure water security for 41 million people in this basin in this climate changing world?”

‘Very hard time’

Terry Goddard, president of the Central Arizona Project‘s governing board, says he cannot disclose specifics about the negotiations, because the board has discussed them in executive session. But in an interview Wednesday, he expressed frustration at what he sees as a lack of progress.

“This is a constantly sinking situation (with water levels at Lake Powell and Lake Mead), and people still don’t get the idea we’re in a very serious situation,” Goddard said. Asked to specify which people, he replied, “I would start with the public at large. People still think this is, with some justification, it’s a problem we can manage our way out of.”

But he said he mainly means water officials of the seven basin states.

“They need to make very significant progress. I don’t think I’m violating any confidence to say that even at 2 million acre-feet, they’re having a very hard time to come to a unified conclusion, even in the Lower Basin.

“You’d think a crisis would move people to say ‘here’s a 2 million acre-foot plan and here’s a 4 million acre-foot plan’. It’s time for Interior to step up and take action. If the states can’t do it, the secretary of the Interior is water master. It’s time for bold approaches,” said Goddard, a former Arizona attorney general and former Phoenix mayor.

Goddard has done a still-unvetted analysis of the reservoirs’ precarious situation. He estimates about 18.5 million acre-feet of available water in the reservoirs going into 2023, he said. That doesn’t include water that can’t be extracted from the lakes because it lies below “dead pool” levels.

Adding up how much Arizona, California, Nevada and Mexico are likely to take from the river next year, along with expected water losses to evaporation, that would leave a little more than 9 million acre-feet available water in both reservoirs, he said. That’s about 3.6 million acre-feet less than was in the reservoirs this year.

If you cut the Lower Basin’s water use further by assuming that the water system entered its most severe shortage level in 2023, that would save another 700,000 acre-feet for the two lakes. That would mean the lakes lose a little bit less than 3 million acre-feet, he said.

“That still means we’re just short of 3 million acre-feet from stabilization of the lakes, not building them up back up, with security (for the future),” he said.

Another way of looking at the river system’s plight is through Reclamation’s 24-month study, which forecasts future levels of all Colorado River system reservoirs.

The most recent study, from July, has a “minimum probable” forecast for Lake Powell to fall below 3,490 feet — the level at which Glen Canyon Dam could no longer generate power — for eight months starting in October 2023.

For Lake Mead, the “minimum probable” forecast has it below 1,020 feet for 12 months starting in June 2023, hitting 991 feet in June 2024. Below 950 feet, Hoover Dam’s turbines can’t generate power.

The “minimum probable” forecast is supposed to occur at most 10% of the time. But in recent years, on several occasions, reservoirs’ levels have fallen closer to what earlier “minimum probable” projections had said than to forecasts considered “most probable.”

Upper vs. Lower basins

One reason the states can’t agree on a water-saving plan is that the Upper Basin’s proposal to the bureau won’t save any water in 2023, although it offers the prospect of future cuts. The Upper Basin states are Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming.

In a July 18 letter to the bureau, Upper Colorado River Commission Executive Director Chuck Cullom wrote that while Upper Basin states recognize bringing the river into balance requires collaboration from all parties, the Upper Basin’s “options to protect critical reservoir elevations are limited.”

First, the Upper Basin’s water supplies are limited to the river’s shrinking supplies, with little available reservoir storage upstream of Lake Powell. Second, that basin has lost more than 660,000 ace-feet of water in the past two years due to extra releases from upstream reservoirs to prop up Powell, he wrote.

“Our water users already suffer chronic shortages under current conditions” including reductions to those holding normally protected water rights, he added.

The Upper Basin proposes a plan:

Congressional reauthorization of a past “system conservation” pilot program, in which various parties are paid to give up some of their water supplies.

A new Drought Response Operations Plan for 2023, in which still more water would be released to Powell from upstream reservoirs.

Consideration of a comprehensive Upper Basin demand management program, that would compensate water users for giving up water in larger quantities. The Upper Basin has been investigating such a program for several years, but progress has been halting.

Other proposals involve spending money from the recently passed federal infrastructure law to improve water measurement and monitoring efforts, and continuing “strict water management and administration” of existing supplies.

Because federal data shows the Lower Basin is depleting more than twice as much water as the Upper Basin, “additional efforts to protect critical reservoir elevations must include significant actions focused downstream of Lake Powell,” wrote Cullom.

Responding, Lower Basin state water officials noted Interior Department officials have said water-use curbs must come from both basins for a plan to be fair and effective.

On Friday, the Metropolitan Water District’s Hasencamp expressed optimism that if the Lower Basin comes up with a “robust plan” to conserve, “we can be more aggressive with the Upper Basin.”

