It was just over a year ago that the Interior Department declared the first shortage on the Colorado River — Tier 1. But the past 12 months haven’t brought enough rain and snow. A report from July shows Lake Mead, which the agency uses to determine shortage conditions, hovers about 1,040 feet above sea level after dropping 10 feet in just two, dry months. Tuesday’s report is certain that Lake Mead will be below 1,050 feet in January — the threshold needed to declare a Tier 2 shortage by 2023. The question is how far below that threshold it will be. If the forecast is below 1,045 feet, which recent forecasts suggest it will be, then mandatory water outages will extend beyond Arizona, Nevada and Mexico and into California for the first time. But there is growing concern that the mandatory cuts — a system that was only updated in 2019 — are not enough to save the river in the face of a historic drought due to climate change. States, water managers and tribes are now returning to the negotiating table to figure out how to solve the West’s water crisis. “We thought we were good, but the last few years have been so dry that we realized those grade reductions weren’t enough and they aren’t enough,” Bill Hasenkamp, Colorado River resources manager at the Southern California Metropolitan Water District. he told CNN. “So the two things we’re focusing on are how do we get through the next three years without the system collapsing, and then how do we develop a long-term plan to preserve the Colorado River.”
“There’s only so much water”
The water of the Colorado River was divided among seven states in the West a century ago. The compact gave half of the river’s water to the Upper Basin states (Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, and New Mexico) and half to the Lower Basin (California, Arizona, and Nevada). Mexico — through which the river flows before reaching the Gulf of California — was also guaranteed a share.
There was one major problem: Written in the 1920s, at a time when precipitation was higher than normal, the compact overestimated how much water the Colorado River carried. It also failed to take into account the rapid population growth of the West and its hotter and drier future in the face of the climate crisis.
At a Senate hearing in June, Bureau of Recovery chief Camille Tutton issued a stark warning. In order to stabilize the Colorado River Basin, states and water districts must come up with a plan by Aug. 15 to reduce water use by 2 to 4 million acre feet by next year. (An acre-foot is the amount of water that would fill an acre per foot in depth — about 326,000 gallons.)
Touton’s proposed cut is a huge amount — the high end of the target is about 25 percent less water than states currently receive. And the low end of the target represents the vast majority of Arizona’s annual Colorado River water allocation.
Tutton also made clear in June that if states can’t come up with a plan, the federal government will act.
“It is within our principles to act unilaterally to protect the system and we will protect the system,” he said at the time. “We’ve got to see the work. We’ve got to see the action. Let’s go to the table and figure it out by August.”
But the interstate negotiations are not going well.
John Enzminger, general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, told CNN that so far not enough stakeholders have submitted proposals that would bring the basin to Tutton’s goal. He said he hoped the federal government would propose “some pretty strong measures” that could be taken immediately.
“Honestly, I’m disappointed because the overwhelming sense I get from the negotiations is that there aren’t enough people taking this seriously enough and understanding that this is about adapting to less water in this river,” Enzminger said.
Nevada has already moved to reduce its metropolitan water use by banning non-functional turf and paying people for years to remove water-intensive lawns, Enzminger said. But agriculture, which draws a lot of water from the river, must also be part of the equation.
“You have to have input from the industry that uses 80% of the water,” he said. “That’s not law, politics, that’s just math.”
Enzminger said other stakeholders reluctant to give up their water allotment must accept a new reality: The river is drying up and sacrifices must be made.
“It doesn’t matter what can be agreed because there is so much water and mother nature will figure it out at some point,” he said. “At some point, there’s just no water in the river channel.”
The federal government has not often stepped in and has control over state water management plans, but it has the authority to do so in the Lower Colorado River Basin — which includes Arizona, southern Nevada and southern California. And experts told CNN that the threat of federal action is something states will respond to.
“We kind of need the federal government to make some threats to incite action,” John Fleck, an expert on western waters and a professor at the University of New Mexico, told CNN earlier this year. “It seems like progress happens when the federal government comes in and says to the states, you have to do this or we’re going to do something you don’t like.”
