Arizona and California, which have battled over the Colorado River for nearly a century, are at it again. This time, Arizona leaders are blaming California, and other states, for putting the burden of stemming the river’s impending crisis on their backs alone.
It became publicly known last week that Arizona and Nevada made a proposal this summer to save a lot of Colorado River water but that California, and possibly the U.S. government, rejected it. While discussing this proposal, leaders of the Arizona Department of Water Resources and the Central Arizona Project said they felt it “unacceptable for Arizona to continue to carry a disproportionate burden of reductions for the benefit of others who have not contributed.”
California officials disagree with that comment, and both sides present numbers backing their case about which one has saved more water. Both sides also continue negotiating.
“I don’t know if they will get a deal or not,” said Kathy Ferris, a former Arizona Department of Water Resources director and chief counsel. “We have become dependent on an over-allocated supply.”
The path to an agreement is clogged by concerns about priorities for use of the declining river water, Ferris said.
California and Yuma farmers want to protect their senior priority right for river water, while the Bureau of Reclamation commissioner counts on water users to cut a deal that protects the river but ignores priorities, she said. At the same time, she believes some water users are betting that Reclamation is afraid to take unilateral action, which could trigger intense litigation.
“This is uncharted territory. Who’s going to call whose bluff? Who’s going to blink first? Are the feds going to blink? Will California blink, or are we just going to run out of water?” Ferris asked.
‘Keys to the kingdom’
Where few people will disagree is that the Colorado’s fate depends on Arizona and California’s ability to come to terms. California and Arizona control the largest and second-largest allocations, respectively, of river water in the seven-state Colorado River Basin.
Arizona and California “hold the keys to the kingdom,” said Arizona State University water researcher Sarah Porter.
The “kingdom” is a deal to save the river, at least for now, by reducing water users’ take from it by 2 million to 4 million acre-feet a year — an unprecedented cut in the river’s modern history. It was ordered by U.S. Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Camille Touton in June, but an agreement to do it has not been achieved.
Word of the latest division between Arizona and California came a few hours after Interior Department and Reclamation officials announced Tuesday they are giving the seven states more time to reach agreement on how to achieve cuts.
The feds said they are starting work on a plan to impose cuts if the states can’t do it on their own — a statement that many critics thought was too timid because the feds had said in June they would intervene if the states failed to reach agreement by now.
At a news conference that day, ADWR and CAP executives said Arizona and Nevada had offered to cut around 2 million acre-feet, but that other “parties in the room” had rejected it. CAP General Manager Ted Cooke said the other parties were California and the federal government.
Later, officials of the Colorado River Board of California, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California and the Southern Nevada Water Authority confirmed that an Arizona-Nevada proposal was rejected.
Metropolitan official Bill Hasencamp said Arizona and California each floated “concepts” for water use reductions, but “neither of the concepts were acceptable to all three states,” meaning the Lower Basin states of Arizona, California and Nevada. Reclamation and the Interior Department did not respond to a question about whether they rejected the deal.
The nature of the disagreements is not clear, because the agencies won’t go public on specifics.
A factor clearly weighing on California’s side dates back nearly 55 years and serves as a legal backdrop for today’s ongoing negotiations. It is a key provision in the 1968 Colorado River Basin Project Act, which authorized construction of the $4 billion CAP canal system in Arizona. It gives California a higher priority than Arizona for river water in times of shortage.
In a provision that Arizona had to accept to get California’s support for building the CAP, Arizona must give up all its CAP water supply during shortages before California gives up any of its supply from the river. How that provision might play out, however, remains uncertain.
A divided basin
Arizona and California’s role is important because without federal intervention, there’s no way a seven-state deal will be reached unless Lower Basin states and the Upper Basin states — Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming — agree to one.
The Upper Basin states, while putting forth a detailed plan that suggests future water saving measures are coming, have not offered any immediate cuts.
