LAS VEGAS — About 1,400 people from every corner of the Colorado River Basin flocked to the palm tree-lined Caesars Palace casino in Las Vegas this week thirsty for insights into the stalled negotiations over the future management of the river.
New insights, however, were sparse as of Tuesday morning.
The highly anticipated Colorado River Water Users Association conference is the largest river gathering of the year. It’s a meet up where federal and state officials like to make big announcements about the water supply for 40 million people, and when farmers, tribal nations, city water managers, industrial representatives and environmental groups can swap strategies in hallway chats.
The meetings started Tuesday morning before the conference officially kicked off. Officials from basin states, including Colorado, set the tone by digging into their oft-repeated rhetoric about the worrisome conditions in the basin, impacts in their own states and conservation efforts. Conference-goers pushed state leaders for more transparency and progress in the discussions over the river’s future.
The basin’s main reservoirs, lakes Mead and Powell, have fallen to historic lows despite pouring state and federal dollars into broad conservation efforts, said Commissioner Becky Mitchell, Colorado’s governor-appointed negotiator on Colorado River issues.
“We’re in a precarious time because none of that is enough,” Mitchell told hundreds of audience members during an Upper Colorado River Commission meeting Tuesday. “It has not been enough.”
As the river’s water supply is strained by a 26-year drought and human demands, officials are trying to replace an expiring agreement from 2007, which manages how Mead and Powell capture water from upstream states and release it downstream for water users in Arizona, California, Nevada and Mexico.
The Department of the Interior is managing the effort, dubbed the post-2026 process, but deciding new rules is simpler said than done: Basin officials will have to address a changing climate and decide on painful water cuts going forward.
The Interior Department has given the seven basin states until Feb. 14 to reach a consensus. If they can agree, the feds will use the states’ proposal to manage the basin’s reservoirs. If not, the federal officials will decide what to do.
Officials from the Upper Basin states — Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming — did not share examples of progress in the post-2026 negotiations. They said the basin’s water cycle, not its legal issues, are the main problem.
“It’s not political positions. It’s not legal interpretations,” Brandon Gebhart, Wyoming’s top negotiator, said. “It’s the hydrology of the entire basin.”
Others, including some of the 30 tribes in the basin, saw it differently. Some tribal representatives called for more transparency. Others said they couldn’t support a plan that is geared toward sending water to downstream states.
A basin divided by a Rome-inspired wall
Relationships between upstream states and Lower Basin states — Arizona, California and Nevada — have been strained since the post-2026 effort kicked into gear in 2022 and 2023.
He lauded California’s “massive” and expensive efforts to address the river’s shrinking supply while still growing the state’s economy and agriculture industry.
California has cut its water use to 3.76 million acre-feet, the lowest it has been since 1949, state officials said. It has a proposed plan to conserve 440,000 acre-feet of river water per year.
One acre-foot roughly equals the annual water use of two to three households.
“We hear lots of applause lines from our friends next door, and we encourage them to take some examples from what California has been able to put together,” Hamby said. “We must all live with the resources we have, not the ones that we wish for.”
While the states might be divided in water politics, conference attendees like Ken Curtis of Colorado moved between the rooms to hear each group’s discussion.
“We appear to be talking past each other,” said Curtis, the general manager of the Dolores Water Conservancy District in southwestern Colorado.
Some water managers from central Utah said they were already looking beyond the current negotiations to the next few decades. The basin’s challenges don’t end next fall — this is just a speed bump in a long future ahead, they said.
Others were waiting for updates from federal officials, scheduled for Wednesday. The Department of the Interior is set to release a highly anticipated look at different options for how to manage the basin around the end of the year.
Curtis said he is at the conference mainly to learn how other states were grappling with the tough water conditions and to get more insight into the negotiations beyond what’s in the media, he said.
“Squeezing it [water] out of the Upper Basin isn’t going to make enough water for the Lower Basin demands,” Curtis said. “And that may be a biased view, obviously, so I’m trying to get a little bit beyond my own biases.”
Print