There’s a break in the clouds that have hovered over Colorado River negotiations for more than a year. State water leaders appear to be coalescing behind a new proposal for sharing the river after talks were stuck in a deadlock for more than a year.
The river is used by nearly 40 million people across seven states and Mexico, but it’s shrinking due to climate change. As a result, state leaders need to rein in demand. For months, they were mired in a standoff about how to interpret a century-old legal agreement. The new proposal is completely different.
Instead of those states leaning on old rules that don’t account for climate change, they’re proposing a new system that divides the river based on how much water is in it today.
“We finally have an approach that at least allows a glimmer of hope that the laying down of arms is possible,” said John Fleck, a writer and water policy researcher at the University of New Mexico.
The long, tense negotiations have mostly been stuck on one issue: How much water should the Upper Basin states — Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, and New Mexico — send downstream from their largest reservoir, Lake Powell?
The new plan says the amount should be based on a three-year rolling average of the “natural flows” in the river — basically, how much water would flow through it if human dams and diversion weren’t in the way.
States would still have to negotiate the exact percentage of those “natural flows” that would go downstream to the Lower Basin states of California, Arizona and Nevada. Picking that number will likely be difficult, but the fact that states are willing to base it on current climate conditions represents a major philosophical shift in how the river is divided.
“This new approach gets beyond the obsessively arcane discussions about various interpretations of laws written 100 years ago, with people hoping that their lawyers' arguments can mean they get more water,” Fleck said. “It says, ‘Look, we all have to share this river. We have to do some math about how much water it really has.’”
Details of the plan first emerged in a meeting of the Arizona Reconsultation Committee, where the state’s water leaders gather to discuss Arizona’s position in multistate talks. Tom Buschatzke, director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources, described the plan as “innovative.”
“I was very pessimistic that we were on a path towards litigation,” he said. “I’m more optimistic now that we can avoid that path if we can make this work.”
Buschatzke emphasized that the proposal is in its early stages. The concept is now heading to the Bureau of Reclamation, the federal water agency which manages dams and reservoirs in the West. Employees there will run models to figure out exactly how much water would flow between the two basins.
State and federal leaders are in a crunch to finalize new water sharing rules before a 2026 deadline, when the current rules expire.
“It is still just a concept,” Buschatzke said. “We haven’t agreed to anything at this point, but we agreed to test it.”
Colorado, which often speaks on behalf of all four Upper Basin states, appears cautiously supportive of the plan.
“Colorado remains committed to developing supply-driven, sustainable operations of Lake Powell and Lake Mead,” Becky Mitchell, Colorado’s top water negotiator, wrote to KUNC in a statement. “The natural flow approach is one way to achieve this, if it is done right.”
Colorado and its allies initially dug in their heels on a very specific interpretation of the 1922 Colorado River compact, arguing that they shouldn’t have to take new cutbacks to their water supplies since they feel the impacts of climate change-fueled shortages more than their downstream neighbors.
“There is no doubt that Arizona views things differently than the Upper Division States, and a successful framework will set aside our differing views and focus instead on the health and sustainability of the Colorado River System for all who depend upon it,” Mitchell wrote.
This story is part of ongoing coverage of the Colorado River, produced by KUNC and supported by the Walton Family Foundation.