And as Arizona water officials concede, there’s no chance Upper Basin states will agree to cuts until the Lower Basin states agree to some.
“They want to see more certainty out of the Lower Basin. We haven’t achieved that goal,” said ADWR Director Tom Buschatzke, who with CAP’s Cooke give the Upper Basin proposal an “incomplete.”
Conversely, “We want to see more numbers and certainty out of them. The closer we get, the more they’ll do. The more they do, the closer we’ll get,” Buschatzke said.
As disappointed as Arizona officials might be by the Upper Basin’s plan, “I don’t really blame them, and I’m not making excuses for them, or allowing them to make an excuse,” Cooke said. “There’s more (water) use in the Lower Basin. We have more work to do here, and we have not done what we need to do yet.”
Asked for details about Arizona and Nevada’s proposal, Buschatzke said, “I don’t think there’s a lot of value in trying to get specific about what was in that proposal. The numbers throughout the process of discussion kind of fluctuated, up and down.”
Cooke said the Arizona-Nevada plan, combined with what was approved in the 2019 drought contingency plan, would have reduced the Lower Basin and Mexico’s share of river water from 9 million acre-feet today to 5.6 million.
How the additional 2 million acre-feet in cuts would be divvied up wouldn’t have been “completely proportional” to the three states’ existing shares of river water, but “it was very similar to that,” Cooke said.
If the 2 million were to be split proportionally to the states’ river water allocations, Arizona would give up about 746,000 acre-feet of its 2.8 million acre-feet total allocation, which represents 37.3% of the 7.5 million acre- feet allocated to the Lower Basin. California would give up about 1.172 million acre-feet of its 4.4 million acre-foot share, which represents nearly 59% of the river’s allocated supply. Nevada would give up about 80,000 of its 300,000 acre-feet, which represents 4% of the total supply.
Buschatzke and Cooke noted that so far, Arizona has taken all cuts in river water use that are required by the river’s operating guidelines approved in 2007 and in the 2019 drought plan. Arizona kept 800,000 acre-feet of its water in Lake Mead in 2022 alone, they said, and has left about 2 million acre-feet in Mead since 2014.
“We’re not expecting folks to catch up to this imbalance between Arizona and everybody else,” CAP’s Cooke said. “But certainly we expect that going forward, we expect folks to keep up with the level of contribution that we are making.”
‘California holds all the cards’
Both Arizona officials said, however, that they believe California is negotiating in good faith — “I don’t think that they’re messing around with us, or being disingenuous with us at all. I think we’re on the right path,” said Cooke, despite the remaining issues between them.
Asked to comment on Cooke and Buschatzke’s statements, Hasencamp, of Southern California’s Metropolitan district, said, “I don’t believe it’s accurate to say that Arizona and Nevada proposed a plan for cuts. We never received any such plan in writing.
“What did happen was that Arizona floated a concept verbally on a process to reduce water use. California floated its own concept. Neither of the concepts were acceptable to all three states. So we spent the last two months seeing if we could develop a plan that was acceptable to all three states. We made a lot of progress, but we haven’t achieved that goal yet,” said Hasencamp, Metropolitan’s Colorado River program manager.
In a statement, the Colorado River Board of California added Arizona’s proposal “was very disproportionately weighted against California.”
The board said it also “was not respectful or in line with the existing priority system” for river water users. That system was laid out in the final U.S. Supreme Court decree that ended the protracted Arizona v. California Colorado River water rights litigation of the 1950s and ‘60s and in the 1968 law authorizing CAP’s construction, it said. The board is California’s official negotiator on Colorado River issues.
Ferris observed: “They don’t want to set a precedent that compromises their priorities. California holds all the cards because they hold all the water.”
Chris Harris, the board’s executive director, declined to elaborate to the Arizona Daily Star on California’s views. He refused, for example, to say if board officials believe that being “respectful” of the 1968 law means that Arizona would have to give up all CAP water — which Arizona has vowed not to do.
