Local Opinion: Feds' failure on Colorado River cuts hurts Arizona

The following is the opinion and analysis of the writer:

By Kirsten Engel

Special to the Arizona Daily Star (Aug. 26, 2022)

Kirsten Engel is a former state senator, an environmental attorney, and a candidate for Arizona’s 6th Congressional District.

Once again, Arizona is bearing the brunt of a national, indeed a global, crisis. The Colorado River, lifeblood of 40 million Americans, is in peril. Long known to be over-allocated, unprecedented climate change-driven drought is today finally forcing a reckoning that drastic cuts will be required to preserve the once mighty river.

Climate change makes this everyone’s problem. But inaction by President Biden’s Department of the Interior has made it Arizona’s problem.

The good news is that the Biden administration can require cuts be taken equitably from all Lower Basin states, and importantly, from the river’s biggest water user, California. The bad news is that it has failed to follow through on its promise to do so. The even worse news is that, as a result, Arizona will be forced to continue to sacrifice more, while California and other states continue to use water in a crisis. This unfair distinction will carry far reaching and harmful consequences for farmers, municipalities and future generations.

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According to the Supreme Court, the federal government has sweeping powers over Colorado River management, especially the Lower Basin, with Interior’s Bureau of Reclamation acting as “water master.” Back in June, with water levels in the river’s major reservoirs, Lake Mead and Lake Powell, plummeting, Commissioner Camille Calimlim Touton, appointed by Biden in 2021, announced that the Basin states had 60 days to cut 2-4 million acre-feet from their river allocations (roughly 15 percent of the river’s flow). If they didn’t, the Bureau said it would do it for them.

It seems this was just talk. Despite the states’ failure to come up with such a plan by the deadline last week, the Biden administration has done just about nothing.

Time is not on our side. Lake Mead and Lake Powell are barely above one-quarter of their capacity. If they fall much lower, they will be unable to generate hydroelectric power for millions in the West. The most effective and least disruptive steps — building more storage capacity, switching to less water-intensive farming practices, adopting water reuse and recycling programs, retrofitting homes and businesses with water-efficient appliances — all need time to develop, fund and implement.

Luckily we now have $4 billion from the Inflation Reduction Act and over $8 billion from the Infrastructure Act to help us do so. But further delay will shrink our options to the most short-term reduction measures available — measures such as paying farmers to fallow their fields year by year — rather than those that permanently transition our economy to a less water-intensive future.

Arizona is paying the price of the delay in increasingly bigger water cuts. Under the 2019 Lower Basin Drought Contingency Plan (DCP), in 2023 Arizona must cut a fifth of its entire allocation. And California? Zero. Granted, California must shoulder future cuts should Lake Mead continue to drop, but this will occur only after Arizona has reduced nearly 800,000 acre-feet of water in mandatory cuts together with voluntary cuts negotiated with Tribal governments and others.

The DCP (which I supported as a member of the Arizona Legislature) was critical to keeping Lake Mead water levels up while we waited for a 2026 renegotiation of the River’s management guidelines. But recent events have made clear that the situation is much more dire than then understood and the DCP-mandated cuts are plainly insufficient to get us to 2023, much less 2026. Bigger cuts are required and they will need to come from other Basin states, most importantly, California.

Nature, economics and fairness all argue in favor of the Biden administration acting quickly to provide at least the framework of an equitable plan requiring the states and Mexico collectively reduce 2-4 million acre-feet from their Colorado River diversions. The river can’t wait, and nor can we in Arizona.