Federal officials on Wednesday essentially signed on to much less severe cuts in Colorado River water use for Arizona and other Lower Basin states, abandoning more drastic cuts the government initially put forward earlier this year.
The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation formally proposed to cut river water use in Arizona, California and Nevada by a total of 3 million acre-feet through the end of 2026, according to its just-released revised draft supplemental environmental impact statement on the river.
Thatβs a far cry from the drastic cuts the feds proposed last April in an earlier draft, and that Reclamation Commissioner Camille Touton told Congress were needed back in June 2022.
The bureauβs proposed cuts from April 2023 had ranged between 2.1 million and 4 million acre-feet per year through 2026 β with exact cuts to be based on how low the riverβs two big reservoirs fall in the future. By comparison, the Central Arizona Project that supplies drinking water to Tucson and Phoenix has been delivering about 1 million acre-feet yearly in recent years.
In response to this announcement, the Arizona Department of Water Resources said in a statement that the three Lower Basin states have met the bureauβs goal this year through voluntary conservation measures.
But an environmentalist pooh-poohed the bureauβs new environmental report as βmuch ado about nothing,β due to longer-term challenges facing the imperiled river. A longtime water researcher also warned that the Colorado River Basin could easily "blow through" the extra water that built up in the river's reservoirs during this wet year in as little as two years, since that's happened before several times.
The newly proposed cuts are virtually identical to a set of cuts the three Lower Basin states, including Arizona, offered in May. The bureau had based its original proposal on estimates made back in September 2022 of how far Lakes Mead and Powell could fall by 2026. But the new proposed cuts are based on a similar type of forecast made in June 2023, the bureau said.
In that period, conditions on the river improved dramatically due to a very wet and snowy season, giving the Colorado this year its second highest runoff of the otherwise arid 21th century.
That makes the risks of Mead and Powell falling to dangerously low levels in the next few years much less likely than they were a year ago, the bureau said.
The proposal from the states and the bureau is aimed at offsetting short-term risks to Mead and Powell due to ongoing drought and gradual βaridificationβ of the system triggered by human-caused climate change. While long-term risks to river flows are much more serious than those addressed by the proposed cuts, authorities have said they plan to address longer-term issues as they revise broader operating guidelines for the river that expire at the end of 2026.
The entire Colorado River Basin provides essential water supplies to about 40 million people, nearly 5.5 million acres of agricultural lands, hydroelectric renewable power, recreational opportunities, habitat for ecological resources, and other benefits across the western United States and northwestern Mexico, the bureau said in its new report.
The basin occupies about 250,000 square miles in the western United States and 3,500 square miles in northwestern Mexico. The basin states for years have struggled to figure out how to manage a declining river system, one caused by past overbooking of the riverβs supply as well as climate change.
Arizona Department of Water Resources noted the three Lower Basin states this year will only take 5.8 million acre-feet from Lake Mead. Thatβs 1.7 million less than they have the right to use, based on the 1922 Colorado River Compact that divvied up river water supplies among all seven basin states. Those include the Upper Basin states of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming.
This year, the three Lower Basin states voluntarily conserved more than 1 million acre-feet total, ADWR said. Arizona will leave 907,000 acre-feet in Mead this year, with about 272,000 acre feet compensated by federal payouts.
βTaken together, the ongoing voluntary commitments are on track to achieve the volumes in the Lower Basin consensus proposal offered to the federal government earlier this year. Combined with the past yearβs above-average hydrology, the system is stable through 2026,β ADWR said.
But Kyle Roerink, director of the environmentalist Great Basin Water Network, called the bureauβs latest proposal βmuch ado about nothing.
βWhat theyβre trying to do is give more credence to the deal that was struck in May, and affirm that the better hydrology put us in a position where their original draft SEIS was unnecessary. But looking at the 30,000 foot view, we have to be re wise not rest on our laurels.
βWe shouldnβt let this be something that lets us lose sight for negotiations for long-term coordination of management for long-term for Powell and Mead,β said Roerink, whose group operates in Nevada and Utah.
Speaking of the bureau, he added, βI think they are putting a feather in their cap. While they have every right to do so, I would view this as a distraction. This is taking our eyes off the ball a little bit.
βThe bigger issues are dealing with the long-term management. The wet winters buy us a little bit of time, but weβre not going to be able to outrun the demon that is climate change,β Roerink said.
The bureau noted that if no cuts at all were made, based on the river water conditions of September 2022, all possible scenarios it studied showed a 57% chance of Lake Powell falling below 3,490 feet through 2026. Thatβs the level below which the Glen Canyon Dam canβt generate electricity. Similarly, it found a 52% chance of Lake Mead falling below 1,000 feet β 50 feet higher than the level at which Hoover Dam stops generating power β through 2026.
Using this past Juneβs river conditions as a baseline, however, only 8% of all scenarios studied showed Powell falling below 3,490 and Mead falling below 1,000 feet through 2026 with no conservation done on the river, the bureau said.
If the cuts proposed by the Lower Basin states are adopted, only 4% of all possible scenarios studied show Powell falling below 3,490 feet and Mead falling below 1,000, the bureau said.
Because of such analyses showing reduced risks to the reservoirs from the statesβ proposal, the bureau is now eliminating future consideration of the two proposals it had made last April that drew fear and anger from many Western state water officials. Those proposals were so drastic that many Western officials said they thought they were drawn deliberately to force the previously warring Lower Basin states to find a compromise.
βThe reduced risks from improved hydrology, cautious modeling approach, and short timeline will allow Reclamation to efficiently consider tools to address critical elevations at Lake Powell and Lake Mead, allowing the entire Colorado River Basin and its many water users to focus on longer-term planning,β the bureau said.
But Jack Schmidt, a retired Utah State University professor who has extensively researched the Colorado, offered a cautionary note in a blog item he posted Wednesday.
In 2011, the Colorado had its best spring-summer runoff season of this century. But due to water use and evaporation, the river system lost half the extra water it had when the reservoirs were at their peak from that runoff in 11 to 13 months. All the extra water was gone in another eight to 10 months, he wrote.
The same pattern of water storage loss followed high runoff years of 2017 and 2019, he wrote.
Today, it's unrealistic to expect the next several years will be similar to the remarkable winter of 2022-2023, he wrote.
"No other high flow year of the 21st century was immediately followed by another high flow year. Our best hope for achieving sustainability in water supply is for the basin states and the federal government to reach new agreements to greatly reduce basin-wide water use so that the modest recovery in reservoir storage (in 2023)Β might be preserved.
"Otherwise, our gains may quickly disappear," he wrote.
This year, reservoir storage has again started declining since the snowmelt season ended in mid-July, Schmidt wrote. By the end of September, the reservoir system had lost 16% of the water it had gained during this year's runoff season.
βWeβve blown through surpluses in two years before. We can do it again,β Schmidt told the Star, adding that the posting of his blog item on the same day that Reclamation released its latest report was "coincidental," not intentional.
In the blog post, he wrote, "It is imperative to keep a keen eye toward accomplishing significant reductions in water use throughout the basin to save what we have gained. We should not expect Mother Nature to bail us out again."
