For Colorado River expert Anne Castle, the basin state negotiations over the future water supply for 40 million people is like a black hole.
“There are very few people who know what is being discussed,” said Castle, who as a former federal official, has had an inside view of the closed-door negotiations.
The seven Colorado River states are trying to agree on a shared vision for Colorado River management after 2026, when the current management rules expire. But the states have been at loggerheads for months, and they are out of time to disagree. They have months (some say weeks) to submit a proposal for federal analysis. If they can’t, the federal government will have to move on with its process in order to have new management rules in place by fall of 2026.
The lack of public updates about progress on a seven-state agreement has experts like Castle getting antsy. So she and five other influential water experts published a policy paper Friday outlining seven “essential pillars” of river management — like sharing required cuts among all basin states, a controversial idea for some water users.
The goal was to remind basin officials of the key concepts that should be in any new set of guidelines, Castle said.
“Sometimes when you’re really … into the weeds in negotiations, it can be possible to lose sight of those foundational principles,” she said. “That’s another reason why we thought it was timely to put these out now.”
Castle is one to know: She has held some of the biggest leadership positions in the basin, like assistant secretary for water and science at the Department of the Interior and U.S. commissioner on the Upper Colorado River Commission.
Many of her co-authors have held similarly influential positions in the Upper Basin — Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming — and the Lower Basin — Arizona, California and Nevada. They include John Fleck, Eric Kuhn, Jack Schmidt, Kathryn Sorensen and Katherine Tara.
Now, they are independent operators, mostly at academic institutions, with a lot of expertise in Colorado River matters, the authors said.
“We don’t have skin in the game. We can look holistically at the river,” Castle said. “We are envisioning this report to be a pretty commonsense proposal for the basic foundation for any new operating regime.”
Seven “Essential Pillars”
The four-page policy paper outlines seven concepts that the authors felt were key to the basin’s future.
Some points strike at the heart of central tensions in the negotiations: The authors said all states need to share in water cuts, and the basin can’t depend on federal dollars to pay for the reductions.
“People need to overcome their limbic fear, that gut-level fear, of running out of water,” said Fleck, a former science journalist, author of two books about the basin, and director of Water Resources in the Department of Economics and the University of New Mexico. “They need to recognize that they can, in fact, use less water and still have communities that not only survive but thrive.”
Sharing required water cuts likely has water users bristling in Upper Basin states where officials have been adamantly against mandatory cuts and in favor of voluntary conservation.
Colorado’s representatives on Colorado River matters said the policy paper shares some of their negotiating priorities, but it overlooks a key facet of how the Upper Basin already manages its water: cutting use each year based on how much precipitation falls.
“I appreciate the interest and commitment of stakeholders to help the seven Basin States find a sustainable solution,” said Colorado’s Commissioner to the Upper Colorado River Commission Becky Mitchell. “We can and must live within the means of the River throughout the Basin.”
The authors also said the new management plan needs to be flexible enough to adapt to changing conditions; tribes need to have water management options; and lakes Mead and Powell should have “conservation pools,” like small banking accounts of conserved water within the reservoirs.
Other key “pillars,” like managing water to elevate water levels at lakes Mead and Powell, already have broad, high-level support. The challenge is deciding how much water should be saved in the near future to replenish the long-term savings accounts, the experts said.
The basin can’t rely on unusually wet water years every once in a while to save them from painful outcomes, said Schmidt, director of the Center for Colorado River Studies at Utah State University.
Reservoir storage throughout the basin is similar to conditions in August 2021, when reservoirs were low, and Reclamation officials were concerned about the system’s collapse, he said.
This year, runoff projections keep falling. The basin’s largest reservoirs, Lake Mead and Lake Powell, are 33% full. But the water use is average compared to the last 15 years: People aren’t behaving like they’re in a crisis, he said.
And states are still pointing fingers at each other for who should be the one to cut their use in the basin’s driest possible conditions.
In the past, the federal government has helped force an agreement between states, but there has been a leadership vacuum during high-level leadership transitions and unfilled positions, like the Bureau of Reclamation commissioner, the experts said.
“We need to change the mentality throughout the basin,” Schmidt said. “We need to think about this as, ‘What is in the nation’s interest, not in our local, parochial, individual state interest?”
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