As California agencies continue discussions with Arizona water officials “it is therefore best if you accept our perspectives … as they are. We have eminent respect and admiration for Tom (Buschatzke) and Ted (Cooke) and fully acknowledge the difficult challenges facing both of our states as we address climate change and drought in the Colorado River Basin,” Harris said.
But in responding to Arizona’s concerns about taking a disproportionate share of water use cuts, the California board said, “The plain reading of the existing relevant elements of the ‘Law of the River’ states that in periods of insufficient mainstream water supplies, the Central Arizona Project’s use of mainstream Colorado River water is subordinated to California’s basic mainstream apportionment of 4.4 million acre-feet.”
By Law of the River, they mean the collection of laws, regulations, court decisions and other legal matters that have governed the management of the Colorado for more than a century.
Yet California agrees that “no one state can do it alone,” the board added.
“California has been involved in these difficult discussions from the beginning and remains willing to continue discussions with the other six states and the United States. California believes that its proposals have been reasonable, significant and respectful of the current framework of the ‘Law of the River,’” said the board.
While the legal plans such as the 2019 drought plan do not require California to leave any water in Lake Mead until it drops further, California has voluntarily left 1.5 million acre-feet in the lake, Hasencamp said. Most of that water was left due to a program that has existed since 2007. It also allows states to take the water back until Lake Mead falls below 1,025 feet — 17 feet lower than the level it stands at today.
“We are taking a small fraction of that back this year (perhaps 150,000 acre-feet or 10%), but overall our efforts to reduce water use have exceeded any other state by a significant amount,” Hasencamp said.
Voluntary vs. mandatory cuts
The dispute is not just about numbers, Buschatzke and Cooke said at their news conference. It’s that in the early days of these negotiations after June 14, Arizona officials thought the water use cuts would be “enforceable, mandatory, whatever words you want to use, so we had certainty thought that the reductions would be completed,” Buschatzke said.
But maybe three or four weeks into the negotiations, it became apparent that some participants were looking more at a voluntary program, which the two officials call unacceptable, he said.
“Voluntary programs create a level of uncertainty … in which we didn’t know if the volumes of water attached to these programs will come to fruition,” Buschatzke said.
Cooke noted that the “500 plus” program that Lower Bain agencies developed late last year to leave 500,000 acre-feet a year in Lake Mead has not reached its goal, although Arizona water users agreed to conserve well over 200,000 acre-feet.
“We can’t have that kind of experience again,” Cooke said.
The difference between voluntary and mandatory may be a matter of semantics, Metropolitan’s Hasencamp replied. To him, voluntary conservation means that the party conserving is financially compensated.
Once an agreement is actually signed, water use reductions become mandatory, he said. That was the arrangement Metropolitan worked out last year to pay $38 million over three years to the Palo Verde Irrigation District near Blythe to leave some of its water in the lake.
“I think this is what we are trying to achieve in our Lower Basin plan, developing compensated reductions in water use,” he said.
But even with the $4 billion for drought relief that was inserted into recently signed federal legislation, “we’re not in a position in the entire Colorado River Basin to consume a large portion of that, and I don’t think that’s the intent of Congress, just to pay people one year at a time to not take water, to be repeated every single year until you run out of money, and eventually out of water,” Cooke said. “We can’t do that.”
‘We need prompt resolution’
On Thursday, CAP officials amplified these concerns in a letter to Interior Secretary Deborah Haaland.
Saying they’re disappointed with the lack of progress among the basin states, CAP Board Chairman Terry Goddard and his predecessor Lisa Adkins said they’re equally disappointed that the Bureau of Reclamation was unwilling to impose water use curbs on them, as Touton had threatened in June to do if no agreement was reached.
“This outcome is inexplicable considering the urgency expressed in Commissioner Touton’s June 14 testimony” before a Senate committee, they wrote.
