Despite Biden Administration Proposals to Address Colorado River Shortages, a Solution Is Far Off

The Biden administration on Wednesday released four alternatives to address the drought-stricken Colorado River’s water shortages, giving seven states, 30 tribes and the 40 million people who rely on the river a taste of how the vital waterway will be managed in the coming decades. 

But the announcement offers little in the way of hard details, with a draft environmental impact statement analyzing the impacts of the Department of Interior’s proposed alternatives pushed back to next year. The states, meanwhile, remain divided over the path forward to deal with shortages on the river. Over the past year, the seven Colorado River Basin states—Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming—along with tribes and the federal governments have been in negotiations over the “Post-2026 Operations” for the river that will dictate how to deal with water shortages. The river’s current drought guidelines, drafted in 2007, will expire at the end of 2026. 

“We continue to support and encourage all partners as they work toward another consensus agreement that will both protect the long-term stability of the Colorado River Basin and meet the needs of all communities,” said Laura Daniel-Davis, the acting deputy secretary of the Department of Interior. “The alternatives we have put forth today establish a robust and fair framework for a Basin-wide agreement. As this process moves forward, the Biden-Harris administration has laid the foundation to ensure that these future guidelines and strategies can withstand any uncertainty ahead, and ultimately provide greater stability to the 40 million water users and the public throughout the Colorado River Basin.” 

The river that enabled the Southwest’s rapid growth and vital agricultural production has seen its flows diminished roughly 20 percent over the past two decades by a megadrought. Climate change and years of overuse of the river’s resources have led the system’s massive reservoirs—lakes Mead and Powell—to fall to just a third of their capacities. That prompted steep cuts in allocations of the river’s water to Arizona, California and Nevada, and tense negotiations over its future. Further declines at the reservoirs could cause their respective dams to reach minimum power pool, where they can no longer generate electricity, or dead pool, when the water drops too low to flow through the concrete dams’ plumbing.

The Colorado River Basin is regulatorily split in two. The Upper Basin consists of Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico. The Lower Basin is composed of Arizona, California and Nevada, which historically has used more of the river. Under the 1922 Colorado River Compact, which divided up the river’s resources and is the bedrock document for how it is governed, the Upper Basin is required to allow the Lower Basin states’ allocation of water to flow downstream before it can use its half of the river. If the Upper Basin fails to send the required amount of water, its own allocation could be cut. 

Earlier this year, each basin submitted its own proposals for how it would manage the river’s water post-2026, but there was little agreement between their plans. The Upper Basin argued that, since it does not have large reservoirs and its users already have to make cuts anytime there is drought, it should be able to send less water downstream and the Lower Basin should bear responsibility for cutbacks. Under the Lower Basin’s proposal, all users would be forced to take cuts based on the total amount of water held in eight reservoirs across the entire system. Meanwhile, tribes have submitted their own proposals and comments, as have environmental groups.

The two basins remain deeply split, and though both sides are committed to coming to an agreement, it’s possible that the question of how Colorado River water will be divided and distributed between the basins will have to be settled in court, KUNC reported earlier this week. The Upper Basin representatives also maintain it has the right to take more water out of the river, given it does not use its full share, something that’s drawn the ire of its lower basin counterparts, environmental groups and water attorneys.

The Interior Department will analyze the four options presented Wednesday in an environmental assessment, with a final decision planned for 2026 on how to advance the process the Biden administration began and that President-elect Donald Trump’s administration will have to take over. One alternative is the federal government’s plan to “achieve robust protection of critical infrastructure,” like Hoover and Glen Canyon dams and the large amounts of hydropower they produce, along the river. Another combines that plan with comments from tribes and others. A third follows a proposal submitted by environmental groups, while the fourth combines the proposals of the states and tribes. 

“Big picture: There’s still a lot of conflict about how Lake Powell will be managed,” said Kyle Roerink, the executive director of the Great Basin Water Network. A key difference between the alternatives is how water would be released from Lake Powell, the massive reservoir in the middle of the river system. He said the Upper Basin’s proposal would use it as a “piggy bank” to store water for them while the Lower Basin, which has priority rights to the water, wants to see it used to deliver what it is owed by the upstream states.

The states themselves say it will take time to fully analyze the proposals put forth by the Bureau of Reclamation, which oversees the river’s management, but neither side seems excited about the options, though they’ve admitted the need to continue working together.

“There are some really positive elements to these alternatives, but at the same time I am disappointed that Reclamation chose to create alternatives, rather than to model the Lower Basin states’ alternative in its entirety,” said Tom Buschatzke, the director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources, in a statement. “The Lower Basin’s alternative didn’t start at one extreme or the other, and it showed unequivocally that the Lower Basin was willing to take the first tranche of cuts.” 

In a statement, Colorado River Commissioner Becky Mitchell said that “Colorado continues to stand firmly behind the Upper Division States’ Alternative, which performs best according to Reclamation’s own modeling and directly meets the purpose and need of this federal action.

“The Upper Division States Alternative is supply-driven and is designed to help rebuild storage at our nation’s two largest reservoirs,” she said. “The Alternative protects Lake Powell’s continued ability to release water downstream into the future to continue to meet our obligations and protect our significant rights and interests in the Colorado River.”

Roerink likened the Biden administration’s efforts to bring water users together as “herding cats” and said that Wednesday’s decision may help bring them back to the table to find a solution. But the divide between the two basins remains wide. “Change is scary,” he said.