Upper Basin officials haven’t committed to that in negotiations, “but I think they sense the critical nature of the problem, and that we all have to participate,” said Hasencamp.

Sara Leonard, a spokeswoman from the Colorado Water Conservation Board, said in an email Friday, “Colorado looks forward to seeing proposals from Arizona, California, and Nevada.”

Unlike the Lower Basin, the Upper Basin’s water supplies vary year to year, Leonard said. The five-point plan recognizes that information on available snowpack won’t be available until spring 2023, she added.

Farmers propose compensation plan

In the Lower Basin, the only specific water saving proposal to surface has come from a coalition of Yuma-area irrigation districts.

The coalition offers to give up one acre-foot of water for 925,000 acres along the Lower Colorado River, south of Lake Mead, in both Arizona and California. That acreage doesn’t include farmland watered with river supplies by various tribes.

The farmers seek compensation of $1,500 an acre-foot, to cover financial losses they incur by giving up water. They propose that much conservation and compensation annually for four years.

“It would be an effort to protect food security for 300 million people who benefit from Yuma and the Imperial Irrigation District region” in the Southern California desert, said Chris Udall, executive director of the Agri-Business and Water Council of Arizona.

“It’s not a fallowing program. It’s not a transfer,” Udall said. “It’s an effort to try to keep operations going and protect economies there. They’ve stepped up to provide what they can.”

Explaining the rationale for the $1,500-an-acre-foot payments, Wade Noble, a longtime Yuma water lawyer and spokesman for the coalition of irrigation districts there, said it takes about $10,000 an acre to grow a crop.

“When you say $1,500 an acre, that is only about 15% of your cost, and you’re taking a 15-20% loss in water. You can’t translate that from reduction of water to loss of profit. It’s a rough way of looking at,” Noble said. “You go to farmers and say, ‘would you be willing to cut 1 acre-foot per acre to grow food.’ They say, we will only do this voluntarily if it works for us.”

“We’re not going to take it and be putting it into our pockets. We will invest that into the land, so we can figure out a way to recover from the absolute decrease in crop production due to a decrease in water,” perhaps by drilling wells to tap groundwater supplies, Noble said.

“This is a natural disaster of historic proportions. You are talking about just from the Yuma area alone, produce that feeds 300 million people. You can’t replicate that anywhere else in the world” in the winter, he said.

Until very recently, major uncertainty existed where money would come from to compensate farmers and other parties who give up river water supplies. But about 10 days ago, U.S. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona secured a commitment from Democratic leaders in the Senate to insert $4 billion for Western drought relief into the Inflation Reduction Act, which has since passed the Senate and House.

But while all parties in the Colorado River issues agree that money will be a big help, it won’t be enough to by itself fund the Yuma-area farmers’ proposal. At $1,500 an acre-foot for 925,000 acre-feet, $4 billion would run out in about 2.8 years. Plus, that money is supposed to be spent not only in the Colorado River Basin but in other drought-stricken areas such as California’s Central Valley.

“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” said Kightlinger, of the farmers’ request. He noted that when Metropolitan was doing fallowing programs in Southern California five to seven years ago, farmers’ typical profit margins on alfalfa ranged from $300 to $500 an acre. While that’s certainly increased, $1,500 an acre is too much, he said.

Another big issue about the $4 billion is: Will it be spent on temporary water use reductions such as fallowing crops, “or is it going to be invested in something that will permanently reduce the demand, and bring this demand closer to the supply?” asked Eric Kuhn, an author and former general manager of a western Colorado water district.

The feds aren’t going to put up $4 billion to solve this problem every two years, so, “My question is how is this going to get paid for?” asked CAP board member Jim Holway. “It’s ultimately got to be the water users paying for it. We set a dangerous precedent, relying on a short-term bailout. Farmers can’t expect this, year after year.”

As for other Lower Basin water users, two weeks ago the Desert Sun in Palm Springs reported that the region’s biggest Colorado River user, the Imperial Irrigation District in El Centro, along with other Southern California irrigation districts and Metropolitan were considering giving up 400,000 to 500,000 acre-feet.

On Friday, Imperial spokesman Bob Schettler said, “To clarify, that was one of many proposals. We can’t confirm or deny it’s still existing. We can say negotiations continue. We don’t want to impede any talks by getting confused over the numbers yet.”

Several other sources, speaking on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the negotiations, said they’ve heard that California and Arizona are likely to or are considering giving up about 1 million acre-feet total, with Arizona giving up slightly more than California.

Neither Hasencamp nor CAP officials would comment on their specific proposals.

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