“We hope it is clear that Arizona alone can’t solve a problem of this magnitude. To be successful, the plan must include equitable participation from all water users across the basin, provide some mechanism to ensure performance and to have the understanding that the United States is prepared to take unilateral action if voluntary efforts are insufficient,” they wrote.
While Reclamation has predicted flows into Lake Powell from mountain snows will reach 8.3 million acre-feet from October of this year until September 2023, that’s far more water than flowed into the lake in the past two years, they wrote. Should the lower flows repeat themselves, just the one-year imbalance between river water supply and use could approach 3 million acre-feet, they said.
“We need prompt resolution to stop this decline. There is no time to waste,” they wrote.
Replying, an Interior spokeswoman, Melissa Schwartz, told the Star that “we do not respond to correspondence through the media.” But Reclamation officials are tracking other questions the Star has asked about the negotiations, “and will respond when they are able,” Schwartz said.
On Sunday, Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Arizona, joined the chorus of Arizona officials calling for more states including California to reduce their water use to prop up Lake Mead.
"We've got solutions. I was able to add $8 billion to the bipartisan infrastructure bill for Western water, for more water storage and resiliency and settling tribal water claims. And in the Inflation Reduciton Act, $4 billion to deal with this drought. We do have the tools in place. What we don't have right now is the partnership with other states," Kelly said on CNN"s "State of the Union" Sunday morning talk show.
"Arizona has made an offer to leave in Lake Mead by far more water than any other state. We need other states to step up and do their parts. if we do that, we are not going to have a catastrophic collapse of the system. We will be able to will stabilize it."
Asked by host Jake Tapper to specify which states he was talking about, Kelly replied, "California gets a large portion of its water from the river. It can't just be on us. This is about food security for the entire nation. If Yuma County doesn’t have the water it needs to grow produce, those products are going to be more expensive across the entire country."
‘It’s time to pay up’
Ferris has for years criticized her former agency and the CAP management for what she felt was a lack of aggressiveness in protecting the Colorado from depletion. But last week, she praised Buschatzke and Cooke for what she called their candid comments.
“It feels to me like everybody’s just flummoxed. Nobody’s been able to get anybody to do anything. I’m impressed that Tom and Ted were as outspoken as they were,” said Ferris, now a senior research fellow at ASU’s Kyl Center for Water Policy. “They’re obviously upset.
“Arizona can’t take this whole thing, the whole burden of conservation. We can’t have the CAP dried up — we just can’t.”
But longtime Arizona environmental activist Robin Silver took a more jaded view of Arizona’s stance. While agreeing that California needs to take more of the water cuts, he noted that Arizona knew back in 1968 that the water would run short, and it agreed to the deal with California giving CAP lower priority for it.
“Now, they want to go back on the deal, when it’s time to pay up. They want the feds to come in and negate their agreement,” said Silver, who works for the Tucson-based Center for Biological Diversity. “The CAP was not sustainable from the very beginning. We should have provided some provision so we wouldn’t strap our kids where we’re leaving them now.”
But ASU’s Porter said the politicians who accepted CAP’s junior priority status didn’t foresee the permanent changes in the Colorado River’s hydrology that were triggered by human-caused warming.
The argument CAP is making is that “we’re dealing with conditions that no one saw coming, so the junior priority shouldn’t apply,” said Porter, director of the Kyl Center for Water Policy.
Feds announce short-term cut in Colorado River water for ArizonaFor Star subscribers: But U.S. officials held off Tuesday on any larger, longer-term cuts in Colorado River water deliveries in the West — which they've said are necessary. Some water officials and environmentalists criticized that lack of immediate action as "punting" and "extraordinarily discouraging."
For Star subscribers: Although officials describe the situation as "fluid" with discussions likely continuing to the last minute, it appears the Upper and Lower Basin states remain far apart on what their relative cuts in water use should be. Here's the latest on the negotiations.
For Star subscribers: Fourteen tribal governments, including eight in Arizona, say the U.S. has wrongly left them out of negotiations over major future cuts of Colorado River water use.
